Steinar H. Gunderson: AV1 live streaming: The bitrate difference
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-08-02-23-11_av1_live_streaming_the_bitrate_difference.html
August 2, 2022, 9:15 PM
As part of looking into AV1, I wanted to get a feel for what kind of bitrate
to aim for. Of course, Intel and others have made exquisite graphs containing
results for many different encoders (although they might have wanted to spend
a little more pixels on that latest one…), but you always feel suspicious
that the results might be a bit cherry-picked. In particular, SVT-AV1 always
seems to run on pretty wide machines (in this case, 48 cores/96 threads),
and I wondered whether this was the prim...
--------------------
Bastian Venthur: Keychron keyboards fixed on Linux
https://venthur.de/2022-08-01-keychron-keyboards-fixed-on-linux.html
August 1, 2022, 8:00 PM
Last year, I wrote about on how to get my
buggy Keychron C1 keyboard working properly on Linux by setting a kernel module
parameter. Afterwards, I contacted Hans de Goede since he was the last
one that contributed a major patch to the relevant kernel module. After some
debugging, it turned out that the Keychron keyboards are indeed misbehaving
when set to Windows mode. Almost a year later, Bryan Cain provided a
patch fixing the behavior, which has now been merged to the Linux kernel in
5.19.
Tha...
--------------------
Sergio Talens-Oliag: Using Git Server Hooks on GitLab CE to Validate Tags
https://blogops.mixinet.net/posts/using_git_server_hooks/
August 1, 2022, 11:00 AM
Since a long time ago I’ve been a
gitlab-ce user, in fact I’ve set
it up on three of the last four companies I’ve worked for (initially I installed
it using the omnibus packages on a
debian server but on the last two places I moved to
the docker based installation,
as it is easy to maintain and we don’t need a big installation as the teams
using it are small).
On the company I work for now (kyso) we are using it
to host all our internal repositories and to do all the CI/CD work (the
auto...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: August.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Aug-1.html.en#2022-Aug-1-09:07:37
August 1, 2022, 12:07 AM
August. I think I finally understood what's going on in io_uring.
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links July 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/07/31/links-july-2022/
July 31, 2022, 11:51 AM
Darren Hayes wrote an interesting article about his battle with depression and his journey to accepting being gay [1]. Savage Garden had some great songs, Affirmation is relevant to this topic.
Rorodi wrote an interesting article about the biggest crypto lending company being a Ponzi scheme [2]. One thing I find particularly noteworthy is how obviously scammy it is, even to the extent of having an ex porn star as an executive! Celsuis is now in the process of going bankrupt, 7 months after that ...
--------------------
Joachim Breitner: The Via Alpina red trail through Slovenia
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/791-The_Via_Alpina_red_trail_through_Slovenia
July 31, 2022, 9:19 AM
This July my girlfriend and I hiked the Slovenian part of the Red Trail of the Via Alpina, from the edge of the Julian Alps to Trieste, and I’d like to share some observations and tips that we might have found useful before our trip.
Our most favorite camp spot
Getting there
As we traveled with complete camping gear and wanted to stay in our tent, we avoided the high alpine parts of the trail and started just where the trail came down from the Alps and entered the Karst. A great way to get ...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Workstations With ECC RAM
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/07/31/workstations-ecc-ram/
July 31, 2022, 8:27 AM
The last new PC I bought was a Dell PowerEdge T110II in 2013. That model had been out for a while and I got it for under $2000. Since then the CPI has gone up by about 20% so it’s probably about $2000 in today’s money. Currently Dell has a special on the T150 tower server (the latest replacement for the T110II) which has a G6405T CPU that isn’t even twice as fast as the i3-3220 (3746 vs 2219) in the T110II according to passmark.com (AKA cpubenchmark.net). The special price is $2600. I can�...
--------------------
Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.5.10
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4284
July 30, 2022, 9:35 PM
Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
Get it on github.
These release notes are also available on the git-cinnabar wiki.
What’s new since 0.5.9?
Fixed exceptions during config initialization.
Fixed swapped error messages.
Fixed correctness issues with bundle chunks with no delta node.
This is probably the last 0.5.x release before 0.6.0....
--------------------
Ian Jackson: chiark’s skip-skip-cross-up-grade
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11840.html
July 30, 2022, 11:27 AM
Two weeks ago I upgraded chiark from Debian jessie i386 to bullseye amd64, after nearly 30 years running Debian i386. This went really quite well, in fact!
Background
chiark is my “colo” - a server I run, which lives in a data centre in London. It hosts ~200 users with shell accounts, various websites and mailing lists, moderators for a number of USENET newsgroups, and countless other services. chiark’s internal setup is designed to enable my users to do a maximum number of exciting things...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/07/new-developers-2022-06.html
July 29, 2022, 2:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Geoffroy Berret (kaliko)
Arnaud Ferraris (aferraris)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Alec Leanas
Christopher Michael Obbard
Lance Lin
Stefan Kropp
Matteo Bini
Tino Didriksen
Congratulations!...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 220 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-220-released/
July 29, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 220. This version includes the following changes:
* Support Haskell 9.x series files and update the test files to match. Thanks
to Scott Talbert for the relevant info about the new format.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#309)
* Fix a regression introduced in diffoscope version 207 where diffoscope
would crash if one directory contained a directory that wasn't in the
other. Thanks to Alderico Gal...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: UEFI rootkits and UEFI secure boot
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60654.html
July 28, 2022, 10:19 PM
Kaspersky describes a UEFI-implant used to attack Windows systems. Based on it appearing to require patching of the system firmware image, they hypothesise that it's propagated by manually dumping the contents of the system flash, modifying it, and then reflashing it back to the board. This probably requires physical access to the board, so it's not especially terrifying - if you're in a situation where someone's sufficiently enthusiastic about targeting you that they're reflashing your computer...
--------------------
Dominique Dumont: How I investigated connection hogs on Kubernetes
https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2022/07/28/how-i-investigated-connection-hogs-on-kubernetes/
July 28, 2022, 12:10 PM
Hi
My name is Dominhique Dumont, DevOps freelance in Grenoble, France.
My goal is to share my experience regarding a production issue that occurred last week where my client complained that the applications was very slow and sometime showed 5xx errors. The production service is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and use a MongoDB on ScaleGrid.
I reproduced the issue on my side and found that the API calls were randomly failing due to timeouts on server side.
The server logs were showing som...
--------------------
Vincent Bernat: ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup: Akvorado
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2022-clickhouse-meetup-akvorado
July 27, 2022, 9:00 PM
Here are the slides I presented for a ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup in
July 2022, hosted by Altinity. They are about Akvorado, a
network flow collector and visualizer, and notably on how it relies on
ClickHouse, a column-oriented database.
Slides in PDF format
The meetup was recorded and available on YouTube. Here is the part
relevant to my presentation, with subtitles:1
I got a few questions about how to get information from the higher
layers, like HTTP. As my use case for Akvorado was at th...
--------------------
Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2022
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/07/26/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-june-2022/
July 26, 2022, 8:38 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
No any major updates on running projects.Two 1, 2 projects are in the pipeline now.Tryton project is in a review phase. Gradle projects is still fighting in work.
In June, we put aside 2254 EUR to fund Debian projects.
We’re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS ...
--------------------
Michael Ablassmeier: Added remote capability to virtnbdbackup
https://abbbi.github.io//virtnbdbackup-remote/
July 26, 2022, 12:00 AM
Latest virtnbdbackup version now
supports backing up remote libvirt hosts, too. No installation on the
hypervisor required anymore:
virtnbdbackup -U qemu+ssh://usr@hypervisor/system -d vm1 -o /backup/vm1
Same applies for restore operations, other enhancements are:
New backup mode auto which allows
easy backup rotation.
Option to freeze only specific filesystems within backed up domain.
Remote backup via dedicated network: use --nbd-ip to bind the remote
NDB service to an specific inte...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: DebConf22 closes in Prizren and DebConf23 dates announced
https://bits.debian.org/2022/07/debconf22-closes.html
July 25, 2022, 8:30 AM
On Sunday 24 July 2022, the annual Debian Developers and
Contributors Conference came to a close.
Hosting more than 210 attendees
from 38 different countries over a combined 91 event talks, discussion
sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and
activities, DebConf22 was a large
success.
The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 10 July to 16
July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person
collaboration towards developing Debian. In particular,...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: AV1 live streaming: Exploring SVT-AV1 rate control
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-07-24-15-40_av1_live_streaming_exploring_svt_av1_rate_control.html
July 24, 2022, 2:40 PM
I'm looking into AV1 live streaming these days; it's still very early,
but it looks like enough of the required parts may finally align,
and it seems it's the way I'll have to go to get to that next quality
level. (Specifically, I'd like to go from 720p60 to 1080p60 for sports,
and it seems this is hard to do under H.264 as-is without making pretty
big concessions in terms of artifacts/smudges, or else jack up the
bitrate so much that clients will start having viewing problems.)
After some brie...
--------------------
Wouter Verhelst: Planet Grep now running PtLink
https://grep.be/blog//en/computer/Planet_Grep_now_running_PtLink/
July 23, 2022, 6:48 PM
Almost 2 decades ago, Planet Debian was
created using the "planetplanet" RSS aggregator. A short while later, I
created Planet Grep using the same software.
Over the years, the blog aggregator landscape has changed a bit. First
of all, planetplanet was abandoned, forked into Planet
Venus, and then abandoned again.
Second, the world of blogging (aka the "blogosphere") has disappeared
much, and the more modern world uses things like "Social Networks", etc,
making blogs less relevant these days.
...
--------------------
Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf 22 photos
http://aigarius.com/blog/2022/07/22/debconf22-photos/
July 22, 2022, 1:54 PM
Finally after a long break, the in-person Debconf is a thing again, this time
Debconf 22 is happening in Prizren, Kosovo.
And it has been my pleasure to again be here and take lots of pictures of the
event and of the surroundings.
The photos can be found in this Google Photo shared album and also on
this git-lfs share.
But the main photographic delight, as always is the DebConf 22 Group Photo.
And here it is!!!
You can also see it in:
on Google Photos
on git-lfs...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Relaying mail through debian.org
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-07-20-debian-relay-no-dkim/
July 20, 2022, 5:22 PM
Back in 2020, I wrote this article about using DKIM to sign outgoing
debian.org mail. This worked well
for me for a while: outgoing mail was signed with DKIM and somehow was
delivered. Maybe. Who knows.
But now we have a relay server which makes this kind of moot. So
I have changed my configuration to use that relay instead of sending
email on my own. It seems more reliable that mail seems to be coming
from a real debian.org machine, so I'm hoping this will have better
reputation than my curren...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Deconstruction of the DAM hat
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/debian/deconstruction-of-the-dam-hat
July 20, 2022, 5:55 AM
Slides
Talk page
Video of the talk
Further reading
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
You cannot create or curate a community where everyone is welcome
Talk notes
Intro
I'm not speaking for the whole of DAM
Motivation in part is personal frustration, and need to set boundaries and
negotiate expectations
Debian Account Managers
history
Responsibility for official membership
approve account creation
manage the New Member Process and nm.debian.org
close MIA accounts
occasional emergency te...
--------------------
Russell Coker: DDC as a KVM Switch
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/07/19/ddc-switch/
July 19, 2022, 11:55 AM
With the recent resurgence in Covid19 I’ve been working from home a lot and using both my work laptop and personal PC on the same monitor. HDMI KVM switches start at $150 and I didn’t feel like buying one. So I wrote a script to change inputs on my monitor. The following script locks the session on the local machine and switches the monitor’s input to the other machine. I ran the command “ddcutil vcpinfo| grep Input” which shows that (on my monitor at least) 60 is the VCP for input. T...
--------------------
Craig Small: Linux Memory Statistics
https://dropbear.xyz/2022/07/19/linux-memory-statistics/
July 19, 2022, 11:53 AM
Pretty much everyone who has spent some time on a command line in Linux would have looked at the free command. This command provides some overall statistics on the memory and how it is used. Typical output looks something like this:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 32717924 3101156 26950016 143608 2666752 29011928
Swap: 1000444 0 1000444
Memory sits in the first row after the headers then we have the...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: DebConf22 welcomes its sponsors!
https://bits.debian.org/2022/07/debconf22-welcomes-sponsors.html
July 18, 2022, 7:00 AM
DebConf22 is taking place in Prizren, Kosovo,
from 17th to 24th July, 2022.
It is the 23rd edition of the Debian conference and organizers are working hard
to create another interesting and fruitful event for attendees.
We would like to warmly welcome the sponsors of DebConf22, and
introduce you to them.
We have four Platinum sponsors.
Our first Platinum sponsor is Lenovo.
As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products,
including smartphones, tablets, PCs and ...
--------------------
Martin-Éric Racine: Trying to chainload iPXE on old Etherboot hardware
http://q-funk.blogspot.com/2022/07/trying-to-chainload-ipxe-on-old.html
July 17, 2022, 7:10 PM
Among my collection of PC hardware, I have a few rarities whose netboot implementation predates PXE. Since I recently managed to configure dnsmasq as a potent TFTP and PXE server, I figured that I'd try chainloading iPXE via BOOTP options. This required preparing a boot image using antiquated tools:
$ sudo mkelf-linux --param=autoboot --output=/srv/tftp/ipxe.nbi /srv/tftp/ipxe.lkrn
The host succesufully loads the boot image, except that the iPXE blob fails to find the network card:
Any idea...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: DebConf22 starts today in Prizren
https://bits.debian.org/2022/07/debconf22-starts.html
July 17, 2022, 7:00 AM
DebConf22, the 23rd annual
Debian Conference, is taking place in Prizren, Kosovo
from July 17th to 24th, 2022.
Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at
Innovation and Training Park (ITP)
in Prizren, Kosovo, to participate and work in a conference exclusively
run by volunteers.
Today the main conference starts with over 270 attendants expected
and 82 activities scheduled,
including 45-minute and 20-minute talks and team meetings ("BoF"),
workshops, and a job fair, as well...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Trang
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/trang.html
July 17, 2022, 4:06 AM
Review: Trang, by Mary Sisson

Series:
Trang #1


Publisher:
Mary Sisson


Copyright:
2011


Printing:
December 2013


ASIN:
B004I6DAQ8


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
374

In 2113, a radio mapping satellite near the Titan station disappeared. It
then reappeared five days later, apparently damaged and broadcasting a
signal that made computers crash. The satellite was immediately sent back
to the Space Authority b...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: Automatic LinuxCNC servo PID tuning?
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html
July 16, 2022, 8:30 PM
While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the
LinuxCNC
PID
controller, I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values
that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is. It
proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded
in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X
and Y to move accurately and reliably. But while climbing up this
rather steep learning curve, I discovered that some motor control
systems are ...
--------------------
Thomas Goirand: My work during debcamp
http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=402
July 16, 2022, 8:22 PM
I arrived in Prizren late on Wednesday. Here’s what I did during debcamp (so over 3 days). I hope this post just motivates others to contribute more to Debian.
At least 2 DDs want to upload packages that need a new version of python3-jsonschema (ie: version > 4.x). Unfortunately, version 4 broke a few packages. I therefore uploaded it to Experimental a few months/week, so I could see the result of autopkgtest reading the pseudo excuse page. And it showed a few packages broke. Here’s th...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: INN 2.7.0
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-07/001.html
July 16, 2022, 6:16 PM
This is the first major release of the INN news server package since 2015.
It incorporates tons of work on just about every part of INN, ranging from
a brand new overview backend contributed by Bo Lindbergh through
Cancel-Lock support contributed by Julien ÉLIE to numerous smaller changes
in configuration files, protocol support, and overall simplification.
Since this represents seven years of development, there are too many major
changes to summarize in a short blog post, so I'll simply lin...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Rust GUI advice
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-07-16-11-13_rust_gui_advice.html
July 16, 2022, 10:13 AM
The piece is largely about Rust, but Raph Levien's blog post about Rust GUI toolkits
contains some of the most thoughtful writings on GUI toolkits that I've seen
in a while, regardless of language. Recommended.
--------------------
Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.5.9
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4282
July 15, 2022, 10:11 PM
Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
Get it on github.
These release notes are also available on the git-cinnabar wiki.
What’s new since 0.5.8?
Updated git to 2.37.1 for the helper.
Various python 3 fixes.
Fixed stream bundle
Added python and py.exe as executables tried on top of python3 and python2.
Improved handling of ill-formed local urls.
Fixed using old mercurial l...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: (Unofficial) Debian Perl Sprint 2022
https://bits.debian.org/2022/07/debian-perl-sprint-2022.html
July 15, 2022, 3:35 PM
Three members of the Debian Perl Group
met in Hamburg between May 23 and May 30 2022 as part of the
Debian Reunion Hamburg
to continue perl development work for Bookworm and to work on QA tasks across
our 3800+ packages.
The participants had a good time and met other Debian friends. The
sprint was also productive:
pkg-perl-tools and dh-make-perl were improved and extended.
More than 50 uploads were done, and more than 30 bugs were fixed or at least triaged.
autopkgtests were added to lots of p...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: So we come to Lisp
https://blog.steve.fi/so_we_come_to_lisp.html
July 15, 2022, 1:00 AM
Recently I've been working with simple/trivial scripting languages, and I guess I finally reached a point where I thought "Lisp? Why not". One of the reasons for recent experimentation was thinking about the kind of minimalism that makes implementing a language less work - being able to actually use the language to write itself.
FORTH is my recurring example, because implementing it mostly means writing a virtual machine which consists of memory ("cells") along with a pair of stacks, and some...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 219 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-219-released/
July 15, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 219. This version includes the following changes:
* Don't traceback if we encounter an invalid Unicode character in Haskell
versioning headers. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#307)
* Update various copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Patryk Cisek: Playing with NitroKey 3 -- PC runner using USBIP
https://prezu.ca/post/2022-07-13-nk3-pc-usbip-1/
July 14, 2022, 11:01 PM
I’ve been wanting to use my brand new NitroKey 3, but TOTP is not supported yet. So, I’m looking to implement it myself, since firmware and tooling are open-source.
NitroKey 3’s firmware is based on Trussed framework. In essence, it’s been designed so that anyone can implement an independent Trussed application. Each such application is like a module that can be added to Trussed-based product. So if I write a Trussed app, I’d be able to add it to NK3’s firmware....
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: rfoaas 2.3.2: New upstream accessors
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/07/13#rfoaas_2.3.2
July 13, 2022, 11:08 PM
FOAAS by now moved to version 2.3.2 in its repo. This releases 2.3.2 of rfoaas catches up, and brings the first release in about two and a half years.
This 2.3.2 release of FOAAS brings us six new REST access points: absolutely(), dense(), dumbledore(), lowpoly(), understand(), and yeah(). Along with these new functions, documentation and tests were updated.
My CRANberries service provides a diff to the previous CRAN release. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker. More ba...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-06/
July 13, 2022, 1:58 PM
Welcome to the June 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
Save the date!
Despite several delays, we are pleased to announce dates for our in-person summit this year:
November 1st 2022 — November 3rd 2022
The...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Responsible stewardship of the UEFI secure boot ecosystem
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html
July 12, 2022, 5:50 AM
After I mentioned that Lenovo are now shipping laptops that only boot Windows by default, a few people pointed to a Lenovo document that says:Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default."Secured-core" is a term used to describe machines that meet a certain set of Microsoft requirements around firmware security, and by and large it's a good thing - devices that meet these requirements are resilient against a whole bun...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: 20220709 2100 UTC - Finished Debian media testing for the day
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/07/20220709-2100-utc-finished-debian-media.html
July 9, 2022, 9:07 PM
 I've just finished my last test: Sledge is finishing his and will then push the release out. Today's been a bit slow and steady - but we've finally got there.Thanks, as ever, due to the release team for actually giving us an update, the press team for announcements - and, of course, the various sponsors, administrators and maintainers of Debian infrastructure like cdimage.debian.org and the CD building machines.It's been a quiet release for the media team in terms of participation - we've not ...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Testing 11.4 Debian media images - almost finished - 20220709 1933 UTC
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/07/testing-114-debian-media-images-almost.html
July 9, 2022, 7:34 PM
 We're flagging a bit now, I think but close to the end. The standard Debian images caused no problems: Sledge and I are just finishing up the last few live images to test now.Thanks, as ever, to the crew: RattusRattus and Isy, Sledge struggling through feeling awful. No debian-edu testing today, unfortunately, but that almost never breaks anyway.Everyone's getting geared up for Kosovo - you'll see the other three there with any luck - and you'd catch all of us at the BBQ in Cambridge. It's goi...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: As has become traditional - blogging as part of the media release for Debian 11.4 - 202207091436 UTC
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/07/as-has-become-traditional-blogging-as.html
July 9, 2022, 2:37 PM
 A lower profile release today: Sledge working in the background as affected by COVID. RattusRattus and Isy doing sterling service on the other side of Cambridge, /me over here.Testing on the standard install media is pretty much done: Isy, Andy and Sledge have moved on to testing the live images.Stupidly hot for UK - it's 28 degrees indoors with windows open.All good so far :)
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.9 on CRAN: Regular Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/07/09#rcpp_1.0.9
July 9, 2022, 2:08 PM
The Rcpp team is please to announce the newest release 1.0.9 of Rcpp which hit CRAN late yesterday, and has been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course at r2u. The release was prepared om July 2, but it took a few days to clear a handful of spurious errors as false positives with CRAN — this can when the set of reverse dependencies is so large, and the CRAN team remains busy. ...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by default
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59931.html
July 8, 2022, 6:49 AM
I finally managed to get hold of a Thinkpad Z13 to examine a functional implementation of Microsoft's Pluton security co-processor. Trying to boot Linux from a USB stick failed out of the box for no obvious reason, but after further examination the cause became clear - the firmware defaults to not trusting bootloaders or drivers signed with the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA key. This means that given the default firmware configuration, nothing other than Windows will boot. It also means that you w...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 218 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-218-released/
July 8, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 218. This version includes the following changes:
* Improve output of Markdown and reStructuredText to use code blocks with
syntax highlighting. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#306)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Musick To Play In The Dark 2
https://jmtd.net/log/Musick_To_Play_In_The_Dark_2/
July 7, 2022, 1:54 PM
This took a while to arrive! After the success of the reissue of
Coil's Musick To Play In The Dark, it was inevitable that the
second edition would also be reissued. The pre-order opened late
November 2021 and mine arrived in late April this year.
I was toying with the idea of ordering one of the most exclusive editions
direct from DAIS Records, in particular the
glow in the dark one, but with international shipping the cost was pretty high.
I went with a UK distributor
(Boomkat)
instea...
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Russ Allbery: Review: A Master of Djinn
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-26767-6.html
July 6, 2022, 3:04 AM
Review: A Master of Djinn, by P. Djèlí Clark

Series:
Dead Djinn Universe #1


Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
2021


ISBN:
1-250-26767-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
391

A Master of Djinn is the first novel in the Dead Djinn Universe,
but (as you might guess from the series title) is a direct sequel to the
novelette "A Dead Djinn in Cairo". The
novelette is not as good as the novel, but I recommend reading it first
f...
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Alberto García: Running the Steam Deck’s OS in a virtual machine using QEMU
https://blogs.igalia.com/berto/2022/07/05/running-the-steam-decks-os-in-a-virtual-machine-using-qemu/
July 5, 2022, 7:11 PM
Introduction
The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer that runs a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS. The machine comes with SteamOS 3 (code name “holo”), which is in turn based on Arch Linux.
Although there is no SteamOS 3 installer for a generic PC (yet), it is very easy to install on a virtual machine using QEMU. This post explains how to do it.
The goal of this VM is not to play games (you can already install Steam on your computer after all) but to use SteamOS in desktop mo...
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Russ Allbery: Review: A Mirror Mended
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-76665-6.html
July 5, 2022, 2:27 AM
Review: A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow

Series:
Fractured Fables #2


Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
1-250-76665-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
129

This is a direct sequel to A Spindle
Splintered and will completely spoil that story, so start there rather
than here.
A Mirror Mended opens with a glimpse at yet another version of the
Sleeping Beauty story, this one (delightfully) a Spanish telenovela.
...
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Russ Allbery: Review: She Who Became the Sun
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-62179-8.html
July 4, 2022, 2:58 AM
Review: She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

Series:
Radiant Emperor #1


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2021


Printing:
2022


ISBN:
1-250-62179-8


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
414

In 1345 in Zhongli village, in fourth year of a drought, lived a man with
his son and his daughter, the last surviving of seven children. The son
was promised by his father to the Wuhuang Monastery on his twelfth
birthday i...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/07/my-debian-activities-in-june-2022/
July 3, 2022, 11:37 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 305 and rejected 59 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 310.
From time to time I am also looking at the list of packages to be removed. If you would like to make life easier for the people who remove packages, please make sure that the resulting dak command really makes sense. If this command consists of garbage, please adapt the Subject: of your bug report accordingly.
Also it does not make sense to file bugs to remove packages from NE...
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Martin-Éric Racine: Refactoring Debian's dhcpcd packaging
http://q-funk.blogspot.com/2022/07/refactoring-debians-dhcpcd-packaging.html
July 3, 2022, 8:57 AM
Given news that ISC's DHCP suite is getting deprecated by upstream and seeing how dhclient has never worked properly for DHCPv6, I decided to look into alternatives. ISC itself recommends Roy Maple's dhcpcd as a migration path. Sadly, Debian's package had been left unattended for a good 2 years. After refactoring the packaging, updating to the latest upstream and performing one NMU, I decided to adopt the package.
Numerous issues were exposed in the process:
Upstream's ./configure makes BSD...
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François Marier: Remote logging of Turris Omnia log messages using syslog-ng and rsyslog
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/remote-logging-turris-omnia-router/
July 2, 2022, 3:45 AM
As part of debugging an upstream connection problem I've been seeing
recently, I wanted to be able to monitor the logs from my Turris
Omnia router. Here's how I
configured it to send its logs to a server I already had on the local
network.
Server setup
The first thing I did was to open up my server's
rsyslog (Debian's default syslog server) to
remote connections since it's going to be the destination host for the
router's log messages.
I added the following to /etc/rsyslog.d/router.conf:
mod...
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Steve Kemp: An update on my simple golang TCL interpreter
https://blog.steve.fi/an_update_on_my_simple_golang_tcl_interpreter.html
July 1, 2022, 7:00 PM
So my previous post introduced a trivial interpreter for a TCL-like language.
In the past week or two I've cleaned it up, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added 100% test-coverage. I'm actually pretty happy with it now.
One of the reasons for starting this toy project was to experiment with how easy it is to extend the language using itself
Some things are simple, for example replacing this:
puts "3 x 4 = [expr 3 * 4]"
With this:
puts "3 x 4 = [* 3 4]"
Just means defining a function (proc) n...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, June 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-june-2022.html
July 1, 2022, 1:12 PM
In June I was not assigned additional hours of work by Freexian's
Debian LTS initiative, but carried over 16 hours from May and worked
all of those hours.
I spent some time triaging security issues for Linux. I tested
several security fixes for Linux 4.9 and 4.19 and submitted them for
inclusion in the upstream stable branches.
I rebased the Linux 4.9 (linux) package on the latest stable update
(4.9.320), uploaded this and issued the final DLA for stretch,
DLA-3065-1....
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities June 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/07/01/floss-activities/
July 1, 2022, 2:51 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
duck:
add more obsolete domains
(1
2),
indicator phrases
(1
2)
lintian:
add more obsolete domains
Debian BTS usertags:
fix old release goal tags,
reassign edos tags to debian-qa,
reassign sphinx tag to debian-python
Debian userdir-ldap:
modernise and cleanup welcome message wording
Debian website:
consultants fix
Debian package uploads:
sptag
Debian wiki pages:
AutomaticPackagingTools,
Ava...
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Russell Coker: Links June 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/06/30/links-june-2022/
June 30, 2022, 1:38 PM
Google did some interesting research on the impact of discrimination on code reviers [1]. It turns out that this is a bigger problem than most white men would have ever suspected and it even has an adverse effect on Asian people.
nothello.net is an amusing site to make the point that you shouldn’t use IM to say hello separately from asking the question [2]. A good link to share on your corporate IM system.
TechCrunch has an amusing article about the Facebook farewell to Sheryl Sandburg [3].
Bl...
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Aigars Mahinovs: Long travel in an electric car
http://aigarius.com/blog/2022/06/29/long-travel-in-an-electric-car/
June 29, 2022, 6:37 PM
Since the first week of April 2022 I have (finally!) changed my company car from
a plug-in hybrid to a fully electic car. My new ride, for the next two years, is
a BMW i4 M50 in Aventurine Red metallic.
An ellegant car with very deep and
memorable color, insanely powerful (544 hp/795 Nm), sub-4 second 0-100 km/h, large
84 kWh battery (80 kWh usable), charging up to 210 kW, top speed of 225 km/h
and also very efficient (which came out best in this trip) with WLTP range of 510 km
and EVDB real r...
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Tim Retout: Git internals and SHA-1
https://retout.co.uk/2022/06/29/git-internals-and-sha1/
June 29, 2022, 5:54 PM
LWN reminds us that Git still uses SHA-1 by default.
Commit or tag signing is not a mitigation, and to understand why you need to
know a little about Git’s internal structure.
Git internally looks rather like a content-addressable filesystem, with four
object types: tags, commits, trees and blobs.
Content-addressable means changing the content of an object changes the way
you address or reference it, and this is achieved using a cryptographic hash
function. Here is an illustration of the inte...
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