Russ Allbery: Small book haul
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2023-02/001.html
March 1, 2023, 5:28 AM
I'm a bit behind on both free software maintenance and on writing reviews,
what with one thing and another, but hopefully will have time to catch up
next month. Meanwhile, publishing continues and books keep catching my
eye.
Blake Crouch (ed.) — Forward (sff anthology)
Kate Elliott — The Keeper's Six (sff)
Ruthanna Emrys — A Half-Built Garden (sff)
R.F. Kuang — Babel (sff)
Seanan McGuire — The Unkindest Tide (sff)
Seanan McGuire — A Killing Frost (sff)
Seanan McGuire — When Sor...
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Junichi Uekawa: Got crosvm building in Debian.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Mar-1.html.en#2023-Mar-1-13:32:34
March 1, 2023, 4:32 AM
Got crosvm building in Debian. Now to rebase and try to upload. Or maybe upload the version I have first and then rebase.
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities Feb 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/03/01/floss-activities/
February 28, 2023, 11:38 PM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
translate-shell:
https,
typo
pyemd:
fix dep
duck:
sort,
add moved site indicators
devscripts:
fix
https,
UTF-8,
wnpp-alert
reportbug:
fix URLs/data
Debian QA services:
excuses improvements
Debian package uploads:
pyemd
(1
2),
sptag
Debian sysadmin wiki pages:
ports/hardware-requirements
Debian wiki pages:
DebianEdu
(DebianEdu/Documentation
(Buster,
Etch,
Jessie,
Lenny,
Squeeze,
Stretch,
Wh...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Cutting off body parts and Lenovo
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/02/28/cutting-off-body-parts-and-lenovo/
February 28, 2023, 2:09 PM
I would suggest that this blog post would be slightly unpleasant and I do wish that there was a way, a standardized way just like movies where you can put General, 14+, 16+, Adult and whatnot. so people could share without getting into trouble. I would suggest to consider this blog as for somewhat mature and perhaps disturbing.
Cutting off body parts
From last couple of months or so we have been getting daily reports of either men or women killed and then being chopped into pieces and t...
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Russell Coker: Links February 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/02/28/links-february-2023/
February 28, 2023, 12:03 PM
Vox has an insightful interview with the author of “Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century” [1]. The main claim of that book is that “The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries”. A claim that seems well supported.
PostMarketOS is an interesting OS for hardware designed for Android [2]. It is based on Alpine Linux, is small, and modular. If you want to ch...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 237 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-237-released/
February 28, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 237. This version includes the following changes:
* autopkgtest: only install appt and dexdump on architectures where they are
available. (Closes: #1031297)
* compartors/pdf:
+ Drop backward compatibility assignment.
+ Fix flake warnings, potentially reinstating PyPDF 1.x support (untested).
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Daniel Lange: Thunderbird gpg key import
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/179-Thunderbird-gpg-key-import.html
February 27, 2023, 3:50 PM
Thunderbird, srsly?
5MB (or 4.8MiB) import limit. Sure. My modest pubring (111 keys) is 18MB. The Debian keyring is 28MB.
May be, just may be, add another 0 to that if statement?
So, until that happens, workarounds ...
Option 1:
Export each pubkey into a separate file. The import dialog allows to select them all in one go. But - of course - it will ask confirmation for each. So prepare some valerian tea.
gpg --with-colons --list-public-keys | grep ^pub | cut -d : -f 5 | xargs -I {} -...
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Daniel Lange: Getting gpg to import signatures again
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/178-Getting-gpg-to-import-signatures-again.html
February 27, 2023, 2:00 PM
The GnuPG (gpg) ecosystem has been played with a bit in 2019 by adding fake signatures en masse to well known keys. The main result is that the SKS Keyserver network based on the OCaml software of the same name is basically history. A few other keyservers have come up like Hagrid (Rust) and Hockeypuck (Go) but there seems to be no clear winner yet. In case you missed it in 2019, see my take on cleaning these polluted keys.
Now the changed defaults in gpg to "mitigate" this issue are trickling d...
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Billy Warren: My take on IRCs - let's rest from Slack and Discord for a while.
https://dev.to/warbilly/my-take-on-ircs-lets-rest-from-slack-and-discord-for-a-while-2g9g
February 27, 2023, 6:41 AM
I want to interest those that haven’t used IRCs for a while through this article. This article generally leans toward the Debian Community but I hope it gives you some perspectives into IRCs and also interests you in joining the Debian Community as well.
Most Generation Z developers I know have at least used slack, discord, discourse and so many other communication tools but so few have used IRCs so heavily and this could be because they find it boring and limited to what kind of content they...
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Russ Allbery: Review: An Informal History of the Hugos
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-4668-6573-3.html
February 26, 2023, 5:17 AM
Review: An Informal History of the Hugos, by Jo Walton

Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
August 2018


ISBN:
1-4668-6573-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
564

An Informal History of the Hugos is another collection of Jo
Walton's Tor.com posts. As with What
Makes This Book So Great, these are blog posts that are still available
for free on-line. Unlike that collection, this series happened after
Tor.com got better at tags, so it's
much easie...
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Gregor Herrmann: demo video: dpt(1) in pkg-perl-tools
https://info.comodo.priv.at/blog/demo_video__dpt_1__in_pkg_perl_tools.html
February 25, 2023, 10:36 PM
in the Debian Perl
Group we are maintaining a lot of packages (around 4000 at the time of
writing). this also means that we are spending some time on improving our
tools which allow us to handle this amount of packages in a reasonable time.
many of the tools are shipped in the pkg-perl-tools package
since 2013, & lots of them are scripts which are called as subcommands
of the dpt(1) wrapper script.
in the last years I got the impression that not all team members are aware
of all the us...
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Jelmer Vernooij: Silver Platter Batch Mode
https://www.jelmer.uk/silver-platter-batch.html
February 25, 2023, 9:44 PM
Background
Silver-Platter makes it easier to
publish automated changes to repositories. However, in its default mode, the
only option for reviewing changes before publishing them is to run in dry-run mode.
This can be quite cumbersome if you have a lot of repositories.
A new “batch” mode now makes it possible to generate a large number of changes
against different repositories using a script, review and optionally alter the
diffs, and then all publish them (and potentially refresh them late...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available_in_Debian_Sid_and_Bookworm.html
February 25, 2023, 7:30 PM
Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo
Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload,
the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch is now available in Debian
Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian.
This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more
machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will
ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local
network or the Internet. If some background daemo...
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Holger Levsen: 20230225-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2023
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20230225-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2023/
February 25, 2023, 4:19 PM
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 from May 23 to 30
As in the last years there will be a Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 event taking place at the same location as previous years, from May 23rd until the 30th (with the 29th being a public holiday in Germany and elsewhere).
This is just a short announcement to get the word out, that this event will happen, so you can ponder and prepare attending. The wiki page has more information and some fine folks have even already registered! Announcements on the app...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: ttdo 0.0.9 on CRAN: Small Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/02/24#ttdo_0.0.9
February 24, 2023, 10:33 PM
A new minor release of our ttdo package arrived
on CRAN a few days ago. The ttdo package extends
the excellent (and very minimal / zero depends) unit testing package tinytest by Mark van der Loo with the very
clever and well-done diffobj package by
Brodie Gaslam to give us test
results with visual diffs (as shown in the screenshot below) which
seemingly is so compelling an idea that it eventually got copied by
another package which shall remain unnamed…
This release adds a versioned dependenc...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: Snowstorms, Kittens and Shattered dreams
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/snowstorms-kittens-and-shattered-dreams/
February 24, 2023, 2:12 PM
Icy morning Witch Wells Az
Long ago I applied for my dream job at a company I have wanted to wok for since its beginning and I wasn’t ready technically. Fast forward to now, I am ready! A big thank you goes out to Blue Systems for that. So I go out and find the perfect role and start the application process. The process was months long, but was going very well, the interviews and I passed the technical with flying colors. I got to the end where the hiring lead told me he was submitting my of...
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Steve Kemp: A quick hack for Emacs
https://blog.steve.fi/a_quick_hack_for_emacs.html
February 23, 2023, 8:30 PM
As I've mentioned in the past I keep a work-log, or work-diary, recording my activities every day.
I have a bunch of standard things that I record, but one thing that often ends up happening is that I make references to external bug trackers, be they Jira, Bugzilla, or something else.
Today I hacked up a simple emacs minor-mode for converting these references to hyperlinks, automatically, via the use of regular expressions.
Given this configuration:
(setq linkifier-patterns '(
("\...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Announcing hz.tools
https://k3xec.com/hztools/
February 23, 2023, 2:00 AM
Interested in future updates? Follow me on mastodon at
@paul@soylent.green. Posts about
hz.tools will be tagged
#hztools.
If you're on the Fediverse, I'd very much appreciate boosts on
my announcement toot!
Ever since 2019, I’ve been learning about how radios work, and trying to learn
about using them “the hard way” – by writing as much of the stack as is
practical (for some value of practical) myself. I wrote my first “Hello World”
in 2018, which was a simple FM radio player, whic...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.0.1.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, New Features
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/02/22#rcpparmadillo_0.12.0.1.0
February 22, 2023, 10:34 PM
Armadillo is a powerful
and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific
computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use,
has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm
development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into
production environments. RcppArmadillo
integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is
widely used by (currently) 1042 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 28.1 million
tim...
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Billy Warren: A straight Guide to Salsa CI - A Debian Continuous Integration tool
https://dev.to/warbilly/a-straight-guide-to-salsa-ci-a-debian-continuous-integration-tool-42b7
February 21, 2023, 1:33 PM
I won’t waste your time with introductions. The title says it all so let’s jump right in. I’ll give you as many links as possible so that this article stays as short as possible.
So first, what is Salsa? Salsa is a name of a GitLab instance that is used by Debian teams to manage Debian packages and also collaborate on Development. If you have used GitLab before, the Salsa platform is not any different. To have a feel of it, it is available at https://salsa.debian.org. Still, want to know ...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2023 (by Anton Gladky)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2023-01/
February 21, 2023, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
This is the first monthly report in 2023.
Debian LTS contributors
In January, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS. which is possibly the highest number of active contributors per month!
Their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
Adrian Bunk
did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
Anton Gladky
...
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Jonathan McDowell: Fixing mobile viewing
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/02/fixing-mobile-viewing.html
February 20, 2023, 7:09 PM
It was brought to my attention recently that the mobile viewing experience of this blog was not exactly what I’d hope for. In my poor defence I proof read on my desktop and the only time I see my posts on mobile is via FreshRSS. Also my UX ability sucks.
Anyway. I’ve updated the “theme” to a more recent version of minima and tried to make sure I haven’t broken it all in the process (I did break tagging, but then I fixed it again). I double checked the generated feed to confirm it was ...
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Russell Coker: New 18 Core CPU and NVMe
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/02/19/18-core-cpu-nvme/
February 19, 2023, 12:13 PM
I just got a E5-2696 v3 CPU for my ML110 Gen9 home workstation, this has a Passmark score of 23326 which is almost 3 times faster than the E5-2620 v4 which rated 9224. Previously it took over 40 minutes real time to compile a 6.10 kernel that was based on the Debian kernel configuration, now it takes 14 minutes of real time, 202 minutes of user time, and 37 minutes of system CPU time. That’s a definite benefit of having a faster CPU, I don’t often compile kernels but when I do I don’t want...
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Enrico Zini: Monitoring a heart rate monitor
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/debian/monitoring-a-heart-rate-monitor
February 17, 2023, 10:22 PM
I bought myself a cheap wearable Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor in order to
play with it, and this is a simple Python script to monitor it and plot
data.
Bluetooth LE
I was surprised that these things seem decently interoperable.
You can use hcitool to scan for devices:
hcitool lescan
You can then use gatttool to connect to device and poke at them interactively
from a command line.
Bluetooth LE from Python
There is a nice library called Bleak which
is also packaged in Debian. It's modern Pyth...
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Jonathan McDowell: First impressions of the VisionFive 2
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/02/visionfive-2-impressions.html
February 17, 2023, 6:06 PM
Back in September last year I chose to back the StarFive VisionFive 2 on Kickstarter. I don’t have a particular use in mind for it, but I felt it was one of the first RISC-V systems that were relatively capable (mentally I have it as somewhere between a Raspberry Pi 3 + a Pi 4). In particular it’s a quad 1.5GHz 64-bit RISC-V core with 8G RAM, USB3, GigE ethernet and a single M.2 PCIe slot. More than ample as a personal machine for playing around with RISC-V and doing local builds. I ended up...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 236 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-236-released/
February 17, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 236. This version includes the following changes:
[ FC Stegerman ]
* Update code to match latest version of Black. (Closes: #1031433)
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Require at least Black version 23.1.0 to run the internal Black tests.
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Valhalla's Things: git status Side Effects
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/02/17-git-status-side-effects/index.html
February 17, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on February 17, 2023



TIL, from a conversation with friends1, that git status can indeed have side effects, of some sort.
By default, running git status causes a background refresh of the index to happen, which holds the write lock on the repository.
In theory, if somebody is really unlucky, this could break some script / process that is also trying to work on the repo at the same time, especially on a huge repository where git status takes a significant time, ra...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snaps, Security updates, Debian Freeze
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-security-updates-debian-freeze/
February 16, 2023, 7:17 PM
Icy morning Witch Wells Az
Much like our trees, Debian is now in freeze stage for Bookworm. I am still working on packages locally until development opens up again. My main focus is getting mycroft packages updated to the new fork at https://github.com/orgs/OpenVoiceOS/repositories.
On the KDE Snaps side of things:
My PPA is not going well. There is a problem in Focal here qhelpgenerator-qt5 is a missing dependency, HOWEVER it is there… as shown here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/foc...
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Gunnar Wolf: We are GREAT at handling multimedia!
https://gwolf.org/2023/02/we-are-great-at-handling-multimedia.html
February 16, 2023, 7:12 PM
I have mentioned several times in this blog, as well as by other
communication means, that I am very happy with the laptop I bought
(used) about a year and a half ago: an ARM-based Lenovo Yoga
C630.
Yes, I knew from the very beginning that using this laptop would pose
a challenge to me in many ways, as full hardware support for ARM
laptops are nowhere as easy as for plain boring x86 systems. But the
advantages far outweigh the inconvenience (i.e. the hoops I had to
jump through to handle vide...
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Marco d'Itri: I replaced grub with systemd-boot
https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_465
February 15, 2023, 1:45 PM
To be able to investigate and work on the the measured boot features I have switched from grub to systemd-boot (sd-boot).
This initial step is optional, but it is useful because this way /etc/kernel/cmdline will become the new place where the kernel command line can be configured:
/etc/default/grub
echo "root=/dev/mapper/root $GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX $GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" > /etc/kernel/cmdline
Do not forget to set the correct root file system there, because initramfs-tools does not sup...
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Lukas Märdian: Netplan v0.106 is now available
https://blog.slyon.de/2023/02/15/netplan-v0-106-is-now-available/
February 15, 2023, 1:41 PM
I’m happy to announce that Netplan version 0.106 is now available on GitHub and is soon to be deployed into an Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora installation near you! Six months and 65 commits after the previous version, this release is brought to you by 4 free software contributors from around the globe.
Highlights
Highlights of this release include the new netplan status command, which queries your system for IP addresses, routes, DNS information, etc… in addition to the Netplan backend rend...
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Valhalla's Things: My experience with a PinePhone
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/02/15-my-experience-with-a-pinephone/index.html
February 15, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on February 15, 2023



I’ve had and used1 a PinePhone for quite some time now, and a shiny new blog sounds like a good time to do a review of my experience.
TL;DL: I love it, but my use cases may not be very typical.
While I’ve had a mobile phone since an early time (my parents made me carry one for emergencies before it was usual for my peers) I’ve never used a typical smartphone (android / iPhone / those other proprietary things) because I can’t trust th...
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Holger Levsen: 20230214-i-love-osuosl
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20230214-i-love-osuosl/
February 14, 2023, 6:15 PM
I love free software and I ❤️ OSUOSL
So in December 2018 I was approached somewhat out of the blue by someone from
OSUOSL who offered eight servers to the Reproducible Builds project and as these
machines had 32 cores and 144 GB Ram each (plus 3 TB on a single HDD) and
they also offered free hosting, I very happyly said yes.
And since them I'm a very happy Oregon State University Open Source Labs user,
and these days we're switching the setup to different machines, which
is another story ...
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Jonathan Dowland: A visit to Prusa Labs
https://jmtd.net/log/prusa_labs/
February 13, 2023, 10:12 AM
In September I was in Czechia for a Red Hat event. I ended up travelling via
Prague, and had an unexpected extra day due to an airline strike causing my
flight home to be cancelled. I took the opportunity to visit Prusa's
offices/factory/Lab, and it was amazing!
The Prusa team were all busy getting ready for the Prague Maker Faire that
was happening the day afterwards.1
On arriving at the street which houses Prusa's Lab and Office buildings, the
first thing that hit me was the smell. I find th...
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Vincent Bernat: Building a SQL-like language to filter flows
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-sql-like-language-filter
February 13, 2023, 8:06 AM
Akvorado collects network flows using IPFIX or sFlow. It stores them
in a ClickHouse database. A web console allows a user to query the data and
plot some graphs. A nice aspect of this console is how we can filter flows with
a SQL-like language:
Filter editor in Akvorado console
Often, web interfaces expose a query
builder to build such filters. I think combining a
SQL-like language with an editor supporting completion, syntax
highlighting, and linting is a better approach.1
The language parse...
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Valhalla's Things: Cernit Sets for the Royal Game of UR
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/02/13-royal-game-of-ur-cernit-sets/index.html
February 13, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on February 13, 2023



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