I wanted to start using (neo)mutt's sidebar and I wanted a way of separating groups of mail folders in the list. To achieve that I interleaved a couple of fake "divider" folder names. It looks like this: This was spurred on by an attempt to revamp my personal organisation. I've been using mutt for at least 20 years (these days neomutt), which, by default, does not show you a list of mail folders all the time. The default view is an index of your default mailbox, from which you can view a mail (pager view), switch to a mailbox, or do a bunch of other things, some of which involve showing a list of mailboxes. But the list is not omnipresent. That's somewhat of a feature, if you believe that you don't need to see that list until you are actually planning to pick from it. There's an old and widespread "sidebar" patch for mutt (which neomutt ships out of the box). It reserves a portion of the left-hand side of the terminal to render a list of mailboxes. It felt superfluous to me so I never really thought to use it, until now: I wanted to make my Inbox functional again, and to achieve that, I needed to move mail out of it which was serving as a placeholder for a particular Action, or as a reminder that I was Waiting on a response. What was stopping me was a feeling I'd forget to check other mailboxes. So, I need to have them up in my face all the time to remind me. Key for me, to make it useful, is to control the ordering of mailboxes and to divide them up using the interleaved fake mailboxes. The key configuration is therefore

set sidebar_sort_method = 'unsorted'
mailboxes =INBOX =Action =Waiting
mailboxes '=   ~~~~~~~~' # divider
...

My groupings, for what it's worth, are: the key functional mailboxes (INBOX/Action/Waiting) come first; last, is reference ('2023' is the name of my current Archive folder; the other folders listed are project-specific reference and the two mailing lists I still directly subscribe to). Sandwiched in between is currently a single mailbox which is for a particular project for which it makes sense to have a separate mailbox. Once that's gone, so will that middle section. For my work mail I do something similar, but the groupings are

1. INBOX/Action/Waiting
2. Reference (Sent Mail, Starred Mail)
3. More reference (internal mailing lists I need to closely monitor)
4. Even more reference (less important mailing lists)

As with everything, these approaches are under constant review.

Posted on May 5, 2023

When I travel for a few days I don t usually¹ bring any other shoe than the ones I m wearing, plus some kind of slippers for use inside hotel / B&B rooms. It s good for not carrying useless weight, but it always leave me with a vague feeling of what if my only shoes break , followed by on a Sunday, when the shops are closed . So I started to think in the general direction of hiking sandals, shoes that are designed to be worn when resting, and lightweight to carry, but are a passable substitute for regular shoes in case of an accident to the main ones, maybe with the help of an extra pair of socks² (or when crossing fords, but that s not really a usecase I have). My requirements are easier than the ones for real hiking sandals, since I m only going to be walking on paved streets (or at most easy unpaved ones), and the weight considerations are a thing, but not as strict as if I had to carry these on my back while hiking many hours in a day. My first attempt was a pair of hiking sandals from things I already had in my stash, with vibram soles, neoprene padding and polyester webbing. After a couple fixes they sort of worked, but they had a few big issues.

• While comfortable when worn, the neoprene made the sandals hard to make, as it tended to deform while being assembled.
• Polyester webbing is slippery. Some strips of hot glue in strategical places helped, but they weren t perfect and in time they are peeling off.
• Most importantly, to make the sandals stable enough to wear while walking I had to add a strap around the ankle that needs closing: this makes it a bit of a hassle to use the sandals, say, when waking up in the middle of the night for metabolic reasons.

And then, one day I made my linen slippers, and that lead me to think again about the problem: what if I made a pair of slippers with a rubber sole, technical materials and maybe uppers made of net, so that they would be lightweight, breathable and possibly even still suitable in case I ever need to cross a ford. This was also readily attainable from the stash: some polycotton for the sole lining, elastic mesh for the uppers, EVA foam for padding and vibram soles. I decided to assemble most of them by machine, and it was quick and painless (possibly also thanks to the elasticity of the mesh) For the soles I may have gone a bit overboard with the vibram claw, but:

• I already had it in the stash;
• if I need to wear them on an unpaved road, they are going to be suitable;
• why not?

The soles were glued to the slippers rather than being sewn, as I don t think there is a reasonable way to sew these soles; I hope it won t cause durability issues later on (if it does, there will be an update) As for the finished weight, at 235 g for the pair I thought I could do better, but apparently shoes are considered ultralight if they are around 500 g? Using just one layer of mesh rather than two would probably help, but it would have required a few changes to the pattern, and anyway I don t really to carry them around all day. I ve also added a loop of fabric (polycotton) to the centre back to be able to hang the slippers to the backpack when wet or dirty; a bit of narrow webbing may have been better, but I didn t have any in my stash. The pattern is the same as that used for the linen slippers, and of course it s released as #FreeSoftWear. I ve worn these for a few days around the home and they worked just fine, except for the fact that I had to re-glue the sole in a few places (but I suspect it was glued badly in the first place, since the other sole had no issues). Right now I have no plans to travel, so I don t know how much I will be able to test these in the next few months, but sooner or later I will (or I ll keep wearing them at home after I ve thoroughly tested the linen ones), and if there are issues I will post them here on the blog (and add a link to this post).

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1. the exception would be when I m also bringing some kind of costume, and even there it s not always true.
2. and one should always carry an extra pair of clean socks, as they are useful for so many things, as Pratchett reminds us.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 242. This version includes the following changes: You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

(Edit 2023-05-10: This has now launched for a subset of Twitter users. The code that existed to notify users that device identities had changed does not appear to have been enabled - as a result, in its current form, Twitter can absolutely MITM conversations and read your messages)

Elon Musk appeared on an interview with Tucker Carlson last month, with one of the topics being the fact that Twitter could be legally compelled to hand over users' direct messages to government agencies since they're held on Twitter's servers and aren't encrypted. Elon talked about how they were in the process of implementing proper encryption for DMs that would prevent this - "You could put a gun to my head and I couldn't tell you. That's how it should be."

tl;dr - in the current implementation, while Twitter could subvert the end-to-end nature of the encryption, it could not do so without users being notified. If any user involved in a conversation were to ignore that notification, all messages in that conversation (including ones sent in the past) could then be decrypted. This isn't ideal, but it still seems like an improvement over having no encryption at all. More technical discussion follows.

For context: all information about Twitter's implementation here has been derived from reverse engineering version 9.86.0 of the Android client and 9.56.1 of the iOS client (the current versions at time of writing), and the feature hasn't yet launched. While it's certainly possible that there could be major changes in the protocol between now launch, Elon has asserted that they plan to launch the feature this week so it's plausible that this reflects what'll ship.

For it to be impossible for Twitter to read DMs, they need to not only be encrypted, they need to be encrypted with a key that's not available to Twitter. This is what's referred to as "end-to-end encryption", or e2ee - it means that the only components in the communication chain that have access to the unencrypted data are the endpoints. Even if the message passes through other systems (and even if it's stored on other systems), those systems do not have access to the keys that would be needed to decrypt the data.

End-to-end encrypted messengers were initially popularised by Signal, but the Signal protocol has since been incorporated into WhatsApp and is probably much more widely used there. Millions of people per day are sending messages to each other that pass through servers controlled by third parties, but those third parties are completely unable to read the contents of those messages. This is the scenario that Elon described, where there's no degree of compulsion that could cause the people relaying messages to and from people to decrypt those messages afterwards.

But for this to be possible, both ends of the communication need to be able to encrypt messages in a way the other end can decrypt. This is usually performed using AES, a well-studied encryption algorithm with no known significant weaknesses. AES is a form of what's referred to as a symmetric encryption, one where encryption and decryption are performed with the same key. This means that both ends need access to that key, which presents us with a bootstrapping problem. Until a shared secret is obtained, there's no way to communicate securely, so how do we generate that shared secret? A common mechanism for this is something called Diffie Hellman key exchange, which makes use of asymmetric encryption. In asymmetric encryption, an encryption key can be split into two components - a public key and a private key. Both devices involved in the communication combine their private key and the other party's public key to generate a secret that can only be decoded with access to the private key. As long as you know the other party's public key, you can now securely generate a shared secret with them. Even a third party with access to all the public keys won't be able to identify this secret. Signal makes use of a variation of Diffie-Hellman called Extended Triple Diffie-Hellman that has some desirable properties, but it's not strictly necessary for the implementation of something that's end-to-end encrypted.

Although it was rumoured that Twitter would make use of the Signal protocol, and in fact there are vestiges of code in the Twitter client that still reference Signal, recent versions of the app have shipped with an entirely different approach that appears to have been written from scratch. It seems simple enough. Each device generates an asymmetric keypair using the NIST P-256 elliptic curve, along with a device identifier. The device identifier and the public half of the key are uploaded to Twitter using a new API endpoint called /1.1/keyregistry/register. When you want to send an encrypted DM to someone, the app calls /1.1/keyregistry/extract_public_keys with the IDs of the users you want to communicate with, and gets back a list of their public keys. It then looks up the conversation ID (a numeric identifier that corresponds to a given DM exchange - for a 1:1 conversation between two people it doesn't appear that this ever changes, so if you DMed an account 5 years ago and then DM them again now from the same account, the conversation ID will be the same) in a local database to retrieve a conversation key. If that key doesn't exist yet, the sender generates a random one. The message is then encrypted with the conversation key using AES in GCM mode, and the conversation key is then put through Diffie-Hellman with each of the recipients' public device keys. The encrypted message is then sent to Twitter along with the list of encrypted conversation keys. When each of the recipients' devices receives the message it checks whether it already has a copy of the conversation key, and if not performs its half of the Diffie-Hellman negotiation to decrypt the encrypted conversation key. One it has the conversation key it decrypts it and shows it to the user.

What would happen if Twitter changed the registered public key associated with a device to one where they held the private key, or added an entirely new device to a user's account? If the app were to just happily send a message with the conversation key encrypted with that new key, Twitter would be able to decrypt that and obtain the conversation key. Since the conversation key is tied to the conversation, not any given pair of devices, obtaining the conversation key means you can then decrypt every message in that conversation, including ones sent before the key was obtained.

(An aside: Signal and WhatsApp make use of a protocol called Sesame which involves additional secret material that's shared between every device a user owns, hence why you have to do that QR code dance whenever you add a new device to your account. I'm grossly over-simplifying how clever the Signal approach is here, largely because I don't understand the details of it myself. The Signal protocol uses something called the Double Ratchet Algorithm to implement the actual message encryption keys in such a way that even if someone were able to successfully impersonate a device they'd only be able to decrypt messages sent after that point even if they had encrypted copies of every previous message in the conversation)

How's this avoided? Based on the UI that exists in the iOS version of the app, in a fairly straightforward way - each user can only have a single device that supports encrypted messages. If the user (or, in our hypothetical, a malicious Twitter) replaces the device key, the client will generate a notification. If the user pays attention to that notification and verifies with the recipient through some out of band mechanism that the device has actually been replaced, then everything is fine. But, if any participant in the conversation ignores this warning, the holder of the subverted key can obtain the conversation key and decrypt the entire history of the conversation. That's strictly worse than anything based on Signal, where such impersonation would simply not work, but even in the Twitter case it's not possible for someone to silently subvert the security.

So when Elon says Twitter wouldn't be able to decrypt these messages even if someone held a gun to his head, there's a condition applied to that - it's true as long as nobody fucks up. This is clearly better than the messages just not being encrypted at all in the first place, but overall it's a weaker solution than Signal. If you're currently using Twitter DMs, should you turn on encryption? As long as the limitations aren't too limiting, definitely! Should you use this in preference to Signal or WhatsApp? Almost certainly not. This seems like a genuine incremental improvement, but it'd be easy to interpret what Elon says as providing stronger guarantees than actually exist.

comments

Small reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 from May 23 to 30 As in previous years there will be a rather small Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 event taking place from May 23rd until the 30th (with the 29th being a public holiday in Germany and elsewhere). We'll have days of hacking (inside and outside), a day trip and a small cheese & wine party, as well as daily standup meetings to learn what others are doing, and there shall also be talks and workshops. At the moment there are even still some beds on site available! For more information on all of this: please check the above wiki page! May the force be with you.

In March and April I worked a total of 28 hours for Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, out of a maximum of 48 hours. I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable and stable-rt updates, and uploaded it at the end of April. I merged the latest bullseye security update into the linux-5.10 package and uploaded that at the same time.

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Posted on May 4, 2023

I hate going out to buy shoes. Even more so I hate buying home shoes, which is what I spend most of my life in, also because no matter what I buy they seem to disintegrate after a season or so. So, obviously, I ve been on a quest to make my own. As a side note, going barefoot (with socks) would only move the wear issue to the socks, so it s not really a solution, and going bare barefoot on ceramic floors is not going to happen, kaythanksbye. For the winter I m trying to make knit and felted slippers; I ve had partial success, and they should be pretty easy to mend (I ve just had to do the first mend, with darning and needle felting, and it seems to have worked nicely). For the summer, I ve been thinking of something sewn, and with the warm season approaching (and the winter slippers needing urgent repairs) I decided it was time to work on them. I already had a shaped (left/right) pattern for a sole from my hiking sandals attempts (a topic for another post), so I started by drafting a front upper, and then I started to have espadrille feeling and decided that a heel guard was needed. As for fabric, looking around in the most easily accessible part of the Stash I ve found the nice heavyweight linen I m using for my Augusta Stays, of which I still have a lot and which looked almost perfect except for one small detail: it s very white. I briefly thought about dyeing, but I wanted to start sewing NOW to test the pattern, so, yeah, maybe it will happen one day, or maybe I ll have patchy dust-grey slippers. If I ll ever have a place where I can do woad dyeing a blue pair will happen, however. Contrary to the typical espadrillas I decided to have a full lining, and some padding between the lining and the sole, using cotton padding leftovers from my ironing board. To add some structure I also decided to add a few rows of cording (and thus make the uppers in two layers of fabric), to help prevent everything from collapsing flat. As for the sole, that s something that is still causing me woes: I do have some rubber sole sheets (see hiking sandals above), but I suspect that they require glueing, which I m not sure would work well with the natural fabric uppers and will probably make repairs harder to do. In the past I tried to make some crocheted rope soles and they were a big failure: they felt really nice on the foot, but they also self-destroyed in a matter of weeks, which is not really the kind of sole I m looking for. Now I have some ~ 3 mm twine that feels much harsher on the hands while working it (and would probably feel harsher on the feet, but that s what the lining and padding are for), so I hope it may be a bit more resistant, and I tried to make a braided rope sole. Of course, I have published the pattern and instructions for the slippers as well as those for the braided rope sole as #FreeSoftWear. Now what is left is trying everything under daily use, and I hope I will have updates on this at the end of the season, rather than soon :D

Martha, now 5, can t remember a time when she didn t fly periodically. She s come along in our airplane in short flights to a nearby restaurant and long ones to Michigan and South Dakota. All this time, she s been riding in the back seat next to Laura. Martha has been talking excitedly about riding up front next to me. She wants to be my co-pilot . I promised to give her an airplane wing pin when she did one I got from a pilot of a commercial flight when I was a kid. Of course, safety was first, so I wanted to be sure she was old enough to fly there without being a distraction. Last weekend, the moment finally arrived. She was so excited! She brought along her Claire bear aviator, one that I bought for her at an airport a little while back. She buckled in two of her dolls in the back seat. And then up we went! Martha was so proud when we landed! We went to Stearman Field, just a short 10-minute flight away, and parked the plane right in front of the restaurant. We flew back, and Martha thought we should get a photo of her standing on the wing by the door. Great idea! She was happily jabbering about the flight all the way home. She told us several times about the pin she got, watching out the window, watching all the screens in the airplane, and also that she didn t get sick at all despite some turbulence. And, she says, Now just you and I can go flying! Yes, that s something I m looking forward to!

This isn't a book review, although the reason that I am typing this now is because of a book, You Are Not Alone: from the creator and host of Griefcast, Cariad Lloyd, ISBN: 978-1526621870 and I include a handful of quotes from Cariad where there is really no better way of describing things. Many people experience death for the first time as a child, often relating to a family pet. Death is universal but every experience of death is unique. One of the myths of grief is the idea of the Five Stages but this is a misinterpretation. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance represent the five stage model of death and have nothing to do with grief. The five stages were developed from studying those who are terminally ill, the dying, not those who then grieve for the dead person and have to go on living without them. Grief is for those who loved the person who has died and it varies between each of those people just as people vary in how they love someone. The Five Stages end at the moment of death, grief is what comes next and most people do not grieve in stages, it can be more like a tangled knot. Death has a date and time, so that is why the last stage of the model is Acceptance. Grief has no timetable, those who grieve will carry that grief for the rest of their lives. Death starts the process of grief in those who go on living just as it ends the life of the person who is loved. "Grief eases and changes and returns but it never disappears.". I suspect many will have already stopped reading by this point. People do not talk about death and grief enough and this only adds to the burden of those who carry their grief. It can be of enormous comfort to those who have carried grief for some time to talk directly about the dead, not in vague pleasantries but with specific and strong memories. Find a safe place without distractions and talk with the person grieving face to face. Name the dead person. Go to places with strong memories and be there alongside. Talk about the times with that person before their death. Early on, everything about grief is painful and sad. It does ease but it remains unpredictable. Closing it away in a box inside your head (as I did at one point) is like cutting off a damaged limb but keeping the pain in a box on the shelf. You still miss the limb and eventually, the box starts leaking. For me, there were family pets which died but my first job out of university was to work in hospitals, helping the nurses manage the medication regimen and providing specialist advice as a pharmacist. It will not be long in that environment before everyone on the ward gets direct experience of the death of a person. In some ways, this helped me to separate the process of death from the process of grief. I cared for these people as patients but these were not my loved ones. Later, I worked in specialist terminal care units, including providing potential treatments as part of clinical trials. Here, it was not expected for any patient to be discharged alive. The more aggressive chemotherapies had already been tried and had failed, this was about pain relief, symptom management and helping the loved ones. Palliative care is not just about the patient, it involves helping the loved ones to accept what is happening as this provides comfort to the patient by closing the loop. Grief is stressful. One of the most common causes of personal stress is bereavement. The death of your loved one is outside of your control, it has happened, no amount of regret can change that. Then come all the other stresses, maybe about money or having somewhere to live as a result of what else has changed after the death or having to care for other loved ones. In the early stages, the first two years, I found it helpful to imagine my life as a box containing a ball and a button. The button triggers new waves of pain and loss each time it is hit. The ball bounces around the box and hits the button at random. Initially, the button is large and the ball is enormous, so the button is hit almost constantly. Over time, both the button and the ball change size. Starting off at maximum, initially there is only one direction of change. There are two problems with this analogy. First is that the grief ball has infinite energy which does not happen in reality. The ball may get smaller and the button harder to hit but the ball will continue bouncing. Secondly, the life box is not a predictable shape, so the pattern of movement of the ball is unpredictable. A single stress is one thing, but what has happened since has just kept adding more stress for me. Shortly before my father died 5 years ago now, I had moved house. Then, I was made redundant on the day of the first anniversary of my father's death. A year or so later, my long term relationship failed and a few months after that COVID-19 appeared. As the country eased out of the pandemic in 2021, my mother died (unrelated to COVID itself). A year after that, I had to take early retirement. My brother and sister, of course, share a lot of those stressors. My brother, in particular, took the responsibility for organising both funerals and did most of the visits to my mother before her death. The grief is different for each of the surviving family. Cariad's book helped me understand why I was getting frequent ideas about going back to visit places which my father and I both knew. My parents encouraged each of us to work hard to leave Port Talbot (or Pong Toilet locally) behind, in no small part due to the unrestrained pollution and deprivation that is common to small industrial towns across Wales, the midlands and the north of the UK. It wasn't that I wanted to move house back to our ancestral roots. It was my grief leaking out of the box. Yes, I long for mountains and the sea because I'm now living in a remorselessly flat and landlocked region after moving here for employment. However, it was my grief driving those longings - not for the physical surroundings but out of the shared memories with my father. I can visit those memories without moving house, I just need to arrange things so that I can be undisturbed and undistracted. I am not alone with my grief and I am grateful to my friends who have helped whilst carrying their own grief. It is necessary for everyone to think and talk about death and grief. In respect of your own death, no matter how far ahead that may be, consider Advance Care Planning and Expressions of Wish as well as your Will.

• Help your loved ones cope with your death by describing what you would like to happen.

• Document how your life has been arranged so that the executor of your Will can find the right documents to inform:

  • your bank,
  • your mortgage company,
  • your energy company,
  • your mobile phone company,
  • your house and car insurers and the like.

• If you've got a complex home setup with servers and other machines which would be unfamiliar to the executor of your Will, then entrust someone else with the information required to revoke your keys, access your machines etc. and then provide the contact information for that person to your executor.

• Arrange for your pets to be looked after.

• Describe how you would like your belongings to be handled - do you want every effort made to have your clothes and furnishing recycled instead of going to landfill?

• Where are the documents for the oven, the dishwasher and the central heating system so that these can be included in the sale of your property?

• If there are loans outstanding, make sure your executor or a trusted person knows where to find the account numbers and company names.

• What about organ donation? Make sure your executor knows your wishes and make sure your loved ones either agree or are willing to respect your wishes.

• Then the personal stuff, what do you want to happen to your social media accounts, your cloud data, your games, DVD and CD collection, your photos and other media? Some social media companies have explicit settings available in your account to describe if you want the data deleted after a certain amount of time, after a notification from some government service or to set up some kind of memorialised version or hand over control of the account to a trusted person.

Talk to people, document what you want. Your loved ones will be grateful and they deserve that much whilst they try to cope with the first onslaught of grief. Talk to your loved ones and get them to do the same for themselves. Normalise talking about death with your family, especially children. None of us are getting out of this alive and we will all leave behind people who will grieve.

A new release 0.4.18 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and will be uploaded to Debian as well. QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language. This release of RQuantLib comes about six months after the previous maintenance release. It brings a few small updates triggered by small changes in the QuantLib releases 1.29 and 1.30. It also contains updates reflecting changes in the rgl package kindly contributed by Duncan Murdoch. Last but not least, Jeroen Ooms helped with two pull requests updating builds on, repspectively, macOS and Windows by updating the pre-made libraries of QuantLib.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.18 (2023-05-01)

• Use of several rgl functions was updated to a new naming scheme in the package (kindly contributed by Duncan Murdoch in #174)
• A default argument is now given for option surface plots
• Changed call from SwaptionVolCube1 to SabrSwaptionVolatilityCube (conditional on using QuantLib 1.30 or later)
• Some other deprecation warnings were tweaked as in QL test file
• Builds for macOS and Windows were updated with more library build (changes kindly contributed by Jeron Ooms in #176 and #175)
• Some remaining throw calls were replace by Rcpp::stop

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the new rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

After my father passed away, I brought home most of the personal items he had, both at home and at his office. Among many, many (many, many, many) other things, I brought two of his personal treasures: His photo collection and a box with the 8mm movies he shot approximately between 1956 and 1989, when he was forced into modernity and got a portable videocassette recorder. I have talked with several friends, as I really want to get it all in a digital format, and while I ve been making slow but steady advances scanning the photo reels, I was particularly dismayed (even though it was most expected most personal electronic devices aren t meant to last over 50 years) to find out the 8mm projector was no longer in working conditions; the lamp and the fans work, but the spindles won t spin. Of course, it is quite likely it is easy to fix, but it is beyond my tinkering abilities and finding photographic equipment repair shops is no longer easy. Anyway, even if I got it fixed, filming a movie from a screen, even with a decent camera, is a lousy way to get it digitized. But almost by mere chance, I got in contact with my cousin Daniel, ho came to Mexico to visit his parents, and had precisely brought with him a 8mm/Super8 movie scanner! It is a much simpler piece of equipment than I had expected, and while it does present some minor glitches (i.e. the vertical framing slightly loses alignment over the course of a medium-length film scanning session, and no adjustment is possible while the scan is ongoing), this is something that can be decently fixed in post-processing, and a scanning session can be split with no ill effects. Anyway, it is quite uncommon a mid-length (5min) film can be done without interrupting i.e. to join a splice, mostly given my father didn t just film, but also edited a lot (this is, it s not just family pictures, but all different kinds of fiction and documentary work he did). So, Daniel lent me a great, brand new, entry-level film scanner; I rushed to scan as many movies as possible before his return to the USA this week, but he insisted he bought it to help preserve our family s memory, and given we are still several cousins living in Mexico, I could keep hold of it so any other of the cousins will find it more easily. Of course, I am thankful and delighted! So, this equipment is a Magnasonic FS81. It is entry-level, as it lacks some adjustment abilities a professional one would surely have, and I m sure a better scanner will make the job faster but it s infinitely superior to not having it! The scanner processes roughly two frames per second (while the nominal 8mm/Super8 speed is 24 frames per second), so a 3 minute film reel takes a bit over 35 minutes And a long, ~20 minute film reel takes Close to 4hr, if nothing gets in your way :- And yes, with longer reels, the probability of a splice breaking are way higher than with a short one not only because there is simply a longer film to process, but also because, both at the unwinding and at the receiving reels, mechanics play their roles. The films don t advance smoothly, but jump to position each frame in the scanner s screen, so every bit of film gets its fair share of gentle tugs. My professional consultant on how and what to do is my good friend Chema Serralde, who has stopped me from doing several things I would regret later otherwise (such as joining spliced tapes with acidic chemical adhesives such as Kola Loka, a.k.a. Krazy Glue even if it s a bit trickier to do it, he insisted me on best using simple transparent tape if I m not buying fancy things such as film-adhesive). Chema also explained me the importance of the loopers (las Lupes in his technical Spanish translation), which I feared increased the likelihood of breaking a bit of old glue due to the angle in which the film gets pulled but if skipped, result in films with too much jumping. Not all of the movies I have are for public sharing Some of them are just family movies, with high personal value, but probably of very little interest to others. But some are! I have been uploading some of the movies, after minor post-processing, to the Internet Archive. Among them:

• Pel cula experimental de la c mara Bolex H-8
• CUM: Trabajo de Actividad Est tica 1957
• Majan a Morillotla
• 10 de mayo: D a de la madre (1958)
• Crimen
• Muerte de un planeta
• Un cad ver flota en el espacio

Anyway, I have a long way forward for scanning. I have 20 3min reels, 19 5min reels, and 8 20min reels. I want to check the scanning quality, but I think my 20min reels are mostly processed (we paid for scanning them some years ago). I mostly finished the 3min reels, but might have to go over some of them again due to the learning process. And Well, I m having quite a bit of fun in the process!

Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #28
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Copyright:	2001
Printing:	2008
ISBN:	0-06-001235-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	351

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is the 28th Discworld novel and the first marketed for younger readers. Although it has enough references to establish it as taking place on Discworld, it has no obvious connections with the other books and doesn't rely on any knowledge of the series so far. This would not be a bad place to start with Terry Pratchett and see if his writing style and sense of humor is for you. Despite being marketed as young adult, and despite Pratchett's comments in an afterward in the edition I own that writing YA novels is much harder, I didn't think this was that different than a typical Discworld novel. The two main human characters read as about twelve and there were some minor changes in tone, but I'm not sure I would have immediately labeled it as YA if I hadn't already known it was supposed to be. There are considerably fewer obvious pop culture references than average, though; if that's related, I think I'll prefer Pratchett's YA novels, since I think his writing is stronger when he's not playing reference bingo. Maurice (note to US readers: Maurice is pronounced "Morris" in the UK) is a talking cat and the mastermind of a wandering con job. He, a stupid-looking kid with a flute (Maurice's description), and a tribe of talking rats travel the small towns of Discworld. The rats go in first, making a show of breaking into the food, swimming in the cream, and widdling on things that humans don't want widdled on. Once the townspeople are convinced they have a plague of rats, the kid with the flute enters the town and offers to pipe the rats away for a very reasonable fee. He plays his flute, the rats swarm out of town, and they take their money and move on to the next town. It's a successful life that suits Maurice and his growing hoard of gold very well. If only the rats would stop asking pointed questions about the ethics of this scheme. The town of Bad Blintz is the next on their itinerary, and if the rats have their way, will be the last. Their hope is they've gathered enough money by now to find an island, away from humans, where they can live their own lives. But, as is always the case for one last job in fiction, there's something uncannily wrong about Bad Blintz. There are traps everywhere, more brutal and dangerous ones than they've found in any other town, and yet there is no sign of native, unintelligent rats. Meanwhile, Maurice and the boy find a town that looks wealthy but has food shortages, a bounty on rats that is absurdly high, and a pair of sinister-looking rat-catchers who are bringing in collections of rat tails that look suspiciously like bootlaces. The mayor's daughter discovers Maurice can talk and immediately decides she has to take them in hand. Malicia is very certain of her own opinions, not accustomed to taking no for an answer, and is certain that the world follows the logic of stories, even if she has to help it along. This is truly great stuff. I think this might be my favorite Discworld novel to date, although I do have some criticisms that I'll get to in a moment. The best part are the rats, and particularly the blind philosopher rat Dangerous Beans and his assistant Peaches. In the middle of daring infiltration of the trapped sewers in scenes reminiscent of Mission: Impossible, the rats are also having philosophical arguments. They've become something different than the unaltered rats that they call the keekees, but what those differences mean is harder to understand. The older rats are not happy about too many changes and think the rats should keep acting like rats. The younger ones are discovering that they're afraid of shadows because now they understand what the shadows hint at. Dangerous Beans is trying to work out a writing system so that they can keep important thoughts. One of their few guides is a children's book of talking animals, although they quickly discover that the portrayed clothing is annoyingly impractical. But as good as the rats are, Maurice is nearly as much fun in an entirely different way. He is unapologetically out for himself, streetwise and canny in a way that feels apt for a cat, gets bored and mentally wanders off in the middle of conversations, and pretends to agree with people when that's how he can get what he wants. But he also has a weird sense of loyalty and ethics that only shows up when something is truly important. It's a variation on the con man with a heart of gold, but it's a very well-done variation that weaves in a cat's impatience with and inattention to anything that doesn't directly concern them. I was laughing throughout the book. Malicia is an absolute delight, the sort of character who takes over scenes through sheer force of will, and the dumb-looking kid (whose name turns out to be Keith) is a perfect counterbalance: a laid-back, quiet boy who just wants to play his music and is almost entirely unflappable. It's such a great cast. The best part of the plot is the end. I won't spoil it, so I'll only say that Pratchett has the characters do the work on the aftermath that a lot of books skip over. He doesn't have any magical solutions for the world's problems, but he's so very good at restoring one's faith that maybe sometimes those solutions can be constructed. My one complaint with this book is that Pratchett introduces a second villain, and while there are good in-story justifications for it and it's entangled with the primary plot, he added elements of (mild) supernatural horror and evil that I thought were extraneous and unnecessary. He already had enough of a conflict set up without adding that additional element, and I think it undermined the moral complexity of the story. I would have much rather he kept the social dynamics of the town at the core of the story and used that to trigger the moments of sacrifice and philosophy that made the climax work. The Discworld books by this point have gotten very good, but each book seems to have one element like that where it felt like Pratchett took the easy way out of a plot corner or added some story element that didn't really work. I feel like the series is on the verge of having a truly great book that rises above the entire series to date, but never quite gets there. That caveat aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this and had trouble putting it down. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh was one of my favorite books as a kid, and this reminded me of it in some good ways (enough so that I think some of the references were intentional). Great stuff. If you were to read only one Discworld book and didn't want to be confused by all the entangled plot threads and established characters, I would seriously consider making it this one. Recommended. Followed by Night Watch in publication order. There doesn't appear to be a direct plot sequel, more's the pity. Rating: 8 out of 10

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• libsafe: allow local deps
• i2c-tools: usability
• notmuch: notmuch-mutt: fix queries, drop shell usage
• duck: add indicators (1 2)
• Debian BTS: fix some QA/Python usertags
• Debian QA services: pass on HTTP errors, block bingbot (1 2), update releases
• Debian package tracker: update hard-coded data
• Debian wiki pages: DebianExperimental, DebianInstaller/CreateUSBMedia, DebianLogo, FileSystem, Firmware/Open, PortsDocs/New, QEMU, ReleasePartyBookworm
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Issues

• Security issue in secret manager (sent privately)
• Broken symlinks in opencpn
• Test problem in SPTAG
• Debian migration unblock needed for evolution

Review

• Spam: reported 22 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored trurl
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved audacious fortune-anarchism four-in-a-row freecell-solver-bin liblatex-table-perl mathtex neofetch pass px quadrapassel sash shellex swell-foop wifi-qr yash zsh-autosuggestions
  • rejected csmash (Windows wallpaper), anarchism (not very useful), agda-bin (music app), freecell-solver-bin (Windows), brasero/sagemath (screenshots web page), chrome-gnome-shell (phone call log), nitroshare (selfie), golang-go (logo), build-essential (random website), chromium-browser (photo)

Administration

• Debian IRC: fixed the #debian-mips channel topic
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts
• Debian QA services: deploy changes, investigate SourceForge uscan issue

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SPTAG work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Lots of Windows dependencies in Debian Rust packages. As cargo tries to check even the optional dependencies exist, Debian has lots of rust packages that are not needed on Debian platforms. I would think it would be okay to have a stub that mirrors the version number but nothing else, but Debian seems to have a full copy of the packages. An alternative is to patch out the dependencies in Cargo.toml, which some packages. As a result so many packages depend on winapi package, but don't really use in our configuration. Seems like a waste of our resources to keep these around (albeit maybe a small resource).

Cory Doctorow has an insightful article Gig Work is the Opposite of Steampunk [1] about the horrors that companies like Amazon are forcing on their employees. Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell wrote an insightful article about the al Capone theory of sexual harassment [2]. Why people who sexually harass others usually perform other anti-social activity that is also easier to prosecute. The IEEE has an interesting article about using ML for parts of the CPU design process, both the technical issues and the controversy about competing ideas which is probably caused by sexism [3]. Love and taxes are forever my heart is a line from an anime dating sim game that prepares US taxes [4]. Unfortunately it was removed from Steam. The existence of the game is a weird social commentary and removing the game because you can t have an anime hottie do taxes is bizarre but also understandable given liability issues. There s no mention in the review of whether male hotties are available for people who prefer dating guys. As an aside my accountant looks like he is allergic to exercise The Killdozer Book web site (which has an invalid SSL certificate so you have to click on advanced in Chrome to get to the content) has an insightful article debunking some of the stories about the Killdozer [5]. He wasn t some sort of hero of freedom, he was just a jerk who reneged on a deal hoping to get more money, thought that laws shouldn t apply to him, and killed himself because of it. Apparently some big tech companies are knowingly hiring people to not work unlike the usual large corporate case of unknowingly hiring people to not work [6]. Silicon Valley is a good TV show, and it s apparently realistic. Ron Garrett wrote in insightful blog post about theoretical attacks on Bitcoin and how Bitcoin could be used [7]. The conclusion is not good for Bitcoin. Compiler Explorer is a program that shows how various C++ compilers produce assembly code for various architectures, this site hosts the main active instance [8]. There are other instances, here is an instance that produces code for the Ruzzian Elbrus architecture [9]. The Elbrus Wikipedia page is interesting [10]. Apparently the Ruzzians don t want this information to be spread, LOL. The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article about pet parrots being taught to video call each other [11]. Apparently parrots are social animals and can develop psychological problems if kept alone, so the video calls can be good for them. Also the owners had to monitor the chats to ensure that they played nicely together, just like play-dates for kids! Phoronix has an amusing article about the drama regarding the AMD Spectral Chicken bit in the Linux kernel source [12]. This page listing bad free software licenses is amusing [13]. The ACS has an interesting article about how Samsung fakes photos of the moon and presumably could fake other photos of notable objects that don t change [14]. The way that they proved the forgery was interesting.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2fer3f5j
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2q4wgc26
• [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-design-controversy
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2mslyfcv
• [5] https://killdozerbook.com/2018/07/fake-news/
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/25qtqyn4
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2dhq5qrx
• [8] https://godbolt.org/
• [9] https://ce.mentality.rip/
• [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2bktn42p
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/24pqhlf6
• [13] https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/2eo65py7

Posted on April 30, 2023

A few months ago we may have bought a few ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo boards from Olimex. Since every time I go back to working with them I ve forgotten how to do so, and my old notes on the fediverse are hard to find, this is the full procedure.

Setup I start by sort-of-following https://docs.espressif.com/projects/arduino-esp32/en/latest/installing.html

• Install arduino from the distribution packages (version 1.8 is ok).
• Under File Preferences, add the development URL to the Additional Boards Manager URLs field. (on 2023-04-30 that s https://espressif.github.io/arduino-esp32/package_esp32_dev_index.json).
• Under Tools Board Boards Manager make sure that you install a version of esp32 by Espressif Systems that is above 2.0 (on 2023-04-30 there is a 2.0.8 that works).

Programming

• Under Tools Board ESP32 Arduino select ESP32C3 Dev Module.
• Under Tools USB CDC On Boot select Enabled.

You can now compile and upload your sketches. If something goes wrong, to force the board to bootloader mode bring GPIO9 to GND. Note that the serial port device /dev/ttyACM0 only appears when in bootloader mode, but uploading sketches and the serial monitor will still work even if the port is not set in the arduino IDE.

I m in the process of getting super-strict about the code quality of cretrit, the comparison-revealing encryption library that underlies the queryable encryption of the Enquo project. While I m going to write a whole big thing about Rust linting in the future, I bumped across a rather gnarly problem that I thought was worth sharing separately. The problem, in short, is that the unused_crate_dependencies lint interacts badly with crates that are only needed for benchmarking, such as (in my case) criterion. Rust has a whole bucketload of lints that can help your codebase adhere to certain standards, by warning (or exploding) if the problem is detected. The unused_crate_dependencies lint, as the name suggests, gets snippy when there s a crate listed in your Cargo.toml that doesn t appear to be used anywhere. All well and good so far. However, while Rust has the ability to specify crates needed for running the testsuite (the [dev-dependencies] section of Cargo.toml) separately from crates needed for actually using this thing ([dependencies]), it doesn t have a way to specify crates needed for running the benchmarks . That is a problem when you re using something like criterion for benchmarking, because it doesn t get refered to at all in your project code it only gets used in the benchmarks. When building your codebase for running the test suite, the compiler sees that you ve specified criterion as one of your testsuite dependencies , but it never gets used in your testsuite. This causes the unused_crate_dependencies lint to lose its tiny mind, and make your build look ugly (or fail). Thankfully, the solution is very simple, once you know the trick (this could be the unofficial theme song of the entire Rust ecosystem). You need to refer to the criterion crate somewhere in the code that gets built during the testsuite. The lint tells you most of what you need to do (like most things Rust, it tries hard to be helpful), but since it s a development dependency, you need a little extra secret sauce. All you need to do is add these two lines to the bottom of your src/lib.rs (or src/main.rs for a binary crate):

#[cfg(test)]
use criterion as _;

For the less Rust-literate, this means when the build-time configuration flag test is set, import the criterion crate, but don t, like, allow it to actually be referred to . This is enough to make the lint believe that the dependency is being used, and making it only happen when the test build-time config flag is set avoids the ugliness of it trying to refer to the crate during regular builds (which would fail, because criterion is only a dev-dependency). Simple? Yes. Did it take me a lot of skull-sweat to figure out? You betcha. That s why I m writing it down even if everyone else already knows this, at least future Matt will find this post next time he trips over this problem.

We're all but done - a couple of bugs sorted. All testing complete.

This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.7.0, and the upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from ISC or my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation. As of this release, we're no longer generating hashes and signed hashes. Instead, the release is a simple tarball and a detached GnuPG signature, similar to my other software releases. We're also maintaining the releases in parallel on GitHub. For the full list of changes, see the INN 2.7.1 NEWS file. As always, thanks to Julien LIE for preparing this release and doing most of the maintenance work on INN!