Want to make your Linux desktop lit? You need aafire. It is a terminal-based utility that starts an ASCII art fire right inside your terminal. Although you won't physically feel the heat aafire brings to the table, it's definitely a "cool" Linux program to have on your system.

CfP for the Grazer Linuxtage 2022 is open until February 20th. They try to turn GLT22 into an on-site event again.

I have identified two important kinds of value judgment -  important vs. unimportant, and success vs. failure. I have showed how these judgments are made by our existing code highlighting themes: comments are hidden as unimportant, and deletions are displayed as errors. These judgments intrude on and influence our own thoughts and judgments. Further, I demonstrate that the judgments made by our existing color themes are the polar opposite of those that we wish to convey: comments are important, and deletion is neither dangerous nor improper. I suggest historical explanations for our current situation, and show that rectifying it is actually extremely easy.

PolKit, which provides methods for nonprivileged processes to interact with privileged ones, has been assigned CVE-2021-4034 and dubbed “PwnKit.”

PolKit 🇬🇧 (oder in der langen Form: PolicyKit) ist ein im Hintergrund laufender Dienst, der es erlaubt, Berechtigung für die Nutzung von Systemkomponenten und Software festzulegen.

So kann mittels PolKit z.B. festgelegt werden, dass beim Aufruf eines Programms nach dem Passwort eines Nutzer mit Root-Rechten gefragt wird, auch wenn das Programm nicht mittels sudo oder pkexec gestartet wurde. PolKit ist auch in Werkzeuge der Systemverwaltung von GNOME integriert. Dies ist daran zu erkennen, dass bei vielen Anwendungen nicht mehr das Root-Passwort beim Start der Anwendung abgefragt wird, sondern dass die Anwendung durch einen

Almost all systems using traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs) rely on leader election to pick a leader database which handles all writes, and sometimes, all reads. In these systems, election may be automated, but it’s frequently done manually by a human operator.

“Conventional wisdom will kill you in your search for a job,” Siegel says. “You want the simplest, most boring résumé template you can find. You want to write like a caveman in the shortest, crispest words you can.”

In most cases, when candidates apply for jobs their résumés will first be processed by an automated applicant tracking system (ATS), Siegel says. To increase your chances of advancing to an interview, you should submit a résumé that the AI will interpret accurately.

In creating this vast, faceless bureaucratic machine, the Loki design team needed to source enough old hardware to furnish whole offices. “A lot of it was our set decorator Claudia Bonfe and her team [who] found an amazing array of retro televisions,” says Farahani. “Some of these things, they’re old and they’re brittle, so by the time you get them, the amount of modifications that we wanted to do to them, they just wouldn’t hold up. So it was easier in many cases to just fabricate them or build them from scratch.” (There is, however, a prominent Lear Siegler ADM-3A sitting on the reception desk when we first see the TVA, which could be the real deal.)

build awareness that NTLM needs to die (probably find better wording). This is our stretch goal. It won’t happen any time soon but it’s good to know where we’re heading. Make sure that any new application works without NTLM e.g., by disabling NTLM via GPO on all new servers you bring to production.

A century ago, the leading symbol of information management was the filing cabinet; by the turn of the millennium, it was Google search.

Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games (intro) so far covers 1971-1986. But several dissertations reconsider texts from the further past in similar terms: "machine[s] for producing possible worlds".

If, as Eco argues, a literary text is “a machine for producing possible worlds”, including the many worlds the audience imagines, then one way of looking at computer games is as machines for producing such machines.

The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.

The documentary is voice by Laurie Anderson and brings together archival footage, interviews and long periods of letting the music speak for itself.

The Grand Hotel was designed by Nikola Dobrović (1897-1967) in the early 1930s for the native island family. The construction took several years and represented an attraction nothing like what had been seen before, and when the hotel opened in 1936, it kicked off the development of modern tourism on Lopud.

“As people realise it’s not going to end soon, this is when cracks begin appearing.”

While people may not be able to travel far, especially those in lockdown with travel limits, Scott says there are ways to find space close to home by going “somewhere you can see the horizon, you feel less crowded, less stressed and less pressure”.

“We know being cooped up in small spaces, especially in environments with lots of noise and activity, is not good for our mental health.”

She recommends going to the top of a hill, the beach, a forest and parks or, if you live in the inner city, even the middle of a football field. She says research shows even virtual reality, for example putting on a nature documentary, also works.

...

“We call it zoning out instead of relaxing. You zone out on Netflix or a packet of chips, but even though you haven’t done anything, you haven’t relaxed. You wake up the next morning and you’re still tired.

Our goal with this project is to speculate on the future of cities, and to celebrate the vitality and diversity of urban spaces, by imagining ways that communities can use the clean-energy transition as an opportunity to enhance what makes them special. The transition will involve messiness, discomfort, and in some cases, dislocation and displacement. Yet it is also a chance to strengthen neighborhoods, foster greater equity and civic engagement, and repair the natural environments and ecosystems that both surround and wind through our cities. In this collection, we aim to provide glimpses into possible configurations of clean-energy infrastructure—along with its concomitant social relations, political structures, and institutions—that embrace the unique circumstances of different cities. We hope to encourage dialogue, debate, and critical thinking about how to navigate urban energy transitions in ways that are culturally responsive and inclusive, and in ways that honor and amplify the beauty and grandeur of cities, as well as their ability to provide places where people can live and thrive and make futures for themselves, their neighbors, and future generations.

This article explains the role of the X Window System when it was first developed in the 1980s, and today. I highlight three advanced traits:

X was highly portable, so that applications written for X could run on virtually any Unix system, on BSD, on GNU/Linux, and on the Mac.
X allowed distributed computing. You could run graphical applications hosted on another computer, displaying them on your local desktop.
X was customizable to an almost limitless extent. This made X a platform for sophisticated interfaces such as KDE and GNOME.

Since last year, I’ve become a bit of an arborist throw line evangelist. Arborist throw lines have made my wire antenna deployments so quick and easy compared with using monofilament fishing line or more complicated systems.

Since purchasing this arborist throw line last year, I’ve never looked back. The throw line never gets caught in tree branches, it’s reusable hundreds of times, and with it I can easily snag branches 50’+ above the ground to hang my wire antennas.

Here are 11 Linux commands that one sysadmin cannot live without.

This is all to say that the more standard tools I know about, the more powerful my throwaway commands become, the faster I can write them, and the quicker my clients get their actual problems solved.

Did you know there is a Linux package you can install that is actually called "HOLLYWOOD" and that is designed to simply LOOK COOL ON SCREEN? (I've already spotted it on at least one major news site this cycle)

via Ethan "Mr.E" Schoonover (@ethanschoonover)