Mozilla acquires Pocket! RetroPie gets trademarked, Torvalds talks about SHA-1, and NVIDIA unveils the 1080Ti. All this, plus your feedback!
Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan
News
PSA
https://retropie.org.uk/news/
- Some people have no shame
- RetroPie has been trademarked in the USA by some dorks.
- A LOT of people have contacted them but the more the merrier.
SHA Yeah
http://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-sha-1-and-git-the-sky-isnt-falling/
- We shouldn’t be afraid of an attack that requires 6500 CPU years and 110 GPU years to execute?
- I tried to upload a bunch of files to shattered.io and I couldn’t find one vulnerable one.
- Were those SHA-1 encrypted files?
- Yip, we’re not moving to SHA-256 until it’s too late and SHA-1 is blown wide open.
- That’s the ticket, right?
Skype Beta
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/skype-linux-beta-video-calling
- We can finally call MAC/Windows users.
- This makes getting guests on infinitely easier.
- And they added the ability to pay them money… because you know you want to.
Stacer
https://github.com/oguzhaninan/Stacer/
- I have an impression of deja vu, but we’ve reviewed so many Electron apps now.
- Shouldn’t the root password be asked before removing system logs or stopping services.
- Haven’t seen any PolicyKit files in the package, wonder how it’s done.
- Sourceforge, ick.
- Tried in on 16.04 and it does what is said on the tin.
- I wanted to hate on it for being a tonka toy GUI but it’s alright.
- The System Cleaner is borderline useful.
Gemini
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-pda-android-linux-keyboard-mobile-device-phone#/
- It’s the comeback of the PDAs! It’s the nineties all over again!
- 10 cores divided in 3 CPUs, will that be enough?
- Looks like a really neat device, and not overpriced
- Wonder how that display is going to work with all the Linux apps that don’t handle HiDPI properly
- Linux can barely UHD, bro.
- Considering the GPD pocket did as well as it did, it’s probably a good time to be putting hardware up on the IndieGoGos… that way you don’t need working prototypes either.
- And before Monster Cameron comes foaming at the mouth in the comments: Yes, I saw the MWC shitty 3D printed plastic mockup. It looks like arse and no, it wasn’t a working prototype.
- Mechanical keyboard… REALLY?
- Does it come with a pint of Newcastle and a fixie as well?
- “Dedicated button for voice commands”
- Android already has a button, it’s called Okay Google!
- That, and Linux doesn’t have a voice assistant.
- What about Mycroft?
- “Two weeks of stand-by time / 12 hours of talk time”
- Standby is not hyphenated.
- How many hours of “being a useful device” time?
- “hoping to be able to assemble Gemini in the UK”
- You think manufacturing in Merica is cost prohibitive?
Pocket
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/
- Only mildly surprising since Pocket has been integrated in Firefox for a while now.
- On the other hand, the founder of Wallabag, an open source alternative to Pocket was surprised that it was acquired by Mozilla.
- He also doesn’t think it will run on a RaspberryPi when the code is open sourced, challenge accepted!
- They acquired a bookmarking app, fascinating.
- I give it 16 months before they kill it.
Ti
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11172/nvidia-unveils-geforce-gtx-1080-ti-next-week-699
- A TitanX for almost half the price!
- Hold on!
- They disabled one of the ROPs (along with its memory controller) thus lowering the memory bus to 352bit but still claim to be able to reach higher bandwith (a full 4 GB/s extra) with the 1080Ti than the TitanX?
- People who bought the Pascal Titan X are gonna be pissed, if that turns out to be the case.
- The real story here is that the 1080 dropped $100.
Slice of Pi
NTP (From @aenertia)
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/02/22/how-to-build-a-stratum-1-ntp-server-using-a-raspberry-pi/
- I still don’t get how he got his office to be far more efficient by setting up a NTP server.
- I guess if you needed your own internal air-gapped NTP server?
- To the surprise of no one, it’s out of stock on Adafruit!
- I’m tempted to make a home brew PlexCast with one of these critters.
Feedback
GPL
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?f5fTSI3
- Picard rocks
- That’s the reason I run Ubuntu, it runs out of the box, I don’t have to mess with it.