Month: May 2020

Enlarge / A Long March 5B rocket lifts off from the Wenchang launch site on China's southern Hainan Island on May 5, 2020. (credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images)

A week ago, China launched the newest version of its largest rocket, the Long March 5B, from its southernmost spaceport. The launch proceeded normally and represented another success for China as it seeks to build a robust human spaceflight program. Over the next few years, this rocket will launch components of a modular space station.

Notably, because of this rocket's design, its large core stage reached orbit after the launch. Typically during a launch, a rocket's large first stage will provide the majority of thrust during the first minutes of launch and then drop away before reaching an orbital velocity, falling back into the ocean. Then, a smaller second stage takes over and pushes the rocket's payload into orbit.

However, the Long March 5B rocket has no second stage. For last week's launch, then, four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters generated most of the thrust off the launch pad. After this, the core stage with two YF-77 main engines pushed an experimental spacecraft into orbit before the payload separated.

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  Logic Pro X 10.5. [credit: Apple ]

Today, Apple announced Logic Pro X 10.5, a major update to its popular digital audio workstation (DAW) for macOS. Key new features include a pro version of Live Loops, a new drum-machine-like tool (Step Sequencer) for making drum beats and other sounds, and some significant updates to the Sampler tool.

Taking a page right out of competing DAW Ableton Live’s book, Live Loops offers a grid-based approach to plotting out loops and samples. Apple also introduced a new feature called Remix FX that allows application of filters in a way that works for live performance. Live performance is something most music producers feel competing DAW Ableton Live excels at, compared to Logic, so this reads as an effort to close that gap.

The Sampler tool has been updated with a new interface and some small new features. The company also offers Quick Sampler here, a tool that lets you pull audio samples from places like the Voice Memos app (and elsewhere) and turn them into playable instruments within Logic.

Enlarge / Hellfire missiles not included. (credit: Flickr user Mike)

Recently, we took a look at the Caddy Web server. Today, we're going to back things up a little bit and look at the A from the classic LAMP stack: the Apache Web server.

Apache has a bad reputation for being old, crusty, and low-performance—but this idea mostly stems from the persistence of ancient guides that still show users how to set it up in extremely antiquated ways. In this guide, we're going to set up an Ubuntu 20.04 droplet at Digital Ocean with an Apache Web server set up properly and capable of handling serious levels of traffic.

Installation

After spinning up a new $5/mo VM (Digital Ocean calls them "droplets"), the first thing we'll do is what anyone should do with any brand new Linux server. We check for and then install upgrades, and—since one of them was a new Linux kernel version—reboot the server.