Software – Jupiter Broadcasting

The change would be aimed at enticing developers to continue investing in Alexa as a voice assistant platform, by giving those app makers more data that could help improve their software over time. Amazon’s goal, according to The Information, is to stay competitive with more recent entrants in the smart speaker market, like Apple and Google.

The post Mike the Botter | CR 266 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hi-Tech Lady Tubes | CR 259

chris — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 18:27:18 +0000

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— Show Notes: —

Feedback:

Why use Homebrew on Linux?

Hoopla

Swift Playgrounds Gets Interesting

SwiftGtk: A Swift wrapper around gtk-3.x that is largely auto-generated from gobject-introspection

A Swift wrapper around gtk-3.x that is largely auto-generated from gobject-introspection.
This project tries to make gtk more “swifty” than using the plain C language interface.

An Interview With Notepad++ Creator Don Ho

Where do you see the open source software community headed?

Few years ago, open source was still “à la mode”. Now it’s almost a standard way. Though the proprietary softwares won’t disappear, more and more softwares will take open source option. The open source software community will be much larger in the future, and more accessible for sure.

Pre-WWDC Hoopla

Apple Says Developers Have Earned Over $70 Billion From App Store Since It Launched

Apple today announced that its global developer community has earned over $70 billion since the App Store launched in 2008.

Apple Is Manufacturing a Siri Speaker to Outdo Google and Amazon – Bloomberg

The iPhone-maker has started manufacturing a long-in-the-works Siri-controlled smart speaker, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple could debut the speaker as soon as its annual developer conference in June, but the device will not be ready to ship until later in the year, the people said.

Amazon’s Alexa adds support for iCloud calendars – The Verge

The post Hi-Tech Lady Tubes | CR 259 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Just Some Tools | CR 249

chris — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 15:10:26 +0000

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Hoopla

Trying out a new @daskeyboard #Programming pic.twitter.com/o7Oguhlpwl

— Michael Dominick (@dominucco) March 17, 2017

So I needed one…. #mac #xamarin #iosdev pic.twitter.com/9shIKvruaU

— Michael Dominick (@dominucco) March 18, 2017

The post Just Some Tools | CR 249 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Minimal Functional Product | CR 232

chris — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 16:28:29 +0000

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— Show Notes: —

Hoopla

Mike’s Vacation / Lemur Update
Visual Studio for Mac?

Meeting Hell Followup

Big Fish Eats Small Fish

Customer Management For Devs?

Business Innovations: Fast Pass
Value based pricing?
Has Software Development Been Commoditized?

Book Recommendation

Weapons of Math Destruction

Coding Challenge

Challenge

The post Minimal Functional Product | CR 232 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Get Swifty | CR 223

chris — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 15:50:20 +0000

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— Show Notes: —

Hoopla:

Microsoft is #1 on GitHub open source

And Microsoft weighs in at #1, with 16,419 contributors, edging out Facebook with 15,682.

GitHub Octoverse 2016

The Fall of Eclipse

Eclipse felt less like an IDE and more like a collection of plugins you somehow hobble together to form your own.

Thimble by Mozilla – An online code editor for learners & educators.

Thimble is an online code editor that makes it easy to create and publish your own web pages while learning HTML, CSS & JavaScript.

[Vapor.codes] (https://vapor.codes)

Swift3

Migrating to #swift3 is proving to be a nightmare #iOSDev #swift #programming

— Michael Dominick (@dominucco) September 18, 2016

Swift.org – Migrating to Swift 2.3 or Swift 3 from Swift 2.2

iPhone 7 Train Leaves the Station

Back on the #iphone train @ChrisLAS @Xaccary

— Michael Dominick (@dominucco) September 16, 2016

iOS wide password manager
Intense App installation performance, literally unbelievable.
No headphone jack bites ironically.
Speaker(s) are a lot better. Much better for listening to Podcasts. (Nearly as good as Nexus 6p)
New sounds (lock, type, etc).
Widget Screen, like your own custom Google Now. Reminder widget, combined with Siri = win

The post Get Swifty | CR 223 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Happy Birthday Debian | LINUX Unplugged 158

chris — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 19:43:29 +0000

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Pre-Show

DebianDay/2016 – Debian Wiki

Follow Up / Catch Up

Firefox 49 for Linux gains plugin-free support for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video

Another plugin bites the dust. The Windows and macOS versions of Firefox have supported the Widevine video protocol for a little while now, and the upcoming Firefox 49 for Linux gets the same treatment.

This Theme Pack Makes GIMP Look and Work Like Photoshop

The pack includes:

Photoshop icons for the toolbox

Photoshop keyboard shortcuts (e.g., ‘p’ for pen, ‘c’ for crop, etc.)

A dark grey background

Photoshop layout

Tool options placed on the right-hand side

Canonical Strikes Deal To Bring Ubuntu Core to Intel Gateways

Oft-neglected in talk of smart refrigerators and network-controlled lightbulbs, Gateways are intrinsic to the ‘Internet of Things’. They act as the “middleman” in the Internet-of-Things, ferrying data from sensors and equipment in the real world to and from that stored and analysed in the cloud.

TING

Ting – mobile that makes sense

Leaving Mycroft

Today I am sharing the news that I will be leaving Mycroft AI, Inc. I love my team and have thoroughly enjoyed working on the project, but have decided to pursue other ventures.

Ryan Sipes (@ryanleesipes) | Twitter

Fake Linus Torvalds’ Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs.

Nevertheless, real attacks started in June, some developers found
their fake keys with same name, email, and even “same” fake signatures
by more fake keys in the wild, on the keyservers.

Quick comment about btrfs coverage on the latest LAS

Humble Indie Bundle 17 Goes Live With 7 Linux Games

all the games on offer in the latest Humble Indie Bundle support Linux! Hurrah! Amazing!

Kent Overstreet is creating bcachefs – a next generation Linux filesystem | Patreon

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

What’s Next for Debian?

Debian turns 23!

Today is Debian’s 23rd anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities
celebrating Debian Day 2016, you’re
very welcome to join the party!

Debian Project Timeline – a timeline of the Debian Project

Linux Academy

Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Linux on the MacBook

MacBook – ArchWiki

Installing Arch Linux on a MacBook (Air/Pro) or an iMac is quite similar to installing it on any other computer. However, due to the specific hardware configuration of a Mac, there are a few deviations and special considerations which warrant a separate guide

For Chris’s Specific Model: MacBookPro11,x – ArchWiki

This wiki page should help you in getting your MacBook Pro from Late 2013 or Mid 2014 to work with Arch Linux.

Post-Show:

Convergent terminal | Ubuntu Design Blog

On the visual side, we have brought the app in line with our Suru visual language. We have also adopted the very nice Solarized palette as the default palette — though this will of course be completely customisable by the user.

The post Happy Birthday Debian | LINUX Unplugged 158 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Fair-use Frustrations | CR 208

chris — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 16:08:29 +0000

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

Mike & Chris have very different opinions on how interview tests should be conducted & this week they try to come to some common ground. Plus the real reasons to develop software on Linux are not the ones often cited, bit more on Google’s fair use & the master plan to get Mike to move to the west coast.

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— Show Notes: —

Hoopla

Hiring a programmer? Ditch the coding interview and get back to basics

So before we go any further, let’s establish one very simple truth: coding interviews are worthless.

Why Develop Software On Linux

From my point of view, Linux is indeed a superior platform for developers, and that is becoming increasingly so due to a number of critical factors that have improved in the last ten years. Every year, our toolset srengthens, and does so at an exponential rate in comparison to the relatively stagnant Apple and Microsoft ecosystems.

Flatpak is gaining momentum

The Xdg App project has been renamed to Flatpak to get an easy-to-remember name and reflect that after almost two years of development it’s finally ready for broader adoption.

Google’s fair use victory is good for open source

Hurst is wrong in asserting that Google’s fair use victory means that anyone can freely appropriate whatever they want from open source and other programs. All that the jury verdict means is that Google made fair use of the Java API packages. Anyone else who appropriates elements from another firm’s software would have to defend a legal challenge on much the same grounds that Google did: either by claiming that the elements appropriated were not within the scope of protection that copyright law provides to software developers or that the appropriation of those elements was fair use.

The Google/Oracle decision was bad for copyright and bad for software

Though Android shares important elements with Java, Android is not a Java platform; it does not pass the tests that Sun and Oracle developed, and it is not designed to do so. Google deliberately chose to reject elements of Java’s design that it didn’t like, leaving a hodge-podge that is Java in some places but not-Java in others.

That lack of interest in interoperability means, in my view, that Google’s use of the Java APIs should not qualify as fair use.

Mike Moves to the West?

Software for the marijuana industry set to yield high returns

The post Fair-use Frustrations | CR 208 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

16.04 and Shut Your Face | LINUX Unplugged 141

chris — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 20:52:31 +0000

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We get a little rambunctious as we talk about Ubuntu 16.04, why not the openSUSE Build Server & the remarkable problem with Ubuntu that’s just now being solved.

Plus some audio never meant for public release, updates on your favorite projects, first hands on with the Bq Ubuntu Tablet & more!

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Follow Up / Catch Up

And We’re Off: World’s First Ubuntu Tablet Is Now Shipping

Yes, if you pre-ordered one of the Ubuntu-powered slates from Bq last month you’ll want to keep an eye your email address over the coming days.

Received my bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition today!

TING

Ting – mobile that makes sense

Jupiter Broadcasting @ LFNW 2016 – Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup

2016 | LinuxFest Northwest 2016

Create the first open source cloud with LibreOffice online

Improve your productivity and communicate better with your team members. The world is moving forward. Welcome to the open source cloud!

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Ubuntu 16.04 Review Follow Up

Few things that were not mentioned in LAS:

new option to always show menu has been added
client side decoration is fully supported in Unity
Gnome Calendar is installed by default
Empathy has been removed similar to Brasero as not many people use desktop IM clients
Startup Disk Creator have been update, and actually works
Gnome Software has proper notifications (what Noah was saying has been fixed)
Music and Messaging menus are dynamic now, for example if you use VLC to play media only controls for that player show up
Unity now support 3rd party themes better
most software are set to optional, so you can uninstall a key software and it won’t break your system
The launcher, not only can you move it to the bottom, it also shows the icon of the application you launched to let the user know that it has been launched and is loading (for slower computers, this will help the user from accidentally launching it again)
Launcher now properly shows different instances of nautilus (i.e. USB CD, Trash, Downloads, etc. are shown separately and not all clumped into one icon of Files)
Gnome Software got comments and rating support

Linux Academy

Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Follow Up Pt 2

Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Graphics: Unity, Xfce, KDE, LXDE, GNOME, MATE, Openbox – Phoronix

Again, it’s the out-of-the-box experience on each of the desktop environments without any tweaking. There’s also some desktop environment developers that recommend running Linux games in their own X.Org Server, etc.

Bug #1552539 “Ubiquity Erase Disk and Install Fails to create Sw…” : Bugs : ubiquity package : Ubuntu

Daily Build of Gnome 16.04 using installation option to Erase Disk and Install fails with following message:
“The creation of swap space in Partition #5 of SCSi3(0,0,0) (sda) failed.

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The post 16.04 and Shut Your Face | LINUX Unplugged 141 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Brave New Code | CR 198

chris — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 15:05:24 +0000

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Is Google dumping to compete with Nuance as they prepare to unleash their voice API to developers for free? Mike updates us on his Linux switch adventure, his new toy & a couple of important PSAs.

Plus feedback & more!

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— Show Notes: —

Hoopla:

Google opens access to its speech recognition API, going head to head with Nuance | TechCrunch

Google is planning to compete with Nuance and other voice recognition companies head on by opening up its speech recognition API to third-party developers. To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date.

Mike’s New Toy — Nexus 5X

PSA

XCode 7.3 breaks debugging on AppCode until the update
Code for America | Brigade

Linux Adventure Pt 2

Feedback:

The post Brave New Code | CR 198 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Making Music with Linux | LAS 408

chris — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 18:54:46 +0000

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What’s the best software under Linux to create music? We answer that & the best hardware that work together. We have something for the musician to casual hardware geek, we cover the dark art of creating music under Linux as we go inside Noah’s music studio and see what he uses.

Plus we chat with ownCloud’s Community Manager about the new features in version 9, our thoughts on Microsoft’s SQL for Linux announcement & more!

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— Show Notes: —

Brought to you by: Linux Academy

MIDI Sequencers

Musical Instrument Digital Interface
Protocol allows electronic instruments, computers, and devices to communicate with one another.

Equipment

Analog to Digital Recording Interface

M Audio M-Track Two-Channel Portable USB Audio & MIDI Interface

+ XLR
+ 1/4″
+ Headphones
+ TRS Output
+ Phantom Power
+ Native Linux Compatible

PreSonus AudioBox USB

+ Bus Powered USB Audio and MIDI Interface
+ 24-bit resolution 44.1 & 48khz sampling rate
+ 2 combo mic/instrument inputs with high-performance, low-noise, high-headroom mic preamplifiers.
+ Zero Latency Monitoring

Microphones

Singing Vocal Mic – AKG P420

Podcasting Vocal Mic – RE320

Instrument Mic – SM57

Almost Perfect Replication of Sound – DPA 2006A

Instruments

MIDI Interface

Synthesizer

MIDI Controller

Yamaha UX96

Works with Linux
Inexpensive
MIDI Only
Not available any more

Software

Audacity

Free Audio Editor and Recorder
New Version as of Jan 20th (2.1.2)
Major Improvements

Rosegarden

Rosegarden is a music composition and editing environment based around a MIDI sequencer that features a rich understanding of music notation and includes basic support for digital audio.
Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.
Rosegarden’s matrix and notation editors also include rulers for graphically editing control changes, as well as for velocity and pitch bend.
Rosegarden includes synth plugin support for sample-accurate synthesis of MIDI tracks.
Rosegarden uses the DSSI architecture for synth plugins, a public standard which permits each plugin to be controlled from its own custom GUI as well as Rosegarden’s built-in plugin interface.

Hydrogen

Very user-friendly, modular, fast and intuitive graphical interface based on QT 4.
Sample-based stereo audio engine, with import of sound samples in .wav, .au and .aiff formats.
Pattern-based sequencer, with unlimited number of patterns and ability to chain patterns into a song.
Up to 192 ticks per pattern with individual level per event and variable pattern length.
Unlimited instrument tracks with volume, mute, solo, pan capabilities.

Ardour

Full DAW
An Ardour track can be of type audio or MIDI, depending on the data that the track will primarily record and play back.
No limits on number of tracks, buses, plugins, inserts, or sends.
Pick your audio interface based on your needs and budget. If your OS supports it, Ardour can use it. PCI, USB, Firewire interfaces, along with the option to use network audio too.
Non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo/redo, even across editing sessions (reload and undo your changes from last time).
All editing is in-window: no switching to piano roll or other dedicated dialogs/displays for specialized operations.
Route anything to anywhere (for more than ten years!).
Matrix-style patching/routing.
Hundreds of no-cost plugins in LV2, native VST and LADSPA formats on Linux.
Export to many different data and file formats, including but not limited to WAV, AIFF, CAF, BWF, FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis.

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

Mr Lube – RUNS LINUX!

Hello Noah,
I just wanted to send in Linux in the wild where Mr Lube In Canada at Kitchener Ontario Canada.

Sent by Matt S.

Desktop App Pick

Git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux

Submitted by Rikai

The downright luxurious Git client for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Cross-platform, 100% standalone, and free.

GitKraken is free (as in beer) but is not open source.

Weekly Spotlight

bomi

By taking the advantage of mpv and GUI, bomi provides various features.
Submitted by Rikai

— NEWS —

Facebook launches project to open source hardware, designs for cell networks | Ars Technica

There have already been a number of efforts to bring open source software and commodity hardware to bear on providing wireless service to unserved communities. OpenBTS, an open source cellular infrastructure software project, released a fully open 3G cellular network stack in October of 2014. The OpenBTS software was used by the University of California at Berkeley’s Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group to _build a community cellular network in Papua, Indonesia_in 2013, with a VSAT backhaul for SMS text messaging to the rest of the world.

SQL Server on Linux Shows Microsoft’s More Flexible Side

Microsoft has made a preview of SQL Server for Linux available. The final product is expected to ship in mid

Microsoft’s former CEO claimed he “loved” this week’s news that Redmond would deliver a Linux-compatible version of its ever-popular SQL Server database.

Qubes OS 3.1 has been released!

The major new architectural feature of this release has been the introduction of
the Qubes Management
infrastructure, which is
based on the popular Salt management software.

In Qubes 3.1, this management stack makes it possible to conveniently control
system-wide Qubes configuration using centralized, declarative statements.
Declarative is the key word here: it makes creating advanced configurations
significantly simpler. (The user or administrator needs only to specify what
they want to get, rather than how they want to get it).

This has already allowed us to improve our installation wizard (firstboot) so
that it now offers the user the ability to easily select from various options to
pre-create some useful configurations, such as Whonix or USB-hosting VMs.

Salt management stack in Qubes

ownCloud 9 is OUT

ownCloud Server 9.0 has significant improvements for users, administrators and developers. Learn how ownCloud 9.0 provides the safest home for all your data.

Jos Poortvliet (@jospoortvliet) on Twitter

People person, technology enthusiast and all-things-open evangelist.

Feedback:

Brought to you by: System76

Mail Bag

https://slexy.org/view/s20ZFIJU3I
https://slexy.org/view/s20S61jF47
https://slexy.org/view/s2huFL1YzK
GitHub – hanschen/ksuperkey: Linux utility to make Super key send Alt+F1 key events when pressed on its own to launch the application launcher in KDE Plasma Desktop.

Emma v. Noah Who: Switching People to Linux

Can not already be running Linux.
Must agree to install Linux, or have Linux installed
Will take place Sat during Linux Fest NW (Location TBD)
Come find Noah let him switch you to Linux and get a free SSD installed.

Call Box

Chris’ call out for the community to help him with his background

Catch the show LIVE SUNDAY:

— CHRIS’ STASH —

Chris’s Twitter account has changed, you’ll need to follow!

Chris Fisher (@ChrisLAS) | Twitter

Hang in our chat room:

irc.geekshed.net #jupiterbroadcasting

— NOAH’S STASH —

Noah’s Day Job

Altispeed Technologies

Contact Noah

noah [at] jupiterbroadcasting.com

Find us on Google+

Find us on Twitter

Follow us on Facebook

The post Making Music with Linux | LAS 408 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Pi 3: The Next Generation | LINUX Unplugged 134

chris — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 19:55:33 +0000

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After some updates about some of your favorite distros, we go hands on with the Raspberry Pi 3. Then we look at the AppImage project and their delivery on the download and run promise.

Plus a make good on a recent mistake, looking at a new kind of distro funding model & much more!

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Follow Up / Catch Up

The Linux Mint Blog » Post Attack

I’d like to thank Avast for working with us on this. They contacted us and offered to help analyze the fake ISO. We gave them a copy of it and all the info we already had. A day later they came back with a full malware analysis and we were able to issue an update to warn people who might still be affected by it. Avast also pushed updates towards their own users and they were able to block access to the Bulgarian servers used by the hackers. Finally, the addresses the malware was connecting to were either shut down or blocked by Kaspersky’s DNS sinkhole. I’ve been really impressed by Avast and the awesome work they did, it really helped us react quicker.

Response Summary

To protect ourselves and reduce the risk of future attacks, many restrictions were placed on our servers. This might affect some of the websites a bit. If you find yourself unable to comment, to upload or to do something that worked well before, please let us know.
To protect you and reduce the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks, almost all websites moved to HTTPS so you’re guaranteed you’re looking at the real Linux Mint server and the communication between you and us is encrypted. These measures protect you against local attacks (somebody listening to your local network, somebody maliciously opening up free Wifi to capture passwords being typed in a public place, or even on a greater scale.. fake DNS resolution pointing you to malicious servers). Note: The blog is yet to switch to HTTPS, we’re working on that still.
Our servers are now monitored by Sucuri and protected by their firewall. We’ll be entering a partnership with them and it’s a real pleasure not just to benefit from the protection and the range of services they’re offering us but also to have that close relationship with security experts and to be able to quickly get in touch with them whenever our project needs it.
To make ISO verification more accurate we’ll communicate SHA256 sums and GPG information more prominently going forward. MD5 was displayed as the primary mean of verification, with SHA256 and GPG being available for people who wanted them. We’ll review the way this information is shown and try to make more people use SHA256 and hopefully also GPG by default.
We’re considering re-adding Gufw to the default software selection. What happened was very uncommon but as our project and Linux in general are getting more and more popular, our operating system is becoming more and more of a target. We cannot ignore the threat of malware and think that it only affects Windows. The centralization of our software and the better practices of our users who rarely directly install 3rd party packages or binaries are an asset, but they can also be a vulnerability. A malicious PPA archive could affect Ubuntu and Linux Mint users, it could offer legitimate packages for months and then suddenly spread malware that would be immediately accepted by thousands of users. It’s important to understand that the reason we’ve been so safe until now is because we’re smaller and because we therefore represent a much less interesting target. We can’t just protect ourselves from attacks, we also need to think of how we can react to them after they’ve taken place. We need scanners, and we’ll look into that as well, and we need something people can use to quickly and easily configure outgoing traffic and review applications communicating with their network, and Gufw does that very well.

Fedora project leader Matthew Miller reveals what’s in store for Fedora in 2016

Fedora is still focused on developers—but developers want to play games on their laptops, too.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Ubuntu MATE February 2016 supporters

Many thanks to everyone who donated to the Ubuntu MATE project this
month. You have been generous as always and ensured that we can meet
all the costs associated with running the Ubuntu MATE project and the
community site. In fact, this month we are able to reward some
developers for working on Ubuntu MATE projects.

AppImage | Linux apps that run anywhere

Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.

Linus: This is just very cool. I finally got around to play with the “AppImage”…

I finally got around to play with the “AppImage” version of +Subsurface, and it really does seem to “just work”.

AppImages

Intel Atom X3: 100-Dollar-Smartphone bietet ‘Continuum’ mit Android & Debian Linux

TING

Ting – mobile that makes sense

Raspberry Pi 3 has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 64-bit chip, still just $35

Pi will still run 32-bit operating systems, but it’ll be 50% faster.

Ubuntu MATE for Raspberry Pi 3

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is here and we are delighted to announce the immediate availability of Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B!

Microsoft releases Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 3 — can it displace Linux on Pi?

We’re excited to have Windows 10 support the new board via a new Windows 10 IoT Core Insider Preview update available for download today. The new Raspberry Pi 3 board is available now in the Microsoft Store online”, says Billy Anders, Director of Program Management, Windows IoT.

$40 ODROID-C2 is faster, has more memory than Raspberry Pi 3

While the ODROID-C2 costs $5 more than a Raspberry Pi 3, it does have a faster processor, twice as much memory, Gigabit Ethernet, and a number of other features which could make it faster than the new Raspberry Pi.

Linux Academy

Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

N1 is a very nice open source client with modern workflow but it requires that all emails are synced on the Nylas servers or run/maintain a sync engine yourself locally. Would you trust a 3rd party service provider with your emails however secure they claim to be?

markole comments on Entroware Apollo: Linux Macbook Killer | LAS 406

Chris, are you aware that by using N1 client, all your mails are routed through 3rd party servers?

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/10/n1-open-source-email-app-linux

By default N1 uses the Nylas API and open-source Sync Engine to handle mailsync operations on Nylas’ own cloud infrastructure.

In effect this means that all email you get in the app first passes through — and is stored on — a Nylas server.

That’s a big no in my book.

nylas/sync-engine: IMAP/SMTP sync system with modern APIs

The Nylas Sync Engine provides a RESTful API on top of a powerful email sync platform, making it easy to build apps on top of email. See the full API documentation for more details.

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The post Pi 3: The Next Generation | LINUX Unplugged 134 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Built for Linux: Inside System76 | Rover Log 15

chris — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 20:17:34 +0000

Go inside one of the first dedicated consumer Linux computer companies, System76. They flew us out for their #system76fan contest, and we got our hands on new hardware, cool toys, and a great understanding of what makes them tick.

In this special edition of the Rover Log, from Denver Colorado we tour their offices, and check out the greener side of Denver.

The post Built for Linux: Inside System76 | Rover Log 15 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Keyboardio | WTR 44

chris — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 08:03:39 +0000

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Kaia is the CEO cofounder of keyboardio – premium ergonomic keyboard using open source and open hardware!

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube

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MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

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Show Notes:

Transcription:

ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: ANGELA: KAIA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: KAIA: ANGELA: KAIA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: KAIA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: ANGELA: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: KAIA: ANGELA: PAIGE: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
And I’m Angela.
So, Angela, today we’re interviewing Kaia, she is from Keyboardio, which is a badass software company that is trying to reinvent the way that we use keyboards, and we talked to her about the Kickstarter process, the open hardware process, the open software process, and how she got involved in all that, so it’s a really fascinating interview.
And before we get into that, I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio and the Jupiter Broadcasting Network by going to Patreon.com/today. That is a general bucket of Jupiter Broadcasting support. We have a bunch of other shows, but specifically if you go there and you donate, it is also contributing to Women’s Tech Radio.
And we get started by asking Kaia what she’s up to in tech today.
I am Kaia Dekker and I’m currently the co-founder and CEO of a company called Keyboardio. We make premium ergonomic keyboards that are also open hardware, so they’re super hackable. We give you the firmware source, we give you schematics for the electronics, and still are selling it fully assembled as a finished product, but at the same time, it’s also open hardware. So if you want to open it up and hack it, you can.
So, an open hardware keyboard. How did you get there?
My co-founder who is also my husband had really bad wrists and cubital tunnel, like a repetitive stress injury from typing too much. He professionally had been a programmer for most of his life, and had tried out something like 20 or 30 different ergonomic keyboards, and none of them were really working for him. So he started out as sort of a hobby project trying to build his own that would be tailored specifically to him and have a working keyboard that wouldn’t make his wrists hurt too much. And he started sort of spending more time on this and I was just getting out of business school and was trying to kind of what I wanted to do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back to the companies that I had worked at before, but hey, we may be able to spin this into a business! And keyboards in particular were really interesting to me, mostly from a blank slate design perspective where it’s this thing that most of us are using for eight hours plus almost every day that we literally have our hands on every day. It’s a very intimate, long lasting relationship with an object, but it’s not something that had seen a lot of design or really thought put into the design. Innovation, the basic keyboard design, it’s based on what a typewriter looked like in the nineteenth century which was based on how you could build something in the nineteenth century. The technology has come a lot farther, the understanding of what makes for good design has come a lot farther, and there is no reason not to make something that would be better. So I was really attracted to the idea of being able to rethink this tool that we use all the time and what would it be like if you were to start over a little bit. We ended up with something, it’s a little weird, a little different. So the materials are different. We have an enclosure made out of wood as opposed to plastic or aluminum. The shape is really different. It’s based around originally research on different hand shapes and what keys people can reach easily, and iterated probably two dozen times before we ended up where we are today. It’s fully programmable, so it’s trying to be a little bit smarter as a piece of hardware as opposed to just sort of a dumb input device.
Right, and specifically one of the first things I pick up when I see your keyboard is that it’s the left and the right hand are separated. They’re broken in the middle if that makes sense. And we’ve seen Microsoft put out a keyboard like that, but what they did was they took a standard keyboard and just broke it in half essentially and moved it at an angle, whereas yours, the actual keys are placed differently with more focus on thumb work than any other keyboard that I’ve seen.
Yeah, so we’ve put the keys in columns because that’s the way, if you look at your hands and sort of bend your fingers, they move in a column. They don’t move in a sort of strange diagonal method, the staggered layout of a traditional keyboard. And we’ve actually somewhat subtly arched them to follow the actual arch that your fingers make. It takes a bit of retraining to follow an ergonomic layout, but once you do, it just feels a lot more natural, which makes sense. It’s building something designed around how your hands work as opposed to just following the sort of cargo culting the same thing that we’ve done for a very long time.
Now, I have a question. It is reprogrammable, but when I was taking typing classes back in seventh and eighth grade, I learned some history about keyboards, and that is that they used to be in alphabetical order, and this may or may not be accurate.
It’s accurate.
Okay. And that it was scrambled onto the keyboard because people were too fast. They learned it, they knew the prediction of where the letters would be based on the alphabet was too fast, so they scrambled them up to slow people down because the technology couldn’t keep up. Well, I think technology can keep up now, and I am wondering have you, well, because it’s reprogrammable, I think anybody can change how the letters are, but have you done any specific keyboards with it in alphabetical order instead of scrambled?
Yeah, so there are a lot of stories. It’s actually really fascinating the history of why people stuck with QWERTY when it isn’t a particularly good design. I still type QWERTY because I’ve been typing it for decades, and for me, learning a new layout wasn’t going to be enough faster, enough more efficient. For me the limiting factor isn’t usually how fast I can type, it’s how fast my brain goes. And so, until I learn how to think faster, I’m not going to worry too much about optimizing for speed. Definitely, some of the people we’ve had beta testing are people who used vorac or other alternative key layouts. There’s actually a very fascinating group of people who have a community online where they will basically track all of their key presses and then feed it into a program to figure out their own personal custom layout that minimizes finger movement. So you can have your own thing that’s completely different from anyone else’s. Otherwise, QWERTY is pretty standard. Vorac is pretty common, and then there is something sort of similar to vorac but based on a more recent and bigger purpose of data to figure out where to put the keys called culmac and that’s actually built into Mac OS and other things as well, so it’s pretty popular. Not as popular as vorac, and of course, not nearly as popular as qwerty, but those three plus one other alternative are built into the firmware by default, and then if you want to change what any particular key does, you are able to do that as well.
Now, if I go to keyboard.ao, there is a lot of information on here, and it shows the keyboard, but I’m wondering, what I don’t see is, and/or, are you planning to put out a ten key?
We’ve thought about it. Right now we are just about to ink a contract for manufacturing our first product, the model one, which is what’s called a 60 percent keyboard. It doesn’t have a separate tenkey pad, and I think once we’ve got that produced, or a little further down the line, we’re going to really kind of look at the product road map and figure out what comes next. Right now we’re a small company and we don’t quite have the resources.
Honestly, if the keyboard were better and more functional, easier to reach the numbers, maybe ten key, maybe it would eliminate that need which I think is what Paige was kind of snobbily implying with her–you didn’t even comment, but you said you and your tenkeys or whatever.
I have a lot of friends that I’ve gotten into this argument, because I have friends who won’t buy laptops that don’t have tenkeys.
Well, you could always get a USB tenkey.
How often do you actually use a ten key?
That’s the thing, if your work is in numbers, it is very handy.
If you’re an accountant or something.
Well, even some things I do, I would really prefer a ten key, so I was just curious.
We do have a numlock mode that turns kind of the right hand side into basically a ten key, which is definitely, I’m the one that gets stuck doing all of the accounting, and I switched to that for doing that. It’s easier.
That actually makes even more sense than a separate tenkey.
Yes, it does, you’re right.
So, you’ve been kind of on this journey. What was it like to go from kind of a business background kind of into this crazy tech world? You dove in deep. This is hardware, software, open source on both side, it’s a pretty complex crazy project.
Yeah, I’ve never been one for just sticking my toe in. I’m kind of a jump all the way in kind of girl. I’d always been interested in tech. I went to a technology magnet focused high school and then I went to MIT which has a very strong engineering culture and a lot of people building things for fun on the weekends and in the evenings, and I’ve always followed that and been interested in that. I ended up sort of in business almost somewhat accidentally. I had been a physics major and undergrad and thought that I’d been sort of pushed that way by teachers and so on, and I thought okay, this is what I’ll do as a career. And then I sort of realized junior year that I didn’t have, one the type of mind that works really well doing physics research, and two, I didn’t really have the temperament to live an academic type of life. You need to be a type of person who can work by themselves and be very driven and work in a very hardworking, but in many ways, a very slow paced environment. That just wasn’t, I realized by that time, that wasn’t the kind of environment where I did my best work or where I was happiest. I preferred working with other people, like things that are much more fast paced, even if you’re working on something that’s not as fundamental as understanding new things about the universe, I’m just happier when I’m working on fast paced things with a lot of different people to bounce ideas off of and to learn from. So I kind of pivoted I guess into doing then technology investment banking which has paid very well, but I sort of left as soon as I got my first bonus check, and I did managing consulting for a while, and then software marketing, then ended up doing this. It’s interesting. There is definitely things that you get used to when you’re working for large companies or on behalf of very large companies that just don’t apply in the startup world where you have to learn to get by with a lot fewer resources when you’re a startup, and there’s no one a lot of times where you can go out and find the person in such and such department who knows about something because you are the such and such department.
You’re every department.
Yeah, but it’s been great. We relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area which has been amazing just in terms of there is a community of hardware startups out here, and anything from you need to borrow a part last minute or getting someone to take a second look at your boards and trying to figure out why they’re not working or getting advice on how to choose a manufacturer, whether or not paying for a sourcing agent is worth it. Anything from the business end to a big architectural type decisions to just day to day prototyping help, like it’s been so amazing to be around so many really talented, really interesting people working on hardware. It’s really been amazing.
That’s really neat that the community would still play such a role. You would think hardware is so much more of a, I don’t know, a set thing, that there’s more like set ways to do it, but I think it’s just as mutable as software.
It’s much more so now than it was 20 years ago or even five or ten years ago and I think it’s still shaking out a little bit. Historically, at least, hardware was something that took huge investment and had very low returns and was something that you could only do if you were a big company or had a lot of money. The prototyping phase of things has gotten so much easier with it being very accessible to have rapid prototyping technologies like 3D printing or laser cutters and CNC mills and so on being much more accessible due to things like tech shop or Hackerspaces where they have these machines available and let people from the community access them, to things like Arduino or teensy or other microcontrollers or environments where the first embedded programming is done for you, so you don’t really have to start from scratch, you can hook together things and do a quick prototype without having to put in quite as much of an investment as you used to. And things like Digikey or Adafruit where being able to access, I need ten of a part is very easy and affordable now, and you don’t have to buy an entire real component to get it, you can find pretty much any component you want and order it in pretty much any quantity that you want. So the prototyping phase is a lot easier.
Yeah, it’s like we’re finally catching up with hardware where we’ve been with software for a long time. Like we’re building these hardware frameworks almost that kind of piece together in a way that makes things fast, easy, and accessible. I’ve seen so many things around Portland or other places where it’s like hey, come over and work on Arduino’s for the day, and just seeing like little kids up to big adults playing with hardware for the first time is really fascinating.
Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to make our product open source was that getting people, like the moment, whenever you have a programming language that you’re learning and you get Hello World to work, and when it’s like your first time programming anything, it’s a really magical feeling that like I got the computer to do this thing, and when you do it in hardware, when you get a light pattern to flash up or do things like that, it’s even more magical. It’s a tangible piece of the world that you are controlling through the code that you’re writing and it’s a really, really awesome feeling.
Yeah, I totally agree. This winter I played with my Raspberry Pie and some relays for the first time and made some lights light up and it was like as inspiring as Hello World is. This was even more like woah!
Yeah, and I think the question for hardware is like the prototyping phase, we’re finally catching up, and it’s getting from your first working prototype into production which is obviously not something that every project wants, but if you’re trying to build a company and build products, you do eventually have to make the change away from 3D printing and hooking things together with cables and Arduino and so on. You have to make a fundamental shift in the technologies you’re using to move to even small scale mass production, and that’s something where there is a bunch of different people trying to figure out how to make it easier and make it better. But it’s still just very complicated that there is, not only do you have all of these systems where the changes you make to your electrical layout are going to make your actual physical hardware layout change, and that involves, you might need to get mechanical engineering skill and electrical engineering skill and industrial design type of skill all involved just to make what seems like it should be a really small change, which I mean, that’s a hard problem. And then figuring out what does that do when you take it into production, how does that change things, and very small changes can make very big changes and very big costs down the line.
Your margin for error is very small.
Yeah, and it’s something from software where I think people have gotten so used to Agile or other sort of sprints to make quick changes in small increments and keep building on that, and it’s not something that transfers over to hardware necessarily as well, which is frustrating to someone who likes being able to fool around and try different things and realizing that there is much more kind of top down planning you have to do is not necessarily how people have trained to do it.
Yeah, you have to give a pivot for polish.
Yeah that’s a great way of putting it.
So, in that vein, you guys ran an amazingly successful Kickstarter, originally reaching for $120,000.00 goal, you hit $650. What was that like to go through? What are some of the challenges you’ve had afterwards or during? Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Sure. It was an amazing experience in Kickstarter. Especially as the person who ends up being in charge of the business stuff, there is always the primary question in my mind, and before we did the Kickstarter was like I think there is a market for this. We’ve got a bunch of people on our mailing list, people seem to think it’s really interesting, but does anyone actually want this? You don’t really trust that people will want a product until they put in their credit card number. So that was great and sort of took this thing that I’ve been worrying about for months and sort of just eliminated it really quickly. It’s like yeah, there are a lot of people who kind of get what we’re trying to do and see why we’re trying to do it that way. And yeah, the whole Kickstarter experience was really cool. We did a cross country road trip from Boston where we used to live to San Francisco and stopped at Makerspaces just about every day and did little meet ups talking about here is how you could build your own keyboard with the materials and tools that are in this Makerspace, and letting people put their hands on our product. It’s a somewhat weird and different product, and so being able to put your hands on it, actually see it, actually try it out is the time when a lot of people sort of get it for the first time, and it was also kind of a great way, like Kickstarter, or any crowdfunding is a lot of work where you have people writing you every day and you have to manage are you doing ads, and there is all this stuff you have to kind of manage and being able to have something that we were doing every day that took the focus away from–its hyper focused on this campaign, and let us look and see what people were doing at different Makerspaces was really cool. We were lucky that it was sort of something that was on grand for us that we are open hardware, we did come out of kind of a hobby maker type of place, but honestly, it’s always so cool to see like what people are making and what people are doing and talk to people who do cool things and put cool things together.
How big is your team? Is it just you and your husband and some 1099?
Yeah, we’ve floated up and down. We don’t have quite enough work in any one discipline to have another full time person coming on, but we have had in the past full time contractors from–currently we have a friend of mine who is working on EE, and she is, I don’t know, it will be a couple of weeks contract probably. We’re pretty close to being done with the electrical, and we’ve had people helping out with industrial design and mechanical as well at different points in the past, so I think peak size would be like five people and sometimes it’s just the two of us.
This is fascinating, a very cool story. I don’t know, I was wondering, so you said there is kind of embedded software for this. Do you guys actually run an embedded processor in the keyboard? Like is there something it’s actually running on like Arduino, Lennox, or whatever?
The chip is an Apple chip. It’s an 18 mega 30T4, which is the same thing that’s in an Arduino Leonardo, so it’s not technically an Arduino because we’re not buying a board from Arduino, but we’re what we call Arduino at heart where essentially what we’ve done is take the Arduino and squish it onto our own board and made a couple of little changes, but it’s compatible with the Arduino developer environment. So right now I can just pull up the Arduino ID, use it to make changes to the firmware and use that to flash the keyboard which is cool. When we were trying to decide which architecture to use, we had actually originally been using something else and ended up switching over to this branch of Arduino because you just, you’re going to have to have some kind of processor anyway, like why not pick one that has this huge ecosystem of other people writing code and making devices that are compatible with it.
That makes total sense. Making that approachable is huge. So just one final question for you before we get out of here. Oh, I have two actually. First, I would love to know what you work in day to day for tools. I love to know other people’s stacks like what kind of tools are you using. You mentioned the Arduino IDE. Is there anything else that kind of keeps you going day to day? Especially I’m always interested in the business stack because I don’t touch that most of the time.
We do sort of a mix of ad hoc tools and otherwise available tools. I would say the most important tool that we use is slack, which I’m sure you hear a lot is great for communication both within our team, with investors and contractors.
I think that might have actually been one of the first–you might be the first person to bring slack up on the show.
Okay. It’s a great tool. I’m happy to evangelize about it. it’s a team communication tool, and it’s an example of really good design where it sort of sets the norms for communication being friendly and kind of fun, but also very easy to–it’s designed by the team that had made flikr back in the day, or a lot of the same team anyway, and it’s really software sort of made with love.
It’s a fantastic tool. I’m in slack every day, and I agree. I think it’s interesting because in my mind, like as a super old nerd, it’s like IRC with user friendliness. But super useful.
We use hackpad for a lot of other things that don’t quite fit into slack in terms of communication, so daily to do lists, we’ve tried out probably most of the tools that are out there like Trello and so on for keeping track of thing and product management type tools, and every time we sort of just end up reverting back to Excel or Google Sheets in terms of they don’t add enough–the complexity that they add doesn’t add enough value to be worth it. And then some of the more mundane things like for payroll and accounting and stuff, I use Zero and Zenpayroll and all these SAS providers which are great and definitely much easier to use than some of the things that I had been using even a couple of years ago.
That’s a neat stack. I like that–slack is very cool. I definitely encourage people to check that out. I actually just signed up for the, there is a, I’m pretty sure it’s just Women in Tech Slack. It’s an invite only, but you can apply for an invitation and then you get invited and the community has been really great so far. They are very friendly and there is a lot of resource sharing and just general helping each other out which has been really cool. And my last question, before we ramble on any more is, looking at the future of kind of what’s happening in technology–be it hardware or software–what gets you the most excited?
I think the thing that excites me the most is the fact that there are companies out there that are taking things that we already have technologies for and really applying a lot of thought and design to them. I mean, slack is an example of that where Hipchat had been around there for a long time, IRC has been around for decades, but they aren’t adding a lot of new functionality, they’re just taking a user experience that hadn’t been very good and transforming it into something that’s awesome.
Sounds like Apple.
A lot of people make that argument for things like Airbnb. Really originally it was Craig’s List, but ten percent better.
And focused.
And focused, yeah, and Uber. Uber is just a cab service.
Yeah, and that’s a trend, as a user I completely appreciate and it’s starting to come into more enterprise tools as well. We just put in a preorder for a Glowforge which is a laser cutter which is something that is a great tool to have, but traditionally it costs $10,000.00 and you’ve ended up spending about a third to a half of your time with it trying to fix problems with different issues with it, and they’re coming out with a laser cutter at a lower price point that is also supported by software that takes away a lot of the pain points of using this tool. This is something that is a prototyping tool, it’s not used by consumers for the most part, but they’re still taking that philosophy and applying it to that. I think people’s expectations in terms of design have come up a lot, and that’s an amazing thing.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember you can go to JupiterBroadcasting.com for the show notes as well as a full transcription, and you can find us on Twitter @heywtr.
We’d love to hear what you think about the show. If you’d like to tell us, you can use the contact form on the website or email us at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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