Bits from Debian: Debian turns 29!
https://bits.debian.org/2022/08/debian-turns-29.html
August 16, 2022, 11:00 AM
Today is Debian's 29th anniversary. We recently wrote
about some ideas to celebrate the DebianDay,
and several events have been planned in more than 14 locations.
You can join the party or organise something yourselves too!
Today is also an opportunity for you to start or resume your
contributions to Debian. For example, you can have a look at our
list of Debian Teams,
install the how-can-i-help package
and see if there is a bug in any of the software that you use that you can help to fix,
sta...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Temperature monitoring
https://jmtd.net/log/temperature/
August 15, 2022, 4:01 PM
Xiaomi Mijia Temperature Sensor
I've been having some temperature problems in my house, so I wanted to set
up some thermometers which I could read from a computer, and look at trends.
I bought a pack of three cheap Xiaomi IoT thermometers. There's some official
Xiaomi tooling to access them from smartphones and suchlike, but I wanted
something more open. The thermometers have some rudimentary security on them
to try and ensure you use the official tooling. This is pretty weak, and
the open-...
--------------------
John Goerzen: The Joy of Easy Personal Radio: FRS, GMRS, and Motorola DLR/DTR
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10406-the-joy-of-easy-personal-radio-frs-gmrs-and-motorola-dlr-dtr
August 15, 2022, 2:02 PM
Most of us carry cell phones with us almost everywhere we go. So much so that we often forget not just the usefulness, but even the joy, of having our own radios. For instance:
When traveling to national parks or other wilderness areas, family and friends can keep in touch even where there is no cell coverage.
It is a lot faster to just push a button and start talking than it is to unlock a phone, open the phone app, select a person, wait for the call to connect, wait for the other person ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo used by 1001 CRAN Packages
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/08/14#rcpparmadillo_at_1001
August 14, 2022, 2:08 PM
It is with a mix of pride and joy, but also some genuine astonishment and amazement, that we can share that the counter of reverse dependencies at CRAN for our RcppArmadillo package for R just crossed 1000 packages [1]:
Conrad actually posted this a few weeks ago, by my count we were then still a few packages shy. In any event, having crossed this marker this summer, either then or now, and after more than a dozen years of working on the package is a really nice moment. Google Scholar counts ne...
--------------------
Jamie McClelland: Web caching is hard
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2022/web-caching-is-hard/
August 14, 2022, 12:27 PM
Web caching is hard. And also, maybe I’m not that good under pressure? In any
event, I made the following mistakes while trying to debug a web site using our
nginx cache that bit the dust under heavy load today:
Action: I ran curl -I https://website.org/ and it hung.
Wrong assumption: Something is wrong with nginx. Why else would it just hang?
Reconsidered conclusion: The resource (the home page) is a MISS, so nginx has
to retrieve it from the origin, but the origin is over-loaded and timing o...
--------------------
Sergio Durigan Junior: Debuginfod is coming to Ubuntu
https://blog.sergiodj.net/2022/08/14/debuginfod-is-coming-to-ubuntu.html
August 14, 2022, 4:00 AM
These past couple of months I have been working to bring
debuginfod to
Ubuntu. I thought it would be a good idea to make this post and
explain a little bit about what the service is and how I'm planning to
deploy it.
A quick recap: what's debuginfod?
Here's a good summary of what debuginfod is:
debuginfod is a new-ish project whose purpose is to serve
ELF/DWARF/source-code information over HTTP. It is developed under the
elfutils umbrella. You can find more information about it here:
https...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Still Not Safe
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-19-027128-0.html
August 14, 2022, 3:38 AM
Review: Still Not Safe, by Robert L. Wears & Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Publisher:
Oxford University Press


Copyright:
November 2019


ISBN:
0-19-027128-0


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
232

Still Not Safe is an examination of the recent politics and history
of patient safety in medicine. Its conclusions are summarized by the
opening paragraph of the preface:
The American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer reportedly said
...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Mum and Books
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/08/13/mum-and-books/
August 12, 2022, 6:33 PM
The last day
The first lesson I would like everybody to know and have is to buy two machines, especially a machine to check low blood pressure. I had actually ordered one from Amazon but they never delivered. I hope to sue them in consumer court in due course of time. The other one is a blood sugar machine which I ordered and did get, but the former is more important than the latter, and the reason why will be known soon.
Mum had stopped eating solids and was entirely on liquids for the ...
--------------------
Wouter Verhelst: Upgrading a Windows 10 VM to Windows 11
https://grep.be/blog//en/computer/Upgrading_a_Windows_10_VM_to_Windows_11/
August 12, 2022, 3:00 PM
I run Debian on my laptop (obviously); but occasionally, for $DAYJOB, I
have some work to do on Windows. In order to do so, I have had a Windows
10 VM in my libvirt configuration that I can use.
A while ago, Microsoft issued Windows 11. I recently found out that all
the components for running Windows 11 inside a libvirt VM are available,
and so I set out to upgrade my VM from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This
wasn't as easy as I thought, so here's a bit of a writeup of all the
things I ran against...
--------------------
Guido Günther: On a road to Prizren with a Free Software Phone
https://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/On_a_road_to_Prizren_with_a_Free_Software_Phone.html
August 12, 2022, 2:06 PM
Since people are sometimes slightly surprised that you can go onto a
multi week trip with a smartphone running free sofware so only I
wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo
to attend Debconf 22 using a Librem 5. It's a mix of things that
happend and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun
to use. And, yes, there won't be any big surprises like being stranded
without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there
weren't and there shouldn...
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, July 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-july-2022.html
August 12, 2022, 12:27 PM
In July I was assigned 24 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative. I worked 3 hours and will carry over the rest to
August.
In July, no Debian release was in LTS status. However, I spent some
time finishing the DLA text for my upload of linux at the end of
June. I also attended the LTS BoF at DebConf and the regular team
meeting.
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Mum, Samsung Galaxy M-52
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/08/11/mum-samsung-galaxy-m-52/
August 10, 2022, 7:44 PM
Mum
I dunno from where to start. While I’m not supposed to announce it, mum left this earth a month ago (thirteen days when I started to write this blog post) ago. I am still in part denial, part shock, and morose. Of all the seasons in a year, the rainy season used to be my favorite, now would I ever be able to look and feel other than the emptiness that this season has given me? In some senses, it is and was very ironic, when she became ill about last year, I had promised myself I would ...
--------------------
Russell Coker: TSIG Error From SSSD
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/08/10/tsig-error-sssd/
August 10, 2022, 3:03 AM
A common error when using the sssd daemon to authenticate via Active Directory on Linux seems to be:
sssd[$PID]: ; TSIG error with server: tsig verify failure
This is from sssd launching the command “nsupdate -g” to do dynamic DNS updates. It is possible to specify the DNS server in /etc/sssd/sssd.conf but that will only be used AFTER the default servers have been attempted, so it seems impossible to stop this error from happening. It doesn’t appear to do any harm as the correct server is ...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: Debian Day 2022 - call for celebration
https://bits.debian.org/2022/08/debianday2022-call-for-celebration.html
August 8, 2022, 3:00 PM
Every year on August 16th, the anniversary of the Debian Project takes place.
And several communities around the world celebrate this date by organizing local
meetings in an event called "Debian Day".
So, how about celebrating the 29th anniversary of the Debian Project in 2022 in
your city?
We invite you and your local community to organize Debian Day by hosting an
event with talks, workshops, bug squashing party,
OpenPGP keysigning, etc.
Or simply holding a meeting between people who like Debia...
--------------------
Adnan Hodzic: atuf.app: Amsterdam Toilet & Urinal Finder
https://foolcontrol.org/?p=4393
August 8, 2022, 9:48 AM
Amsterdam is a great city to enjoy a beer, or two. However, after you had your beers and you’re strolling down the streets, you might...
The post atuf.app: Amsterdam Toilet & Urinal Finder appeared first on FoolControl: Phear the penguin.
--------------------
Ian Jackson: dkim-rotate - rotation and revocation of DKIM signing keys
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/12191.html
August 8, 2022, 12:20 AM
Background
Internet email is becoming more reliant on DKIM, a scheme for having mail servers cryptographically sign emails. The Big Email providers have started silently spambinning messages that lack either DKIM signatures, or SPF. DKIM is arguably less broken than SPF, so I wanted to deploy it.
But it has a problem: if done in a naive way, it makes all your emails non-repudiable, forever. This is not really a desirable property - at least, not desirable for you, although it can be nice for som...
--------------------
Aurelien Jarno: GNU libc 2.34 in unstable
https://blog.aurel32.net/glibc-2.34-unstable.html
August 7, 2022, 9:25 PM
The GNU libc version 2.34 has just been
accepted
into unstable. Getting it ready has been more challenging than other versions,
as this version integrates a few libraries (libpthread, libdl, libutil,
libanl) into libc. While this is handled transparently at runtime, there are a
few corner cases at build time:
For backwards compatibility, empty static archives (e.g. libpthread.a) are
provided, so that the linker options keep working. However a few cmake
files shipped in some packages st...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RApiSerialize 0.1.1 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/08/07#rapiserialize_0.1.1
August 7, 2022, 4:38 PM
A new release 0.1.1 of RApiSerialize is now on CRAN. While this is the first release in seven years (!!), it brings mostly minor internal updates along with the option of using serialization format 3.
The package is used by both my RcppRedis as well as by Travers excellent qs package. Neither one of us has a need to switch to format 3 yet so format 2 remains the default. But along with other standard updates to package internals, it was straightforward to offer the newer format so that is what w...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppCCTZ 0.2.11 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/08/06#rcppcctz_0.2.11
August 6, 2022, 6:52 PM
A new release 0.2.11 of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN.
RcppCCTZ uses Rcpp to bring CCTZ to R. CCTZ is a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. In fact, it is two libraries. One for dealing with civil time: human-readable dates and times, and one for converting between between absolute and civil times via time zones. And while CCTZ is made by Google(rs), it is not an official Google product. The RcppCCTZ page has a few usage examples and details. Th...
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in July 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/08/my-debian-activities-in-july-2022/
August 5, 2022, 3:43 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 420 and rejected 44 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 422.
I am sad to write the following lines, but unfortunately there are people who rather take advantage of others instead of doing a proper maintenance of their packages.
So, in order to find time slots for as much packages in NEW as possible, I no longer write a debian/copyright for others. I know it is a boring task to collect the copyright information, but our policy still requ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppXts 0.0.5 on CRAN: Routine Refreshment
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/08/05#rcppxts_0.0.5
August 5, 2022, 1:07 PM
A full eight and half years (!!) since its 0.0.4 release, version 0.0.5 of RcppXts is now on CRAN. The RcppXts package demonstrates how to access the export C API of xts which we contributed a looong time ago.
This release contains an accumulated small set of updates made as the CRAN Policies evolved. We now register and use the shared library routines (updates in both src/init.c and NAMESPACE), turned on continuous integration, switched it from the now disgraces service to another, adopted our ...
--------------------
Jamie McClelland: Fine tuning Thunderbird's end-to-end encryption
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2022/thunderbird-and-openpgpg/
August 4, 2022, 10:27 PM
I love that Thunderbird really tackled OpenPGP head on and incorporated it
directly into the client. I know it’s been a bit rough for some users, but I
think it’s a good long term investment.
And to demonstrate I’ll now complain about a minor issue :).
I replied to an encrypted message but couldn’t send the response using
encryption. I got an error message indicating that “End-to-end encryption
requires resolving certificate issues for” … and it listed the recipient
email address.
...
--------------------
Jamie McClelland: Fine tuning Thunderbird's end-to-end encryption
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2022/thunderbird-and-openpgp/
August 4, 2022, 10:27 PM
I love that Thunderbird really tackled OpenPGP head on and incorporated it
directly into the client. I know it’s been a bit rough for some users, but I
think it’s a good long term investment.
And to demonstrate I’ll now complain about a minor issue :).
I replied to an encrypted message but couldn’t send the response using
encryption. I got an error message indicating that “End-to-end encryption
requires resolving certificate issues for” and it listed the recipient
email address.
I ...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-07/
August 4, 2022, 3:35 PM
Welcome to the July 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project!
In our reports we attempt to outline the most relevant things that have been going on in the past month. As a brief introduction, the reproducible builds effort is concerned with ensuring no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. As ever, i...
--------------------
Abhijith PA: Trip to misty mountains in Munnar
https://abhijithpa.me/2022/Trip-to-misty-mountains-in-munnar/
August 4, 2022, 9:53 AM
Munnar is a hill station in Idukki district of Kerala, India. Home to
2nd largest tea plantation in the country. Lot of people
visit here on summer and in winter as well. I live in the neighboring district of Munnar though I never made a visit. In my mind I pictured Munnar as a Tourist trap
with lots of garbage lying around.
I recently made a visit and it changed my perception of this place.
Little background
I never liked tea much. I am also not a coffee person either. But if I
have to ...
--------------------
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, 10:11 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.
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities July 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/08/01/floss-activities/
July 31, 2022, 11:02 PM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
SPTAG:
print error reason
duck:
add
(1
2),
sort
indicator phrases
aptitude:
fix GCC 12 FTBFS
Debian security tracker:
link GitHub advisories
Debian packages website:
sync contact footer
Debian sysadmin scripts:
use TLS not StartTLS
Debian BTS usertags:
fix some Hurd, ftp-master and release manager usertags
Debian package uploads:
tldextract,
sptag
Debian wiki pages:
Arturo_Teslao,
DebConf
...
--------------------
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 260 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, this year...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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....
--------------------