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You might not know, but there are currently 7,117 languages spoken in the world. Not dialects, but living languages! However, much of the world's digital media is available in only a couple dozen languages, and translation platforms like Google Translate only support around 100 languages. This reality means that there are billions of people around the world that are marginalized due to a lack of timely access to information.

Recently, fellow Opensource.com scribe James Farrell wrote a wonderful article entitled How Ansible brought peace to my home. In addition to the great article, I really liked the title, one of those unexpected phrases that I’m sure brought a smile to many faces.

One of the original hopes for Unix was that it would empower everyday computer users to fine-tune their computers to match their unique working style. The expectations around computer customization have diminished over the decades, and many users consider their collection of apps and websites to be their "custom environment." One reason for that is that the components of many operating systems are not open, so their source code isn't available to normal users.

We have a laser printer at home. This Hewlett Packard LaserJet Pro CP1525nw Color Printer is an older model, but it has been a great workhorse that prints reliably and in color. I put it on our home network a few years ago using our Raspberry Pi as a print server.

COVID-19 has suddenly thrown all of us into a new and challenging situation. Many of us are now working full-time from home, and for a lot of us (especially people who aren't used to working remotely), this is taking some getting used to.

LaTeX is a powerful system, especially for writing scientific and technical documents. But writing documents in LaTeX can be confusing because you need to know a lot of commands, and your text is littered with backslashes, curly braces, and other syntax distractions. But being productive as a writer requires that you focus on the text's content instead of how it looks. Fortunately, the GNU Emacs Org mode extension makes it easy to write plain-text documents and seamlessly export them to LaTeX and PDF.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and its rapid development, we are all being called to take protective and preventative measures, including avoiding social contact as much as possible. Events are canceled, trips are postponed, and companies are asking their employees to work from home. It's an exceptional situation for everyone, as remote work cultures with distributed teams are being introduced overnight. Many companies are being challenged to quickly organize a team that works completely remotely.

It all started in the mid-1980s with an Apple ][c that my parents purchased for our family. Although I enjoyed playing games, I quickly became fascinated with BASIC programming and how useful it could be for work and fun. This was an era when computers were viewed as little more than typewriters, so people with "advanced computer skills" could easily use them to their advantage.

Whether you're a learner or a teacher, you probably recognize the value of online workshops set up like slideshows for communicating knowledge. If you've ever stumbled upon one of these well-organized tutorials that are set up page by page, chapter by chapter, you may have wondered how hard it was to create such a website.

Well, I'm here to show you how easy it is to generate this type of workshop using a fully automated process.

If there's anything that's changed software in the past two decades, Git is at the top of the list.

Chat is a part of most people's daily lives, especially if you work in tech, and especially if you work with teammates located in different parts of the world. It can be a great way to achieve these goals:

Managing a local Python development environment continues to be a challenge, even for experienced developers. While there are well-documented strategies for package management, there is another step necessary to ensure you are running the version of Python you need when you need it.

Whether you're sending data on your computer or talking to someone online, you want to assume some level of security and privacy.

But what if a third party is eavesdropping online, unbeknownst to you? And worse, what if they're impersonating someone from a business you trust in order to gain damaging information? This could put your personal data into the hands of dangerous, would-be thieves.

Welcome to what's called a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.

"All the documentation, the tooling, the community is great—you have all the tools to succeed in writing Rust code."

Antonio Verardi, Infrastructure Engineer of Yelp

So, why hesitate to learn a new programming language when all this is provided to you? It's now your turn to join the great community of Rust. If you are interested, you can read more about the advantages of Rust over other languages here.

The Open Geospatial (OSGeo) Foundation recently participated in Google's first Season of Docs, in which Google sponsored senior technical writers to contribute to open source projects. OSGeo is an umbrella organization for around 50 geospatial open source projects. I've contributed to a number of these projects over the years and recently co-mentored the two Season of Docs technical writers Google allocated to OSGeo.

In this month's wander around the web, we've found articles on Ansible Runner, managing network interfaces, securing your Ansible Tower installations and a data scientist's analysis of how Collections was an inevitable path for Ansible. On YouTube, there were some great videos this month, including an Ansible 101 with Jeff Geerling. Enjoy!

In Nine Lies About Work, authors Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall examine what we might consider "common theories" about aspects of contemporary organizational life—and they debunk those theories. The book's so-called "lies" are, therefore, not really lies but rather common beliefs about work that simply aren't accurate in actual working environments today.

First things first: What are proxy servers, and why use them?

"How do I make plots in Python?" used to have a simple answer: Matplotlib was the only way. Nowadays, Python is the language of data science, and there's a lot more choice. What should you use?