today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 11, 2025

• Devices

  • Games

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Rare Steam Deck prototype sold for $2,000 on eBay — Features a 6-year-old AMD Picasso APU with Zen+ and Vega

      A Steam Deck prototype has seemingly been sold for $2,000 on eBay, shown to feature different silicon than the retail units we have today.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • CNX Software ☛ Antenna hack more than doubles the range of cheap ESP32-C3 USB-C boards

      There are plenty of small ESP32-C3 IoT boards with a USB-C connector on the market, and while they all look very similar, antenna designs differ, and less thought-out ones may severely impact the WiFi and Bluetooth range. Peter Neufeld decided to hack one of those cheap ESP32-C3 boards by adding a custom antenna, and this resulted in the board having more than twice the range and almost three times in some cases.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Openwashing

    • Open Source Initiative ☛ Key insights from the 2025 State of Open Source Report [Ed: OpenLogic is a Microsoft proxy]

      Each year, the State of Open Source Report offers a valuable pulse check on the global Open Source ecosystem—and the 2025 edition is no exception. Produced by Perforce OpenLogic, in partnership with the Eclipse Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, this report uncovers the latest trends, tensions, and transformations shaping how Open Source is adopted, managed, and scaled in organizations of all sizes.

  • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

    • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice Conference 2025 will take place in Budapest

      For this year’s LibreOffice Conference we had two location proposals: Luxembourg and Budapest. Members of The Document Foundation voted to choose the final location, and we can announce that Budapest is the winner. Currently, the expected date for the conference is September 1 – 5, but this is still subject to change.

  • Programming/Development

    • Rlang ☛ eDNAjoint: a Modeling Tool for Environmental DNA Data

      In 2024, the version 0.2 of eDNAjoint was peer-reviewed and approved by rOpenSci, and a few months later, a manuscript about the package was published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

    • KDAB ☛ Mastering Debugging in Embedded Linux

      Effective debugging in embedded GNU/Linux requires a full-stack approach and the right tools. This post covers key techniques—from hardware abstraction and static analysis to profiling and logging—to help you build more reliable systems.

    • Perl / Raku

      • Perl ☛ Enhancing Your MIDI Devices: Round II

        Control Your MIDI Controllers!

        As we discovered previously, your MIDI devices can be enhanced to function in different ways besides just triggering a single note per key (or pad) press.

        Being a serial module creator, and with the help of the author John, I bundled these concepts and more into a few handy CPAN packages that allow you to control your devices with minimal lines of code. So far, these are: MIDI::RtController, MIDI::RtController::Filter::Tonal, MIDI::RtController::Filter::Drums, and [MIDI::RtController::Filter::CC](https://metacpan.org/pod/MIDI::RtController::Filter::CC.