Table of contents for July 2022 in Linux Format

Richard Hughes, a maintainer of GNOME software (among other things) highlighted in a blog post that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has now delivered a remarkable 50 million updates. LVFS (https://fwupd.org) is a secure portal for uploading and distributing firmware updates. As Richard explains in his blog (https://bit.ly/lxf290gnomeblog), “Just seven years ago Christian [Schaller, director for Desktop, Graphics and Infotainment at Red Hat] asked me to ‘make firmware updates work on Linux’ and we have a thriving client project that respects both your freedom and your privacy, and a thriving ecosystem of hardware vendors who consider Linux users first-class citizens.” Richard’s blog post also celebrated the release of fwupd 1.8.0. This is an opensource daemon that’s used for installing firmware updates. It’s well worth checking out the release notes…

Mozilla recently celebrated the 100th version of its open-source web browser, Firefox. After 17 years, Firefox remains one of the most popular browsers, despite Google Chrome’s dominance, and as the Firefox team state in a blog post celebrating the release (which you can read at https://mzl.la/3kWIxID), that using its web browser “contributes directly to a better web, keeping it open and accessible to all.” Firefox 100.0 brings an improved Picture-in-Picture mode, with wide support for video captions, better spell checking and installation process. This new version looks to be great for media, with HDR video support on Mac, and hardware-accelerated AV1 video decoding.…

TurnKey Linux is a godsend for anyone who has spent hours preparing a server, cobbling together the necessary components to deploy network accessible software or web apps. The project produces an extensive set of appliances that you can use to roll out a new server application in no time. The self-contained appliances pack in a fully functional instance of a web app with just enough components of an OS to power that program. Their distro of choice is Debian, and the latest version of the appliances are built around the latest Debian 11 Bullseye release. In fact, according to the release notes, virtually all the changes in the latest release have been to the software powering the appliances, rendering them mostly invisible to the users of the appliances. For instance,…

Many distros try to do many things in an attempt to appeal to a large number of people, but end up failing to impress. Q4OS is a welcome exception, in that the distro caters for three distinct sets of users. Q4OS’ 32-bit edition, for older computers, comes with a curated set of programs to help you get the most of your aging workhorse. On the other hand, the main 64-bit edition of the distro rocks the KDE Plasma desktop and uses customised tools to tune the desktop for everyone from those new to Linux to experienced users. One of the unique aspects of the distro is its Windows installer that you can use to install Q4OS alongside an existing Windows installation without worrying about things like disk partitioning. The installer…

We installed all of the CMSes locally on to an Ubuntu server. In some respects, this might seem unfair because a typical hosting provider usually has a more suitable setup environment for a typical CMS. On the other hand, it does give us full control to troubleshoot each system, along with a level playing field. All of the CMSes required a bit of work to create a suitable environment for hosting on our server. We took it as read that we’d have to set the correct permissions for the installation directory and that we’d have to create a MySQL database. Most paid-for web hosting comes with a web-based tool called phpMyAdmin, which makes this part of the process a bit easier. Once we’d taken these steps to prepare our server…

Extensions can be a lifesaver when there’s an additional feature that you need to offer. That said, employing extensions isn’t always ideal because they can add performance and maintenance overheads. If you’re having to massively expand the CMS with extensions, it might be worth considering a system that’s closer to your needs by default. WordPress has a massive number of extensions available. This means it can turn its hand to any kind of content management role you can think of. WordPress extensions are browsed and installed from within the admin panel, and the listings include reviews and ratings. Extensions that exist outside the official ecosystem can also be added to WordPress, but this has to be done manually. Drupal and Joomla! take a similar tack to each other when it…

Usually for these hacker-themed features we tend to make judicious use of Kali Linux, a distro that’s jam-packed with pentesting and OSINT (open source intelligence) tools. But it’s not the only one – Parrot OS is equally powerful. And we’d urge you to go and grab the Security edition from https://parrotsec.org and write it to a USB stick without delay. Then the games can begin. Before exploring Parrot OS, marvel at the stylish MATE desktop. Besides the colourful background, the Applications menu is organised into categories ranging with everything from privacy tools to text editors. Most of the specialist software is in the Pentesting category, so here you’ll find password crackers, social engineering tools and many scanners. The System Services category enables you to start various database and web services,…

After almost two years’ work, Pi tinkerer Jeff Geerling has succeeded in his goal of getting an external GPU to work on Compute Module 4’s via the carrier board’s PCIe slot. Overall, it runs more slowly than the Pi’s built-in GPU and the CM4 may never interact with a GPU in a meaningful way, partly due to Broadcom’s out-of-spec implementation of the PCIe root complex. See https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com.…

Credit http://yape.homeserver.hu/index.htm Christmas 1985 in the Pounder household, and under the tree that year was a Commodore. Not the Commodore 64 – that would be under the tree a few years from now – but a Commodore 16. The Commodore 16 was a $99 computer designed to compete with the lower-cost bracket of home computers, especially the US markets Timex and Texas Instruments range of machines. Powered by a MOS 7501 (0.89MHz) or a MOS 8501 CPU (1.76MHz, which is the version we have) the Commodore 16 was comparable, and indeed with the 8501 processor was faster than the Commodore 64. However, we had less RAM than the C64 – a mere 16KB – of which 12KB was available to the user. The C16 followed the same aesthetic as the…

Credit: https://antumdeluge.github.io/debreate-web The open source ecosystem provides us with such a bounty of great software. And while modern distributions have come a long way in collecting everything a typical user might want, you may still find something that’s “not in the repos.” And while you can just compile it and plonk it down on your system, in this article we’ll explore a couple of ways to make it fit in nicely with the rest of your software. Distribution publishers also do a great job of collecting the best of open source software in their repos. Fedora contains an estimated 15,000 packages in its main repo alone, while Ubuntu boasts over 60,000. So why not use the ones they provide? There might be a couple of very good reasons you’d want…

Readers in the US who are on the lookout for a Linux machine could do a lot worse than hit up Denver-based System76 and grab one of its fine desktops or laptops. Nope, this isn’t an advertorial, this is just fact. We’ve been impressed by System76’s efforts ever since it launched its first machines in the mid-naughties. We’d recommend them to UK readers too, but transatlantic shipping is a little pricey. Oh, and the reference to the 1776 American Revolution twinges our government-mandated nationalistic sensitivities a tad, too. Be that as it may, System76 has also been shipping its own Linux distribution since 2017. And it’s not just for its hardware too – it works great on other PCs. Far from being just another Ubuntu spin, Pop!_OS runs a different…

Version: N/A Web: https://sherlock-project.github.io pen source intelligence (OSINT) is the technique of gathering data and information that’s publicly available. Sherlock is an important command line tool that quickly collates such information. The nifty little tool can find any username across over 350 popular websites and social networks. Sherlock requires Python 3.6 or higher, and works on MacOS, Linux and Windows. Installation is a simple matter of cloning the repository, and installing the required components. You can then run the script to query for a particular username across its list of supported websites and social networks. You can also specify multiple usernames at the same time. One of the purposes of OSINT is to dig up information about yourself. Anything that can be found by OSINT tools can also be found…

Version: 22.03 Web: https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo Are you the curious type? Then you can use MediaInfo to view all kinds of technical details about your media files, along with the tag information for many audio and video files. MediaInfo supports popular video formats, including Matroska, WebM, DivX, XviD, AVI, WMV, QuickTime and Real, as well as lesser-known or emerging formats. The cross-platform tool has both a command-line interface and a graphical interface to display the information. The tool first displays data about the file’s container such as its format, the format profile, codec ID, bitrate, date of encoding and other general details. This is followed by details about the video, including the name of the format, codec ID, aspect ratio, frame rate, bitrate, stream size and more. Next up, similar type of…

Version: 1.9.6 Web: www.eternal-lands.com Eternal Lands (EL) is a multiplayer, online roleplaying game (MMORPG) set in a fictional medieval fantasy world. The game offers everything you’d expect from such a setting, such as period-accurate weapons and architecture. Complimenting these are several other fictional elements that you get in other games with a similar setting, including other humanoid races and magic. The game has over a dozen maps across two continents. Players begin play by selecting the race, name and appearance of their character. Skills, abilities and alignments are automatically given initial values. The game offers several races such as humans, elves and dwarves. Three of the offered races are pay-to-play races and players must pay a fee to play a character of one of these three races. Like its peers,…

Version: 3.7.9 Web: https://github.com/genivia/ugrep Grep is one of the oldest Unix commands. In addition to fixed search terms, it can also search for patterns with wildcard characters. Virtually all Linux distros ship with the GNU variant of grep, which extends the features of the original grep in some places, most notably, allowing recursive searching in directories. Ugrep is a faster, user-friendly variant of grep that uses new match algorithms for ultra-fast operations. It’s written for advanced users who can appreciate and make good use of its rich set of features and speed. For all intents and purposes, ugrep is a drop-in replacement for the standard GNU grep utility, and also supports all its options. It can match Unicode patterns by default in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encoded files, as well…

The premise of Rolling Rhino Remix is simple. Replace Ubuntu’s stable release repositories with its development branch, and you’ve got a sort of a bleeding-edge rolling release distro. Executing the idea into a stable distro however, takes some doing. The idea came from Ubuntu developer and former Canonical employee Stuart Langridge, who wrote the Rolling-Rhino script to transform an Ubuntu release into a rolling release composed of packages from Ubuntu’s development repositories. The Rolling Rhino Remix project then took those scripts, and extended them with a couple of custom tools to create the distro. Since the distro is based on packages that are being developed, the developers state that Rolling Rhino Remix is best used by Ubuntu devs or experienced Ubuntu users who prefer tracking Ubuntu’s progress – even if…

Pixel Dungeon is something of a legend in mobile gaming circles. It’s also open source, which means there are a bazillion terrible copies floating around on Google Play. One of the few high-quality options is Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which has recently gained a polished PC port on Steam as part of its continuous update process that’s detailed in detail on its dev blog. Did we mention this is GPL v3 licenced? Who knew you could make a profitable open source game! Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a game set within dungeons portrayed in a pixel style. It’s a rogue-like, which means if your character dies then their world – which is procedurally generated – is wiped and you’re sentenced to perma-death. Just like playing the infamously difficult Dwarf Fortress, losing is…

Whether you’re installing the CMS, making content, handling problems or customising, you’ll need some instructions from time to time. WordPress, Joolma! and Drupal are well-established systems and this means that you can usually find answers to problems online. WordPress has the biggest advantage here due to its popularity. The official WordPress documentation is highly comprehensive, consisting of articles and a handbook. The official forum was reasonably active. The Joomla! website features an active forum. Documentation was plentiful, but it was difficult to navigate for a newcomer, and it varied in quality and age. The Drupal documentation was well organised, and we quickly found the traditional, full online manual. There were also many articles covering most aspects of using and administering Drupal. An active forum ticked the final box of what…

We’ve decided that WordPress is the overall winner of this month’s Roundup. As often happens when comparing different pieces of software, popularity in itself brings many advantages. Any problem that crops up is usually fixable thanks to all of the advice that’s out there for WordPress. WordPress is also the leader when it comes to extensions. Thanks to that, we’d struggle to find any role that WordPress couldn’t be used for when it comes to serving up content over the internet. Whenever one of the alternatives seems to offer an advantage, the answer is usually that WordPress has a plugin that can achieve the same thing. Ghost struck us as a highly streamlined environment for magazine-style sites that mix news posts with articles. It’s designed for the type of website…

Almost 10 years have passed since the infamous ‘Learn to Hack’ feature got us in trouble with Barnes & Noble, but just in case let’s start with a warning. The word “hacking” has unfortunately been co-opted by the media and entertainment industries, where it’s repeatedly used to denote any and all illegal activities done on a computer. The traditional (and correct!) usage refers to much more honourable pastimes: tinkering, reimagining and making machines behave in a way other than how they were designed to behave. Wait, that wasn’t a warning. This is though: whatever you learn in this feature, be aware that inappropriate use of computers can land you in a lot of trouble. Some of the tools featured here can do real damage. It’s also simple for a skilled…

Mini retro computers and consoles are enjoying a resurgence of late. Case in point? The Nintendo Mini NES and the A500 Mini, a licenced miniature Commodore Amiga 500. In effect the A500 Mini is an Arm-powered Linux machine, so can’t we just build our own? The answer is yes. Step forward Amiberry Amiberry is an optimised Amiga emulator for multiple Arm-based single board computers. We tested Amiberry on a 8GB Raspberry Pi 4, but there are versions for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 32-/64-bit OSes. Installation was simple, if a little involved. Downloading the Amiberry release from the website, extracting the contents to a new directory and then installing the required dependencies was easy. The “gotcha” issue was the latest Raspberry Pi OS (April 2022) using the KMS driver. Amiberry…

Credit: https://esphome.io ESPHome is a project that comes under the banner of Nabu Casa (the company started by Home Assistant’s founder to provide funding for core developers). ESPHome creates firmware for microcontroller boards, which can communicate with Home Assistant. Communication is two-way and microcontroller outputs can be controlled from Lovelace dashboards/automations as well as data from the microcontroller being fed back to Home Assistant. Around five years ago the ESP8266 model of microcontroller changed the world by offering a small, cheap circuit board. These boards contain a Wi-Fi controller, as well as support for many communication standards. These boards support digital input/output, analogue outputs, and pseudo-analogue output using Pulse Width Modulation – PWM is a way of turning a digital signal on and off very quickly so that the average…

An initiative of the European Space Agency in collaboration with The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Astro Pi is providing teams of young coders with the opportunity to see their applications running aboard the International Space Station, Python and the Linux Operating system. The Astro Pi platform comprises a RPi 4, a sensor HAT and a HQ Camera. But it doesn’t look like any previous Raspberry Pi-based platform, as you can see in the photo. Stringent testing was required before the Astro Pi would be allowed aboard on the ISS. First, it had to be capable of withstanding the huge vibrations that occur at lift-off. Then, to ensure the safety of the astronauts who will use them, the surface temperature of the case couldn’t exceed 45 degrees. It also had to have…

Credit https://github.com/maaslalani/slides Slides uses markdown language to create a presentation. While the finished work lacks features such as a timer or animations, it more than makes up for it with other add-ons. For instance, you can use different themes, and even make your own. The feature we like best is code handling. If Slides encounters code on a slide, it can execute the code and display the output as part of the presentation. The beauty of Slides lies less with its features and more with the ability to create presentations using markdown language. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is one of the most well-known markup languages. All processing in HTML is accomplished using elements such <br> for line breaks, <h1>, <h2> for heading, </strong> for bold, etc. In comparison, you can…

Credit: www.freecadweb.org FreeCAD is a CAD (computer aided design) program that can be used to design and visualise 3D objects. It’s a parametric modeller in that all dimensions are specified as parameters, and they can be controlled like variables in computer programming. This also means that you can design a complex 3D object and, at any time, alter any element that makes up that object. FreeCAD is also a solid modeller, meaning that if you cut a chunk out of a solid object in FreeCAD, it’s like taking a bite out of an apple. By contrast, in a polygonbased modeller such as Blender, the objects that you work with are actually hollow. FreeCAD can turn its hand to many different types of projects such as simple models like the one…

Okay Michael, tell us about Aliasing XOR mutability, ownership models, and er, that other thing you said. “Aliasing XOR mutability means that a value may either be lent with multiple read-only references, or lent with a single mutable reference,” explains Michael. “It also means that you can’t pass ownership of a value while it’s being actively referenced. This is technically a best practice to follow regardless of what programming language that you use, but it wasn’t possible to verify at compile time until Rust. “The ownership model in Rust simply declares that any variable passed by value into a function is transferring ownership of the value to that function. This means that you can’t use a variable again after it’s been passed into a function. This is very useful for…

Version: 2.7.1 Web: https://simple-keylogger.github.io. Simple Keylogger is a program that records your keystrokes, and saves them in a log file on your local computer. You’ve probably heard of keyloggers for their use by threat actors for unethical purposes, such as stealing passwords and reading private data. However, there are many legitimate uses for a keylogger as well. For instance, business users can use a keylogger to monitor their employees (what?!?–ED) in order to ensure that they don’t venture near sensitive files or copy or leak any confidential files. Similarly, schools and other institutions track keystrokes to deter students from using banned words, in a bid to deter hate speech and prevent online bullying. Keylogging also has an important role as a parental control tool to help you track what your…

Version: 2.3.1 Web: https://mechvibes.com Not everyone will have experienced typing on a mechanical keyboard, and therefore won’t understand what the fuss is all about. Mechvibes enables you to have a slice of the experience, at least from a sound perspective. Mechvibes’ author describes the program as a side project that he put together to irritate his family and friends by making his non-mechanical keyboard sound just like a mechanical one. The application has an intuitive user interface that you can use to customise the sound for the keys on your keyboard. It includes various themes to help you select the best mechanical keyboard sound that appeals to you. Helpfully, Mechvibes also enable you to adjust the volume for your faux mechanical keyboard. Furthermore, in addition to the standard sounds that…

Version: 2.2.3 Web: www.speed-dreams.org Speed Dreams is a motorsport simulation and racing game, which began life as a fork of the venerable Torcs racing car simulator. Thanks to constant improvements over the years, Speed Dreams has now grown to include several interesting features, cars, tracks and AI opponents, and offers a more enjoyable experience, and excellent physics realism. The game offers several different racing modes, from a simple practice session to a full-time career. The latest release adds three new car sets, namely 1936 Grand Prix, Supercars and Long Day Series GT1, each featuring a variety of cars and car classes. In all, the game includes a total of 82 cars under 16 different car sets. Speed Dreams also includes animated drivers on the 1936 Grand Prix cars, and offers…

The Vector data type is very popular in Rust, so it deserves some extra attention. First of all, a Vector is like an array. As is the case with arrays, index values start from 0. The main advantage of vectors over arrays is that vectors can be resized, provided that they’re declared as mutable. You can put or remove vector elements using pop() and push(), respectively. Additionally, apart from the size, which is the number of elements stored, a vector has a capacity, which is the amount of memory reserved for the vector. Finally, a vector represents a pointer to the data. You can select the part of a Vector that you want to access using an index range, as occurs in read.rs. So, for a vector named a_vector, you…

For over two decades the Linux community has watched from the sidelines as Nvidia offered marketleading GPU and compute performance, but only through a proprietary driver stack. Yet ever since AMD moved to an open source driver with much success, the pressure has been growing on Nvidia to do the same. Finally the company has decided to do the smart thing and transition to an open source kernel driver. There have been indications in recent years that Nvidia was finally succumbing to pressure and developing open source components. Such signs include an Nvidia Tegra driver in early 2022 and being more helpful towards the open soure Nouveau Nvidia driver project. New from Nvidia is an out-of-tree kernel driver that so far has only been tested with CUDA and datacentre GPUs…

Save the earth! Please include a 32-bit EFI in upcoming Linux distributions. Cubic and UCK seem to be obsolete to newer distributions. 600K of data can free up a load of kit that’s out there – energy-efficient stuff that can operate on 5V. Save the planet. Do your bit. Tony Thomson Neil says… Not meaning to be negative, but there’s a reason these tools don’t support 32-bit Ubuntu any more: 32-bit Ubuntu doesn’t exist as such. There’s no impetus for desktop or server distros to support 32-bit and no amount of badgering is going to change that. Just maintaining 32-bit kernel support is going to be tricky enough, never mind an entire distro ecosystem. The Linux kernel has reasons for supporting 32-bit embedded systems, but again even the industries that…

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is architecturally identical to the standard Ryzen 7 5800X, using the same Zen 3 processor design, and therefore the same chiplet setup that’s made AMD’s recent generations of CPU such world-beaters. That means you’re getting the same eight core, 16-thread layout in a single chiplet (so no potential inter-chiplet latency issues), but a slightly slower clock speed because of a necessarily lower voltage. AMD is gambling on that lower operating frequency being a small price to pay in terms of gaming when it comes to bumping up the total L3 cache on offer from 32MB to 96MB. How does that all fit in, you ask? Using a new 3D packaging technique, the 5800X3D’s compute chiplet, the Core Complex Die (CCD), has a new hat. It’s a…

SysLinuxOS’s developer is a system integrator who wanted an all-on-one solution to help him put a system through its paces. To that end, the distro offers a plethora of networking tools and utilities to help system integrators evaluate and assess a PC. SysLinuxOS gets its tools from Debian, and the latest edition of the distro is based on the Debian 11 Bullseye release. The distro is available in two editions. One uses the Mate desktop, while the other ships with the Gnome desktop. Both ISOs weigh over 4GB and are available only for 64-bit systems. You can dd the ISO on to a USB to thoroughly vet a computer from the Live environment. That said, the distro does include the Calamares installer to help you anchor SysLinuxOS on to a…

The installation process and administration of a CMS are important, but the content editor is where you’ll spend most of your time, as a user. CMSes tend to deal with two types of content: pages and posts. In the case of the CMSes that we’re looking at, the editors for both types of content are unified. What we’re looking for is a workflow that keeps out of our way as much as possible. That said, some users may have more technical requirements, and the right balance has to be struck. Consequently, some post editors stick to the traditional layout and look similar to a word processor, whereas some go for a minimalist design for quick entry of content with a uniform layout. As well as entering the content itself, there…

Ghost has built-in subscription features. Posts can be published on your site while simultaneously being sent as a social media post or even an email newsletter. It’s also helpful that these end products can be previewed from within the post editor. You can also export or import your subscriber list. Screenshots can’t convey the speed of a CMS, but subjectively, we noticed that Ghost seemed a bit snappier than the competition. This makes sense – it’s not as reliant on plugins and extensions because it comes pre-optimised for its intended role at the expense of overall flexibility. WordPress has different roles that can be assigned to a user, but Drupal has more granularity and detail in this department. For example, you could create a custom role with certain privileges or…

We’ve seen how the humble ping command can tell us not just if our machines are reachable, but how many of them are on the local network. If we read into the timings column a bit, we might even speculate about how far away these machines are. However, for network reconnaissance and port scanning, you can’t beat Nmap. Since we’ve already got an XML list of machines on our LAN it would be nice if we could re-use it here to save scanning again. Sadly, the XML files generated by Nmapsi4’s network discovery can’t be easily digested by Nmap itself (or we couldn’t figure out a way). So let’s open a terminal and do it manually. To start, just enter the following: $ sudo nmap 192.168.0.0/24 This will scan the…

We’re used to seeing Raspberry Pi competition come and go. Over the years many boards have featured better-looking specifications, yet have been hamstrung with lacklustre software and support options that disappear as fast as the parent companies. However, one model that’s stuck around is the Rock Pi, which is now available as the Pi 4 Model C+. This is a reduced-cost version of the Pi 4 Model B+. The Rock Pi looks almost identical to the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, and is based around the Rockchip RK3399T. This is a Big.Little Arm design that utilises two Cortex-A72 cores, similar to those in the Pi 4, but running at 1.5GHz. In addition there are four more “little” cores: Cortex-A53s running at 1.4GHz. Also appearing on the specs sheet is 4GB…

Powered by the RP2040, a chip that’s beating the current chip shortage, Servo 2040 wears its purpose on its sleeve. Designed to control up to 18 servos, and work with up to six analog inputs, this is a serious board backed up by a well-crafted software library. Servo 2040 is a densely packed board. It’s slightly longer and almost double the width of a Raspberry Pi Pico. The 18 servo outputs feature three pins for each output. The pins are the Signal, Voltage and GND connection, and servos tend to have colour-coded connectors to show orientation. The headers are typical 2.54mm pitch and we can easily connect 18 servos, creating noodles of servo cables across your bench. We tested the Pimoroni Servo 2040 using MicroPython and CircuitPython. Pimoroni has created…

Incorporating single-board computers into a hobby such as model railways is a great way for a maker to double their pleasure by combining their passions. In this tutorial, we’re going to develop a Raspberry Pi camera system to produce a video from a moving HO scale model train. The tutorial will introduce the latest Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (PZ2W) and provide the configuration details required to stream video from the camera-fitted Pi. We’ll also touch on the model rail cars. The PZ2W is ideal for this project. Its small physical size fits nicely in the limited space of an HO-scale model rail car. The quad-core processor packs enough processing power to support streaming content. All aboard? Then let’s get started. First stop: OS We’re assuming that the reader knows…

Credit: www.portainer.io Docker is a fantastic tool, enabling you to run all kinds of applications, tools and services in selfcontained spaces without the need for a fullblown virtual machine. But controlling it from the command line can be tricky. The obvious solution when running Docker on a desktop is to pair it with Docker Compose, the official GUI frontend, but what if you don’t like Docker Compose, or you’re running Docker on a server with no desktop? The answer lies in Portainer (www.portainer.io) – a web-based frontend you can use to control Docker from any PC on your local network – or even further afield if you pair it with a reverse proxy. Portainer’s user-friendly interface is packed with powerful features to make it a worthy alternative to Docker Compose.…

Credit: https://photoprism.app Photography was a viable career path once upon a time. As a hobby, it was expensive, with steep outlays for even basic point-and-click compact cameras. A roll of decent quality 35mm film would set you back £4 in 1990 (equivalent to about a tenner in 2022 money), and you could add an extra £3.50 to get the film developed so you could actually see them in glorious 6x4 format. Professionals who chose to pour their creative juice into the field spent even more. Then there were the years of training to learn about light levels, exposures and framing. And a high-end single lens reflex camera in the late 80s could easily cost as much as a two-bedroom terrace in Liverpool. But the extraordinary outlay would be made back…

Version: 0.10 Web: www.kariliq.nl/siren Siren is a text-based audio player that has all the necessary features to enable you to enjoy your music, without exerting a footprint on your computer’s resources. It can play audio through various sound libraries and servers including sndio, PulseAudio, ALSA, OSS and Sun audio. Similarly, it supports a large number of file formats including Ogg Vorbis, MP3, Opus, FLAC, AAC, WavPack, WAVE and AIFF. Siren’s user interface consists of three areas. The bottom line is the status line. It’s used to display error and informational messages and to enter commands and search queries. The two lines above the status line show playback-related information, such as the currently playing track and the volume level. The majority of the screen is used to display one of the…

Version: 2022.04.08 Web: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp Yt-dlp is a fork of the popular youtube-dl script and also takes inspiration from the nowinactive youtube-dlc. The main focus of this project is adding new features and patches while also keeping up to date with the original project. The utility is dexterous and can download videos from all types of feeds and private playlists. It can also fetch tracks from YouTube Music, as well as entire channels. The release also has an experimental feature to download live streams from the beginning. You have the option to split the downloaded videos into multiple files based on chapters, and the script can speed up downloads by downloading multiple fragments of a video in parallel. The main focus of yt-dlp development is adding new features and fixes, as…

Version: 6.4.0 Web: https://snapbackup.org One of the reasons why many people fail to take backups is because the popular programs for the task are too complex to use. That’s because in their bid to offer their users more bang for the buck, they pile on options and features that only make the tool unapproachable for first-time users. In stark contrast, Snap Backup bills itself as a simple, one-click backup tool that creates backups of select files and folders inside a compressed archive, and nothing more. It doesn’t include any other options, whatsoever. That’s because the application is designed for people who just want to back up their data files, and nothing else. Snap Backup has a simple, intuitive interface that’s easy to navigate. You begin by selecting the directories you…