News

New F-Droid releases on IPFS

by

TWIF generated on Thursday, 23 Nov 2023, Week 47

F-Droid core

Android Apps now on IPFS

New app releases on F-Droid are now being pushed to IPFS too, providing an additional mirroring channel that can be managed more flexibly. If this goes smoothly, we intend to upload all releases on F-Droid to IPFS. In the next F-Droid and Basic alpha versions the IPFS settings get overhauled, thanks to @uniqx

Community News

Tor on Mobile Devices Developer Guide

Guardian Project is working on a guide on how to integrate Tor into a mobile application, touching the broader goal of promoting online privacy and freedom. You can follow the progress here.

@Licaon_Kter’s comments:

Organic Maps: Hike, Bike, Drive Offline was updated to 2023.11.17-17-FDroid which, besides the usual maps updates, fixes and features, also brings “experimental ‘Details on KAYAK’ affiliate link to hotels”.

Missed in last weeks TWIF, FreePaint got a new signature key from its developer because “something happened to the old key”. We encourage developers to take great care of their keys but I guess this information it’s just not yet very evenly distributed. What does this mean for you? If this is the first time you install the app, just enjoy it, everything is fine. But if you had it installed before version 1.1.0 (4) please uninstall it and reinstall it. (!14020)

KeePassDX was updated to 4.0.5 after a long hiatus. The issue delaying its update is that the upstream code repo has a historic mistake that can’t be easily fixed (read in more detail here). Security measures set up in the F-Droid build server were blocking this mistake and the team had to provision code to handle such known exceptions.

Removed Apps

4 apps were removed

While Androidacy Module Manager’s license is LGPL-3.0, users are forced to agree to an extra EULA too just to be able to actually start the app. This makes the situation confusing for the users who expect a FOSS app, not restrictions. (#3129)

ForkHub for GitHub is no longer maintained and it can’t even login.

LibGen Mobile and SimpleWeatherForecast depend on servers or services that are no longer accessible.

Newly Added Apps

3 apps were newly added

fWallet – A beautiful cross-platform wallet application for your PkPass files.

Prayer Book for Catholic prayers.

Simple Counter – Keep track of things with a Material You interface.

Updated Apps

153 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂
Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread if you have any news from around the community, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

China’s new(ish) SW26010-Pro supercomputer at SC23

by
Sunway’s new supercomputer therefore feels like a system designed with the goal of landing high on some TOP500 lists. For that purpose, it’s perfect, providing a lot of throughput without wasting money on pesky things like cache, out-of-order execution, and high bandwidth memory. But from the perspective of solving a nation’s problems, I feel like Sunway is chasing a metric. A nation doing well in advanced technology might have a lot of supercomputer throughput, but more supercomputer throughput doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll solve technological problems faster. A detailed look at China’s new supercomputer. The conclusion quoted above is very well supported by the data and research concerning this new supercomputer, and the article is a great read.

M3GAN (2022)

by
M3GAN (pronounced “Megan”) is a 2022 American science fiction horror film directed by Gerard Johnstone. It was written by Akela Cooper from a story by Cooper and James Wan (who also produced with Jason Blum). Allison Williams and Violet McGraw star, Amie Donald physically portrays M3GAN, and Jenna Davis voices the character. Its plot follows an artificially intelligent doll, who develops self-awareness and becomes hostile toward anyone who comes between her and her human companion.

parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20231122 (‘Grindavík’) released

by

GNU Parallel 20231122 (‘Grindavík’) has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

Quote of the month:

  Got around to using GNU parallel for the first time from a suggestion by @jdwasmuth … now I’m wishing I started using this years ago

    — Stefan Gavriliuc @GavriliucStefan@twitter

New in this release:

  • -a file1 -a +file2 will link file2 to file1 similar to ::::+
  • –bar shows total time when all jobs are done.
  • Bug fixes and man page updates.


News about GNU Parallel:


GNU Parallel – For people who live life in the parallel lane.

If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it.

About GNU Parallel


GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

For example you can run this to convert all jpeg files into png and gif files and have a progress bar:

  parallel –bar convert {1} {1.}.{2} ::: *.jpg ::: png gif

Or you can generate big, medium, and small thumbnails of all jpeg files in sub dirs:

  find . -name ‘*.jpg’ |

    parallel convert -geometry {2} {1} {1//}/thumb{2}_{1/} :::: – ::: 50 100 200

You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel/

You can install GNU Parallel in just 10 seconds with:

    $ (wget -O – pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ ||

       fetch -o – http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh

    $ sha1sum install.sh | grep 883c667e01eed62f975ad28b6d50e22a

    12345678 883c667e 01eed62f 975ad28b 6d50e22a

    $ md5sum install.sh | grep cc21b4c943fd03e93ae1ae49e28573c0

    cc21b4c9 43fd03e9 3ae1ae49 e28573c0

    $ sha512sum install.sh | grep ec113b49a54e705f86d51e784ebced224fdff3f52

    79945d9d 250b42a4 2067bb00 99da012e c113b49a 54e705f8 6d51e784 ebced224

    fdff3f52 ca588d64 e75f6033 61bd543f d631f592 2f87ceb2 ab034149 6df84a35

    $ bash install.sh

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it.

When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite:

O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014.

If you like GNU Parallel:

  • Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues
  • Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/ Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists
  • Get the merchandise https://gnuparallel.threadless.com/designs/gnu-parallel
  • Request or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine
  • Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there)
  • Invite me for your next conference


If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:

  • Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use –citation)


If GNU Parallel saves you money:

About GNU SQL


GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases’ command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database’s interactive shell.

When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL – A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.

About GNU Niceload


GNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.