Search Results: "ema"

3 May 2026

Birger Schacht: Status update, February - April 2026

Due to health reasons I did not have the energy to write individual status updates for February & March, so I ll just combine them with the April update: In February I cleaned out my GitHub account and moved all remaining projects to Codeberg. I archived the repositories on GitHub and added links to the new repositories on Codeberg. GitHub is a platform that is more and more frustrating to use. I still have to use it for my dayjob, though. The number of pull requests and issues that are written either by bots or by users that use bots increased in the last two years. Combined with that, GitHub provides a very low barrier for entitled users who do not want to contribute to a productive environment. GitHub now feels like the Twitter/X of git forges. Codeberg on the other hand is a community project. I feel a lot more at home there and the platform itself feels a lot more responsive than GitHub.

28 April 2026

Abhijith PA: Patience could've saved me time.

If I had been patient, it would have saved me time. One such instance is following. From my early blogs, you might know I am using mutt to do email. Just after I get along with mutt, I started using notmuch. Because limit search in mutt is always a pain when you have multiple folders. And what better tool out there than notmuch-mutt to bind both these. notmuch-mutt provide three macros by default.

macro index <F8> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<shell-escape>notmuch-mutt -r --prompt search<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly> echo $ XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache /notmuch/mutt/results <enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: search mail"
macro index <F9> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt -r thread<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly> echo $ XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache /notmuch/mutt/results <enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: reconstruct thread"
macro index <F6> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: remove message from inbox"

One for search, one for reconstructing threads and one for manipulating tags, which I missed. Now my impatient part. I have already mapped f6 for my folder movements and in my initial days of notmuch, I only use just search. So I never cared about the f6 macro provided by notmuch-mutt. As time goes by I got very comfortable with notmuch. I was stretching my notmuch legs. I started to live more on notmuch search results date:today tag:unread than more on the mutt index. To the problem, since notmuch-mutt dump all results to a temp maildir location, can t perform flag changes back to the original maildir which was annoying, because we need to distinguish what mail you read and what not when you subscribed to most of all debian mailing list. I was under the impression that, the notmuch-mutt is not capable of doing so and I just went like that without checking docs. I started doing all crazy hack to sync these maildirs. I even started reading notmuch-mutt codebase. Later, I settled on notmuch-vim. Cause I can manipulate flags sync back from notmuch to maildir. And while searching for something, I accidentally revisited the the the notmuch-mutt macro page and saw the tag manipulation. I was like :( . If I read about the third macro patiently when added that to config, I could ve saved time by not doing ugly hacks around it. I think I learned my lesson.

Ravi Dwivedi: A day in Vienna

On the 7th of September 2025, my friend Dione and I had a day trip to Vienna the capital of Austria. We were attending a conference in Budapest, Hungary, which is 250 km from Vienna. So, it was a good opportunity to visit Vienna. We took a morning train from Budapest to Vienna and got back to Budapest by night. However, booking these tickets turned out to be a bit complicated. There were many websites to book the train ticket Hungarian Railways, Austrian Railways, and third-party sites such as Omio. All these websites had different prices for the same ticket. I booked the tickets from the Hungarian Railways website as it was the cheapest. The train from Budapest to Vienna was 13, operated by Eurocity. Also, I had to pay 2 for the seat reservation on top. The train from Vienna to Budapest operated by Railjet was 21, along with 2 extra for reservation again making it 23. The tickets for the two-way journey added up to 38. The cost of these tickets varied depending on when one purchses them: the sooner you purchase, the lower the price. I bought my tickets 15 days ahead of the date of journey and paid just 38. In contrast, Dione booked just one day before her trip and paid around 100 for her tickets. As for the seat reservation, long-distance trains in Europe usually require paying extra for the seat reservation. This ensures that you get your preferred seat, such as a window seat or an aisle seat. Nevertheless, you will get a seat on long-distance trains because they do not sell more tickets than there are seats. Therefore, you will get a seat without reservation as well. However, we reserved our seats so that we can sit together. This helped us more in the return part of the journey from Vienna to Budapest which was more crowded than the train we took from Budapest to Vienna in the morning. On another note, reservation is mandatory on some trains in Europe, but ours wasn t one of them. In addition, people also use rail passes, so an extra charge is required on top for reserving the seats for pass holders. On the other hand, local trains do not require seat reservations in general. Our train s scheduled departure was at 08:55 from the Budapest Kelenfold station. We reached the train station 40 minutes before the train s scheduled departure. The Kelenfold station had free Wi-Fi, which was handy because I didn t have a local SIM.

A departures board at Budapest Kelenfold station.

A platform on Budapest Kelenfold station.

Our train arrived on time. I tried to find our coach number but could not find the numbers written anywhere on the side of the coach. Luckily, we were helped by a fellow passenger who directed me to look at the doors, where the numbers were mentioned clearly! Then we got into our compartment and took our respective seats. Our tickets were checked twice - once while the train was in Hungary and the other when in Austria. Showing the PDF of the train ticket on our mobile to the ticket inspector was good enough for the purpose. Austria and Hungary are a part of the open transit Schengen area, which means this was the extent of the border control checks we had to go through.

The train also had free Wi-Fi, albeit with poor connection at times. There were no eatery options inside the train. We deboarded at the Wien Hauptbahnhof station in Vienna. The journey was 250 km and took 2.5 hours, reaching Vienna at 11:25, which was the scheduled time.

A blue and white colored train on a railway platform

A red colored train standing at the Vienna station

At the station, we bought a 24-hour public transport pass from a ticket machine for 8. The pass includes unlimited access to all the public transport in Vienna for 24 hours. My pass was valid from the 7th of September at 11:34 to the 8th of September at 11:33. A single public transport ticket (from anywhere to anywhere) costs 2.4. A single ticket of 2.4 can be used once on any public transport in Vienna trams, metros, and buses. Therefore, the pass is a good deal if you are going to take at least four public transport trips in a day. Unlike the public transport pass I got in Budapest, the pass in Vienna was anonymous and not tied to the rider s name.

We wanted to visit the Sch nbrunn Palace. The palace was reachable by subway. In order to get to the subway station, we started by going outside the station. But it was not outside. So we came back inside the station building and realized that the subway was underground. We took the subway and deboarded at the Sch nbrunn subway station the closest one to the palace. The ride was smooth; the train was pretty silent. By the way, like Budapest, there were no AFC gates for boarding the subway in Vienna. The stations had ticket validators instead, where you are supposed to validate your tickets before getting into the subway.

These validators are in place to ensure that you use your ticket only once. Unlike AFC gates, which are present in metros of most of the countries I have been to, the ticket validators don t act as a physical barrier to enter the boarding area. If you board the metro without validating your ticket, you will be facing hefty fines upon getting caught. I have heard that the fine is around 100. On the other hand, if you have a public transport pass like we did, then you don t need to validate it before boarding. In addition, there were no annoying security checks either, unlike in Indian cities. In the Delhi metro, for example, you would need to scan your bags and pass through a security check before getting to the AFC gates.

Now back to the story, after alighting at the Sch nbrunn subway station, we walked to the Sch nbrunn Palace. One can roam around outside the palace and click pictures for free. To go inside, however, requires buying tickets. The tickets for the palace can be booked in advance on the internet. We didn t take the tickets in advance, as we decided to visit the palace at the last moment. So we went to the ticket counter and found out that we needed to wait for 1 hour 40 minutes before going inside if we took the tickets at that moment. In addition, one ticket costs 44 (around 4000 Indian rupees). Since we had to return to Budapest in the evening and only had a few hours in the city, we decided not to go inside the palace. Instead, we clicked a few pictures outside the palace.

The Sch nbrunn Palace is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is a historically significant place. It servedas one of the residences of the powerful Habsburg dynasty. The palace looked so good that my friend Dione said, It seemed like the palace was built yesterday . This remark applied to other parts of Vienna we went to. For example, the subway stations also seemed like they were built yesterday.

Now, we wanted to go someplace to grab a bite. I asked my friend Urbec for suggestions on where to go. They suggested we visit the steps named Strudlhofstiege, which had the added benefit of being in a neighborhood with good bakeries and buildings. So, we took the subway and deboarded at the Ro auer L nde station, followed by walking around a kilometer to reach the stairs.

Platform of the _Ro auer L nde_ subway station.

stairs with road in the front and trees in the background. Blue sky can also be seen in the background.

On the way, we were also looking for a place to eat. Unfortunately, it was Sunday, and Vienna closes on Sunday. That means most of the shops including bakeries and caf s are closed. Only places like railway stations have shops open on Sundays. By the way, walking around in the streets of Vienna was a treat. The streets were not crowded (as it was not exactly a touristy neighborhood) and had good pedestrian infrastructure, with clean streets and separate cycling tracks. The buildings were also beautiful.

After some walking, we found a restaurant open. I grabbed the menu to check the prices. A lady at the shop asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I was browsing the menu. She said that the menu was in German. I don t know how she knew that we didn t know German, but it seemed like a racist thing to be told. We roamed around further and found a caf by the name of Blue Orange, where we ordered coffee and croissants. When we got our order, the waiter told us that they were having some issues, so they wouldn t charge us for the croissant if it wasn t good.

My friend and I took a bite, and both of us didn t like the croissant. After some time, the waiter came to us and asked whether the croissant was okay, to which we said no. Therefore, they didn t charge us for the croissant. This was the first time something like this happened to me. It felt like I was in a different world. I added a small tip at the end for this gesture, which I had to put in a jar at the counter. The cappuccino I ordered was 4.50, while the espresso that Dione ordered was 3.60. The croissant would have been 3.60. I remember Paris having cheaper croissants! Then when the waiter brought our drinks out, they automatically gave me the espresso and Dione the cappuccino. Dione found this funny because there is a stereotype in her country (Australia) that men drink strong black coffee, and women drink milky drinks like cappuccinos. She found it interesting that this stereotype seems to exist in Austrian culture too. We hopped on a tram to reach the nearest subway station and went to the Wien Hauptbahnhof station to have something before we caught our return train to Budapest.

Trams with buildings and the blue sky in the background

At the station, I had Esterhazyschnitten and Punschkrapfen (thanks, Urbec, for the suggestion). The lady at the shop warned me that punschkrapfen had alcohol in it, to which I said okay. Esterhazyschnitten was a cake made of almonds, while punschkrapfen was a jam-filled sponge cake, soaked in rum. Esterhazyschnitten was my favorite out of the two. The punschkrapfen was too sweet for my taste.

While the station was well-built, there were a couple of things about the Wien Hauptbahnhof station that we didn t like. There were no seats inside the station, so we had to eat outside the building. Also, the toilets needed to be paid for. It costs 50 cents to use the toilets at this station. The Vienna train station had departure boards all over the place. So, we went to the platform our train was to arrive on.

A departure board in Vienna displaying information about the trains

Platform and tracks at Wien Hauptbahnhof station.

When our train arrived, we had some difficulty locating our compartment. This train was operated by a different company (Railjet) than the one we took in the morning (Eurocity) from Budapest to Vienna, and we were able to locate the coach numbers using the digital board at the station. Each compartment had a digital board next to it on the station displaying the coach number. However, that wasn t the problem. Even after reading the coach numbers and trying to find ours, it didn t appear where we expected in the sequence. When we were not able to find our coach for a while, we asked a ticket inspector of the train who was standing on the platform. He directed us towards the front side of the train. So we started running to the front side as we didn t know how long the train stops. As we ran toward our coach, we found out that the engine of the back train was connected with the last compartment of the train at the front. At that point, we realized that the train was a combination of two trains. At a later station, the train on the back side parted ways and went towards Vienna Airport.

A red colored train standing on the platform of Budapest Kelenfold station.

We had a smooth journey and reached Budapest a couple of hours later. Vienna is a beautiful city; we enjoyed being there, and we would like to visit the city again! That s it for now. Signing off. See you in the next one! Credits: Thanks to Dione and Badri for proofreading.

27 April 2026

Gunnar Wolf: Heads we win, tails you lose AI detectors in education

This post is an unpublished review for Heads we win, tails you lose AI detectors in education

Educators throughout the world are tasked with the difficult requirement of evaluating students works, making sure the grades meaningfully reflect the students understanding of the subject, and that a graded assignment maps to the relevant work invested in solving it. After the irruption of Large-Language Models in late 2023, this task became obviously much harder: if a widely available computer program is able to solve an assignment in a way that resembles a human-generated response, how can educators meaningfully grade their groups? As it has been the case with different innovations over time (such as with the appearance of electronic calculators or the mass availability of digital encyclopedias), the first reactions were of prohibition and denial: students who use the new tool in question are to be disqualified or somehow punished. It is only some time after the innovation in question settles that teachers find a way to properly weigh, integrate and accept its use. The authors of this position article present several arguments as to why it is impossible, unethical and unadvisable to use automated AI detection systems to process student assignments. The first argument is whether it is at all possible to reliably differentiate human-written essays from LLM-generated artifacts. The first criticism is that AI detectors are, themselves, LLMs trained on human-generated texts (negative) and LLM-generated texts (positive). However, the only way to assert the training material is not noisy is to use pre-2020 text as human-generated but natural ways of writing are influenced by what people read, and the authors quote studies pointing out that human language, particularly in the scholarly fields, has incorporated terms and constructions that were used as LLM markers. Quoting the authors, As exposure to AI-generated material becomes increasingly widespread, it is reasonable to expect that the linguistic patterns of human writing will shift, reflecting the influence of AI-assisted texts encountered across education, media, and everyday communication . Stylistic elements and other such markers are being adopted back into regular speech at a high rate. Then, the aspect of ethics comes into play as well. While it is expected that teachers should demand intellectual integrity from students, and plagiarism detectors have been widely accepted into the workflow of academics, the accusation of presenting LLM output as own work is necessarily an uphill battle: the accused party is tasked with providing proof of innocence based on nebulous, probabilistic accusations. The authors argue, once an accusation of turning in a LLM-generated text is made on a student, the onus on proving innocence lies with the accused. The authors review and argue against a series of techniques that have been presented in literature to aid teachers in detecting LLM abuse, such as linguistic markers, single or multiple AI detectors, the use of false references, hidden adversarial prompts, arguing in all cases the techniques fail to be trustable enough and highlighting the probability of both false positives and negatives. They also present AI detection as a false dichotomy: many works presented are not 100% human generated nor 100% LLM-generated, but some pertinent LLM-generated paragraphs are presented mixed with human-generated content, in a positive, critical AI use ( Students work is frequently created with, not by, generative AI ). The article closes by reiterating the authors position: AI detection in education is not merely flawed; it is conceptually unsound . they call upon institutions to accept the use of generative LLMs cannot be solved through surveillance and punishment , but has to be tackled by an assessment design that recognizes AI s role in learning . This article s position is very strong and well argued, and although it will surely meet with ample opposition, it surely poses an important, very current problematic. As a teacher, I found it a very enlightening read.

Russ Allbery: Review: What We Are Seeking

Review: What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2026
ISBN:	1-250-36474-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	339

What We Are Seeking is a bit hard to classify beyond science fiction. I think I would call it anthropological science fiction, but it's also a first contact story and a planetary colony story. It is a standalone novel (well, so far as I know; see later in the review for caveats). This is Cameron Reed's second novel after the excellent and memorable cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall, first published in 1996 under Reed's former name of Raphael Carter. John Maraintha is a doctor from the world of Essius. He took what he thought was a temporary job on the Free Ship Edgar's Folly, where he's endured considerable culture shock. As the novel opens, John learns that the colonists on Scythia have requested a translator to talk to one of the native life forms, and a doctor since they're down to only one. John will be that doctor. The captain has decided, and by the rules of the free ships, John does not get a choice in the matter. The Scythian colony is about four hundred people, now located in a desert climate since the complex native life forms destroyed their previous settlement. The colonists are a split between Ischnurans and Zandaheans, two other human civilizations from the scatter of colony worlds left after Earth embraced AIs (aiyis here) and turned inward. Both of those groups marry, something John considers a moral abomination. Neither of them seem likely to understand Essian sexual ethics. More devastatingly, John had intended to spend some time as a ship doctor and then return home to a new place in Essian society. Once he lands on Scythia, the chances of that are gone; it is highly unlikely any ship would pick him up again and take him home. I have been trying to find the right books to compare What We Are Seeking with ever since I read it. The best I've come up with are Ursula K. Le Guin (particularly The Dispossessed), Eleanor Arnason's A Woman of the Iron People, and Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, If Fortunate. The start of the book felt like an intentional revisiting of an earlier era of science fiction, with somewhat updated science and politics, but the last half of the book, where the action picks up considerably, is a meditation on gender, social systems, religion, and small-group politics. All of that is mixed with biological exploration and a first-contact story with some quite-alien aliens. This is the sort of novel where the protagonist's culture is as foreign to the reader as any of the other cultures he counters, so the reader is assembling several jigsaw puzzles at once. John is dropped into an established colony with its own social norms and established hierarchies. The one other outsider, the translator Sudharma Jain, is, as his name implies, a Jain who keeps very strict religious observances. Half of the colony is from something akin to a fundamentalist Christian religious sect that practices patriarchy and strict marriage codes. The other half is more gently sexist (but still sexist) and has its own tradition of a third gender that becomes central to the story. John, meanwhile, is a strong believer in the Essian approach to social organization: Any two partners of any gender freely have sex by mutual consent and without obligation, and family is based solely on blood relations. These beliefs do not fit comfortably together, even when people are trying (as they mostly do) to be welcoming. The first half of this book is very slow. This gives all of the characters space to breathe and become comfortable, and the characterization is superb, but it is a book to start when you're in the mood for something slow and observational. There is a plot that gradually becomes apparent, or rather there are several plots that are intertwined, but tension and urgency are mostly reserved for the second half of the book. Instead, the book opens with a lot of close observation of alien flora and fauna and the untangling of subtle social dynamics among the Scythians. There is also a visitor from earth, much to the distress of the Scythians. Earth presence means the ships will not return and the colony may be cut off from any sort of technological resupply. Despite speaking a common language, that visitor is as mutually alien to the other groups as they are to the native flora. Her life is fully integrated with aiyis, giving her essentially godlike powers and the ability to turn off inconvenient emotions and disregard anything she doesn't want to see. What she and the Earth aiyis are doing on the planet is one of the early mysteries. The dialogue in this book is truly excellent. Each characters has their own voice, there are fascinating digressions on different words that lead to tidbits of world-building, and some of the culture-specific idioms are delightful.

"I'm making a mess of this. None of that matters. Let me fall out the window and come in the door again. This is how my story ought to start:"

The challenges for the characters in this story are slow but deep ones: belonging and self-definition, the conflict between cultural tradition and personal circumstance, and the sacrifices required to live with small groups in situations where civil war is viscerally attractive. It has one of the most comprehensive and fascinating treatments of transgender issues that I've read in science fiction. Its commentary on current politics is subtle and estranged in the way that science fiction does best, but still pointed and satisfying. And, well, there are passages like this that I absolutely adore:

"I wouldn't go that far. It could be they are right, the universe we see exists because a mind like ours created it at least, a mind enough like ours that we can say it wants one thing and not another, and when it acts it does so with intent. That's as good an idea as any. But it is certainly not plausible that such a being believes that people everywhere should marry, or that men should never visit men, or no one should become a jess. Look at what they have created. The universe could have been nothing at all, or one atom of hydrogen floating in a void, or a diamond crystal infinite in all directions, if their mind cared for simplicity or tidiness. Instead we have stars and planets and black holes and nebulas. It could have all been cold and dead, but there is life. They could have made one species for each world, or just a few, which could have stayed the same forever, but instead we have millions and millions, all of which are changing every moment, varying among themselves and boiling off in all directions. Such a god is like an artist who fills up a library of sketchbooks with their drawings of strange creatures, and when every scrap of paper in the place is used up, goes back with a different color ink and scribbles over them again. They are obsessed with variation they gorge themselves with it and never grow full. Do you really think a mind like that could want us all to live in the same way?"

I had one problem with this book, though, and for me it was a big one: There is no ending. Reed effectively builds tension, gets me caring about all of the characters, sets up several problems, starts down a path towards resolution, and then the book just... ends. Long-time readers of my reviews will know that I'm a denouement fanatic. I want the scouring of the shire, I want the chapter set in the happily ever after, I want the catharsis of an ending. This made me so grumpy! To be clear, this is not sequel bait (at least so far as I can tell). I can write a philosophical defense of the ending. The types of problems and lives that Reed set up don't have clear endings; this is, to some extent, the point. We muddle through, and then those who come after us muddle through some more, and the cumulative effect is called human civilization. And there is some denouement; Reed doesn't leave the reader at a cliffhanger or anything that egregious. But still, I wanted the happy ending, even though that was unrealistic for the style of story this is, because I'm a happy ending reader. This is not an ending sort of book; it's the sort of book where I get a sinking feeling at the 95% mark because there aren't enough pages left for the number of remaining unresolved problems. I've gotten less annoyed in the days since I finished the book, and I can appreciate the thematic point made by how the book ends, but I still feel like it's worth an advance warning if you're a reader like I am. I would be delighted by a sequel, but it didn't feel like that was the intent. Apart from that, this was both excellent and rather unlike a lot of current science fiction. I think the closest comparison I can make among recent novels I've read is Sue Burke's Semiosis. What We Are Seeking has a similar sort of world-building, but I liked these characters so much more. It felt like a classic literary science fiction novel, but very much written in 2026. Highly recommended, just beware of the lack of closure. Content notes: Sexism, homophobia, stomach illness, and some religious abuse. Rating: 8 out of 10

26 April 2026

Aurelien Jarno: Running upstream OpenSBI on SpacemiT K1

The SpacemiT K1 is a rather interesting RISC-V SoC, found for instance on boards like the Banana Pi BPI-F3 board. It's one of those platforms that looked promising on paper, but took a bit of time before things really started to move upstream. Things have clearly accelerated over the last few months. Linux 7.0 brings, among other things PCIe support, making the board quite capable as a development board. SD card, CPU thermal sensor and cpufreq support are already in the pipe. Unfortunately the situation is less advanced on the firmware side. There is only very basic support for the SpacemiT K1 in U-Boot for the second stage, and initial SPL support has been posted on the mailing list, but has not yet been merged. In practice, this means you still have to rely on the vendor U-Boot, which is based on the rather old 2022.10 release. On the other hand, OpenSBI does have upstream support for the SpacemiT K1, however it is not compatible with the vendor U-Boot, mostly due to device tree differences. This can be addressed by applying a few patches to the vendor U-Boot, which I have published in a git tree in the k1-bl-v2.2.y-opensbi branch (technically this can also be handled on the OpenSBI side, but I prefer using a vanilla upstream OpenSBI version). The first two patches update the configuration to get closer to the upstream U-Boot defaults, and to enable some configuration options for the Milk-V Jupiter board, which stores its firmware in SPI NOR flash, instead of eMMC for the Banana Pi BPI-F3. The following patches update the device tree by adding extra compatible entries to several devices, as expected by the upstream kernel and OpenSBI (thanks to Troy Mitchell for the hint about the UART change) and update the CPU riscv,isa properties. Finally an additional patch adds the SpacemiT P1 PMIC to the device tree, which is required for the OpenSBI reboot patchset I recently posted (this is currently done only for the Banana Pi BPI-F3 and Milk-V Jupiter boards, but extending it to other boards should be straightforward). Building this U-Boot version is as simple as running this command in the source directory:

make k1_defconfig && make

On a Banana Pi BPI-F3 board, the resulting U-Boot can be flashed with:

echo 0 > /sys/block/mmcblk0boot0/force_ro
dd if=FSBL.bin of=/dev/mmcblk0boot0 bs=512 seek=1
dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/mmcblk0p1

Building upstream OpenSBI is also fairly simple, and can be done by running this command in the source directory:

make PLATFORM=generic

On a Banana Pi BPI-F3 board, the resulting OpenSBI can be flashed with:

dd if=fw_dynamic.itb of=/dev/mmcblk0p2

Note that the vendor U-Boot version is patched to install OpenSBI in a separate partition instead of embedding, as the upstream U-Boot does. While this works well on the Banana Pi BPI-F3, the corresponding partition in the Milk-V Jupiter SPI NOR flash is too small for the upstream OpenSBI version, and can't be easily resized without breaking compatibility. To address this, the branch k1-bl-v2.2.y-opensbi-embedded contains an additional patch (a bit hackish I admit) to somehow restore the upstream approach. The build process remains simple, first build OpenSBI with the following command:

make PLATFORM=generic

Then build U-Boot, specifying the patch to the just built OpenSBI firmware:

make k1_defconfig && make OPENSBI=/path/to/opensbi/build/platform/generic/firmware/fw_dynamic.bin

On a Milk-V Jupiter board, the resulting combined U-Boot/OpenSBI can be flashed with:

modprobe mdtblock
dd bs=4k if=FSBL.bin of=/dev/mtdblock2
dd bs=4k if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/mtdblock5

This combined U-Boot/OpenSBI can also be used on a Banana Pi BPI-F3, using the same flashing procedure as above, while skipping the OpenSBI part (although running it won't cause any issue, it will simply be unused). All of this is admittedly a bit hackish, but enabling the use of upstream OpenSBI is already one step forward. Hopefully, in a few months, we will be able to rely entirely on upstream U-Boot.

24 April 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for March.

Activity summary During the month of March, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below). The team released 24 DLAs fixing 250 CVEs. We also welcomed two new members: Lukas M rdian and Emmanuel Arias to the team, who actually started to contribute to the LTS project several months ago. The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 ( bullseye ), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 ( bookworm ) and Debian 13 ( trixie )), including Debian unstable. We highlight several notable security updates here below.

ansible (DLA 4502-1), prepared by Lee Garret in collaboration with Jochen, fixing a vulnerability that allows attackers to bypass unsafe content protections

asterisk (DLA 4515-1), prepared by Lukas M rdian, fixing four CVEs that include possible privilege escalations.

gimp (DLA 4500-1), prepared by Thorsten, fixing four CVEs related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code.

gst-plugins-base1.0 and gst-plugins-ugly1.0 (DLA-4514-1, DLA-4516-1, respectively), both prepared by Utkarsh, addressing vulnerabilities that may yield to arbitrary code execution.

imagemagick, released by Bastien Roucari s (DLA 4497-1) fixing multiple vulnerabilities that could lead to information leaks, bypass of security policies, denial of service or arbitrary code execution.

libpng1.6 (DLA 4521-1), prepared by Tobias Frost, fixing an arbitrary code execution vulnerability

linux: Ben Hutchings released DLA 4498-1 and DLA 4499-1 for linux 5.10 and linux 6.1, respectively. Those updates especially address the CrackArmor flaw.

ruby-rack (DLA 4505-1), prepared by Utkarsh Gupta, addressing two vulnerabilities

strongswan (DLA 4512-1), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, fixing a Denial of Service vulnerability

roundcube (DLA 4517-1) prepared by Guilhem Moulin, who discovered that one of the fixes provided by upstream was incomplete.

Contributions from outside the LTS Team: As usual, the thunderbird update, released as DLA 4511-1, was prepared by its maintainer Christoph Goehre. Thanks a lot for his continuous contributions. The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:

Andreas Henriksson completed the uploads of glib2.0 for both trixie and bookworm

Arnaud Rebillout: python-cryptography for trixie

Arnaud and Bastien worked together to prepare a ca-certificates-java release for unstable

Bastien completed the upload of gpsd for trixie that was proposed in January.

Bastien uploaded a regression update of apache2 for trixie

Bastien prepared a zabbix point update for trixie

Bastien in collaboration with Markus released netty updates for trixie and bookworm DSA 6160-1

Daniel Leidert proposed python-tornado releases for both trixie and bookworm.

Daniel also prepared a python-authlib update for trixie

Guilhem prepared a mapserver update for bookworm.

Lucas Kanashiro proposed merge requests to fix three CVEs in erlang for both trixie and bookworm

Sylvain Beucler continued the work to replace p7zip with 7zip in the different supported releases, and proposed a point update for bookworm

Tobias prepared trixie and bookworm security updates, released as DSA-6189-1

Utkarsh prepared trixie and bookworm security update for ruby-rack, released as DSA-6180-1

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Andreas Henriksson

Andrej Shadura

Arnaud Rebillout

Bastien Roucari s

Ben Hutchings

Carlos Henrique Lima Melara

Chris Lamb

Daniel Leidert

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort

Guilhem Moulin

Jochen Sprickerhof

Lee Garrett

Lucas Kanashiro

Lukas M rdian

Markus Koschany

Santiago Ruano Rinc n

Sylvain Beucler

Thorsten Alteholz

Tobias Frost

Utkarsh Gupta

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Tem Innovations GmbH (for 55 months)

WordFinder.pro (for 55 months)

CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 54 months)

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Alter Way (for 47 months)

SOBIS Software GmbH (for 21 months)

Tuxera Inc. (for 13 months)

OPM-OP AS (for 4 months)

21 April 2026

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, E tv s Lor nd 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.

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

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

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

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.
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! Credits: Thanks to Dione and Richard for proofreading.

19 April 2026

Russ Allbery: 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

18 April 2026

Valhalla's Things: Pizza!

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 N MMAR 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 N MMAR , 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.

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.

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.

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

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.
come on! it s made of STEEL. how can it be not good? :D
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.
why did they put a thermometer on it, and not add labels with the actual temperature? WHY???
if you don t have dietary restrictions a bit of olive oil would taste even better.
numbers above 2 are all basically the same, right?

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.

16 April 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.

15 April 2026

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
0x01	Critical (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
0x01	Header
0x02	Stream Header
0x03	Samples
0x04	Frequency Change
0x05	Timing
0x06	Discontinuity
0x07	Location
0xFE	Vendor 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

0x01 f32 interleaved 32 bit floating point scalar values

0x02 i8 interleaved 8 bit signed integer scalar values

0x03 i16 interleaved 16 bit signed integer scalar values

0x04 u8 interleaved 8 bit unsigned integer scalar values

0x05 f64 interleaved 64 bit floating point scalar values

0x06 f16 interleaved 16 bit floating point scalar values

ID	Name	Description
0x01	f32	interleaved 32 bit floating point scalar values
0x02	i8	interleaved 8 bit signed integer scalar values
0x03	i16	interleaved 16 bit signed integer scalar values
0x04	u8	interleaved 8 bit unsigned integer scalar values
0x05	f64	interleaved 64 bit floating point scalar values
0x06	f16	interleaved 16 bit floating point scalar values

Header 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.

flags

fmt

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.

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.

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 .

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

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!

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.

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.

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).

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 Rinc n 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 Rapha l 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

Rapha l 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 :-)

14 April 2026

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.

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:

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.
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.
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.

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.

12 April 2026

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.

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