For quite a while now, I’ve been annoyed by the system notification
volume going to 100% on my Debian systems, regardless of my attempts to
set it to a lower level. For example, when I open the KDE System
Settings app, change something, then try to close the window, the sound
that accompanies the save/discard/cancel alert is always startlingly
loud.
I think I have finally found a fix: in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf,
put in a line saying
flat-volumes = no
(You should find an existing comment “; flat-volumes = yes” that
indicates the default.)
You can make this new setting take effect in the current session
immediately without having to logout or reboot, by executing the
following as the currently-logged-in user:
pulseaudio -k
(This kills and restarts the PulseAudio daemon for your user session.)
There are several discussions of the pros and cons of this issue online,
going back some years. For example, here
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267>. Also a mention
about the “flat-volumes” setting in the ever-reliable Arch Linux Wiki
here <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio>.
Been looking at various settings changes you can make in the
“about:config” page in Firefox. Here are a couple I have found useful:
* keyword.enabled -- set to false to stop Firefox trying to
do a search on the contents of the address box if it doesn’t match
a URL. This is why I have a search box separate from the address
box.
* browser.fixup.alternate.enabled -- set to false to stop it
helpfully tacking on “www.” and “.com” if the original URL you type
doesn’t work. I have occasionally been confused by it complaining
about not finding a URL, but showing a different one from the one I
typed.
By the way, when you first try to view this page, Firefox shows you a
warning to ensure you understand the consequences of messing
about with settings at this level. It remembers it has shown you this
warning by adding the following line to the prefs.js file in your
profile:
user_pref("browser.aboutConfig.showWarning", false);
Firefox seems to overwrite this file when it quits, and reloads it when
it is launched again.
A pretty sobering read
<https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cel…>:
Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms
requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just
phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips.
Sound familiar?
Judge Koh draws a direct parallel to licensing behavior that got
Microsoft in legal trouble in the 1990s. Microsoft would offer PC
makers a discount if they agreed to pay Microsoft a licensing fee
for every PC sold—whether or not the PC shipped with a copy of
MS-DOS. This effectively meant that a PC maker had to pay twice if
it shipped a PC running a non-Microsoft operating system.
There’s a lot more--the article reads like a catalogue of gangster-like
tactics. All of which is perfectly all right under the US
interpretation of “Free Enterprise”, of course ...
Also, reading the details of how Qualcomm managed to sabotage Intel’s
efforts to develop 5G chips, it seems to me that Qualcomm is directly
responsible for the situation today where US companies are lagging
behind Chinese ones like Huawei in 5G capability.
Hi everyone
Our last meeting moved to virtual Google Hangout on short notice, which probably explained the low turnout.
My question is, whether speakers and attendees would be willing to move to virtual ones, to keep our little community together and going?
The last meeting was done with Google Hangouts, as it allows sharing the screen as well. Doesn't have to be Hangouts, it was simply convenient as a lot of people have gmail accounts. Open to viable alternatives.
Stay safe!
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
If there is anybody else besides me who wondered what happened to Edge
TV, as of the beginning of this month it is no longer on Freeview, it
can now only be viewed as an online stream
<https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/113928839/the-edge-tv-remove…>.
In the last few days of June, there was a promo announcing that it
was going HD, but I don’t recall it mentioning that it was leaving the
broadcast airwaves.
Quote:
MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson says the move is in
line with audience trends, which show people primarily consume
music videos online.
While that may be mostly true, personally I would go look for videos on
YouTube after seeing them first on Edge TV.
Came across this blog post
<https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust-a190bb…>
explaining why Discord, which has been using Google’s Go language to
implement its services, has now decided to rewrite them in Mozilla’s
Rust.
The problem was garbage collection. Go has a similar memory-allocation
model to Java or LISP, where you can create objects and simply forget
about them when you don’t need them any more, and a background process
will automatically reclaim the storage at some point. The trouble is,
that reclamation process (the “garbage collector”) tends to be the
source of performance bottlenecks in the system. Not to mention that
the memory usage of your program can grow to fill all available space,
unless you impose arbitrary limits on it.
Languages like Perl and Python use a hybrid model, where objects have
reference counts attached to them, keeping track of how many other
objects or variables still point to them, so they can be automatically
freed when the count goes to zero. There are cases where this isn’t
enough, and in those cases a full garbage-collection process kicks in.
One benefit that I certainly observe with this is that memory usage for
a program can remain reasonable, even after it has been running for a
long time.
Rust avoids the whole issue in a clever way, by having the compiler
enforce memory-ownership restrictions in the language itself, so memory
can be correctly allocated and freed without resorting to a garbage
collector.
The result is that Rust can achieve significantly higher performance
than Go, while avoiding most of the attendant risks of dumping the whole
responsibility for memory management on the programmer, as is done in
languages like C++ and C.
'Mozilla has announced plans to remove support for the FTP protocol
from Firefox. Going forward, users won't be able to download files via
the FTP protocol and view the content of FTP links/folders inside the
Firefox browser. From a report:
"We're doing this for security reasons," said Michal Novotny, a
software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the
Firefox browser. "FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons
to prefer it over HTTPS for downloading resources," he said. "Also, a
part of the FTP code is very old, unsafe and hard to maintain and we
found a lot of security bugs in it in the past." Novotny says Mozilla
plans to disable support for the FTP protocol with the release of
Firefox 77, scheduled for release in June this year.'
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/03/19/169246
There's always FileZilla...
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Today, we learn some new details about the upcoming Linux Mint 20.
While most of the newly revealed information is positive, there is one
thing that is sure to upset many Linux Mint users. First things first,
Linux Mint 20 will be based on the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04. This
shouldn't come as a surprise, as Mint only uses Long Term Support
versions of Ubuntu, and 20.04 will be an LTS. We also now know the
name of Linux Mint 20. The Mint team always uses female names, and
this time they chose "Ulyana." This is apparently a Russian name
meaning "youthful." So far, all of the news is positive, so what
exactly will upset some users? The Linux Mint developers are finally
dropping 32-bit support and will only produce 64-bit ISOs.'
-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/03/31/1842216
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Zoom, the video conferencing service whose use has spiked amid the
Covid-19 pandemic, claims to implement end-to-end encryption, widely
understood as the most private form of internet communication,
protecting conversations from all outside parties. In fact, Zoom is
using its own definition of the term, one that lets Zoom itself access
unencrypted video and audio from meetings. With millions of people
around the world working from home in order to slow the spread of the
coronavirus, business is booming for Zoom, bringing more attention on
the company and its privacy practices, including a policy, later
updated, that seemed to give the company permission to mine messages
and files shared during meetings for the purpose of ad targeting.
Still, Zoom offers reliability, ease of use, and at least one very
important security assurance: As long as you make sure everyone in a
Zoom meeting connects using "computer audio" instead of calling in on
a phone, the meeting is secured with end-to-end encryption, at least
according to Zoom's website, its security white paper, and the user
interface within the app. But despite this misleading marketing, the
service actually does not support end-to-end encryption for video and
audio content, at least as the term is commonly understood. Instead it
offers what is usually called transport encryption.'
-- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/03/31/1526250
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Popular video-conferencing Zoom is leaking personal information of at
least thousands of users, including their email address and photo, and
giving strangers the ability to attempt to start a video call with
them through Zoom. From a report:
The issue lies in Zoom's "Company Directory" setting, which
automatically adds other people to a user's lists of contacts if they
signed up with an email address that shares the same domain. This can
make it easier to find a specific colleague to call when the domain
belongs to an individual company. But multiple Zoom users say they
signed up with personal email addresses, and Zoom pooled them together
with thousands of other people as if they all worked for the same
company, exposing their personal information to one another.'
-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/03/31/201237
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/