Month: August 2016

We tested the latest Mint on this beauty: Dell's XPS 13 Developer's Edition (2016). (credit: Scott Gilbertson)

The newly released Mint 18 is a major upgrade. Not only has the Linux Mint project improved Mint's dueling desktops (Cinnamon and MATE), but the group's latest work impacts all underlying systems. With Mint 18, Linux Mint has finally moved its base software system from Ubuntu 14.04 to the new Ubuntu 16.04.

Upgrading to the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu means, as with the Mint 17.x series, the Mint 18.x release cycle is now locked to its base for two years. Rather than tracking alongside Ubuntu, Mint 18 and all subsequent releases will stick with Ubuntu 16.04. Mint won't necessarily get as out of date as Ubuntu LTS releases tend to by the end of their two-year cycle, but this setup does mean nothing major is going to change for quite a while.

If the Mint 17.x release series is anything to judge by, that's a good thing. Stability allows Mint to focus on its own projects rather than spending development time creating patches for every Ubuntu update. That should be especially good news for the 18.x series since Ubuntu plans to make some major changes in the next two years: moving to a new display server (Mir) and updating its own Unity desktop to Unity 8 are chief among the priorities. Many of those initiatives will impact components that affect downstream users like Mint.

(credit: Strava)

It's no secret that apps and programs on your smartphone have a lot of information about you, and now some of them are letting you broadcast some of that information to the world. Facebook Live is a good example of this friendly, social intrusion, but is wasn't the first example of this, and it certainly won't be the last. But rather than just exploiting the social aspect of these features, some companies are figuring out how to make broadcasting personal information work for the broadcaster. Strava is the latest company to do this with a new feature called Strava Beacon, which lets athletes share their real-time location with anyone they want.

This is mostly a safety feature—when Beacon is activated, users can go into the Strava app and select three contacts they want to send a notification text to with their location. The contacts can be anyone in their smartphone, so you’re not limited to just Strava user friends. Once selected, a text message will form, either with Strava’s default language or your own custom message, with a link to a real-time map of your location. The link leads to a page on Strava’s website where the people you sent the link to can see where you are as you move throughout your run or ride.

The link will always open in a browser, so your recipients don’t need to have the Strava app—or even be a Strava user—to see your location. This will come in handy for those parents and relatives who aren’t into fitness or who aren’t too tech savvy. The link also isn’t limited to the three contacts you choose within the Strava Beacon feature. You can copy and paste the link anywhere you want, but Strava advises caution when doing this. Common sense is key—if you don’t want strangers seeing where you are, maybe don’t post the link to Facebook or Twitter.