Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppAnnoy 0.0.21 on CRAN: Upstream Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/07/02#rcppannoy_0.0.21
July 2, 2023, 11:41 PM
Another minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.20, of RcppAnnoy
has arrived on CRAN.
RcppAnnoy
is the Rcpp-based R integration of
the nifty Annoy library
by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and
lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate
nearest neighbours—originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery
algorithm.
This release mainly updates the included copy of Annoy to version 1.7.3 which
now provides a C++ namespace in the header API. So I sent a pa...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: The bestest sine function, redux
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-07-01-16-32_the_bestest_sine_function_redux.html
July 1, 2023, 2:45 PM
A small followup to the last post:
Sreepathi Pai pointed out that Z3 isn't the fastest solver when it comes to
floats; CVC5 is faster
but cannot optimize. However, OptiMathSAT,
while non-free, detronizes Z3 on this problem; the minimization time goes
down from eight hours to five minutes! (Pai also pointed to
sat-smt.codes, if you want to read 650+ pages
about SAT/SMT techniques.)
I discovered that the desired range is not [0,16384) but [0,16384];
that is, you need to include 16384. This makes...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: New Achievement Unlocked: Bugfix Patch into Stable Release Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/07/01#vm_bugfix_in_stable
July 1, 2023, 2:14 PM
Last weekend was the bi-annual time to roll the main machine and
server to the current Ubuntu release, now at 23.04. It must now have
been fifteen or so years that I have used Ubuntu for my desktop / server
(for “reasons” I may write about another time). And of course it all
passed swimmingly as usual.
[ And a small aside, if I may. Among all these upgrades, one of my
favourite piece of tech trivia that may well be too little known remains
the dedication of the PostgreSQL maintainers install...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: The smallest Pride contribution
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-07-01-15-47_the_smallest_pride_contribution.html
July 1, 2023, 2:00 PM
Happy Pride! In lieu of doing something actually useful for the case,
here is a patch
to make screen show the Pride flag emoji correctly.
I hadn't counted on screen literally being from 1987, though. In K&R C!
This patch is for all the LBGT+ users needing Unicode 15.0 support in
the screens running on their SVR4 PDP-11s....
--------------------
Bastian Venthur: dotenv-cli update
https://venthur.de/2023-07-01-dotenv-cli-update.html
July 1, 2023, 1:00 PM
Thanks to Nicholas Guriev,
dotenv-cli now uses exec instead of popen to create the new process on
POSIX systems.
As a refresher, dotenv-cli is a package that
provides the dotenv command. dotenv reads the .env file from the current
directory, puts the contents in the environment variables, and executes the
given command with the extra environment variables set.
dotenv comes in handy if you follow the 12 factor app
methodology or just need to run a program locally with specific environment
variabl...
--------------------
Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 - um breve relato
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-brasilia-2023-um-breve-relato/
July 1, 2023, 11:00 AM
No período de 25 a 27 de maio, Brasília foi palco da
MiniDebConf 2023. Esse encontro, composto
por diversas atividades como palestras, oficinas, sprints,
BSP (Bug Squashing Party), assinatura de chaves,
eventos sociais e hacking, teve como principal objetivo reunir a comunidade e
celebrar o maior projeto de Software Livre do mundo: o
Debian.
A MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 foi um sucesso graças à participação de todas e
todos, independentemente do nível de conhecimento sobre o Debian. Valor...
--------------------
Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 - a brief report
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-brasilia-2023-a-brief-report/
July 1, 2023, 11:00 AM
From May 25th to 27th, Brasília hosted the
MiniDebConf 2023. This gathering, composed
of various activities such as talks, workshops, sprints, BSP (Bug Squashing
Party), key signing, social events, and hacking, aimed to bring the community
together and celebrate the world's largest Free Software project: Debian.
The MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 was a success thanks to the participation of
everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about Debian. We valued the
presence of both beginners who ...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: New month.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Jul-1.html.en#2023-Jul-1-11:50:53
July 1, 2023, 2:50 AM
New month. It's been 15 years since I joined the current company. That's a long time.
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities June 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/07/01/floss-activities/
July 1, 2023, 12:33 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
thermal_daemon:
fix thermal_monitor build,
make power group configurable,
cleanups
trurl:
cleanups
yt-dlp:
improve acast extractor
duck:
add indicator
dpkg:
avoid shell
Debian BTS usertags:
fix release/port usertags
Debian QA services:
more debugging,
update hardcoding
(1
2)
Debian package uploads:
foxtrotgps,
sptag
(1
2 3)
Debian wiki pages:
BookwormGdalPerl,
ChrootOnAndroid,
DebianKernel...
--------------------
Abhijith PA: Running Debian on my phone
https://abhijithpa.me/2023/Running-Debian-on-my-phone/
June 30, 2023, 5:53 PM
You might have already read my blog titled ‘Running PostmarketOS on my
phone’. After running pmOS on phone, my mind kept talking “run
Debian”. So I started preparing for that.
At the moment no straight way tool exist in Debian like
postmarketOS’s pmbootstrap. Well I can compile what is already available,
do debootstrap rootfs. But I don’t know how to build the final image
that can be flashed from recovery.
One crooked idea I had is, extract the pmOS image, find the packages
a...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links June 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/30/links-june-2023/
June 30, 2023, 9:31 AM
Tablet Magazine has an interesting article about Jewish men who fought in the military for Nazi Germany [1]. I’m surprised that they didn’t frag their colleagues.
Dropbox has an insightful interview with a lawyer about the future of machine learning in the legal profession [2]. This seems like it could give real benefits to society in giving legal assistance to more people and giving less uncertainty about the result of court cases. It could also find unclear laws for legislators who want to...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Motherboard battery, Framework, VR headsets, Steam
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/06/30/motherboard-battery-framework-vr-headsets-steam/
June 30, 2023, 3:32 AM
Motherboard Battery
You know you have become too old when you get stumped and the solution is simple and fixed by the vendor. About a week back, I was getting CPU Fan Error. It’s a 6 year old desktop so I figured that the fan or the ball bearings on the fan must have worn out. I opened up the cabinet and I could see both the on cpu fan was working coolly as well as the side fan was working without an issue. So I couldn’t figure out what was the issue. I had updated the BIOS/UEFI number of...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Finding the BESTEST sine function for Nintendo 64
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-06-29-23-16_finding_the_bestest_sine_function_for_nintendo_64.html
June 29, 2023, 10:16 PM
YouTube gave me the video “Finding the BEST sine function for Nintendo 64”
yesterday, and while I thought the title was very intriguing, I came away
a bit disappointed; the video is hardly about the specifics of Nintendo 64
at all, and the author mostly spends time comparing straight-up LUTs with
some hand-made splines under a proxy metric (no real comparative benchmarks, hardly any
numerics).
I have no idea what the optimal solution is, but it got me thinking: How good
can we get with the ...
--------------------
C.J. Collier: Converting a windows install to a libvirt VM
https://wp.c9h.org/cj/?p=1952
June 29, 2023, 5:41 PM
Reduce the size of your c: partition to the smallest it can be and then turn off windows with the understanding that you will never boot this system on the iron ever again.
Boot into a netinst installer image (no GUI). hold alt and press left arrow a few times until you get to a prompt to press enter. Press enter.
In this example /dev/sda is your windows disk which contains the c: partition
and /dev/disk/by-id/usb0 is the USB-3 attached SATA controller that you have your SSD attached to (please ...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Using signal-cli to cancel your Signal account
https://anarc.at/blog/2023-06-28-using-signal-cli-to-unregister/
June 29, 2023, 4:23 AM
For obscure reasons, I have found
myself with a phone number registered with Signal but without any
device associated with it.
This is the I lost my phone section in Signal support, which
rather unhelpfully tell you that, literally:
Until you have access to your phone number, there is nothing that
can be done with Signal.
To be fair, I guess that sort of makes sense: Signal relies heavily on
phone numbers for identity. It's how you register to the service and
how you recover after losing your...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Semiosis
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-9137-6.html
June 29, 2023, 3:17 AM
Review: Semiosis, by Sue Burke

Series:
Semiosis #1


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
February 2018


ISBN:
0-7653-9137-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
333

Semiosis is a first-contact science fiction novel and the first
half of a duology. It was Sue Burke's first novel.
In the 2060s, with the Earth plagued by environmental issues, a group of
utopians decided to found a colony on another planet. Their goal is to
live in har...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Translation State
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-29024-6.html
June 28, 2023, 4:04 AM
Review: Translation State, by Ann Leckie

Publisher:
Orbit


Copyright:
June 2023


ISBN:
0-316-29024-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
354

Translation State is a science fiction novel set in the same
universe as the Imperial Radch series and
Provenance. It is not truly a sequel of
any of those books, but as with Provenance, it has significant
spoilers for the conclusion of Ancillary
Mercy. Provenance takes place earlier, but it's plot...
--------------------
Daniel Lange: Xfce4 opening links in Chromium despite Firefox having been set as the default browser
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/184-Xfce4-opening-links-in-Chromium-despite-Firefox-having-been-set-as-the-default-browser.html
June 27, 2023, 1:55 PM
Installing a laptop with the shiny new Debian Bookworm release finds a few interesting things broken that I probably had fixed in the past already on the old laptop.
One, that was increadibly unintuitive to fix, was lots of applications (like xfce4-terminal or Telegram) opening links in Chromium despite Firefox being set as the preferred webbrowser everywhere.
update-alternatives --config x-www-browser was pointing at Firefox already, of course.
The Xfce4 preferred application from settings wa...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Running a ChatGPT Type System
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/27/running-a-chatgpt-type-system/
June 27, 2023, 1:43 PM
Alpaca
I’ve just done some experiments running ChatGPT type programs. The first one I tried was Alpaca [1] (because I saw an alphabetical list of such systems). Here’s the 4GB data file [2]. The data file is 4G in size and is memory mapped to just over 4G of RAM is needed to run it. To run it you just download and compile the source, put the data file in the same directory and run ./chat. I run it with the Bubblewrap container via the following command line:
exec bwrap --ro-bind $(pwd) $(pwd...
--------------------
Wouter Verhelst: The future of the eID on RHEL
https://grep.be/blog//en/work/The_future_of_the_eID_on_RHEL/
June 27, 2023, 12:08 PM
Since before I got involved in the eID back in
2014, we have
provided official packages of the eID for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Since RHEL itself requires a license, we did this, first, by using
buildbot and
mock
on a Fedora VM to set up a CentOS chroot in
which to build the RPM package. Later this was migrated to using GitLab
CI and to using
docker rather than VMs, in an effort to save
some resources. Even later still, when Red Hat made CentOS no longer be
a downstream of RHEL, we migrated fro...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.32 on CRAN: CRC32C and AES Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/06/26#digest_0.6.32
June 27, 2023, 12:48 AM
Release 0.6.32 of the digest package
arrived at CRAN this morning,
and will be uploaded to Debian as
well.
digest
creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5,
sha-1, sha-256, sha-512,
crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64,
murmur32, spookyhash, blake3, and
crc32c algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language
objects. It is a mature and widely-used (with 58.3 million downloads
just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks
may involve caching of objects for whi...
--------------------
Matt Brown: Designing a PCBA friendly CO2 monitor
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/06/27/designing-a-pcba-friendly-co2-monitor/
June 27, 2023, 12:05 AM
co2mon.nz currently uses monitors based on Oliver Seiler’s open source design which I am personally building. This post describes my exploration of how to achieve production of a CO2 monitor that could enable the growth of co2mon.nz.
Goals
Primarily I want to design a CO2 monitor which allows the majority of the production process to be outsourced. In particular, the PCB should be able to be assembled in an automated fashion (PCBA).
As a secondary goal, I’d like to improve the aesthetics of ...
--------------------
Lukas Märdian: Netplan 0.106.1 stable release
https://blog.slyon.de/2023/06/26/netplan-0-106-1-stable-release/
June 26, 2023, 12:30 PM
We are happy to announce that Netplan 0.106.1 is available for download on Ubuntu Mantic Minotaur and Debian testing.
This release includes some improvements in our documentation and CI infrastructure and a number of bug fixes.
What’s new in Netplan 0.106.1?
Documentation
New Netplan tutorial. A tutorial for beginners on how to get started with Netplan was included in our main documentation. It’s intended to help newcomers to get familiar with Netplan and guide the reader throug...
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Jonathan McDowell: Figuring out the right card for foreign currency transactions
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/06/foreign-currency-debit-cards.html
June 25, 2023, 5:28 PM
While travel these days is much reduced I still end up in Dublin regularly enough (though less so now I’m not working directly with folk there), and have the occasional US trip. Given that I live and work in the UK, and thus get paid in GBP (£), this leads to the question of what to do about USD ($) and EUR (€) transaction. USD turns out to be easy; I still have a US account from when I lived there and keeping it active has, so far, not proved to be a problem.
EUR is tricker. In an ideal w...
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Vasudev Kamath: Migrating my domain from copyninja.info to copyninja.in
https://copyninja.in/blog/migrating_domain.html
June 25, 2023, 10:43 AM
After holding the domain copyninja.info for almost 15 years, I finally let it
expire and bought a new domain, copyninja.in. With this move, I also bid
goodbye to my VPS, which I had been using for over 12 years on DigitalOcean.
This particular VPS was initially set up with Debian Wheezy (7) and had been
upgraded over the years to successive Debian versions and finally was running
Debian Bullseye (11).
The main reason for the move was that the .info domain was becoming more
expensive every year, ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Wee Free Men
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-001238-2.html
June 25, 2023, 3:14 AM
Review: The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #30


Publisher:
HarperTempest


Copyright:
2003


Printing:
2006


ISBN:
0-06-001238-2


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
375

The Wee Free Men is the 30th Discworld novel but the first Tiffany
Aching book and doesn't rely on prior knowledge of Discworld, although the
witches from previous books do appear. You could start here, although I
think the...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: Simple REPL for CP/M, in Z80 assembly
https://blog.steve.fi/simple_repl_for_cp_m__in_z80_assembly.html
June 24, 2023, 4:45 AM
So my previous post documented a couple of simple "scripting languages" for small computers, allowing basic operations in a compact/terse fashion.
I mentioned that I might be tempted to write something similar for CP/M, in Z80 assembly, and the result is here:
https://github.com/skx/z80-cpm-scripting-interpreter
To sum up it allows running programs like this:
0m 16k{rP _ _}
C3 03 EA 00 00 C3 06 DC 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Numbers automatically get saved to the A-register, the accumulator....
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Russ Allbery: Review: Rose/House
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-64524-034-7.html
June 24, 2023, 3:53 AM
Review: Rose/House, by Arkady Martine

Publisher:
Subterranean Press


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-64524-034-7


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
109

Arkady Martine is the author of the wonderful Teixcalaan duology, a political space opera. Rose/House is a
standalone science fiction novella in an entirely different subgenre.
Basit Deniau was a legendary architect whose trademark was infusing his
houses with artificial intelligences. A ho...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 243 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-243-released/
June 23, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 243. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Drop Jenkins build reference in README.rst.
[ Ed Maste ]
* Update FreeBSD package names
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Improve the documentation on to produce that binary blob that in the arsc
comparator.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Steve Kemp: Simple toy languages
https://blog.steve.fi/simple_toy_languages.html
June 22, 2023, 1:00 PM
Recently I was looking around the internet and looking for something to do with some ESP8266 devices, which I've been neglecting over recent years.
When I was on paternity-leave, five years ago, I decided I wanted a new hobby for my "down" time. I had two obvious choices a) developing applications for mobiles, or b) working with "hardware". I chose the latter.
By accident I came across a couple of simple scripting languages, FORTH-esque. Sample usage looks something like this (which obvio...
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Russell Coker: Cheap Peripherals for Work
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/22/cheap-peripherals-work/
June 22, 2023, 9:56 AM
A problem with a lot of the purchase of peripherals is that they don’t match the needs of the users and often get thrown away long before they wear out.
At many companies when a new employee starts they are given a laptop (expensive corporate asset), a cheap headset for video calls, and optionally a keyboard and mouse for people who don’t like the laptop keyboard and/or touchpad.
When an employee leaves the company their laptop can be assigned to someone else if it isn’t too old. Headsets ...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Furious Heaven
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-86701-0.html
June 22, 2023, 3:35 AM
Review: Furious Heaven, by Kate Elliott

Series:
Sun Chronicles #2


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-250-86701-0


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
725

Furious Heaven is the middle book of a trilogy and a direct sequel
to Unconquerable Sun. Don't start here.
I also had some trouble remembering what happened in the previous book
(grumble recaps mutter), and there are a lot of threads, so I would try to
minimize the ti...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: New Keyboard, Who This?
https://veronneau.org/new-keyboard-who-this.html
June 21, 2023, 4:15 PM
My old Thinkpad X220 has been slowly dying1 and as much as it makes me
sad, it is also showing its age in terms of computational power. As such, I've
pre-ordered a Framework 13 (the AMD version) and plan to retire my X220 when I
get it.
One thing I will miss from that laptop is the keyboard. At work, I dock it (on
the amazing Thinkpad dock), which lets me use the keyboard while working on a
larger monitor.
I could probably replicate this setup with the Framework, but I'm not a fan of
trackpads. ...
--------------------
Vasudev Kamath: Notes: Experimenting with ZRAM and Memory Over commit
https://copyninja.in/blog/zram_memory_overcommit.html
June 20, 2023, 5:25 AM
Introduction
The ZRAM module in the Linux kernel creates a memory-backed block device that
stores its content in a compressed format. It offers users the choice of
compression algorithms such as lz4, zstd, or lzo. These algorithms differ in
compression ratio and speed, with zstd providing the best compression but being
slower, while lz4 offers higher speed but lower compression.
Using ZRAM as Swap
One interesting use case for ZRAM is utilizing it as swap space in the system.
There are two util...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.4.1.0 on CRAN: New Upstream Bugfix
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/06/19#rcpparmadillo_0.12.4.1.0
June 19, 2023, 2:05 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) 1079 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 29.6 million
tim...
--------------------
Daniel Lange: Linux kernel USB errors -71 and -110
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/183-Linux-kernel-USB-errors-71-and-110.html
June 19, 2023, 11:00 AM
After an upgrade of my PC's mainboard BIOS the boot would take a minute or more to complete and sometimes the lightdm login screen would sit there but not accept keyboard input for another minute or so. Then the keyboard got enabled and I could log in normally. Everything worked fine after that bootup struggle completed. This was fully reproducible and persisted across reboots. Weird.
The kernel dmesg log showed entries that looked suspicious:
Googleing these error -110 and error -71 is a bi...
--------------------
C.J. Collier: First taste of Debian 12
https://wp.c9h.org/cj/?p=1949
June 19, 2023, 4:49 AM
As some of you may know, the Debian project released v12, bookworm to stable on the 10th of this month. I haven’t had a reason to try it yet, but I’m downloading it now. My first thought is that it’s much larger than I expected. The normal sized version used to fit on a CD-ROM disk, so around 650MB. The netinst has until now been even smaller, with the most recent versions being about 256MB if I recall correctly. The netinst, now with proprietary firmware, weighs in over 700MB:
2023-0...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: spdl 0.0.5 on CRAN: Small Extension
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/06/18#spdl_0.0.5
June 18, 2023, 4:11 PM
Another quick update to the still somewhat new package spdl is now om CRAN, and will go to Debian soon
too. The key focus of spdl is to offer the
exact same interface to logging from both R and C++ by relying
on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog
package. Usage examples are shown on the RcppSpdlog docs
page.
This release add support for the wrappers init() and
log() wrapping the existing setup() function
but requiring only the level argument. This requires version 0.0.13 of
RcppSpdlog
which was released t...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Solo V2: nice but flawed
https://veronneau.org/solo-v2-nice-but-flawed.html
June 18, 2023, 4:00 AM
EDIT: One of my 2 keys has died. There are what seems like golden bubbles
under the epoxy, over one of the chips and those were not there before. I've
emailed SoloKeys and I'm waiting for a reply, but for now, I've stopped using
the Solo V2 altogether :(
I recently received the two Solo V2 hardware tokens I ordered as part of their
crowdfunding campaign, back in March 2022. It did take them longer than
advertised to ship me the tokens, but that's hardly unexpected from such
small-scale, crowdfun...
--------------------
Bastian Venthur: Blag 2.0 released
https://venthur.de/2023-06-17-blag.html
June 17, 2023, 2:00 PM
A few days ago, I released a major update on blag, my blog-aware
static-site generator, which introduces a few backwards-incompatible changes
and many improvements over the old version.
Good-looking default theme
The old bare-bones default theme has been replaced with a good-looking one,
based on the one used on this blog:
It comes with a light- and dark theme that switches automatically based on the
browser setting, as well as fitting light- and dark syntax highlighting themes
for code blocks....
--------------------
John Goerzen: Using dar for Data Archiving
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10527-using-dar-for-data-archiving
June 17, 2023, 1:16 AM
This is the third post in a series about data archiving to removable media (optical discs and hard drives). In the first, I explained the difference between backing up and archiving, established goals for the project, and said I’d evaluate git-annex and dar. The second post evaluated git-annex, and now it’s time to look at dar. The series will conclude with a post comparing git-annex with dar.
What is dar?
I could open with the same thing I did with git-annex, just changing the name of th...
--------------------
Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Qt 6 in Debian bullseye, take 2
https://perezmeyer.com.ar/blog/2023/06/16/qt6-in-debian-bullseye-take-2/
June 16, 2023, 1:45 PM
Bookworm has been released and Bullseye is now old-stable. Non the less today I took the time to update the Qt 6 backports so they are as close as Bookworm as possible. Except security fixes are needed these ought to be the latest uploads of Qt 6 to bullseye-backports.
Hope you enjoyed them, and thanks again The Qt Company and ICS for making this possible....
--------------------
Russell Coker: BOINC and Idle Users
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/16/boinc-idle-users/
June 16, 2023, 1:37 PM
The BOINC distributed computing client in Debian (Bookworm and previous releases) can check the idle time via the X11 protocol and run GPU jobs when the interactive user is idle, so the user gets GPU power for graphics when they need it and when it’s idle BOINC uses it. This doesn’t work for Wayland and unfortunately no-one has written a Wayland equivalent of xprintidle (which shows the number of milliseconds that the X11 session has been idle in milliseconds.
In the Debian bug system there ...
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John Goerzen: Using git-annex for Data Archiving
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10516-using-git-annex-for-data-archiving
June 16, 2023, 4:59 AM
In my recent post about data archiving to removable media, I laid out the difference between backing up and archiving, and also said I’d evaluate git-annex and dar. This post evaluates git-annex. The next will look at dar, and then I’ll make a comparison post.
What is git-annex?
git-annex is a fantastic and versatile program that does… well, it’s one of those things that can do so much that it’s a bit hard to describe. Its homepage says:
git-annex allows managing large files with g...
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Valhalla's Things: Shawl Calculations
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/drafts/shawl_calculations/index.html
June 16, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on June 16, 2023



I’ve just realized that I’m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I’m knitting, so I’ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one.
This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows.
It’s a top-down crescent, with 6 increases every ...
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Valhalla's Things: Shawl Calculations
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/06/16-shawl_calculations/index.html
June 16, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on June 16, 2023



Update 2023-06-17: I had missed an N in the formulas, they have been updated, and since I was editing this I’ve added the haskell bit.
I’ve just realized that I’m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I’m knitting, so I’ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one.
This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I wei...
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Shirish Agarwal: Ayisha, Manju Warrier, Debutsav, Books
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/06/16/ayisha-manju-warrier-debutsav-books/
June 15, 2023, 6:37 PM
Ayisha
After a long time I saw a movie that I enjoyed wholeheartedly. And it unexpectedly touched my heart. The name of the movie is Ayisha. The first frame of the movie itself sets the pace where we see Ayisha (Manju Warrier) who decides to help out a gang as lot of women were being hassled. So she agrees to hoodwink cops and help launder some money. Then she is shown to work as a maid for an elite Arab family. To portray a Muslim character in these polarized times really shows guts especia...
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Thomas Lange: 20.000 customized images created by the FAI.me build service
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-20000/
June 15, 2023, 5:21 PM
The counter of the FAI.me build service has reached 20.000. This
counter was added shortly after the service was started in
November 2017. Since then, this service has built more than 21.000
installation images and more than 1300 cloud disk images.
In the last few month we had averaged 100 requests per week.
Some statistics which settings are popular:
Language/keyboard layout selected








12000
us


4000
...
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Jonathan Dowland: containers as first-class network citizens
https://jmtd.net/log/podman_network/
June 15, 2023, 2:11 PM
I've moved to having containers be first-class citizens on my home network, so
any local machine (laptop, phone,tablet) can communicate directly with them all,
but they're not (by default) exposed to the wider Internet. Here's why, and how.
After I moved containers from docker to Podman and
systemd, it became much more convenient to run web apps on
my home server, but the default approach to networking
(each container gets an address on a private network between the host server
and containers) ...
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Jonathan Carter: CLUG Talk: Running Debian on a 100Gbps router
https://jonathancarter.org/2023/06/14/clug-talk-running-debian-on-a-100gbps-router/
June 14, 2023, 4:41 PM
Last night I attended the first local Linux User Group talk since before the pandemic (possibly even… long before the pandemic!)
Topic: How and why Atomic Access runs Debian on a 100Gbps router
Speaker: Joe Botha
This is the first time CLUG used Woodstock Brewery as a venue. It’s great, because now we can have snacks and beer during the talks :)
Joe has worked in the internet space for quite some time, and co-founded companies like Teraco, Frogfoot, Amobia, Octotel and Atomic ...
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Russell Coker: Do Not Use …
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/15/do-not-use/
June 14, 2023, 2:25 PM
When I connect my Desklab USB-C monitor [1] (which has been vastly underused for the last 3 years) into a Linux system the display type is listed as “DO NOT USE – RTK“.
One of the more informative discussions of this was on Linux Mint forums [2] which revealed that it’s a mapping for an code that shouldn’t be used. So it’s not saying “don’t use this monitor” it’s saying “don’t use this code”. So the Desklab people when they implemented a display with an RTK chipset shou...
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Sven Hoexter: htop on stage in the theatre
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/misc_htop_in_the_theatre/
June 14, 2023, 9:28 AM
Always amusing to see some more or less famous
open source tools on stage or in movies. Lately
we watched THE ME
(german only) which is mixing live playing of actors and pre
recorded video material. In one of the early video sequences a
fictional console interface is displayed, claiming to be running
on a Macbook, and htop
is used to look for a suspicious process.
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2023 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2023-05/
June 14, 2023, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In May, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
Anton Gladky
did 6.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
Bastien Roucariès
did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h f...
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Matt Brown: Ventilation Monitoring Market Research
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/06/14/ventilation-monitoring-market-research/
June 13, 2023, 11:49 PM
Over the last month I’ve performed some market research to better understand the potential for co2mon.nz and to help me decide whether the product I’ve built has a fit with the market or not. The key conclusions I’ve drawn from this work are:
Air quality is acknowledged as important, but monitoring it is not an urgent or pressing problem for most people.
Most of the value is seen in the hardware rather than the software service.
Keep reading to hear more about the results that lead to th...
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Bits from Debian: Registration and the Call for Proposals for DebConf23 are now open!
https://bits.debian.org/2023/06/debconf23-registation-opens.html
June 12, 2023, 4:17 PM
For DebConf23, we're pleased to announce opening of registration and call for proposal. Following is the info text -
Registration and the Call for Proposals for DebConf23 are now open. The 24th edition of the Debian annual conference will be held from September 10th to September 17th, 2023, in Infopark, Kochi, India. The main conference will be preceded by DebCamp, which will take place from September 3rd to September 9th, 2023.
The registration form can be accessed by creating an account on th...
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Matthew Palmer: Private Key Redaction: Redux
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2023/06/12/private-key-redaction-redux.html
June 12, 2023, 12:00 AM
[Note: the original version of this post named the author of the referenced blog post, and the tone of my writing could be construed to be mocking or otherwise belittling them.
While that was not my intention, I recognise that was a possible interpretation, and I have revised this post to remove identifying information and try to neutralise the tone.
On the other hand, I have kept the identifying details of the domain involved, as there are entirely legitimate security concerns that result from ...
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Michael Prokop: What to expect from Debian/bookworm #newinbookworm
https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2023/06/11/what-to-expect-from-debian-bookworm-newinbookworm/
June 11, 2023, 9:50 AM
Debian v12 with codename bookworm was released as new stable release on 10th of June 2023. Similar to what we had with #newinbullseye and previous releases, now it’s time for #newinbookworm!
I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bookworm. As usual with major upgrades, there are some things to be aware of, and hereby I’m starting my public notes on bookworm that might be worth also for other folks. My focus is primarily on server systems and looking at thi...
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Thomas Lange: New FAI ISO images for bookworm available and FAI Live ISO
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/fai-cd-bookworm/
June 11, 2023, 9:30 AM
After Debian 12 aka bookworm was released yesterday, I've also created
new FAI ISO images using Debian 12.
The defaut ISO (large) uses FAI 6.0.3, kernel 6.1 and can install the
XFCE and GNOME desktop without internet connection, since all needed
packages are included into the ISO. Additional you can install Ubuntu
22.04 or Rocky Linux 9 with this FAI ISO. During these installations,
the packages will be downloade via network.
There's also the variant FAI ISO UBUNTU, which includes all Ubuntu
pa...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: What did I learn from OpenSnitch this summer?
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html
June 11, 2023, 6:30 AM
With yesterdays
release of Debian
12 Bookworm, I am happy to know the
the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch is available for a wider audience.
I have been running it for a few weeks now, and have been surprised
about some of the programs connecting to the Internet. Some programs
are obviously calling out from my machine, like the NTP network based
clock adjusting system and Tor to reach other Tor clients, but others
were more dubious. For example, the KDE Window manager try to look u...
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Bits from Debian: Debian 12 "bookworm" has been released!
https://bits.debian.org/2023/06/bookworm-released.html
June 10, 2023, 9:30 PM
We're happy to announce the release of Debian 12, codenamed bookworm!
Want to install it?
Choose your favourite installation media
and read the installation manual.
You can also use an official cloud image directly on your cloud provider,
or try Debian prior to installing it using our "live" images.
Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade?
You can easily upgrade from your current Debian 11 "bullseye" installation;
please read the release notes.
Do you want to celebrate the relea...
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