schestowitz.com

Explaining AlternativeApproaches.com

HE other day I was contacted by Christine from FOSS Force. I thought the matter was worth documenting in public and I carefully checked that no personal information would be divulged in the process, not something embarrassing anyway (if told otherwise, I’d modify accordingly). Regarding FOSS Force ownership, she told me, “I notice that you identify articles on FOSS Force as being on Unicorn Media, which is an identity that hasn’t existed in about 10 years down.”

Playing CDs With VLC and KDE’s Dragon Player

hese days I use two media players to play my CDs (mostly 1990s albums and collections). One is KDE’s Dragon Player (because it’s based on Qt), the other is VLC. The latter has a lot more functionality but higher RAM footprint. In the past I used even leaner applications to achieve the same functionality. Those are no longer compatible with this setup (a lot changes in 20+ years in this sector).

Quality Lost and It’s Intentional

he music of the past is better and more complex. A year before I was born Lisa Jane Stansfield (from Manchester) won Search for a Star and I still listen to her music in 2026.

Social Control Media is Good for Forgeries, Not Information

ake a look at the tweets below, as recent as hours. I added green highlights.

Pushing to Live Soon

oday we are one week away from September and I will soon ‘push to live’ the new version of “Today in Techrights” and “Over at Tux Machines…”

Reaping What They Sow

he insensitive behaviour of Brett Wilson LLP last year [1, 2, 3] was a self-inflicted wound, as it was not the first time, far from it, but this time it was more blatant and likely intentional (they like to attack people during holidays, they effectively weaponise religion). In this particular case it was a mistake as they know that in this sector being seen as antisemitic is career suicide and, to make matters worse, their biggest client is alleged to be profoundly antisemitic. Freedom fighters don’t massacre dogs and civilians.

22-Year Record

oday I published 13 posts here, which probably is an all-time high for this blog or “Weblog” that began in 2004. That’s despite the fact we were out for Rianne’s birthday, so at least the day of this record will be a memorable one (the date).

More Activity Than Originally Expected

Personal stuff isolated:

Very Good Day Out

oday we travelled to 3 places (quite distant from one another). One of them had a beach-like feel to it, but Manchester has no beaches, the closest one can get to that are the reservoirs, the boat canal, or the port-like structures in Salford Quays. They’re not too far from central stations, the weather was perfect (blue sky, but not too hot), so we made the most out of it and everything went smoothly for Rianne’s birthday.

Evri Customer Services Seems to be a Bot and It’s Not Functioning

wrote to Evri today, early in the morning to be more specific, opening a second ticket after they had made an error by automation. Finally, after a week, I received a reply. Only after opening two tickets and further chasing the first (unhandled) one.

9to5Linux

Armbian 26.8 Released with Linux 7.1, Revamped Installer, and UEFI ISO Images

Coming almost three months after Armbian 26.5, the Armbian 26.8 release adds support for new ARM boards and chips, including Anbernic RG DS and RG Vita Pro, Radxa Cubie A7Z and Dragon Q6A/Q8B, Seeed reComputer RK3576 and RK3588 DevKits, as well as TI BeagleBadge and TMDS64EVM.

COSMIC 1.7 Desktop Environment Improves COSMIC Files, COSMIC Edit, and More

Coming only a week after COSMIC 1.6, the COSMIC 1.7 release is a small update that updates the COSMIC Compositor with improved support for scalable cursors so that they won’t be blurry when their size is increased, the ability to increase the zoom with each keypress, and support for magnifying the cursor when it’s shaken.

Ardour 9.8 Open-Source DAW Is Now Available with Initial Scales Support

Coming two and a half months after Ardour 9.7, the Ardour 9.8 release introduces initial scales support to let you visualize out-of-scale notes and choose if you want to avoid creating them entirely when composing and improvising in a specific musical key, as well as support for the Novation Launchkey 88 Mk4 and Arturia Drumbrute controllers.

OpenSSL 4.0.2 Released with Important Security and Bug Fixes

Coming two and a half months after OpenSSL 4.0.1, the OpenSSL 4.0.2 release is here to address several important security vulnerabilities, including a heap buffer overflow in CMS key unwrapping (CVE-2026-63072), excessive memory use buffering DTLS records (CVE-2026-54874), and a client-side memory leak in OCSP response checking (CVE-2026-54876).

Happy 35th Birthday, Linux!

It was on August 25th, 1991, that the 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Benedict Torvalds made his now-famous announcement on the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he was working on a free operating system for 386 (486) AT clones, just as a “hobby”.

Shelly 3.1 Package Manager Is Out with Support for Building Arch Linux Packages

Shelly 3.1 is here to introduce support for building Arch Linux packages through a new shelly build command that’s part of the native package-management library, not a wrapper around makepkg. It writes makepkg-compatible entries and produces archives that pacman and other Arch Linux tools understand.

Vanilla OS 3 “Reunion” Released with Reproducible Builds, ARM64 Support

Powered by Linux kernel 7.1, Vanilla OS 3 “Reunion” features a pure, Wayland-only GNOME 50 desktop environment with a refreshed set of default apps, including Ptyxis as the default terminal emulator, Papers as the default document viewer, and Resources as the default system monitor.

9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: August 23rd, 2026

I want to thank everyone who sent us donations; your generosity is greatly appreciated. I also want to thank all of you for your continued support by commenting, liking, sharing, and boosting the articles, following us on social media, and, last but not least, sending us feedback.

Slackware-Based PorteuX 2.8 Released with Linux 7.2, COSMIC 1.6, and More

Coming two months after PorteuX 2.7, the PorteuX 2.8 release is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 7.2 kernel series and features the latest KDE Plasma 6.7.4, GNOME 50.4, Xfce 4.20, LXQt 2.4, Cinnamon 6.6.9, COSMIC 1.6, MATE 1.28.2, and LXDE 0.11.1 desktop environments as standalone flavors.

LinuxGizmos.com

Upcoming Jetson Orin Nano 2 boosts edge AI performance to 78 TOPS

NVIDIA has announced the Jetson Orin Nano 2, an updated edge AI platform aimed at robotics, drones, machine vision, and other embedded AI applications. The new module provides up to 78 TOPS of AI performance, 8GB of memory, and an 8-core Arm CPU while retaining the compact form factor of the previous Jetson Orin Nano generation.

Fanless Edge box runs Linux on Rockchip RV1126B with 3-TOPS NPU

The Forlinx FCU3101 is a fanless edge AI computing system based on Rockchip’s RV1126B/RV1126BJ processor, providing local AI inference, Ethernet, serial, and digital I/O connectivity for industrial vision, security monitoring, and data acquisition applications.

IAR webinar to examine static and runtime analysis for AI-assisted embedded development

IAR will host a September 15 webinar focused on the use of AI-generated code in regulated embedded development, with discussion covering static analysis, runtime checking, and CI/CD workflows used to support software verification and compliance activities.