today's leftovers

• The Right To Being Anonymous Online Must Be Defended

       

• Psychological horror adventure 'Saint Kotar' gets extra Kickstarter time

  Saint Kotar, the upcoming psychological horror adventure from Red Martyr Entertainment has been given extra time on Kickstarter and it's really close to the goal. What is it? A point and click horror adventure with a chilling atmosphere and a stylish hand-painted world. You follow the tale of Benedek Dohnany and Nikolay Kalyakin as they try to find the truth behind a macabre series of murders and strange phenomena, allegedly related to devil worship and witchcraft. You can try it yourself too, as they actually released a prologue going by the name of Saint Kotar: The Yellow Mask to give you a small 2-3 hour slice of what to expect. 

        

• FLOSS Weekly 587: Internet vs. Broadcasting

  Open source has enabled democratized communication in the tech world. Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett talk with Tim Pozar, who has been building out network infrastructure since the 80s. They discuss the philosophy of communication and the history of open source, how it got its start with broadcasting. Now, in the last 20 years, open source has exploded, however, we are in the digital age and still have limited access to ISPS. They discuss how Starlink, could be a great solution to fix that problem.

Programming: Rust, Python, Ruby and More

• GStreamer Rust Bindings & Plugins New Releases

  I won’t write too much about the bindings this time. The latest version as of now is 0.16.1, which means that since I started working on the bindings there were 8 major releases. In that same time there were 45 contributors working on the bindings, which seems quite a lot and really makes me happy. Just as before, I don’t think any major APIs are missing from the bindings anymore, even for implementing subclasses of the various GStreamer types. The wide usage of the bindings in Free Software projects and commercial products also shows both the interest in writing GStreamer applications and plugins in Rust as well as that the bindings are complete enough and production-ready. Most of the changes since the last status update involve API cleanups, usability improvements, various bugfixes and addition of minor API that was not included before. The details of all changes can be read in the changelog.

• Python 3.8.3 : Lists in Python 3 - part 001.

  I am currently working on a project that involves the use of complex data structures and lists and my time is limited. This led me to start a new series of python tutorials on python lists. I realized that the lists had no substantial changes in the evolution of the python programming language, see the official documentation. You will find on the internet a lot of questions related to lists, algorithms, and problems involving lists. If you are not a beginner then it will seem boring at first but over time I will try to draw attention to really significant elements in python programming with lists.

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check In - 6

• Stupid RCU Tricks: So rcutorture is Not Aggressive Enough For You?

  The rcutorture.stall_cpu=22 says to stall a CPU for 22 seconds, that is, one second longer than the default RCU CPU stall timeout in mainline. If you are instead using a distribution kernel, you might need to specify 61 seconds (as in “rcutorture.stall_cpu=61”) in order to allow for the typical 60-second RCU CPU stall timeout. The rcutorture.fwd_progress=0 has no effect except to suppress a warning message (with stack trace included free of charge) that questions the wisdom of running both RCU-callback forward-progress tests and RCU CPU stall tests at the same time. In fact, the code not only emits the warning message, it also automatically suppresses the forward-progress tests. If you prefer living dangerously and don't mind the occasional out-of-memory (OOM) lockup accompanying your RCU CPU stall warnings, feel free to edit kernel/rcu/rcutorture.c to remove this automatic suppression. If you are running on a large system that takes more than ten seconds to boot, you might need to increase the RCU CPU stall holdoff interval. For example, adding rcutorture.stall_cpu_holdoff=120 to the --bootargs list would wait for two minutes before stalling a CPU instead of the default holdoff of 10 seconds. If simply spinning a CPU with preemption disabled does not fully vent your ire, you could undertake a more profound act of vandalism by adding rcutorture.stall_cpu_irqsoff=1 so as to cause interrupts to be disabled on the spinning CPU. Some flavors of RCU such as SRCU permit general blocking within their read-side critical sections, and you can exercise this capability by adding rcutorture.stall_cpu_block=1 to the --bootargs list. Better yet, you can use this kernel-boot parameter to torture flavors of RCU that forbid blocking within read-side critical sections, which allows you to see they complain about such mistreatment.

• Utkarsh Gupta: GSoC Phase 2

  In early May, I got selected as a Google Summer of Code student for Debian to work on a project which is to write a linter (an extension to RuboCop). This tool is mostly to help the Debian Ruby team. And that is the best part, I love working in/for/with the Ruby team! (I’ve been an active part of the team for 19 months now :))

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Timestamps

  I spent a few days locked in a hellish battle against a software implementation of doubles (64-bit floats) for ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 in the raging summer heat.

GNOME and KDE: Official Merch Shop, FOSS-North Video Editing and KStars

• GNOME Opens an Official Merch Shop

  The GNOME Shop is a new, official storefront. It stocks a range of GNOME branded items, including t-shirts, hoodies, socks, and (topically) colourful face masks – all bearing the famous lone foot logo. GNOME says it’s using a ‘print on demand’ company to fulfil orders and that all products ‘are unique and producer per order’. “Due to this, and the limitations of our print suppliers, returns or exchanges are not supported for incorrect order issues such as wrong size or color,” they add. So what’s available? Well, a simple grey v-neck mens t-shirt sporting the GNOME logo will set you back a cool $25 and is available in sizes XS through to 3XL. A navy “Cruiser Logo Hoodie” costs just over double that at $55 and it is available in sizes up to 2XL.

• foss-north kdenlive workflow

  As some of you might already have noticed, we’ve complemented foss-north with a new pod / vod / vlog – I’m not sure what to call it. Basically, it is a video based pod cast (making it available as a audio only pod-cast is high on the todo). Our main focus right now is a series on licenses and copyright, but there is more to come. As a part of this, I’ve started editing videos in kdenlive on a weekly basis, and I’m very happy with it so far. In this blog, I want to share my workflow. It is probably far from ideal, but it does the work for me.

• Weekly Report 5: Qt3D based backend for KStars

  In the sixth week of GSoC, I worked on adding mouseevents and integrate the custom qt3d window with existing skymap