Antoine Beaupré: router archeology: the Soekris net5001
https://anarc.at/hardware/server/roadkiller/
January 30, 2024, 4:20 AM
Roadkiller was a Soekris net5501 router I used as my main gateway
between 2010 and 2016 (for réseau and
téléphone).
It was upgraded to FreeBSD 8.4-p12 (2014-06-06) and pkgng. It was
retired in favor of octavia around 2016.
Roughly 10 years later (2024-01-24), I found it in a drawer and, to my
surprised, it booted. After wrangling with a RS-232 USB adapter,
a null modem cable, and bit rates, I even logged in:
comBIOS ver. 1.33 20070103 Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.
net5501...
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Matthew Palmer: Why Certificate Lifecycle Automation Matters
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/01/30/why-certificate-automation-matters.html
January 29, 2024, 10:30 PM
If you’ve perused the ActivityPub feed of certificates whose keys are known to be compromised, and clicked on the “Show More” button to see the name of the certificate issuer, you may have noticed that some issuers seem to come up again and again.
This might make sense – after all, if a CA is issuing a large volume of certificates, they’ll be seen more often in a list of compromised certificates.
In an attempt to see if there is anything that we can learn from this data, though, I did ...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: bcachefs boot tweaks
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-01-29-18-09_bcachefs_boot_tweaks.html
January 29, 2024, 5:09 PM
Following my previous foray into bcachefs-on-/ booting, I whipped up some
patches to make multidevice root filesystems boot in Debian:
bcachefs-tools:
Enable the Rust parts in the Debian package, and upgrade to latest
git HEAD.
klibc: Add bcachefs detection and
UUID extraction to fstype (probably not needed, blkid is used as a fallback
and seems to work fine)
initramfs-tools:
Don't rewrite root=UUID=12345678 back to a /dev device for bcachefs
(which would find only an arbitrary device in the f...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/29/thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen3/
January 29, 2024, 11:23 AM
I just bought myself a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359.10. I have been quite happy with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 I’ve had for just over a year (apart from my mistake in buying one with lost password) [1] and I normally try to get more use out of a computer than that. If I divide total cost by the time that I’ve had it working that comes out to about $1.30 per day. I would pay more than that for a laptop and I have paid much more than that for laptops in the past, but I prefer not to. I was...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Bluebird
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-85766-967-2.html
January 29, 2024, 2:20 AM
Review: Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot

Publisher:
Angry Robot


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
0-85766-967-2


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
458

Bluebird is a stand-alone far-future science fiction adventure.
Ten thousand years ago, a star fell into the galaxy carrying three
factions of humanity. The Ascetics, the Ossuary, and the Pyrites each
believe that only their god survived and the other two factions are
heretics. Between them, they have...
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Michael Ablassmeier: qmpbackup 0.28
https://abbbi.github.io//qmpbackup28/
January 29, 2024, 12:00 AM
Over the last weekend i had some spare time to improve
qmpbackup a little more, the new version:
Uses blockdev-backup QMP commands instead of the soon to be deprecated
drive-backup.
Adds --compress option: target QCOW files data can be compressed.
Adds --speed-limit option to limit backup speed throughput.
Adds --include-raw option so attached raw devices can be backed up
too.
Allows backing up virtual machines in paused or pre-running state.
Adds backup option copy to allow backi...
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Niels Thykier: Annotating the Debian packaging directory
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/annotating-the-debian-packaging-directory.html
January 28, 2024, 4:45 PM
In my previous blog post Providing online reference documentation for debputy,
I made a point about how debhelper documentation was suboptimal on account
of being static rather than online. The thing is that debhelper is not alone
in this problem space, even if it is a major contributor to the number of
packaging files you have to to know about.
If we look at the "competition" here such as Fedora and Arch Linux, they tend to only
have one packaging file. While most Debian people will tell you a ...
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Russell Coker: Links January 2024
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/28/links-january-2024/
January 28, 2024, 2:22 AM
Long Now has an insightful article about domestication that considers whether humans have evolved to want to control nature [1].
The OMG Elite hacker cable is an interesting device [2]. A Wifi device in a USB cable to allow remote control and monitoring of data transfer, including remote keyboard control and sniffing. Pity that USB-C cables have chips in them so you can’t use a spark to remove unwanted chips from modern cables.
David Brin’s blog post The core goal of tyrants: The “Red-Caes...
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Bastian Venthur: Investigating popularity of Python build backends over time
https://venthur.de/2024-01-26-build-backends.html
January 26, 2024, 6:00 PM
Inspired by a Mastodon
post by Françoise Conil,
who investigated the current popularity of build backends used in
pyproject.toml files, I wanted to investigate how the popularity of build
backends used in pyproject.toml files evolved over the years since the
introduction of PEP-0517 in 2015.
Getting the data
Tom Forbes provides a huge
dataset that contains information
about every file within every release uploaded to PyPI. To
get the current dataset, we can use:
curl -L --remote-name-all $(curl...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Life with bcachefs
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-01-26-17-33_life_with_bcachefs.html
January 26, 2024, 4:33 PM
After bcachefs suddenly got merged into mainline in 6.7 (after years and years
of development and arguing on LKML), I've been curious; could this be an
interesting thing to test out? I gave up btrfs many years ago as just way too
slow, and to be honest I've been quite fine with ext4/xfs + LVM + md, but
there was something in it that spoke to me nevertheless.
So the last month or so, I've been having /home on my primary machine
(server) as bcachefs, with a small 10GB SSD backing. Surprisingly…...
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Dima Kogan: mrcal 2.4 released!
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2024/01/25_mrcal-24-released.html
January 26, 2024, 2:07 AM
mrcal 2.4 is out: the release notes. Once again, this is mostly a bug-fix
release en route to the big new features coming in 3.0. The most noteworthy
fixes:
mrcal can be built with clang. Try it out like this: CC=clang CXX=clang++
make. This opens up some portability improvements, such as making it easier
to run on Windows.
Full dense stereo pipeline in C.
Tools to support more file formats:
mrcal-from-kalibr
mrcal-to-kalibr
mrcal-from-ros
These are experimental. Please let me know ...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 255 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-255-released/
January 26, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 255. This version includes the following changes:
[ Vekhir ]
* Add/fix compatibility for Python progressbar 2.5 & 3.0 etc.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Dimitri John Ledkov: Ubuntu Livepatch service now supports over 60 different kernels
http://blog.surgut.co.uk/2024/01/ubuntu-livepatch-fips-s390-arm64.html
January 25, 2024, 6:01 PM
Linux kernel getting a livepatch whilst running a marathon. Generated with AI.Livepatch service eliminates the need for unplanned maintenance windows for high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities by patching the Linux kernel while the system runs. Originally the service launched in 2016 with just a single kernel flavour supported.Over the years, additional kernels were added: new LTS releases, ESM kernels, Public Cloud kernels, and most recently HWE kernels too.Recently livepatch support...
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Jonathan Dowland: I'm going to FOSDEM 2024
https://jmtd.net/log/fosdem/2024/
January 25, 2024, 4:04 PM
I'm attending FOSDEM 2024. Perhaps I'll
see you there!
For the first time, I'm giving some talks, both in the Free Java
Devroom (UB5.132) on Saturday 3rd. They are
A beginner's guide to Backports
Bespoke containers with Jlink and OpenShift...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.10 on CRAN: Calendar Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/24#qlcal-r_0.0.10
January 25, 2024, 1:09 AM
The tenth release of the qlcal package
arrivied at CRAN today.
qlcal
delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R
package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained
and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be
demanding to build). qlcal covers
over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its
complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples
are in the README at the repository, the package page,
an...
--------------------
Joachim Breitner: GHC Steering Committee Retrospective
https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/811-GHC_Steering_Committee_Retrospective
January 25, 2024, 12:21 AM
After seven years of service as member and secretary on the GHC Steering Committee, I have resigned from that role. So this is a good time to look back and retrace the formation of the GHC proposal process and committee.
In my memory, I helped define and shape the proposal process, optimizing it for effectiveness and throughput, but memory can be misleading, and judging from the paper trail in my email archives, this was indeed mostly Ben Gamari’s and Richard Eisenberg’s achievement: Already...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RApiDatetime 0.0.9 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/24#rapidatetime_0.0.9
January 24, 2024, 11:06 PM
A new maintenance release of our RApiDatetime
package is now on CRAN
RApiDatetime
provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for
Date and Datetime calculations. The functions
asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long
and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and
Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and
POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between
Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly,
asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions
are rather u...
--------------------
Thomas Lange: FAI 6.2 released
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/fai-6.2/
January 24, 2024, 11:12 AM
After more than one a year, a new minor FAI version is available, but
it includes some interesting new features.
Here a the items from the NEWS file:
fai (6.2) unstable; urgency=low
fai-cd can now create live images
Use systemd during installation
New feature: run FAI inside a screen or tmux session
fai-diskimage: do not use compression of qemu-img which is slow
instead provide .qcow2.zst, add option -C
fai-kvm: add support for booting from USB storage
new tool mk-data-partition adds a data ...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2023 edition
https://veronneau.org/montreal-subway-foot-traffic-data-2023-edition.html
January 24, 2024, 4:15 AM
For the fifth year in a row, I've asked Société de Transport de Montréal,
Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway.
By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the
station's foot traffic.
Orange line (top10)
Green line (top10)
Blue line
Yellow line
Global Top 10
Licences
The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my
modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in
the public domain.
The R code I w...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppAnnoy 0.0.22 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/23#rcppannoy_0.0.22
January 24, 2024, 12:42 AM
A very minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.22, of RcppAnnoy
has arrived on CRAN.
RcppAnnoy
is the Rcpp-based R integration of
the nifty Annoy library
by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and
lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate
nearest neighbours—originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm. It
had all the buzzwords already a decade ago: it is one of the algorithms
behind (drum roll …) vector search as it finds
approximate match...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
This post is a review


for A deep learning technique for intrusion detection system using a recurrent neural networks based framework



published in Computer Communications



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�...
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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:
...
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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...
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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
...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 16, 2024, 12:00 AM
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------