GNU/Linux and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Darren Goossens ☛ Linux box recovery
What happened: not sure. Machine was being accessed remotely via RDP with a Windows 11 box as the client. Power loss, hard shutdown of both machines, and then the Linux box would not boot. It gave the Ubuntu splash screen, with the coloured dots doing their thing, but forever. Hitting keys showed the text boot screen, showing that things were loading, unloading, failing to load and going round and round.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Linux Gizmos ☛ ESP32-S3 Development Board with 2-Inch Display, Camera Interface, and 6-Axis IMU
The ESP32-S3-LCD-2 is a compact development board based on the ESP32-S3R8 processor. It integrates features such as wireless connectivity, a small LCD display, and various interface options, including a battery connector for portable applications.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Super Watchdog Raspberry Pi HAT with Battery Backup Gains Multi-Chemistry Support
The Super Watchdog HAT with UPS Battery Backup provides power management and reliability for mission-critical Raspberry Pi applications. It supports all Raspberry Pi models, ensuring uninterrupted operation, data protection during outages, and system monitoring.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Jan Piet Mens ☛ Geolocation in Ansible Local Facts
In the list of ideas for using Ansible local facts (you might recall I’m a fan of local facts), Fabian mentioned how he populates a .fact file with GeoIP information in it, and my interpretation of what he described has been a draft for over a year, so here goes.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n report: January 2025 Edition
Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet.
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Firefox Nightly: New Year New Tab – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 175
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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The New Stack ☛ Vector Databases: The Foundation of AI Agent Innovation
Vector database growth shows no signs of slowing in the year and years ahead, with Forrester predicting that most organizations will have vector databases in production by 2026. However, vector databases and their challenges will change dramatically, especially when used at scale. Today, this is especially apparent in the role vector databases are playing in the enterprise adoption of AI agents.
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Education
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Rlang ☛ Shiny in Production 2025
Set in the heart of Newcastle, this conference dives into the world of {shiny} and other web-focused R packages. Whether you’re a seasoned {shiny} user looking to connect and share insights, a beginner eager to learn from experts, or anyone in between, this event is tailored for anyone passionate about {shiny}.
The two-day program includes an afternoon of hands-on workshops, followed by a full day of engaging conference talks. You can choose a ticket for the conference only or bundle it with one of the workshops for a deeper learning experience.
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GNU Projects
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GNU ☛ Meet Guix at FOSDEM
Next week will be FOSDEM time for Guix! As in previous years, a sizable delegation of Guix community members will be in Brussels. Right before FOSDEM, about sixty of us will gather on January 30–31 for the now traditional Guix Days!
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Licensing / Legal
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Simon Willison ☛ A selfish personal argument for releasing code as Open Source
At 5m32s I presented what I think is the best version yet of my selfish personal argument for why it makes sense to default to releasing code as Open Source: [...]
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Techdirt ☛ India Spends $715 Million On The Wrong Kind Of Open Access Journals
The clearest sign of how successful academic publishers have been in colonizing the idea of open access is the rise of gold open access. Under this approach, articles are freely available online, but academic establishments pay for their researchers’ work to be published, usually in the form of “article processing charges”, or APCs. Publishers were quick to embrace gold open access, because once the system was in place they could push up the price for those APCs continually until their profit margins matched or even exceeded those under traditional publishing models.
Unfortunately, many funding bodies still see gold open access as an acceptable way to achieve open access’s goals, and continue to fund it. For example, India has just signed a huge journal subscription deal, worth $715 million over three years, with 30 academic publishers. It will allow an estimated 18 million researchers and students in India to access some 13,000 journals, including many leading titles. There is an open access element to the deal, but as a news item on Science explains, it is gold open access: [...]
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Standards/Consortia
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Joey Einerhand ☛ I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS—and You Should Too
To make it easier, let's differentiate between three levels of ease when it comes to adding a website to RSS: Easy, medium, and hard. I'll be going over how to add several popular sites to your feed.
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Kev Quirk ☛ RSS Feed Changes
I've made a couple of changes to the way that RSS works on this site. It's all very minor, but I thought it was worth mentioning since you've probably seen a load of "new" items if you subscribe to my RSS feed.
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