Debian Social Team: Some site updates
https://wordpress.debian.social/2022/01/14/some-site-updates-4/
January 14, 2022, 6:01 PM
Pleroma has been updated to version 2.4.1. We also suffered some downtime during the 11th of January. Upgrading to the latest version fixed our issues.Peertube has been upgraded to version 4.0.0.Jitsi Meet has been upgraded to version 2.0.6726.Mjolnr has been upgraded to 1.2.1.Our upgrade to bullseye is complete, we haven’t encountered any problems upgrading to bullseye o/....
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Norbert Preining: Future of “my” packages in Debian
https://www.preining.info/blog/2022/01/future-of-my-packages-in-debian/
January 14, 2022, 2:17 AM
After having been (again) demoted (timed perfectly to my round birthday!) based on flimsy arguments, I have been forced to rethink the level of contribution I want to do for Debian. Considering in particular that I have switched my main desktop to dual-boot into Arch Linux (all on the same btrfs fs with subvolumes, great!) and have run Arch now for several days exclusively, I think it is time to review the packages I am somehow responsible for (full list of packages).
After about 20 years in Deb...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.8: Updated, Strict Headers
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/13#rcpp_1.0.8
January 14, 2022, 1:03 AM
The Rcpp team is thrilled to share the news of the newest release 1.0.8 of Rcpp which hit CRAN today, and has already been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days. This release continues with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, interim ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases will alwasys be available in the Rcpp drat repo; this cycle there were once again seven (!!) – times two as we also tested the modifie...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 200 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-200-released/
January 14, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 200. This version includes the following changes:
* Even if a Sphinx .inv inventory file is labelled "The remainder of this
file is compressed using zlib", it might not actually be. In this case,
don't traceback, and simply return the original content.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#299)
* Update "X has been modified after NT_GNU_BUILD_ID has been applied" message
to, for instance, not duplicat...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2021)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/01/new-developers-2021-12.html
January 13, 2022, 4:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Douglas Andrew Torrance (dtorrance)
Mark Lee Garrett (lee)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Lukas Matthias Märdian
Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira
Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior
Julien Lamy
Kristian Nielsen
Jeremy Paul Arnold Sowden
Jussi Tapio Pakkanen
Marius Gripsgard
Martin Budaj
Peymaneh
Tommi Petteri Höynälänmaa
Congratulations!...
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Daniel Lange: Leveling the playing field for non-native speakers
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/173-Leveling-the-playing-field-for-non-native-speakers.html
January 13, 2022, 9:00 AM
...
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Michael Prokop: Revisiting 2021
https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2022/01/12/revisiting-2021/
January 12, 2022, 5:30 PM
Uhm yeah, so this shirt didn’t age well. :) Mainly to recall what happened, I’m once again revisiting my previous year (previous edition: 2020).
2021 was quite challenging overall. It started with four weeks of distance learning at school. Luckily at least at school things got back to "some kind of normal" afterwards. The lockdowns turned out to be an excellent opportunity for practising Geocaching though, and that’s what I started to do with my family. It’s a great way to grab some fres...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Training apps
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-01-12-18-27_training_apps.html
January 12, 2022, 5:27 PM
I've been using various training apps (and their associated web sites)
since 2010 now, forward-porting data to give me twelve years of logs.
(My primary migration path has been CardioTrianer → Endomondo → Strava.)
However, it strikes me that they're just becoming worse and worse,
and I think I've figured out why: What I want is a training site
with some social functions, but what companies are creating are social
networks. Not social networks about training; just social networks.
To be a bi...
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Ritesh Raj Sarraf: ThinkPad AMD Debian
https://www.researchut.com/blog/Thinkpad_AMD_Debian/
January 11, 2022, 2:07 PM
After a hiatus of 6 years, it was nice to be back with the ThinkPad. This blog post briefly touches upon my impressions with the current generation ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD variant.





ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD


Lenovo
It took 8 weeks to get my hands on the machine. Given the pandemic, restrictions and uncertainities, not sure if I should call it an ontime delivery. This was a CTO - Customise-to-order; so was nice to get rid of things I really didn’t care/use...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Hench
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-297859-4.html
January 11, 2022, 2:56 AM
Review: Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots

Publisher:
William Morrow


Copyright:
September 2020


ISBN:
0-06-297859-4


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
403

Anna Tromedlov is a hench, which means she does boring things for terrible
people for money. Supervillains need a lot of labor to keep their bases
and criminal organizations running, and they get that labor the same way
everyone else does: through temporary agencies. Anna does spreads...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rblpapi 0.3.13: Some Fixes and Documentation
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/09#rblpapi_0.3.13
January 9, 2022, 11:07 PM
A new version, now at 0.3.13, of the Rblpapi package just arrived at CRAN. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required).
This is the thirteenth release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. It comprises the PRs from three different contributors (with special thanks once again to Michael Kerber), and extends test and documentation, and extends two fu...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Grading using the Wacom Intuos S
https://veronneau.org/grading-using-the-wacom-intuos-s.html
January 9, 2022, 9:30 PM
I've been teaching economics for a few semesters already and, slowly but
surely, I'm starting to get the hang of it. Having to deal with teaching
remotely hasn't been easy though and I'm really hoping the winter semester will
be in-person again.
Although I worked way too much last semester1, I somehow managed to
transition to using a graphics tablet. I bought a Wacom Intuos S tablet (model
CTL-4100) in late August 2021 and overall, I have been very happy with it.
Wacom Canada offers a small disc...
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Russell Coker: Video Conferencing (LCA)
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/09/video-conferencing-lca/
January 9, 2022, 7:20 AM
I’ve just done a tech check for my LCA lecture. I had initially planned to do what I had done before and use my phone for recording audio and video and my PC for other stuff. The problem is that I wanted to get an external microphone going and plugging in a USB microphone turned off the speaker in the phone (it seemed to direct audio to a non-existent USB audio output). I tried using bluetooth headphones with the USB microphone and that didn’t work. Eventually a viable option seemed to be us...
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François Marier: Removing an alias/domain from a Let's Encrypt certificate managed by certbot
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/removing-alias-lets-encrypt-certificate-certbot/
January 9, 2022, 6:00 AM
I recently got an error during a certbot renewal:
Challenge failed for domain echo.fmarier.org
Failed to renew certificate jabber-gw.fmarier.org with error: Some challenges have failed.
The following renewals failed:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/jabber-gw.fmarier.org/fullchain.pem (failure)
1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)
due to the fact that I had removed the DNS entry for echo.fmarier.org.
I tried to find a way to remove that name from the certificate before
renewing it, but it seems lik...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Redemptor
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-68335-720-5.html
January 9, 2022, 3:19 AM
Review: Redemptor, by Jordan Ifueko

Series:
Raybearer #2


Publisher:
Amulet Books


Copyright:
2021


ISBN:
1-68335-720-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
328

Redemptor is the second half of a duology that started with
Raybearer. You could read the first
book without the second, but reading the second without the first will not
make much sense. I'm going to be a bit elliptical in my plot description
since there's a lot of ...
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Matthew Garrett: Pluton is not (currently) a threat to software freedom
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/58125.html
January 9, 2022, 12:59 AM
At CES this week, Lenovo announced that their new Z-series laptops would ship with AMD processors that incorporate Microsoft's Pluton security chip. There's a fair degree of cynicism around whether Microsoft have the interests of the industry as a whole at heart or not, so unsurprisingly people have voiced concerns about Pluton allowing for platform lock-in and future devices no longer booting non-Windows operating systems. Based on what we currently know, I think those concerns are understandab...
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Jonathan Dowland: 2021 in Fiction
https://jmtd.net/log/2021_in_fiction/
January 8, 2022, 9:32 PM
Following on from last year's round-up of my reading,
here's a look at the fiction I enjoyed in 2021.
I managed to read 42 books in 2021, up from 31 last year. That's
partly to do with buying an ereader: 33/36% of my reading
(by pages/by books) was ebooks. I think this demonstrates that
ebooks have mostly complemented paper books for me, rather than
replacing them.
My book of the year (although it was published in 2019) was
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and
Max Gladstone:...
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John Goerzen: Make the Internet Yours Again With an Instant Mesh Network
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10319-make-the-internet-yours-again-with-an-instant-mesh-network
January 8, 2022, 3:57 AM
I’m going to lead with the technical punch line, and then explain it:
Yggdrasil Network is an opportunistic mesh that can be deployed privately or as part of a global-scale network. Each node gets a stable IPv6 address (or even an entire /64) that is derived from its public key and is bound to that node as long as the node wants it (of course, it can generate a new keypair anytime) and is valid wherever the node joins the mesh. All traffic is end-to-end encrypted.
Yggdrasil will automaticall...
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Ingo Juergensmann: Moving my repositories from Github to Codeberg.org
https://blog.windfluechter.net/2022/01/07/moving-my-repositories-from-github-to-codeberg-org/
January 7, 2022, 10:50 PM
Some weeks ago I moved my repositories from Github (evil, Microsoft, blabla) to Codeberg. Codeberg is a non-profit organisation located in Germany. When you really dislike Microsoft products it is somewhat a natural reaction (at least for me) to move away from Github, which was bought by Microsoft, to some more independent service provider for hosting source code. Nice thing with Codeberg is as well that it offers a migration tool from Github to Codeberg. Additionally Codeberg is also on Mastodo...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 199 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-199-released/
January 7, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 199. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Support both variants of "odt2txt", including the one provided by unoconv.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#298)
[ Jelle van der Waa ]
* Add external tool reference on Arch Linux for xb-tool.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Jacob Adams: Linux Hibernation Documentation
https://tookmund.com/2022/01/hibernate-docs
January 6, 2022, 12:00 AM
Recently I’ve been curious about how hibernation works on Linux,
as it’s an interesting interaction between hardware and software.
There are some notes in the Arch wiki
and the kernel documentation
(as well as some kernel documentation on debugging hibernation
and on sleep states more generally),
and of course the ACPI Specification
The Formal Definition
ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is,
according to the spec,
“an architecture-independent power management and configura...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2021
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2021-12/
January 5, 2022, 2:44 PM
Welcome to the December 2021 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try and summarise what we have been up to over the past month, as well as what else has been occurring in the world of software supply-chain security.
As a quick recap of what reproducible builds is trying to address, 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 reprod...
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Jonathan Wiltshire: Continuing adventures of the mystery cable
https://www.jwiltshire.org.uk/2022/01/05/continuing-adventures-of-the-mystery-cable/
January 5, 2022, 1:39 PM
My 4×2 has been in action again, trying to find the remainder of the mystery sometimes-4mm/sometimes-2.5mm/sometimes-1.5mm cable. It finally appeared in the tiniest gap possible between back wall and joist.
As we had suspected by tracing everything else, the junction is an unfused union of all three cable types with a 230V 32A circuit breaker on one end and a light switch on the other. So in the event of fault current at the kitchen lights, the 1.5mm cable is definitely going to burn out and...
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Thomas Lange: FAI.me service now support backports for Debian 11 (bullseye)
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-bpo-2/
January 5, 2022, 11:46 AM
The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud
images now supports a backports kernel for the stable release Debian 11
(aka bullseye). If you enable the backports option, you will currently
get kernel 5.14. This will help you if you have newer
hardware that is not support by the default kernel 5.10.
The backports option is also still available for the images when using
the old Debian 10 (buster) release.
The URL of the FAI.me service is
https://fai-project.org/FAIme/
FAI...
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Russell Coker: Terrorists Inspired by Fiction
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/05/terrorists-inspired-by-fiction/
January 4, 2022, 11:00 PM
The Tom Clancy book Debt of Honor published in August 1994 first introduced the concept of a heavy passenger aircraft being used as a weapon by terrorists against a well defended building. In April 1994 there was an attempt to hijack and deliberately crash FedEx flight 705. It’s possible for a book to be changed 4 months before publication, but it seems unlikely that a significant plot point in a series of books was changed in such a small amount of time so it’s likely that Tom Clancy got th...
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Jelmer Vernooij: Personal Streaming Audio Server
https://www.jelmer.uk/navidrome.html
January 4, 2022, 6:00 PM
For a while now, I’ve been looking for a good way to stream music from my home
music collection on my phone.
There are quite a few options for music servers that support streaming. However,
Android apps that can stream music from one of those servers tend to be
unmaintained, clunky or slow (or more than one of those).
It is possible to use something that runs in a web server, but that means
no offline caching - which can be quite convenient in spots without
connectivity, such as the Undergro...
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Jonathan McDowell: Upgrading from a CC2531 to a CC2538 Zigbee coordinator
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/01/new-zigbee-coordinator.html
January 4, 2022, 3:50 PM
Previously I setup a CC2531 as a Zigbee coordinator for my home automation. This has turned out to be a good move, with the 4 gang wireless switch being particularly useful. However the range of the CC2531 is fairly poor; it has a simple PCB antenna. It’s also a very basic device. I set about trying to improve the range and scalability and settled upon a CC2538 + CC2592 device, which feature an MMCX antenna connector. This device also has the advantage that it’s ARM based, which I’m hopefu...
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Russell Coker: Big Smart TVs
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/04/big-smart-tvs/
January 4, 2022, 11:37 AM
Recently a relative who owned a 50″ Plasma TV asked me for advice on getting a new TV. Looking at the options all the TVs seem to be smart TVs (running Android with built in support for YouTube and Netflix) and most of them seem to be 4K resolution. 4K doesn’t provide much benefit now as most people don’t have BlueRay DVD players and discs, there aren’t a lot of 4K YouTube videos, and most streaming services don’t offer 4K resolution. But as 4K doesn’t cost much more it doesn’t mak...
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Russell Coker: Curiosity Stream
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/04/curiosity-stream/
January 4, 2022, 5:27 AM
I have recently signed up for the Curiosity Stream [1] documentary site, this is designed to be like Netflix but for non-fiction content only. The service costs $US15 per annum or $52US per annum for 4K (I think the 4K service was about $US120 per annum when I signed up). The extra price for 4K seems excessive, while it is in line with the bandwidth requirements a large portion of the costs of the service would be about user support and running the service reliably for which 4K makes little diff...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities December 2021
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/01/04/floss-activities/
January 3, 2022, 11:35 PM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
plac:
release cleanup
bibliogram-docs:
update a feed checkbox
duck:
add indicator phrases
(1
2
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