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Litebook launches a $249 linux laptop
by Ron Dean 07 Mar '17

07 Mar '17

Presumably this is in $US -- Ron Dean Unit 61 Village Gardens 16 Rototuna Road Hamilton 3210 New Zealand Home 64 7 8493904 Mob 02102259172

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The City of Munich Might Stick With Linux
by Peter Reutemann 06 Mar '17

06 Mar '17

'Munich's "LiMux" project brought FOSS software to their city's IT administration -- until a vote last month on whether to abandon Linux and return to Windows. "Since this decision was reached, the majority of media have reported that a final call was made to halt LiMux and switch back to Microsoft software," reports the Free Software Foundation Europe. "This is, however, not an accurate representation of the outcome of the city council meeting." An anonymous reader quotes their report: The opposing parties were overruled, but the decision was amended such that the strategy document must specify which LiMux-applications will no longer be needed, the extent in which prior investments must be written off, and a rough calculation of the overall costs of the desired unification... [Only then will the city council make their final decision...] We succeeded thus far in forcing the mayor Dieter Reiter to postpone the final decision, and this was possible through the unwavering pressure created by joint efforts between The Document Foundation, KDE, OSBA, and the FSFE together with all the individuals who wrote to city council members and took the issue to the media. Although the mandate is highly suggestive in that it suggests that the existing vendor-neutral approach is to be replaced with a proprietary solution, it leaves the door open... The new mandate buys us some time. And we will keep going. Some politicians said they'd never received this much input from the public before, and the Free Software Foundation Europe says the city's issues were caused "from organizational problems, including lack of clear structures and responsibilities," which should not be attributed to the Linux operating system. "LiMux as such is still one of the best examples of how to create a vendor-neutral administration based on Free Software."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/03/04/0532214 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Litebook Launches A $249 Linux Laptop
by Peter Reutemann 06 Mar '17

06 Mar '17

'It's "like a Chromebook for Linux users on a budget," reports ZDNet. The new 2.9-pound Litebook uses Intel's Celeron N3150 processor and ships with a 14.1-inch display and a 512-gigabyte hard drive with full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080). For $20 more they'll throw in a 32-gigabyte SSD to speed up your boot time. "Unlike Windows laptops, Litebooks are highly optimized, come without performance hogging bloatware, [are] designed to ensure your privacy, and are entirely free of malware and viruses," writes the company's web site. They also add that their new devices "are affordable, customizable, and are backwards compatible with Windows software."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/03/06/0050203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Tim Berners-Lee Endorses DRM In HTML5, Offers Depressingly Weak Defense Of His Decision
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Mar '17

02 Mar '17

Has the godfather of the Web just sold it down the river? <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170301/03062936815/tim-berners-lee-endo…>

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Researchers find “severe” flaw in WordPress plugin with 1 million installs
by Peter Reutemann 01 Mar '17

01 Mar '17

'More than 1 million websites running the WordPress content management system may be vulnerable to hacks that allow visitors to snatch password data and secret keys out of databases, at least under certain conditions. The vulnerability stems from a "severe" SQL injection bug in NextGEN Gallery, a WordPress plugin with more than 1 million installations. Until the flaw was recently fixed, NextGEN Gallery allowed input from untrusted visitors to be included in WordPress-prepared SQL queries. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit the weakness to pipe powerful commands to a Web server's backend database.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/02/severe-vulnerability-in-wordpress-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New $10 Raspberry Pi Zero comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
by Peter Reutemann 01 Mar '17

01 Mar '17

'The newest member of the Raspberry Pi product line costs just $10 plus tax and includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability. The "Raspberry Pi Zero W" is an updated version of the Raspberry Pi Zero. While it lacks some niceties, like Ethernet and full-sized USB-A ports, it's smaller than the flagship Pi and a fraction of the cost. The original Raspberry Pi Zero was released in November 2015 at a price of just $5/£4. The new Pi Zero W is almost identical to the original, but doubles the price to $10 and adds a wireless chip that supports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (2.4GHz-only) and Bluetooth 4.0.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/new-10-raspberry-pi-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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CSS font-size parameter
by Ian Stewart 27 Feb '17

27 Feb '17

Hi All, There was discussion at last nights meeting regarding the CSS "font-size" property and which units to use. E.g. px (pixels), % (percentage), pt (point), or em (a unit in the field of typography originally based on the width of an "M"), . Note that there are more than just these four units, see here<https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html>. If you buy-off on the statements from w3schools.com, then this<http://%20https://www.w3schools.com/TAgs/ref_pxtoemconversion.asp> web-page provides a pixel to em converter, and to quote from their CSS page<https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp>... "Note: If you do not specify a font size, the default size for normal text, like paragraphs, is 16px (16px=1em)." "The em size unit is recommended by the W3C. 1em is equal to the current font size. The default text size in browsers is 16px. So, the default size of 1em is 16px. The size can be calculated from pixels to em using this formula: pixels/16=em." Although admitting there is much debate over which is the better approach, Kyle Schaeffer, on his website<http://kyleschaeffer.com/development/css-font-size-em-vs-px-vs-pt-vs/>, adds in an addendum from 2011... "Generally, when I create a new design, I will use percent on the body element (body { font-size: 62.5%; }), and then use the em unit to size it from there." Or, for some quotes from wikipedia...<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)> "One em was traditionally defined as the width of the capital M in the current typeface and point size..." "In Cascading Style Sheets, the em unit is the height of the font in nominal points or inches." ...And finally there is one "rem" to save us all... "To make style rules that depend only on the default font size, another unit was developed: the rem. The rem, or root em, is the font size of the root element of the document. Unlike the em, which may be different for each element, the rem is constant throughout the document." More on rem's here<https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html#future> cheers, Ian.

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Running Emacs As A Daemon With systemd
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Feb '17

26 Feb '17

Some instructions here <http://blog.refu.co/?p=1296> for creating a systemd “.service” file for running Emacs. Initially he did it as a privileged systemwide service, then he figured out how to make it per-user without needing special privileges. (Found in a user comment to this article <http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=systemd-233>.)

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Image-To-Image Translation In TensorFlow
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Feb '17

24 Feb '17

This page <http://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/index.html> lets you create schematic renditions of various kinds of objects, and then synthesize corresponding photorealistic representations of those objects, based on pieces of images taken from the training databases. You can draw your own outlines, or just click the “Random” buttons to see what it does. Results range from entertaining to disturbing.

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“Smart Contracts” May Not Be So Smart
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Feb '17

23 Feb '17

To review, “smart contracts” are a feature of some blockchain-based systems, which allow an interaction between multiple parties to be encoded as a set of rules which will be executed automatically by the system, so that neither the parties nor anyone else can prevent those rules from being enforced. ... To give just one example, a legal contract need not try to anticipate absolutely every relevant event that might occur. If some weird thing happens that is not envisioned in a regular legal contract, the parties can work out a modification to the contract that seems reasonable to them, and failing that, a judge might decide the outcome, subject to established legal principles. Similarly, a single error or “bug” in writing a regular contract, causing its literal meaning to differ from what the parties intended, is unlikely to lead to extreme results because the legal system will often resolve such a problem by trying to be reasonable. Contrast this with “smart contracts” where a bug in a “contract’s” code can lead to a perverse result that may allow one party to exploit the bug, extracting much of the value out of the arrangement with no recourse for the other parties. That’s what happened with the DAO in Ethereum, leading to a controversial attempt to unwind a legal-according-to-the-rules set of transactions, and dividing the Ethereum community. <http://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/02/20/smart-contracts-neither-smart-not-c…>

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