Shirish Agarwal: Three Ancient Civilizations, Tesla, IMU and other things.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/03/29/three-ancient-civilizations-tesla-imu-and-other-things/
March 28, 2023, 10:29 PM
Three Ancient Civilizations
I have been reading books for a long time but somehow I don’t know how or when I realized that there are three medieval civilizations that time and again seem to fascinate the authors, either American or European. The three civilizations that do get mentioned every now and then are Egyptian, Greece and Roman and I have no clue as to why. Another two civilizations closely follow them, Mesopotian and Sumerian Civilizations. Why most of the authors irrespective of g...
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Jonathan Dowland: daily log
https://jmtd.net/log/daily_log/
March 28, 2023, 2:34 PM
I was asked on the Fediverse1 to describe my $dayjob daily
workflow. Blogging about it seemed like a good opportunity to take stock of my
current setup.
The core of my approach is to maintain a daily log, rather like an engineering
Lab Book2. My number one tip for anyone starting a career in Software
Engineering (or for that matter systems administration) is to keep a daily log
of what you intended to do, what you actually did, what you changed, what
changed as a consequence, etcetera. I've alr...
--------------------
Mike Gabriel: UbuntuTouch Focal OTA-1 has been released
https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/143
March 28, 2023, 8:46 AM
Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1
(In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.)
For all the details, please study:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-1-f...
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Matt Brown: Ventilation Monitoring
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/03/28/ventilation-monitoring/
March 28, 2023, 12:44 AM
The importance of clean, fresh indoor air is one of the most tangible takeaways of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to being an effective risk mitigation strategy for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses, clean, fresh air is necessary to enable effective cognitive performance.
Monitoring indoor air quality is relatively easy to do, but traditionally has not been a key focus. I believe air quality monitoring should be accessible for any indoor space, and for highly occupied indoor space...
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kpcyrd: Writing a Linux executable from scratch with x86_64-unknown-none and Rust
https://vulns.xyz/2023/03/linux-executable-from-scratch-with-x86_64-unknown-none-rust/
March 28, 2023, 12:00 AM
I recently mentioned on the internet I did work in this direction and a friend of mine asked me to write a blogpost on this. I didn’t blog for a long time (keeping all the goodness for myself hehe), so here we go. 🦝 To set the scene, let’s assume we want to make an exectuable binary for x86_64 Linux that’s supposed to be extremely portable. It should work on both Debian and Arch Linux. It should work on systems without glibc like Alpine Linux. It should even work in a FROM scratch Docke...
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Vincent Fourmond: QSoas version 3.2 is out
https://vince-debian.blogspot.com/2023/03/qsoas-version-32-is-out.html
March 27, 2023, 4:06 PM
Version 3.2 of QSoas is out ! It is mostly a bug-fix release, fixing the computation mistake found in the eecr-relay wave shape fit, see the correction to our initial article in JACS. We strongly encourage all the users of the eecr-relay wave shape fit to upgrade, and, unfortunately, refit previously fitted data as the results might change. The other wave shape fits are not affected by the issue.
New features
In addition to this important bug fix, new possibilities have been added, including a ...
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Simon Josefsson: OpenPGP master key on Nitrokey Start
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/03/27/openpgp-master-key-on-nitrokey-start/
March 27, 2023, 2:57 PM
I’ve used hardware-backed OpenPGP keys since 2006 when I imported newly generated rsa1024 subkeys to a FSFE Fellowship card. This worked well for several years, and I recall buying more ZeitControl cards for multi-machine usage and backup purposes. As a side note, I recall being unsatisfied with the weak 1024-bit RSA subkeys at the time – my primary key was a somewhat stronger 1280-bit RSA key created back in 2002 — but OpenPGP cards at the time didn’t support more than 1024 bit RSA, a...
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Russell Coker: Strange X11 Grabbing
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/03/27/strange-x11-grabbing/
March 27, 2023, 12:22 PM
A couple of days ago I upgraded my home server from Debian/Bullseye to Debian/Testing (soon to be Bookworm). Since then KDE sessions on that system have had problems of locking the input queue, the mouse can move and mouse-over events work but clicking the mouse or pressing the keyboard does nothing. Various web pages suggested that the xdotool program (in the xdotool package in Debian) can address this. The problem is apparently programs “grabbing” the input and not letting it go.
The comma...
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Jonathan Dowland: Imaging Optical Media, Part 3: Figuring out disc contents
https://jmtd.net/log/imaging_discs/3/
March 27, 2023, 10:30 AM
Too many years ago, I started (but did not finish) a series
of blog posts on the topic of Imaging Optical Media. I was writing it as I
was figuring out the process to use whilst importing my own piles of home-made
CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to a more suitable storage.
Back in 2018 Antoine Beaupré
blogged about being inspired by
my article series to sort out his optical media collection, and wrote up his
notes so far.
This inspired me (in 2018!) to change the approach for writing up what I'd
been doing....
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.18 on CRAN: New and Updated Scripts
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/03/26#littler-0.3.18
March 26, 2023, 1:17 PM
The nineteenth release of littler as a
CRAN package
landed this morning, following in the now seventeen year history (!!) as
a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined
by me a few weeks later.
littler
is the first command-line interface for R as it predates
Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang
scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more
consistently and still starts
faster. It also always loaded the methods package which
Rscript only began to do in recent years.
littler
li...
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Emanuele Rocca: EFI and Secure Boot Notes
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/efi-sb-notes/
March 26, 2023, 5:18 AM
To create a bootable EFI drive to use with QEMU, first make a disk image and
create a vfat filesystem on it.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=boot.img bs=1M count=512
$ sudo mkfs.vfat boot.img
By default, EFI firmwares boot a specific file under /efi/boot/. The name of
such file depends on the architecture: for example, on 64 bit x86 systems it is
bootx64.efi, while on ARM it is bootaa64.efi.
Copy /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi/monolithic/grubx64.efi from package
grub-efi-amd64-bin to /efi/boot/bootx64.ef...
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Gunnar Wolf: Four days to fix a simple configuration bug
https://gwolf.org/2023/03/four-days-to-fix-a-simple-configuration-bug.html
March 25, 2023, 10:31 PM
Phew!
Today, after four days of combing through code I am unfamiliar with, I
was finally able to change my expression.
I’m finally at the part of my PhD work where I am tasked with
implementing the protocol I claim improves from the current
situation. I wrote a script to deploy the infrastructure I need for
the experiment, and was not expecting any issues — I am not (yet)
familiar with the Go language (in which the Hockeypuck key
server is developed), but I have managed to
install it sev...
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Gunnar Wolf: Now that we are talking about kernel building... What about firebuild?
https://gwolf.org/2023/03/now-that-we-are-talking-about-kernel-building-what-about-firebuild.html
March 25, 2023, 6:31 PM
After my last
post,
Bálint (who prompted it with his last
post)
suggested I should do a hybrid test of his tests and my extremes. He
suggested I should build the Linux kernel using my Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB
model), but using the Firebuild build
accelerator.
Before going any further: I must make clear that while Firebuild is
freely redistributable, it is not made available under a free
license. It
is free for personal use or commercial trial, but otherwise requires
licensing.
Bálint managed to b...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Thief of Time
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-230739-8.html
March 25, 2023, 4:31 AM
Review: Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #26


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
May 2001


Printing:
August 2014


ISBN:
0-06-230739-8


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
420

Thief of Time is the 26th Discworld novel and the last Death novel,
although he still appears in subsequent books. It's the third book
starring Susan Sto Helit, so I don't recommend starting here.
Mort is the best starting...
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Matthew Garrett: We need better support for SSH host certificates
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/65874.html
March 24, 2023, 5:12 PM
Github accidentally committed their SSH RSA private key to a repository, and now a bunch of people's infrastructure is broken because it needs to be updated to trust the new key. This is obviously bad, but what's frustrating is that there's no inherent need for it to be - almost all the technological components needed to both reduce the initial risk and to make the transition seamless already exist.But first, let's talk about what actually happened here. You're probably used to the idea of TLS c...
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Kentaro Hayashi: My New Gear...UHK
https://kenhys.hatenablog.jp/entry/2023/03/23/204343
March 23, 2023, 11:43 AM
Recently, I'm coming to feel the burden on my shoulder, it makes me so annoyed.
As of that, I've considered replacing the hardware (keyboard).
I've searched for a new gear candidate to resolve the above issue with the following conditions:
MUST: Needs trackpoint (because I'm using ThinkPad Keyboard with TrackPoint so long, I'm afraid to
work without it)
MUST: Separate keyboard (split keyboard) to be ergonomic to reduce the burden on my shoulder.
SHOULD: Upstream publishes products in a form ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSMC 0.2.7 on CRAN: Extensions and Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/03/22#rcppsmc_0.2.7
March 23, 2023, 1:40 AM
A new release 0.2.7 of our RcppSMC package arrived at
CRAN earlier today. It contains
several extensions added by team member (and former GSoC student) Ilya Zarubin since the last
release. We were a little slow to release those—but “one of those CRAN
emails” forced our hand for a release now. The updated ‘uninitialized
variable’ messages in clang++-16 have found a fan in Brian
Ripley, and so he sent us a note. And as the issue was trivially
reproducible with clang++-15 here too I had i...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2023)
https://bits.debian.org/2023/03/new-developers-2023-02.html
March 22, 2023, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Sahil Dhiman (sahil)
Jakub Ružička (jru)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Josenilson Ferreira da Silva
Ileana Dumitrescu
Douglas Kosovic
Israel Galadima
Timothy Pearson
Blake Lee
Vasyl Gello
Joachim Zobel
Amin Bandali
Congratulations!...
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Daniel Lange: Install "kept back" updates on Ubuntu
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/182-Install-kept-back-updates-on-Ubuntu.html
March 22, 2023, 2:20 PM
Canonical has implemented a staged roll-out for some Ubuntu package updates.
I find that rather annoying at times, e.g. when preparing the laptop for traveling.
So for my memory and for the benefit of others:
# disable the phased roll-out feature on this apt upgrade runsudo apt -o "APT::Get::Always-Include-Phased-Updates=true" dist-upgrade
This can - for permanent use - be put into a config file, e.g. Gerrit Heim puts it into /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99-Phased-Updates [German]. Some other optio...
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Michael Prokop: Automatically unlocking a LUKS encrypted root filesystem during boot
https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2023/03/22/automatically-unlocking-a-luks-encrypted-root-filesystem-during-boot/
March 22, 2023, 12:30 PM
Update on 2023-03-23: thanks to Daniel Roschka for mentioning the Mandos and TPM approaches, which might be better alternatives, depending on your options and needs. Peter Palfrader furthermore pointed me towards clevis-initramfs and tang.
A customer of mine runs dedicated servers inside a foreign data-center, remote hands only. In such an environment you might need a disk replacement because you need bigger or faster disks, though also a disk might (start to) fail and you need a replacement. On...
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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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Gunnar Wolf: Impact of parallelism and processor architecture while building a kernel
https://gwolf.org/2023/03/impact-of-parallelism-and-processor-architecture-while-building-a-kernel.html
March 21, 2023, 6:02 PM
Given that Bálint just braggedblogged about how
efficiently he can build a Linux
kernel
(less than 8 seconds, wow! Well, yes, until you read it is the
result of aggressive caching and is achieved only for a second run),
and that a question just popped up today on the Debian ARM mailing
list, «is an ARM computer a good choice? Which
one?»,
I decided to share my results of an experiment I did several months
ago, to graphically show to my students the effects of parallelism,
the artifacts of hy...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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....
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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....
--------------------
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 ...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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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