Showing headlines posted by bob

Google’s Nest upgraded its Linux-based automation line with a new “Nest Protect,” and a 1080p “Nest Cam” surveillance cam with optional cloud analytics. In 2013 and 2014, it seemed we were covering Linux-based home automation gizmos almost every week, but by the end of last year, the market grew saturated, and acquisitions overtook startups. This […]

Linux Journal editors are proud to introduce GeekGuides-- practical ebooks for the most technical people on the planet.

Normally, I don’t cover vulnerabilities about which the user can do little or nothing to prevent, but two newly detailed flaws affecting hundreds of millions of Android, iOS and Apple products probably deserve special exceptions.

I’ve lived in many cities during my military career. Each time I’ve moved, I’ve had to deal with a new city’s website, and what I’ve learned is that there are great differences across each city's site design and in how much government data is online and accessible. read more

A few weeks ago, I received an email notification from GitHub alerting me to a new, user-submitted issue in PencilBlue, our Node.js-based, open source content management system. The notification was titled, “WYSIWYG: Server running on Ubuntu generate [sic] ??? when pasting large chunk of text.” read more

Sierra Wireless unveiled a Cortex-A5 based “AirPrime WP” IoT module with 3G or 4G radios, plus a modularly expandable, open-source “mangOH” carrier board. We’ve seen plenty of low-power, Linux-ready Internet of Things computer-on-modules, mostly based on Qualcomm’s MIPS-based Atheros SoCs. The Linux-based AirPrime WP modules from Sierra Wireless instead tackle IoT and industrial M2M with […]

Someday you'll code for the web in any language, and it'll run at near-native speed Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, has announced a new project that could not only speed up web applications but could eventually see the end of JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development.…

Programming is a creative activity that any kid can engage in. Your child might not care about writing data processing algorithms, but they might enjoy creating games, programming music, designing websites, or just playing around with code. I've written several books to teach beginners of all ages how to code, and I know from experience that you don't need to consider yourself a techie or "good at math" to learn. In fact, kids often can learn to program faster than adults precisely because they don't know how "difficult" coding is supposed to be. read more

I had an "aha moment" recently while reading The Responsive City, a book co-authored by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford that tells fascinating stories about local and state governments that adopted new technologies as a way to better respond to the needs of citizens. read more

The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the first official case for the Raspberry Pi, which exposes all ports and features a clip-on lid for adding HATs. A variety of third-party enclosures for the Raspberry Pi have become available over the years, but the vendors no doubt realized the Raspberry Pi Foundation would eventually build one of […]

San Francisco upstart in series-B round Code-sharing website GitHub is pursuing a new round of venture capital based on a $2bn valuation.…

When you run a program as setuid, it runs with all the permissions of that user. And if the program spawns new processes, they inherit the same permissions. Not so with filesystem capabilities. When you run a program with a set of capabilities, the processes it spawns do not have those capabilities by default; they must be given explicitly.

Browser snuck proprietary voice-snoop code into Linux distro. The Debian Project thinks it's fixed an issue where Google's Chromium web browser snuck proprietary code into the fiercely Free Software oriented Debian Linux distro. That hasn't stopped Debian users from wondering how the issue got past project maintainers in the first place.

Axiomtek has spun three slim, rugged “eBox” PCs with Atom E3800 or Celeron J1900 SoCs that include dual GbEs, SATA and mSATA storage, and optional wireless.

Cat Robson is a user experience strategist and manager working on the Red Hat user experience team. Since arriving at Red Hat in 2012, she has influenced the design of the JBoss Developer website, JBoss EAP, JBDS, and other products. She helps teams see how a user experience focus can improve the quality of their offerings. She teaches each part of the organization to become passionate about the user experience. Read her blog about user experience at CatRobson.com. Priot to her talk at DevNation this year, I reached out to her so we could learn more about her work at Red Hat and about the future of open source licenses in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. read more

In all the years I have been dealing with both Linux and sound recordings, I have never found a simplest and more powerful tool than Audacity to get the job done. This open source sound recorder, editor, analyzer, generator and effect applicator is surely one of the most useful and important tools ever to be produced by the free software community.

The release of Blender 2.75 is right around the corner. Granted, with a two[-ish]-month release cycle, that always seems to be the case. Of course, this particular release cycle has happened squarely in the middle of the Blender Institute's production of Cosmos Laundromat, also known as the Gooseberry Open Movie Project. read more

The rugged Arcturus “uCP1020? COM for IoT/M2M gateways runs Linux on Freescale’s QorIQ P1020, with up to up to 64GB eMMC, three GbE ports, and a baseboard.

Today's computational needs in diverse fields cannot be met by a single computer. Such areas include weather forecasting, astronomy, aerodynamics simulations for cars, material sciences and computational drug design. This makes it necessary to combine multiple computers into one system, a so-called computer cluster, to obtain the required computational power.

There is a civic hacker in you! He or she is in there... I promise! Today, technology has evolved into a perfect storm of open source tools, code, social networks, and lots of data. Civic technologists thrive on all of these getting together with like-minded hackers and turning all these sources into useful applications, websites and visualizations. read more