@dragongoose wrote an extensive post about creating and listening to radio signals using IQ components as the first entry in their DIY SDR transceiver series. There’s a lot of acronyms and terms to get used to, but fortunately there’s a helpful guide at the beginning. There’s also lots of fun math!
AdwCustomizer, later renamed to Gradience, is a graphical application that allowed users to recolor their libadwaita and GTK3 apps. This article documents the history of the project and the author’s experience with maintaining it. At the end, the author hints at the project’s future.
“Dumb phones” are becoming increasingly popular nowadays as a way to reduce screen time while being somewhat useful on a daily basis. On this post @daudix talks about broken phones and especially about the experience of switching for a while to an old Nokia 100 from 2011.
In this post @daudix talks about “fast food” content, comparing it to old content that is forgotten by people and recommendation algorithms, no matter how much effort is put into it.
Note from @cloudyy: There’s the canonical event of YouTube randomly recommending a video from 15 years ago late at night that makes you realize how much content has changed from small and passion-driven to mass-produced and greedy. Recommendation algorithms will recommend what people watch the most and younger generations don’t seem to care much about quality (I feel like I’m 80 years old after saying it like that).
@nvpie wrote a rant about Ubuntu so I guess avoid it if you don’t want some negativity to ruin your day. Still, it makes some interesting points about stable vs rolling releases and the future of Linux packaging.
Note from @a: I think the root of these problems is that Ubuntu is an enterprise distro. Sure, it started out as “Linux for human beings”, but nowadays their website is plastered full of cloud and Kubernetes stuff. And companies (and some ordinary people) need stability. Ubuntu can’t just go around CrowdStriking the world, right? So for software to be stable and not break all the time, it can’t change much. And Ubuntu can’t include every odd app in the world since they’re committed to maintaining everything in their repos. Now sometimes you need a newer version of some software in the Ubuntu repos or some obscure app, which you can install with Flatpak or Nix or whatever. Now before you scream 800 MB, the fact is that most modern software has a lot of dependencies. You might not normally notice this when installing packages from your distro’s repos since you probably already have some of the big dependencies like Mesa drivers and stuff already installed. However, when installing newer software using those alternative methods, newer software needs newer dependencies so the 800 MB is unavoidable. Lastly, there’s no such thing as the best distro since everyone’s needs and requirements are different. If you’re a company, maybe Ubuntu is best. If you’re a developer or power user who likes bleeding edge software, maybe Arch is the best. But also, distros are complicated and maybe it’s not even a one-dimensional scale.
Back in June, we covered SWANTV/Epilepsend, a project for sharing data using a giant, colorful animated QR code. This time @a has made some further improvements by addressing some performance issues, making it 7% faster and capable of transferring data at up to 2.242 mbps. Now your Bad Apple!! QR Code takes only 70 seconds to decode, instead of the previous 180!
If you want to discuss anything from this issue, feel free to join our Matrix space and chat with our community!