Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There is definitely something different about the Code for America Summit this year. It’s still got the family feeling and warm welcome that I’ve come to expect each year, but the tone is a little more serious. The civic projects being worked on are having a bigger impact on society. The projects highlighted during the first day of the conference are saving people time and improving our experience with government. The tide is on the rise and so is the impact of open government and open data.

Self publishing a book has never been easier. There are numerous open source tools that you can use to create a book. Having published three ebooks, and being in the process of putting together another one, I’ve learned that after writing a book there are a few more things that you need to do before sharing your book with the world.

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If you watch foreign movies regularly, chances are you prefer having subtitles rather than the dub. Grown up in France, I know that most Disney movies during my childhood sounded weird because of the French dub. If now I have the chance to be able to watch them in their original version, I know that […]Continue reading... The post What is a good subtitle editor on Linux appeared first on Xmodulo. No related FAQ.

Once you fall down the genealogical rabbit hole, it's hard to find your way back out. My journey began with my grandfather, a polio survivor confined to a wheelchair who took to computers in his later years. One of his passions was researching his ancestors, and the tool he used to collect his findings was Brøderbund's Family Tree Maker. I was fascinated by the charts and tables that he'd print out on his bubble jet printer, but I didn't have the patience for all the data entry. read more

MediaTek announced a Mediatek Labs hacker site, plus a MediaTek SDK for Android and a “LinkIt” RTOS that runs on an ARM-based, IoT-oriented “Aster” SoC. For years, Taiwan-based MediaTek has offered ARM-based system-on-chips for Android, starting with the budget market, but more recently offering powerful SoCs such as the MediaTek MT6595, an octa-core SoC with four 2.5GHz Cortex-A17 cores. Now, the company is extending its development support by launching a MediaTek Labs portal division based in Silicon Valley. The first offerings include a preview release of MediaTek SDK for Android, which provides a set of extensions that build on Google’s Android SDK.

Keeping, maintaining and analyzing logs (i.e., accounts of events that have happened during a certain period of time or are currently happening) are among the most basic and essential tasks of a Linux system administrator. In case of user management, examining user logon and logout logs (both failed and successful) can alert us about any […]Continue reading... The post How to monitor user login history on CentOS with utmpdump appeared first on Xmodulo. No related FAQ.

That Netflix is coming to desktop Linux soon is great news. Considering the OS only holds about 1.6 percent of overall desktop marketshare, it's an important moment for those who use Linux in their home lives that Netflix's engineers are even exploring the idea. It's not like they had to, right?

LXer Feature: 21-Sept-2014

A few of the big stories to hit the newswire this week for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Google is turning on data encryption by default in the next version of Android, a step that mirrors broad moves in the technology industry to ensure better data security. Android has been capable of encryption for more than three years, with the keys stored on the device, according to a Google spokesman. That means Google or another service provider wouldn't be able to provide access to the encrypted data. Law enforcement would have to approach the device's user. Android L, which is still in a developer preview mode, is due for release before the end of the year.

ODG’s “R-7 Glasses” eyewear features augmented reality features based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 SoC and Android-based Vuforia SDK for Digital Eyewear. Osterhout Design Group (ODG), which calls itself a developer of “emerging and disruptive electro-optics and sensor-based technologies,” announced the R-7 Glasses eyewear computer in conjunction with Qualcomm’s announcement of the Vuforia SDK for Digital Eyewear (VOD), which was used to design it. Qualcomm’s VOD, part of its larger Vuforia Mobile Vision Platform, is an Android-based augmented and virtual reality system for Google Glasses type gear that will be released in a limited beta later this year (see farther below).

This is the second part in a series of three articles surveying automation projects within OpenStack, explaining what they do, how they do it, and where they stand in development readiness and field usage. Previously, in part one, I covered cloud deployment tools that enable you to install/update OpenStack cloud on bare metal. Next week, in the final article, I will cover automating "day 2 management"—tools to keep the cloud and workloads up and running.

Maker Party is Mozilla’s annual campaign to teach the culture, mechanics and citizenship of the Web through community-run events around the world. This week we celebrated the record-breaking 2,513 events in 86 countries that made up Maker Party 2014.

Via debuted a rugged fanless low-power Android mini-PC based on Via’s dual-core Cortex-A9 Elite E1000 SoC, and offering mini-PCIe, mSATA, HDMI, and GbE I/O. Via designed the “Artigo A900? mini-PC for use in Android-based interactive kiosks, home automation devices, signage, and other HMI solutions. The 125 x 125 x 30mm mini-PC can be configured to “blend locally-captured real-time video streams with cloud-delivered content to create visually-compelling interactive displays for retail, banking, museums, and other environments,” says Via Technologies. The device can integrate peripherals including sensors, cameras, ticket printers, and barcode and fingerprint scanners, adds the company.

Tiling window managers have always interested me, but spending a lot of time tinkering with config files or learning how to wrangle them? Not so much. What I really want is a dead simple way to organize my windows and still use a friendly desktop. And I found it, finally: the gTile extension for GNOME.

Request a roll from the tweet-powered dice machine, made from the unlikely mix of Ruby, Python and Pi with an antique game. I worked on it myself. I got a little help on the website from some others at Intridea, but we’ve been working as a company just exploring various interfaces and social machines – Internet of Things, things like that. So it’s kind of how this idea came about. We have a few projects that we’re working on at the moment that are in a similar vein but this is the first one we’ve published. So I came across this little dice roller and I thought ‘Hey, this would make a perfect internet- controlled device’. And it would be a fun project, using something old and retro.

If you're like me (and you're a Linux Journal reader, so you may actually be like me), you probably rotate through your cell phones and/or tablets every couple years. These little devices are so convenient and have been consistently dropping in price, while their power continues to go up, so you may have a few older devices sitting in a drawer.

In light of recent events it might be worth for fans of Minecraft to try out Minetest or it’s fork Voxelands. Both are open source, infinite voxel sandbox games that are currently available for Fedora. Minetest is currently being developed on and is fairly simplistic without adding mods, it does have the main game mechanics of gathering resources, crafting and building structures. There are a range of Mods available to add functionality as well as texture packs to customise your experience. Minetest is available now in Fedora from the Software application, or using the command line yum install minetest.

For most students and teachers, our lives revolve around tests. For students, the tests determine whether they’re a success or a failure. The same is increasingly true of teachers. Take my career as an example.

It appears we have a new price/performance standout in the open source single board computer game. Longmont, Colorado based LinkSprite Technologies, which hosts the open source project for Allwinner-based pcDuino SBCs, has just announced a $39 board with a set of features that would typically go for about $60. The pcDuino3Nano offers the same dual-core, 1GHz Cortex-A7 system-on-chip and all the other features of the $77 pcDuino3 SBC except for the LVDS interface, I2S stereo digital audio output, and built-in WiFi. It also adds a second USB 2.0 host port, and upgrades the LAN interface from 10/100 to 10/100/1000 Ethernet.