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Ditch Linux For Windows 10 On Your Raspberry Pi With Microsoft's IoT Kit
by Peter Reutemann 29 Sep '15

29 Sep '15

'Partnering with Adafruit, Microsoft has announced the Windows IoT Core Starter Kit. The $75 kit comes comes with an SD card preloaded with Windows 10 IoT. According to the Raspberry Pi blog: "The pack is available with a Pi 2 for people who are are new to Raspberry Pi or who'd like a dedicated device for their projects, or without one for those who'll be using a Pi they already own. The box contains an SD card with Windows 10 Core and a case, power supply, wifi module and Ethernet cable for your Pi; a breadboard, jumper wires and components including LEDs, potentiometers and switches; and sensors for light, colour, temperature and pressure. There's everything you need to start building."' -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/09/28/1949211 Looks like it wasn't vaporware after all. But I'm not gonna replace the Linux on my RPis. Especially not since I can have a full-blown Linux OS on it rather than some stripped down Windows version. :-) 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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The Life And Death Of A Laptop Battery
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Sep '15

27 Sep '15

<http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_batte…> “Why are my laptop batteries always dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe Battery University, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100% all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.” ... “Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in preparation for a longer trip?”

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LibreSSL Gets Rid Of SSL
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

LibreSSL (a fork of OpenSSL created after the security scandals over the latter) has now got rid of all versions of the protocol called “SSL” (“Secure Sockets Layer”) <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreSSL-2.3-Released>. The official name of current versions of the protocol used for secure HTTP connections (among other things) is “TLS” (“Transport Layer Security”).

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Why Ad Blockers Could Be A Good Thing
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

A posting <https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/golden/has-apple-doomed-ads-on-the-web-w…> on “Freedom To Tinker”, which is part of my regular reading, talks about the potential implications of more widespread use of ad-blocker plugins in Web browsers. Not quite triggering an “arms race” of ad-blocker-blockers, and so on: If the use of these plugins becomes ubiquitous, only one thing would have to change – the publishers would have to insert the line of code in some way on the server side, and the ad would just look as though it came with the rest of the page. At that point, the browser plugin is useless. What would be the knock-on effects of this? The ad companies no longer have any way to track users as they move around the web. Absent some way on the ad companies’ part to implement a cross-site evercookie (which would be considered unethical and would quickly be blocked by browser authors if discovered), the ad companies will no longer have a way to connect users on one site to users on another. The ads you’d see on a given site could be based solely on the interactions you’ve had with that one site – which would be a boon to privacy. So rather than becoming worse, the ads would actually take on a less creepy form.

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PatchSee Ethernet Cables
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Sep '15

23 Sep '15

The unique selling point is the special LED tool that, when plugged in to one end, lights up the other end. So you can tell where your cables run without having to colour-code or label them. But is it worth the cost? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PETJpmxiyOY>

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Copying from a pdf, removing EOL and spaces
by Roderick Aldridge 23 Sep '15

23 Sep '15

Hi everyone I want to copy an extract from a .pdf file. When I select some text to copy and paste it puts each word followed by two spaces on a separate line. Do you know a better way to extract some text from a .pdf? Alternatively what is an easy way to remove the space and EOL to reformat the text in a readable format? I am sure there are several, but I would appreciate a really easy one. TIA Roderick

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WLUG meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 22 Sep '15

22 Sep '15

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting coming up next Monday: "Hieu Trinh will talk about how to use a Raspberry Pi for sorting fruit." More details: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/223612685/ According to Hieu, his presentation will be a short one, so if you have something else from the world of Linux/Open Source, then please let me know and I'll add it. 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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Keith Packard On X11
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Sep '15

19 Sep '15

A half-hour talk from “Mr X11” himself, Keith Packard <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KeithP-Sustaining-X>. Notable points: * The original MIT X Consortium was dominated by the proprietary UNIX workstation vendors, who were all trying to lock in their own customers into their own ways of doing things. These “UNIX Wars” led to the whole workstation market imploding, letting Microsoft take over with Windows NT. * XFree86 was, in the beginning, like a “rebel alliance”, trying to bring X11 to commodity PC hardware. They were shunned for many years by the X Consortium. Of course this changed after all the UNIX vendors went under. Later, the revitalized X Consortium became a home for the X11 developer community which left the inflexibilities of the XFree86 corporate organization behind. * Over the last decade, the X server has become less and less of an operating system in its own right. Hardware-specific graphics drivers have been moved into the Linux kernel, leaving the X userland code to focus on the hardware-independent implementation layers. * Programs written to work with X11 nearly thirty years ago still work today. Even with all the reorganization and rewrites, X11 still remains fully backward-compatible. Which is more than Microsoft Windows can manage. * Keith made it clear he prefers GPL-style (copyleft/sharealike) licences to MIT/BSD style ones. Net contributors of code tend to prefer the former, while net consumers of code (those who don’t want to give back to the community) tend to favour the latter. In other words, freeloaders.

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Microsoft Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Sep '15

18 Sep '15

Microsoft’s “Azure Cloud Switch” is a “a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux”. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/microsoft_has_developed_its_own_lin…>

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Dell Reportedly Shipping Ubuntu-Based Linux On 40%+ Of PCs In China
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Sep '15

15 Sep '15

<http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-China-40-Linux> As the article admits, it is common for a pirated copy of Windows to be installed on such machines after the fact. However, as a commenter points out, these machines still officially count as sales of desktop Linux regardless.

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