We're happy to announce the release of BusKill v0.7.0!

Most importantly, this release allows you to arm the BusKill GUI app such that it shuts-down your computer when the BusKill cable's connection to the computer is severed.

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

Upgrading

You can upgrade your BusKill app to the latest version either by

1. Clicking "Update" in the app or
2. Downloading it from GitHub

Changes

This update includes many bug fixes and new features, including:

1. Adds support for 'soft-shutdown' trigger to GUI
2. Adds a new buskill.ini config file
3. Adds a new "Settings" screen in GUI
4. Merges kivy & buskill config files into one standardized location
5. Fixes in-app updates on MacOS
6. Fixes lockscreen trigger on Linux Mint Cinnamon
7. Fixes background blue/red disarm/arm color to propagate to all screens
8. Fixes --run-trigger to be executed inside usb_handler child process and communicate to root_child through the parent process

You can find our changelog here:

• https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/changelog.html

Documentation Improvements

We've also made many improvements to our documentation

1. Updated the Software User Guide to include how to arm the BusKill app with the soft-shutdown trigger in the GUI
2. Added a manpage
3. Better documentation on how to build your own USB-C BusKill Cable
4. Better documentation on how to test the buskill app
5. Fixes in Release Workflow
6. Added some additional related projects to our documentation

Soft-Shutdown Trigger

This release now allows you to choose between either [a] locking your screen or [b] shutting down your computer when you arm the BusKill app from the GUI. By default, the BusKill app will trigger the lockscreen. To choose the 'soft-shutdown' trigger, open the navigation drawer, go to the Settings Screen, click Trigger, and change the selected trigger from lock-screen to soft-shutdown. For more information, see our Software GUI User Guide.

• https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/v0.7.0/software_usr/cli.html

BusKill Now in Debian!

We're also happy to announce that, with the release of Debian 12, it's now possible to install BusKill in Debian with Apt!

sudo apt-get install buskill

Testers Needed!

We do our best to test the BusKill app on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. But unfortunately it's possible that our app doesn't fully function on all versions, distributions, and flavours of these three platforms.

We could really use your help testing the BusKill app, especially if you have access to a system that's not (yet) listed in our Supported Platforms.

And in this release, we specifically would like you to help us test the new soft shutdown feature. Please let us know if it does or does not work for you.

Please contact us if you'd like to help test the BusKill app :)

Now, it's Oracle's turn to jump into the Red Hat open-source Linux code kerfuffle.

A series of disastrous missteps over the past year has robbed Twitter of its relevance

Textual words from them:

It’s our first step towards a more modern, more beautiful, and more customizable Thunderbird experience. We think you’re going to love it, and we are endlessly grateful for all of your support throughout the years 💙

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/1054591

Link for those who prefer to watch on Youtube

Thoughts?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1255003

A Canadian judge has ruled that the popular “thumbs-up” emoji not only can be used as a contract agreement, but is just as valid as an actual signature. The Saskatchewan-based judge made the ruling on the grounds that the courts must adapt to the “new reality” of how people communicate, as originally reported by The Guardian.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1305651

OpenLM-Research has Released OpenLLaMA: An Open-Source Reproduction of LLaMA

• https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama

TL;DR: OpenLM-Research has released a public preview of OpenLLaMA, a permissively licensed open source reproduction of Meta AI’s LLaMA. We are releasing a series of 3B, 7B and 13B models trained on different data mixtures. Our model weights can serve as the drop in replacement of LLaMA in existing implementations.

In this repo, OpenLM-Research presents a permissively licensed open source reproduction of Meta AI's LLaMA large language model. We are releasing a series of 3B, 7B and 13B models trained on 1T tokens. We provide PyTorch and JAX weights of pre-trained OpenLLaMA models, as well as evaluation results and comparison against the original LLaMA models. The v2 model is better than the old v1 model trained on a different data mixture.

This is pretty incredible news for anyone working with LLaMA or other open-source LLMs. This allows you to utilize the vast ecosystem of developers, weights, and resources that have been created for the LLaMA models, which are very popular in many AI communities right now.

With this, anyone can now hop into LLaMA R&D knowing they have avenues to utilize it within their projects and businesses (commercially).

Big shoutout to the team who made this possible (OpenLM-Research). You should support them by visiting their GitHub and starring the repo.

A handful of varying parameter models have been released by this team, some of which are already circulating and being improved upon.

Yet another very exciting development for FOSS! If I recall correctly, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his recent podcast with Lex Fridman that the next official version of LLaMA from Meta will be open-source as well. I am very curious to see how this model develops this coming year.

If you found any of this interesting, please consider subscribing to /c/FOSAI where I do my best to keep you up to date with the most important updates and developments in the space.

Want to get started with FOSAI, but don't know how? Try starting with my Welcome Message and/or The FOSAI Nexus & Lemmy Crash Course to Free Open-Source AI.

When Threads launched on Wednesday, numerous right-wing users shared(opens in a new tab) their dissatisfaction(opens in a new tab) with Twitter's biggest competitor — on Twitter of course — over having their accounts flagged for disinformation. As of Friday, however, it seems the warning label on accounts that reported the issue has since disappeared.

Heya! I thought I'd mention that I've been doing a bunch of development on the optical Timex Datalink watches! I have been carefully sniffing data from the original Timex software with a logic analyzer, and have fully reverse engineered every Datalink protocol, the serial Notebook Adapter, and even the CRT syncing graphics! This means that every Datalink device, including every Timex and Motorola watch, all PDAs, and the funny e-BRAIN talking toy is supported!

For those that aren't familiar, the Timex Datalink is a watch that was introduced in 1994 that is essentially a small PDA on your wrist. The early models (supported by this software) have an optical sensor on the top of the face that receives data via visible light.

The original data transfer method involves drawing patterns of lines on a CRT monitor for the watch to receive with the optical sensor. CRTs use electron beams that draw scan lines one-by-one from top to bottom, then it returns to the top and repeats for the next frame. This means that the electron guns turn on when its drawing a white line, and and turn off when its drawing the black background. This produces flashing light as the graphics are drawn, which is ultimately received by the optical sensor and decoded by the Timex Datalink device.

For laptop users, Timex also offered the Datalink Notebook Adapter. Instead of using a CRT monitor, the Notebook Adapter simply flashed a single LED light. This adapter is fully supported by the Timex Datalink software, and sends the same data as a CRT.

However, Notebook Adapters are rare and expensive now, so I reverse-engineered one! Here's my timex_datalink_client Ruby library communicating with my DIY Datalink Notebook Adapter to emit data to a Timex Datalink watch!

And if you want to try the reverse-engineered CRT graphics, I got you covered! I reverse-engineered that, too!

As a fun tidbit, these watches are flight certified by NASA and is one of four watches qualified by NASA for space travel! Here's a shot of James H. Newman wearing a Datalink watch on the Space Shuttle for STS-88!

Here is my Ruby library with all options for all watches reverse-engineered into a tidy model-based syntax!

• https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_client

Here is a Notebook Adapter emulator that is fully compatible with all Timex software on old and new machines, and also works with my library too!

• https://github.com/synthead/timex-datalink-arduino

And if you have an anchor that happens to contain an electron beam and wanna try it, here's my library for drawing graphics to a CRT to transfer data!

• https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_crt

This has all been done over months of careful effort with lots of VMs, Pentium machines, Windows 98SE, logic analyzers, and solving data puzzles little by little. On July 4th, 2023, I'm proud to announce that I have reverse-engineered every Datalink device with 100% feature compatibility! This is definitely a passion project by all means, and I thought I'd pop in and share this passion with y'all!

Enjoy!

I'm putting a smallish (200x2) amp in my car Real Soon Now. The factory head unit can drive the speakers well enough to sound good enough for background music or an audiobook, but when I really want to play music it sounds not awesome. Better than a clock radio from 1992 but not by much.

The thing is I want it both ways. When I'm playing an audio book I don't need the amp and want it to play directly without the amp in the speaker circuit at all.

This isn't something beyond my ability to solve, I could knock out a nice solution with relays and blinky lights and whatnot to do the job triggered by the antenna/amp line like the amp would be, then switch that from the dash. But if there's an existing solution that isn't stupid expensive I'd rather not reinvent the wheel.

Has anyone done this or am I the only one who would even want it?

One more important point: the amp will be using line level input, I'm going to install RCA lines for the future but the factory stereo has no low level outputs. It would be dead easy to do what I want if it did, but alas.