today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 18, 2024

• Engadget ☛ 2024-03-15 [Older] Microsoft is once again asking Chrome users to try Bing through unblockable pop-ups

• University of Michigan ☛ 2024-03-12 [Older] The Apple Vision Pro isn’t as innovative as you think

• Linux Made Simple ☛ 2024-03-10 [Older] Linux Weekly Roundup #276

• Slashdot ☛ 2024-03-11 [Older] Linux 6.9 Will Be the First To Top 10 Million Git Objects

• Slashdot ☛ 2024-03-10 [Older] To Replace HexChat, Linux Mint is Building a New Desktop Chat App Called 'Jargonaut'

• Slashdot ☛ 2024-03-10 [Older] Linux Variants of Bifrost Trojan Evade Detection via Typosquatting

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Breeze Icon Update March 16, 2024

    I am back with another update for adapting icons to the 24px grid and doing some larger edits. This week, I worked on 3 rows, which is great, and was able to hit just past the 50% mark, it seems

    Here is a video with the changes:

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • GNU World Order (Audio Show) ☛ GNU World Order 556

    **alpine** , **autofs** , **biff+comsat** from **n** series of Slackware

    packages, and all about networking.

    shasum -a256=c33c0e58c6fb280934d93377846dc2f0766363514d19905040870094ba1e79ae

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Free Software Security Podcast Episode 420 – What’s going on at NVD

    Josh and Kurt talk about what’s going on at the National Vulnerability Database. NVD suddenly stopped enriching vulnerabilities, and it’s sent shock-waves through the vulnerability management space. While there are many unknowns right now, the one thing we can count on is things won’t go back to the way they were.

• Server

  • [Old] Punkx ☛ We got it all wrong

    The very basic highly available infra now looks like this: [...]

  • [Old] Punkx ☛ benchmarking back-to-back vs http

    i believe that this will be even more obvious in multi hop environment like modern micro services mesh, if 10% of the requests are slower, in 3 hop env 27% (1 - 0.9**3) of the requests will be slower.

• Debian Family

  • 2024-03-13 [Older] Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, packaging simplemonitor, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Punkx ☛ The Linux Desktop Is Finally Great (both Ubuntu and Firefox)

    I feel over the years Apple has been treating its users more and more like children, e.g., when you compile a program and the first time you run it, it starts slowly because "something" has to decide if it's "allowed" or should be quarentined, or you can't gdb -p into a process. Every time it does that it just pisses me off so much. Since M1 came out, I can say only good things about the hardware, my mac often has 100-200 days uptime, battery life of 10+ hours.. I just cant stand the patronizing attitude.

    Is it too much to ask? For my computer to execute the code I wrote and compiled?

    I thought that the Linux desktop is leaps behind macOS, and I was proven wrong. Now I can't wait to get back to my Linux PC and just open my emacs. It feels like home.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Do politics influence Web Browser choice? Yes. In a big way.

    Are you a nerd on the Political Left or Right? Good odds we can guess what Browser you use.

    [...]

    It's important to note that this data comes from a survey of 7,200 IT Professionals and Computer Nerds -- with respondants from a wide range of technical and political communities (more details on that survey below). As such, while it provides a detailed look at the "Tech" world, it does not represent the broader populace (read: non-Nerds).

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Modern web bloat means some pages load 21MB of data - entry-level phones can't run some simple web pages, and some sites are harder to render than PUBG

    Earlier this month, Danluu.com released an exhaustive 23-page analysis/op-ed/manifesto on the current status of unoptimized web pages and web app performance, finding that just loading a web page can even bog down an entry-level device that can run the popular game PUBG at 40 fps. In fact, the Wix webpage requires loading 21MB of data for one page, while the more famous websites Patreon and Threads load 13MB of data for one page. This can result in slow load times that reach up to 33 seconds or, in some cases, result in the page failing to load at all.

    The main measurements are in the table below (expand the tweet to see the table), which measures the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time across several websites and low-spec devices. As LCP's full name implies, this is usually the time between a user opening the page and the device rendering its primary content. In addition to the time it takes to load, the bandwidth demands of each site are shown in the left-hand columns. The testing includes the lowest-end Itel P32, the entry-level Tecno S8C, and more powerful systems like the Apple M3 Max, M1 Pro, and M3.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Michal Pitr ☛ How does SQLite store data? - by Michal Pitr

    Recently I’ve been implementing a subset of SQLite (the world’s most used database, btw) from scratch in Go. I’ll share what I’ve learned about how SQLite stores data on disk which will help us understand key database concepts.