Holger Levsen: 20230214-i-love-osuosl
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20230214-i-love-osuosl/
February 14, 2023, 6:15 PM
I love free software and I ❤️ OSUOSL
So in December 2018 I was approached somewhat out of the blue by someone from
OSUOSL who offered eight servers to the Reproducible Builds project and as these
machines had 32 cores and 144 GB Ram each (plus 3 TB on a single HDD) and
they also offered free hosting, I very happyly said yes.
And since them I'm a very happy Oregon State University Open Source Labs user,
and these days we're switching the setup to different machines, which
is another story ...
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Jonathan Dowland: A visit to Prusa Labs
https://jmtd.net/log/prusa_labs/
February 13, 2023, 10:12 AM
In September I was in Czechia for a Red Hat event. I ended up travelling via
Prague, and had an unexpected extra day due to an airline strike causing my
flight home to be cancelled. I took the opportunity to visit Prusa's
offices/factory/Lab, and it was amazing!
The Prusa team were all busy getting ready for the Prague Maker Faire that
was happening the day afterwards.1
On arriving at the street which houses Prusa's Lab and Office buildings, the
first thing that hit me was the smell. I find th...
--------------------
Vincent Bernat: Building a SQL-like language to filter flows
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-sql-like-language-filter
February 13, 2023, 8:06 AM
Akvorado collects network flows using IPFIX or sFlow. It stores them
in a ClickHouse database. A web console allows a user to query the data and
plot some graphs. A nice aspect of this console is how we can filter flows with
a SQL-like language:
Filter editor in Akvorado console
Often, web interfaces expose a query
builder to build such filters. I think combining a
SQL-like language with an editor supporting completion, syntax
highlighting, and linting is a better approach.1
The language parse...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Cernit Sets for the Royal Game of UR
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/02/13-royal-game-of-ur-cernit-sets/index.html
February 13, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on February 13, 2023



Some months ago I stumbled on the video where Irving Finkel teaches Tom Scott how to play the Royal Game of Ur and my takeout was:
Irving Finkel is Gandalf or something;
the game sounded quite fun!;
so I did the almost sensible thing, quickly drew a board with inkscape, printed it on 160 g/m² paper and used my piecepack pieces to try a few games.
I say almost sensible, because rather than drawing the rosettes with inkscape I decided to c...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Intel vs AMD
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/02/12/intel-vs-amd/
February 12, 2023, 5:31 AM
In response to a post about my latest laptop I had someone ask why I chose an Intel CPU. I’ve been a fan of the Thinkpad series of laptops since the 90s. They have always seemed well constructed (given the constraints of being light etc) and had a good feature set. Also I really like the TrackPoint. I’ve been a fan of the smaller Thinkpads since I got an X-301 from e-waste [1] and the X1-Carbon series is the latest and greatest line of small Thinkpads.
AMD makes some nice laptop CPUs which a...
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Russell Coker: T320 iDRAC Failure and new HP Z640
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/02/12/t320-idrac-failure-hp-z640/
February 12, 2023, 2:10 AM
The Dell T320
Almost 2 years ago I made a Dell PowerEdge T320 my home server [1]. It was a decent upgrade from the PowerEdge T110 II that I had used previously. One benefit of that system was that I needed more RAM and the PowerEdge T1xx series use unbuffered ECC RAM which is unreasonably expensive as well as the DIMMs tending to be smaller (no Load Reduced DIMMS) and only having 4 slots. As I had bought two T320s I put all the RAM in a single server getting a total of 96G and then put some chea...
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Vincent Bernat: Hacking the Geberit Sigma 70 flush plate
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-geberit-sigma-70
February 11, 2023, 9:22 PM
My toilet is equipped with a Geberit Sigma 70 flush plate. The sales pitch
for this hydraulic-assisted device praises the
“ingenious mount that acts like a rocker switch.” In practice, the flush is very
capricious and has a very high failure rate. Avoid this type of
mechanism! Prefer a fully mechanical version like the Geberit Sigma 20.
After several plumbers, exchanges with Geberit’s technical department, and the
expensive replacement of the entire mechanism, I was still getting a fai...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: HLedger, 1 year on
https://jmtd.net/log/hledger_1yr/
February 10, 2023, 9:11 PM
It's been a year since I started exploring HLedger, and I'm still
going. The rollover to 2023 was an opportunity to revisit my approach.
Some time ago I stumbled across Dmitry Astapov's HLedger notes (fully-fledged
hledger, which I briefly
mentioned in eventual consistency) and decided to adopt some of its ideas.
new year, new journal
First up, Astapov encourages starting a new journal file for a new calendar
year. I do this for other, accounting-adjacent files as a matter of course,
and I di...
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Antoine Beaupré: Picking a USB-C hub and charger
https://anarc.at/blog/2023-02-10-usb-c/
February 10, 2023, 8:09 PM
Dear lazy web, help me pick the right hardware to make my shiny new
laptop work better. I want a new USB-C dock and travel power supply.
Background
I need advice on hardware, because my current setup in the office
doesn't work so well. My new Framework laptop has four (4!) USB-C
ports which is great, but it only has those ports (there's a combo
jack, but I don't use it because it's
noisy). So
right now I have the following setup:
HDMI: monitor one
HDMI: monitor two
USB-A: Yubikey
USB-C: USB-...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 235 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-235-released/
February 10, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 235. This version includes the following changes:
[ Akihiro Suda ]
* Update .gitlab-ci.yml to push versioned tags to the container registry.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!119)
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix compatibility with PyPDF2. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#331)
* Fix compatibility with ImageMagick 7.1.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#330)
[ Daniel Kahn Gillmor ]
* Update from PyPD...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Building a read-only Debian root setup: Part 2
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/02/debian-read-only-root-part2.html
February 9, 2023, 10:13 PM
This is the second part of how I build a read-only root setup for my router. You might want to read part 1 first, which covers the initial boot and general overview of how I tie the pieces together. This post will describe how I build the squashfs image that forms the main filesystem.
Most of the build is driven from a script, make-router, which I’ll dissect below. It’s highly tailored to my needs, and this is a fairly lengthy post, but hopefully the steps I describe prove useful to anyone ...
--------------------
Sam Hartman: Building Carthage with Carthage
https://hartmans.dreamwidth.org/100287.html
February 9, 2023, 8:43 PM
This is the second in a series of blog posts introducing Carthage,
an Infrastructure as Code framework I’ve been working on the last four
years. In this post we’ll talk about how we use Carthage to build the
Carthage container images. We absolutely could have just used a
Containerfile to do this; in fact I recently removed a hybrid solution that produced an artifact
and then used a Containerfile to turn it into an OCI image. The biggest
reason we don’t use a Containerfile is that we want t...
--------------------
Chris Lamb: Most anticipated films of 2023
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/most-anticipated-films-of-2023
February 8, 2023, 11:42 PM
Very few highly-anticipated movies appear in January and February, as the bigger releases are timed so they can be considered for the Golden Globes in January and the Oscars in late February or early March, so film fans have the advantage of a few weeks after the New Year to collect their thoughts on the year ahead. In other words, I'm not actually late in outlining below the films I'm most looking forward to in 2023...
§
Barbie
No, seriously! If anyone can make a good film about a doll franchi...
--------------------
Stephan Lachnit: Setting up fast Debian package builds using sbuild, mmdebstrap and apt-cacher-ng
https://stephan.lachnit.xyz/posts/2023-02-08-debian-sbuild-mmdebstrap-apt-cacher-ng/
February 8, 2023, 6:49 PM
In this post I will give a quick tutorial on how to set up fast Debian package builds using sbuild with mmdebstrap and apt-cacher-ng.
The usual tool for building Debian packages is dpkg-buildpackage, or a user-friendly wrapper like debuild, and while these are geat tools, if you want to upload something to the Debian archive they lack the required separation from the system they are run on to ensure that your packaging also works on a different system. The usual candidate here is sbuild. But set...
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2023
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2023/02/my-debian-activities-in-january-2023/
February 8, 2023, 6:45 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 419 and rejected 46 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 429. Looking at these numbers and comparing them to the previous month, one can see: the freeze is near. Everybody wants to get some packages into the archive and I hope nobody is disappointed.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-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 14h.
Durin...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Major outage with Oricom uplink
https://anarc.at/blog/2023-02-08-major-outage/
February 8, 2023, 5:45 PM
The server that normally serves this page, all my email, and many more
services was unavailable for about 24 hours. This post explains how and
why.
What happened?
Starting February 2nd, I started seeing intermittent packet loss on
the network. Every hour or so, the link would go down for one or two
minutes, then come back up.
At first, I didn't think much of it because I was away and could blame
the crappy wifi or the uplink I using. But when I came in the office
on Monday, the service was in...
--------------------
Stephan Lachnit: Installing Debian on F2FS rootfs with deboostrap and systemd-boot
https://stephan.lachnit.xyz/posts/2023-02-07-install-debian-debootstrap-f2fs-systemd-boot/
February 7, 2023, 10:37 PM
I recently got a new NVME drive. My plan was to create a fresh Debian install on an F2FS root partition with compression for maximum performance. As it turns out, this is not entirely trivil to accomplish.
For one, the Debian installer does not support F2FS (here is my attempt to add it from 2021).
And even if it did, grub does not support F2FS with the extra_attr flag that is required for compression support (at least as of grub 2.06).
Luckily, we can install Debian anyway with all these these ...
--------------------
Vincent Bernat: Fast and dynamic encoding of Protocol Buffers in Go
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-dynamic-protobuf-golang
February 6, 2023, 8:58 AM
Protocol Buffers are a popular choice for serializing structured data
due to their compact size, fast processing speed, language independence, and
compatibility. There exist other alternatives, including Cap’n Proto,
CBOR, and Avro.
Usually, data structures are described in a proto definition file
(.proto). The protoc compiler and a language-specific plugin convert it into
code:
$ head flow-4.proto
syntax = "proto3";
package decoder;
option go_package = "akvorado/inlet/flow/decoder";
message ...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-01/
February 6, 2023, 12:37 AM
Welcome to the first report for 2023 from the Reproducible Builds project!
In these reports we try and outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month, as well as the most important things in/around the community. As a quick recap, the motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no malicious flaws can be deliberately introduced during compilation and distribution of the software that we run on our devices. As ever, if you are interested in contr...
--------------------
James Valleroy: A look back at FreedomBox project in 2022
https://jvalleroy.me/wordpress/?p=49
February 5, 2023, 9:44 PM
This post is very late, but better late than never! I want to take a look back at the work that was done on FreedomBox during 2022.
Several apps were added to FreedomBox in 2022. The email server app (that was developed by a Google Summer of Code student back in 2021) was finally made available to the general audience of FreedomBox users. You will find it under the name “Postfix/Dovecot”, which are the main services configured by this app.
Another app that was added is Janus, which has...
--------------------
Mike Gabriel: Call for translations: Lomiri / Ubuntu Touch 20.04
https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/142
February 5, 2023, 7:50 PM
Prologue
For over a year now, Fre(i)e Software GmbH (my company) is involved in Ubuntu Touch developmt. The development effort currently is handle by a mix of paid and voluntary developers/contributors under the umbrella of the UBports Foundation. We are approaching the official first release of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 with rapid pace.
And, if you are a non-Englisch native speaker, we'd like to ask you for help... Read below.
light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org, Mastodon, IRC, etc.)
Inte...
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Jonathan Dowland: 2022 in reading
https://jmtd.net/log/2022_in_reading/
February 5, 2023, 10:00 AM
In 2022 I read 34 books (-19% on last year).
In 2021 roughly a quarter of the books I read were written by women. I was
determined to push that ratio in 2022, so I made an effort to try and only
read books by women. I knew that I wouldn't manage that, but by trying to, I
did get the ratio up to 58% (by page count).
I'm not sure what will happen in 2023. My to-read pile has some back-pressure
from books by male authors I postponed reading in 2022 (in particular new works
by Christopher Priest a...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Wayland in Bookworm
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/02/05/wayland-bookworm/
February 5, 2023, 8:41 AM
We are getting towards the freeze for Debian/Bookworm so the current state of packages isn’t going to change much before the release. Bugs will get fixed but missing features will mostly be missing until the next release.
Anarcat wrote an excellent blog post about using Wayland with the Sway window manager [1]. It seems pretty good if you like Sway, but I like KDE and plan to continue using it. Several of the important utility programs referenced by Anarcat won’t run with KDE/Wayland and giv...
--------------------
C.J. Collier: IPv6 with CenturyLink Fiber
https://wp.colliertech.org/cj/?p=1844
February 5, 2023, 12:49 AM
In case you want to know how to configure IPv6 using CenturyLink’s 6rd tunneling service.
There are four files to update with my script:
/etc/radvd.conf.header
/etc/default/centurylink-6rd
/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/centurylink-6rd
/etc/ppp/ip-down.d/centurylink-6rd
There are a couple of environment variables in /etc/default/centurylink-6rd that you will want to set. Mine looks like this:
LAN_IFACE="ens18,ens21,ens22"
HEADER_FILE=/etc/radvd.conf.header
The script will configure radvd to advertise v6...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: FreedomBox
https://jmtd.net/log/freedombox/
February 4, 2023, 6:44 PM
personal servers
Moxie Marlinspike, former CEO of Signal, wrote a very interesting
blog post about
"web3", the
crypto-scam1. It's worth a read if you are interested in that stuff. This
blog post, however, is not about crypto-scams; but I wanted to quote from the
beginning of the article:
People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise
for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and
consumer of content as well as a publisher and consumer of inf...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: The Horror Show!
https://jmtd.net/log/the_horror_show/
February 4, 2023, 6:22 PM
I was passing through London on Friday and I had time to get to The Horror Show! Exhibit at Somerset House, over by Victoria embankment. I learned about the exhibition from Gazelle Twin’s website: she wrote music for the final part of the exhibit, with Maxine Peake delivering a monologue over the top.
I loved it. It was almost like David Keenan’s book England’s Hidden Reverse had been made into an exhibition. It’s divided into three themes: Monster, Ghost and Witch, although the themes ...
--------------------
Tim Retout: AlmaLinux and SBOMs
https://retout.co.uk/2023/02/04/almalinux-and-sboms/
February 4, 2023, 4:37 PM
At CentOS Connect yesterday, Jack Aboutboul and Javier Hernandez
presented a talk about AlmaLinux and SBOMs
[video],
where they are exploring a novel supply-chain security effort in the
RHEL ecosystem.
Now, I have unfortunately ignored the Red Hat ecosystem for a long
time, so if you are in a similar position to me: CentOS used to
produce debranded rebuilds of RHEL; but Red Hat changed the project
round so that CentOS Stream now sits in between Fedora Rawhide and
RHEL releases, allowing the wide...
--------------------
Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snaps, snapcraft, Debian packages.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-snapcraft-debian-packages/
February 3, 2023, 6:54 PM
Sunset, Witch Wells Arizona
Another busy week!
In the snap world, I have been busy trying to solve the problem of core20 snaps needing security updates and focal is no longer supported in KDE Neon. So I have created a ppa at https://launchpad.net/~scarlettmoore/+archive/ubuntu/kf5-5.99-focal-updates/+packages
Which of course presents more work, as kf5 5.99.0 requires qt5 5.15.7. Sooo this is a WIP.
Snapcraft kde-neon-extension is moving along as I learn the python ways of formatting,...
--------------------
Ian Jackson: derive-adhoc: powerful pattern-based derive macros for Rust
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/14345.html
February 3, 2023, 12:34 AM
tl;dr
Have you ever wished that you could that could write a new derive macro without having to mess with procedural macros?
Now you can!
derive-adhoc lets you write a #[derive] macro, using a template syntax which looks a lot like macro_rules!.
It’s still 0.x - so unstable, and maybe with sharp edges. We want feedback!
And, the documentation is still very terse. It is doesn’t omit anything, but, it is severely lacking in examples, motivation, and so on. It will suit readers who enjoy dense ...
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Matt Brown: 2023 Writing Plan
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/02/03/2023-writing-plan/
February 2, 2023, 9:07 PM
To achieve my goal of publishing one high-quality piece of writing per week this year, I’ve put together a draft writing plan and a few organisational notes.
Please let me know what you think - what’s missing? what would you like to read more/less of from me?
I aim for each piece of writing to generate discussion, inspire further writing, and raise my visibility and profile with potential customers and peers. Some of the writing will be opinion, but I expect a majority of it will take a “l...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Blocking free API access to Twitter doesn't stop abuse
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/65647.html
February 2, 2023, 10:21 AM
In one week from now, Twitter will block free API access. This prevents anyone who has written interesting bot accounts, integrations, or tooling from accessing Twitter without paying for it. A whole number of fascinating accounts will cease functioning, people will no longer be able to use tools that interact with Twitter, and anyone using a free service to do things like find Twitter mutuals who have moved to Mastodon or to cross-post between Twitter and other services will be blocked.There's ...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Using Yggdrasil As an Automatic Mesh Fabric to Connect All Your Docker Containers, VMs, and Servers
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10461-using-yggdrasil-as-an-automatic-mesh-fabric-to-connect-all-your-docker-containers-vms-and-servers
February 2, 2023, 4:18 AM
Sometimes you might want to run Docker containers on more than one host. Maybe you want to run some at one hosting facility, some at another, and so forth.
Maybe you’d like run VMs at various places, and let them talk to Docker containers and bare metal servers wherever they are.
And maybe you’d like to be able to easily migrate any of these from one provider to another.
There are all sorts of very complicated ways to set all this stuff up. But there’s also a simple one: Yggdrasil.
My bl...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RInside 0.2.18 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/02/01#rinside_0.2.18
February 2, 2023, 12:17 AM
A new release 0.2.18 of RInside
arrived on CRAN and in Debian today. This is the first
release in ten months since the 0.2.17 release. RInside
provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and
programs, using the classes and functions provided by Rcpp.
This release brings a contributed change to how the internal REPL is
called: Dominick found the
current form more reliable when embedding R on Windows. We also updated
a few other things around th...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: How To Verify Debian's ARM Installer Images
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/02/02-how-to-verify-debian-arm-installer-images/index.html
February 2, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on February 2, 2023



Thanks to Vagrant on the debian-arm mailing list I’ve found that there is a chain of verifiability for the images usually used to install Debian on ARM devices.
It’s not trivial, so I’m writing it down for future reference when I’ll need it again.
Download the images from https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/current/images/ (choose either hd-media or netboot, then SD-card-images and download the firmware...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: Apt Archive Transparency: debdistdiff & apt-canary
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/02/01/apt-archive-transparency-debdistdiff-apt-canary/
February 1, 2023, 8:56 PM
I’ve always found the operation of apt software package repositories to be a mystery. There appears to be a lack of transparency into which people have access to important apt package repositories out there, how the automatic non-human update mechanism is implemented, and what changes are published. I’m thinking of big distributions like Ubuntu and Debian, but also the free GNU/Linux distributions like Trisquel and PureOS that are derived from the more well-known distributions.
As far as...
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Julian Andres Klode: Ubuntu 2022v1 secure boot key rotation and friends
https://blog.jak-linux.org/2023/02/01/ubuntu-key-rotation/
February 1, 2023, 1:40 PM
This is the story of the currently progressing changes to secure boot
on Ubuntu and the history of how we got to where we are.
taking a step back: how does secure boot on Ubuntu work?
Booting on Ubuntu involves three components after the firmware:
shim
grub
linux
Each of these is a PE binary signed with a key. The shim is signed by Microsoft’s
3rd party key and embeds a self-signed Canonical CA certificate, and optionally a
vendor dbx (a list of revoked certificates or binaries). grub and li...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: February.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Feb-1.html.en#2023-Feb-1-09:19:43
February 1, 2023, 12:19 AM
February. Working through crosvm dependencies and found that cargo-debstatus does not dump all dependencies; seems like it skips over optional ones.
Haven't tracked down what is going on yet but at least it seems like crosvm does not have all dependencies and can't build yet.
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities January 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/02/01/floss-activities/
February 1, 2023, 12:02 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
pydispatcher:
fix doc build with Python 3.11
pyemd:
cleanups
sourcehut:
add repo description to
git,
hg
summary page titles
Debian security tracker:
add more CVE search services
Debian BTS usertags:
fixed some cross, ftp-master, website, porting usertags
Debian screenshots:
deleted
wine (WinXP not Wine)
Debian package uploads:
python-docutils,
pydispatcher,
celery
Debian wiki pages:
Arch...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Enabling retrogaming with Kodi on Debian
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/01/kodi-retro-gaming.html
January 31, 2023, 5:00 PM
For some reason my son has started to be really into watching playthroughs of Mario and similar games on Youtube. I don’t understand the appeal, but it’s less distracting as background than Paw Patrol, so I’m not complaining. He’s not quite at the stage he’s ready to play the games himself, but it’s coming. So I figured it would be neat to sort out some retrogaming bits ready for when that happens.
I already have a Kodi box underneath the TV; it doesn’t get as much use these days ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: #39: Faster Feedback Systems – A Continuous Integration Example
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/01/30#039_faster_feedback_system_tiny_vs_tidy_example
January 31, 2023, 3:11 AM
Welcome to the 39th post in the relatively randomly recurring rants,
or R4 for short. Today’s
post picks up where the previous post #38:
Faster Feedback Systems started. As we argued in #38,
the need for fast feedback loops is fairly universal and
widespread. Fairly shortly after we posted #38,
useR! 2022 happened and one presentation had the key line
Waiting 1-24 minutes for a build to finish can be a massive time
suck.
which we would like to come back to today. Furthermore, the
unimitable ...
--------------------
Arturo Borrero González: Debian and the adventure of the screen resolution
https://ral-arturo.org/2023/01/30/console.html
January 30, 2023, 5:21 PM
I read somewhere a nice meme about Linux: Do you want an operating system or do you want an adventure? I love
it, because it is so true. What you are about to read is my adventure to set a usable screen resolution in a fresh
Debian testing installation.
The context is that I have two different Lenovo Thinkpad laptops with 16” screen and nvidia graphic cards. They are both
installed with the latest Debian testing. I use the closed-source nvidia drivers (they seem to work better than the nouvea...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links January 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/01/30/links-january-2023/
January 30, 2023, 1:17 PM
The Intercept has an amusing and interesting article about senior Facebook employees testifying that they don’t know where Facebook stores all it’s data on users [1]. One lesson all programmers can learn from this is to document all these things in an orderly manner.
Cory Doctorow wrote a short informative article about inflation from a modern monetary theory perspective [2].
Russ Allbery wrote an insightful blog post about effecive altruism and respect for disadvantaged people [3]. GiveDire...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 234 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-234-released/
January 30, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 234. This version includes the following changes:
[ FC Stegerman ]
* test_text_proper_indentation requires at least file version 5.44.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#329)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppTOML 0.2.2 on CRAN: Now with macOS-on-Intel Builds
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/01/29#rcpptoml_0.2.2
January 29, 2023, 10:23 PM
Just days after a build-fix
release (for aarch64) and still only a few weeks after the 0.2.0
release of RcppTOML
and its switch to toml++, we have
another bugfix release 0.2.2 on CRAN also bringing release 3.3.0 of
toml++ (even if we
had large chunks of 3.3.0 already incorporated).
TOML is a file format that is most
suitable for configurations, as it is meant to be edited by
humans but read by computers. It emphasizes strong readability
for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing
...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_desktop_recommending_your_program_for_opening_its_files_.html
January 29, 2023, 10:00 AM
Linux desktop systems
have
standardized how programs present themselves to the desktop
system. If a package include a .desktop file in
/usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop
environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the
menu of available programs in the system. A lesser known fact is that
a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the
files created by the program in question, and use it to open these
files on reque...
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Gunnar Wolf: miniDebConf Tamil Nadu 2023
https://gwolf.org/2023/01/minidebconf-tamil-nadu-2023.html
January 29, 2023, 7:17 AM
Greetings from Viluppuram, Tamil Nadu, South India!
As a preparation and warm-up for DebConf in September, the Debian
people in India have organized a miniDebConf. Well, I don’t want to be
unfair to them — They have been regularly organizing miniDebConfs for
over a decade, and while most of the attendees are students local to
this state in South India (the very ``tip’’ of the country; Tamil Nadu
is the Eastern side, and Kerala, where Kochi is and DebConf will be
held, is the Western s...
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Valhalla's Things: Hello World!
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/01/29-hello-world/index.html
January 29, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on January 29, 2023



Welcome to my new blog!
Or rather, strictly speaking, welcome to my first blog!
Back when everybody had a blog, I had an old-fashioned personal website where pages were organized by topic rather than by date, so now that blogs are dead (or so they say), I guess it’s time for me to have one :) .
The old website is still online, but updating it is getting harder, both for organizational reasons and because the static generator I’ve used is ...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snaps, Debian uploads and much more in the works!
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-debian-uploads-and-much-more-in-the-works/
January 28, 2023, 3:01 PM
Witch Wells, AZ Snow
It has been a very busy few weeks as we endured snowstorm after snowstorm!
I have made some progress on the Mycroft in debian adventure! This will slow down as we enter freeze for bookworm and there is no way we will make it into bookworm as there are some significant issues to solve.
lingua-franco uploaded and accepted
pako uploaded and accepted
speechpy-fast uploaded
fitipy ready to upload
On the KDE side of things:
Plasma-bigscreen uploaded and a...
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Emmanuel Kasper: Table of correspondence between AWS / Azure / Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform / upstream projects
https://00formicapunk00.wordpress.com/2023/01/28/table-of-correspondence-between-aws-azure-red-hat-openshift-container-platform-upstream-projects/
January 28, 2023, 1:14 PM
If you know the Amazon Web Services or Azure portfolio, and you are interested in OpenShift or the OKD OpenShift community distribution, this is a table of corresponding technologies.
OpenShift is Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution: it is basically the upstream Kubernetes delivered with monitoring, logging, CI/CD, underlying OS, tested upgrade paths not found with a manual kubernetes.io kubeadm install.
After passing the two corresponding certifications, my opinion on cloud operators is that it...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Library of the Dead
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-76777-6.html
January 28, 2023, 3:54 AM
Review: The Library of the Dead, by T.L. Huchu

Series:
Edinburgh Nights #1


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2021


Printing:
2022


ISBN:
1-250-76777-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
329

The Library of the Dead is the first book in a post-apocalyptic
(sort of) urban fantasy series set in Edinburgh, written by Zimbabwean
author (and current Scotland resident) T.L. Huchu.
Ropa is a ghosttalker. This means she can...
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Craig Small: Fixing iCalendar feeds
https://dropbear.xyz/2023/01/28/fixing-icalendar-feeds/
January 28, 2023, 1:28 AM
The local government here has all the schools use an iCalendar feed for things like when school terms start and stop and other school events occur. The department’s website also has events like public holidays. The issue is that all of them don’t make it an all-day event but one that happens at midnight, or one past midnight.
The events synchronise fine, though Google’s calendar is known for synchronising when it feels like it, not at any particular time you would like it to.
Even ...
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Matthew Garrett: Further adventures in Apple PKCS#11 land
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/65462.html
January 27, 2023, 11:39 PM
After my previous efforts, I wrote up a PKCS#11 module of my own that had no odd restrictions about using non-RSA keys and I tested it. And things looked much better - ssh successfully obtained the key, negotiated with the server to determine that it was present in authorized_keys, and then went to actually do the key verification step. At which point things went wrong - the Sign() method in my PKCS#11 module was never called, and a strangedebug1: identity_sign: sshkey_sign: error in libcryptosi...
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Matt Brown: Goals for 2023
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/01/27/goals-for-2023/
January 26, 2023, 7:50 PM
This is the second of a two-part post covering my goals for 2023. See the first part to understand the vision, mission and strategy driving these goals.
I want to thank my friend Nat, and Will Larson whose annual reviews I’ve always enjoyed reading for inspiring me to write these posts.
I’ve found the process articulating my motivations and goals very useful to clarify my thoughts and create tangible next steps. I’m grateful for that in and of itself, but I also hope that by publishing thi...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2022 edition
https://veronneau.org/montreal-subway-foot-traffic-data-2022-edition.html
January 26, 2023, 6:30 PM
For the fourth year in a row, I've asked Société de Transport de Montréal,
Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway.
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 10
Licences
The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my
modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in
the public domain.
The R code I ...
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Shirish Agarwal: Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023, Tinnitus, Cooking, Books and Series.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/01/26/minidebconf-tamilnadu-2023-tinnitus-cooking-books-and-series/
January 26, 2023, 1:34 PM
First up is Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023 that would be held on 28-29 January 2023. You can find rest of the details here. I do hope we get to see/hear some good stuff from the Minidebconf. Best of luck to all those who are applying.
Tinnitus
During the lock-down of March 2020, I became aware of noise in ears and subsequently major hearing loss. It took me quite a while to know that Tinnitus happens to both those who have hearing loss as well as not. I keep running into threads like this and...
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Bálint Réczey: How to speed up your next build 5-20x with Firebuild?
https://balintreczey.hu/blog/how-to-speed-up-your-next-build-with-firebuild/
January 26, 2023, 9:06 AM
TL;DR: Just prefix your build command (or any command) with firebuild:
firebuild <build command>
OK, but how does it work?
Firebuild intercepts all processes started by the command to cache their outputs. Next time when the command or any of its descendant commands is executed with the same parameters, inputs and environment, the outputs are replayed (the command is shortcut) from the cache instead of running the command again.
This is similar to how ccache and other compiler-...
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Matt Brown: Vision, Mission and Strategy
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/01/26/vision-mission-and-strategy/
January 26, 2023, 4:30 AM
This is the first of a two-part post, covering high-level thoughts around my motivations and vision. Make sure to check out the second part for my specific goals for 2023.
A new year is upon us! My plan was to be 6 months into the journey of starting a business by this point.
I made some very tentative progress towards that goal in 2022, registering a company and starting some consulting work, but on the whole I’ve found it much harder than expected to gather the necessary energy to begin that...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppTOML 0.2.1 on CRAN: Small Build Fix for Some Arches
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/01/25#rcpptoml_0.2.1
January 26, 2023, 12:54 AM
Two weeks after the release of RcppTOML
0.2.0 and the switch to toml++, we have a
quick bugfix release 0.2.1.
TOML is a file format that is most
suitable for configurations, as it is meant to be edited by
humans but read by computers. It emphasizes strong readability
for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing
as well as immediate and clear error reports. On small typos
you get parse errors, rather than silently corrupted garbage. Much
preferable to any and all of XML, JSON or YAM...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2023/01/new-developers-2022-12.html
January 24, 2023, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Dennis Braun (snd)
Raúl Benencia (rul)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Gioele Barabucci
Agathe Porte
Braulio Henrique Marques Souto
Matthias Geiger
Alper Nebi Yasak
Fabian Grünbichler
Lance Lin
Congratulations!...
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Kentaro Hayashi: Porterboxes and alternatives
https://kenhys.hatenablog.jp/entry/2023/01/24/202912
January 24, 2023, 11:29 AM
As you know, Debian projects and sponsor provides so-called "porterbox", but it does not cover all architectures.
There are some alternatives to fix architecture-specific bugs.
For the record, let's pick it up them. [1][2][3]
porterbox
deb-o-matic
qemu
amd64
adayevskaya.d.o
debomatic-amd64.d.n
DQIB ready
arm64
amdahl.d.o
debomatic-arm64.d.n
DQIB ready
armel
amdahl.d.o abel.d.o
debomatic-armel.d.n
NG
armhf
amdahl.d.o abel.d.o harris.d.o
debomatic-armhf.d.n
DQIB ready
i386
exodar...
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