Category: News

One twenty for everyone

Posted on by Michael G

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 13 Jun 2024, Week 24

F-Droid core

As a low key event last week, F-Droid Client and Basic 1.20 were marked as suggested, so everyone who can run it (Android 6 or later) should update and enjoy the new features.

Since the repositories changes have a big impact, we recommend you to take a look in your client Settings and to read @grote’s explainer post on how things work now.

Community News

@linsui cleans an NFC card:

Many OEM Android distributions have a built-in NFC card emulator but there was no such thing in the open-source ones. Now we have NFCGate, An NFC research toolkit, which can emulate some cards with NFC. Do note that an unlocked device with LSPosed and Root are required to use this function.

The popular system cleaner, SD Maid 2/SE – System Cleaner, A trusted assistant for your Android, to keep it clean and tidy, is available on F-Droid now. It was removed from some centralized alternative store and the developer account was banned by its known monopolistic owner last year, but that won’t happen on F-Droid because we don’t have accounts at all.

@Licaon_Kter calculates an element:

Back in January we highlighted an Element update and hinted about their work-in-progress enhanced version. The wait is over, Element X – Secure messenger, Fastest ever Matrix client, is now live and built reproducible. You can
read last years blog and keep an eye on future announcements. Note: as the plan is to replace Element with ElementX in the future keep in mind that the life of the new app might be cut short as the developers decide. We’ll keep you posted as the news reach us.

While we have some old apps that still prove useful we usually touch them for archiving or they become uninstallable as Google moves target goal posts further away. A nice surprise is RPN, Reverse Polish Notation Calculator, which appears to be a fan favorite and was updated to 2.0.4 after 12(!) years. Feel free to browse our other RPN apps too.

Removed Apps

4 apps were removed
  • LMD and taz.app klassisch already have newer and better replacements that are developed and supported.
  • ODK Collect is no longer up to date so upstream asked the team to archive it.
  • Tiny Tiny RSS was started based on a need to have it easily accessible. By now there are plenty more RSS apps in the repo.

Newly Added Apps

6 more apps were newly added
  • Caffeinate – Keep your phone’s screen On while developing
  • Fridgey – Help for recording your food!
  • Healthy Battery Charging – Prolong the battery life of your phone by keeping it charged between 40% and 80%
  • Meditation Timer – App that counts, beeps, and helps with repeating tasks, such as meditation
  • Satunes – An mp3 player compatible with Android Auto for Android Lollipop 5.1.1+
  • SkinBread – Lightweight application for viewing Minecraft skins from different services

Updated Apps

135 more apps were updated

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Canonical and DeepComputing announce new RISC-V laptop shipping with Ubuntu

Posted on by Michael G
Speaking of PCs that don’t use x86 chips, Canonical and DeepComputing today announced a new RISC-V laptop running Ubuntu, available for pre-order in a few days. It’s the successor to the DC-ROMA, which shipped last year. Adding to a long list of firsts, the new DC-ROMA laptop II is the first to feature SpacemiT’s SoC K1 – with its 8-cores RISC-V CPU running at up to 2.0GHz with 16GB of memory. This significantly doubled its overall performance and energy efficiency over the previous generation’s 4-cores SoC running at 1.5GHz. Moreover, SpacemiT’s SoC K1 is also the world’s first SoC to support RISC-V high performance computing RVA 22 Profile RVV 1.0 with 256 bit width, and to have powerful AI capabilities with its customised matrix operation instruction based on IME Group design principle!  This second-generation DC-ROMA RISC-V laptop also features an all-metal casing making it more durable, as well as improving heat dissipation and more on its premium class look and feel compared to previous generation. ↫ Canonical’s blog The DC-ROMA II is clearly aimed at developers, as it has what is essentially a GeekPort on the side of the laptop, to aid in porting and debugging software. Aside from that and the RISC-V processor, it’s a rather mid-range kind of device, and no pricing has been published yet so I’m not sure if this is something I could afford for an OSNews review. Once the preorders go live in a few days, we’ll know more. If you’d like to see this RISC-V laptop make an appearance on OSNews, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.

La gritona Bergerot trata de acorralar a Ayuso y le sale el tiro por la culata: “¡No os vota nadie!”

Posted on by Michael G
Un troleo en toda regla.

La líder de Más Madrid, la heredera de la pistolera Mónica García, se presentó en la Asamblea de Madrid con la clásica pregunta genérica.

En este caso le cuestionó a Isabel Díaz Ayuso por las medidas que tenía en mente para mejorar la salud mental de los madrileños.

La presidenta, hábil como nadie, respondió con contundencia asegurando que cualquier medida salvo la de afiliarse a un sindicato o a una asociación feminista.

Woman stunned after bear opens her car door and climbs into passenger seat

Posted on by Michael G
A woman was left stunned to find a black bear had opened her car and climbed into the passenger seat.

Annalyn Chia, 29, was vacationing with her friends in the Great Smoky Mountains in Townsend, Tennessee, USA when she witnessed a bear trying to gain access to her car.

The video shows the bear poking its head from out of the car whilst Annalyn can be heard instructing her friend to “get some pots and pans” to scare the bear away.

Annalyn, who works as an executive assistant in Chicago, Illinois, USA, said: “Shortly after arriving at our Airbnb cabin, several of us witnessed the bear attempt to open the door of the black car first.

“Since it was locked, It moved to my car, which was unlocked and proceeded to climb into the passenger side of the vehicle.

“The bear eventually left after we triggered the car alarm.”

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Posted on by Michael G
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Join us for the Moodle Academy webinar “Active Flipped Learning” on Tuesday 25th June, 10:00 UTC

Posted on by Michael G
by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to register for the Moodle Academy free webinar “Active Flipped Learning”, on Tuesday 25 June, 10:00-11:00 UTC. At this webinar we will welcome Matthew Seren Smith, Learning Technologist at UCL.

During the session you will learn how you can achieve very high levels of student engagement with the active flipped learning approach. Active flipped learning involves setting pre-class, interactive learning activities including videos, text and Moodle quizzes to capture student responses and help students engage with the learning material before class. It provides the teacher with valuable insights into the gaps in student knowledge, which is then used to formulate the in-class teaching content for the next class.

This webinar is part of the course ‘Moodle Academy webinars‘. You have to be enrolled in this free course to register and join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

Join us for the Moodle Academy webinar “Active Flipped Learning” on Tuesday 25th June, 10:00 UTC

Drupal Core News: New community initiative: Frontend bundler

Posted on by Michael G

Adapted from: https://www.sitback.com.au/insights/article/working-with-javascript-in-d…

As far as I understand it, community initiatives exist because enough people say they’re interested and start working towards the initiative’s goals.

So I thought I would try starting an initiative to solve a problem I see pop up fairly regularly:

Basically: why isn’t there a standard way to install javascript dependencies?

Some modules have tried asset-packagist, but there are myriad problems with that:

I had a whinge about it in #australia-nz: https://drupal.slack.com/archives/C45SW3FLM/p1712295645835869 and took up larowlan’s generous offer to try to get a new initiative this off the ground.

He introduced me to Théodore (@nod_) the frontend framework manager and we three had a short discussion around suitable directions to take. This initiative would not be happening without their help and guidance, thank you so much Lee and Théodore 🙇‍♂️

We explored the idea of using import-maps to let the browser handle module imports and agreed that the cascading downloads would be an unacceptable performance burden on non-admin pages.

The result of that meeting was the idea of trying out publishing Drupal modules on npm, or at least an npm-like repository, since @larowlan mentioned that GitLab can provide one. I got started and wrote some scripts for gathering package names and putting them in a central package.json to be downloaded by npm/yarn/whatever.

Then @larowlan pointed out https://github.com/php-forge/foxy which I had seen, but didn’t really understand the power of. What I didn’t understand was that you could define a package.json file inside a composer package, make a couple of tweaks to composer.json and without publishing any kind of npm package, foxy would find it and treat it like one.

Cue a couple of weeks of messing around with foxy, composer and vite, and I have created a working prototype for compiling multiple Drupal modules (including custom modules if desired) in a project, and routing the library system to the new entry points:

https://github.com/darvanen/drupal-js

It requires a few things:

Any module that wants to opt in:

  • Adds php-forge/foxy to require or require-dev in composer.json.

  • Adds a module-name.foxy.yml file to represent the library state when using foxy.

Site builders:

  • Have one or more modules that use foxy in their project

  • Require and enable drupal/foxy

  • Add a provided vite.config.js to their project (could this be done by the foxy module?)

  • Set up a way to run vite build (or their own implementation):

    • post-install/update commands

    • pipeline?

    • manually?

—

This is where you come in

The prototype is just a starting point. I want us to come together to define a new way of working with JavaScript in Drupal that everyone can and will want to use, similar to how drupal-composer/drupal-project pioneered effective usage of composer and was eventually adopted by core. I intend to keep working on this but I want it to be driven by the community, hence the initiative.

Things you can do right now:

  • Spread the word, recruit more people to the initiative, especially if they maintain a module with JS dependencies.

  • Try out the prototype and give feedback – no change is too big to explore.

  • Join the #frontend-bundler-initiative channel to chat about ways forward – bikeshedding is welcome here, we used to call that brainstorming 😉

  • If you have a module with JS dependencies: speak up to have your module included in the prototype, or make a PR.

  • Contribute to the foxy module to get it to import css/image/asset dependencies from the vite manifest

So what do you say, are you in?- come join me in the channel!