TIL: which in Shellscripts sollte vermieden werden. Es ist inkonsistent, unvollständig, nicht plattform-/shellübergreifend und noch nicht mal in POSIX. Stattdessen bietet sich command an, also z.B. command -v tmux.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/85249/why-not-use-which-what-to-use-then/85250#85250

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/command.html

Bullshit isn’t what it used to be. Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data.

Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. We are fairly well equipped to spot the sort of old-school bullshit that is based in fancy rhetoric and weasel words, but most of us don’t feel qualified to challenge the avalanche of new-school bullshit presented in the language of math, science, or statistics. In Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data.

You don’t need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit.

We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of skepticism.

Keynote for the GUUG FFG 2015, Stuttgart (Video: FrosCON, deutsche Sprache)

In the last two weeks, Peter Zaitsev published a 4-part series on measuring Linux performance on this blog.

His writings cover the 4 main areas where you can spot performance problems on any Linux machine, with practical tips on how to draw the right conclusions. Here are the individual pieces:

Measuring Linux Performance: CPU
Measuring Linux Performance: Disk
Measuring Linux Performance: Memory
Measuring Linux Performance: Network

I found these gave a good overall summary of the things to be on the look-out for whenever you’re troubleshooting slow applications or slow servers.

Ever tried comparing MySQL's my.cnf from a Debian and a Gentoo machine with diff(1) without going crazy?

diff(1) is an awesome tool, you use it (or similar implementations like git diff, svn diff etc) every day when dealing with code. But configuration files aren't code. Indentation often does not matter (yeah, there is diff -w and yeah, people use YAML for configs), order of settings does not matter and comments are just beautiful noise.
How?

cfgdiff will try to parse your configuration files, fetching all the relevant keys and values from them and then pretty-printing them in the original format. These results are then diffed and the diff is shown to you.

• With --indicator (or -q or 'set indicator') nano will show a kind
of scrollbar on the righthand side of the screen to indicate where
in the buffer the viewport is located and how much it covers.
• With <Alt+Insert> any line can be "tagged" with an anchor, and
<Alt+PageUp> and <Alt+PageDown> will jump to the nearest anchor.
When using line numbers, an anchor is shown as "+" in the margin.
• The Execute Command prompt is now directly accessible from the
main menu (with ^T, replacing the Spell Checker). The Linter,
Formatter, Spell Checker, Full Justification, Suspension, and
Cut-Till-End functions are available in this menu too.
• On terminals that support at least 256 colors, nine new color
names are available: pink, purple, mauve, lagoon, mint, lime,
peach, orange, and latte. These do not have lighter versions.
• For the color names red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, magenta,
white, and black, the prefix 'light' gives a brighter color.
Prefix 'bright' is deprecated, as it means both bold AND light.
• All color names can be preceded with "bold," and/or "italic,"
(in that order) to get a bold and/or italic typeface.
• With --bookstyle (or -O or 'set bookstyle') nano considers any
line that begins with whitespace as the start of a paragraph.
• Refreshing the screen with ^L now works in every menu.
• In the main menu, ^L also centers the line with the cursor.
• Toggling the help lines with M-X now works in all menus except
in the help viewer and the linter.
• At a filename prompt, the first <Tab> lists the possibilities,
and these are listed near the bottom instead of near the top.
• Bindable function 'curpos' has been renamed to 'location'.
• Long option --tempfile has been renamed to --saveonexit.
• Short option -S is now a synonym of --softwrap.
• The New Buffer toggle (M-F) has become non-persistent. Options
--multibuffer and 'set multibuffer' still make it default to on.
• Backup files will retain their group ownership (when possible).
• Data is synced to disk before "... lines written" is shown.
• The raw escape sequences for F13 to F16 are no longer recognized.
• Distro-specific syntaxes, and syntaxes of less common languages,
have been moved down to subdirectory syntax/extra/. The affected
distros and others may wish to move wanted syntaxes one level up.
• Syntaxes for Markdown, Haskell, and Ada were added.

Be authoritative. Tell your readers what they need to know, not what you might ideally like them to know. Tell them also what they need to think about it.

Save your readers time. If you are summarising a file of documents for them, you do not need to give them the experience of reading it themselves. Don’t use a piece of writing as a dumping ground for evidence; use the evidence sparingly to illustrate your argument.

Pick your battles. You may need to prove some points laboriously, especially if the ground is controversial. But you can’t do this across the board. Work out where a blow-by-blow account is necessary and where a simple allusion will suffice.

Don’t include details just because they are fun or interesting. If they don’t serve your argument or your story, they should go.

Observe the 5% rule. Any text, whether it’s a 1,000-page novel or a tweet, can be reduced by 5% without serious sacrifice of meaning. In fact, the true percentage is probably higher …

Rewritten in Rust: Modern Alternatives of Command-Line Tools
https://zaiste.net/posts/shell-commands-rust/

Following the success of our first smartphone, the Pro1, team F(x)tec have been working closely with our customers and the wider tech community to bring you a special version of our award winning phone.

In partnership with XDA (one of the largest online tech communities) we present the Pro1-X; the smartphone that gives you control. Control over your data, control over your privacy, and choice over your software. For the first time, a high spec smartphone with your choice of Android, Lineage OS or Ubuntu Touch OS out of the box.

So you just got your first longboard or cruiser board, now what!? Landyachtz team rider Alex Hannigan gives you all the tips he wishes he had when he started skateboarding. You’ll learn about foot placement, how to push, footbrake, turn, carve and whether you are goofy or regular! We’ll also give you some helpful tips like what to look for when picking a spot to skate. Comment below to let us know what other trick tips you’d like Alex to teach you.

Im Juni 2020 hat die Kommission eine öffentliche Konsultation über ihr lang angekündigtes Gesetzespaket zu digitalen Dienstleistungen gestartet. Rückmeldungen zu Online-Sicherheit, Haftung, Marktbeherrschung, Online-Werbung und intelligenten Verträgen etc. sollen bis 8. September eingeholt werden. Einerseits geht es darum, wie mit dem Digital Services Act die in der E-Commerce-Richtlinie aus dem Jahr 2000 festgelegten Regeln aktualisiert werden könnten. Andererseits sollen sogenannte Ex-ante-Vorschriften aufgestellt werden. Damit soll auf Märkten, die durch große Plattformen geprägt sind, fairer Wettbewerb auch für kleine Akteure gewährleistet werden können. Die Ergebnisse der Konsultation sollen in den Rechtsakt, der Ende 2020 von der Kommission veröffentlicht werden soll, einfließen. Umso wichtiger erscheint eine rege Teilnahme an diesem Konsultationsprozess.

Der Digital Services Act wird die Akteure, InteressenvertreterInnen und Stakeholder jahrelang beschäftigen

Whether you’re keeping safe from a pandemic, cosplaying, scaring passersby, practicing kissing, or just giving a lonely alien a hug, we’ve got just the thing for you! This Facehugger mask was patterned by the incredibly talented LeatherHub Patterns and is laser cut from 4-5 oz vegetable tanned leather. This li’l leather beauty is available as a completed mask or as a kit – the kit has everything you need to build, connect, sew, dye, and mold your Facehugger to your liking. One kit contains 60 laser cut leather pieces and requires anywhere from 4-10 hours of assembly, perfect for a weekend of crafting.

Here's another iteration on the Zero Terminal projects I've been working on for a few years. For those of you who haven't seen them, I've been trying to design the most usable all in one Pi Zero computer out there.

This version departs a little from the previous ones, as it is more focused on modularity, and forgoes a keyboard as standard, though it is possible to add one, as I'll show you in a bit. The goal here was to create something very versatile, allowing for all sorts of use cases to unlock the Zero's potential. Anyways, let's take a look at it.

I have been running a full IBM System/370 Mainframe on a $20 Raspberry Pi Zero for ~5 months. Thousands of lines of COBOL and HLASM running flawless. Tested an entire bank’s mainframe COBOL on it.

That’s fundamentally all that the STUN protocol is: your machine sends a “what’s my endpoint from your point of view?” request to a STUN server, and the server replies with “here’s the ip:port that I saw your UDP packet coming from.”

For example, we’ve observed that the UC Berkeley guest WiFi blocks all outbound UDP except for DNS traffic. No amount of clever NAT tricks is going to get around the firewall eating your packets. So, we need some kind of reliable fallback no matter what.

You could implement relays in a variety of ways. The classic way is a protocol called TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT). We’ll skip the protocol details, but the idea is that you authenticate yourself to a TURN server on the internet, and it tells you “okay, I’ve allocated ip:port, and will relay packets for you.” You tell your peer the TURN ip:port, and we’re back to a completely trivial client/server communication scenario.

Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) protocol. Like STUN and TURN, ICE has its roots in the telephony world, and so the RFC is full of SIP and SDP and signalling sessions and dialing and so forth. However, if you push past that, it also specifies a stunningly elegant algorithm for figuring out the best way to get a connection.

Ready? The algorithm is: try everything at once, and pick the best thing that works. That’s it. Isn’t that amazing?

Let’s look at this algorithm in a bit more detail. We’re going to deviate from the ICE spec here and there, so if you’re trying to implement an interoperable ICE client, you should go read RFC 8445 and implement that.

Several DNS-related programs want to automatically manage the DNS name server and resolution configuration file at /etc/resolv.conf. In some situations, you may want to manage this file yourself. Here is how you identify which programs are automatically managing this file on your Linux distribution, and how you can take back manual control of the file.

There are quite a few different tools that fight to control a Linux system’s DNS resolution configuration file /etc/resolv.conf including netconfig, NetworkManager, resolvconf, rdnssd, and systemd-resolved.

After a prolonged period of inactivity, new devs have taken over to support
htop. The new 3.0 release features lots of improvements (
https://github.com/htop-dev/htop/blob/master/ChangeLog ), mostly to
underlying low-level items.

Since 2012, the Raspberry Pi nano computer has become an increasingly important part of the DIY and « maker » community. The increase in power of the Raspberry Pi over the years offers very interesting possibilities for radio amateurs. Indeed, it allows not to permanently monopolize a PC in the decoding of frames with software like WSJT-X, FLDIGI, etc…, without forgetting the possibility to control the Raspberry Pi remotely and thus to be able to work outside the radio shack as I can sometimes do on my couch. Moreover, this nano computer is now widely used in any Hotspot (DMR or D-STAR).

Researchers from Intel Labs have developed an open-source 3D printed smart robot that it is possible to build for less than $50.

Once combined with a modern smartphone, the additive bot is able to navigate autonomously, and its real-time sensing capabilities enable it to conduct recon tasks such as following people. The PLA-based Openbot has also been designed to be easy to build too, and its STL files have been made freely available online. By making their design public, the researchers hope that creators will tinker with and improve their robot to continue developing new applications for it in the future.

In the 8-bit age, data screeched slowly off tape decks. In the 16-bit era, floppy drives whirred, clinked and chunked according to the peculiarities of the system's disk controller. For the BBC's "Boring Talks"—podcasts about things most people would find boring—journalist Keith Stuart remembers.