LWDW 146: Penguin Festivus

L33t hacker desktops, hidden Raspberry Pi’s, holiday gift ideas for Linux nerds and a handy tool for making the web less blinky.

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Drumr7

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Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

L3£7 #4x0Rz

They had electron everything else, might as well make a desktop environment thing with it too!
Cool! The interface is a combination of an extremely useful terminal and file manager with htop stats.
Similar to the Hollywood Hacker terminal interface, but that one is just for show and not functional like eDEX UI (But it does play 007 music in the background!): https://www.ostechnix.com/turn-ubuntu-terminal-hollywood-technical-melodrama-hacker-interface/
The Appimage take a minute to get going, dosen’t it.
Designed for touch screen obviously.
Disk, network, RAM, storage stats at a glance.
I like how it sticks a pin in the globe while interneting.
This might be handy to have up when the cable installer visits.

The Linux Journal presents 12 holiday gifts under $59 for your linux loved ones!
I have several of these gifts in this room!
- My ZaReason Tux penguin is right here . . . ;-D
  - And this adorably soft Tux can be purchased for $19!
  - ZaReason makes wonderful Linux computers and laptops, and a Tux penguin backlit keyboard that is now on sale for $25!
  - http://zareason.com/Lighted-Tux-Keyboard.html
  - Also, ZaReason donates to LinuxChix LA.
- And many of the unixstickers are on this cabinet.
  - unixstickers is offering the Pro Pack of 10 stickers for just $1 (plus free shipping!).
  - Elite pack of 20 stickers for $19
  - Ultimate pack of 30 stickers for $24
- Linux Computer Case Badge Stickers on all my rigs.
  - They can be purchased for just a few dollars on Etsy, Ebay or Amazon.
The feet on that Tux, wow.
Cufflinks are always welcome but I’m the only person in North America who wears French cuff dress shirts.
Pi’s are as good as cash, can always find a use for them.
Oh hey, I already got myself one of those gifts!

Slowing down the cycle.
Considering how much overlap you get from 2 contiguous Fedora versions, it makes sense!
This way they will have more time for tooling changes, testing and bug fixes that will improve Fedora’s reliability.
They want to skip a release to retool a gang of things on the backend to make things better?
Or
OMG IBM!??
Well, I did suggest maybe introducing an LTS wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
This seems to be a step in that direction.
I hope they do it for more than just the F30 release.

This is amazing considering that Albania was once one of the most isolated countries in the world, up to their revolution from communism in 1991.
RTheren in chat brought this to our attention.
The majority of the 1,000 desktops in the Municipality of Tirana have already been migrated to LibreOffice.
Starting with HR because it was document crazy.
LibreOffice Writer and Calc manuals have been translated into Albanian.
All governments should use open source and the only people who are against that sell software that is not.
Saving a lot of money in Licensing is a pretty damn good idea for a country that’s only recently started to catch up to the outside world.

You would think something like this already exists.
Especially in today’s day of inclusive and accessible web design and laws pertaining to that by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
This is a chrome extension that helps people with photosensitive epilepsy browse the web without risking having a seizure from an animated GIF.
Analyzes GIFs in real time and if they are dangerous, disable them, or slow them down.
Two level of danger Jifs according to the W3C.
Seriously, how was this not a thing?

This effected flatmap-stream and targeted users of a bitcoin wallet developed by Copay.
It’s been fixed but should assume that private keys on affected wallets may have been compromised, so they should move funds to new wallets (v5.2.0) immediately.
You can’t rely on random internet developers to vett your code.
Looks like NPM has become the perfect breeding ground for repo poisoning exploits.

Linux routes (RTheren)

Admiditally Germany has come up with some ridiculous tech ideas.
This is not one of them.
When was the last time you checked your router’s firmware, logs?
These all seem like minimum effort stuff that would have a significant impact on security.
Having this set from day 1 would help curb a lot of nasty malware from less tech savvy family members.

Slice of Pi

RougePi

We did it Reddit!
Yeah, former employee had a key and management knew about it.
When I notice someone screwing with my stuff my first reaction is not to stop them, it’s how to mess with them.
Wifi story.
In University I too had a router with a guest wifi which would let you give free access to the interwebs.
The kicker was you could set up special rules, like replacing all JPGs and PNGs with pictures of cats.

Feedback

Unity

Unity performance is much better these days, but had a history of, well, Nope!
I have to have an application menu for all my window managers, whether it is visible on the desktop as a shortcut in a menu bar like MATE, or by right clicking on the desktop, like you can in XFCE, wmaker and fluxbox.
Minimal and low memory window managers have always been my preferred because that is what I started with on UNIX and Solaris with CDE, twm etc. . .
The beauty of Linux is that you can use whatever Desktop Manager works for you!
When Unity was first introduced in Ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition, it was the perfect poop storm!