My offgrid house has an industrial automation panel. I started building this in February, before covid-19 was impacting us here, when lots of mail orders were no big problem, and getting an unusual 3D-printed DIN rail bracket for a SSD was just a couple clicks. I finished a month later, deep into social isolation and quarentine, scrounging around the house for scrap wire, scavenging screws from unused stuff and cutting them to size, and hoping I would not end up in a "need just one more part that I can't get" situation. It got rather elaborate, and working on it was often a welcome distraction from the news when I couldn't concentrate on my usual work. I'm posting this now because people sometimes tell me they like hearing about my offfgrid stuff, and perhaps you could use a distraction too. The panel has my house's computer on it, as well as both AC and DC power distribution, breakers, and switching. Since the house is offgrid, the panel is designed to let every non-essential power drain be turned off, from my offgrid fridge to the 20 terabytes of offline storage to the inverter and satellite dish, the spring pump for my gravity flow water system, and even the power outlet by the kitchen sink. Saving power is part of why I'm using old-school relays and stuff and not IOT devices, the other reason is of course: IOT devices are horrible dystopian e-waste. I'm taking the utopian Star Trek approach, where I can command "full power to the vacuum cleaner!" At the core of the panel, next to the cubietruck arm board, is a custom IO daughterboard. Designed and built by hand to fit into a DIN mount case, it uses every GPIO pin on the cubietruck's main GPIO header. Making this board took 40+ hours, and was about half the project. It got pretty tight in there. This was my first foray into DIN rail mount, and it really is industrial lego -- a whole universe of parts that all fit together and are immensely flexible. Often priced more than seems reasonable for a little bit of plastic and metal, until you look at the spec sheets and the ratings. (Total cost for my panel was $400.) It's odd that it's not more used outside its niche -- I came of age in the Bay Area, surrounded by rack mount equipment, but no DIN mount equipment. Hacking the hardware in a rack is unusual, but DIN invites hacking. Admittedly, this is a second system kind of project, replacing some unsightly shelves full of gear and wires everywhere with something kind of overdone. But should be worth it in the long run as new gear gets clipped into place and it evolves for changing needs. Also, wire gutters, where have you been all my life? Finally, if you'd like to know what everything on the DIN rail is, from left to right: Ground block, 24v DC disconnect, fridge GFI, spare GFI, USB hub switch, computer switch, +24v block, -24v block, IO daughterboard, 1tb SSD, arm board, modem, 3 USB hubs, 5 relays, AC hot block, AC neutral block, DC-DC power converters, humidity sensor.

Review: A Grand and Bold Thing, by Ann Finkbeiner

Publisher:	Free Press
Copyright:	August 2010
ISBN:	1-4391-9647-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	200

With the (somewhat excessively long) subtitle of An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In a New Era of Discovery, this is a history of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It's structured as a mostly chronological history of the project with background profiles on key project members, particularly James Gunn. Those who follow my blog will know that I recently started a new job at Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope). Our goal is to take a complete survey of the night sky several times a week for ten years. That project is the direct successor of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and its project team includes many people who formerly worked on Sloan. This book (and another one, Giant Telescopes) was recommended to me as a way to come up to speed on the history of this branch of astronomy. Before reading this book, I hadn't understood how deeply the ready availability of the Sloan sky survey data had changed astronomy. Prior to the availability of that survey data, astronomers would develop theories and then try to book telescope time to make observations to test those theories. That telescope time was precious and in high demand, so was not readily available, and was vulnerable to poor weather conditions (like overcast skies) once the allocated time finally arrived. The Sloan project changed all of that. Its output was a comprehensive sky survey available digitally whenever and wherever an astronomer needed it. One could develop a theory and then search the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for relevant data and, for at least some types of theories, test that theory against the data without needing precious telescope time or new observations. It was a transformational change in astronomy, made possible by the radical decision, early in the project, to release all of the data instead of keeping it private to a specific research project. The shape of that change is one takeaway from this book. The other is how many problems the project ran into trying to achieve that goal. About a third of the way into this book, I started wondering if the project was cursed. So many things went wrong, from institutional politics through equipment failures to software bugs and manufacturing problems with the telescope mirror. That makes it all the more impressive how much impact the project eventually had. It's also remarkable just how many bad things can happen to a telescope mirror without making the telescope unusable. Finkbeiner provides the most relevant astronomical background as she tells the story so that the unfamiliar reader can get an idea of what questions the Sloan survey originally set out to answer (particularly about quasars), but this is more of a project history than a popular astronomy book. There's enough astronomy here for context, but not enough to satisfy curiosity. If you're like me, expect to have your curiosity piqued, possibly resulting in buying popular surveys of current astronomy research. (At least one review is coming soon.) Obviously this book is of special interest to me because of my new field of work, my background at a research university, and because it features some of my co-workers. I'm not sure how interesting it will be to someone without that background and personal connection. But if you've ever been adjacent to or curious about how large-scale science projects are done, this is a fascinating story. Both the failures and problems and the way they were eventually solved is different than how the more common stories of successful or failed companies are told. (It helps, at least for me, that the shared goal was to do science, rather than to make money for a corporation whose fortunes are loosely connected to those of the people doing the work.) Recommended if this topic sounds at all interesting. Rating: 7 out of 10

A while ago I wrote a little game (or toy) called Kaleidogen. It is a relatively contemplative game where, starting from just unicolored disks, you combine abstract circular patterns to breed more interesting patterns. See my FARM 2019 talk for more details, or check out the source repository. It has mostly been quiet with this game, but I finally got around to add a little bit of animation: When you have bred one of these patterns, you can animate its genesis, from nothing to a complex patterns, as you can see in this screencast: By the way: I am looking for collaborators who help me to get this into the Play Store properly, so let me know if you want to play around with Haskell, Android, Nix, OpenGL and cross-compilation.

Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. Uyuni is a fork of Spacewalk that leverages Salt, Cobbler and containers to modernize it. Uyuni is the upstream for SUSE Manager (the main difference is support: with SUSE Manager you get it from SUSE; with Uyuni you get it from the community) and our development and feature discussion is done in the open. Last week we released Uyuni 2020.03, with much improved Debian support, coming from the community: we have got client tools (both the Salt stack and the traditional stack) for Debian 9 and 10, and bootstrapping support! In addition to that, Uyuni 2020.03 brings many other new features:

• Package pre-downloading for Debian and Ubuntu
• Automatic generation of bootstrap repositories
• Provisioning API for Salt clients (previously only for traditional clients), which allows to provision and re-provision Salt minions
• Recurring actions scheduling, e. g. schedule highstate to happen every so often, repeatedly
• Content Lifecycle Management filters for RHEL 8 appstreams so that you can convert modular repositories to plain repositories by applying a combination of filters. It will also work on RHEL derivatives, of course: CentOS, Oracle Linux and SLES Expanded Support.
• Yomi: Yet One More Installer is a Salt-based installer for SUSE and openSUSE operating systems. More architectures (e. g. ARM) and Linux distributions will follow soon!
• Hub XML-RPC API: the first component of our multi-Server architecture, to support hundreds of thousands of clients
• SUSE Container as a Platform 4 (SUSE s Kubernetes distribution) cluster awareness. Nodes in a SUSE CaaSP 4 cluster will by default not install updates, patches, run commands, etc from Uyuni Server on the normal schedule but default to doing that using skuba, CaaSP s tool in charge of updates and reboots. Further enhancements are coming to this feature soon.

While this version of Uyuni provides a much better experience for Debian sysadmins, we still have a lot of room for improvement:

• Run Uyuni Server and Proxy on Debian (currently only supported on openSUSE Leap, sponsored by SUSE)
• Autoinstallation with preseed (currently only AutoYaST and Kickstart are supported)
• CVE auditing and errata (patch) concept. Uyuni currently treats all .deb packages equally as normal updates.
• Use Salt from Debian (currently using the openSUSE version for Debian 9 and Debian 10, because it s more recent and it includes a lot of patches and backports from upstream)
• Building Debian-based images (e. g. using Kiwi)
• Package and system locking (the kind of locking used on CaaSP 4 systems)
• And probably more I cannot even remember at this point

Do you want to help us with development, or just with feedback? Join our community on IRC, Gitter or the mailing lists. And check our user documentation, developer documentation and presentations. We are also participating in Google Summer of Code 2020. Hurry up and submit a proposal to provide Uyuni for Debian, and/or enhance Debian support!

Rolling Stone has an insightful article about why the Christian Right supports Trump and won t stop supporting him no matter what he does [1]. Interesting article about Data Oriented Architecture [2]. Quarantine Will normalise WFH and Recession will Denormalise Jobs [3]. I guess we can always hope that after a disaster we can learn to do things better than before. Tyre wear is worse than exhaust for small particulate matter [4]. We need better tyres and legal controls over such things. Scott Santens wrote an insightful article about the need for democracy and unconditional basic income [5]. In ancient Greece, work was regarded as a curse is an extreme position but strongly supported by evidence. In his essay In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell wrote Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus titled A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick about expansions to copyright laws [6]. One of his analogies is that giving a bullied kid more lunch money just allows the bullies to steal more money, with artists being bullied kids and lunch money being the rights that are granted under copyright law. The proposed solution includes changes to labor and contract law, presumably Cory will write other articles in future giving the details of his ideas in this regard. The Register has an amusing article about the trial of a former CIA employee on trial for being the alleged vault 7 leaker [7]. Both the prosecution and the defence are building their cases around the defendent being a jerk. The article exposes poor security and poor hiring practices in the CIA. CNN has an informative article about Finland s war on fake news [8]. As Finland has long standing disputes with Russia they have had more practice at dealing with fake news than most countries. The Times of Israel has an interesting article about how the UK used German Jews to spy on German prisoners of war [9]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article Data is the New Toxic Waste about how collecting personal data isn t an asset, it s a liability [10]. Ulrike Uhlig wrote an insightful article about Control Freaks , analysing the different meanings of control, both positive and negative [11]. 538 has an informative article about the value of statistical life [12]. It s about $9M per person in the US, which means a mind-boggling amount of money should be spent to save the millions of lives that will be potentially lost in a natural disaster (like Coronavirus). NPR has an interesting interview about Crypto AG, the Swiss crypto company owned by the CIA [13]. I first learned of this years ago, it s not new, but I still learned a lot from this interview.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/r2zyrpz
• [2] https://blog.eyas.sh/2020/03/data-oriented-architecture/
• [3] https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/03/07/wfhdemic.html
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/tf4yj4m
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/y9dcnzma
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/v3mxgh5
• [7] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/05/cia_leak_trial/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/y6cn42us
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/y67mo4rr
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/wucsgw8
• [11] https://curlybracket.net/2020/03/16/control-freaks.html
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/s6e7luk
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qpx3dah

Some of you might have noticed that I m into keyboards since a few years ago into mechanical keyboards to be precise. Preface It basically started with the Swiss Mechanical Keyboard Meetup (whose website I started later on) was held in the hackerspace of the CCCZH. I mostly used TKL keyboards (i.e. keyboards with just the for me useless number block missing) and tried to get my hands on more keyboards with Trackpoints (but failed so far). At some point a year or two ago, I looking into smaller keyboards for having a mechanical keyboard with me when travelling. I first bought a Vortex Core at Candykeys. The size was nice and especially having all layers labelled on the keys was helpful, but nevertheless I soon noticed that the smaller the keyboards get, the more important is, that they re properly programmable. The Vortex Core is programmable, but not the keys in the bottom right corner which are exactly the keys I wanted to change to get a cursor block down there. (Later I found out that there are possibilities to get this done, either with an alternative firmware and a hack of it or desoldering all switches and mounting an alternative PCB called Atom47.) 40% Keyboards So at some point I ordered a MiniVan keyboard from The Van Keyboards (MiniVan keyboards will soon be available again at The Key Dot Company), here shown with GMK Paperwork (also bought from and designed by The Van Keyboards): The MiniVan PCBs are fully programmable with the free and open source firmware QMK and started to use that more and more instead of bigger keyboards. Layers With the MiniVan I learned the concepts of layers. Layers are similar to what many laptop keyboards do with the Fn key and to some extent also what the German standard layout does with the AltGr key: Layers are basically alternative key maps you can switch with a special key (often called Fn , Fn1 , Fn2 , etc., or especially if there are two additional layers Raise and Lower ). There are several concepts how these layers can be reached with these keys:

• By keeping the Fn key pressed, i.e. the alternative layer is active as long as you hold the Fn key down.
• One-shot layer switch: After having pressed and released the Fn key, all keys are on the alternative layer for a single key press and then you are back to the default layer.
• Layer toggle: Pressing the Fn key once switches to the alternative layer and pressing it a second time switches back to the default layer.
• There are also a lot of variants of the latter variant, e.g. rotating between layers upon every key press of the Fn key. In that case it seems common to have a second special key which always switches back to the default layer, kinda Escape key for layer switching.

My MiniVan Layout For the MiniVan, two additional layers suffice easily, but since I have a few characters on multiple layers and also have mouse control and media keys crammed in there, I have three additional layers on my MiniVan keyboards: I also use a feature that allows me to mind different actions to a key depending if I just tap the key or if I hold it. Some also call this tap dance . This is especially very popular on the usually rather huge spacebar. There, the term SpaceFn has been coined, probably after this discussion on Geekhack. I use this for all my layer switching keys:

• The left spacebar is space on tap and switches to layer 1 if hold. The right spacebar is a real spacebar, i.e. already triggers a space on key press, not only on key release. Layer 1 has numbers on the top row and the special characters of the number row in the second row. It also has Home/End and Page Up/Down on the cursor keys.
• The key between the Enter key and the cursor-right key (medium grey with a light grey caret in the picture) is actually the Slash and Question Mark key, but if hold, it switches me to layer 2. Layer 2 has function keys on the top row and also the special characters of the number row in the second row. On the cursor keys it has volume up and down as well as the media keys previous and next .
• The green key in the picture is actually the Backslash and Pipe key, but if hold, it switches me to layer 3. On layer 3 I have mouse control.

With this layout I can type English texts as fast as I can type them on a standard or TKL layout. German umlauts are a bit more difficult because it requires 4 to 6 key presses per umlaut as I use the Compose key functionality (mapped to the Menu key between the spacebars and the cursor block. So to type an on my MiniVan, I have to:

1. press and release Menu (i.e. Compose); then
2. press and hold either Shift-Spacebar (i.e. Shift-Fn1) or Slash (i.e. Fn2), then
3. press N for a double quote (i.e. Shift-Fn1-N or Fn2-N) and then release all keys, and finally
4. press and release the base character for the umlaut, in this case Shift-A.

And now just use these concepts and reduce the amount of keys to 28: 30% and Sub-30% Keyboards In late 2019 I stumbled upon a nice little keyboard kit shop on Etsy which I (and probably most other people in the mechanical keyboard scene) didn t take into account for looking for keyboards called WorldspawnsKeebs. They offer mostly kits for keyboards of 40% size and below, most of them rather simple and not expensive. For about 30 you get a complete sub-30% keyboard kit (without switches and keycaps though, but that very common for keyboard kits as it leaves the choice of switches and key caps to you) named Alpha28 consisting of a minimal Acrylic case and a PCB and electronics set. This Alpha28 keyboard is btw. fully open source as the source code, (i.e. design files) for the hardware are published under a free license (MIT license) on GitHub. And here s how my Alpha28 looks like with GMK Mitolet (part of the GMK Pulse group-buy) key caps: So we only have character keys, Enter (labelled Data as there was no 1u Enter key with that row profile in that key cap set; I ll also call it Data for the rest of this posting) and a small spacebar, not even modifier keys. The Default Alpha28 Layout The original key layout by the developer of the Alpha28 used the spacbar as Shift on hold and as space if just tapped, and the Data key switches always to the next layer, i.e. it switches the layer permanently on tap and not just on hold. This way that key rotates through all layers. In all other layers, V switches back to the default layer. I assume that the modifiers on the second layer are also on tap and apply to the next other normal key. This has the advantage that you don t have to bend your fingers for some key combos, but you have to remember on which layer you are at the moment. (IIRC QMK allows you to show that via LEDs or similar.) Kinda just like vi. My Alpha28 Layout But maybe because I m more an Emacs person, I dislike remembering states myself and don t bind bending my fingers. So I decided to develop my own layout using tap-or-hold and only doing layer switches by holding down keys: It might not be very obvious, but on the default layer, all keys in the bottom row and most keys on the row ends have tap-or-hold configurations. Basic ideas

• Use all keys on tap as labelled by default. (Data = Enter as mentioned above)
• Use different meanings on hold for the whole bottom row and some edge column keys.
• Have all classic modifiers (Shift, Control, OS/Sys/Win, Alt/Meta) on the first layer twice (always only on hold), so that any key, even those with a modifier on hold, can be used with any modifier. (Example: Shift is on A hold and L hold so that Shift-A is holding L and then pressing A and Shift-L is holding A and then pressing L.)

Bottom row if hold

• Z = Control
• X = OS/Sys/Win
• C = Alt/Meta
• V = Layer 3 (aka Fn3)
• Space = Layer 1 (aka Fn1)
• B = Alt/Meta
• N = OS/Sys/Win
• M = Ctrl

Other rows if hold

• A = Shift
• L = Shift
• Data (Enter) = Layer 2 (aka Fn2)
• P = Layer 4 (aka Fn4)

How the keys are divided into layers

• Layer 0 (Default): alphabetic keys, Space, Enter, and (on hold) standard modifiers
• Layer 1: numbers, special characters (most need Shift, too), and some more common other keys, e.g.
  • Space-Enter = Backspace
  • Space-S = Esc
  • Space-D = Tab
  • Space-F = Menu/Compose
  • Space-K = :
  • Space-L = '
  • Space-B = ,
  • Space-N = .
  • Space-M = /, etc.
• Layer 2: F-keys and less common other keys, e.g.
  • Enter-K = -
  • Enter-L = =
  • Enter-B = [
  • Enter-N = ]
  • Enter-M = \, etc.)
• Layer 3: Cursor movement, e.g.
  • scrolling
  • and mouse movement.
  • Cursor cross is on V-IJKL (with V-I for Up)
  • V-U and V-O are Home and End
  • V-P and V-Enter are Page Up/Down.
  • Mouse movement is on V-WASD
  • V-Q
  • V-E and V-X being mouse buttons
  • V-F and V-R is the scroll wheel up down
  • V-Z and V-C left and right.
• Layer 4: Configuring the RGB bling-bling and the QMK reset key:
  • P-Q (the both top corner keys) are QMK reset to be able to reflash the firmware.
  • The keys on the right half of the keyboard control the modes of the RGB LED strip on the bottom side of the PCB, with the upper two rows usually having keys with some Plus and Minus semantics, e.g. P-I and P-K is brightness up and down.
  • The remaining left half is unused and has no function at all on layer 4.

Using the Alpha28 This layout works surprisingly well for me. Only for Minus, Equal, Single Quote and Semicolon I still often have to think or try if they re on Layer 1 or 2 as on my 40%s (MiniVan, Zlant, etc.) I have them all on layer 1 (and in general one layer less over all). And for really seldom used keys like Insert, PrintScreen, ScrollLock or Pause, I might have to consult my own documentation. They re somewhere in the middle of the keyboard, either on layer 1, 2, or 3. ;-) And of course, typing umlauts takes even two keys more per umlaut as on the MiniVan since on the one hand Menu is not on the default layer and on the other hand, I don t have this nice shifted number row and actually have to also press Shift to get a double quote. So to type an on my Alpha, I have to:

1. press and release Space-F (i.e. Fn1-F) for Menu (i.e. Compose); then
2. press and hold A-Spacebar-L (i.e. Shift-Fn1-L) for getting a double quote, then
3. press and release the base character for the umlaut, in this case L-A for Shift-A (because we can t use A for Shift as I can t hold a key and then press it again :-).

Conclusion If the characters on upper layers are not labelled like on the Vortex Core, i.e. especially on all self-made layouts, typing is a bit like playing that old children s game Memory: as soon as you remember (or your muscle memory knows) where some special characters are, typing gets faster. Otherwise, you start with trial and error or look the documentation. Or give up. ;-) Nevertheless, typing on a sub-30% keyboard like the Alpha28 is much more difficult and slower than on a 40% keyboard like the MiniVan. So the Alpha28 very likely won t become my daily driver while the MiniVan defacto is my already my daily driver. But I like these kind of challenges as others like the game Memory . So I ordered three more 30% and sub-30% keyboard kits and WorldspawnsKeebs for soldering on the upcoming weekend during the COVID19 lockdown:

• A Reviung39 to start a new try on ortholinear layouts.
• A Jerkin (sold out, waitlist available) to try an Alice-style keyboard layout.
• A Pain27 (which btw. is also open source under the CC0 license) to try typing with even one key less than the Alpha28 has. ;-)

And if I at some point want to try to type with even fewer keys, I ll try a Butterstick keyboard with just 20 keys. It s a chorded keyboard where you have to press multiple keys at the same time to get one charcter: So to get an A from the missing middle row, you have to press Q and Z simultaneously, to get Escape, press Q and W simultaneously, to get Control, press Q, W, Z and X simultaneously, etc. And if that s not even enough, I already bought a keyboard kit named Ginny (or Ginni, the developer can t seem to decide) with just 10 keys from an acquaintance. Couldn t resist when offered his surplus kits. :-) It uses the ASETNIOP layout which was initially developed for on-screen keyboards on tablets.

There have been lot of stories about Coronavirus and with it a lot of political blame-game has been happening. The first step that India took of a lockdown is and was a good step but without having a plan as to how especially the poor and the needy and especially the huge migrant population that India has (internal migration) be affected by it. A 2019 World Economic Forum shares the stats. as 139 million people. That is a huge amount of people and there are a variety of both push and pull factors which has displaced these huge number of people. While there have been attempts in the past and probably will continue in future they will be hampered unless we have trust-worthy data which is where there is lots that need to be done. In the recent few years, both the primary and secondary data has generated lot of controversies within India as well as abroad so no point in rehashing all of that. Even the definition of who is a migrant needs to be well-established just as who is a farmer . The simplest lucanae in the later is those who have land are known as farmers but the tenant farmers and their wives are not added as farmers hence the true numbers are never known. Is this an India-specific problem or similar definition issues are there in the rest of the world I don t know.

How our Policies fail to reach the poor and the vulnerable The sad part is most policies in India are made in castles in the air . An interview by the wire shares the conundrum of those who are affected and the policies which are enacted for them (it s a youtube video, sorry)

If one with an open and fresh mind sees the interview it is clear that why there was a huge reverse migration from Indian cities to villages. The poor and marginalized has always seen the Indian state as an extortive force so it doesn t make sense for them to be in the cities. The Prime Minister s annoucement of food for 3 months was a clear indication for the migrant population that for 3 months they will have no work. Faced with such a scenario, the best option for them was to return to their native places. While videos of huge number of migrants were shown of Delhi, this was the scenario of most states and cities, including Pune, my own city . Another interesting point which was made is most of the policies will need the migrants to be back in the villages. Most of these are tied to the accounts which are opened in villages, so even if they want to have the benefits they will have to migrate to villages in order to use them. Of course, everybody in India knows how leaky the administration is. The late Shri Rajiv Gandhi had famously and infamously remarked once how leaky the Public Distribution system and such systems are. It s only 10 paise out of rupee which reaches the poor. And he said this about 30 years ago. There have been numerous reports of both IPS (Indian Police Services) reforms and IAS (Indian Administrative Services) reforms over the years, many of the committee reports have been in public domain and in fact was part of the election manifesto of the ruling party in 2014 but no movement has happened on that part. The only thing which has happened is people from the ruling party have been appointed on various posts which is same as earlier governments. I was discussing with a friend who is a contractor and builder about the construction labour issues which were pointed in the report and if it is true that many a times the migrant labour is not counted. While he shared a number of cases where he knew, a more recent case in public memory was when some labourers died while building Amanora mall which is perhaps one of largest malls in India. There were few accidents while constructing the mall. Apparently, the insurance money which should have gone to the migrant laborer was taken by somebody close to the developers who were building the mall. I have a friend in who lives in Jharkhand who is a labour officer. She has shared with me so many stories of how the labourers are exploited. Keep in mind she has been a labor officer appointed by the state and her salary is paid by the state. So she always has to maintain a balance of ensuring worker s rights and the interests of the state, private entities etc. which are usually in cahoots with the state and it is possible that lot of times the State wins over the worker s rights. Again, as a labour officer, she doesn t have that much power and when she was new to the work, she was often frustrated but as she remarked few months back, she has started taking it easy (routinized) as anyways it wasn t helping her in any good way. Also there have been plenty of cases of labor officers being murdered so its easier to understand why one tries to retain some sanity while doing their job.

The Indian response and the World Response The Indian response has been the lockdown and very limited testing. We seem to be following the pattern of UK and U.S. which had been slow to respond and slow to testing. In the past Kerala showed the way but this time even that is not enough. At the end of the day we need to test, test and test just as shared by the WHO chairman. India is trying to create its own cheap test kits with ICMR approval, for e.g. a firm from my own city Pune MyLab has been given approval. We will know how good or bad they are only after they have been field-tested. For ventilators we have asked Mahindra and Mahindra even though there are companies like Allied Medical and others who have exported to EU and others which the Govt. is still taking time to think through. This is similar to how in UK some companies who are with the Govt. but who have no experience in making ventilators are been given orders while those who have experience and were exporting to Germany and other countries are not been given orders. The playbook is errily similar. In India, we don t have the infrastructure for any new patients, period. Heck only a couple of states have done something proper for the anganwadi workers. In fact, last year there were massive strikes by anganwadi workers all over India but only NDTV showed a bit of it along with some of the news channels from South India. Most mainstream channels chose to ignore it. On the world stage, some of the other countries and how they have responded perhaps need sharing. For e.g. I didn t know that Cuba had so many doctors and the politics between it and Brazil. Or the interesting stats. shared by Andreas Backhaus which seems to show how distributed the issue (age-wise) is rather than just a few groups as has been told in Indian media. What was surprising for me is the 20-29 age group which has not been shared so much in the Indian media which is the bulk of our population. The HBR article also makes a few key points which I hope both the general public and policymakers both in India as well as elsewhere take note of. What is worrying though that people can be infected twice or more as seems to be from Singapore or China and elsewhere. I have read enough of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton books to be aware that viruses can do whatever. They will over time mutate, how things will happen then is anybody s guess. What I found interesting is the world economic forum article which hypothesis that it may be two viruses which got together as well as research paper from journal from poteome research which has recently been published. The biggest myth flying around is that summer will halt or kill the spread which even some of my friends have been victim of . While a part of me wants to believe them, a simple scientific fact has been viruses have probably been around us and evolved over time, just like we have. In fact, there have been cases of people dying due to common cold and other things. Viruses are so prevalent it s unbelivable. What is and was interesting to note is that bat-borne viruses as well as pangolin viruses had been theorized and shared by Chinese researchers going all the way back to 90 s . The problem is even if we killed all the bats in the world, some other virus will take its place for sure. One of the ideas I had, dunno if it s feasible or not that at least in places like Airports, we should have some sort of screenings and a labs working on virology. Of course, this will mean more expenses for flying passengers but for public health and safety maybe it would worth doing so. In any case, virologists should have a field day cataloging various viruses and would make it harder for viruses to spread as fast as this one has. The virus spread also showed a lack of leadership in most of our leaders who didn t react fast enough. While one hopes people do learn from this, I am afraid the whole thing is far from over. These are unprecedented times and hope that all are maintaining social distancing and going out only when needed.

How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse

Silicon Valley s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster and when it comes, they ll leave the rest of us behind

Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed, or under the sway of another, as in a military occupation.

Poster P590CW $9.00 Early Warning Signs Of Fascism Laurence W. Britt wrote about the common signs of fascism in April, 2003, after researching seven fascist regimes: Hitler's Nazi Germany; Mussolini's Italy; Franco's Spain; Salazar's Portugal; Papadopoulos' Greece; Pinochet's Chile; Suharto's Indonesia. Get involved! Text: Early Warning Signs of Fascism Powerful and Continuing Nationalism Disdain For Human Rights Identification of Enemies As a unifying cause Supremacy of the military Rampant Sexism Controlled Mass Media Obsession With National Security

Political and social scientist Stefania Milan writes about social movements, mobilization and organized collective action. On the one hand, interactions and networks achieve more visibility and become a proxy for a collective we . On the other hand: Law enforcement can exercise preemptive monitorin

How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election

A regional election offers lessons on combatting the rise of the far right, both across the Continent and in the United States.

The Italian diaspora is the large-scale emigration of Italians from Italy. There are two major Italian diasporas in Italian history. The first diaspora began more or less around 1880, a decade or so after the Unification of Italy (with most leaving after 1880), and ended in the 1920s to early-1940s with the rise of Fascism in Italy. The second diaspora started after the end of World War II and roughly concluded in the 1970s. These together constituted the largest voluntary emigration period in documented history. Between 1880-1980, about 15,000,000 Italians left the country permanently. By 1980, it was estimated that about 25,000,000 Italians were residing outside Italy. A third wave is being reported in present times, due to the socio-economic problems caused by the financial crisis of the early twenty-first century, especially amongst the youth. According to the Public Register of Italian Residents Abroad (AIRE), figures of Italians abroad rose from 3,106,251 in 2006 to 4,636,647 in 2015, growing by 49.3% in just ten years.

Under the current climate of lock-ins, self-isolation, shelter-in-place policies, and quarantine, it is becoming evident to more people the integral role computers play in our lives. Students are learning entirely online, those who can are working from home, and our personal relationships are being carried largely by technology like video chats, online games, and group messages. When these things have become our only means of socializing with those outside our homes, we begin to realize how important they are and the inequity inherent to many technologies. Someone was telling me how a neighbor doesn t have a printer, so they are printing off school assignments for their neighbor. People I know are sharing internet connections with people in their buildings, when possible, to help save on costs with people losing jobs. I worry now even more about people who have limited access to home devices or poor internet connections. As we are forced into our homes and are increasingly limited in the resources we have available, we find ourselves potentially unable to easily fill material needs and desires. In my neighborhood, it s hard to find flour. A friend cannot find yeast. A coworker couldn t find eggs. Someone else is without dish soap. Supply chains are not designed to meet with the demand currently being exerted on the system. This problem is mimicked in technology. If your computer breaks, it is much harder to fix it, and you lose a lot more than just a machine you lose your source of connection with the world. If you run out of toner cartridges for your printer and only one particular brand works the risk of losing your printer, and your access to school work, becomes a bigger deal. As an increasing number of things in our homes are wired, networked, and only able to function with a prescribed set of proprietary parts, gaps in supply chains become an even bigger issue. When you cannot use whatever is available, and instead need to wait for the particular thing, you find yourself either hoarding or going without. What happens when you can t get the toothbrush heads for your smart toothbrush due to prioritization and scarcity with online ordering when it s not so easy to just go to the pharmacy and get a regular toothbrush? In response to COVID-19 Adobe is offering no-cost access to some of their services. If people allow themselves to rely on these free services, they end up in a bad situation when a cost is re-attached. Lock-in is always a risk, but when people are desperate, unemployed, and lacking the resources they need to survive, the implications of being trapped in these proprietary systems are much more painful. What worries me even more than this is the reliance on insecure communication apps. Zoom, which is becoming the default service in many fields right now, offers anti-features like attendee attention tracking and user reporting. We are now being required to use technologies designed to maximize opportunities for surveillance to learn, work, and socialize. This is worrisome to me for two main reasons: the violation of privacy and the normalization of a surveillance state. It is a violation of privacy, to have our actions tracked. It also gets us used to being watched, which is dangerous as we look towards the future.

Disclaimer: I'm neither an experienced programmer nor proficient in reverse engineering, but I like at least to try to figure out how things work. Sometimes the solution is so easy, that even I manage to find it, still take this with a grain of salt. I lately witnessed the setup of an Envertech EnverBridge ENB-202 which is kind of a classic Chinese IoT device. Buy it, plug it in, use some strange setup software, and it will report your PV statistics to a web portal. The setup involved downloading a PE32 Windows executable, with an UI that basically has two input boxes and a sent button. You've to input the serial number(s) of your inverter boxes and the ID of your EnverBridge. That made me interested in what this setup process really looks like. The EnverBridge device itself has on one end a power plug, which is also used to communicate with the inverter via some Powerline protocol, and a network plug with a classic RJ45 end you plug into your network. If you power it up it will request an IPv4 address via DHCP. That brings us to the first oddity, the MAC address is in the BC:20:90 prefix which I could not find in the IEEE lists. Setting Up the SetID Software You can download the Windows software in a Zipfile, once you unpack it you end up with a Nullsoft installer .exe. Since this is a PE32 executable we've to add i386 as foreign architecture to install the wine32 package.

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt update
apt install wine32:i386
wget http://www.envertec.com/uploads/bigfiles/Set%20ID.zip
unzip Set\ ID.zip
wine Set\ ID.exe

The end result is an installation in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/SetID which reveals that this software is build with Qt5 according to the shipped dll's. The tool itself is in udpCilentNow.exe, and looks like this: The Network Communication To my own surprise, the communication is straight forward. A single UDP paket is sent to the broadcast address (255.255.255.255) on port 8765. I expected some strange binary protocol, but the payload is just simple numbers. They're a combination of the serial numbers of the inverter and the ID of the Enverbridge device. One thing I'm not 100% sure about are the inverter serial numbers, there are two of them, but on the inverter I've seen the serial numbers are always the same. So the payload is assembled like this:

• ID of the EnverBridge
• char 9 to 16 of the inverter serial 1
• char 9 to 16 of the inverter serial 2

If you've more inverter the serials are just appended in the same way. Another strange thing is that the software does close to no input validation, they only check that the inverter serials start with CN and then just extract char 9 to 16. The response from the EnverBridge is also a single UDP paket to the broadcast address on port 8764, with exactly the same content we've sent. Writing a Replacement My result is probably an insult for all proficient Python coders, but based on a bit of research and some cut&paste programming I could assemble a small script to replicate the function of the Windows binary. I guess the usefulness of this exercise was mostly my personal entertainment, though it might help some none Windows users to setup this device. Usage is also very simple:

./enverbridge.py -h
Usage: enverbridge.py [options] MIIDs
Options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -b BID, --bid=BID  Serial Number of your EnverBridge
./enverbridge.py -b 90087654 CN19100912345678 CN19100912345679

This is basically 1:1 the behaviour of the Windows binary, though I tried to add a bit more validation then the original binary and some more error messages. I also assume the serial numbers are also always the same so I take only one as the input, and duplicate it for the paket data.

My free software activities in february 2020 March is ending but I finally wrote my monthly report about activities in Debian and Free Software in general for February. As I already wrote here, I attended to FOSDEM 2020 on February 1st and 2nd in Brussels. It was a amazing experience. After my return to Curitiba, I felt my energies renewed to start new challenges.

MiniDebConf Macei 2020 I continued helping to organize MiniDebConf and I got positive answers from 4Linux and Globo.com and they are sponsorsing the event.

FLISOL 2020 I started to talk with Maristela from IEP - Instituto de Engenharia do Paran and after some messages and I joined a meeting with her and other members of C mara T cnica de Eletr nica, Computa o e Ci ncias de Dados. I explained about FLISOL in Curitiba to them and they agreed to host the event at IEP. I asked to use three spaces: Auditorium for FLISOL talks, Sal o Nobre for meetups from WordPress and PostgreSQL Communities, and the hall for Install Fest. Besides FLISOL, they would like to host other events and meetups from Communities in Curitiba as Python, PHP, and so on. At least one per month. I helped to schedule a PHP Paran Community meetup on March.

New job Since 17th I started to work at Rentcars as Infrastructure Analyst. I m very happy to work there because we use a lot of FLOSS and with nice people. Ubuntu LTS is the approved OS for desktops but I could install Debian on my laptop :-)

Misc I signed pgp keys from friends I met in Brussels and I had my pgp key signed by them. Finally my MR to the DebConf20 website fixing some texts was accepted. I have watched v deos from FOSDEM

1. Until now, I saw these great talks:

• Growing Sustainable Contributions Through Ambassador Networks
• Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism
• Cognitive biases, blindspots and inclusion
• Building a thriving community in company-led open source projects
• Building Community for your Company s OSS Projects
• The Ethics of Open Source
• Be The Leader You Need in Open Source
• The next generation of contributors is not on IRC
• Open Source Won, but Software Freedom Hasn t Yet
• Open Source Under Attack
• Lessons Learned from Cultivating Open Source Projects and Communities

That s all folks!

WebRTC is a standard real-time communication protocol built directly into modern web browsers. It enables the creation of video conferencing services which do not require participants to download additional software. Many services make use of it and it almost always works out of the box. The reason it just works is that it uses a protocol called ICE to establish a connection regardless of the network environment. What that means however is that in some cases, your video/audio connection will need to be relayed (using end-to-end encryption) to the other person via third-party TURN server. In addition to adding extra network latency to your call that relay server might overloaded at some point and drop or delay packets coming through. Here's how to tell whether or not your WebRTC calls are being relayed, and how to ensure you get a direct connection to the other host.

Testing basic WebRTC functionality Before you place a real call, I suggest using the official test page which will test your camera, microphone and network connectivity. Note that this test page makes use of a Google TURN server which is locked to particular HTTP referrers and so you'll need to disable privacy features that might interfere with this:

• Brave: Disable Shields entirely for that page (Simple view) or allow all cookies for that page (Advanced view).

• Firefox: Ensure that http.network.referer.spoofSource is set to false in about:config, which it is by default.
• uMatrix: The "Spoof Referer header" option needs to be turned off for that site.

Checking the type of peer connection you have Once you know that WebRTC is working in your browser, it's time to establish a connection and look at the network configuration that the two peers agreed on. My favorite service at the moment is Whereby (formerly Appear.in), so I'm going to use that to connect from two different computers:

• canada is a laptop behind a regular home router without any port forwarding.
• siberia is a desktop computer in a remote location that is also behind a home router, but in this case its internal IP address (192.168.1.2) is set as the DMZ host.

Chromium For all Chromium-based browsers, such as Brave, Chrome, Edge, Opera and Vivaldi, the debugging page you'll need to open is called chrome://webrtc-internals. Look for RTCIceCandidatePair lines and expand them one at a time until you find the one which says:

• state: succeeded (or state: in-progress)
• nominated: true
• writable: true

Then from the name of that pair (N6cxxnrr_OEpeash in the above example) find the two matching RTCIceCandidate lines (one local-candidate and one remote-candidate) and expand them. In the case of a direct connection, I saw the following on the remote-candidate:

• ip shows the external IP address of siberia
• port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
• candidateType: srflx

and the following on local-candidate:

• ip shows the external IP address of canada
• port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
• candidateType: prflx

These candidate types indicate that a STUN server was used to determine the public-facing IP address and port for each computer, but the actual connection between the peers is direct. On the other hand, for a relayed/proxied connection, I saw the following on the remote-candidate side:

• ip shows an IP address belonging to the TURN server
• candidateType: relay

and the same information as before on the local-candidate.

Firefox If you are using Firefox, the debugging page you want to look at is about:webrtc. Expand the top entry under "Session Statistics" and look for the line (should be the first one) which says the following in green:

• ICE State: succeeded
• Nominated: true
• Selected: true

then look in the "Local Candidate" and "Remote Candidate" sections to find the candidate type in brackets.

Firewall ports to open to avoid using a relay In order to get a direct connection to the other WebRTC peer, one of the two computers (in my case, siberia) needs to open all inbound UDP ports since there doesn't appear to be a way to restrict Chromium or Firefox to a smaller port range for incoming WebRTC connections. This isn't great and so I decided to tighten that up in two ways by:

• restricting incoming UDP traffic to the IP range of siberia's ISP, and
• explicitly denying incoming to the UDP ports I know are open on siberia.

To get the IP range, start with the external IP address of the machine (I'll use the IP address of my blog in this example: 66.228.46.55) and pass it to the whois command:

$ whois 66.228.46.55   grep CIDR
CIDR:           66.228.32.0/19

To get the list of open UDP ports on siberia, I sshed into it and ran nmap:

$ sudo nmap -sU localhost
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-03-28 15:55 PDT
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.000015s latency).
Not shown: 994 closed ports
PORT      STATE         SERVICE
631/udp   open filtered ipp
5060/udp  open filtered sip
5353/udp  open          zeroconf
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 190.25 seconds

I ended up with the following in my /etc/network/iptables.up.rules (ports below 1024 are denied by the default rule and don't need to be included here):

# Deny all known-open high UDP ports before enabling WebRTC for canada
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -j DROP
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5353 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 66.228.32.0/19 -p udp --dport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT

Assume for a minute that that best way to take notes is on paper with pens, pencils etc., and not in a digital device. (I might return to this later). I'm torn between two extremes for note-taking. One one hand, I find it useful in the short-term to make scrappy, ephemeral notes: ad-hoc daily TODO lists; mind maps and experiments, that I intend to throw away. There are lots of styles of stationary to support this: ring-bound notebooks that are easy to tear leaves from; or literally the back of envelopes. The other extreme is the "preserve everything" mentality. For my PhD, I have a single, hard-backed notebook that I try to do all my PhD note taking in. I date each entry. There's a history I can refer to, no matter whether what I'm writing is seemingly ephemeral or not. So I do both. Sometimes I want to refer back to something I did which was ephemeral and I've lost it or thrown it away. And having lots of mis-matched stationary for ephemeral storage is a bit messy, and works against the other extreme to a certain extent. I've started to wonder whether strictly doing one or the other (and most likely, the "preserve everything" approach) might be a good idea. In practise that would mean settling on a particular notebook format, and disposing of anything else; having separate notebooks by topics (PhD, work, ) with a "catch-all" for the rest. Does anyone have any advice or useful resources to read on this topic?

I just took my dog for a nice long walk. It s the last walk we ll be taking for the next 3 weeks, he already starts moping around if we just skip one day of walking, so I m going to have to get creative keeping him entertained. My entire country is going on lockdown starting at midnight. People won t be allowed to leave their homes unless it s for medical emergencies, to buy food or if their work has been deemed essential.

• 

• 

• 

Due to the Covid-19 epidemic nearing half a million confirmed infections, this has become quite common in the world right now, with about a quarter of the world s population currently under lockdown and confined to their homes. Some people may have noticed I ve been a bit absent recently, I ve been going through some really rough personal stuff. I m dealing with it and I ll be ok, but please practice some patience with me in the immediate future if you re waiting on anything. I have a lot of things going on in Debian right now. It helps keeping me busy through all the turmoil and gives me something positive to focus on. I m running for Debian Project Leader (DPL), I haven t been able to put in quite the energy into my campaign that I would have liked, but I think it s going ok under the circumstances. I think because of everything happening in the world it s been more difficult for other Debianites to participate in debian-vote discussions as well. Recently we also announced Debian Social, a project that s still in its early phases, but we ve been trying to get it going for about 2 years, so it s nice to finally see it shaping up. There s also plans to put Debian Social and some additional tooling to the test, with the idea to host a MiniDebConf entirely online. No dates have been confirmed yet, we still have a lot of crucial bits to figure out, but you can subscribe to debian-devel-announce and Debian micronews for updates as soon as more information is available. To everyone out there, stay safe, keep your physical distance for now and don t lose hope, things will get better again.

I recently stumbled upon chafa, a tool to display pictures, especially color pictures on your ANSI text terminal, e.g. inside an xterm. And I occasionally use aha, the Ansi HTML Adapter to convert a colorful terminal content into HTML to show off terminal screenshots without the requirement of a picture so that it also works in e.g. text browsers or for blinds. Combining chafa and aha: Examples A moment ago I had the thought what would happen if I feed the output of chafa into aha and expected nothing really usable. But I was surprised by the quality of the outcome. looks like this after chafa -w 9 -c full -s 160x50 DSCN4692.jpg aha -n:

Checking the Look in Text Browsers It even looks not that bad in elinks as far as I know the only text browser which supports CSS and styles: In Lynx and Links 2, the text composing the image is displayed only in black and white, but you at least can recognise the edges in the picture: Same Functionality in One Tool? I knew there was a tool which did this in one step. Seems to have been png2html. Tried to play around with it, too, but neither really understood how to use it (seems to require a text file for the characters to be used why?) nor did I really got it working. It always ran until I aborted it and it never filled the target file with any content. Additionally, png2html insists on one character per pixel, requiring to first properly resize the image before converting to HTML. The Keyboard in the Pictures Oh, and btw., the displayed keyboard is my Zlant. The Zlant is a 40% uniform staggered mechanical keyboard. Currently, only Zlant PCBs are available at 1UP Keyboards (USA), i.e. no complete kits. It is shown with the SA Vilebloom key cap set, currently available at MechSupply (UK).