Jonathan Dowland: Welcome Oblivion 10th Anniversary
https://jmtd.net/log/Welcome_Oblivion/
March 7, 2023, 11:08 AM
I haven’t done one of these for a while, and they’ll be less frequent than I
once planned as I’m working from home less and less. I'm also trying to get
back into exploring my digital music collection, and more generally engaging
with digital music again.
It’s the ten year anniversary of the first (and last) LP by How To Destroy
Angels (HTDA), the side-project of Trent Reznor with his wife, his Nine Inch
Nails (NIN) partner in crime Atticus Ross and visual artist (and NIN artist...
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Robert McQueen: Flathub in 2023
https://ramcq.net/2023/03/07/flathub-in-2023/
March 7, 2023, 11:00 AM
It’s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, so I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at Flathub and why—and what’s coming up from us this year. I want to focus on:
Where Flathub is today as a strong ecosystem with 2,000 apps
Our progress on evolving Flathub from a build service to an app store
The economic barrier to growing the ecosystem, and its consequences
What’s next to overcome our chall...
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Jonathan Dowland: date warping in HLedger
https://jmtd.net/log/date_warping/
March 7, 2023, 10:28 AM
My credit card and bank account rarely agree on the date for when I pay it off1.
Since I added balance assertions for bank account transactions,
I need the transaction in my ledger to match what the bank thinks, otherwise
the balance assertions would start to fail.
The skew is not normally more than a couple of days, and could be corrected by
changing the date for just one of the two
postings. But the skew is
not very important, and altering the posting date could be used for something
more use...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFastAD 0.0.1 and 0.0.2: New Package on CRAN!
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/03/06#rcppfastad_0.0.1_0.0.2
March 7, 2023, 1:34 AM
James Yang and I are
thrilled to announce the new CRAN package RcppFastAD which
arrived at CRAN last Monday as
version 0.0.1, and is as of today at version 0.0.2 with a first set of
small updates.
It is based on the FastAD header-only C++
library by James which provides a C++ implementation of both forward and
reverse mode of automatic differentiation in an easy-to-use header
library (which we wrapped here) that is both lightweight and performant.
With a little of bit of Rcpp glue, it
is also ea...
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Valhalla's Things: Forgotten Yeast Bread
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/03/07-forgotten-yeast-bread/index.html
March 7, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 7, 2023



Yesterday around 13:00 I started my usual ”I’m being lazy” bread recipe:
400 g flour
250 g water
6 g salt
worked for 8 minutes (by machine), left to rise until about 18:00.
For the record, it was a strong flour (310 W), type 1, so white, but somewhat coarsely ground.
And then, when it was time to cook bread for dinner I realized that something was missing. Something critical. See if you can spot it in the list above.
The yeast.
Some bre...
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Vincent Bernat: DDoS detection and remediation with Akvorado and Flowspec
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-akvorado-ddos-flowspec
March 6, 2023, 7:34 AM
Akvorado collects sFlow and IPFIX flows, stores them in a
ClickHouse database, and presents them in a web console. Although it lacks
built-in DDoS detection, it’s possible to create one by crafting custom
ClickHouse queries.
DDoS detection​
Let’s assume we want to detect DDoS targeting our customers. As an example, we
consider a DDoS attack as a collection of flows over one minute targeting a
single customer IP address, from a single source port and matching one
of these conditions:
an av...
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Valhalla's Things: Bookbinding: photo album
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/03/06-bookbinging-photo-album/index.html
March 6, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 6, 2023




When I paint postcards I tend to start with a draft (usually on lightweight (250 g/m²) watercolour paper, then trace1 the drawing on blank postcards and paint it again.
I keep the drafts for a number of reasons; for the views / architectural ones I’m using a landscape photo album that I bought many years ago, but lately I’ve also sent a few cards with my historical outfits to people who like to be kept updated on that, and I wanted a diff...
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Enrico Zini: Heart-driven drum loop
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/python/heart-driven-drum-loop
March 5, 2023, 10:53 PM
I have Python code for reading a heart rate monitor.
I have Python code to generate MIDI events.
Could I resist putting them together? Clearly not.
Here's Jack Of Hearts, a JACK MIDI
drum loop generator that uses the heart rate for BPM, and an improvised way to
compute heart rate increase/decrease to add variations in the drum pattern.
It's very simple minded and silly. To me it was a fun way of putting unrelated
things together, and Python worked very well for it....
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Generating MIDI events with JACK and Python
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/python/generating-midi-events-with-jack-and-python
March 5, 2023, 11:14 AM
I had a go at trying to figure out how to generate arbitrary MIDI events and
send them out over a JACK MIDI channel.
Setting up JACK and Pipewire
Pipewire has a JACK interface, which in theory means one could use JACK clients
out of the box without extra setup.
In practice, one need to tell JACK clients which set of libraries to use to
communicate to servers, and Pipewire's JACK server is not the default choice.
To tell JACK clients to use Pipewire's server, you can either:
on a client-by-clien...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-02/
March 5, 2023, 8:53 AM
Welcome to the February 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to our project, please visit the Contribute page on our website.
FOSDEM 2023 was held in Brussels on the 4th & 5th of February and featured a number of talks related to reproducibility. In particular, Akihiro Suda gave a talk titled Bit-for-bit reproducible builds with Dockerfile discussing deterministic timestamps and deterministic apt-get (original announcement). Th...
--------------------
Matt Brown: Retrospective: Feb 2023
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/03/04/retrospective-feb-2023/
March 4, 2023, 1:03 AM
February ended up being a very short work month as I made a last minute decision to travel to Adelaide for the first 2 weeks of the month to help my brother with some house renovations he was undertaking. I thought I might be able to keep up with some work and my writing goals in the evenings while I was there, but days of hard manual labour are such an unfamiliar routine for me that I didn’t have any energy left to make good on that intention.
The majority of my time and focus for the remaini...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Goodbye Bullseye — report from the Montreal 2023 BSP
https://veronneau.org/goodbye-bullseye-report-from-the-montreal-2023-bsp.html
March 3, 2023, 9:30 PM
Hello World! I haven't really had time to blog here since the start of the
semester, as I've been pretty busy at work1.
All this to say, this report for the Bug Squashing Party we held in
Montreal last weekend is a little late, sorry :)
First of all, I'm pleased to announce our local community seems to be doing
great and has recovered from the pandemic-induced lull. May COVID stay away
from our bodies forever.
This time around, a total of 9 people made it to what has become somewhat of a
biennia...
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Sven Hoexter: exfat-fuse 1.4 in experimental
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/deb_fuse-exfat-1.4/
March 3, 2023, 3:39 PM
I know a few people hold on to the exFAT fuse implementation due the
support for timezone offsets, so here is a small update for you.
Andrew released 1.4.0, which includes the timezone offset support, which
was so far only part of the git master branch. It also fixes a,
from my point of view very minor, security issue
CVE-2022-29973.
In addition to that it's the first build with fuse3 support. If you
still use this driver, pick it up in experimental (we're in the bookworm freeze
right now), and ...
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Russell Coker: Hyper Threading on the E5-2696v3
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/03/03/hyper-threading-e5-2696v3/
March 3, 2023, 10:35 AM
I just did some quick tests of hyper-threading on my new E5-2696v3 CPU. I compiled the Linux 6.0.10 kernel with and without hyper-threading enabled. Here’s the times for “make -j36 bzImage” and “make -j36 modules” with HT enabled:
real 2m26.540s
user 55m25.121s
sys 9m56.443s
real 10m57.374s
user 309m21.531s
sys 58m1.070s
Here’s the times for “make -j18 bzImage” and “make -j18 modules” with HT disabled:
real 2m40.501s
user 31m35.295s
sys 5m43.523...
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Ian Jackson: Never use git submodules
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/14666.html
March 2, 2023, 7:48 PM
tl;dr
git submodules are always the wrong solution. Yes, even the to the problem they were specifically invented to solve.
What is wrong with git submodules
Better alternatives to git submodules
Use git subtree
Just have a monorepo
Use a package management system, and explicit dependencies
Use the multiple repository tool mr
Have your build expect to find the dependency in .., its parent dir
Provide an ad-hoc in-tree script to download the dependency
( Read more... ) comments...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January/February 2023
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-januaryfebruary-2023.html
March 2, 2023, 4:16 PM
In January I was assigned 24 hours by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and worked 8 hours. In February I was assigned another 8
hours and worked 8 hours.
I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable update, but
didn't upload it. I merged the latest bullseye security update into
the linux-5.10 package and uploaded that.
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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.
--------------------
Debian XMPP Team: XMPP What's new in Debian 12 bookworm
https://xmpp-team.pages.debian.net/blog/2023/03/xmpp-whats-new-in-bookworm.html
March 1, 2023, 12:00 AM
On Tue 13 July 2021 there was a
blog post
of new XMPP related software releases which have been uploaded to Debian 11 (bullseye).
Today, we will inform you about updates for the upcoming Debian release bookworm.
A lot of new releases have been provided by the upstream projects. There were lot of changes
to the XMPP clients like Dino, Gajim, Profanity, Poezio and others. Also the XMPP servers have been
enhanced.
Unfortunately, we can not provide a list of all the changes which have been done,
but...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 238 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-238-released/
March 1, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 238. This version includes the following changes:
* autopkgtest: fix tool name in the skippable list.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.
--------------------
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 aapt 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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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 '(
("\...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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
...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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 dock 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-...
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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...
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