• Godot Engine to get various improvements thanks to the Google Summer of Code program

  The open source Godot game engine is a really amazing project that’s quickly becoming even more amazing. Development continues unabated and, thanks to dedicated programmers, there’s plenty to look forward to in the works.

  The free, open source and cross-platform game engine Godot has been steadily improving for quite some time. The upcoming 4.0 version already promises neat new features such as Vulkan support and real-time global illumination. Now, thanks to Google’s Summer of Code program, a few student developers have been focusing on improving several areas of the engine and editor.

  All six of the projects are good improvements and generally add to the available tools but a few caught my attention more than others. Particularly the inclusion of document generation for Godot’s own scripting language as well as improvements to localization tools. Yes, I know, they may not be as obviously pleasing as better animation support or modelling improvements but solid documentation and the ability to painlessly edit a sprawling project is something that’s often sadly overlooked in the development world. Making an engine or editor more accessible is always a noble goal.

• In Blood is an upcoming visual novel about toxic relationships and lovecraftian horror

  While, admittedly, this isn’t the usual fare that we cover, some of you might be interested in this upcoming project by developer Jaime Scribbles. Finding herself in another dimension, protagonist Eleadora struggles to get back to her own world while having to rely on potentially untrustworthy allies. Eleadora may well find herself changed both physically and mentally after her ordeal, mutating into something other than human if things don’t go well.

• Godhood to ascend Early Access on August 11

  This god simulator by Abbey Games allows players to create their own religion, cultivate followers and grow the faith into glorious prosperity. Originally crowdfunded, Godhood has come a long way since its original pitch, adding a whole range of options and mechanics to better define your godly cult. Expect to issue commandments, manage disciple and engage in divine combat against other deities in a battle to establish yourself as the one true faith.

• PlayStation 2 emulator PCSX2 continues to show improvements in latest progress report

  The quest for better emulation is never quite done, it seems. The open source PS2 emulator saw its first major stable release in years a few months ago and since then more exciting stuff has been under development.

  If you’re not familiar with PCSX2, it’s one of the oldest PlayStation 2 emulators around. While not completely perfect, it’s allowed for reasonably good emulation of titles for a long time and has gotten noticeably better on Linux as of the last few years. Back in May, PCSX2 released its first new stable version in four years and, with it, brought countless improvements and fixes as well.

  The development hasn’t slowed since and there’s plenty to love in a recent progress report. While there’s a fair bit of code refactoring and bug fixing, I’m mostly excited about some the accuracy improvements that have been implemented. Z-buffer improvements, for example, solve many text and HUD display issues while dithering support and blending improvements make things look more as they were originally intended.

  I’ve got quite a few PS2 games from back in the day and, as PCSX2 has steadily improved, it’s been fun to revisit those titles. While things aren’t quite perfect yet, there’s an impressive amount of compatibility. Even software rendering is relatively manageable for those few picky titles that don’t play nice yet. Still, projects like these are invaluable for preservation of old games even as the original hardware becomes more difficult to find.

• EVERSPACE 2 continues to shape up in Alpha, shows off second star system

  The rather pretty open-world space action sim from ROCKFISH games looks to be steadily improving as it nears Beta quality. The developers have shown the adjustments made in response to feedback as well as new content they hope to add soon.

• How to install Steam on Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, Majaro, Mint)

  In this article, you will learn how to install Steam on Linux. The guide applies to all the distributions.

  Steam is a very popular video game distribution service. It acts as a storefront where users can buy the game, play and update it directly through the Steam application. Apart from that, community features such as friends lists and groups, cloud storage, and in-game voice chat functionalities are also provided by Steam.

  The Steam platform is the largest digital distribution platform for PC gaming in the world, accounting around 75% of the market share.

• [Meme] GitHub Looking to Replace Free/Libre Git With Proprietary Software, Centralised and Controlled by Microsoft
• Microsoft Gender (In)Equality: Women Don’t Ask for Raises
• IBM and the Bomb – Part I: How IBM Played a Technical and Diplomatic Role in the Cold War
• UEFI ‘Secure Boot’ is Just a Security Mess, as Techrights Predicted All Along, and FSF Should Not Have Given That Award
• Declassified 6-8 Years Ago: Thomas Watson Jr. (Son of IBM Founder) as Politician Navigating Cold War Politics
• Techrights Now Has All Pages (Nearly 3,000 of Them) About the Famous Police Arrest, an Arrest for Pedophilia by Engineer of Bill Gates, Working at His Home (the Gates Estate Where He Was Busted, Admitted Guilt)
• IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 29, 2020
• Links 30/7/2020: Kodi Media Center 18.8, GNOME Gingerblue 0.2.0, ‘BootHole’ Hype Everywhere (UEFI ‘Security’ Was Always Overhyped Anyway)

• OnePlus yet again teases always-on display in OxygenOS 11

• Firefox for Android starts rolling out redesign w/ bottom-bar, limited extension support

• BMW finally rolls out Android Auto, but there are some restrictions

• Google One now offers free phone backups up to 15GB on Android and iOS

• Google is working on better integration between Chrome OS and Android devices

• Google Play services is the first Android app to hit 10 billion installs

• Google Chat adds dark theme on Android and iOS for G Suite customers

• Google’s Nearby Share is Now Disappearing on Android Phones

• Sprint and T-Mobile Galaxy A20 units finally receive Android 10 along with One UI 2.0

• Qualcomm Unveils 'World's Fastest' Commercial Charging Solution for Android Devices

• NTV-Plus launches Android box

• 3SS and Hoppr join forces for Android TV monetisation

• Best headphones for Android in the UK: The top picks for 2020

• EclecticIQ and ThreatFabric Investigation Reveals Evidence of Malicious Android Packages

• Top 6 best iOS and Android games of July 2020

When you're a systems administrator, you don't just have one job; you have ALL the jobs, and often each one is on-demand with little to no warning. Unless you do a task every day, you may not always have all the commands and options you need in mind when you need them. And that's why I love cheat sheets.

Cheat sheets help you avoid silly mistakes, they keep you from having to look through pages of documentation, and they keep you moving efficiently through your tasks. I've selected my favorite 10 cheat sheets for any sysadmin, regardless of experience level.

I recently participated in The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America, held virtually June 29-July 2, 2020. In the course of that event, I had the opportunity to speak with a fellow attendee about my career in Linux systems administration and how it had led me to a career focused on open source. Specifically, he asked, how does a systems administrator who doesn't do a lot of coding participate in open source projects?

That's a great question!

A lot of focus in open source projects is placed on the actual code, but there's a lot more to it than that. The following are some ways that I've been deeply involved in open source projects, without writing code.

• Intel Prepping Bus Lock Detection For Linux To Avoid This Performance Pitfall

  Building off the recently mainlined Intel work on split lock detection, Intel engineers have now been extending that with bus lock detection support.

  A bus lock as outlined within Intel's PRM happens via split locked access to writeback memory or using locks to uncacheable memory. Detecting bus locks is important due to performance penalties and possible denial of service implications.

  Intel's Fenghua Yu summed up the performance implications as typically being more than one thousand cycles slower than an atomic operation within a cache line and disrupting the performance of other CPU cores as well.

• MSM Open-Source Driver Continues On Qualcomm Adreno 640/650 Series Bring-Up

  The open-source MSM DRM driver developed by Google, Qualcomm's Code Aurora, and other parties as what started out as part of the "Freedreno" driver initiative is continuing to see better support for the newer Adreno 640 and 650 series.

  The MSM DRM driver developers continue working on the Adreno 640/650 series as found in the Snapdragon 855/855+ and 865/865+, respectively. Sent in on Wednesday was the MSM-next material for Linux 5.9. This pull has "a bunch more" work on Adreno 640/650 both on the display and GPU enablement side, among that work are fixes, setting up the UBWC configuration, HWCG setup (hardware clock gating), and other bits.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 868

  jenkins, chromeos, chromebook, arm, buying a house

• Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma Status Update 2020-07-30

  Only a short update on the current status of my KDE/Plasma package for Debian sid and testing:

  Frameworks 5.72
  Plasma 5.19.4
  Apps 20.04.3
  Digikam 7.0.0
  Ark CVE-2020-16116 fixed in version 20.04.3-1~np2
  Hope that helps a few people.

• Week 8: GSoC Project Report

  Last week I implemented the duration fields and addition of storyboard items from storyboard. Previously it could only be done from the timeline docker. Also I implemented updating of all affected items’ thumbnail. This makes the docker almost complete sans the capability to save or export.

  The duration field is implemented such that any item in the storyboard docker has the duration equal to the next keyframe in any node. This makes sense because the canvas image would be identical to the keyframe image for that duration only, after that the other keyframe’s content would be added to it. Changing duration would move all keyframes in all nodes after the keyframe for that item.

• [Godot] GSoC 2020 - Progress report #1

  As we announced a few months ago, Godot is participating again in the Google Summer of Code program for its 2020 edition.

  6 projects have been selected back in May, and the 6 students and their mentors have now been working on their projects for close to two months. We omitted to announce the projects formally (sorry about that!), but this first progress report written by each student will make up for it by giving a direct glimpse into their work.

• Diversity in Open Source and Gaming: Does it Matter?

  It shouldn’t need to be said, and yet it needs to be shouted, over and over. The US has an especially egregious problem among developed nations with police violence (while data is difficult to obtain and interpret, there is clearly a problem). However, these are worldwide struggles in one form or another which shouldn’t be limited to protests in the streets and discussions of police and politics. As gamers and Linux users, we sit at a special intersection of entertainment and industry. Neither side is well represented when it comes to diversity and action. Our community needs to do better. We need to make Black lives matter in our own space and do our part to push society forward.

  This issue should be crucial to us because of the values we represent as Linux gamers. Gaming is universal. There is an innate desire to play, to escape, to be challenged, to connect or compete with others, to tell stories. Gaming is to be shared, to break down barriers and find commonality. Gaming on Linux means we also value Free/Libre Software. And Free Software is meant to be free: free from restrictions, for anyone to use and make it their own. These words are hollow without putting them into practice and ensuring this is available to all, that anyone can contribute. There is a natural connection here, between the joy and universality of gaming and the benefits and openness of Free Software, twin ideals we want to succeed. So while games are rarely Open Source, as a community that uses both we should reflect a culmination of these values.

  [...]

  Unfortunately, we do not. Many games and their players are rife with white supremacy, neo-Nazis, hate speech and groups, bigotry, poor (if any) representation, toxicity, issues of how they represent police, excuses of “historical accuracy,” ignoring the real problems of the locations they represent, and ugly actions like players spawning KKK members in Red Dead Online to terrorize others.

• Gender balance in computing: current research

• Nest With Fedora registration now open

  Registration for Nest with Fedora is now open! We welcome you to join us for three days of Fedora content, workshops, and social hours. Nest begins Friday 7 August at 1200 UTC and runs through Sunday 9 August at 2200 UTC. The schedule will be published in the coming days. We are using a platform called Hopin, which has been generously provided by the Apache Software Foundation.

  As we all know, this year our annual contributor conference Flock to Fedora has been moved to a virtual event: Nest with Fedora. It won’t be a literal replacement for all the great in person time we usually get, but I am still excited to see all of the familiar (and new!) faces and to catch up on what everybody has been working on. There is also a silver lining going virtual: so many more Fedora contributors can attend!

• Sandworm details the group behind the worst cyberattacks in history [iophk: Windows TCO]

                   
  

                     

  Andy and Nilay discuss the origins of Sandworm, the intricacies and ramifications of their attacks, and what mysteries and situations are still left unsolved. Listen here or in your preferred podcast player to hear the entire conversation.

                     

  Below is a lightly edited excerpt from the conversation.

• Industrial Systems Can Be [Cr]acked Remotely via VPN Vulnerabilities

                   
  

                     

  In Secomea GateManager, which allows users to connect to the internal network from the internet through an encrypted tunnel, researchers discovered multiple security holes, including weaknesses that can be exploited to overwrite arbitrary data (CVE-2020-14500), execute arbitrary code, cause a DoS condition, execute commands as root by connecting via hardcoded Telnet credentials, and obtain user passwords due to weak hashing.

• An awk corner case?

  So even after years and years of experience, core tools still find ways to surprise me. Today I tried to do some timestamp comparisons with mawk (vnl-filter, to be more precise), and ran into a detail of the language that made it not work. Not a bug, I guess, since both mawk and gawk are affected. I'll claim "language design flaw", however.

• The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

  "Do Not Track" (DNT) is a simple HTTP header that a browser can send to signal to a web site that the user does not want to be tracked. The DNT header had a promising start and the support of major browsers almost a decade ago. Most web browsers still support sending it, but in 2020 it is almost useless because the vast majority of web sites ignore it. Advertising companies, in particular, argued that its legal status was unclear, and that it was difficult to determine how to interpret the header. There have been some relatively recent attempts at legislation to enforce honoring the DNT header, but those efforts do not appear to be going anywhere. In comparison, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) attempt to solve some of the same problems as DNT but are legally enforceable.

  In 2007, the US Federal Trade Commission was asked [PDF] to create a "Do Not Track" list, similar to the popular "Do Not Call" list. This would have been a list of advertiser domain names that tracked consumer behavior online, and would allow browsers to prevent requests to those sites if the user opted in. However, that approach never got off the ground, and DNT first appeared as a header in 2009, when security researchers Christopher Soghoian, Sid Stamm, and Dan Kaminsky got together to create a prototype.

• ’90s vibes: Fresh themes for Firefox, video calls and more

  Raise your hand if your watchlists are showing signs of ‘90s reruns. Saved by the Bell, Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air are making comfort TV comebacks along with bike shorts, oversize button-downs and bandanas, which could honestly be the WFH meets socially distant uniform of the summer. Visually the ‘90s give so much in a simple, joyful way. A little neon here, a few shapes there, and whoomp, there it is!

  Get some fresh ’90s styles into your digital day-to-day, with wallpapers, video call backgrounds and browser themes. This collection is here to bring you ‘90s joy without the Macarena playing on the radio all the time.

• Open-source contact tracing, part 2

  In March 2020, the first contact-tracing app was released; it was TraceTogether in Singapore. As of early July 2020, it had been downloaded over 2.1 million times for a population of Singapore of around 5.8 million. The app uses a protocol called BlueTrace. A reference implementation of the protocol was released under the name of OpenTrace; it includes Android and iOS apps and the server piece. All those elements are released under GPL v3.

  The Git repository seems quiet after the initial release, counting, for example, only five commits to the Android app. It seems likely, then, that the public and private source trees diverged at some point. This looks to be confirmed when we look into the binary TraceTogether app analysis by Frank Liauw, and compare his results with the OpenTrace source code. OpenTrace includes, for example, the same database structure, but does not contain the updates made in TraceTogether. This means that the installed app does not correspond with the released source code, which could mean that some of the privacy characteristics of the app have changed.

  Beyond just the source code, the design paper [PDF] describes the main ideas and details of the protocol. Users are identified by their phone numbers; both global and temporary IDs are generated by the centralized server. The apps may download batches of temporary IDs in advance in order to continue working offline. The proximity tracing is done by Bluetooth and the BlueTrace protocol includes sending the phone model, for distance calibration purposes, along with the temporary ID.

• New features in gnuplot 5.4

  Gnuplot 5.4 has been released, three years after the last major release of the free-software graphing program. In this article we will take a look at five major new capabilities in gnuplot. First, we briefly visit voxel plotting, for visualizing 3D data. Since this is a big subject and the most significant addition to the program, we'll save the details for a subsequent article. Next, we learn about plotting polygons in 3D, another completely new gnuplot feature. After that, we'll get caught up briefly in spider plots, using them to display some recent COVID-19 infection data. Then we'll see an example of how to use pixmaps, a new feature allowing for the embedding of pictures alongside curves or surfaces. Finally, we'll look at some more COVID-19 data using the new 3D bar chart.

  A full accounting of all of the improvements and bug fixes in 5.4 can be found in the release notes. More gnuplot history can be found in our May 2017 article on the soon-to-be-released gnuplot version 5.2, which described its new features, some of which have been expanded in 5.4.

               

       

• How to Reset Forgotten Root Password in Ubuntu Linux

• Sharing data and metadata together

• Stupid RCU Tricks: Failure Probability and CPU Count

  So rcutorture found a bug, whether in RCU or elsewhere, and it is now time to reproduce that bug, whether to make good use of git bisect or to verify an alleged fix. One problem is that, rcutorture being what it is, that bug is likely a race condition and it likely takes longer than you would like to reproduce. Assuming that it reproduces at all.

  How to make it reproduce faster? Or at all, as the case may be?

  One approach is to tweak the Kconfig options and maybe even the code to make the failure more probable. Another is to find a “near miss” that is related to and more probable than the actual failure.

  But given that we are trying to make a race condition happen more frequently, it is only natural to try tweaking the number of CPUs. After all, one would hope that increasing the number of CPUs would increase the probability of hitting the race condition. So the straightforward answer is to use all available CPUs.

  But how to use them? Run a single rcutorture scenario covering all the CPUs, give or take the limitations imposed by qemu and KVM? Or run many instances of that same scenario, with each instance using a small fraction of the available CPUs?

• The 6 Best Free phpMyAdmin Themes (and How to install)

• Du Command to get Size of Directory in Linux a Guide for beginners

• screenFetch in Linux Mint 20.0 Ulyana

• Debian and CentOS Add User to sudo group and sudoers File complete guide

• Linux Basics for Hackers: Getting Started with Networking, Scripting, and Security in Kali

• Monitor systemd journals via email

• 10 cheat sheets for Linux sysadmins

• How to fix .NET Core’s ‘Unable to obtain lock file access’ error on Red Hat OpenShift

• How to Remove Directory in Linux by command and GUI Guide for beginners

• How to Set Up Nginx Server Blocks (Virtual Hosts) on CentOS 8

One of the most beautiful things about Linux is that it can deliver fluid performance even on low-tier hardware. You don’t need 16GB of RAM or a quad-core processor just to browse the web. In fact, Ubuntu – one of the most popular Linux Distro can run perfectly well with a simple 2GHz dual-core system racking no more than 4GB of RAM and just needs a minimum of 25GB storage space.

This opens up a whole new world for budget computing. By using Linux, you can get way more performance out on a low-spec system giving you a better bang-for-buck performance. With this in mind, we have put together a list of going over the best cheap laptops for Linux.

Top 10 Budget Linux Laptops

To keep the list diverse and useful for everybody, we have included laptops that fall between the $200 to $1000 price bracket. This makes sure there is something for everybody.

Also, only some of the systems discussed here come with Linux pre-installed. Since most manufacturers prefer to ship with Windows, you might need to install Linux manually or set up a dual-boot configuration. We will tell you which laptops come with Linux out of the box and which don’t.

So with that being said, here is our list of the ten best cheap Linux laptops.

• Maintaining stable stability

  The goals of the stable tree are somewhat in competition with each other, Levin said. The maintainers do not want to introduce regressions into the tree, but they also want to try to ensure that they do not miss any fixes that should be in the tree. It is "very tricky" to balance those two goals. The talk would follow the path of patches that fix bugs, from the time they are written until they get released in a stable tree, showing the mechanisms in place to try to ensure that only real, non-regressing fixes make it all the way to the end.

  The first stage is the rules for the kinds of patches that get accepted into the stable tree. They have to be small, straightforward fixes that are already upstream in Linus Torvalds's tree. No complex new mechanisms or new features are welcome in the stable tree. The patches have "passed the minimal bar" to get accepted into the mainline, but it is sometimes necessary for the maintainers (or patch submitters) to backport the patch. That is something the maintainers try hard to avoid, so that the testing of the mainline is effectively also testing everything in stable, but backports cannot be avoided at all times. If there are large, intrusive patches that must be backported—for, say, mitigations for speculative-execution processor flaws—the stable maintainers require a lot more testing, subsystem maintainer signoffs, and more to try to ensure that the backport is reasonable.

• Emulating Windows system calls, take 2

  Back in June, LWN covered a patch set adding a mechanism intended to help systems like Wine emulate Windows system calls on a Linux system. That patch set got a lot of attention and comments, with the result that its form has changed considerably. Gabriel Krisman Bertazi has now posted a new patch set that takes a different approach to solving the same problem.
  As a reminder, the intent of this work is to enable the running of Windows binaries that call directly into the Windows kernel without going through the Windows API. Those system calls must somehow be trapped and emulated for the program to run correctly; this must be done without modifying the Windows program itself, lest Wine run afoul of the cheat-detection mechanisms built into many of those programs. The previous attempt added a new mmap() flag that would mark regions of the program's address space as unable to make direct system calls. That was coupled with a new seccomp() mode that would trap system calls made from the marked range(s). There were a number of concerns raised about this approach, starting with the fact that using seccomp() might cause some developers to think that it could be used as a security mechanism, which is not the case.

         

• Memory protection keys for the kernel

  The memory protection keys feature was added to the 4.6 kernel in 2016; it allows user space to group pages into "protection domains" that can have their access restricted independently of the normal page protections. There is no equivalent feature for kernel space; access to memory in the kernel's portion of the address space is controlled exclusively by the page protections. That situation may be about to change, though, as a result of the protection keys supervisor (PKS) patch set posted by Ira Weiny (with many patches written by Fenghua Yu).
  Virtual-memory systems maintain a set of protection bits in their page tables; those bits specify the types of accesses (read, write, or execute) that are allowed for a given processor mode. These protections are implemented by the hardware, and even the kernel cannot get around them without changing them first. On the face of it, the normal page protections would appear to be sufficient for the task of keeping the kernel away from pages that, for whatever reason, it should not be accessing. Those protections do indeed do the job in a number of places; for example, page protections prevent the kernel from writing to its own code.

  Page protections work less well, though, in situations where the kernel should be kept away from some memory most of the time, but where occasional access must be allowed. Changing page protections is a relatively expensive operation involving tasks like translation lookaside buffer invalidations; doing so frequently would hurt the performance of the kernel. Given that protecting memory from the kernel is usually done as a way of protecting against kernel bugs that, one hopes, do not normally exist anyway, that performance hit is one that few users are willing to pay.

• Linux Quietly Makes It Harder To Guess Network RNG's Internal State

  Merged today to mainline for Linux 5.8 Git and also marked for back-porting is a change to make it more difficult to guess the network random number generator's internal state. It looks like it could be for a yet-to-be-published vulnerability. 

  Hitting the Linux kernel Git tree today was random32: update the net random state on interrupt and activity. With that change the first 32 bits out of the 128 bits of a random CPU's "net_rand_state" is now being modified on interrupt or CPU activity. This is being done "to complicate remote observations that could lead to guessing the network RNG's internal state." 

• Linux Foundation Launches Open Source COVID Group [Ed: They are tactlessly associating "Linux" with mass surveillance]

  The Linux Foundation has set up a group to bring together a number of open source projects that are working to fight COVID-19. The Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) builds, secures, and sustains open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) combat COVID-19 and future epidemics.

  [...]

  The Linux Foundation says LFPH will initially focus on exposure notification applications like COVID Green and COVID Shield that use the GAEN system, after which it will expand to support all aspects of PHA’s testing, tracing, and isolation activities.

  COVID Shield was developed by a volunteer team of more than 40 developers from Shopify along with members of the Ontario and Canadian Digital Services. and is in the process of being deployed in Canada. While not an official Shopify project, the efforts were supported by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke.

• VMware Hands Control of Kubernetes Ingress Project Contour Over to CNCF

  Joe Beda, one of its creators, said one reason for the move was reassuring non-VMware developers that Contour's development wouldn't be steered by a single company.

• Success Story: Linux System Administration Training and Certification Leads to New Career

  Fabian Pichardo has worked with multiple hardware platforms such as Nvidia, Xilinx, Microchip, and National Instruments, and is skilled in languages such as C++, Python, Matlab and Julia. During university, Fabian created the Mechatronic Student Society to offer programming training for newbies and demonstrate new technology trends.

• 6 Ways to generate a secure password on Debian

• Building a new rescue kernel

• How to install LMMS on Ubuntu 20.04

• Mastering Pacman for Arch Linux

• GitLab From The Terminal: It's Simple With Lab

• GCC Sees More Progress On Ability To Parallelize The Compilation Of Large Source Files

  While GCC with GNU Make and other build systems can scale nicely in compiling many files concurrently, there has been an ongoing GCC effort to be able to parallelize more of the GNU Compiler Collection work when compiling large source files. 

  Back in the summer of 2019 the work got underway for trying to address the parallelization bottleneck in letting more of the compiler work be parallelized in larger source files. 

• What's new on CPAN - June 2020

  Welcome to “What’s new on CPAN”, a curated look at last month’s new CPAN uploads for your reading and programming pleasure. Enjoy!

• Face Mask Detection using Yolo V3

  Face Mask Detection Using Yolo_v3 on Google Colab

  Great you are ready to implement a hands on project " Face Mask Detection "

  Requirements
  Windows or Linux
  CMake >= 3.12
  CUDA 10.0
  OpenCV >= 2.4
  GPU with CC >= 3.0

• Namespaces and Scope in Python

  This tutorial covers Python namespaces, the structures used to organize the symbolic names assigned to objects in a Python program.

  The previous tutorials in this series have emphasized the importance of objects in Python. Objects are everywhere! Virtually everything that your Python program creates or acts on is an object.

  An assignment statement creates a symbolic name that you can use to reference an object. The statement x = 'foo' creates a symbolic name x that refers to the string object 'foo'.

  In a program of any complexity, you’ll create hundreds or thousands of such names, each pointing to a specific object. How does Python keep track of all these names so that they don’t interfere with one another?

• Django Developers Community Survey 2020

  We're conducting a seventeen question survey to assess how the community feels about the current Django development process. This was last done in 2015.

  Please take a few minutes to complete the 2020 survey. Your feedback will help guide future efforts.

• How much fun was EuroPython 2020

  This year I’ve finally got enough courage and will, and I had 2 submissions for #pyconil. COVID-19 had other plans, and #pyconil was canceled

  I’ve told @ultrabug about this (Numberly CTO, Alexys Jacob), after a few weeks he surprised me with telling me he’s gonna present scylla-driver in europython2020, the shard-aware driver we were working on in the last 6 months.

  At the time it wasn’t yet ready nor publish. (Also found out that Numberly were sponsoring europython for years now) Took me a few seconds to figure that he just set me deadline without my consent…

• This Week in Rust 349

• Dave Darko designs a 16-button keep-alive switch with a Nano Every

  It’s generally not advisable to leave equipment running when unattended. As a safeguard against this possibility at hackerspaces and elsewhere, element14 Presents’ Dave Darko built a custom switch that requires users to intermittently push a button in order to produce additional ‘on’ time.

  The trick here is that instead of having one keep-alive button, the unit has a matrix of 16 buttons that light up randomly to be pressed. The idea is to prevent someone from setting up a second device to simply poke the same key over and over.

  The ‘unhackable’ switch, which resembles a MIDI sequencer input, runs on an Arduino Nano Every and uses a relay to directly control the power state. It’s demonstrated toward the end of the video below, where Darko plays a sort of simple button-based game to keep an LED fixture on.

• 15-inch touch panel PC builds on Raspberry Pi CM3

  Comfile’s 15-inch “ComfilePi CPi-A150WR” touch-panel computer is built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and offers an IP65 protected, 1024 x 768 resistive touchscreen pus USB, LAN, serial, and 22x GPIO.

  Comfile Technology has added to its line of ComfilePi touch panel computers built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3). The new 15-inch ComfilePi CPi-A150WR follows its earlier, 7-inch ComfilePi CPi-A070WR and 10.2-inch CPi-A102WR.

• UP Xtreme Lite SBC offers more affordable Whiskey Lake option

  Aaeon announced a slightly scaled down “UP Xtreme Lite” variant of its 8th Gen U-series based UP Xtreme SBC that provides up to 16GB DDR4, 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.2, and 3x M.2 plus SATA, HDMI, DP, and 40-pin GPIO.

  Aaeon announced a Linux-ready UP Xtreme Lite version of its Kickstarter-backed UP Xtreme SBC, which has also been featured as the mainboard for Aaeon’s UPX Edge embedded system. Aaeon claims the UP Xtreme Lite will be more affordable than the original. Yet, this is the first UP board announced without individual pricing or any promises of community support from its UP project. It is possible that both will be forthcoming.

• FLOSS Weekly 589: LifeScope - Using Open Source to Organize and Play VR

  The open-source software that allows you to organize your life with VR! Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennet talk with Liam Broza, the CEO and Co-founder of LifeScope. The discuss the LifeScope platform, which is built to organizes your existing data and allows you to manage it better. It is a consultancy that helps you find and remove unwanted data. They also create virtual spaces for events, businesses, and brands that allow people to meet in the time of social distancing. They talk about the future of VR, and what is that going to look like for business and consumers and why it is essential to keep the future of VR open source.

• 2020-07-29 | Linux Headlines

  The first standard-conformant implementations for OpenXR are finally shipping, LineageOS 17.1 has an unsupported build for the Raspberry Pi, Nextcloud gains a Forms feature, nano version 5 brings new features to the venerable text editor, Facebook releases PyTorch version 1.6, and Microsoft backs the Blender Foundation.

• Destination Linux 184: Let's Squash Some Bugs (plus Manjaro ARM Interview)

  Coming up on this week’s episode of Destination Linux, we have an interview with Dan Johansen of Manjaro ARM to talk all things ARM. The big topic of the week is about Bug Reports and how they can get better for both Users and Developers so Let’s Squash Some Bugs. In the News, we talk about the new AMD Ryzen Linux Laptops are finally hitting the market. Thanks to Tuxedo & Slimbook we’ve got 2 new Linux Laptops with the Tuxedo Pulse 15 & the KDE Slimbook. In Linux Gaming section we talk about SuperTuxKart which an awesome Open Source game for Linux! We’ve also got some great Community Feedback to talk about. In addition to our Software Spotlight we are going to start explaining the Linux Filesystem in the Tip of the Week for a Filesystem Breakdown Series. All of this and so much more on Episode 184 of the #1 video-centric Linux podcast, Destination Linux!

The internet is a prominent place. And while it may feel like a few huge names like Netflix, Dropbox, and Facebook run the show, they are far from the only option you have available. It’s now easier than ever to find a self-hosted alternative to just about any online platform.

What does self-hosted mean? Self-hosted platforms are apps that function through their web hosting instead of a major option like Amazon Web Services. Generally, they’re not only open-source (a.k.a. free) but full of different content, features, and other things worth checking out.

And here’s the best part—they’re often cheaper! Here are some of the best self-hosted alternatives to popular services.

Also: Ideal Linux webhosting services of 2020

Today I released GNOME Gingerblue version 0.2.0 with the basic new features...

[...]

The GNOME release team complained at the early release cycle in July and call the project empty, but I estimate it will take at least 4 years to complete 4.0.0 in reasonable time for GNOME 4 to be released between 2020 and 2026.

• ‘Clickbait Star’ ZDNet Does Not Know the Difference Between Linux and Docker Misconfiguration
• It’s Good to be King (of EPOnia)
• [Meme] Demolishing Facts, As Always, With Help From IAM ‘Magazine’
• The Internet and General-Purpose Technology Will Never Improve (But Only Get Worse Over Time) Unless People Stick to Principles, Take a Smarter Stance
• When the Mainstream German Media Stops Reporting or Even Talking About EPO Scandals for No Valid Reason/s
• IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 28, 2020
• Links 29/7/2020: LLVM 11.0 Release Candidate, Tails 4.9 and WordPress 5.5 Release Candidate
• Links 28/7/2020: OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 Alpha, 4MLinux 33.1, Telegram Desktop 2.2 and GNOME OS Testing
• Links 29/7/2020: LabPlot 2.8 Beta and GNU Nano 5

• Humax targets Android TV market with advanced box and operator tier programme

• OnePlus Buds review: Perfect for OnePlus smartphones

• [Update: Now available] BMW is bringing Wireless Android Auto to select vehicles

• How to block a number on any Android phone to stop receiving unwanted calls

• Realme 2 Pro and Realme 5/5s/5i Android 10 kernel source code now available

• Nearby Sharing, Android’s AirDrop, is disappearing for most

• Android Hack: Features You Probably that You Should Have Known

• Manage your home stocks like a pro with Grocy and Raspberry PI

• How to open any terminal app from Nautilus

• How to deploy a multi-container pod to a Kubernetes cluster

• How to git clone on Ubuntu with GitLab and GitHub

• How to add the Sid “unstable” repository and get the latest Linux apps on your Chromebook

• Linux Boot-Time

Linear Computing has posted specs for two carrier boards with optional enclosures that support Toradex’s Linux-driven i.MX8M Mini and Nano based Verdin modules: a general purpose “VSC-4436” and a “VBB-4449” DAQ controller.

While reporting this week on Toradex’s Dahlia carrier board for its Verdin modules, we saw that Ontario-based Linear Computing, Inc. (LCI) had posted specs for its promised Verdin carrier boards. The VSC-4436 and VBB-4449 are both available as boards or as enclosed embedded systems.