Summary of the week of March 20, 2023

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Using a Raspberry Pi to extend HDMI ports

This post explains how to use a Raspberry Pi to add an HDMI port to a laptop. The process involves streaming video over the network with FFmpeg.

When a disk fails, it does so after two years and eleven months

A data recovery company has conducted a study that concludes that most hard drives that fail do so just before they reach three years. They have also found that WD and Seagate drives manufactured before 2015 were much more reliable than those manufactured since then.

cURL turns 25 with a new version

The team behind the popular cURL download tool has released version 8.0 to celebrate the project's 25th anniversary. The only real change has been to remove support for systems that do not support 64-bit long long data types.

Program to watch TV

Someone has created an open-source program for watching TV. It allows recording and will soon have support for Xtream. They say it's very fast, although unfortunately, it's another piece of software developed with Electron.

Mozilla is working on its AI

Mozilla has begun its own open-source AI project. The topic is still in its infancy and they are dealing with administrative issues. No technical details have been released.

Peertube 5.1 available

Version 5.1 of Peertube has been released, which comes with some new features such as the ability to resume a live stream. We will update the instance in mid-April.

USB bomb

A few days ago, a journalist connected an unknown USB drive that was sent to him and it exploded in his face. Over the years, we have seen them used to infiltrate an Iranian nuclear facility, infect critical control systems in American power plants, transform into undetectable programmable attack platforms, and destroy computers with an electrical overload of 220 volts.

Gnome 44 available

Gnome 44 comes with a new mosaic view in its FileChooser file selection window. It also brings improvements to its configuration panels, new apps have been released in the Cycle, and many bugs have been fixed.

Right to repair for 10 years

The EU wants to extend the right to repair to 10 years, not only obliging manufacturers to have spare parts during that period but also obliging them to carry out the repair.

The usefulness of donations in free software

The people at Libreoffice have published a pamphlet explaining where the money from donations goes. Among other things, it serves to maintain the hardware infrastructure, pay a small team of people who do development and documentation, and finance conferences and events.

The problems with musl

Someone has written a post about why they have stopped using Alpine Linux, a distro that, to save resources, uses musl as the standard C library instead of the classic glibc. The problem lies in the way this library manages DNS resolutions.