April 25, 2026

Russ Allbery

Review: The Genocidal Healer

Review: The Genocidal Healer, by James White

Series: Sector General #8
Publisher: Orb
Copyright: 1991
Printing: May 2003
ISBN: 0-7653-0663-8
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 255

The Genocidal Healer is the eighth book in James White's medical science fiction series about the Sector General hospital. As with the rest of the series, detailed memory of the previous books is not required and the books could be read out of order if you didn't mind spoilers.

I read this as part of the Orb General Practice omnibus.

Surgeon-Captain Lioren is a Tarlan doctor who was in charge of the medical response to a newly-discovered civilization. The aliens were suffering from an apparently universal plague and an ongoing vicious war waged entirely through hand-to-hand combat, putting them on the edge of extinction. Lioren rushed the distribution of a possible cure against the advice of the doctors working on developing it, with catastrophic results. As The Genocidal Healer opens, Lioren is insisting on a court-martial in the hope of receiving the sentence it believes it deserves and was denied: death.

(It pronouns are the convention in the Sector General series for all alien races and formal discussions, because even someone prone to bouts of gender essentialism such as White understood the need for avoiding gender assumptions in a science fiction medical context.)

Predictably, both Sector General and the Monitor Corps that technically runs the hospital are flatly unwilling to execute Lioren. Instead, he is assigned as a new apprentice in the psychology department under the legendary O'Mara, where he is ordered to investigate the psychological fitness of a senior doctor named Seldal. This leads him to talk to Seldal's patients, which in turn leads to a challenging set of ethical dilemmas.

The first five chapters (and more than sixty pages) are the story of Lioren's trial and a recounting of the events on Cromsag. The series is full of medical and cultural puzzles like this, and usually I like them, but I thought this one was less successful. We know the vague (and horrible) outline of the ending in advance, and the massive simplification and artificial universality that is required to make this puzzle work is particularly blatant. A universally infectious disease is more of a fiction plot than a believable biological concept, and the number of failures of communication, analysis, and misunderstanding that have to line up to create White's predetermined outcome were a bit much for me.

Once the story gets past that and into Lioren's psychological work, the novel improves. Lioren is guilt-ridden and irrational, but also rather arrogant about his guilt and his concepts of professional responsibility in a way that I think mostly worked. Most of the novel consists of Lioren slowly discovering that people like him and enjoy talking to him, much to his bafflement. In that, it has the gentle kindness and sense of universal basic decency that is characteristic of this series. There are, of course, medical puzzles to solve, although this time they are primarily psychological in nature. Various characters from previous books make an appearance, but White re-explains their background in sufficient detail that you don't need to remember (or have read) those previous books.

There are a lot of similarities between this book and the previous one, Code Blue—Emergency. Both feature nonhuman viewpoint protagonists and amusing descriptions of human facial expressions from an alien perspective. Both feature protagonists with overly rigid ethical structures that partly clash with the generally human policies of Sector General. The Genocidal Healer is a bit more subtle and nuanced, although a lot of Lioren's psychological evaluation rests on an ethical difference that I found somewhat unbelievable. This book, though, tackles a subject the previous book did not: religion. The treatment isn't horrible, but I have some complaints.

My primary issue is that Lioren, who starts as an atheist, does extensive research into religion to help a patient and then starts making statements summarizing the religions beliefs of the majority of known species that are just... Christianity. As someone raised Christian, I recognized it immediately as the sort of abstracted Christianity that Christians claim is universal while completely ignoring the opinions of the adherents of any other religion.

Key components of this majority galactic religious pattern, according to Lioren, include an omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator god, a religious figure who preaches forgiveness and mercy and is persecuted, and emphasis on redemption. This simply is not some abstract universal religion. This is just Christianity in disguise. Even in religions that have some of those elements in their traditions, they do not get the same emphasis and are not handled the way that Lioren describes them. I therefore found Lioren's extended discussions of religion rather annoying, since he kept claiming as relatively universal principles beliefs that are not even held by the majority of religious adherents on Earth, let alone a wildly varying collection of alien races with entirely different biology and societal constructions. It caused a lot of problems for my suspension of disbelief, on top of the annoyance at this repetition of, frankly, Christian propaganda.

Lioren goes, from that research, into theodicy (the problem of evil). The interesting part of this is White's earnest portrayal of a doctor's approach to societal problems: a desire to find workarounds and patches and fixes for anything that makes people unhappy, whether medical or social. It makes sense, given the horrible biologic hands that some of the aliens in this series have been dealt, that they would question the idea of a benevolent god, so this philosophical digression is justified in that sense. But you might guess that a mid-list science fiction author is not going to say something new about one of the oldest problems in Christianity, and indeed he does not. Lioren arrives at the standard handwaving about the unknowability of divine intent, which I found tedious to read but at least not fatal to the plot.

White, thankfully, doesn't take the religious material too far. The characters recognize how sensitive of an issue religion is in a hospital, Lioren never adopts religion fully, and the resolution of the plot is as much biological as philosophical. White is going somewhere with the introduction of religion, and although some of the path there annoyed me, I think the destination worked. White was from Northern Ireland, and therefore well aware of the drawbacks of religion, and he abhorred violence (hence Sector General as a setting), so the reader is in better hands with him than with most authors who might attempt this plot.

I think I know a bit too much about religion to be the best audience for this entry in the series, and I'm not sure the introductory five chapters quite worked. But as with all of the other books in the series, this kept me turning the pages and I'm glad I read it. The Genocidal Healer probably isn't worth seeking out unless you're reading the whole series, but if you're enjoying the rest of the series, you'll probably like this too.

Followed by The Galactic Gourmet.

Rating: 6 out of 10

25 April, 2026 04:44AM

April 23, 2026

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

dtts 0.1.4 on CRAN: Maintenance

Leonardo and I are happy to announce another maintenance release 0.1.4 of our dtts package which has been on CRAN for four years now. dtts builds upon our nanotime package as well as the beloved data.table to bring high-performance and high-resolution indexing at the nanosecond level to data frames. dtts aims to offers the time-series indexing versatility of xts (and zoo) to the immense power of data.table while supporting highest nanosecond resolution.

This release, not unlike yesterday’s release of nanotime, is driven by recent changes in the bit64 package which underlies it. Michael, who now maintains it, had sent in two PRs to prepare for these changes. I updated continuous integration, and switched to Authors@R, and that pretty much is the release. The short list of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.1.4 (2026-04-23)

  • Continuous integration has received some routine updates

  • Adapt align() column names with changes in 'data.table' (Michael Chirico in #20)

  • Narrow imports to functions used for packages 'bit64', 'data.table' and 'nanotime' (Michael Chirico in #21)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a [diffstat repor]tbsdiffstat for this release. Questions, comments, issue tickets can be brought to the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.

23 April, 2026 06:58PM

hackergotchi for Sergio Talens-Oliag

Sergio Talens-Oliag

Developing a Git Worktree Helper with Copilot

Over the past few weeks I’ve been developing and using a personal command-line tool called gwt (Git Worktree) to manage Git repositories using worktrees. This article explains what the tool does, how it evolved, and how I used GitHub Copilot CLI to develop it (in fact the idea of building the script was also to test the tool).

The Problem: Managing Multiple Branches

I was working on a project with multiple active branches, including orphans; the regular branches are for fixes or features, while the orphans are used to keep copies of remote documents or store processed versions of those documents.

The project also uses a special orphan branch that contains the scripts and the CI/CD configuration to store and process the external documents (it is on a separate branch to avoid mixing its operation with the main project code).

The plan is trigger a pipeline against the special branch from remote projects to create or update the doc branch for it in our git repository, retrieving artifacts from the remote projects to get the files and put them on an orphan branch (initially I added new commits after each update, but I changed the system to use force pushes and keep only one commit, as the history is not really needed).

The original documents have to be changed, so, after ingesting them, we run a script that modifies them and adds or updates another branch with the processed version; the contents of that branch are used by the main branch build process (there we use git fetch and git archive to retrieve its contents).

When working on the scripts to manage the orphan branches I discovered the worktree feature of git, a functionality that allows me to keep multiple branches checked out in parallel using a single .git folder, removing the need to use git switch and git stash when changing between branches (until now I’ve been a heavy user of those commands).

Reading about it I found that a lot of people use worktrees with the help of a wrapper script to simplify the management. After looking at one or two posts and the related scripts I decided to create my own using a specific directory structure to simplify things.

That’s how I started to work on the gwt script; as I also wanted to test copilot I decided to build it using its help (I have a pro license at work and wanted to play with the cli version instead of integrated into an editor, as I didn’t want to learn a lot of new keyboard shortcuts).

The gwt Philosophy: Opinionated and Transparent

gwt enforces a simple, filesystem-visible model:

  • Exactly one bare repository named bare.git (treated as an implementation detail)
  • One worktree directory per branch where the directory name matches the branch name
  • Single responsibility: gwt doesn’t try to be a general git wrapper; it only handles operations that map cleanly to this layout

The repository structure looks like this:

my-repo/
+-- bare.git/           # the Git repository (internal)
+-- main/               # worktree for branch "main"
+-- feature/api/        # worktree for branch "feature/api"
+-- fix/docs/           # worktree for branch "fix/docs"
+-- orphan-history/     # worktree for the "orphan-history" branch

The tool follows five core design principles:

  1. Explicit over clever: Git commands are not hidden or reinterpreted
  2. Transparent execution: Every operation is printed before it happens
  3. Safe, preview-first operations: Destructive commands default to preview, confirmation, then apply
  4. Shell-agnostic core: The script never changes the caller’s working directory (shell wrappers handle that)
  5. Opinionated but minimal: Only commands that fit the layout model are included

Core Commands

The script provides these essential commands:

  • gwt init <url> — Clone a repository and set up the gwt layout
  • gwt convert <dir> — Convert an existing Git checkout to the gwt layout
  • gwt add [--orphan] <branch> [<base>] — Create a new worktree (optionally orphaned)
  • gwt remove <branch> — Remove a worktree and unregister it (asks the user to remove the local branch too, useful when removing already merged branches)
  • gwt rename <old> <new> — Rename a branch AND its worktree directory
  • gwt list — List all worktrees
  • gwt default [<branch>] — Get or set the default branch
  • gwt current — Print the current worktree or branch name

Except init and convert all of the commands work inside a directory structure that follows the gwt layout, which looks for the bare.git folder to find the root folder of the structure.

As I don’t want to hide which commands are really used by the wrapper, all git and filesystem operations pass through a single run shell function that prints each command before executing it. This gives complete visibility into what the tool is doing.

Also, destructive operations (remove, rename) default to preview mode:

$ gwt remove feature-old --dry-run

+ git -C bare.git branch -d feature-old
+ git -C bare.git worktree remove feature-old/

Apply these changes? [y/N]:

The user sees exactly what will happen, can verify it’s correct, and only then confirm execution.

Incremental Development with Copilot

The gwt script has grown from 597 lines in its original version (git-wt) to 1,111 lines when writing the first draft of this post.

This growth happened through incremental, test-driven development, with each feature being refined based on real usage patterns.

What follows is a little history of the script evolution written with the help of git log.

Initial version

First I wrote a design document and asked copilot to create the initial version of the git-wt script with the original core commands.

I started to use the tool with a remote repostory (I made copies of the branches in some cases to avoid missing work) and fixed bugs (trivial ones with neovim, larger ones asking copilot to fix the issues for me, so I had less typing to do).

First command update

One of the first commands I had to enhance was rename:

  • as I normally use branches with / on their name and my tool checks out the worktrees using the branch name as the path inside the gwt root folder (i.e. a fix/rename branch creates the fix directory and checks the branch inside the fix/rename folder) the rename command had to clean up the empty parent directories
  • when renaming a worktree we move the folders and fix the references using the worktree repair command to make things work locally, but the rename also affects the remote branch reference, to avoid surprises the command unsets the remote branch reference so it can be pushed again using the new name (of course, the user is responsible of managing the old remote branch, as the gwt can’t guess what it should do with it).

Integration with the shell

As I use zsh with the Powerlevel10k theme I asked copilot to help me add visual elements to the prompt when working with gwt folders, something that I would have never tried without help, as it would have required a lot of digging on my part on how to do it, as I never looked into it.

The initial version of the code was on an independent file that I sourced from my .zshrc file and it prints on the right part of the prompt when we are inside a gwt folder (note that if the folder is a worktree we see the existing git integration text right before it, so we have the previous behavior and we see that it is a gwt friendly repo) and if we are on the root folder or the bare.git folder we see gwt or bare (I added the text because there are no git promts on those folders).

I also asked copilot to create zsh autocompletion functions (I only use zsh, so I didn’t add autocompletion for other shells). The good thing here is that I wouldn’t have done that manually, as it would have required some reading to get it right, but the output of copilot worked and I can update things using it or manually if I need to.

One thing I was missing from the script was the possibility of changing the working directory easily, so I wrote a gwt wrapper function for zsh that intercepts commands that require shell cooperation (changing the working directory) and delegates everything else to the core script.

Currently the function supports the following enhanced commands:

  • cd [<branch>]: change into a worktree or the default one if missing
  • convert <dir>: convert a checkout, then cd into the initial worktree
  • add [--orphan] <branch> [<base>]: create a worktree, then cd into it on success
  • rename <old> <new>: rename a worktree, then cd into it if we were inside it

Note that the cd command will not work on other shells or if the user does not load my wrapper, but the rest will still work without the working directory changes.

Renaming the command

As I felt that git-wt was a long name I renamed the tool to gwt, I could have done it by hand, but using copilot I didn’t have to review all files by myself and it did it right (note that I have it configured to always ask me before doing changes, as it sometimes tries to do something I don’t want and I like to check its changes …​ as I have the files in git repos, I manually add the files when I like the status and if the cli output is not clear I allow it to apply it and check the effects with git diff so I can validate or revert what was done).

The convert command

After playing with one repo I added the convert subcommand for migrating existing checkouts, it seemed a simple task at first, but it took multiple iterations to get it right, as I found multiple issues while testing (in fact I did copies of the existing checkouts to be able to re-test each update, as some of the iterations broke them).

The version of the function when this post was first edited had the following comment explaining what it does:

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# convert - convert an existing checkout into the gwt layout
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Must be run from the parent directory of <dir>.
#
# Steps:
#   1. Read branch from the checkout's HEAD
#   2. Rename <dir> to <dir>.wt.tmp (sibling, same filesystem)
#   3. Create <dir>/ as the new gwt root
#   4. Move <dir>.wt.tmp/.git to <dir>/bare.git; set core.bare = true
#   5. Fix fetch refspec (bare clone default maps refs directly, no remotes/)
#   6. Add a --no-checkout worktree so git wires up the metadata and
#      creates <dir>/<branch>/.git (the only file in that dir)
#   7. Move that .git file into the real working tree (<dir>.wt.tmp)
#   8. Remove the now-empty placeholder directory
#   9. Move the real working tree into place as <dir>/<branch>
#  10. Reset the index to HEAD so git status is clean
#      (--no-checkout leaves the index empty)
#  11. Create <dir>/.git -> bare.git symlink so plain git commands work
#      from the root without --git-dir
#
# The .git file ends up at the same absolute path git recorded in step 5,
# so no worktree repair is needed. Working tree files are never modified.

The .git link was added when I noticed that I could run commands that don’t need the checked out files on the root of the gwt structure, which is handy sometimes (i.e. a git fetch or a git log, that shows the log of the branch marked as default).

After playing with commands that used the bare.git folder I updated the init and convert commands to keep the origin refs, ensuring that the remote tracking works correctly.

Improving the add command

While playing with the tool on more repos I noticed that I also had to enhance the add command to better handle worktree creation, depending on my needs.

Right now the tool supports the following use cases:

  • if the branch exists locally or on origin, it just checks it out.
  • if the branch does not exist, we create it using the given base branch or, if no base is given, the current worktree (if we are in the root folder or bare.git the command fails).
  • as I needed it for my project, I added a --orphan option to be able to create orphan branches directly.

Moving to a single file

Eventually I decided to make the tool self contained; I removed the design document (I moved the content to comments on the top of the script and details to comments on each function definition) and added a pair of commands to print the code to source for the p10k and zsh integration (autocompletion & functions), leaving everything in a single file.

Now my .zshrc file adds the following to source both things:

# After loading the p10k configuration
if type gwt >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  source <(gwt p10k)
fi
[...]
# After loading autocompletion
if type gwt >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  source <(gwt zsh)
fi

Versioning

As I modified the script I found interesting to use CalVer-based versioning (the version variable has the format YYYY.mm.dd-r#) so I added a subcommand to show its value or bump it using the current date and computing the right revision number.

About the use of copilot

Although I’ve never been a fan of AI tools I have to admit that the copilot CLI has been very useful for building the tool:

  • Rapid prototyping: Each commit represented a small feature or fix that I could implement, test immediately in my actual workflow, and iterate on based on the result
  • Edge case handling: Rather than trying to anticipate every scenario upfront, I could ask Copilot how to handle edge cases as they appeared in real usage
  • Script refinement: Questions like "how do I clean up empty directories after a rename" or "how do I detect if I’m inside a specific worktree" were quickly answered with working code
  • Shell integration: The Zsh wrapper and completion system grew from simple prototypes to sophisticated features, with each iteration informed by how I actually used the tool

For example, the convert command started as a simple rename operation, but evolved to also create a .git symlink and intelligently handle various migration scenarios—all because I used it repeatedly and refined the implementation each time.

Self-Contained and Opinionated

gwt is deliberately opinionated:

  • Zsh & Powerlevel10k Integration: The tool includes built-in Zsh shell integration, accessed via source <(gwt zsh) and supports adding a prompt segment when using p10k, as described earlier.
  • Directory Structure: The bare.git directory name is non-negotiable. This is how gwt discovers the repository root from any subdirectory, and how the tool knows whether a directory is a gwt repository. The simplicity of this marker means the discovery mechanism is foolproof and requires no configuration.
  • No Configuration Files: gwt deliberately has no configuration. There are no .gwtrc files or config directories. This makes it portable; the tool works the same way everywhere, and repositories can be shared across systems without synchronizing configuration.

From Script to System

What started as a small helper script for managing worktrees has become a complete system:

  1. Core script (gwt): 1,111 lines of pure shell, no external dependencies
  2. Shell integration: Zsh functions and completions
  3. Prompt integration: Powerlevel10k segment
  4. Documentation: Built-in help and design philosophy documentation

The script is self-contained, everything needed for the tool to work is in a single file.

This makes it trivial to update (just replace the script) or audit (no hidden dependencies).

Development with AI support

Developing gwt with copilot taught me some things:

  • Incremental refinement works well for small tools: Each iteration informed the next, resulting in a tool that handles real use cases elegantly
  • Transparency is a feature: Making operations visible builds confidence and is easier to debug
  • Opinionated tools can be powerful: By constraining the problem space (one bare repo, one worktree per branch), the solution becomes simpler and more robust
  • Shell integration matters: The same core commands are easier to use when they can automatically change directories and provide completions
  • Real-world testing is essential: I wouldn’t have discovered the need for automatic directory cleanup or context-aware cd behavior without actually using the tool daily

What was next?

The tool is stable and handles my daily workflow well, so my guess is that I would keep using it and fixing issues if or when I found them, but I do not plan to include additional features unless I find a use case that justifies it (i.e. I never added support for some of the worktree subcommands, as it is easier to use the git versions if I ever needed them).

What really happened

While editing this post I discovered that I needed to add another command to it and fixed a bug (see below).

With those changes and the inclusion of a license and copyright notice (just in case I distribute it at some point) now the script is 1,217 lines long instead of the 1,111 it had when I started to write this entry.

Submodule Support

When I converted this blog repository to the gwt format and tried to preview the post using docker compose, it failed because the worktree I was on didn’t have the Git submodule initialized.

My blog theme is included on the repository as a submodule, and when I used gwt to check out different branches in worktrees, the submodule was not initialized in the new worktrees.

This led me to add new internal function and a gwt submodule command to handle submodule initialization; the internal function is called from convert and add (when converting a repo or adding a worktree) and the public command is useful to update the submodules on existing branches.

Path Handling with Branch Names Containing Slashes

The second discovery was a bug in how the tool handled branch names containing slashes (e.g., feature/new-api, docs/user-guide), the worktree directories are created with the branch name as the path, so a branch like feature/new-api would create two nested folders (feature and new-api inside it).

However, there was a mismatch in how the zsh wrapper function resolved worktree paths (initially it used shell parameter expansion, i.e. rel="${cwd#"$REPO_ROOT"/}"), versus how the core script calculated them, causing the cd command to fail or navigate to the wrong location when branch names contained slashes.

The fix involved ensuring consistent path resolution throughout the script and wrapper (now it uses a function that processes the git worktree list output), so that gwt cd feature/new-api correctly navigates to the worktree directory regardless of path depth.

Conclusion

gwt is a tool that solves a real problem: managing multiple Git branches simultaneously without context-switching overhead.

I’m sure I’m going to keep using it for my projects, as it simplifies some workflows, although I’ll also use switch and stash in some cases, but I like the use of multiple worktrees in parallel.

In fact I converted this blog repository checkout to the gwt format to work on a separate branch as it felt the right approach even if I’m the only one using the repo now, and it helped me improve the tool, as explained before.

Also, it was a good example of how to use AI tools like copilot to develop a simple tool and keep it evolving while using it.

In any case, although I find the copilot useful and has saved me time, I don’t trust it to work without supervision, it worked well, but got stuck some times and didn’t do the things as I wanted in multiple occasions.

I also have an additional problem now …​ I’ve been reading about it, but I don’t really know which models to use or how the premium requests are computed (I’ve only been playing with it since last month and I ran out of requests the last day of the month on purpose, just to see what happened …​ it stops working …​ ;).

On my work machine I’ve been using a specific user account with a GitHub Copilot Business subscription and I only used the Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 model and with my personal account I configured the Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5 model, but I’ve only used that to create the initial draft of this post (I ended up rewriting most of it manually anyway) and to review the final version (I’m not a native speaker and it was useful for finding typos and improving the style in some parts).

I guess I’ll try other models with copilot in the future and check other command line tools like aider or claude-code, but probably only using free accounts unless I get a payed account at work, as I have with GitHub Copilot.

To be fair, what I will love to be able to do is to use local models (aider can do it), but the machines I have are not powerful enough. I tried to run a simple test and it felt really slow, but when I have the time or the need I’ll try again, just in case.

23 April, 2026 05:40PM

April 22, 2026

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

nanotime 0.3.14 on CRAN: Upstream Maintenance

Another minor update 0.3.14 for our nanotime package is now on CRAN, and has compiled for r2u (and will have to wait to be uploaded to Debian until dependency bit64 has been updated there). nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, using the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations.

This release has been driven almost entirely by Michael, who took over as bit64 maintainer and has been making changes there that have an effect on us ‘downstream’. He reached out with a number of PRs which (following occassional refinement and smoothing) have all been integrated. There are no user-facing changes, or behavioural changes or enhancements, in this release.

The NEWS snippet below has the fuller details.

Changes in version 0.3.14 (2026-04-22)

  • Tests were refactored to use NA_integer64_ (Michael Chirico in #149 and Dirk in #156)

  • nanoduration was updated for changes in nanotime 4.8.0 (Michael Chirico in #152 fixing #151)

  • Use of as.integer64(keep.names=TRUE) has been refactored (Michael Chirico in #154 fixing #153)

  • In tests, nanotime is attached after bit64; this still needs a better fix (Michael Chirico in #155)

  • The package now has a hard dependency on the just released bit64 version 4.8.0 (or later)

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository – and all documentation is provided at the nanotime documentation site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.

22 April, 2026 08:34PM

Vincent Bernat

CSS & vertical rhythm for text, images, and tables

Vertical rhythm aligns lines to a consistent spacing cadence down the page. It creates a predictable flow for the eye to follow. Thanks to the rlh CSS unit, vertical rhythm is now easier to implement for text.1 But illustrations and tables can disrupt the layout. The amateur typographer in me wants to follow Bringhurst’s wisdom:

Headings, subheads, block quotations, footnotes, illustrations, captions and other intrusions into the text create syncopations and variations against the base rhythm of regularly leaded lines. These variations can and should add life to the page, but the main text should also return after each variation precisely on beat and in phase.

― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Text

Three factors govern vertical rhythm: font size, line height and margin or padding. Let’s set our baseline with an 18-pixel font and a 1.5 line height:

html {
  font-size: 112.5%;
  line-height: 1.5;
}
h1, h2, h3, h4 {
  font-size: 100%;
}
html, body,
h1, h2, h3, h4,
p, blockquote,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

CSS Values and Units Module Level 4 defines the rlh unit, equal to the computed line height of the root element. All browsers support it since 2023.2 Use it to insert vertical spaces or to fix the line height when altering font size:3

h1, h2, h3, h4 {
  margin-top: 2rlh;
  margin-bottom: 1rlh;
}
h1 {
  font-size: 2.4rem;
  line-height: 2rlh;
}
h2 {
  font-size: 1.5rem;
  line-height: 1rlh;
}
h3 {
  font-size: 1.2rem;
  line-height: 1rlh;
}
p, blockquote, pre {
  margin-top: 1rlh;
}
aside {
  font-size: 0.875rem;
  line-height: 1rlh;
}

We can check the result by overlaying a grid4 on the content:

Screenshot of my website with a grid as an overlay and each line of text fitting on the grid
Using CSS rlh unit to set vertical space works well for text. You can display the grid using Ctrl+Shift+G.

If a child element uses a font with taller intrinsic metrics, it may stretch the line’s box beyond the configured line height.5 A workaround is to reduce the line height to 1. The glyphs overflow but don’t push the line taller.

code, kbd {
  line-height: 1;
}

Responsive images

Responsive images are difficult to align on the grid because we don’t know their height. CSS Rhythmic Sizing Module Level 1 introduces the block-step property to adjust the height of an element to a multiple of a step unit. But most browsers don’t support it yet.

With JavaScript, we can add padding around the image so it does not disturb the vertical rhythm:

const targets = document.querySelectorAll(".lf-media-outer");
const adjust = (el, height) => {
  const rlh = parseFloat(getComputedStyle(document.documentElement).lineHeight);
  const padding = Math.ceil(height / rlh) * rlh - height;
  el.style.padding = `${padding / 2}px 0`;
};

targets.forEach((el) => adjust(el, el.clientHeight));
Screenshot of my website with a grid as an overlay and an image not breaking the vertical rhythm. Additional padding is visible before and after the image. The height of the image with padding is 216.
The image is snapped to the grid thanks to the additional padding computed with JavaScript. 216 is divisible by 27, our line height in this example.

As the image is responsive, its height can change. We need to wrap a resize observer around the adjust() function:

const ro = new ResizeObserver((entries) => {
  for (const entry of entries) {
    const height = entry.contentBoxSize[0].blockSize;
    adjust(entry.target, height);
  }
});
for (const target of targets) {
  ro.observe(target);
}

Tables

Table cells could set 1rlh as their height but they would feel constricted. Using 2rlh wastes too much space. Instead, we use incremental leading: we align one in every five lines.

table {
  border-spacing: 2px 0;
  border-collapse: separate;
  th {
    padding: 0.4rlh 1em;
  }
  td {
    padding: 0.2rlh 0.5em;
  }
}

To align the elements after the table, we need to add some padding. We can either reuse the JavaScript code from images or use a few lines of CSS that count the regular rows and compute the missing vertical padding:

table:has(tbody tr:nth-child(5n):last-child)   { padding-bottom: 0.2rlh; }
table:has(tbody tr:nth-child(5n+1):last-child) { padding-bottom: 0.8rlh; }
table:has(tbody tr:nth-child(5n+2):last-child) { padding-bottom: 0.4rlh; }
table:has(tbody tr:nth-child(5n+3):last-child) { padding-bottom: 0 }
table:has(tbody tr:nth-child(5n+4):last-child) { padding-bottom: 0.6rlh; }

A header cell has twice the padding of a regular cell. With two regular rows, the total padding is 2×2×0.2+2×0.4=1.6. We need to add 0.4rlh to reach 2rlh of extra vertical padding across the table.

Screenshot of my website with a grid as an overlay and a table following the vertical rhythm. Additional padding is visible after the table. The height of the table with padding is 405.
One line out of five is aligned to the grid. Additional padding is added after the table to not break the vertical rhythm. 405 is divisible by 27, our line height in this example.

None of this is necessary. But once you start looking, you can’t unsee it. Until browsers implement CSS Rhythmic Sizing, a bit of CSS wizardry and a touch of JavaScript is enough to pull it off. The main text now returns after each intrusion “precisely on beat and in phase.” 🎼

  1. See “Vertical rhythm using CSS lh and rlh units” by Paweł Grzybek. ❦

  2. For broader compatibility, you can replace 2rlh with calc(var(--line-height) * 2rem) and set the --line-height custom property in the :root pseudo-class. I wrote a simple PostCSS plugin for this purpose. ❦

  3. It would have been nicer to compute the line height with calc(round(up, calc(2.4rem / 1rlh), 0) * 1rlh). Unfortunately, typed arithmetic is not supported by Firefox yet. Moreover, browsers support round() only since 2024. Instead, I coded a PostCSS plugin for this as well. ❦

  4. The following CSS code defines a grid tracking the line height:

    body::after {
  content: "";
  z-index: 9999;
  background: linear-gradient(180deg, #c8e1ff99 1px, transparent 1px);
  background-size: 20px 1rlh;
  pointer-events: none;
}

    ❦

  5. See “Deep dive CSS: font metrics, line-height and vertical-align” by Vincent De Oliveira. ❦

22 April, 2026 07:48PM by Vincent Bernat

April 21, 2026

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RcppArmadillo 15.2.6-1 on CRAN: Several Updates

armadillo image

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) 1263 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 45.7 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 683 times according to Google Scholar.

This versions updates to the 15.2.5 and 15.2.6 upstream Armadillo releases from, respectively, two and five days ago. The package has already been updated for Debian, and built for r2u. When we ran the reverse-dependency check for 15.2.5 at the end of last week, one package failed. I got in touch with the authors, filed an issue, poked some more, isolated the one line that caused an example to fail … and right then 15.2.6 came out fixing just that. It was after all an upstream issue. We used to ran these checks before Conrad made a release, he now skips this and hence needed a quick follow-up release. It can happen.

The other big change is that this R package release phases out the ‘dual support’ for both C++14 or newer (as in current Armadillo) along with a C++11 fallback for more slowly updating packages. I am happy to say that after over eight months of this managed transition (during which CRAN expulsed some laggard packages that were not moving in from C++11) we are now at all packages using C++14 or newer which is nice. And I will take this as an opportunity to stress that one can in fact manage a disruptive API change this way as we just demonstrated. Sadly, R Core does not seem to have gotten that message and rollout of this package was also still a little delayed because of the commotion created by the last minute API changes preceding the R 4.6.0 release later this week.

Smaller changes in the package are a switch in pdf vignette production to the Rcpp::asis() driver, and a higher-precision computation in rmultinom() (matching a change made in R-devel during last week in its use of Kahan summation). All detailed changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.6-1 (2026-04-20)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.6 (Medium Roast Deluxe)

    • Ensure internally computed tolerances are not NaN

  • The rmultinom deploys 'Kahan summation' as R-devel does now.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.5-1 [github-only] (2026-04-18)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.5 (Medium Roast Deluxe)

    • Fix for handling NaN elements in .is_zero()

    • Fix for handling NaN in tolerance and conformance checks

    • Faster handling of diagonal views and submatrices with one row>

  • Sunset the C++11 fallback of including Armadillo 14.6.3 (#504 closing #503)

  • The vignettes have refreshed bibliographies, and are now built using the Rcpp::asis vignette builder (#506)

  • One rmultinom test is skipped under R-devel which has switched to a higher precisions calc

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.

21 April, 2026 11:20PM

hackergotchi for Mike Gabriel

Mike Gabriel

Join us at Lomiri CodeFest on May 16-17 & Fre(i)e Software GmbH is hiring more Lomiri Developers

Lomiri Codefest in Tilburg NL (May 16-17 2026)

Just a quick invitation to an in-person event in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

All people interested in the Lomiri Operating Environment are invited to join us at the Lomiri Codefest [codefest] taking place on May 16-17 (participation is free of charge).

We are hiring Lomiri developers

And as another side node, we still have budget (until 07/2027) for 2-3 additional Lomiri developers (depends on each devs weekly availability). The details of my previous post [hiringdetails] +/- still apply. One more limitation / strength: You need real coding skills to apply for the open positions, AI-generated contributions will not be accepted for the tasks at hand.

If you are interested and a skilled FLOSS developer (you need previous OSS contributions as references) and available with at least 10 hrs / week, please get in touch [fsgmbh].

References

[codefest] https://codefest.os-sci.info/?lang=en
[hiringdetails] https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/150
[fsgmbh] https://freiesoftware.gmbh/

21 April, 2026 05:35PM by sunweaver

Sergio Cipriano

How to view the Debian Upload Queue

How to view the Debian Upload Queue

Some people may not know this, but the Debian Upload Queue is public and very easy to access:

$ curl ftp://ftp.upload.debian.org/pub/UploadQueue/
drwxr-sr-x   18 1518     1281         4096 Jun 26  2019 DELAYED
-rw-r--r--    1 1518     1281         3442 Jul 14  2025 README
-rw-r-----    1 117      1281         3052 Apr 20 21:32 neovim-tokyonight_4.14.1-1.debian.tar.xz
-rw-r-----    1 117      1281         2119 Apr 20 21:32 neovim-tokyonight_4.14.1-1.dsc
-rw-r-----    1 117      1281         5533 Apr 20 21:32 neovim-tokyonight_4.14.1-1_amd64.buildinfo
-rw-r-----    1 117      1281         2637 Apr 20 21:32 neovim-tokyonight_4.14.1-1_source.changes
-rw-r-----    1 117      1281       197584 Apr 20 21:32 neovim-tokyonight_4.14.1.orig.tar.gz

21 April, 2026 03:16PM

Russell Coker

More About Ebook Readers in Debian

FBReader

After my previous blog post about eBook readers in Debian [1] a reader recommended FBReader. I tried it and it’s now my favourite reader. It works nicely on laptop and phone and takes significantly less RAM than Calibre or Arianna (especially important for phones). While the problems with my FLX1s not displaying text with Calibre or Arianna might be the fault of something on the FLX1s side those problems just don’t happen with FBReader.

FBReader has apparently now got a proprietary version as the upstream, but we still have FOSS code to use in Debian. It would be nice if someone updated it to store the reading location using WebDAV and/or a local file that can be copied with the NextCloud client or similar. Currently there is code to store reading location in the Google cloud which I don’t want to use. It’s not THAT difficult to see what chapter you are at with one device and just skip to that part on another, but it is an annoyance.

One thing I really like about FBReader is that you can run it with a epub file on the command line and it just opens it and when it’s been closed you can just open it again to the same spot in the same file. I don’t want a “library” to view a book list, I just want to go back to what I was last reading in a hurry. Calibre might be better for some uses, for example I can imagine someone in the publishing industry with a collection of thousands of epub files finding that Calibre works better for them. But for the typical person who just wants to read one book and keep reading it until they finish it FBReader seems clearly better. The GUI is a little unusual, but it’s not at all confusing and it works really well on mobile.

Okular

I tried Okular (the KDE viewer for PDF files etc) which displays epub files if you have the “okular-extra-backends” installed, but it appears to not display books with the background color set to black. I would appreciate it if someone who has read some public domain or CC licences epub files can recommend ones with a black background that I could use for testing as I can’t file a Debian bug report without sample data to reproduce the bug. I decided not to use it for actual book reading as FBReader is far better for my use taking less RAM and being well optimised for mobile use.

Folite

Foliate supports specifying a book on the command-line which is nice. But it takes more memory than FBReader which is probably mostly due to using webkit to display things. The output was in 2 columns on my laptop in small text which is probably configurable but I didn’t proceed with it. I determined that it doesn’t compare with FBReader for my use. It’s written in JavaScript which may be a positive feature for some people.

Koodo

I had a brief test of Koodo which isn’t in Debian. Here is the Koodo Reader Github [2]. I installed the .deb that they created, it installs files to “/opt/Koodo Reader/” (yes that’s a space in the directory name) and appears to have Chromium as part of the runtime. I didn’t go past that even though it appears to have a decent feature set. It is licensed under version 3 of the AGPL so is suitable for Debian packaging if someone wants to do it.

Thorium

I saw the Thorium reader on Github [3] which looks promising, it’s under the BSD 3 clause license so is suitable for Debian packaging. The EDR Lab seems like a good project for advancing electronic document use [4] and it would be good to have their stuff in Debian.

For the moment I’m happy using FBReader.

Related posts:

  1. Ebook Readers in Debian Laptop For a while I’ve been using Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 in...
  2. Apache Mesos on Debian I decided to try packaging Mesos for Debian/Stretch. I had...
  3. NBD and PXE Booting on Debian I have a Xen server that I use for testing...

21 April, 2026 09:26AM by etbe

Ravi Dwivedi

LibreOffice Conference Budapest 2025

In September 2025, I attended the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest, Hungary, on the 4th and the 5th, and a community meeting on the 3rd. Thanks to The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring my travel and accommodation costs. The conference venue was Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).

The conference was planned to be held from the 4th to the 6th, but the program for the 6th of September had to be canceled due to the venue being unavailable because of a marathon in Budapest. So, all the talks got squeezed into just two days, making the schedule a bit hectic.

The TDF had booked my room at the Corvin Hotel. It was a double bedroom with a window. The breakfast was included in the hotel booking. The hotel was walking distance from the conference venue. One could also take a tram from the hotel to reach the venue.

A double bed

A shot of my room. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Tram

A tram in Budapest. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

3rd of September

On the 3rd of September, we had a community meeting at the above-mentioned venue. I walked with my friend Dione to the venue. Upon reaching there, I noticed that the university had no boundaries and gates. This reminded me of the previous year’s conference venue in Luxembourg, which also had no boundaries or gates.

In contrast, Indian universities and institutes typically have walls and gates serving as boundaries to separate them from the rest of the city. Many of these institutes also have security guards at the entrance, who may ask attendees to present proof of admission before allowing them inside. I was surprised to find that institutes in Europe, like the one where the conference was held, did not have such boundaries.

The building where the conference was held was red, which happened to be the same color as the building for the previous year’s conference venue. I remember joking with Dione that the criteria for the conference venue might have been the color of the building.

A red building

The red building in the picture served as the conference venue. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

During the community meeting, we shared ideas on how to spread the word about LibreOffice. The meeting lasted for a couple of hours.

After the community meeting, we went to the hotel for dinner sponsored by the TDF.

Cake slices

These Esterházy cake bites were really yummy. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Raspberry Currant cake slices

Raspberry Currant cake slices. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

4th of September

On the first day of the conference, attendees were given swag bags containing a pad, sticky notes, a pen, a conference T-shirt, and a bottle.

A blue colored T-shirt on a bed along with a pen, a bottle, a diary and a sticky note

Conference swag. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The talks started early in the morning with Eliane Domingos, Chairperson of TDF’s Board of Directors, giving the inauguration talk. As always, I found Italo Vignoli’s talk on the importance of document freedom interesting.

During the snack break, I noticed that there were three types of milk available for coffee: cow’s milk, lactose-free milk, and almond milk. Almond milk is rare in India, but I have managed to get it, but I have never seen lactose-free milk in India.

Since I run fundraisers in my projects, such as Prav, I could relate to Lothar K. Becker’s talk. He discussed the issue that certain implementations in LibreOffice require a budget that is too large for any single interested entity to fund independently. Furthermore, The Document Foundation (TDF) cannot legally receive funds from government entities. Therefore, there is no organization or entity to pool resources from all the interested entities to finance the implementation.

Lothar giving his presentation

Lothar giving his presentation. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Another talk was by the Austrian Armed Forces on their migration to LibreOffice. I wanted to know why they migrated, and I found out that they did it for their digital sovereignty, and not for saving on the license costs. Another point presented in the talk was that LibreOffice is available on all the operating systems, while the Microsoft Office suite is not that widely available. The migration was systematic and was performed over a few years. They started working on it in 2021, and the migration was finished recently. In addition, it also required training their staff in using LibreOffice.

Presentation on migration to LibreOffice by Austrian Armed Forces

Presentation on migration to LibreOffice by Austrian Armed Forces. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The lunch was inside the university canteen. We were provided lunch coupons by the TDF. I got a vegan coupon with 4000 Ft written on it, which meant I could take lunch for up to 4000 Hungarian forints.

My lunch ticket

My lunch ticket for the conference. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The lunch I had on the first day

The lunch I had on the first day. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

During the evening, it was my turn for the presentation. I was done with preparing my slides ten days before my talk. I also got my slides reviewed by friends.

My talk was finished in 20 minutes, while I was given a 30-minute slot. This helped us catch up on the schedule. Furthermore, I made my talk interactive by asking questions and making sure that the audience was not asleep. During my talk, my friend Dione took my pictures with my camera.

My talk was on how free software projects could give users a say in freedom to modify the software. I illustrated this using the Prav project that I am a part of.

After the talks were over, we were treated to a conference dinner at Trofea Grill. It had a great selection of desserts, which helped me sample some Hungarian desserts. The sponge cake was especially good.

Desserts at Tofea Grill

Desserts at Tofea Grill. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

5th of September

The next day—the 5th of September—I went with Dione to the venue early in the morning, as her talk was the first one of the day. Her talk was titled Managing Tasks with Nextcloud Deck. Later that day, I also attended a talk on Collabora. At lunch, I found the egg white salad quite tasty.

Dione giving her presentation

Dione giving her presentation. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Egg white salad

Egg white salad. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

After the lunch break, we had the conference group photo. I had a Nikon camera, which we used to take the group photo. I requested a university student to take our group photo and also taught her how to operate the camera.

People looking at the camera and smiling

Group photo

By the evening, the conference ended, after which we went to a pub, which was again sponsored by TDF. I had beer, but that one really tasted bad, so I couldn’t finish it. The only vegetarian option was goat cheeseburger, which my friend Manish and I opted for. The burger tasted awful. Apparently, I don’t like goat cheese.

The next day I went sightseeing with Dione in Budapest. Stay tuned for our adventures in Budapest!

Credits: Thanks to Dione and Richard for proofreading.

21 April, 2026 03:54AM

April 20, 2026

hackergotchi for Bits from Debian

Bits from Debian

Debian Project Leader election 2026 is over, Sruthi Chandran elected!

The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election has just concluded, and the winner is Sruthi Chandran. Congratulations!

347 out of 1,039 Developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the results of the voting is available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2026 page.

Many thanks to Sruthi Chandran for her campaign, to our Developers for their votes, and to Andreas Tille for his service as DPL over the past two years!

The new term for the project leader will start on April 21, 2026 and expire on April 20, 2027.

20 April, 2026 05:00PM by Jean-Pierre Giraud

hackergotchi for Sune Vuorela

Sune Vuorela

Kookbook 0.3.0 released

I recently released version 0.3.0 of my recipe manager application Kookbook – find it in git in KDE Invent or as released tarballs in https://download.kde.org/stable/kookbook/

Changes since last time is more or less “Minor bugfixes and a Qt6 port” – nothing as such noteworthy unless you aim to get rid of Qt5 on your system.

so what is kookbook?
It is a simple recipe viewer that works with semi-structured markdown. More details can be seen in the quite old 0.1.0 announcement

At some point I should do a 10 recipe example collection, but my personal collection is in danish, so I’m not sure it is going to be useful. Unless someone will donate me some handfuls of pre-formatted recipes, I will happily announce it.

20 April, 2026 03:01PM by Sune Vuorela

Russ Allbery

Review: Surface Detail

Review: Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks

Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: October 2010
Printing: May 2011
ISBN: 0-316-12341-2
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 627

Surface Detail is the ninth novel in Banks's Culture science fiction (literary space opera?) series. As with most of the Culture novels, it can be read in any order, although this isn't the best starting point. There is an Easter egg reference to Use of Weapons that would be easier to notice if you have read that book recently, but which is not that important to the story.

Lededje Y'breq is an Indented Intagliate from the Sichultian Enablement. Her body is patterned from her skin down to her bones, covered with elaborate markings similar to tattoos that extend to her internal organs. As an intagliate, she is someone's property. In her case, she is the property of Joller Veppers, the richest man in the Enablement and her father's former business partner. Intagliates are a tradition of great cultural pride in the Enablement. They are a living representation of the seriousness with which debts and honor are taken, up to and including one's not-yet-born children becoming the property of one's debtor. Such children are decorated as living works of art of the highest skill and technical sophistication; after all, the Enablement are not barbarians.

As the story opens, Lededje is attempting, not for the first time, to escape. This attempt is successful in an unexpected way.

Prin and Chay are Pavulean researchers and academics who, as this story opens, are in Hell. They are not dead; they have infiltrated the Hell that Pavuleans are shown to scare them into proper behavior in order to prove that it is not an illusion and their society does indeed torture people in an afterlife, in more awful ways than people dare imagine. They have reached the portal through which temporary visitors exit, hoping to escape with firm evidence of the existence and horrors of the Pavulean afterlife. They will not be entirely successful.

Yime Nsokyi is a Culture agent for Quietus, the part of Contact that concerns itself with the dead. Many advanced societies throughout the galaxy have invented and reinvented the ability to digitize a mind and then run it in a virtual environment. Once a society can capture the minds of every person in that society from that point forward, it faces the question of whether to do so and, if it does, what to do with those minds. More specifically, it faces the moral question of whether to punish the minds of people who were horrible in life. It faces the question of whether to create Hell.

Vatueil is a soldier in a contestation, a limited and carefully monitored virtual war. The purpose of that war game is to, once and for all, resolve the question of whether civilizations should be allowed to create Hells. Some civilizations consider them integral to their religion or self-conception. Others consider them morally abhorrent, and that conflict was in danger of spilling over into war in the Real. Hence the War in Heaven: Both sides committed to fight in a virtual space under specific and structured rules, and the winner decides the fate of the galaxy's Hells. Vatueil is fighting for the anti-Hell side. The anti-Hell side is losing.

There are very few authors who were better at big-idea science fiction than Iain M. Banks. I've been reading a few books about AI ships and remembered that I had two unread Culture novels that I was saving. It felt like a good time to lose myself in something sprawling.

Surface Detail does sprawl. Even by Banks's standards, there was an impressive amount of infodumping in this book. Banks always has huge and lovingly described set pieces, and this book is no exception, but there are also paragraphs and pages of background and cultural musings and galactic politics. We are introduced to not one but three new Contact divisions; as well as the already-mentioned Quietus, there is Numina, which concerns itself with the races that have sublimed (transcended), and Restoria, which deals with hegemonizing swarms (grey goo nanotech, paperclip maximizers, and their equivalents).

Infodumping is both a feature and a bane of big-idea science fiction, and it helps to be in the right mood. It also helps if the info being dumped is interesting, and this is where Banks shines. This is a huge, sprawling book, but it deals with some huge, sprawling questions and it has interesting and non-reductive thoughts about them. The problems posed by the plot come with history, failed solutions, multi-sided political disputes, strategies and tactics of varying morality and efficacy, and an effort to wrestle with the irreducible complexity of trying to resolve political and ethical disagreements in a universe full of profound disagreements and moral systems that one cannot simply steamroll.

It also helps that the characters are interesting, even when they're not likable. Surface Detail has one fully hissable villain (Veppers) as a viewpoint character, but even Veppers is interesting in a "let me check the publication date to see if Banks was aware of Peter Thiel" sort of way. The Culture ships, of which there are several in this story, tend towards a gently sarcastic kindness that I find utterly charming. Lededje provides the compelling motive force of someone who has no involvement in the broader philosophical questions and instead intends to resolve one specific problem through lethal violence. Vatueil and Yime were a bit bland in personality, more exposition generators than characters I warmed to, but their roles and therefore the surrounding exposition were fascinating enough that I still enjoyed their sections.

I'm sure this is not an original observation, but I was struck reading this book in the first half of 2026 that the Culture functions as an implementation of what the United States likes to think it is but has never been. It has a strong sense of shared ethics and moral principles, it tries to export them to the rest of the galaxy through example, persuasion, and careful meddling, but it tries to follow some combination of pragmatic and moral rules while doing so, partly to avoid a backlash and partly to avoid becoming its own sort of hegemonizing swarm. That is a powerfully attractive vision of how to be an advanced civilization, and the fact that every hegemon that has claimed that mantle has behaved appallingly just makes it more intriguing as a fictional concept. In this book, like in many Culture books, the Culture is painfully aware of the failure modes of meddling, and the story slowly reveals the effort the Culture put into staying just on a defensible side of their own moral lines. This is, in a sense, a Prime Directive story, but with a level of hard-nosed pragmatism and political sophistication that the endless Star Trek Prime Directive episodes never reach.

Surface Detail does tend to sprawl, and I'm not sure Banks pulled together all the pieces of the plot. For example, if there was a point to the subplot involving the Unfallen Bulbitian, it was lost on me. (There is always a possibility with Banks that I wasn't paying close enough attention.) But the descriptions are so elaborate and the sense of politics and history are so deep that I was never bored, even when following a plot thread that meandered off into apparent irrelevance. The main plot line comes to a satisfying conclusion that may be even more biting social commentary today than it was in 2010.

A large part of the plot does involve Hell, so a warning for those who haven't read much Banks: He adores elaborate descriptions of body horror and physical torture. The sections involving Prin and Chay are rather grim and horrific, probably a bit worse than Dante's Inferno. I have a low tolerance for horror and I was able to read past and around the worst bits, but be warned that Banks indulges his love for the painfully grotesque quite a bit.

This was great, and exactly what I was hoping for when I picked it up. It's not the strongest Culture novel (for me, that's either The Player of Games or Excession), but it's one of the better ones. Highly recommended, although if you're new to the Culture, I would start with one of the earlier books that provide a more gradual introduction to the Culture and Special Circumstances.

Followed, in the somewhat disconnected Culture series sense, by The Hydrogen Sonata.

Content warnings: Rape (largely off-screen), graphic violence, lots of Bosch-style grotesque torture, and a lot of Veppers being a thoroughly awful human being as a viewpoint character.

Rating: 8 out of 10

20 April, 2026 04:26AM

April 19, 2026

Review: Collision Course

Review: Collision Course, by Michelle Diener

Series: Class 5 #6
Publisher: Eclipse
Copyright: November 2024
ISBN: 1-7637844-0-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 289

Collision Course is the sixth novel in the Class 5 science fiction series and the first that doesn't use the Dark X naming convention. There are lots of spoilers in this story for the earlier books, but you don't have to remember all the details of previous events. Like the novella, Dark Ambitions, this novel returns to Rose, Sazo, and Dav instead of introducing another Earth woman and Class 5 ship.

In Dark Class, Ellie discovered an interesting artifact of a previously-unknown space-faring civilization. Rose, Sazo, and Dav are on their way to make first contact when, during a routine shuttle flight between the Class 5 and Dav's Grih military ship, Rose is abducted. The aliens they came to contact have an aggressive, leverage-based negotiating strategy. They're also in the middle of a complicated war with more sides than are readily apparent.

What I liked most about Dark Horse, the first book of this series and our introduction to Rose, was the revealed ethical system and a tense plot that hinged primarily on establishing mutual trust when there were excellent reasons for the characters to not trust each other. As the series has continued, I think the plots have become more complicated but the ethical dilemmas and revealing moments of culture shock have become less common. That is certainly true of Collision Course; this is science fiction as thriller, with a complex factional conflict, a lot of events, more plot reversals than the earlier books, but also less ethics and philosophy.

I'm not sure if this is a complaint. I kind of miss the ethics and philosophy, but Diener also hasn't had much new to say for the past few books. The plot of Collision Course is quite satisfyingly twisty for a popcorn-style science fiction series. I was kept guessing about the merits of some of the factions quite late into the book, although admittedly I was in the mood for light entertainment and was not trying too hard to figure out where the book was going. I did read nearly the entire book in one sitting and stayed up until 2am to finish it, which is a solid indication that something Diener was doing worked.

I do have quibbles, though. One is that the ending is a bit unsatisfying. Like Sazo, I was getting quite annoyed at the people capturing (and recapturing) Rose and would have enjoyed somewhat more decisive consequences. Also, and here I have to be vague to avoid spoilers, I was expecting a bit more of a redemption arc for one of the players in the multi-sided conflict. The ending I did get was believable but rather sad, and I wish Diener had either chosen a different outcome (this is light happily-ever-after science fiction, after all) or wrestled more directly with the implications. There were a bit too many "wait, one more thing" ending reversals and not quite enough emotional payoff for me.

The other quibble is that Collision Course was a bit too damsel in distress for this series. Rose is pregnant, which Diener uses throughout the book as a way to raise the stakes of the plot and also make Rose more annoyed but also less capable than she was in her earlier novel. Both Sazo and Dav are in full heroic rescue mode, and while Diener still ensures Rose is primarily responsible for her own fate, there is some "military men attempt to protect the vulnerable woman" here. One of the things I like about this series is that it does not use that plot, so while the balance between Rose rescuing herself and other people rescuing her is still tilted towards Rose, I would have liked this book more if Rose were in firmer control of events.

I will mostly ignore the fact that a human and a Grih sexually reproducing makes little to no biological sense, since Star Trek did similar things routinely and it's an established genre trope. But I admit that it still annoys me a bit that the alien hunk is essentially human except that he's obsessed with Rose's singing and has pointy ears. Diener cares about Rose's pregnancy a lot more than I did, which added to my mild grumpiness at how often it came up.

Overall, this was fine. I prefer a bit more of a protagonist discovering how powerful she is by making ingenious use of the ethical dilemmas her captors have trapped themselves in, and a bit less of Rose untangling a complicated political situation by getting abducted by every player serially, but it still kept the pages turning. Any book that is sufficiently engrossing for me to read straight through is working at some level. Collision Course was highly readable, undemanding, and distracting, which is what I was looking for when I read it. I would put it about middle of pack in the series. If Rose's pregnancy is more interesting to you than it was to me, that might push it a bit higher.

If you have gotten this far in the series, you will probably enjoy this, although it does feel like Diener is running out of new things to say about this universe. That's unfortunate given the number of threads about AI sentience and rights that could still be followed, but I think tracing them properly would require more philosophical meat than Diener intends for these books. Which is why the next book I grabbed was a Culture novel.

Currently this is the final book in the Class 5 series, but there is no inherent reason why Diener couldn't write more of them.

Rating: 7 out of 10

19 April, 2026 04:52AM

April 18, 2026

hackergotchi for Charles Plessy

Charles Plessy

Thanks Branchable!

I was hosted for a long time, free of charge, on https://www.branchable.com/ by Joey and Lars. Branchable and Ikiwiki were wonderful ideas that never took off as much as they deserved. To avoid being a burden now that Branchable is nearing its end, I migrated to a VPS at Sakura.

However, I have not left Ikiwiki. I only use it as a site engine, but I haven't found any equivalent that gives me both native Git integration, wiki syntax for a personal site, the creativity of its directives (you can do anything with inline and pagespec), and its multilingual support through the po plugin.

Joey and Lars, thank you for everything!

18 April, 2026 01:37PM

Matthias Klumpp

Hello old new “Projects” directory!

If you have recently installed a very up-to-date Linux distribution with a desktop environment, or upgraded your system on a rolling-release distribution, you might have noticed that your home directory has a new folder: “Projects”

Why?

With the recent 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs we enabled the “Projects” directory by default. Support for this has already existed since 2007, but was never formally enabled. This closes a more than 11 year old bug report that asked for this feature.

The purpose of the Projects directory is to give applications a default location to place project files that do not cleanly belong into one of the existing categories (Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos). Examples of this are software engineering projects, scientific projects, 3D printing projects, CAD design or even things like video editing projects, where project files would end up in the “Projects” directory, with output video being more at home in “Videos”.

By enabling this by default, and subsequently in the coming months adding support to GLib, Flatpak, desktops and applications that want to make use of it, we hope to give applications that do operate in a “project-centric” manner with mixed media a better default storage location. As of now, those tools either default to the home directory, or will clutter the “Documents” folder, both of which is not ideal. It also gives users a default organization structure, hopefully leading to less clutter overall and better storage layouts.

This sucks, I don’t like it!

As usual, you are in control and can modify your system’s behavior. If you do not like the “Projects” folder, simply delete it! The xdg-user-dirs utility will not try to create it again, and instead adjust the default location for this directory to your home directory. If you want more control, you can influence exactly what goes where by editing your ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs configuration file.

If you are a system administrator or distribution vendor and want to set default locations for the default XDG directories, you can edit the /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults file to set global defaults that affect all users on the system (users can still adjust the settings however they like though).

What else is new?

Besides this change, the 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs brings full support for the Meson build system (dropping Automake), translation updates, and some robustness improvements to its code. We also fixed the “arbitrary code execution from unsanitized input” bug that the Arch Linux Wiki mentions here for the xdg-user-dirs utility, by replacing the shell script with a C binary.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

18 April, 2026 08:06AM by Matthias

Yifei Zhan

CommBank hardware MFA token

A while ago, CommBank started asking for MFA confirmation on its mobile app for every NetBank login on a browser. Previously, there was an option to use SMS for MFA, which isn’t as secure as I would like, but it was at least usable. Since I’m switching away from Android to Mobian and won’t be able to use the CommBank app for much longer, I applied for a physical NetCode token.

The hardware is made by Digipass and looks disposable. It is a small, battery powered gadget with a screen and a button. When pressed, it shows a temporary NetCode for authentication. Such a NetCode is required both for NetBank logins and approving online transactions.

The letter that came with it has the wrong link for activation, the correct link is under NetBank -> Settings -> NetCode (under the Security section)

To apply for a physical token, call the NetBank team, mention you can’t use the app and need a physical NetCode token, and make sure they actually submit your request for a token. It took me 2 calls to get them to ship me a token. The hardware is free of charge but can only be applied for via phone call; unfortunately staff members at my local branch are unable to do anything in relation to NetBank. I was told privately by a CommBank employee that they are deprecating the hardware token in favor of the mobile app, I hope that won’t happen anytime soon, or that they add support for passkeys before they do. The last time I checked, the CommBank app was LineageOS-friendly, but I don’t want to configure WayDroid just to do online banking.

PayID, the thing that allows you to receive payment via a phone number or email address, is not compatible with the hardware token, and existing PayID will be silently deactivated if you use hardware token. This looks to be an artificial restriction; I don’t see why it has to be this way.

Regular CommBank mobile app sessions will also be de-activated once the hardware token is activated (I was told so but my sessions weren’t deactivated until I wiped my Android phone), and you won’t be able to sign into mobile app again until you manually disable the NetCode token.

Online banking has been getting progressively more invasive and anti-user over the last decade, from demanding remote attestation to requiring real time location data, each time locking certain features when those demands are not satisfied; all based on the flawed assumptions that everyone owns a phone running a certain flavor of iOS or Android, and has it ready all the time. I’m not sure what can be done to reverse this trend, but on the personal level I will use NetBank less and go back to cash.

18 April, 2026 12:00AM

Valhalla's Things

Pizza!

Posted on April 18, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:cooking

This post contains a bit of consumerism and is full of references to commercial products, none of which caused me to receive any money nor non-monetary compensation.

This post has also been written after eating in one meal the amount of bread-like stuff that we usually have in more than 24 hours.

I’ve been baking bread since a long time ago. I don’t know exactly when, but probably it was the early 2000s or so, and remained a regular-ish thing until 2020, when it became an extremely regular thing, as in I believe I bake bread on average every other day.

In the before times, I’ve had a chance to bake pizza in a wood fired oven a few times: a friend had one and would offer the house, my partner would mind the fire, and I would get there with the dough and prepare the pizza.

Now that we have moved to a new house, we don’t have a good and convenient place for a proper wood fired oven in masonry, but we can use one of the portable ones, and having dealt with more urgent expenses, I decided that just before the potential collapse of the global economy was a good time as any to buy the oven I had been looking at since we found this house.

I decided to get an Ooni Karu 2, having heard good things about the brand, and since it looked like a good balance between size and portability. I also didn’t consider their gas fired ovens (nor did I buy the gas burner) because I’m trying to get rid of gas, not add stuff that uses it, and I didn’t get an electric one because I’m not at all unhappy with the bakery-style pizza we make in our regular oven, and I have to admit we also wanted to play with fire1.

We also needed an outdoor table suitable to use the oven on and store it. Here I looked for inspiration at the Ooni tables (and for cheaper alternatives in the same style), but my mother who shares the outdoor area with us wasn’t happy with the idea of steel2. And then I was browsing the modern viking shores, and found that there was a new piece in the NÄMMARÖ series my mother likes (and of which we already have some reclining chairs): a kitchen unit in wood with a steel top.

At first I expected to just skip the back panel, since it would be in the way when using the oven, but then I realized that it could probably be assembled upside down, down from the top between the table legs, and we decided to try that option.

This week everything had arrived, and we could try it.

Yesterday evening, after dinner (around 21, I think) I prepared the dough with the flour I usually use for bakery-style pizza: Farina di Grano Tenero Tipo 0 PANE (320 - 340 W); since I wanted to make things easier for myself I only used 55% hydration, so the recipe was:

  • 1 kg flour
  • 550 g water
  • 2 g dry yeast
  • 12 g salt

The next time I think I’ll try with one of my other staples: Molino Bogetto etichetta blu (260/280 W)

Then this morning we assembled the NÄMMARÖ, then I divided the dough in eight balls, put them in a covered — but not sealed — container 3, well floured with rice flour and then we fired the oven (as in: my partner did, I looked for a short while and then set the table and stuff), using charcoal, because we already had some, and could conveniently get more at the supermarket.

When the oven had reached temperatures in the orange range4 I stretched the smallest ball out, working on my wooden peel, sprayed it with water5, sprinkled it with coarse salt and put it in the oven.

After 30 seconds I turned it around with the new metal peel, then again after 30 seconds, and then I lost count of how many times I repeated this6, but it was probably 2 or 3 minutes until it looked good.

A flatbread on a regular plate: it's only a bit more than half the plate in diameter, puffed up near the borders and thin in the middle, and only lightly browned in places, not burnt. It's sitting on the lower shelf of a wooden table.

And it was good. The kind of pizza that is quite soft, especially near the borders.

We ate it with fresh mozzarella and tomatoes, and then made another one the same way, to finish the mozzarella.

Another flatbread on the same plate, this time it's about 4 cm smaller than the plate on all sides, and it's covered with brownish-red chopped up vegetables.

This was supposed to be our lunch, but we decided to try one with some leftover cooked radicchio, and that also worked quite nicely.

And finally, we decided we needed to try a more classical pizza, with tomato sauce and cured meat, of which we forgot to take pictures.

Up to here we had eaten about half of the dough, and we were getting full: I had prepared significantly more than what I expected to eat, to be able to accidentally burn some, but also with the idea to bake something else to be eaten later.

So I made two more focaccias with just water and salt, and then I tried to cook some bread with what I expected to be residual heat.

Another flatbread with coarse salt and two bread rolls, one of which is completely carbonized on one side. The other one has been cut, and while it has a carbonized spot, it is also well cooked in the middle, and perfectly edible.

Except that the oven was getting a bit too cold, so my partner added some charcoal, and when I put the last two unflattened balls right at the back of the oven where it was still warmer, that side carbonized. After 5 minutes I moved them to the middle of the oven, and turned them, and then after another turn and 5 more minutes they were ready. And other than the burnt crust, they were pretty edible.

So, the thoughts after our first experience. Everybody around the table (my SO, my mother and me) was quite happy with the results, and they are different enough from the ones I could get with the regular oven.

As I should have expected, it’s much faster than a masonry oven, both in getting to temperature and in cooling down: my plan for residual heat bread cooking will have to be adjusted with experience.

We were able to get it hot enough, but not as hot as it’s supposed to be able to get: we suspect that using just charcoal may have influenced it, and next week we’ll try to get some wood, and try with a mix.

As for the recipe, dividing the dough in eight parts worked quite well: maybe the pizzas are a bit on the smaller side, but since they come one at a time it’s more convenient to cut and share them, and maybe make a couple more at the end.

Of course, I’ll want to try different recipes, for different styles of pizzas (including some almost-trademark-violating ones) and for other types of flatbread.

I expect it won’t be hard to find volunteers to help us with the experiments. :D

  1. any insinuation that there may have been considerations of having a way to have freshly baked bread in case of a prolonged blackout may or may not be based on reality. But it wasn’t the only — or even the main — reason.↩︎

  2. come on! it’s made of STEEL. how can it be not good? :D↩︎

  3. IKEA 365+ 3.1 glass, the one that is 32 cm × 21 cm × 9 cm; it was just big enough for the amount of dough, and then I covered it with a lid that is missing the seal.↩︎

  4. why did they put a thermometer on it, and not add labels with the actual temperature? WHY???↩︎

  5. if you don’t have dietary restrictions a bit of olive oil would taste even better.↩︎

  6. numbers above 2 are all basically the same, right?↩︎

18 April, 2026 12:00AM

April 17, 2026

Russell Coker

Home Battery

Prices

On the 19th of March I got a home battery system installed. The government has a rebate scheme so it had a list price of about $22k for a 40kWh setup and cost me about $12k. It seems that 40KWh is the minimum usable size for the amount of electricity I use, I have 84 cores running BOINC when they have nothing better to do which is 585W of TDP according to Intel. While the CPUs are certainly using less than the maximum TDP (both due to design safety limits and the fact that I have disabled hyper-threading on all systems due to it providing minimal benefits and potential security issues) given some power usage by cooling fans and some inefficiency in PSUs I think that assuming that 585W is accounted for 24*7 by CPUs is reasonable. So my home draws between 800W and 1KW when no-one is home and with an electric car and all electric cooking a reasonable amount of electricity can be used.

My bills prior to the battery installation were around $200/month which was based on charging my car only during sunny times as my electricity provider (Amber Electric) has variable rates based on wholesale prices. Also the feed in rates if my solar panels produce too much electricity in sunny times often go negative so if I don’t use enough electricity. I haven’t had the electric car long enough to find out what the bills might be in winter without a home battery.

Before getting the battery my daily bills according to the Amber app were usually between $5 and $10. After getting it the daily bills have almost always been below $5. The only day where it’s been over $5 since the battery installation was when electricity was cheap and I fully charged the home battery and my car which used 50KWh in one day and cost $7.87 which is 16 cents per KWh. 16 cents isn’t the cheapest price (sometimes it gets as low as 10 cents) but is fairly cheap, sometimes even in the cheap parts of the day it doesn’t get that low (the cheapest price on the day I started writing this was 20 cents).

So it looks like this may save me $100 per month, if so there will be a 10% annual return on investment on the $12K I spent. This makes it a good investment, better than repaying a mortgage (which is generally under 6%) and almost as good as the long term results of index tracker funds. However if it cost $22K (the full price without subsidy) then it would still be ok but wouldn’t be a great investment. The government subsidised batteries because the huge amount of power generated by rooftop solar systems was greater than the grid could use during the day in summer and batteries are needed to use that power when it’s dark.

Android App

The battery system is from Fox ESS and the FoxCloud 2.0 Android app is a bit lacking in functionality. It has a timer for mode setting with options “Self-use” (not clearly explained), “Feed-in Priority” (not explained but testing shows feeding everything in to the grid), “Back Up”, “Forced Charge”, and “Forced Discharge”. Currently I have “Forced Charge” setup for most sunny 5 hours of the day for a maximum charge power of 5KW. I did that because about 25KW/day is what I need to cover everything and while the system can do almost 10KW that would charge the battery fully in a few hours and then electricity would be exported to the grid which would at best pay me almost nothing and at worst bill me for supplying electricity when they don’t want it. There doesn’t seem to be a “never put locally generated power into the grid unless the battery is full” option. The force charge mode allows stopping at a certain percentage, but when that is reached there is no fallback to another option. It would be nice if the people who designed the configuration could take as a baseline assumption that the macro programming in office suites and functions in spreadsheets are things that regular people are capable of using when designing the configuration options. I don’t think we need a Turing complete programming language in the app to control batteries (although I would use it if there was one), but I think we need clauses like “if battery is X% full then end this section”.

There is no option to say “force charge until 100%” or “force charge for the next X minutes” as a one-off thing. If I came home in the afternoon with my car below 50% battery and a plan to do a lot of driving the next day then I’d want to force charge it immediately to allow charging the car overnight. But I can’t do that without entering a “schedule”. For Unix people imagine having to do everything via a cron job and no option to run something directly from the command-line.

It’s a little annoying that they appear to have spent more development time on animations for the app than some of what should be core functionality.

Management

Amber has an option to allow my battery to be managed by them based on wholesale pries but I haven’t done that as the feed-in prices are very low. So I just charge my battery when electricity is cheap and use it for the rest of the day. There is usually a factor of 2 or more price difference between the middle of the day and night time so that saves money. It also means I don’t have to go out of my way to try and charge my car in the middle of the day. There is some energy lost in charging and discharging the batteries but it’s not a lot. I configured the system to force charge for the 5 sunniest hours every day for 5KW as that’s enough to keep it charged overnight and 5KW is greater than the amount of solar electricity produced on my house since I’ve been monitoring it so that forces it to all be used for the battery. In summer I might have to change that to 6KW for the sunniest 2 or 3 hours and then 4KW or 5KW surrounding that which will be a pain to manage.

Instead of charging the car every day during sunny times I charge it once or twice a week, I have a 3.3KW charger and the car has a 40KWh battery so usually it takes me less than 10 hours to fully charge it and I get at least 5 hours of good sunlight in the process.

There are people hacking on these devices which is interesting to get direct control from computers [1], and apparently not banned from the official community for doing so. I’m not enthusiastic enough to do this, I’ve got plenty of other free software things to work on. But it’s good that others are doing so.

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17 April, 2026 12:58PM by etbe

April 16, 2026

Sahil Dhiman

What is Life (to you)?

It started with a thought: to understand people’s perspectives on life and its meaning. So I texted folks, “What is life (to you)?”. Each of the following list items (-) is a response from a different individual, mostly verbatim.

- A lot

- Everyone has a few universal basic qualities, and some special qualities. To me life is pursuit of exploring world based on those qualities and maturing those qualities as one goes on about exploring world/life with those qualities.
Discovering and enhancing experiences as one goes through them.

- life is endless suffering

- my answer might change daily, but this is what I’ve noticed and feel recently. Life is a spectrum with two distinct ends: what we control and what we don’t. At birth, the spectrum is largely tilted toward control, but throughout our lives, it gradually shifts toward the other side. Ultimately, as we approach death, we lose all control over any aspect of our existence, reaching the other end of the spectrum.
tho this isn’t universal, privilege plays a huge part in what you control tho i believe it holds true for the majority
but yeah man, meaning and purpose are dynamic, it’s in their nature to change i can give you a different answer this evening itself xD

- Funeral Monologue from Synecdoche, New York. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9PzSNy3xj0

- Zindagi ek nadiya hai, Aur mujhe tairna nahi aata
(translation - Life is a river, and I don’t know how to swim)
On a more serious note, Life is what you make it out for yourself. The only established truth is that it will end. We can never know if there is something after or if there was something before. So try to live a life that you feel aspired by? But this question was beautifully answered by that book which you had about that dying professor
(Me - He was talking about Tuesday’s with Morrie)

- My answer is 42

- One, it’s living on your own terms, you define everything for yourself, success, normal, whatever. You get to curate your version of it no matter the societal norms.
It’s an accumulation of experiences - friends, parents, work, activities, doing shit loads. Sab try karo- travel, zumba, art, music, workout, sports, dil kara ye karna hai karlo. (translation - If your heart wants to do it, just do it.)
Then I think relationships - all that you’ve nurtured, people forget maintaining people because of work. It takes efforts to keep people in your life, everyone that comes has a place in yours, how well thats stays is upto you. You also get to curate your people, who stays who don’t. Family toh hai hi (translation - family is there) but everyone else that comes along can make it pretty good.
So I don’t want to be 50 and be like chalo ab kuch apne liye karte hai… (translation - Come on, now let’s do something for ourselves) Do whatever shit you want today. Not everything costs money, and if it does get thrifty
But do keep healthy while doing all of that

- Being alive so that my daughter can grow up and i can help raising her kids as well. Raising kids without mother is tough :P

- Definitively, I feel like Life is a by product of proteins and energy working together. But in a more personal sense, Life is a dumb joke played onto us. It’s a rat race. But rats exists because of life and then it becomes a chicken-egg problem
Honestly, I don’t give good answers to life questions. I’m generally the one asking
Life can be like a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you’re gonna get untill you experience the chocolate(assuming the chocolates are heterogenous and contains a mix of everything)
Camus once said, “Life is a revolt”, and one of his students added more spice to it like “Life is a revolt against the meaninglessness of existence"
I kinda feel like Life is the pursuit of every person’s search for meaning

- Imprisonment waiting for execution 😄
I have one more thought while we are on the topic , game with pre defined starting position and predefined destination , path to reach is a maze

- A phase where you can have a really good time or really bad one, usually the mix of both. A phase where you are prisoner to responsibility and materialistic wants.
It’s a hell for you, where you try to create heaven for others. Being born was never your choice, but ending is always in your hands but you are a prisoner. You fear that leaving this world behind will destroy the heavens you created for others and they will be back to hell. But eventually everyone moves on watching the hourglass of their life.
Once you are left with no desires or no one to create heavens for, you look arround yourself. You see everyone chasing something, everyone scared of their limitted life time sliping away yet you want it to end sooner.
Doesn’t matter if it was all good till now, or all bad. The other half is waiting for redemption. If it was all good, it’s best time to die don’t wait for the bad to start. If was all bad, it’s still the best time to die what if it was the good one and more worst is waiting for you. We desire to be remembered, yet we want to free from this loop of suffering.
Someone once said, life is a suffering, chose your sufferings.

- Life to me is to live without regrets and live with freedom.
Life is always unpredictable and this unpredictability makes it more interesting and worth it.

- As of now, for the state of mind that I am in , I think for me life is about subtle struggle, subtle inconveniences and yet moving forward cause that’s all I know.
I am not sure if any of this has any meaning, but sometimes I feel I was born of a purpose and that the universe has my back.
For me it’s about raising my consciousness, understanding people to their depths, gaining moderate material success and helping people to some extend.
I have tried to seek a grander meaning but I have failed.
Life for me is what I make out it.
In my times of great success i rarely think about life for I am busy enjoying it, whatever you may call that state of mind.

- For me its the little things that you enjoy with YOUR people

- Life to me is about living and loving, and doing it in a way that sustains. It’s the people who shape you, the work you get absorbed in, the quiet moments in between. There’s also the wanting, the drive to figure out what’s worth going after and how to get there, but that’s just one part of it, not the point of it. And none of it happens in a vacuum. I’m aware of the privileges that let me live this way, and I try to hold on to that gratitude. In the end, life has both a material and a non-material side, and a lot of what we do is chasing material things in an attempt to satisfy something non-material within us

- Mere liye (translation - for me) life is staying at my home and studying random economics papers. That’s when I enjoy myself the most.

- Very complicated
Some days I wish this life never ended and some time I feel it would be better if it stopped at that moment.
It all depends on the events that happen in the so called “life”.
So life to me is a string of events that happen anyway and you get to make some decisions which can turn it in any direction and then you wonder how did that happen.

- not forgetting to breathe, learn, eat, game, take a good shit, love, sleep.

- To be honest it changed with time! At 19 it was about freedom, wasn’t sure what freedom meant but i wanted that! To be free from everything, maybe because parents still controlled a part of my life. Then came 22-24 where i was working, trying to figure out what i want, the meaning changed from freedom to living for myself. To earn more, to be greedy about myself and pursue whatever would help me gain more steps in my career.
Came my mba life, switched my life from doing for myself to trying everything out to have no regrets. Life meaning was just about living with no regrets, invested, gambled, did everything to earn that tag of “yeah, have tried that”. Now it has all switched to, it was all just a fake facade. Life turned to having a meaningful life rather than finding meaning in what i am doing. Living for people around me, chhoti chhoti cheezo m khushi (translation - happiness in small things(?)) isn’t really a topic of conversation but more of happy thing for me. So it changed, and m quite happy to be honest. Life did show me a lot of failures, but was privileged enough to face those failures. Gained a lot of learnings if not money😂
Hopeful for more learnings and change meaning of life with time

- A task.

- You have different answers at different times You learn different meanings at different times When you are studying, basically it is about job, finding a partner then it becomes, house, car other things based on your income in between, there can be passion too
Free Software was a passion, electoral politics too, but both kind of faded and I want cooperative and user driven development now (prav - something that motivates me every day) and these days learning Chinese and watching Cdrama takes a huge part of my leisure time it is heavily subjective and also influences by previous experiences people around you, how much influence they have on you
it also depends on if they had to struggle in their life or not, for some life did not give much troubles and trouble itself can be relative people who never had to struggle may find even smallest challenges as troubles like if you own a car, your worry is finding a parking slot

- I am too young to think about lyfe

- A ticket to see the show on earth, I guess 😀
I guess life is different depending on the mood. It is a very broad question.
(Me - What is it in this present mood?)
Learning stuff (like I am learning a new language) and being happy but also to regulate emotions in a world where being optimistic is getting harder each day.
Life is also having a unique set of glasses you wear. Both in terms of looking from your eyeballs and your psychological perspective. Both are unique and cannot be replicated.
It is interesting what people on their deathbed think of life. If I know I am dying, my perspective would change a whole lot.
Life is finishing reading books while we are alive 😉
Life is sleeping after a good XMPP chat 😉

- Dukh dard peeda (translation - surrow pain suffering)

- uhh to word it? life is just like a journey from A to somewhere and its all about what paths you take and what line you get on to me, just a series of short adventures that all connect to a larger sequence until you can’t have any more adventures-
(Me - eee, THE END. drop dead, like a coin)
yeaaaah- I am not really for spirituality of an afterlife, to me life just ends at some point, after which point there fails to remain a discernable you, and some X time after which, you will be last remembered, try to make that last time a good one I guess?
(Me - no soul?)
uhhh not in the way most people think of it i guess?
theres just a lot of yous, theres the physical you, there is the idea of you, there is the expectation of you, and one of the undefinable you I would label as the soul maybe? like the part thats not physically you, but also certainly you
(Me - can’t say I understood part, but I get you in this sense)
mhm- well its about just questioning who you are more so questioning what life is-, I have sadly spent way too much time trying to figure that out

- Making the best of the time you have

- living a full range of experiences and embracing the good ones, seeing all that the world has to offer. In the end we were always just stardust. Might as well enjoy it when we are stardust with a consciousness of our own.

- For some reason or the Universe’s /dev/random I was born here as a biological being, and from my experience I understood living is hard and the best way to live is by embracing it. Loving everyone and everything around you. Be happy and joyful until you naturally say good bye to this world.

- Life is being fucked by everything and you just have to figure out and try to stick to the things worth being fucked for

Note: Following was transcribed from a audio message.

- There are five conditions to become a life to survive in the environment. I think there’s five conditions by the biological definitions and reproduction is one of the factor virus is not considered a life form because it cannot reproduce on its own but technically it’s kind of a life because it reproduces using the DNA ability this is the biological definition. Do you want a philosophical definition?
My definition is kind of the same except that you get life experiences along with it as a human. Extra benefits is that you are not an NPC. All other organisms are NPCs. But humans can interpret the world and change it to their liking. That is life in the case of a human. But then many humans are mostly NPCs. But they still can change the life. Okay, fuck this. Where is this even going?
A human is an exception in the case of life, because human is not an NPC. Human can interrupt the world, human can change it to its liking, which is why we are such a successful organism on this planet. That is life to me. That’s a human. But all of this is kind of meaningless, because the biological impurity of a human being still exists, so you still have the urges to reproduce, which kind of makes it like just another organism. But then, humans are yet to evolve to overcome that biological imperative.

I’m grateful for all the replies, outlooks, and subsequent conversations I got to have after this question with everyone. After all, it was a deeply personal question. It does fit in nicely with my definition of life:
“Life is all about experiences and all the transient relationships one gets to have with folks we meet on the way.”

PS - I would love you hear you on this. Feel free to text or email on sahil AT sahilister.in

16 April, 2026 05:59PM by Sahil Dhiman

April 15, 2026

hackergotchi for Paul Tagliamonte

Paul Tagliamonte

designing arf, an sdr iq encoding format 🐶

Interested in future updates? Follow me on mastodon at @paul@soylent.green. Posts about hz.tools will be tagged #hztools.

🐶 Want to jump right to the draft? I'll be maintaining ARF going forward at /draft-tagliamonte-arf-00.txt.

It’s true – processing data from software defined radios can be a bit complex 👈😏👈 – which tends to keep all but the most grizzled experts and bravest souls from playing with it. While I wouldn’t describe myself as either, I will say that I’ve stuck with it for longer than most would have expected of me. One of the biggest takeaways I have from my adventures with software defined radio is that there’s a lot of cool crossover opportunity between RF and nearly every other field of engineering.

Fairly early on, I decided on a very light metadata scheme to track SDR captures, called rfcap. rfcap has withstood my test of time, and I can go back to even my earliest captures and still make sense of what they are – IQ format, capture frequencies, sample rates, etc. A huge part of this was the simplicity of the scheme (fixed-lengh header, byte-aligned to supported capture formats), which made it roughly as easy to work with as a raw file of IQ samples.

However, rfcap has a number of downsides. It’s only a single, fixed-length header. If the frequency of operation changed during the capture, that change is not represented in the capture information. It’s not possible to easily represent mulit-channel coherent IQ streams, and additional metadata is condemned to adjacent text files.

ARF (Archive of RF)

A few years ago, I needed to finally solve some of these shortcomings and tried to see if a new format would stick. I sat down and wrote out my design goals before I started figuring out what it looked like.

First, whatever I come up with must be capable of being streamed and processed while being streamed. This includes streaming across the network or merely written to disk as it’s being created. No post-processing required. This is mostly an artifact of how I’ve built all my tools and how I intereact with my SDRs. I use them extensively over the network (both locally, as well as remotely by friends across my wider lan). This decision sometimes even prompts me to do some crazy things from time to time.

I need actual, real support for multiple IQ channels from my multi-channel SDRs (Ettus, Kerberos/Kracken SDR, etc) for playing with things like beamforming. My new format must be capable of storing multiple streams in a single capture file, rather than a pile of files in a directory (and hope they’re aligned).

Finally, metadata must be capable of being stored in-band. The initial set of metadata I needed to formalize in-stream were Frequency Changes and Discontinuities. Since then, ARF has grown a few more.

After getting all that down, I opted to start at what I thought the simplest container would look like, TLV (tag-length-value) encoded packets. This is a fairly well trodden path, and used by a bunch of existing protocols we all know and love. Each ARF file (or stream) was a set of encoded “packets” (sometimes called data units in other specs). This means that unknown packet types may be skipped (since the length is included) and additional data can be added after the existing fields without breaking existing decoders.

tag
flags
length
value
Heads up! Once this is posted, I'm not super likely to update this page. Once this goes out, the latest stable copy of the ARF spec is maintained at draft-tagliamonte-arf-00.txt. This page may quickly become out of date, so if you're actually interested in implementing this, I've put a lot of effort into making the draft comprehensive, and I plan to maintain it as I edit the format.

Unlike a “traditional” TLV structure, I opted to add “flags” to the top-level packet. This gives me a bit of wiggle room down the line, and gives me a feature that I like from ASN.1 – a “critical” bit. The critical bit indicates that the packet must be understood fully by implementers, which allows future backward incompatible changes by marking a new packet type as critical. This would only really be done if something meaningfully changed the interpretation of the backwards compatible data to follow.

Flag Description
0x01Critical (tag must be understood)

Within each Packet is a tag field. This tag indicates how the contents of the value field should be interpreted.

Tag ID Description
0x01Header
0x02Stream Header
0x03Samples
0x04Frequency Change
0x05Timing
0x06Discontinuity
0x07Location
0xFEVendor Extension

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is an example packet which should parse without error.

 00, // tag (0; no subpacket is 0 yet)
 00, // flags (0; no flags)
 00, 00 // length (0; no data)
 // data would go here, but there is none

Additionally, throughout the rest of the subpackets, there are a few unique and shared datatypes. I document them all more clearly in the draft, but to quickly run through them here too:

UUID

This field represents a globally unique idenfifer, as defined by RFC 9562, as 16 raw bytes.

Frequency

Data encoded in a Frequency field is stored as microhz (1 Hz is stored as 1000000, 2 Hz is stored as 2000000) as an unsigned 64 bit integer. This has a minimum value of 0 Hz, and a maximum value of 18446744073709551615 uHz, or just above 18.4 THz. This is a bit of a tradeoff, but it’s a set of issues that I would gladly contend with rather than deal with the related issues with storing frequency data as a floating point value downstream. Not a huge factor, but as an aside, this is also how my current generation SDR processing code (sparky) stores Frequency data internally, which makes conversion between the two natural.

IQ samples

ARF supports IQ samples in a number of different formats. Part of the idea here is I want it to be easy for capturing programs to encode ARF for a specific radio without mandating a single iq format representation. For IQ types with a scalar value which takes more than a single byte, this is always paired with a Byte Order field, to indicate if the IQ scalar values are little or big endian.

ID Name Description
0x01f32interleaved 32 bit floating point scalar values
0x02i8 interleaved 8 bit signed integer scalar values
0x03i16interleaved 16 bit signed integer scalar values
0x04u8 interleaved 8 bit unsigned integer scalar values
0x05f64interleaved 64 bit floating point scalar values
0x06f16interleaved 16 bit floating point scalar values

Each ARF file must start with a specific Header packet. The header contains information about the ARF stream writ large to follow. Header packets are always marked as “critical”.

magic
flags
start
guid
site guid
#st

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is an example header subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above) which should parse without error, with known values.

00, 00, 00, fa, de, dc, ab, 1e, // magic
00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, // flags
18, 27, a6, c0, b5, 3b, 06, 07, // start time (1740543127)

// guid (fb47f2f0-957f-4545-94b3-75bc4018dd4b)
fb, 47, f2, f0, 95, 7f, 45, 45,
94, b3, 75, bc, 40, 18, dd, 4b,

// site_id (ba07c5ce-352b-4b20-a8ac-782628e805ca)
ba, 07, c5, ce, 35, 2b, 4b, 20,
a8, ac, 78, 26, 28, e8, 05, ca

Stream Header

Immediately after the arf Header, some number of Stream Headers follow. There must be exactly the same number of Stream Header packets as are indicated by the num streams field of the Header. This has the nice effect of enabling clients to read all the stream headers without requiring buffering of “unread” packets from the stream.

id
flags
fmt
bo
rate
freq
guid
site

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is an example stream header subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above) which should parse without error, with known values.

00, 01, // id (1)
00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, // flags
01, // format (float32)
01, // byte order (Little Endian)
00, 00, 01, d1, a9, 4a, 20, 00, // rate (2 MHz)
00, 00, 5a, f3, 10, 7a, 40, 00, // frequency (100 MHz)

// guid (7b98019d-694e-417a-8f18-167e2052be4d)
7b, 98, 01, 9d, 69, 4e, 41, 7a,
8f, 18, 16, 7e, 20, 52, be, 4d,

// site_id (98c98dc7-c3c6-47fe-bc05-05fb37b2e0db)
98, c9, 8d, c7, c3, c6, 47, fe,
bc, 05, 05, fb, 37, b2, e0, db,

Samples

Block of IQ samples in the format indicated by this stream’s format and byte_order field sent in the related Stream Header.

id
iq samples

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is an samples subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above). The IQ values here are notional (and are either 2 8 bit samples, or 1 16 bit sample, depending on what the related Stream Header was).

01, // id
ab, cd, ab, cd, // iq samples

Frequency Change

The center frequency of the IQ stream has changed since the Stream Header or last Frequency Change has been sent. This is useful to capture IQ streams that are jumping around in frequency during the duration of the capture, rather than starting and stopping them.

id
frequency

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is a frequency change subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above).

01, // id
00, 00, b5, e6, 20, f4, 80, 00 // frequency (200 MHz)

Discontinuity

Since the last Samples packet for this stream, samples have been dropped or not encoded to this stream. This can be used for a stream that has dropped samples for some reason, a large gap (radio was needed for something else), or communicating “iq snippits”.

id

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is a discontinuity subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above).

01, // id

Location

Up-to-date location as of this moment of the IQ stream, usually from a GPS. This allows for in-band geospatial information to be marked in the IQ stream. This can be used for all sorts of things (detected IQ packet snippits aligned with a time and location or a survey of rf noise in an area)

flags
sys
lat
long
el
accuracy

The sys field indicates the Geodetic system to be used for the provided latitude, longitude and elevation fields. The full list of supported geodetic systems is currently just WGS84, but in case something meaningfully changes in the future, it’d be nice to migrate forward.

Unfortunately, being a bit of a coward here, the accuracy field is a bit of a cop-out. I’d really rather it be what we see out of kinematic state estimation tools like a kalman filter, or at minimum, some sort of ellipsoid. This is neither of those - it’s a perfect sphere of error where we pick the largest error in any direction and use that. Truthfully, I can’t be bothered to model this accurately, and I don’t want to contort myself into half-assing something I know I will half-ass just because I know better.

System Description
0x01 WGS84 - World Geodetic System 1984

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is a location subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above).

00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, // flags
01, // system (wgs84)
3f, f3, be, 76, c8, b4, 39, 58, // latitude (1.234)
40, 02, c2, 8f, 5c, 28, f5, c3, // longitude (2.345)
40, 59, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, // elevation (100)
40, 24, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00 // accuracy (10)

Vendor Extension

In addition to the fields I put in the spec, I expect that I may need custom packet types I can’t think of now. There’s all sorts of useful data that could be encoded into the stream, so I’d rather there be an officially sanctioned mechanism that allows future work on the spec without constraining myself.

Just an example, I’ve used a custom subpacket to create test vectors, the data is encoded into a Vendor Extension, followed by the IQ for the modulated packet. If the demodulated data and in-band original data don’t match, we’ve regressed. You could imagine in-band speech-to-text, antenna rotator azimuth information, or demodulated digital sideband data (like FM HDR data) too. Or even things I can’t even think of!

id
data

In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format, the following is a vendor extension subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above).

// extension id (b24305f6-ff73-4b7a-ae99-7a6b37a5d5cd)
b2, 43, 05, f6, ff, 73, 4b, 7a,
ae, 99, 7a, 6b, 37, a5, d5, cd,

// data (0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05)
01, 02, 03, 04, 05

Tradeoffs

The biggest tradeoff that I’m not entirely happy with is limiting the length of a packet to u16 – 65535 bytes. Given the u8 sample header, this limits us to 8191 32 bit sample pairs at a time. I wound up believing that the overhead in terms of additional packet framing is worth it – because always encoding 4 byte lengths felt like overkill, and a dynamic length scheme ballooned codepaths in the decoder that I was trying to keep as easy to change as possible as I worked with the format.

15 April, 2026 03:43PM

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

qlcal 0.1.1 on CRAN: Calendar Updates

The nineteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN just now, and has already been built for r2u. This version synchronises with QuantLib 1.42 released this week.

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, and course at the CRAN package page.

This releases updates to the 2025 holidays for China, Singapore, and Taiwan.

The full details from NEWS.Rd follow.

Changes in version 0.1.1 (2026-04-15)

  • Synchronized with QuantLib 1.42 released two days ago

  • Calendar updates for China, Singapore, Taiwan

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.

15 April, 2026 01:07PM

hackergotchi for Emmanuel Kasper

Emmanuel Kasper

Minix 3 on Beagle Board Black (ARM)

Connected via serial console. Does not have a package manager, web or ssh server, but can play tetris in the terminal (bsdgames in Debian have the same tetris version packaged).

asciicast

15 April, 2026 09:44AM by Manu

hackergotchi for Freexian Collaborators

Freexian Collaborators

Debian Contributions: Debusine projects in GSoC, Debian CI updates, Salsa CI maintenance and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-03

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.

Debusine projects in Google’s Summer of Code

While Freexian initiated Debusine, and is investing a lot of resources in the project, we manage it as a true free software project that can and should have a broader community.

We always had documentation for new contributors and we aim to be reactive with them when they interact via the issue tracker or via merge requests. We decided to put those intentions under stress tests by proposing five projects for Google’s Summer of Code as part of Debian’s participation in that program.

Given that at least 11 candidates managed to get their merge request accepted in the last 30 days (interacting with the development team is part of the pre-requisites to apply to Google Summer of Code projects these days), the contributing experience must not be too bad. 🙂 If you want to try it out, we maintain a list of “quick fixes” that are accessible to newcomers. And as always, we welcome your feedback!

Debian CI: incus backend and upgrade to Bootstrap 5, by Antonio Terceiro

debci 3.14 was released on March 4th, with a followup 3.14.1 release with regression fixes a few days afterwards. Those releases were followed by new development and maintenance work that will provide extra capabilities and stability to the platform.

This month saw the initial version of an incus backend land in Debian CI. The transition into the new backend will be done carefully so as to not disrupt ‘testing’ migration. Each package will be running jobs with both the current lxc backend and with incus. Packages that have the same result on both backends will be migrated over, and packages that exhibit different results will be investigated further, resulting in bug reports and/or other communication with the maintainers.

On the frontend side, the code has been ported to Bootstrap 5 over from the now ancient Bootstrap 3. This need has been originally reported back in 2024 based on the lack of security support for Bootstrap 3. Beyond improving maintainability, this upgrade also enables support for dark mode in debci, which is still work in progress.

Both updates mentioned in this section will be available in a following debci release.

Salsa CI maintenance by Santiago Ruano Rincón et al.

Santiago reviewed some Salsa CI issues and reviewed associated merge requests. For example, he investigated a regression (#545), introduced by the move to sbuild, on the use of extra repositories configured as “.source” files; and reviewed the MR (!712) that fixes it.

Also, there were conflicts with changes made in debci 3.14 and debci 3.14.1 (those updates are mentioned above), and different people have contributed to fix the subsequent issues, in a long-term way. This includes Raphaël who proposed MR !707 and who also suggested Antonio to merge the Salsa CI patches to avoid similar errors in the future. This happened shortly after. Those fixes finally required the unrelated MR !709, which will prevent similar problems when building images.

To identify bugs related to the autopkgtest support in the backport suites as early as possible, Santiago proposed MR !708.

Finally, Santiago, in collaboration with Emmanuel Arias also had exchanges with GSoC candidates for the Salsa CI project, including the contributions they have made as merge requests. It is important to note that there are several very good candidates interested in participating. Thanks a lot to them for their work so far!

Miscellaneous contributions

  • Raphaël reported a zim bug affecting Debian Unstable users, which was already fixed in git apparently. He could thus cherry-pick the fix and update the package in Debian Unstable.
  • Carles created a new page on the InstallingDebianOn in Debian Wiki.
  • Carles submitted translation errors in the debian-installer Weblate.
  • Carles, using po-debconf-manager, improved Catalan translations: reviewed and submitted 3 packages. Also improved error handling when forking or submitting an MR if the fork already existed.
  • Carles kept improving check-relations: code base related general improvements (added strict typing, enabled pre-commit). Also added DebPorts support, virtual packages support and added commands for reporting missing relations and importing bugs from bugs.debian.org.
  • Antonio handled miscellaneous Salsa support requests.
  • Antonio improved the management of MiniDebConf websites by keeping all non-secret settings in git and fixed exporting these sites as static HTML.
  • Stefano uploaded routine updates to hatchling, python-mitogen, python-virtualenv, python-discovery, dh-python, pypy3, python-pipx, and git-filter-repo.
  • Faidon uploaded routine updates to crun, libmaxminddb, librdkafka, lowdown, platformdirs, python-discovery, sphinx-argparse-cli, tox, tox-uv.
  • Stefano and Santiago continued to help with DebConf 26 preparations.
  • Stefano reviewed some contributions to debian-reimbursements and handled admin for reimbursements.debian.net.
  • Stefano attended the Debian Technical Committee meeting.
  • Helmut sent 8 patches for cross build failures.
  • Building on the work of postmarketOS, Helmut managed to cross build systemd for musl in rebootstrap and sent several patches in the process.
  • Helmut reviewed several MRs of Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues expanding support for DPKG_ROOT to support installing hurd.
  • Helmut incorporated a final round of feedback for the Multi-Arch documentation in Debian policy, which finally made it into unstable together with documentation of Build-Profiles.
  • In order to fix python-memray, Helmut NMUed libunwind generally disabling C++ exception support as being an incompatible duplication of the gcc implementation. Unfortunately, that ended up breaking suricata on riscv64. After another NMU, python-memray finally migrated.
  • Thorsten uploaded new upstream versions of epson-inkjet-printer-escpr and sane-airscan. He also fixed a packaging bug in printer-driver-oki. As of systemd 260.1-1 the configuration of lpadmin has been added to the sysusers.d configuration. All printing packages can now simply depend on the systemd-sysusers package and don’t have to take care of its creation in maintainer scripts anymore.
  • In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago had exchanges with GSoC candidates and reviewed the proposals of the Linux livepatching GSoC 2026 project.
  • Colin helped to fix CVE-2026-3497 in openssh and CVE-2026-28356 in multipart.
  • Colin upgraded tango and pytango to new upstream releases and packaged pybind11-stubgen (needed for pytango), thanks to a Freexian customer. Tests of reproducible builds revealed that pybind11-stubgen didn’t generate imports in a stable order; this is now fixed upstream.
  • Lucas fixed CVE-2025-67733 and CVE-2026-21863 affecting src:valkey in unstable and testing. Also reviewed the same fixes targeting stable proposed by Peter Wienemann.
  • Faidon worked with upstream and build-dep Debian maintainers on resolving blockers in order to bring pyHanko into Debian, starting with the adoption of python-pyhanko-certvalidator. pyHanko is a suite for signing and stamping PDF files, and one of the few libraries that can be leveraged to sign PDFs with eIDAS Qualified Electronic Signatures.
  • Anupa co-organized MiniDebConf Kanpur and attended the event with many others from all across India. She handled the accommodation arrangements along with the registration team members, worked on the budget and expenses. She was also a speaker at the event.
  • Lucas helped with content review/schedule for the MiniDebConf Campinas. Thanks Freexian for being a Gold sponsor!
  • Lucas organized and took part in a one-day in-person sprint to work on Ruby 3.4 transition. It was held in a coworking space in Brasilia - Brazil on April 6th. There were 5 DDs and they fixed multiple packages FTBFSing against Ruby 3.4 (coming to unstable soon hopefully). Lucas has been postponing a blog post about this sprint since then :-)

15 April, 2026 12:00AM by Anupa Ann Joseph

April 14, 2026

hackergotchi for Steinar H. Gunderson

Steinar H. Gunderson

Looking for work

It seems my own plans and life's plans diverged this spring, so I am in the market for a new job. So if you're looking for someone with a long track record making your code go brrr really fast, give me a ping (contact information at my homepage). Working from Oslo (on-site or remote), CV available upon request. No AI boosterism or cryptocurrency grifters, please :-)

14 April, 2026 04:44PM

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

anytime 0.3.13 on CRAN: Mostly Minor Bugfix

A maintenance release 0.3.13 of the anytime package arrived on CRAN today, sticking with the roughly yearly schedule we have now. Binaries for r2u have been built already. The package is fairly feature-complete, and code and functionality remain mature and stable.

anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … input format to either POSIXct (when called as anytime) or Date objects (when called as anydate) – and to do so without requiring a format string as well as accomodating different formats in one input vector. See the anytime page, the GitHub repo for a few examples, the nice pdf vignette, and the beautiful documentation site for all documentation.

This release was triggered by a bizarre bug seen on elementary os 8. For “reason” anytime was taking note on startup where it runs, and used a small and simply piece of code reading /etc/os-release when it exists. We assumed sane content, but this particular operating system and releases managed to have a duplicate entry throwing us spanner. So now this code is robust to duplicates, and no longer executed on each startup but “as needed” which is a net improvement. We also switched the vignette to being deployed by the new Rcpp::asis() driver.

The short list of changes follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.13 (2026-04-14)

  • Continuous integration has received minor updates

  • The vignette now use the Rcpp::asis() driver, and references have been refreshed

  • Stateful 'where are we running' detection is now more robust, and has been moved from running on each startup to a cached 'as needed' case

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report of changes relative to the previous release. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments. More information about the package is at the package page, the GitHub repo, in the vignette, and at the documentation site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.

14 April, 2026 03:07PM

Petter Reinholdtsen

Talking to the Computer, and Getting Some Nonsense Back...

At last, I can run my own large language model artificial idiocy generator at home on a Debian testing host using Debian packages directly from the Debian archive. After months of polishing the llama.cpp, whisper.cpp and ggml packages, and their dependencies, I was very happy to see today that they all entered Debian testing this morning. Several release-critical issues in dependencies have been blocking the migration for the last few weeks, and now finally the last one of these has been fixed. I would like to extend a big thanks to everyone involved in making this happen.

I've been running home-build editions of whisper.cpp and llama.cpp packages for a while now, first building from the upstream Git repository and later, as the Debian packaging progressed, from the relevant Salsa Git repositories for the ROCM packages, GGML, whisper.cpp and llama.cpp. The only snag with the official Debian packages is that the JavaScript chat client web pages are slightly broken in my setup, where I use a reverse proxy to make my home server visible on the public Internet while the included web pages only want to communicate with localhost / 127.0.0.1. I suspect it might be simple to fix by making the JavaScript code dynamically look up the URL of the current page and use that to determine where to find the API service, but until someone fixes BTS report #1128381, I just have to edit /usr/share/llama.cpp-tools/llama-server/themes/simplechat/simplechat.js every time I upgrade the package. I start my server like this on my machine with a nice AMD GPU (donated to me as a Debian developer by AMD two years ago, thank you very much):

  LC_ALL=C llama-server \
    -ngl 256  \
    -c $(( 42 * 1024)) \
    --temp 0.7 \
    --repeat_penalty 1.1 \
    -n -1 \
    -m Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-Q5_K_S.gguf

It only takes a few minutes to load the model for the first time and prepare a nice API server for me at https://my.reverse.proxy.example.com:8080/v1/, available (note, this sets up the server up without authentication; use a reverse proxy with authentication if you need it) for all the API clients I care to test. I switch models regularly to test different new ones, the Qwen3-Coder one just happen to be the one I use at the moment. Perhaps these packages is something for you to have fun with too?

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

14 April, 2026 12:15PM

Russell Coker

Furilabs FLX1s Finally Working

I’ve been using the Furilabs FLX1s phone [1] as my daily driver for 6 weeks, it’s a decent phone, not as good as I hoped but good enough to use every day and rely on for phone calls about job interviews etc. I intend to keep using it as my main phone and as a platform to improve phone software in Debian as you really can’t effectively find bugs unless you use the platform for important tasks.

Support Problems

I previously wrote about the phone after I received it without a SIM caddy on the 13th of Jan. I had a saga with support about this, on the 16th of Jan one support person said that they would ship it immediately but didn’t provide a tracking number or any indication of when it would arrive. On the 5th of Feb I contacted support again and asked how long it would be, the new support person seemed to have no record of my previous communication but said that they would send it. On the 17th of Feb I made another support request including asking for a way of direct communication as the support email came from an address that wouldn’t accept replies, I was asked for a photo showing where the problem is. The support person also said that they might have to send a replacement phone!

The last support request I sent included my disappointment at the time taken to resolve the issue and the proposed solution of replacing the entire phone (why have two international shipments of a fragile and expensive phone when a single letter with a cheap SIM caddy would do?). I didn’t receive a reply but the SIM caddy arrived on the 2nd of Mar. Here is a pic of the SIM caddy and the package it came in:

One thing that should be noted is that some of the support people seemed to be very good at their jobs and they were all friendly. It was the system that failed here, turning a minor issue of a missing part into a 6 week saga.

Furilabs needs to do the following to address this issue:

  1. Make it possible to reply directly to a message from a support person. Accept email with a custom subject to sort it, give a URL for a web form, anything. Collating discussions with a customer allows giving better support while taking less time for the support people.
  2. Have someone monitor every social media address that is used by the company. When someone sends a support request in a public Mastodon post it indicates that something has gone wrong and you want to move quickly to resolve it.
  3. Take care of the little things, like sending a tracking number for every parcel. If it’s something too small for a parcel (the SIM caddy could have fit in a regular letter) then just tell the customer what date it was posted and where it was posted from so they have some idea of when it will arrive.

This is not just a single failure of Furilabs support, it’s a systemic failure of their processes.

Problems I Will Fix – Unless Someone Beats Me to it

Here are some issues I plan to work on.

Smart Watch Support

I need to port one of the smart watch programs to Debian. Also I want to make one of them support the Colmi P80 [2].

A smart watch significantly increases the utility of a phone even though IMHO they aren’t doing nearly all the things that they could and should do. When we get Debian programs talking to the PineTime it will make a good platform for development of new smart phone and OS features.

Nextcloud

I have ongoing issues of my text Nextcloud installation on a Debian VM not allowing connection from the Linux desktop app (as packaged in Debian) and from the Android client (from f-droid). The desktop client works with a friend’s Nextcloud installation on Ubuntu so I may try running it on an Ubuntu VM I run while waiting for the Debian issue to get resolved. There was a bug recently fixed in Nextcloud that appears related so maybe the next release will fix it.

For the moment I’ve been running without these features and I call and SMS people from knowing their number or just returning calls. Phone calls generally aren’t very useful for me nowadays except when applying for jobs. If I could deal with recruiters and hiring managers via video calls then I would consider just not having a phone number.

Wifi IPv6

Periodically IPv6 support just stops working, I can’t ping the gateway. I turn wifi off and on again and it works. This might be an issue with my wifi network configuration. This might be an issue with the way I have configured my IPv6 networking, although that problem doesn’t happen with any of my laptops.

Chatty Sorting

Chatty is the program for SMS that is installed by default (part of the phosh/phoc setup), it also does Jabber. Version 0.8.7 is installed which apparently has some Furios modifications and it doesn’t properly support sorting SMS/Jabber conversations. Version 0.8.9 from Debian sorts in the same way as most SMS and Jabber programs with the most recent at the top. But the Debian version doesn’t support Jabber (only SMS and Matrix). When I went back to the Furilabs version of Chatty it still sorted for a while but then suddenly stopped. Killing Chatty (not just closing the window and reopening it) seems to make it sort the conversations sometimes.

Problems for Others to Fix

Here are the current issues I have starting with the most important.

Important

The following issues seriously reduce the usability of the device.

Hotspot

The Wifi hotspot functionality wasn’t working for a few weeks, this Gitlab issue seems to match it [3]. It started working correctly for a day and I was not sure if an update I applied fixed the bug or if it’s some sort of race condition that worked for this boot and will return next time I reboot it. Later on I rebooted it and found that it’s somewhat random whether it works or now.

Also while it is mostly working it seemed to stop working about every 25 minutes or so and I had to turn it off and on again to get it going.

On another day it went to a stage where it got repeated packet loss when I pinged the phone as a hotspot from my laptop. A pattern of 3 ping responses and 3 “Destination Host Unreachable” messages was often repeated.

I don’t know if this is related to the way Android software is run in a container to access the hardware.

4G Reliability

Sometimes 4G connectivity has just stopped, sometimes I can stop and restart the 4G data through software to fix it and sometimes I need to use the hardware switch. I haven’t noticed this for a week or two so there is a possibility that one fix addressed both Hotspot and 4G.

One thing that I will do is setup monitoring to give an alert on the phone if it can’t connect to the Internet. I don’t want it to just quietly stop doing networking stuff and not tell me!

On-screen Keyboard

The compatibility issues of the GNOME and KDE on-screen keyboards are getting me. I use phosh/phoc as the login environment as I want to stick to defaults at first to not make things any more difficult than they need to be. When I use programs that use QT such as Nheko the keyboard doesn’t always appear when it should and it forgets the setting for “word completion” (which means spelling correction).

The spelling correction system doesn’t suggest replacing “dont” with “don’t” which is really annoying as a major advantage for spelling checkers on touch screens is inserting an apostrophy. An apostrophy takes at least 3* longer than a regular character and saving that delay makes a difference to typing speed.

The spelling correction doesn’t correct two words run together.

Medium Priority

These issues are ongoing annoyances.

Delay on Power Button

In the best case scenario this phone has a much slower response to pressing the power button than the Android phones I tested (Huawei Mate 10 Pro and Samsung Galaxy Note 9) and a much slower response than my recollection of the vast majority of Android phones I’ve ever used. For testing pressing buttons on the phones simultaneously resulted in the Android phone screens lighting up much sooner. Something like 200ms vs 600ms – I don’t have a good setup to time these things but it’s very obvious when I test.

In a less common case scenario (the phone having been unused for some time) the response can be something like 5 seconds. The worst case scenario is something in excess of 20 seconds.

For UI designers, if you get multiple press events from a button that can turn the screen on/off please make your UI leave the screen on and ignore all the stacked events. Having the screen start turning on and off repeatedly when the phone recovers and processes all the button presses isn’t good, especially when each screen flash takes half a second.

Notifications

Touching on a notification for a program often doesn’t bring it to the foreground. I haven’t yet found a connection between when it does and when it doesn’t.

Also the lack of icons in the top bar on the screen to indicate notifications is annoying, but that seems to be an issue of design not the implementation.

Charge Delay

When I connect the phone to a power source there is a delay of about 22 seconds before it starts to charge. Having it miss 22 seconds of charge time is no big deal, having to wait 22 seconds to be sure it’s charging before leaving it is really annoying. Also the phone makes an audible alert when it gets to 0% charge which woke me up one night when I had failed to push the USB-C connector in hard enough. This phone requires a slightly deeper connector than most phones so with some plugs it’s easy to not quite insert them far enough.

Torch aka Flash

The light for the “torch” or flash for camera is not bright at all. In a quick test staring into the light from 40cm away wasn’t unpleasant compared to my Huawei Mate 10 Pro which has a light bright enough that it hurts to look at it from 4 meters away.

Because of this photos at night are not viable, not even when photographing something that’s less than a meter away.

The torch has a brightness setting which doesn’t seem to change the brightness, so it seems likely that this is a software issue and the brightness is set at a low level and the software isn’t changing it.

Audio

When I connect to my car the Lollypop player starts playing before the phone directs audio to the car, so the music starts coming from the phone for about a second. This is an annoying cosmetic error. Sometimes audio playing pauses for no apparent reason.

It doesn’t support the phone profile with Bluetooth so phone calls can’t go through the car audio system. Also it doesn’t always connect to my car when I start driving, sometimes I need to disable and enable Bluetooth to make it connect.

When I initially set the phone up Lollypop would send the track name when playing music through my car (Nissan LEAF) Bluetooth connection, after an update that often doesn’t happen so the car doesn’t display the track name or whether the music is playing but the pause icon works to pause and resume music (sometimes it does work).

About 30 seconds into a phone call it switches to hands-free mode while the icon to indicate hands-free is not highlighted, so I have to press the hands-free button twice to get it back to normal phone mode.

Low Priority

I could live with these things remaining as-is but it’s annoying.

Ticket Mode

There is apparently some code written to display tickets on screen without unlocking. I want to get this working and store screen-caps of the Android barcode screens of the different loyalty cards so I can scan them without unlocking. My threat model does not include someone trying to steal my phone to get a free loaf of bread on the bakery loyalty program.

Camera

The camera app works with both the back and front cameras, which is nice, and sadly based on my experience with other Debian phones it’s noteworthy. The problem is that it takes a long time to take a photo, something like a second after the button is pressed – long enough for you to think that it just silently took a photo and then move the phone.

The UI of the furios-camera app is also a little annoying, when viewing photos there is an icon at the bottom left of the screen for a video camera and an icon at the bottom right with a cross. Which every time makes me think “record videos” and “leave this screen” not “return to taking photos” and “delete current photo”. I can get used to the surprising icons, but being so slow is a real problem.

GUI App Installation

The program for managing software doesn’t work very well. It said that there were two updates for Mesa package needed, but didn’t seem to want to install them. I ran “flatpak update” as root to fix that. The process of selecting software defaults to including non-free, and most of the available apps are for desktop/laptop with no way to search for phone/tablet apps.

Generally I think it’s best to just avoid this and use apt and flatpak directly from the command-line. Being able to ssh to my phone from a desktop or laptop is good!

Android Emulation

The file /home/furios/.local/share/andromeda/data/system/uiderrors.txt is created by the Andromeda system which runs Android apps in a LXC container and appears to grow without end. After using the phone for a month it was 3.5G in size. The disk space usage isn’t directly a problem, out of the 110G storage space only 17G is used and I don’t have a need to put much else on it, even if I wanted to put backups of /home from my laptop on it when travelling that would still leave plenty of free space. But that sort of thing is a problem for backing up the phone and wasting 3.5G out of 110G total is a fairly significant step towards breaking the entire system.

Also having lots of logging messages from a subsystem that isn’t even being used is a bad sign.

I just tried using it and it doesn’t start from either the settings menu or from the f-droid icon. Android isn’t that important to me as I want to get away from the proprietary app space so I won’t bother trying this any more.

Unfixable Problems

Unlocking

After getting used to fingerprint unlocking going back to a password is a pain. I think that the hardware isn’t sufficient for modern quality face recognition that can’t be fooled by a photo and there isn’t fingerprint hardware.

When I first used an Android phone using a pin to unlock didn’t seem like a big deal, but after getting used to fingerprint unlock it’s a real drag to go without. This is a real annoyance when doing things like checking Wikipedia while watching TV.

This phone would be significantly improved with a fingerprint sensor or a camera that worked well enough for face unlock.

Plasma Mobile

According to Reddit Plasma Mobile (KDE for phones) doesn’t support Halium and can never work on this phone because of it [4]. This is one of a number of potential issues with the phone, running on hardware that was never designed for open OSs is always going to have issues.

Wifi MAC Address

The MAC keeps changing on reboot so I can’t assign a permanent IPv4 address to the phone. It appears from the MAC prefix of 00:08:22 that the network hardware is made in InPro Comm which is well known for using random addresses in the products it OEMs. They apparently have one allocation of 2^24 addresses and each device randomly chooses a MAC from that range on boot.

In the settings for a Wifi connection the “Identity” tab has a field named “Cloned Address” which can be set to “Stable for SSID” that prevents it from changing and allows a static IP address allocation from DHCP. It’s not ideal but it works.

Network Manager can be configured to have a permanent assigned MAC address for all connections or for just some connections. In the past for such things I have copied MAC addresses from ethernet devices that were being discarded and used them for such things. For the moment the “Stable for SSID” setting does what I need but I will consider setting a permanent address at some future time.

Docks

Having the ability to connect to a dock is really handy. The PinePhonePro and Librem5 support it and on the proprietary side a lot of Samsung devices do it with a special desktop GUI named Dex and some Huawei devices also have a desktop version of the GUI. It’s unfortunate that this phone can’t do it.

The Good Things

It’s good to be able to ssh in to my phone, even if the on-screen keyboard worked as well as the Android ones it would still be a major pain to use when compared to a real keyboard. The phone doesn’t support connecting to a dock (unlike Samsung phones I’ve used for which I found Dex to be very useful with a 4K monitor and proper keyboard) so ssh is the best way to access it.

This phone has very reliable connections to my home wifi. I’ve had ssh sessions from my desktop to my phone that have remained open for multiple days. I don’t really need this, I’ve just forgotten to logout and noticed days later that the connection is still running. None of the other phones running Debian could do that.

Running the same OS on desktop and phone makes things easier to test and debug.

Having support for all the things that Linux distributions support is good. For example none of the Android music players support all the encodings of audio that comes from YouTube so to play all of my music collection on Android I would need to transcode most of them which means either losing quality, wasting storage space, or both. While Lollypop plays FLAC0, mp3, m4a, mka, webm, ogg, and more.

Conclusion

This is a step towards where I want to go but it’s far from the end goal.

The PinePhonePro and Librem5 are more open hardware platforms which have some significant benefits. But the battery life issues make them unusable for me.

Running Mobian on a OnePlus 6 or Droidian on a Note 9 works well for the small tablet features but without VoLTE. While the telcos have blocked phones without VoLTE data devices still work so if recruiters etc would stop requiring phone calls then I could make one of them an option.

The phone works well enough that it could potentially be used by one of my older relatives. If I could ssh in to my parents phones when they mess things up that would be convenient.

I’ve run this phone as my daily driver since the 3rd of March and it has worked reasonably well. 6 weeks compared to my previous use of the PinePhonePro for 3 days. This is the first time in 15 years that a non-Android phone has worked for me personally. I have briefly used an iPhone 7 for work which basically did what it needed to do, it was at the bottom of the pile of unused phones at work and I didn’t want to take a newer iPhone that could be used by someone who’s doing more than the occasional SMS or Slack message.

So this is better than it might have been, not as good as I hoped, but a decent platform to use it while developing for it.

Related posts:

  1. Furilabs FLX1s The Aim I have just got a Furilabs FLX1s [1]...
  2. My Ideal Mobile Phone Based on my experience testing the IBM Seer software on...
  3. OnePlus 6 Debian I recently got a OnePlus 6 for the purpose of...

14 April, 2026 09:31AM by etbe

Ravi Dwivedi

Hungary Visa

The annual LibreOffice conference 2025 was held in Budapest, Hungary, from the 3rd to the 6th of September 2025. Thanks to the The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring me to attend the conference.

As Hungary is a part of the Schengen area, I needed a Schengen visa to attend the conference. In order to apply for a Schengen visa, one needs to get an appointment at VFS Global and submit all the required documents there, which are then forwarded to the embassy.

I got an appointment for a Hungary visa at VFS Global in New Delhi for the 24th of July. There were many appointment slots available for the Hungary visa. One could easily get an appointment for the next day at the Delhi center. There were some technical problems on the VFS website, though, as I was unable to upload a scanned copy of my passport while booking the appointment. I got an error saying, “Unfortunately, you have exceeded the maximum upload limit.”

The problem didn’t get fixed even after contacting the VFS helpline. They asked me to try in the Firefox browser and deleting all the cache, which I already did.

So I created another account with a different email address and phone number, after which I was able to upload my passport and book an appointment. Other conference attendees from India also reported facing some technical issues on the VFS Hungary website.

Anyway, I went to the VFS Hungary application center as per my appointment on the 24th of July. Going inside, I located the Hungary visa application counter. There were two applicants ahead of me.

When it was my turn, the VFS staff warned me that my passport was damaged. The “damage” was on the bio-data page. All the details could be seen, but the lamination of the details page wore off a bit. They asked me to write an application to the Embassy of Hungary in New Delhi stating that I insist VFS to submit my application along with describing the “damage” on my passport.

I got a bit worried about my application getting rejected due to the “damage.” But I decided to gamble my money on this one, as I didn’t have time (and energy) to apply for a new passport before this trip.

Moreover, I had struck down a couple of fields in my visa application form which were not applicable to me, due to which the VFS staff asked me to fill out another visa application.

After this, the application got submitted, and it was 11,000 INR (including the fee to book the appointment at VFS). Here is the list of documents I submitted:

  • My passport

  • Photocopy of my passport

  • Two photographs of myself

  • Duly filled visa application form

  • Return flight ticket reservations

  • Payslips for the last three months

  • Invitation letter from the conference organizer (in Hungarian)

  • Proof of hotel bookings during my stay in Hungary

  • Cover letter stating my itinerary

  • Income tax returns filed by me

  • Bank account statement, signed and sealed by the bank

  • Travel insurance valid for the period of the entire trip

It took 2 hours for me to submit my visa application, even though there were only two applicants before me. This was by far the longest time to submit a Schengen visa application for me.

Fast-forward to the 30th of July, and I received an email from the Embassy of Hungary asking me to submit an additional document - paid air ticket - for my application. I had only submitted dummy flight tickets, and they were enough for the Schengen visas I applied for until now. This was the first time a country was asking me to submit a confirmed flight ticket during the visa process.

I consulted my travel agent on this, and they were fairly confident that I will get the visa if the embassy is asking me to submit confirmed flight tickets. So I asked the travel agent to book the flight tickets. These tickets were ₹78,000, and the airline was Emirates. Then, I sent the flight tickets to the embassy by email.

The embassy sent the visa results on the 6th of August, which I received the next day.

My visa had been approved! It took 14 days for me to get the Hungary visa after submitting the application.

See you in the next one!

Thanks to Badri for proofreading.

14 April, 2026 05:50AM

April 12, 2026

hackergotchi for Colin Watson

Colin Watson

Free software activity in March 2026

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors.

OpenSSH

I fixed CVE-2026-3497 in unstable, thanks to a fix in Ubuntu by Marc Deslauriers. Relatedly, I applied an Ubuntu patch by Athos Ribeiro to not default to weak GSS-API exchange algorithms.

I’m looking forward to being able to split out GSS-API key exchange support in OpenSSH once Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released! This stuff will still be my problem, but at least it won’t be in packages that nearly everyone has installed.

Python packaging

New upstream versions:

  • dill
  • django-modeltranslation
  • isort
  • langtable
  • pathos
  • pendulum
  • pox
  • ppft
  • pydantic-extra-types
  • pytango
  • python-asyncssh
  • python-datamodel-code-generator
  • python-evalidate
  • python-packaging (including fixes for python-hatch-requirements-txt and python-pyproject-examples)
  • python-zxcvbn-rs-py
  • rpds-py
  • smart-open
  • trove-classifiers

I packaged pybind11-stubgen, needed for new upstream versions of pytango. Tests of reproducible builds revealed that it didn’t generate imports in a stable order; I contributed a fix for that upstream.

I worked with the security team to release DSA-6161-1 in multipart, fixing CVE-2026-28356 (upstream discussion). (Most of the work for this was in February, but the vulnerability was still embargoed when I published my last monthly update.)

In trixie-backports, I updated pytest-django to 4.12.0.

I fixed a number of packages to support building with pyo3 0.28:

Other build/test failures:

Rust packaging

New upstream versions:

  • rust-rpds

Other bits and pieces

I upgraded tango to 10.1.2, and yubihsm-shell to 2.7.2.

Code reviews

12 April, 2026 10:13AM by Colin Watson

hackergotchi for Vasudev Kamath

Vasudev Kamath

Hardening the Unpacakgeable: A systemd-run Sandbox for Third-Party Binaries

The Shift in Software Consumption

Historically, I have been a "distribution-first" user. Sticking to tools packaged within the Debian archives provides a layer of trust; maintainers validate licenses, audit code, and ensure the entire dependency chain is verified. However, the rapid pace of development in the Generative AI space—specifically with new tools like Gemini-CLI—has made this traditional approach difficult to sustain.

Many modern CLI tools are built within the npm or Python ecosystems. For a distribution packager, these are a nightmare; packaging a single tool often requires packaging a massive, shifting dependency chain. Consequently, I found myself forced to use third-party binaries, bypassing the safety of the Debian archive.

The Supply Chain Risk

Recent supply chain attacks affecting widely used packages like axios and LiteLLM have made it clear: running unvetted binaries on a personal system is a significant risk. These scripts often have full access to your $HOME directory, SSH keys, and the system D-Bus.

After discussing these concerns with a colleague, I was inspired by his approach—using a Flatpak-style sandbox for even basic applications like Google Chrome. I decided to build a generalized version of this using OpenCode and Qwen 3.6 Fast (which was available for free use at the time) to create a robust, transient sandbox utility.

The Solution: safe-run-binary

My script, safe-run-binary, leverages systemd-run to execute binaries within an isolated scope. It implements strict filesystem masking and resource control to ensure that even if a dependency is compromised, the "blast radius" is contained.

Key Technical Features

1. Virtualized Home Directory (tmpfs)
Instead of exposing my real home directory, the script mounts a tmpfs over $HOME. It then selectively creates and bind-mounts only the necessary subdirectories (like .cache or .config) into a virtual structure. This prevents the application from ever "seeing" sensitive files like ~/.ssh or ~/.gnupg.
2. D-Bus Isolation via xdg-dbus-proxy
For GUI applications, providing raw access to the D-Bus is a security hole. The script uses xdg-dbus-proxy to sit between the application and the system bus. By using the --filter and --talk=org.freedesktop.portal.* flags, the app can only communicate with necessary portals (like the file picker) rather than sniffing the entire bus.
3. Linux Namespace Restrictions

The sandbox utilizes several systemd execution properties to harden the process:

  • RestrictNamespaces=yes: For CLI tools, this prevents the app from creating its own nested namespaces.
  • PrivateTmp=yes: Ensures a private /tmp space that isn't shared with the host.
  • NoNewPrivileges=yes: Prevents the binary from gaining elevated permissions through SUID/SGID bits.
4. GPU and Audio Passthrough
The script intelligently detects and binds Wayland, PipeWire, and NVIDIA/DRI device nodes. This allows browsers like Firefox to run with full hardware acceleration and audio support while remaining locked out of the rest of the filesystem.

Usage

To run a CLI tool like Gemini-CLI with access only to a specific directory:

safe-run-binary -b ~/.gemini-config -- npx @google/gemini-cli

For a GUI application like Firefox:

safe-run-binary --gui -b ~/.mozilla -b ~/.cache/mozilla -b ~/Downloads -- firefox

Conclusion

While it is not always possible to escape the need for third-party software, it is possible to control the environment in which it operates. By leveraging native Linux primitives like systemd and namespaces, high-grade isolation is achievable.

PS: If you spot any issues or have suggestions for improving the script, feel free to raise a PR on the repo.

12 April, 2026 07:23AM by copyninja

Russ Allbery

Review: The Teller of Small Fortunes

Review: The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong

Publisher: Ace
Copyright: November 2024
ISBN: 0-593-81590-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 324

The Teller of Small Fortunes is a cozy found-family fantasy with a roughly medieval setting. It was Julie Leong's first novel.

Tao is a traveling teller of small fortunes. In her wagon, pulled by her friendly mule Laohu, she wanders the small villages of Eshtera and reads the trivial fortunes of villagers in the tea leaves. An upcoming injury, a lost ring, a future kiss, a small business deal... she looks around the large lines of fate and finds the small threads. After a few days, she moves on, making her solitary way to another village.

Tao is not originally from Eshtera. She is Shinn, which means she encounters a bit of suspicion and hostility mixed with the fascination of the exotic. (Language and culture clues lead me to think Shinara is intended to be this world's not-China, but it's not a direct mapping.) Tao uses the fascination to help her business; fortune telling is more believable from someone who seems exotic. The hostility she's learned to deflect and ignore. In the worst case, there's always another village.

If you've read any cozy found-family novels, you know roughly what happens next. Tao encounters people on the road and, for various reasons, they decide to travel together. The first two are a massive mercenary (Mash) and a semi-reformed thief (Silt), who join Tao somewhat awkwardly after Tao gives Mash a fortune that is far more significant than she intended. One town later, they pick up an apprentice baker best known for her misshapen pastries. They also collect a stray cat, because of course they do. It's that sort of book.

For me, this sort of novel lives or dies by the characters, so it's good news that I liked Tao and enjoyed spending time with her. She's quiet, resilient, competent, and self-contained, with a difficult past and some mysteries and emotions the others can draw over time. She's also thoughtful and introspective, which means the tight third-person narration that almost always stays on Tao offers emotional growth to mull over. I also liked Kina (the baker) and Mash; they're a bit more obvious and straightforward, but Kina adds irrepressible energy and Mash is a good example of the sometimes-gruff soldier with a soft heart. Silt was a bit more annoying and I never entirely warmed to him, but he's tolerable and does get a bit of much-needed (if superficial) character development.

It takes some time for the reader to learn about the primary conflict of the story (Tao does not give up her secrets quickly), so I won't spoil it, but I thought it worked well. I was momentarily afraid the story would develop a clear villain, but Leong has some satisfying alternate surprises in store. The ending was well-done, although it is very happily-ever-after in a way that may strike some readers as too neat. The Teller of Small Fortunes aims for a quiet and relaxed mood rather than forcing character development through difficult choices; it's a fine aim for a novel, but it won't match everyone's mood.

I liked the world-building, although expect small and somewhat disconnected details rather than an overarching theory of magic. Tao's ability gets the most elaboration, for obvious reasons, and I liked how Leong describes it and explores its consequences. Most of the attention in the setting is on the friction, wistfulness, and small reminders of coming from a different culture than everyone around you, but so long ago that you are not fully a part of either world. This, I thought, was very well-done and is one of the places where the story is comfortable with complex feelings and doesn't try to reach a simplifying conclusion.

There is one bit of the story that felt like it was taken directly out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign to a degree that felt jarring, but that was the only odd world-building note.

This book felt like a warm cup of tea intended to comfort and relax, without large or complex thoughts about the world. It's not intended to be challenging; there are a few plot twists I didn't anticipate, but nothing that dramatic, and I doubt anyone will be surprised by the conclusions it reaches. It's a pleasant time with some nice people and just enough tension and mystery to add some motivation to find out what happens next. If that's what you're in the mood for, recommended. If you want a book that has Things To Say or will put you on the edge of your seat, maybe save this one for another mood.

All the on-line sources I found for this book call it a standalone, but The Keeper of Magical Things is set in the same world, so I would call it a loose series with different protagonists. The Teller of Small Fortunes is a complete story in one book, though.

Rating: 7 out of 10

12 April, 2026 02:53AM

April 10, 2026

Reproducible Builds

Reproducible Builds in March 2026

Welcome to the March 2026 report from the Reproducible Builds project!

These reports outline what we’ve been up to over the past month, highlighting items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please see the Contribute page on our website.

  1. Linux kernel hash-based integrity checking proposed
  2. Distribution work
  3. Tool development
  4. Upstream patches
  5. Documentation updates
  6. Two new academic papers
  7. Misc news

Linux kernel hash-based integrity checking proposed

Eric Biggers posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List in response to a patch series posted by Thomas Weißschuh to introduce a calculated hash-based system of integrity checking to complement the existing signature-based approach. Thomas’ original post mentions:

The current signature-based module integrity checking has some drawbacks in combination with reproducible builds. Either the module signing key is generated at build time, which makes the build unreproducible, or a static signing key is used, which precludes rebuilds by third parties and makes the whole build and packaging process much more complicated.

However, Eric’s followup message goes further:

I think this actually undersells the feature. It’s also much simpler than the signature-based module authentication. The latter relies on PKCS#7, X.509, ASN.1, OID registry, crypto_sig API, etc in addition to the implementations of the actual signature algorithm (RSA / ECDSA / ML-DSA) and at least one hash algorithm.


Distribution work

In Debian this month,

  • Lucas Nussbaum announced Debaudit, a “new service to verify the reproducibility of Debian source packages”:

    debaudit complements the work of the Reproducible Builds project. While reproduce.debian.net focuses on ensuring that binary packages can be bit-for-bit reproduced from their source packages, debaudit focuses on the preceding step: ensuring that the source package itself is a faithful and reproducible representation of its upstream source or Vcs-Git repository.

  • kpcyrd filed a bug against the librust-const-random-dev package reporting that the compile-time-rng feature of the ahash crate uses the const-random crate in turn, which uses a macro to read/generate a random number generator during the build. This issue was also filed upstream.

  • 60 reviews of Debian packages were added, 4 were updated and 16 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. One new issue types was added, pkgjs_lock_json_file_issue.

Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another openSUSE monthly update for their work there.


Tool development

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including preparing and uploading versions, 314 and 315 to Debian.

  • Chris Lamb:

    • Don’t run test_code_is_black_clean test in the autopkgtests. (#1130402). […]
    • Add some debugging info for PyPI debugging. […]

  • Jelle van der Waa:

    • Fix compatibility with LLVM version 22. […]
    • Adjust the PGP file detection regular expression. […]

  • Michael R. Crusoe:

    • Reformat the source code using Black version 26.1.0 […][…]

In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 315.


rebuilderd, our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempt to reproduce the observed results there; it powers, amongst other things, reproduce.debian.net.

A new version, 0.26.0, was released this month, with the following improvements:

  • Much smoother onboarding/installation.
  • Complete database redesign with many improvements.
  • New REST HTTP API.
  • It’s now possible to artificially delay the first reproduce attempt. This gives archive infrastructure more time to catch up.
  • And many, many other changes.


Upstream patches

The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:


Documentation updates

Once again, there were a number of improvements made to our website this month including:

  • kpcyrd:

  • Robin Candau:

    • Add link to the diffoci Arch Linux package on the Tools page. […]

  • Timo Pohl:


Two new academic papers

Marc Ohm, Timo Pohl, Ben Swierzy and Michael Meier published a paper on the threat of cache poisoning in the Python ecosystem:

Attacks on software supply chains are on the rise, and attackers are becoming increasingly creative in how they inject malicious code into software components. This paper is the first to investigate Python cache poisoning, which manipulates bytecode cache files to execute malicious code without altering the human-readable source code. We demonstrate a proof of concept, showing that an attacker can inject malicious bytecode into a cache file without failing the Python interpreter’s integrity checks. In a large-scale analysis of the Python Package Index, we find that about 12,500 packages are distributed with cache files. Through manual investigation of cache files that cannot be reproduced automatically from the corresponding source files, we identify classes of reasons for irreproducibility to locate malicious cache files. While we did not identify any malware leveraging this attack vector, we demonstrate that several widespread package managers are vulnerable to such attacks.

A PDF of the paper is available online.


Mario Lins of the University of Linz, Austria, has published their PhD doctoral thesis on the topic of Software supply chain transparency:

We begin by examining threats to the software distribution stage — the point at which artifacts (e.g., mobile apps) are delivered to end users — with an emphasis on mobile ecosystems [and] we next focus on the operating system on mobile devices, with an emphasis on mitigating bootloader-targeted attacks. We demonstrate how to compensate lost security guarantees on devices with an unlocked bootloader. This allows users to flash custom operating systems on devices that no longer receive security updates from the original manufacturer without compromising security. We then move to the source code stage. [Also,] we introduce a new architecture to ensure strong source-to-binary correspondence by leveraging the security guarantees of Confidential Computing technology. Finally, we present The Supply Chain Game, an organizational security approach that enhances standard risk-management methods. We demonstrate how game-theoretic techniques, combined with common risk management practices, can derive new criteria to better support decision makers.

A PDF of the paper is available online.


Misc news

On our mailing list this month:

  • Holger Levsen announced that this year’s Reproducible Builds summit will almost certainly be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, from September 22 until 24, followed by two days of hacking. However, these dates are preliminary and not 100% final — an official announcement is forthcoming.

  • Mark Wielaard posted to our list asking a question on the difference between debugedit and relative debug paths based on a comment on the Build path page: “Have people tried more modern versions of debugedit to get deterministic (absolute) DWARF paths and found issues with it?



Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

10 April, 2026 04:13PM

Jamie McClelland

AI Hacking the Planet

A colleague asked me if we should move all our money to our pillow cases after reading the latest AI editorial from Thomas Friedman. The article reads like a press release from Anthropic, repeating the claim that their latest AI model is so good at finding software vulnerabilities that it is a danger to the world.

I think I now know what it’s like to be a doctor who is forced to watch Gray’s Anatomy.

By now every journalist should be able to recognize the AI publicity playbook:

Step 1: Start with a wildly unsubstantiated claim about how dangerous your product is:

AI will cause human extinction before we have a chance to colonize mars (remember that one? Even Kim Stanley Robinson, author of perhaps the most compelling science fiction on colonizing mars calls bull shit on it).

AI will eliminate all of our jobs (this one was extremely effective at providing cover for software companies laying off staff but it has quickly dawned on people that the companies that did this are living in chaos not humming along happily with functional robots)

AI will discover massive software vulnerabilities allowing bad actors to “hack pretty much every major software system in the world”. (Did Friedman pull that directly from Anthropic’s press release or was that his contribution?)

Step 2: To help stave off human collapse, only release the new version to a vetted group of software companies and developers, preferably ones with big social media followings

Step 3: Wait for the limited release developers to spew unbridled enthusiasm and shocking examples that seem to suggest this new AI produce is truly unbelievable

Step 4: Watch stock prices and valuations soar

Step 5: Release to the world, and experience a steady stream of mockery as people discover how wrong you are

Step 6: Start over

Even if Friedman missed the text book example of the playbook, I have to ask: if you think bad actors compromising software resulting in massive loss of private data, major outages and wasted resources needs to be reported on, then where have you been for the last 10 years? This literally happens on a daily basis due to the fundamentally flawed way capitalism has been writing software even before the invention of AI. A small part of me wonders - maybe AI writing software is not so bad, because how could it be any worse than it is now?

Also, let’s keep in mind that AI’s super ability at finding vulnerable software depends on having access to the software’s source code, which most companies keep locked up tight. That means the owners of the software can use AI to find vulnerabilities and fix them but bad actors can’t.

Oh, but wait, what if a company is so incompetent that they accidentally release their proprietary software to the Internet?

Surely that would allow AI bots to discover their vulnerabilities and destroy the company right? I’m not sure if anyone has discovered world ending vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s Claude code since it was accidentally released, but it is fun to watch people mock software that is clearly written by AI (and spoiler alert, it seems way worse that software written now).

Well… we probably should all be keeping our money in a pillow case anyway.

10 April, 2026 12:27PM

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope)

diffoscope 317 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 317. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Limit python3-guestfs Build-Dependency to !i386. (Closes: #1132974)
* Try to fix PYPI_ID_TOKEN debugging.

[ Holger Levsen ]
* Add ppc64el to the list of architectures for python3-guestfs.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

10 April, 2026 12:00AM

April 09, 2026

Russell Coker

HP Z640 and E5-2696 v4

I recently decided to upgrade the CPU in my workstation, the E5-2696 v3 CPU was OK (passmark 2045 for single thread and 21,380 for multi thread) [1] but I felt like buying something better so I got a E5-2696 v4 (passmark 2115 and 24,643) [2]. I chose the E5-2696 v4 because I was looking for a E5-2699 v4 and found an ebay seller who had them at $140 but was offering the E5-2696 v4 for $99 and the passmark results for the two CPUs are almost identical.

After buying the CPU and waiting for it to be delivered I realised that the Z640 doesn’t include it in the list of supported CPUs and that the maximum TDP of any supported CPU is 145W while according to passmark it has a TDP of 150W. I looked for information about it on Intel ARK (the official site for specs of Intel CPUs) and discovered that “The Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2696 v4 is designed to be used by system manufacturers (OEMs), and this means they can modify its specifications depending on the system where it will be implemented” and “The processor does not have an ARK page for this reason, since it has no standard specification from Intel, so depending on the original system, it is necessary to contact that system manufacturer for information” [3]. That’s the official response from an Intel employee saying that there are no standard specs for that CPU!!!

Somehow I had used a E5-2696 v3 for 3 years without realising that the same lack of support and specs applies to it [4]!

I installed the new CPU in another Z640 which had a E5-1620 v3 CPU and it worked. I was a little surprised to discover that the hole in the corner is in the bottom right (according to the alignment of the printed text on the top) for all my E5-26xx CPUs while it’s in the top left on the E5-1620 v3. Google searches for things like “e5-2600 e5-1600 difference” and “e5-2600 e5-1600 difference hole in corner” didn’t turn up any useful information. The best information I found was from the Linus Tech Tips forum which says that the hole is to allow gasses to escape when the CPU package is glued together [5] which implies (but doesn’t state) that the location of the hole has no meaning. I had previously thought that the hole was to indicate the location of “pin 1” and was surprised when the new CPU had the hole in the opposite corner. Hopefully in future when people have such concerns they can find this post and not be worried that they are about to destroy their CPU, PC, or both when upgrading the CPU.

The previous Z640 was one I bought from Facebook marketplace for $50 in “unknown condition” in the expectation that I would get at least $50 of parts but it worked perfectly apart from one DIMM socket. The Z640 I’m using now is one I bought from Facebook marketplace for $200 and it’s working perfectly with 4 DIMMs, 128G of RAM, and the E5-2696 v4 CPU. $300 for a workstation with ECC RAM and a 22 core CPU is good value for money!

There are some accounts of the E5-2696 v4 not working on white-box motherboards including a claim that when it was selling for $4000US someone’s motherboard destroyed one. The best plan for such CPUs is to google for someone who’s already got it working in the same machine, which means a name-brand server. That doesn’t guarantee that it will work (Intel refuses to supply specs and states that different items may work differently) but greatly improves the probability.

This system has the HP BIOS version 2.61, note that the Linux fwupd package doesn’t seem to update the BIOS on HP workstations so you need to manually download it and install it. There is a possibility that a Z640 with an older BIOS won’t work with this CPU.

Here is the previous post in my Z640 saga [6].

Related posts:

  1. More About the HP ML110 Gen9 and z640 In May 2021 I bought a ML110 Gen9 to use...
  2. HP z840 Many PCs with DDR4 RAM have started going cheap on...
  3. T320 iDRAC Failure and new HP Z640 The Dell T320 Almost 2 years ago I made a...

09 April, 2026 11:33PM by etbe

April 08, 2026

hackergotchi for Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland

nvim-µwiki

In January 2025, as a pre-requisite for something else, I published a minimal neovim plugin called nvim-µwiki. It's essentially just the features from vimwiki that I regularly use, which is a small fraction them. I forgot to blog about it. I recently dusted it off and cleaned it up. You can find it here, along with a longer list of its features and how to configure it: https://github.com/jmtd/nvim-microwiki

I had a couple of design goals. I didn't want to define a new filetype, so this is designed to work with the existing markdown one. I'm using neovim, so I wanted to leverage some of its features: this plugin is written in Lua, rather than vimscript. I use the parse trees provided by TreeSitter to navigate the structure of a document. I also decided to "plug into" the existing tag stack navigation, rather than define another dimension of navigation (along with buffers, etc.) to track: Following a wiki-link pushes onto the tag stack, just as if you followed a tag.

This was my first serious bit of Lua programming, as well as my first dive into neovim (or even vim) internals. Lua is quite reasonable. Most of the vim and neovim architecture is reasonable. The emerging conventions about structuring neovim plugins are mostly reasonable. TreeSitter is, well, interesting, but the devil is very much in the details. Somehow all together the experience for me was largely just frustrating, and I didn't really enjoy writing it.

08 April, 2026 08:31PM

April 06, 2026

Thorsten Alteholz

My Debian Activities in March 2026

Debian LTS/ELTS

This was my hundred-forty-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

  • [DLA 4500-1] gimp security update to fix four CVEs related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code.
  • [DLA 4503-1] evolution-data-server to fix one CVE related to a missing canonicalization of a file path.
  • [DLA 4512-1] strongswan security update to fix one CVE related to a denial of service.
  • [ELA-1656-1] gimp security update to fix four CVEs in Buster and Stretch related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code.
  • [ELA-1660-1] evolution-data-server security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch related to a missing canonicalization of a file path.
  • [ELA-1665-1] strongswan security update to fix one CVE in Buster related to a denial of service.
  • [ELA-1666-1] libvpx security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch related to a denial of service or potentially execution of arbitrary code.

I also worked on the check-advisories script and proposed a fix for cases where issues would be assigned to the coordinator instead of the person who forgot doing something. I also did some work for a kernel update and packages snapd and ldx on security-master and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Last but not least I started to work on gst-plugins-bad1.0

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded a new upstream versions:

Several packages take care of group lpadmin in their maintainer scripts. With the upload of version 260.1-1 of systemd there is now a central package (systemd | systemd-standalone-sysusers | systemd-sysusers) that takes care of this. Other dependencies like adduser can now be dropped.

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Lomiri

This month I continued to work on unifying packaging on Debian and Ubuntu. This makes it easier to work on those packages independent of the used platform. I am also able to upload Debian packages to the corresponding Ubuntu PPA now. A small bug had to be fixed in the python script to allow the initial configuration in Launchpad.

This work is generously funded by Fre(i)e Software GmbH!

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

  • … libplayerone to experimental. For a list of other packages please see below.

I also uploaded lots of indi-drivers (libplayerone, libsbig, libricohcamerasdk, indi-asi, indi-eqmod, indi-fishcamp, indi-inovaplx, indi-pentax, indi-playerone, indi-sbig, indi-mi, libahp-xc, indi-aagcloudwatcher, indi-aok, indi-apogee, libapogee3, indi-nightscape, libasi, libinovasdk, libmicam, indi-avalon, indi-beefocus, indi-bresserexos2, indi-dsi, indi-ffmv, indi-fli, indi-gige, info-gphoto, indi-gpsd, indi-gpsnmea, indi-limesdr, indi-maxdomeii, indi-mgen, indi-rtklib, indi-shelyak, indi-starbook, indi-starbookten, indi-talon6, indi-weewx-json, indi-webcam, indi-orion-ssg3, indi-armadillo-playtypus ) to experimental to make progress with the indi-transition. No problems with those drivers appeared and the next step would be the upload of indi version 2.x to unstable. I hope this will happen soon, as new drivers are already waiting in the pipeline. There have been also four packages, that migrated to the official indi package and are no longer needed as 3rdparty drivers (indi-astrolink4, indi-astromechfoc, indi-dreamfocuser, indi-spectracyber).

While working on these packages, I thought about testing them. Unfortunately I don’t have enough hardware to really check out every package, so I can upload most of them only as is. In case anybody is interested in a better testing coverage and me being able to provide upstream patches, I would be very glad about hardware donations.

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

Debian Mobcom

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

misc

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

I also sponsored the upload of Matomo. Thanks a lot to William for preparing the package.

06 April, 2026 05:45PM by alteholz

April 04, 2026

Isoken Ibizugbe

Post Outreachy Activities

It’s been about a month since I wrapped up my Outreachy internship, but my journey with Debian is far from over. I planned to keep contributing and exploring the community, and these past few weeks have been busy

Testing Locales and Solving Bug #1111214

For the openQA project, we decided to explore how accurate local language installations are and see if we can improve the translations. While exploring this, I started working on automating a test for a specific bug report: Debian Bug #1111214

This is a test I had started by writing a detailed description of the installation process to confirm that selecting the Spanish_panama locale works accurately. I spent time studying previous language installation tests, and I learned that I needed to add a specific tag (LANGUAGE-) to the “needles” (visual test markers).

Since the installation wasn’t in English anymore, taking the correct screenshots and defining the areas took quite some time. I used the following command on the CLI to run the test:

`openqa-cli api -X POST isos ISO=debian-live-testing-amd64-gnome.iso DISTRI=debian-live VERSION=forky FLAVOR=gnome LANGUAGE=spanish_panama ARCH=x86_64 BUILD=1311 CHECKSUM=unknown`

While working on this, I got stuck at the complete_installation step. Because the keyboard layout had changed to Spanish, the commands required to confirm a successful install weren’t working as expected. Specifically, we had an issue typing the “greater than” sign (>).

My mentor, Roland Clobus, worked on a clever maneuver for the keys (AltGr-Shift-X), which was actually submitted upstream to openSUSE.

In this step, I also had to confirm that the locale was correctly set to LANG=”es_PA.UTF-8″. I had to dig into the scripts and Linux commands to make this work. It was a bit intimidating at first, but it turned out to be a great learning experience. You can follow my progress on this Merge Request here. I’m currently debugging a small issue where the “home” key seems to click twice in the final step, and after that, the test would be complete 😀.

Community & Connections

Beyond the code, I’ve been getting more involved in the social side of Debian:

  • Debian Women: I attended the monthly meeting and met Sruthi Chandran. I’ve always seen her name as an Outreachy organizer, so it was great to meet her! She is currently running for Debian Project Leader (DPL). We also discussed starting technical sessions to introduce members to packaging, which I am very excited to learn.
  • DebConf Preparation: I am officially preparing for my first DebConf! My mentors, Tassia and Roland, along with my fellow intern Hellen, have been incredibly supportive in guiding me through the application and presentation process.

04 April, 2026 11:24PM by Isoken Ibizugbe

Dima Kogan

Simple gpx export from ridewithgps

The Tour de Los Padres is coming! The race organizer post the route on ridewithgps. This works, but has convoluted interfaces for people not wanting to use their service. I just wrote a simple script to export their data into a plain .gpx file, including all the waypoints; their exporter omits those.

I've seen two flavors of their data, so here're two flavors of the gpx-from-ridewithgps.py script: 

#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import json

def quote_xml(s):
    return s.replace("&", "&amp;").replace("<", "&lt;").replace(">", "&gt;")

print("Reading stdin", file=sys.stderr)
data = json.load(sys.stdin)

print(r"""<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gpx version="1.1" creator="gpx-from-ridewithgps.py" xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1">""")

for item in data["extras"]:
    if item["type"] != "point_of_interest":
        continue
    poi = item["point_of_interest"]
    print(f'  <wpt lat="{poi["lat"]}" lon="{poi["lng"]}">')
    print(f'    <name>{quote_xml(poi["name"])}</name>')

    desc = poi.get("description","")
    if len(desc):
        print(f'    <desc>{quote_xml(desc)}</desc>')
    print(f'  </wpt>')

print("  <trk><trkseg>")
for pt in data.get("route", {}).get("track_points", []):
    print(f'    <trkpt lat="{pt["y"]}" lon="{pt["x"]}"><ele>{pt["e"]}</ele></trkpt>')
print("  </trkseg></trk>")

print("</gpx>")

#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import json

def quote_xml(s):
    return s.replace("&", "&amp;").replace("<", "&lt;").replace(">", "&gt;")

print("Reading stdin", file=sys.stderr)
data = json.load(sys.stdin)

print(r"""<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gpx version="1.1" creator="gpx-from-ridewithgps.py" xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1">""")

for poi in data["points_of_interest"]:
    print(f'  <wpt lat="{poi["lat"]}" lon="{poi["lng"]}">')
    print(f'    <name>{quote_xml(poi["name"])}</name>')

    desc = poi.get("description","")
    if len(desc):
        print(f'    <desc>{quote_xml(desc)}</desc>')
    print(f'  </wpt>')

for poi in data["course_points"]:
    print(f'  <wpt lat="{poi["y"]}" lon="{poi["x"]}">')
    print(f'    <name>{quote_xml(poi["n"])}</name>')
    print(f'  </wpt>')

print("  <trk><trkseg>")
for pt in data['track_points']:
    print(f'    <trkpt lat="{pt["y"]}" lon="{pt["x"]}"><ele>{pt["e"]}</ele></trkpt>')
print("  </trkseg></trk>")

print("</gpx>")

You invoke it by downloading the route and feeding it into the script: 

curl -s https://ridewithgps.com/routes/54493422.json | ./ridewithgps-to-gpx.py > out.gpx

Note that the route number 54493422 is in the url above.

04 April, 2026 05:21PM by Dima Kogan

April 02, 2026

Joerg Jaspert

Building a house - 1 year in

Haven’t written here about it, but last March we finally started on our journey to get our own house build, so we can move out of the rented flat here.

That will be a big step, both the actual building, but also the moving - I am living at this one single place for 36 years now.

If you can read german there is a dedicated webpage where I sometimes write about the process. Will have much more details (and way more ramblings) than the following part.

If you can’t read german, a somewhat short summary follows. Yes, still a lot of text, but shortened, still.

What? Why now?

Current flat has 83m² - which simply isn’t enough space. And the number of rooms also doesn’t fit anymore. But it is hard to find a place that fits our requirements (which do include location).

Moving to a different rented place would also mean changed amount of rent. And nowadays that would be huge increase (my current rent is still the price from about 30 years ago!).

So if we go and pay more - we could adjust and pay for something we own instead. And both, my wife and I had changes in our jobs that made it possible for us now, so we started looking.

Market

Brrrr, looking is good, actually finding something that fits - not so. We never found an offer that fit. Space wise, sure. But then location was off, or price was idiotically high. Location fit, but then size was a joke, and guess about the price… Who needs 200 square meters with 3 rooms? Entirely stupid design choices there. Or how about 40 square meters of hallway - with 50m² of tiny rooms around. What are they smoking? Oh, there, useful size, good rooms - but now you want more money than a kidney is worth, or something. Thanks, no.

New place

In February 2025 we finally got lucky and found a (newly opened) area with a large number of places to build a house on. Had multiple talks with someone from on of the companies developing that area (there are two you can select from), then talked with banks and signed a contract in March 2025. We got promised that actual house construction would be first quarter of 2026, finished in second quarter.

House type

There are basically 2 ways of building a new house (that matter here). First is called “Massivhaus”, second is called “Fertighaus” in german, roughly translating to solid and prefabricated. The latter commonly a wood based construction, though it doesn’t need to be. The important part of it is the prefabrication, walls and stuff get assembled in a factory somewhere and then transported to your place, where they play “big kid lego” for a day and suddenly a house is there.

A common thought is “prefabricated” is faster, but that is only a half true. Sure, the actual work on side is way shorter - usually one or two days and the house is done - while a massive construction usually takes weeks to build up. But that is only a tiny part of the time needed, the major part goes of into planning and waiting and in there it doesn’t matter what material you end up with.

Money fun

Last year already wasn’t the best time to start a huge loan - but isn’t it always “a few years ago would have been better”? So we had multiple talks with different banks and specialised consultants until we found something that we thought is good for us.

Thinking about it now - we should have put even more money on top as “reserve”, but who could have thought that 2026 turns into such a shitshow? Does not help at all, quite the contrary. And that damn lotto game always ends up with the wrong numbers, meh.

Plans and plans and more plans - and rules

For whichever reason you can not just go and put something on your ground and be happy. At least not if you are part of the normal people and not enormously rich. There is a large set of rules to follow. Usually that is a good thing, even though some rules are sometimes hard to understand.

In Germany, besides the usual laws, we have something that is called “Bebauungsplan”, which translates to “development plan” (don’t know if that carries the right meaning, it’s a plan on what and how may be build, which can have really detailed specifications in). It basically tells you every aspect on top of the normal law that you have to keep in mind.

In our case we have the requirement of 2 full floors and CAN have a third smaller on top, it limits how high the house can be and also how high our ground floor may be compared to the street. It regulates where on the property we may build and how much ground we may cover with the house, it gives a set of colors we are allowed to use, it demands a flat roof that we must have as a green roof and has a number of things more that aren’t important enough to list here. If you do want to see the full list, my german post on it has all the details that matter to us.

With all that stuff in mind - off to plans. Wouldn’t have believed how many details there are to take in. Room sizes are simple, but how to arrange them for ideal usage of the sun, useful ways inside the house, but also keeping in mind that water needs to flow through and out. Putting a bath room right atop a living room means a water pipe needs to go down there. Switch the bath room side in the house, and it suddenly is above the kitchen - means you can connect the pipes from it to the ones from kitchen, which is much preferred than going through the living room. And lots more such things.

It took us until nearly end of October to finalize the plans! And we learned a whole load from it. We started with a lot of wishes. The planner tried to make them work. Then we changed our minds. Plans changed. Minds changed again. Comparing the end result with the first draft we changed most of the ground floor around, with only the stairs and the entrance door at the same position. Less changes for the upper floor, but still enough.

Side quests

The whole year was riddled with something my son named side quests. We visited a construction exhibition near us, we went to the house builders factory and took a look on how they work. We went to many different other companies that do SOME type of work which we need soon, say inside floors, painters, kitchen and more stuff.

Of course the most important side quest was a visit to the notary to finalize the contracts, especially for the plot of land (in Germany you must have a notary for that to get entered into the governments books). Creates lots of fees, of course, for the notary and also the government (both fees and taxes here).

Building permit

We had been lucky and only needed a small change to the plans to get the building permit - and the second part, the wastewater permit (yes, you need a separate one for this) also got through without trouble.

Choices, so many of them

So in January we finally had an appointment for something that’s called “Bemusterung” which badly translates to “Sampling”. Basically two days at the house builders factory to select all of what’s needed for the house that you don’t do in the plans. Doors, inside and out and their type and color and handles. Same things for the windows and the blinds and the protection level you want the windows to have. Decide about stairs, design for the sanitary installations - and also the height of the toilet! - and the tiles to put into the bathrooms. Decisions on all the tech needed (heating system, ventilation and whatnot.

Two days, busy ones - and you can easily spend a lot of extra money here if you aren’t careful. We managed to get “out of it” with only about 4000€ extra, so pretty good.

Electro and automation

Now, here I am special. Back when I was young the job I learned is electrician. So here I have very detailed wishes. I am also running lots of automatism in my current flat - obviously the new house should be better than that. So I have a lot of ideas and thoughts on it, so this is entirely extra and certainly out of the ordinary the house builder usually see.

Which means I do all of that on my own. Well, the planning and some of the work, I must have a company at hand for certain tasks, it is required by some rules. But they will do what I planned, as long as I don’t violate regulations.

Which means the whole electrical installation is … different. Entirely planned for automatisms and using KNX for it. I am so happy to ditch Homeassistant and the load of Homematic, Zigbee and ZWave based wireless things.

Ok, Homeassistant is a nice thing - it can do a lot. And it can bridge between about any system you can find. But it is a central single point of failure. And it is a system that needs constant maintenance. Not touched for a while? Plan for a few hours playing update whack-a-mole. And often enough a component here or there breaks with an update. Can be fixed, but takes another hour or two.

So I change. Away from wireless based stuff. To wires. To a system thats a standard for decades already. And works entirely without a SPOF. (Yes, you can add one here too). And, most important, should I ever die - can easily be maintained by anyone out there dealing with KNX, which is a large number of people and companies. Without digging through dozens of specialised integrations and whatnot.

I may even end up with Homeassistant again - but that will entirely be as a client. It won’t drive automations. It won’t be the central point to do anything for the house. It will be a logging and data collecting thing that enables me to put up easy visualizations. It may be an easy interface for smartphones or tablets to control parts of the house, for those parts where one wants this to happen. Not the usual day-to-day stuff, extras on top.

Actual work happening

Since march there finally is action visible. The base of the house is getting build. Wednesday the 1st April we finally got the base slab poured on the construction site and in another 10 days the house is getting delivered and build up. A 40ton mobile crane will be there.

02 April, 2026 09:23PM

hackergotchi for Samuel Henrique

Samuel Henrique

Bringing HTTP/3 to curl on Amazon Linux

Screenshot of the top entry of the curl package's changelog, showing the following: Changelogs for curl-8.17.0-1.amzn2023.0.2.x86_64 * Mon Mar 16 00:00:00 2026 Samuel Henrique (samueloph) <samhn@amazon.com> - 8.17.0-1.amzn2023.0.2 - Enable HTTP/3 support in the full build using ngtcp2 and nghttp3 - HTTP/3 is explicitly disabled in the minimal build - Add runtime dependencies on libnghttp3 and libngtcp2 with minimum version pinning - Run tests in parallel via upstream make test-nonflaky, with serial fallback for race-prone tests

tl;dr

Starting with curl 8.17.0-1.amzn2023.0.2 in Amazon Linux 2023, you can now use HTTP/3.

dnf swap -y libcurl-minimal libcurl-full
dnf swap -y curl-minimal curl-full
curl --http3-only https://example.com

(HTTP/3 is only enabled in the curl -full builds)

Or, if you would like to try it out in a container:

podman run amazonlinux:2023 /bin/sh -c 'dnf upgrade -y --releasever=latest && dnf swap -y libcurl-minimal libcurl-full && dnf swap -y curl-minimal curl-full && curl --http3-only https://example.com'

For a list of test endpoints, you can refer to https://bagder.github.io/HTTP3-test/

The Upgrade I Didn't Have to Make

My teammate Steve Zarkos, who previously worked on upgrading OpenSSL in Amazon Linux from 3.0 to 3.2, spent the last few months on the complex task of bumping OpenSSL again, this time to 3.5. A bump like this only happens after extensive code analysis and testing, something that I didn't foresee happening when AL2023 was released but that was a notable request from users.

Having enabled HTTP/3 on Debian, I was always keeping an eye on when I would get to do the same for Amazon Linux (mind you, I work at AWS, in the Amazon Linux org). The bump to OpenSSL 3.5 was the perfect opportunity to do that, for the first time Amazon Linux is shipping an OpenSSL version that is supported by ngtcp2 for HTTP/3 support.

Non-Intrusive Change

In order to avoid any intrusive changes to existing users of AL2023, I've only enabled HTTP/3 in the full build of curl, not in the minimal one, this means there is no change for the minimal images.

The way curl handles HTTP/3 today also does not lead to any behavior changes for those who have the full variants of curl installed, this is due to the fact that HTTP/3 is only used if the user explicitly asks for it with the flags --http3 or --http3-only.

Side Quests

Supporting HTTP/3 on curl also requires building it with ngtcp2 and nghttp3, two packages which were not shipped in Amazon Linux, besides, my team doesn't even own the curl package, we are a security team so our packages are the security related stuff such as OpenSSL and GnuTLS. Our main focus is the services behind Amazon Linux's vulnerability handling, not package maintenance.

I worked with the owners of the curl package and got approvals on a plan to introduce the two new dependencies under their ownership and to enable the feature on curl, I appreciate their responsiveness.

Amazon Linux 2023 is forked from Fedora, so while introducing ngtcp2, I also sent a couple of Pull Requests upstream to keep things in sync:

[ngtcp2] package latest release 1.21.0

[ngtcp2] do not skip tests

While building the curl package in Amazon Linux, I've noticed the build was taking 1 hour from start to end, and the culprit was something well known to me; tests.

The curl test suite is quite extensive, with more than 1600 tests, all of that running without parallelization, running two times for each build of the package; once for the minimal build and again for the full build.

I had previously enabled parallel tests in Debian back in 2024 but never got around to submit the same improvements to Amazon Linux or Fedora, this is now fixed. The build times for Amazon Linux came down to 10 minutes under the same host (previously 1 hour), and Fedora promptly merged my PR to do the same there:

[curl] run tests in parallel

All of this uncovered a test which is timing-dependent, meaning it's not supposed to be run with high levels of parallelism, so there goes another PR, this time to curl:

Flag test 766 as timing-dependent#21155

What started as enabling a single feature turned into improvements that landed in curl, Fedora, and Amazon Linux alike. I did this in a mix of work and volunteer time, mostly during work hours (work email address used when this was the case), but I'm glad I put in the extra time for the sake of improving curl for everyone.

Release Notes

Amazon Linux 2023 release notes for 2023.10.20260330

02 April, 2026 12:00AM by Unknown

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope)

diffoscope 316 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 316. This version includes the following changes:

[ Jelle van der Waa ]
* Fix compatibility with LLVM version 22.

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add some debugging info for PyPI debugging.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

02 April, 2026 12:00AM

April 01, 2026

hackergotchi for Joey Hess

Joey Hess

banning all Anthropic employees

Per my policies, I need to ban every employee and contractor of Anthropic Inc from ever contributing code to any of my projects. Anyone have a list?

Any project that requires a Developer Certificate of Origin or similar should be doing this, because Anthropic is making tools that explicitly lie about the origin of patches to free software projects.

UNDERCOVER MODE — CRITICAL

You are operating UNDERCOVER in a PUBLIC/OPEN-SOURCE repository. [...] Do not blow your cover.

NEVER include in commit messages or PR descriptions:

[...] The phrase 'Claude Code' or any mention that you are an AI
Co-Authored-By lines or any other attribution

-- via @vedolos

01 April, 2026 04:36PM

hackergotchi for Ben Hutchings

Ben Hutchings

FOSS activity in March 2026

01 April, 2026 03:30PM by Ben Hutchings

hackergotchi for Matthew Garrett

Matthew Garrett

Self hosting as much of my online presence as practical

Because I am bad at giving up on things, I’ve been running my own email server for over 20 years. Some of that time it’s been a PC at the end of a DSL line, some of that time it’s been a Mac Mini in a data centre, and some of that time it’s been a hosted VM. Last year I decided to bring it in house, and since then I’ve been gradually consolidating as much of the rest of my online presence as possible on it. I mentioned this on Mastodon and a couple of people asked for more details, so here we are.

First: my ISP doesn’t guarantee a static IPv4 unless I’m on a business plan and that seems like it’d cost a bunch more, so I’m doing what I described here: running a Wireguard link between a box that sits in a cupboard in my living room and the smallest OVH instance I can, with an additional IP address allocated to the VM and NATted over the VPN link. The practical outcome of this is that my home IP address is irrelevant and can change as much as it wants - my DNS points at the OVH IP, and traffic to that all ends up hitting my server.

The server itself is pretty uninteresting. It’s a refurbished HP EliteDesk which idles at 10W or so, along 2TB of NVMe and 32GB of RAM that I found under a pile of laptops in my office. We’re not talking rackmount Xeon levels of performance, but it’s entirely adequate for everything I’m doing here.

So. Let’s talk about the services I’m hosting.

Web

This one’s trivial. I’m not really hosting much of a website right now, but what there is is served via Apache with a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Nothing interesting at all here, other than the proxying that’s going to be relevant later.

Email

Inbound email is easy enough. I’m running Postfix with a pretty stock configuration, and my MX records point at me. The same Let’s Encrypt certificate is there for TLS delivery. I’m using Dovecot as an IMAP server (again with the same cert). You can find plenty of guides on setting this up.

Outbound email? That’s harder. I’m on a residential IP address, so if I send email directly nobody’s going to deliver it. Going via my OVH address isn’t going to be a lot better. I have a Google Workspace, so in the end I just made use of Google’s SMTP relay service. There’s various commerical alternatives available, I just chose this one because it didn’t cost me anything more than I’m already paying.

Blog

My blog is largely static content generated by Hugo. Comments are Remark42 running in a Docker container. If you don’t want to handle even that level of dynamic content you can use a third party comment provider like Disqus.

Mastodon

I’m deploying Mastodon pretty much along the lines of the upstream compose file. Apache is proxying /api/v1/streaming to the websocket provided by the streaming container and / to the actual Mastodon service. The only thing I tripped over for a while was the need to set the “X-Forwarded-Proto” header since otherwise you get stuck in a redirect loop of Mastodon receiving a request over http (because TLS termination is being done by the Apache proxy) and redirecting to https, except that’s where we just came from.

Mastodon is easily the heaviest part of all of this, using around 5GB of RAM and 60GB of disk for an instance with 3 users. This is more a point of principle than an especially good idea.

Bluesky

I’m arguably cheating here. Bluesky’s federation model is quite different to Mastodon - while running a Mastodon service implies running the webview and other infrastructure associated with it, Bluesky has split that into multiple parts. User data is stored on Personal Data Servers, then aggregated from those by Relays, and then displayed on Appviews. Third parties can run any of these, but a user’s actual posts are stored on a PDS. There are various reasons to run the others, for instance to implement alternative moderation policies, but if all you want is to ensure that you have control over your data, running a PDS is sufficient. I followed these instructions, other than using Apache as the frontend proxy rather than nginx, and it’s all been working fine since then. In terms of ensuring that my data remains under my control, it’s sufficient.

Backups

I’m using borgmatic, backing up to a local Synology NAS and also to my parents’ home (where I have another HP EliteDesk set up with an equivalent OVH IPv4 fronting setup). At some point I’ll check that I’m actually able to restore them.

Conclusion

Most of what I post is now stored on a system that’s happily living under a TV, but is available to the rest of the world just as visibly as if I used a hosted provider. Is this necessary? No. Does it improve my life? In no practical way. Does it generate additional complexity? Absolutely. Should you do it? Oh good heavens no. But you can, and once it’s working it largely just keeps working, and there’s a certain sense of comfort in knowing that my online presence is carefully contained in a small box making a gentle whirring noise.

01 April, 2026 02:35AM

March 31, 2026

hackergotchi for Junichi Uekawa

Junichi Uekawa

April already.

April already. Wondering how bazel update is going in Debian. Seems like a large undertaking.

31 March, 2026 11:27PM by Junichi Uekawa

hackergotchi for Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill

Quote #75514

Although I never submitted to it, I made several appearances in the now-defunct quote database on bash.org (QDB). I’m dealing with a broken keyboard now, and went to dig hard to find this classic in the Wayback machine. I thought I would put it back on the web:

<mako> my letter "eye" stopped worng
<luca> k, too?
<mako> yeah
<luca> sounds like a mountain dew spill
<mako> and comma
<mako> those three
<mako> ths s horrble
<luca> tme for a new eyboard
<luca> 've successfully taen my eyboard apart and fxed t by cleanng t wth alcohol
<mako> stop mang fun of me
<mako> ths s a laptop!

It was, in fact, horrble.

31 March, 2026 09:13PM by Benjamin Mako Hill

hackergotchi for C.J. Collier

C.J. Collier

Finding: Promoting SeaBIOS Cloud Images to UEFI Secure Boot (Proxmox)

Discovery

Legacy cloud templates often lack the partitioning and bootloader
binaries required for UEFI Secure Boot. Attempting to switch such a VM
to OVMF in Proxmox results in “not a bootable disk.” We discovered that
a surgical promotion is possible by manipulating the block device and
EFI variables from the hypervisor.

The Problem

  1. Protective MBR Flags: Legacy installers often set
    the pmbr_boot flag on the GPT’s protective MBR. Strict UEFI
    implementations (OVMF) will ignore the GPT if this flag is present.
  2. Missing ESP: Cloud images often lack a FAT32 EFI
    System Partition (ESP).
  3. Variable Store: A fresh Proxmox
    efidisk0 is empty and lacks both the trust certificates
    (PK/KEK/db) and the BootOrder entries required for an automated
    boot.

The “Promotion” Rule

To upgrade a SeaBIOS VM to Secure Boot without a full OS reinstall:
1. Surgical Partitioning: Map the disk on the host and
add a FAT32 partition (Type EF00). Clear the
pmbr_boot flag from the MBR. 2. Binary
Preparation: Boot the VM in SeaBIOS mode to install
shim and grub-efi packages. Use
grub2-mkconfig to populate the new ESP. 3. Trust
Injection: Use the virt-fw-vars utility on the
hypervisor to programmatically enroll the Red Hat/Microsoft CA keys and
any custom certificates (e.g., FreeIPA CA) into the VM’s
efidisk. 4. Boot Pinning: Explicitly set
the UEFI BootOrder to point to the shimx64.efi
path via virt-fw-vars --append-boot-filepath.

Solution (Example Command
Sequence)

On the Proxmox Host (root):

# Map and Clean MBR
DEV=$(rbd map pool/disk)
parted -s $DEV disk_set pmbr_boot off

# Inject Trust and Boot Path (VM must be stopped)
virt-fw-vars --inplace /dev/rbd/mapped_efidisk \
  --enroll-redhat \
  --add-db <GUID> /path/to/ipa-ca.crt \
  --append-boot-filepath '\EFI\centos\shimx64.efi' \
  --sb

This workflow enables high-integrity Secure Boot environments using
existing SeaBIOS infrastructure templates.

31 March, 2026 09:03PM by C.J. Collier

hackergotchi for Thomas Lange

Thomas Lange

FAIme using apt-cacher-ng

The FAI.me service has become faster over the past two months.

First, the tool fai-mirror can now download all packages in one go (with all their dependencies) instead of downloading one by one. This helped a lot for the Linux Mint ISO because it uses a long list of packages.

I've also added a local apt cache (using apt-cacher-ng), so the network speed does not matter any more in most cases. This led to the following improvements:

  • Linux Mint install ISOs went from around 6-7 min to now only 2min.
  • Ubuntu install ISO went from average 3min to around 90 seconds.
  • The average time for a Debian Linux install ISO dropped from 2min to 40 seconds.

So far we only had once a problem with apt-cacher-ng, because the underlying partition was full.

Building cloud and live images do not gain that much from the local package cache, because most time is spend in extracting and installing the packages.

31 March, 2026 12:56PM

Russ Allbery

Review: Code Blue—Emergency

Review: Code Blue—Emergency, by James White

Series: Sector General #7
Publisher: Orb
Copyright: 1987
Printing: May 2003
ISBN: 0-7653-0663-8
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 252

Code Blue—Emergency (annoying em-dash in original title) is the seventh book of James White's Sector General science fiction series about a vast multi-species hospital station. While there are some references to (and spoilers for) earlier books in the series, you don't have to remember the previous books to read this one. I had no trouble despite a nine-year gap.

I read this as part of the Orb General Practice omnibus, which collects this novel and The Genocidal Healer.

Cha Thrat is a Sommaradvan warrior-surgeon, member of a newly-discovered species that is beginning the process of contact with the Federation. She saved a Monitor corps human after an accident on her world, performing some some highly competent surgery on a species she had never seen before. That plus her somewhat outcast status on her own world due to her very traditional attitude towards medical ethics led Sector General to extend an offer of medical internship, and led her to leap into the unknown by accepting. This may have been a mistake; there is a great deal that Sector General does not understand about Sommaradvan medical ethics.

This series entry is another proper (if somewhat episodic) novel and the first book of the series that doesn't primarily focus on Conway. He makes an appearance in his new role as Diagnostician, but only as a supporting character. Code Blue—Emergency is told in the tight third-person perspective of Cha Thrat, an alien who finds many things about Sector General baffling, confusing, and ethically troubling (and who therefore provides a good reader surrogate for reintroducing the basics of how the hospital works).

Using an alien viewpoint is a more sophisticated narrative technique than White has used previously. I'm glad he tried it, and it mostly works, although I have some complaints. Cha Thrat comes from the middle caste of a strictly hierarchical society of three castes, but is also immensely stubborn and used to a medical system in which doctors take sole responsibility for their patients. This creates a lot of cultural conflicts, and I do enjoy science fiction where the human attitudes are portrayed as the strange ones, but the cultural analysis offered by this novel is not very deep.

The pattern of this book is for Cha Thrat to stumble into a successful approach to a problem while being either oblivious to or hostile to the normal hierarchical structure expected of medical trainees. This is believable as far as it goes. She is a skilled and intelligent doctor with some good instincts and a strong commitment to patient care, but is also culturally inclined to not ask for help. It makes sense for that to be a serious problem in a hospital. Unfortunately, no one says this directly. Sector General staff get quite upset in ways that seem more territorial than oriented towards patient safety, no one directly explains to Cha Thrat why following a process is important or shows examples of what could go wrong, and plot armor means that her mistakes usually have positive outcomes. One can extrapolate the reasons why she is not a good medical student, but the reader is forced to do the extrapolation.

This is the sort of book where the narration makes clear there are unresolved cultural clashes that are going to cause problems but hides the details. To Cha Thrat, her perspective is so obvious she never bothers to explain it to the reader, so the specifics come as a surprise. As with the alien perspective, I've seen this technique used with more subtlety and sophistication in other books, but White's version mostly works. Cha Thrat is a sympathetic protagonist because she is truly trying to take the most ethical and empathetic action in every situation and is clearly competent. Most of my frustration as a reader, ironically, lands on the other Sector General doctors who seem to make little to no effort to understand her perspective when she fails to conform to their expectations. This is believable in the abstract, but the whole point of Sector General is that they're supposed to be wiser about interspecies difference than this.

Also, sometimes their reactions just seem petty. Cha Thrat has a very hierarchical concept of medicine that matches the social classes of her culture. For her, the highest tier of doctor are wizards who treat rulers, because the work of rulers is mostly mental and intellectual and therefore the diseases of rulers are treated with magic spells performed with words to reshape their thinking rather than surgery on their bodies. O'Mara and the other Sector General psychologists take great offense at this, muttering about being called witch doctors, which I found completely absurd. This is a comprehensible, if odd, description of psychology from a wholly alien species. Surely one's first reaction should be that words like "wizard" or "magic" are translation errors. Don't get offended; look to see if the underlying substance matches, which it clearly does.

Apart from cultural and psychological clashes, Code Blue—Emergency has the standard episodic Sector General structure of interesting medical mysteries that require lateral thinking. I find this sort of puzzle story satisfying, particularly given the firm belief of every character in an essentially pacifist and empathetic approach to even the most alien of creatures. This determined non-violence is one of the more interesting things about this series, and it continues here.

White does tend towards both biological and gender essentialism for everyone other than the protagonist and main supporting characters, but he seemed to be walking back some of the more outrageous limitations on women that appeared in previous books. There is still some nonsense in here about how females of any species can't be Diagnosticians, but then Cha Thrat, who is female, seems to violate the justification for that rule over the course of this novel (sadly without comment). Perhaps he's setting up for proving Sector General wrong about this prejudice.

I picked this up after reading Elizabeth Bear's Machine, which is essentially a (better written) Sector General novel that got me in the mood for reading more. I wouldn't give Code Blue—Emergency any awards, but it delivered exactly what I was looking for. This series is not as deep or well-written as some more recent SF, but it is reliably itself and reliably entertaining. There are worse things in a series. Recommended if you're in the mood for alien ER in space.

The omnibus edition that I read has an introduction to both novels by John Clute. It does add some interesting insights, but (as is somewhat typical for Clute) it also spoils parts of both books. You may want to read it after you read the novels.

Followed by The Genocidal Healer.

Rating: 7 out of 10

31 March, 2026 03:08AM

March 30, 2026

Jamie McClelland

Mailman3 has 2 databases. Whoops.

At May First we have been carefully planning our migration of about 1200 lists from mailman2 to mailman3 for almost six months now. We did a lot of user communications, had several months of beta testing with a handful of lists ported over, and everything was looking good. So we kicked off the migration!

But, about 15% of the way through I started seeing sqlite lock errors. Wait, what? I carefully re-configured mailman3 to use postgres, not sqlite. Well, yes, but apparently that was for the database managing the email list configuration, not the database powering the django web app, which, incidentally, also includes hundresds of gigabytes of archives. In other words, the one we really need in postgres, not sqlite.

Moving from sqlite to postgres

Well that sucks. We immediately stopped the migration to deal with this.

I noticed that the web is full of useful django instructions on how to migrate your database from one database to antoher. However, if you read the fine print, those convenient looking “dumpdata loaddata” workflows are designed to move the table definitions and a small amount of data. In our case, even after just 15% of our lists moved, our sqlite database was about 30GB.

I considered some of the hacks to manage memory and try to run this via django, but eventually decided that pgloader was a more robust option. This option also allowed me to more easily test things out on a copy of our sqlite database (made while mailman was turned off). This way I could migrate and re-migrate the sqlite database over and over without impacting our live installation until I was satisfied it was all working.

My first decision was to opt out of pgloader’s schema creation. I used django’s schema creation tool by:

  • Turning off mailman3 and mailman3-web and changing the mailman web configuration to use the new postgresql database.
  • Running mailman-web migrate
  • Changing the mailman web configuration back to sqlite and starting everything again.

Note: I tried just adding new database settings in the mailman web configuration indexed to ’new’ - django has the ability to define different databases by name, then you can run mailman-web migrate --database new. But, during the migration, I caught django querying the sqlite database for some migrations that required referencing existing fields (specifically hyperkitty’s 0003_thread_starting_email). I didn’t want any of these steps to touch the live database so I opted for the cleaner approach.

Once I had a clean postgres schema, I dumped it so I could easily return to this spot.

Next I started working on our pgloader load file. After a lot of trial and error, I ended with:

LOAD DATABASE
    FROM sqlite:///var/lib/mailman3/sqlite-postgres-migration/mailman3web.clean.backup.db
    INTO postgresql://mailmanweb:xxxxxxxxxxx@localhost:5432/mailmanweb

WITH data only,
    reset sequences,
    include no drop,
    disable triggers,
    create no tables,
    batch size = 5MB,
    batch rows = 500,
    prefetch rows = 50,
    workers = 2,
    concurrency = 1

SET work_mem to '64MB',
    maintenance_work_mem to '512MB'

CAST type datetime to timestamptz drop default drop not null,
    type date to date drop default drop not null,
    type int when (= precision 1) to boolean using tinyint-to-boolean,
    type text to varchar using remove-null-characters;

The batch, prefetch, workers and concurreny settings are all there to ensure memory doesn’t blow up.

I also discovered that I had to make some changes to the schema before loading data. Mostly truncating tables that the django migrate command populated to avoid duplicate key errors:

TRUNCATE TABLE django_migrations CASCADE;
TRUNCATE TABLE django_content_type CASCADE;
TRUNCATE TABLE auth_permission CASCADE;
TRUNCATE TABLE django_site CASCADE;

And also, I had to change a column type. Apparently the mailman import process allowed an attachment file name that exceeds the limit for postgres, but was allowed into sqlite:

ALTER TABLE hyperkitty_attachment ALTER COLUMN name TYPE text

When pgloader runs, we still get a lot of warnings from pgloader, which wants to cast columns differently than django does. These are harmless (I was able to import the data without a problem).

And there are still a lot of warnings along the lines of:

2026-03-30T14:08:01.691990Z WARNING PostgreSQL warning: constraint “hyperkitty_vote_email_id_73a50f4d_fk_hyperkitty_email_id” of relation “hyperkitty_vote” does not exist, skipping

These are harmless as well. They appear because disable triggers disables foreign key constraints. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to load tables that require values in tables that have not yet been populated.

After all the tweaking, the import of our 30GB sqlite database took about 40 minutes.

Final Steps

I think the reset sequences from pgloader should take care of this, but just in case:

mailman-web sqlsequencereset hyperkitty mailman_django auth | mailman-web dbshell

And, just to ensure postgres is optimized, run this in the psql shell:

ANALYZE VERBOSE;

Last thoughts

I understand very well all the decisions the mailman3 devs made in designing the next version of mailman, and if I was in the same place I may have made them the same ones. For example, separating the code running the mailing list from the code managing the archives and the web interface makes perfectly good sense - many people might want to run just the mailing list part without a web interface. And building the web interface in django makes a lot of sense as well - why re-invent the wheel? I’m sure a lot of time and effort was saved by simply using the built in features you get for free with django.

But the unfortunate consequence of these decisions is that sys admins have a much harder time. Almost everyone wants the email lists along with the web interface and the archives. But nobody wants two different configuration files with different syntaxes and logic, not to mention two different command lines to use for maintenance and configuration with completely different APIs. Trying to understand how to change a default template or set list defaults requires a lot of research and usually you have to write a python script to do it.

I have finally come to the conclusion that mailman2 is designed for sys admins, while mailman3 is designed for developers.

Despite these short comings, I am impressed with the community and their quick and friendly responses to the questions of a confused sys admin. That might be more valuable than anything else.

30 March, 2026 12:27PM

Utkarsh Gupta

FOSS Activites in March 2026

Here’s my monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the FOSS world.

Debian

Whilst I didn’t get a chance to do much, here are still a few things that I worked on:

  • A quick exchange with Xavier about node-lodash fixes for stable releases.
  • Uploaded ruby-rack to CVE-2026-25500 & CVE-2026-22860 to sid, trixie, and bookworm.
  • Started to work on the DebConf Bursary team along with PEB.
  • Assited a few folks in getting their patches submitted via Salsa.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu

I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time back in February 2021.

Whilst I can’t give a full, detailed list of things I did, here’s a quick TL;DR of what I did:

  • Successfully released 26.04 LTS Beta!
  • Worked further on the whole artifact signing story for cdimage.
  • Assisted a bunch of folks with my Archive Admin and Release team hats to:
    • Review and grant FFes.
    • Coordinating weekly syncs.
    • Promoting/demoting binaries to/from main.
    • Taking care of package removals and so on.
  • Was pretty occupied with the new release processs architecture and design.
  • Preparing for the 26.04 LTS final release.

Debian (E)LTS

This month I have worked 50 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and on its sister Extended LTS project and did the following things:

Released Security Updates

Work in Progress

  • knot-resolver: Affected by CVE-2023-26249, CVE-2023-46317, and CVE-2022-40188, leading to Denial of Service.

  • node-lodash: Affected by CVE-2025-13465, prototype pollution in the baseUnset function.

    • [stable]: Xavier from the JS team ACK’d the patch. The trixie and bookworm uploads will follow.
    • [LTS]: The bullseye test and upload will follow in April once the stable uploads are in and ACK’d by the SRMs.

  • vlc: Affected by CVE-2025-51602, an out-of-bounds read and denial of service via a crafted 0x01 response from an MMS server.

    • [LTS]: 3.0.23 backport is ready but not tested. I’ll get this over the line in March.
    • [ELTS]: 3.0.23 backport is ready but not very clean. Would like to complete LTS and get back to this.

Other Activities

  • [ELTS] Continued to review ruby-rack for ELTS – it has since received about 13 new CVEs, making it even more chaotic. Might consider releasing in batches.

  • [E/LTS] Monitored discussions on mailing lists, IRC, and all the documentation updates.

  • [E/LTS] Attended the monthly LTS meeting on IRC. Summary here.

  • [Other] Spent quite some time debugging a bug in debusine. Filed https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/issues/1412 for the same. Have worked on a preliminary patch but would like to submit something for Colin to review. Will follow up in April.

Until next time.
:wq for today.

30 March, 2026 05:41AM

Sahil Dhiman

MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026

MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026 was held on 14th and 15th March 2026 at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Having a Debian conference in the North was something many folks wanted. Ravi started the discussion (with local IIT Kanpur folks) almost 7 months before the conference. Lots of folks from Debian India joined in organizing the conference, which was nice. All the meeting notes and discussions were posted on the Debian India mailing list, a first.

Despite all the efforts, the conference start was delayed due to logistical issues. Things went fine post Day 1 lunch. We had two days of almost full schedule. disaster’s Decentralising Indian Communication was an interesting talk, diving into decentralized communication.

IIT Kanpur is a huge campus with nice footpaths and greenery. We got the opportunity to explore their HPC at Computer Center post conference.

Work has been started for MiniDebCamp Kochi. More details can be found on the wiki.

Working to make this conference happen was different with all the challenges involved, but overall, everyone was happy with the outcome.

MDC K group photo

Group photo. Click to enlarge

30 March, 2026 02:24AM by Sahil Dhiman

March 29, 2026

Russell Coker

Ebook Readers in Debian

Laptop

For a while I’ve been using Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 in Debian/Trixie running KDE for reading ebooks on my laptop, it generally works well and has a large font size. The only downsides of it for that use are taking more RAM than I would prefer (about 780M RSS which seems a lot for a relatively simple task) and having separate windows for the list of books and reading an actual book without any options to just open the last book and not delay me.

I tried Arianna 25.04.0-1 in Debian/Trixie, it has a significantly smaller font size and doesn’t allow high contrast colors as the default is black on gray with the dark theme in KDE. It also only allows left and right arrows for moving through the book while Calibre uses up/down, left/right, or pgup/pgdn so whatever keys seem reasonable to you are going to work. The RSS was 762M which wasn’t great but wasn’t the real problem. Rumours of Arianna using less RAM than Calibre seem exaggerated.

Librem5

On my Librem5 phone with Plasma Mobile Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 both the initial setup screen and the main screen for selecting a book to read don’t work in the width of portrait view on the phone. After putting it in landscape mode it worked, but I couldn’t touch on a book title to select it I had to touch on the number of the book at the left of the list box. But once it was loaded everything was fine. On the Librem5 Arianna 25.04.0-1 just worked fine, although only using left/right swipes to change pages instead of up/down was annoying.

Furilabs FLX1s

On my Furilabs FLX1s with phosh Arianna 25.04.0-1 and Calibre 8.16.2+ds+~0.10.5-3 both gave the same result of not displaying text or images from the book, I’m not sure if it’s phosh or some other aspect of the FLX1s configuration at fault.

PinePhonePro

On my PinePhonePro running Debian/Testing with Plasma Mobile Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked without any issue and up/down swipes worked. Calibre 9.5.0+ds+~0.10.5-1 had the initial screen work fine in portrait mode but the main screen was too wide and needed landscape. Also the issue of having to touch the number applied.

Laptop running Debian/Unstable

Calibre 9.6.0+ds+~0.10.5-2 and Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked quite nicely on a Thinkpad running Debian/Unstable. One thing I discovered while testing it is that Calibre supports the CTRL-PLUS and CTRL-MINUS key combinations to change font sizes and that also works on the version in Debian/Trixie. Arianna doesn’t support CTRL-PLUS/MINUS.

Conclusion

The problems I had were Arianna on a laptop, everything on the Furilabs FLX1s, and Calibre’s UI not being well adjusted for mobile devices.

Related posts:

  1. encryption speed – Debian vs Fedora I’m in the process of converting my Fedora/rawhide laptop to...
  2. Phone Charging Speeds With Debian/Trixie One of the problems I encountered with the PinePhone Pro...
  3. Furilabs FLX1s The Aim I have just got a Furilabs FLX1s [1]...

29 March, 2026 12:29PM by etbe

hackergotchi for Samuel Henrique

Samuel Henrique

Latest NVIDIA Drivers for Debian (Packaged with AI)

Two terminal windows side-by-side, on the left there's the Debian logo in ASCII art, and on the right it's the output of nvidia-smi, showing the driver version 595.58.03 running on a machine that has an NVIDIA RTS 5080

tl;dr

This is not an official package, it's good enough for me and it might be good enough for you, confirmed as working in Debian Testing but I don't have a Stable machine to test there.

You can use my custom repo to install the latest NVIDIA drivers on Debian Stable, Testing or Unstable (install from Sid repository):

https://deb.debusine.debian.net/debian/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai/

The page above contains the APT sources you need, just add the one for your release to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai.sources, run sudo apt update and install the packages, you might need to disable Secure Boot.

This is not about AI

Discussions about AI are quite divisive in the Free Software communities, and there's so much to be said about it that I'm not willing to go into in this blog post. This is rather just me telling people that if they need up-to-date NVIDIA packages for Debian, they could check if my custom repository gets the job done.

The AI part is a means to an end, I've been careful to note in the repository names that the packages were produced with AI to respect people who do not want to run it for any reason.

RTX 5000 series support

Back in May 2025 I opened a bug report asking for the NVIDIA drivers on Debian to be updated to support the RTX 5000 series. The Nouveau drivers might be good enough for some people, but I need the NVIDIA drivers because I want to play games and do experiments with open weight models.

Opening a bug report doesn't guarantee anything, at the end of the day Debian Developers are volunteers, so if I really wanted the newer drivers, I would have to do something about it, ideally submitting a merge request.

I briefly looked into the NVIDIA packaging, which involves 3 source packages (and one extra git repo for tarballs), unfortunately this was going to take more time and effort than what I was willing to spend.

What I Did

After a few weeks of lamenting that I wasn't running the NVIDIA drivers, I figured I was willing to put in more effort than I originally thought, just enough to instruct the Claude Code agent to package the latest releases. I'm skilled enough with agentic tools that I knew how to use it to save time; providing a clear instruction on how to build the package and explaining the packaging layout, then letting the agent iterate until it gets a working build. The agent was running inside a VM that didn't have any of my credentials.

After a little bit of back and forth, where I was reviewing the changes guiding the agent into how to fix certain issues, I ended up with a working set of packages.

Once I installed it on my machine and confirmed they worked, I set up a debusine repository to make it easier to install future updates, and let others test it out.

Debusine is analogous to Ubuntu's famous PPA, or Fedora's EPEL, it's a relatively new project but it has been working fine for this.

Matheus Polkorny helped me test the packages and did spot a few issues which are fixed now. The Debusine developers were also always quick to respond to my questions and bug reports.

How Good Is It?

Short answer: good enough for daily use, but not a substitute for an official Debian package.

The whole point of doing this is because I don't have enough free time to maintain the package myself. All of this work was done as a volunteer, on my personal time.

This means I'm trusting the agent to some degree; I review its commits but I don't go too deep into it, the quality will be dictated by the fact that I'm a Debian Developer and so by how easily I can spot issues without double checking everything.

I only have a single machine with an NVIDIA GPU, this machine runs Debian Testing and so I don't have a way to test the Stable packages. I can do my best to address problems but at this point there is a risk that new updates break something.

Installing NVIDIA drivers has always been a bit risky regardless, if you're comfortable with reverting updates and handling a system without a graphical interface (in case you end up in a tty), you will be fine.

You will likely need to disable Secure Boot in order to use them, or set up your BIOS so that a MOK can be used to sign the DKMS modules.

When choosing the version strings for the packages, I was careful enough to pick something that would sort lower than an official Debian package, meaning that whenever that same version is packaged in Debian, your system will see it as an upgrade.

If you have any other methods of installing the NVIDIA drivers on your Debian system that is working for you, you should likely stick to that.

I have a strong preference for installing them through .deb packages, making the package sort out configuration changes and dependency updates, besides handling the DKMS modules.

Ultimately I'm not happy with the amount of difficulty that Debian users have in installing up-to-date NVIDIA drivers, and I hope this makes it easier for some.

How To Install

Head over to the Debusine page that contains both repos for Trixie (Debian Stable) and Sid (for Debian Testing and Unstable):

https://deb.debusine.debian.net/debian/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai/

If you are running Debian Testing, then pick the Sid repository.

That page contains the contents of the apt .sources file you need, create the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai.sources with the sources for your release.

Run sudo apt update and install the packages you need, if you already have a previous version installed, sudo apt upgrade --update would update them.

If there are no upgrades, meaning you don't have a previous version installed, then you need to explicitly install them.

sudo apt install nvidia-open-kernel-dkms nvidia-driver

If you run into issues in Debian Stable, consider using the Linux kernel package from the backports repository, if you need an up-to-date NVIDIA driver, you likely should also be running the backports kernel package (if you can't upgrade to Debian Testing).

Future Plans

I currently have no means of measuring how many people are using the debusine repositories, so if you do end up using it feel free to let me know somehow.

I don't know for how long I will keep managing this repository, and how much effort I will spend, but my machine needs it and for now I will keep it up-to-date with the latest production-grade NVIDIA drivers.

Sources

The sources of the packages are available under a namespace in Salsa (Debian's GitLab instance):

https://salsa.debian.org/samueloph-forks-team/nvidia-drivers-forks-with-ai

You can also get the exact sources used in the repositories from debusine:

https://debusine.debian.net/debian/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai/collection/debian:suite/sid-nvidia-ai/search/?category=debian:source-package

https://debusine.debian.net/debian/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai/collection/debian:suite/trixie-nvidia-ai/search/?category=debian:source-package

29 March, 2026 12:00AM by Unknown

March 28, 2026

hackergotchi for Evgeni Golov

Evgeni Golov

Converting Dovecot password schemes on the fly without (too much) cursing

I finally upgraded my mail server to Debian 13 and, as expected, the Dovecot part was quite a ride.

The configuration syntax changed between Dovecot 2.3 (Debian 12) and Dovecot 2.4 (Debian 13), so I started first with diffing my configuration against a vanilla Debian 12 one (this setup is slightly old) and then applied the same (logical) changes to a vanilla Debian 13 one. This mostly went well. Mostly because my user database is stored in SQL and while the Dovecot Configuration Upgrader says it can convert old dovecot-auth-sql.conf.ext files to the new syntax, it only does so for the structure, not the SQL queries themselves. While I don't expect it to be able to parse the queries and adopt them correctly, at least a hint that the field names in userdb changed and might require adjustment would've been cool.

Once I got that all sorted, Dovecot would still refuse to let me in:

Error: sql: Invalid password in passdb: Weak password scheme 'MD5-CRYPT' used and refused

Yeah, right. Did I mention that this setup is old?

The quick cure against this is a auth_allow_weak_schemes = yes in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf, but long term I really should upgrade the password hashes in the database to something more modern.

And this is what this post is about.

My database only contains hashed (and salted) passwords, so I can't just update them without changing the password. And while there are only 9 users in total, I wanted to play nice and professional. (LOL)

There is a Converting Password Schemes howto in the Dovecot documentation, but it uses a rather odd looking PHP script, wrapped in a shell script which leaks the plaintext password to the process list, and I really didn't want to remember how to write PHP to complete this task.

Luckily, I know Python.

The general idea is:

  • As we're using plaintext authentication (auth_mechanisms = plain login), the plaintext password is available during login.
  • After Dovecot's imap-login has verified the password against the old (insecure) hash in the database, we can execute a post-login script, which will connect to the database and update it with a new hash of the plaintext password.

To make the plaintext password available to the post-login script, we add '%{password}' as userdb_plain_pass to the SELECT statement of our passdb query. The original howto also says to add a prefetch userdb, which we do. The sql userdb remains, as otherwise Postfix can't use Dovecot to deliver mail.

Now comes the interesting part. We need to write a script that is executed by Dovecot's script-login and that will update the database for us. Thanks to Python's passlib and mysqlclient, the database and hashing parts are relatively straight forward:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import os

import MySQLdb
import passlib.hash

DB_SETTINGS = {"host": "127.0.0.1", "user": "user", "password": "password", "database": "mail"}
SELECT_QUERY = "SELECT password_enc FROM mail_users WHERE username=%(username)s"
UPDATE_QUERY = "UPDATE mail_users SET password_enc=%(pwhash)s WHERE username=%(username)s"

SCHEME = "bcrypt"
EXPECTED_PREFIX = "$2b$"


def main():
    # https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.3/core/config/post_login_scripting.html
    # https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.3/howto/convert_password_schemes.html
    user = os.environ.get("USER")

    plain_pass = os.environ.get("PLAIN_PASS")
    if plain_pass is not None:
        db = MySQLdb.connect(**DB_SETTINGS)
        cursor = db.cursor()
        cursor.execute(SELECT_QUERY, {"username": user})
        result = cursor.fetchone()
        current_pwhash = result[0]

        if not current_pwhash.startswith(EXPECTED_PREFIX):
            hash_module = getattr(passlib.hash, SCHEME)
            pwhash = hash_module.hash(plain_pass)
            data = {"pwhash": pwhash, "username": user}
            cursor.execute(UPDATE_QUERY, data)
        cursor.close()
        db.close()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

But if we add that as executable = script-login /etc/dovecot/dpsu.py to our imap-postlogin service, as the howto suggests, the users won't be able to login anymore:

Error: Post-login script denied access to user

WAT?

Remember that shell script I wanted to avoid? It ends with exec "$@".

Turns out the script-login "API" is rather interesting. It's not "pass in a list of scripts to call and I'll call all of them". It's "pass a list of scripts, I'll execv the first item and pass the rest as args, and every item is expected to execv the next one again". 🤯

With that (cursed) knowledge, the script becomes:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import os
import sys

import MySQLdb
import passlib.hash

DB_SETTINGS = {"host": "127.0.0.1", "user": "user", "password": "password", "database": "mail"}
SELECT_QUERY = "SELECT password_enc FROM mail_users WHERE username=%(username)s"
UPDATE_QUERY = "UPDATE mail_users SET password_enc=%(pwhash)s WHERE username=%(username)s"

SCHEME = "bcrypt"
EXPECTED_PREFIX = "$2b$"


def main():
    # https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.3/core/config/post_login_scripting.html
    # https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.3/howto/convert_password_schemes.html
    user = os.environ.get("USER")

    plain_pass = os.environ.get("PLAIN_PASS")
    if plain_pass is not None:
        db = MySQLdb.connect(**DB_SETTINGS)
        cursor = db.cursor()
        cursor.execute(SELECT_QUERY, {"username": user})
        result = cursor.fetchone()
        current_pwhash = result[0]

        if not current_pwhash.startswith(EXPECTED_PREFIX):
            hash_module = getattr(passlib.hash, SCHEME)
            pwhash = hash_module.hash(plain_pass)
            data = {"pwhash": pwhash, "username": user}
            cursor.execute(UPDATE_QUERY, data)
        cursor.close()
        db.close()

    os.execv(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[1:])


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

And the passwords are getting gradually updated as the users log in. Once all are updated, we can remove the post-login script and drop the auth_allow_weak_schemes = yes.

28 March, 2026 10:11PM by evgeni

James Valleroy

Stagger v0.1.0

I’ve decided it’s time to tag a v0.1.0 release on my roguelike game project, Stagger. It’s more of a small demo than a full game at this point. It is turn-based, and has purely text-based “graphics”, like the original Rogue.

Here’s a “screenshot”:

####################
#..................#
#.@................#
#....|.............#
#..................#
#.........>........#
#..................#
#..................#
#..................#
####################

HP: 10/10

You can find the repository at either of these locations:
https://git.sr.ht/~jvalleroy/stagger
https://codeberg.org/jvalleroy/stagger

The game is developed in Python, using ncurses. It is dual-licensed under AGPL and MPL.

28 March, 2026 10:54AM by James Valleroy

Valhalla's Things

Ink Lightfastness Tests 2026

Posted on March 28, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, topic:inks

A borderless frame set on a table outdoors, with two sheets of paper a vertical half of which is covered by black paper, while the other half has lines with an ink name and a small filled rectangle, all in the ink itself.

Note

This post will be updated in the next weeks with the test results as they become available.

Note

Most of the images in this post have no real alt-text: they are all scans of the test sheet at various stages through the test, and the results visible on them are described in detail at the end of the post.

Most of the time, what people write by hand will either end up inside a notebook in a drawer or cupboard where it’s well protected, or thrown in the recycling where it doesn’t matter. There are times, however, when things will be exposed to light: it doesn’t matter whether it’s a work of artistic calligraphy that you want to frame or a passive-aggressive notice left in the atrium of a building; it is useful to know whether the work will remain legible or it will fade into nothing in a short time.

A few inks are tested by the producers for lightfastness according to some established standard, a few others are declared lightfast in a generic way, but a lot come with no indication at all. Proper testing according to the standard scales requires significant equipment to precisely control the exposure, but it’s significantly easier — and fun — to do a simple test to divide the inks into three categories:

  • suitable for framed calligraphy, i.e. it looks the same after 3 months of direct sun exposure;
  • suitable for complaining about the way your neighbours deal with the trash, i.e. still readable after 3 months of exposure;
  • not suitable for either, i.e. has faded significantly in the same time.

In the past I’ve done some such tests by taping some sheets to a south-east facing window, and I’ve noticed that most of the results were already apparent after a month, and there was basically no difference between two and three months of exposure, but spring equinox to summer solstice is a nice timeframe to use for such a test (and it leaves time for a second test of different materials from summer solstice to autumn equinox), so this is what I’ve chosen to do this year.

Rather than a window, now I have access to a south-facing covered balcony that is protected from rain but receives quite a bit of direct sun, so instead of taping sheets to the windows1 I’ve prepared a sturdy cardboard panel that I can leave on a table on the balcony, hopefully safe from the rain, but well exposed to the sun.

And then made a quick test, and realized that without the window glass in front, the black strip used to cover the unexposed half of the sample doesn’t lay flat and lets some sun in, so I used an old cheap2 glass frame instead of the panel.

The contents of an order from a fountain pen shop, spread out on a table: a couple of cheap pens, a couple bottles of ink, a converter, a small ritter sport chocolate and a bag full of 5 ml vials with 2 ml of ink each, and a thank-you note from the seller (Steffi).

The next step, already in January, was mentioning in a fountain-pen enthusiasts forum that I planned such a test, and asking if people were interested in having me buy a few samples of more inks when I was buying my next pen. The word “enthusiasts” is probably a hint of the reason why soon afterwards I received a package with the pen I had planned to buy, its converter, and a couple dozens ink samples. And then a couple envelopes with additional samples of inks that weren’t available on the shops, from said enthusiasts.

Added to the inks I already had acquired since the last lightfastness test, it meant that they couldn’t all fit in one single page, and thus I had some room to add some inks I had already tested: some were requests, and for others I tried to select ones that felt relevant. Since I’m changing the test setup, I’ve decided I should probably keep doing this until I’ve tested again all of the inks I still have available.

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For the paper, I’ve used A4 sheets of Clairefontaine Dessin Croquis 160 g/m², one of my staples that I’m sure I will have available in the next years, printed with a dot pattern with a laser printer, using this pdf. And as for the pen I’ve used a fresh Brause n°361 nib: loading a fountain pen with all of these inks wouldn’t be a reasonable effort, and the 361 is one of the writing implements I use most anyway. I also used a glass pen to fill a couple of squares on the paper with more ink. One side of each sheet was then covered with a strip of 300 g/m² black paper (also from Clairefontaine), kept in place with three dots of non-permanent two sided tape, put in the frame and set out in the sun on the morning of 2026-03-20, the day of the spring equinox.

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While I was filling the sheet for the lightfastness tests, I decided to also prepare a second set of sheet, for a liquid resistance drop test.

On each line, beside the name of the ink, I added five sets of crossing parallel lines, and let everything dry for a few days.

Then I used a syringe to put a drop of a liquid on each set of lines, waited for it to be absorbed into the paper and to dry, at least overnight, but sometimes also for a day or two (life happened), and then looked at the results and did the next test.

The first liquid was water, with the usual wild difference between washable and permanent inks, and all of the intermediate possibilities.

The second liquid was isopropyl alcohol, and I was surprised to see that, with very few exceptions, most inks didn’t change at all. I wonder whether that’s related to the fact that instead of forming a drop it was absorbed almost immediately into the paper, and dried in a very short time.

The third liquid was hydrogen peroxide: beside the individual results I noticed that its column yellowed visibly; I wonder whether that means that the paper I used has optical brighteners, and it will also yellow under the sun: that wouldn’t be ideal, but it would also be a surprise, for paper that is acid free and sold for arts.

The fourth liquid was citric acid, by mixing a bit less than a teaspoon of citric acid granules in just enough very warm water (heated to 70°C, i.e. the lowest temperature available on my kettle) to dissolve most of the acid. I forgot that I had some old PH strips until one hour after I’ve put the drop on the paper, and I don’t know whether something had changed, but when I did remember about them it showed a deep red between 1 and 2. I don’t think I can trust those strips too much, however.

This backfired badly: the drop of citric acid never dried out, but formed a sticky paste that prevented me from scanning the results, and I’m not sure whether I’ll do the last test, which was supposed to be household bleach.

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Luckily I had scanned the partial results, and they are shown here.

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After one full day with plenty of sun, nothing really had changed, except possibly for a vague hint that the Herbin Bleu Myosotis may have have been a bit lighter than it started, but it may also have been a suggestion.

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After three days, however, some results started to show, with the most fugitive inks starting to be visibly changed, becoming either paler or in some case duller.

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And the full week showed more of that, with a few more inks starting to show visible change.

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After two weeks the paper had significantly yellowed, something I did not expect from drawing paper (and which means that I will probably use a different paper when making similar tests in the future).

As for the inks, there were a couple more inks with visible changes, but mostly it was more of the same as seen in the previous week.

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Three weeks started to show changes in the black and most irongall inks, and of course more changes in the even less resistant inks.

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Week four saw a bit more clouds and rain than the first few weeks, and there weren’t big changes, but mostly more of what had already started to happen earlier.

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A month didn’t change much compared to the four weeks, but I did the scans for completeness, and from now on I’m going to update monthly.

These are the inks I’ve tested, and here I’ll add notes on the results, as soon as they will be available, keeping this section updated.

When nothing is mentioned, it means that there were no changes, either under the light or under the various liquids.

Lamy Sepia

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After one week it started to be just slightly paler, more so after three weeks.

Sheaffer Skrip Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After one week it started to be just slightly paler, more so after three weeks.

Waterman Audacious Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After three days it started to be just slightly paler, after a week visibly so. After four weeks it was very pale.

Waterman Harmonious Green

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop looks a bit lighter than the one with just water.

After one week it started to be just slightly paler, more so after three weeks. After four weeks it was very pale.

Waterman Mysterious Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is significantly lighter and tends towards green.

After two weeks it started to be just slightly paler, after three weeks it was more gray. After four weeks it was very pale.

Waterman Serenity Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow.

After one week it started to be a bit duller. After four weeks it was paler and duller.

Visconti Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After one week it was visibly duller, looking darker than the original. After three weeks it was duller, and lighter. After a month it was just a pale gray.

Montblanc Royal Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow.

After one week it started to be just slightly duller, more so after two weeks. After three weeks it was also paler. After a month it was just a pale gray.

Montblanc Mystery Black

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After three weeks it started to be a bit paler.

Aurora Nero

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After three weeks it started to be a bit more brown.

Online Duft Blueberry

Not resistant to water, the drop looks very washed out, although a hint of the original shape can be guessed; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow.

After one week it was visibly paler and duller. After three weeks significantly so. After a month it was a pale grey.

Diamine Forever Ink - Smoky Mauve

After a month it looked a bit more purple.

Diamine Forever Ink - Honey Pot

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Diamine Forever Ink - Coral Blaze

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Diamine Forever Ink - Red Ochre

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Diamine Graphite

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

Diamine Rustic Brown

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After three weeks it started to be very slightely paler.

Diamine China Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow.

After three weeks it started to be paler and duller.

Diamine Inkvent Purple Edition - Glacier

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape.

After three weeks it started to be lighter.

Fountainfeder STEVE

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape.

After two weeks the base colour had changed to a pink rather than purple.

Pilot Iroshizuku Syo Ro

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape.

After four weeks it was very slightely paler.

Pilot Iroshizuku Shin-Kai

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape.

After two weeks it had become lighter and more purple. After four weeks it was a purple gray.

Rohrer & Klingner IG Ebony

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a recognisable shade of the original shape; under hydrogen peroxide the shade is significantly lighter.

After four weeks it was a bit lighter

KWZ IG Orange

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is significantly bleached to a light orange.

Kallipos.de Schwarze Eisengallus-Tinte

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is it almost completely bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three weeks it started to be very slightely lighter.

Kallipos.de Blaue Eisengallus-Tinte

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is it almost completely bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After two weeks it had started to become lighter and more gray.

Rohrer & Klingner IG Salix

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is it almost completely bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After two weeks it had become lighter and significantly more gray. After a month it was a yellowish gray.

Rohrer & Klingner IG Scabiosa

Water stains the paper with a significant purple spot, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is is a bit bleached by hydrogen peroxide, but still quite readable.

Pelikan Edelstein Tanzanite

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, but there is a visible trace of the original shape.

After three weeks it started to be slightly paler.

Montblanc Burgundy Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; slightly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three weeks it started to be paler.

Cifra inchiostro finissimo verde alla lavanda

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; quite bleached to a light yellowish green by hydrogen peroxide.

After one week it was visibly paler. After a month it was a still readable pale trace.

Sennelier Abstract acrylic ink 917 purple

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The Feather Pen Ink

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Eloquentia Inchiostro nero

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DeAtramentis Document Blue

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DeAtramentis Document BlueGrey

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DeAtramentis Document Brown

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DeAtramentis Document Fuchsia

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DeAtramentis Document Grau

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DeAtramentis Document Green Grey

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DeAtramentis Document Light Grey

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DeAtramentis Document Moosgrün

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DeAtramentis Document Orange

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DeAtramentis Document Purpurviolett

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DeAtramentis Document Urban Sienna

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KWZ Sheen Machine

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide bleached away the red sheen. This was one of the only two inks to react to isopropyl alcohol, which caused a pale cyan halo around the lines.

After three days it was still perfectly readable, but had visibly lost some red sheen, after one week the red had completely gone and it looked very dark blue (but still shiny)

KWZ Walk over Vistula

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After four weeks it looked a bit darker and duller.

KWZ Warsaw Dreaming

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After a month it started to be a bit lighter.

Octopus Neon Violett

Water very lightly stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible. The other ink that reacted to isopropyl alcohol, with a pale purple halo around the lines.

After two weeks it was paler, more pink.

Octopus Write & Draw Elephant Black

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Platinum blue black

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; it is significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three weeks it started to become gray.

Pelikan 4001 Brillant-Schwarz

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

After three weeks it was a bit more brown than black, after a month noticeably so.

Pelikan 4001 Blau-Schwarz

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; it is significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three weeks it started to become gray.

Pelikan 4001 Königsblau

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three days it had started to be slightly paler. After three weeks it was significantly desaturated.

Herbin Bleu Myosotis

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform pink spot, significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three days it was already visibly paler, after one week it was a pale grey. After a month it was still somehow readable, but as a trace.

Faber Castell Royal Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three days it was slightly duller, after two weeks definitely so. After a month it was also quite paler.

Koh-I-Noor Fountain pen ink blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three days it had started to be slightly paler, more so after one week when it had also turned grey. After four weeks it was very pale.

Koh-I-Noor Document Ink Blue

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Koh-I-Noor Document Ink Black

Water leaves a very light stain, but the original shape doesn’t look changed.

DeAtramentis Document Black

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Waterman Intense Black

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with a trace of the original shape still visible; very lightly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three weeks it started to look a bit more brown, noticeably so after a month.

Herbin Perle Noir

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with a trace of the original shape still visible.

After three weeks it started to look a bit more brown, noticeably so after a month.

Parker Quink black

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

Platinum Carbon black

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Rohrer & Klingner Documentus Black

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Sailor Pigment Kiwaguro

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Platinum Dyestuff Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; very lightly bleached by hydrogen peroxide.

After three weeks it was a bit paler.

Noodler’s Eternal Polar Blue

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  1. which would be spend the day covered by mostly closed shutters anyway, because they receive quite a bit of direct sun, and we don’t want that to enter the house during the summer.↩︎

  2. and thus, I hope, not especially UV-filtering.↩︎

28 March, 2026 12:00AM

March 27, 2026

hackergotchi for Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland

Digital gardening

I was reading a post on Alex Chan's website1 that referenced the concept of digital gardens, a concept/analogy for organising information which dates back to the 90s. This old concept is getting new traction today by contrasting the approach with "endless stream" as used and abused by social media, but also how blogs are typically presented.

This site, my homepage, has a blog, and that's the bit that most people who interact with the site will experience. Partly, because it's the bit that gets syndicated out: via feeds; on Planet Debian and downstream from it; once upon a time on Twitter; nowadays on the Fediverse.

However there's more to my homepage than that. The rest of it may be of little interest to anyone beside me, but it's useful to me, at least. So I may switch focus a little bit from mainly writing blog posts, and tend to the rest of the garden a bit more.

Some recent seeding and pruning: Recently my guest status at Newcastle University came up for renewal, so I wrote down my goals in the Historic Computing Committee for the next year or so, and put them here: nuhcc. I've also been pondering what I'm up to in Debian at the moment, so took some time to add my current projects to that page.

  1. I'm reminded that I should really publish a "blog roll" of cool blogs I'm following at the moment, of which Alex Chan's is one.↩

27 March, 2026 10:05PM