Hi everyone! 👋

Welcome to cron.weekly issue #130.

There’s quite a bit of news from Github this week, together with Windows 10 (I know, on a Linux-focussed newsletter no less!) and ARM servers. I should have some content for everyone to enjoy.

Stay strong, stay home, stay alive.

Oh, and ☕️, of course.

News & general 🗞

Did you know the internet is held together with duct tape? BGP is one of those pieces of tape. Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) can help authenticate routes, but is only seeing slow adoption.

This is a pretty big move on their part: you can now create teams and host unlimited private git repositories at Github for free!

We’ve wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. - Nat Friedman

Big players pay for the little ones, I appreciate that.

Even your computer fan can leak your personal data. tl;dr: don’t use computers. Ever.

Good news, for now - as the .org sale announced late last year is put on hold. Question is, for how long?

GitHub has completed its acquisition of npm. Which is a bit of a weird announcement from Github, as npm already announced it last month? Oh well, corporate stuff. 😄

Scaleway is sunsetting its ARM64 instances at the end of this year. This is a bit of a surprise move, as they reached their fame (I believe?) mostly because they did ARM server hosting at scale.

In an age where Apple is supposed to release ARM laptops within the year, I’d be very curious to learn why Scaleway is terminating their ARM support.

Windows WSL2 & Explorer integration for Linux

Two interesting stories that caught my attention last week from the Windows front:

The new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) will run as a lightweight VM running a full Linux kernel, which means it’ll support things like Docker and FUSE.

The new Explorer integration means you’ll be able to access the files on that tiny Linux VM much easier.

This is crazy: a machine learning dataset that can turn just about any (really) dark image into a bright-as-day version. The video blew my mind.

The ProtonMail Bridge is an application that runs on your computer in the background and seamlessly encrypts and decrypts your mail as it enters and leaves your computer.

Enhance visibility into containers and container orchestration with Datadog. Automatically track containerized services with Autodiscovery and receive smarter alerts that won’t panic as customers scale down. Easily monitor the health of all your containers with granular, real-time metrics and visualize performance from a bird’s eye view with Datadog’s live container map. Start your free Datadog trial today!

LiveDashboard provides real-time performance monitoring and debugging tools for Phoenix developers.

This is a composer plugin (PHP’s package manager) that downloads packages in parallel to speed up the installation process.

Kanboard is a free and open-source Kanban project management software.

Monitor your services every 30 seconds, get notified the way you want! Slack, Email, Webhooks, … your pick. See rich metrics and use our customizable status pages to keep all your customers informed. Try us for free for 30 days!

“Did you ever want to match a regex, but all you had was a fat32 driver? Ever wanted to serialize your regex DFAs into one of the most widely supported formats used by over 3 billion devices?"

I have no idea how any of this works, but it got shared far & wide on the internet, so I figure I’ll do the same here. But really … even the tagline confuses me. 🙈

Falcon is a free, open-source SQL editor with inline data visualization. It currently supports connecting to RedShift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Impala, MS SQL, Oracle, SQLite.

Keycloak is an Open Source Identity and Access Management solution for modern Applications and Services. It allows you to add authentication to applications and secure services with minimum fuss. No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users. It’s all available out of the box. You’ll even get advanced features such as User Federation, Identity Brokering and Social Login.

Ever wanted to write a book (You’re crazy)? Ever wanted to do it in Markdown (OK, maybe you’re not crazy)? You can use mdBook to take Markdown files, parse them & create online books.

3mux is a terminal multiplexer with out-of-the-box support for search, mouse-controlled scrollback, and i3-like keybindings. Imagine tmux with a smaller learning curve and more sane defaults.

Guides & Tutorials 🎓

It’s true, using PGP with email isn’t very user friendly, to this day. This post contains the commands used to send encrypted e-mails, and it’s enough to put you off - honestly.

A good overview of the basics when looking at the /proc filesystem. I use this all the time when debugging, it’s a good place to start a lot of debug-quests.

The team at KeyDB compares its key/value daemon (originally a fork of Redis) with the latest Redis 6. Surprise surprise, KeyDB wins. 😅 But the metrics & numbers are interesting enough to share the post regardless.

In short, compatibility. The format that crontab uses is described in minute detail as part of the POSIX Specification.

A nice in-depth set of slides to optimize UDP traffic on a Linux server. This might come in handy when HTTP/3 takes off and you want to optimise your throughput.

This is clever use of a Bash alias and the read method in Bash to prompt for input.

This post covers some of the technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux.

This guide helps you set up Wireguard VPN on your Linux box with step-by-step instructions.