News briefs for February 28, 2019.
Mozilla today released Common Voices[1], the "largest to-date public domain transcribed voice dataset". The dataset includes 18 languages and almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice from more than 42,000 people. From the Mozilla blog: "With this release, the continuously growing Common Voice dataset is now the largest ever of its kind, with tens of thousands of people contributing their voices and original written sentences to the public domain (CC0[2]). Moving forward, the full dataset will be available for download on the Common Voice site[3]."
KStars v3.1.0 was released[4] today, marking the first release of 2019. This release focuses on stability and performance improvements—for example, some bugs in the Ekos Scheduler, Ring-Field Focusing was added to the Focus module, and the LiveView window now enables zooming and panning for supported DSLR cameras. See the Jasem's Ekosphere blog[5] for all the details, and go here[6] for download links and other resources.
LibreELEC 9.0.1 (Leia)[7] is now available. This release of the Linux-based open-source operating system for embedded devices "contains many changes and refinements to user experience and a complete overhaul of the underlying OS core to improve stability and extend hardware support. Kodi v18 also brings new features like Kodi Retroplayer and DRM support that (equipped with an appropriate add-on) allows Kodi to unofficially stream content from services like Netflix and Amazon." In addition, "Changeable SSH passwords and a default firewall configuration have been added to combat the increasing number of HTPC installs that can be found on the public internet." Go here[8] to download.
System76's new Oryx Pro laptop with RTX 20-Series GPUs is slated to arrive today[9]. Features include "super thin aluminum alloy design, switchable NVIDIA and Intel GPUs, performance 8th-gen CPus, 15" and 17" IPS display options and up to 32GB of memory",