Hows my snap faring on different distributions?
Nearly everyone alive today has never the technical marvel that is the mechanical television. In short, the work by quickly strobing a light through a disc that has holes cut around its perimeter, with each hole being slightly lower than its predecessor. Combined with the persistence of vision effect, this gives the illusion of a still image with its number of rows being equal to the number of holes in the disc. YouTuber Science n Stuff wanted to try creating a modern version that uses a microcontroller to precisely adjust an LEDs color, rather than using an analog signal. The device has a single large plastic disc with 32 holes for a total of 32 rows in the image. Its spun at 1500 RPM by a DC motor thats driven via PWM, and because there can be some variance in the motors speed, the synchronization signal thats produced on each full rotation is also used to carefully adjust the motors speed to keep it constant. Both images and sound are read from an onboard microSD card, with the images being converted into pulses of light and the sound being played on a mono speaker. All of this is controlled by an Arduino Due board. There are dozens, if not hundreds of amazing Arduino Cloud features. So its perfectly understandable if youve missed some of them. So weve put together a list of our favorite Arduino Cloud features that you might not know existed. Texas Instruments AM64x is a family of 64-bit Arm processors with functional safety designed for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), motor drives, remote I/O, and industrial robots. The top-end processor of the family, AM6442, comes with seven cores including two Cortex-A53 application cores, four Cortex-R5F real-time cores, and one Cortex-M4F isolated core. AFAICT, while the documentation is dated January 2021 and TI announced the processor in February in a blog post with a cryptic title, it was only first picked up by Embedded Computing in early May. Besides the processor itself, TI also provides an AM64x starter kit and a full-featured AM64x evaluation kit, and several companies are already preparing development boards and modules as well see further below. Geniatech used to be better known for their Amlogic TV boxes, before expanding their business to development boards and systems-on-modules. But the company has now introduced KloudNote, a 10.3-inch E-reader running Android 8.1 on a quad-core Cortex-A35 processor. The device is equipped with 2GB of RAM and a 16GB eMMC flash, supports WiFi 5 and Bluetooth, as well as optional 2G/3G/4G LTE cellular connectivity, and comes with a USB-C port and a headphone jack. Here at KDE neon we pride ourselves on giving you the latest from KDE built pronto and QAed and shipped to you with no questions asked. We also base on the stable Ubuntu LTS 20.04 release giving a generally stable system. If you want an updated version of an app which isnt from KDE we advise you to use a non-distro package from the Snap store, AppImage or Flatpak. But Linux has one property which is still inconvenient for the end user even the more nerdy of end users, which is that drivers are shipped with the Linux version you get and theres no stable programmer interface for them so they cant easily be shipped externally. That means if you use Linux 5.4 which is what comes with KDE neon and Ubuntu 20.04 you will get drivers which are a few years old, which is no good for those shiny new AMD Radeon graphics chips. So weve now switched the installable images to the HWE build which brings in Linux 5.8. Neon installs should just install it on upgrade and use it on the next boot. Chat on our forum and report bugs on bugs.kde.org as ever. GCompris is a high quality educational software suite, including a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10, some of the activities are game orientated, but nonetheless still educational. Currently GCompris offers more than 100 activities, and more are being developed. GCompris is free software, it means that you can adapt it to your own needs, improve it, and most importantly share it with children everywhere. The GCompris project is hosted and developed by the KDE community. Free Software Leftovers GNU Guix: Substitutes now also available from bordeaux.guix.gnu.org There have been a number of different project operated sources of substitutes, for the last couple of years the default source of substitutes has been ci.guix.gnu.org (with a few different URLs). [...] This change is an important milestone, following on from the work that started on the Guix Build Coordinator towards the start of 2020. Back in 2020, the substitute availability from ci.guix.gnu.org was often an issue. There seemed to be a number of contributing factors, including some parts of the architecture. Without going too much in to the details of the issues, aspects of the design of the Guix Build Coordinator were specifically meant to avoid some of these issues. While there were some very positive results from testing back in 2020, it's taken so long to bring the substitute availability benefits to general users of Guix that ci.guix.gnu.org has changed and improved significantly in the meantime. This means that any benefits in terms of substitute availability are less significant now. One clearer benefit of just having two independent sources of substitutes is redundancy. While the availability of ci.guix.gnu.org has been very high (in my opinion), having a second independent substitute server should mean that if there's a future issue with users accessing either source of substitutes, the disruption should be reduced. I'm also excited about the new possibilities offered by having a second substitute server, particularly one using the Guix Build Coordinator to manage the builds. Substitutes for the Hurd is already something that's been prototyped, so I'm hopeful that bordeaux.guix.gnu.org can start using childhurd VMs to build things soon. Looking a bit further forward, I think there's some benefits to be had in doing further work on how the nar and narinfo files used for substitutes are managed. There are some rough plans already on how to address the retention of nars, and how to look at high performance mirrors. Gary Linden, legendary surfer & Firefox fan On the internet you are never alone, and because of that at Mozilla we know that we cant work to build a better internet alone. We believe in and rely on our community  from our volunteers, to our staff, to our users and even the parents of our staff (who also happen to be some of our power users). For Fathers Day, Mozillas Natalie Linden sat down with her father, big wave surf legend and surfboard maker, Gary Linden to talk the ocean, the internet and where humanity goes from here. We should probably start by telling people who we are. I am Natalie Linden, the Director of the Creative Studio in Mozilla marketing. The Apache News Round-up: week ending 18 June 2021 The week has zipped by --it's Friday already-- and it's time to take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week...  A revival at the intersection of open source and open standards  TechCrunch Tremendous technological innovation and transformative power are possible for the future if we re-energize the spirit of collaboration between the open-standards and open-source communities. Open Source, Open Standards, and the Need for Collaboration Our world has big problems to solve, says Guy Martin, executive director of OASIS Open, and finding solutions will require open source and open standards communities to work together. In a recent article at TechCrunch, Martin describes the differences between open source and open standards but also examines their similarities and common goals, such as interoperability, innovation, and choice.