Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 207 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-207-released/
March 4, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 207. This version includes the following changes:
* Fix a gnarly regression when comparing directories against non-directories.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#292)
* Use our assert_diff utility where we can within test_directory.py
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Joerg Jaspert: Scan for SSH private keys without passphrase
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/03/scan-for-ssh-private-keys-without-passphrase.html
March 3, 2022, 8:32 PM
SSH private key scanner (keys without passphrase)
So for policy reasons, customer wanted to ensure that every SSH
private key in use by a human on their systems has a passphrase set.
And asked us to make sure this is the case.
There is no way in SSH to check this during connection, so client side
needs to be looked at. Which means looking at actual files on the
system.
Turns out there are multiple formats for the private keys - and I
really do not want to implement something able to deal with...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Neat uses for a backlit keyboard
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/03/backlit-keyboard-uses.html
March 3, 2022, 6:32 PM
I bought myself a new keyboard last November, a Logitech G213. True keyboard fans will tell me it’s not a real mechanical keyboard, but it was a lot cheaper and met my requirements of having some backlighting and a few media keys (really all I use are the volume control keys). Oh, and being a proper UK layout.
While the G213 isn’t fully independent RGB per key it does have a set of zones that can be controlled. Also this has been reverse engineered, so there are tools to do this under Linux...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Migrating from procmail to sieve
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/debian/migrating-from-procmail-to-sieve
March 3, 2022, 2:03 PM
Anarcat's "procmail considered harmful" post
convinced me to get my act together and finally migrate my venerable procmail based setup to sieve.
My setup was nontrivial, so I migrated with an intermediate step in which sieve
scripts would by default pipe everything to procmail, which allowed me to
slowly move rules from procmailrc to sieve until nothing remained in
procmailrc.
Here's what I did.
Literature review
https://brokkr.net/2019/10/31/lets-do-dovecot-slowly-and-properly-part-3-lmtp/
has ...
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John Goerzen: Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10356-tools-for-communicating-offline-and-in-difficult-circumstances
March 3, 2022, 2:49 AM
Note: this post is also available on my website, where it will be updated periodically.
When things are difficult – maybe there’s been a disaster, or an invasion (this page is being written in 2022 just after Russia invaded Ukraine), or maybe you’re just backpacking off the grid – there are tools that can help you keep in touch, or move your data around. This page aims to survey some of them, roughly in order from easiest to more complex.
Simple radios
Handheld radios shouldn’t be for...
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Ian Jackson: 3D printed hard case for Fairphone 4
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11376.html
March 3, 2022, 12:11 AM
About 4 years ago, I posted about making a 3D printed case for my then-new phone. The FP2 was already a few years old when I got one and by now, some spares are unavailable - which is a problem, because I'm terribly hard on hardware. Indeed, that's why I need a very sturdy case for my phone - a case which can be ablative when necessary.
With the arrival of my new Fairphone 4, I've updated my case design. Sadly the FP4 doesn't have a notification LED - I guess we're supposed to be glued to t...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: procmail considered harmful
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-02-procmail-considered-harmful/
March 2, 2022, 6:16 PM
TL;DR: procmail is a security liability and has been abandoned
upstream for the last two decades. If you are still using it, you
should probably drop everything and at least remove its SUID
flag. There are plenty of alternatives to chose from, and conversion
is a one-time, acceptable trade-off.
Procmail is unmaintained
procmail is unmaintained. The "Final release", according to
Wikipedia, dates back to September 10, 2001 (3.22). That release
was shipped in Debian since then, all the way back f...
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, February 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-february-2022.html
March 2, 2022, 3:04 PM
In February I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 8 hours from January. I worked 16
hours, and will carry over the remaining time to March.
I spent most of my time triaging security issues for Linux, working
out which of them were fixed upstream and which actually applied to
the versions provided in Debian 9 "stretch". I also rebased the
Linux 4.9 (linux) package on the latest stable update, but did not
make an upload this month....
--------------------
Keith Packard: picolibc-testing
http://keithp.com/blogs/picolibc-testing/
March 2, 2022, 7:28 AM
Testing Picolibc with the glibc tests
Picolibc has a bunch of built-in tests, but more testing is always
better, right? I decided to see how hard it would be to run some of
the tests provided in the GNU C Library (glibc).
Parallel meson build files
Similar to how Picolibc uses meson build files to avoid modifying the
newlib autotools infrastructure, I decided to take the glibc code and
write meson build rules that would compile the tests against Picolibc
header files and link against Picolibc...
--------------------
François Marier: Ways to refer to locahost in Chromium
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/ways-to-refer-to-localhost-chromium/
March 2, 2022, 2:45 AM
The filter rules preventing websites from portscanning the local
machine have recently
been tightened in Brave. It turns out there are a surprising number of ways
to refer to the local machine in Chromium.
localhost and friends
127.0.0.1 is the first address that comes to mind when thinking of the
local machine. localhost is typically aliased to that address (via
/etc/hosts), though that convention is not mandatory. The IPv6 equivalent
is [::1].
http://localhost/
http://foo.localhost/
http:/...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities February 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/03/01/floss-activities/
March 1, 2022, 4:16 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
gensim:
use datapath consistently,
enable a test,
rm cruft
git-remote-hg:
option to test installed code, fix shebang handling, check for Python/Mercurial
mpv-mpris:
add
CPPFLAGS,
smoke tests
purple-discord:
fix dead store,
fix crash
zxing-cpp:
drop code copy,
fix
crash,
spelling
iotop:
URL cleanup,
hide SWAPIN/IO when data collection is disabled,
promote
iotop-c,
distro packages
duck:
indi...
--------------------
Russell Coker: SAGE (ITPA) Spam
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/01/sage-itpa-spam/
March 1, 2022, 4:11 AM
In 2008 I joined SAGE (the System Administrators’ Guild of Australia). It was a professional society for people doing sysadmin work (running computer servers). I quit when I found that the level of clue was lower than hoped and that members used the code of ethics as nothing but a way to score points in online debates. After quitting SAGE kept emailing me and wouldn’t respect my request to be removed from all lists so I had to block their mail server.
SAGE has in recent times changed it’s ...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: The World is changing.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Mar-1.html.en#2022-Mar-1-08:45:37
February 28, 2022, 11:45 PM
The World is changing. People are not satisfied with COVID-19.
--------------------
Daniel Silverstone: Subplot and FOSDEM 2022 talk
http://blog.digital-scurf.org/posts/2022-fosdem/
February 26, 2022, 10:22 PM
As many of you may be aware, I work with Lars Wirzenius on a project
we call Subplot which is a tool for writing documentation which helps
all stakeholders involved with a proejct to understand how the project meets
its requirements.
At the start of February we had FOSDEM which was once again online, and
I decided to give a talk in the Safety and open source devroom to
introduce the concepts of safety argumentation and to bring some attention
to how I feel that Subplot could be used in that are...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: INN 2.6.5
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-02/001.html
February 26, 2022, 5:36 AM
This is a bit of a sneak preview announcement since I'm waiting for the
ISC mirror to update before sending the official announcement to the
normal channels, but INN 2.6.5 has been released. (The release was
finalized a few days ago, and I'm a bit behind in posting it.)
This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.6.4, and the
upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from
ftp.isc.org (once it updates) or
my personal INN pages. The latter also has
links to the ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: It was twenty years ago today …
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/02/25#twenty_years_ago_cran
February 25, 2022, 11:30 PM
… that I made my first upload to CRAN as demonstrated by the very bottom of the ChangeLog file of the RQuantLib package:
2002-02-25 Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>
* Initial 0.1.0 release
And quite a few more uploads followed since.
(Also see the earlier twenty years ago … post about my initial contributions to the Debian R package I had by then adopted too.)
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel ori...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 2500 CRAN packages!
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/02/24#rcpp_2500_packages
February 25, 2022, 1:58 AM
As of this morning, Rcpp stands at 2501 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time.
Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in lat...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 206 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-206-released/
February 25, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 206. This version includes the following changes:
* Also allow "Unicode text, UTF-8 text" as well as "UTF-8 Unicode text" to
match for .buildinfo files too.
* Add a test for recent file(1) issue regarding .changes files.
(Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#291)
* Drop "_PATH" suffix from some module-level globals that are not paths.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Charles Plessy: New media types in 2022
http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/media-types-2022/
February 24, 2022, 12:32 PM
At the beginning of this year I updated a hundred of media
types associated with file name
extensions in the file called /etc/mime.types, distributed by the
media-types package. Most
changes
are additions originating from recent submissions to the
IANA. Amon the themes that
caught my attention, there are telecommunications, computer security,
commerce, healthcare and industrial automation. The vast majority of the
update come from western provenance. Did the rest of the World decide to
move ah...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: #36: pub/sub for live market monitoring with R and Redis
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/02/23#036_pub_sub_for_market_monitoring_with_r_and_redis
February 24, 2022, 3:10 AM
Welcome to the 36th post of the really randomly reverberating R, or R4 for short, write-ups. Today’s post is about using Redis, and especially RcppRedis, for live or (near) real-time monitoring with R.
There is an saying that “you can take the boy out of the valley, but you cannot the valley out of the boy” so for those of us who spent a decade or two in finance and on trading floors, having “some” market price information available becomes second nature. And/or sometimes it is just g...
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Ian Jackson: Rooting an Eos Fairphone 4
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11154.html
February 23, 2022, 11:44 PM
Last week I received (finally) my Fairphone 4, supplied with a de-googled operating system, which I had ordered from the E Foundation’s shop in December. (I’m am very hard on hardware and my venerable Fairphone 2 is really on its last legs.)
I expect to have full control over the software on any computing device I own which is as complicated, capable, and therefore, hazardous, as a mobile phone. Unfortunately the Eos image (they prefer to spell it “/e/ os”, srsly!) doesn’t come with a ...
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Joey Hess: announcing zephyr-copilot
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/announcing_zephyr-copilot/
February 23, 2022, 7:55 PM
I recently learned about the Zephyr Project
which is a rather neat embedded OS for devices too small to run Linux.
This led me to wondering if I could adapt arduino-copilot to target
Zephyr, and so be able to program any of the 350+ boards it supports using
Haskell.
At the same time I had an opportunity to give a talk at the Houston
Functional Programmers group. On February 1st I decided to
give
that talk, about arduino-copilot.
That left 2 weeks to buy some hardware supported by Zephyr and p...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Upgrading my home internet; a story of yak shaving
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/02/yak-shaving-internet.html
February 23, 2022, 7:14 PM
This has ended up longer than I expected. I’ll write up posts about some of the individual steps with some more details at some point, but this is an overview of the yak shaving I engaged in. The TL;DR is:
I wanted to upgrade my internet connection, but:
My router wasn’t fast enough, so:
I bought a new one and:
Proceeded to help work on mainline Linux support, and:
Did some tweaking of my Debian setup to allow for a squashfs root, and:
Upgraded it to Debian 11 (bullseye) in the...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Elder Race
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-76871-3.html
February 23, 2022, 4:34 AM
Review: Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
November 2021


ISBN:
1-250-76871-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
199

(It's a shame that a lot of people will be reading this novella on a
black-and-white ebook reader, since
the Emmanuel Shiu cover is absolutely spectacular. There's a larger
image without the words at the bottom of that article.)
When reports arrive at the court about demons deep in the f...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Children of Earth and Sky
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-698-18327-4.html
February 22, 2022, 4:51 AM
Review: Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Publisher:
New American Library


Copyright:
2016


ISBN:
0-698-18327-4


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
572

Nine hundred years have passed since the events of
Lord of Emperors. Twenty-five years
ago, Sarantium, queen of cities, fell to the Osmanlis, who have renamed it
Asharias in honor of their Asherite faith. The repercussions are still
echoing through the western world, as the O...
--------------------
Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2022
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/02/21/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-january-2022/
February 21, 2022, 2:21 PM
Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for January below.
Debian project funding
In January we saw a new funded project proposed. The project is meant to bring in a number of changes to the Tryton modules and packages in Debian. Tryton, a full featured, entirely open source business software platform, is supported by its own foundation. You can track the current status of all our funded projects at its dedicated web page.Folks cont...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: The King of Torts – John Grisham
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/02/19/the-king-of-torts-john-grisham/
February 19, 2022, 6:44 AM
John Grisham The King of Torts
Lots of things have been happening and I have been unable to be on top of things. There are so many things that happen and keep on happening and a lot of it is just not in control. For those who are watching Brexit, India is going through the same/similar phenomena just without Brexit. I would not like to delve much into Indian happenings as there is no sweet story to tell.
Mum is in hospital (diabetic foot) so a lot of time to read books. So I have been mak...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 205 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-205-released/
February 19, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 205. This version includes the following changes:
* Fix a file(1)-related regression where .changes files that contained
non-ASCII text were not identified as being .changes files, resulting in
seemingly arbitrary packages on tests.reproducible-builds.org and elswhere
not comparing the package at all. The non-ASCII parts could have been in
the Maintainer or in the upload changelog, so we were effectivel...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.7 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/02/18#rcppsimdjson_0.1.7
February 18, 2022, 11:34 PM
The RcppSimdJson package was updated to release 0.1.7 today. CRAN had sent a note overnight that it triggered ‘LENGTH_1’ error (where boolean comparisons happen with longer vectors). That may be debatable in the two cases flagged if one looks at the commit but life being too short to debate this so we just fixed it. The email came in at 04:50h-ish when I was sound asleep, but four hours later the fixed version was on CRAN thanks to the automated processing:
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic ...
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Colin Watson: Launchpad now supports SSH Ed25519 keys and RSA SHA-2 signatures
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/lp-new-ssh-features.html
February 18, 2022, 1:49 PM
As of 2022-02-16, Launchpad supports a couple of features on its SSH
endpoints (git.launchpad.net, bazaar.launchpad.net, ppa.launchpad.net,
and upload.ubuntu.com) that it previously didn’t: Ed25519 public
keys (a well-regarded format,
supported by OpenSSH since 6.5 in 2014) and signatures with existing RSA
public keys using SHA-2 rather than
SHA-1 (supported by OpenSSH since
7.2 in 2016).
I’m hesitant to call these features “new”, since they’ve been around for a
long time elsewhere, a...
--------------------
Abiola Ajadi: Modifying expectations!
https://ajadi-abiola.github.io/blog/Modifying-expectation
February 17, 2022, 12:00 AM
Hi everyone!
In today’s blog post I will be talking about the progress i have made , the hurdles I encountered and how my current progress differs from my original expectations.
I applied to Debian community with a particular timeline and expected it to go that way, but after starting out i realized i had alot to learn in Ruby and the codebase.
So far i have worked on issues i am proud of and when i use Debci i see some of the changes i added for example the self-service form remembering va...
--------------------
Joerg Jaspert: Funny CPU usage - rewrite it in rust
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/02/funny-cpu-usage-rewrite-in-rust.html
February 16, 2022, 8:23 PM
Munin plugin and it’s CPU usage (and a rewrite in rust)
With my last blog on the Munin plugins CPU usage I complained about Oracle
Linux doing something really weird, driving up CPU usage when running
a fairly simple Shell script with a loop in.
Turns out, I was wrong. It is not OL7 that makes this problem show
up. It appears to be something from the Oracle “Enterprise” Database
installed on the system, that makes it go this crazy. I’ve now had
this show up on RedHat7 systems too, and ...
--------------------
Robert McQueen: Forward the Foundation
https://ramcq.net/2022/02/16/forward-the-foundation/
February 16, 2022, 2:48 PM
Earlier this week, Neil McGovern announced that he is due to be stepping down as the Executive Director as the GNOME Foundation later this year. As the President of the board and Neil’s effective manager together with the Executive Committee, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on his achievements in the past 5 years and explain a little about what the next steps would be.
Since joining in 2017, Neil has overseen a productive period of growth and maturity for the Foundation, increasing our...
--------------------
Norbert Preining: NVEnc for Arch Linux
https://www.preining.info/blog/2022/02/nvenc-for-arch-linux/
February 15, 2022, 2:33 AM
I have been using NVEnc – a NVIDIA hardware based encoder – for quite some time now. Mostly because I was pointed to it by FastFlix, one of the best video en/recoding frontend programs out there. Having switched to Arch Linux lately, I realized there is no package of it – perfect time to start contributing and preparing an AUR package for it.
Since it is my first package I made for Arch, it took me a bit of reading through the excellent wiki of Arch, and comparing a few other PKGBUILD fil...
--------------------
Neil McGovern: Handing over
https://blog.halon.org.uk/2022/02/handing-over/
February 14, 2022, 2:30 PM
In 2017, I was attending FOSDEM when GNOME announced that I was to become the new Executive Director of the Foundation. Now, nearly 5 years later, I’ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader. I’ve been working closely with Rob and the rest of the board to ensure that there’s an extended and smooth transition, and that GNOME can continue to go from strength to strength.
GNOME has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and a lot has ...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: Updated vlc bittorrent plugin in Debian (version 2.14)
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_vlc_bittorrent_plugin_in_Debian__version_2_14_.html
February 14, 2022, 7:00 AM
I am very happy to report that a new version of the
VLC
bittorrent plugin was just uploaded into debian. The changes
since last time is mostly code clean in the download code. The package
is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian
testing son. To test it, simply install it like this:
apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file
downloaded live via bittorrent like this:
vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Gla...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: Got to boot a RPi Zero 2 W with Debian
https://gwolf.org/2022/02/got-to-boot-a-rpi-zero-2-w-with-debian.html
February 13, 2022, 6:45 AM
About a month ago, I got tired of waiting for the newest member of
the Raspberry product
lineup
to be sold in Mexico, and I bought it from a Chinese reseller through
a big online shopping platform. I paid quite a bit of premium (~US$85
instead of the advertised US$15), and got it delivered ten days
later…
Anyway, it’s known this machine does not yet boot mainline Linux. The
vast majority of ARM systems require the bootloader to load a Device
Tree file, presenting the hardware characterist...
--------------------
Ritesh Raj Sarraf: apt-offline 1.8.4
https://www.researchut.com/blog/apt_offline_184/
February 12, 2022, 3:17 PM
apt-offline 1.8.4
apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released.
This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are:
Better GPG signature handling
Support for verifying InRelease files
Changelog
apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium
[ Debian Janitor ]
* Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed.
[ Paul Wise ]
* Clarify file type in unknown file message
* Fix typos
* Remove trailing whitespace
* Update LICENSE file to match official GNU version
*...
--------------------
Ingo Juergensmann: Old Buildd.Net Database
https://blog.windfluechter.net/2022/02/11/old-buildd-net-database/
February 11, 2022, 6:05 PM
Since March/April 2000 I was deeply involved in Debian m68k and operated multiple m68k autobuilder for over a decade. In fact my Amiga 3000 named “arrakis” was the second buildd for m68k in addition to the Debian owned Amiga 3000UX named “kullervo”.
Back in that time there was some small website running on Kullervo to display some information about the Debian autobuilder. After some time we (as m68k porters) moved that webpage away from Kullervo to my root server. Step by step this s...
--------------------
Holger Levsen: 20220211-inbox-zero-in-2022-and-beyond
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220211-inbox-zero-in-2022-and-beyond/
February 11, 2022, 1:34 PM
Back to the old and new normal: inbox zero
So, a long time ago, on the last two days of January 2020 I had reached zero unread mails
in my inbox and all mailing lists and then... some stuff kept me distracted for a (too) long time...
And then two weeks ago on the 29th of January 2022, I've reached inbox zero again,
and again on the 30th and then I had a hardware issue and couldn't really use my computer
for two days (one day trying to fix, the other copying data around...) and thus
only on Feb...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 204 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-204-released/
February 11, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 204. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't run the binwalk comparator tests as root (or fakeroot) as the
latest version of binwalk has some security protection against doing
precisely this.
* If we fail to scan a file using binwalk, return 'False' from
BinwalkFile.recognizes rather than raise a traceback.
* If we fail to import the Python "binwalk" module, don't accidentally ...
--------------------
Patryk Cisek: Automating Let's Encrypt certificates with Gandi LiveDNS
https://prezu.ca/post/2022-02-10-certbot-gandi/
February 10, 2022, 10:43 PM
As a Debian Developer I have a discount on using Gandi and I’ve been using it for quite a long time and have been very happy with it. I’ve been using it for registering domains. For example this blog’s domain is managed by my Gandi account.
Using publicly registered domain in private-only setup In addition to using this DNS registrar for public stuff, like a blog, one can also use it for a domain accessible only within a private network....
--------------------
Russell Coker: Mouse and Teflon
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/02/10/mouse-teflon/
February 10, 2022, 7:28 AM
I had a problem with my mouse. The slippery plastic bits on the bottom weren’t glued on well and came off, which then gave more friction when moving on the desk. After asking advice on a mailing list the best suggestion was Teflon sticky tape. I bought a few meters of such tape (a lifetime supply for mouse repair) and used an 8cm strip on each side of the bottom of my mouse which made it slippery enough.
Ebay seems like a good place to buy that, most of the offers are well below $20 for a reel...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Faster man-db
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-02-10-00-33_faster_man_db.html
February 9, 2022, 11:33 PM
Since Colin isn't blogging about it, I guess the honor falls to me :-)
As of a few days ago, the man-db version in Debian unstable (2.10.0)
is a lot faster in rebuilding its index (used for whatis/apropos).
Earlier versions would use as much as a few minutes in the dpkg trigger;
now it's about 40 times as fast, and rarely takes more than a few seconds
even for large upgrades. (We've discussed putting it in the background,
but it's really not that annoying anymore.)
The code is basically all Co...
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Jonathan Dowland: One, by Be
https://jmtd.net/log/One,_by_Be/
February 9, 2022, 8:29 PM
The sublime One, by Be is a pastoral, English summer time instrumental improvisation around field recordings and the theme of the honey bee. A lovely piece to accompany deep thinking. I’m reminded of Virginia Astley. Be are associated with Caught by the River, a collective who explore ways of setpping out of daily digital live and embrace, nature, walks, calm, etc....
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Kentaro Hayashi: Writing Debian New Contributor Guide
https://kenhys.hatenablog.jp/entry/2022/02/09/191755
February 9, 2022, 10:17 AM
Recently, I've wrote Debian New Cotributor Guide in Japanese.
Here is the photo of on-demand printed version.
Debian New Contributor Guide
This book (JIS-B5 128p) was published for online event - Techbookfest 12th.
It covers how to package a new software in Debian.
techbookfest.org
Mostly PDF format is preferred, and a few printed versions were distributed....
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Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma 5.24 for Debian
https://www.preining.info/blog/2022/02/kde-plasma-5-24-for-debian/
February 9, 2022, 8:09 AM
Yesterday, KDE released version 5.24 of the Plasma desktop with the usual long list of updates and improvements. This release will be considered a LTS release. And Plasma 5.24 is now available for all Debian releases. (And don’t forget KDE Gears/Apps 21.12!)
As usual, I am providing packages via my OBS builds. If you have used my packages till now, then you only need to change the plasma5XX line to read plasma524. To give full details, I repeat (and update) instructions for all here: First of...
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Neil Williams: Django Model Mommy moving to Model Bakery
https://linux.codehelp.co.uk/moving-to-bakery.html
February 8, 2022, 2:01 PM
Some Django applications use Model Mommy in unit tests:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-model-mommy
Upstream, model mommy has been renamed model bakery:
https://model-bakery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Model Bakery is a rename of the legacy model_mommy’s project. This is
because the project’s creator and maintainers decided to not reinforce
gender stereotypes for women in technology. You can read more about
this subject here
Hence: https://bugs.debian.org/1005114
and https://ftp-master....
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John Goerzen: KDE: A Nice Tiling Envieonment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10338-kde-a-nice-tiling-envieonment-and-a-surprisingly-awesome-de
February 7, 2022, 9:45 PM
I recently wrote that managing an external display on Linux shouldn’t be this hard. I went down a path of trying out some different options before finally landing at an unexpected place: KDE. I say “unexpected” because I find tiling window managers are just about a necessity.
Background: xmonad
Until a few months ago, I’d been using xmonad for well over a decade. Configurable, minimal, and very nice; it suited me well.
However, xmonad is getting somewhat long in the tooth. xmobar, wh...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: x13binary 1.1.57-3 on CRAN: Packaging Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/02/07#x13binary_1.1.57-3
February 7, 2022, 1:09 PM
Release 1.1.57-3 of the x13binary package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau arrived late yesterday on CRAN.
This release relaxes the download requirement on macOS and Linux: if a user supplies a path in an environment variable X13_PATH we check for a suitable binary there and omit the download. This helps with air-gapped installation (and alike).
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release showing changes to the previous release.
If yo...
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Gustavo R. Montesino: Hardware failures...
http://grmontesino.blogspot.com/2008/06/hardware-failures.html
February 7, 2022, 12:39 PM
The Bad:
When I got to work today, I've found our server (white box with Debian etch responsible for networking, files, printers, etc) powered off - most likely the UPS' battery didn't survive a power outage during the night. When I turned the server on I was greeted by all those nice lines telling me I had a hard disk problem.
The Ugly:
Instead off marking the disk showing the read errors as bad, the RAID stack (device mapper?) somehow concluded the "good" disk of the RAID 1 array wasn't syn...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Embers of War
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-78565-519-1.html
February 7, 2022, 4:50 AM
Review: Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell

Series:
Embers of War #1


Publisher:
Titan Books


Copyright:
February 2018


ISBN:
1-78565-519-1


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
312

The military leadership of the Outward faction of humanity was meeting on
the forest world of Pelapatarn, creating an opportunity for the
Conglomeration to win the war at a stroke. Resistance was supposed to be
minimal, since the Outward had attempt...
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Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2021
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/02/a-year-in-free-software.html
February 6, 2022, 6:34 PM
About a month later than I probably should have posted it, here’s a recap of my Free Software activities in 2021. For previous years see 2019 + 2020. Again, this year had fewer contributions than I’d like thanks to continuing fatigue about the state of the world, and trying to work on separation between work and leisure while working from home. I’ve made some effort to improve that balance but it’s still a work in progress.
Conferences
No surprise, I didn’t attend any in-person confe...
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Jonathan Dowland: Death from Above
https://jmtd.net/log/Death_from_Above/
February 6, 2022, 5:59 PM
I received the last two Death From Above albums at Christmas and this weekend managed to give the first (Outrage Is Now) a spin. Pretty colours! They remain one of the best bands to see live. Last time I saw them in a support slot in Newcastle. My friend Rob, a man of few words said “I wouldn’t want to have to follow them on stage!”...
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Christian Kastner: New release of sbuild-qemu Utilities
https://www.kvr.at/posts/new-release-of-sbuild-qemu-utilities/
February 6, 2022, 8:03 AM
I just released a new version of the sbuild-qemu utilities as part of
sbuild. Notable changes are support for new architectures, and a new
sbuild-qemu-boot utility to start a VM and interact with its console
directly through the terminal.
As a reminder, these utilities leverage functionality in vmdb2,
autopkgtest, and sbuild to use QEMU VM images for building and
testing packages in strongly isolated environments and/or on foreign
architectures and/or that might break the system. For example, th...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-01/
February 5, 2022, 7:08 PM
Welcome to the January 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try outline the most important things that have been happening in the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
An interesting blog post was published by Paragon Initiative Enterprises about Gossamer, a proposal for securing the PHP software supply-chain. Utilising code-signing and third-party attestations, Gossamer aim...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/02/my-debian-activities-in-january-2022/
February 5, 2022, 6:28 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 342 and rejected 57 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 366.
Lately I was asked: Is it ftpmaster’s opinion and policy that there is no difference in NEW queue review process between bin and src?
This is a yes/no-question and in this generality the answer is clearly: Every package in NEW needs a full review.
Of course there are circumstances with exceptions. For example after an upload of -1, which would get a full review, the upload o...
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Steve Kemp: Removing my last server?
https://blog.steve.fi/removing_my_last_server_.html
February 5, 2022, 9:00 AM
In the past I used to run a number of virtual machines, or dedicated hosts. Currently I'm cut things down to only a single machine which I'm planning to remove.
Email
Email used to be hosted via dovecot, and then read with mutt-ng on the host itself. Later I moved to reading mail with my own console-based email client.
Eventually I succumbed, and now I pay for Google's Workspace product.
Git Repositories
I used to use gitbucket for hosting a bunch of (mostly private) git repositories. A ...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Migrating from ledger to hledger
https://veronneau.org/migrating-from-ledger-to-hledger.html
February 5, 2022, 5:00 AM
I first started using ledger — the original plain-text accounting
software — in 2017. Since then, I had been pretty happy with my
accounting routine, but grew a little annoyed by the repetitive manual work I
had to do to assign recurring transactions to the right account.
To make things easier, I had a collection of bash scripts to parse and convert
the CSV files from my bank's website1 into ledger entries. They were of
course ugly, unreadable piles of sed-grep-regex and did not let met achi...
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Ian Jackson: EUDCC QR codes vs NHS “Travel” barcodes vs TAC Verify
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/10886.html
February 4, 2022, 7:43 PM
The EU Digital Covid Certificate scheme is a format for (digitally signed) vaccination status certificates. Not only EU countries participate - the UK is now a participant in this scheme.
I am currently on my way to go skiing in the French Alps. So I needed a certificate that would be accepted in France. AFAICT the official way to do this is to get the “international” certificate from the NHS, and take it to a French pharmacy who will convert it into something suitably French. (AIUI the NHS ...
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