Russ Allbery: Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-8913-4.html
March 22, 2023, 3:21 AM
Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi

Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
0-7653-8913-4


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
264

As this novel opens, Jamie Gray, our first-person narrator, is working for
the business side of a startup food delivery service named füdmüd. He's
up for his six month performance review and has some great ideas for how
to improve the company's market standing going into pandemic lockdown.
...
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Shirish Agarwal: Anti-national says the Indian Law Minister.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/03/22/anti-national-says-the-indian-law-minister/
March 22, 2023, 1:11 AM
Anti-national and Anti-India judges – Kiren Rijiju, Law Minister.
For those who can’t see the above poster says the following – ‘A handful of retired Supreme Court judges who are part of ‘Anti-India’ and are trying to make Indian judiciary play role of the Opposition party. – Law Minister Kiren Rijiju.
Now, just to give bit more of a context, the above has happened as the CJI (Chief Justice has not been listening or toeing their line)
The above is a statement given by...
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Daniel Lange: Linux App Summit - Linux applications apparently unable to produce a five page sponsorship brochure
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/181-Linux-App-Summit-Linux-applications-apparently-unable-to-produce-a-five-page-sponsorship-brochure.html
March 21, 2023, 7:15 PM
I've been calling out the Linux foundation for producing their annual report on Macs. And again.
But catching the Linux App(lication) Summit to produce their 5 page sponsorship brochure one Windows with Adobe...
Apparently neither GNOME nor KDE have apps that are sufficient to produce such content. Wtf folks.
P.S.: Just checked the Linux Foundation's 2022 Annual Report titled "Leadership in Security and Innovation" ... Adobe InDesign 18.0 (Macintosh).
Their pdf title looks like this:
Pd...
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Bálint Réczey: Building the Linux kernel in under 10 seconds with Firebuild
https://balintreczey.hu/blog/building-the-linux-kernel-under-10-seconds-with-firebuild/
March 21, 2023, 8:54 AM
Russell published an interesting post about his first experience with Firebuild accelerating refpolicy‘s and the Linux kernel‘s build. It turned out a few small tweaks could accelerate the builds even more, crossing the 10 second barrier with Linux’s build.
Build performance with 18 cores
The Linux kernel’s build time is a widely used benchmark for compilers, making it a prime candidate to test a build accelerator as well. In the first run on Russell’s 18 core test system the ob...
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Daniel Lange: We're still safe, it doesn't claim to be conscious. Yet.
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/180-Were-still-safe,-it-doesnt-claim-to-be-conscious.-Yet..html
March 20, 2023, 11:45 AM
Talking to ChatGPT v4 (2023-03-14 release)...
Q: What is the purpose of life?
A: The purpose of life is a philosophical question that has puzzled humans for centuries. Different people and cultures have different answers to this question. Some people believe that the purpose of life is to seek happiness, while others believe that it is to fulfill a particular destiny or achieve a specific goal.
From a biological perspective, the purpose of life could be to ensure the survival and reproduction...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Star Fraction
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-85723-833-8.html
March 20, 2023, 4:08 AM
Review: The Star Fraction, by Ken MacLeod

Series:
Fall Revolution #1


Publisher:
Orbit


Copyright:
1995


Printing:
2001


ISBN:
1-85723-833-8


Format:
Trade paperback


Pages:
341

Ken MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer who has become amusingly
famous for repeatedly winning the libertarian Prometheus Award despite
being a (somewhat libertarian-leaning) socialist. The Star
Fraction is the first...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Allow Me to Retort
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-62097-690-0.html
March 19, 2023, 3:59 AM
Review: Allow Me to Retort, by Elie Mystal

Publisher:
The New Press


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
1-62097-690-0


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
257

If you're familiar with Elie Mystal's previous work (writer for The
Nation, previously editor for Above the Law, Twitter gadfly, and
occasional talking head on news commentary programs), you'll have a good
idea what to expect from this book: pointed liberal commentary, frequently
developing into...
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Michael Ablassmeier: small standalone sshds in go
https://abbbi.github.io//go-ssh/
March 19, 2023, 12:00 AM
Been looking into some existant sshd implementations in go. Most of the
projects on github seem to use the standard x/crypto/ssh lib.
During testing, i just wanted to see which banner these kind of ssh servers
provide, using the simple command:
nc localhost <port>
And noticed that at least some of these “sshds” did not accept any further
connection. Simple DoS via netcat, nice.
Until this day, the Golang documentation is missing some crucial hint that the
function handling the con...
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Jonathan Dowland: Qi charger stand
https://jmtd.net/log/Qi_charger_stand/
March 18, 2023, 10:02 PM
I've got a Qi-charging phone cradle at home which orients the phone up at an angle
which works with Apple's Face ID. At work, I've got a simpler "puck"-shaped one
which is less convenient, so I designed a basic cradle to raise both the charger
and the phone up.
I did two iterations, and the second iteration was "good enough" to use that I
stopped there, although I would make some further alterations if I was to print
it again: more of a cut-out for the USB-C cable, raise the plinth for ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 239 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-239-released/
March 17, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 239. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix compatibility with pypdf 3.x, and correctly restore test data.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#335)
* Rework PDF annotations processing into a separate method.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Scarlett Gately Moore: A Big Thank You Community! KDE Snaps resumed and More.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/a-big-thank-you-community-kde-snaps-resumed-and-more/
March 16, 2023, 10:07 PM
Snowy Sunrise Witch Wells, Az
After my last post a few things have happened. First, I want to thank all of you for your support, monetary and moral. The open source community is amazing and I love being a part of it. We are surviving thanks to all of you. Despite my failed interview, a new door has opened up and I am happy to announce that Canonical is funding me to work part time for a period of 3 months on KDE Snaps! While not the full time role I was hoping for, I’ll take it, and who know...
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Valhalla's Things: Swiss Embroidery Princess Petticoat
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/03/16-swiss-embroidery-princess-petticoat/index.html
March 16, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 16, 2023




A few years ago a friend told me that her usual fabric shop was closing down and had a sale on all remaining stock.
While being sad for yet another brick and mortar shop that was going to be missed (at least it was because the owners were retiring, not because it wasn’t sustainable anymore), of course I couldn’t miss the opportunity.
So we drove a few hundred km, had some nice time with a friend that (because of said few hundred km) we rar...
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Thomas Koch: Know your tools - simple backup with rsync
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-06-09-know-rsync.html
March 15, 2023, 6:48 PM
Posted on June 9, 2022


Tags: debian, free software

I’ve been using rsync for years and still did not know its full powers. I just wanted a quick and dirty simple backup but realised that rsnapshot is not in Debian anymore.
However you can do much of rsnapshot with rsync alone nowadays.
The --link-dest option (manpage) solves the part of creating hardlinks to a previous backup (found here). So my backup program becomes this shell script in ~/backups/backup.sh:
#!/bin/sh
...
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Thomas Koch: Missing memegen
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-05-01-missing-memegen.html
March 15, 2023, 6:48 PM
Posted on May 1, 2022


Tags: debian, free software, life

Back at $COMPANY we had an internal meme-site. I had some reputation in my team for creating good memes. When I watched Episode 3 of Season 2 from Yes Premier Minister yesterday, I really missed a place to post memes.
This is the full scene. Please watch it or even the full episode before scrolling down to the GIFs. I had a good laugh for some time.
With Debian, I could just download the episode from somewhere on the...
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Thomas Koch: lsp-java coming to debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-03-12-lsp-java-coming-to-debian.html
March 15, 2023, 6:48 PM
Posted on March 12, 2022


Tags: debian

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardizes communication between editors and so called language servers for different programming languages. This reduces the old problem that every editor had to implement many different plugins for all different programming languages. With LSP an editor just needs to talk LSP and can immediately provide typicall IDE features.
I already packaged the Emacs packages lsp-mode and lsp-haskell for Debia...
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Emanuele Rocca: Disposable Debian VMs with debvm
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/disposable-debian-vms-debvm/
March 15, 2023, 5:18 AM
Some notes on using debvm, an amazing piece of software I’ve started using
only recently.
Create a new virtual machine:
$ debvm-create
You now have a virtual machine with Debian Sid of your host native
architecture (probably amd64). The image file is called rootfs.ext4. You’ve
got 1G of disk space in the VM.
You can now just run the VM! You will be automatically logged is as root.
$ debvm-run
Experiment in the VM, run all the sort of tests you have in mind. For example,
one t...
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Core python package, Redmine backports, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-02-2023/
March 15, 2023, 12:00 AM
Contributing to Debian is part of
Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest
achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made
possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support
contracts and consulting services.
Core Python Packages, by Stefano Rivera
Just before the freeze, pip added support for PEP-668.
This is a scheme devised by Debian with other distributions and the Python
Packaging Authority, to allow distributors to mark Python installations as
...
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Anuradha Weeraman: US-11604662-B2
https://anuradha.medium.com/us-11604662-b2-d9ea5965b6c9?source=rss-ade561389abc------2
March 14, 2023, 2:20 PM
US-11604662-B2I’m happy to announce, that after a long wait, patent US-11604662-B2 has been issued.I want to thank and recognize my co-inventors, Div Prakash and Subin George, who I’m privileged to be on paper with.The effort that led to this work involved a group of engineers, many phone calls, some nerve-wracking presentations, culminating in a fantastic hackathon-winning outcome for a young and talented team, which I was proud to be a part of and privileged to lead....
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Dima Kogan: Debian at SCaLE 20x
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2023/03/13_debian-at-scale-20x.html
March 13, 2023, 7:58 PM
SCaLE 20x just wrapped up. We spent three days running the Debian booth: passing
out stickers, penguin swag, coffee and cookies, and telling everyone that would
listen about about our great OS. As usual, Richard Hecker, Chris McKenzie and I
attended as the "LA Debian contingent". Mathias Gibbens flew in from
Albuquerque, and Ha Lam and Syed Reza stopped by periodically.
Chris created extra demand by restricting the supply of plushy penguins. Some
kid was shocked at my old laptop, only to see ...
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Russell Coker: Firebuild
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/03/13/firebuild/
March 13, 2023, 12:07 PM
After reading Bálint’s blog post about Firebuild (a compile cache) [1] I decided to give it a go. It’s non-free, the project web site [2] says that it’s free for non-commercial use or commercial trials.
My first attempt at building a Debian package failed due to man-recode using a seccomp() sandbox, I filed Debian bug #1032619 [3] about this (thanks for the quick response Bálint). The solution for me was to edit /etc/firebuild.conf and add man-recode to the dont_intercept list. The new v...
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Russell Coker: Xmpp Tools
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/03/13/xmpp-tools/
March 13, 2023, 7:13 AM
For a while I’ve had my monitoring systems alert me via XMPP (Jabber). To do that I used the sendxmpp command-line program which worked well for it’s basic tasks. I recently noticed that my laptop and workstation which I had upgraded to Debian/Testing weren’t sending messages, I’m not sure when it started as my main monitoring of such machines is to touch a key and see if there’s a response – if I’m not at the keyboard then a failure doesn’t bother me too much.
I’ve filed Debia...
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Antoine Beaupré: Framework 12th gen laptop review
https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/framework-12th-gen/
March 13, 2023, 2:01 AM
The Framework is a 13.5" laptop body with swappable parts, which
makes it somewhat future-proof and certainly easily repairable,
scoring an "exceedingly rare" 10/10 score from ifixit.com.
There are two generations of the laptop's main board (both compatible
with the same body): the Intel 11th and 12th gen chipsets.
I have received my Framework, 12th generation "DIY", device in late
September 2022 and will update this page as I go along in the process
of ordering, burning-in, setting up and usi...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: pkgKitten 0.2.3 on CRAN: Minor Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/03/11#pkgKitten_0.2.3
March 11, 2023, 6:35 PM
A new release 0.2.3 of pkgKitten
arrived on CRAN earlier, and
will be uploaded to Debian. pkgKitten
makes it simple to create new R packages via a simple function
invocation. A wrapper kitten.r exists in the littler
package to make it even easier.
This release improves the created ‘Description:’, and updated some of
the continuous integration.
Changes in version 0.2.3
(2023-03-11)
Small improvement to generated Description: field and
Title:
Maintenance for continuous integration setup
Mo...
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Antoine Beaupré: how to audit for open services with iproute2
https://anarc.at/blog/2023-03-10-listening-processes/
March 10, 2023, 7:16 PM
The computer world has a tendency of reinventing the wheel once in a
while. I am not a fan of that process, but sometimes I just have to
bite the bullet and adapt to change. This post explains how I adapted
to one particular change: the netstat to sockstat transition.
I used to do this to show which processes where listening on which
port on a server:
netstat -anpe
It was a handy mnemonic as, in France, ANPE was the agency
responsible for the unemployed (basically). That would list all
socke...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2023
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2023/03/my-debian-activities-in-february-2023/
March 10, 2023, 6:45 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 284 and rejected 49 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 286.
I love this calm and peaceful time now within the Debian project, when everybody only cares for RC bugs and NEW does not grow.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-fourth 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 8h.
During that time I uploaded:
[DLA 3310-1] xorg-server security upd...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Solving a 1998 problem with 2023 methods
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-03-09-23-32_solving_a_1998_problem_with_2023_methods.html
March 9, 2023, 10:32 PM
A long time ago, in 1998, our family entered a contest with a puzzle;
given a bunch of company names (they were the ones participating in a
loyalty program known as Domino, which has since gone defunct),
try to spell out as many Norwegian names as possible. (The name list
was fixed, but you actually had to buy a book to find it.)
The prize was fairly attractive, so I went to work with a computer program
instead of trying to figure it out by hand. I remember running it literally
for weeks on my ...
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Charles Plessy: If you work at Dreamhost, can you help us?
http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/dreamhost/
March 9, 2023, 1:35 PM
Update: thanks to the very kind involvment of the widow of our wemaster, we
could provide enough private information to Dreamhost, who finally accepted to
reset the password and the MFA. We have recovered evrything! Many thanks to
everybody who helped us!
Due to tragic circumstances, one association that I am part of,
Sciencescope got locked out of its account
at Dreamhost. Locked out, we can not pay the annual bill. Dreamhost
contacted us about the payment, but will not let us recover the ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppRedis 0.2.3 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/03/08#rcppredis_0.2.3
March 9, 2023, 12:57 AM
A new minor release 0.2.3 of our RcppRedis
package arrived on CRAN today.
RcppRedis
is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and
much more). RcppRedis
does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things
faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling
with MessagePack binary
(de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The
package has carried production loads on a trading floor for several
years.
This update is fairly...
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Jelmer Vernooij: The Kali Janitor
https://www.jelmer.uk/kali-janitor.html
March 8, 2023, 9:25 PM
The Debian Janitor is an automated
system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be
fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early
December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in
Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.
Kali Linux have been running their own instance
of the Janitor for the last year, under
the kali-bot user on GitLab.
Their web site has some excellent documenta...
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Joey Hess: the slink and a half boxed set
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/the_slink_and_a_half_boxed_set/
March 8, 2023, 8:07 PM
Today I stumbled upon
this youtube video
which takes a retrocomputing look at a product I was involved in
creating in 1999. It was fascinating looking back at it, and I realized
I've never written down how this boxed set of Debian "slink and a half",
an unofficial Debian release, came to be.
As best I can remember, the CD in that box was Debian 2.1 ("slink") with
the linux kernel updated from 2.0 to 2.2. Specifically, it used VA Linux
Systems's patched version of the kernel, which supported t...
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Anton Gladky: Boost C++: default for Debian Bookworm will remain 1.74.0
https://gladk.de/posts/202302_boost_in_debian_bookworm/
March 8, 2023, 6:16 PM
Boost C++ is a popular set of free, open-source C++ libraries that provide developers with powerful tools
and functionality to enhance their software development projects. The newest version, 1.81.0, has been available
in Debian Bookworm for about a month now,
but the default version for boost-dependent packages is still the older 1.74.0.
The transition to the newer library has been postponed due to possible regressions that could take more time
to resolve. This means that the default version fo...
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Thomas Lange: Launch of new FAI project website
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/fai-css/
March 8, 2023, 11:57 AM
After more than 13 years, I've launched a new design for the FAI
project web site
https://fai-project.org
It now uses Materialize CSS and will work much better on mobile
devices. Thanks to Thorsten Bülo who did the first part of converting
the web pages to the new design.
I hope you all enjoy the new layout.
FAI...
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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....
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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...
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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.
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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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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...
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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.
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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...
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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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Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in February 2023
https://utkarsh2102.com/posts/foss-in-feb-23/
February 28, 2023, 5:41 AM
Here’s my (forty-first) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 50th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! o/
There’s a bunch of things I do, both, technical and non-technical. Here are the things I did this month:
Uploads
ruby-delayed-job (4.1.9-1~bpo11+1) - Backport to bullseye.
ruby-delayed-job-active-record (4.1.6-3~bpo11+1) - Backport to bullseye.
ruby-global...
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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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