Jonathan Dowland: 3D-printed replacement battery cover
https://jmtd.net/log/battery_cover/
April 22, 2022, 2:57 PM
Print next to the original
new cover in the light
My first self-designed functional 3D print is a replacement
battery cover for a LED fake-candle that my daughter uses
as a night-light.
I measured the original cover (we have three of the candles)
using a newly-purchased micrometer and tried to re-create it
in OpenSCAD. I skipped the screw-hole that is for securing
the cover as we don't use that.
I sliced it using Cura and printed it using PETG on our
office 3D printer, a Ender 3. ...
--------------------
Andrej Shadura: To England by train (part 1)
https://blog.shadura.me/2021/08/10/england-by-train-part-1/
April 22, 2022, 1:25 PM
This post was written in August 2021. Just as I was going to publish it, I received an email from ÖBB stating that due to a railway strike in Germany my night train would be cancelled. Since the rest of the trip has already been booked well in advance, I had to take a plane to Charleroi and a bus to Brussels to catch my Eurostar. Ultimately, I ended up publishing it in April 2022, just as I’m about to leave for a fully train-powered trip to the UK once again.
Before the pandemic started, I pl...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Joplin Notes
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/04/22/joplin-notes/
April 22, 2022, 9:53 AM
In response to my post about Android phones without Google Play [1] I received an email recommending Joplin for notes on Android [2].
Joplin supports storing notes on a number of protocols including Nextcloud and WebDAV. I setup WebDAV because it’s easiest, here is Digital Ocean instructions for WebDAV on Apache [3]. That basically works. One problem for my use case is that the Joplin client doesn’t support accounts on multiple servers and the only released way of sharing notes between accou...
--------------------
Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Systemd Service Hang
https://www.researchut.com/blog/Systemd_Service_Hang/
April 22, 2022, 7:47 AM
Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario.
The scene would be something along the lines of:
rrs 6467 0.0 0.0 23088 15852 pts/1 Ss 12:53 0:00 | | _ /bin/bash
rrs 11512 0.0 0.0 14876 4608 pts/1 S+ 13:18 0:00 | | | ...
--------------------
Andy Simpkins: Firmware and Debian
https://blog.koipond.org.uk/archives/325
April 21, 2022, 10:55 PM
There has been a
flurry of activity on the Debian mailing lists ever since Steve
McIntyre raised the issue of including non-free firmware as part of
official Debian installation images.
Firstly I should point out that I am in complete agreement with Steve’s proposal to include non-free firmware as part of an installation image. Likewise I think that we should have a separate archive section for firmware. Because without doing so it will soon become almost impossible to install onto any new...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: Debian Project Leader election 2022, Jonathan Carter re-elected
https://bits.debian.org/2022/04/dpl-elections-2022.html
April 21, 2022, 5:30 PM
The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election has just concluded, and the winner is Jonathan Carter, who has been elected for third time.
Congratulations! The new term for the project leader starts on 2022-04-21.
354 of 1,023 Developers voted using the Condorcet method.
More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2022 page.
Many thanks to Felix Lechner, Jonathan Carter and Hideki Yamane for their campaigns, ...
--------------------
Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Btrfs Subvol Fix
https://www.researchut.com/blog/BTRFS_Subvol_Fix/
April 20, 2022, 5:11 PM
There surely is need for better tooling on the BTRFS File System side.
While migrating my setup from one machine to another, this is one issue I came to be aware of, only today, when my backup tool (btrbk) complained about it. Following the pointers, I see the below snippet in btrfs-subvolume manual page.
A snapshot that was created by send/receive will be read-only, with different last change generation, read-only and with set received_uuid which identifies the subvolume on the
fi...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Android Without Play
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/04/20/android-without-play/
April 20, 2022, 9:04 AM
A while ago I was given a few reasonably high-end Android phones to give away. I gave two very nice phones to someone who looks after refugees so a couple of refugee families could make video calls to relatives. The third phone is a Huawei Nova 7i [1] which doesn’t have the Google Play Store. The Nova 7i is a ridiculously powerful computer (8G of RAM in a phone!!!) but without the Google Play Store it’s not much use to the average phone user. It has the “HuaWei App Gallery” which isn’t...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html
April 20, 2022, 9:00 AM
Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
information that I would like). The
download
from Lenovo is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
when all I got available is a USB memory stick. I tried booting the
ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work. But genisoimage came to
the rescue.
The geteltorito program in
the genisoimage bi...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: genisoimage make CD firmware upgrades a breeze
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/genisoimage_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html
April 20, 2022, 7:00 AM
Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
information that I would like). The
download
from Lenovo is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
when all I got available is a USB memory stick. I tried booting the
ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work. But genisoimage came to
the rescue.
The geteltorito program in
the genisoimage
pa...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: ITP Prizren Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22
https://bits.debian.org/2022/04/debconf22-itp-prizren-platinum.html
April 19, 2022, 7:00 AM
We are very pleased to announce that
ITP - Innovation and Training Park Prizren
has committed to supporting DebConf22 as a
Platinum sponsor. Also, ITP Prizren will host the Conference for all 15
days!
The ITP Prizren intends to be a changing and
boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and creatives industries, through
the creation and management of a favourable environment and efficient services
for SMEs, exploiting different kinds of innovations that can contribute to
Kosovo to improve i...
--------------------
Steve McIntyre: Firmware - what are we going to do about it?
https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19#firmware-what-do-we-do
April 19, 2022, 12:24 AM
TL;DR: firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change
this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
In my opinion, the way we deal with (non-free) firmware in Debian is a
mess, and this is hurting many of our users daily. For a long time
we've been pretending that supporting and including (non-free)
firmware on Debian systems is not necessary. We don't want to have
to provide (non-free) firmware to our users, and in an ideal world we
wouldn't need to. However, it's very c...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: First 2022 haul post
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-04/001.html
April 17, 2022, 3:49 AM
I haven't posted one of these in a while. Here's the (mostly new) stuff
that's come out that caught my interest in the past few months. Some of
these I've already read and reviewed.
Tom Burgis — Kleptopia (non-fiction)
Angela Chen — Ace (non-fiction)
P. Djèlí Clark — A Dead Djinn in Cairo (sff)
P. Djèlí Clark — The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (sff)
P. Djèlí Clark — A Master of Djinn (sff)
Brittney C. Cooper — Eloquent Rage (non-fiction)
Madeleine Dore — I Didn't Do the Thin...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59479.html
April 17, 2022, 12:23 AM
The Freedom Phone advertises itself as a "Free speech and privacy first focused phone". As documented on the features page, it runs ClearOS, an Android-based OS produced by Clear United (or maybe one of the bewildering array of associated companies, we'll come back to that later). It's advertised as including Signal, but what's shipped is not the version available from the Signal website or any official app store - instead it's this fork called "ClearSignal".The first thing to note about ClearSi...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: Playing and encoding AV1 in Debian Bullseye
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Playing_and_encoding_AV1_in_Debian_Bullseye.html
April 16, 2022, 6:40 AM
Inspired by the recent news of
AV1
hardware encoding support from Intel, I decided to look into
the state of AV1 on Linux today. AV1 is a
free
and open standard as defined by Digistan without any royalty
payment requirement, unlike its much used competitor encoding
H.264. While looking, I came across an 5 year
old
question on askubuntu.com which in turn inspired me to check out
how things are in Debian Stable regarding AV1. The test file listed
in the question (askubuntu_test_aom.mp4) did not...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 210 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-210-released/
April 15, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 210. This version includes the following changes:
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Make sure that PATH is properly mangled for all diffoscope actions, not
just when running comparators.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC)
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2022/04/14/supporter-spotlight-ardc/
April 14, 2022, 10:00 AM
The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters
and sponsors for financial support, but they are
also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about the project and the work
that we do.
This is the third instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies
and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. If you are a
supporter of the Reproducible Builds project (of whatever size) and would like
to be featured here, please let get in touch with us at
conta...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: hledger
https://jmtd.net/log/hledger/
April 14, 2022, 9:07 AM
This year I've decided to bite the bullet and properly try out
hledger for personal accounting. It seems I need to
commit to it properly if I'm to figure out whether it will work for me or not.
Up until now I'd been strictly separating my finances into two buckets: family
and personal. I'd been using GNUCash for a couple of years for my personal
finances, initially to evaluate it for use for the family,
but I had not managed to adopt it for that.
I set up a new git repository to track the ledg...
--------------------
Daniel Kahn Gillmor: Bitstream Vera Must Die
https://dkg.fifthhorseman.net/blog/bitstream-vera-must-die.html
April 14, 2022, 4:00 AM
Bitstream Vera must die.
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.2.3 on CRAN: Arm M1 Support
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/13#drat_0.2.3
April 14, 2022, 1:16 AM
A new minor release of drat arrived on CRAN today. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. See below for a few custom reference examples.
Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Prope...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Tuning my wifi radios
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-04-13-wifi-tuning/
April 13, 2022, 8:56 PM
After listening to an episode of the 2.5 admins podcast, I
realized there was some sort of low-hanging fruit I could pick to
better tune my WiFi at home. You see, I'm kind of a fraud in WiFi: I
only started a WiFi mesh in Montreal (now defunct), I don't
really know how any of that stuff works. So I was surprised to hear
one of the podcast host say "it's all about airtime" and "you want to
reduce the power on your access points" (APs). It seemed like sound
advice: better bandwidth means less time...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Another Green World
https://jmtd.net/log/Another_Green_World/
April 13, 2022, 8:41 AM
Brian Eno's classic 1975 album Another Green World, with the
iconic cover crop from Tom Philip's After Raphael. This is a
recent pressing. I try to avoid buying new vinyl, and I think I
got this as part of a trade-in swap two years ago when I went to
get one of my first Covid vaccinations in Newcastle. It was the
first time I'd been anywhere near a record shop (which was adjacent
to the temporary vaccine centre) in a year or more, and I took the
opportunity to bring in some records to sell. I de...
--------------------
Sven Hoexter: Emulating Raspi2 like hardware with RaspiOS in 2022
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/deb_qemu_rpi2_2022/
April 12, 2022, 9:27 AM
Update of my notes from
2020.
# Download a binary device tree file and matching kernel a good soul uploaded to github
wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/kernel-qemu-4.4.1-vexpress
wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb
# Download the official Rasbian image without X
wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_lite_armhf/images/raspios_lite_armhf-2022-04-07/2022-04-04-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite.img.xz
unxz 2022-04-04...
--------------------
Paul Tagliamonte: k3xec.com/patty: Go bindings to patty
https://k3xec.com/patty/
April 11, 2022, 11:33 PM
AX.25 is a tough protocol to use on UNIX systems. A lot of the support in
Linux, specifically, is pretty hard to use, and tends to be built into the
reptilian brain of the kernel. xan built a userland
AX.25 stack called patty, for which I have
now built some Go bindings on top of.
Code needed to create AX.25 Sockets via Go can be found at
github.com/k3xec/go-patty,
and imported by Go source as
k3xec.com/patty.
Overview
Clint patty programs (including consumers of this Go library) work by
communi...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: With Teeth
https://jmtd.net/log/With_Teeth/
April 11, 2022, 8:53 AM
Sometimes people ask me which is the best entry point for Nine Inch Nails,
and I have trouble answering. I've eventually decided that it's 2005's With
Teeth.
I've pulled this from my pile of records to sell. Most Nine Inch Nails stuff
seems to increase in value over time, and it's got to the stage that some of
the ones in my collection are now valuable enough that I'm nervous to play them,
which makes them a little pointless. A couple of years ago, a handful of the
albums were re-issued...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppRedis 0.2.1: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/10#rcppredis_0.2.1
April 10, 2022, 2:02 PM
A month after the major release 0.2.0 bringing pub/sub and other goodies to our RcppRedis package, a new version 0.2.1 arrived on CRAN yesterday. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried prod...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppEigen 0.3.3.9.2 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/08#rcppeigen_0.3.3.9.2
April 8, 2022, 11:31 PM
A new release 0.3.3.9.2 of RcppEigen arrived on CRAN today (and already went to Debian). Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms.
This update was (as it happens) requested by CRAN as R aims to bring the Fortran / C interface to best practices. We call dgesdd twice in one example and use a character argument, and the-powers-that-be now prefer better control over that character argument. So we did. Another change, kindly cont...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-03/
April 8, 2022, 8:14 AM
Welcome to the March 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our monthly reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month.
The in-toto project was accepted as an “incubating project” within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). in-toto is a framework that protects the software supply chain by collecting and verifying relevant data. It does so by enabling libraries to collect information about software supply chain actions and ...
--------------------
Jacob Adams: The Unexpected Importance of the Trailing Slash
https://tookmund.com/2022/04/importance-of-the-trailing-slash
April 8, 2022, 12:00 AM
For many using Unix-derived systems today, we take for granted
that /some/path and /some/path/ are the same.
Most shells will even add a trailing slash for you when you press the Tab key
after the name of a directory or a symbolic link to one.
However, many programs treat these two paths as subtly different in certain cases,
which I outline below, as all three have tripped me up
in various ways1.
POSIX and Coreutils
Perhaps the trickiest use of the trailing slash in a distinguishing way is in...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: How is the free firmware for the Raspberry progressing?
https://gwolf.org/2022/04/how-is-the-free-firmware-for-the-raspberry-progressing.html
April 7, 2022, 6:40 PM
Raspberry Pi computers require a piece of non-free software to boot —
the infamous
raspi-firmware
package. But for almost as long as there has been a Raspberry Pi to
talk of (this year it turns 10 years old!), there have been efforts to
get it to boot using only free software. How is it progressing?
Michael Bishop (IRC user clever) explained today in the
#debian-raspberrypi channel in OFTC that it advances far better than
what I expected: It is even possible to boot a usable system under the
...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Ubuntu plocate security review
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-04-07-16-13_ubuntu_plocate_security_review.html
April 7, 2022, 3:13 PM
Seemingly, the Ubuntu security team made a (quick!) review of plocate prior to
inclusion in main. I'm pretty happy about the result:
I reviewed plocate 1.1.15-1ubuntu2 as checked into jammy. This shouldn't be
considered a full audit but rather a quick gauge of maintainability.
plocate is a locate implementation based on posting lists and io_uring,
intended as a drop-in replacement for mlocate.
- No CVE History.
- Build-Depends on liburing and libzstd
- The pre/post inst/rm scripts adds a ploc...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Hope in a Darkened Heart
https://jmtd.net/log/Hope_in_a_Darkened_Heart/
April 6, 2022, 8:01 PM
I first heard Virginia Astley via Lauren Laverne, who played (I think) "With my
eyes wide open" from her first album, "From Gardens Where We Feel Secure". Mostly
ambient, a conceptual piece about a garden in an English Summer, spanning dawn to
dusk. Bucolic ambient, dream pop.
It was a little outside my wheel-house, but I loved it, and wanted to find out
more. I soon learned that official, physical copies of it were rare and
expensive.
Some time later I stumbled across her second album...
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/04/my-debian-activities-in-march-2022/
April 6, 2022, 5:01 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 332 and rejected 15 packages. This ratio gives a reason to hope. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 342.
Debian LTS
This was my ninety-third 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 2932-1] tiff security update for three CVEs
[DLA 2931-1] cyrus-sasl2 security for one CVE
[DLA...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: Infomaniak Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22
https://bits.debian.org/2022/04/debconf22-infomaniak-platinum.html
April 6, 2022, 10:30 AM
We are very pleased to announce that Infomaniak
has committed to support DebConf22 as a
Platinum sponsor. This is the fourth year in a row that Infomaniak is
sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!
Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company,
also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers,
live-streaming and video on demand services.
It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical
to the functioning of the services and products prov...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Bearer tokens are just awful
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59353.html
April 5, 2022, 6:54 AM
As I mentioned last time, bearer tokens are not super compatible with a model in which every access is verified to ensure it's coming from a trusted device. Let's talk about that in a bit more detail.First off, what is a bearer token? In its simplest form, it's simply an opaque blob that you give to a user after an authentication or authorisation challenge, and then they show it to you to prove that they should be allowed access to a resource. In theory you could just hand someone a randomly gen...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.8 on CRAN: Upstream Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/04#rcppspdlog_0.0.8
April 5, 2022, 12:48 AM
A new version 0.0.8 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich.
This release brings a new upstream release 1.10.0 of spdlog. The (minimal) NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.8 (2022-04-04)
Upgraded to upstream releases spdlog 1.10.0
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a dif...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.0.0.0 on CRAN: Upstream Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/04#rcpparmadillo_0.11.0.0.0
April 5, 2022, 12:42 AM
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) 972 other packages on CRAN, downloaded over 24 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 465 times ac...
--------------------
Kees Cook: security things in Linux v5.10
https://outflux.net/blog/archives/2022/04/04/security-things-in-linux-v5-10/
April 5, 2022, 12:01 AM
Previously: v5.9
Linux v5.10 was released in December, 2020. Here’s my summary of various security things that I found interesting:
AMD SEV-ES
While guest VM memory encryption with AMD SEV has been supported for a while, Joerg Roedel, Thomas Lendacky, and others added register state encryption (SEV-ES). This means it’s even harder for a VM host to reconstruct a guest VM’s state.
x86 static calls
Josh Poimboeuf and Peter Zijlstra implemented static calls for x86, which operates very similar...
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, March 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-march-2022.html
April 4, 2022, 7:34 PM
In March I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 8 hours from February. I worked 16 hours,
and will carry over the remaining time to April.
I backported the mitigations for Spectre-BHB (CVE-2022-0001,
CVE-2022-0002) on x86 processors, to Linux 4.9. I worked together
with Salvatore Bonaccorso in preparing the kernel updates that were
needed in all suites, and writing advisory text. I uploaded both
the linux (4.9) and linux-4.19 packag...
--------------------
Arturo Borrero González: Wikimedia Toolforge and Grid Engine
https://ral-arturo.org/2022/04/04/wmcs-toolforge-grid.html
April 4, 2022, 5:45 PM
This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by
Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.
One of the most important and successful products provided by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation is
Toolforge, a hosting service commonly known in the industry as Platform as a Service (PaaS). In particular, it is a
platform that allows users and developers to run and use a variety of applications with the ultimate goal of helping the Wikimedia
mission from the technica...
--------------------
Ian Jackson: Otter (game server) 1.0.0 released
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11775.html
April 2, 2022, 3:39 PM
I have just released Otter 1.0.0.
Recap: what is Otter
Otter is my game server for arbitrary board games. Unlike most online game systems. It does not know (nor does it need to know) the rules of the game you are playing. Instead, it lets you and your friends play with common tabletop/boardgame elements such as hands of cards, boards, and so on. So it’s something like a “tabletop simulator” (but it does not have any 3D, or a physics engine, or anything like that).
There are provided game m...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: I am more used to Rust.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Apr-1.html.en#2022-Apr-1-19:27:48
April 1, 2022, 10:27 AM
I am more used to Rust.
I can do simple string processing faster in Rust than say Python.
It has enough things to make it more pleasant to work with than C++.
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-59606-992-9.html
April 1, 2022, 4:28 AM
Review: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, by Tamsyn Muir

Publisher:
Subterranean Press


Copyright:
2020


ISBN:
1-59606-992-9


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
111

A witch put Princess Floralinda at the top of a forty-flight tower, but it
wasn't personal. This is just what witches do, particularly with
princesses with butter-coloured curls and sapphire-blue eyes. Princes
would come from miles around to battle up the floor...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Updated eyrie Debian archive keyring
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-03/001.html
April 1, 2022, 3:15 AM
For anyone who uses my personal Debian repository (there are fewer and
fewer reasons to do that, but there are still some Debian packages there
that aren't available anywhere else), I've (finally) refreshed the archive
signing key.
The new key is available through the eyrie-archive-keyring package as
normal. Both the new and the old keys were provided in that package for a
while. As of today, the old key has been removed. The key can also be
downloaded from my web site....
--------------------
Russell Coker: Converting to UEFI
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/04/01/converting-to-uefi/
April 1, 2022, 2:17 AM
When I got my HP ML110 Gen9 working as a workstation I initially was under the impression that boot wasn’t supported on NVMe and booted it from USB. I found USB booting with legacy boot to be unreliable so decided to try EFI booting and noticed that the NVMe devices were boot candidates with UEFI. Making one of them bootable was more complex than expected because no-one seems to have documented such things. So here’s my documentation, it’s not great but this method has worked once for me.
...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Salvaged my first Debian package
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-31-first-package-salvaged/
April 1, 2022, 1:50 AM
I finally salvaged my first Debian package, python-invoke. As
part of ITS 964718, I moved the package from the Openstack Team
to the Python team. The Python team might not be super happy with
it, because it's breaking some of its rules, but at least someone
(ie. me) is actively working (and using) the package.
Wait what
People not familiar with Debian will not understand anything in that
first paragraph, so let me expand. Know-it-all Debian developers (you
know who you are) can skip to the nex...
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/04/01/floss-activities/
April 1, 2022, 1:27 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
fuelwatch:
cleanup
circuitbreaker:
fix dev requires
playerctl:
error on no player
mpv-mpris:
allow install layout override,
test MPRIS Quit,
add test fixes for
re-adding dropped check,
ensuring clean logs,
waiting for mpv,
old playerctl compat,
socat UNIX-CONNECT,
D-Bus dir perms
iotop-py:
fix date
dnsgraph:
dep missing error message usability
flower:
relax dep
apt:
document interval suffi...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: ZTA doesn't solve all problems, but partial implementations solve fewer
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59079.html
March 31, 2022, 11:06 PM
Traditional network access controls work by assuming that something is trustworthy based on some other factor - for example, if a computer is on your office network, it's trustworthy because only trustworthy people should be able to gain physical access to plug something in. If you restrict access to your services to requests coming from trusted networks, then you can assert that it's coming from a trusted device.Of course, this isn't necessarily true. A machine on your office network may be com...
--------------------
Russell Coker: AMT/MEBX on Debian
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/31/amt-mebx-debian/
March 31, 2022, 3:51 AM
I’ve just been playing with Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) [1] which is also known as Management Engine Bios Extension (MEBX).
Firstly a disclaimer, using this sort of technology gives remote access to your system at a level that allows in some ways overriding the OS. If this gets broken then you have big problems. Also all the code that matters is non-free. Please don’t comment on this post saying that AMT is bad, take it as known that it has issues and that people are forced ...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links March 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/31/links-march-2022/
March 31, 2022, 12:50 AM
Anarcat wrote a great blog post about switching from OpenNTP to Chrony which gives a good overview of how NTP works and how accurate the different versions are [1].
Bleeping Computer has an amusing article about criminals who copied a lot of data from NVidia servers including specs of their latest products [2], they are threatening to release all the data if NVidia doesn’t stop crippling their GPUs to make them unsuitable for crypto currency mining. I don’t support these criminals, but I thi...
--------------------
Ulrike Uhlig: How do kids conceive the internet?
https://curlybracket.net/2022/03/31/internet-kids.html
March 30, 2022, 10:00 PM
I wanted to understand how kids between 10 and 18 conceive the internet.
Surely, we have seen a generation that we call “digital natives” grow up with
the internet. Now, there is a younger generation who grows up with pervasive
technology, such as smartphones, smart watches, virtual assistants and so on.
And only a few of them have parents who work in IT or engineering…
Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial
With their search engine website design, G...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: Lenovo Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22
https://bits.debian.org/2022/03/debconf22-lenovo-platinum.html
March 30, 2022, 9:00 AM
We are very pleased to announce that Lenovo
has committed to supporting DebConf22 as a
Platinum sponsor. This is the fourth year in a row that Lenovo is
sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!
As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products,
including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices,
smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo
understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world....
--------------------
Jeremy Bicha: How to install a bunch of debs
https://jeremy.bicha.net/2022/03/29/how-to-install-a-bunch-of-debs/
March 29, 2022, 9:55 PM
Recently, I needed to check if a regression in Ubuntu 22.04 Beta was triggered by the mesa upgrade. Ok, sounds simple, let me just install the older mesa version.
Let’s take a look.
Oh, wow, there are about 24 binary packages (excluding the packages for debug symbols) included in mesa!
Because it’s no longer published in Ubuntu 22.04, we can’t use our normal apt way to install those packages. And downloading those one by one and then installing them sounds like too much work.
S...
--------------------
Raphaël Hertzog: Join Freexian to help improve Debian
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/03/29/join-freexian-to-help-improve-debian/
March 29, 2022, 10:29 AM
Freexian has set itself new ambitious goals in support of Debian and we would like to expand our team to help us reach those goals. We have drafted a mission statement to clarify our purpose and our values, and we hope to be able to attract talented software developers, entrepreneurs and Debian experts from our community.
Freexian’s mission is to help Debian evolve to be the leading Linux distribution and a model to follow in the free software world.We want to achieve that by enabling passi...
--------------------
Jacob Adams: A Lesson in Shortcuts
https://tookmund.com/2022/03/rob-pike-shortcuts
March 29, 2022, 12:00 AM
(The below was written by Rob Pike, copied here for posterity from The Wayback Machine)
Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I’m not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on). When one typed ls, however, these files appeared, so either Ken or Dennis added a simple test to the program. It was in assem...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: What is going on with web servers
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-28-wtf-web-servers/
March 28, 2022, 2:11 PM
I stumbled upon this graph recently, which is w3techs.com
graph of "Historical yearly trends in the usage statistics of web
servers". It seems I hadn't looked at it in a long while because I was
surprised at many levels:
Apache is now second, behind Nginx, since ~2022 (so that's really
new at least)
Cloudflare "server" is third ahead of the traditional third
(Microsoft IIS) - I somewhat knew that Cloudflare was hosting a
lot of stuff, but I somehow didn't expect to see it there at all
for some...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: A Song for a New Day
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-9848-0259-3.html
March 27, 2022, 3:58 AM
Review: A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker

Publisher:
Berkley


Copyright:
September 2019


ISBN:
1-9848-0259-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
372

Luce Cannon was touring with a session band when the shutdown began.
First came the hotel evacuation in the middle of the night due to bomb
threats against every hotel in the state. Then came the stadium bombing
just before they were ready to go on stage. Luce and most of the band
perf...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Imminent release for the media images for Debian 10.12 and 11.3 20220327 0010
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/03/imminent-release-for-media-images-for.html
March 27, 2022, 12:10 AM
 OK - so it wasn't quite all done in one day - and since today is TZ change day in the UK, it might actually run into the TZ bump but I suspect that it will all be done very soon now. Very few glitches - everybody cheerful with what's been done.I did spot someone in IRC who had been reading the release notes - which is always much appreciated. Lots of security fixes overall in the last couple of months but just a fairly normal time, I think.Thanks to the team behind all of this: the ftpmasters,...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 209 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-209-released/
March 27, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 209. This version includes the following changes:
* Update R test fixture for R 4.2.x series. (Closes: #1008446)
* Update minimum version of Black to prevent test failure on Ubuntu jammy.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Part way through testing Debian media images 20220326 1555UTC - Found a new useful utility
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/03/part-way-through-testing-debian-media.html
March 26, 2022, 10:15 PM
 For various obscure reasons, I have a mirror of Debian in one room and the main laptop and so on I use in another. The mirror is connected to a fast Internet line - and has a 1Gb Ethernet cable into the back directly from the router, the laptop and everything else - not so much, everything is wired, but depends on a WiFi link across the property. One end is fast - one end runs like a snail.Steve suggested I use a different tool to make images directly on the mirror machine - jigit. Slightly le...
--------------------