Linux Blimp

Intrinsyc has launched an Android-based Open-Q 2500 SOM module and development kit for smartwatches based on the Snapdragon 2500. Meanwhile, Fossil unveiled the first watch to run Wear OS on the next-gen Snapdragon 3100.

Intrinsyc has followed up on last year’s smartwatch oriented Open‐Q 2100 SOM, featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC, with a new Open-Q 2500 SOM and Open-Q 624A Development Kit for this year’s kids-watch focused Snapdragon Wear 2500 (SDW2500). You can ore-order an early adopter version of the $795 kit due in mid-November. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has already moved on to a new Snapdragon Wear 3100, which powers a new Fossil Sport Smartwatch running Wear OS (see farther below).

Open-Q 2500 Development Kit (left) and Open-Q 2500 SOM

Intrinsyc, which also this week released an

Open-Q 670 HDK

kit for the Snapdragon 670 smartphone SoC, does not use the name

Wear OS

(formerly Android Wear) for the Open-Q 2100 module and kit. Instead, the long-time Qualcomm collaborator says the Open-Q 2500 module and kit are designed for “a range of Android based wearable devices including pet, children, and elderly trackers, high-end fitness trackers, smartwatches, connected headsets, smart eyewear, and more.”

The products run run a version of “Android for Wearables” that is much like Wear OS but optimized for kids. Wear OS has appeared on a variety of new smartwatch models since we last checked in on Google’s Wear 2.0 update in early 2017.

When Qualcomm announced the SDW2500 in June, the media reception was muted. The technical improvements are modest compared to the SDW2100 — or to the SDW2100’s leap over the Snapdragon 400. Since the SoC is marketed at the kids watch segment, it is not the breakthrough release that might have given the struggling Wear OS a fighting chance against the market leading Apple Watch. Yet, Qualcomm’s SDW3100 may prove more competitive.

Apple recently jumped ahead again with a well-regarded Apple Watch Series 4 model. Meanwhile, Samsung continues to run a viable third-party candidacy with its latest Tizen-based Samsung Galaxy Watch.

Snapdragon Wear 2500

Like Qualcomm’s SDW2100, as well as the new SDW3100, the SDW2500 runs on 4x 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 cores with Adreno 304 graphics and support for 640 x 480 pixel displays. However, the 28nm fabricated chip offers an updated 5th gen 4G multi-mode LTE modem option in addition to 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.1 BLE, and a new NXP NFC chip. It also provides 14 percent longer battery life than the SDW2100, thanks in part to an improved PMIC.

Other features focused on children (or at least parents trying to keep track of them) include a low power RF Front End (RFFE) location tracking chip and support for up to 5-megapixel cameras per Qualcomm and 8-megapixel cameras, according to Intrinsyc. The SDW2500 also integrates Qualcomm Voice Activation technology with support for popular AI assistants such as Google Assistant.

The SDW2500 provides an integrated, DSP-driven sensor hub driven by an with pre-optimized algorithms aimed at kids health and fitness tracking. Gesture based gaming is also available.

Open-Q 2500 module and development kit

The Open-Q 2500 SOM module that powers the new Open-Q 2500 Development Kit encapsulates the SDW2500 is a tiny 31.5 x 15mm footprint. Intrinsyc clocks the SoC to 1.1GHz instead of 1.2GHz. The module provides 1GB LPDDR3 and 8GB eMMC in a PoP package.

Open-Q 2500 SOM

The Open-Q 2500 SOM supports the WiFi/BT module and Qualcomm Gen 8C GNSS location chip with respective U.FL antenna connectors. The module provides 4-lane MIPI-DSI for up to 720p at 60fps video and 2-lane MIPI-CSI for cameras. Dual I2S interfaces and a DMIC input support digital audio.

Other features include GPIO, BLSP, sensor I/O, SDIO, and a USB 2.0 Type-C with 3.6V to 4.2V power input and battery charging support. Dual 100-pin connectors hook up to the dev kit.

Open-Q 2500 Development Kit, front and back

The Open-Q 2500 Development Kit ships an optional, smartphone like MIPI-DSI-based touchscreen with 640 x 480 resolution as well as an optional camera kit. The 170 x 170mm board adds a microSD slot, a micro-USB serial debug port, and expansion headers for all I/O. You also get 2x digital mics, and an I2S-based mono speaker amp with terminals.

The 0 to 50°C tolerant board is further equipped with PCB antennas for WiFi/BT and a GNSS receiver and antenna for location. There’s a 12V/3A input and a USB Type-C port for charging (batteries not included).

Fossil Sport Smartwatch

Snapdragon Wear 3100 and Fossil Sport Smartwatch

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear 3100 SoC was designed in close collaboration with Google, according to a Tom’s Guide report. The big change is the up to two-day battery life enabled by a co-processor that offloads tasks such as time displays and fitness features like step counting.

Other features include more customized color watch faces and improved fitness-tracking. As noted, however, basic specs haven’t changed much from the SDW2500.

The first watch to use the SDW3100 is the 4th Gen, $255 Fossil Sport Smartwatch. This will be followed by the Montblanc Summit 2, as well as a Louis Vuitton model and additional Fossil models.

Fossil promises only all-day battery life for its 350mAh battery under normal usage. The Wear OS watch is available in six colors, 28 strap styles, and two sizes (41mm and 43mm). Other features include improved NFC, GPS, and heart rate sensor. The water resistant watch has 4GB storage, WiFi, and Bluetooth, but lacks a 4G option.

Further information

The Open-Q 2500 Development Kit is available for pre-order at $795 for an early adopter kit with shipments due in mid-November. More information may be found on Intrinsyc’s Open-Q 2500 Development Kit and Open-Q 2500 SOM product pages.

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stretchly is an open source, cross-platform break time reminder. The Electron application sits in your tray, reminding you to take breaks from working on the computer.

The application is designed to be easy to use, but also flexible. You can start using it as soon as you install it, without having to dig into its settings. After 10 minutes, it notifies you to take a 20 second break. It does this every 10 minutes, with a larger 5-minute break every 30 minutes.

The break duration and interval can be customized, along with various other aspects, like only enabling microbreaks or breaks, enabling or disabling strict mode (breaks can’t be finished early), and more advanced options.

You can pause break reminders for 1 hour, 2 hours, 5 hours, until morning, or indefinitely, from the stretchly tray icon menu.

A microbreak notification

Break ideas (like “Stretch your arms”, “Slowly look all the way left, then right”, “Slowly tilt head to side and hold for 5-10 seconds”, and so on) are shown by default, but can be turned off from the application settings.

The application also allows choosing from 5 color themes, as well as pick from 3 sounds (or silence) to be played at the end of a break:

Full-screen mode for breaks is available, but it does not work on Linux.

For future releases, the plan is to add a history / timeline of breaks, as well as implement a color picker, allowing users to apply any color they wish to the break notifications background.

To use stretchly on Gnome Shell, you’ll need an extension like the AppIndicator support extension that’s shipped by default in Ubuntu. In elementary OS 5.0 Juno you can follow these instructions for re-enabling Ayatana AppIndicators.

Download stretchly

The developer provides offline and web installers for Windows, and a DMG for macOS. For Linux, the

GitHub releases

page has binaries like AppImage, RPM, and DEB.

To get stretchly installed from DEB or RPM package to run on startup, open Startup Applications or equivalent, click Add, and add stretchly with the following command: /opt/stretchly/stretchly.

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GDM (short for GNOME Display Manager) is an open source graphical login manager specifically designed to be used as a display manager for the GNOME desktop environment. It is used in many well known Linux distributions. It’s comprised of a system service responsible for providing graphical log-ins, as well as for managing both local and remote displays, and the graphical login part that features a face browser, a language/session type selector and an optional logo.

Protects your computer from pesky people

There’s not much to say about a login manager, because it runs at boot time and you interact with it maybe a few times a day, when you login and when you lock your screen. But it’s there, it protects your computer from intruders or pesky people.

Helps you easily switch between multiple desktop sessions

In addition, the login manager usually allows a Linux user to switch between different desktop environment that are installed in the respective operating system. It also lets you to quickly login as a different user, use a guest account or the remote login function.

Looks very professional

When compared with other similar products, we can immediately notice that this project looks very professional, and provides users with state-of-the-art functionality. In our opinion, LightDM can be made to look even more professional than GDM, and provides some extra functionality.

Designed for GNOME

By default, GDM (GNOME Display Manager) is distributed as part of the GNOME desktop environment, but it can also be used as a standalone application that provides login capabilities for other desktop environments or Linux operating systems. However, GDM supports any Linux-based operating system and several desktop environments, including Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, Openbox, Fluxbox, KDE, LXDE, and others.

Bottom line

We suggest GDM if you want a mature and full-featured login manager for your Linux distribution. But, if you operating system supports LightDM, we feel obliged to urge users to stick with it because it’s much more powerful and provides state-of-the-art and modern functionality.

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Git has become the de-facto standard for code versioning, but its popularity didn’t remove the complexity of performing deep analyses of the history and contents of source code repositories.

SQL, on the other hand, is a battle-tested language to query large codebases as its adoption by projects like Spark and BigQuery shows.

So it is just logical that at source we chose these two technologies to create gitbase: the code-as-data solution for large-scale analysis of git repositories with SQL.

Gitbase is a fully open source project that stands on the shoulders of a series of giants which made its development possible, this article aims to point out the main ones.

The gitbase playground provides a visual way to use gitbase.

Parsing SQL with Vitess

Gitbase’s user interface is SQL. This means we need to be able to parse and understand the SQL requests that arrive through the network following the MySQL protocol. Fortunately for us, this was already implemented by our friends at YouTube and their Vitess project. Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.

We simply grabbed the pieces of code that mattered to us and made it into an open source project that allows anyone to write a MySQL server in minutes (as I showed in my justforfunc episode CSVQL—serving CSV with SQL).

Reading git repositories with go-git

Once we’ve parsed a request we still need to find how to answer it by reading the git repositories in our dataset. For this, we integrated source’s most successful repository go-git. Go-git is a highly extensible Git implementation in pure Go.

This allowed us to easily analyze repositories stored on disk as siva files (again an open source project by source) or simply cloned with git clone.

Detecting languages with enry and parsing files with babelfish

Gitbase does not stop its analytic power at the git history. By integrating language detection with our (obviously) open source project enry and program parsing with babelfish. Babelfish is a self-hosted server for universal source code parsing, turning code files into Universal Abstract Syntax Trees (UASTs)

These two features are exposed in gitbase as the user functions LANGUAGE and UAST. Together they make requests like “find the name of the function that was most often modified during the last month” possible.

Making it go fast

Gitbase analyzes really large datasets—e.g. Public Git Archive, with 3TB of source code from GitHub (announcement) and in order to do so every CPU cycle counts.

This is why we integrated two more projects into the mix: Rubex and Pilosa.

Speeding up regular expressions with Rubex and Oniguruma

Rubex is a quasi-drop-in replacement for Go’s regexp standard library package. I say quasi because they do not implement the LiteralPrefix method on the regexp.Regexp type, but I also had never heard about that method until right now.

Rubex gets its performance from the highly optimized C library

Oniguruma

which it calls using

cgo

Speeding up queries with Pilosa indexes

Indexes are a well-known feature of basically every relational database, but Vitess does not implement them since it doesn’t really need to.

But again open source came to the rescue with Pilosa, a distributed bitmap index implemented in Go which made gitbase usable on massive datasets. Pilosa is an open source, distributed bitmap index that dramatically accelerates queries across multiple, massive datasets.

Conclusion

I’d like to use this blog post to personally thank the open source community that made it possible for us to create gitbase in such a shorter period that anyone would have expected. At source we are firm believers in open source and every single line of code under github.com/src-d (including our OKRs and investor board) is a testament to that.

Would you like to give gitbase a try? The fastest and easiest way is with source Engine. Download it from sourced.tech/engine and get gitbase running with a single command!

The article was originally published on Medium and is republished here with permission.

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At first glance it seems that Telegram requires a mobile phone and Android, but fear not. You can use your mobile phone to get started and your favourite Linux device to get on Telegram. SMS capability is required though, in what decade did the last mobile without SMS disappear? When you start Telegram from the beginning, the system requires that you identify yourself. This may make you believe that you have to start using Telegram on a mobile phone. In the case of Telegram you do not use a regular user name. Instead, you use your mobile phone to secure your access. This is why you do need a phone number though.

Pick a phone number for the activation.

The application will ask for confirmation before starting you off. When you have your mobile on and in range, start your installation. The first time you run the application, it will ask for your number and send you an SMS. This procedure is the same for every new install. If you use the same phone each time, the system will return the screen with the channels you have picked on other devices. It will also keep track of where you stopped reading.

Download the client. Apt option

With most distributions, you can find the Telegram Desktop client in your repositories. A search in the Ubuntu repositories will show both the desktop client and a few other packages. The other packages are for supporting voice over IP for your Telegram installation. There are also development libraries available. If you want to use this option, the install is a simple apt command.

A small warning is that the apt version lags behind the other options. Unless there is security issue, this is not a problem though.

Snap option

You can also use the snap option for installation. This package is usually updated quicker than other binary packages. If you search with the snap command, you can find the desktop application and a few other interesting options. This also follows the standard install procedure though you have a few options here. Most people will run the regular install with command snap.

$ sudo snap install telegram-desktop

You can also raise your bets and choose the development version by using the –edge switch. You can also accomplish after install by running the switch command.

$ sudo snap switch –edge
$ sudo snap refresh telegram-desktop

Since you are using a snap, you also have the option to choose a command line version. The snap is named telegram-cli.

Download tarball

Pick up the tarball from their own website, and unpack. The procedure is extremely simple and it only creates two files! You pick up the tarball from the web-page, where you can also find other platforms where you can use Telegram.

After you have the Telegram tarball available, just unpack it in a directory of your choice.

$ tar -xvf tsetup.x.x.x.tar.xz
$ cd Telegram

Finally, the two files that the install creates are the executable and the updater program, both are set executable so just run. If you have run the application before on this computer, then the settings are already in your home directory.

Add the chrome app

If you are using chrome most of the day, you can also install the application. You install the application like any other chrome app. To make sure you are using the same account for all installations, make sure you have your mobile handy when installing.

There are also command line choices

As mentioned earlier, there is a command line client available. After installing it with snap, you start it the same way you do an ordinary session. This client does not recognise your earlier clients on the machine you are running, so you will have to get a new code when you start it. The application asks for your phone number, type it in international format and off you go. The code will be sent to your phone or if you still have your graphical client running, you get the code to that client. The best way to start is by using channel list command and then the history command to see what is going on in your channels. All commands can be run when you call the executable, this makes it great for you scripting kids out there to use for projects.

Conclusion

As you can see its easy to get started with Telegram on a Linux, with a little extra effort.

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gtkmm-documentation is an open source package that contains a gtkmm manual for GTK/GNOME developers. gtkmm is a C++ API for GTK+.

gtkmm is an open source software that features inheritance to derive custom widgets, type-safe signal handlers, in standard C++, polymorphism, use of standard C++ library, including containers, iterators, and strings, full internationalization with UTF-8, complete C++ memory management, object composition, and automatic deallocation of dynamically allocated widgets.

Moreover, gtkmm features full use of C++ namespaces, no macros, and it is cross-platform, supporting Linux (gcc), FreeBSD (gcc), NetBSD (gcc), Solaris (gcc, Forte), Windows (gcc, MSVC++ .Net 2003), Mac OS X (gcc), and other OSes

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The default firewall on Ubuntu operating system is called UFW. The full form of UFW is Uncomplicated Firewall. According to the official website of Ubuntu, “ufw is not intended to provide complete firewall functionality via its command interface, but instead provides an easy way to add or remove simple rules. It is currently mainly used for host-based firewalls.” So, UFW has a user friendly way of managing IPv4 and IPv6 simple firewall rules. You can’t replace iptables with UFW. But, you can setup basic firewalls with UFW very easily.

In this article, I will show you how to open and block ports through the Ubuntu’s default firewall, UFW. Let’s get started.

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Python is easy to use, powerful, versatile and a Linux Journal reader favorite. We’ve round up some of the most popular recent Python-related articles for your weekend reading.

• Introducing PyInstaller by Reuven M. Lerner: Want to distribute Python programs to your Python-less clients? PyInstaller is the answer.
• Bytes, Characters and Python 2 by Reuven M. Lerner: Moving from Python 2 to 3? Here’s what you need to know about strings and their role in in your upgrade.
• Introducing Python 3.7’s Dataclasses by Reuven M. Lerner: Python 3.7’s dataclasses reduce repetition in your class definitions.
• Examining Data Using Pandas by Reuven M. Lerner: You don’t need to be a data scientist to use Pandas for some basic analysis.
• Multiprocessing in Python by Reuven M. Lerner: Python’s “multiprocessing” module feels like threads, but actually launches processes.
• Launching External Processes in Python by Reuven M. Lerner: Think it’s complex to connect your Python program to the UNIX shell? Think again!
• Thinking Concurrently: How Modern Network Applications Handle Multiple Connections by Reuven M. Lerner: exploring different types of multiprocessing and looks at the advantages and disadvantages of each.
• Threading in Python by Reuven M. Lerner: threads can provide concurrency, even if they’re not truly parallel.
• Using Python for Science by Joey Bernard: introducing Anaconda, a Python distribution for scientific research.
• Visualizing Molecules with Python by Joey Bernard: introducing PyMOL, a Python package for studying chemical structures.
• Novelty and Outlier Detection by Reuven M. Lerner: we look at a number of ways you can try to identify outliers using the tools and libraries that Python provides for working with data: NumPy, Pandas and scikit-learn.
• Learning Data Science by Reuven M. Lerner: I’ve written a lot about data science and machine learning. In case my enthusiasm wasn’t obvious from my writing, let me say it plainly: it has been a long time since I last encountered a technology that was so poised to revolutionize the world in which we live.
• Classifying Text by Reuven M. Lerner: I want to bring your attention to a surprisingly simple—but powerful and widespread—use of machine learning, namely document classification.
• Pythonic Science in the Browser by Joey Bernard: the web browser interface has become the de facto way of doing scientific programming with Python. It has become so popular in fact, it has spun off as its own project, named Jupyter. In this article, I take a look at how to get the latest version up and running, and I discuss the kinds of things you can do with it once it is set up.

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