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Weekly recap of open source and sysadmin related stuff
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Recap of week 04 of 2016, covering open source and sysadmin related news, articles, guides, talks, discussions and fun stuff.
Comic by Savage Chickens
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Earlier editions can be found here. That page has a special RSS feed for the recaps as well.
News, tutorials and articles
A game developer writes about quitting at Ubisoft and going Indie.
Anandtech reviews the iPad Pro, in the same line as all other reviews. Good device, unsure what the target is.
Microsoft silenty adds Amazon root certificates to its certificate trust list. But they were also cross-signed already so where trusted by everyone already.
If you use external tools and scripts to deploy your application, shit might break without you knowing it. This time it’s Dokku/Docker, next week it’s another hip tool.
Why Mattermost was created as open source software, instead of closed. From the developers, some history behind it.
Why the Sun 2 bootprom bootloader has a anti-government message in it. TL;DR, to find out when someone stole their code…
The history, development, current state and future of the Lumina Desktop Environment, FreeBSD’s new desktop. It looks nice and it seems to be lightweight.
Office 365 had a week-long IMAP outage. For an email service, that is really bad. Would be a reason to cancel the service for me.
Reverse engineering the Google Nest Cloud Telescreen, I mean, Webcam. The top comment on the Hackernews thread on the Nest is this:
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plate commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. but at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." - "1984", Orwell
"Video and audio signals and data: When you enable the recording or streaming features of your Nest Cam, we may record and process video and/or audio recordings from the device, subject to your configuration and settings. This may include capturing and emailing to you portions of this data as part of a notification or analyzing the data to identify motion or other events. We may process information from your Nest Cam so that we can send you alerts when something happens. In addition, if you have the recording features enabled, we will capture, process and retain video and audio data recordings from your device for the duration of your recording subscription period (for example, 10 or 30 days) and you will be able to access those recordings using the Services during that time." - NestCam privacy policy, Google
An article about the scaling issues bitcoin seems to get and the developer rumble about it. Fab on Geek News Radio did a good explanation of this as well.
Not doing constant GUI updates makes your stuff run faster. Something the NodeJS devs found out as well. I do still totaly hate and loathe NodeJS and their package manager. Javascript on the server? 99% of the users don’t have the massive concurency issues and for the other 1% it crashes constantly. Plus, I hate programming language specific package managers. Just use the distro’s one. .deb or .rpm are good enough.
Using the TPM module in your PC for SSH key signing. Great article by a friend of mine.
If you dare so, here’s a script to replace a running debian installation into Arch Linux. There is also VPS2ARCH which is around longer.
IKEA SKARSTA sit/stand convertable desk review. I have a Standing Desk from my local desk shop and I live it, but it’s electric. I’m considering this SKARSTA for my home office.
What’s new in Hyper-V Server 2016. Live migration and 1 TB of RAM, yay!
The truth about Web hosting and all the things regular users don’t want to hear. Kind of a rant, but a lot of truth there.
Software, hardware and releases
Linux Kernel 4.5-RC1 released.
gParted 0.25 released. Amazing tool, I love it.
Wine 1.9.2 released. Crossover fan myself, Wine is cool as well.
Review of the Everdrive-N8 for the NES. A cartridge for the NES with an SD card slot, so all your backed up ROMs on an actual NES. Cool.
DistroWatch reviews Linux Mint 17.3.
Comparison between the Apple TV, the Roku and the Nexus Player by Lifehacker. I’m fairly content with the ChromeCast plus an android tablet and Netflix. TL:DR, the Roku wins because platform agnostic.
Solder a MicroSD card slot onto your Nexus 5. I find phones without expandable storage quite worthless. Especially now Android 6.0 allows you to treat a MicroSD card the same as internal storage.
SecureCRT 1.2 for iPad adds support for an ethernet cable and iOS 9 multitasking. I like SecureCRT on the Desktop, I also maintain the AUR Arch Linux package for SecureCRT.
Tails 2.0 is released, now based on Debian 8 with modern Gnome Shell and inclusion of Thunderbird.
NayuOS, an alternative for Chrome OS on Chromebooks. Why you would run this instead of full blown linux is a mystery to me. My C270 runs OpenSUSE as a charm.
A Polish hackerspace has made OpenWRT run on a Wifi-enabled SD card reader. First, that is cool, second, I was not aware that such a thing, a Wifi-enabled SD card reader existed. Now I know and I kinda want one to tinker with.
A small bugfix release of SQLite 3.10.2.
Orange Pi Oneis a tiny quad-core PC for $10 (plus $4 shipping). I like these small ARM boards, just like the Olimex and Banana Pi’s.
There is an Open Source Laptop and that now has got an upgradable CPU Card. The device is new to me but it looks cool. Upgradable CPU cards make me think back to my Pentium CPU which was a ISA-like card as well.
Talks, videos, slides and podcasts
A modern Theremin via Hackaday
Geek News Radio Episode 5, on Bitcoin and the Expanse.
B Sides security conference video’s are up.
Fun and nifty things and discussions
How to get the most out of your caffeine shot, either tea or coffee. Very important in this industry.
The oldest torrent, 12 years old, is still being seeded. My seedboxes are in the swarm now as well.
Add a USB port to your Linksys WRT54G. I started with this router as well, to run DD-WRT back then. Still have it somewhere in a box.
What happpened to Ian Murdock?
Microsoft is porting Minecraft to C++ and that is faster then the Java version. Like, duh…
Reverse Engineering a closed-source JURA Coffee Machine. We have one of those at the office, so we might try that as well.
Comments
NVM, just spotted that cloudflare message...