Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2022 May 30

Explanation: What's happening behind that island? Things both expected and unexpected. Expected, perhaps, the pictured rays of light -- called crepuscular rays -- originate from the Sun. Unexpected, though, the Sun was being partially eclipsed by the Moon at the time -- late last month. Expected, perhaps, the Sun's rays are quite bright as they shine through gaps in below-horizon clouds. Unexpected, though, the crepuscular rays are quite red, likely the result an abundance of aerosols in Earth's atmosphere scattering away much of the blue light. Expected, with hope, a memorable scene featuring both the Moon and the Sun, superposed. Unfortunately, from this location -- in Uruguay looking toward Argentina -- clouds obscured the eclipse -- which wasn't completely unexpected. However, after packing up to go home, the beauty of bright red crepuscular rays emerged -- quite unexpectedly. Oh -- and that island on the horizon -- it's really two islands.

Upcoming Debian 10 Buster! https://bits.debian.org/2019/07/upcoming-buster.html #Debian10Buster

A new, much more talkative version of AkariXB, my Jabber/XMPP bot, is out!

Some of the main changes are:

• Ability to greet users in chatrooms, talk to the rooms at random intervals, and reply to room messages that match custom regular expressions.
• Room configuration can specify whether the bot can talk in each room, and for what purposes.
• String syntax will be checked for valid %substitutions% and {a|b|c} choices, where needed.
• The list of chatrooms now uses a proper table with more information, and room configuration is clearer.

https://jancoding.wordpress.com/2019/06/22/akarixb-v0-8-is-out/ 😁

The Mageia Community is very happy to announce what will hopefully be the last release before Mageia 7 is final. We all hope that this release builds on the quality of the previous beta releases.
The release process so far has been smooth so we all hope that there are no new release critical bugs found here and that we can get Mageia 7 out into the wild shortly!

If you want to get involved with the final stage of testing, the ISO’s are available to download directly, and by torrent here.

→ https://blog.mageia.org/en/2019/06/02/mageia-7-rc-released-for-testing/

Amazing GNU/Linux distribution! 🎉

Next 03 June 2019 at 12:00 UTC join us via IRC for an introduction to Debian Edu, ask anything you ever wanted to know about this project! https://bits.debian.org/2019/05/ask-debian-edu-anything.html

Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.16.

In this release, many aspects of Plasma have been polished and rewritten to provide high consistency and bring new features. There is a completely rewritten notification system supporting Do Not Disturb mode, more intelligent history with grouping, critical notifications in fullscreen apps, improved notifications for file transfer jobs, a much more usable System Settings page to configure everything, and many other things. The System and Widget Settings have been refined and worked on by porting code to newer Kirigami and Qt technologies and polishing the user interface.
And of course the VDG and Plasma team effort towards Usability & Productivity goal continues, getting feedback on all the papercuts in our software that make your life less smooth and fixing them to ensure an intuitive and consistent workflow for your daily use.

https://dot.kde.org/2019/05/16/kde-plasma-516-beta-your-three-week-notification-more-tidy-and-composed-desktop

Best desktop environment on the planet 😎

Gentrification of Payments 

http://gatossindicales.blogspot.com/2019/05/ofertas-de-trabajo.html

http://gatossindicales.blogspot.com/2019/05/la-vineta-del-dia_13.html

This is one of the #freesoftware projects that's most inspiring to me at the moment and that I use every day https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2019/gnu-guix-1.0.0-released/

Donations to FLOSS, Nextcloud performance and the end of internet 

"Donating to FLOSS projects

We'd like to start with some good news, an awesome achievement made possible thanks to all of those who have been supporting the project financially. Last year we've decided to unlock a goal we've been dreaming of since the moment we started Disroot. Since our platform depends on the work of Open/Libre Source software developers and their amazing creations, we decided to share part of the donations that we receive with those who make Disroot possible. And so, we're very proud and happy, that we have just transferred 300 euros in donations to several projects. This is the amount we have managed to accumalate from January till March. This time, the projects we've donated to, are:

• Conversejs (XMPP webchat we host at https://webchat.disroot.org)
• Conversations.im (Android XMPP client)
• Dino.im (XMPP GNU/Linux desktop client)
• Hubzilla (social network and publishing platform)
• Nextcloud (bounty pending)
• Searx (meta-search engine).
  We're really happy we could contribute, even with small donation, to those projects, which we host or use on daily basis. We expect that the sum will grow, so we will be able to donate to more projects in the future.
  We salute everyone that has made a contribution to the Disroot Platform and we would like to ask those that haven't yet, to consider it. There are a lot of financial challenges lying ahead.
  We want to set an example and show that there are different ways of financing a project, that it is not necessary to require people to pay fixed great sums or to sell private data as exchange for free services. We think that it should be a conscious personal choice of each disrooter to decide how much they value our services and how much money they can contribute. We don't lie or hide the fact that everything has its price. We pay for hardware (since we own it), for rack space, electricity and bandwidth in the datacenter. Not to mention the labor we put into the project, which by now far exceeds most typical day jobs and that we still doing it (lets hope that will change at some point too) for free.
  We can say without a doubt that if everyone would buy us a cup of coffee, not only we could stop worrying about hardware and have paid staff, but also donate much more money to Open/Libre Source software and thus improve the Disroot experience. Such healthy and natural eco-system and symbiosis is what we believe should be a driving force behind ethical internet service providers, and we hope we'll be able to reach that point soon enough. https://disroot.org/donate"

...

"☠ Internet is about to die ☠

Unfortunately, we must end this joyful post with a depressing note. The future of the free internet is in danger. And it's not tinfoil hat speech. This is real. The latest EU legislation around copyright laws requires commercial (for now) entities to implement filters that will scan every post, comment, image, video or music published by their users against copyright infringement. Despite large opposition, the new directive has passed and within the next years all European countries will need to implement it one way or another. Although it does specify that the new laws will not affect non-profit organizations, we're not entirely sure if those like Disroot, or the entire fediverse, will not be included. However, while one might think we have managed to escape it and that disrooters, as well as all the fediverse dwellers, can enjoy unaffected freedom (wait until all google etc. users start moving to free platforms like ours), there is another draconian law in the working that is being passed behind most people's backs, under the code name #TERREG.
According to this directive, a law will enforce service provider to remove "terrorist" content within one hour notice! This means there is no way to object or dispute, no room for discussion, nothing. And if you think this will affect only "terrorist" content think about it for a second. No one argues that ISIS propaganda, Nazi, white (or any for that matter) supremacy should not be tolerated, but who defines what a "terrorist" act is? For some, anti-government demonstration is considered terrorist. Can the yellow-vest movement be defined as terorist organization? In the eyes of French government, it is very likely. Guess who is the one that will be sending takedown notice emails. Need proof? Official EU agencies falsely report more then 550 archive.org URLS as terrorist content.
The new legislation, together with previously passed copyright directives, has the potential to destroy the internet as we know it and turn it to what TV and Radio's are now. Controlled, licensed, non-interactive, censored handful of corporately and governmentally owned websites and services. While the copyright directive potentially doesn't affect non-profits, who get to escapes the imposed content filters, those are being smuggled via backdoor thanks to 1 hour takedown notice requirement which will push most of the website owners to use such filters (or stay awake 24/7). Guess who has enough money to develop those filters and who will benefit from licensing it to the entire European based internet? And don't get fooled by political propaganda. This new law is as useful for the right as it is for the left. We're being played by their silly little left/right game like a bunch of sheep! It's time to rise up beyond the obsolete 20th century division. The world is not binary! It's not blue or red, black or white and its time we start making conscious educated decisions and start kicking back!

https://juliareda.eu/2019/04/not-in-vain/
https://juliareda.eu/2019/04/reject-terror-filters/
https://saveyourinternet.eu"

http://gatossindicales.blogspot.com/2019/05/las-redes-sociales-hablan_7.html

Doctrina del shock (a la española) 

También conocido como "El Preparao". ¬¬

(https://gatossindicales.blogspot.com/2019/05/otra-portada-de-el-jueves-dia-del.html)

(https://gatossindicales.blogspot.com/2019/05/las-redes-sociales-hablan_2.html)