Steve Kemp: Visiting the UK was difficult, but worth it
https://blog.steve.fi/visiting_the_uk_was_difficult__but_worth_it.html
January 22, 2022, 5:15 AM
So in my previous post I mentioned that we were going to spend the Christmas period in the UK, which we did.
We spent a couple of days there, meeting my parents, and family. We also persuaded my sister to drive us to Scarborough so that we could hang out on the beach for an afternoon.
Finland has lots of lakes, but it doesn't have proper waves. So it was surprisingly good just to wade in the sea and see waves! Unfortunately our child was a wee bit too scared to ride on a donkey!
Unfortunat...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Goodbye Nexus 5
https://veronneau.org/goodbye-nexus-5.html
January 22, 2022, 4:30 AM
I've blogged a few times already about my Nexus 5, the Android device I
have/had been using for 8 years. Sadly, it died a few weeks ago, when the WiFi
chip stopped working. I could probably have attempted a mainboard swap, but at
this point, getting a new device seemed like the best choice.
In a world where most Android devices are EOL after less than 3 years, it is
amazing I was able to keep this device for so long, always running the latest
Android version with the latest security patch. The N...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.2 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/21#qlcal-r_0.0.2
January 22, 2022, 3:03 AM
The second release of the still fairly new qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.
qlcal is based on the calendaring subset of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.
This release brings a further package simpli...
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Neil McGovern: Further investments in desktop Linux
https://blog.halon.org.uk/2022/01/further-investments-in-desktop-linux/
January 21, 2022, 3:31 PM
This was originally posted on the GNOME Foundation news feed
The GNOME Foundation was supported during 2020-2021 by a grant from Endless Network which funded the Community Engagement Challenge, strategy consultancy with the board, and a contribution towards our general running costs. At the end of last year we had a portion of this grant remaining, and after the success of our work in previous years directly funding developer and infrastructure work on GTK and Flathub, we wanted to see whethe...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Homebrewing recipes
https://veronneau.org/homebrewing-recipes.html
January 21, 2022, 5:15 AM
Looking at my blog, it seems I haven't written anything about homebrewing in a
while. In fact, the last time I did was when I had a carboy blow out on
me in the middle of the night...
Fear not, I haven't stopped brewing since then. I have in fact decided to
publish my homebrew recipes. Not on this blog though, as it would get pretty
repetitive.
So here are my recipes. So far, I've brewed around 30 different
beers!
The format is pretty simple (no fancy HTML, just plain markdown) and although
I'm ...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2021 edition
https://veronneau.org/montreal-subway-foot-traffic-data-2021-edition.html
January 21, 2022, 5:00 AM
For the third time now, I've asked Société de Transport de Montréal,
Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. I
think this has become an annual thing now :)
The original blog post and the 2019-2020 edition can be read here:
Original blog post (2001 to 2018)
2019-2020 edition (2001 to 2020)
By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the
station's foot traffic.
Orange line (top10)
Green line (top10)
Blue line
Yellow line
Global Top ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 201 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-201-released/
January 21, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 201. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* If the debian.deb822 module raises any exception on import, re-raise it as
an ImportError instead. This should fix diffoscope on some Fedora systems.
Thanks to Mattia Rizzolo for suggesting this particular solution.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#300)
[ Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek ]
* Fix json detection with file-5.41-3.fc36.x86...
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Sven Hoexter: Running OpenWRT x86 in qemu
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/deb_qemu_local_openwrt/
January 20, 2022, 8:20 PM
Sometimes it's nice for testing purpose to have the OpenWRT
userland available locally. Since there is an x86 build
available one can just run it within qemu.
wget https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.1/targets/x86/64/openwrt-21.02.1-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined.img.gz
gunzip openwrt-21.02.1-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined.img.gz
qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 openwrt-21.02.1-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined.img openwrt-21.02.1.qcow2
qemu-img resize openwrt-21.02.1.qcow2 200M
qem...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.15: Regular Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/20#rquantlib_0.4.15
January 20, 2022, 12:44 PM
A new release 0.4.15 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian as well.
QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language.
The release of RQuantLib comes four months after the previous release, and brings a momitor update for the just-released QuantLib 1.2.5 version along with a few small cleanups to calendars and daycounters.
Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.15 (2022-01-1...
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Caleb Adepitan: I'm Thinking About You Right Now!
https://chainofcommand.hashnode.dev/im-thinking-about-you-right-now
January 20, 2022, 10:17 AM
Just in case you stumbled on this incidentally and you wonder “Who in the seven fat worlds is this mysterious...?” Ha! That was what I was thinking about you you were thinking about me. You gerrit!?
I heard you listening to my thoughts; I listened to yours too. I wonder if you heard me too.
I will like to talk, today, about what it is I do at Debian as an Outreachy Intern under the JavaScript team. I woke up this morning and decided to bore you with so much details. I must have woken up glor...
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Russ Allbery: DocKnot 7.01
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-01/004.html
January 20, 2022, 5:17 AM
Continuing to flush out bugs in the recent changes to my static web site
generator.
I had missed some Unicode implications for how output from external
programs was handled, and also missed Unicode decoding of the output from
Pod::Thread, since Pod::Simple always encodes its output even if that
output is to a scalar. I also missed an implication for how symlinks were
handled in Path::Iterator::Rule, causing docknot spin to fail to
copy files into the output tree that were symlinks in the inp...
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Joerg Jaspert: Funny CPU usage
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/01/funny-cpu-usage.html
January 19, 2022, 8:56 PM
Munin plugin and it’s CPU usage (shell fixup)
So at work we do have a munin server running, and one of
the graphs we do for every system is a network statistics one with a
resolution of 1 second. That’s a simple enough script to have, and it
is working nicely - on 98% of our machines. You just don’t notice the
data gatherer at all, so that we also have some other graphs done with
a 1 second resolution. For some, this really helps.
Basics
The basic code for this is simple. There is a bun...
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Joey Hess: encountered near the start of a new chapter
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/encountered_near_the_start_of_a_new_chapter/
January 18, 2022, 1:01 AM

--------------------
Russ Allbery: DocKnot 7.00
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-01/003.html
January 17, 2022, 9:41 PM
The recent 6.01 release of my static web site generator was kind of a
buggy mess, which uncovered a bunch of holes in my test suite and
immediately turned up problems when I tried to use it to rebuild my actual
web site. Most of the problems were Unicode-related; this release
hopefully sorts out Unicode properly and handles it consistently.
Other bugs fixed include processing of old-style pointers in a spin input
tree, several rather obvious bugs in the new docknot release
command, and a few...
--------------------
Wouter Verhelst: Different types of Backups
https://grep.be/blog//en/computer/Different_types_of_Backups/
January 17, 2022, 3:43 PM
In my previous
post,
I explained how I recently set up backups for my home server to be
synced using Amazon's services. I received a (correct) comment on that
by Iustin Pop which pointed out that while it is reasonably cheap to
upload data into Amazon's offering, the reverse -- extracting data --
is not as cheap.
He is right, in that extracting data from S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs
over an order of magnitude more than it costs to store it there on a
monthly basis -- in my case, I expect to ha...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Boot Guard and PSB have user-hostile defaults
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/58424.html
January 17, 2022, 4:37 AM
Compromising an OS without it being detectable is hard. Modern operating systems support the imposition of a security policy or the launch of some sort of monitoring agent sufficient early in boot that even if you compromise the OS, you're probably going to have left some sort of detectable trace[1]. You can avoid this by attacking the lower layers - if you compromise the bootloader then it can just hotpatch a backdoor into the kernel before executing it, for instance.This is avoided via one of ...
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Chris Lamb: Favourite films of 2021
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourite-films-of-2021
January 16, 2022, 6:44 PM
In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' novels that I enjoyed reading the most in 2021. But in the very last of my 2021 roundup posts, I'll be going over some of my favourite movies. (Saying that, these are perhaps less of my 'favourite films' than the ones worth remarking on — after all, nobody needs to hear that The Godfather is a good movie.)
It's probably helpful to remark you that I took a self-directed course...
--------------------
Wouter Verhelst: Backing up my home server with Bacula and Amazon Storage Gateway
https://grep.be/blog//en/computer/Backing_up_my_home_server_with_Bacula_and_Amazon_Storage_Gateway/
January 16, 2022, 9:06 AM
I have a home server.
Initially conceived and sized so I could digitize my (rather sizeable)
DVD collection, I started using it for other things; I added a few play
VMs on it, started using it as a destination for the
deja-dup-based backups of my
laptop and the time machine-based ones of the various macs in the house,
and used it as the primary location of all the photos I've taken with my
cameras over the years (currently taking up somewhere around 500G) as
well as those that were taking at ou...
--------------------
Russell Coker: SSD Endurance
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/16/ssd-endurance/
January 16, 2022, 5:33 AM
I previously wrote about the issue of swap potentially breaking SSD [1]. My conclusion was that swap wouldn’t be a problem as no normally operating systems that I run had swap using any significant fraction of total disk writes. In that post the most writes I could see was 128GB written per day on a 120G Intel SSD (writing the entire device once a day).
My post about swap and SSD was based on the assumption that you could get many thousands of writes to the entire device which was incorrect. H...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Brightest Fell
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-698-18352-5.html
January 16, 2022, 3:06 AM
Review: The Brightest Fell, by Seanan McGuire

Series:
October Daye #11


Publisher:
DAW


Copyright:
2017


ISBN:
0-698-18352-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
353

This is the eleventh book in the October Daye urban fantasy series, not
counting various novellas and side stories. You really cannot start here,
particularly given how many ties this book has to the rest of the series.
I would like to claim there's some sort ...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: DocKnot 6.01
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-01/002.html
January 16, 2022, 1:34 AM
This release of my static site generator and software release manager
finishes incorporating the last piece of my old release script that I was
still using: copying a new software release into a software distribution
archive tree, updating symlinks, updating the version database used to
generate my web pages, and archiving the old version.
I also added a new docknot update-spin command that updates an
input tree for the spin static site generator, fixing any deprecations or
changes in the inp...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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!...
--------------------
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
...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Grading using the Wacom Intuos S
https://veronneau.org/grading-using-the-wacom-intuos-s.html
January 10, 2022, 5:00 AM
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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:...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
Ayoyimika Ajibade: Nodejs 16 and Webpack 5 transition in Debian🍥
https://ayoyimika.hashnode.dev/nodejs-16-and-webpack-5-transition-in-debian
January 8, 2022, 3:30 AM
What is Debian 🍥 ?
Debian is also known as Debian GNU/Linux is a free open-source operating system (OS) based currently on the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel, developed by the community-supported Debian Project; although efforts are in place to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd.
Fun fact about Debian 😁💃💃
Debian was the first Linux distribution to include a package management system for easy installation and removal of software. It was also the first ...
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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...
--------------------
Ayoyimika Ajibade: Everyone Struggles
https://ayoyimika.hashnode.dev/everyone-struggles
January 7, 2022, 8:02 AM
Starting anything new always has in it an element of uncertainty, doubt, fears, and struggle to forge ahead, this has been my current situation as an outreachy intern working on the transition of nodejs16 and webpack5 which is about updating all packages that depend on nodejs14 and webpack4 to work well with the updated version of nodejs16 and webpack5 in the Debian operations system. Juicy right!😋
As a software developer struggling to grasp both basic and advanced knowledge of a concept can ...
--------------------
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....
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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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