Neil Williams: Carrying Grief
https://linux.codehelp.co.uk/grief-universal-unique.html
May 2, 2023, 12:45 PM
This isn't a book review, although the reason that I am typing this now is
because of a book, You Are Not Alone: from the creator and host of
Griefcast, Cariad Lloyd, ISBN: 978-1526621870 and I include a handful of
quotes from Cariad where there is really no better way of describing things.
Many people experience death for the first time as a child, often relating to a
family pet. Death is universal but every experience of death is unique. One of
the myths of grief is the idea of the Five Stages...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.18 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/05/01#rquantlib_0.4.18
May 2, 2023, 12:48 AM
A new release 0.4.18 of RQuantLib
arrived at CRAN earlier today,
and will be uploaded to Debian as
well.
QuantLib is a very
comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative
finance; RQuantLib
connects it to the R environment and language.
This release of RQuantLib
comes about six months after the previous maintenance release. It brings
a few small updates triggered by small changes in the QuantLib releases
1.29 and 1.30. It also contains updates reflecting changes in the
rgl package kindl...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: Scanning heaps of 8mm movies
https://gwolf.org/2023/05/scanning-heaps-of-8mm-movies.html
May 1, 2023, 11:21 PM
After my father passed away, I brought home most of the personal items
he had, both at home and at his office. Among many, many (many, many,
many) other things, I brought two of his personal treasures: His photo
collection and a box with the 8mm movies he shot approximately between
1956 and 1989, when he was forced into modernity and got a portable
videocassette recorder.
I have talked with several friends, as I really want to get it all in
a digital format, and while I’ve been making slow bu...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: May.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-May-1.html.en#2023-May-1-16:24:20
May 1, 2023, 7:24 AM
May. Doing some rust stuff and maintenance of existing C++ code.
Doing something that I can feel improves the codebase is nice.
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-001235-8.html
May 1, 2023, 4:03 AM
Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #28


Publisher:
HarperCollins


Copyright:
2001


Printing:
2008


ISBN:
0-06-001235-8


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
351

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is the 28th Discworld
novel and the first marketed for younger readers. Although it has enough
references to establish it as taking place on Discworld...
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/05/01/floss-activities/
May 1, 2023, 12:42 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
libsafe:
allow local deps
i2c-tools:
usability
notmuch:
notmuch-mutt: fix queries, drop shell usage
duck:
add indicators
(1
2)
Debian BTS:
fix some QA/Python usertags
Debian QA services:
pass on HTTP errors,
block bingbot
(1
2),
update releases
Debian package tracker:
update hard-coded data
Debian wiki pages:
DebianExperimental,
DebianInstaller/CreateUSBMedia,
DebianLogo,
FileSystem,
Firmw...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links April 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/04/30/links-april-2023/
April 30, 2023, 7:00 AM
Cory Doctorow has an insightful article Gig Work is the Opposite of Steampunk [1] about the horrors that companies like Amazon are forcing on their employees.
Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell wrote an insightful article about the al Capone theory of sexual harassment [2]. Why people who sexually harass others usually perform other anti-social activity that is also easier to prosecute.
The IEEE has an interesting article about using ML for parts of the CPU design process, both the technical iss...
--------------------
Matthew Palmer: dev-dependencies and Rust's unused_crate_dependencies lint
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2023/04/30/dev-dependencies-and-rusts-unused_crate_dependencies.html
April 30, 2023, 12:00 AM
I’m in the process of getting super-strict about the code quality of cretrit, the comparison-revealing encryption library that underlies the queryable encryption of the Enquo project.
While I’m going to write a whole big thing about Rust linting in the future, I bumped across a rather gnarly problem that I thought was worth sharing separately.
The problem, in short, is that the unused_crate_dependencies lint interacts badly with crates that are only needed for benchmarking, such as (in my ca...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Programming the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo with Arduino
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/04/30-programming_the_ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo_with_arduino/index.html
April 30, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on April 30, 2023



A few months ago we may have bought a few ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo boards from Olimex.
Since every time I go back to working with them I’ve forgotten how to do so, and my old notes on the fediverse are hard to find, this is the full procedure.
Setup
I start by sort-of-following https://docs.espressif.com/projects/arduino-esp32/en/latest/installing.html
Install arduino from the distribution packages (version 1.8 is ok).
Under File → Preferences...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: And it's now after 2100 - so the unexpurgated version
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/and-its-now-after-2100-so-unexpurgated.html
April 29, 2023, 9:23 PM
 We're all but done - a couple of bugs sorted. All testing complete....
--------------------
Russ Allbery: INN 2.7.1
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2023-04/001.html
April 29, 2023, 5:18 PM
This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.7.0, and the
upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from
ISC or
my personal INN pages. The latter also has
links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.
As of this release, we're no longer generating hashes and signed hashes.
Instead, the release is a simple tarball and a detached GnuPG signature,
similar to my other software releases. We're also maintaining the
releases in parallel on GitHub.
Fo...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Release testing for 11.7 - pictures (with appropriate identity protection)
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/release-testing-for-117-pictures-with.html
April 29, 2023, 3:16 PM
 ...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Debian Bullseye 11.7 release - testing going on - 202304291427
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/debian-bullseye-117-release-testing.html
April 29, 2023, 2:27 PM
 We've been joined by Simon (smcv) - lots of chat bouncing backwards and forwards. Laptops appearing out of backpacks suddenly being repurposed.Settling very much into a rhythm and routine.Working with two laptops on your lap ends up being quite heavy :)
--------------------
Russell Coker: Write a blog post in the style of Russell Coker
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/04/30/blog-post-style-russell-coker/
April 29, 2023, 2:18 PM
Feeling a bit bored I asked ChatGPT “Write a blog post in the style of Russell Coker” and the result is in the section below. I don’t know if ChatGPT knows that the person asking the question is the same as the person being asked about. If a human had created that I’d be certain that “great computer scientist and writer” was an attempt at flattery, for a machine I’m not sure.
I have not written a single book, but I expect that in some alternate universe some version of me has writt...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Gkt4 model-backed radio button in Python
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/python/gkt4-model-backed-radio-button-in-python
April 29, 2023, 2:03 PM
Gtk4 has interesting ways of splitting models and views. One that I didn't find
very well documented, especially for Python bindings, is a set of radio buttons
backed by a common model.
The idea is to define an action that takes a string as a state. Each radio
button is assigned a string matching one of the possible states, and when the
state of the backend action is changed, the radio buttons are automatically
updated.
All the examples below use a string for a value type, but anything can be us...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Debian Bullseye 11.7 release weekend 202304291215UTC
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/debian-bullseye-117-release-weekend.html
April 29, 2023, 11:46 AM
 A switch failure early on: some quick changes of wiring and we're off. The room is very quiet for a few minutes then a burst of chatter, then on we go.Just the noise of keyboards and quiet concentration
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: How To Trust A Machine
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/29/how-to-trust-a-machine/
April 29, 2023, 11:45 AM
Let’s reflect on some of my recent work that started with understanding Trisquel GNU/Linux, improving transparency into apt-archives, working on reproducible builds of Trisquel, strengthening verification of apt-archives with Sigstore, and finally thinking about security device threat models. A theme in all this is improving methods to have trust in machines, or generally any external entity. While I believe that everything starts by trusting something, usually something familiar and well-kn...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Back in Cambridge - Debian point release for Debian Bullseye due this weekend - 11.7
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/back-in-cambridge-debian-point-release.html
April 29, 2023, 10:30 AM
Back in Cambridge for a point release weekend. Lots of people turning up - it comes to something when large monitors, a desktop machine require two or three trips to the car and there's still a crate of leads to go.As ever, lots of banter - computer renovations and updates were done yesterday - if they hadn't been, I'd have had at least another expert engineer on hand.This is *definitely* the place to be rather than at the other end of an IRC chat.This is *not* the release for Debian Bookworm: t...
--------------------
Abhijith PA: Attending FOSSASIA 2023
https://abhijithpa.me/2023/Attending-FOSSASIA-2023/
April 29, 2023, 6:53 AM
I attended FOSSASIA 2023 summit held
at Lifelong Learning Institute,
Singapore. A 3 day long parallel talk filled conference. Its my second
time attending FOSSASIA. The first one was 2018 summit. Like
last time, I didn’t attend much talks but focussed on networking with
people. A lot of familiar faces there. PV Anthony, Harish, etc.
I vounteered to run Debian Booth at the exhibition hall distributing
stickers, flyers. Rajudev also helped me at the booth. Most of the
people there used de...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Handling keyboard-like devices
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/debian/handling-keyboard-like-devices
April 28, 2023, 6:58 PM
I acquired some unusual input devices to experiment with, like a CNC control
panel and a bluetooth pedal page turner.
These identify and behave like a keyboard, sending nice and simple keystrokes,
and can be accessed with no drivers or other special software. However, their
keystrokes appear together with keystrokes from normal keyboards, which is the
expected default when plugging in a keyboard, but not what I want in this case.
I'd also like them to be readable via evdev and accessible by my o...
--------------------
Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snaps, Gear 23.04.0 available in snap store
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-gear-23-04-0-available-in-snap-store/
April 28, 2023, 4:04 PM
KDE Digikam 8.0.0 Snap
It has been another crazy busy couple of weeks. There are too many snaps released to list here, but you can track my progress here:
https://invent.kde.org/packaging/snapcraft-kde-applications/-/issues/30
Some notable releases are:
Digikam 8.0.0
KPhotoalbum ( New! )
KDevelop
Kate ( Now classic )
Arianna ( New! )
Kdenlive
Kommit ( New! )
I updated our Frameworks/QT5 content pack to kf5 105 and qt5 5.15.9.
I have added more documentation...
--------------------
Sven Hoexter: What's wrong in IT: commit messages
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/rant_what_is_wrong_in_it_commit_messages/
April 28, 2023, 8:15 AM
In my day job someone today took the time in the team daily to explain
his research why some of our configuration is wrong. He spent quite
some time on his own to look at the history in git and how everything
was setup initially, and ended up in the current - wrong - way. That triggered
me to validate that quickly, another 5min of work. So we agreed
to change it. A one line change, nothing spectacular, but lifetime was
invested to figure out why it should've a different value.
When the pull req...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: John Grisham’s books, Evolution removed from textbooks
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/john-grishams-books-evolution-removed-from-textbooks/
April 28, 2023, 3:34 AM
Gray Mountain – John Grisham
I have been perusing John Grisham’s books, some read and some re-read again. Almost all of the books that Mr. Grisham wrote are relevant even today. The Gray Mountain talks about how mountain top removal was done in Applachia, the U.S. (South). In fact NASA made a summary which either was borrowed from this book or the author borrowed from NASA, either could be true although seems it might be the former. And this is when GOI just made a new Forest ‘Conser...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Repurposing my C.H.I.P.
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/04/repurposing-my-chip.html
April 27, 2023, 6:44 PM
Way back at DebConf16 Gunnar managed to arrange for a number of Next Thing Co. C.H.I.P. boards to be distributed to those who were interested. I was lucky enough to be amongst those who received one, but I have to confess after some initial experimentation it ended up sitting in its box unused.
The reasons for that were varied; partly about not being quite sure what best to do with it, partly due to a number of limitations it had, partly because NTC sadly went insolvent and there was less momen...
--------------------
Thomas Lange: New feature for FAI.me build service
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-ssh-keys/
April 27, 2023, 6:25 PM
After the initial installation of a new machine, you often want to
login as root via ssh. Therefore it's convenient to provide
a ssh public key for a passwordless login.
This can now be done by just adding your user name from
salsa.debian.org, gitlab.com or github.com. You can also give a
customized URL from where to download the keys.
Before it was only possible to use a github account name.
The FAI.me build service then creates a customized installation ISO for
you, which will automatically ...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: A Security Device Threat Model: The Substitution Attack
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/27/a-security-device-threat-model-the-substitution-attack/
April 27, 2023, 4:30 PM
I’d like to describe and discuss a threat model for computational devices. This is generic but we will narrow it down to security-related devices. For example, portable hardware dongles used for OpenPGP/OpenSSH keys, FIDO/U2F, OATH HOTP/TOTP, PIV, payment cards, wallets etc and more permanently attached devices like a Hardware Security Module (HSM), a TPM-chip, or the hybrid variant of a mostly permanently-inserted but removable hardware security dongles.
Our context is cryptographic hard...
--------------------
Arturo Borrero González: Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe summary
https://ral-arturo.org/2023/04/27/kubecon.html
April 27, 2023, 10:47 AM
This post serves as a report from my attendance to Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe that took place in
Amsterdam in April 2023. It was my second time physically attending this conference, the first one was in
Austin, Texas (USA) in 2017. I also attended once in a virtual fashion.
The content here is mostly generated for the sake of my own recollection and learnings, and is written from
the notes I took during the event.
The very first session was the opening keynote, which reunited ...
--------------------
Bálint Réczey: Improve build time of Rust, Java and Intel Fortran projects with Firebuild’s new release!
https://balintreczey.hu/blog/improve-build-time-of-rust-java-and-intel-fortran-projects-with-firebuilds-new-release/
April 25, 2023, 9:38 PM
Rust is a hugely popular compiled programming language and accelerating it was an important goal for Firebuild for some time.
Firebuild’s v0.8.0 release finally added Rust support in addition to numerous other improvements including support for Doxygen, Intel’s Fortran compiler and restored javac and javadoc acceleration.
Firebuild’s Rust + Cargo support
Firebuild treats programs as black boxes intercepting C standard library calls and system calls. It shortcuts the program invoc...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: Debian Project Leader Election 2023, Jonathan Carter re-elected
https://bits.debian.org/2023/04/dpl-elections-2023.html
April 24, 2023, 7:00 PM
The voting period for the Debian Project Leader election has ended, with all of the votes tallied we announce the winner is: Jonathan Carter, who has been elected for the forth time.
Congratulations! The new term for the project leader started on 2023-04-21.
279 of 997 Developers voted using the Condorcet method.
More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2023 page.
Many thanks all of our Developers for voting....
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Separate hledgers
https://jmtd.net/log/hledger/separate/
April 24, 2023, 2:29 PM
In a previous blog post I described the use of virtual
postings to track accidental personal/family expenses. I've always been
uncomfortable with that, and in hledger 1yr I outlined a potential scheme
for finally addressing the virtual posting problem.
separate journals
My outline built on top of continuing to maintain both personal and family
financial data in the same place, but I've decided that this can't work,
because the different "directions" (or signs) of accidental transactions
origin...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html
April 23, 2023, 7:40 AM
While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that
it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with
transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into
stuff I need to write. The background is that long drives often bring
up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out
of the question while driving. With the release of
OpenAI Whisper, this
seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a
go. OpenAI Whisper...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: Managing header-spacing in markdown/org-mode files
https://blog.steve.fi/managing_header_spacing_in_markdown_org_mode_files.html
April 21, 2023, 6:00 AM
It seems I'm having a theme recently on this blog, of making emacs-related posts. Here's another.
I write a bunch of stuff in markdown, such as my emacs init-file, blog-posts and other documents. I try to be quite consistent about vertical spacing, for example a post might look like this:
# header1
Some top-level stuff.
## header2
Some more details.
## header2
Some more things on a related topic.
# header2
Here I'm trying to breakup sections, so there is a "big gap" between H1 and...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 241 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-241-released/
April 21, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 241. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add a missing 'raise' statement dropped in 2d95ae41e. Thanks, Mattia!
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* document sending out an email upon release
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.5 on CRAN: Updates from QuantLib 1.3.0
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/04/20#qlcal-r_0.0.5
April 20, 2023, 11:38 PM
The fifth release of the still new-ish qlcal package
arrivied at CRAN just now.
qlcal
delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R
package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained
and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be
demanding to build). qlcal covers
over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its
complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.
This release brings updates to five calendars fro...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: Sigstore for Apt Archives: apt-cosign
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/20/sigstore-for-apt-archives-apt-cosign/
April 20, 2023, 5:04 PM
As suggested in my initial announcement of apt-sigstore my plan was to look into stronger uses of Sigstore than rekor, and I’m now happy to announce that the apt-cosign plugin has been added to apt-sigstore and the operational project debdistcanary is publishing cosign-statements about the InRelease file published by the following distributions: Trisquel GNU/Linux, PureOS, Gnuinos, Ubuntu, Debian and Devuan.
Summarizing the commands that you need to run as root to experience the great new w...
--------------------
Dima Kogan: =numpy.percentile= API update
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2023/04/20_numpypercentile-api-update.html
April 20, 2023, 4:57 PM
The numpy devs did a bad thing. Don't be like the numpy devs.
The current (version 1.24) docs for numpy.percentile say this about
the method keyword argument:
Changed in version 1.22.0: This argument was previously called "interpolation" ...
They renamed a keyword argument. So if you had working code that did
np.percentile( ...., interpolation=xxx, ....)
then running it in the most recent numpy would throw lots of
Deprecation warnings at you, and presumably eventually it will sto...
--------------------
Jamie McClelland: Electron doesn't like negative layout coordinates
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2023/electron-doesnt-like-negative-numbers/
April 20, 2023, 12:27 PM
I got a second external monitor. Overkill? Probably, but I like having a
dedicated space to instant messaging (now left monitor) and also a dedicated
space for a web browser (right monitor).
But, when I moved signal-desktop to the left monitor, clicks stopped working. I
moved it back to my laptop screen, clicks started working. Other apps (like
gajim) worked fine. A real mystery.
I spent a lot of time on the wrong thing. I turned this monitor into portrait
mode. Maybe signal doesn’t like portr...
--------------------
Ian Jackson: The Rust Foundation's bad draft trademark policy
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/14929.html
April 19, 2023, 4:36 PM
tl;dr
The Rust Foundation’s proposed new trademark policy is far too restrictive, and will cause (more) drama unless it is substantially revised.
Process
Substance
Values
Next steps
Echoes of a dispute from 2006
Process
“Rust” is a trademark owned by the Foundation.
The Rust Foundation still seems to be finding its feet. Evidently, one of the items on its backlog was to update the trademark policy. Apparently they have been working on this for some time, in an informal working group.
In...
--------------------
Tim Retout: Data Diodes
https://retout.co.uk/2023/04/18/data-diodes/
April 18, 2023, 10:05 PM
At ArgoCon today, Thomas Fricke gave a nice talk on Cloud Native
Deployments in Air Gapped
Environments
describing container vulnerability scanning in the German energy
sector… and since he didn’t mention data diodes, and since some of
my colleagues at Oakdoor/PA Consulting make data
diodes for a living, I thought this might be interesting to write
about!
It’s one thing to have an air-gapped system, but eventually in order
to be useful you’re going to have to move data into it, and this ...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Philips LCD Monitor 22″, 1984, Reaper Man, The Firm.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/04/18/philips-lcd-monitor-22-1984-reaper-man-the-firm/
April 18, 2023, 9:31 AM
PHILIPS PHL 221S8L
Those who have been reading this blog for a long time would perhaps know that I had bought a Viewsonic 19″ almost 12 years ago. The Monitor was functioning well till last week. I had thought to change it to a 24″ monitor almost 3-4 years ago when 24″ LCD Monitors were going for around 4k/- or thereabouts. But the monitor kept on functioning and I didn’t have space (nor do) to have a dual-monitor setup. It just didn’t make sense. Apart from higher electricity charg...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Naguru 2.2.1 released
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-04-18-09-07_nageru_2_2_1_released.html
April 18, 2023, 8:07 AM
I've released version 2.2.1 of Nageru, my free
software video mixer. This is pretty much a “bookworm release”; a bunch of
focused fixes for video input-related issues I hadn't seen before (mostly
because the hardware I had accessible to test with didn't happen to stress
these bugs).
The changelog reads:
Nageru and Futatabi 2.2.1, April 17th, 2023
- Work around an issue with OpenGL on Wayland, causing all
displays to be blank.
- Several fixes related to video inputs; in particular...
--------------------
Matt Brown: co2mon.nz: Ventilation monitoring as a service
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/04/18/co2mon.nz/
April 18, 2023, 8:02 AM
Previously, I explained why ventilation monitoring is important, and the opportunity I see to help accelerate deployment of high quality ventilation monitoring for small businesses and organisations.
In this post, I’m going to discuss my plans to tackle that opportunity:
My journey to ventilation monitoring
co2mon.nz: Ventilation monitoring as a service prototype
Areas of development
Next steps
My journey to ventilation monitoring
I started looking into ventilation monitoring in detail las...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: PSA: upgrade your LUKS key derivation function
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html
April 18, 2023, 12:26 AM
Here's an article from a French anarchist describing how his (encrypted) laptop was seized after he was arrested, and material from the encrypted partition has since been entered as evidence against him. His encryption password was supposedly greater than 20 characters and included a mixture of cases, numbers, and punctuation, so in the absence of any sort of opsec failures this implies that even relatively complex passwords can now be brute forced, and we should be transitioning to even more se...
--------------------
Matthew Palmer: Rutie and Magnus, Two Good Ways to Build Ruby Extensions in Rust
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2023/04/18/rutie-magnus-rust-extensions-for-ruby.html
April 18, 2023, 12:00 AM
I wrote the Ruby bindings for the Enquo Project, my attempt to bring queryable encryption to all databases, using the Rutie library.
Recently, I’ve rewritten the bindings to use Magnus instead, and I thought I’d put down my thoughts about the whole situation.
The Story So Far
The Enquo Project core cryptography is all written in Rust, as seems to be the vogue these days.
Rust is fast, safe, and easily interoperable with most of the rest of the modern software development ecosystem, making ...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: More on Differential Reproducible Builds: Devuan is 46% reproducible!
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/17/more-on-differential-reproducible-builds-devuan-is-46-reproducible/
April 17, 2023, 3:29 PM
Building on my work to rebuild Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0 aramo, it felt simple to generalize the tooling to any two apt-repository pairs and I’ve created debdistreproduce as a template-project for doing this through the infrastructure of GitLab CI/CD and meanwhile even set up my own gitlab-runner on spare hardware. I’ve brought over reproduce/trisquel to using debdistreproduce as well, and archived the old reproduce-trisquel project.
After fixing some quirks, building Devuan GNU+Linux 4.0 ...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Booting modern Intel CPUs
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66109.html
April 17, 2023, 12:04 AM
CPUs can't do anything without being told what to do, which leaves the obvious problem of how do you tell a CPU to do something in the first place. On many CPUs this is handled in the form of a reset vector - an address the CPU is hardcoded to start reading instructions from when power is applied. The address the reset vector points to will typically be some form of ROM or flash that can be read by the CPU even if no other hardware has been configured yet. This allows the system vendor to ship c...
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Iustin Pop: Quick note: nftables and TCP MSS clamping
https://k1024.org/posts/2023/2023-04-16-nftables-tcp-clamp-mss/
April 16, 2023, 4:46 PM
Another short note to myself, and whomever cares/searches later for
nft or nftables, tcp mss clamping.
Somewhat surprising, many/most of the instructions found by Google are
still related to iptables. I guess people stopped writing blog posts
by the time nftables became widely used? 🤷
The only official documentation I can find is in the official
wiki,
but it doesn’t list/explain exactly how does this work/in which
conditions. I think this results in posts like this
one
that suggest addition...
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Simon Josefsson: Sigstore protects Apt archives: apt-verify & apt-sigstore
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/15/sigstore-protects-apt-archives-apt-verify-apt-sigstore/
April 15, 2023, 8:33 AM
Do you want your apt-get update to only ever use files whose hash checksum have been recorded in the globally immutable tamper-resistance ledger rekor provided by the Sigstore project? Well I thought you’d never ask, but now you can, thanks to my new projects apt-verify and apt-sigstore. I have not done proper stable releases yet, so this is work in progress. To try it out, adapt to the modern era of running random stuff from the Internet as root, and run the following commands. Use a conta...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snaps! Oh so many released! Debian update
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-oh-so-many-released-debian-update/
April 14, 2023, 6:39 PM
KDE Elisia snap
It has been another very busy couple of weeks! I have released many snaps, fixed a few bugs, started the documentation, and have many snaps in progress. So without further ado here is my status update for KDE snaps:
Fixed two very important Krita bugs:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=465307
Fixed several other minor bugs and triaged all the snap bugs I could find on bugs.kde.org. Remember to assign snap bugs to me! It makes my life easier and I see them quicker.
...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Babel
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-302144-7.html
April 14, 2023, 3:10 AM
Review: Babel, by R.F. Kuang

Publisher:
Harper Voyage


Copyright:
August 2022


ISBN:
0-06-302144-7


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
544

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford
Translators' Revolution, to give it its full title, is a standalone
dark academia fantasy
set in the 1830s and 1840s, primarily in Oxford, England. The first book
of R.F. Kuang's previous trilogy, The Poppy War, was nominated for
mul...
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John Goerzen: Easily Accessing All Your Stuff with a Zero-Trust Mesh VPN
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10478-easily-accessing-all-your-stuff-with-a-zero-trust-mesh-vpn
April 14, 2023, 2:47 AM
Probably everyone is familiar with a regular VPN. The traditional use case is to connect to a corporate or home network from a remote location, and access services as if you were there.
But these days, the notion of “corporate network” and “home network” are less based around physical location. For instance, a company may have no particular office at all, may have a number of offices plus a number of people working remotely, and so forth. A home network might have, say, a PVR and file...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Once Upon a Tome
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-324-09208-4.html
April 13, 2023, 2:18 AM
Review: Once Upon a Tome, by Oliver Darkshire

Publisher:
W.W. Norton & Company


Copyright:
2022


Printing:
2023


ISBN:
1-324-09208-4


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
243

The full title page of this book, in delightful 19th century style, is:
Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller,
wherein the theory of the profession is partially explained, with a
variety of insufficient examples, by Ol...
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Thomas Lange: FAI creates your own Ubuntu installation ISO
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-ubuntu/
April 12, 2023, 7:25 PM
A new service is available on the FAI project website
https://fai-project.org/FAIme
Build your own customized installation ISO for Ubuntu!
You can select if you want to install an Ubuntu LTS 22.04 server or
desktop and enable Ubuntu LTS packages which are also called Hardware
Enablement (HWE). Different disk partition schemes including LVM are
available and you can select a language and keyboard layout and add
your own list of packages which are then automatically installed from
the customized...
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Jonathan Dowland: blog after death
https://jmtd.net/log/blog_after_death/
April 12, 2023, 3:14 PM
I've been pondering what should happen to personal websites once the owner has
passed, or otherwise "moved on". Some time ago I stumbled across a blog by Kev
Quirk, who wrote
I’d need to come up with contingency plans for...This website, and any other
websites and own/manage
I thought it was a strange idea, to have a contingency plan for a personal site
to survive its writer. Even a site such as my own, which (as sites go) would be
trivial to host/mirror (since it's static), who would want...
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Andrej Shadura: Connecting lights to a Swytch e-bike kit
https://blog.shadura.me/2023/04/12/swytch-e-bike-lights/
April 12, 2023, 1:09 PM
Last year I purchased an e-bike upgrade kit for my mother in law. We decided to install it on a bicycle she originally bought back in the 80s, which I fixed and refurbished a couple of years ago and used until September 2022 when I bought myself a Dutch Cortina U4.
When I used this bicycle, I installed a lightweight Shutter Precision dynamo hub and compatible lights, XLC at the front, Büchel at the back. Unfortunately, since Swytch is a front wheel with a built-in electric motor, these lights d...
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Jamie McClelland: Doing whatever Gmail says
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2023/doing-whatever-gmail-says/
April 12, 2023, 12:27 PM
As we slowly move our members to our new email infrastructure, an unexpected
twist turned up: One member reported getting the Gmail warning:
Be careful with this message The sender hasn’t authenticated this message so Gmail can’t verify that it actually came from them.
They have their email delivered to May First, but have configured Gmail to pull
in that email using the “Check mail from other accounts” feature. It worked
fine on our old infrastructure, but started giving this message ...
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Aurelien Jarno: Backup server upgraded to Bookworm
https://blog.aurel32.net/backup-server-upgraded-to-bookworm.html
April 12, 2023, 9:07 AM
A few months ago, I switched my backup server to an ODROID-M1
SBC. It uses a RK3568 SoC with a
quad-core Cortex-A55 and AES extensions (useful for disk encryption), and I
added a 2 TB NVME SSD to the M2 slot. It also has a SATA connector, but the
default enclosure does not have space for 2.5" drives. It's not the fastest
SBC, but it runs stable and quite well as a backup server, and it's fanless,
and low-power (less than 2 W idle). The support for the SoC has been added
recently to the Linux k...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Hero
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-050777-2.html
April 12, 2023, 2:29 AM
Review: The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett

Illustrator:
Paul Kidby


Series:
Discworld #27


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
2001, 2002


ISBN:
0-06-050777-2


Format:
Graphic novel


Pages:
176

The Last Hero is the 27th Discworld novel and part of the Rincewind
subseries. This is something of a sequel to Interesting Times and relies heavily on the cast that was built
up in previous books. It's not a good p...
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Debian Developer Survey Results, DebConf updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-03-2023/
April 12, 2023, 12:00 AM
Contributing to Debian is
part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers
the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made
possible by organizations subscribing to our
Long Term Support contracts and
consulting services.
Results of the Debian Developer Survey, by Roberto C. Sánchez
In 2022, Freexian polled Debian Developers
about the usage of money in Debian. More than 200 Debian Developers
graciously participated, providing useful and constructive answers.
Rob...
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Aurelien Jarno: New website, or kind of...
https://blog.aurel32.net/new-website.html
April 11, 2023, 8:29 AM
For over 15 years, I've hardly made any updates to my website, and it remains
low on my priority list. So I made a radical decision to replace it entirely
with my blog. The content of the website has been reduced to just two
additional pages.
But nothing has been lost: nowadays, Wikipedia is a much better platform for
sharing knowledge than random websites. And it happens that they already cover
all that was on my website about
subaquatic diving in French.
They also offer a multitude of resource...
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