Dirk Eddelbuettel: x13binary 1.1.60 on CRAN: Upstream Update, Updated Build
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/22#x13binary_1.1.60
January 22, 2024, 11:12 PM
The x13binary team
is thrilled to share the availability of Release 1.1.60-1 of the x13binary
package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program
by the US Census Bureau which arrived on CRAN earlier today.
This release brings the package up to speed with the most current
release by the Census Bureau. More importantly, we finally made good on
an old promise to ourselves and now install the binary by compiling from
its Fortran sources! No more pre-made binaries. This required some work
by Kirill, Micha...
--------------------
Chris Lamb: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE ‘Best Paper’ award
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/ieee-best-paper-award
January 22, 2024, 5:11 PM
IEEE Software recently announced that a paper that I co-authored with Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli has recently been awarded their ‘Best Paper’ award:
Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains, the abstract reads as follows:
Although it is possible to increase confidence in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by reviewing its source code, trusting code is not the same as trusting its executable counterparts. These are typically built and distributed by thi...
--------------------
Paul Tagliamonte: Writing a simulator to check phased array beamforming 🌀
https://k3xec.com/simulating-phased-arrays/
January 22, 2024, 3:11 PM
Interested in future updates? Follow me on mastodon at
@paul@soylent.green. Posts about
hz.tools will be tagged
#hztools.
If you're on the Fediverse, I'd very much appreciate boosts on
my toot!
While working on hz.tools, I started to move my beamforming
code from 2-D (meaning, beamforming to some specific angle on the X-Y plane for
waves on the X-Y plane) to 3-D. I’ll have more to say about that once I get
around to publishing the code as soon as I’m sure it’s not completely wrong,
but ...
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Russell Coker: Storage Trends 2024
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/22/storage-trends-2024/
January 22, 2024, 12:57 PM
It has been less than a year since my last post about storage trends [1] and enough has changed to make it worth writing again. My previous analysis was that for <2TB only SSD made sense, for 4TB SSD made sense for business use while hard drives were still a good option for home use, and for 8TB+ hard drives were clearly the best choice for most uses.
I will start by looking at MSY prices, they aren't the cheapest (you can get cheaper online) but they are competitive and they make it easy to...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.22 on CRAN: Updated Windows Support!
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/21#rprotobuf_0.4.22
January 22, 2024, 3:41 AM
A new maintenance release 0.4.22 of RProtoBuf
arrived on CRAN earlier today.
RProtoBuf
provides R with bindings for the
Google Protocol Buffers
(“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and
released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a
language and operating-system agnostic protocol.
This release matches the recent 0.4.21
release which enabled use of the package with newer ProtoBuf releases. Tomas
has been updating the Windows / rtools side of things,...
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Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf BH 2024 - patrocínio e financiamento coletivo
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-bh-2024-patrocinio-e-financimento-coletivo/
January 21, 2024, 11:00 AM
Já está rolando a
inscrição de participante e a
chamada de atividades
para a MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024, que acontecerá de 27 a 30 de abril
no Campus Pampulha da UFMG.
Este ano estamos ofertando
bolsas de alimentação, hospedagem e passagens
para contribuidores(as) ativos(as) do Projeto Debian.
Patrocínio:
Para a realização da MiniDebConf, estamos buscando
patrocínio financeiro
de empresas e entidades. Então se você trabalha em uma empresa/entidade (ou
conhece alguém que tra...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: Ruffle helps bring back my family history
https://gwolf.org/2024/01/ruffle-helps-bring-back-my-family-history.html
January 20, 2024, 6:17 PM
Probably a trait of my family’s origins as migrants from East Europe, probably
part of the collective trauma of jews throughout the world… or probably
because that’s just who I turned out to be, I hold in high regard the
preservation of memory of my family’s photos, movies and such items. And it’s a
trait shared by many people in my familiar group.
Shortly after my grandmother died 24 years ago, my mother did a large, loving
work of digitalization and restoration of my grandparent’s...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: A deep learning technique for intrusion detection system using a recurrent neural networks based framework
https://gwolf.org/2024/01/a-deep-learning-technique-for-intrusion-detection-system-using-a-recurrent-neural-networks-based-framework.html
January 20, 2024, 5:42 PM
So let’s assume you already know and understand that artificial intelligence’s main building blocks are perceptrons, that is, mathematical models of neurons. And you know that, while a single perceptron is too limited to get “interesting” information from, very interesting structures–neural networks–can be built with them. You also understand that neural networks can be “trained” with large datasets, and you can get them to become quite efficient and accurate classifiers for data...
--------------------
Niels Thykier: Making debputy: Writing declarative parsing logic
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/making-debputy-writing-declarative-parsing-logic.html
January 20, 2024, 5:10 PM
In this blog post, I will cover how debputy parses its manifest and the
conceptual improvements I did to make parsing of the manifest easier.
All instructions to debputy are provided via the debian/debputy.manifest file and
said manifest is written in the YAML format. After the YAML parser has read the
basic file structure, debputy does another pass over the data to extract the
information from the basic structure. As an example, the following YAML file:
manifest-version: "0.1"
installations:
...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Rebuild search with trust
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-20-rebuild-search-with-trust.html
January 20, 2024, 11:10 AM
Posted on January 20, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, life, search, decentralization

Finally there is a thing people can agree on:
2023-08-28, OSNews: The end of the Googleverse
2023-07-28, Cory Doctorow: Microincentives and Enshittification
2023-10-03, Cory Doctorow: Google’s enshittification memos
2024-01-15, Tim Bray: Mourning Google
Apparently, Google Search is not good anymore. And I’m not the only one thinking about decentralization to fix it:
Honey I federat...
--------------------
Thomas Koch: Using nix package manager in Debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-16-using-nix-package-manager-in-debian.html
January 20, 2024, 11:10 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...
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Thomas Koch: Chromium gtk-filechooser preview size
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-09-chromium-gtk-filechooser-preview-size.html
January 20, 2024, 11:10 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...
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Thomas Koch: Good things come ... state folder
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-02-good-things-state-folder.html
January 20, 2024, 11:10 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...
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Thomas Koch: Know your tools - simple backup with rsync
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-06-09-know-rsync.html
January 20, 2024, 11:10 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
...
--------------------
François Marier: Proper Multicast DNS Handling with NetworkManager and systemd-resolved
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/proper-multicast-dns-handling-network-manager-systemd-resolved/
January 20, 2024, 1:10 AM
Using NetworkManager and systemd-resolved together in Debian
bookworm does not work out of the box. The first sign of trouble was these constant
messages in my logs:
avahi-daemon[pid]: Host name conflict, retrying with hostname-2
Then I realized that CUPS printer discovery didn't work: my network
printer could not be found. Since this discovery now relies on Multicast DNS,
it would make sense that both problems are related to an incompatibility
between NetworkManager and Avahi.
What didn't w...
--------------------
Russell Coker: 2.5Gbit Ethernet
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/19/2-5gbit-ethernet/
January 19, 2024, 12:46 PM
I just decided to upgrade the core of my home network from 1Gbit to 2.5Gbit. I didn’t really need to do this, it was only about 5 years ago that I upgrade from 100Mbit to 1Gbit. but it’s cheap and seemed interesting.
I decided to do it because a 2.5Gbit switch was listed as cheap on Ozbargain Computing [1], that was $40.94 delivered. If you are in Australia and like computers then Ozbargain is a site worth polling, every day there’s interesting things at low prices. The seller of the switc...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 254 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-254-released/
January 19, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 254. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Reflow some code according to black.
[ Seth Michael Larson ]
* Add support for comparing the 'eXtensible ARchive' (.XAR/.PKG) file format.
[ Vagrant Cascadian ]
* Add external tool on GNU Guix for 7z.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Russell Coker: LicheePi 4A (RISC-V) First Look
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/18/licheepi-4a-risc-v-first-look/
January 18, 2024, 12:04 PM
I Just bought a LicheePi 4A RISC-V embedded computer (like a RaspberryPi but with a RISC-V CPU) for $322.68 from Aliexpress (the official site for buying LicheePi devices). Here is the Sipheed web page about it and their other recent offerings [1]. I got the version with 16G of RAM and 128G of storage, I probably don’t need that much storage (I can use NFS or USB) but 16G of RAM is good for VMs. Here is the Wiki about this board [2].
Configuration
When you get one of these devices you should m...
--------------------
Colin Watson: Task management
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/task-management.html
January 17, 2024, 1:28 PM
Now that I’m freelancing, I need to
actually track my time, which is something I’ve had the luxury of not having
to do before. That meant something of a rethink of the way I’ve been
keeping track of my to-do list. Up to now that was a combination of things
like the bug lists for the projects I’m working on at the moment, whatever
task tracking system Canonical was using at the moment (Jira when I left),
and a giant flat text file in which I recorded logbook-style notes of what
I’d do...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Reading hack
https://jmtd.net/log/reading_hack/
January 16, 2024, 3:44 PM
My to-read shelf
This year, with respect to my ever-growing reading backlog, I'm going to try
something new: when I acquire a new book, I'm going to try to read at least a
few pages of it immediately. My theory is this will help me to have a better
idea of what to expect when I come to pick the next book to start, later on. A
few pages may not be very representative of a full book (In "How to read a
Novel: A User's Guide
John Sullivan suggests reading 69 pages before giving up on a book), b...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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 ...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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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