today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 17, 2024

• GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows/Videos

    • Document Foundation ☛ Another eight videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2024

      The next batch is here! We’re editing and uploading more videos from our recent conference – these ones covering C++, the LibreOffice WebAssembly port from Allotropia, and Collabora Online.

    • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast Episode 296: Supercon Wrapup With Tom And Al, The 3DP Brick Layering Controversy, And How To Weld In Space

      In this episode you’ll get to hear not one, not two, but three Hackaday Editors! Now that the dust has mostly settled from the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, Al Williams joins Elliot and Tom to compare notes and pick out a few highlights from the event. But before that, the week’s discussion will cover the questionable patents holding back a promising feature for desktop 3D printers, a new digital book from NODE, and the surprisingly limited history of welding in space. You’ll also hear about the challenge of commercializing free and open source software, the finicky optics of the James Web Space Telescope, and the once exciting prospect of distributing software via pages of printed barcodes.

  • Kernel Space

    • Michal Pitr ☛ Primer on Linux container filesystems

      I spent the weekend building a toy Docker clone. One question going into this project was how each container gets its own filesystem. Let’s first reverse-engineer what Docker does and then replicate it ourselves.

  • Games

    • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ The Rock Paper Shotgun 100: A Quick Analysis

      This week, Rock Paper Shotgun presented their best games to play on the PC today list or the RPS 100 (2024), another interesting PC video game top 100 list. Another heavily biased top 100 list, which calls for a good doze of armchair scientific analysis to determine exactly how reliable this list is. I do like the presentation of the list: click on a cover to find out more about the entry in question.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Volker Krause ☛ Testing application first use experience

        When working on an application it’s not uncommon to be testing with your own configuration and data, and often more in a power-user setup of that application. While that has advantages it’s easy to lose sight of how the application looks and behaves when first opened in a clean environment.

        Testing in a clean environment

        Testing the first use experience is technically easy, you just have to delete the entire application state and configuration, or create a new user account. However that’s very cumbersome and thus wont be done regularly.

        Fortunately there are more convenient and less invasive shortcuts.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • Vermaden ☛ Scan on FreeBSD

      Some time ago I covered how to Print on FreeBSD and I was really surprised that it was not that hard in the end.

      Recently my wife wanted to scan some logical puzzles … and as it seems we had some old Canon CanoScan LiDE 25 USB scanner in the house. I was curious how much work would it take to make it work under FreeBSD … and it seems that it was way easier then I expected 🙂

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: Infra and RelEng Update – Week 46 2024

      This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

    • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Update Q3 2024

      This is a summary of the work done on initiatives by the CPE Team. Every quarter, the CPE team works together with CentOS Project and Fedora Project community leaders and representatives to choose projects that will be being worked upon in that quarter. The CPE team is then split into multiple smaller sub-teams that will work on the chosen initiatives + day-to-day work that needs to be done. Some of the sub-teams  are dedicated to the continuous efforts in the team whilst some are created only for the initiative purposes.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Events

    • Unicorn Media ☛ How Does Little Ol’ Raleigh Manage to Get at Least 18 Open-Source Events in 2025?

      There's more to All Things Open than the single annual conference. Here's a look at all of the open-source events that ATO plans to stage in the Raleigh area in 2025.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Hazel Bachrach ☛ What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres | ChallahScript

      I’ve been working professionally for the better part of a decade on web apps and, in that time, I’ve had to learn how to use a lot of different systems and tools. During that education, I found that the official documentation typically proved to be the most helpful.

      Except…Postgres. It’s not because the official docs aren’t stellar (they are!)–they’re just massive. For the current version (17 at the time of writing), if printed as a standard PDF on US letter-sized paper, it’s 3,200 pages long.1 It’s not something any junior engineer can just sit down and read start to finish.

      So I want to try to catalog the bits that I wish someone had just told me before working with a Postgres database. Hopefully, this makes things easier for the next person going on a journey similar to mine.

      Note that many of these things may also apply to other SQL database management systems (DBMSs) or other databases more generally, but I’m not as familiar with others so I’m not sure what does and does not apply.