Android Leftovers

• 17 new and notable Android apps from the last three weeks including Disney+, Spotify Kids, and Stadia (10/26/19 - 11/16/19)

• Top 3 Gaming Apps Hold 55% of the Android Market

• Android gift guide: The best gifts in 2019

• Chrome for Android has just solved one of the web's most irritating problems

• Only these two Sony phones will get the Android 10 update in 2019

Orange Pi 4 has an RK3399 and an optional NPU

Shenzhen Xunlong has posted preliminary specs for a Rockchip RK3399 based “Orange Pi 4” SBC that is smaller and more affordable than the Orange Pi RK3399 and faster and more feature rich than the Orange Pi 3. A 4B variant adds a Lightspeeur 2801S AI chip. New Orange Pi boards usually just show up unannounced on AliExpress, but for the fourth iteration of its flagship Orange Pi board, Shenzhen Xunlong teased some detail views on Twitter. The Orange Pi 4 and an AI-enhanced Orange Pi 4B will ship in two weeks. Pricing is undisclosed, but the boards will be “cheaper” than the previous Rockchip RK3399-based Orange Pi, the Orange Pi RK3399. That larger SBC debuted at $109 and now sells for $89 with 2GB DDR3 and 16GB eMMC compared to 4GB LPDDR4 and 16GB eMMC for the Orange Pi 4.

RedisInsight Revealed and WordPress 5.2.4 Released

• Redis Labs eases database management with RedisInsight

  The robust market of tools to help users of the Redis database manage their systems just got a new entrant. Redis Labs disclosed the availability of its RedisInsight tool, a graphical user interface (GUI) for database management and operations. Redis is a popular open source NoSQL database that is also increasingly being used in cloud-native Kubernetes deployments as users move workloads to the cloud. Open source database use is growing quickly according to recent reports as the need for flexible, open systems to meet different needs has become a common requirement. Among the challenges often associated with databases of any type is ease of management, which Redis is trying to address with RedisInsight.

• WordPress 5.2.4 Update

  Late-breaking news on the 5.2.4 short-cycle security release that landed October 14. When we released the news post, I inadvertently missed giving props to Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies for finding and disclosing an issue where path traversal can lead to remote code execution. Simon has done a great deal of work on the WordPress project, and failing to mention his contributions is a huge oversight on our end. Thank you to all of the reporters for privately disclosing vulnerabilities, which gave us time to fix them before WordPress sites could be attacked.

Desktop GNU/Linux: Rick and Morty, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto on GNOME and Linux Format on Eoan Ermine

• We know where Rick (from Rick and Morty) stands on Intel vs AMD debate

  For one, it appears Rick is running a version of Debian with a very old Linux kernel (3.2.0) — one dating back to 2012. He badly needs to install some frickin’ updates. “Also his partitions are real weird. It’s all Microsoft based partitions,” a Redditor says. “A Linux user would never do [this] unless they were insane since NTFS/Exfat drivers on Linux are not great.”

• Georges Basile Stavracas Neto: Every shell has a story

  … a wise someone once muttered while walking on a beach, as they picked up a shell lying on the sand. Indeed, every shell began somewhere, crossed a unique path with different goals and driven by different motivations. Some shells were created to optimize for mobility; some, for lightness; some, for speed; some were created to just fit whoever is using it and do their jobs efficiently. It’s statistically close to impossible to not find a suitable shell, one could argue. So, is this a blog about muttered shell wisdom? In some way, it actually is. It is, indeed, about Shell, and about Mutter. And even though “wisdom” is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, it is expected that whoever reads this blog doesn’t leave it less wise, so the word applies to a certain degree. Evidently, the Shell in question is composed of bits and bytes; its protection is more about the complexities of a kernel and command lines than sea predators, and the Mutter is actually more about compositing the desktop than barely audible uttering.

• Adieu, 32

  The tenth month of the year arrives and so does a new Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) update. Is it a portent that this is the 31st release of Ubuntu and with the 32nd release next year, 32-bit x86 Ubuntu builds will end?