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A lot has changed since the first Arduino board arrived a decade ago. Today, the Arduino family has grown to include more than two dozen low-cost, open hardware boards and an active community of more than 250,000 tinkerers. read more

A group of technology companies, non-profits and privacy and human rights organizations have sent a letter to President Barack Obama, the director of national intelligence and a wide range of Congressional leaders, calling for an end to the bulk collection of phone metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.

CeBIT attendees on Thursday fell victims to a series of well-executed hacks. Thankfully, they weren't malicious in origin; instead, they were live demonstrations by notorious ex-hacker Kevin Mitnick.

Google is offering a new incentive for using its Google Compute Engine. With Google Cloud Launcher, you can launch more than 120 popular open-source packages.

In my last article, I started to look at multitenant Web applications. These are applications that run a single time, but that can be retrieved via a variety of hostnames.

A common disease of software development is the "not-invented-here" syndrome, a tendency to write new implementations instead of leveraging existing solutions. We then just write it as part of the application we're currently building, thinking it's a small thing. Over time, such helper or utility classes grow as new things are added, but usually stay tightly coupled to the application. read more

Network simulators are tools used to simulate discrete events in a network and which helps to predict the behaviours of a computer network. Generally the simulated networks have entities like links, switches, hubs, applications, etc. Once the simulation model is complete, it is executed to analyse the performance. Administrators can then customize the simulator to suit their needs. Network simulators typically come with support for the most popular protocols and networks in use today, such as WLAN,UDP,TCP,IP, WAN, etc.

When we first open sourced Spark, we aimed to provide a simple API for distributed data processing in general-purpose programming languages (Java, Python, Scala). Spark enabled distributed data processing through functional transformations on distributed collections of data (RDDs). This was an incredibly powerful API—tasks that used to take thousands of lines of code to express could be reduced to dozens. read more

Imagination is hosting a raffle for a 9.7-inch, MIPS-based Ingenic tablet that runs a MIPS port of Firefox OS, which will also support its Creator C120 SBC.

Collabora, a leading contributor to the popular LibreOffice productivity application, has partnered with IceWarp, the provider of global messaging and collaboration solutions, to jointly develop web-based document editing technology and contribute these to the thriving Free Software community around LibreOffice.

It's been years since The Document Foundation announced that LibreOffice would be ported to an online version. It looks like it will finally arrive... in 2016.

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for March 25th, 2015.

Human rights NGO Amnesty International, a movement of more than seven million people, released its Annual Report for 2014-15 at the end of February. This 500+ page print book is published simultaneously in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, and translated into 12 other languages by local teams. It is composed of 160 detailed chapters written by regional experts on the human rights situation in most of the countries of the world. read more

I can’t recall the exact time I learned about open source software, but I can certainly narrow down the place. I quickly realized how transformative it could be. In 1996, I was sitting in the tech support department of a large ISP that provided hosting and connectivity to the Fortune 1000. Most of our servers ran Solaris, floppy disks arrived via snail mail, and we applied security updates manually adhering to a regime of updates and invoices prescribed by Sun Microsystems. It was a huge change from my university career of dumb terminals and mainframes.

After my project to control my Christmas Tree lights with my Raspberry Pi, what would be my next project? I eventually landed on tinkering with Pi Musicbox, a spin of Raspbian with Mopidy that allows users to play all sorts of streaming services—like Spotify, TuneIn, SoundCloud—and local sound files on a 'headless' Raspberry Pi. In this guide, I'll show a bit of the work I had to do to get Pi MusicBox working to my satisfaction as well as some of the issues I'm still dealing with. read more

Many Linux admins rely on a centralized remote monitoring system (e.g., Nagios or Cacti) to check the health of their network infrastructure. While centralized monitoring makes an admin's life easy when dealing with many hosts and devices, a dedicated monitoring box obviously becomes a single point of failure; if the monitoring box goes down or […]Continue reading... The post How to set up server monitoring system with Monit appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to monitor Linux servers with SNMP and Cacti How to install and configure Nagios on Linux How to configure Nagios for audio alerts and mobile notifications How to monitor and troubleshoot a Linux server using sysdig How to set up a cross-platform backup server on Linux with BackupPC

Rethink Robotics’s one-armed, Linux- and ROS-based “Sawyer” manipulation robot is smaller, faster, stronger, and more precise than the earlier Baxter. When MIT spinoff Rethink Robotics announced the $25,000+ Baxter manipulation robot in 2012, it inspired a whole new category of small, relatively low-cost robots for light manufacturing and product assembly. The fixed, two-armed, “collaborative” robot […]

When it comes to picking a programming language to use when teaching people how to program, there are many, many options. Scratch is a good choice when teaching the basics because of its drag and drop building block method of programming. Python or Ruby are also good choices—both languages have a straight-forward syntax, are used in major real-world projects, and have excellent communities and supplemental projects built around them. Or there is Java, Objective-C, and C#, which are solid programming languages and marketable job skills. Honestly, they are all good choices, but when it comes to teaching programming in an academic setting, are they really the best way to go about doing it? read more

Variscite released a tiny “VAR-SOM-DUAL” module starting at $46 that runs Android or Linux on a Freescale i.MX6 Dual, and offers onboard WiFi and Bluetooth.

Tue, 24 Mar 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.2.2. Plasma 5.2 was released in January with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.