Turn Your Regular TV into a Smart TV With KDE Plasma Bigscreen Submitted by itsfoss on Friday 27th of March 2020 02:46:54 AM Filed under KDE’s upcoming Plasma Bigscreen project lets you use open source technologies to turn your regular TV into a smart one.» KDE Plasma Bigscreen for TVs and TV Boxes Offers a Linux Alternative to Android TV
KDE Plasma is a desktop environment initially developed for Linux Desktop PC or SBCs, but that’s also available on Linux phones with Plasma Mobile (previously known as Plasma Active).
The developers have now decided to work on a version for the big screens with Plasma Bigscreen suitable for TVs and TV boxes and offering an open-source, Linux-based alternative o Android TV.KDE Working On “Plasma Bigscreen” As TV Interface With AI Voice Assistant
Plasma Bigscreen is a new KDE project aiming to provide a user interface for television screens
Besides having an UI adapted for TV use, Plasma Bigscreen also incorporates the Mycroft AI voice assistant in aiming to be a robust Smart TV platform.KDE Plasma Bigscreen aims to be innovative, support full voice control, and easy to expand with new “skills” capabilities.Login or register to post comments Comment viewing options Select your preferred way to display the comments and click “Save settings” to activate your changes.More in Tux Machines
The details that make a great distro, things that make us wince, smug people online, great photos, imposter syndrome, and more.
Programming Leftovers GCC’s New Static Analysis Capabilities Are Getting Into Shape For GCC 10
One of many new features in the GCC 10 code compiler releasing in about one month’s time is finally having a built-in static analyzer.
This static analyzer can be enabled with the -fanalyzer switch and has been maturing nicely for its initial capabilities in the GNU Compiler Collection 10.
The static analyzer was added to GCC 10 just back in January with an initial focus on C code.This static analyzer for GCC was spearheaded by GCC’s David Malcolm and was available in patch form a few months prior.This static analyzer isn’t as mature or robust as what’s been built into the likes of LLVM Clang for a while now, but it’s getting there.It’s just a matter of selecting the right search terms
Once more, I wanted to push a small change to a Git repository to which the owner gave me write access.This repo is currently the only one for me, for which I need to use https as transport protocol and therefore have to enter username and password for each and every push.On the other hand, I keep all my valuable credentials in Pass: The Standard Unix Password Manager for a couple of years now.It stores them with strong GPG encryption on my disk, is nicely integrated into Firefox by a plugin and there is also a KDE plasma widget available, created by my fellow KDE developer Daniel Vrátil.So why can’t Git read (I was about to use pull here, but that might be confusing in the context of Git) the credentials from my password store? There must be a way! Next, I started reading the documentation about git-credentials which seems to provide all that is needed.
Just that pass was not on the list of helpers.Reading the specs, I expected it to be pretty easy to write a small wrapper that solves the issue.But: this sounds like a problem too obvious and to be solved already.So the search began.Using all kinds of combinations of git-credentials, pass, password-store and some more I don’t remember, I always ended up on some general Git documentation, but no sign of what I was looking for.
So maybe, it really does not exist (oh, I have not consulted the yellow pages) and I have to develop and provide it to the internet community myself.6 tricks for developing a work from home schedule
When you start working from home, one of the first things you might have noticed is that there almost no outside influences on your schedule.You probably have meetings—some over team chat and others over video— that you have to attend, but otherwise, there’s nothing requiring you to do anything at any specific time.
What you find out pretty quickly, though, is that there’s an invisible influence that sneaks up on you: deadlines.This lack of structure fosters procrastination, sometimes willful and other times aimless, followed by frantic sprints to get something done.Learning to mitigate that, along with all the distractions working from home might offer, is often the hardest part of your home-based work.Here are a few ways to build in that structure for yourself do you don’t end up feeling like you are falling behind.PHP 7.4 Lands For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
It shouldn’t come as a big surprise but PHP 7.4 has now landed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to replace the existing PHP 7.3 support within the “Focal Fossa” package archive.PHP 7.4 released back in November with support for accessing C functions / structs / variables using FFI, Opcache preload functionality, and a variety of other improvements as the annual big update to PHP7.
Learn snapcraft by example – multi-app client-server snap
Over the past few months, we published a number of articles showing how to snap desktop applications written in different languages – Rust, Java, C/C++, and others.In each one of these zero-to-hero guides, we went through a representative snapcraft.yaml file and highlighted the specific bits and pieces developers need to successfully build a snap.
Today, we want to diverge from this journey and focus on the server side of things.We will give you an overview of a snapcraft.yaml with two interesting components: a) it will have more than one application; typically, snaps come with one application inside b) it will have a simple background service, to which other applications can connect.Let’s have a look.
This month: * Command & Conquer * How-To : Python, Ubuntu & Security, and Rawtherapee [NEW!] * Graphics : Inkscape * Graphics : Krita for Old Photos * Linux Loopback: nomadBSD * Everyday Ubuntu * Review : QNAP NAS * Ubuntu Games : Asciiker plus: News, My Opinion, The Daily Waddle, Q&A, and more.
Security: Free Software Patches, Microsoft and Apple Failures and FSCRYPT in Linux Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bluez and php5), Fedora (chromium, kernel, and PyYAML), Gentoo (adobe-flash, libvpx, php, qtcore, and unzip), openSUSE (chromium, kernel, and mcpp), Oracle (ipmitool and libvncserver), Red Hat (ipmitool and rh-postgresql10-postgresql), Slackware (kernel), and SUSE (ldns and tomcat6).Unpatched bug in iOS 13.3.1 and later stops VPNs from encrypting all connections
An ongoing security vulnerability in iPhones and iPads is keeping VPN applications from doing their job.For iOS versions 13.3.1 and later, this bug remains unpatched and has been rated with a 5.3 CVSS v3.1 base score.When a VPN connection is initiated on iOS, all existing internet connections by the operating system and other applications are supposed to be terminated and then restarted inside the VPN app’s encrypted tunnel as a proxy so no third parties are able to see your IP address.The VPN bypass bug in iOS 13.3.1 and later causes some internet connections to continue with their original, unencrypted connection – which is a security and privacy concern.This means that people on the same network could snoop on the unencrypted data stream and the endpoint of the unprotected connections are still able to see your device’s IP address.Microsoft Issues Windows 10 Update Warning
Picked up by the always-excellent Bleeping Computer and Windows Latest, Microsoft has announced that both its big March 2020 update and a new patch issued to fix buggy antivirus scans within Windows 10 have severe side-effects which users need to know about.
FSCRYPT Inline Encryption Revised For Better Encryption Performance On Modern SoCs
It remains to be seen if it will make it for the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel merge window, but the FSCRYPT inline encryption functionality has now made it up to its ninth revision for offering better file-system encryption performance on modern mobile SoCs.FSCRYPT inline encryption came out at the end of last summer and compared to the existing FSCRYPT file-system encryption/decryption where the work is left to the file-system and Linux’s crypto API, this inline encryption/description shifts the work off to the block layer as part of the bio.Latest News Antitrust Regulators Turn Attention to Standards Organizations It’s well recognized by courts and regulators in many countries that standard setting among competitors can be procompetitive and good for consumers.As noted by the 5th Circuit Court in 1988, “it has long been recognized that the establishment and monitoring of trade standards is a legitimate and beneficial function of trade associations …[and] a trade association is not by its nature a ‘walking conspiracy’, its every denial of some benefit amounting to an unreasonable restraint of trade.”(1) But regulatory sands can shift, and especially at a time when broad and dramatic changes (political and otherwise) seem to be the rule rather than the exception, it makes sense for collaborative organizations to keep vigilant, and to review their policies and procedures on a regular basis to help ensure antitrust compliance.In my recent blog regarding Antitrust Laws and Open Collaboration, I briefly mentioned recent U.S.Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations into standards organizations.
There were two, in particular, both focusing on internal policies and the importance of avoiding rules that might potentially disadvantage consumers or competitors.In this blog entry, we’ll take a deeper look at the specific types of conduct that concerned the regulators, and how the standards organizations under examination were eventually able to address those concerns.Tails .
