• Generating numeric sequences with the Linux seq command [Ed: seq is a GNU program, not “Linux command”]

  One of the easiest ways to generate a list of numbers in Linux is to use the seq (sequence) command. In its simplest form, seq will take a single number and then list all the numbers from 1 to that number.

• HomeBank 5.3

  HomeBank is a free software (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") that will assist you to manage your personal accounting. It is designed to easy to use and be able to analyse your personal finance and budget in detail using powerful filtering tools and beautiful charts. If you are looking for a completely free and easy application to manage your personal accounting, budget, finance then HomeBank should be the software of choice.

• Staticsite for blogging

  I just released staticsite version 1.4, dedicated to creating a blog.

  After reorganising the documentation, I decided to write a simple tutorial showing how to get a new blog started.

One could say that the Flathub team is working silently behind the scenes most of the time and it wouldn't be far from the truth. Unless changes are substantial, they are rarely announced elsewhere than under a pull request or issue on GitHub. Let's change it a bit and try to summarize what was going on with Flathub over the last year.

Beta branch and test builds

2019 started off strong. In February, several improvements to general workflow but also how things under the hood work landed. Maintainers gained the ability to sign-in to buildbot to manage the builds and start new ones without having to push new commits. A delay has been introduced between finishing the build and publishing it to the stable repository to the possibility to test new build locally and also publish it faster or scrap it altogether. The initial delay was 24 hours but as it was too confusing, it was shortened to 3 hours.

Perhaps most importantly, the changes made it possible to publish test builds of pull requests and completely new applications. Additionally, Flathub gained support for publishing applications to separate beta remote.

Alex wrote more about the changes on his blog.

Also: Shell aliases for Flatpak applications

A conference, in the sense of a meeting, is a gathering of individuals who meet at an agreed place and time to discuss or engage in some common interest. There’s tons of conferences each year which will interest Linux users. No matter the size of your budget, there’s a Linux or open source conference you should attend.

Do you have problems tracking conferences? Which conferences do you plan to attend in 2020? Do you need a tool to help you track conferences you want to attend, and serve reminders to you? conrad might be the tool for you.

conrad is a free and open source command-line tool designed to help you track conferences and meetups. The tool is written in Python. Its first release was only a few months ago, so bear in mind the software is in an early stage of development. We’re looking at version 0.3.2.

• 5 technology trends for the roaring 20s, part 1: Blockchain, cloud, open source

  In other words, open-source is winning, in databases and beyond. There are some very good reasons why this is happening: low barrier to entry, community, innovation, interoperability. But the fact that open source is becoming the norm in enterprise software has side effects, too. To put it simply: AWS is eating open-source software because it can.

  Following customer demand, AWS has, over the last few years, added every single top open=source database to its arsenal as a managed service. This is a rather complicated issue, which we first touched on in May 2019. We are glad to see it been taken up by the likes of The New York Times, and the debate around the issue is heating up.

• What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits

  One of the great cultural events of the 2010s was the slow abandonment and ultimate death of iTunes. By the time the software was euthanized earlier this year, it had become an embarrassment, a mess of greasy preference panes and grayed-out, unreliable content. We were glad to see it go.

• How Iran's [Attackers] Might Strike Back After Soleimani's Assassination [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The most likely form of cyberattack to expect from Iran will be the one it has launched repeatedly against its neighbors in recent years: so-called wiper malware designed to destroy as many computers as possible inside target networks. Iran has used wipers like Shamoon and Stone Drill to inflict waves of disruption across neighboring countries in the Middle East, starting with an attack in 2012 that destroyed 30,000 Saudi Aramco computers. In 2014, Iranian hackers hit the Las Vegas Sands corporation with a wiper after owner Sheldon Adelson suggested a nuclear strike against the country. More recently, Iran's hackers have hit private-sector targets in neighboring Gulf states like the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait, as well as Saipem, an Italian oil firm for whom Saudi Aramco is a major customer.