Search Results: "ag"

9 October 2017

Petter Reinholdtsen: Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)

At my nearby maker space, Sonen, I heard the story that it was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+) on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X. I found this annoying, as the software involved, Cura, is free software and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took the time to package it for the relevant distributions. I even found a request for adding into Debian from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but never resulted in the software showing up in Debian. So a few days ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation. Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW queue for the ftpmasters to have a look. You can track the progress on the status page for the 3D printer team. The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded now to get slots in the NEW queue while we work up updating the packages to the latest upstream version. On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the short time I spent on it, are already in Debian. If you are looking for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in Debian, check out slic3r and slic3r-prusa. The latter is a fork of the former.

Gunnar Wolf: Achievement unlocked - Made with Creative Commons translated to Spanish! (Thanks, @xattack!)

I am very, very, very happy to report this And I cannot believe we have achieved this so fast: Back in June, I announced I'd start working on the translation of the Made with Creative Commons book into Spanish. Over the following few weeks, I worked out the most viable infrastructure, gathered input and commitments for help from a couple of friends, submitted my project for inclusion in the Hosted Weblate translations site (and got it approved!) Then, we quietly and slowly started working. Then, as it usually happens in late August, early September... The rush of the semester caught me in full, and I left this translation project for later For the next semester, perhaps... Today, I received a mail that surprised me. That stunned me. 99% of translated strings! Of course, it does not look as neat as "100%" would, but there are several strings not to be translated. So, yay for collaborative work! Oh, and FWIW Thanks to everybody who helped. And really, really, really, hats off to Luis Enrique Amaya, a friend whom I see way less than I should. A LIDSOL graduate, and a nice guy all around. Why to him specially? Well... This has several wrinkles to iron out, but, by number of translated lines: ...Need I say more? Luis, I hope you enjoyed reading the book :-] There is still a lot of work to do, and I'm asking the rest of the team some days so I can get my act together. From the mail I just sent, I need to:
  1. Review the Pandoc conversion process, to get the strings formatted again into a book; I had got this working somewhere in the process, but last I checked it broke. I expect this not to be too much of a hurdle, and it will help all other translations.
  2. Start the editorial process at my Institute. Once the book builds, I'll have to start again the stylistic correction process so the Institute agrees to print it out under its seal. This time, we have the hurdle that our correctors will probably hate us due to part of the work being done before we had actually agreed on some important Spanish language issues... which are different between Mexico, Argentina and Costa Rica (where translators are from). Anyway This sets the mood for a great start of the week. Yay!
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8 October 2017

Iain R. Learmonth: Free Software Efforts (2017W40)

Here s my weekly report for week 40 of 2017. In this week I have looked at censorship in Catalonia and had my deleted Facebook account hacked (which made HN front page). I ve also been thinking about DRM on the web.

Debian I have prepared and uploaded fixes for the measurement-kit and hamradio-maintguide packages. I have also sponsored uploads for gnustep-base (to experimental) and chkservice. I have given DM upload privileges to Eric Heintzmann for the gnustep-base package as he has shown to care for the GNUstep packages well. In the near future, I think we re looking at a transition for gnustep- base,back,gui as these packages all have updates. Bugs filed: #877680 Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #872202, #877466, #877468

Tor Project This week I have participated in a discussion around renaming the Operations section of the Metrics website. I have also filed a new ticket on Atlas, which I am planning to implement, to link to the new relay lifecycle post on the Tor Project blog if a relay is less than a week old to help new relay operators understand the bandwidth usage they ll be seeing. Finally, I ve been hacking on a Twitter bot to tweet factoids about the public Tor network. I ve detailed this in a separate blog post. Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #23683

Sustainability I believe it is important to be clear not only about the work I have already completed but also about the sustainability of this work into the future. I plan to include a short report on the current sustainability of my work in each weekly report. I have not had any free software related expenses this week. The current funds I have available for equipment, travel and other free software expenses remains 60.52. I do not believe that any hardware I rely on is looking at imminent failure.

Michael Stapelberg: Debian stretch on the Raspberry Pi 3 (update)

I previously wrote about my Debian stretch preview image for the Raspberry Pi 3. Now, I m publishing an updated version, containing the following changes: A couple of issues remain, notably the lack of WiFi and bluetooth support (see wiki:RaspberryPi3 for details. Any help with fixing these issues is very welcome! As a preview version (i.e. unofficial, unsupported, etc.) until all the necessary bits and pieces are in place to build images in a proper place in Debian, I built and uploaded the resulting image. Find it at https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/raspberrypi3/2017-10-08/. To install the image, insert the SD card into your computer (I m assuming it s available as /dev/sdb) and copy the image onto it: 
$ wget https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/raspberrypi3/2017-10-08/2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.bz2
$ bunzip2 2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.bz2
$ sudo dd if=2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img of=/dev/sdb bs=5M
If resolving client-supplied DHCP hostnames works in your network, you should be able to log into the Raspberry Pi 3 using SSH after booting it: 
$ ssh root@rpi3
# Password is  raspberry

Joachim Breitner: e.g. in TeX

When I learned TeX, I was told to not write e.g. something, because TeX would think the period after the g ends a sentence, and introduce a wider, inter-sentence space. Instead, I was to write e.g.\ . Years later, I learned from a convincing, but since forgotten source, that in fact e.g.\@ is the proper thing to write. I vaguely remembering that e.g.\ supposedly affected the inter-word space in some unwanted way. So I did that for many years. Until I recently was called out for doing it wrong, and that infact e.g.\ is the proper way. This was supported by a StackExchange answer written by a LaTeX authority and backed by a reference to documentation. The same question has, however, another answer by another TeX authority, backed by an analysis of the implementation, which concludes that e.g.\@ is proper. What now? I guess I just have to find it out myself.
The problem and two solutions

The problem and two solutions

The above image shows three variants: The obviously broken version with e.g., and the two contesting variants to fix it. Looks like they yield equal results! So maybe the difference lies in how \@ and \ react when the line length changes, and the word wrapping require differences in the inter-word spacing. Will there be differences? Let s see;
Expanding whitespace, take 1

Expanding whitespace, take 1

Expanding whitespace, take 2

Expanding whitespace, take 2

I cannot see any difference. But the inter-sentence whitespace ate most of the expansion. Is there a difference visible if we have only inter-word spacing in the line?
Expanding whitespace, take 3

Expanding whitespace, take 3

Expanding whitespace, take 4

Expanding whitespace, take 4

Again, I see the same behaviour. Conclusion: It does not matter, but e.g.\ is less hassle when using lhs2tex than e.g.\@ (which has to be escaped as e.g.\@@), so the winner is e.g.\ ! (Unless you put it in a macro, then \@ might be preferable, and it is still needed between a captial letter and a sentence period.)

Daniel Pocock: A step change in managing your calendar, without social media

Have you been to an event recently involving free software or a related topic? How did you find it? Are you organizing an event and don't want to fall into the trap of using Facebook or Meetup or other services that compete for a share of your community's attention? Are you keen to find events in foreign destinations related to your interest areas to coincide with other travel intentions? Have you been concerned when your GSoC or Outreachy interns lost a week of their project going through the bureaucracy to get a visa for your community's event? Would you like to make it easier for them to find the best events in the countries that welcome and respect visitors? In many recent discussions about free software activism, people have struggled to break out of the illusion that social media is the way to cultivate new contacts. Wouldn't it be great to make more meaningful contacts by attending more a more diverse range of events rather than losing time on social media? Making it happen There are already a number of tools (for example, Drupal plugins and Wordpress plugins) for promoting your events on the web and in iCalendar format. There are also a number of sites like Agenda du Libre and GriCal who aggregate events from multiple communities where people can browse them. How can we take these concepts further and make a convenient, compelling and global solution? Can we harvest event data from a wide range of sources and compile it into a large database using something like PostgreSQL or a NoSQL solution or even a distributed solution like OpenDHT? Can we use big data techniques to mine these datasources and help match people to events without compromising on privacy? Why not build an automated iCalendar "to-do" list of deadlines for events you want to be reminded about, so you never miss the deadlines for travel sponsorship or submitting a talk proposal? I've started documenting an architecture for this on the Debian wiki and proposed it as an Outreachy project. It will also be offered as part of GSoC in 2018. Ways to get involved If you would like to help this project, please consider introducing yourself on the debian-outreach mailing list and helping to mentor or refer interns for the project. You can also help contribute ideas for the specification through the mailing list or wiki. Mini DebConf Prishtina 2017 This weekend I've been at the MiniDebConf in Prishtina, Kosovo. It has been hosted by the amazing Prishtina hackerspace community. Watch out for future events in Prishtina, the pizzas are huge, but that didn't stop them disappearing before we finished the photos:

Ricardo Mones: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

One of the reasons which made me switch my old 17" BenQ monitor for a Dell U2413 three years ago was it had an integrated SD card reader. I find very convenient to take camera's card out, plug the card into the monitor and click on KDE device monitor's option Open with digiKam to download the photos or videos.

But last week, when trying to reconnect the USB cable to the new board just didn't work and the kernel log messages were not very hopeful:

[190231.770349] usb 2-2.3.3: new SuperSpeed USB device number 15 using xhci_hcd
[190231.890439] usb 2-2.3.3: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=0307
[190231.890444] usb 2-2.3.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[190231.890446] usb 2-2.3.3: Product: USB3.0 Card Reader
[190231.890449] usb 2-2.3.3: Manufacturer: Realtek
[190231.890451] usb 2-2.3.3: SerialNumber: F141000037E1
[190231.896592] usb-storage 2-2.3.3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[190231.896764] scsi host8: usb-storage 2-2.3.3:1.0
[190232.931861] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic- SD/MMC/MS/MSPRO  1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[190232.933902] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
[190232.937989] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
[190243.069680] hub 2-2.3:1.0: hub_ext_port_status failed (err = -71)
[190243.070037] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.070410] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.070660] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071035] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071409] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071413] usb 2-2.3-port3: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
...

I was sure USB 3.0 ports were working, because I've already used them with a USB 3.0 drive, so first thought was the monitor USB hub had failed. It seemed unlikely that a cable which has not been moved in 3 years was suddenly failing, is that even possible?

But a few moments later the same cable plugged into a USB 2.0 worked flawlessly and all photos could be downloaded, just noticeably slower.

A bit confused, and thinking that, since everything else was working maybe the cable had to be replaced, it happened I upgraded the system in the meantime. And luck came into rescue, because now it works again in 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 kernel. Looking at the package changelog it seems the fix was this usb:xhci:Fix regression when ATI chipsets detected . So, not a bad cable but a little kernel bug ;-)

Thanks to all involved, specially Ben for the package update!

Iain R. Learmonth: Tor Relays on Twitter

A while ago I played with a Twitter bot that would track radio amateurs using a packet radio position reporting system, tweet their location and a picture from Flickr that was taken near to their location and a link to their packet radio activity on aprs.fi. It s really not that hard to put these things together and they can be a lot of fun. The tweets looked like this: This isn t about building a system that serves any critical purpose, it s about fun. As the radio stations were chosen essentially at random, there could be some cool things showing up that you wouldn t otherwise have seen. Maybe you d spot a callsign of a station you ve spoken to before on HF or perhaps you d see stations in areas near you or in cool places. On Friday evening I took a go at hacking together a bot for Tor relays. The idea being to have regular snippets of information from the Tor network and perhaps you ll spot something insightful or interesting. Not every tweet is going to be amazing, but it wasn t running for very long before I spotted a relay very close to its 10th birthday: The relays are chosen at random, and tweet templates are chosen at random too. So far, tweets about individual relays can be about age or current bandwidth contribution to the Tor network. There are also tweets about how many relays run in a particular autonomous system (again, chosen at random) and tweets about the total number of relays currently running. The total relays tweets come with a map: The maps are produced using xplanet. The Earth will rotate to show the current side in daylight at the time the tweet is posted. Unfortunately, the bot currently cannot tweet as the account has been suspended. You should still be able to though and tweets will begin appearing again once I ve resolved the suspension. I plan to rewrite the mess of cron-activated Python scripts into a coherent Python (maybe Java) application and publish the sources soon. There are also a number of new templates for tweets I d like to explore, including number of relays and bandwidth contributed per family and statistics on operating system diversity. Update (2017-10-08): The @TorAtlas account should now be unsuspended.

Thomas Lange: FAI 5.4 enters the embedded world

Since DebConf 17 I was working on cross-architecture support for FAI. The new FAI release supports creating cross-architecture disk images, for e.g. you can build an image for Arm64 (aarch64) on a host running 64-bit x86 Linux (amd64) in about 6 minutes. The release announcement has more details, and I also created a video showing the build process for an Arm64 disk image and booting this image using Qemu. I'm happy to join the Debian cloud sprint in a week, where more FAI related work is waiting. FAI embedded ARM

7 October 2017

Chris Lamb: python-gfshare: Secret sharing in Python

I've just released python-gfshare, a Python library that implements Shamir s method for secret sharing, a technique to split a "secret" into multiple parts. An arbitrary number of those parts are then needed to recover the original file but any smaller combination of parts are useless to an attacker. For instance, you might split a GPG key into a 3-of-5 share, putting one share on each of three computers and two shares on a USB memory stick. You can then use the GPG key on any of those three computers using the memory stick. If the memory stick is lost you can ultimately recover the key by bringing the three computers back together again. For example: 
$ pip install gfshare

>>> import gfshare
>>> shares = gfshare.split(3, 5, b"secret")
>>> shares
 104: b'1\x9cQ\xd8\xd3\xaf',
 164: b'\x15\xa4\xcf7R\xd2',
 171: b'>\xf5*\xce\xa2\xe2',
 173: b'd\xd1\xaaR\xa5\x1d',
 183: b'\x0c\xb4Y\x8apC' 
>>> gfshare.combine(shares)
b"secret"
After removing two "shares" we can still reconstruct the secret as we have 3 out of the 5 originals: 
>>> del shares['104']
>>> del shares['171']
>>> gfshare.combine(shares)
b"secret"
Under the hood it uses Daniel Silverstone s libgfshare library. The source code is available on GitHub as is the documentation. Patches welcome.

6 October 2017

Scarlett Clark: KDE at #UbuntuRally in New York! KDE Applications snaps!

#UbuntuRally New York

KDE at #UbuntuRally New York

I was happy to attend Ubuntu Rally last week in New York with Aleix Pol to represent KDE.
We were able toaccomplish many things during this week, and that is a result of having direct contact with Snap developers.
So a big thank you out to Canonical for sponsoring me. I now have all of KDE core applications,
and many KDE extragear applications in the edge channel looking for testers.
I have also made a huge dent in also making the massive KDE PIM snap!
I hope to have this done by week end.
Most of our issue list made it onto TO-DO lists
So from KDE perspective, this sprint was a huge success!

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in September 2017

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I was allocated 12h but I only spent 10.5h. During this time, I continued my work on exiv2. I finished reproducing all the issues and then went on doing code reviews to confirm that vulnerabilities were not present when the issue was not reproducible. I found two CVE where the vulnerability was present in the wheezy version and I posted patches in the upstream bug tracker: #57 and #55. Then another batch of 10 CVE appeared and I started the process over I m currently trying to reproduce the issues. While doing all this work on exiv2, I also uncovered a failure to build on the package in experimental (reported here). Misc Debian/Kali work Debian Live. I merged 3 live-build patches prepared by Matthijs Kooijman and added an armel fix to cope with the the rename of the orion5x image into the marvell one. I also uploaded a new live-config to fix a bug with the keyboard configuration. Finally, I also released a new live-installer udeb to cope with a recent live-build change that broke the locale selection during the installation process. Debian Installer. I prepared a few patches on pkgsel to merge a few features that had been added to Ubuntu, most notably the possibility to enable unattended-upgrades by default. More bug reports. I investigated much further my problem with non-booting qemu images when they are built by vmdebootstrap in a chroot managed by schroot (cf #872999) and while we have much more data, it s not yet clear why it doesn t work. But we have a working work-around While investigating issues seen in Kali, I opened a bunch of reports on the Debian side: Packaging. I sponsored two uploads (dirb and python-elasticsearch). Debian Handbook. My work on updating the book mostly stalled. The only thing I did was to review the patch about wireless configuration in #863496. I must really get back to work on the book! Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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5 October 2017

Ross Gammon: My FOSS activities for August & September 2017

I am writing this from my hotel room in Bologna, Italy before going out for a pizza. After a successful Factory Acceptance Test today, I might also allow myself to celebrate with a beer. But anyway, here is what I have been up to in the FLOSS world for the last month and a bit. Debian
  • Uploaded gramps (4.2.6) to stretch-backports & jessie-backports-sloppy.
  • Started working on the latest release of node-tmp. It needs further work due to new documentation being included etc.
  • Started working on packaging the latest goocanvas-2.0 package. Everything is ready except for producing some autopkgtests.
  • Moved node-coffeeify experimental to unstable.
  • Updated the Multimedia Blends Tasks with all the latest ITPs etc.
  • Reviewed doris for Antonio Valentino, and sponsored it for him.
  • Reviewed pyresample for Antonio Valentino, and sponsored it for him.
  • Reviewed a new parlatype package for Gabor Karsay, and sponsored it for him.
Ubuntu
  • Successfully did my first merge using git-ubuntu for the Qjackctl package. Thanks to Nish for patiently answering my questions, reviewing my work, and sponsoring the upload.
  • Refreshed the gramps backport request to 4.2.6. Still no willing sponsor.
  • Tested Len s rewrite of ubuntustudio-controls, adding a CPU governor option in particular. There are a couple of minor things to tidy up, but we have probably missed the chance to get it finalised for Artful.
  • Tested the First Beta release of Ubuntu Studio 17.10 Artful and wrote the release notes. Also drafted my first release announcement on the Ubunti Studio website which Eylul reviewed and published.
  • Refreshed the ubuntustudio-meta package and requested sponsorship. This was done by Steve Langasek. Thanks Steve.
  • Tested the Final Beta release of Ubuntu Studio 17.10 Artful and wrote the release notes.
  • Started working on a new Carla package, starting from where V ctor Cuadrado Juan left it (ITP in Debian).

Wouter Verhelst: Patching Firefox

At work, I help maintain a smartcard middleware that is provided to Belgian citizens who want to use their electronic ID card to, e.g., log on to government websites. This middleware is a piece of software that hooks into various browsers and adds a way to access the smartcard in question, through whatever APIs the operating system and the browser in question provide for that purpose. The details of how that is done differ between each browser (and in the case of Google Chrome, for the same browser between different operating systems); but for Firefox (and Google Chrome on free operating systems), this is done by way of a PKCS#11 module. For Firefox 57, mozilla decided to overhaul much of their browser. The changes are large and massive, and in some ways revolutionary. It's no surprise, therefore, that some of the changes break compatibility with older things. One of the areas in which breaking changes were made is in the area of extensions to the browser. Previously, Firefox had various APIs available for extensions; right now, all APIs apart from the WebExtensions API are considered "legacy" and support for them will be removed from Firefox 57 going forward. Since installing a PKCS#11 module manually is a bit complicated, and since the legacy APIs provided a way to do so automatically provided the user would first install an add-on (or provided the installer of the PKCS#11 module sideloads it), most parties who provide a PKCS#11 module for use with Firefox will provide an add-on to automatically install it. Since the alternative involves entering the right values in a dialog box that's hidden away somewhere deep in the preferences screen, the add-on option is much more user friendly. I'm sure you can imagine my dismay when I found out that there was no WebExtensions API to provide the same functionality. So, after asking around a bit, I filed bug 1357391 to get a discussion started. While it took some convincing initially to get people to understand the reasons for wanting such an API, eventually the bug was assigned the "P5" priority -- essentially, a "we understand the need and won't block it, but we don't have the time to implement it. Patches welcome, though" statement. Since having an add-on was something that work really wanted, and since I had the time, I got the go-ahead from management to look into implementing the required code myself. I made it obvious rather quickly that my background in Firefox was fairly limited, though, and so was assigned a mentor to help me through the process. Having been a Debian Developer for the past fifteen years, I do understand how to develop free software. Yet, the experience was different enough that still learned some new things about free software development, which was somewhat unexpected. Unfortunately, the process took much longer than I had hoped, which meant that the patch was not ready by the time Firefox 57 was branched off mozilla's "central" repository. The result of that is that while my patch has been merged into what will eventually become Firefox 58, it looks strongly as though it won't make it into Firefox 57. That's going to cause some severe headaches, which I'm not looking forward to; and while I can certainly understand the reasons for not wanting to grant the exception for the merge into 57, I can't help but feeling like this is a missed opportunity. Anyway, writing code for the massive Open Source project that mozilla is has been a load of fun, and in the process I've learned a lot -- not only about Open Source development in general, but also about this weird little thing that Javascript is. That might actually be useful for this other project that I've got running here. In closing, I'd like to thank Tomislav 'zombie' Jovanovic for mentoring me during the whole process, without whom it would have been doubtful if I would even have been ready by now. Apologies for any procedural mistakes I've made, and good luck in your future endeavours! :-)

4 October 2017

Steve Kemp: Tracking aircraft in real-time, via software-defined-radio

So my last blog-post was about creating a digital-radio, powered by an ESP8266 device, there's a joke there about wireless-control of a wireless. I'm not going to make it. Sticking with a theme this post is also about radio, software-defined radio. I know almost nothing about SDR, except that it can be used to let your computer "do stuff" with radio. The only application I've ever read about that seemed interesting was tracking aircraft. This post is about setting up a Debian GNU/Linux system to do exactly that, show aircraft in real-time above your head! This was almost painless to setup. So I bought this USB device from AliExpress for the grand total of 8.46. I have no idea if that URL is stable, but I suspect it is probably not. Good luck finding something similar if you're living in the future! Once I connected the Antenna to the USB stick, and inserted it into a spare slot it showed up in the output of lsusb: 
  $ lsusb
  ..
  Bus 003 Device 043: ID 0bda:2838 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2838 DVB-T
  ..
In more detail I see the major/minor numbers: 
  idVendor           0x0bda Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
  idProduct          0x2838 RTL2838 DVB-T
So far, so good. I installed the development headers/library I needed: 
  # apt-get install librtlsdr-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev
Once that was done I could clone antirez's repository, and build it: 
  $ git clone https://github.com/antirez/dump1090.git
  $ cd dump1090
  $ make
And run it: 
  $ sudo ./dump1090 --interactive --net
This failed initially as a kernel-module had claimed the device, but removing that was trivial: 
  $ sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
  $ sudo ./dump1090 --interactive --net
Once it was running I'd see live updates on the console, every second: 
  Hex    Flight   Altitude  Speed   Lat       Lon       Track  Messages Seen       .
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  4601fc          14200     0       0.000     0.000     0     11        1 sec
  4601f2          9550      0       0.000     0.000     0     58        0 sec
  45ac52 SAS1716  2650      177     60.252    24.770    47    26        1 sec
And opening a browser pointing at http://localhost:8080/ would show that graphically, like so: NOTE: In this view I'm in Helsinki, and the airport is at Vantaa, just outside the city. Of course there are tweaks to be made:

Daniel Silverstone: F/LOSS (in)activity, September 2017

In the interests of keeping myself "honest" regarding F/LOSS activity, here's a report, sadly it's not very good.
Unfortunately, September was a poor month for me in terms of motivation and energy for F/LOSS work. I did some amount of Gitano work, merging a patch from Richard Ipsum for help text of the config command. I also submitted another patch to the STM32F103xx Rust repository, though it wasn't a particularly big thing. Otherwise I've been relatively quiet on the Rust/USB stuff and have otherwise kept away from projects. Sometimes one needs to take a step away from things in order to recuperate and care for oneself rather than the various demands on ones time. This is something I had been feeling I needed for a while, and with a lack of motivation toward the start of the month I gave myself permission to take a short break. Next weekend is the next Gitano developer day and I hope to pick up my activity again then, so I should have more to report for October.

Iain R. Learmonth: MAC Catching

As we walk around with mobile phones in our pockets, there are multiple radios each with identifiers that can be captured and recorded just through their normal operation. Bluetooth and Wifi devices have MAC addresses and can advertise their presence to other devices merely by sending traffic, or by probing for devices to connect to if they re not connected. I found a simple tool, probemon that allows for anyone with a wifi card to track who is at which location at any given time. You could deploy a few of these with Raspberry Pis or even go even cheaper with a number of ESP8266. In the news recently was a report from TfL about their WiFi data collection. Sky News reported that TfL plans to make 322m by collecting data from passengers mobiles . TfL have later denied this but the fact remains that collecting this data is trivial. I ve been thinking about ideas for spoofing mass amounts of wireless devices making the collected data useless. I ve found that people have had success in using Scapy to forge WiFi frames. When I have some free time I plan to look into some kind of proof-of-concept for this. On the underground, this is the way to do this, but above ground I ve also heard of systems that use the TMSI from 3G/4G, not WiFi data, to identify mobile phones. You ll have to be a bit more brave if you want to forge these (please do not, unless using alternative licensed frequencies, you may interfere with mobile service and prevent 999 calls). If you wanted to spy on mobile phones near to you, you can do this with the gr-gsm package now available in Debian.

Norbert Preining: Einstein and Freud s letters on Why War? 85th anniversary

85 years ago, on 30 July 1932, Albert Einstein send a letter to Sigmund Freud discussing the question: Why War? Freud answered to this letter in early September 1932. To commemorate the 85 year anniversary, the German typographer Harald Geisler has started a project on Kickstarter to recreate the letters send back then. Over the last weeks the two letters have arrived at my place in Japan:
But not only were the letters reproduces, but typeset in the original digitized handwriting and sent from the original locations. Harald Geisler crafted fonts based on the hand-writing of Einstein and Freud, an layout out the pages of the letters according to the originals. Since the letters were originally written in German, an English translation also typeset in the hand-writing font was added.
In addition to the a bit archaic hand writing of Freud which even many German natives will not be able to read, the German text of his letter has been included in normal print style. Not only that, Harald Geisler even managed to convince the Sigmund Freud Museum to let rest the letters for one night in the very office where the original letter was written, so all the letters send out actually came from Freud s office.
This project was one of the first Kickstarter projects I supported, and I really liked the idea, and would like to thanks Harald Geisler for realizing it. These kind of activities, combining of typography, history, action, dedication, keep our culture and history alive. Thanks.
Harald Geisler also invites us all to continue the dialog on Why War?, which is getting more and more relevant again, with war-mongering becoming respected practice.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.11

RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("ProtoBuf") data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed fairly widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. A new releases RProtoBuf 0.4.11 appeared on CRAN earlier today. Not unlike the other recent releases, it is mostly a maintenance release which switches two of the vignettes over to using the pinp package and its template for vignettes.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.11 (2017-10-03)
  • The RProtoBuf-intro and RProtoBuf-quickref vignettes were converted to Rmarkdown using the templates and style file from the pinp package.
  • A few minor internal upgrades

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the 'quick' overview vignette, a unit test summary vignette, and the pre-print for the JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

3 October 2017

Christoph Egger: Observations on Catalunya

Some things I don't really understand reading in German media Too bad I didn't keep the links / articles from Sunday night.

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