Sad days for fans of Bodhi Linux¹: project lead Jeff Hoogland has announced he will be stepping down, and the project is in search of a volunteer or supporter to take over the leadership role of this unique distro.

There's more information - and a fair bit of anxiety - over at the Bodhi Linux forums.

This isn't necessarily the end of the distro, but there's no mistake this distro was very much his baby, and his vision and leadership have made it what it is. If you've never tried it, give it a spin. BodhiLinux starts with the Ubuntu base and installer, but strips out anything Gnome and replaces it with the Enlightenment 17 (E17) desktop environment. E17 is an amazing bit of work - a total rewrite from E16 that took years in the making. It's graphically very enticing, with carefully designed accents (animations, eye candy) that serves a useful purpose. You don't get wobbly windows, which is bling for the sake of bling. Instead, everything is very subtle and very useful. And on your E17 desktop you can download and install from Bodhi's - which are essentially Ubuntu's - repositories.

One of E17's most useful tricks is configuration profiles that provide different functionality for different machines or situations: there's a desktop, laptop, and tablet configuration, each with defaults that make sense for your likely hardware and situation. I'd love to try it on a tablet. You can get E17 on other distros, including Ubuntu, but by installing Bodhi you got a clean, useful, and well-configured Enlightenment desktop minutes after installing with no fuss. Lastly, E17 is phenomenally resource-conserving, so it runs blisteringly fast even on lightweight machines, and its install footprint is very small. It ran great on my Intel Atom netbook, and almost-as-great on a Pentium 4 with a gig of RAM.

This is a reminder that distros are a lot of work, and consist of long, thankless hours that you don't necessarily get to spend with your family or lounging in front of the TV. Many thanks to Jeff for a fantastic Linux distro, and thanks in advance to whichever hero decides to step up to the plate and continue where he left off.

¹ [Ed. note: and I'm one of them! Bodhi has been one of my favorites since it came out.]

Stem cells are not only about scandals, deaths and retracted publications. There is a lot of research going on and new medical applications are regularly presented in the news as "tomorrow's revolution".

This week, a Japanese team has taken a new step towards actually using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), for which Shinya Yamanaka and John Gurdon shared a Nobel prize in 2012. On Wednesday, Nature announced that a Japanese patient was about to receive iPS-based eye surgery, a test on human for which permission had been granted by a health-ministry committee. The surgery took place this Friday.

[Author note: As a side note, the team belongs to the same research center (CDB) from which the author of the retracted STAP papers originated]

Richard Yao has written a provocative piece detailing the state of the ZFS filesytem on Linux. It's made the rounds on other sites, where it's generating a lot of buzz. The reason is twofold: (1) ZFS is such a phenomenal piece of software, and (2) Yao insists the ZFSonLinux project (ZoL) is ready for primetime.

Linux users familiar with other filesystems or ZFS users from other platforms will often ask whether ZFS on Linux (ZoL) is "stable". The short answer is yes, depending on your definition of stable. The term stable itself is somewhat ambiguous. While one would think that stable means "ready for production use", that can mean that it does not lose data, that it does not crash, that it is a drop-in replacement for an existing filesystem, that changes to the disk format are forward compatible, that updates are always flawless or some combination thereof. Consequently, the long answer is much more nuanced than a single word can express. ...

He continues: I believe ZoL is production ready for the following reasons:

1. Key ZFS data integrity features work on Linux like they do on other platforms.
2. ZFS runtime stability on Linux is comparable to other filesystems, with certain exceptions that I document below.
3. ZoL is at near feature parity with ZFS on other platforms.

Read on for the rest.

How do you feel about the government maintaining a database of voice samples of everyone? If you're not against the practice, then Australia might be the place for you.

A new voice recognition system in use by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to identify customers. The system asks taxpayers to repeat a phrase in order to compare it to a voiceprint by which they can prove their identity. The system is expected to save up to 45 seconds per phone call. The ATO receives about 8 million calls each year, 6 million of which require identification checks, for a total of about 3125 days, or 75,000 hours, each year spent performing identity checking.

On the one side, that's interesting tech, was probably a fun database project for some team, and saves money. What's not to like? On the other hand, you can bet that the NSA and similar agencies are also employing some version of this technology. So, who would like to step up to the microphone?

[Author note: On the flip side, it could be useful for people to record telemarketers so we can build a database of the people who spam us with annoying phone calls.]

A lot of the tech world is taking a moment to have a laugh at Apple, after a lackluster event earlier this week. Here are some of the digs:

• Samsung is making fun of the streaming problems Apple had on a new Youtube video called It Doesn't Take a Genius.
• The Telegraph is predicting that AndroidWear will come to quickly dominate the lackluster Apple Watch.
• Macworld Magazine, the venerable journal that has covered Apple since 1984, is shutting its doors.
• The Apple store crashed during preorders for the iphone 6 (OK, we could construe that as good news)
• The Register has panned the Apple Watch as "nothing more than digital perfume" and concludes gadget-mania is over.
• Most damning is this post making the rounds on Google Plus, telling iphone 6 users: welcome to 2012! If you need help with your iphone 6 features, just ask an Android user: we've had this stuff for years.

Is Apple off its game? Or is the tech press just snippy as always? Or is the new Apple ecosystem going to wow us, as the fans predict?

A Stanford engineering team has built a radio the size of an ant, a device so energy efficient that it gathers all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna - no batteries required.

Designed to compute, execute and relay commands, this tiny wireless chip costs pennies to fabricate - making it cheap enough to become the missing link between the Internet as we know it and the linked-together smart gadgets envisioned in the "Internet of Things." "The next exponential growth in connectivity will be connecting objects together and giving us remote control through the web," said Amin Arbabian, an assistant professor of electrical engineering who recently demonstrated this ant-sized radio chip at the VLSI Technology and Circuits Symposium in Hawaii.

Much of the infrastructure needed to enable us to control sensors and devices remotely already exists: We have the Internet to carry commands around the globe, and computers and smartphones to issue the commands. What's missing is a wireless controller cheap enough to so that it can be installed on any gadget anywhere. "How do you put a bi-directional wireless control system on every lightbulb?" Arbabian said. "By putting all the essential elements of a radio on a single chip that costs pennies to make."

Cost is critical because, as Arbabian observed, "We're ultimately talking about connecting trillions of devices."

This is amazing stuff. Check out the website for pictures of the radio, which is smaller than Lincoln's forehead on an American penny, as well as links to the developers' website with more musings on the future of gadgets that remain connected and controllable.

AbsoluteLinux [screenshots] is different from most other niche distros because it's built on a Slackware base instead of Debian/Ubuntu, so I installed it in a VM and have been giving it a test drive for a while. It's the work of one man: Paul Sherman, of Rochester, New York, who took his extensive customizations to Slackware and began making them available to the public as a distro.

Absolute fits on a single CD, and focuses on being a lightweight OS optimized for speed and designed to stay out of your way. It's a desktop, with no pretensions of being installed on a server. It uses the IceWM windowmanager, so you get a fast, traditional desktop, task bar and tray with none of the bulkiness of modern KDE or Gnome desktops, and a set of apps judged to be 'best of class' as well as a couple of utilities he wrote himself (the volume control is a stand-alone app that avoids having to install another package that would've had other dependencies).

Because Absolute is based on Slackware you get all of Slackware's simplicity, stability, and dependability. But you also get Slackware's thin package selection and install mechanism. Absolute has its own repo, and you can add Slackware's repository too [file list is here], as Absolute is 100% compatible with Slackware. But you will soon find yourself over at www.slackbuilds.org looking for 3rd party packages. You also have to manage your own dependencies - a good thing if you want to avoid finding out that a simple app brought all the underlying base packages with it, but a bad thing if you prefer the ease of simple apt-getting your way to the desktop you like. That said, you can use gslapt-get, which comes preinstalled, and takes some of the hassle out of package management.

That said, I like it. It boots quickly, and I do appreciate Slackware's simplicity and straight-forwardness. By installing Absolute instead of straight Slackware you get a graphical, lightweight desktop by default. I think I prefer FreeBSD's ports system or Debian's apt-get for installing software, and it's true Slack - and therefore Absolute - aren't for just anybody. But if you're looking for a refreshing change from the quotidian, Absolute Linux is pretty enjoyable. And above all, it's a reminder that the most interesting things don't come out of corporations trying to be everything to everybody, they come out of willful and skilled hackers that focus on doing one thing and doing it well - much like the Unix tradition itself.

Intel has released more information regarding the availability of Skylake, their successor to Broadwell. The first surprise is that Skylake is still on track for an end of year release in 2015. After the delays with Broadwell, many thought that the Skylake roll-out would be similarly pushed back. Because of the lack of delay, the first Skylake chips will ship to manufacturers only a few months after the general availability of desktop Broadwell models.

Another surprise is that the Intel Gen 9 graphics completely do away with VGA connector support. That's right, the 15 pin analog "D" shaped connector is finally getting nixed - at least from the built-in Intel graphics.

Unlike Broadwell, which only supports DDR4 memory on the server and the extreme versions, Skylake will finally support DDR4 on consumer rated models.

There's a good editorial over at ZDNet by Violet Blue, who writes in the "Zero Day" opinion column: Wake up: The celebrity nudes hack is everyone's problem. The celebrity nudes 'hacking' scandal is a wake up call about security and human nature.

The amount of private data theft going on right now is insane. Until the online revolution, our private spaces were our bedrooms and bathrooms, our homes, sex clubs, our phone calls and our inner fantasy worlds. Now, our private spaces for adult playtime include texts, emails and direct messages to trusted friends or family members, and especially photos. But that's only true if we really trust the person we share them with.

The problem we face now is that not everyone understands or agrees what constitutes a private space online. Online, private spaces include our email inboxes, chat rooms, IRC, social media profiles and their not-public messaging systems (Twitter DMs, Facebook chat), dating websites, message boards. Private space now includes all the places that our personal information resides.

I have an alternate theory, though I do agree with Violet Blue: maybe Web 2.0 and the "culture of sharing" is the problem? Web 1.0 wasn't so bad, if you ask me.

Munich city council's decision to move from Windows to Linux may be under scrutiny, but it's worth remembering it's not the only major organisation to have chosen open source for its desktops. Linux-based desktop operating systems face barriers to widespread adoption and skepticism about their future prospects due to their limited use today. Yet major users do exist, including companies such as Google and a small but growing number of government bodies. TechRepublic covers five of the major players that have invested seriously in Linux desktops.

1. Google
2. NASA
3. French Gendarmerie
4. US Dept of Defense
5. CERN
6. yo mamma