When Bryan said he was going to focus on coding the site, I thought to myself, "well maybe that's the end of this: it will turn into a software project and nothing more." Then I went back to the other well-known News-for-X sites and had a look around. It's a Goldilocks and the Three Bears story: one has a semi-decent news and a large community but an awful interface. Another has an awful interface and a medium-sized community, crappy news, and no editing. There's Reddit too, and although everyone says the gold is in the sub-reddits, I found few sub-reddits that were really chock-full of awesome comments and something about Reddit lends itself to the quick repartee and stupid puns instead of real conversation.

So I'm going to throw my weight behind Pipedot. It's got a great interface that works well on every screen I use, and huge potential. All we need are some more contributors. Give me a hand getting the word out. Here's how you can help.

Got a lot of time? We could certainly use another editor.
This place will only be as good as its submitted articles. You know what to do.
Got a good idea for a poll? Post it here or submit it to the list: list@pipedot.org

Otherwise, help get the word out! Link Pipedot articles to other places you read news: ArsTechnica, the Register, OSNews, Usenet, the millions of Android sites, the Verge, and so on. If you're not into those things, how about emailing your friends with a link to Pipedot. We could use more voices around here. Spread links on IRC if that's your thing.

There's an RSS feed. But Pipedot articles are getting distributed by Twitter now too. Follow @Pipedot and retweet as far and wide as you can. The Twittersphere is (inexplicably) a great echo chamber for linking to Pipedot articles and getting the word out. I'm also thinking about paying to have an advert or two placed in some strategic places. Got any suggestions for the best placement of these adverts? Let me know.

Hoping to see this place turn into something awesome.

The QGIS Project released the latest 2.4 version of their free and open source QGIS geospatial information system software a week or so ago (codename Chugiak). The 2.4 changelog lists a number of new features that indicate the QGIS software is increasing in data analysis and map composing sophistication, i.e., moving beyond its traditional strength as a geospatial data management interface. One new feature that seems especially exciting is the multi-threaded rendering which allows users to continue to interact with the map views while re-rendering of the map is ongoing.

Anyway, I've been using QGIS almost exclusively in my own research for the past five years or more -- although I have been preparing final figures and maps using Generic Mapping Tools scripts because of perceived limitations with previous iterations of the Map Compositor functionality in QGIS. However, my place of work and many of my colleagues continue to use the commericial ArcGIS suite of software for GIS and Map preparation tasks and so, out of necessity, I am constantly switching back and forth between the two.

I remain convinced that for many people's workflows, QGIS is a hugely competitive product because it is free and supports a wide range of GIS activities. QGIS functions are only getting more numerous and sophisticated with time.

I thought I would take the 2.4 release of QGIS as an opportunity to ask the Pipedot community if they had any ongoing experience switching from ArcGIS to QGIS or supporting both platforms concurrently? As well, what points of comparison would Pipedot contributors emphasize in considering the QGIS versus ArcMap question? Thanks!

I got the idea when writing up that article about Distrowatch: they cover so many distros and so many of them are so obscure; I decided to check some of them out. Conveniently - as though they're tempting me - there's a "Random Distribution" button on the front page of Distrowatch, which makes it easy. Every Friday I propose a roll of the dice, and a quick look at some distro you've probably never heard of. I'll try to give equal coverage to the BSDs too.

If this is annoying or not interesting to you, quick! Flame me to a cinder in the comments. Otherwise, enjoy what will hopefully be a weekly feature that will lead to interesting commentary and comparison. I'll be skipping the big guys (RedHat, openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc.) since the purpose is to give some exposure to the obscure/niche stuff. These aren't reviews since I don't have time to install and try each one.

Today's distro is GALPon MiniNo, which gets my vote for the "least memorable name for a distro, ever." But it can be explained: GALPon is the Linux User's Group of Pontevedra, Spain, in the region of Galicia. And they're actively working to get Linux in schools, especially where equipment is old or low-powered and often recycled. No surprise then that GALPon MiniNo emphasizes low system requirements: it installs on machines with 128M of RAM and 4GB hard drives, and uses IceWM or Openbox, RoxFiler, and the like to stay light. It also supports Galician and Catalan - regional languages of Spain - out of the box. Looks like it will install nicely on a netbook or liveCD.

I'm a big fan of lightweight distros to counter the otherwise endless bloat of the big guns. I might have to try this one out and give Puppy a run for its money. Read more (in Spanish) at their homepage, their help and documentation (also Spanish/Galician), or their Google group forum.

If you haven't heard of Atom already, now's a good chance to get acquainted. It's GitHub's open source editor, and it's pretty awesome. The developers behind it write:

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

It's different from traditional text editors in a couple of important ways, including a web-based core and Node.js integration. Atom is "A hackable text editor for the 21st Century." It is built on node and chromium and is very easy to extend and customize. Best of all, it is now available on Windows.

I have been using it on OS X for several months and like it a lot. It is great for ruby, python, html, etc. One of its few shortcomings is that it really isn't great for editing very large text files - megabytes of logs, for example. It's been available for Mac OSX for a while already. And for those linux users who do not want to wait for an official release, there is a build howto here.

Curious, or ready to start coding? Here are five tips for getting started.

This week's Monday poll showed general consensus that scientists should be focusing on energy technology. Looks like some of them are doing just that, and who better to deal with heat and huge flames than a rocket scientist?

The Telegraph reports that a rocket scientist from Oxford University has reinvented the saucepan. The new design, developed by Dr. Thomas Povey, has regular channels incorporated into the pan's sides which allows heat delivered to the base to be captured more efficiently as it moves upwards around the pan's sides and testing indicates that it requires forty percent less energy to achieve equivalent cooking results compared with previous saucepan designs. According to the article, Dr. Povey originally hoped to improve the efficiency of cooking in the outdoors, but decided to develop his new Flare Pan design when he realized that the domestic market could also benefit.

A short summary video on the development and testing of Dr. Povey's new Flare Pan design is available on the Oxford University website.

[ed. note: the appropriate way to test this pan is with some good bacon, and as mentioned here, with a case of beer, for science.]

Manufacturers and the easily-excited tech media are more excited than ever to push us into the world of the "Internet of Things," in which common appliances can all communicate with us over (presumably) TCP/IP. I have yet to see why this is useful for anyone other than appliance manufacturers, who will have a reason to sell us new versions of everything we already own.

But here's another reason to be suspect: the folks building out the latest smart devices seem to have avoided learning any lessons from the security flaws we have been working out of the last wave of devices (computers, phones, routers). This article asks, "How many security researchers does it take to hack a [smart] lightbulb?" and concludes: not very many at all.

Routers are an obvious target for hackers as they are intrinsically linked to the Internet making it possible for hackers to compromise them from a distance, but less attention has been given to some of the other network-enabled devices cropping up in people's homes. Once a hacker has access to a person's home network they have access to any device connected to it, and with an increasingly diverse suite of devices coming online the potential to break down the barrier between the cyber and the physical worlds is getting ever greater.

To demonstrate the concept, Context's senior managers bought a case of beer and five network-enabled consumer devices from a mixture of start-ups and established vendors, configured them with the recommended security settings, set up a secure wi-fi network and set their best and brightest cyber-security researchers to the task of hacking this mock smart home.

Don't feel bad though that the new Internet of Things has been delivered pre-rooted. Your new Android Wear watch just got rooted too. Hopefully they'll invent "smart underwear" too so that can get rooted upon arrival: then we'll really be vulnerable.

[Ed. note: Kudos to this research team, by the way, for ensuring their study was accompanied by a case of beer - an important part of any tech research, in my opinion.]

Sports bring about advances in technology too, although less frequently and all too often, chemically. But after watching the last couple of matches of FIFA World Cup 2014, I thought I'd look into what new technologies were being used or had been put into usage in order to present the World Cup. Here are five bits of technology being used in this cup, but be warned, one of them is the frikkin' "Twitter Wall," which I'm not sure counts as innovation.

Stick around though. In another 35 years, if these guys' prediction is correct, we'll have FIFA robots playing their own World Cup, and we can bet our money on which robotic team will win it. Hopefully by that time we'll all be getting back and forth to work on an advanced version of these rocket skates too, if only to ensure we can still outrun the robots.

If the tech market experienced a bit of a downturn not long ago, it would now seem it's on the rebound, and investors are looking for the next dot-com miracle. The proof? Stocks like this one.

Check out the CYNK stock, linked to a company called Introbiz. Registered in Belize, chartered in Nevada, one employee, totally opaque financial statements. Zero revenue, $1.5M in operating losses. No assets. And yet, the stock is up 25,000% from $0.10 to $14 per share in the last 16 days.

What does the site do? Looks like an ersatz social networking firm with a vague charter of connecting you to famous people. No idea how, who, or where. This is a bubble at its finest, and you know what they say about a fool and his money ...

Once hailed as the most free and widest used X toolkit, the future of GTK+ now looks dire. The gnome developers have essentially highjacked the latest version, GTK3, and are actively destroying all ability of non-gnome users from using this once popular toolkit. I find this very unsettling, as I have developed a number of my own desktop applications using GTK+ through all three of its major versions. I've always preferred GTK over QT, but with some of the recent changes, I'm starting to change my mind.

Of course, I'm hardly alone in this opinion as many other projects have abandoned GTK in the recent months. Take Audacious, for example. This GTK music player has had increasing troubles with the gnome developers screwing things up. So many troubles that they are now planning on switching toolkits rather than further deal with the upstream management. Although they had a functional GTK3 port, they've officially reverted back to GTK2 until they can properly refactor their entire program into QT.

I've been a happy user of the XFCE desktop environment for the last few years. This light and easy to use UI gets out of the way and just plain works. However, the interface toolkit of XFCE is tied to GTK2 and its authors have no clear upgrade path. A similar project, LXDE, has also seen the writing on the wall and are well into a rewrite project that switches their preferred toolkit from GTK to QT.

Although the "G" in GTK stands for "GIMP" this popular image manipulation program has yet to release a GTK3 version. Even Linus Torvalds' own pet project, Subsurface, has recently abandoned GTK for QT. Is the future of GTK+ programs doomed? Can a revival project, such as Mate, takeover maintenance of the GTK toolkit for the rest of us? (let the gnome people screw up their own fork)

Not sure what happened, and Distrowatch king Ladislav Bodnar isn't saying, but a couple of days ago, Distrowatch.com went off line. A day or two later it was back, but as distrowatch.org.

Ladislav writes:

As many of you noticed, the distrowatch.com domain name was suspended by the domain's registrar, Doteasy, last Sunday. I don't want to go into details about what exactly happened as it's a long and boring story. Suffice to say that I feel grossly aggrieved by the series of greedy and even malicious actions taken by Doteasy and as soon as I get this sorted out, I will be looking into transferring the distrowatch.com domain name to another registrar. If any of you have a recommendation for a good registrar (preferably with customer support personnel that is competent), please let me know in the comments section below or send me an email.

Glad to see it was just bureaucracy, and not Distrowatch going off line. I love that site and visit it on a pretty regular basis, even though I'm pretty loyal to just two or three distros and almost never try out those exotic, little-known ones.