Russ Allbery: Review: Contact
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-671-43422-5.html
December 14, 2022, 4:21 AM
Review: Contact, by Carl Sagan

Publisher:
Pocket Books


Copyright:
1985


Printing:
October 1986


ISBN:
0-671-43422-5


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
434

Contact is a standalone first-contact science fiction novel. Carl
Sagan (1934–1996) was best known as a non-fiction writer, astronomer, and
narrator of the PBS non-fiction program Cosmos. This is his first
and only novel.
Ellie Arroway is the director of Proje...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.11 on CRAN: Small Enhancement
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/13#rcppspdlog_0.0.11
December 13, 2022, 11:53 PM
Version 0.0.11 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and in Debian. 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 adds support for a basic file logger as a alternative to the console logger. This can be helpful with code which suppresses or hides console output – as for example unit test code does. We also expose the formatting helper function ...
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Matthew Garrett: Trying to remove the need to trust cloud providers
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/63261.html
December 13, 2022, 9:19 PM
First up: what I'm covering here is probably not relevant for most people. That's ok! Different situations have different threat models, and if what I'm talking about here doesn't feel like you have to worry about it, that's great! Your life is easier as a result. But I have worked in situations where we had to care about some of the scenarios I'm going to describe here, and the technologies I'm going to talk about here solve a bunch of these problems.So. You run a typical VM in the cloud. Who h...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.31 on CRAN: snprintf Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/12#digest_0.6.31
December 12, 2022, 10:29 PM
Release 0.6.31 of the digest package arrived at CRAN this weekend, and is being uploaded to Debian as well.
digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, and blake3 algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a mature and widely-used as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various o...
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Jonathan McDowell: Setting up FreshRSS in a subdirectory
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/12/setting-up-freshrss-subdirectory.html
December 12, 2022, 7:30 PM
Ever since the demise of Google Reader I have been looking for a suitable replacement RSS reader. In the past I used to use Liferea but that was when I used a single desktop machine; these days I want to be able to read on my phone and multiple machines. I moved to Feedly and it’s been mostly ok, but I’m hitting the limit of feeds available in the free tier, and $72/year is a bit more than I can justify to myself. Especially when I have machines already available to me where I could self hos...
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Matthew Garrett: Quick update on Pluton and Linux
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/63219.html
December 12, 2022, 12:12 PM
I've been ridiculously burned out for a while now but I'm taking the month off to recover and that's giving me an opportunity to catch up on a lot of stuff. This has included me actually writing some code to work with the Pluton in my Thinkpad Z13. I've learned some more stuff in the process, but based on everything I know I'd still say that in its current form Pluton isn't a threat to free software.So, first up: by default on the Z13, Pluton is disabled. It's not obviously exposed to the OS at ...
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Vasudev Kamath: Installing Debian from GRML Live CD
https://copyninja.info/blog/live_install_debian.html
December 12, 2022, 7:05 AM
I had bought a Thinkpad E470 laptop back in 2018 which was lying unused for
quite some time. Recently when I wanted to use it, I found that the keyboard is
not working, especially some keys and after some time the laptop will hang in
Lenovo boot screen. I came back to Bangalore almost after 2 years from my
hometown (WFH due to Covid) and thought it was the right time to get my laptop
back to normal working state. After getting the keyboard replaced I noticed that
1TB HDD is no longer fast enough...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Unbroken
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-54267-9.html
December 12, 2022, 3:50 AM
Review: The Unbroken, by C.L. Clark

Series:
Magic of the Lost #1


Publisher:
Orbit


Copyright:
March 2021


ISBN:
0-316-54267-9


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
490

The Unbroken is the first book of a projected fantasy trilogy. It
is C.L. Clark's first novel.
Lieutenant Touraine is one of the Sands, the derogatory name for the
Balladairan Colonial Brigade. She, like the others of her squad, are
conscript soldiers, kidn...
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Vincent Bernat: Akvorado: a flow collector, enricher, and visualizer
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2022-akvorado-flow-collector
December 11, 2022, 2:10 PM
Earlier this year, we released Akvorado, a flow collector, enricher, and
visualizer. It receives network flows from your routers using either NetFlow
v9, IPFIX, or sFlow. Several pieces of information are added, like
GeoIP and interface names. The flows are exported to Apache Kafka, a
distributed queue, then stored inside ClickHouse, a column-oriented
database. A web frontend is provided to run queries. A live version is
available for you to play.
Akvorado’s web frontend
Several alternatives e...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Fifth Elephant
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-228013-9.html
December 11, 2022, 5:33 AM
Review: The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #24


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
2000


Printing:
May 2014


ISBN:
0-06-228013-9


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
455

The Fifth Elephant is the 24th Discworld and fifth Watch novel, and
largely assumes you know who the main characters are. This is not a good
place to start.
The dwarves are electing a new king. The resulting political co...
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Simon Josefsson: Trisquel 11 on NV41PZ: First impressions
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/10/trisquel-11-on-nv41pz-first-impressions/
December 10, 2022, 7:47 PM
My NovaCustom NV41PZ laptop arrived a couple of days ago, and today I had some time to install it. You may want to read about my purchasing decision process first. I expected a rough ride to get it to work, given the number of people claiming that modern laptops can’t run fully free operating systems. I first tried the Trisquel 10 live DVD and it booted fine including network, but the mouse trackpad did not work. Before investigating it, I noticed a forum thread about Trisquel 11 beta3 ima...
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Timo Jyrinki: Running Cockpit inside ALP
http://losca.blogspot.com/2022/12/running-cockpit-inside-alp.html
December 10, 2022, 1:07 PM
(quoted from my other blog at since a new OS might be interesting for many and this is published in separate planets)ALP - The Adaptable Linux Platform – is a new operating system from SUSE to run containerized and virtualized workloads. It is in early prototype phase, but the development is done completely openly so it’s easy to jump in to try it.For this trying out, I used the latest encrypted build – as of the writing, 22.1 – from ALP images. I imported it in virt-manager as a Gene...
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Simon Josefsson: How to complicate buying a laptop
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/10/how-to-complicate-buying-a-laptop/
December 10, 2022, 11:26 AM
I’m about to migrate to a new laptop, having done a brief pre-purchase review of options on Fosstodon and reaching a decision to buy the NovaCustom NV41. Given the rapid launch and decline of Mastodon instances, I thought I’d better summarize my process and conclusion on my self-hosted blog until the fediverse self-hosting situation improves.
Since 2010 my main portable computing device has been the Lenovo X201 that replaced the Dell Precision M65 that I bought in 2006. I have been incre...
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Matthew Garrett: On-device WebAuthn and what makes it hard to do well
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/62746.html
December 10, 2022, 10:41 AM
WebAuthn improves login security a lot by making it significantly harder for a user's credentials to be misused - a WebAuthn token will only respond to a challenge if it's issued by the site a secret was issued to, and in general will only do so if the user provides proof of physical presence[1]. But giving people tokens is tedious and also I have a new laptop which only has USB-C but does have a working fingerprint reader and I hate the aesthetics of the Yubikey 5C Nano, so I've been thinking a...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Trust
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/trust.html
December 10, 2022, 5:46 AM
Review: Trust, by Mary Sisson

Series:
Trang #2


Publisher:
Mary Sisson


Copyright:
2012


Printing:
December 2013


ASIN:
B0087KQDQ0


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
375

Trust is a direct sequel to Trang and
should not be read out of order. Both the primary and secondary plot deal
with the consequences of the ending of Trang and thus spoil it
heavily.
After a dodgy and unethical debriefing under mental probe...
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John Goerzen: Music Playing: Both Whole-House and Mobile
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10439-music-playing-both-whole-house-and-mobile
December 10, 2022, 12:28 AM
It’s been nearly 8 years since I last made choices about music playing. At the time, I picked Logitech Media Server (LMS, aka Slimserver and Squeezebox server) for whole-house audio and Ampache with the DSub Android app.
It’s time to revisit that approach. Here are the things I’m looking for:
Whole-house audio: a single control point for all the speakers in the house, which are all connected to some form of Linux (Raspberry Pi or x86). The speakers should be reasonably in sync with eac...
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Matthew Garrett: End-to-end encrypted messages need more than libsignal
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/62598.html
December 9, 2022, 6:17 AM
(Disclaimer: I'm not a cryptographer, and I do not claim to be an expert in Signal. I've had this read over by a couple of people who are so with luck there's no egregious errors, but any mistakes here are mine)There are indications that Twitter is working on end-to-end encrypted DMs, likely building on work that was done back in 2018. This made use of libsignal, the reference implementation of the protocol used by the Signal encrypted messaging app. There seems to be a fairly widespread percept...
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Russell Coker: USB-PD and GaN
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/09/usb-pd-gan/
December 9, 2022, 2:00 AM
A recent development is cheap Gallium Nitride based power supplies that provide better efficiency in a smaller space than other technologies. Kogan recently had a special on such devices so I decided to try them out with my new Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 5 [1]. Google searches for power supplies for that Thinkpad included results for 30W PSUs which implies that any 30W USB-C PSU should work.
I bought a 30W charger for $10 that can supply 15V/2A or 20V/1.5A on a single USB-C port or 15W on the USB-C ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: AsioHeaders 1.22.1-2 on CRAN: Small Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/08#asioheaders_1.22.1-2
December 9, 2022, 12:49 AM
An new minor revision of the AsioHeaders package arrived at CRAN earlier today. Asio provides a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It is also included in Boost – but requires linking when used as part of Boost. This standalone version of Asio is a header-only C++ library which can be used without linking (just like our BH package with parts of Boost).
This minor update avoid use of (v)sprintf which CRAN now flags in r-devel (for all R builds), following the d...
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John Goerzen: Building an Asynchronous, Internet-Optional Instant Messaging System
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10435-building-an-asynchronous-internet-optional-instant-messaging-system
December 8, 2022, 9:12 PM
I loaded up this title with buzzwords. The basic idea is that IM systems shouldn’t have to only use the Internet. Why not let them be carried across LoRa radios, USB sticks, local Wifi networks, and yes, the Internet? I’ll first discuss how, and then why.
How do set it up
I’ve talked about most of the pieces here already:
Delta Chat, which is an IM app that uses mail servers (SMTP and IMAP) as transport, and OpenPGP encryption for security.
One of the items I highlighted in Tools for C...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-11/
December 8, 2022, 5:45 PM
Welcome to yet another report from the Reproducible Builds project, this time for November 2022. In all of these reports (which we have been publishing regularly since May 2015) we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
Reproducible Builds Summit 2022
Following-up from last month’s report about our recent summit in Venice, Italy,...
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Shirish Agarwal: Wayland, Hearing aids, Multiverse & Identity
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2022/12/08/wayland-hearing-aids-multiverse-identity/
December 8, 2022, 5:11 PM
Wayland
First up, I read Antoine Beaupré’s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it’s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there’s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn’t say it’s done or whatever till it’s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn’t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience.
I have been usi...
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Jonathan Dowland: Portland, Oregon and Beatdown Records, Newcastle
https://jmtd.net/log/portland/
December 8, 2022, 2:28 PM
Powell's frontage
I'm over on the west coast of the States attending 15th IEEE/ACM International
Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing
(UCC2022) in Vancouver, WA.
Vancouver is a city on the southern extent of Washington, on the north side of
the Columbia River from the (better known) Portland, Oregon. (Perhaps
more about Vancouver in another post.)
In between conference sessions I've made a couple of trips out to Portland to
see bits and pieces. My friends with experience here all rave...
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Russell Coker: Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/08/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen5/
December 8, 2022, 10:13 AM
Gen1
Since February 2018 I have been using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen1 [1] as my main laptop. Generally I’ve been very happy with it, it’s small and light, has good performance for web browsing etc, and with my transition to doing all compiles etc on servers it works well. When I wrote my original review I was unhappy with the keyboard, but I got used to that and found it to be reasonably good.
The things that I have found as limits on it are the display resolution as 1600*900 isn’t that gre...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Debian Python Team 2022 Sprint Report
https://veronneau.org/debian-python-team-2022-sprint-report.html
December 8, 2022, 5:00 AM
This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint
that took place on December 2-3-4 2022.
Many thanks to those who participated, namely:
Étienne Mollier (emollier)
Taihsiang Ho (tai271828)
Athos Ribeiro (athos)
Stuart Prescott (stuart)
Louis-Philippe Véronneau (pollo)
Ileana Dumitrescu (ildumi)
James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
Emmanuel Arias (eamanu)
Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
Mohammed Bilal (rmb)
Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)
Here is a list of issues we worked on:
p...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/12/my-debian-activities-in-november-2022/
December 7, 2022, 12:45 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 292 and rejected 43 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 295.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-first 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.
During that time I uploaded:
[DLA 3200-1] graphicsmagick security update for one CVE
[DLA 3201-1] ntfs-3g security update for one CVE
[inetutils]found unfixed CVE in latest DLA
I also started ...
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Matthew Garrett: Making an Orbic Speed RC400L autoboot when USB power is attached
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/62419.html
December 7, 2022, 6:33 AM
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've been trying to hack an Orbic Speed RC400L mobile hotspot so it'll automatically boot when power is attached. When plugged in it would flash a "Welcome" screen and then switch to a display showing the battery charging - it wouldn't show up on USB, and didn't turn on any networking. So, my initial assumption was that the bootloader was making a policy decision not to boot Linux. After getting root (as described in the previous post), I was able to cat /pr...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, November 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-november-2022.html
December 3, 2022, 10:57 PM
In November I was assigned 24 hours by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative. I worked 9 of those hours and will carry over the
remainder.
I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable update, but
didn't upload it. I attended the monthly LTS team meeting.
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Vincent Bernat: Broken commit diff on Cisco IOS XR
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2022-cisco-show-commit-changes-diff
December 3, 2022, 3:40 PM
TL;DR
Never trust show commit changes diff on Cisco IOS XR.
Cisco IOS XR is the operating system running for the Cisco ASR, NCS, and
8000 routers. Compared to Cisco IOS, it features a candidate
configuration and a running configuration. In configuration mode, you can
modify the first one and issue the commit command to apply it to the running
configuration.1 This is a common concept for many NOS.
Before committing the candidate configuration to the running configuration, you
may want to check...
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Junichi Uekawa: Already December.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Dec-2.html.en#2022-Dec-2-19:13:56
December 2, 2022, 10:13 AM
Already December. Things changed a lot. Six months ago I was at home most of the time. I hope I can keep on going out for a while.
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/12/02/floss-activities/
December 2, 2022, 2:13 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
vcs-home:
add links
(1
2)
purple-discord:
link repology
duck:
add indicator
how-can-i-help:
cleanups
libusbgx:
fix C++ build
devscripts:
add error info
debbugs:
allow mbox export of responses,
toggle response display using CSS
Debian website:
drop spam domain
Debian package uploads:
libemail-outlook-message-perl
(backports
1
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