Audacity is a great free and open source audio editor, which is available for all major computing platforms – Linux, Mac and Windows. It’s one of the free and open source software packages I recommend in my list of free and open source software.
Audacity running on Linux, audio track and MIDI track playing
Today The Register reports that Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, which has promised to keep the platform free and open source.
The deal was announced on 30th April by Martin Keary, who is Head Of Design at MuseScore, an open-source notation software package also owned by Muse Group, and who will now “manage Audacity in partnership with its open-source community”. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
Audacity received a major update to version 3.0 in March, some 20 years since its first version 1.0 was released. Among the new release’s features were a new file format, analyser and a multitude of bug fixes.
In addition Keary announced that the project was seeking to recruit “a few key positions for senior developers or designers who have experience in audio or music tech.”
A video was also released to coincide with the announcement.
We’re now in May and one reliable natural occurrence of the time of year is the flowering of common hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), which is also known as the oneseed hawthorn, or single-seeded hawthorn.
Other common names include may, mayblossom, maythorn, quickthorn, whitethorn, motherdie, and haw.
The Woodland Trust have produced a short video depicting one year in the life of the hawthorn.
The specimen below can be found in the Easton section of the Bristol & Railway Path near the Brixton Road access point.
Hawthorn is amongst the first trees to start budding in the spring (the above specimen first put out leaves in late January. Ed.) and is also a fast-growing plant. This may explain the alternative name of quickthorn.
As it forms a dense, thorny mass of branches, it is often used for hedging, particularly where livestock has to be contained.
Besides its agricultural value as hedging, common hawthorn can support more than 300 insects. It is a food plant for caterpillars of numerous moths. Its flowers are eaten by dormice and provide nectar and pollen for bees and other pollinating insects. The haws (berries) are rich in antioxidants and are eaten by migrating birds, such as redwings, fieldfares and thrushes, as well as small mammals.
Furthermore, the dense, thorny foliage makes fantastic nesting shelter for many bird species of bird.
Folklore and symbolism
Hawthorn is a pagan symbol of fertility and has associations with May Day stretching back beyond written history. It was the forerunner of the Maypole and its leaves and flowers provided the source of May Day garlands as well as appearing in the wreath of the Green Man.
In medieval times hawthorn was never brought indoors as it was generally believed that bringing its blossom indoors would result in illness and even death. In those times it was also commonly believed that hawthorn blossom smelled like the plague. In more recent times scientists have discovered the chemical trimethylamine (which smells like ammonia or rotting flesh. Ed.) in hawthorn blossom is also one of the first chemicals formed in rotting animal fish, hence the tree’s traditional linking with illness and death.
In spite of the beliefs and symbolism outlined above, the young hawthorn leaves, flower buds and young flowers are all edible. The leaves are often described as having the flavour of bread and cheese. They can be added to green salads and grated root salads. The developing flower buds are particularly good. The haws can be eaten raw (beware a stomach upset. Ed.), but are most commonly used to make jellies and wines.
A final personal note
In my own life, the blossoming of the hawthorn always reminds me that spring is giving way to early summer.
In particular, it reminds of when I was 8 years old and my mother took my 2 younger siblings and me by train all the way from Stafford to Harling Road in Norfolk – the nearest station to my grandmother’s home. The journey took the best part of a day (showing how difficult it was to travel cross-country in England, even in pre-Beeching times. Ed.). The fields on either side of the railway lines on which we travelled were thick with hawthorn blossoming pink and white.
Whenever I see hawthorn in bloom these days, I’m immediately reminded of that one train journey, even though it’s now almost 6 decades in the past.
Update: After writing this post, I asked both my siblings if they remembered that journey and if so, what they recalled. My sister replied that she recollected the journey as being interminable and her chief memory was all the trackside telegraph poles, whilst my brother – the youngest of us – responded with a question as to whether that was the railway trip during which he was sick. He obviously had other matters than lineside shrubbery on his mind. 😀
Even though the elderly have had a bath thanks to ambiguity and poor proofreading in the Evesham Journal’s dead tree version, this age discrimination has thankfully been eliminated from the paper’s online version of the report.
No pensioners were harmed – or dunked – in the drafting of this blog post.
It’s now 10 years since TidyBS5 was inaugurated by local residents with the support of local ward councillors to campaign for a more pleasant street scene in the Bristol council wards of Easton and Lawrence Hill.
During all that time, both residents and councillors has persistently call on Bristol City Council to increase both the presence and visibility of enforcement action, but our efforts have only been rewarded in the last couple of years with higher fixed penalty notices (FPNs) for environmental crimes in 2019 and the recent recruiting of more enforcement officers (posts passim).
Largely as a result of the actions of local residents raising awareness of environmental blight, the streets of Lawrence Hill and Easton are now marginally freer of fly-tipping than they were then, but problems still persist, not helped by the lower footfall due to lockdown and the amount of DIY and building works being undertaken.
This was spotted at the junction of Walton Street and Chaplin Road.
Is this an example of illiteracy or bloody-mindedness? Kindly give your answers in the comments.
It’s one week to go to the elections for Bristol City Council, the elected Mayor of Bristol (with 2 of the 9 candidates standing for election to the office vowing to hold a referendum with a view to abolishing the autocratic post. Ed.), the West of England Combined Authority Mayor and the Avon & Somerset Police & Crime Commissioner.
My recycling box is rapidly filling up with election materials as the parties all vie for my cross against their candidates’ names on the four ballot papers (Hint to canvassers: don’t bother with my house any more; I’ve already voted by post! Ed.).
Following the arrival on the latest leaflet on the doormat, the poll has been updated and now shows the following state of the parties.
The Greens seem determined to win Lawrence Hill ward and are pulling out all the stops. As they’re normally in fourth place, the Tories have managed on token leaflet as have the Liberal Democrats, who were once renowned for their zeal in bunging up letterboxes with their literature.
Why has there only been one Labour leaflet? Is this a symptom of lower levels of activism in the wake of members deserting the party after the election of Keir Starmer (whom some unkindly refer to as Keith. Ed.)?
German digital civil society organisations have made four demands for a digitally sovereign society to politicians standing in the 2021 federal election in late September 2021. Among them is the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which works to ensure that software developed with public money shall be published under a free and open source software licence.
On 1st April 2020, German civil society organisations working for an independent digital infrastructure and free access to knowledge called on politicians to learn from the crisis and strengthen digital civil society.
In an open letter (German) of that date, the signatories (Chaos Computer Club, D64 – Zentrum für Digitalen Fortschritt, Epicenter.Works, the FSFE, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, Superrr Lab and Wikimedia Deutschland) also made clear recommendations for action. However, far too little has happened since then. The past year has made it clear that politics and the public sector are overwhelmed with their own digital transformation and are setting priorities in digital policy that do not meet the needs of society. We are far from a digitally sovereign society.That is why a broad spectrum of organisations, including the FSFE has once again come together to support politics with their expertise.
With four demands, the network shows how digitisation can succeed for a digitally sovereign society – and calls upon the parties to make digitisation for the common good a central topic in the forthcoming federal elections.
Photo courtesy of FSFE
Four demands for the federal government
Digital Sovereignty: politicians must anchor the digital sovereignty of society as the highest maxim in digital policy. Instead of a digital ministry, we need a mission for the coming legislative period that elevates digital sovereignty to a guiding principle and is drafted and evaluated together with representatives from civil society, science and business.
Participation and Transparency: civil society must finally be afforded the same opportunities as business and science to contribute its expertise via a civil society quota in political advisory bodies, communication and transparency on procedures of political decision-making processes, legally defined deadlines for consultations and machine-readable documentation.
Public Money, Public Good: publicly funded solutions must be accessible to all under a free licence so that no knowledge is lost or problems are solved twice. It should be a legal requirement that software developed for the public sector with public money must be published under a free and open source software licence. If public money is involved, the code should also be public. In addition, public sector data must be open data.
Sustainable Digitisation: digitisation can only succeed if the development of digital infrastructure is economically and socially viable. To this end, diversity in digitisation and the development and maintenance of secure, decentralised digital infrastructure for society must be promoted in the long term.
5th May launch event
A new organisation and website – https://digitalezivilgesellschaft.org/ – has been established to promote the above demands and a launch event will be held on 5th May 2021 from 18:00 to 19:30 hrs to discuss these demands with a panel consisting of Julia Reda (former MEP), Henning Tillmann (software developer and co-chair of D64) and Julia Kloiber (co-founder Superrr Lab). The panel will be moderated by Katja Jäger (betterplace lab). Afterwards, all participants will have the opportunity to exchange ideas on solutions, measures and calls for action in four thematic rooms. FSFE’s Alexander Sander will moderate the room on “Public Money? Public Code!”.
Mozilla, the organisation behind the free and open source Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, has just released the Pyodide project from its organisation and it will henceforth be managed independently by the community, French IT news site Le Monde Informatique reports. Formed within Mozilla in 2018 as an experimental project to create in full Python stack for data science, the tool is compiled to WebAssembly and can be used to leverage Python in a web browser and give the language full access to web-based APIs. Via WebAssembly, Pyodide thus brings the Python 3.8 runtime to the browser, with its scientific stack including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, SciPy and scikit-learn. Almost 75 packages are currently offered, with the tool providing transparent object conversion between JavaScript and Python.
The project currently has a separate GitHub organisation and documentation site. It will be maintained by volunteers. A governance document and roadmap have been published to set out Pyodide’s targets, including better Python code performance, reducing the size of downloads and simplifying package uploads. The roadmap introduction states:
This document lists general directions that core developers are interested to see developed in Pyodide. The fact that an item is listed here is in no way a promise that it will happen, as resources are limited. Rather, it is an indication that help is welcomed on this topic.
Pyodide can install any Python package in wheel format from the PyPi repository. It also includes an interface which exposes Python packages Python to JavaScript and exposes the browser interface (including the DOM) to Python. Developers can test Pyodide in an REPL environment.
Version 0.17.0 with API revision
Mozilla has at the same time announced the release of Pyodide version 0.17.0 with major maintenance improvements, a revision of the central APIs and the squashing of bugs and memory leaks. Since its creation the project has given rise to plenty of interest and is used in several projects outside Mozilla.
Yesterday, which was Earth Day, US President Joe Biden organised a two-day virtual climate summit bringing together dozens of world leaders.
Apart from world political leaders, Biden also inexplicably invited one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Britain’s part-time alleged Prime Minister, to participate.
Besides his propensity never to let the truth escape from his lips, Johnson is well known for his lack of attention to detail, his loose tongue and gaffes; and true to form he didn’t fail to embarrass the country of which he is supposed to be the highest elected public official, as shown in the following video clip.
Yes, you did hear that correctly – “politically correct green act of bunny hugging“!
Needless to say, Bozo the Clown had half of the country’s social media users rolling their eyes in despair, condemning his cavalier attitude and wondering what the blonde buffoon was going to sully next with his reverse Midas Touch.
However, it wasn’t just Britons who reacted to Bozo’s gaffe.
Amongst them was one Greta Thunberg, an 18 year-old Swede whose name is not exactly unknown on the world stage where climate change is concerned.
Greta very quickly changed her Twitter bio to reflect Johnson’s words.
Nice work, Greta! 😀
As for the embarrassment that is part-time alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, you can consider yourself well and truly pwned.
Being born in the mid-50s, some of my main childhood memories include the Cold War rivalry of the “Space Race” between the then USSR and the USA, all reinforced by such TV fare as Jerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Fireball XL5.
These have stayed with me throughout life and I still follow human achievements in space closely.
Coming hard on the heels of the Ubiquity helicopter’s first flight on Mars (posts passim), German IT news website heise reports that NASA’s next lunar rover will also be powered by free and open source software.
In 2023 NASA will launch its Viper (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) rover which will be searching for and mapping water ice (which could one day be used to make rocket fuel) on the Moon’s surface. The rover will be equipped with high-tech instruments and tools: wheels which can revolve well on the dusty lunar surface; a drill which can dig into the lunar soil and hardware which can survive the lunar night which lasts 14 days and during which temperatures can drop to -173 degrees Celsius.
Image courtesy of NASA
Whereas Viper’s equipment is largely bespoke, the rover will run mostly on open source software which can be freely used and adapted. If the mission is successful, it will not only lay the foundations for a future Moon colony, but also enable the aerospace industry to develop and operate its robots in a different manner.
Open source technology has been little thought of to date in respect of space missions. It costs vast sums to build something space-worthy which can find its way to a target hundreds of thousands of kilometres away and carry out its specific tasks there. The natural impulse is usually to conceal the necessary know-how. On the other hand, open source software is often associated with cobbled-together programming for small projects such as hackathons or student demonstrations. The programming code that fills online repositories like GitHub is often a cheap alternative for groups with little money and few resources.
Into space with open source
The aerospace industry is being propelled forward by many factors, not least the increasing drive into space. This also entails a demand for cheap and accessible technologies, including software. Even for major organisations like NASA, for whom funds are less of a problem, the open source approach can result in better software. With open source, scientists can access additional expertise and feedback from a wider community when problems arise, just as amateur developers do.
If open source software is good enough for the likes of NASA, it should probably also be good enough for everyone else trying to control a robot remotely from Earth. As ever more new companies and new national agencies throughout the world are trying to send their own hardware into space and at the same time keep costs down, cheaper robotics software able to cope with risky missions could be a major benefit.
NASA has already been using open source software for 10-15 years in several research and development projects. It manages a very comprehensive range of open source program code. However, its use for space robots is still in the initial stages. One of the systems the agency has tested is the Robot Operating System (ROS), a collection of open source software frameworks which is maintained by Open Robotics, a non-profit which is based in Mountain View, California. ROS is already used in the Robonaut 2 humanoid robot, which has assisted in the International Space Station’s research, and in the autonomous Astrobee robots, which float around the ISS supporting astronauts in their routine tasks.
The ROS will carry out ground flight control tasks. NASA staff will control the Viper rover from Earth. Ground flight control will then use the data collected by Viper for a real-time map and rendering of the lunar environment, with which the rover’s drivers will then be able to navigate more safely. Other parts of the rover’s software also have open source roots: the “Core Flight System” (cFS) program, which NASA developed itself and made available free of charge on GitHub, is responsible for basic functions like telemetry and on-board file management. Viper’s mission operations beyond the rover will be carried out by Open MCT, another NASA development.
Viper will be controlled in real time – almost
In addition, the Viper mission is suitable for open source software. Because the Moon is so close, the rover will be able to be controlled almost in real time, meaning that part of the software does not need to be on the rover, but can be run on Earth instead.
However, Viper doesn’t run fully on open source software. For example, its onboard flight system uses reliable proprietary software. Nevertheless it can be assumed that future missions will both use and extend the open source software used for the Viper mission.
Today NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter became the first craft to be flown remotely on another planet. The Ingenuity team at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed the flight succeeded after receiving data from the helicopter via NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover at 6:46 a.m. EDT (3:46 a.m. PDT).
Ingenuity’s mission was essentially a technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars. The helicopter rode to Mars attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover.
The solar-powered helicopter first became airborne at 3:34 a.m. EDT (12:34 a.m. PDT) – 12:33 Local Mean Solar Time (Mars time) – a time the Ingenuity team determined would have optimal energy and flight conditions. Altimeter data indicate Ingenuity climbed to its prescribed maximum altitude of 3 metres, with Ingenuity maintaining a stable hover for 30 seconds.
Mars has a significantly lower gravity – only one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 1.2 metre wide rotor blades can interact to achieve flight. The helicopter contains unique components, as well as off-the-shelf-commercial parts – many from the smartphone industry – that were tested in deep space for the first time with this mission.
Both Perseverance and Ingenuity feature free and open source software (posts passim) extensively.
German digital civil society organisations have made four demands for a digitally sovereign society to politicians standing in the 2021 federal election in late September 2021. Among them is the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which works to ensure that software developed with public money shall be published under a free and open source software licence.
Mozilla
NASA has already been using open source software for 10-15 years in several research and development projects. It manages a very comprehensive range of open source program code. However, its use for space robots is still in the initial stages. One of the systems the agency has tested is the