Jonathan Dowland: dark mode
https://jmtd.net/log/dark_mode/
December 28, 2022, 7:45 AM
A few weeks ago I added a “dark mode” to this site. I’d been planning to do it
for a while but hadn’t the time to look into how it worked. In the end it was
simpler than I thought: the the hard part was choosing colours I liked.
I now think I prefer the dark theme; I might make it the default.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the crux of the
technical side was to define
“alternate stylesheets”, something I was playing around with 20 years ago. If
your browser supports it (Fi...
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Russell Coker: Links December 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/28/links-december-2022/
December 28, 2022, 7:28 AM
Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with the UK monarchy [1], conveniently before the queen died.
The blog post “To The Next Mass Shooter, A Modest Proposal” is a well written suggestion to potential mass murderers [2].
The New Yorker has an interesting and amusing article about the former CIA employee who released the “Vault 7” collection of CIA attack software [3]. This exposes the ridiculously poor hiring practices of the CIA which involved far less background ...
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Junichi Uekawa: ITP crosvm.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Dec-28.html.en#2022-Dec-28-15:24:35
December 28, 2022, 6:24 AM
ITP crosvm. I wanted to package the virtual machine monitor thing that I've been working on for my day job.
ITP bug 1026126.
Lurked around in debian-rust for a few days and poked around different git repositories.
Looked at cargo debstatus and it seems like there's some missing dependencies.
remain is the most prolific in the code base.
There's argh which seems to be not packaged yet in Debian.
enumn and document-features seems to be also not available.
For others, there's ...
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Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Fiction
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourite-books-of-2022-fiction
December 27, 2022, 9:15 PM
Here begins my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies that I consumed in 2022, to be published over the next few days.
Just as I did for 2020 and 2021, I won't actually reveal exactly how many books I read in the last year. I didn't get through as many books as I did in 2021, however, but that's partly due to reading a significant number of long nineteenth-century novels — in particular, those books that American writer Henry James once referred to as "large, loose, baggy monsters"...
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Ian Wienand: Redirecting webfinger requests with Apache
https://www.technovelty.org/web/redirecting-webfinger-requests-with-apache.html
December 27, 2022, 8:51 PM
If you have a personal domain, it is nice if you can redirect
webfinger requests so you
can be easily found via your email. This is hardly a new idea, but
the growth of Mastodon recently
has made this more prominent.
I wanted to redirect webfinger endpoints to a Mastondon host I am
using, but only my email and only standard Apache rewrites. Below,
replace xxx@yyy.com with your email and zzz.social with the
account to be redirected to. There are a couple of tricks in being
able to inspect the...
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Steve Kemp: A summary of the year.
https://blog.steve.fi/a_summary_of_the_year_.html
December 27, 2022, 5:15 PM
This year had a lot of things happen in it, world-wide, as is always the case.
Being more selfish here are the things I remember, in brief unless there are comments/questions:
I learned more Finnish.
Lots of things with our child.
I helped teach him to swim.
He learned to tell the time with an analog clock/watch.
I took him to a circus for the first (only) time ever.
He cut his hair for the first time in six years.
He spent his a birthday with my parents, in the UK - His languages skills w...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: The ultimate single-page app
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-12-27-00-07_the_ultimate_single_page_app.html
December 26, 2022, 11:07 PM
I run a chess analysis site as a hobby.
It's not a big thing (usually ~1k simultaneous viewers when it's broadcasting,
peak at ~27k during the London WCC), and the surface functionality
is also pretty basic: It's a single-page app picking up a JSON (updated via long-poll)
from a backend containing a chess position and computer analysis,
and then presents it to the viewer.
I won't go into detail for why this isn't as simple as it seems,
but there's one thing I've always prided myself in: Making ...
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Vincent Bernat: Managing infrastructure with Terraform, CDKTF, and NixOS
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2022-cdktf-nixos
December 26, 2022, 3:18 PM
A few years ago, I downsized my personal infrastructure. Until 2018, there were
a dozen containers running on a single Hetzner server.1 I migrated
my emails to Fastmail and my DNS zones to Gandi. It left me with only my
blog to self-host. As of today, my low-scale infrastructure is composed of 4
virtual machines running NixOS on Hetzner Cloud and Vultr, a handful
of DNS zones on Gandi and Route 53, and a couple of Cloudfront
distributions. It is managed by CDK for Terraform (CDKTF), while Ni...
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Russ Allbery: podlators 5.01
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-12/002.html
December 25, 2022, 5:56 PM
podlators is the Perl distribution providing Pod::Man and Pod::Text, along
with related modules and supporting scripts.
The primary change in this release is the addition of configurable
guesswork for Pod::Text, paralleling Pod::Man. I had forgotten that
Pod::Text also had complex heuristics for whether to quote C<> text that
have the same Perl-specific properties as Pod::Man. This is now
configurable via a guesswork option, the same as in Pod::Man, although the
only type of guesswork...
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Russ Allbery: rra-c-util 10.3
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-12/001.html
December 25, 2022, 5:17 PM
This is a minor feature and bug fix release of my collection of utilities
and tests intended for copying into other packages I maintain.
The new feature is an additional Perl test using Test::Kwalitee to check a
few more things about the Perl packaging, and a MANIFEST.SKIP file
that is suitable for copying as-is into most Perl packages.
On the bug fix side, the portable/getnameinfo test now skips some tests
rather than failing on systems that are strange enough that someone has
put 0.0.0.0...
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David Bremner: Why won't crusty old host recognize my shiny new terminal emulator?
https://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner//blog/posts/sendterminfo/
December 25, 2022, 4:30 PM
Spiffy new terminal emulators seem to come with their own terminfo
definitions. Venerable hosts that I ssh into tend not to know about
those. kitty comes with a thing to transfer that definition, but it
breaks if the remote host is running tcsh (don't ask). Similary the
one liner for alacritty on the arch wiki seems to assume the remote
shell is bash. Forthwith, a dumb shell script that works to send the
terminfo of the current terminal emulator to the remote host.
EDIT: Jakub Wilk worked out t...
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Simon Josefsson: OpenPGP key on FST-01SZ
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/24/openpgp-key-on-fst-01sz/
December 24, 2022, 1:36 PM
I use GnuPG to compute cryptographic signatures for my emails, git commits/tags, and software release artifacts (tarballs). Part of GnuPG is gpg-agent which talks to OpenSSH, which I login to remote servers and to clone git repositories. I dislike storing cryptographic keys on general-purpose machines, and have used hardware-backed OpenPGP keys since around 2006 when I got a FSFE Fellowship Card. GnuPG via gpg-agent handles this well, and the private key never leaves the hardware. The ZeitCon...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ONVIF_IP_camera_management_tool_finally_in_Debian.html
December 24, 2022, 7:00 AM
Merry Christmas to you all. Here is a small gift to all those with
IP cameras following the ONVIF
specification. There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool
in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras. After working with upstream for
a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that
the libonvif package
entered Debian Sid last night.
The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a
command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the
c...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: Debian uploads, Core22 KDE snap content pack and more!
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/debian-uploads-core22-kde-snap-content-pack-and-more/
December 23, 2022, 6:55 PM
I have been quite busy! I have been working on several projects so my cover image is a lovely sunset where I live.
Debian:
I have updated and uploaded several packages and working on more.
Umbrello
Squashfuse with the help of Scott Moser ( Thanks! )
libappimage
plasma-bigscreen WIP
KDE Snaps:
I have reworked the CI to now do Core22 snaps! They will publish to the beta channel until we get them tested. First snap completed is the ever important KDE Frameworks / QT conte...
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Jonathan Dowland: 2022 music discovery: Underworld
https://jmtd.net/log/2022_discovery_underworld/
December 23, 2022, 2:39 PM
One of my main musical 'discoveries' in 2022 was British electronic band
Underworld.
I’m super late to the party. Underworld’s commercial high point was the mid
nineties. And I was certainly aware of them then: the use of
“Born Slippy .NUXX in 1996’s Trainspotting soundtrack was ubiquitous, but it
didn’t grab me.
In more recent years my colleague and friend Andrew Dinn (with whom I enjoyed
many pre-pandemic conversations about music) enthusiastically advocated for
Underworld ...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: 2022 — A Musical Retrospective
https://veronneau.org/2022-a-musical-retrospective.html
December 23, 2022, 5:00 AM
With the end of the year approaching fast, I thought putting my year in
retrospective via music would be a fun thing to do.
Albums
In 2022, I added 51 new albums to my collection — nearly one a week! I listed
them below in the order in which I acquired them.
I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at
libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers
pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital
copies weren't ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Shutdown
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-593-29756-3.html
December 21, 2022, 4:58 AM
Review: Shutdown, by Adam Tooze

Publisher:
Viking


Copyright:
September 2021


ISBN:
0-593-29756-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
305

Shutdown is a history of the world macroeconomic response to
COVID-19, covering 2020 and the very beginning of 2021.
But wait, you might be saying. It's only the end of 2022 right now, and
this book was published in September of 2021. That's not history, that's
journalism. And yes, I think that's ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppDE 0.1.7 on CRAN: Several Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/20#rcppde_0.1.7
December 21, 2022, 12:27 AM
The first fresh release of our RcppDE package in over four years (!!) is now on CRAN.
RcppDE is a “port” of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential evolution optimization, from plain C to C++. By using RcppArmadillo the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. Our other main contribution is to leverage some of the excellence we get for free from using Rcpp, in particular the ability to optimise user-supplied compiled objective functions which can ma...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Tess of the Road
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-101-93130-2.html
December 20, 2022, 4:19 AM
Review: Tess of the Road, by Rachel Hartman

Series:
Tess of the Road #1


Publisher:
Random House


Copyright:
2018


Printing:
2022


ISBN:
1-101-93130-2


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
536

Tess of the Road is the first book of a YA fantasy duology set in
the same universe as Seraphina and
Shadow Scale.
It's hard to decide what to say about reading order (and I now appreciate
the ambiguous answers I got). Te...
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Ian Jackson: Rust for the Polyglot Programmer, December 2022 edition
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/13884.html
December 20, 2022, 1:47 AM
I have reviewed, updated and revised my short book about the Rust programming language, Rust for the Polyglot Programmer.
It now covers some language improvements from the past year (noting which versions of Rust they’re available in), and has been updated for changes in the Rust library ecosystem.
With (further) assistance from Mark Wooding, there is also a new table of recommendations for numerical conversion.
Recap about Rust for the Polyglot Programmer
There are many introductory materials...
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Freexian Collaborators: Recent improvements to Tryton's Debian Packaging (by Mathias Behrle and Raphaël Hertzog)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/tryton-funded-projects/
December 20, 2022, 12:00 AM
Foreword
Freexian has been using Tryton for a few years
to handle its invoicing and accounting. We have thus also been using
the Debian packages maintained by Mathias
Behrle and
we have been funding some of his work because maintaining an ERP with more
than 50 source packages was too much for him to handle alone on his free
time.
When Mathias discovered our Project
Funding
initiative, it was quite natural for him to consider applying to be able
to bring some much needed improvements to Tryton’...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 229 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-229-released/
December 20, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 229. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Skip test_html.py::test_diff if html2text is not installed.
(Closes: #1026034)
[ Holger Levsen ]
* Bump standards version to 4.6.2, no changes needed.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Simon Josefsson: Second impressions of Guix 1.4
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/19/second-impressions-of-guix-1-4/
December 19, 2022, 9:38 PM
While my first impression of Guix 1.4rc2 on NV41PZ was only days ago, the final Guix 1.4 release has happened. I thought I should give it a second try, although being at my summer house with no wired ethernet I realized this may be overly optimistic. However I am happy to say that a guided graphical installation on my new laptop went smooth without any problem. Practicing OS installations has a tendency to make problems disappear.
My WiFi issues last time was probably due to a user interfac...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Artifact Space
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-4732-3262-7.html
December 19, 2022, 4:14 AM
Review: Artifact Space, by Miles Cameron

Series:
Arcana Imperii #1


Publisher:
Gollancz


Copyright:
June 2021


ISBN:
1-4732-3262-7


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
483

Artifact Space is a military (mostly) science fiction novel, the
first of an expected trilogy. Christian Cameron is a prolific author of
historical fiction under that name, thrillers under the name Gordon Kent,
and historical fantasy under the name Miles Ca...
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Ian Jackson: Rust needs #[throws]
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/13657.html
December 18, 2022, 11:27 PM
tl;dr:
Ok-wrapping as needed in today’s Rust is a significant distraction, because there are multiple ways to do it. They are all slightly awkward in different ways, so are least-bad in different situations. You must choose a way for every fallible function, and sometimes change a function from one pattern to another.
Rust really needs #[throws] as a first-class language feature. Code using #[throws] is simpler and clearer.
Please try out withoutboats’s fehler. I think you will like it.
Cont...
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Bastian Venthur: The State of Python Packaging in 2022
https://venthur.de/2022-12-18-python-packaging.html
December 18, 2022, 6:15 PM
Every year or so, I revisit the current best practices for Python packaging.
This was my summary for 2021 – here’s the update for 2022.
PyPA
PyPA is still the place to go for information, best practices and tutorials
for packaging Python projects. My only criticism from last year, namely that
PyPA was heavily biased towards their own tooling (e.g. pipenv), has been
addressed: the tool recommendations section lists now several tools
for the same purpose with their own ones not necessarily bei...
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Russell Coker: Wall Facers
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/18/wall-facers/
December 18, 2022, 11:13 AM
I’m currently reading the second book of the TriSolar Sci-Fi series by Cixin Liu, I’ve only just started it so this post can’t have spoilers for it and I will also only have minimal spoilers for the first book (nothing more than you will get from pop culture references to it).
In the second book there are people called “Wall Facers” who have broad powers to shape the course of the Human response to an alien invasion in 400+ years time. The idea is that as the aliens have an ability to ...
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Matthew Garrett: Off Twitter for a bit
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/63632.html
December 18, 2022, 3:25 AM
Turns out that linking to several days old public data in order to demonstrate that Elon's jet was broadcasting its tail number in the clear is apparently "posting private information" so for anyone looking for me there I'm actually here comments...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2022 (by Anton Gladky)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2022-11/
December 18, 2022, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In November, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 0.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
Anton Gladky
did 6.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
Ben Hutchings
did 9.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
Chris Lamb
did 18.0h (...
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Charles Plessy: Bad words in Debian.
http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/grosmot/
December 16, 2022, 1:00 PM
A discussion on the debian-project mailing list caught my attention to an
Italian word meaning something like “would you be so kind to please go
somewhere else?”, but in a more direct and vulgar manner. I then used
http://codesearch.debian.net to study its usage more in detail.
I found it in:
the source code of XEmacs;
a list of bad words to filter conversations in BZflag;
the random sentence generator PolyGen;
the source code of the board game Tagua;
a database of offensive fortunes for ...
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Simon Josefsson: Guix 1.4 on NV41PZ
https://blog.josefsson.org/2022/12/16/guix-1-4-on-nv41pz/
December 16, 2022, 11:09 AM
On the shortlist of things to try on my new laptop has been Guix. I have been using Guix on my rsnapshot-based backup server since 2018, and experimented using it on a second laptop but never on my primary daily work machine. The main difference with Guix for me, compared to Debian (or Trisquel), is that Guix follows a rolling release model, even though they prepare stable versioned installation images once in a while. It seems the trend for operating system software releases is to either fol...
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Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: David A. Wheeler on supply chain security
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2022/12/15/supporter-spotlight-davidawheeler-supply-chain-security/
December 15, 2022, 12:00 PM
The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do.
This is the sixth instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as a rec...
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Russell Coker: Pixel 6A
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/15/pixel-6a/
December 15, 2022, 11:17 AM
I have just bought a Pixel 6A [1] for my wife. It’s one of the latest Google phones that was released almost at the same time as the Pixel 7 series, so if you want to spend a lot of money on a phone that’s the latest and greatest then the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are the options, but if you want to save some money and don’t need something really high end then the Pixel 6A is a good option.
The one I bought cost $550 when I bought it from Google which seemed like a good deal when it was adve...
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Abhijith PA: Running PostmarketOS on my phone
https://abhijithpa.me/2022/Running-postmarketos-on-my-phone/
December 15, 2022, 9:53 AM
Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for
some time now.
It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about
this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen’s Librem
5 kept charing on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion
about
PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now.
My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started
setting up porting pmOS to this device....
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: spdl 0.0.3 on CRAN: Adding File Logger
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/12/14#spdl_0.0.3
December 15, 2022, 12:00 AM
A second update to the still-new package spdl is now om CRAN, and in Debian. The key focus of spdl is a offering the same interface from both R and C++ for logging by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package.
This release add support for a simple filesetup() initialiser to direct logging output to a file. For now the console logger and the file logger are exclusive, if there is interest we could borrow a page from upstream and combine them.
The short NEWS entry follows.
Changes in spld versi...
--------------------
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 ...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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 ...
--------------------
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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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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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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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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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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