Search Results: "tar"

23 February 2022

Ian Jackson: Rooting an Eos Fairphone 4

Last week I received (finally) my Fairphone 4, supplied with a de-googled operating system, which I had ordered from the E Foundation s shop in December. (I m am very hard on hardware and my venerable Fairphone 2 is really on its last legs.) I expect to have full control over the software on any computing device I own which is as complicated, capable, and therefore, hazardous, as a mobile phone. Unfortunately the Eos image (they prefer to spell it /e/ os , srsly!) doesn t come with a way to get root without taking fairly serious measures including unlocking the bootloader. Unlocking the bootloader wouldn t be desirable for me but I can t live without root. So. I started with these helpful instructions: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/fairphone-4-root.4376421/ I found the whole process a bit of a trial, and I thought I would write down what I did. But, it s not straightforward, at least for someone like me who only has a dim understanding of all this Android stuff. Unfortunately, due to the number of missteps and restarts, what I actually did is not really a sensible procedure. So here is a retcon of a process I think will work: Unlock the bootloader The E Foundation provide instructions for unlocking the bootloader on a stock FP4, here https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP4/install and they seem applicable to the Murena phone supplied with Eos pre-installed, too. NB tht unlocking the bootloader wipes the phone. So we do it first. So:
  1. Power on the phone, with no SIM installed
  2. You get a welcome screen.
  3. Skip all things on startup including wifi
  4. Go to the very end of the settings, tap a gazillion times on the phone s version until you re a developer
  5. In the developer settings, allow usb debugging
  6. In the developer settings, allow oem bootloader unlocking
  7. Connect a computer via a USB cable, say yes on phone to USB debugging
  8. adb reboot bootloader
  9. The phone will reboot into a texty kind of screen, the bootloader
  10. fastboot flashing unlock
  11. The phone will reboot, back to the welcome screen
  12. Repeat steps 3-9 (maybe not all are necessary)
  13. fastboot flashing unlock_critical
  14. The phone will reboot, back to the welcome screen
Note that although you are running fastboot, you must run this command with the phone in bootloader mode, not fastboot (aka fastbootd ) mode. If you run fastboot flashing unlcok from fastboot you just get a don t know what you re talking about . I found conflicting instructions on what kind of Vulcan nerve pinches could be used to get into which boot modes, and had poor experiences with those. adb reboot bootloader always worked reliably for me. Some docs say to run fastboot oem unlock; I used flashing. Maybe this depends on the Android tools version. Initial privacy prep and OTA update We want to update the supplied phone OS. The build mine shipped with is too buggy to run Magisk, the application we are going to use to root the phone. (With the pre-installed phone OS, Magisk crashes at the patch boot image step.) But I didn t want to let the phone talk to Google, even for the push notifications registration.
  1. From the welcome screen, skip all things except location, date, time. Notably, do not set up wifi
  2. In settings, microg section
    1. turn off cloud messaging
    2. turn off google safetynet
    3. turn off google registration (NB you must do this after the other two, because their sliders become dysfunctional after you turn google registration off)
    4. turn off both location modules
  3. In settings, location section, turn off allowed location for browser and magic earth
  4. Now go into settings and enable wifi, giving it your wifi details
  5. Tell the phone to update its operating system. This is a big download.
Install Magisk, the root manager (As a starting point I used these instructions https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-install-magisk/ and a lot of random forum posts.) You will need the official boot.img. Bizarrely there doesn t seem to be a way to obtain this from the phone. Instead, you must download it. You can find it by starting at https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP4/install which links to https://images.ecloud.global/stable/FP4/. At the time of writing, the most recent version, whose version number seemed to correspond to the OS update I installed above, was IMG-e-0.21-r-20220123158735-stable-FP4.zip.
  1. Download the giant zipfile to your computer
  2. Unzip it to extract boot.img
  3. Copy the file to your phone s storage . Eg, via adb: with the phone booted into the main operating system, using USB debugging, adb push boot.img /storage/self/primary/Download.
  4. On the phone, open the browser, and enter https://f-droid.org. Click on the link to install f-droid. You will need to enable installing apps from the browser (follow the provided flow to the settings, change the setting, and then use Back, and you can do the install). If you wish, you can download the f-droid apk separately on a computer, and verify it with pgp.
  5. Using f-droid, install Magisk. You will need to enable installing apps from f-droid. (I installed Magisk from f-droid because 1. I was going to trust f-droid anyway 2. it has a shorter URL than Magisk s.)
  6. Open the Magisk app. Tell Magisk to install (Magisk, not the app). There will be only one option: patch boot file. Tell it to patch the boot.img file from before.
  7. Transfer the magisk_patched-THING.img back to your computer (eg via adb pull).
  8. adb reboot bootloader
  9. fastboot boot magisk_patched-THING.img (again, NB, from bootloader mode, not from fastboot mode)
  10. In Magisk you ll see it shows as installed. But it s not really; you ve just booted from an image with it. Ask to install Magisk with Direct install .
After you have done all this, I believe that each time you do an over-the-air OS update, you must, between installing the update and rebooting the phone, ask Magisk to Install to inactive slot (after OTA) . Presumably if you forget you must do the fastboot boot dance again. After all this, I was able to use tsu in Termux. There s a strange behaviour with the root prompt you get apropos Termux s request for root; I found that it definitely worked if Termux wasn t the foreground app You have to leave the bootloader unlocked. Howwever, as I understand it, the phone s encryption will still prevent an attacker from hoovering the data out of your phone. The bootloader lock is to prevent someone tricking you into entering the decryption passkey into a trojaned device. Other things to change There are probably other things to change. I have not yet transferred my Signal account from my old phone. It is possible that Signal will require me to re-enable the google push notifications, but I hope that having disabled them in microg it will be happy to use its own system, as it does on my old phone.

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Joey Hess: announcing zephyr-copilot

I recently learned about the Zephyr Project which is a rather neat embedded OS for devices too small to run Linux. This led me to wondering if I could adapt arduino-copilot to target Zephyr, and so be able to program any of the 350+ boards it supports using Haskell. At the same time I had an opportunity to give a talk at the Houston Functional Programmers group. On February 1st I decided to give that talk, about arduino-copilot. That left 2 weeks to buy some hardware supported by Zephyr and port arduino-copilot to it. The result is zephyr-copilot, and I was able to demo it during my talk. This example can be used with any of 293 different boards, and will blink an on-board LED: 
module Examples.Blink.Demo where
import Copilot.Zephyr.Board.Generic
main :: IO ()
main = zephyr $ do
        led0 =: blinking
        delay =: MilliSeconds (constant 100)
Doing much more than that needs a board specific module to set up GPIO pins etc. So far I only have written those for a couple of boards I have, but they are fairly easy to write. I'd be happy to help anyone who wants to contribute one. Due to the time constraints I have not implemented serial port support, or PWM or ADC yet, although all should be fairly easy. Zephyr also has no end of other capabilities, from networking to file systems to sensors, that could perhaps be supported in zephyr-copilot. My talk has now been published on youtube. I really enjoyed presenting again for the first time in 4 years(!), and to a very nice group of people. Thanks to Claude Rubinson for his persistence in getting me to give a talk.
Development of zephyr-copilot was sponsored by Mark Reidenbach, Erik Bj reholt, Jake Vosloo, and Graham Spencer on Patreon.

22 February 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Children of Earth and Sky

Review: Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: New American Library
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 0-698-18327-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 572
Nine hundred years have passed since the events of Lord of Emperors. Twenty-five years ago, Sarantium, queen of cities, fell to the Osmanlis, who have renamed it Asharias in honor of their Asherite faith. The repercussions are still echoing through the western world, as the Osmanlis attempt each spring to push farther west and the forces of Rodolfo, Holy Emperor in Obravic and defender of the Jaddite faith, hold them back. Seressa and Dubrava are city-state republics built on the sea trade. Seressa is the larger and most renown, money-lenders to Rodolfo and notorious for their focus on business and profit, including willingness to trade with the Osmanlis. Dubrava has a more tenuous position: smaller, reliant on trade and other assistance from Seressa, but also holding a more-favored trading position with Asharias. Both are harassed by piracy from Senjan, a fiercely Jaddite raiding city north up the coast from Dubrava and renown for its bravery against the Asherites. The Senjani are bad for business. Seressa would love to wipe them out, but they have the favor of the Holy Emperor. They settled for attempting to starve the city with a blockade. As Children of Earth and Sky opens, Seressa is sending out new spies. One is a woman named Leonora Valeri, who will present herself as the wife of a doctor that Seressa is sending to Dubrava. She is neither his wife nor Seressani, but this assignment gets her out of the convent to which her noble father exiled her after an unapproved love affair. The other new spy is the young artist Pero Villani, a minor painter whose only notable work was destroyed by the woman who commissioned it for being too revealing. Pero's destination is farther east: Grand Khalif Gur u the Destroyer, the man whose forces took Sarantium, wants to be painted in the western style. Pero will do so, and observe all he can, and if the opportunity arises to do more than that, well, so much the better. Pero and Leonora are traveling on a ship owned by Marin Djivo, the younger son of a wealthy Dubravan merchant family, when their ship is captured by Senjani raiders. Among the raiders is Danica Gradek, the archer who broke the Seressani blockade of Senjan. This sort of piracy, while tense, should be an economic transaction: some theft, some bargaining, some ransom, and everyone goes on their way. That is not what happens. Moments later, two men lie dead, and Danica's life has become entangled with Dubravan merchants and Seressani spies. Children of Earth and Sky is in some sense a sequel to the Sarantine Mosaic, and knowing the events of that series adds some emotional depth and significant moments to this story, but you can easily read it as a stand-alone novel. (That said, I recommend the Sarantine Mosaic regardless.) As with nearly all of Kay's work, it's historical fiction with the names changed (less this time than in most of this books) and a bit of magic added. The setting is the middle of the 15th century. Seressa is, of course, Venice. The Osmanlis are the Ottoman Turks, and Asharias is Istanbul, the captured Constantinople. Rodolfo is a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, holding court in an amalgam of northern cities that (per the afterward) is primarily Prague. Dubrava, which is central to much of this book, is Dubrovnik in Croatia. As usual with Kay's novels, you don't need to know this to enjoy the story, but it may spark some fun secondary reading. The touch of magic is present in several places, but comes primarily from Danica, whose grandfather resides as a voice in her head. He is the last of her family that she is in contact with. Her father and older brother were killed by Osmanli raiders, and her younger brother taken as a slave to be raised as a djanni warrior in the khalif's infantry. (Djannis are akin to Mamluks in our world.) Damaz, as he is now known, is the remaining major viewpoint character I've not mentioned. There are a couple of key events in the book that have magic at the center, generally involving Danica or Damaz, but most of the story is straight historical fiction (albeit with significant divergences from our world). I'd talked myself out of starting this novel several times before I finally picked it up. Like most of Kay's, it's a long book, and I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for epic narration and a huge cast. And indeed, I found it slow at the start. Once the story got underway, though, I was as enthralled as always. There is a bit of sag in the middle of the book, in part because Kay didn't follow up on some relationships that I wish were more central to the plot and in part because he overdoes the narrative weight in one scene, but the ending is exceptional. Guy Gavriel Kay is the master of a specific type of omniscient tight third person narration, one in which the reader sees what a character is thinking but also gets narrative commentary, foreshadowing, and emotional emphasis apart from the character's thoughts. It can feel heavy-handed; if something is important, Kay tells you, explicitly and sometimes repetitively, and the foreshadowing frequently can be described as portentous. But in return, Kay gets fine control of pacing and emphasis. The narrative commentary functions like a soundtrack in a movie. It tells you when to pay close attention and when you can relax, what moments are important, where to slow down, when to brace yourself, and when you can speed up. That in turn requires trust; if you're not in the mood for the author to dictate your reading pace to the degree Kay is attempting, it can be irritating. If you are in the mood, though, it makes his novels easy to relax into. The narrator will ensure that you don't miss anything important, and it's an effective way to build tension. Kay also strikes just the right balance between showing multiple perspectives on a single moment and spending too much time retelling the same story. He will often switch viewpoint characters in the middle of a scene, but he avoids the trap of replaying the scene and thus losing the reader's interest. There is instead just a moment of doubled perspective or retrospective commentary, just enough information for the reader to extrapolate the other character's experience backwards, and then the story moves on. Kay has an excellent feel for when I badly wanted to see another character's perspective on something that just happened. Some of Kay's novels revolve around a specific event or person. Children of Earth and Sky is not one of those. It's a braided novel following five main characters, each with their own story. Some of those stories converge; some of them touch for a while and then diverge again. About three-quarters of the way through, I wasn't sure how Kay would manage a satisfying conclusion for the numerous separate threads that didn't feel rushed, but I need not have worried. The ending had very little of the shape that I had expected, focused more on the small than the large (although there are some world-changing events here), but it was an absolute delight, with some beautiful moments of happiness that took the rest of the novel to set up. This is not the sort of novel with a clear theme, but insofar as it has one, it's a story about how much of the future shape and events of the world are unknowable. All we can control is our own choices, and we may never know their impact. Each individual must decide who they want to be and attempt to live their life in accordance with that decision, hopefully with some grace towards others in the world. The novel does, alas, still have some of Kay's standard weaknesses. There is (at last!) an important female friendship, and I had great hopes for a second one, but sadly it lasted only a scant handful of pages. Men interact with each other and with women; women interact almost exclusively with men. Kay does slightly less awarding of women to male characters than in some previous books (although it still happens), but this world is still weirdly obsessed with handing women to men for sex as a hospitality gesture. None of this is too belabored or central to the story, or I would be complaining more, but as soon as one sees how regressive the gender roles typically are in a Kay novel, it's hard to unsee. And, as always for Kay, the sex in this book is weirdly off-putting to me. I think this goes hand in hand with Kay's ability to write some of the best conversations in fantasy. Kay's characters spar and thrust with every line and read nuance into small details of wording. Frequently, the turn of the story rests on the outcome of a careful conversation. This is great reading; it's the part of Kay's writing I enjoy the most. But I'm not sure he knows how to turn it off between characters who love and trust each other. The characters never fully relax; sex feels like another move in ongoing chess games, which in turn makes it feel weirdly transactional or manipulative instead of open-hearted and intimate. It doesn't help that Kay appears to believe that arousal is a far more irresistible force for men than I do. Those problems did get in the way of my enjoyment occasionally, but I didn't think they ruined the book. The rest of the story is too good. Danica in particular is a wonderful character: thoughtful, brave, determined, and deeply honest with herself in that way that is typical of the best of Kay's characters. I wanted to read the book where Danica's and Leonora's stories stayed more entwined; alas, that's not the story Kay was writing. But I am in awe at Kay's ability to write characters who feel thoughtful and insightful even when working at cross purposes, in a world that mostly avoids simple villains, with a plot that never hinges on someone doing something stupid. I love reading about these people. Their triumphs, when they finally come, are deeply satisfying. Children of Earth and Sky is probably not in the top echelon of Kay's works with the Sarantine Mosaic and Under Heaven, but it's close. If you like his other writing, you will like this as well. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

19 February 2022

Shirish Agarwal: The King of Torts John Grisham

John Grisham The King of Torts Lots of things have been happening and I have been unable to be on top of things. There are so many things that happen and keep on happening and a lot of it is just not in control. For those who are watching Brexit, India is going through the same/similar phenomena just without Brexit. I would not like to delve much into Indian happenings as there is no sweet story to tell. Mum is in hospital (diabetic foot) so a lot of time to read books. So I have been making use of the time and at the same time learning or making connections from what I know of the history of the world which goes on enriching what I read all the time. For e.g. in this book, opens up with people who are on Crack. Now while the book is set in 2003, it is still relevant today for a lot of things. There have been rumors and whatnot that the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan supplied a lot of cocaine to black folks in the early 1980s. While that has never been proved, it has been proved somewhat that the CIA and even people in the state department were part of providing crack cocaine to African Americans (as they refer to blacks) in those days. Whether this was because of black power rising or non-profits like ACLU or other organizations is beyond me. I had also read that the GOP (Republicans/Grand Old Party) in the 1970s itself when computers became fast and could do a lot of processing, came to know if education would be as it is, then soon they would no voters. hence they decided to defund education in America, the end result being massive education loans to prospective students and perhaps partly the reason why China produces more than enough STEM graduates than the total number of Americans who become graduates. It is a shame nonetheless, that education in the U.S. is never top . This is somewhat from a Republican perspective. That is also the reason they are much anti-science.

Tort Cases India doesn t have either class-action suits or tort cases. But before we go headlong, this is what tort means. The book however is not about general tort cases but medical tort cases. The idea is that medical companies often produce medicines claiming they solve x or y issues but more often than not they take short-cuts to get approval from FDA and other regulators. And sooner or later those medicines can and do have harmful effects on the body, sometimes resulting in death. One of the more interesting articles that I read and probably also shared is the work done by Mr. Rob Bilott. While it is a typical David and Goliath story once you read the book, you realize that there are and were many difficulties in Mr. Rob s path that are never fully appreciated or even worked out. The biggest issue is the 8 years that he paid out of his own pocket to get the hundreds and thousands of people tested. How many of us would do that? And this is before proving causation of any disease, illness or anything to a particular environment, pollution etc. is hard even then and even now. Whatever money the victims receive afterward and whatever went to Mr. Rob Bilott would never compensate for the stress faced by him. And lawyers have to be careful, if they ask too little, they are not hurting the company and there is no change in its behavior. If they ask too much, the company can declare Chapter 11, bankruptcy so they have to keep the balance. There is also a lot of greed shown by the tort lawyer and while at the end he does tell about a company s nefarious activities that he suspects he could share his opinion only after giving up his law career. There is and was talk of tort-reform in the book but as can be seen if you reform tort there is just no way to punish such companies but that is in the U.S. There is also some observations that I have shared over the years, for e.g. Europe bans far more drugs than the U.S. does. A major part of it is perhaps due to the fact that Europe has 26/27 independent medical regulators and one country bans medicine for one or the other reason, the rest of Europe also bans the same. In the U.S. it is only the FDA. I have read they have had both funding and staffing issues for years and this is from before the pandemic. The Indian regulators are much worse. One could follow Priyanka Pulla s articles in Mint and others where she has shared how the regulator is corrupt and lazy and a combo of both. And all of this is besides how doctors are corrupted in India by marketing executives of pharma companies. That would be a whole article in itself. In short, when you read this book, there are so many thoughts that come alive when you are reading the book. The sad part is the book doesn t offer any solutions at all. John Grisham s books are usually legal thrillers and courtroom exchanges, this one though is and was very different. This one sadly doesn t take one to any conclusion apart from the fact that we live in an imperfect world and there don t seem to be any solutions. This was even shared by Rep. Katie Porter in her pinned tweet. The Abbvie s of the world will continue to take common people like you and me for a ride.

18 February 2022

Colin Watson: Launchpad now supports SSH Ed25519 keys and RSA SHA-2 signatures

As of 2022-02-16, Launchpad supports a couple of features on its SSH endpoints (git.launchpad.net, bazaar.launchpad.net, ppa.launchpad.net, and upload.ubuntu.com) that it previously didn t: Ed25519 public keys (a well-regarded format, supported by OpenSSH since 6.5 in 2014) and signatures with existing RSA public keys using SHA-2 rather than SHA-1 (supported by OpenSSH since 7.2 in 2016). I m hesitant to call these features new , since they ve been around for a long time elsewhere, and people might quite reasonably ask why it s taken us so long. The problem has always been that Launchpad can t really use a normal SSH server such as OpenSSH because it needs features that aren t practical to implement that way, such as virtual filesystems and dynamic user key authorization against the Launchpad database. Instead, we use Twisted Conch, which is a very extensible Python SSH implementation that has generally served us well. The downside is that, because it s an independent implementation and one that occupies a relatively small niche, it often lags behind in terms of newer protocol features. Catching up to this point has been something we ve been working on for around five years, although it s taken a painfully long time for a variety of reasons which I thought some people might find interesting to go into, at least people who have the patience for details of the SSH protocol. Many of the delays were my own responsibility, although realistically we probably couldn t have added Ed25519 support before OpenSSL/cryptography work that landed in 2019. Phew! Thanks to everyone who works on Twisted, cryptography, and OpenSSL - it s been really useful to be able to build on solid lower-level cryptographic primitives - and to those who helped with code review.

17 February 2022

Abiola Ajadi: Modifying expectations!

Hi everyone! In today s blog post I will be talking about the progress i have made , the hurdles I encountered and how my current progress differs from my original expectations. I applied to Debian community with a particular timeline and expected it to go that way, but after starting out i realized i had alot to learn in Ruby and the codebase. So far i have worked on issues i am proud of and when i use Debci i see some of the changes i added for example the self-service form remembering values that was filled after an error message / it reloads. Another milestone for me is writing test cases, I learnt about test driven development which is an awesome process is developing software. Looking back at the beginning before the internship started I can see how much experience i have gained and also improvement I made.

Road block Some tasks took longer than expected for example writing the test cases as i was new to this way of building and also i had to refactor some code, I was very careful doing this as i wanted to make sure i do it the right way.

The journey continues I had to modify my initial expectations and my mentors have been so supportive. I hope to add more features to Debci and also write more tests. So far, it has been a great experience. Till next time!

16 February 2022

Joerg Jaspert: Funny CPU usage - rewrite it in rust

Munin plugin and it s CPU usage (and a rewrite in rust) With my last blog on the Munin plugins CPU usage I complained about Oracle Linux doing something really weird, driving up CPU usage when running a fairly simple Shell script with a loop in. Turns out, I was wrong. It is not OL7 that makes this problem show up. It appears to be something from the Oracle Enterprise Database installed on the system, that makes it go this crazy. I ve now had this show up on RedHat7 systems too, and the only thing that singles them out is that overpriced index card system on it. I still don t know what the actual reason for this is, and honestly, don t have enough time to dig deep into it. It is not something that a bit of debugging/tracing finds - especially as it does start out all nice, and accumulates more CPU usage over time. Which would suggest some kind of leak leading to more processing needed, or so - but then it is only CPU affected, not memory, and ONLY on systems with that database on. Meh. Well, I recently (December vacation) got me to look deeper into learning Rust. My first project with that was a multi-threaded milter to do some TLS checks on outgoing mails (kind of fun customer requirements there), and heck, Rust did make that a surprisingly easy task in the end. (Comparing the old, single-threaded C code with my multi-threaded Rust version, a third of the code length doing more, and being way easier to extend with wanted new features is nice). So my second project was Replace this shell script with a Rust binary doing the same . Hell yeah. Didn t take that long and looks good (well, the result. Not sure about the code. People knowing rust may possibly scratch out eyes when looking at it). Not yet running for that long, but even compared to the shell on systems that did not show the above mentioned bugs (read: Debian, without Oracle foo), uses WAY less CPU (again, mentioned by highly accurate outputs of the top command). So longer term I hope this version won t run into the same problems as the shell one. Time will tell. If you are interested in the code, go find it here, and if you happen to know rust and not run away screaming, I m happy for tips and code fixes, I m sure this can be improved lots. (At least cargo clippy is happy, so basics are done ) Update: According to munin, the rust version creates 14 forks/second less than the shell one. And the fork rate change is same on machines with/without the database. That 14 is more than I would have guessed. CPU usage as expected: only on the problem hosts with Oracle Database installed you can see a huge difference, otherwise it is not an easily noticable difference. That is, on an otherwise idle host (munin graph shows average use of low one-digit numbers), one can see a drop of around 1% in the CPU usage graph from munin. Ohwell, poor Shell.

Robert McQueen: Forward the Foundation

Earlier this week, Neil McGovern announced that he is due to be stepping down as the Executive Director as the GNOME Foundation later this year. As the President of the board and Neil s effective manager together with the Executive Committee, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on his achievements in the past 5 years and explain a little about what the next steps would be. Since joining in 2017, Neil has overseen a productive period of growth and maturity for the Foundation, increasing our influence both within the GNOME project and the wider Free and Open Source Software community. Here s a few highlights of what he s achieved together with the Foundation team and the community: Recognizing and appreciating the amazing progress that GNOME has made with Neil s support, the search for a new Executive Director provides the opportunity for the Foundation board to set the agenda and next high-level goals we d like to achieve together with our new Executive Director. In terms of the desktop, applications, technology, design and development processes, whilst there are always improvements to be made, the board s general feeling is that thanks to the work of our amazing community of contributors, GNOME is doing very well in terms of what we produce and publish. Recent desktop releases have looked great, highly polished and well-received, and the application ecosystem is growing and improving through new developers and applications bringing great energy at the moment. From here, our largest opportunity in terms of growing the community and our user base is being able to articulate the benefits of what we ve produced to a wider public audience, and deliver impact which allows us to secure and grow new and sustainable sources of funding. For individuals, we are able to offer an exceedingly high quality desktop experience and a broad range of powerful applications which are affordable to all, backed by a nonprofit which can be trusted to look after your data, digital security and your best interests as an individual. From the perspective of being a public charity in the US, we also have the opportunity to establish programs that draw upon our community, technology and products to deliver impact such as developing employable skills, incubating new Open Source contributors, learning to program and more. For our next Executive Director, we will be looking for an individual with existing experience in that nonprofit landscape, ideally with prior experience establishing and raising funds for programs that deliver impact through technology, and appreciation for the values that bring people to Free, Open Source and other Open Culture organizations. Working closely with the existing members, contributors, volunteers and whole GNOME community, and managing our relationships with the Advisory Board and other key partners, we hope to find a candidate that can build public awareness and help people learn about, use and benefit from what GNOME has built over the past two decades. Neil has agreed to stay in his position for a 6 month transition period, during which he will support the board in our search for a new Executive Director and support a smooth hand-over. Over the coming weeks we will publish the job description for the new ED, and establish a search committee who will be responsible for sourcing and interviewing candidates to make a recommendation to the board for Neil s successor a hard act to follow! I m confident the community will join me and the board in personally thanking Neil for his 5 years of dedicated service in support of GNOME and the Foundation. Should you have any queries regarding the process, or offers of assistance in the coming hiring process, please don t hesitate to join the discussion or reach out directly to the board.

15 February 2022

Norbert Preining: NVEnc for Arch Linux

I have been using NVEnc a NVIDIA hardware based encoder for quite some time now. Mostly because I was pointed to it by FastFlix, one of the best video en/recoding frontend programs out there. Having switched to Arch Linux lately, I realized there is no package of it perfect time to start contributing and preparing an AUR package for it. Since it is my first package I made for Arch, it took me a bit of reading through the excellent wiki of Arch, and comparing a few other PKGBUILD files. After a few trials (and several errors) finally the package seems ready to me: nvenc @ AUR. More expert Arch packagers, please leave comments or contact me with suggestions for improvements, all of that is more than welcome! That said, now back to some video encoding (just got all the James Bond on BluRay ;-). Enjoy

14 February 2022

Neil McGovern: Handing over

In 2017, I was attending FOSDEM when GNOME announced that I was to become the new Executive Director of the Foundation. Now, nearly 5 years later, I ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader. I ve been working closely with Rob and the rest of the board to ensure that there s an extended and smooth transition, and that GNOME can continue to go from strength to strength. GNOME has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and a lot has happened in that time. As a Foundation, we ve gone from a small team of 3, to employing people to work on marketing, investment in technical frameworks, conference organisation and much more beyond. We ve become the default desktop on all major Linux distributions. We ve launched Flathub to help connect application developers directly to their users. We ve dealt with patent suits, trademarks, and bylaw changes. We ve moved our entire development platform to GitLab. We released 10 new GNOME releases, GTK 4 and GNOME 40. We ve reset our relationships with external community partners and forged our way towards that future we all dream of where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. For that future, we now need to build on that work. We need to look beyond the traditional role that desktop Linux has held and this is something that GNOME has always been able to do. I ve shown that the Foundation can be more than just a bank account for the project, and I believe that this is vital in our efforts to build a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. For this, we need to establish programs that align not only with the unique community and technology of the project, but also deliver those benefits to the wider world and drive real impact. 5 years has been the longest that the Foundation has had an ED for, and certainly the longest that I ve held a single post for. I remember my first GUADEC as ED. As you may know, like many of you, I m used to giving talks at conferences and yet I have never been so nervous as when I walked out on that stage. However, the welcome and genuine warmth that I received that day, and the continued support throughout the last 5 years makes me proud of what a welcoming and amazing community GNOME is. Thank you all.

13 February 2022

Gunnar Wolf: Got to boot a RPi Zero 2 W with Debian

About a month ago, I got tired of waiting for the newest member of the Raspberry product lineup to be sold in Mexico, and I bought it from a Chinese reseller through a big online shopping platform. I paid quite a bit of premium (~US$85 instead of the advertised US$15), and got it delivered ten days later Anyway, it s known this machine does not yet boot mainline Linux. The vast majority of ARM systems require the bootloader to load a Device Tree file, presenting the hardware characteristics map. And while the RPi Zero 2 W (hey what an awful and confusing naming scheme they chose!) is mostly similar to a RPi3B+, it is not quite the same thing. A kernel with RPi3B+ s device tree will refuse to boot. Anyway, I started digging, and found that some days ago Stephan Wahren sent a patch to the linux-arm-kernel mailing list with a matching device tree. Read the patch! It s quite simple to read (what is harder is to know where each declaration should go, if you want to write your own, of course). It basically includes all basic details for the main chip in the RPi3 family (BCM2837), pulls in also the declarations from the BCM2836 present in the RPi2, and adds the necessary bits for the USB OTG connection and the WiFi and Bluetooth declarations. Registers the model name as Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which you can easily see in the following photo, informs the kernel it has 512MB RAM, and Well, really, it s an easy device tree to read, don t be shy! So, I booted my RPi 3B+ with a freshly downloaded Bookworm image, installed and unpacked linux-source-5.15, applied Stephan s patch, and added the following for the DTB to be generated in the arm64 tree as well: 
--- /dev/null   2022-01-26 23:35:40.747999998 +0000
+++ arch/arm64/boot/dts/broadcom/bcm2837-rpi-zero-2-w.dts       2022-02-13 06:28:29.968429953 +0000
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+#include "arm/bcm2837-rpi-zero-2-w.dts"
Then, ran a simple make dtbs, and Failed, because bcm283x-rpi-wifi-bt.dtsi is not yet in the kernel . OK, no worries: Getting wireless to work is a later step. I commented out the lines causing conflict (10, 33-35, 134-136), and: 
root@rpi3-20220212:/usr/src/linux-source-5.15# make dtbs
  DTC     arch/arm64/boot/dts/broadcom/bcm2837-rpi-zero-2-w.dtb
Great! Just copied over that generated file to /boot/firmware/, moved the SD over to my RPiZ2W, and behold! It boots! When I bragged about it in #debian-raspberrypi, steev suggested me to pull in the WiFi patch, that has also been submitted (but not yet accepted) for kernel inclusion. I did so, uncommented the lines I modified, and built again. It builds correctly, and again copied the DTB over. It still does not find the WiFi; dmesg still complains about a missing bit of firmware (failed to load brcm/brcmfmac43430b0-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-2-w.bin). Steev pointed out it can be downloaded from RPi Distro s GitHub page, but I called it a night and didn t pursue it any further ;-) So I understand this post is still a far cry from saying our images properly boot under a RPi 0 2 W , but we will get there

12 February 2022

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: apt-offline 1.8.4

apt-offline 1.8.4 apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released. This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are:
  • Better GPG signature handling
  • Support for verifying InRelease files

Changelog 
apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium
  [ Debian Janitor ]
  * Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed.
  [ Paul Wise ]
  * Clarify file type in unknown file message
  * Fix typos
  * Remove trailing whitespace
  * Update LICENSE file to match official GNU version
  * Complain when there are no valid keyrings instead of missing keyrings
  * Make all syncrhronised files world readable
  * Fix usage of indefinite articles
  * Only show the APT Offline GUI once in the menu
  * Update out of date URLs
  * Fix date and whitespace issues in the manual page
  * Replace stereotyping with an appropriate word
  * Switch more Python shebangs to Python 3
  * Correct usage of the /tmp/ directory
  * Fix YAML files
  * Fix usage of the log API
  * Make the copying of changelog lines less brittle
  * Do not split keyring paths on whitespace
  [ Ritesh Raj Sarraf ]
  * Drop the redundant import of the apt module.
    Thanks to github/dandelionred
  * Fix deprecation of get_bugs() in debianbts
  * Drop the unused IgnoredBugTypes
  * Set encoding for files when opening
  * Better error logging when apt fails
  * Don't mandate a default option
  * Demote metadata errors to verbose
  * Also log an error message for every failed .deb url
  * Check hard for the url type
  * Check for ascii armored signature files.
    Thanks to David Klnischkies
  * Add MIME type for InRelease files
  * Drop patch 0001-Drop-the-redundant-import-of-the-apt-module.patch.
    Now part of the 1.8.4 release
  * Prepare release 1.8.3
  * Prepare release 1.8.4
  * debian packaging
    + Bump debhelper compatibility to 13
    + Update install files
  [ Dean Anderson ]
  * [#143] Added support for verifying InRelease files
 -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org>  Sat, 12 Feb 2022 18:52:58 +0530

Resources
  • Tarball and Zip archive for apt-offline are available here
  • Packages should be available in Debian.
  • Development for apt-offline is currently hosted here

11 February 2022

Holger Levsen: 20220211-inbox-zero-in-2022-and-beyond

Back to the old and new normal: inbox zero So, a long time ago, on the last two days of January 2020 I had reached zero unread mails in my inbox and all mailing lists and then... some stuff kept me distracted for a (too) long time... And then two weeks ago on the 29th of January 2022, I've reached inbox zero again, and again on the 30th and then I had a hardware issue and couldn't really use my computer for two days (one day trying to fix, the other copying data around...) and thus only on February 2nd I've hit zero unread mails again and again and again, every day for the last 9 days up until today. Yay! I'm sure there will be days (and weeks) where I won't manage to deal with all my incoming mail everyday, but I surely hope I'll manage at least once a month. As I did in 2019 when I started tracking this :) Reaching inbox zero every day is good for several reasons and probably the most important one is peace of mind. Even though the incoming flood of email never really stops, by reaching inbox zero I can achieve the feeling that I've dealt with all my emails for the day and that I can put email off my focus, at least for that day and despite emails coming in... ...and then email is too easy to be used as a todo list. Narf. So I guess I need to improve those workflows eventually as well. And offline days, do you remember those? Fully offline even, and by choice?!!

9 February 2022

Kentaro Hayashi: Writing Debian New Contributor Guide

Recently, I've wrote Debian New Cotributor Guide in Japanese. Here is the photo of on-demand printed version.
f:id:kenhys:20220207163644j:plainDebian New Contributor Guide
This book (JIS-B5 128p) was published for online event - Techbookfest 12th. It covers how to package a new software in Debian. techbookfest.org Mostly PDF format is preferred, and a few printed versions were distributed.

7 February 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Embers of War

Review: Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell
Series: Embers of War #1
Publisher: Titan Books
Copyright: February 2018
ISBN: 1-78565-519-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 312
The military leadership of the Outward faction of humanity was meeting on the forest world of Pelapatarn, creating an opportunity for the Conglomeration to win the war at a stroke. Resistance was supposed to be minimal, since the Outward had attempted to keep the conference secret rather than massing forces to protect it. But the Outward resistance was stronger than expected, and Captain Deal's forces would not be able to locate and assassinate the Outward leadership before they could escape. She therefore followed orders from above her and ordered the four incoming Carnivore heavy cruisers to jump past the space battle and bomb the planet. The entire planet. The Carnivores' nuclear and antimatter weaponry reduced the billion-year-old sentient jungle of Pelapatarn to ash. Three years later, Sal Konstanz is a ship captain for the House of Reclamation, a strictly neutral search and rescue force modeled after a long-vanished alien fleet that prioritizes preservation of life above all else. Anyone can join Reclamation, provided that they renounce their previous alliances and devote themselves to the Reclamation cause. Sal and her crew member Alva Clay were Outward. The ship medic was Conglomeration. So was the ship: the Trouble Dog, a sentient AI heavy cruiser built to carry an arsenal of weapons and three hundred crew, and now carrying three humans and a Druff mechanic. More precisely, the Trouble Dog was one of the four Carnivores that destroyed Pelapatarn. Meanwhile, Ona Sudak, a popular war poet, is a passenger on a luxury cruise on the liner Geest van Amsterdam, which is making an unscheduled stop in the star system known as the Gallery. The Gallery is the home of the Objects: seven planets that, ten thousand years earlier, were carved by unknown aliens into immense sculptures for unknown reasons. The Objects appear to be both harmless and mysterious, making them an irresistible tourist attraction for the liner passengers. The Gallery is in disputed space, but no one was expecting serious trouble. They certainly weren't expecting the Geest van Amsterdam to be attacked and brought down on the Object known as the Brain, killing nearly everyone aboard. The Trouble Dog is the closest rescue ship. This book was... fine. It's a perfectly serviceable science fiction novel that didn't stand out for me, which I think says more about the current excellent state of the science fiction field than about this book. When I was a teenager reading Asimov, Niven, and Heinlein, I would have devoured this. It compares favorably to minor Niven or Heinlein (The Integral Trees, for example, or Double Star), but the bar for excellent science fiction is just so much higher now. The best character in this book (and the reason why I read it) is the Trouble Dog. I love science fiction about intelligent space ships, and she did not disappoint. The AI ships in this book are partly made from human and dog neurons, so their viewpoint is mostly human but with some interesting minor variations. And the Trouble Dog would be a great character even if she weren't an intelligent ship: ethical, aggressive, daring, and introspective, with a nuanced relationship with her human crew. Unfortunately, Embers of War has four other viewpoint characters, and Powell chose to write them all in the first person. First person narration depends heavily on a memorable and interesting character because the reader is so thoroughly within their perspective. This works great for the Trouble Dog, and is fine for Nod, the Druff who serves as the ship mechanic. (Nod's perspective is intriguing, short, almost free-verse musings, rather than major story segments.) Sal, the ship captain, is a bit of a default character, but I didn't mind her much. Neither of the other two viewpoint characters are interesting enough to warrant the narrative attention. The Conglomerate agent Ashton Childe has such an uninteresting internal monologue that I would have liked the character better if he'd only been seen through other people's viewpoints, and although Powell needs some way to show Ona Sudak's view of events, I didn't think her thoughts added much to the story. The writing is adequate but a bit clunky: slightly flat descriptions, a bit too predictable at the sentence level, and rarely that memorable. There is a bit of fun world-building of the ancient artifact variety and a couple of decent set pieces (and one rather-too-obvious Matrix homage that I didn't think was as effective as the author did), but most of the story is focused on characters navigating their lives and processing trauma from the war. The story kept me turning the pages with interest, but I also doubt it will surprise anyone who has read much science fiction. I suspect a lot of it is setup for the following two books of the trilogy, and there are plenty of hooks for more stories in this universe. I really wanted a first-person story from the perspective of the Trouble Dog, possibly with some tight third-person interludes showing Ona Sudak's story. What I got instead was entertaining but not memorable enough to stand out in the current rich state of science fiction. I think I'm invested enough in this story to want to read the next book, though, so that's still a recommendation of sorts. Followed by Fleet of Knives. Rating: 6 out of 10

6 February 2022

Christian Kastner: New release of sbuild-qemu Utilities

I just released a new version of the sbuild-qemu utilities as part of sbuild. Notable changes are support for new architectures, and a new sbuild-qemu-boot utility to start a VM and interact with its console directly through the terminal. As a reminder, these utilities leverage functionality in vmdb2, autopkgtest, and sbuild to use QEMU VM images for building and testing packages in strongly isolated environments and/or on foreign architectures and/or that might break the system. For example, the following would create an image for sid on the ppc64el architecture, and then use that image to build a package: 
# Creating an image still requires root, unfortunately
$ sudo sbuild-qemu-create --arch ppc64el -o simple.img unstable http://deb.debian.org/debian
$ sudo chown <user>:<group> simple.img

# Building a package doesn't
$ sbuild-qemu --arch ppc64el --image simple.img -d unstable [<other sbuild options>] FOO.dsc

# Neither does updating the image (runs apt-get update && dist-upgrade in the VM)
$ sbuild-qemu-update --arch ppc64el simple.img
Since the sbuild-qemu utilities build on top of the autopkgtest utilities, the created images can also be used for running autopkgtests: 
$ autopkgtest <test params> -- qemu --dpkg-architecture ppc64el simple.img
sbuild-qemu-boot This new release now ships with sbuild-qemu-boot which boots a VM directly to a console, where it can be used as a porterbox, or to evaluate changes that might break the system, etc. By default, the VM is started in read-only mode, so changes are not saved when the VM is shut down. This can be changed with the --read-write option. With the --shared-dir option, a directory can be shared with the host. It will be mounted at /shared within the VM. 
$ sbuild-qemu-boot --arch ppc64el --shared-dir /path/to/folder simple.img
Note that the console in the VM is 24x80 by default. This can be changed within the VM with stty to match your host, e.g.: 
$ stty rows M cols N
I'm still pondering whether to automate this in sbuild-qemu-create.
New Architectures Thanks to updates to vmdb2 and autopkgtest, the sbuild-qemu utilities now also support new architectures. Currently, amd64, i386, arm64, armhf, and ppc64el are supported, so most of the official architectures. However, there's an autopkgtest issue (#10031002) with the host-guest communication bridge on armhf and on multi-core arm64 (single-core seems to work fine) that currently makes images unusable for sbuild and autopkgtest. I haven't yet figured out what the problem seems to be, but for the time being, the images can still be used with sbuild-qemu-boot.

5 February 2022

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2022

FTP master This month I accepted 342 and rejected 57 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 366. Lately I was asked: Is it ftpmaster s opinion and policy that there is no difference in NEW queue review process between bin and src? This is a yes/no-question and in this generality the answer is clearly: Every package in NEW needs a full review. Of course there are circumstances with exceptions. For example after an upload of -1, which would get a full review, the upload of -2 afterwards, introducing a new binary package, would get a much faster review. In this case it would make sense to ping on IRC and draw attention to this. Nevertheless the evaluation of a light review might differ between the maintainer and the person doing the review. Debian LTS This was my ninety-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of: I also started to work on security support for golang packages. Though this sounds like an easy task, the devel is in the details.
As CVEs need to be fixed in unstable first, at the moment it looks like this is the most time consuming task. I will report later on my journey to fix open CVEs in golang-github-russellhaering-goxmldsig Further I worked on packages in NEW on security-master and injected missing sources. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties and attended an LTS meeting on IRC. Debian ELTS This month was the forty-third ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: Further I worked on an update for apache2 Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian Printing I was finally able to upload a new version of hplip and Ubuntu is now able to build new snaps for their next release.
Altogether I uploaded new upstream versions or improved packaging of: Now the dashboard looks rather good and my next task for February is an update of cups. Debian Astro As there was a release of version 1.9.4 of INDI and indi-3rdparty, I also uploaded the new version of all INDI drivers and releated libs from indi-3rdparty. Other stuff This month I uploaded lots of new upstream releases of golang packages.

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Migrating from ledger to hledger

I first started using ledger the original plain-text accounting software in 2017. Since then, I had been pretty happy with my accounting routine, but grew a little annoyed by the repetitive manual work I had to do to assign recurring transactions to the right account. To make things easier, I had a collection of bash scripts to parse and convert the CSV files from my bank's website1 into ledger entries. They were of course ugly, unreadable piles of sed-grep-regex and did not let met achieve the automation complexity I longed for. Dissatisfied with ledger's features, I decided to migrate to hledger. Contrary to ledger, hledger comes with a CSV parser one can use to import and classify recurring transactions automagically. Having a proper DSL for this makes all the difference: I can easily add new rules and understand the old ones. In the end, I get a very consistent result, something my old bash scripts weren't great at. Here is what my debit.csv.rules file looks like. It is used to tell hledger how CSV data from my debit card should be parsed: 
# skip the headings line:
skip 1
# assign fields
fields , , , date, , description, , amount2-in, amount2-out
# assign account where the money comes from
# 99 to get it at the bottom of the transaction
account99 assets:checking
include matchers.rules
As you can see, the rules matching transactions to specific accounts are imported from another file, matchers.rules. I'm doing this since I want to be able to use the same set of rules for debit and credit and use the cards interchangeably. Here's a snippet of my matchers.rules file: 
# house
if Loyer/bail
  account2  expenses:rent
# leisure
if PAYPAL .*STEAM GAMES
  account2  expenses:leisure:videogame
if PAYPAL .*BANDCAMP
  account2  expenses:leisure:music
Using this ruleset, a transaction looking like this: 
"SOME ACCOUNT DESC","111111","EOP","2022/01/03",00002,"Loyer/bail","",521.00,"","","","",""
Would be transformed into: 
2022-01-03 Loyer/bail
    expenses:rent                               521.00
    assets:checking
Sadly, hledger's CSV rules won't let you do arithmetics. This can be useful when you know a certain transaction needs to be split between accounts. This is where auto postings come in. They are a way to specify arbitrary rules when an account is encountered. Going back to my previous rent example, I split it 50/50 with my SO using this rule: 
= expenses:rent
    assets:receivable:rent    *0.5
    assets:checking
After it is applied, the final transaction looks like this: 
2022-01-03 Loyer/bail  ; modified:
    expenses:rent                               521.00
    assets:receivable:rent                      260.50  ; generated-posting: = expenses:rent
    assets:checking
Neat eh? Here is the little bash script I've written to automate all these steps: 
 #!/bin/bash
#
# Convert CSV to ledger using hledger
declare -a assets=("credit" "debit")
# Read the array values with space
for i in "$ assets[@] "
do
  if test -f "$i.csv"
  then
    # convert to ledger
    LEDGER=$(hledger -f "$i.csv" --rules-file rules/"$i.csv".rules print)
    # add auto_postings
    LEDGER=$(printf "include rules/auto_postings.ledger\n\n$LEDGER\n"   hledger print -f- --auto)
    # remove superfluous assets:checking lines
    LEDGER=$(printf "$LEDGER"   sed '/assets:checking \+; generated.\+/d')
    printf "$LEDGER" > "$i.ledger"
  else
    printf "File $i.csv does not exist\n"
  fi
done
Migrating to hledger, I've cut down the time I spend on accounting from 1 hour per month to about 10 minutes, all while making my workflow much cleaner. Many thanks to the kind folks on #hledger @irc.libera.chat for the help!
  1. One for my checking+savings account and another one for my credit card.

4 February 2022

Ian Jackson: EUDCC QR codes vs NHS Travel barcodes vs TAC Verify

The EU Digital Covid Certificate scheme is a format for (digitally signed) vaccination status certificates. Not only EU countries participate - the UK is now a participant in this scheme. I am currently on my way to go skiing in the French Alps. So I needed a certificate that would be accepted in France. AFAICT the official way to do this is to get the international certificate from the NHS, and take it to a French pharmacy who will convert it into something suitably French. (AIUI the NHS international barcode is the same regardless of whether you get it via the NHS website, the NHS app, or a paper letter. NB that there is one barcode per vaccine dose so you have to get the right one - probably that means your booster since there s a 9 month rule!) I read on an forum somewhere that you could use the French TousAntiCovid app to convert the barcode. So I thought I would try that. The TousAntiCovid is Free Softare and on F-Droid, so I was happy to install and use it for this. I also used the French TAC Verify app to check to see what barcodes were accepted. (I found an official document addressed to French professionals recommending this as an option for verifying the status of visitors to one s establishment.) Unfortunately this involves a googlified phone, but one could use a burner phone or ask a friend who s bitten that bullet already. I discovered that, indeed: This made me curious. I used a QR code reader to decode both barcodes. The decodings were identical! A long string of guff starting HC1:. AIUI it is an encoded JWT. But there was a difference in the framing: Binary Eye reported that the NHS barcode used error correction level M (medium, aka 15%). The TousAntiCovid barcode used level L (low, 7%). I had my QR code software regenerate a QR code at level M for the data from the TousAntiCovid code. The result was a QR code which is identical (pixel-wise) to the one from the NHS. So the only difference is the error correction level. Curiously, both L (low, generated by TousAntiCovid, accepted by TAC Verify) and M (medium, generated by NHS, rejected by TAC Verify) are lower than the Q (25") recommended by what I think is the specification. This is all very odd. But the upshot is that I think you can convert the NHS international barcode into something that should work in France simply by passing it through any QR code software to re-encode it at error correction level L (7%). But if you re happy to use the TousAntiCovid app it s probably a good way to store them. I guess I ll find out when I get to France if the converted NHS barcodes work in real establishments. Thanks to the folks behind sanipasse.fr for publishing some helpful backround info and operating a Free Software backed public verification service. Footnote To compare the QR codes pixelwise, I roughly cropped the NHS PDF image using a GUI tool, and then on each of the two images used pnmcrop (to trim the border), pnmscale (to rescale the one-pixel-per-pixel output from Binary Eye) and pnmarith -difference to compare them (producing a pretty squirgly image showing just the pixel edges due to antialiasing).

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2 February 2022

Norbert Preining: Mechanical keyboards: Pulsar PCMK

Mechanical keyboards the big fat rabbit hole you can disappear I started using mechanical keyboards about a year ago, with a Drevo Blademaster Pro (review coming up), but recently got a Pulsar PCML TKL keyboard in a build-it-yourself order.
The Drevo Blademaster Pro I am using is great, but doesn t allow changing switches at all. So I was contemplating getting a mechanical keyboard that allows for arbitrary switches. My biggest problem here is that I am used to the Japanese JIS layout which gives you a lot more keys which come in extremely handy in Emacs or when typing various languages. Fortunately, APlusX a Korean company manufactures a lot of gear under the Pulsar name, and supports also JIS layout. In addition, they have a great web site to customize your keyboard (layout, color, switch, keycaps) and send you a build-yourself kit for a very reasonable prize at least in Japan. So I got my first keyboard to put together myself . how was I nervous getting all the stuff out! Despite being a DIY keyboard, it is very easy (and they offer also pre-assembly options, too!). You don t need to solder the PCB or similar, the steps are more or less: (i) put in the switches, and (ii) add the key caps. I started with the first, putting the switches (I went with Kailh Box Brown tactile ones) into the PCB board
Well, that was easy at least I thought until I started testing the keys and realized that about 20 of them didn t work!! Pulling out the switches again I saw that I twisted a pin on each of them. One by one I straightened the pins and reinserted them very carefully. Lesson learned! At the end all the switches were on the board and reacted to key presses. Next step was adding the key caps. Again, those are not really special key caps, but simply style and sufficient for me. Of course I messed up 0 and O (which have different heights) and at first were confused about different arrow options etc, but since plugging in and pulling out key caps is very easy, at the end all the caps were in place.
With the final keyboard assembled (see top photo), I connected it to my Linux system and started typing around. And first of all, the typing experience was nice. The Kailh Box Brown switches have a bit stronger actuation point then the switches I have in the Blademaster Pro (which are Cherry MX Brown ones), but above all the sound is a bit deeper and thumbier , which really gives a nice feeling. The keyboard also allows changing the RGB lightening via the keyboard (color, pattern, speed, brightness etc). There is a configuration software for macros etc, unfortunately it only works on Windows (and I couldn t get it to work with Wine, either), a sour point One more negative point is that the LED backlight doesn t have a timeout, that is, it stays on all the time. The Drevo I have turns off after a configured number of seconds, and turns completely black something I really like and miss on the Pulsar. Another difference to the Blademaster is connectivity: While the Blademaster offers cable, bluetooth, and wireless (with dongle), the Pulsar only offers cable (USB-C). Not a real deal-breaker for me, since I use it at my desktop and really don t need wireless/bluetooth capabilities, but still. I have been using the Pulsar now for a few days without even touching the Drevo (besides comparing typing sounds and actuation points), and really like the Pulsar. I think it is hard to get a fully configurable and changeable mechanical keyboard for a similar prize. There is one last thing that I really really miss an ergonomic mechanical keyboard. Of course there are some, like the ErgoDox EZ or the Kinesis Advantage 2, but they don t offer JIS layout (and are very expensive). Then there is the Truly Ergonomic CLEAVE keyboard, which is really great, but quite expensive. I guess I have to dive down the rabbit hole even more and make my own PCB and ergonomic keyboard!

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