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This year, students may need extra help to make college a reality. From a report: Amid the coronavirus crisis and sky-high unemployment rates, less than half of families feel confident in their ability to meet the costs of higher education, according to education lender Sallie Mae. About 69% of parents and 55% of students entering college in the fall said Covid-19 has impacted their ability to pay for school, according to a separate poll of 6,500-plus high school seniors and their families by NitroCollege.com, a site that helps students and parents navigate college admissions and financial aid. Already, nearly 40% of parents have tapped their child's college fund to help cover expenses due to economic fallout from the pandemic, according to another report by LendingTree. Yet fewer families have applied for financial aid. Only a few more weeks remain until the June 30 deadline for submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for the upcoming fall semester. The FAFSA form serves as the gateway to all federal money, including loans, work-study and grants, which are the most desirable kind of assistance. With just about a month to go, the number of applications is down 2.8% from last year, with roughly 55,000 fewer high school seniors applying, according to the National College Attainment Network.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Systemd Will Change How Your Linux Home Directory Works  How-To Geek

We get lots of questions every day - in our Webmaster office hours, at conferences, in the webmaster forum and on Twitter. One of the more frequent themes among these questions are links and especially those generated through JavaScript.

In our Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks video series, we recently addressed the most frequently asked questions on Links and JavaScript:

Note: This video has subtitles in many languages available, too.

During the live premiere, we also had a Q&A session with a few additional questions from the community and decided to publish those questions and our answers along with some other frequently asked questions around the topic of links and JavaScript.

What kinds of links can Googlebot discover?

Googlebot parses the HTML of a page, looking for links to discover the URLs of related pages to crawl. To discover these pages, you need to make your links actual HTML links, as described in the webmaster guidelines on links.

What kind of URLs are okay for Googlebot?

Googlebot extracts the URLs from the href attribute of your links and then enqueues them for crawling. This means that the URL needs to be resolvable or simply put: The URL should work when put into the address bar of a browser. See the webmaster guidelines on links for more information.

Is it okay to use JavaScript to create and inject links?

As long as these links fulfill the criteria as per our webmaster guidelines and outlined above, yes.

When Googlebot renders a page, it executes JavaScript and then discovers the links generated from JavaScript, too. It's worth mentioning that link discovery can happen twice: Before and after JavaScript executed, so having your links in the initial server response allows Googlebot to discover your links a bit faster.

Does Googlebot understand fragment URLs?

Fragment URLs, also known as "hash URLs", are technically fine, but might not work the way you expect with Googlebot.

Fragments are supposed to be used to address a piece of content within the page and when used for this purpose, fragments are absolutely fine.

Sometimes developers decide to use fragments with JavaScript to load different content than what is on the page without the fragment. That is not what fragments are meant for and won't work with Googlebot. See the JavaScript SEO guide on how the History API can be used instead.

Does Googlebot still use the AJAX crawling scheme?

The AJAX crawling scheme has long been deprecated. Do not rely on it for your pages.

The recommendation for this is to use the History API and migrate your web apps to URLs that do not rely on fragments to load different content.

Stay tuned for more Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks

This post was inspired by the first installment of the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks, but make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos to come! We definitely recommend joining the premieres on YouTube to participate in the live chat and Q&A session for each episode!

If you are interested to see more Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks, check out the video Google Monetized Policies and subscribe to our channel to stay tuned for the next one!

Join the webmaster community in the upcoming video premieres and in the YouTube comments!

Posted by Martin Splitt, Googlebot whisperer at the Google Search Relations team

SHIFT13mi Linux tablet now available to pre-order  Geeky Gadgets

4 Weeks Linux & Unix Training in West Chester | June 1, 2020 - June 24, 2020 - Things to do in Chester County, PA  MyChesCo

COVID-19: Potential impact on Linux-based Set Top Box Market 2019- Global Market Report with Market Size, Market Growth, Industry Chain Structure, Trends, Challenges and Market Estimation to 2028  News Distinct

COVID-19: Potential impact on Linux-based Set Top Box Market 2019- Global Market Report with Market Size, Market Growth, Industry Chain Structure, Trends, Challenges and Market Estimation to 2028  News Distinct

COVID-19: Potential impact on Linux-based Set Top Box Market 2019- Global Market Report with Market Size, Market Growth, Industry Chain Structure, Trends, Challenges and Market Estimation to 2028  News Distinct

COVID-19: Potential impact on Linux-based Set Top Box Market 2019- Global Market Report with Market Size, Market Growth, Industry Chain Structure, Trends, Challenges and Market Estimation to 2028  News Distinct

COVID-19: Potential impact on Linux-based Set Top Box Market 2019- Global Market Report with Market Size, Market Growth, Industry Chain Structure, Trends, Challenges and Market Estimation to 2028  News Distinct

{Updated} I want to start command called foo, and kill it if still running after given DURATION in seconds. How do I run a command a time Limit on Linux? How do I run a Linux command, and have it timeout (abort) after N seconds? Can you give timeout command examples in Linux?

The post Linux run a command with a time limit (timeout) appeared first on nixCraft.

ODYSSEY expandable mini PC supports Win10, Linux and Arduino  Geeky Gadgets

Linux Kodachi 7.0 'Katana' Released: Browse The Internet Anonymously  Fossbytes

Linux chief says he's picking AMD over Intel  TechRadar

Now that I set up an LXD container, how do I backup and restore LXD containers running on Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/CentOS Linux server?

The post How to backup and restore LXD containers appeared first on nixCraft.

My family enjoys watching Kid’s Baking Championship on Food Network, and I’m always impressed how many of these 8-13 year-old contestants have a side baking business! Last weekend, the WSJ article How Etsy Became America’s Unlikeliest Breadbasket profiled home bakers selling their baked goods online through Etsy. That could be a perfect business education for a teenager, including concepts like business plans, accounting, customer service, online marketing, and basic coding.

Cottage food laws. Many states allow exemptions that don’t require you to use a commercial kitchen to sell “non-potentially hazardous” items like bread and other baked goods. I knew about “cottage food laws” in terms of church bake sales, but I wasn’t aware that some states have much more relaxed laws than others. For example, some states require you to sell in-person and you must hand-deliver it yourself to a customer within your home state. However, the following states allow you to sell bread and other baked goods via online marketplace and deliver them via mail:

• Colorado
• Idaho
• Iowa
• Maine
• Maryland
• Nebraska
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Tennessee
• Utah
• Vermont
• Virginia
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin

Source: Forrager.com, May 2020. Note that some states will require an annual home inspection and/or permits.

The WSJ article profiled the Etsy shop ChickensintheRoad by Suzanne McMinn. She lives in West Virginia, which has some of the most open cottage food laws. McMinn shares some of her Etsy history in this blog post. Both an experienced baker and soapmaker, she realized that the competition was much more intense in the soap category. She now specializes in fresh baked goods as well as various dry food and seasoning mixes.

What is a hand-crafter worth? Can you buy biscuits–or cookies or fudge or soap or bread of whatever–for less at the grocery store? YES. But you don’t get the hand-crafter. You don’t get the individual batch per order. You don’t get homemade. You don’t get that attention to detail. You don’t get that packaging that makes every order of a dozen biscuits (or whatever) look like a present under the Christmas tree. That is what you get from a hand-crafter on Etsy.

Making the most out of your valuable knowledge. Thanks to a recent profile on Good Morning America, it looks like McMinn isn’t even taking any new orders until late June. She’s booked solid! Her skills are definitely valuable, but I can’t help but notice that if she is not baking, she’s not making money. She’s still selling her time for money.

What I would love to see her do is create a series of online videos for making some of her specialties, and then charge for access. Yes, there are many videos for free on YouTube, but what about those superfan customers that want to recreate her exact biscuits? The best part is that it would only take a one-time commitment of say, 10 hours. After that, the upside is unlimited.

Actually, you know what would make the most money? A full digital course that would teach others how to start their own online home baking business. For example, her blog post also revealed the triple-wrapping method that keeps her biscuits at maximum freshness even when delivered in a USPS box. I’m sure she has make many mistakes along the way that would be valuable to know ahead of time. You could charge anywhere from $100 or far upwards depending on how much detailed, step-by-step content was included. Again, the upfront cost is fixed and the upside is unlimited. She could make $1,000, but she could also make $100,000 if she sold 1,000 copies over time. She could always keep on baking, but now she’d also be making money 24 hours a day, even when she’s sleeping.

Indeed, she’s pretty funny and I appreciate her sense of humor:

Remember that year, when I first moved to Sassafras Farm, and all the pipes froze, and I had no money, and it was like, Kids, be happy we have running water, that is your Christmas present? This year is almost like that, but with running water, and it’s like, Kids, be happy there are a couple leftover cookies after I make this batch I’m shipping, cuz other than that, you can just starve! OR PAY ME BECAUSE I CHARGE FOR FOOD.

There’s nothing like someone telling you that what you’re doing isn’t worth what you’re charging right when you’re dying of exhaustion from doing it.

Anyhow, I thought this was a cool example of how someone’s special knowledge can be turned into a living by taking advantage of new opportunities, in this case new cottage food laws and the Etsy online marketplace. I’m also always trying to show my kids ways to decouple time and money, and not forever work for an hourly wage.

“The editorial content here is not provided by any of the companies mentioned, and has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities. Opinions expressed here are the author's alone. This email may contain links through which we are compensated when you click on or are approved for offers.”

Creative Business Idea: Selling Baked Goods Online via Etsy from My Money Blog.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, Virgin Orbit attempted the first full flight of its orbital payload launch system, which includes a modified Boeing 747 called 'Cosmic Girl' that acts as a carrier aircraft for its air-launched rocket LauncherOne. While Virgin Orbit has flown Cosmic Girl and LauncherOne previously for different tests and demonstrations, this was the first end-to-end system test. Unfortunately, that test ended much earlier than planned -- just shortly after the LauncherOne rocket was released from Cosmic Girl. Cosmic Girl took off just before 12 PM PT (3 PM ET) from Mojave Air and Spaceport in California. The aircraft was piloted by Chief Test Pilot Kelly Latimer, along with her co-pilot Todd Ericson. The aircraft then flew to its target release point, where LauncherOne did manage a "clean release" from the carrier craft as planned at around 12:50 PM PT (3:50 PM ET), but Virgin noted just a few minutes later that the mission was subsequently "terminated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The moon visits one of the spring constellations this week by traveling through the faint constellation of Virgo, the virgin. On 1 and 2 June, our natural satellite will pass close to Virgo's only bright star, Spica. Memorise its position and then return in the days to come to pick out the constellation's other, fainter stars. Spica is one of the 20 brightest stars in the night sky, located at a distance of about 250 light years. A blue giant star, containing around 10 times the Sun's mass, it is more than 20,000 times more luminous than our star.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is bent on bringing Linux desktop to Windows 10 users - Video  ZDNet

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has shared few usage numbers since acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion in October 2011. Skype's monthly active users, for example, haven't been updated since August 2015 -- 300 million has been the number for years. But the coronavirus has shaken up the communications space for everyone, even Skype. With usage exploding due to COVID-19 and working from home policies, the company has been eager to talk up Skype along with Microsoft Teams, its fastest-growing business app ever. Microsoft has now confirmed plans to invest in Skype, including adding new features, regardless of its plans with Teams.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.