Recently there was an announcement from Ubuntu that the desktop team are working on a replacement for the Ubiquity installer. The really interesting part of the post by Martin Wimpress, head of the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical, is that the new installer will be built using Flutter. Flutter is a cross-platform User Interface framework that can target Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS all from the same source code. I have been aware of Flutter for some time now but have been trepidatious in jumping in to sample the water, because I am completely unfamilier with the Dart programming language and was worried about making the time investment.

Well this is a doozy. Made public a while back was a security vulnerability in many Snap Packages and the Snapcraft tool used to create them. Specifically, this is the vulnerability identified as CVE-2020-27348. It unfortunately affects many many snap packages… What is it?The issue at the heart of this vulnerability is the prolific way that we in the Snapcraft community are overriding the Dynamic Linker search path. The Dynamic Linker is the library that searches for and loads libraries into memory when an application needs them.

While WordPress Core is working towards their own Native Lazy Loading of images, I have been using something for a while already to do the job. I’m sure I found this from, or was inspired by, someone else’s code but I don’t recall where. If it is your code, please leave a comment so that I may correctly attribute it. Step oneThe first step is to hook into the wp_get_attachment_image_attributes filter to override the in-built src, srcset, and sizes attributes set by Core.

In a post by Benjamin Elder there is a really nice proof-of-concept app. This app is based on the Bodypix.js AI/ML library. Ben’s article about their Open Source Virtual Background explains the inner workings. Using Ben’s code, I created a Snap Package called Fakecam. I also include a nice User Interface, which allows easy configuration of the options. Performance issuesNext, I convinced several members of the Ubuntu Podcast Telegram channel to give Fakecam a test run.

While I’ve been lurking about the OpenFaaS Community I haven’t really had the wherewithal to actually get myself knuckled-down to build something that might be classed as useful or fun. To remedy that I finally came up with a new idea for a function that I can publish into the FaaS Store. I’m calling this function “Awesomify”. It will take any text you throw at it and make it awesome!

Showcasing my skills in Web Development where I am constantly pushing the boundaries, here is my CSS Loading Animation. The experiment here uses CSS keyframes to achieve 60 frames per second animation without repainting the elements. To build the animated object (the spinner) I use a pair of incomplete CSS Triangle tricks. When you combine the CSS Triangle trick with border-radius you find you can curve one edge of the triangle.