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Posts published in “Web Apps”

Cayenne: IoT Made Easy for the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi Report

If you want to add ‘Internet of Things’ functions to your home, you can now do so with relative ease using Raspberry Pi and Cayenne, an easy-to-use online service.

As the Internet of Things gets bigger and bigger, some of you may be wondering how you can get started with IoT without having to purchase an expensive setup. Companies such as Nest and Wink are great for automating your home, but who wants to spend a lot of money only to realize that home automation isn’t for you? This is where the Raspberry Pi can be a great tool for figuring out if the IoT world is right for you. But even if you own a Raspberry Pi and are tech-savvy, getting started in the IoT realm can be quite daunting, which is where Cayenne comes into the picture.

Cayenne dashboard
The Cayenne dashboard viewed on a PC and as a mobile app.
Click to enlarge

Gmail and a Can of Spam

The Heart of Linux

“You’ve got mail compromised mail!”

The emails started coming in slowly at first. Friends and colleagues were telling me that my Gmail address was pushing out spam.

“Spam? Really?”

My first inclination was to push those emails aside as a temporary albeit bothersome incident. Something similar had happened a few years earlier, but subsided quickly with no real or evident damage. I guessed that some bot did a drive by and picked up my email contacts and started pumping out spam and other messages.

GmailBut this incident wasn’t to be pushed aside. The emails started coming in faster and faster, until I acknowledged that I had a real problem.

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

In Search of a Linux Calendar

CalendarOne of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to only use cloud services when absolutely necessary. Web apps are great tools when you need to collaborate at a distance, but other than that you’re better off keeping your work on your own machines, for privacy reasons if nothing else.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSS Force’s Hot Nine for 2015

We’re going to pretend like we’re AM disc jockeys from the golden days of top 40 radio and countdown the top nine stories that appeared on FOSS Force last year. Along the way, we’ll offer a bit of commentary, and maybe remind you a time or two that things were much different way back in 2015.

A BSD Wish List for 2016

Larry the BSD Guy

FOSS Force editor Christine Hall beat me to the punch — that’s the luck of the draw (or lack thereof on my part) in my having a column appearing later in the week — on what she hopes to see in 2016 in the FOSS realm. So I’m taking a page from her playbook and, as a new PC-BSD user, I have a wish list for what I’d like to see on *BSD going forward into the new year.

Google Hangouts iconFirst things first: I know that the wide number of variants in the BSD family are primarily aimed at servers. That said, it’s clearly understandable that with the exception of PC-BSD and BSD variants like GhostBSD, desktop/laptop users are not the primary focus in the BSD constellation.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

The Dog Ate Our Poll Results

Or desparately seeking Schrödinger’s cat’s data

Right about now is the time we told you we’d be giving you the results of the poll we started last week detailing the methods our readers use to receive and send emails. Well, it ain’t going to happen. Nor are we going to tell you next Wednesday about the results of the poll we put up late Sunday night on how you feel about Microsoft as an open source company. Why? The best we can come up with is “the dog ate our homework.” Actually, none of us has a dog, so that’s out. We’ll just say the poll data ran away from home.

How Do FOSSers Use Email?

The FOSS Force Readers’ Poll

The "at" sign in email addressesHow do you receive and send your email? Inquiring minds want to know.

Last week’s article about Mozilla thinking of kicking Thunderbird out of the house to stay with friends started us thinking. For some reason, probably because our thoughts were on other things, such as the difference between the java in our cup (Chock full o’ Nuts, which has no nuts, by the way) and the Java on our machines (which has no Chock full o’ Nuts — go figure), it never occurred to us that the mobile revolution might’ve changed the way folks use email more than we’d realized.

Debian Live Dead, Linux Ransomware & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Larry’s away today, hiding beneath his tinfoil hat and hoping to escape the ravishes of Friday the thirteenth, so I was volunteered to write this week’s review. Sorry. Larry will return next week.

G’bye Debian Live: By now you’ve probably heard the news that evidently the Debian Live project is no more. This according to the project’s leader, Daniel Baumann, who posted An Abrupt End to Debian Live on the Debian website on Monday. According to him, the project was “hijacked by the Debian-cd and the Debian-installer teams.”

Debian LiveReading the post, you might be excused for thinking it’s not all wine and roses over in Debian-land. “Debian can be great,” Baumann wrote. “But depending on who you are, where you come from, and who your friends are, Debian can also be hateful and full of deceit.”

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Six WordPress Plugins Vulnerable

In the same week that we learned from W3Techs that the popular open source content management system (CMS) WordPress now powers a full 25 percent of all sites on the web, we learn that six popular WordPress plugins contain serious security vulnerabilities. The later news comes to us by way of security firm Wordfence, which specializes in WordPress security and develops the Wordfence security plugin for the platform.

WordPress logoThis news isn’t surprising, nor is it cause for alarm. Because WordPress is by far the most popular content management platform on the web, it’s an obvious target for hackers, and third party plugins are the most obvious way inside. However, the folks at Automattic, which develops the platform, have proven themselves to be diligent at finding vulnerabilities and keeping them patched.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Linux Foundation Scales, Raspberry Music Pi & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Back to school, back to work, back to just about everything else free and open source this week: The temperatures could be a little cooler in California, but there’s a modicum of cool to go with the heat.

Like the following items in this week’s wrap…

Tipping the Scales for Linux: Sean Michael Kerner over at Datamation wrote an article accompanying a video interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, who says, among other things, why the foundation is just going to keep growing.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

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