Jonathan Dowland: Two reissued Coil LPs
https://jmtd.net/log/coil/2lps/
January 16, 2024, 11:08 AM
Happy 2024!
DAIS have continued their programme of posthumous Coil remasters and re-issues.
Constant Shallowness Leads To
Evil
was remastered by Josh Bonati in 2021 and re-released in 2022 in a dizzying
array of different packaging variants. The original releases in 2000 had barely
any artwork, and given that void I think Nathaniel Young has done a great job
of creating something compelling.
A limited number of the original re-issue have special lenticular covers, although
these were n...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Using nix package manager in Debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-16-using-nix-package-manager-in-debian.html
January 16, 2024, 10:27 AM
Posted on January 16, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, nix, life

The nix package manager is available in Debian since May 2020. Why would one use it in Debian?
learn about nix
install software that might not be available in Debian
install software without root access
declare software necessary for a user’s environment inside $HOME/.config
Especially the last point nagged me every time I set up a new Debian installation. My emacs configuration and my Desktop setup expe...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Chromium gkt-filechooser preview size
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-09-chromium-gtk-filechooser-preview-size.html
January 16, 2024, 10:27 AM
Posted on January 9, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, life

I wanted to report this issue in chromiums issue tracker, but it gave me:
“Something went wrong, please try again later.”
Ok, then at least let me reply to this askubuntu question. But my attempt to signup with my launchpad account gave me:
“Launchpad Login Failed. Please try logging in again.”
I refrain from commenting on this to not violate some code of conduct.
So this is what I wanted to write:
G...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Good things come ... state folder
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-02-good-things-state-folder.html
January 16, 2024, 10:27 AM
Posted on January 2, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, life

Just a little while ago (10 years) I proposed the addition of a state folder to the XDG basedir specification and expanded the article XDGBaseDirectorySpecification in the Debian wiki. Recently I learned, that version 0.8 (from May 2021) of the spec finally includes a state folder.
Granted, I wasn’t the first to have this idea (2009), nor the one who actually made it happen.
Now, please go ahead and use it! Tha...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Know your tools - simple backup with rsync
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-06-09-know-rsync.html
January 16, 2024, 10:27 AM
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
...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Missing memegen
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-05-01-missing-memegen.html
January 16, 2024, 10:27 AM
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...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Making Money
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-233499-9.html
January 16, 2024, 4:05 AM
Review: Making Money, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #36


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
October 2007


Printing:
November 2014


ISBN:
0-06-233499-9


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
473

Making Money is the 36th Discworld novel, the second Moist von
Lipwig book, and a direct sequel to Going
Postal. You could start the series with Going Postal, but I
would not start here.
The post office is running ...
--------------------
Matthew Palmer: Pwned Certificates on the Fediverse
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/01/16/pwned-certificates-on-the-fediverse.html
January 15, 2024, 9:45 PM
As well as the collection and distribution of compromised keys, the pwnedkeys project also matches those pwned keys against issued SSL certificates.
I’m excited to announce that, as of the beginning of 2024, all matched certificates are now being published on the Fediverse, thanks to the botsin.space Mastodon server.
Want to know which sites are susceptible to interception and interference, in (near-)real time?
Do you have a burning desire to know who is issuing certificates to people that po...
--------------------
Colin Watson: OpenUK New Year’s Honours
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/openuk-new-years-honours.html
January 15, 2024, 4:15 PM
Apparently I got an honour from OpenUK.
There are a bunch of people I know on that list. Chris Lamb and Mark Brown
are familiar names from Debian. Colin King and
Jonathan Riddell are people I know from past work in
Ubuntu. I’ve admired David MacIver’s work on
Hypothesis and Richard Hughes’ work on
firmware updates from afar. And there are a bunch of
other excellent projects represented there:
OpenStreetMap,
Textualize, and my alma mater of
Cambridge to name but a few.
My friend Stuar...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Library of Broken Worlds
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-338-29064-9.html
January 15, 2024, 4:42 AM
Review: The Library of Broken Worlds, by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Publisher:
Scholastic Press


Copyright:
June 2023


ISBN:
1-338-29064-9


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
446

The Library of Broken Worlds is a young-adult far-future science
fantasy. So far as I can tell, it's stand-alone, although more on that
later in the review.
Freida is the adopted daughter of Nadi, the Head Librarian, and her
greatest wish is to become a librarian her...
--------------------
Uwe Kleine-König: PGP Keysigning on FOSDEM'24
https://blog.kleine-koenig.org/ukl/pgp-keysigning-on-fosdem24.html
January 14, 2024, 8:08 PM
I'm going to FOSDEM'24. Assuming to meet Debian and
Kernel folks there, this should be a good opportunity to do PGP keysigning.
If you also go there and you're interested in keysigning: Send me your key via
email to fosdem24-keysigning@kleine-koenig.org. I'll collect the keys, create a
paper list for a keysigning party and send it back to you in the week before
FOSDEM. The list will only be made available to other participants.
Then maybe wear a "keysigning" badge (or a crepe tape with that capt...
--------------------
Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf BH 2024 - abertura de inscrição e chamada de atividades
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-bh-2024-abertura-de-inscricao-e-chamada-de-atividades/
January 14, 2024, 11:00 AM
Está aberta a inscrição de participantes e a
chamada de atividades
para a
MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 e para o
FLISOL - Festival Latino-americano de Instalação de Software Livre.
Veja abaixo algumas informações importantes:
Data e local da MiniDebConf e do FLISOL
A MiniDebConf acontecerá de 27 a 30 de abril no
Campus Pampulha da UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
No dia 27 (sábado) também realizaremos uma edição do
FLISOL - Festival Latino-americano de Instalação ...
--------------------
Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: LXD/Incus backend bug, /usr-merge updates, gcc-for-host, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-12-2023/
January 13, 2024, 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.
LXD/Incus backend bug in autopkgtest by Stefano Rivera
While working on the Python 3.12 transition, Stefano repeatedly ran into
a bug in autopkgtest when using LXD (or in
the future Incus), that caused it to hang when running cython’s multi-ho...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Mini Books
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/01/13-mini_books/index.html
January 13, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on January 13, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:bookbinding




In 2022 I read a post on the fediverse by somebody who mentioned that
they had bought on a whim a cute tiny book years ago, and that it
had been a companion through hard times. Right now I can’t find the
post, but it was pretty aaaaawwww.
At the same time, I had discovered Coptic binding, and I wanted to do
some exercise to let my hands learn it, but apparently there is a lim...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.16 on CRAN: New Upstream
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/12#rcppspdlog_0.0.16
January 12, 2024, 1:21 PM
Version 0.0.16 of RcppSpdlog is now
on CRAN and will be uploaded to
Debian. RcppSpdlog
bundles spdlog, a
wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and
whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn
more at the nice package
documention site.
This releases updates the code to the version 1.13 of spdlog which was release
this morning.
The NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in
RcppSpdlog version 0.0.16 (...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RDieHarder 0.2.6 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/12#rdieharder_0.2.6
January 12, 2024, 1:06 PM
An new version 0.2.6 of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder
(based on the DieHarder
suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David
Bauer and myself along with other contributors) is now on CRAN (and to the day year after
the previous release).
This release contains changes to printf format strings
to avoid new warnings on Windows. No functional changes have been
made.
Thanks to CRANberries, you
can also look at the most recent diff
to the previous release.
If ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.34 on CRAN: Maintanance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/11#digest_0.6.34
January 12, 2024, 12:19 AM
Release 0.6.34 of the digest package
arrived at CRAN today and has
also been uploaded to Debian
already.
digest
creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects. It can use a number
different hashing algorithms (md5, sha-1,
sha-256, sha-512, crc32,
xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32,
spookyhash, blake3, and crc32c),
and ebales easy comparison of (potentially large and nested) R language
objects as it relies on the native serialization in R. It is a mature
and widely-used package (with 63.8 million download...
--------------------
Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2023 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2023-12/
January 12, 2024, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In December, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
Adrian Bunk
did 16.0h (out of 26.25h assigned and 8.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.0h to the next month.
Bastien Roucariès
did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned a...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-12/
January 11, 2024, 7:41 PM
Welcome to the December 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).
Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE Software “Best Paper” award
In February 2022, ...
--------------------
Matthias Klumpp: Wayland really breaks things… Just for now?
https://blog.tenstral.net/2024/01/wayland-really-breaks-things-just-for-now.html
January 11, 2024, 4:24 PM
This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?“, but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months1.
Some facts
Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland2 – this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects. From reading Wayland protocols ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH 1.84.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/10#bh_1.84.0-0
January 10, 2024, 10:41 PM
Boost is a very large and
comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming
language, containing well over one hundred individual libraries. The BH package provides a
sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking
required) use by R. It is fairly
widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud
mirrors) show over 35.7 million package downloads.
Version 1.84.0 of Boost was released in December following the
regular Boost release schedul...
--------------------
Colin Watson: Going freelance
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/going-freelance.html
January 10, 2024, 9:50 AM
I’ve mentioned this in a
couple of
other
places, but I realized I never got round to posting about it on my own blog
rather than on other people’s services. How remiss of me.
Anyway: after much soul-searching, I decided a few months ago that it was
time for me to move on from Canonical and the
Launchpad team there. Nearly 20 years is a long
time to spend at any company, and although there are a bunch of people I’ll
miss, Launchpad is in a reasonable state where I can let other people ha...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: Trisquel on arm64: Ampere Altra
https://blog.josefsson.org/2024/01/10/trisquel-on-arm64-ampere-altra/
January 10, 2024, 9:26 AM
Having had success running Trisquel on the ppc64 Talos II, I felt ready to get an arm64 machine running Trisquel. I have a Ampere Altra Developer Platform from ADLINK, which is a fairly powerful desktop machine. While there were some issues during installation, I’m happy to say the machine is stable and everything appears to work fine.
ISO images for non-amd64 platforms are unfortunately still hidden from the main Trisquel download area, so you will have to use the following pro...
--------------------
Russell Coker: SAS vs SATA and Recovery
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/10/sas-sata-recovery/
January 10, 2024, 6:30 AM
SAS and SATA are electrically compatible to a degree that allows connecting a SATA storage device to a SAS controller. The SAS controller understands the SATA protocol so this works. A SAS device can’t be physically connected to a SATA controller and if you did manage to connect it then it wouldn’t work.
Some SAS RAID controllers don’t permit mixing SAS and SATA devices in the same array, this is a software issue and could be changed. I know that the PERC controllers used by Dell (at least...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.12 on CRAN: New Maintenance / Update Release
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/09#rcpp_1.0.12
January 10, 2024, 12:54 AM
The Rcpp Core Team is once again thrilled to announce a new release
1.0.12 of the Rcpp package. It
arrived on CRAN early today,
and has since been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS
builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in
different Linux distribution–and of course at r2u should catch up
tomorrow. The release was uploaded yesterday, and run its reverse
dependencies overnight. Rcpp always
gets flagged nomatter what because the grandfathered
.Call(symbol) b...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: IOS-XE HTTPS certificates from Let's Encrypt
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-01-09-20-01_ios_xe_https_certificates_from_lets_encrypt.html
January 9, 2024, 7:01 PM
Newer Cisco wireless controllers run IOS-XE instead of AireOS, but they still
don't speak ACME (which would let them integrate with Let's Encrypt);
they support only
SCEP,
which I guess is basically Microsoft-and-Cisco only? Something like that.
But it is possible to get it to work nevertheless, and get proper
and free certificates for the web administration interface. Unfortunately,
I don't think you can use HTTP authentication (since you can't drop arbitrary
files into webui:), but assuming y...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: 2023 — A Musical Retrospective
https://veronneau.org/2023-a-musical-retrospective.html
January 9, 2024, 5:00 AM
I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing
that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on,
this will probably be an annual thing :)
Albums
In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection — nearly 2 albums every three
weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them.
I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at
libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers
pointing e...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: Last year on this blog
https://anarc.at/blog/2024-01-08-one-more-year/
January 8, 2024, 8:58 PM
So this blog is now celebrating its 21st birthday (or 20 if you count
from zero, or 18 if you want to be pedantic), and I figured I would do
this yearly thing of reviewing how that went.
Number of posts
2022 was the official 20th
anniversary in any case, and
that was one of my best years on record, with 46 posts, surpassed only
by the noisy 2005 (62) and matching 2006 (46). 2023, in comparison,
was underwhelming: a feeble 11 posts! What happened!
Well, I was busy with other things, mostly awa...
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in December 2023
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2024/01/my-debian-activities-in-december-2023/
January 8, 2024, 6:40 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 235 and rejected 13 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 249. I also handled lots of RM bugs and almost stopped the increase in packages this month :-). Please be aware, if you don’t want your package to be removed, take care of it and keep it in good shape!
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-fourteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
During my allocated time I u...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Faithless
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-54283-0.html
January 8, 2024, 3:47 AM
Review: The Faithless, by C.L. Clark

Series:
Magic of the Lost #2


Publisher:
Orbit


Copyright:
March 2023


ISBN:
0-316-54283-0


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
527

The Faithless is the second book in a political fantasy series that
seems likely to be a trilogy. It is a direct sequel to
The Unbroken, which you should read
first. As usual, Orbit made it unnecessarily hard to get re-immersed in
the world by refusing to pro...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2023
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2024/01/a-year-in-free-software.html
January 7, 2024, 6:34 PM
This year was hard from a personal and work point of view, which impacted the amount of Free Software bits I ended up doing - even when I had the time I often wasn’t in the right head space to make progress on things. However writing this annual recap up has been a useful exercise, as I achieved more than I realised. For previous years see 2019, 2020, 2021 + 2022.
Conferences
The only Free Software related conference I made it to this year was DebConf23 in Kochi, India. Changes with project...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: A Corset or Two
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/01/08-a_corset_or_two/index.html
January 7, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on January 7, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, period:victorian, FreeSoftWear




CW for body size change mentions
I needed a corset, badly.
Years ago I had a chance to have my measurements taken by a former
professional corset maker and then a lesson in how to draft an underbust
corset, and that lead to me learning how nice wearing a well-fitted
corset feels.
Later I tried to extend that pattern up for a midbust corset, with
succes...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Blog updates
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/01/06-blog_updates/index.html
January 6, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on January 6, 2024


Tags: madeof:bits, meta



After just a tiny1 delay I’ve finally added support for tags to this
blog.
In the next few days I may go back and add / change tags to the older
posts, or I may not, I’ll decide.
Also, I still need to render a tag cloud somewhere; maybe it will
happen soon, maybe it will take another year. :D
I hope I’ve also succesfully worked around the bug in Friendica where
the src for images got del...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Random Sashiko + Crazy Quilt Pocket
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/01/05-sashiko_crazy_quilt_pocket/index.html
January 5, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on January 5, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms




Lately I’ve seen people on the internet talking about victorian crazy
quilting. Years ago I had watched a Numberphile video about Hitomezashi
Stitch Patterns based on numbers, words or randomness.
Few weeks ago I had cut some fabric piece out of an old pair of jeans
and I had a lot of scraps that were too small to do anything useful on
their own.
It easy to see where this can go, right?
I cut a...
--------------------
Aigars Mahinovs: Figuring out finances part 5
http://aigarius.com/blog/2024/01/04/figuring-out-finances-part-5/
January 4, 2024, 8:46 PM
At the end of the last part of this,
we got a Home Assistant OS installation that contains in itself a Firefly III instance and that
contains all the current financial information. They are communicating and calculating predictions
for me.
The only part that I was not 100% happy with was accounting of cash transactions. You see payments
in cash are mostly made away from computer and sometimes even in areas without a mobile Internet
connection. And all Firefly III apps that I tried failed at the ...
--------------------
Michael Ablassmeier: Migrating a system to Hetzner cloud using REAR and kexec
https://abbbi.github.io//hetzner/
January 4, 2024, 12:00 AM
I needed to migrate an existing system to an Hetzner cloud VPS. While it is
possible to attach KVM consoles and custom ISO images to dedicated servers, i
didn’t find any way to do so with regular cloud instances.
For system migrations i usually use REAR,
which has never failed me. (and also has saved my ass during recovery multiple
times). It’s an awesome utility!
It’s possible to do this using the Hetzner recovery console too, but using REAR
is very convenient here, because it handles t...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Live Migrating from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10622-live-migrating-from-raspberry-pi-os-bullseye-to-debian-bookworm
January 3, 2024, 11:33 PM
I’ve been getting annoyed with Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) for years now. It’s a fork of Debian, but manages to omit some of the most useful things. So I’ve decided to migrate all of my Pis to run pure Debian. These are my reasons:
Raspberry Pi OS has, for years now, specified that there is no upgrade path. That is, to get to a newer major release, it’s a reinstall. While I have sometimes worked around this, for a device that is frequently installed in hard-to-reach locations, this ...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Consider Security First
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10620-consider-security-first
January 3, 2024, 12:38 AM
I write this in the context of my decision to ditch Raspberry Pi OS and move everything I possibly can, including my Raspberry Pi devices, to Debian. I will write about that later.
But for now, I wanted to comment on something I think is often overlooked and misunderstood by people considering distributions or operating systems: the huge importance of getting security updates in an automated and easy way.
Background
Let’s assume that these statements are true, which I think are well-supported...
--------------------
Jacob Adams: Fixing My Shell
https://tookmund.com/2024/01/fixing-my-shell
January 3, 2024, 12:00 AM
For an embarassingly long time, my shell has unnecessarily tried to
initialize a console font in every kind of interactive terminal.
This leaves the following error message in my terminal:
Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console.
It even shows up twice when running tmux!
Clearly I’ve done something horrible to my configuration,
and now I’ve got to clean it up.
How does Shell Initialization Work?
The precise files a shell reads at start-up is somewhat complex, and define...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Dealing with weird ELF libraries
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/69070.html
January 2, 2024, 7:04 PM
Libraries are collections of code that are intended to be usable by multiple consumers (if you're interested in the etymology, watch this video). In the old days we had what we now refer to as "static" libraries, collections of code that existed on disk but which would be copied into newly compiled binaries. We've moved beyond that, thankfully, and now make use of what we call "dynamic" or "shared" libraries - instead of the code being copied into the binary, a reference to the library function ...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Crescent Shawl
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/01/02-crescent_shawl/index.html
January 2, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on January 2, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms




One of the knitting projects I’m working on is a big bottom-up
triangular shawl in less-than-fingering weight yarn (NM 1/15): it feels
like a cloud should by all rights feel, and I have good expectations out
of it, but it’s taking forever and a day.
And then one day last spring I started thinking in the general direction
of top-down shawls, and decided I couldn’t wait until I had finished th...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: 2023 Book Reading in Review
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2024-01/001.html
January 1, 2024, 10:06 PM
In 2023, I finished and reviewed 53 books, continuing a trend of
year-over-year increases and of reading the most books since 2012 (the
last year I averaged five books a month). Reviewing continued to be
uneven, with a significant slump in the summer and smaller slumps in
February and November, and a big clump of reviews finished in October in
addition to my normal year-end reading and reviewing vacation.
The unevenness this year was mostly due to finishing books and not writing
reviews imme...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: Welcome out of prison, Mickey, hope you find some freedom!
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_out_of_prison__Mickey__hope_you_find_some_freedom_.html
January 1, 2024, 8:00 PM
Today, the animation figure Mickey Mouse finally was released from
the corporate copyright prison, as the 1928 movie
Steamboat
Willie entered the public domain in USA. This movie was the first
public appearance of Mickey Mouse. Sadly the figure is still on
probation, thanks to trademark laws and a the Disney corporations
powerful pack of lawyers, as described in the 2017 article
in "How
Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain" from Priceonomics. On the
positive side, the primary driver for repe...
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Tim Retout: Prevent DOM-XSS with Trusted Types - a smarter DevSecOps approach
https://retout.co.uk/2024/01/01/trusted-types/
January 1, 2024, 12:46 PM
It can be incredibly easy for a frontend developer to accidentally
write a client-side cross-site-scripting (DOM-XSS) security issue, and
yet these are hard for security teams to detect. Vulnerability
scanners are slow, and suffer from false positives. Can smarter
collaboration between development, operations and security teams
provide a way to eliminate these problems altogether?
Google claims that Trusted
Types has all but eliminated
DOM-XSS exploits on those of their sites which have implem...
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Junichi Uekawa: Happy new year.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2024-Jan-1.html.en#2024-Jan-1-17:05:23
January 1, 2024, 8:05 AM
Happy new year. 2023 saw my first foreign travels since COVID lockdown
happened, and that was fun. I felt I had more than enough travel for me.
Work life was challenging due to the lay offs and economic environment
we are operating in, needs a different mode of operation.
Family life is facing a different phase as kids grow, the eldest is
approaching the teens....
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities December 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2024/01/01/floss-activities/
January 1, 2024, 4:31 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
swh-web:
direct replies better,
strip whitespace
Debian screenshots:
deleted
freecell-solver-bin (not a graphical program)
Debian BTS usertags:
fix ports/archive usertags
Debian wiki pages:
DebianAlternatives,
LoongArch,
Mobian/Devices,
Software that can't be packaged,
Statistics,
Teams/Cinnamon
FOSSjobs wiki pages:
Resources
Issues
Feature in
UDD
Conffile removal needed in
neomutt
d...
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Chris Lamb: Favourites of 2023
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/favourites-of-2023
December 31, 2023, 4:59 PM
This post should have marked the beginning of my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies I read and watched in 2023.
However, due to coming down with a nasty bout of flu recently and other sundry commitments, I wasn't able to undertake writing the necessary four or five blog posts… In lieu of this, however, I will simply present my (unordered and unadorned) highlights for now. Do get in touch if this (or any of my previous posts) have spurred you into picking something up yourself…...
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Iustin Pop: Happy New Year!
https://k1024.org/posts/2023/2023-12-31-happy-new-year%21/
December 31, 2023, 2:40 PM
Happy New Year everyone!
Goodbye 2023: you were a… difficult year. Along multiple axes. Learned
new things, learned not pleasant things, and mostly failed at becoming
better.
Hello 2024: I’m hoping I can do better in the coming year. We’ll
see. My goal list is quite long, and ambitious. But all plans meet
reality at one point, so who knows where 2024 will end.
In any case - wishing all good people health, wisdom, and a good year.
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Petter Reinholdtsen: VLC bittorrent plugin still going strong, new upload 2.14-4
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/VLC_bittorrent_plugin_still_going_strong__new_upload_2_14_4.html
December 31, 2023, 9:45 AM
The other day I uploaded a new version of
the VLC
bittorrent plugin to Debian, version 2.14-4, to fix a few
packaging issues. This plugin extend VLC allowing it to stream videos
directly from a bittorrent source using both torrent files and magnet
links, as easy as using a HTTP or local file source. I believe such
protocol support is a vital feature in VLC, allowing efficient
streaming from sources such at the 11 million movies in
the Internet Archive. Bittorrent is
one of the most efficient ...
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Guido Günther: Phosh 2023 in Retrospect
https://phosh.mobi/posts/phosh-2023-in-retrospect/
December 31, 2023, 12:00 AM
As in 2022 I took another look back at what changed in Phosh in 2023 and instead of just updating my notes why not share it here. In short: While collecting these bits I became really impressed about the progress we made 🚀:
Some numbers Link to heading We were discussing at this years Phosh Community Get Together at Froscon if we should lengthen the Phosh release cycle a bit but we kept the one release per month schedule to get improvements out to users quickly....
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Riku Voipio: Adguard DNS, or how to reduce ads without apps/extensions
http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2023/12/adguard-dns-or-how-to-reduce-ads.html
December 30, 2023, 3:57 PM
Looking at the options for blocking ads, people usually first look at browser extensions. Google's plan is to disable adblock extensions in 2024. The alternative is usually an app (on phones) or a "VPN" that does filtering for you. All these methods are quite heavyweight, and require installing software on your phone or PC. What is less known, is that you can you DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS for ad blocking.
What is DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS
Since Android 9, Google has provided a sett...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Hound of Justice
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-269938-5.html
December 30, 2023, 3:23 AM
Review: The Hound of Justice, by Claire O'Dell

Series:
Janet Watson Chronicles #2


Publisher:
Harper Voyager


Copyright:
July 2019


ISBN:
0-06-269938-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
325

The Hound of Justice is a near-future thriller novel with Sherlock
Holmes references. It is a direct sequel to A Study in Honor. This series is best read in order.
Janet Watson is in a much better place than she was in the first boo...
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Ulrike Uhlig: How do kids conceive the internet? - part 4
https://the.curlybracket.net/2023/12/30/internet-kids-pt4.html
December 29, 2023, 11:00 PM
Read all parts of the series
Part 1
// Part 2
// Part 3
// Part 4
I’ve been wanting to write this post for over a year, but lacked energy
and time. Before 2023 is coming to an end, I want to close this series
and share some more insights with you and hopefully provide you with a
smile here and there.
For this round of interviews, four more kids around the ages of 8 to 13
were interviewed, 3 of them have a US background—these 3
interviews were done by a friend who recorded these interviews ...
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Simon Josefsson: Validating debian/copyright: licenserecon
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/12/29/validating-debian-copyright-licenserecon/
December 28, 2023, 11:17 PM
Recently I noticed a new tool called licenserecon written by Peter Blackman, and I helped get licenserecon into Debian. The purpose of licenserecon is to reconcile licenses from debian/copyright against the output from licensecheck, a tool written by Jonas Smedegaard. It assumes DEP5 copyright files. You run the tool in a directory that has a debian/ sub-directory, and its output when it notices mismatches (this is for resolv-wrapper):
# sudo apt install licenserecon
jas@kaka:~/dpkg/resolv...
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Antonio Terceiro: Debian CI: 10 years later
https://terceiro.xyz/2023/12/28/debian-ci-10-years-later/
December 28, 2023, 3:00 PM
It was 2013, and I was on a break from work between Christmas and New Year of
2013. I had been working at Linaro for well over a year, on the LAVA
project. I was living and breathing automated testing infrastructure,
mostly for testing low-level components such as kernels and bootloaders, on
real hardware.
At this point I was also a Debian contributor for quite some years, and had
become an official project members two years prior. Most of my involvement was
in the Ruby team, where we were alre...
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David Bremner: Added a derived backend for org export
https://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner//blog/posts/web-stacker2/
December 27, 2023, 7:15 PM
See web-stacker for the background.
yantar92 on #org-mode pointed out that a derived backend would be
a cleaner solution. I had initially thought it was too complicated, but I have to agree the example in the org-mode documentation does
pretty much what I need.
This new approach has the big advantage that the generation of URLs
happens at export time, so it's not possible for the displayed program
code and the version encoded in the URL to get out of sync.
;; derived backend to customize src ...
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Bits from Debian: Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act
https://bits.debian.org/2023/12/debian-statement-cyber-resillience-act.md.html
December 27, 2023, 4:30 PM
Debian Public Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive
The European Union is currently preparing a regulation "on horizontal
cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements" known as the
Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). It is currently in the final "trilogue" phase of
the legislative process. The act includes a set of essential cybersecurity and
vulnerability handling requirements for manufacturers. It will require products
to be accompanied by inf...
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David Bremner: Generating links to a web IDE from org-beamer
https://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner//blog/posts/web-stacker/
December 27, 2023, 4:01 PM
The Emacs part is superceded by a cleaner approach
I the upcoming term I want to use KC Lu's
web based stacker tool.
The key point is that it takes (small) programs encoded as part of the url.
Yesterday I spent some time integrating it into my existing
org-beamer workflow.
In my init.el I have
(defun org-babel-execute:stacker (body params)
(let* ((table '(? ?n ?: ?/ ?? ?# ?[ ?] ?@ ?! ?$ ?& ??
?( ?) ?* ?+ ?, ?= ?%))
(slug (org-link-encode body table))
...
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Sergio Talens-Oliag: GitLab CI/CD Tips: Automatic Versioning Using semantic-release
https://blogops.mixinet.net/posts/gitlab-ci/semantic-release/
December 25, 2023, 11:30 PM
This post describes how I’m using
semantic-release on
gitlab-ci to manage versioning automatically
for different kinds of projects following a simple workflow (a develop branch
where changes are added or merged to test new versions, a temporary
release/#.#.# to generate the release candidate versions and a main branch
where the final versions are published).
What is semantic-releaseIt is a Node.js application designed to manage project
versioning information on Git Repositories using a
Continu...
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John Goerzen: The Grumpy Cricket (And Other Enormous Creatures)
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10618-the-grumpy-cricket-and-other-enormous-creatures
December 25, 2023, 8:23 PM
This Christmas, one of my gifts to my kids was a text adventure (interactive fiction) game for them. Now that they’ve enjoyed it, I’m releasing it under the GPL v3.
As interactive fiction, it’s like an e-book, but the reader is also the player, guiding the exploration of the world.
The Grumpy Cricket is designed to be friendly for a first-time player of interactive fiction. There is no way to lose the game or to die. There is an in-game hint system providing context-sensitive hints anytim...
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