If you have tried at building an Android app recently you might notice that there is a new icon shown on newer Android Oreo, Android 10, Android 11 devices… it shows the Android antenna head instead of the normal icon. The odd thing is that the “design” area of the .xml file will display it but not let you actually design and draw in it like you can change layout xml. You can however use Inkscape or your favorite .svg editor and convert that file to this Android format:
Continue reading “Turning a normal SVG into an Android Vector (Updated Repeater-START!)”Let your voice be heard for Librem Phone/Pinephone Apps!
As you may have noted if you have recently upgraded to Pinephone or Librem Phone, there are currently some missing spots as far as good and well built mobile apps for the platform. While this affords great opportunity for the first folks to build apps to profit from this growing segment, we also should encourage local app makers to fix their apps to work on Linux/Librem Phone!
Continue reading “Let your voice be heard for Librem Phone/Pinephone Apps!”Chrome 93 brings a different way of thinking
If you are using Chrome 93, you may have noticed recently the “Your connection is always secure unless Chrome tells you otherwise” in the location bar. This raises an interesting question – should the system be telling you that any site that you visit is secure? Should we be trusting Chrome in this regard?
Continue reading “Chrome 93 brings a different way of thinking”Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history
In the chapter The Long Tail of the Law, in Alex Bellos’ book The Grapes of Math, he shows some different statistical patterns that share the same properties:
Continue reading “Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history”Pat 0.11 Review and setup… the long awaited update!
If you have used Ham radio and are on Linux, you most likely have used the Winlink program Pat, an open source interface to use Winlink over internet (and some radios if you have that set up). The long awaited new release now includes the forms feature! and other improvements! If you haven’t set it up here is a quick review:
Continue reading “Pat 0.11 Review and setup… the long awaited update!”PyImageSearch Review
If you have been doing OpenCV or Python machine learning, you have most likely come across PyImageSearch. If you come across a sale for this service I would recommend trying it out if you are learning some machine learning. This past week they have run a free promo 7 day trial, which gave me an opportunity to browse these.
Continue reading “PyImageSearch Review”Keeping a process running with a 3 line Bash script
While you are running a long running process, you may want to run it again if it stops or is watching some process that should be running all the time. At first look at this might seem best to…
- Create some cron running a script that checks output of “ps aux | grep myprogram”, run it if it is not running.
- Wrap some other Python script calling it and at the end wait and try running again.
- Check in on the process and see what might be wrong. (Not great, if it is a process you want to be checking errors in you should be using Sentry anyway)
Government publication shows practical ways you can prep for an EMP
Chances are you have seen a movie or book recently covering the topic of an EMP – an Electro-magnetic pulse from a faraway nuke that could cause outages and damage. While most of what you hear will either be dismissive of the possibility, or a horror story of years of electronic wasteland, the reality could be more in the middle and is something folks can prepare for, according to a US government publication linked in the documents section of the SHARES site.
The SHARES system is a HF long range ham radio service but there are several recommendations in the document that just about any civilian should be considering, not just radio maintainers and organizations:
Continue reading “Government publication shows practical ways you can prep for an EMP”In search of the best scientific calculator for Librem Phone/Pinephone
While many apps do run on Librem 5 phone, there are many yet to be fully working on the small screen. In this post we explore the various calculator apps for Linux and see which might best work as a student/engineer’s go-to calculator:
Continue reading “In search of the best scientific calculator for Librem Phone/Pinephone”Only a few days before T-mobile auto-opts-in advertising with your information
If you’ve been following the Purism mailing list you probably know now that on Apr 26 T-mobile will be able to use your data for “anonymized” advertising targeted to you. What does that mean for you and what can you do to opt out?
Continue reading “Only a few days before T-mobile auto-opts-in advertising with your information”