Aurelien Jarno: Backup server upgraded to Bookworm
https://blog.aurel32.net/backup-server-upgraded-to-bookworm.html
April 12, 2023, 9:07 AM
A few months ago, I switched my backup server to an ODROID-M1
SBC. It uses a RK3568 SoC with a
quad-core Cortex-A55 and AES extensions (useful for disk encryption), and I
added a 2 TB NVME SSD to the M2 slot. It also has a SATA connector, but the
default enclosure does not have space for 2.5" drives. It's not the fastest
SBC, but it runs stable and quite well as a backup server, and it's fanless,
and low-power (less than 2 W idle). The support for the SoC has been added
recently to the Linux k...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Hero
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-050777-2.html
April 12, 2023, 2:29 AM
Review: The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett

Illustrator:
Paul Kidby


Series:
Discworld #27


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
2001, 2002


ISBN:
0-06-050777-2


Format:
Graphic novel


Pages:
176

The Last Hero is the 27th Discworld novel and part of the Rincewind
subseries. This is something of a sequel to Interesting Times and relies heavily on the cast that was built
up in previous books. It's not a good p...
--------------------
Aurelien Jarno: New website, or kind of...
https://blog.aurel32.net/new-website.html
April 11, 2023, 8:29 AM
For over 15 years, I've hardly made any updates to my website, and it remains
low on my priority list. So I made a radical decision to replace it entirely
with my blog. The content of the website has been reduced to just two
additional pages.
But nothing has been lost: nowadays, Wikipedia is a much better platform for
sharing knowledge than random websites. And it happens that they already cover
all that was on my website about
subaquatic diving in French.
They also offer a multitude of resource...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Circe
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-55633-5.html
April 11, 2023, 4:20 AM
Review: Circe, by Madeline Miller

Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company


Copyright:
April 2018


Printing:
2020


ISBN:
0-316-55633-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
421

Circe is the story of the goddess Circe, best known as a minor
character in Homer's Odyssey. Circe was Miller's third book
if you count the short novella Galatea. She wrote it after
Song of Achilles, a reworking of part of the Iliad, but as
with Homer, you...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: Trisquel is 42% Reproducible!
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/10/trisquel-is-42-reproducible/
April 10, 2023, 5:36 PM
The absolute number may not be impressive, but what I hope is at least a useful contribution is that there actually is a number on how much of Trisquel is reproducible. Hopefully this will inspire others to help improve the actual metric.
tl;dr: go to reproduce-trisquel.
When I set about to understand how Trisquel worked, I identified a number of things that would improve my confidence in it. The lowest hanging fruit for me was to manually audit the package archive, and I wrote a tool ca...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: Twenty years
https://gwolf.org/2023/04/twenty-years.html
April 10, 2023, 6:01 AM
Twenty years… A seemingly big, very round number, at least for me.
I can recall several very well-known songs mentioning this
timespan:
«It was twenty years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to
play», sang four youth idols in 1967 for whom said timespan was
not-quite-but-almost their full lifes so far.
«Si las cosas que uno quiere se pudieran alcanzar, tú me quisieras
lo mismo que veinte años atrás» (if what one wants could be
achieved, you would love me the same as twenty ye...
--------------------
Russell Coker: BTRFS Rebuild Time
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/04/10/btrfs-rebuild-time/
April 10, 2023, 5:19 AM
In February I replaced a Dell T320 server with a HP Z640 workstation for a home server/workstation [1]. The T320 has 8*3.5″ drive bays which I had used to put 3*4TB disks in a BTRFS RAID-10 array for 6TB of usable capacity. The Z640 has only 2*3.5″ bays and 4*2.5″ bays, so one option I could have taken was to buy a 4TB 2.5″ SSD and keep the same 3*4TB array as before. Instead I chose to use an 8TB disk I had spare in an array with one of the original 4TB disks and some extra on NVMe devi...
--------------------
Marco d'Itri: Installing Debian 12 on a Banana Pi M5
https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_466
April 9, 2023, 1:47 PM
I recently bought a Banana Pi BPI-M5, which uses the Amlogic S905X3 SoC: these are my notes about installing Debian on it.
While this SoC is supported by the upstream U-Boot it is not supported by the Debian U-Boot package, so debian-installer does not work. Do not be fooled by seeing the DTB file for this exact board being distributed with debian-installer: all DTB files are, and it does not mean that the board is supposed to work.
As I documented in #1033504, the Debian kernels are currently...
--------------------
Evgeni Golov: Running autopkgtest with Docker inside Docker
https://www.die-welt.net/2023/04/running-autopkgtest-with-docker-inside-docker/
April 8, 2023, 5:39 PM
While I am not the biggest fan of Docker, I must admit it has quite some reach across various service providers and can often be seen as an API for running things in isolated environments.
One such service provider is GitHub when it comes to their Actions service.
I have no idea what isolation technology GitHub uses on the outside of Actions, but inside you just get an Ubuntu system and can run whatever you want via Docker as that comes pre-installed and pre-configured. This especially means you...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Storage Trends 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/04/09/storage-trends-2023/
April 8, 2023, 2:46 PM
It’s been 2 years since my last blog post about storage trends [1].
Minimum Storage <=2TB
In 2021 I stated that as MSY had 2TB disks for $72 and 2TB SSD for $245 it was barely worth considering a 2TB disk and anything less than 2TB wasn’t worth considering. Now for 2TB storage from MSY NVMe starts at $129, SATA SSD starts at $143, and hard disks start at $75. I guess that NVMe is slightly cheaper due to some combination of economies of scale for manufacture/sales and having less postage c...
--------------------
Petter Reinholdtsen: rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux - nice free software
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html
April 7, 2023, 9:10 PM
Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency
scanner for my software defined radio. Just for fun I tried to locate
the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all
the frequencies to see what is in use. I've tried to find a useful
program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful
tool. This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I
found a description of
rtlsdr-scanner
over at the Kali site, and was able to track dow...
--------------------
Matthew Palmer: Database Encryption: If It's So Good, Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2023/04/07/queryable-encryption.html
April 7, 2023, 12:00 AM
Just some of the organisations that leaked data in 2022
It seems like just about every day there’s another report of another company getting “hacked” and having its sensitive data (or, worse, the sensitive data of its customers) stolen.
Sometimes, people’s most intimate information gets dumped for the world to see.
Other times it’s “just” used for identity theft, extortion, and other crimes.
In the least worst case, the attacker gets cold feet, but people suffer stress and inconv...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-03/
April 6, 2023, 1:52 PM
Welcome to the March 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 quick recap, the motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no malicious flaws have been introduced during compilation and distributing processes. It does this by ensuring identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether ...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.2.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream Minor
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/04/05#rcpparmadillo_0.12.2.0.0
April 6, 2023, 12:22 AM
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) 1052 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 28.6 million
tim...
--------------------
Michael Ablassmeier: tracking changes between pypi package releases
https://abbbi.github.io//pypidiff/
April 6, 2023, 12:00 AM
I wondered if there is some tracking for differences between packages
published on pypi, something that stores this information in a format
similar to debdiff..
I failed to find something on the web, so created a little utility which
watches the pypi
changelog for new
releaes and fetches the new and old version.
It uses diffoscope to create reports on the published releases and
automatically pushes them to a github repository:
https://github.com/pypi-diff
Is it useful? I dont know, it may be...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Fitting Top and Camisole
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/04/05-fitting_top_and_camisole/index.html
April 5, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on April 5, 2023




For this summer, I’ve just made a nice sleeveless dress, but that doesn’t mean that I’m planning to go around with bare arms like, I don’t know, a peasant or even somebody with no health issues, perish the thought!
Instead, at the end of last season I’ve bought a remnant of white ramie / viscose jersey that is a bit too transparent to be decent when worn on its own, but should still give some protection from the sun without being unc...
--------------------
Adnan Hodzic: “Kubernetes, Resistance is Futile” – KubeCon & KCD 2023 talk
https://foolcontrol.org/?p=4508
April 3, 2023, 2:16 PM
A story to tell As part of my career at ING with my previous team, MLP (Machine Learning Platform). I spent over 2 years leading...
The post “Kubernetes, Resistance is Futile” – KubeCon & KCD 2023 talk appeared first on FoolControl: Phear the penguin....
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Nordic Theory of Everything
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-231656-7.html
April 3, 2023, 2:45 AM
Review: The Nordic Theory of Everything, by Anu Partanen

Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
2016


Printing:
June 2017


ISBN:
0-06-231656-7


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
338

Anu Partanen is a Finnish journalist who immigrated to the United States.
The Nordic Theory of Everything, subtitled In Search of a
Better Life, is an attempt to explain the merits of Finnish approaches to
government and society to a US audience. It was ...
--------------------
Matt Brown: Retrospective: Mar 2023
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/04/03/retrospective-mar-2023/
April 3, 2023, 2:24 AM
The key decision I made mid-March was to commit to pursuing ventilation monitoring as my primary product development focus.
Prior to that decision, I hoped to use my writing plan to drive a breadth-first survey of the opportunities for each of my product ideas before deciding which had the best business potential to focus on first. Two factors changed my mind:
As noted last month, I’m finding the writing process much slower and harder than I expected – the survey across all the ideas may no...
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2023
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2023/04/my-debian-activities-in-march-2023/
April 2, 2023, 10:57 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 78 and rejected 12 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 78.
I still love this calm and peaceful time now within the Debian project, when everybody only cares for RC bugs and NEW does not grow.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. 
This month my all in all workload has been 14h.
During that time I uploaded:
[DLA 3358-1] mpv security update ...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Nearest multiple of a double
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-04-02-10-06_nearest_multiple_of_a_double.html
April 2, 2023, 9:06 AM
This problem came up the other day; given doubles (or floats, for that
matter) a >= 0 and b > 0, find the multiples of b that are closest to a,
in both directions.
I was surprised that I could not find anything about this online;
perhaps I just don't know the right term, but there is usually a
pretty vast and completely inscrutinable literature about anything
related to floating-point, usually ending in some magic incantation
you can just paste in (or 2000 lines of FORTRAN). I didn't real...
--------------------
David Bremner: Installing Debian using the OVH rescue environment
https://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner//blog/posts/rescue-install/
April 2, 2023, 12:34 AM
Problem description(s)
For some of its cheaper dedicated servers, OVH does not provide a KVM
(in the virtual console sense) interface. Sometimes when a virtual
console is provided, it requires a horrible java applet that won't
run on modern systems without a lot of song and dance. Although OVH
provides a few web based ways of installing,
I prefer to use the debian installer image I'm used to and trust, and
I needed some way to debug a broken install.
I have only tested this in the OVH resc...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: April.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Apr-2.html.en#2023-Apr-2-07:49:17
April 1, 2023, 10:49 PM
April. Cherry blossoms are in full. Beautiful weather.
--------------------
Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 - 25 a 27 de maio
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-brasilia-2023-25-a-27-de-maio/
April 1, 2023, 11:00 AM
Nesse ano a MiniDebConf Brasil está de volta! A comunidade brasileira de
usuários(as) e desenvolvedores(as) Debian convida a todos(as) a participarem da
MiniDebConf Brasília 2023 que acontecerá
durante 3 dias na capital federal.
Nos dias 25 e 26 de maio estaremos no Complexo Avançado da Câmara dos Deputados
- LabHacker/CEFOR, promovendo palestras, oficinas e outras atividades. E, no
- dia 27 de maio (sábado), estaremos em um coworking (local a definir) para
- colocar a mão na massa hac...
--------------------
Debian Brasil: Primeira oficina de tradução em 2023 da equipe pt_BR
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/primeira-oficina-de-traducao-em-2023-da-equipe-pt-BR/
April 1, 2023, 10:00 AM
The Brazilian translation team debian-l10n-portuguese
realizou a primeira oficina de 2023
em fevereiro, com ótimos resultados:
A oficina foi direcionada para iniciantes, usando o DDTP/DDTSS.
Dois dias de oficina mão-na-massa via Jitsi.
Nos dias seguintes, continuidade dos trabalho de tradução de forma
independente, com o suporte da equipe.
Quantidade de pessoas inscritos(as): 29
Novos(as) contribuidores(as) no DDPT/DDTSS: 22
Traduções dos(as) novos(as) participantes: 175
Revisões dos(as...
--------------------
Debian Brasil: First 2023 translation workshop from the pt_BR team
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/first-2023-translation-workshop-from-the-pt-BR-team/
April 1, 2023, 10:00 AM
The Brazilian translation team debian-l10n-portuguese
had their first workshop of 2023
in February, with great results:
The workshop was aimed at beginners, working in DDTP/DDTSS.
Two days of a hands-on workshop via Jitsi.
In the following days, translation work continued independently, with team support.
Subscribers: 29
New contributors to DDPT/DDTSS: 22
Translations from new participants: 175
Revisions from new participants : 261
Our focus was to complete the descriptions of the 500 most ...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: rra-c-util 10.4
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2023-03/001.html
April 1, 2023, 3:55 AM
rra-c-util is my library of supporting functions, code, Autoconf macros,
and similar portability and build machinery helpers. This is a very minor
release, made mostly because I haven't done a non-work free software
release in rather too long.
This release adds serial numbers to all of the provided Autoconf macros,
which enables some features in Automake's aclocal tool. It properly fixes
the portable/getnameinfo test that the last release tried to fix (thanks
again to Julien ÉLIE). And it...
--------------------
Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.6.0
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4292
April 1, 2023, 2:17 AM
Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
Get it on github.
These release notes are also available on the git-cinnabar wiki.
What’s new since 0.5.11?
Full rewrite of the Python parts of git-cinnabar in Rust.
Push performance is between twice and 10 times faster than 0.5.x,
depending on scenarios.
Based on git 2.38.0.
git cinnabar fetch now accepts a --tags flag to fetch tags....
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/04/01/floss-activities/
April 1, 2023, 1:31 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
colord:
update link
ArchiveBot:
add
gitweb
ignoreset
gensim:
gitignore generated file,
fix docs build,
update links
duck:
add indicators
(1
2)
Debian QA services:
drop jessie,
convert errors to SQL commands,
handle timeouts
Debian BTS usertags:
fix BSP, porter, rebootstrap, Python 3 tags
Debian package uploads:
purple-discord
(1
2),
sptag
(1
2)
Debian wiki pages:
CrossGrading,
Hardware/Wan...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Things I learnt in March 2023
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/debian/til-2023-03
March 31, 2023, 10:00 PM
str.endswith()
can take a tuple of possible endings instead of a single string
About JACK and Debian
There are 3 JACK implementations: jackd1,
jackd2, pipewire-jack.
jackd1 is mostly superseded in favour of jackd2, and as far as I understand,
can be ignored
pipewire-jack integrates well with pipewire and the rest of the Linux audio
world
jackd2 is the native JACK server. When started it handles the sound card
directly, and will steal it from pipewire. Non-JACK audio applications will...
--------------------
Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snaps! Many new releases, more to come.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-many-new-releases-more-to-come/
March 31, 2023, 5:47 PM
I have been extremely busy the last 2 weeks churning out KDE snaps! All of the have been tested and released on AMD64 and Arm64 architectures. If you run into any problems please file bugs @ http://bugs.kde.org and feel free to assign me. Thanks!
KDE Krita snap
Krita Version 5.1.5
https://apps.kde.org/krita/
KDE Parley snap
Parley Version 22.12.3
https://apps.kde.org/parley/
KDE Kate snap
Kate Version 22.12.3
https://apps.kde.org/kate/
KDE Okular snap
Okular Vers...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 240 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-240-released/
March 31, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 240. This version includes the following changes:
[ Holger Levsen ]
* Update Lintian override info format in debian/source/lintian-overrides.
* Add Lintian overrides for some "very long lines" in test cases.
* Update Lintian overrides for tests being tagged source-is-missing or
prebuilt.
* Add Lintian override for very long lines for debian/tests/control.
* Re-add two Lintian overrides about (well-known) sour...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: Buttering up my storage
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/03/buttering-up-my-storage.html
March 30, 2023, 6:50 PM
(TL;DR: I’ve been trying out btrfs in some places instead of ext4, I’ve hit absolutely zero issues and there are a few features that make me plan to use it more.)
Despite (or perhaps because of) working on storage products for a reasonable chunk of my career I have tended towards a conservative approach to my filesystems. By the time I came to Linux ext2 was well established, the move to ext3 was a logical one (the joys of added journalling for faster recovery after unclean shutdowns) and f...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links March 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/03/30/links-march-2023/
March 30, 2023, 11:09 AM
Interesting paper about a plan for eugenics in dogs with an aim to get human equivalent IQ within 100 generations [1]. It gets a bit silly when the author predicts IQs of 8000+ as there will eventually be limits of what can fit in one head. But the basic concept is good.
Interesting article about what happens inside a proton [2]. This makes some aspects of the Trisolar series and the Dragon’s Egg series seem less implausible.
Insightful article about how crypto-currencies really work [3]. Basi...
--------------------
Shirish Agarwal: Three Ancient Civilizations, Tesla, IMU and other things.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/03/29/three-ancient-civilizations-tesla-imu-and-other-things/
March 28, 2023, 10:29 PM
Three Ancient Civilizations
I have been reading books for a long time but somehow I don’t know how or when I realized that there are three medieval civilizations that time and again seem to fascinate the authors, either American or European. The three civilizations that do get mentioned every now and then are Egyptian, Greece and Roman and I have no clue as to why. Another two civilizations closely follow them, Mesopotian and Sumerian Civilizations. Why most of the authors irrespective of g...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: daily log
https://jmtd.net/log/daily_log/
March 28, 2023, 2:34 PM
I was asked on the Fediverse1 to describe my $dayjob daily
workflow. Blogging about it seemed like a good opportunity to take stock of my
current setup.
The core of my approach is to maintain a daily log, rather like an engineering
Lab Book2. My number one tip for anyone starting a career in Software
Engineering (or for that matter systems administration) is to keep a daily log
of what you intended to do, what you actually did, what you changed, what
changed as a consequence, etcetera. I've alr...
--------------------
Mike Gabriel: UbuntuTouch Focal OTA-1 has been released
https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/143
March 28, 2023, 8:46 AM
Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1
(In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.)
For all the details, please study:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-1-f...
--------------------
Matt Brown: Ventilation Monitoring: Ensuring every space has clean, fresh air
https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/03/28/ventilation-monitoring/
March 28, 2023, 12:44 AM
The importance of clean, fresh indoor air is one of the most tangible takeaways of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to being an effective risk mitigation strategy for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses, clean, fresh air is necessary to enable effective cognitive performance.
Monitoring indoor air quality is relatively easy to do, but traditionally has not been a key focus. I believe air quality monitoring should be accessible for any indoor space, and for highly occupied indoor space...
--------------------
kpcyrd: Writing a Linux executable from scratch with x86_64-unknown-none and Rust
https://vulns.xyz/2023/03/linux-executable-from-scratch-with-x86_64-unknown-none-rust/
March 28, 2023, 12:00 AM
I recently mentioned on the internet I did work in this direction and a friend of mine asked me to write a blogpost on this. I didn’t blog for a long time (keeping all the goodness for myself hehe), so here we go. 🦝 To set the scene, let’s assume we want to make an exectuable binary for x86_64 Linux that’s supposed to be extremely portable. It should work on both Debian and Arch Linux. It should work on systems without glibc like Alpine Linux. It should even work in a FROM scratch Docke...
--------------------
Vincent Fourmond: QSoas version 3.2 is out
https://vince-debian.blogspot.com/2023/03/qsoas-version-32-is-out.html
March 27, 2023, 4:06 PM
Version 3.2 of QSoas is out ! It is mostly a bug-fix release, fixing the computation mistake found in the eecr-relay wave shape fit, see the correction to our initial article in JACS. We strongly encourage all the users of the eecr-relay wave shape fit to upgrade, and, unfortunately, refit previously fitted data as the results might change. The other wave shape fits are not affected by the issue.
New features
In addition to this important bug fix, new possibilities have been added, including a ...
--------------------
Simon Josefsson: OpenPGP master key on Nitrokey Start
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/03/27/openpgp-master-key-on-nitrokey-start/
March 27, 2023, 2:57 PM
I’ve used hardware-backed OpenPGP keys since 2006 when I imported newly generated rsa1024 subkeys to a FSFE Fellowship card. This worked well for several years, and I recall buying more ZeitControl cards for multi-machine usage and backup purposes. As a side note, I recall being unsatisfied with the weak 1024-bit RSA subkeys at the time – my primary key was a somewhat stronger 1280-bit RSA key created back in 2002 — but OpenPGP cards at the time didn’t support more than 1024 bit RSA, a...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Strange X11 Grabbing
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/03/27/strange-x11-grabbing/
March 27, 2023, 12:22 PM
A couple of days ago I upgraded my home server from Debian/Bullseye to Debian/Testing (soon to be Bookworm). Since then KDE sessions on that system have had problems of locking the input queue, the mouse can move and mouse-over events work but clicking the mouse or pressing the keyboard does nothing. Various web pages suggested that the xdotool program (in the xdotool package in Debian) can address this. The problem is apparently programs “grabbing” the input and not letting it go.
The comma...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Imaging Optical Media, Part 3: Figuring out disc contents
https://jmtd.net/log/imaging_discs/3/
March 27, 2023, 10:30 AM
Too many years ago, I started (but did not finish) a series
of blog posts on the topic of Imaging Optical Media. I was writing it as I
was figuring out the process to use whilst importing my own piles of home-made
CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to a more suitable storage.
Back in 2018 Antoine Beaupré
blogged about being inspired by
my article series to sort out his optical media collection, and wrote up his
notes so far.
This inspired me (in 2018!) to change the approach for writing up what I'd
been doing....
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.18 on CRAN: New and Updated Scripts
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/03/26#littler-0.3.18
March 26, 2023, 1:17 PM
The nineteenth release of littler as a
CRAN package
landed this morning, following in the now seventeen year history (!!) as
a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined
by me a few weeks later.
littler
is the first command-line interface for R as it predates
Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang
scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more
consistently and still starts
faster. It also always loaded the methods package which
Rscript only began to do in recent years.
littler
li...
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Emanuele Rocca: EFI and Secure Boot Notes
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/efi-sb-notes/
March 26, 2023, 5:18 AM
To create a bootable EFI drive to use with QEMU, first make a disk image and
create a vfat filesystem on it.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=boot.img bs=1M count=512
$ sudo mkfs.vfat boot.img
By default, EFI firmwares boot a specific file under /efi/boot/. The name of
such file depends on the architecture: for example, on 64 bit x86 systems it is
bootx64.efi, while on ARM it is bootaa64.efi.
Copy /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi/monolithic/grubx64.efi from package
grub-efi-amd64-bin to /efi/boot/bootx64.ef...
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Gunnar Wolf: Four days to fix a simple configuration bug
https://gwolf.org/2023/03/four-days-to-fix-a-simple-configuration-bug.html
March 25, 2023, 10:31 PM
Phew!
Today, after four days of combing through code I am unfamiliar with, I
was finally able to change my expression.
I’m finally at the part of my PhD work where I am tasked with
implementing the protocol I claim improves from the current
situation. I wrote a script to deploy the infrastructure I need for
the experiment, and was not expecting any issues — I am not (yet)
familiar with the Go language (in which the Hockeypuck key
server is developed), but I have managed to
install it sev...
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Gunnar Wolf: Now that we are talking about kernel building... What about firebuild?
https://gwolf.org/2023/03/now-that-we-are-talking-about-kernel-building-what-about-firebuild.html
March 25, 2023, 6:31 PM
After my last
post,
Bálint (who prompted it with his last
post)
suggested I should do a hybrid test of his tests and my extremes. He
suggested I should build the Linux kernel using my Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB
model), but using the Firebuild build
accelerator.
Before going any further: I must make clear that while Firebuild is
freely redistributable, it is not made available under a free
license. It
is free for personal use or commercial trial, but otherwise requires
licensing.
Bálint managed to b...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Thief of Time
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-230739-8.html
March 25, 2023, 4:31 AM
Review: Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #26


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
May 2001


Printing:
August 2014


ISBN:
0-06-230739-8


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
420

Thief of Time is the 26th Discworld novel and the last Death novel,
although he still appears in subsequent books. It's the third book
starring Susan Sto Helit, so I don't recommend starting here.
Mort is the best starting...
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Matthew Garrett: We need better support for SSH host certificates
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/65874.html
March 24, 2023, 5:12 PM
Github accidentally committed their SSH RSA private key to a repository, and now a bunch of people's infrastructure is broken because it needs to be updated to trust the new key. This is obviously bad, but what's frustrating is that there's no inherent need for it to be - almost all the technological components needed to both reduce the initial risk and to make the transition seamless already exist.But first, let's talk about what actually happened here. You're probably used to the idea of TLS c...
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Kentaro Hayashi: My New Gear...UHK
https://kenhys.hatenablog.jp/entry/2023/03/23/204343
March 23, 2023, 11:43 AM
Recently, I'm coming to feel the burden on my shoulder, it makes me so annoyed.
As of that, I've considered replacing the hardware (keyboard).
I've searched for a new gear candidate to resolve the above issue with the following conditions:
MUST: Needs trackpoint (because I'm using ThinkPad Keyboard with TrackPoint so long, I'm afraid to
work without it)
MUST: Separate keyboard (split keyboard) to be ergonomic to reduce the burden on my shoulder.
SHOULD: Upstream publishes products in a form ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSMC 0.2.7 on CRAN: Extensions and Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/03/22#rcppsmc_0.2.7
March 23, 2023, 1:40 AM
A new release 0.2.7 of our RcppSMC package arrived at
CRAN earlier today. It contains
several extensions added by team member (and former GSoC student) Ilya Zarubin since the last
release. We were a little slow to release those—but “one of those CRAN
emails” forced our hand for a release now. The updated ‘uninitialized
variable’ messages in clang++-16 have found a fan in Brian
Ripley, and so he sent us a note. And as the issue was trivially
reproducible with clang++-15 here too I had i...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2023)
https://bits.debian.org/2023/03/new-developers-2023-02.html
March 22, 2023, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Sahil Dhiman (sahil)
Jakub Ružička (jru)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Josenilson Ferreira da Silva
Ileana Dumitrescu
Douglas Kosovic
Israel Galadima
Timothy Pearson
Blake Lee
Vasyl Gello
Joachim Zobel
Amin Bandali
Congratulations!...
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Daniel Lange: Install "kept back" updates on Ubuntu
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/182-Install-kept-back-updates-on-Ubuntu.html
March 22, 2023, 2:20 PM
Canonical has implemented a staged roll-out for some Ubuntu package updates.
I find that rather annoying at times, e.g. when preparing the laptop for traveling.
So for my memory and for the benefit of others:
# disable the phased roll-out feature on this apt upgrade runsudo apt -o "APT::Get::Always-Include-Phased-Updates=true" dist-upgrade
This can - for permanent use - be put into a config file, e.g. Gerrit Heim puts it into /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99-Phased-Updates [German]. Some other optio...
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Michael Prokop: Automatically unlocking a LUKS encrypted root filesystem during boot
https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2023/03/22/automatically-unlocking-a-luks-encrypted-root-filesystem-during-boot/
March 22, 2023, 12:30 PM
Update on 2023-03-23: thanks to Daniel Roschka for mentioning the Mandos and TPM approaches, which might be better alternatives, depending on your options and needs. Peter Palfrader furthermore pointed me towards clevis-initramfs and tang.
A customer of mine runs dedicated servers inside a foreign data-center, remote hands only. In such an environment you might need a disk replacement because you need bigger or faster disks, though also a disk might (start to) fail and you need a replacement. On...
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Shirish Agarwal: Anti-national says the Indian Law Minister.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/03/22/anti-national-says-the-indian-law-minister/
March 22, 2023, 1:11 AM
Anti-national and Anti-India judges – Kiren Rijiju, Law Minister.
For those who can’t see the above poster says the following – ‘A handful of retired Supreme Court judges who are part of ‘Anti-India’ and are trying to make Indian judiciary play role of the Opposition party. – Law Minister Kiren Rijiju.
Now, just to give bit more of a context, the above has happened as the CJI (Chief Justice has not been listening or toeing their line)
The above is a statement given by...
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Daniel Lange: Linux App Summit - Linux applications apparently unable to produce a five page sponsorship brochure
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/181-Linux-App-Summit-Linux-applications-apparently-unable-to-produce-a-five-page-sponsorship-brochure.html
March 21, 2023, 7:15 PM
I've been calling out the Linux foundation for producing their annual report on Macs. And again.
But catching the Linux App(lication) Summit to produce their 5 page sponsorship brochure one Windows with Adobe...
Apparently neither GNOME nor KDE have apps that are sufficient to produce such content. Wtf folks.
P.S.: Just checked the Linux Foundation's 2022 Annual Report titled "Leadership in Security and Innovation" ... Adobe InDesign 18.0 (Macintosh).
Their pdf title looks like this:
Pd...
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Gunnar Wolf: Impact of parallelism and processor architecture while building a kernel
https://gwolf.org/2023/03/impact-of-parallelism-and-processor-architecture-while-building-a-kernel.html
March 21, 2023, 6:02 PM
Given that Bálint just braggedblogged about how
efficiently he can build a Linux
kernel
(less than 8 seconds, wow! Well, yes, until you read it is the
result of aggressive caching and is achieved only for a second run),
and that a question just popped up today on the Debian ARM mailing
list, «is an ARM computer a good choice? Which
one?»,
I decided to share my results of an experiment I did several months
ago, to graphically show to my students the effects of parallelism,
the artifacts of hy...
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Bálint Réczey: Building the Linux kernel in under 10 seconds with Firebuild
https://balintreczey.hu/blog/building-the-linux-kernel-under-10-seconds-with-firebuild/
March 21, 2023, 8:54 AM
Russell published an interesting post about his first experience with Firebuild accelerating refpolicy‘s and the Linux kernel‘s build. It turned out a few small tweaks could accelerate the builds even more, crossing the 10 second barrier with Linux’s build.
Build performance with 18 cores
The Linux kernel’s build time is a widely used benchmark for compilers, making it a prime candidate to test a build accelerator as well. In the first run on Russell’s 18 core test system the ob...
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Daniel Lange: We're still safe, it doesn't claim to be conscious. Yet.
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/180-Were-still-safe,-it-doesnt-claim-to-be-conscious.-Yet..html
March 20, 2023, 11:45 AM
Talking to ChatGPT v4 (2023-03-14 release)...
Q: What is the purpose of life?
A: The purpose of life is a philosophical question that has puzzled humans for centuries. Different people and cultures have different answers to this question. Some people believe that the purpose of life is to seek happiness, while others believe that it is to fulfill a particular destiny or achieve a specific goal.
From a biological perspective, the purpose of life could be to ensure the survival and reproduction...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2023 (by LTS Team)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2023-02/
March 20, 2023, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In February, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Adrian Bunk
did 22.0h (out of 32.25h assigned), thus carrying over 10.25h to the next month.
Anton Gladky
did 9.75h (out of 11.5h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
Ben Hutchings
did 8.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), t...
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