I mentor several people in Debian, and have been repeatedly asked to offer an opportunity to ask questions on a live call. I have now started a recurring video call for exactly that, which I call Mentoring Mondays, and it is open for anyone aspiring to contribute to Debian, one of the oldest and most widely used Linux distributions.
Mentoring Mondays have already been happening for the past few Mondays, and this week we had a record 20 people on the call. During the calls so far we have had a demo of updating a package for a new upstream release using gbp, and of how to create a Merge Request on Salsa for a new upstream version. There is clearly a need for this, so I am announcing this now also on my blog, just as I have publicly announced that I offer mentoring for aspiring Debian contributors.
What is Mentoring Mondays?
Mentoring Mondays is a recurring video call that lasts roughly 45 minutes with the agenda:
Weekly walk-through: demo of something in Debian packaging, explaining the what and why
Discussion on pros and cons to help participants develop their judgment
Questions & answers on Debian packaging, or open source contributing in general
This is ideal for you if you:
Have built a .deb package at least once and want to do it better
Are stuck on a specific Debian packaging bug and need guidance
Want to understand how Debian Developers actually work day-to-day
The call is mainly intended for those who want to contribute to Debian (or Debian derivatives, with Ubuntu being the most popular), but anyone can join to learn about things related to contributing to a Linux distribution. Please note that video chat uses Debian Social Jitsi. Joining the call requires authentication using a Salsa account, which anyone contributing to Debian should have anyway.
Calls are not recorded, so participants can chat freely, and are also encouraged to be on-camera for an enhanced sense of community.
Matrix channel and future meeting time announcements
Please join the Matrix channel #mentoringmondays:matrix.debian.social if you plan to attend Mentoring Mondays. All future meeting times will be announced there. It is also the channel to post questions about Debian packaging to be answered during the call.
The current meeting time is friendly to people in Europe, Asia and Australian time zones, and will repeat at the same time slot on:
May 11th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
May 18th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
May 25th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
June 1st, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
June 8th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
Starting in mid-June the meeting time will change to accommodate participation in different time zones.
Spread the word
Feel free to extend the invite to anyone you think might be interested in joining!
If you mention this on social media, please post using tag #mentoringmondays, or simply boost the existing posts on the social media of your preference: Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Farcaster, X.
Thanks
A big thanks to Jason Kregting for helping organize. I would also like to thank in advance all the Debian Developers who are able to join the call and be available to participate in discussions and help answer questions.
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. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
This is platform number 15 of Budapest Kelenfold station where we boarded our train. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
Interior of our Budapest to Vienna train. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
This blue colored train was the one we took for our Budapest to Vienna journey. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
An BB train standing at a platform of Vienna train station. BB is the national carrier of Austria. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Wien Hauptbahnhof train station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
My public transport pass in Vienna.
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.
Instead of AFC gates, Vienna has ticket validators as in the picture. You need to tap your ticket in the validator before boarding the subway. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
Vienna subway. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
Sch nbrunn Palace. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
A street near Sch nbrunn Palace. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
Ro auer L nde subway station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Platform of the Ro auer L nde subway station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
The The Strudlhofstiege steps. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
A random street in Vienna.
Another street in Vienna.
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.
A picture of Blue Orange caf . Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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 in Vienna. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
Punschkrapfen. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Esterhazyschnitten. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
Departure boards in Vienna displaying information about the trains. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Platform and tracks at Wien Hauptbahnhof station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
Interior of the train we took from Vienna to Budapest. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
This is the train we took for our return journey from Vienna to Budapest. It is standing on a platform in Budapest Kelenfold station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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.
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.
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
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:
makek1_defconfig&&make
On a Banana Pi BPI-F3 board, the resulting U-Boot can be flashed with:
Building upstream OpenSBI is also fairly simple, and can be done by running this command in the source directory:
makePLATFORM=generic
On a Banana Pi BPI-F3 board, the resulting OpenSBI can be flashed with:
ddif=fw_dynamic.itbof=/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:
makePLATFORM=generic
Then build U-Boot, specifying the patch to the just built OpenSBI firmware:
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.
The Genocidal Healer is the eighth book in James White's medical
science fiction series about the Sector General hospital. As with the rest
of the series, detailed memory of the previous books is not required and
the books could be read out of order if you didn't mind spoilers.
I read this as part of the Orb General Practice omnibus.
Surgeon-Captain Lioren is a Tarlan doctor who was in charge of the medical
response to a newly-discovered civilization. The aliens were suffering
from an apparently universal plague and an ongoing vicious war waged
entirely through hand-to-hand combat, putting them on the edge of
extinction. Lioren rushed the distribution of a possible cure against the
advice of the doctors working on developing it, with catastrophic results.
As The Genocidal Healer opens, Lioren is insisting on a
court-martial in the hope of receiving the sentence it believes it
deserves and was denied: death.
(It pronouns are the convention in the Sector General series for all alien
races and formal discussions, because even someone prone to bouts of
gender essentialism such as White understood the need for avoiding gender
assumptions in a science fiction medical context.)
Predictably, both Sector General and the Monitor Corps that technically
runs the hospital are flatly unwilling to execute Lioren. Instead, he is
assigned as a new apprentice in the psychology department under the
legendary O'Mara, where he is ordered to investigate the psychological
fitness of a senior doctor named Seldal. This leads him to talk to
Seldal's patients, which in turn leads to a challenging set of ethical
dilemmas.
The first five chapters (and more than sixty pages) are the story of
Lioren's trial and a recounting of the events on Cromsag. The series is
full of medical and cultural puzzles like this, and usually I like them,
but I thought this one was less successful. We know the vague (and
horrible) outline of the ending in advance, and the massive simplification
and artificial universality that is required to make this puzzle work is
particularly blatant. A universally infectious disease is more of a
fiction plot than a believable biological concept, and the number of
failures of communication, analysis, and misunderstanding that have to
line up to create White's predetermined outcome were a bit much for me.
Once the story gets past that and into Lioren's psychological work, the
novel improves. Lioren is guilt-ridden and irrational, but also rather
arrogant about his guilt and his concepts of professional responsibility
in a way that I think mostly worked. Most of the novel consists of Lioren
slowly discovering that people like him and enjoy talking to him, much to
his bafflement. In that, it has the gentle kindness and sense of universal
basic decency that is characteristic of this series. There are, of course,
medical puzzles to solve, although this time they are primarily
psychological in nature. Various characters from previous books make an
appearance, but White re-explains their background in sufficient detail
that you don't need to remember (or have read) those previous books.
There are a lot of similarities between this book and the previous one,
Code Blue Emergency. Both feature
nonhuman viewpoint protagonists and amusing descriptions of human facial
expressions from an alien perspective. Both feature protagonists with
overly rigid ethical structures that partly clash with the generally human
policies of Sector General. The Genocidal Healer is a bit more
subtle and nuanced, although a lot of Lioren's psychological evaluation
rests on an ethical difference that I found somewhat unbelievable. This
book, though, tackles a subject the previous book did not: religion. The
treatment isn't horrible, but I have some complaints.
My primary issue is that Lioren, who starts as an atheist, does extensive
research into religion to help a patient and then starts making statements
summarizing the religions beliefs of the majority of known species that
are just... Christianity. As someone raised Christian, I recognized it
immediately as the sort of abstracted Christianity that Christians claim
is universal while completely ignoring the opinions of the adherents of
any other religion.
Key components of this majority galactic religious pattern, according to
Lioren, include an omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator god, a religious
figure who preaches forgiveness and mercy and is persecuted, and emphasis
on redemption. This simply is not some abstract universal religion. This
is just Christianity in disguise. Even in religions that have some of
those elements in their traditions, they do not get the same emphasis and
are not handled the way that Lioren describes them. I therefore found
Lioren's extended discussions of religion rather annoying, since he kept
claiming as relatively universal principles beliefs that are not even held
by the majority of religious adherents on Earth, let alone a wildly
varying collection of alien races with entirely different biology and
societal constructions. It caused a lot of problems for my suspension of
disbelief, on top of the annoyance at this repetition of, frankly,
Christian propaganda.
Lioren goes, from that research, into theodicy (the problem of evil). The
interesting part of this is White's earnest portrayal of a doctor's
approach to societal problems: a desire to find workarounds and patches
and fixes for anything that makes people unhappy, whether medical or
social. It makes sense, given the horrible biologic hands that some of the
aliens in this series have been dealt, that they would question the idea
of a benevolent god, so this philosophical digression is justified in that
sense. But you might guess that a mid-list science fiction author is not
going to say something new about one of the oldest problems in
Christianity, and indeed he does not. Lioren arrives at the standard
handwaving about the unknowability of divine intent, which I found tedious
to read but at least not fatal to the plot.
White, thankfully, doesn't take the religious material too far. The
characters recognize how sensitive of an issue religion is in a hospital,
Lioren never adopts religion fully, and the resolution of the plot is as
much biological as philosophical. White is going somewhere with the
introduction of religion, and although some of the path there annoyed me,
I think the destination worked. White was from Northern Ireland, and
therefore well aware of the drawbacks of religion, and he abhorred
violence (hence Sector General as a setting), so the reader is in better
hands with him than with most authors who might attempt this plot.
I think I know a bit too much about religion to be the best audience for
this entry in the series, and I'm not sure the introductory five chapters
quite worked. But as with all of the other books in the series, this kept
me turning the pages and I'm glad I read it. The Genocidal Healer
probably isn't worth seeking out unless you're reading the whole series,
but if you're enjoying the rest of the series, you'll probably like this
too.
Followed by The Galactic Gourmet.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Over the past few weeks I ve been developing and using a personal command-line
tool called gwt (Git Worktree) to manage Git repositories using worktrees.
This article explains what the tool does, how it evolved, and how I used
GitHub Copilot CLI to develop it (in
fact the idea of building the script was also to test the tool).
The Problem: Managing Multiple BranchesI was working on a project with multiple active branches, including orphans; the
regular branches are for fixes or features, while the orphans are used to keep
copies of remote documents or store processed versions of those documents.
The project also uses a special orphan branch that contains the scripts and the
CI/CD configuration to store and process the external documents (it is on a
separate branch to avoid mixing its operation with the main project code).
The plan is trigger a pipeline against the special branch from remote projects
to create or update the doc branch for it in our git repository, retrieving
artifacts from the remote projects to get the files and put them on an orphan
branch (initially I added new commits after each update, but I changed the
system to use force pushes and keep only one commit, as the history is not
really needed).
The original documents have to be changed, so, after ingesting them, we run a
script that modifies them and adds or updates another branch with the processed
version; the contents of that branch are used by the main branch build process
(there we use git fetch and git archive to retrieve its contents).
When working on the scripts to manage the orphan branches I discovered the
worktree feature of git, a
functionality that allows me to keep multiple branches checked out in parallel
using a single .git folder, removing the need to use git switch and git
stash when changing between branches (until now I ve been a heavy user of those
commands).
Reading about it I found that a lot of people use worktrees with the help of a
wrapper script to simplify the management. After looking at one or two posts
and the related scripts I decided to create my own using a specific directory
structure to simplify things.
That s how I started to work on the gwt script; as I also wanted to test
copilot I decided to build it using its help (I have a pro license at work and
wanted to play with the cli version instead of integrated into an editor, as I
didn t want to learn a lot of new keyboard shortcuts).
The gwt Philosophy: Opinionated and Transparentgwt enforces a simple, filesystem-visible model:
Exactly one bare repository named bare.git (treated as an implementation
detail)
One worktree directory per branch where the directory name matches the
branch name
Single responsibility: gwt doesn t try to be a general git wrapper; it
only handles operations that map cleanly to this layout
The repository structure looks like this:
my-repo/
+-- bare.git/ # the Git repository (internal)
+-- main/ # worktree for branch "main"
+-- feature/api/ # worktree for branch "feature/api"
+-- fix/docs/ # worktree for branch "fix/docs"
+-- orphan-history/ # worktree for the "orphan-history" branch
The tool follows five core design principles:
Explicit over clever: Git commands are not hidden or reinterpreted
Transparent execution: Every operation is printed before it happens
Safe, preview-first operations: Destructive commands default to preview,
confirmation, then apply
Shell-agnostic core: The script never changes the caller s working
directory (shell wrappers handle that)
Opinionated but minimal: Only commands that fit the layout model are
included
Core CommandsThe script provides these essential commands:
gwt init <url> Clone a repository and set up the gwt layout
gwt convert <dir> Convert an existing Git checkout to the gwt layout
gwt add [--orphan] <branch> [<base>] Create a new worktree (optionally
orphaned)
gwt remove <branch> Remove a worktree and unregister it (asks the user to
remove the local branch too, useful when removing already merged branches)
gwt rename <old> <new> Rename a branch AND its worktree directory
gwt list List all worktrees
gwt default [<branch>] Get or set the default branch
gwt current Print the current worktree or branch name
Except init and convert all of the commands work inside a directory
structure that follows the gwt layout, which looks for the bare.git folder to
find the root folder of the structure.
As I don t want to hide which commands are really used by the wrapper, all git
and filesystem operations pass through a single run shell function that prints
each command before executing it. This gives complete visibility into what the
tool is doing.
Also, destructive operations (remove, rename) default to preview mode:
The user sees exactly what will happen, can verify it s correct, and only then
confirm execution.
Incremental Development with CopilotThe gwt script has grown from 597 lines in its original version (git-wt) to
1,111 lines when writing the first draft of this post.
This growth happened through incremental, test-driven development, with each
feature being refined based on real usage patterns.
What follows is a little history of the script evolution written with the help
of git log.
Initial versionFirst I wrote a design document and asked copilot to create the initial
version of the git-wt script with the original core commands.
I started to use the tool with a remote repostory (I made copies of the branches
in some cases to avoid missing work) and fixed bugs (trivial ones with neovim,
larger ones asking copilot to fix the issues for me, so I had less typing to
do).
First command updateOne of the first commands I had to enhance was rename:
as I normally use branches with / on their name and my tool checks out the
worktrees using the branch name as the path inside the gwt root folder
(i.e. a fix/rename branch creates the fix directory and checks the branch
inside the fix/rename folder) the rename command had to clean up the empty
parent directories
when renaming a worktree we move the folders and fix the references using the
worktree repair command to make things work locally, but the rename also
affects the remote branch reference, to avoid surprises the command unsets the
remote branch reference so it can be pushed again using the new name (of
course, the user is responsible of managing the old remote branch, as the
gwt can t guess what it should do with it).
Integration with the shellAs I use zsh with the Powerlevel10k
theme I asked copilot to help me add visual elements to the prompt when
working with gwt folders, something that I would have never tried without
help, as it would have required a lot of digging on my part on how to do it, as
I never looked into it.
The initial version of the code was on an independent file that I sourced from
my .zshrc file and it prints on the right part of the prompt
when we are inside a gwt folder (note that if the folder is a worktree we see
the existing git integration text right before it, so we have the previous
behavior and we see that it is a gwt friendly repo) and if we are on the root
folder or the bare.git folder we see gwt or bare
(I added the text because there are no git promts on those folders).
I also asked copilot to create zsh autocompletion functions (I only use
zsh, so I didn t add autocompletion for other shells). The good thing here is
that I wouldn t have done that manually, as it would have required some reading
to get it right, but the output of copilot worked and I can update things
using it or manually if I need to.
One thing I was missing from the script was the possibility of changing the
working directory easily, so I wrote a gwt wrapper function for zsh that
intercepts commands that require shell cooperation (changing the working
directory) and delegates everything else to the core script.
Currently the function supports the following enhanced commands:
cd [<branch>]: change into a worktree or the default one if missing
convert <dir>: convert a checkout, then cd into the initial worktree
add [--orphan] <branch> [<base>]: create a worktree, then cd into it on success
rename <old> <new>: rename a worktree, then cd into it if we were inside it
Note that the cd command will not work on other shells or if the user does not
load my wrapper, but the rest will still work without the working directory
changes.
Renaming the commandAs I felt that git-wt was a long name I renamed the tool to gwt, I could
have done it by hand, but using copilot I didn t have to review all files by
myself and it did it right (note that I have it configured to always ask me
before doing changes, as it sometimes tries to do something I don t want and I
like to check its changes as I have the files in git repos, I manually add
the files when I like the status and if the cli output is not clear I allow it
to apply it and check the effects with git diff so I can validate or revert
what was done).
The convert commandAfter playing with one repo I added the convert subcommand for migrating
existing checkouts, it seemed a simple task at first, but it took multiple
iterations to get it right, as I found multiple issues while testing (in fact I
did copies of the existing checkouts to be able to re-test each update, as some
of the iterations broke them).
The version of the function when this post was first edited had the following
comment explaining what it does:
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# convert - convert an existing checkout into the gwt layout
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Must be run from the parent directory of <dir>.
#
# Steps:
# 1. Read branch from the checkout's HEAD
# 2. Rename <dir> to <dir>.wt.tmp (sibling, same filesystem)
# 3. Create <dir>/ as the new gwt root
# 4. Move <dir>.wt.tmp/.git to <dir>/bare.git; set core.bare = true
# 5. Fix fetch refspec (bare clone default maps refs directly, no remotes/)
# 6. Add a --no-checkout worktree so git wires up the metadata and
# creates <dir>/<branch>/.git (the only file in that dir)
# 7. Move that .git file into the real working tree (<dir>.wt.tmp)
# 8. Remove the now-empty placeholder directory
# 9. Move the real working tree into place as <dir>/<branch>
# 10. Reset the index to HEAD so git status is clean
# (--no-checkout leaves the index empty)
# 11. Create <dir>/.git -> bare.git symlink so plain git commands work
# from the root without --git-dir
#
# The .git file ends up at the same absolute path git recorded in step 5,
# so no worktree repair is needed. Working tree files are never modified.
The .git link was added when I noticed that I could run commands that don t
need the checked out files on the root of the gwt structure, which is handy
sometimes (i.e. a git fetch or a git log, that shows the log of the branch
marked as default).
After playing with commands that used the bare.git folder I updated the init
and convert commands to keep the origin refs, ensuring that the remote
tracking works correctly.
Improving the add commandWhile playing with the tool on more repos I noticed that I also had to enhance
the add command to better handle worktree creation, depending on my needs.
Right now the tool supports the following use cases:
if the branch exists locally or on origin, it just checks it out.
if the branch does not exist, we create it using the given base branch or,
if no base is given, the current worktree (if we are in the root folder or
bare.git the command fails).
as I needed it for my project, I added a --orphan option to be able to
create orphan branches directly.
Moving to a single fileEventually I decided to make the tool self contained; I removed the design
document (I moved the content to comments on the top of the script and details
to comments on each function definition) and added a pair of commands to print
the code to source for the p10k and zsh integration (autocompletion &
functions), leaving everything in a single file.
Now my .zshrc file adds the following to source both things:
# After loading the p10k configuration
if type gwt >/dev/null 2>&1; then
source <(gwt p10k)
fi
[...]
# After loading autocompletion
if type gwt >/dev/null 2>&1; then
source <(gwt zsh)
fi
VersioningAs I modified the script I found interesting to use CalVer-based versioning (the
version variable has the format YYYY.mm.dd-r#) so I added a subcommand to show
its value or bump it using the current date and computing the right revision
number.
About the use of copilotAlthough I ve never been a fan of AI tools I have to admit that the copilot
CLI has been very useful for building the tool:
Rapid prototyping: Each commit represented a small feature or fix that I
could implement, test immediately in my actual workflow, and iterate on based
on the result
Edge case handling: Rather than trying to anticipate every scenario
upfront, I could ask Copilot how to handle edge cases as they appeared in real
usage
Script refinement: Questions like "how do I clean up empty directories
after a rename" or "how do I detect if I m inside a specific worktree" were
quickly answered with working code
Shell integration: The Zsh wrapper and completion system grew from simple
prototypes to sophisticated features, with each iteration informed by how I
actually used the tool
For example, the convert command started as a simple rename operation, but
evolved to also create a .git symlink and intelligently handle various
migration scenarios all because I used it repeatedly and refined the
implementation each time.
Self-Contained and Opinionatedgwt is deliberately opinionated:
Zsh & Powerlevel10k Integration: The tool includes built-in Zsh shell
integration, accessed via source <(gwt zsh) and supports adding a prompt
segment when using p10k, as described earlier.
Directory Structure: The bare.git directory name is non-negotiable. This
is how gwt discovers the repository root from any subdirectory, and how the
tool knows whether a directory is a gwt repository. The simplicity of this
marker means the discovery mechanism is foolproof and requires no
configuration.
No Configuration Files: gwt deliberately has no configuration. There are
no .gwtrc files or config directories. This makes it portable; the tool
works the same way everywhere, and repositories can be shared across systems
without synchronizing configuration.
From Script to SystemWhat started as a small helper script for managing worktrees has become a
complete system:
Core script (gwt): 1,111 lines of pure shell, no external dependencies
Shell integration: Zsh functions and completions
Prompt integration: Powerlevel10k segment
Documentation: Built-in help and design philosophy documentation
The script is self-contained, everything needed for the tool to work is in a
single file.
This makes it trivial to update (just replace the script) or audit
(no hidden dependencies).
Development with AI supportDeveloping gwt with copilot taught me some things:
Incremental refinement works well for small tools: Each iteration informed
the next, resulting in a tool that handles real use cases elegantly
Transparency is a feature: Making operations visible builds confidence and
is easier to debug
Opinionated tools can be powerful: By constraining the problem space (one
bare repo, one worktree per branch), the solution becomes simpler and more
robust
Shell integration matters: The same core commands are easier to use when
they can automatically change directories and provide completions
Real-world testing is essential: I wouldn t have discovered the need for
automatic directory cleanup or context-aware cd behavior without actually
using the tool daily
What was next?The tool is stable and handles my daily workflow well, so my guess is that I
would keep using it and fixing issues if or when I found them, but I do not plan
to include additional features unless I find a use case that justifies it (i.e.
I never added support for some of the worktree subcommands, as it is easier to
use the git versions if I ever needed them).
What really happenedWhile editing this post I discovered that I needed to add another command to it
and fixed a bug (see below).
With those changes and the inclusion of a license and copyright notice (just in
case I distribute it at some point) now the script is 1,217 lines long instead
of the 1,111 it had when I started to write this entry.
Submodule SupportWhen I converted this blog repository to the gwt format and tried to preview
the post using docker compose, it failed because the worktree I was on didn t
have the Git submodule initialized.
My blog theme is included on the repository as a submodule, and when I used
gwt to check out different branches in worktrees, the submodule was not
initialized in the new worktrees.
This led me to add new internal function and a gwt submodule command to
handle submodule initialization; the internal function is called from convert
and add (when converting a repo or adding a worktree) and the public command
is useful to update the submodules on existing branches.
Path Handling with Branch Names Containing SlashesThe second discovery was a bug in how the tool handled branch names containing
slashes (e.g., feature/new-api, docs/user-guide), the worktree directories
are created with the branch name as the path, so a branch like feature/new-api
would create two nested folders (feature and new-api inside it).
However, there was a mismatch in how the zsh wrapper function resolved
worktree paths (initially it used shell parameter expansion, i.e.
rel="$ cwd#"$REPO_ROOT"/ "), versus how the core script calculated them,
causing the cd command to fail or navigate to the wrong location when branch
names contained slashes.
The fix involved ensuring consistent path resolution throughout the script and
wrapper (now it uses a function that processes the git worktree list output),
so that gwt cd feature/new-api correctly navigates to the worktree directory
regardless of path depth.
Conclusiongwt is a tool that solves a real problem: managing multiple Git branches
simultaneously without context-switching overhead.
I m sure I m going to keep using it for my projects, as it simplifies some
workflows, although I ll also use switch and stash in some cases, but I like
the use of multiple worktrees in parallel.
In fact I converted this blog repository checkout to the gwt format to work on
a separate branch as it felt the right approach even if I m the only one using
the repo now, and it helped me improve the tool, as explained before.
Also, it was a good example of how to use AI tools like copilot to develop a
simple tool and keep it evolving while using it.
In any case, although I find the copilot useful and has saved me time, I don t
trust it to work without supervision, it worked well, but got stuck some times
and didn t do the things as I wanted in multiple occasions.
I also have an additional problem now I ve been reading about it, but I
don t really know which models to use or how the premium requests are computed
(I ve only been playing with it since last month and I ran out of requests the
last day of the month on purpose, just to see what happened it stops working
;).
On my work machine I ve been using a specific user account with a GitHub
Copilot Business subscription and I only used the Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6
model and with my personal account I configured the Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5
model, but I ve only used that to create the initial draft of this post (I ended
up rewriting most of it manually anyway) and to review the final version (I m
not a native speaker and it was useful for finding typos and improving the style
in some parts).
I guess I ll try other models with copilot in the future and check other
command line tools like aider or
claude-code, but probably only using
free accounts unless I get a payed account at work, as I have with GitHub
Copilot.
To be fair, what I will love to be able to do is to use local models (aider can
do it), but the machines I have are not powerful enough. I tried to run a simple
test and it felt really slow, but when I have the time or the need I ll try
again, just in case.
Another minor update 0.3.14 for our nanotime
package is now on CRAN, and has
compiled for r2u (and
will have to wait to be uploaded to Debian until dependency bit64 has been
updated there). nanotime
relies on the RcppCCTZ
package (as well as the RcppDate
package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er)
resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution,
using the bit64
package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially
implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a
rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged
nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for
periods, intervals and durations.
This release has been driven almost entirely by Michael, who took over as
bit64 maintainer
and has been making changes there that have an effect on us
downstream . He reached out with a number of PRs which (following
occassional refinement and smoothing) have all been integrated. There
are no user-facing changes, or behavioural changes or enhancements, in
this release.
The NEWS snippet below has the fuller details.
Changes in version 0.3.14
(2026-04-22)
Tests were refactored to use NA_integer64_ (Michael
Chirico in #149 and
Dirk in #156)
nanoduration was updated for changes in nanotime 4.8.0 (Michael Chirico in #152 fixing
#151)
Use of as.integer64(keep.names=TRUE) has been
refactored (Michael Chirico in #154 fixing
#153)
In tests, nanotime is attached after
bit64; this still needs a better fix (Michael
Chirico in #155)
The package now has a hard dependency on the just released bit64 version 4.8.0 (or later)
Armadillo is a powerful
and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific
computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use,
has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm
development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into
production environments. RcppArmadillo
integrates this library with the R environment and language and is
widely used by (currently) 1263 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 45.7 million
times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint
/ vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 683 times according
to Google Scholar.
This versions updates to the 15.2.5 and 15.2.6 upstream Armadillo releases from,
respectively, two and five days ago. The package has already been
updated for Debian, and built for
r2u. When we ran the
reverse-dependency check for 15.2.5 at the end of last week, one package
failed. I got in touch with the authors, filed an issue, poked some
more, isolated the one line that caused an example to fail and right
then 15.2.6 came out fixing just that. It was after all an upstream
issue. We used to ran these checks before Conrad made a release, he now
skips this and hence needed a quick follow-up release. It can
happen.
The other big change is that this R package release phases out the
dual support for both C++14 or newer (as in current Armadillo) along with a C++11
fallback for more slowly updating packages. I am happy to say that after
over eight months of this managed transition (during which CRAN expulsed some laggard
packages that were not moving in from C++11) we are now at all packages
using C++14 or newer which is nice. And I will take this as an
opportunity to stress that one can in fact manage a disruptive API
change this way as we just demonstrated. Sadly, R Core does not seem to
have gotten that message and rollout of this package was also still a
little delayed because of the commotion created by the last minute API
changes preceding the R 4.6.0 release later this week.
Smaller changes in the package are a switch in pdf vignette
production to the Rcpp::asis() driver, and a
higher-precision computation in rmultinom() (matching a
change made in R-devel during last week in its use of Kahan summation).
All detailed changes since the last CRAN release follow.
Changes in
RcppArmadillo version 15.2.6-1 (2026-04-20)
Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.6 (Medium Roast Deluxe)
Ensure internally computed tolerances are not NaN
The rmultinom deploys 'Kahan summation' as R-devel
does now.
Changes
in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.5-1 [github-only] (2026-04-18)
Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.5 (Medium Roast Deluxe)
Fix for handling NaN elements in .is_zero()
Fix for handling NaN in tolerance and conformance checks
Faster handling of diagonal views and submatrices with one
row>
Sunset the C++11 fallback of including Armadillo 14.6.3 (#504
closing #503)
The vignettes have refreshed bibliographies, and are now built
using the Rcpp::asis vignette builder (#506)
One rmultinom test is skipped under R-devel which
has switched to a higher precisions calc
Lomiri Codefest in Tilburg NL (May 16-17 2026)
Just a quick invitation to an in-person event in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
All people interested in the Lomiri Operating Environment are invited to join us at the Lomiri Codefest [codefest] taking place on May 16-17 (participation is free of charge).
We are hiring Lomiri developers
And as another side node, we still have budget (until 07/2027) for 2-3 additional Lomiri developers (depends on each devs weekly availability). The details of my previous post [hiringdetails] +/- still apply. One more limitation / strength: You need real coding skills to apply for the open positions, AI-generated contributions will not be accepted for the tasks at hand.
If you are interested and a skilled FLOSS developer (you need previous OSS contributions as references) and available with at least 10 hrs / week, please get in touch [fsgmbh].
References
[codefest] https://codefest.os-sci.info/?lang=en
[hiringdetails] https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/150
[fsgmbh] https://freiesoftware.gmbh/
The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election
has just concluded, and the winner is Sruthi Chandran. Congratulations!
347 out of 1,039 Developers voted using the
Condorcet method.
More information about the results of the voting is available on the
Debian Project Leader Elections 2026
page.
Many thanks to Sruthi Chandran for her campaign, to our Developers for their
votes, and to Andreas Tille for his service as DPL over the past two years!
The new term for the project leader will start on April 21, 2026 and expire
on April 20, 2027.
I recently released version 0.3.0 of my recipe manager application Kookbook find it in git in KDE Invent or as released tarballs in https://download.kde.org/stable/kookbook/
Changes since last time is more or less Minor bugfixes and a Qt6 port nothing as such noteworthy unless you aim to get rid of Qt5 on your system.
so what is kookbook?
It is a simple recipe viewer that works with semi-structured markdown. More details can be seen in the quite old 0.1.0 announcement
At some point I should do a 10 recipe example collection, but my personal collection is in danish, so I m not sure it is going to be useful. Unless someone will donate me some handfuls of pre-formatted recipes, I will happily announce it.
Surface Detail is the ninth novel in Banks's Culture science
fiction (literary space opera?) series. As with most of the Culture
novels, it can be read in any order, although this isn't the best starting
point. There is an Easter egg reference to Use of Weapons that would be easier to notice if you have read
that book recently, but which is not that important to the story.
Lededje Y'breq is an Indented Intagliate from the Sichultian Enablement.
Her body is patterned from her skin down to her bones, covered with
elaborate markings similar to tattoos that extend to her internal organs.
As an intagliate, she is someone's property. In her case, she is the
property of Joller Veppers, the richest man in the Enablement and her
father's former business partner. Intagliates are a tradition of great
cultural pride in the Enablement. They are a living representation of the
seriousness with which debts and honor are taken, up to and including
one's not-yet-born children becoming the property of one's debtor. Such
children are decorated as living works of art of the highest skill and
technical sophistication; after all, the Enablement are not barbarians.
As the story opens, Lededje is attempting, not for the first time, to
escape. This attempt is successful in an unexpected way.
Prin and Chay are Pavulean researchers and academics who, as this story
opens, are in Hell. They are not dead; they have infiltrated the Hell that
Pavuleans are shown to scare them into proper behavior in order to prove
that it is not an illusion and their society does indeed torture people in
an afterlife, in more awful ways than people dare imagine. They have
reached the portal through which temporary visitors exit, hoping to escape
with firm evidence of the existence and horrors of the Pavulean afterlife.
They will not be entirely successful.
Yime Nsokyi is a Culture agent for Quietus, the part of Contact that
concerns itself with the dead. Many advanced societies throughout the
galaxy have invented and reinvented the ability to digitize a mind and
then run it in a virtual environment. Once a society can capture the minds
of every person in that society from that point forward, it faces the
question of whether to do so and, if it does, what to do with those minds.
More specifically, it faces the moral question of whether to punish the
minds of people who were horrible in life. It faces the question of
whether to create Hell.
Vatueil is a soldier in a contestation, a limited and carefully monitored
virtual war. The purpose of that war game is to, once and for all, resolve
the question of whether civilizations should be allowed to create Hells.
Some civilizations consider them integral to their religion or
self-conception. Others consider them morally abhorrent, and that conflict
was in danger of spilling over into war in the Real. Hence the War in
Heaven: Both sides committed to fight in a virtual space under specific
and structured rules, and the winner decides the fate of the galaxy's
Hells. Vatueil is fighting for the anti-Hell side. The anti-Hell side is
losing.
There are very few authors who were better at big-idea science fiction
than Iain M. Banks. I've been reading a few
books about AI ships and remembered that I had two unread Culture novels
that I was saving. It felt like a good time to lose myself in something
sprawling.
Surface Detail does sprawl. Even by Banks's standards, there was an
impressive amount of infodumping in this book. Banks always has huge and
lovingly described set pieces, and this book is no exception, but there
are also paragraphs and pages of background and cultural musings and
galactic politics. We are introduced to not one but three new Contact
divisions; as well as the already-mentioned Quietus, there is Numina,
which concerns itself with the races that have sublimed (transcended), and
Restoria, which deals with hegemonizing swarms (grey goo nanotech,
paperclip maximizers, and their equivalents).
Infodumping is both a feature and a bane of big-idea science fiction, and
it helps to be in the right mood. It also helps if the info being dumped
is interesting, and this is where Banks shines. This is a huge, sprawling
book, but it deals with some huge, sprawling questions and it has
interesting and non-reductive thoughts about them. The problems posed by
the plot come with history, failed solutions, multi-sided political
disputes, strategies and tactics of varying morality and efficacy, and an
effort to wrestle with the irreducible complexity of trying to resolve
political and ethical disagreements in a universe full of profound
disagreements and moral systems that one cannot simply steamroll.
It also helps that the characters are interesting, even when they're not
likable. Surface Detail has one fully hissable villain (Veppers) as
a viewpoint character, but even Veppers is interesting in a "let me check
the publication date to see if Banks was aware of Peter Thiel" sort of
way. The Culture ships, of which there are several in this story, tend
towards a gently sarcastic kindness that I find utterly charming. Lededje
provides the compelling motive force of someone who has no involvement in
the broader philosophical questions and instead intends to resolve one
specific problem through lethal violence. Vatueil and Yime were a bit
bland in personality, more exposition generators than characters I warmed
to, but their roles and therefore the surrounding exposition were
fascinating enough that I still enjoyed their sections.
I'm sure this is not an original observation, but I was struck reading
this book in the first half of 2026 that the Culture functions as an
implementation of what the United States likes to think it is but has
never been. It has a strong sense of shared ethics and moral principles,
it tries to export them to the rest of the galaxy through example,
persuasion, and careful meddling, but it tries to follow some combination
of pragmatic and moral rules while doing so, partly to avoid a backlash
and partly to avoid becoming its own sort of hegemonizing swarm. That is a
powerfully attractive vision of how to be an advanced civilization, and
the fact that every hegemon that has claimed that mantle has behaved
appallingly just makes it more intriguing as a fictional concept. In this
book, like in many Culture books, the Culture is painfully aware of the
failure modes of meddling, and the story slowly reveals the effort the
Culture put into staying just on a defensible side of their own moral
lines. This is, in a sense, a Prime Directive story, but with a level of
hard-nosed pragmatism and political sophistication that the endless
Star Trek Prime Directive episodes never reach.
Surface Detail does tend to sprawl, and I'm not sure Banks pulled
together all the pieces of the plot. For example, if there was a point to
the subplot involving the Unfallen Bulbitian, it was lost on me. (There is
always a possibility with Banks that I wasn't paying close enough
attention.) But the descriptions are so elaborate and the sense of
politics and history are so deep that I was never bored, even when
following a plot thread that meandered off into apparent irrelevance. The
main plot line comes to a satisfying conclusion that may be even more
biting social commentary today than it was in 2010.
A large part of the plot does involve Hell, so a warning for those who
haven't read much Banks: He adores elaborate descriptions of body horror
and physical torture. The sections involving Prin and Chay are rather
grim and horrific, probably a bit worse than Dante's Inferno. I
have a low tolerance for horror and I was able to read past and around the
worst bits, but be warned that Banks indulges his love for the painfully
grotesque quite a bit.
This was great, and exactly what I was hoping for when I picked it up.
It's not the strongest Culture novel (for me, that's either
The Player of Games or
Excession), but it's one of the better
ones. Highly recommended, although if you're new to the Culture, I would
start with one of the earlier books that provide a more gradual
introduction to the Culture and Special Circumstances.
Followed, in the somewhat disconnected Culture series sense, by The
Hydrogen Sonata.
Content warnings: Rape (largely off-screen), graphic violence, lots of
Bosch-style grotesque torture, and a lot of Veppers being a thoroughly
awful human being as a viewpoint character.
Rating: 8 out of 10
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
If you have recently installed a very up-to-date Linux distribution with a desktop environment, or upgraded your system on a rolling-release distribution, you might have noticed that your home directory has a new folder: Projects
Why?
With the recent 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs we enabled the Projects directory by default. Support for this has already existed since 2007, but was never formally enabled. This closes a more than 11 year old bug report that asked for this feature.
The purpose of the Projects directory is to give applications a default location to place project files that do not cleanly belong into one of the existing categories (Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos). Examples of this are software engineering projects, scientific projects, 3D printing projects, CAD design or even things like video editing projects, where project files would end up in the Projects directory, with output video being more at home in Videos .
By enabling this by default, and subsequently in the coming months adding support to GLib, Flatpak, desktops and applications that want to make use of it, we hope to give applications that do operate in a project-centric manner with mixed media a better default storage location. As of now, those tools either default to the home directory, or will clutter the Documents folder, both of which is not ideal. It also gives users a default organization structure, hopefully leading to less clutter overall and better storage layouts.
This sucks, I don t like it!
As usual, you are in control and can modify your system s behavior. If you do not like the Projects folder, simply delete it! The xdg-user-dirs utility will not try to create it again, and instead adjust the default location for this directory to your home directory. If you want more control, you can influence exactly what goes where by editing your ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs configuration file.
If you are a system administrator or distribution vendor and want to set default locations for the default XDG directories, you can edit the /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults file to set global defaults that affect all users on the system (users can still adjust the settings however they like though).
What else is new?
Besides this change, the 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs brings full support for the Meson build system (dropping Automake), translation updates, and some robustness improvements to its code. We also fixed the arbitrary code execution from unsanitized input bug that the Arch Linux Wiki mentions here for the xdg-user-dirs utility, by replacing the shell script with a C binary.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!
Posted on April 18, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:cooking
This post contains a bit of consumerism and is full of references to
commercial products, none of which caused me to receive any money nor
non-monetary compensation.
This post has also been written after eating in one meal the amount of
bread-like stuff that we usually have in more than 24 hours.
I ve been baking bread since a long time ago. I don t know exactly when,
but probably it was the early 2000s or so, and remained a regular-ish
thing until 2020, when it became an extremely regular thing, as in I
believe I bake bread on average every other day.
In the before times, I ve had a chance to bake pizza in a wood fired
oven a few times: a friend had one and would offer the house, my partner
would mind the fire, and I would get there with the dough and prepare
the pizza.
Now that we have moved to a new house, we don t have a good and
convenient place for a proper wood fired oven in masonry, but we can use
one of the portable ones, and having dealt with more urgent expenses, I
decided that just before the potential collapse of the global economy
was a good time as any to buy the oven I had been looking at since we
found this house.
I decided to get an Ooni Karu 2, having heard good things about the
brand, and since it looked like a good balance between size and
portability. I also didn t consider their gas fired ovens (nor did I buy
the gas burner) because I m trying to get rid of gas, not add stuff that
uses it, and I didn t get an electric one because I m not at all unhappy
with the bakery-style pizza we make in our regular oven, and I have to
admit we also wanted to play with fire1.
We also needed an outdoor table suitable to use the oven on and store
it. Here I looked for inspiration at the Ooni tables (and for cheaper
alternatives in the same style), but my mother who shares the outdoor
area with us wasn t happy with the idea of steel2.
And then I was browsing the modern viking shores, and found that there
was a new piece in the 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Prices
On the 19th of March I got a home battery system installed. The government has a rebate scheme so it had a list price of about $22k for a 40kWh setup and cost me about $12k. It seems that 40KWh is the minimum usable size for the amount of electricity I use, I have 84 cores running BOINC when they have nothing better to do which is 585W of TDP according to Intel. While the CPUs are certainly using less than the maximum TDP (both due to design safety limits and the fact that I have disabled hyper-threading on all systems due to it providing minimal benefits and potential security issues) given some power usage by cooling fans and some inefficiency in PSUs I think that assuming that 585W is accounted for 24*7 by CPUs is reasonable. So my home draws between 800W and 1KW when no-one is home and with an electric car and all electric cooking a reasonable amount of electricity can be used.
My bills prior to the battery installation were around $200/month which was based on charging my car only during sunny times as my electricity provider (Amber Electric) has variable rates based on wholesale prices. Also the feed in rates if my solar panels produce too much electricity in sunny times often go negative so if I don t use enough electricity. I haven t had the electric car long enough to find out what the bills might be in winter without a home battery.
Before getting the battery my daily bills according to the Amber app were usually between $5 and $10. After getting it the daily bills have almost always been below $5. The only day where it s been over $5 since the battery installation was when electricity was cheap and I fully charged the home battery and my car which used 50KWh in one day and cost $7.87 which is 16 cents per KWh. 16 cents isn t the cheapest price (sometimes it gets as low as 10 cents) but is fairly cheap, sometimes even in the cheap parts of the day it doesn t get that low (the cheapest price on the day I started writing this was 20 cents).
So it looks like this may save me $100 per month, if so there will be a 10% annual return on investment on the $12K I spent. This makes it a good investment, better than repaying a mortgage (which is generally under 6%) and almost as good as the long term results of index tracker funds. However if it cost $22K (the full price without subsidy) then it would still be ok but wouldn t be a great investment. The government subsidised batteries because the huge amount of power generated by rooftop solar systems was greater than the grid could use during the day in summer and batteries are needed to use that power when it s dark.
Android App
The battery system is from Fox ESS and the FoxCloud 2.0 Android app is a bit lacking in functionality. It has a timer for mode setting with options Self-use (not clearly explained), Feed-in Priority (not explained but testing shows feeding everything in to the grid), Back Up , Forced Charge , and Forced Discharge . Currently I have Forced Charge setup for most sunny 5 hours of the day for a maximum charge power of 5KW. I did that because about 25KW/day is what I need to cover everything and while the system can do almost 10KW that would charge the battery fully in a few hours and then electricity would be exported to the grid which would at best pay me almost nothing and at worst bill me for supplying electricity when they don t want it. There doesn t seem to be a never put locally generated power into the grid unless the battery is full option. The force charge mode allows stopping at a certain percentage, but when that is reached there is no fallback to another option. It would be nice if the people who designed the configuration could take as a baseline assumption that the macro programming in office suites and functions in spreadsheets are things that regular people are capable of using when designing the configuration options. I don t think we need a Turing complete programming language in the app to control batteries (although I would use it if there was one), but I think we need clauses like if battery is X% full then end this section .
There is no option to say force charge until 100% or force charge for the next X minutes as a one-off thing. If I came home in the afternoon with my car below 50% battery and a plan to do a lot of driving the next day then I d want to force charge it immediately to allow charging the car overnight. But I can t do that without entering a schedule . For Unix people imagine having to do everything via a cron job and no option to run something directly from the command-line.
It s a little annoying that they appear to have spent more development time on animations for the app than some of what should be core functionality.
Management
Amber has an option to allow my battery to be managed by them based on wholesale pries but I haven t done that as the feed-in prices are very low. So I just charge my battery when electricity is cheap and use it for the rest of the day. There is usually a factor of 2 or more price difference between the middle of the day and night time so that saves money. It also means I don t have to go out of my way to try and charge my car in the middle of the day. There is some energy lost in charging and discharging the batteries but it s not a lot. I configured the system to force charge for the 5 sunniest hours every day for 5KW as that s enough to keep it charged overnight and 5KW is greater than the amount of solar electricity produced on my house since I ve been monitoring it so that forces it to all be used for the battery. In summer I might have to change that to 6KW for the sunniest 2 or 3 hours and then 4KW or 5KW surrounding that which will be a pain to manage.
Instead of charging the car every day during sunny times I charge it once or twice a week, I have a 3.3KW charger and the car has a 40KWh battery so usually it takes me less than 10 hours to fully charge it and I get at least 5 hours of good sunlight in the process.
There are people hacking on these devices which is interesting to get direct control from computers [1], and apparently not banned from the official community for doing so. I m not enthusiastic enough to do this, I ve got plenty of other free software things to work on. But it s good that others are doing so.
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
- 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
- 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.
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 widerlan). 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
weallknow
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.
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.
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
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.
Stream Header
Immediately after the arf Header, some number of Stream Headers
follow. There must be exactly the same number of Stream Header packets as are
indicated by the num streams field of the Header. This has the nice effect of
enabling clients to read all the stream headers without requiring buffering of
unread packets from the stream.
id
flags
fmt
bo
rate
freq
guid
site
In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format,
the following is an example stream header subpacket (when encoded or decoded
this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above) which should parse
without error, with known values.
Samples
Block of IQ samples in the format indicated by this stream s format and
byte_order field sent in the related Stream Header.
id
iq samples
In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format,
the following is an samples subpacket (when encoded or decoded
this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above). The IQ values
here are notional (and are either 2 8 bit samples, or 1 16 bit sample,
depending on what the related Stream Header was).
01, // id
ab, cd, ab, cd, // iq samples
Frequency Change
The center frequency of the IQ stream has changed since the
Stream Header or last Frequency Change
has been sent. This is useful to capture IQ streams that are jumping
around in frequency during the duration of the capture, rather than
starting and stopping them.
id
frequency
In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format,
the following is a frequency change subpacket (when encoded or decoded
this will be found inside an ARF packet as described above).
01, // id
00, 00, b5, e6, 20, f4, 80, 00 // frequency (200 MHz)
Discontinuity
Since the last Samples packet for this stream, samples have been dropped
or not encoded to this stream. This can be used for a stream that has
dropped samples for some reason, a large gap (radio was needed for something
else), or communicating iq snippits .
id
In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format,
the following is a discontinuity subpacket (when encoded or decoded this will
be found inside an ARF packet as described above).
01, // id
Location
Up-to-date location as of this moment of the IQ stream, usually from a GPS.
This allows for in-band geospatial information to be marked in the IQ stream.
This can be used for all sorts of things (detected IQ packet snippits aligned
with a time and location or a survey of rf noise in an area)
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.
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).
Vendor Extension
In addition to the fields I put in the spec, I expect that I may need custom
packet types I can t think of now. There s all sorts of useful data that could
be encoded into the stream, so I d rather there be an officially sanctioned
mechanism that allows future work on the spec without constraining myself.
Just an example, I ve used a custom subpacket to create test vectors, the data
is encoded into a Vendor Extension, followed by the IQ for the modulated
packet. If the demodulated data and in-band original data don t match, we ve
regressed. You could imagine in-band speech-to-text, antenna rotator azimuth
information, or demodulated digital sideband data (like FM HDR data) too. Or
even things I can t even think of!
id
data
In order to help with checking the basic parsing and encoding of this format,
the following is a vendor extension subpacket (when encoded or decoded this
will be found inside an ARF packet as described above).
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.
I mentor several people in Debian, and have been repeatedly asked to offer an opportunity to ask questions on a live call. I have now started a recurring video call for exactly that, which I call Mentoring Mondays, and it is open for anyone aspiring to contribute to Debian, one of the oldest and most widely used Linux distributions.
Mentoring Mondays have already been happening for the past few Mondays, and this week we had a record 20 people on the call. During the calls so far we have had a demo of updating a package for a new upstream release using gbp, and of how to create a Merge Request on Salsa for a new upstream version. There is clearly a need for this, so I am announcing this now also on my blog, just as I have publicly announced that I offer mentoring for aspiring Debian contributors.
A departures board at Budapest Kelenfold station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
This is platform number 15 of Budapest Kelenfold station where we boarded our train. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Interior of our Budapest to Vienna train. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
This blue colored train was the one we took for our Budapest to Vienna journey. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
An BB train standing at a platform of Vienna train station. BB is the national carrier of Austria. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Wien Hauptbahnhof train station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
My public transport pass in Vienna.
Instead of AFC gates, Vienna has ticket validators as in the picture. You need to tap your ticket in the validator before boarding the subway. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Vienna subway. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Sch nbrunn Palace. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
A street near Sch nbrunn Palace. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Ro auer L nde subway station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Platform of the Ro auer L nde subway station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
The The Strudlhofstiege steps. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
A random street in Vienna.
Another street in Vienna.
A picture of Blue Orange caf . Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Trams in Vienna. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Punschkrapfen. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Esterhazyschnitten. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Departure boards in Vienna displaying information about the trains. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Platform and tracks at Wien Hauptbahnhof station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Interior of the train we took from Vienna to Budapest. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
This is the train we took for our return journey from Vienna to Budapest. It is standing on a platform in Budapest Kelenfold station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
The 
Another minor update 0.3.14 for our 
Lomiri Codefest in Tilburg NL (May 16-17 2026)
Just a quick invitation to an in-person event in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
All people interested in the Lomiri Operating Environment are invited to join us at the Lomiri Codefest [codefest] taking place on May 16-17 (participation is free of charge).
We are hiring Lomiri developers
And as another side node, we still have budget (until 07/2027) for 2-3 additional Lomiri developers (depends on each devs weekly availability). The details of my previous post [hiringdetails] +/- still apply. One more limitation / strength: You need real coding skills to apply for the open positions, AI-generated contributions will not be accepted for the tasks at hand.
If you are interested and a skilled FLOSS developer (you need previous OSS contributions as references) and available with at least 10 hrs / week, please get in touch [fsgmbh].
References
[codefest] 
The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election
has just concluded, and the winner is Sruthi Chandran. Congratulations!
347 out of 1,039 Developers voted using the
I recently released version 0.3.0 of my recipe manager application Kookbook find it in git in 
At some point I should do a 10 recipe example collection, but my personal collection is in danish, so I m not sure it is going to be useful. Unless someone will donate me some handfuls of pre-formatted recipes, I will happily announce it.
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.
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.
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
