Cairo-Dock 3.6 Released With Wayland Support and HiDPI Display Handling “Cairo-Dock 3.6 is ported to Wayland to mark the project's return to relevance now in 2025 in working with the many Wayland-focused desktops. Cairo-Dock 3.6 is working with the likes of the Wayfire, KDE KWin, Labwc, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland, and other Wayland compositors. But GNOME/Mutter is not currently supported.” Yes, it has been a very long (years) time since Cairo-Dock had any major update. I thought it was dying. The global keyboard shortcuts I think is more a limitation of Wayland, as I'm having to use ydotool for my shortcuts with my Elgato Stream Deck still under Wayland. The HiDPI support will handle higher resolution screens and proper scaling of the displays. See

Cairo-Dock 3.6 Released With Wayland Support & HiDPI - Phoronix

Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010's you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux ...

#technology #Linux #Wayland #CairoDock #opensource

Linux 6.18 Will Be A Big Improvement For Servers Encountering DDoS Attacks “A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service “DDoS” attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimisations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios.” This will be welcome news to most hosting services. The only issue though down the line may be that with cybersecurity, the goalposts also keep shifting and evolving. The details though are in the linked post. See

Linux 6.18 Will Be A Big Improvement For Servers Encountering DDoS Attacks - Phoronix

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service 'D...

#technology #hosting #opensource

Austria's military has switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice "Austria's military has completed a major IT overhaul, replacing Microsoft Office with the open-source LibreOffice suite across all its desktop systems. The change, finalised this month, affects approximately 16,000 workstations in the Austrian Armed Forces. This move will substantially reduce Austria's software bill. At $33.75 per user per month, a Microsoft 365 E3 subscription for 16,000 workstations costs approximately $6,480,000 per year, compared to LibreOffice's zero cost." But despite all the cost savings, the main reason for the change was in fact for digital sovereignty and to gain control over critical data. The whole marketing towards moving everything into foreign controlled clouds not only creates a dependency and lock-in to those services, it also often means reducing an organisation's own capacity to support itself. Any organisation should be basing its decisions on a very holistic view of all the factors involved. Be very wary of the allure of glitzy PR and nice-to-haves. See

ZDNET

This European military just ditched Microsoft for open-source LibreOffice - here's why

It's not about the cost savings, either. Many government organizations are replacing Microsoft software for a more important reason.

#technology #Austria #opensource #digitalsovereignty

Which browsers with integrated AIs collect the most user data The big thing with using integrated AI within browsers is that you are potentially giving a lot more access to your user metadata versus just visiting the AIs webpage and doing a search there. The linked article measures across 23 different types of metadata and in case you think it is just harmless data, it includes data points such as your contacts, location (which can be precise), browser history (what you did in the past), purchases, identifying data (which can be used to build your profile of user behaviour across all the sites you visit), etc. Although we know that WhatsApp and Facebook already collect and even share this information with others (it is stated in their terms and conditions), many don't realise that allowing their browsers integrated AI to have this access, is potentially just as bad. From the Surfshark report, we can see that Google's data collection is at least as bad as Facebooks. One thing that is different is maybe that Google is not actually sharing that data to their partners (well, it is not stated as far as I know). But where this is of serious concern, is for political activists, whistle-blowers, or refugees, where there is a real danger of their governments being able to access this data, just because it is collected and stored. And of course, the contacts' info just helps to connect all the dots between everyone's contacts and friends... So, if you are in any sort of sensitive situation, you want to avoid browser integrated AI, and even consider rather using privacy respecting AI such as Venice or Proton's Lumo. See

Surfshark

New Gemini in Chrome integration collects excessive user data

Gemini AI, which has just been integrated into the Chrome browser, collects the most user data among all browser-integrated AIs, including users’...

#technology #privacy #AI

Steam Client Adds Advanced Options to the In-Game Overlay for AMD & NVIDIA GPUs on Linux “The big news for Linux gamers is the implementation of advanced options for the in-game performance overlay for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, improved Steam UI scaling in XWayland, improved system display scale in the in-game overlay, and improved Big Picture update progress UI. Also for Linux users, the new Steam Client update fixes several bugs, including an issue where the ‘Browse Local Files’ button in ‘Game Properties’ fails to open the system file browser, an issue where the Steam Client fails to reload or shows dialogs unexpectedly after a render process crash, and an issue with crash dump reporting.” Seeing that I have successfully migrated to Wayland, this was of a lot of interest to me. It is also good to see CPU temp added to the on-screen performance monitor. Once about 10 major game updates have finished downloading, I'll be able to try this out. Why are there always so many big updates ;-) See

9to5Linux

Steam Client Adds Advanced Options to the In-Game Overlay for AMD & NVIDIA GPUs - 9to5Linux

The latest stable Steam Client update introduces advanced options for the in-game performance overlay for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.

#technology #gaming #Linux #opensource

TCL’s 8-inch Nxtpaper Android tablet could lure you away from the colour Kindle “Nxtpaper isn’t a reflective display technology like E Ink which relies on little drops of ink moving around, but it does feature several upgrades over standard LCD panels. The Tab 8’s glass screen is etched with a fine pattern giving it a matte finish that reduces glare and reflections, and TCL’s latest version, Nxtpaper 4.0, is also designed to minimize the softening effect often seen on matte displays.” Which is all good, but it still does not beat the real E Ink screen in terms of massively long battery life, and reading in the bright sunlight. So I'd say this is good compared to a standard tablet, but not for what an eReader was specifically designed for. See

The Verge

TCL’s 8-inch Nxtpaper tablet could lure you away from the color Kindle

TCL’s new compact Android tablet may be the e-reader you’ve been looking for.

#technology #eink #ereader

Tecmint's 6 Best Linux Distros for Gaming and Playing Windows Games “The good news is that gaming on Linux has improved dramatically in recent years. Besides the many native Linux titles already available, you can also play a huge selection of Windows-only games using compatibility tools like Proton (built into Steam) and Wine. In fact, nearly 80% of the most popular Windows games now run on Linux with little to no extra effort.” For myself, I've been using Manjaro Linux the last few years, and I am playing all the games I've needed to so far on Linux. My list includes: * Snowrunner * War Thunder multiplayer * Ships at Sea * Assetto Corsa EVO * Assetto Corsa Competizione * BeamNG Drive * Train Fever * Euro Truck Sim in multiplayer * American Truck Sim * FORZA Horizon 4 * Hell Let Loose * Red Dead Redemption II * Dirt Rally 2.0 * rFactor 2 * Train Sim World 5 All in all, it is 77 games, so I have more than enough to keep me playing. I've not got Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 so cannot comment on that one, but the only one that I think did not play for me on Linux was World of Subways 3. See

7 Best Linux Distros for Gaming and Playing Windows Games

7 Best Linux Distros for Running Windows Games Smoothly

These Linux distros come with drivers, preinstalled tools, and optimizations, so you can install them and start gaming right away without extra setup.

#technology #linux #gaming

FOSS Force Asked LibreOffice and Collabora: Why Aren’t They in Schools Instead of Word and Google Docs? “Much free and open source software helps its users save money as possible — on both hardware and software — while protecting their privacy. It also often makes it easy for them to learn how it works — if they’re interested — and customize it in any way they want or need.” “With such features, FOSS should be the default choice in any educational environment, in these days when many schools face budget cuts, and switching to free as in free beer proprietary cloud applications like Microsoft Teams or Google Docs to save money has the consequence of actively preparing and educating pupils to be endless sources of data to be exploited for the likes of money and political control.” There are really no big surprises here in the answers from LibreOffice or Collabora. And there should be a lot going for open source such as being able to use much older hardware, studying and adapting the code, no lock-in license fees, complete and unbroken support for the same open standards such as ODF that governments have endorsed, but yet... big money does tend to make the world go around. Those massive kick-backs that Microsoft gives to education, and the digital villages that they build, etc, all have to be paid for. That money comes out of the far bigger license and cloud subscription costs that governments are already paying. For any change to happen, the whole economic model needs top be rethought. Today, with internal IT being more and more outsourced to cloud service subscriptions, I don't see this change happening easily. In fact, with cloud services the lock-in is way greater than just the internal IT capacity being lost, it is also data lock-in. Ideally, organisations want to be igniting local innovation around IT as well as hosting, and building up their own shared resources. And that all starts with education. See

FOSS Force

We Asked LibreOffice and Collabora: Why Aren’t They in Schools Instead of Word and Google Docs? - FOSS Force

We ask LibreOffice and Collabora why their software isn't used in more schools, and what can be done to turn that around.

#technology #education #opensource

Heart Rate Measurement Via Wi-Fi without any skin contact needed “The basic concept is simple enough. One ESP32 is set up to transmit a stream of Channel State Information packets to another ESP32, with a person standing in between. As the person’s heart beats, it changes the way the radio waves propagate from the transmitting unit to the receiver. These changes can be read from the packets, and processed to estimate the person’s heart rate.” We've seen some fascinating applications before with Wi-Fi (like seeing through walls), but this could have interesting applications too, like measuring heart rate while someone sleeps, not needing to wear a watch or a band at all. Just please don't mention the discounted 5G myth. This also opens up ideas about how else Wi-Fi may be used for other solutions. In the comments below the linked article, someone has also provided the link to the full paper explaining how this works. See

Hackaday

Heart Rate Measurement Via WiFi, The DIY Way

A few weeks back, we reported on a research group that figured out how to measure heartrate using perturbations in WiFi signals. [Nick Bild] was in...

#technology #health #innovation #wifi

Custom Home Assistant Floor Plan Dashboard with Real-Time Controls Do you want a graphical floor plan of your home to show what lights are on or off, whether someone is at your doorbell, etc? There are probably lots more ideas to show the status of many things graphically, and to be able to even control them from this view by clicking on the item in the image. This is a good step-by-step tutorial showing how to put this together. The example showing the layering of the images can be applied to anything else as well. It does involve many repetitive steps to put it together, but it is certainly not difficult to do. Like most things in Home Assistant, start small with one function, and add to it later on. See the video at #technology #homeassistant #opensource #homeautomation

Pix payments happen in 24/7 real-time, are free, and supported by the Central Bank of Brazil "Launched in late 2020, Pix quickly became Brazil's most used payment method, sharply eroding the share of cash, cards, checks, bank slips and other forms of payment in Latin America's largest economy. By cutting out intermediaries, Pix has squeezed revenue from card networks such as Visa and Mastercard, card processors including Cielo, StoneCo, PagBank and Getnet, and banks that once charged more for traditional transfers." This system is very much like the PayShap system in South Africa, but a big difference is in South Africa the banks are often charging nearly normal banking rates for using the system, which has stifled its adoption. In the Brazil the opposite is true, where the norm is cost-free, or very close to it with other banks. I understand there is a Big Power which is not happy about this as they see this as stifling their business, but surely the world is about innovation and cutting costs through increased competition. It is not about banning something competing with you, but rather to embrace change and evolve with the times for the benefit of citizens and consumers. In many 3rd world countries such a system also increases safety when cash need not be carried. Viewed another way, when we pay with cash, those are direct transactions without a middle-person (just VAT being added sometimes). This system really replaces cash. Some quotes from the EBANX site below show over 70% of all Brazilians use Pix as their preferred payment method, making it more popular than credit cards, and merchants that integrated Pix through EBANX saw a 16% increase in revenue and acquired 25% more new customers. It is probably time for the banking system to be overhauled a bit, not only to reduce costs, but also to improve flexibility. This is not going to replace banks yet, but it is up to banks to really start competing more now. See

Pix Payment | The Instant Payment Method from Brazil | EBANX

Meet the Brazilian instant payment system that is revolutionizing transfers and payments. Increase your sales in Latin America by accepting Pix pay...

and

Pix (payment system) - Wikipedia

#technology #banking #Brazil

Keratin extracted from sheep's wool repairs teeth in breakthrough “The finding could support sustainable, low-cost treatments for early tooth decay within the next two to three years, according to the researchers. They reported their findings August 12 in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.” See

Live Science

Keratin extracted from sheep

Keratin extracted from sheep wool has been found to help protect human teeth. It could be coming to your dentist’s office soon.

#health #teeth

Did a video about my recent trip in the Jimny through the Cederberg Mountains -

Mastodon social network is bringing quote posts to the Fediverse "Mastodon is officially rolling out quote posts. Starting next week, you’ll see an option to quote another user by selecting the repost — or “boost” — button, allowing you to add your thoughts to someone else’s post.” I know there were concerns about this, but it does seem to be the way to go. For influencers or bloggers, it does at least link back to their original post for attribution, which is important to them. It also seems users will have the option to disable it for their posts, so surely this choice to have or not have, is the best of both worlds. ActivityPub, which is what powers the Fediverse including Mastodon, is quite significant as it is an open standard and is probably the most used social network protocol outside of the centralised social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. See

The Verge

Mastodon is bringing quote posts to the fediverse

Quote posts on Mastodon are finally happening.

#technology #Mastodon #socialnetworks

Pessimists Archive educates people on and archives the history of technophobia and moral panics Pessimists Archive is a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas and trends. Explore the timeline of technologies at the footer of their site. “We believe the best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old. Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.” It's quite true, I suppose that having a bigger picture context of things, does help put them in perspective. I typically think back to the early 1900s about the panic spread about motor vehicles and having to have a person walking in front of the car with a flag to warn pedestrians. Similarly, with the early steam locomotives that were rumoured to stop cows producing milk, and also travelling too fast so that humans on them would not be able to breathe properly. So much FUD that we have just forgotten about (for good reason). And of course we must not forget that many legacy industries spread all sorts of propaganda and ideas specifically to discount some new advances, because it is in their interests financially to prevent people moving away from using their product or service. The site really deals mainly with the long forgotten technophobia issues, and not with some of the more current ones. It is always best to look back historically, as there is less emotion and personal involvement with those times. They do interestingly enough tie some technophobia together that relates to similar fears, just which re-appear later with newer technology. See

Pessimists Archive

Archive of historical technological pessimism

#technology #conspiracytheories #FUD

Switzerland releases its own AI model trained on public data and its open source “Switzerland launched an open-source model called Apertus on Monday as an alternative to proprietary models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, reports SWI as spotted by Engadget. The model’s source code, training data, model weights, and detailed development process are available on the AI model platform HuggingFace.” Of course, being Switzerland, this is an attempt to adhere to the European Union’s copyright laws and voluntary AI code of practice, which may set it apart from some other AI models. Some may argue then it is won't be as good as some other AI models, but I suppose the analogy may be a thief could be richer than most workers who earn their honest dime through their own hard work. See

The Verge

Switzerland releases an open-weight AI model

The model’s training data, model weights, and source code are open to the public.

#technology #privacy #AI #opensource

[URGENT] DEF CON Researcher Exposes How Password Managers Betray Your Trust "Czech security researcher Marek Tóth demonstrated at DEF CON 33 how a single click on any malicious website can steal passwords, credit cards, and 2FA codes from 40 million users of major password managers, with vendors like 1Password and LastPass refusing to fix the vulnerabilities." What this brings home yet once again is, in regard to security, the easier something is to use is usually not better for security. In this case, much of the issue is around the autofilling of passwords on page loading (because that is easier). So, to some extent, this is all helped along by settings we choose to set. Again for subdomains vs exact domain, it is easier to match to just the base domain… Many password managers will be addressing these issues in the coming week or two, but it is worth rethinking your "ease of use" settings on your password manager so long. See

Sam Bent

[URGENT] DEF CON Researcher Exposes How Password Managers Betray Your Trust

Czech security researcher Marek Tóth demonstrated at DEF CON 33 how a single click on any malicious website can steal passwords, credit cards, and...

#technology #security #vulnerabilities

You can once again buy an official Commodore C64 "Basically, there is a whole gamut of ways to get some part of the C64 experience, ranging from emulator-only to a full hardware DIY or pre-assembled format. Each of which come with their own price tag, starting at $0 for running VICE on your existing system. With so much choice we can only hope that the renewed Commodore company will become something more than Yet Another C64 Experience." The video in the linked article gives a good run down of the various Commodore C64 options up to now, before ending with the details and cost of the revived "official" C64. Apart from holding the world record for the most microcomputer sales of all time. I had one as well, after my ZX81, and it was a major breakthrough with colour graphics, sound, etc. I have very happy memories from that C64, although I must say I did enjoy my Amiga 500 a lot more as the game quality was just that much better, and it had a lot of games. I still play some of those Amiga games today such as Ports of Call every now and again on my Linux PC using an emulator. So the question is, would there still be interest in 2025 for the C64? Well it certainly has been modernised a bit with regard to HDMI and peripheral support, and apparently many thousands of the unofficial C64s are still being sold. See

Hackaday

Commodore Is Back Selling New C64s, But Should You Buy Them?

It’s hard to argue with nostalgia, but you can toss a bucket of cold facts over it. In the case of the recent rescuing of the Commodore brand...

#technology #Commodore #retrocomputing

Homepage - An Open Source Self-Hosted Dashboard Homepage is a modern, fully static, fast, secure fully proxied, highly customizable application dashboard with integrations for over 100 services and translations into multiple languages. Easily configured via YAML files or through docker label discovery. With features like quick search, bookmarks, weather support, a wide range of integrations and widgets, an elegant and modern design, and a focus on performance, Homepage is your ideal start to the day and a handy companion throughout it. My video explains why I moved from Heimdall to Homepage. It also shows what various service and information widgets are available, what my dashboard looks like, what the various parts do, and how the configuration files work. My docker compose file is also unpacked. Watch #technology #selfhosted #opensource #dashboard

Various desktop Linux tips for newbies I'm also seeing more and more new Linux users popping up. They're noticeable for often saying "why did they not do this earlier". The point is, today's Linux is very different from 20+ years ago. It generally just installs and works, often looking very similar to what users experienced before (meaning basically everything can be done in the graphical menus and windows). Linux gets a bit more interesting if you venture into using the AUR or Git versions of apps (you have to enable this, as these are more bleeding edge). This is where dependencies may break, and you need a bit of terminal skill often to fix things, but the good news is, you're not losing any data. Over the years I've also opted to having all my user data (the stuff under /home) in its own partition so that is it fully separate from the main OS. The reason was in the early years I used to format the drive and do clean installs, or was distro hopping. Nowadays, I just use Manjaro KDE, and it just keeps updating all then time - have not reinstalled for many years now (and no nagging to activate it or end of life coming). You may wonder what happens if a distro is no longer supported? Well firstly it keeps working, and it may well still pull some patches and updates. But usually you will be able to migrate to using some other distro, and your user data all stays intact. But this is also a good reason for picking one of the many mainstream distros, that should be around still for a very long time (measuring that long time in terms of Windows release cycles). No-one has to move to Linux, but for those curious enough to want to find out more, the usual approach is to start with a liveboot version and just run it from a USB stick or external drive to test it out a bit. The next step is typically to install it side-by-side with Windows, but I'd really recommend a separate hard drive, as Windows does some odd things to the boot partition sometimes. Linux can access the user data on a Windows drive, but I'd be careful with that, as Windows can lock the drive if it uses hibernation mode. The point is, lots of things are possible for Linux. One will find of course that many companies only bring out their software for Windows and macOS. And example is Stream Deck. But I discovered two excellent 3rd party apps that work even better under Linux with Stream Deck. Da Vinci Resolve for example produces world-class video editing software that runs on Linux natively, but there is also Kdenlive that will work just as well for most users. So always do a bit of research before buying software or hardware to choose wisely. Personally, for me, it's more about the freedom to what I want with it. See https://akselmo.dev/posts/how-to-linux-2025 #technology #Linux #opensource