Today in Techrights

• Links 18/1/2021: GNU Radio 3.9, Wikipedia at 20
• InteLeaks – Part XIX: Intel's Web 'Experts' Seen as Microsoft Champions Dealing With the Platform Microsoft is Looking to Destroy
• Adding Images as Characters to the Daily Bulletins of Techrights
• Links 18/1/2021: Weekly Summaries and Linux 5.11 RC4
• IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 17, 2021
• The Oligarchs' Parties Will Never Choose the Side of Software Freedom Because Free Software Cannot Bribe Officials

today's leftovers

• Meetup Will Discuss Survey Results, Project Improvements

  The openSUSE Project welcomes our followers to participate in two planned meetups to discuss results from the End of the Year Community Survey on Jan. 23 and Jan. 30. Both sessions will start at 13:00 UTC on openSUSE’s Jitsi instance and go for 1:30 hours. Members of the “let’s improve the openSUSE learning experience” initiative will share results and analysis from the survey.

• LF‌ ‌Edge‌ ‌Adds‌ ‌New‌ ‌Members‌

  LF Edge has announced the addition of four new general members (FII, HCL, OpenNebula, and Robin.io) and one new Associate member (Shanghai Open Source Information Technology Association). Additionally, Home Edge has released its third platform update with new Data Storage and Mult-NAT Edge Device Communications (MNDEC) features.

• Text Encoding Menu in 2021

  In mid-January 2021, the Text Encoding menu in Firefox looks like this: Automatic Unicode Western Arabic (Windows) Arabic (ISO) Baltic (Windows) Baltic (ISO) Central European (Windows) Central European (ISO) Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Cyrillic (Windows) Cyrillic (KOI8-U) Cyrillic (KOI8-R) Cyrillic (ISO) Cyrillic (DOS) Greek (Windows) Greek (ISO) Hebrew, Visual Hebrew Japanese Korean Thai Turkish Vietnamese [...] For users who have telemetry enabled, we collect data about whether the item “Automatic” was used at least once in given Firefox subsession, whether an item other than “Automatic” was used at least once in a given Firefox subsession, and a characterization of how the encoding that is being overridden was determined (from HTTP, from meta, from chardetng running without the user triggering it, from chardetng as triggered by the user by having chosen “Automatic” previously, etc.). If things go well, the telemetry can be analyzed when Firefox 87 is released (i.e. when 86 has spent its time on the release channel). The current expectation for this is 2021-03-23.

• Wikipedia is twenty. It’s time to start covering it better. - Columbia Journalism Review

• Jimmy Wales: “Wikipedia is from a different era”

  As the online encyclopedia turns 20-years-old, its founder reflects on the internet’s halcyon days.

• Fact check: As Wikipedia turns 20, how credible is it?

  Wikipedia, which has been referred to as a world treasure, turns 20 on Friday. According to research conducted over the years — including a scientific study published by the journal Nature in 2005 and a report commissioned by the site's Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 — Wikipedia's entries are comparable in quality to those in prestigious encyclopedias such as Britannica. However, it is difficult to measure the consistency of information that can be altered at any time.

• Odin is finally pleased so the open-world survival game Valheim releases on February 2 | GamingOnLinux

  Odin has finally had enough sacrifices and shall be releasing Valheim from Iron Gate AB will enter Early Access with Linux and Windows support on February 2. What is it? A brutal multiplayer exploration and survival game set in a procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage! With low-poly artwork and a very flexible building system it looks absolutely brilliant. The early builds they had available were seriously promising back in 2018 so I'm personally excited to see how far they've progress with it in that time.

Programming Leftovers

• Ravgeet Dhillon: Offline Toast notification in Nuxt/Vue app

  We have often seen apps telling us that “You are offline. Check your network status.”. It is not only convenient to do so but adds to a great UX. In this blog, we will look at how can we display a toast notification in a Nuxt/Vue app whenever the user goes offline or online. This will also help us to understand how to use computed and watch properties together. [...] Hurray! Our toast notifications are working perfectly fine. So using the combined magic of computed and watch properties, we can create outstanding workflows and take our Nuxt/Vue app to next level. If you any doubts or appreciation for our team, let us know in the comments below. We would be happy to assist you.

• Stephen Michael Kellat: Leveraging LaTeX In This Time

  From time to time I like to bring up fun adventures in LaTeX. In these stranges times in the United States it is important to look at somewhat practical applications beyond the normal reports and formal papers most people think of. With a Minimum Working Example we can mostly look at an idea. The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network has a package known as newspaper which is effectively subject to nominative determinism. You can make things with it that look like newspapers out of the 1940s-1960s in terms of layout. The page on CTAN shows nice examples of its use and provides a nice story as to why the package was created. The example source file on CTAN has a bug in it, though. We're going to make a new one based on it. I am also going to add but not yet utilize the markdown package to the example.

• 2021.03 Course Topped – Rakudo Weekly News

  The course of the Raku Programming Language by Andrew Shitov made it to the top 20 of Hacker News and spurred quite a few comments. The first associated Grant Report was also published.

• GCC 11 Is On The Final Stage Of Development With 60+ High Priority Regressions - Phoronix

  GCC 11 entered its final stage of development today as it works towards releasing around the end of Q1 / early Q2 if their past cadence holds up. Before GCC 11.1 can debut as the first stable version, there are some 60+ "P1" high priority regressions that need to be resolved or otherwise demoted to lesser priority regressions. GCC 11 release manager Richard Biener this morning announced GCC 11 is now in stage four development meaning only regression fixes and documentation fixes are allowed. As of this morning the code-base is at 62 P1 regressions, another 334 P2 regressions, 35 P3 regressions, and more than 200 regressions of the lower P4/P5 status.