Blender gets super Wayland powers! Masking your phone number with Firefox Relay, fwupd adds support for Supermicro machines, and Intel ARC sells out.
Listen:
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
04:22 ReBAR support on X399
05:05 Intel ARC sells out
10:47 Blender gets Wayland support
14:47 Supermicro machines added to fwupd
19:02 Masking phone numbers with Firefox Relay
28:07 Where are the Raspberry Pi’s?
Blender on Wayland
https://code.blender.org/2022/10/wayland-support-on-linux/
- Like it or not, Wayland is the future.
- Blender has decided to enable Wayland support in the official builds.
- It will be officially supported in Blender 3.4x, probably.
- Couple of issues remain
- No tablet support.
- No NDOF (3D mouse) support.
- No cursor warping.
- No window frames.
- No Hi-DPI support.
- No show stoppers unless you have a 3D gerbil.
- Different Wayland compositors have different behaviors so there are some quirks.
- Blender eventually had to move to Wayland anyways to support users running Blender on render-farms.
- The Blender devs had considered using SDL, but it would require them to become SDL developers to properly support Blender.
- And SDL’s focus is on gaming, this isn’t necessarily aligned with the needs of applications.
LVFS update (RTheren)
https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/releases/tag/1.8.6
- There has been a big update to the fwupd firmware updates application for Linux.
- Fwupd 1.8.6 has been released, and includes new support for hardware that many users both at home and server side have needed.
- Including firmware support for Supermicro servers running the Redfish protocol for managing servers.
- The developers reduced the installed package size by more than 30% by compressing some data files, building some plugins into the binary, and splitting out common code in tools.
- Also, Fwupd 1.8.6 now uses a higher compression preset for UEFI splash images.
- Thank you RTheren for posting this in our Discord chat.
Firefox Relay
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/hide-your-phone-number-with-firefox-relay/
- So many of us have spam email accounts, so now Firefox is offering a fake phone number for spamming, brilliant!
- Firefox Realy launched in 2020 to help protect users emails addresses.
- Now it can do the same for your phone number.
- For $4.99 a month you get a new number, 50min of calls and 75 text messages.
- Available in the U.S. and Canada.
- It’s like Google voice minus the outbound calls and text.
- No mention on how it handles voice mails.
- I’ve been using Grand Central (now google voice) for the past 15 years.
- If this can eventually compete with that it would be worth it to some people looking to op-tout of the Google data collection machine.
- Speaking of that, Mozilla need to make it crystal clear how they are handling data collection / reselling of information.
- For $4.99 I would expect that to be 0.
Slice of Pi
WHAR Pi
- For those of you looking to buy a Raspberry Pi board, it looks like finding one and buying one at a reasonable price isn’t going to happen any time soon :-(
- I had speculated that most of the limited production was going to businesses because of the pandemic hardware supply problems and great demand. It seems I was right . . .
- 400,000 Pis are still being made every month, but most are going to businesses who rely on Pi boards to run their businesses.
- Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton said a year ago that there were “early signs that the supply chain situation is starting to ease,” but backed-up demand could still explain the short supply even if the Pi’s components have gotten easier to buy.
- The arsTechnica article includes a handy link to track the availability of various models of Pi’s that are in stock at most common Pi retailers:
- https://rpilocator.com/ It looks like there is some availability across the pond.
