Mike Gabriel: MATE 1.26 has finally landed in Debian testing
https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/140
December 23, 2021, 2:54 PM
For those, who haven't realized, yet: MATE 1.26 has now been uploaded to Debian and should be available in Debian testing to all happy testers.
During December, me and the whole family, we had been infected with Covid-19. All of us have recovered well, by now. In fact, I was very happy about a proper fever which I haven't had in years. (Fever is a well-known form of cancer prevention / prophylaxis). Drinking a lot (of warm water!), not eating for five days, and additionally following some healt...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Empress of Salt and Fortune
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-75029-6.html
December 23, 2021, 4:43 AM
Review: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

Series:
Singing Hills Cycle #1


Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
March 2020


ISBN:
1-250-75029-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
119

Cleric Chih is a record-keeper and historian from the Singing Hills abbey.
They have come to Lake Scarlet with their neixin, the hoopoe Almost
Brilliant, because the magical imperial lock placed on the site by the
Empress In-yo has just bee...
--------------------
Molly de Blanc: kindle
http://deblanc.net/blog/2021/12/21/kindle/
December 21, 2021, 11:43 PM
I have a Kindle. I’ve spent a lot of time saying this sheepishly — it’s Amazon, it’s proprietary, DRM is bad, etc, etc. It was a very thoughtful gift from my parents, taking into account things like my travel schedule, preference for traveling lighter, love of reading, and small apartment.
I wanted to share some observations from my experience owning a Kindle.
I don’t like to read for school on it. I really markup the papers I read for school, underlining things, notes in the margins, ...
--------------------
Joey Hess: Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Volunteer_Responsibility_Amnesty_Day/
December 21, 2021, 7:40 PM
Happy solstice, and happy
Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day!
After my inventory of my code today, I have decided it's time to pass
on moreutils to someone new.
This project remains interesting to people, including me. People still send
patches, which are easy to deal with. Taking up basic maintenance of this
package will be easy for you, if you feel like stepping forward.
People still contribute ideas and code for new tools to add to moreutils.
But I have not added any new tools to it sinc...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Vim plugins by Tim Pope
https://jmtd.net/log/vim_plugins/
December 21, 2021, 2:39 PM
I've been using Vim as my main text editor for 18 years, but for most of that
time I've been using something very close to the default configuration: my
vimrc contained not much more than preferences for indentation and how to
visually indicate white space characters like tabs.
Last but not least, I've used a single colour scheme for most of that time:
Zenburn.
In 20151 I started exploring a few Vim plugins2. To manage
them, I started by choosing a plugin manager,
Pathogen3. Recently I
noticed ...
--------------------
Thomas Lange: New ISO images using Debian 11
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/new-iso-fai-5.10/
December 21, 2021, 10:18 AM
I've created new ISO images for FAI. Now, they install Debian 11 using
kernel 5.10. The ISOs are available from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
There's also a Ubuntu version of the FAI CD which installs Ubuntu LTS
20.04 in two variants. A desktop and a server installation is
available.
If you want to install the Debian oldstable version (Debian 10),
please use the FAI.me service.
FAI...
--------------------
Craig Small: WordPress 5.8.2 Debian packages
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/20/wordpress-5-8-2-debian-packages/
December 20, 2021, 11:14 AM
After a bit of a delay, WordPress version 5.8.2 packages should be available now. This is a minor update from 5.8.1 which fixes two bugs but not the security bug.
The security bug is due to WordPress shipping its own CA store, which is a list of certificates it trusts to sign for websites. Debian WordPress has used the system certificate store which uses /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt for years so is not impacted by this change. That CA file is generated by update-ca-certificates and is ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSMC 0.2.6 on CRAN: Compiler Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/19#rcppsmc_0.2.6
December 20, 2021, 3:26 AM
A new maintenance RcppSMC release 0.2.6 arrived at CRAN yesterday. It chiefly updates the code to comply with g++-11 which default to C++17 – which brings us std::data(). And if one is not careful, as we weren’t in three files, this can clash with other uses of data as I tweeted a good week ago. Otherwise some JSS URLs now sport the preferred shorter doi form.
RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his J...
--------------------
Bastian Venthur: Managing dotfiles with GNU Stow
https://venthur.de/2021-12-19-managing-dotfiles-with-stow.html
December 19, 2021, 1:00 PM
Many developers manage their user-specific application configuration – also
known as dotfiles – in a version control system such as git. This allows
for keeping track of changes and synchronizing the dotfiles across different
machines. Searching on github, you’ll find thousands of dotfile
repositories.
As your dotfiles are sprinkled all over your home directory, managing them in
a single repository is not trivial, i.e. how do you make sure that your
bashrc, .tmux.conf, etc. that life in y...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Raybearer
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-68335-719-1.html
December 19, 2021, 4:17 AM
Review: Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko

Series:
Raybearer #1


Publisher:
Amulet Books


Copyright:
2020


ISBN:
1-68335-719-1


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
308

Tarisai was raised alone in Bhekina House by an array of servants and
tutors who were not allowed to touch her. Glimpses of the world were
fleeting and sometimes ended by nailed-shut windows. Her life revolved
around her rarely-seen mother, The Lady, who treats her w...
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, November 2021
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-november-2021.html
December 18, 2021, 8:37 PM
In November I was assigned 0.75 hours of work by Freexian's Debian
LTS initiative and carried over 15.25 hours from earlier months. I
mistakenly worked 20 hours, which we'll try to resolve.
I continued work on an update to the linux (4.9) package, but did
not make an upload this month.
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Debian media team - testing and releasing Debian 11.2 20211218 2030
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2021/12/debian-media-team-tesing-and-releasing.html
December 18, 2021, 8:34 PM
 We've more or less finished the release of the Debian CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and other media for Bullseye 11.2 release. This is one of the (roughly) quarterly point releases and roll-up releases.Thanks firstly to the developers, users, helpers, bug filers who help to keep Debian moving and working and to the release team and press team who more or less finish their job before the media team start theirs. Thanks to Sledge and RattusRattus and Isy in Cambridge and to Schweer who single-handedly clears a...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: 2,000 fonts for Debian
https://bits.debian.org/2021/12/2000-fonts-debian.html
December 17, 2021, 5:45 PM
Debian comes with tons of fonts for all kinds of purposes,
you can easily list them (almost) all with: apt-cache search ^fonts-.
However, sometimes they are not in their latest version, or as a user you would like
to get access to new fonts that are not present in Debian stable yet.
With the tool fnt you can easily preview, and install
fonts from Debian sid and Google Web Fonts (that's about 2,000 fonts that are DSFG compliant).
Any user can use the tool to install fonts only for the user itself...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: ereader
https://jmtd.net/log/ereader/
December 17, 2021, 4:31 PM
Kobo Libra H2O e-reader
This year I finally bought an e-reader: a "Kobo Libra H2O": a 7" 300ppi
screen with an adjustable colour temperature front light, waterproof,
physical buttons on a "margin"/spine which pushes the case dimensions up
to 8", which is sadly a little too big for most jeans pockets.
In fact this is the second time I've bought one. Sarah and I bought a pair
of Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2nd generation) readers as Honeymoon
gifts for each other in 2013. Sarah took to hers, b...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.10.7.5.0 on CRAN: Bugfixes
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/17#rcpparmadillo_0.10.7.5.0
December 17, 2021, 2:27 PM
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 937 other packages on CRAN, and downloaded over 22 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN).
This release brings another bug fix release 10.7.5 by Conrad in the ‘long-term supp...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 197 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-197-released/
December 17, 2021, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 197. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Drop unnecessary has_same_content_as logging calls.
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Ignore the new "binary-with-bad-dynamic-table" Lintian tag.
* Support pgpdump 0.34 in the tests. Thanks to Michael Weiss
<dev.primeos@gmail.com> for reporting and testing the fix.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.18: Multiple Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#rprotobuf_0.4.18
December 16, 2021, 11:05 PM
A new release 0.4.18 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.
This release, the first since March of last year, contains two contributed pull requests improving or extending the package, some internal maintance updating the CI setup as well as ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH 1.78.0-0: New Upstream, Two New Libraries
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#bh_1.78.0-0.txt" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#bh_1.78.0-0.txt
December 16, 2021, 9:46 PM
Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over 100 individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 28 million package downloads.
Version 1.78.0 of Boost was released in a few days ago on their schedule with April, August and Dece...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH 1.78.0-0: New Upstream, Two New Libraries
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#bh_1.78.0-0
December 16, 2021, 9:46 PM
Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over 100 individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 28 million package downloads.
Version 1.78.0 of Boost was released in a few days ago on their schedule with April, August and Decemb...
--------------------
Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2021
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/12/16/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-november-2021/
December 16, 2021, 3:27 PM
Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for November below.
Debian project funding
Our project funding work continues with an active bid on the work of packaging a recent gradle in Debian. This month the bidder has been estimating the scope of the entire project.The Grow Your Ideas project page also has some ambitious initiatives that may evolve into a funded project. The project ideas on that page range from a new wiki for Debian, ...
--------------------
Timo Jyrinki: Working and warming up cats
http://losca.blogspot.com/2021/12/working-and-warming-up-cats.html
December 14, 2021, 7:29 AM
How to disable internal keyboard/touchpad when a cat arrives I’m using an external keyboard (1) and mouse (2), but the laptop lid is usually still open for better cooling. That means the internal keyboard (3) and touchpad (4) – made of comfortable materials – are open to be used by a cat searching for warmth (7), in the obvious “every time” case that a normal non-heated nest (6) is not enough.The problem is, everything goes chaotic at that point in the default configuration...
--------------------
Andrej Shadura: Coffee gear upgrade
https://blog.shadura.me/2021/12/12/coffee-gear-upgrade/
December 12, 2021, 11:49 AM
Two weeks ago I decided to make myself a combined birthday and Christmas present and upgrade my coffee gear.
I’ve got my first espresso machine back in 2013, it was a cheap Saeco Philips Poemia, which made reasonably
drinkable coffee, but not being able to make good coffee made me increasingly unhappy about it. However,
since it worked, I wasn’t motivated enough to change anything — until it stopped working. One day the nut holding
the ‘shower screen’ broke, and I couldn’t replace it...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Some Ideas for Debian Security Improvements
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/12/12/ideas-debian-security-improvements/
December 12, 2021, 7:24 AM
Debian security is pretty good, but there’s always scope for improvement. Here are some ideas that I think could be used to improve things.
A security “wizard”, basically a set of scripts with support for plugins that will investigate your system and look for things that can be improved. It could give suggestions on LSMs that could be used, sysctl settings, lists of daemons running as root that possibly don’t need root privs, etc. Plugins could be for different daemons, so there could b...
--------------------
Molly de Blanc: Applications
http://deblanc.net/blog/2021/12/11/applications/
December 11, 2021, 9:07 PM
The first time I applied for grad school it was a bit of a lark. I was serious about it, I wanted to go, I had goals, and I am happy to be here now. However, it was a little fun. I took a white paper and crisped it up with the help of some friends who read it and provided comments. I wrote a personal statement, got some letters of recommendation, and generally felt pretty good about the process. It wasn’t stressful.
The second time I applied to grad school it was a slog. For several weeks I ga...
--------------------
Neil Williams: Diversity and gender
https://linux.codehelp.co.uk/diversity-and-gender.html
December 11, 2021, 12:20 PM
As a follow on to a previous blog entry of mine, Free and Open, I feel it
worthwhile to do my bit to dismantle the pseudo-science and over
simplification in the idea that gender is binary at a biological level.
TL;DR: Science simply does not support binary sexes or binary genders.
Truth is a bit more complicated.
There is certainty and there are binary answers in mathematics. Things
get less definitive in physics, certainly as soon as quantum is
broached. Processes become more of an equilibrium...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: Updated my raspberry pi to bullseye and no longer connects to network.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2021-Dec-11.html.en#2021-Dec-11-10:10:51
December 11, 2021, 1:10 AM
Updated my raspberry pi to bullseye and no longer connects to network. Seems like eth0 got renamed.
probably this thing that I was supposed to have migrated away from.
Not entirely sure how to recover from this now.
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 196 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-196-released/
December 10, 2021, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 196. This version includes the following changes:
[ Roland Clobus ]
* Add a comment/annotation when the GNU_BUILD_ID field has been modified.
[ Brent Spillner ]
* Fix the "Black" version detection.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Replace "token" with anonymous variable "x" in order to remove extra lines.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
David Kalnischkies: APT for Advent of Code
https://david.kalnischkies.de/blog/2021/apt-for-advent-of-code
December 9, 2021, 12:14 PM
Advent of Code 2021
Advent of Code, for those not in the know,
is a yearly Advent calendar (since 2015) of coding puzzles many people
participate in for a plenary of reasons ranging from speed coding to code
golf with stops at learning a new language or practicing already known
ones.
I usually write boring C++, but any language and then some can be used.
There are reports of people implementing it in hardware, solving them by
hand on paper or using Microsoft Excel…
so, after solving a p...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Java in a Container World
https://jmtd.net/log/uksystems21/redhat/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://jmtd.net/log/uksystems21/redhat/
December 8, 2021, 11:02 AM
me, delivering the talk
The redhat talk I gave at UK Systems '21 was entitled "Java in a
Container World: What we've done and where we're going". The slides (with
notes) for it are available:
java in a container world.pdf (PDF, 670K)...
--------------------
Craig Small: Fediverse Test Three
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/test3/
December 8, 2021, 6:25 AM
This supposedly will go out to the fediverse if I can fix wp-cron.
--------------------
Craig Small: ap test 4
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/ap-test-4/
December 8, 2021, 5:13 AM
dfdsfssdffdsfs
--------------------
Craig Small: ap test3
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/ap-test3/
December 8, 2021, 4:57 AM
this is the body
--------------------
Craig Small: Hello world!
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/hello-world/
December 8, 2021, 1:58 AM
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
--------------------
Abiola Ajadi: Outreachy- Get to know me!
https://ajadi-abiola.github.io/blog/Outreachy-Get-to-know-me!
December 8, 2021, 12:00 AM
Hello Everyone!
I am Abiola Ajadi from Lagos, Nigeria. I have my B.sc in computer science from the University of Ilorin where I was involved in various community building and also a student leader.
In my free time, I love watching anime, reading comics also surfing the net. I enjoy learning about different cultures and will love to travel the world soon!
Concerning pets, I love dogs(they are so cute!!)
My core values
I will use the 3Cs to describe my core values, which stands for Curiosity, ...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Cost models for evaluating stream-processing programs
https://jmtd.net/log/uksystems21/
December 7, 2021, 9:29 PM
As I wrote, last week I attended the UK Systems Research
2021 and gave two (or 2½, or 3) talks. my
PhD talk is entitled "Picking a winner: cost models for evaluating
stream-processing programs". The slides (with notes) are here:
picking a winner.pdf (PDF, 425K)...
--------------------
Evgeni Golov: The Mocking will continue, until CI improves
https://www.die-welt.net/2021/12/the-mocking-will-continue-until-ci-improves/
December 7, 2021, 7:39 PM
One might think, this blog is exclusively about weird language behavior and yelling at computers… Well, welcome to another episode of Jackass!
Today's opponent is Ruby, or maybe minitest , or maybe Mocha. I'm not exactly sure, but it was a rather amusing exercise and I like to share my nightmares ;)
It all started with the classical "you're using old and unmaintained software, please switch to something new".
The first attempt was to switch from the ci_reporter_minitest plugin to the minitest-...
--------------------
Daniel Lange: Gradual improvements at the Linux Foundation
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/172-Gradual-improvements-at-the-Linux-Foundation.html
December 7, 2021, 10:11 AM
After last year's blunder with trying to hide the Adobe toolchain and using hilarious stock photos, the Linux Foundation did much better in their 2021 annual report1 published Dec. 6, 2021.
Still they are using the Adobe toolchain (InDesign, Acrobat PDF) and my fellow DebianKernel2 Developer Geert was quick to point that out as the first comment to the LWN note on the publication:
I think it is important to call the Linux Foundation (LF) out again and again. Adobe is a Silver member of the L...
--------------------
Russell Coker: AS400
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/12/07/as400/
December 7, 2021, 3:08 AM
The IBM i operating system on the AS/400 is a system that runs on PPC for “midrange” systems. I did a bit of reading about it after seeing an AS/400 on ebay for $300, if I had a lot more spare time and energy I might have put in a bid for that if it didn’t look like it had been left out in the rain. It seems that AS/400 is not dead, there are cloud services available, here’s one that provides a VM with 2GM of RAM for “only EUR 251 monthly” [1], wow. I’m not qualified to comment on ...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Sixth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop lightning talk
https://jmtd.net/log/lightning/
December 6, 2021, 10:04 PM
me looking awkward, thanks Mark Little
Last week I attended the UK Systems Research
2021 conference in County Durham, my first
conference in nearly two years (since FOSDEM 2020,
right on the cusp of the Pandemic). The Systems conference community
is very pleasant and welcoming and so when I heard it was going to
take place "physically" again this year I was so keen to attend I
decided to hedge my bets and submit two talk proposals. I wasn't
expecting them both to be accepted…
As well as t...
--------------------
Matthias Klumpp: New things in AppStream 0.15
https://blog.tenstral.net/2021/12/new-things-in-appstream-0-15.html
December 6, 2021, 5:40 PM
On the road to AppStream 1.0, a lot of items from the long todo list have been done so far – only one major feature is remaining, external release descriptions, which is a tricky one to implement and specify. For AppStream 1.0 it needs to be present or be rejected though, as it would be a major change in how release data is handled in AppStream.
Besides 1.0 preparation work, the recent 0.15 release and the releases before it come with their very own large set of changes, that are worth a lo...
--------------------
Paul Tagliamonte: Proxying Ethernet Frames to PACKRAT (Part 5/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-proxy/
December 6, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we left off at being able to send and recieve PACKRAT frames
to and from devices. Since we can transport IPv4 packets over the network,
let’s go ahead and see if we can read/write
Ethernet frames from a Linux network
interface, and on the backend, read and write PACKRAT frames over the air.
This...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2021
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2021-11/
December 5, 2021, 6:33 PM
Welcome to the November 2021 report from the Reproducible Builds project.
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 therefore to ensure 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 co...
--------------------
Paul Tagliamonte: Framing data (Part 4/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-framing/
December 5, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we we were able to build a functioning
Layer 1 PHY where we can encode symbols to transmit, and receive symbols on the
other end, we’re now at the point where we can encode and decode those symbols
as bits and frame blocks of data, marking them with a Sender and a Destination
for routing to the ...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Leaving MySQL
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2021-12-05-16-41_leaving_mysql.html
December 5, 2021, 3:41 PM
Today was my last day at Oracle, and thus also in the MySQL team.
When a decision comes to switch workplaces, there's always the question of
“why”, but that question always has multiple answers, and perhaps the
simplest one is that I found another opportunity, and and as a whole,
it was obvious it was time to move on when that arrived.
But it doesn't really explain why I did go looking for that somewhere else
in the first place. The reasons for that are again complex, and it's not
possible...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 195 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-195-released/
December 5, 2021, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 195. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't use the runtime platform's native endianness when unpacking .pyc
files to fix test failures on big-endian machines.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Paul Tagliamonte: Receiving BPSK symbols (Part 3/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-receiving/
December 4, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we worked through how to generate
a BPSK signal, and hopefully transmit it using one of our SDRs.
Let’s take that and move on to Receiving BPSK and turning that back
into symbols!
Demodulating BPSK data is a bit more tricky than transmitting BPSK data, mostly
due to tedious facts of life such as...
--------------------
Paul Tagliamonte: Transmitting BPSK symbols (Part 2/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-transmitting/
December 3, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we worked through what IQ is,
and different formats that it may be sent or received in. Let’s take that
and move on to Transmitting BPSK using IQ data!
When we transmit and receive information through RF using an SDR, data is
traditionally encoded into a stream of
symbols
which are then used by ...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: A Brazilian Portuguese translation of the book Made with Creative Commons
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Brazilian_Portuguese_translation_of_the_book_Made_with_Creative_Commons.html
December 3, 2021, 8:30 AM
A few days ago, a productive translator started working on a new
translation of the Made with Creative
Commons book for Brazilian Portuguese. The translation take place on
the
Weblate web based translation system. Once the translation is
complete and proof read, we can publish it on paper as well as in PDF,
ePub and HTML format. The translation is already 16% complete, and if
more people get involved I am conviced it can very quickly reach 100%.
If you are interested in helping out with this ...
--------------------
Evgeni Golov: Dependency confusion in the Ansible Galaxy CLI
https://www.die-welt.net/2021/12/dependency-confusion-in-the-ansible-galaxy-cli/
December 3, 2021, 8:00 AM
I hope you enjoyed my last post about Ansible Galaxy Namespaces. In there I noted that I originally looked for something completely different and the namespace takeover was rather accidental.
Well, originally I was looking at how the different Ansible content hosting services and their client (ansible-galaxy) behave in regard to clashes in naming of the hosted content.
"Ansible content hosting services"?! There are currently three main ways for users to obtain Ansible content:
Ansible Galaxy - ...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Building a desktop to improve my work/life balance
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2021/12/desktop-work-life-balance.html
December 2, 2021, 8:00 PM
It’s been over 20 months since the first COVID lockdown kicked in here in Northern Ireland and I started working from home. Even when the strict lockdown was lifted the advice here has continued to be “If you can work from home you should work from home”. I’ve been into the office here and there (for new starts given you need to hand over a laptop and sort out some login details it’s generally easier to do so in person, and I’ve had a couple of whiteboard sessions that needed the hig...
--------------------
Paul Tagliamonte: Processing IQ data formats (Part 1/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-processing-iq/
December 2, 2021, 5:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
When working with SDRs, information about the signals your radio is receiving
are communicated by streams of
IQ
data. IQ is short for “In-phase” and “Quadrature”, which means 90 degrees
out of phase. Values in the IQ stream are
complex numbers, so
converting them to a native complex type in your language
he...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: It has been some time..
https://blog.steve.fi/it_has_been_some_time__.html
December 2, 2021, 5:00 PM
I realize it has been quite some time since I last made a blog-post, so I guess the short version is "I'm still alive", or as Granny Weatherwax would have said:
I ATE'NT DEAD
Of course if I die now this would be an awkward post!
I can't think of anything terribly interesting I've been doing recently, mostly being settled in my new flat and tinkering away with things. The latest "new" code was something for controlling mpd via a web-browser:
https://github.com/skx/mpd-web
This is a simp...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: December.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2021-Dec-2.html.en#2021-Dec-2-08:56:22
December 1, 2021, 11:56 PM
December. The world is turbulent and I am still worried where we are going.
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2021
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2021/12/my-debian-activities-in-november-2021/
December 1, 2021, 3:33 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 564 and rejected 93 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 591.
Debian LTS
This was my eighty-ninth 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 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of:
[DLA 2820-1] atftp security update for two CVEs
[DLA 2821-1] axis security update for one CVE
[DLA 2822-1] netkit-rsh security update for...
--------------------
Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in December 2021
https://utkarsh2102.com/posts/foss-in-nov-21/
December 1, 2021, 5:41 AM
Here’s my (twenty-sixth) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 35th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! o/
Just churning through the backlog again this month. Ugh.
Anyway, I did the following stuff in Debian:
Uploads and bug fixes:
rails (2:6.1.4.1+dfsg-3) - No-change rebuild for unstable.
Other $things:
Mentoring for newcomers.
Moderation of -project mailing ...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: A World Without Email
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-525-53657-4.html
December 1, 2021, 5:07 AM
Review: A World Without Email, by Cal Newport

Publisher:
Portfolio/Penguin


Copyright:
2021


ISBN:
0-525-53657-4


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
264

A World Without Email is the latest book by computer science
professor and productivity writer Cal Newport. After a detour to comment
on the drawbacks of social media in Digital Minimalism, Newport is back to writing about focus and
concentration in the vein of Deep Work.
This time, thou...
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2021
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2021/12/01/floss-activities/
December 1, 2021, 2:52 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
crazydiskinfo:
cleanup
plac:
cleanup
mpv-mpris:
cleanup
(1
2)
purple-discord:
cleanup
yt-dlp:
add
RTRFM,
Blogger,
ABC iView show/series
extractors
gensim:
reenable test dep,
use PATH too
whohas:
https
devscripts:
bts CC improvements
Debian package uploads:
sptag,
purple-discord,
uvloop
Debian wiki pages:
AndroidTools,
ChrootOnAndroid,
DebianBookworm,
DebianHams/Handbook,
DebianKernel/Users...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links November 2021
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/11/30/links-november-2021/
November 30, 2021, 1:31 PM
The Guardian has an amusing article by Sophie Elmhirst about Libertarians buying a cruise ship to make a “seasteading” project off the coast of Panama [1]. It turns out that you need permits etc to do this and maintaining a ship is expensive. Also you wouldn’t want to mine cryptocurrency in a ship cabin as most cabins are small and don’t have enough airconditioning to remain pleasant if you dump 1kW or more into the air.
NPR has an interesting article about the reaction of the NRA to the...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Commitcoin
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2021-11-30-12-00_commitcoin.html
November 30, 2021, 11:00 AM
How do you get a git commit with an interesting commit ID (or “SHA”)?
Of course, interesting is in the eye of the beholder, but let's define
it as having many repeated hex nibbles, e.g. “000” in the commit would
be somewhat interesting and “8888888888888888888888888” would be very
interesting. This is pretty similar to the dreaded cryptocoin mining;
we have no simple way of forcing a given SHA-1 hash unless someone
manages a complete second-preimage break, so we must brute-force.
(An...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Your Device Has Been Improved
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/11/30/your-device-has-been-improved/
November 30, 2021, 9:41 AM
I’ve just started a Samsung tablet downloading a 770MB update, the description says:
Overall stability of your device has been improved
The security of your device has been improved
Technically I have no doubt that both those claims are true and accurate. But according to common understanding of the English language I think they are both misleading.
By “stability improved” they mean “fixed some bugs that made it unstable” and no technical person would imagine that after a certain n...
--------------------