Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-06/
July 12, 2023, 1:17 PM
Welcome to the June 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project
In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
We are very happy to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit which set to take place from October 31st — November 2nd 2023, in the vibrant city of Hamburg, Germany.
Our summits are a unique gathering...
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Matt Brown: 2023 Mid Year Review
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/07/13/2023-mid-year-review/
July 12, 2023, 12:44 PM
I’m six months into my journey of building a business which means its time to reflect and review the goals I set for the year.
No further investment in co2mon.nz
In March I made the decision to focus on completing the market research for co2mon.nz. The results of that research led to two key conclusions:
Indoor air quality/ventilation is not a problem many people are actively thinking about or looking to spend money to improve.
Even when introduced to the problem and educated about the need, ...
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Jonathan Carter: Debian 12
https://jonathancarter.org/2023/07/12/debian-12/
July 12, 2023, 11:04 AM
Last month, the Debian project released Debian 12, with the usual low-key fanfare that Debian usually announces a release with. Even though we shipped with some bugs we’d rather not have (which are at least fixable over the next point releases), the feedback for Debian 12 has been nothing short of overwhelmingly good. From users to the independent Linux blogs to the YouTubers to the tech news sites, the vast majority of feedback so far is that it’s not just one of Debian’s most important r...
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John Goerzen: Backing Up and Archiving to Removable Media: dar vs. git-annex
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10535-backing-up-and-archiving-to-removable-media-dar-vs-git-annex
July 12, 2023, 1:53 AM
This is the fourth in a series about archiving to removable media (optical discs such as BD-Rs and DVD+Rs or portable hard drives). Here are the first three parts:
In part 1, I laid out my goals for the project, and considered a number of tools before determining dar and git-annex were my leading options.
In part 2, I took a deep dive into git-annex and simulated using it for this project.
In part 3, I did the same with dar.
And in this part, I want to put it together to come up with an initia...
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Simon Josefsson: Coping with non-free Debian
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/07/11/coping-with-non-free-debian/
July 11, 2023, 1:27 PM
A personal reflection on how I moved from my Debian home to find two new homes with Trisquel and Guix for my own ethical computing, and while doing so settled my dilemma about further Debian contributions.
Debian‘s contributions to the free software community has been tremendous. Debian was one of the early distributions in the 1990’s that combined the GNU tools (compiler, linker, shell, editor, and a set of Unix tools) with the Linux kernel and published a free software operating system...
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Matthew Garrett: Roots of Trust are difficult
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66907.html
July 11, 2023, 7:58 AM
The phrase "Root of Trust" turns up at various points in discussions about verified boot and measured boot, and to a first approximation nobody is able to give you a coherent explanation of what it means[1]. The Trusted Computing Group has a fairly wordy definition, but (a) it's a lot of words and (b) I don't like it, so instead I'm going to start by defining a root of trust as "A thing that has to be trustworthy for anything else on your computer to be trustworthy".(An aside: when I say "trustw...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.14 on CRAN: Upstream Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/07/10#rcppspdlog_0.0.14
July 11, 2023, 1:11 AM
Version 0.0.14 of RcppSpdlog is now
on CRAN and has just been
uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog
bundles spdlog, a
wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and
whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn
more at the nice package
documention site.
This release simply brings an update to the just release spdlog 1.12.0 from a few
days ago.
The NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in
RcppSpdlog version 0.0...
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Shirish Agarwal: PLIO, Mum, Debconf, Pressure Cooker, RISC-V,
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/plio-mum-debconf-pressure-cooker-risc-v/
July 10, 2023, 3:54 PM
PLIO
I have been looking for an image viewer that can view images via modification date by default. The newer, the better. Alas, most of the image viewers do not do that. Even feh somehow fails. What I need is default listing of images as thumbnails by modification date. I put it up on Unix Stackexchange couple of years ago. Somebody shared ristretto but that just gives listing and doesn’t give the way I want it. To be more illustrative, maybe this may serve as a guide to what I mean.
...
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Lukas Märdian: Netplan and systemd-networkd on Debian Bookworm
https://blog.slyon.de/2023/07/10/netplan-and-systemd-networkd-on-debian-bookworm/
July 10, 2023, 9:44 AM
Debian’s cloud-images are using systemd-networkd as their default network stack in Bookworm. A slim and feature rich networking daemon that comes included with Systemd itself. Debian’s cloud-images are deploying Netplan on top of this as an easy-to-use, declarative control layer.
If you want to experiment with systemd-networkd and Netplan on Debian, this can be done easily in QEMU using the official images. To start, you need to download the relevant .qcow2 Debian cloud-image from: https:...
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Michael Ablassmeier: Java timezone sheanigans
https://abbbi.github.io//timezone/
July 10, 2023, 12:00 AM
While running CI tests for a application that is implemented in C and Java,
some configuration scripts set the current timezone. The C implemented parts
catch the change just nicely, but the java related parts still report the
default image timezone.
A simple example:
import java.util.*;
import java.text.*;
class simpleTest
{ public static void main(String args[])
{
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
System.out.println("TIME ZONE :"+ cal.getTimeZone()....
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Kentaro Hayashi: Upgraded fabre.debian.net to Debian 12 (bookworm)
https://kenhys.hatenablog.jp/entry/2023/07/09/212346
July 9, 2023, 12:23 PM
fabre.debian.net - an experiment service that tries to improve user experience with finding Debian related bugs was now upgraded to Debian 12 (bookworm)
Not only migrating to Debian 12, but the backend E-mail subscription and importing bug report mechanism is also a bit modified.
This was some portion of the side effect of recent Gandi.net announcements.
FAQ - New Mailbox service and management of your current mailboxes - Gandi News
fabre.debian.net rely on the old Mailbox service of Gandi.n...
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Russell Coker: Matrix
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/07/09/matrix/
July 9, 2023, 7:53 AM
Introduction
In 2020 I first setup a Matrix [1] server. Matrix is a full featured instant messaging protocol which requires a less stringent definition of “instant”, messages being delayed for minutes aren’t that uncommon in my experience. Matrix is a federated service where the servers all store copies of the room data, so when you connect your client to it’s home server it gets all the messages that were published while you were offline, it is widely regarded as being IRC but without a...
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Vasudev Kamath: Using LUKS-Encrypted USB Stick with TPM2 Integration
https://copyninja.in/blog/luks2_tpm_mount.html
July 9, 2023, 7:47 AM
I use a LUKS-encrypted USB stick to store my GPG and SSH keys, which acts as a
backup and portable key setup when working on different laptops. One
inconvenience with LUKS-encrypted USB sticks is that you need to enter the
password every time you want to mount the device, either through a Window
Manager like KDE or using the cryptsetup luksOpen command. Fortunately, many
laptops nowadays come equipped with TPM2 modules, which can be utilized to
automatically decrypt the device and subsequently m...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: #40: Another r2u Example – Making Colab Easier
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/07/08#040_r2u_used_at_colab
July 8, 2023, 11:26 PM
Welcome to the 40th post in the $R^4 series. This
one will just be a very brief illustration of r2u use in what might be
an unexpected place: Google
Colab. Colab has a strong bent towards Jupyter and Python but has
been supporting R compute kernels for some time (by changing what they
call the ‘runtime’). And with a little exploration one can identify
these are (currently, as of July 2023) running Ubuntu 20.04 aka
‘focal’.
Which is of course one of two system supported by our lovely r2u ...
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Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Open question: Podman and user/group IDs
https://perezmeyer.com.ar/blog/2023/07/08/podman_and_user_group_ids/
July 8, 2023, 8:45 PM
Here is an open question for Podman users: is there a (ideally simple) way to keep the user/group ID between the real system and the container?
Let me be more verbose.
I use Docker mostly in two "special" cases:
As Yocto build environment: I can use whatever the people I work with/Yocto version wants.
For creating developer environments: I create Docker containers that have the same environments as the CI docker instances I use with GitLab + development tools I run sharing the X socket. In that...
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Russell Coker: Sandboxing Phone Apps
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/07/08/sandboxing-phone-apps/
July 8, 2023, 10:11 AM
As a follow up to Wayland [1]:
A difficult problem with Linux desktop systems (which includes phones and tablets) is restricting application access so that applications can’t mess with each other’s data or configuration but also allowing them to share data as needed. This has been mostly solved for Android but that involved giving up all “legacy” Linux apps. I think that we need to get phones capable of running a full desktop environment and having Android level security on phone apps an...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.33 on CRAN: Bugfix
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/07/07#digest_0.6.33
July 7, 2023, 11:43 PM
Release 0.6.33 of the digest package
arrived at CRAN today and has
been uploaded to Debian
already.
digest
creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5,
sha-1, sha-256, sha-512,
crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64,
murmur32, spookyhash, blake3, and
crc32c algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language
objects. It is a mature and widely-used (with 58.6 million downloads
just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks
may involve caching of objects for which it p...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.11 on CRAN: Updates and Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/07/06#rcpp_1.0.11
July 7, 2023, 1:04 AM
The Rcpp Core Team is delighted to announce that the newest release
1.0.11 of the Rcpp package arrived on
CRAN and in Debian earlier today. 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
finalized three days ago, but given the widespread use and extended
reverse dependencies at CRAN it
usually takes a few days to be processed. This release continues with
the six-months January-July cycle ...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2023
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2023/07/my-debian-activities-in-june-2023/
July 6, 2023, 3:09 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 221 and rejected 33 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 221.
Yeah, Bookworm was released this month. Thanks a lot to everybody who was involved in doing this.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. 
This month my all in all workload has been 14h.
During that time I uploaded:
[DLA 3440-1] cups security update for one CVE (as the CVE was emb...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 in Hamburg
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2023/07/05/reproducible-builds-hamburg-meeting/
July 5, 2023, 12:00 AM
We are glad to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from October 31st to November 2nd, 2023, in the vibrant city of Hamburg, Germany.
This year, we are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice (2022), Marrakesh (2019), Paris (2018), Berlin (2017), Berlin (2016) Athens (2015).
If you’re excited about joining us this year, please make sure t...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppAnnoy 0.0.21 on CRAN: Upstream Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/07/02#rcppannoy_0.0.21
July 2, 2023, 11:41 PM
Another minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.20, of RcppAnnoy
has arrived on CRAN.
RcppAnnoy
is the Rcpp-based R integration of
the nifty Annoy library
by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and
lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate
nearest neighbours—originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery
algorithm.
This release mainly updates the included copy of Annoy to version 1.7.3 which
now provides a C++ namespace in the header API. So I sent a pa...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: The bestest sine function, redux
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-07-01-16-32_the_bestest_sine_function_redux.html
July 1, 2023, 3:32 PM
A small followup to the last post:
Sreepathi Pai pointed out that Z3 isn't the fastest solver when it comes to
floats; CVC5 is faster
but cannot optimize. However, OptiMathSAT,
while non-free, detronizes Z3 on this problem; the minimization time goes
down from eight hours to five minutes! (Pai also pointed to
sat-smt.codes, if you want to read 650+ pages
about SAT/SMT techniques.)
I discovered that the desired range is not [0,16384) but [0,16384];
that is, you need to include 16384. This makes...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: The smallest Pride contribution
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-07-01-15-47_the_smallest_pride_contribution.html
July 1, 2023, 2:47 PM
Happy Pride! In lieu of doing something actually useful for the case,
here is a patch
to make screen show the Pride flag emoji correctly.
I hadn't counted on screen literally being from 1987, though. In K&R C!
This patch is for all the LBGT+ users needing Unicode 15.0 support in
the screens running on their SVR4 PDP-11s....
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Bastian Venthur: dotenv-cli update
https://venthur.de/2023-07-01-dotenv-cli-update.html
July 1, 2023, 1:00 PM
Thanks to Nicholas Guriev,
dotenv-cli now uses exec instead of popen to create the new process on
POSIX systems.
As a refresher, dotenv-cli is a package that
provides the dotenv command. dotenv reads the .env file from the current
directory, puts the contents in the environment variables, and executes the
given command with the extra environment variables set.
dotenv comes in handy if you follow the 12 factor app
methodology or just need to run a program locally with specific environment
variabl...
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Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 - um breve relato
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-brasilia-2023-um-breve-relato/
July 1, 2023, 11:00 AM
No período de 25 a 27 de maio, Brasília foi palco da
MiniDebConf 2023. Esse encontro, composto
por diversas atividades como palestras, oficinas, sprints,
BSP (Bug Squashing Party), assinatura de chaves,
eventos sociais e hacking, teve como principal objetivo reunir a comunidade e
celebrar o maior projeto de Software Livre do mundo: o
Debian.
A MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 foi um sucesso graças à participação de todas e
todos, independentemente do nível de conhecimento sobre o Debian. Valor...
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Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 - a brief report
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-brasilia-2023-a-brief-report/
July 1, 2023, 11:00 AM
From May 25th to 27th, Brasília hosted the
MiniDebConf 2023. This gathering, composed
of various activities such as talks, workshops, sprints, BSP (Bug Squashing
Party), key signing, social events, and hacking, aimed to bring the community
together and celebrate the world's largest Free Software project: Debian.
The MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 was a success thanks to the participation of
everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about Debian. We valued the
presence of both beginners who ...
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Junichi Uekawa: New month.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Jul-1.html.en#2023-Jul-1-11:50:53
July 1, 2023, 2:50 AM
New month. It's been 15 years since I joined the current company. That's a long time.
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities June 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/07/01/floss-activities/
July 1, 2023, 12:33 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
thermal_daemon:
fix thermal_monitor build,
make power group configurable,
cleanups
trurl:
cleanups
yt-dlp:
improve acast extractor
duck:
add indicator
dpkg:
avoid shell
Debian BTS usertags:
fix release/port usertags
Debian QA services:
more debugging,
update hardcoding
(1
2)
Debian package uploads:
foxtrotgps,
sptag
(1
2 3)
Debian wiki pages:
BookwormGdalPerl,
ChrootOnAndroid,
DebianKernel...
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Abhijith PA: Running Debian on my phone
https://abhijithpa.me/2023/Running-Debian-on-my-phone/
June 30, 2023, 5:53 PM
You might have already read my blog titled ‘Running PostmarketOS on my
phone’. After running pmOS on phone, my mind kept talking “run
Debian”. So I started preparing for that.
At the moment no straight way tool exist in Debian like
postmarketOS’s pmbootstrap. Well I can compile what is already available,
do debootstrap rootfs. But I don’t know how to build the final image
that can be flashed from recovery.
One crooked idea I had is, extract the pmOS image, find the packages
a...
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Russell Coker: Links June 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/30/links-june-2023/
June 30, 2023, 9:31 AM
Tablet Magazine has an interesting article about Jewish men who fought in the military for Nazi Germany [1]. I’m surprised that they didn’t frag their colleagues.
Dropbox has an insightful interview with a lawyer about the future of machine learning in the legal profession [2]. This seems like it could give real benefits to society in giving legal assistance to more people and giving less uncertainty about the result of court cases. It could also find unclear laws for legislators who want to...
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Shirish Agarwal: Motherboard battery, Framework, VR headsets, Steam
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/06/30/motherboard-battery-framework-vr-headsets-steam/
June 30, 2023, 3:32 AM
Motherboard Battery
You know you have become too old when you get stumped and the solution is simple and fixed by the vendor. About a week back, I was getting CPU Fan Error. It’s a 6 year old desktop so I figured that the fan or the ball bearings on the fan must have worn out. I opened up the cabinet and I could see both the on cpu fan was working coolly as well as the side fan was working without an issue. So I couldn’t figure out what was the issue. I had updated the BIOS/UEFI number of...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Finding the BESTEST sine function for Nintendo 64
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-06-29-23-16_finding_the_bestest_sine_function_for_nintendo_64.html
June 29, 2023, 10:16 PM
YouTube gave me the video “Finding the BEST sine function for Nintendo 64”
yesterday, and while I thought the title was very intriguing, I came away
a bit disappointed; the video is hardly about the specifics of Nintendo 64
at all, and the author mostly spends time comparing straight-up LUTs with
some hand-made splines under a proxy metric (no real comparative benchmarks, hardly any
numerics).
I have no idea what the optimal solution is, but it got me thinking: How good
can we get with the ...
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C.J. Collier: Converting a windows install to a libvirt VM
https://wp.c9h.org/cj/?p=1952
June 29, 2023, 5:41 PM
Reduce the size of your c: partition to the smallest it can be and then turn off windows with the understanding that you will never boot this system on the iron ever again.
Boot into a netinst installer image (no GUI). hold alt and press left arrow a few times until you get to a prompt to press enter. Press enter.
In this example /dev/sda is your windows disk which contains the c: partition
and /dev/disk/by-id/usb0 is the USB-3 attached SATA controller that you have your SSD attached to (please ...
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Antoine Beaupré: Using signal-cli to cancel your Signal account
https://anarc.at/blog/2023-06-28-using-signal-cli-to-unregister/
June 29, 2023, 4:23 AM
For obscure reasons, I have found
myself with a phone number registered with Signal but without any
device associated with it.
This is the I lost my phone section in Signal support, which
rather unhelpfully tell you that, literally:
Until you have access to your phone number, there is nothing that
can be done with Signal.
To be fair, I guess that sort of makes sense: Signal relies heavily on
phone numbers for identity. It's how you register to the service and
how you recover after losing your...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Semiosis
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-9137-6.html
June 29, 2023, 3:17 AM
Review: Semiosis, by Sue Burke

Series:
Semiosis #1


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
February 2018


ISBN:
0-7653-9137-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
333

Semiosis is a first-contact science fiction novel and the first
half of a duology. It was Sue Burke's first novel.
In the 2060s, with the Earth plagued by environmental issues, a group of
utopians decided to found a colony on another planet. Their goal is to
live in har...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Translation State
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-29024-6.html
June 28, 2023, 4:04 AM
Review: Translation State, by Ann Leckie

Publisher:
Orbit


Copyright:
June 2023


ISBN:
0-316-29024-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
354

Translation State is a science fiction novel set in the same
universe as the Imperial Radch series and
Provenance. It is not truly a sequel of
any of those books, but as with Provenance, it has significant
spoilers for the conclusion of Ancillary
Mercy. Provenance takes place earlier, but it's plot...
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Daniel Lange: Xfce4 opening links in Chromium despite Firefox having been set as the default browser
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/184-Xfce4-opening-links-in-Chromium-despite-Firefox-having-been-set-as-the-default-browser.html
June 27, 2023, 1:55 PM
Installing a laptop with the shiny new Debian Bookworm release finds a few interesting things broken that I probably had fixed in the past already on the old laptop.
One, that was increadibly unintuitive to fix, was lots of applications (like xfce4-terminal or Telegram) opening links in Chromium despite Firefox being set as the preferred webbrowser everywhere.
update-alternatives --config x-www-browser was pointing at Firefox already, of course.
The Xfce4 preferred application from settings wa...
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Russell Coker: Running a ChatGPT Type System
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/27/running-a-chatgpt-type-system/
June 27, 2023, 1:43 PM
Alpaca
I’ve just done some experiments running ChatGPT type programs. The first one I tried was Alpaca [1] (because I saw an alphabetical list of such systems). Here’s the 4GB data file [2]. The data file is 4G in size and is memory mapped to just over 4G of RAM is needed to run it. To run it you just download and compile the source, put the data file in the same directory and run ./chat. I run it with the Bubblewrap container via the following command line:
exec bwrap --ro-bind $(pwd) $(pwd...
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Wouter Verhelst: The future of the eID on RHEL
https://grep.be/blog//en/work/The_future_of_the_eID_on_RHEL/
June 27, 2023, 12:08 PM
Since before I got involved in the eID back in
2014, we have
provided official packages of the eID for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Since RHEL itself requires a license, we did this, first, by using
buildbot and
mock
on a Fedora VM to set up a CentOS chroot in
which to build the RPM package. Later this was migrated to using GitLab
CI and to using
docker rather than VMs, in an effort to save
some resources. Even later still, when Red Hat made CentOS no longer be
a downstream of RHEL, we migrated fro...
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Matt Brown: Designing a PCBA friendly CO2 monitor
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/06/27/designing-a-pcba-friendly-co2-monitor/
June 27, 2023, 12:05 AM
co2mon.nz currently uses monitors based on Oliver Seiler’s open source design which I am personally building. This post describes my exploration of how to achieve production of a CO2 monitor that could enable the growth of co2mon.nz.
Goals
Primarily I want to design a CO2 monitor which allows the majority of the production process to be outsourced. In particular, the PCB should be able to be assembled in an automated fashion (PCBA).
As a secondary goal, I’d like to improve the aesthetics of ...
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Lukas Märdian: Netplan 0.106.1 stable release
https://blog.slyon.de/2023/06/26/netplan-0-106-1-stable-release/
June 26, 2023, 12:30 PM
We are happy to announce that Netplan 0.106.1 is available for download on Ubuntu Mantic Minotaur and Debian testing.
This release includes some improvements in our documentation and CI infrastructure and a number of bug fixes.
What’s new in Netplan 0.106.1?
Documentation
New Netplan tutorial. A tutorial for beginners on how to get started with Netplan was included in our main documentation. It’s intended to help newcomers to get familiar with Netplan and guide the reader throug...
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Jonathan McDowell: Figuring out the right card for foreign currency transactions
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/06/foreign-currency-debit-cards.html
June 25, 2023, 5:28 PM
While travel these days is much reduced I still end up in Dublin regularly enough (though less so now I’m not working directly with folk there), and have the occasional US trip. Given that I live and work in the UK, and thus get paid in GBP (£), this leads to the question of what to do about USD ($) and EUR (€) transaction. USD turns out to be easy; I still have a US account from when I lived there and keeping it active has, so far, not proved to be a problem.
EUR is tricker. In an ideal w...
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Vasudev Kamath: Migrating my domain from copyninja.info to copyninja.in
https://copyninja.in/blog/migrating_domain.html
June 25, 2023, 10:43 AM
After holding the domain copyninja.info for almost 15 years, I finally let it
expire and bought a new domain, copyninja.in. With this move, I also bid
goodbye to my VPS, which I had been using for over 12 years on DigitalOcean.
This particular VPS was initially set up with Debian Wheezy (7) and had been
upgraded over the years to successive Debian versions and finally was running
Debian Bullseye (11).
The main reason for the move was that the .info domain was becoming more
expensive every year, ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Wee Free Men
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-001238-2.html
June 25, 2023, 3:14 AM
Review: The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #30


Publisher:
HarperTempest


Copyright:
2003


Printing:
2006


ISBN:
0-06-001238-2


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
375

The Wee Free Men is the 30th Discworld novel but the first Tiffany
Aching book and doesn't rely on prior knowledge of Discworld, although the
witches from previous books do appear. You could start here, although I
think the...
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Steve Kemp: Simple REPL for CP/M, in Z80 assembly
https://blog.steve.fi/simple_repl_for_cp_m__in_z80_assembly.html
June 24, 2023, 4:45 AM
So my previous post documented a couple of simple "scripting languages" for small computers, allowing basic operations in a compact/terse fashion.
I mentioned that I might be tempted to write something similar for CP/M, in Z80 assembly, and the result is here:
https://github.com/skx/z80-cpm-scripting-interpreter
To sum up it allows running programs like this:
0m 16k{rP _ _}
C3 03 EA 00 00 C3 06 DC 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Numbers automatically get saved to the A-register, the accumulator....
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Russ Allbery: Review: Rose/House
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-64524-034-7.html
June 24, 2023, 3:53 AM
Review: Rose/House, by Arkady Martine

Publisher:
Subterranean Press


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-64524-034-7


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
109

Arkady Martine is the author of the wonderful Teixcalaan duology, a political space opera. Rose/House is a
standalone science fiction novella in an entirely different subgenre.
Basit Deniau was a legendary architect whose trademark was infusing his
houses with artificial intelligences. A ho...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 243 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-243-released/
June 23, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 243. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Drop Jenkins build reference in README.rst.
[ Ed Maste ]
* Update FreeBSD package names
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Improve the documentation on to produce that binary blob that in the arsc
comparator.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Steve Kemp: Simple toy languages
https://blog.steve.fi/simple_toy_languages.html
June 22, 2023, 1:00 PM
Recently I was looking around the internet and looking for something to do with some ESP8266 devices, which I've been neglecting over recent years.
When I was on paternity-leave, five years ago, I decided I wanted a new hobby for my "down" time. I had two obvious choices a) developing applications for mobiles, or b) working with "hardware". I chose the latter.
By accident I came across a couple of simple scripting languages, FORTH-esque. Sample usage looks something like this (which obvio...
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Russell Coker: Cheap Peripherals for Work
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/22/cheap-peripherals-work/
June 22, 2023, 9:56 AM
A problem with a lot of the purchase of peripherals is that they don’t match the needs of the users and often get thrown away long before they wear out.
At many companies when a new employee starts they are given a laptop (expensive corporate asset), a cheap headset for video calls, and optionally a keyboard and mouse for people who don’t like the laptop keyboard and/or touchpad.
When an employee leaves the company their laptop can be assigned to someone else if it isn’t too old. Headsets ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Furious Heaven
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-86701-0.html
June 22, 2023, 3:35 AM
Review: Furious Heaven, by Kate Elliott

Series:
Sun Chronicles #2


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-250-86701-0


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
725

Furious Heaven is the middle book of a trilogy and a direct sequel
to Unconquerable Sun. Don't start here.
I also had some trouble remembering what happened in the previous book
(grumble recaps mutter), and there are a lot of threads, so I would try to
minimize the ti...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: New Keyboard, Who This?
https://veronneau.org/new-keyboard-who-this.html
June 21, 2023, 4:15 PM
My old Thinkpad X220 has been slowly dying1 and as much as it makes me
sad, it is also showing its age in terms of computational power. As such, I've
pre-ordered a Framework 13 (the AMD version) and plan to retire my X220 when I
get it.
One thing I will miss from that laptop is the keyboard. At work, I dock it (on
the amazing Thinkpad dock), which lets me use the keyboard while working on a
larger monitor.
I could probably replicate this setup with the Framework, but I'm not a fan of
trackpads. ...
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Vasudev Kamath: Notes: Experimenting with ZRAM and Memory Over commit
https://copyninja.in/blog/zram_memory_overcommit.html
June 20, 2023, 5:25 AM
Introduction
The ZRAM module in the Linux kernel creates a memory-backed block device that
stores its content in a compressed format. It offers users the choice of
compression algorithms such as lz4, zstd, or lzo. These algorithms differ in
compression ratio and speed, with zstd providing the best compression but being
slower, while lz4 offers higher speed but lower compression.
Using ZRAM as Swap
One interesting use case for ZRAM is utilizing it as swap space in the system.
There are two util...
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Daniel Lange: Linux kernel USB errors -71 and -110
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/183-Linux-kernel-USB-errors-71-and-110.html
June 19, 2023, 11:00 AM
After an upgrade of my PC's mainboard BIOS the boot would take a minute or more to complete and sometimes the lightdm login screen would sit there but not accept keyboard input for another minute or so. Then the keyboard got enabled and I could log in normally. Everything worked fine after that bootup struggle completed. This was fully reproducible and persisted across reboots. Weird.
The kernel dmesg log showed entries that looked suspicious:
Googleing these error -110 and error -71 is a bi...
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C.J. Collier: First taste of Debian 12
https://wp.c9h.org/cj/?p=1949
June 19, 2023, 4:49 AM
As some of you may know, the Debian project released v12, bookworm to stable on the 10th of this month. I haven’t had a reason to try it yet, but I’m downloading it now. My first thought is that it’s much larger than I expected. The normal sized version used to fit on a CD-ROM disk, so around 650MB. The netinst has until now been even smaller, with the most recent versions being about 256MB if I recall correctly. The netinst, now with proprietary firmware, weighs in over 700MB:
2023-0...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Solo V2: nice but flawed
https://veronneau.org/solo-v2-nice-but-flawed.html
June 18, 2023, 4:00 AM
EDIT: One of my 2 keys has died. There are what seems like golden bubbles
under the epoxy, over one of the chips and those were not there before. I've
emailed SoloKeys and I'm waiting for a reply, but for now, I've stopped using
the Solo V2 altogether :(
I recently received the two Solo V2 hardware tokens I ordered as part of their
crowdfunding campaign, back in March 2022. It did take them longer than
advertised to ship me the tokens, but that's hardly unexpected from such
small-scale, crowdfun...
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Bastian Venthur: Blag 2.0 released
https://venthur.de/2023-06-17-blag.html
June 17, 2023, 2:00 PM
A few days ago, I released a major update on blag, my blog-aware
static-site generator, which introduces a few backwards-incompatible changes
and many improvements over the old version.
Good-looking default theme
The old bare-bones default theme has been replaced with a good-looking one,
based on the one used on this blog:
It comes with a light- and dark theme that switches automatically based on the
browser setting, as well as fitting light- and dark syntax highlighting themes
for code blocks....
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John Goerzen: Using dar for Data Archiving
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10527-using-dar-for-data-archiving
June 17, 2023, 1:16 AM
This is the third post in a series about data archiving to removable media (optical discs and hard drives). In the first, I explained the difference between backing up and archiving, established goals for the project, and said I’d evaluate git-annex and dar. The second post evaluated git-annex, and now it’s time to look at dar. The series will conclude with a post comparing git-annex with dar.
What is dar?
I could open with the same thing I did with git-annex, just changing the name of th...
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Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Qt 6 in Debian bullseye, take 2
https://perezmeyer.com.ar/blog/2023/06/16/qt6-in-debian-bullseye-take-2/
June 16, 2023, 1:45 PM
Bookworm has been released and Bullseye is now old-stable. Non the less today I took the time to update the Qt 6 backports so they are as close as Bookworm as possible. Except security fixes are needed these ought to be the latest uploads of Qt 6 to bullseye-backports.
Hope you enjoyed them, and thanks again The Qt Company and ICS for making this possible....
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John Goerzen: Using git-annex for Data Archiving
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10516-using-git-annex-for-data-archiving
June 16, 2023, 4:59 AM
In my recent post about data archiving to removable media, I laid out the difference between backing up and archiving, and also said I’d evaluate git-annex and dar. This post evaluates git-annex. The next will look at dar, and then I’ll make a comparison post.
What is git-annex?
git-annex is a fantastic and versatile program that does… well, it’s one of those things that can do so much that it’s a bit hard to describe. Its homepage says:
git-annex allows managing large files with g...
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Valhalla's Things: Shawl Calculations
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/drafts/shawl_calculations/index.html
June 16, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on June 16, 2023



I’ve just realized that I’m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I’m knitting, so I’ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one.
This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows.
It’s a top-down crescent, with 6 increases every ...
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