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Concurrency is an essential part of modern programming, as we have multiple cores and many tasks that need to cooperate. However, it's harder to understand concurrent programs when they are not running sequentially. It's not as easy for engineers to identify bugs and performance issues in these programs as it is in a single-thread, single-task program.

Parents are always looking for ways to protect their kids online—from malware, banner ads, pop-ups, activity-tracking scripts, and other concerns—and to prevent them from playing games and watching YouTube when they should be doing their schoolwork. Many businesses use tools that regulate their employees' online safety and activities, but the question is how to make this happen at home?

A test case is a lawsuit brought primarily to achieve a policy outcome by securing a judicial ruling that reverses settled law or clarifies some disputed legal question. Bringing a test case typically involves carefully planning out where, when, and whom to sue and which legal arguments to advance in order to maximize the chances of winning the desired result. In the United States, we often see test case strategies used by public interest organizations to effect legal change that cannot practically be attained through other governmental means.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the community-driven nonprofit organization that maintains and evaluates compliance with the Open Source Definition. Last year, I wrote a piece for Opensource.com with a series of questions for candidates in the 2020 election for the OSI board of directors.

Editor's note: This article is part of a series on working with mental health conditions. It details the author's personal experiences and is not meant to convey professional medical advice or guidance.

I'm writing this in the middle of another cold and seemingly endless New England winter. It's the time of year many people begin feeling the effects of burnout.

At the same time, we're observing the first anniversary of many lockdowns since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. So feelings of burnout are even more widespread.

Last summer, my wife and I sold everything we owned and moved with our two dogs to Hawaii. It's been everything we thought it would be: beautiful sun, warm sand, cool surf—you name it. We've also run into some things we didn't expect: WiFi problems.

Now, that's not a Hawaii problem. It's limited to the apartment we are renting. We are living in a single-room studio apartment attached to our landlord's apartment. Part of the rent includes free internet! YAY! However, said internet is provided by the WiFi router in the landlord's apartment. BOO!

I've learned that video tutorials are a great way to teach my students, and open source tools have helped me take my video-production skills to the next level. This article will explain how to get started and add artfulness and creativity to your video tutorial projects.

The open source operating system FreeDOS is a tried-and-true project that helps users play retro games, update firmware, run outdated but beloved applications, and study operating system design. FreeDOS offers insights into the history of personal computing (because it implements the de facto operating system of the early '80s) but in a modern context. In this article, I'll use FreeDOS to explain how file names and extensions developed.

I have lived in 100-plus-year-old brick houses for most of my life. They look nice, they are comfortable, and usually, they are not too expensive. However, humidity is high in the winter in my climate, and mold is a recurring problem. A desktop thermometer that displays relative humidity is useful for measuring it, but it does not provide continuous monitoring.

In comes the Raspberry Pi: It is small, inexpensive, and has many sensor options, including temperature and relative humidity. It can collect data around the clock, do some alerting, and forward data for analysis.

Dictionaries are the Python programming language's way of implementing data structures. A Python dictionary consists of several key-value pairs; each pair maps the key to its associated value.

For example, say you're a teacher who wants to match students' names to their grades. You could use a Python dictionary to map the keys (names) to their associated values (grades).

If you need to find a specific student's grade on an exam, you can access it from your dictionary. This lookup shortcut should save you time over parsing an entire list to find the student's grade.

Nadia Eghbal's 2016 Ford Foundation report on open source software infrastructure shed light on the problem of public code being built and maintained in large part by unpaid volunteers. Since then, the industry has been eager to understand how and why maintainers do this and what we can collectively do to support them better.

It's hard to stay away from the gadgets we use on a daily basis. In the hustle and bustle of modern life, I want to make sure I don't miss out on the important notifications from friends and family that pop up on my phone screen. I'm also busy and do not want to get lost in distractions, and picking up a phone and replying to messages tends to be distracting.

If I were to say I had planned on writing this article a year or so ago, I would be wrong. So, I'll give you a small amount of backstory about how this came to be.

On March 21st, I will be "getting married." I put that in quotes because I got married in Las Vegas on March 21, 2019. But I'm getting married again because my mom, who told us to elope, decided she was wrong and wanted a real wedding. So here I am, planning a wedding.

"Women in tech" is a label we use to describe humans who identify as women who are working in or playing with "tech," which is a broad term itself these days as it's all around us, touching almost everyone's life in a myriad of ways.

Some families have a complex schedule: the kids have school and afterschool activities, you have important events you want to remember, everyone has multiple appointments, and so forth. While you can keep track of everything using your cellphone and an app, wouldn't it be better to have a large, low-power display at home to show your family's calendar? Meet the E Ink calendar!

Containers became widely popular because of Docker on Linux, but there are much earlier implementations, including the jail system on FreeBSD. A container is called a "jail" in FreeBSD terminology. The jail system was first released in FreeBSD 4.0 way back in 2000, and it has continuously improved since. While 20 years ago it was used mostly on large servers, now you can run it on your Raspberry Pi.

LibreOffice has all the productivity features you'd want from an office software suite, making it a popular open source alternative to Microsoft Office or Google Suite. One of LibreOffice's powers is the ability to operate from the command line. For example, Seth Kenlon recently explained how he uses a global command-line option to convert multiple files from DOCX to EPUB with LibreOffice. His article inspired me to share some other LibreOffice command-line tips and tricks.

A good e-learning platform is important for education all over the world. Teachers need a way to hold classes, students need a friendly user interface to facilitate learning, and administrators need a way to monitor the educational system's effectiveness.

Moodle is an open source software package that allows you to create a private website with interactive online courses. It's helping people gather virtually, teach and learn from one another, and stay organized while doing it.

Creating a GUI from scratch is a very time consuming process, dealing with all the positions and alignments in hard code can be really tough for some programmers. In this article, I demonstrate how to speed up this process using XML.

If you are interested in measuring and interacting with the world around you through the Internet of Things (IoT), there are a variety of inexpensive microcontrollers and microcomputers you can use. There are also many sensors available that connect to these devices to measure many aspects of the physical world.