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The H's Hardware Hacks section collects stories about the wide range of uses of open source in the rapidly expanding area of open hardware. It's where you can find out about interesting projects, the re-purposing of devices and the creation of a new generation of deeply open systems. In this edition, the Arduino creator's problems with bogus Kickstarter campaigns, a Morse interface for Twitter, a tiny altimeter, a tour of the Raspberry Pi assembly line, LCD displays for the popular mini-computer and a Raspberry Pi-based gas detector.

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone in the land of stars and stripes, it's a pretty safe bet that blood pressures are rising and tensions are high here in the Linux blogosphere. The holiday season is hard upon us, after all, and Linux Girl, for one, has resorted to her preferred coping strategy of warming the barstools down at the blogosphere's seedy Punchy Penguin Saloon.

With the Linux 3.8 kernel in early 2013 there is going to be an open-source NVIDIA Tegra 2 DRM driver. NVIDIA is currently working out initial patches for applying 2D acceleration atop this mainline Linux kernel driver...

For those Linux users hoping to do PC upgrades this holiday season, a number of interesting Linux hardware benchmarks are imminent to help you with your buying decisions...

While no future generation Geode processors are coming out of AMD, the open-source community still continues to maintain the Geode X.Org graphics driver. Released on Sunday was the xf86-video-geode 2.11.14 driver...

If you plan to upgrade your Linux desktop hardware in the near future or will be shopping for new PC hardware this holiday season, here's a few words of advice on recommended components and manufacturers to go with for the best Linux hardware experience.

A group of Ruby on Rails developers has announced Rails::API, a derivative of the original Rails project that provides a slimmed-down set of functions which are useful for developers using Rails to write applications that use a backend API-only server or servers.

Cinnarch project lead developer Alex Filgueira has released an update to his Linux distribution that includes a new default file manager and LibreOffice installer and improves the live system's overall stability. Cinnarch is a rolling release operating system based on Arch Linux that features Linux Mint's Cinnamon as its default desktop environment. The OS uses the LightDM login manager and Chromium, the open source browser project run by Google, as its default web browser.

Animation studio Dreamworks has released some of its production animation code under an open source licence. OpenVDB, the software in question, is billed as “an open source sparse volume processing toolkit” and is available under version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License. The C++ library “comprises a hierarchical data structure and a suite of tools for the efficient manipulation of sparse, possibly time-varying, volumetric data discretized on a three-dimensional grid.”

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. This edition looks at the latest E17 alpha, Bio-Linux 7, the first point update to Wayland 1.0, a MINIX 3 job opening, and WordPress's latest supported payment method.

The Linux Foundation's promised workaround that will allow Linux to boot on Windows 8 PCs has yet to clear Microsoft's code certification process, although the exact reason for the hold-up remains unclear. As The Reg reported previously, the Secure Boot feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) found on modern Windows 8 PCs will only allow an OS to boot if its code has been digitally signed with a key obtained from Microsoft.

Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

Mozilla has made its Web browser more social -- and more secure -- with the release of Firefox 17. The latest version of the foundation's popular browser includes a plug-in that displays notifications and instant messages from Facebook in a sidebar. The plug-in is the first implementation of the Social API introduced by Mozilla in July.

KMyMoney is a comprehensive finance-tracking application that does not require an accounting degree to use effectively. Linux provides several hearty checkbook and banking programs. Among the more well-known are GNUCash, Grisbi, Skrooge and MoneyDance. Each of these contenders for your attention have their own unique look and feel.

Blockee is a web application that lets you visualize improvements to your block. It was built as a Labs Friday project by Jesse Bounds, Nick Doiron, Serena Wales and myself. You can try it out at Blockee.org.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published RFC 6797, formally declaring the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) security mechanism for HTTPS as an Internet Standard. HSTS is designed to allow (HTTP) servers to ensure that any services offered can only be accessed via secure connections that are encrypted using mechanisms such as Transport Layer Security (TLS). From a client perspective, HSTS forces applications (User Agents) to only use encrypted connections when communicating with web sites. Sites such as the Open Web Application Security Project's describe how to implement the use of HSTS in web servers such as Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd.

In quantum physics, one of the calculations you might want to do is figure out how two or more particles may interact. This can become rather complicated and confusing once you get to more than two particles interacting, however. Also, depending on the interaction, there may be the creation and annihilation of virtual particles as part of the interaction. How can you keep all of this straight and figure out what could be happening?

Despite several attempts, the Linux Foundation's James Bottomley has not managed to get Microsoft to sign the mini bootloader for starting Linux on systems with UEFI Secure Boot. In a blog post, the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) member says that he successfully managed to use a Linux system for various preparatory bootloader signing tasks, although Microsoft stipulates that a specific Windows platform must be used. However, Bottomley said that to upload the CAB file containing the bootloader, he had to use a virtual machine with Windows 7 because this step requires Silverlight, and the open source Moonlight implementation of Silverlight didn't work.

Unix as a whole predates Linux by many years, and even the rather younger BSD variant was well into its teens by the time Linus released his first kernel. BSD networking defined and enabled the Internet. This illustrious history notwithstanding, BSD has long since ceded the spotlight to Linux in most settings. As Linux has come to dominate the free software development world, the result has been some occasional pain for other operating system distributions. Now, as a recent discussion on an OpenBSD mailing list shows, BSD developers are feeling that pain in a heightened manner. This situation has some serious implications.

A new phone OS based on the work Nokia abandoned on its Linux-based mobile OS has been unveiled in Helsinki. Jolla is a start-up run by former Nokia staffers devised to build on the old MeeGo project, which is now called Mer. The Sailfish OS is Mer with proprietary elements: a new user interface. Jolla has an agreement with Chinese retailer D.Phone, China's equivalent to Carphone Warehouse. The start-up inherited no IP whatsoever from Nokia, and the UI is completely new. The backing comes from China which sees a lot of potential in an Android alternative.