Russell Coker: Storing Local Secrets
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/09/14/storing-local-secrets/
September 14, 2022, 1:01 AM
In the operation of a normal Linux system there are many secrets stored on behalf of a user. Wifi passwords, passwords from web sites, etc. Ideally you want them to be quickly and conveniently accessible to the rightful user but also be as difficult as possible for hostile parties to access.
The solution in GNOME and KDE is to have a wallet that is encrypted to store such passwords, the idea is that if a hostile party gets access to a PC that doesn’t use full disk encryption then the secrets w...
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Alberto García: Adding software to the Steam Deck with systemd-sysext
https://blogs.igalia.com/berto/2022/09/13/adding-software-to-the-steam-deck-with-systemd-sysext/
September 13, 2022, 6:00 PM
Introduction: an immutable OS
The Steam Deck runs SteamOS, a single-user operating system based on Arch Linux. Although derived from a standard package-based distro, the OS in the Steam Deck is immutable and system updates replace the contents of the root filesystem atomically instead of using the package manager.
An immutable OS makes the system more stable and its updates less error-prone, but users cannot install additional packages to add more software. This is not a problem for most users s...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator's Handbook
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html
September 12, 2022, 1:45 PM
(The picture is of the previous edition.)
Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of
the "The Debian Administrator's
Handbook" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The
english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the
translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one
way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster
edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%. The
comp...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.2.4.0 on CRAN: Bugfix and Deprecation
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/09/11#rcpparmadillo_0.11.2.4.0
September 11, 2022, 8:31 PM
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1016 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 26.2 mi...
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Shirish Agarwal: Politics, accessibility, books
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/09/11/politics-accessibility-books/
September 11, 2022, 3:47 AM
Politics
I have been reading books, both fiction and non-fiction for a long long time. My first book was a comic most probably when I was down with Malaria when I was a kid. I must be around 4-5 years old. Over the years, books have given me great joy and I continue to find nuggets of useful information, both in fiction as well as non-fiction books. So here’s to sharing something and how that can lead you to a rabbit hole. This entry would be a bit NSFW as far as language is concerned.
...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Hogfather
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-227628-X.html
September 11, 2022, 2:06 AM
Review: Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #20


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
1996


Printing:
February 2014


ISBN:
0-06-227628-X


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
402

Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel and not a very good place to
start. I recommend at least reading Soul
Music first for a proper introduction to Susan, and you may want to
start with Mort.
When we last saw Susan, she was ...
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Andrew Cater: 202209110020 - Debian release day(s) - Cambridge - post 4
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/202209110020-debian-release-days.html
September 11, 2022, 12:24 AM
 RattusRattus, Isy, smcv have all just left after a very long day. Steve is finishing up the final stages. The mayhem has quietened, the network cables are coiled, pretty much everything is tidied away. A new experience for two of us - I just hope it hasn't put them off too much.The IRC channels are quiet and we can put this one to bed after a good day's work well done.
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Andrew Cater: 202209102213 - Debian release day - Cambridge - post 3
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/202209102213-debian-release-day.html
September 10, 2022, 10:18 PM
Working a bit more slowly - coming to the end of the process. I've been wrestling with a couple of annoying old laptops and creating mayhem. The others are almost through the process - it's been a very long day, almost 12 hours now.As ever, it's good to be with people who appreciate this work - I'm also being menaced by a dog that wants fuss all the time. It certainly makes a difference to have fast connectivity and even faster remarks backwards and forwards....
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Andrew Cater: 202209101602 Debian release day - Cambridge - post 2
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/202209101602-debian-release-day.html
September 10, 2022, 4:14 PM
Definitely settling into a rhythm - we've been joined by smcv in person (and bittin on line). Bullseye testing is now well beyond the standard image testing into the live images.Buster images are gradually being built so there's the added confusion of two sets of wiki editing, two sets of potential edit conflicts ...So six people in a small-ish sitting room, several with multiple laptops running several checks at once. It's all good, as ever.Dining room table has nine machines on it, three packe...
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Jonathan Dowland: Prusa Mini
https://jmtd.net/log/prusa_mini/
September 10, 2022, 1:25 PM
In June I caved and bought a Prusa
Mini
3D printer for home. I bought it just before an announced price hike. I went
for a Prusa because of their reputation for "just working", and the Mini mostly
as its the cheapest, although, the print area (7"³) is large enough for most of
the things I am likely to print.
To get started, at the same time I bought some Prusament recycled
PLA to print
with which, unfortunately, I've been a little disappointed with.
I was attracted to the idea of buyi...
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Andrew Cater: 202209101115 Debian release day - Cambridge - Bullseye and Buster testing starting
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/202209101115-debian-release-day.html
September 10, 2022, 11:21 AM
And I'm over here with the Debian images/media release team in Cambridge.First time together in Cambridge for a long time: several of the usual suspects - RattusRattus, Sledge, Isy and myself. Also in the room are Kartik and egw - I think this is their first time.Chat is now physically in Sledge's sitting room as well as on IRC. The first couple of images are trickling in and tests are starting for Bullseye.This is going to be a very long day - we've got full tests for Bullseye (Debian 11) and B...
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Holger Levsen: 20220910-youngest-LUKS-user
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220910-youngest-LUKS-user/
September 10, 2022, 10:39 AM
youngest LUKS user I know...
So I'm in Berlin currently to attend the fourth Qubes OS Summit, also to discuss the future of the reproducible-builds.org mirror of snapshot.debian.org and in the evening I've met an old Debian friend who told a lovely story about his 5 year old daughter, who since recently is a Debian user using an old laptop with LUKS encryption, knowing her data will be lost when she forgets her passphrase... 😀
The Qubes OS Summit is also very cool, great people and exciting...
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Junichi Uekawa: Tried implementing FUSE cpiofs.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Sep-10.html.en#2022-Sep-10-18:53:53
September 10, 2022, 9:53 AM
Tried implementing FUSE cpiofs.
I thought it might be fun to implement a file system that can mount initrd file systems. I've implemented symlinks and regular files handling and then I realized that it is kind of annoying that I need to implement hard links.
cpiofs
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Joachim Breitner: rec-def: Behind the scenes
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/793-rec-def__Behind_the_scenes
September 10, 2022, 9:08 AM
A week ago I wrote about the rec-def Haskell library, which allows you to write more recursive definitions, such as in this small example:
let s1 = rInsert 23 s2
s2 = rInsert 42 s1
in getR s1
This will not loop (as it would if you’d just used Data.Set), but rather correctly return the set S.fromList [23,42]. See the previous blog post for more examples and discussion of the user-facing side of this.
For quick reference, these are the types of the functions involved here:
rInsert :: a ->...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-08/
September 9, 2022, 12:53 PM
Welcome to the August 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. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical result...
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Jonathan Dowland: memtest
https://jmtd.net/log/memtest/
September 9, 2022, 9:23 AM
Since I'm writing about my NAS, a month ago I happened to
notice an odd kernel message:
Aug 8 04:04] list_del corruption. prev->next should be ffff90c96e9c2090,
but was ffff90c94e9c2090
A kernel dev friend said "I'm familiar with that code ... you should run memtest86".
This seemed like advice it would be foolish to ignore!
I installed the memtest86 package, which on Debian stable, is actually the
formerly open-source "memtest86" software, last updated in 2014, rather than
the currently o...
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Emmanuel Kasper: “Forever loading” error with Jitsi and Google Meet
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2022/09/09/forever-loading-error-with-jitsi-and-google-meet/
September 9, 2022, 7:25 AM
I had this issue preventing me to start a call, which happened on two different browsers. It turned out that the pulseaudio service was hung, and no audio devices were available for the browser to use.
In that case it makes sense to check:
if pulseaudio is running
systemctl status --user pulseaudio
if pulseaudio is running, that you have a list from input (sources) and output (sinks) audio devices in the Gnome Desktop Settings. You can also check from the command line with
pactl list source...
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Antoine Beaupré: Complaint about Canada's phone cartel
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-09-08-fido-crtc-complaint/
September 8, 2022, 2:45 PM
I have just filed a complaint with the CRTC about my phone
provider's outrageous fees. This is a copy of the complaint.
I am traveling to Europe, specifically to Ireland, for a 6 days for a
work meeting.
I thought I could use my phone there. So I looked at my phone provider's
services in Europe, and found the "Fido roaming" services:
https://www.fido.ca/mobility/roaming
The fees, at the time of writing, at fifteen (15!) dollars PER DAY
to get access to my regular phone service (not unlimited...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in August 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/09/my-debian-activities-in-august-2022/
September 8, 2022, 10:38 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 375 and rejected 25 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 386.
I also had a closer look at the RM-bugs. All in all I addressed about 90 of them and either simply removed the package or added a moreinfo tag. In total I spent 13 hours for this task.
Anyway, if you want to have your RM-bug processed in a timely manner, please have a look at the removal page and check whether the created dak command is really what you wanted. It would also he...
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Antoine Beaupré: Deleted GitLab forks from my account
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-09-06-deleted-gitlab/
September 7, 2022, 1:34 AM
I have just deleted two forks I had of the GitLab project in my
gitlab.com account. I did this after receiving a warning that quotas
would now start to be enforced. It didn't say that I was going over
quota, so I actually had to go look in the usage quotas page,
which stated I was using 5.6GB of storage. So far so good, I'm not
going to get billed because I'm below the 10GB threshold.
But still, I found that number puzzling. That's a lot of data! Maybe
wallabako? I build images there in CI... O...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - August 2022
https://veronneau.org/montreals-debian-stuff-august-2022.html
September 6, 2022, 8:15 PM
Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday August 28th1 at the very
hackish Foulab for the August 2022 edition of our "Debian & Stuff"
meetings.
As always, the event was a success and we had lots of fun. Nine people showed
up, including some new faces and people I hadn't seen in a while:

Animated picture of the people present at the event.
On my side, although I was badly sleep-deprived 2, I still managed to be
somewhat productive!
One of the WiFi Access Points we use in our 4-ap...
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Shirish Agarwal: Debian on Phone
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/09/06/debian-on-phone/
September 6, 2022, 4:41 PM
History
Before I start, the game I was talking about is called Cell To Singularity. Now I haven’t gone much in the game as I have shared but think that the Singularity it refers to is the Technological Singularity that people think will happen. Whether that will happen or not is open to debate to one and all. This is going to be a bit long one.
Confession Time :- When I was sharing in the blog post, I had no clue that we actually had sessions on it in this year’s Debconf. I just saw t...
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Jonathan Dowland: Borg corrupted hints file
https://jmtd.net/log/borg_woes/
September 6, 2022, 3:29 PM
I've been using Borg backup for a couple of years and it has
seemingly worked very well for me. One difference I really appreciate from my
previous arrangement (rdiff-backup) is the freedom to move large
files or file hierarchies around (including between different filesystems)
without provoking large backup incrementals.
About a week ago I had my first real problem with Borg: backups started to
fail with the following complaints:
Creating archive at "/backup/borg::{hostname}-home-jon-{now:%Y-...
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Junichi Uekawa: September.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Sep-4.html.en#2022-Sep-4-11:28:43
September 4, 2022, 2:28 AM
September. Digging into why my apt-get doesn't complete.
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Joachim Breitner: More recursive definitions
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/792-More_recursive_definitions
September 3, 2022, 12:31 PM
Haskell is a pure and lazy programming language, and the laziness allows us to write some algorithms very elegantly, by recursively referring to already calculated values. A typical example is the following definition of the Fibonacci numbers, as an infinite stream:
fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)
Elegant graph traversals
A maybe more practical example is the following calculation of the transitive closure of a graph:
import qualified Data.Set as S
import qualified Data.Map as M
typ...
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Shirish Agarwal: Fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkein
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/09/03/fantasy-j-r-r-tolkein/
September 3, 2022, 5:02 AM
J.R.R. Tolkein
Now unless you have been living under a rock cave, I am sure you know who Mr. Tolkein is. Apparently, the gentleman passed away on 2nd September 1973 at the sprightly age of 80. And this gives fans like me to talk about fantasy, fantasy authors, and the love-hate relationship we have with them. For a matter of record, I am currently reading Babylon Steel by Gaie Sebold. Now while I won’t go into many details (I never like to, if I enjoy a book, I would want the book to be mys...
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Kunal Mehta: Kiwix in Debian, 2022 update
https://blog.legoktm.com/2022/09/02/kiwix-in-debian-2022-update.html
September 2, 2022, 3:06 AM
Previous updates: 2018, 2021
Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known
for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian
since 2017.
This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release,
including several transitions
for new libzim and libkiwix versions.
libzim: 6.3.0 → 8.0.0
zim-tools: 2.1.0 → 3.1.1
python-libzim: 0.0.3 → 1.1.1 (with a cherry-picked patch)
libkiwix: 9.4.1 → 11.0.0...
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John Goerzen: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10421-dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet
September 2, 2022, 1:43 AM
“OK,” you’re probably thinking. “John, you talk a lot about things like Gopher and personal radios, and now you want to talk about building a reliable network out of… USB drives?”
Well, yes. In fact, I’ve already done it.
What is sneakernet?
Normally, “sneakernet” is a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to using disconnected storage to transport data or messages. By “disconnect storage” I mean anything like CD-ROMs, hard drives, SD cards, USB drives, and so forth. There...
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Emmanuel Kasper: OpenShift vs. AWS product mapping
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2022/09/01/openshift-vs-aws-product-mapping/
September 1, 2022, 7:45 AM
If you know the Amazon Web Services portfolio, and you are interested in OpenShift or the OKD OpenShift community distribution, this is a table of corresponding technologies.
OpenShift is Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution: it is basically the upstream Kubernetes delivered with monitoring, logging, CI/CD, underlying OS, tested upgrade paths not found with a manual kubernetes.io kubeadm install.
AWS
OpenShift
OpenShift upstream project
Cloud Trail
Kubernetes API Server audit log
Kubernete...
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Shirish Agarwal: Culture, Books, Friends
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/09/01/culture-books-friends/
September 1, 2022, 5:59 AM
Culture
Just before I start, I would like to point out that this post may or would probably be NSFW. Again, what is SFW (Safe at Work) and NSFW that so much depends on culture and perception of culture from wherever we are or wherever we take birth? But still, to be on the safe side I have put it as NSFW. Now there have been a few statements and ideas that gave me a pause. This will be a sort of chaotic blog post as I am in such a phase today.
For e.g. while I do not know which culture or...
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Russ Allbery: Summer haul
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-08/001.html
September 1, 2022, 5:26 AM
It's been a while since I posted one of these! Or, really, much of
anything else. Busy and distracted this summer and a bit behind on a wide
variety of things at the moment, although thankfully not in a bad way.
Sara Alfageeh & Nadia Shammas — Squire (graphic novel)
Travis Baldree — Legends & Lattes (sff)
Leigh Bardugo — Six of Crows (sff)
Miles Cameron — Artifact Space (sff)
Robert Caro — The Power Broker (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott — Servant Mage (sff)
Nicola Griffith �...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities August 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/09/01/floss-activities/
September 1, 2022, 4:32 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
webdl:
support ffmpeg 5
libpst:
better error
purple-discord:
fix
line ending,
mojibake
pass-audit:
typos
duck:
add
more match output,
obsolete site,
indicator phrase,
fix
comparisons,
whitespace,
sentence
lintian:
add obsolete site
reportbug:
minor cleanup,
add
ftp.d.o usertags
Debian usertags:
fix repro builds, ports, ftp-master usertags
Debian package uploads:
sptag,
purple-discord,
circ...
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Russell Coker: Links Aug 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/08/31/links-aug-2022/
August 31, 2022, 1:06 PM
Armor is an interesting technology from Manchester University for stopping rowhammer attacks on DRAM [1]. Unfortunately “armor” is a term used for DRAM that looks fancy for ricers so finding out whether it’s used in production is difficult.
The Reckless Limitless Scope of Web Browsers is an insightful analysis of the size of web specs and why it’s impossible to implement them properly [2].
Framework is a company that makes laptop kits you can assemble and upgrade, interesting concept [3]...
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Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2022
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/08/31/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-july-2022/
August 31, 2022, 9:43 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 July, we put aside 2389 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 ...
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Wouter Verhelst: Not currently uploading
https://grep.be/blog//en/life/debian/Not_currently_uploading/
August 30, 2022, 11:22 PM
A notorious ex-DD decided
to post garbage on his site in which he links my name to the suicide of
Frans Pop, and mentions that
my GPG key is currently disabled in the Debian keyring, along with some
manufactured screenshots of the Debian NM site that allegedly show I'm
no longer a DD. I'm not going to link to the post -- he deserves to be
ridiculed, not given attention.
Just to set the record straight, however:
Frans Pop was my friend. I never treated him with anything but respect.
I do not kn...
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Jonathan Dowland: Venineth
https://jmtd.net/log/venineth/
August 30, 2022, 11:25 AM
My turntable is temporarily out of action so this post is in lieu of a
crate digging update.
Some time ago, I saw Matt Hoye raving about a
little indie game called
Venineth. I think he said it was
the perfect little game to relax to. I don’t regularly play games but I could
sometimes do with some help relaxing. I was reminded about Venineth when I saw
some buzz about Exo One, a similar-looking game, so
I thought I’d give Venineth a go.
A scene near the start of Venineth
It’s gre...
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John Goerzen: The PC & Internet Revolution in Rural America
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10417-the-pc-internet-revolution-in-rural-america
August 30, 2022, 1:22 AM
Inspired by several others (such as Alex Schroeder’s post and Szczeżuja’s prompt), as well as a desire to get this down for my kids, I figure it’s time to write a bit about living through the PC and Internet revolution where I did: outside a tiny town in rural Kansas. And, as I’ve been back in that same area for the past 15 years, I reflect some on the challenges that continue to play out.
Although the stories from the others were primarily about getting online, I want to start by sett...
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Emmanuel Kasper: Moving blog from blogger.com to wordpress.com
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2022/08/29/moving-blog-from-blogger-com-to-wordpress-com/
August 29, 2022, 8:05 AM
I switched from blogger.com the Google Blog platform to the hosted wordpress.com of Automaticc, the WordPress blog engine main authors.
I thus gain:
markdown formatting when writing blog entries, finally !
running on a opensource core, that I can move locally to my own server if I ever want to fiddle with MySQL and PHP.
I lose:
free CNAME redirect using my own domain name
a bit of advertising-free space. The blog at wordpress.com has a prominent header indicating I am using the free plan, but...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.16 on CRAN: Package Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/08/28#littler-0.3.16
August 28, 2022, 10:54 PM
The seventeenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now sixteen year history (!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.
littler lives on ...
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Andrew Cater: Debian Barbeque, Cambridge 2022
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/08/debian-barbeque-cambridge-2022.html
August 28, 2022, 8:07 PM
 And here we are: second day of the barbeque in Cambridge. Lots of food - as always - some alcohol, some soft drinks, coffee.Lots of good friends, and banter and good natured argument. For a couple of folk, it's their first time here - but most people have known each other for years. Lots of reminiscing, some crochet from two of us. Multiple technical discussions weaving and overlappingNot just meat and vegetarian options for food: a fresh loaf, gingerbread of various sorts, fresh Belgian-style...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: AV1 live streaming: Muxing and streaming
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-08-28-10-51_av1_live_streaming_muxing_and_streaming.txt.html
August 28, 2022, 9:51 AM
Following up on my previous posts, I've finally gotten to the part of the
actual streaming (which includes muxing). It's not super-broad over all
possible clients, but it probably gives enough information to tell roughly
where we are.
First, the bad news: There is no iOS support for AV1. People had high
hopes after it turned out the latest iOS 16 betas support AVIF, and
even embedded a copy of dav1d
to do so, but according to my own testing, this doesn't extend to video
at all. Not as standalon...
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Antoine Beaupré: How to nationalize the internet in Canada
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-08-26-nationalize-internet/
August 26, 2022, 4:56 PM
Rogers had a catastrophic failure in July
2022. It affected emergency services (as in: people couldn't call 911,
but also some 911 services themselves failed), hospitals (which
couldn't access prescriptions), banks and payment systems (as payment
terminals stopped working), and regular users as well. The outage
lasted almost a full day, and Rogers took days to give any technical
explanation on the outage, and even when they did, details were
sparse. So far the only detailed account is from outsi...
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Jonathan Dowland: Replacement nosecone for Janod Rocket
https://jmtd.net/log/janod_rocket/
August 26, 2022, 3:28 PM
My youngest has a cute little wooden Rocket puzzle, made by a French company
called Janod.
Sadly, at some point, we lost the nose cone part, so I designed and printed a
replacement.
It's substantially based on one module from an OpenSCAD "Nose Cone Library" by
Garrett
Goss,
which he kindly released to the public domain.
I embellished the cone with a top pointy bit and a rounded brim. I also
hollowed out the bottom to make space for a magnet. Originally I designed an
offset-from-centre ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RApiSerialize 0.1.2 on CRAN: Small Bugfix
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/08/25#rapiserialize_0.1.2
August 25, 2022, 11:27 PM
A new bug fix release 0.1.2 of RApiSerialize got onto CRAN earlier. It follows on the 0.1.1 release from earlier this month, and addresses a minor build issue where an error message, only in the case of missing long vector support, tried to use an i18n macro that is not supplied by the build.
The RApiSerialize 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 othe...
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Antoine Beaupré: One dead Purism laptop
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-08-25-one-dead-purism-laptop/
August 25, 2022, 7:28 PM
The "série noire" continues. I ordered my first Purism Librem 13v4
laptop in April 2019 and it arrived, unsurprisingly, more than three
weeks later. But more surprisingly, it did not work at all: a problem
eerily similar to this post talking about a bricked Purism
laptop. Thankfully, Purism was graceful enough to cross-ship a
replacement, and once I paid the extra (gulp) 190$ Fedex fee, I had my
new elite laptop read.
Less than a year later, the right USB-A port breaks: it would deliver
power,...
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Emmanuel Kasper: Investigating database replication in different availability zones
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2022/08/24/investigating-database-replication-in-different-availability-zones/
August 24, 2022, 3:09 PM
Investigating today what is AWS Relational Database Service with two readable standbys
Considering your current read/write server is in Availability Zone AZ1, this is basically postgres 14 with synchronous_standby_names = ANY 1 (az2, az3) and synchronous_commit = on.
In regards to safety of data, it looks similar to the raft algorithm used by etcd with three members as a write is only ack’ed if it has been fsynced by two servers, the difference is that raft has a leader election, whereas in P...
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Ian Jackson: prefork-interp - automatic startup time amortisation for all manner of scripts
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/12367.html
August 23, 2022, 9:30 AM
The problem I had - Mason, so, sadly, FastCGI
Since the update to current Debian stable, the website for YARRG, (a play-aid for Puzzle Pirates which I wrote some years ago), started to occasionally return “Internal Server Error”, apparently due to bug(s) in some FastCGI libraries.
I was using FastCGI because the website is written in Mason, a Perl web framework, and I found that Mason CGI calls were slow. I’m using CGI - yes, trad CGI - via userv-cgi. Running Mason this way would “compil...
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Jonathan Wiltshire: Team Roles and Tuckman’s Model, for Debian teams
https://www.jwiltshire.org.uk/2022/08/22/team-roles-and-tuckmans-model-for-debian-teams/
August 22, 2022, 8:26 PM
When I first moved from being a technical consultant to a manager of other consultants, I took a 5-day course Managing Technical Teams – a bootstrap for managing people within organisations, but with a particular focus on technical people. We do have some particular quirks, after all…
Two elements of that course keep coming to mind when doing Debian work, and they both relate to how teams fit together and get stuff done.
Tuckman’s four stages model
In the mid-1960s Bruce W. Tuckma...
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Antoine Beaupré: Alternative MPD clients to GMPC
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-08-22-gmpc-alternatives/
August 22, 2022, 5:17 PM
GMPC (GNOME Music Player Client) is a audio player based on MPD
(Music Player Daemon) that I've been using as my main audio player for
years now.
Unfortunately, it's marked as "unmaintained" in the official list of
MPD clients, along with basically every client available in
Debian. In fact, if you look closely, all but one of the 5
unmaintained clients are in Debian (ario, cantata, gmpc, and
sonata), which is kind of sad. And none of the active ones are
packaged.
GMPC status and features
GMPC...
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Wouter Verhelst: Remote notification
https://grep.be/blog//en/computer/play/Remote_notification/
August 22, 2022, 2:15 PM
Sometimes, it's useful to get a notification that a command has finished
doing something you were waiting for:
make my-large-program && notify-send "compile finished" "success" || notify-send "compile finished" "failure"
This will send a notification message with the title "compile finished",
and a body of "success" or "failure" depending on whether the command
completed successfully, and allows you to minimize (or otherwise hide)
the terminal window while you do something else, which...
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Simon Josefsson: Static network config with Debian Cloud images
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/08/22/static-network-config-with-debian-cloud-images/
August 22, 2022, 10:09 AM
I self-host some services on virtual machines (VMs), and I’m currently using Debian 11.x as the host machine relying on the libvirt infrastructure to manage QEMU/KVM machines. While everything has worked fine for years (including on Debian 10.x), there has always been one issue causing a one-minute delay every time I install a new VM: the default images run a DHCP client that never succeeds in my environment. I never found out a way to disable DHCP in the image, and none of the documented wa...
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Russ Allbery: Review: And Shall Machines Surrender
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-60701-533-1.html
August 22, 2022, 3:29 AM
Review: And Shall Machines Surrender, by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Series:
Machine Mandate #1


Publisher:
Prime Books


Copyright:
2019


ISBN:
1-60701-533-1


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
86

Shenzhen Sphere is an artificial habitat wrapped like complex ribbons
around a star. It is wealthy, opulent, and notoriously difficult to
enter, even as a tourist. For Dr. Orfea Leung to be approved for a
residency permit was already a ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-23624-X.html
August 21, 2022, 4:08 AM
Review: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, by Becky Chambers

Series:
Monk & Robot #2


Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
1-250-23624-X


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
151

A Prayer for the Crown Shy is the second novella in the Monk &
Robot series and a direct sequel to A
Psalm for the Wild-Built. Don't start here.
I would call this the continuing adventures of Sibling Dex and Mosscap the
robot, except adven...
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Iustin Pop: Note to self: Don't forget Qemu's discard option
https://k1024.org/posts/2022/2022-08-21-do-not-forget-qemu-unmap/
August 21, 2022, 12:00 AM
This is just a short note to myself, and to anyone who might run VMs
via home-grown scripts (or systemd units). I expect modern VM managers
to do this automatically, but for myself, I have just a few hacked
together scripts.
By default, QEMU (at least as of version 7.0) does not honour/pass
discard requests from block devices to the underlying storage. This is
a sane default (like lvm’s default setting), but with long-lived VMs
it can lead to lots of wasted disk space. I keep my VMs on SSDs, w...
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Emmanuel Kasper: Everything markdown with pandoc
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2022/08/19/everything-markdown-with-pandoc/
August 19, 2022, 7:02 PM
Using a markdown file , this style sheet and this simple command,
pandoc couronne.md --standalone --css styling.css
--to html5 --table-of-contents > couronne.html
I feel I will never need a word processor again. It produces this nice looking document without pain....
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.2.3.1 on CRAN: Double Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/08/18#rcpparmadillo_0.11.2.3.1
August 19, 2022, 12:51 AM
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1005 packages other packages on CRAN (as celebrated in t...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 221 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-221-released/
August 19, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 221. This version includes the following changes:
* Don't crash if we can open a PDF file with PyPDF but cannot parse the
annotations within. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#311)
* Depend on the dedicated xxd package, not vim-common.
* Update external_tools.py to reflect xxd/vim-common change.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Lukas Märdian: Netplan v0.105 is now available
https://blog.slyon.de/2022/08/18/netplan-v0-105-is-now-available/
August 18, 2022, 9:40 AM
I’m happy to announce that Netplan version 0.105 is now available on GitHub and is soon to be deployed into an Ubuntu/Debian installation near you! Six month and exactly 100 commits after the previous version, this release is brought to you by 7 free software contributors from around the globe.
Changelog
Add support for VXLAN tunnels (#288), LP#1764716Add support for VRF devices (#285), LP#1773522Add support for InfiniBand (IPoIB) (#283), LP#1848471Allow key configuration for GRE tunn...
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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...
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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 ...
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