Joachim Breitner: Squash your Github PRs with one click
https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/808-Squash_your_Github_PRs_with_one_click
October 29, 2023, 9:46 PM
TL;DR: Squash your PRs with one click at https://squasher.nomeata.de/.
Very recently I got this response from the project maintainer at a pull request I contributed: “Thanks, approved, please squash so that I can merge.”
It’s nice that my contribution can go it, but why did the maintainer not just press the “Squash and merge button”, and instead adds the this unnecessary roundtrip to the process? Anyways, maintainers make the rules, so I play by them. But unlike the maintainer, who can...
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Aigars Mahinovs: Figuring out finances part 4
http://aigarius.com/blog/2023/10/29/finance-project-four/
October 29, 2023, 5:00 PM
At the end of the last part of this,
we got a Home Assistant OS installation that contains in itself a Firefly III instance and that
contains all the current financial information. Now I will try to connect the two.
While it could be nice to create a fully-featured integration for Firefly III to Home Assistant
to communicate all interesting values and events, I have an interest on programming a more
advanced data point calculation for my budget needs, so a less generic, but more flexible approch...
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Russell Coker: Hello Kitty
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/29/hello-kitty/
October 29, 2023, 12:26 PM
I’ve just discovered a new xterm replacement named Kitty [1]. It boasts about being faster due to threading and using the GPU and it does appear faster on some of my systems but that’s not why I like it.
A trend in terminal programs in recent years has been tabbed operation so you can have multiple sessions in one OS window, this is something I’ve never liked just as I’ve never liked using Screen to switch between sessions when I had the option of just having multiple sessions on screen....
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Valhalla's Things: Forgotten Yeast Bread or Pan Sbagliato
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/10/29-forgotten_yeast_bread_or_pan_sbagliato/index.html
October 29, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on October 29, 2023




I’ve made it again. And again. And a few more times, and now it has an official household name, “Pan Sbagliato”, or “Wrong Bread”.
And this is the procedure I’ve mostly settled on; starting on the day before (here called Saturday) and baking it so that it’s ready for lunch time (on what here is called Sunday).
Saturday: around 13:00
In a bowl, mix together and work well:
250 g water;
400 g flour;
8 g salt;
cover to rise.
Sa...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: KDEneon Plasma Release, Unstable BOOM, Snaps, and Debian
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-kdeneon-plasma-release-unstable-boom-snaps-and-debian/
October 27, 2023, 5:46 PM
Yang the cat bird
While Yang our cat tries to lure in unsuspecting birds on the bird feeder, I have been busy working on many things. First things first though, a big thank you to all that donated to my Internet bill. I was able to continue my work without interruption.
KDE neon:
A busy week in KDE neon as https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.9/ was released! We have it ready to update in User edition or if you would like to download the new ISO you can find it here: https://neo...
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Dima Kogan: Talking to ROS from outside a LAN
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2023/10/26_talking-to-ros-from-outside-a-lan.html
October 26, 2023, 11:25 PM
The problem
This is about ROS version 1. Version 2 is different, and maybe they fixed stuff.
But I kinda doubt it since this thing is heinous in a million ways.
Alright so let's say we have have some machines in a LAN doing ROS stuff and we
have another machine outside the LAN that wants to listen in (like to get a
realtime visualization, say). This is an extremely common scenario, but they
created enough hoops to make this not work. Let's say we have 3 computers:
router: the bridge betw...
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Jonathan McDowell: PSA: OpenPGP key updated in Debian keyring
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/10/debian-key-updated.html
October 26, 2023, 8:53 PM
This is a Public Service Announcement that my new OpenPGP key has now been updated in the active Debian keyring. I believe the only team that needs to be informed about this to manually update their systems is DSA, and I’ve filed an RT ticket to give them a heads up.
Thanks to all the folk who signed my new key, both at the Debian UK BBQ, and DebConf....
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Phil Hands: Sleep Apnoea
http://wiki.hands.com/chezfil/entry/sleep_apnoea/
October 25, 2023, 10:40 PM
I just noticed that I wrote this a decade ago, and then never got round to posting
it, so thought I might kick it off now to mark my tentative return to blogging.
At the recent 2015 Cambridge-UK Mini-DebConf (generously hosted by ARM), I
gave an impromptu Lightning Talk about Sleep Apnoea
(video here).
Obstructive Sleep Apnoea
(OSA - the form I'm on about) is a sleep disorder where one repeatedly
stops breathing while asleep, normally when snoring, but not
necessarily. The consequence of this...
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Sven Hoexter: Curing vpnc-scripts Symptoms
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/deb_vpnc_scripts_butchering/
October 25, 2023, 2:05 PM
I stick to some very archaic workflows, e.g. to connect
to some corp VPN I just run sudo vpnc-connect
and later on sudo vpnc-disconnect. In the past that also
managed to restore my resolv.conf, currently it doesn't.
According to a colleague that's also the case for Ubuntu.
Taking a step back, the sane way would be to use the
NetworkManager vpnc plugin, but that does not work with
this specific case because we use uncool VPN tech which
requires the Enable weak authentication setting for vpnc.
Th...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Going Infinite
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-324-07434-5.html
October 25, 2023, 3:08 AM
Review: Going Infinite, by Michael Lewis

Publisher:
W.W. Norton & Company


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-324-07434-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
255

My first reaction when I heard that Michael Lewis had been embedded with
Sam Bankman-Fried working on a book when Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency
exchange FTX collapsed into bankruptcy after losing billions of dollars of
customer deposits was "holy shit, why would you talk to Michael
Le...
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Iustin Pop: OS updates are damn easy nowadays!
https://k1024.org/posts/2023/2023-10-24-os-upgrades-are-easy/
October 24, 2023, 8:20 PM
I’m baffled at how simple and reliable operating system updates have become.
Upgraded Debian bullseye to bookworm, across a few systems, easy. On
VMs, it’s even so fast that installing base system from scratch is
probably the same time.
But Linux/Debian OFC works well. Shall we look at MacOS? Takes longer,
but just runs and reboots a couple of times and then, bam, it’s up and
with windows restored.
Surely Windows is the outlier? Nah, finally said yes to the “Upgrade
to Win 11?” prompt,...
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Russell Coker: Bluetooth Versions and PineTime
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/23/bluetooth-versions-pinetime/
October 23, 2023, 11:40 AM
I’ve done some tests with the PineTime [1] on different Android phones. On a Huawei Mate 10 Pro (from 2017 with Bluetooth 4.2) it has very slow transfer speeds for updating the firmware (less than 1KB/s) and unreliable connection to the phone. On a Huawei Nova 7i (from 2020 with Bluetooth 4.2) it has slow transfer speeds (about 2KB/s) and a more reliable connection to the phone. On a Pixel 4 XL (from 2019 with Bluetooth 5.0) it has very fast speeds for updating the firmware and also a reliable...
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Jonathan Dowland: cherished
https://jmtd.net/log/cherished/
October 23, 2023, 10:47 AM
If I think back to technology I've used and really cherished, quite often
they're audio-related: Minidisc players, Walkmans, MP3 players, headphones.
These pieces of technology served as vessels to access music, which of course I
often have fond emotional connection to. And so I think the tech has benefited
from that, and in some way the fondness or emotional connection to music has
somewhat transferred or rubbed-off on the technology to access it.
Put another way, no matter how well engineered...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Going Postal
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-233497-2.html
October 23, 2023, 3:54 AM
Review: Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #33


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
October 2004


Printing:
November 2014


ISBN:
0-06-233497-2


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
471

Going Postal is the 33rd Discworld novel. You could probably start
here if you wanted to; there are relatively few references to previous
books, and the primary connection (to Feet
of Clay) is fully re-explained. I s...
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Ravi Dwivedi: Software Freedom Day at sflc.in
https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/software-freedom-day-at-sflc.in/
October 22, 2023, 9:55 PM
Software Freedom Law Center, India, also known as sflc.in, organized an event to celebrate the Software Freedom Day on 30th September 2023. Me, Sahil, Contrapunctus and Suresh joined. The venue was at the SFLC India office in Delhi. The sflc.in office was on the second floor of what looked like someone’s apartment:). I also met Chirag, Orendra, Surbhi and others.
My plan was to have a stall on LibreOffice and Prav app to raise awareness about these projects. I didn’t have QR code for downloa...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Some defaults I don't understand
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-10-22-18-57_some_defaults_i_dont_understand.html
October 22, 2023, 5:00 PM
I'll rant about just one in mpv today: Why would you not have hardware
decoding be default, if it's available? Is that really the best thing
for a user who hasn't given a preference?
You should never just copy someone's defaults uncritically, but here is
my HTPC's ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf for reference:
sub-filter-sdh=yes
sub-scale=0.75
audio-spdif=ac3,dts,dts-hd,eac3,truehd
audio-device=alsa/hdmi:CARD=HDMI,DEV=0
fullscreen
audio-delay=0.2
hwdec=vaapi...
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Aigars Mahinovs: Figuring out finances part 3
http://aigarius.com/blog/2023/10/22/finance-project-three/
October 22, 2023, 5:00 PM
So now that I have something that looks very much like a budgeting setup going, I am going to .. delete it! Why?
Well, at the end of the last part of this,
the Firefly III instance was running on a tiny Debian server in a
Docker container right next to another Docker container that is running the main user of this server - a
Home Assistant instance that has been managing my home for several
years already. So why change that?
See, there is one bit of knowledge that is very crucial to your Home As...
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Ian Jackson: DigiSpark (ATTiny85) - Arduino, C, Rust, build systems
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/16771.html
October 22, 2023, 4:04 PM
Recently I completed a small project, including an embedded microcontroller. For me, using the popular Arduino IDE, and C, was a mistake. The experience with Rust was better, but still very exciting, and not in a good way.
Here follows the rant.
Introduction
Arduino IDE
Writing C again
Rust on the DigiSpark
RIIR (Rewrite It In Rust)
An offer of help
Conclusions
Introduction
In a recent project (I’ll write about the purpose, and the hardware in another post) I chose to use a DigiSpark boar...
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Jamie McClelland: Users without passwords
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2023/users-without-passwords/
October 22, 2023, 12:27 PM
About fifteen years ago, while debugging a database probem, I was horrified to
discover that we had two root users - one with the password I had been using
and one without a password. Nooo!
So, I wrote a simple maintenance script that searched for and deleted any user
in our database without a password. I even made it part of our puppet recipe -
since the database server was in use by users and I didn’t want anyone using
SQL statements to change their password to an empty value.
Then I forgot ...
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Daniel Lange: Removing the New Event Button from Thunderbird v115 Calendar
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/185-Removing-the-New-Event-Button-from-Thunderbird-v115-Calendar.html
October 22, 2023, 12:25 PM
Thunderbird in Debian stable (Bookworm) has received Thunderbird v115.3.1 as a security update.
With it comes "Supernova", a UI redesign. There is a Mozilla blogpost with a walk-through of the new UI.
Unfortunately it features a super eye-catching "New Message" button that - thankfully - can be disabled. Even the whole space above the email folder pane can be recovered by disabling the folder pane header at Burger Menu (☰) -> View -> Folders -> Folder Pane Header.
Unfortunately the...
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Russell Coker: Brother MFC-J4440DW Printer
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/22/brother-mfc-j4440dw-printer/
October 22, 2023, 4:07 AM
I just had to setup a Brother MFC-J4440DW for a relative. They were replacing an old HP laser printer that mysteriously stopped printing as dark as it should, I don’t know whether the HP printer had worn out or if the HP firmware decided to hobble it to make them buy a new printer. In either case HP is well known for shady behaviour with their printer firmware and should be avoided.
The new Brother printer has problems when using wifi and auto DNS. I don’t know how much of that was due to th...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.8 on CRAN: QuantLib 1.32 Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/10/21#qlcal-r_0.0.8
October 21, 2023, 7:05 AM
The eighth release of the still fairly new qlcal package
arrivied at CRAN today.
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 from the just-releas...
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Russell Coker: More About the PineTime
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/21/more-about-pinetime/
October 21, 2023, 5:20 AM
Since my initial review of the PineTime 10 days ago [1] I’ve used it in more situations. My initial tests were done connecting to a Huawei Nova 7i [2], I am now using it with a Huawei Mate 10 Pro. I’ve also upgraded the PineTime from version 1.11 (from memory) of the Infinitime software that runs on the watch to version 1.13 [3]. To upgrade it I had to download the file pinetime-mcuboot-app-dfu-1.13.0.zip to the Android phone and then use the File Installer option of the GadgetBridge Android...
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Iustin Pop: How to set a per-app locale in MacOS
https://k1024.org/posts/2023/2023-10-20-macos-app-locale/
October 20, 2023, 9:11 PM
After spending ~20+ years with a Linux desktop, I’m trying to expand
my desktop setup to include MacOS (well, desktop/laptop, I mean end
user in general). And to my surprise, there’s no clear repository of
MacOS info. Man pages yes, some StackOverflow, some Apple forums, but
no canonical version. Or, I didn’t find it, please enlighten me 🙏
Another issue is that Apple apparently changes behaviour without
clearly documenting it. In this specific case, the “region” part of
the locale w...
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Freexian meetup, debusine updates, lpr/lpd in Debian, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-09-2023/
October 20, 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.
Freexian Meetup, by Stefano Rivera, Utkarsh Gupta, et al.
During DebConf, Freexian organized a
meetup for its
collaborators and those interested in learning more about Freexian and its
services. It was well received and many people interested in...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Cassini Division
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-8125-6858-3.html
October 19, 2023, 4:03 AM
Review: The Cassini Division, by Ken MacLeod

Series:
Fall Revolution #3


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
1998


Printing:
August 2000


ISBN:
0-8125-6858-3


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
305

The Cassini Division is the third book in the Fall Revolution
series and a fairly direct sequel (albeit with different protagonists) to
The Stone Canal. This is not a good
place to start the series.
It's impossible to ...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Snap transition complete, 23.08.2 released!
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snap-transition-complete-23-08-2-released/
October 18, 2023, 5:41 PM
KDE Mascot
I have completed the the ‘Big move’! There are still a few lingering MR’s, but I am sure they will be approved so I can merge soon. With the move I was also able to release 23.08.2 for most release service applications. Enjoy!
You can find them all here: https://snapcraft.io/search?q=KDE
I still need to raise a bit more to pay the Internet bill. If you can spare some change please consider a donation.
Thank you!
<script src=”https://liberapay.com/sgmoore/widge...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Wolf Country
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/wolf-country.html
October 18, 2023, 3:53 AM
Review: Wolf Country, by Mar Delaney

Publisher:
Kalikoi


Copyright:
September 2021


ASIN:
B09H55TGXK


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
144

Wolf Country is a short lesbian shifter romance by Mar Delaney, a
pen name for Layla Lawlor (who is also one of the writers behind the
shared pen name Zoe Chant).
Dasha Volkova is a werewolf, a member of a tribe of werewolves who keep to
themselves deep in the wilds of Alaska. She's just become a...
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Russ Allbery: Review: A Hat Full of Sky
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-058662-1.html
October 17, 2023, 2:42 AM
Review: A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #32


Publisher:
HarperTrophy


Copyright:
2004


Printing:
2005


ISBN:
0-06-058662-1


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
407

A Hat Full of Sky is the 32nd Discworld novel and the second
Tiffany Aching young adult novel. You should not start here, but you
could start with The Wee Free Men. As
with that book, some parts of the story carry more wei...
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Wouter Verhelst: New toy: ASUS ZenScreen Go MB16AHP
https://grep.be/blog//en/computer/hardware/New_toy:_ASUS_ZenScreen_Go_MB16AHP/
October 16, 2023, 8:36 PM
A while ago, I saw Stefano's
portable monitor, and thought it was very useful. Personally, I rent a
desk at an office space where I have a 27" Dell monitor; but I do
sometimes use my laptop away from that desk, and then I do sometimes
miss the external monitor.
So a few weeks before DebConf, I bought me one myself. The one I
got
is about a mid-range model; there are models that are less than half the
price of the one that I bought, and there are models that are more than
double its price, too. ...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Debian: Hopefully a short goodbye for now.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-debian-hopefully-a-short-goodbye-for-now/
October 16, 2023, 3:57 PM
KDE Mascot
I have been working around the clock and over the weekend trying to get the transition for snapcraft files in their respective repos. What does this mean for users? Faster releases for Snaps and closer collaboration between snapcrafters and application developers so bugs get resolved much quicker.
Unfortunately, I have 2 days to finish before my internet gets cut off. I did not make enough to pay the bill. Seeing as this is the first time in a year, I am absolutely, positively gr...
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Aigars Mahinovs: Figuring out finances part 2
http://aigarius.com/blog/2023/10/15/finance-project-two/
October 15, 2023, 5:00 PM
A week ago I started to migrate my financial planning from a closed
source system to a new system based on an open source, self-hosted solution. Main candidate is
Firefly III - a relatively simple financial planner with a rather rich feature
set and a solid user base and developer support.
Starting it up with a Docker-Compose file was quite easy, following the official documentation. The same
Compose file also managed the MySQL database, the importer app and a cron container for regular imports....
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Michael Ablassmeier: Testing system updates using libvirts checkpoint feature
https://abbbi.github.io//changes/
October 15, 2023, 12:00 AM
If you want to test upgrades on virtual machines (running on libvit/qemu/kvm)
these are usually the most common steps:
Clone the virtual machine and test the upgrade.
Create a snapshot beforehand, do an in-place upgrade and hope everything
works. If not, revert the snapshot..
Combine both methods
Use LVM or filesystem snapshots (snapper, etc)
As with recent versions, both libvirt and qemu have full support for dirty
bitmaps (so called checkpoints). These checkpoints, once existent, w...
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François Marier: Enabling AppArmor on a Linode VPS in enforcement mode
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/enable-apparmor-on-linode-enforcement-mode/
October 14, 2023, 10:15 PM
Enabling AppArmor on a Debian Linode VPS is not entirely straightforward.
Here's what I had to do in order to make it work.
Packages to install
The easy bit was to install a few packages:
apt install grub2 apparmor-profiles-extra apparmor-profiles apparmor
and then adding apparmor=1 security=apparmor to the kernel command line
(GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX) in /etc/default/grub.
Move away from using Linode's kernels
As mentioned in this blog
post, I found out that
these parameters are ignored by th...
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Ravi Dwivedi: Kochi - Wayanad Trip in August-September 2023
https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/kochi-wayanad-trip-aug-sep-2023/
October 14, 2023, 12:18 PM
A trip full of hitchhiking, beautiful places and welcoming locals.
Day 1: Arrival in Kochi
Kochi is a city in the state of Kerala, India. This year’s DebConf was to be held in Kochi from 3rd September to 17th of September, which I was planning to attend. My friend Suresh, who was planning to join, told me that 29th August 2023 will be Onam, a major festival of the state of Kerala. So, we planned a Kerala trip before the DebConf. We booked early morning flights for Kochi from Delhi and reached ...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Snaps move, KDE neon unstable broken OMG! Fixed, and Debian updates
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-move-kde-neon-unstable-broken-omg-fixed-and-debian-updates/
October 13, 2023, 6:06 PM
It’s that time of year already! We have hit our first freeze of the year. While the kitties keep warm by the wood burning stove, I have been busy with many updates and fixes in a variety of projects.
KDE neon:
It’s true, Neon unstable has been very unstable. Due to a few factors including a builder being out of space, timed with a new Qt release. There is a cost with living in unstable land with bleeding edge releases. It takes time and finesse to get everything happy, especially with ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 251 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-251-released/
October 13, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 251. This version includes the following changes:
* If the equivalent of `file -i` returns text/plain, fallback to comparing
this file as a text file. This especially helps when file(1) miscategorises
text files as some esoteric type. (Closes: Debian:#1053668)
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Installing Debian on the BananaPi M2 Zero
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/10/debian-on-bpi-m2-zero.html
October 12, 2023, 6:46 PM
My previously mentioned C.H.I.P. repurposing has been partly successful; I’ve found a use for it (which I still need to write up), but unfortunately it’s too useful and the fact it’s still a bit flaky has become a problem. I spent a while trying to isolate exactly what the problem is (I’m still seeing occasional hard hangs with no obvious debug output in the logs or on the serial console), then realised I should just buy one of the cheap ARM SBC boards currently available.
The C.H.I.P. ...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Defending abuse does not defend free software
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68004.html
October 12, 2023, 4:32 PM
The Free Software Foundation Europe and the Software Freedom Conservancy recently released a statement that they would no longer work with Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center. Eben was the general counsel for the Free Software Foundation for over 20 years, and was centrally involved in the development of version 3 of the GNU General Public License. He's devoted a great deal of his life to furthering free software.But, as described in the joint statement, he's also acted abus...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-09/
October 12, 2023, 4:22 PM
Welcome to the September 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project
In these reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
Andreas Herrmann gave a talk at All Systems Go 2023 titled “Fast, correct, reproducible builds with Nix and Bazel”. Quoting from the talk desc...
--------------------
Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2023 (by Santiago Ruano Rincón)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2023-09/
October 12, 2023, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In September, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
Adrian Bunk
did 7.0h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
Anton Gladky
did 9.5h (out of 7.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carr...
--------------------
Iustin Pop: Not-quite-announcement: this blog is not entirely dead
https://k1024.org/posts/2023/2023-10-11-this-blog-is-not-entirely-dead/
October 11, 2023, 7:47 PM
Something, something then something else, and it’s been another six
months since I last wrote anything. The world is crazy, somehow
there’s no time for anything, and yet life move forward,
inexorably. (Well, without going into gory side-notes about how evil
stops life in various parts of the world.)
As a proof that this blog is not dead, I’ve finally implemented proper
per-page keywords support, rather than the hard-coded keywords that
were present before. Well, those defaults are still pr...
--------------------
Russell Coker: The PineTime
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinetime/
October 11, 2023, 11:50 AM
I have just got a PineTime smart watch [1] from Pine64. They cost $US27 each which ended up as $144.63 Australian for three including postage when I ordered on the 16th of September, it’s annoying that you can’t order more than 3 at a time to reduce postage costs.
The Australian online store Kogan has smart watches starting at about $15 [2] with Bluetooth and support for phone notifications so the $48.21 for a PineTime doesn’t compare well on just price and features. The watches Kogan sell...
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Julian Andres Klode: Divergence - A case for different upgrade approaches
https://blog.jak-linux.org/2023/10/10/a-case-for-different-upgrades/
October 10, 2023, 5:22 PM
APT currently knows about three types of upgrades:
upgrade without new packages (apt-get upgrade)
upgrade with new packages (apt upgrade)
upgrade with new packages and deletions (apt{,-get} {dist,full}-upgrade)
All of these upgrade types are necessary to deal with upgrades within a
distribution release. Yes, sometimes even removals may be needed because
bug fixes require adding a Conflicts somewhere.
In Ubuntu we have a third type of upgrades, handled by a separate tool: release
upgrades. ubun...
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Matthias Klumpp: How to indicate device compatibility for your app in MetaInfo data
https://blog.tenstral.net/2023/10/how-to-indicate-device-compatibility-for-your-app-in-metainfo-data.html
October 10, 2023, 8:34 AM
At the moment I am hard at work putting together the final bits for the AppStream 1.0 release (hopefully to be released this month). The new release comes with many new new features, an improved developer API and removal of most deprecated things (so it carefully breaks compatibility with very old data and the previous C API). One of the tasks for the upcoming 1.0 release was #481 asking about a formal way to distinguish Linux phone applications from desktop applications.
AppStream infamously...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.2.4 on CRAN: Improved macOS Support, General Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/10/09#drat_0.2.4
October 10, 2023, 1:42 AM
A new minor release of the drat package
arrived on CRAN today making it
the first release in one and a half years. drat stands for
drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and
easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in
early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users
because repositories with marked releases is the better way to
distribute code.
Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends
don’t let friends install random...
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Aigars Mahinovs: Figuring out finances part 1
http://aigarius.com/blog/2023/10/09/finance-project-start/
October 9, 2023, 5:00 PM
I have been managing my finances and getting an overview of where I am financially and where I am
going month-to-month for a few years already. That means that I already have a method of doing
my finances and a method of thinking about them. So far this has been supported by a commerical
tool called MoneyWiz. I was happy to pay them for the ability to have a solid product and be able
to easily access my finances from my phone (to enter cash transactions directly in the field) and
sync data acros...
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Niels Thykier: A new Debian package helper: debputy
https://nthykier.wordpress.com/2023/10/08/a-new-debian-package-helper-debputy/
October 8, 2023, 5:32 PM
I have made a new helper for producing Debian packages called debputy. Today, I uploaded it to Debian unstable for the first time. This enables others to migrate their package build using dh +debputy rather than the “classic” dh. Eventually, I hope to remove dh entirely from this equation, so you only need debputy. But for now, debputy still leverages dh support for managing upstream build systems.
The debputy tool takes a radicially different approach to packaging compared to our existi...
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Sahil Dhiman: Lap 24
https://blog.sahilister.in/2023/10/lap-24/
October 8, 2023, 5:14 AM
Twenty-four is a big number. More than one/fourth (or more) of my life is behind me now. At this point, I truly feel like I have become an adult; mentally and physically. Another year seem to have gone by quickly. I still vividly remember writing 23 and Counting and here I’m writing the next one so soon.
Probably the lowest I felt ever on my birthday; with loss of Abraham and on the other hand, medical issues with a dear one. Didn’t even felt like birthday was almost here. The loss of Abraha...
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Andrew Cater: Point release weekend for Debian: two releases this weekend: 202311071653
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/10/point-release-weekend-for-debian-two.html
October 7, 2023, 4:59 PM
Over in Cambridge with RattusRattus, Sledge, egw and Isy. Andy is very kindly putting us up.We're almost all of the way through testing 12.2 and some of the way through testing 11.8.It's a LONG day - heads down into laptops and relatively quiet - I think we're all tired and we've a way to go yet....
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - "September" 2023
https://veronneau.org/montreals-debian-stuff-september-2023.html
October 7, 2023, 4:00 AM
Last Sunday, our local Debian user group gathered to chat, to work on Debian and
to do other, non-Debian related hacking. A "Debian & Stuff"!
It had been a while since we held a proper meetup. Our last event was the
Montreal BSP we organised back in March 2023... We somewhat missed the
window for a June meetup and summer events never seem to gather a good crowd,
so I didn't try to organise one.
All this to say it was nice to see folks from the Montreal Debian community :)
This event was also...
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Junichi Uekawa: Sick with COVID-19 and flu.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Oct-6.html.en#2023-Oct-6-18:55:13
October 6, 2023, 9:55 AM
Sick with COVID-19 and flu.
This time around we had two different things going around the household. Failure to isolate the second case in the household resulted in more cases.
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Emanuele Rocca: Custom Debian Installer and Kernel on a USB stick
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/custom-debian-installer-usb-stick/
October 6, 2023, 9:29 AM
There are many valid reasons to create a custom Debian Installer image. You may
need to pass some special arguments to the kernel, use a different GRUB
version, automate the installation by means of
preseeding, use a custom
kernel, or modify the installer itself.
If you have a EFI system, which is probably the case in 2023, there is no need
to learn complex procedures in order to create a custom Debian Installer stick.
The source of many frustrations is that the ISO format for CDs/DVDs is
re...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Why KDE snaps Love KDE neon and the Big Move.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-why-kde-snaps-love-kde-neon-and-the-big-move/
October 5, 2023, 5:08 PM
KDE neon
KDE neon:
KDE neon is extremely important to the KDE snaps eco-system as I briefly mentioned in my last post.
Why? KDE neon is based on Jammy LTS which is the same as Core 22 base for snaps. Neon has a very useful continuous integration system in place that tests all the things, including dependencies, qml, cmake errors, debian packaging lintian tool and the list go on. This is very important to get packages out that don’t break things on user desktops. Once the packages are ...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Nageru 2.3.0 released
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-10-05-09-26_nageru_2_3_0_released.html
October 5, 2023, 8:26 AM
I've released version 2.3.0 of Nageru,
my free software video mixer. As always, it's also been uploaded
to Debian unstable.
The “big ticket” thing this time around is SRT video output;
the world is finally moving on from RTMP, and I thought that
it was a good opportunity to add a method of push contribution
(even though I still find pull more flexible).
Apart from that, there's a slew of deprecations in FFmpeg that
have built up over the last few versions. Keeping up with the
churn is some...
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Bastian Blank: Introducing uploads to Debian by git tag
https://bblank.thinkmo.de/introducing-uploads-debian-git.html
October 3, 2023, 4:15 PM
Several years ago, several people proposed a mechanism to upload packages to Debian just by doing "git tag" and "git push".
Two not too long discussions on debian-devel (first and second) did not end with an agreement how this mechanism could work.1
The central problem was the ability to properly trace uploads back to the ones who authorised it.
Now, several years later and after re-reading those e-mail threads, I again was stopped at the question: can we do this?
Yes, it would not be just "git ...
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Junichi Uekawa: Electronic receipt storage in Japan.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Oct-3.html.en#2023-Oct-3-17:16:54
October 3, 2023, 8:16 AM
Electronic receipt storage in Japan.
Japan also started allowing electronic data for receipts, but had some red tape associated with it.
Presumably they were worried about increase in fraud cases.
Law amendment that went in effet Jan 2022 made the last annoying bits simpler.
We used to be required to sign the paper receipt and scan within 3 days of receiving the receipt. This special requirement is now gone. It took a few years to reach this state but now we are at a similar state as...
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Jonathan Dowland: Promotion
https://jmtd.net/log/promotion/
October 2, 2023, 8:46 AM
It's been quiet here (I hope to change that), but I want to share some good
news: I've been promoted to Principal Software Engineer! Next February will
start my 9th year with Red Hat. Time flies when you're
having fun!
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Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf 23 photos all
http://aigarius.com/blog/2023/10/02/debconf23-photos/
October 2, 2023, 8:00 AM
Two weeks have passed since Debconf 23 came to a close in Kochi, Kerala, India this year.
In keeping with the more relaxed nature of Debconf in India, the rest of my photos from the event were to
be published about two weeks from the end of the event. That will give me a bit more time to process them
correctly and also give all of you a chance to see these pictures with fresh eyes and stir up new
memories from the event.
In the end we are looking at 653 photos and one video. Several different gr...
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Junichi Uekawa: Family member getting sick, and I'm starting to feel bad.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Oct-1.html.en#2023-Oct-1-18:48:12
October 1, 2023, 9:48 AM
Family member getting sick, and I'm starting to feel bad. This is bad.
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