Search Results: "ed"

10 October 2025

John Goerzen: I m Not Very Popular, Thankfully. That Makes The Internet Fun Again

Like and subscribe! Help us get our next thousand (or million) followers! I was using Linux before it was popular. Back in the day where you had to write Modelines for your XF86Config file and do it properly, or else you might ruin your monitor. Back when there wasn t a word processor (thankfully; that forced me to learn LaTeX, which I used to write my papers in college). I then ran Linux on an Alpha, a difficult proposition in an era when web browsers were either closed-source or too old to be useful; all sorts of workarounds, including emulating Digital UNIX. Recently I wrote a deep dive into the DOS VGA text mode and how to achieve it on a modern UEFI Linux system. Nobody can monetize things like this. I am one of maybe a dozen or two people globally that care about that sort of thing. That s fine. Today, I m interested in things like asynchronous communication, NNCP, and Gopher. Heck, I m posting these words on a blog. Social media displaced those, right? Some of the things I write about here have maybe a few dozen people on the planet interested in them. That s fine. I have no idea how many people read my blog. I have no idea where people hear about my posts from. I guess I can check my Mastodon profile to see how many followers I have, but it s not something I tend to do. I don t know if the number is going up or down, or if it is all that much in Mastodon terms (probably not). Thank goodness. Since I don t have to care about what s popular, or spend hours editing video, or thousands of dollars on video equipment, I can just sit down and write about what interests me. If that also interests you, then great. If not, you can find what interests you also fine. I once had a colleague that was one of these plugged into Silicon Valley types. He would periodically tell me, with a mixture of excitement and awe, that one of my posts had made Hacker News. This was always news to me, because I never paid a lot of attention over there. Occasionally that would bring in some excellent discussion, but more often than not, it was comments from people that hadn t read or understood the article trying to appear smart by arguing with what it or rather, what they imagined it said, I guess. The thing I value isn t subscriber count. It s discussion. A little discussion in the comments or on Mastodon that s perfect, even if only 10 people read the article. I have the most fun in a community. And I ll go on writing about NNCP and Gopher and non-square DOS pixels, with audiences of dozens globally. I have no advertisers to keep happy, and I enjoy it, so why not?

9 October 2025

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2025

Debian LTS This was my hundred-thirty-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: An upload of spim was not needed, as the corresponding CVE could be marked as ignored. I also started to work on an open-vm-tools and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the eighty-sixth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: The CVEs for open-vm-tools could be marked as not-affeceted as the corresponding plugin was not yet available. I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: misc The main topic of this month has been gcc15 and cmake4, so my upload rate was extra high. This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: I wonder what MBF will happen next, I guess the /var/lock-issue will be a good candidate. On my fight against outdated RFPs, I closed 30 of them in September. Meanwhile only 3397 are still open, so don t hesitate to help closing one or another. FTP master This month I accepted 294 and rejected 28 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 294.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: xptr 1.2.0 on CRAN: New(ly Adopted) Package!

Excited to share that xptr is back on CRAN! The xptr package helps to create, check, modify, use, share, external pointer objects. External pointers are used quite extensively throughout R to manage external resources such as datanbase connection objects and alike, and can be very useful to pass pointers to just about any C / C++ data structure around. While described in Writing R Extensions (notably Section 5.13), they can be a little bare-bones and so this package can be useful. It had been created by Randy Lai and maintained by him during 2017 to 2020, but then fell off CRAN. In work with nanoarrow and its clean and minimal Arrow interface xptr came in handy so I adopted it. Several extensions and updates have been added: (compiled) function registration, continuous integration, tests, refreshed and extended documentation as well as a print format extension useful for PyCapsule objects when passing via reticulate. The package documentation site was switched to altdoc driving the most excellent Material for MkDocs framework (providing my first test case of altdoc replacing my older local scripts; I should post some more about that ). The first NEWS entry follow.

Changes in version 1.2.0 (2025-10-03)
  • New maintainer
  • Compiled functions are now registered, .Call() adjusted
  • README.md and DESCRIPTION edited and update
  • Simple unit tests and continunous integration have been added
  • The package documentation site has been recreated using altdoc
  • All manual pages for functions now contain \value sections

For more, see the package page, the git repo or the documentation site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

Charles: How to Build an Incus Buster Image

It s always nice to have container images of Debian releases to test things, run applications or explore a bit without polluting your host machine. From some Brazilian friends (you know who you are ;-), I ve learned the best way to debug a problem or test a fix is spinning up an incus container, getting to it and finding the minimum reproducer. So the combination incus + Debian is something that I m very used to, but the problem is there are no images for Debian ELTS and testing security fixes to see if they actually fix the vulnerability and don t break anything else is very important. Well, the regular images don t materialize out of thin air, right? So we can learn how they are made and try to generate ELTS images in the same way - shouldn t be that difficult, right? Well, kinda ;-) The images available by default in incus come from images.linuxcontainers.org and are built by Jenkins using distrobuilder. If you follow the links, you will find the repository containing the yaml image definitions used by distrobuilder at github.com/lxc/lxc-ci. With a bit of investigation work, a fork, an incus VM with distrobuilder installed and some magic (also called trial and error) I was able to build a buster image! Whooray, but VM and stretch images are still work in progress. Anyway, I wanted to share how you can build your images and document this process so I don t forget, so here we are

Building Instructions We will use an incus trixie VM to perform the build so we don t clutter our own machine. 
incus launch images:debian/trixie <instance-name> --vm
Then let s hop into the machine and install the dependencies. 
incus shell <instance-name>
And 
apt install git distrobuilder
Let s clone the repository with the yaml definition to build a buster container. 
git clone --branch support-debian-buster https://github.com/charles2910/lxc-ci.git
# and cd into it
cd lxc-ci
Then all we need is to pass the correct arguments to distrobuilder so it can build the image. It can output the image in the current directory or in a pre-defined place, so let s create an easy place for the images. 
mkdir -p /tmp/images/buster/container
# and perform the build
distrobuilder build-incus images/debian.yaml /tmp/images/buster/container/ \
            -o image.architecture=amd64 \
            -o image.release=buster \
            -o image.variant=default  \
            -o source.url="http://archive.debian.org/debian"
It requires a build definition written in yaml format to perform the build. If you are curious, check the images/ subdir. If all worked correctly, you should have two files in your pre-defined target directory. In our case, /tmp/images/buster/container/ contains: 
incus.tar.xz  rootfs.squashfs
Let s copy it to our host so we can add the image to our incus server. 
incus file pull <instance-name>/tmp/images/buster/container/incus.tar.xz .
incus file pull <instance-name>/tmp/images/buster/container/rootfs.squashfs .
# and import it as debian/10
incus image import incus.tar.xz rootfs.squashfs --alias debian/10
If we are lucky, we can run our Debian buster container now! 
incus launch local:debian/10 <debian-buster-instance>
incus shell <debian-buster-instance>
Well, now all that is left is to install Freexian s ELTS package repository and update the image to get a lot of CVE fixes. 
apt install --assume-yes wget
wget https://deb.freexian.com/extended-lts/archive-key.gpg -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/freexian-archive-extended-lts.gpg
cat <<EOF >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/extended-lts.list
deb http://deb.freexian.com/extended-lts buster-lts main contrib non-free
EOF
apt update
apt --assume-yes upgrade

8 October 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in September 2025

About 90% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. Some months I feel like I m pedalling furiously just to keep everything in a roughly working state. This was one of those months. Python team I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: I had to spend a fair bit of time this month chasing down build/test regressions in various packages due to some other upgrades, particularly to pydantic, python-pytest-asyncio, and rust-pyo3: After some upstream discussion I requested removal of pydantic-compat, since it was more trouble than it was worth to keep it working with the latest pydantic version. I filed dh-python: pybuild-plugin-pyproject doesn t know about headers and added it to Python/PybuildPluginPyproject, and converted some packages to pybuild-plugin-pyproject: I updated dh-python to suppress generated dependencies that would be satisfied by python3 >= 3.11. pkg_resources is deprecated. In most cases replacing it is a relatively simple matter of porting to importlib.resources, but packages that used its old namespace package support need more complicated work to port them to implicit namespace packages. We had quite a few bugs about this on zope.* packages, but fortunately upstream did the hard part of this recently. I went round and cleaned up most of the remaining loose ends, with some help from Alexandre Detiste. Some of these aren t completely done yet as they re awaiting new upstream releases: This work also caused a couple of build regressions, which I fixed: I fixed jupyter-client so that its autopkgtests would work in Debusine. I fixed waitress to build with the nocheck profile. I fixed several other build/test failures: I fixed some other bugs: Code reviews Other bits and pieces I fixed several CMake 4 build failures: I got CI for debbugs passing (!22, !23). I fixed a build failure with GCC 15 in trn4. I filed a release-notes bug about the tzdata reorganization in the trixie cycle. I filed and fixed a git-dpm regression with bash 5.3. I upgraded libfilter-perl to a new upstream version. I optimized some code in ubuntu-dev-tools that made O(1) HTTP requests when it could instead make O(n).

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RPushbullet 0.3.5: Mostly Maintenance

RPpushbullet demo A new version 0.3.5 of the RPushbullet package arrived on CRAN. It marks the first release in 4 1/2 years for this mature and feature-stable package. RPushbullet interfaces the neat Pushbullet service for inter-device messaging, communication, and more. It lets you easily send (programmatic) alerts like the one to the left to your browser, phone, tablet, or all at once. This releases reflects mostly internal maintenance and updates to the documentation site, to continuous integration, to package metadata, and one code robustitication. See below for more details.

Changes in version 0.3.5 (2025-10-08)
  • URL and BugReports fields have been added to DESCRIPTION
  • The pbPost function deals more robustly with the case of multiple target emails
  • The continuous integration and the README badge have been updated
  • The DESCRIPTION file now use Authors@R
  • The (encrypted) unit test configuration has been adjusted to reflect the current set of active devices
  • The mkdocs-material documentation site is now generated via altdoc

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the repo where comments and suggestions are welcome.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

Sven Hoexter: Backstage Render Markdown in a Collapsible Block

Brief note to maybe spare someone else the trouble. If you want to hide e.g. a huge table in Backstage (techdocs/mkdocs) behind a collapsible element you need the md_in_html extension and use the markdown attribute for it to kick in on the <details> html tag. Add the extension to your mkdocs.yaml: 
markdown_extensions:
  - md_in_html
Hide the table in your markdown document in a collapsible element like this: 
<details markdown>
<summary>Long Table</summary>
  Foo   Bar  
 - - 
  Fizz   Buzz  
</details>
It's also required to have an empty line between the html tag and starting the markdown part. Rendered for me that way in VSCode, GitHub and Backstage.

3 October 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #053: Adding llvm Snapshots for R Package Testing

Welcome to post 53 in the R4 series. Continuing with posts #51 from Tuesday and #52 from Wednesday and their stated intent of posting some more here is another quick one. Earlier today I helped another package developer who came to the r-package-devel list asking for help with a build error on the Fedora machine at CRAN running recent / development clang. In such situations, the best first step is often to replicate the issue. As I pointed out on the list, the LLVM team behind clang maintains an apt repo at apt.llvm.org/ making it a good resource to add to Debian-based container such as Rocker r-base or the offical r-base (the two are in fact interchangeable, and I take care of both). A small pothole, however, is that the documentation at the top of apt.llvm.org site is a bit stale and behind two aspects that changed on current Debian systems (i.e. unstable/testing as used for r-base). First, apt now prefers files ending in .sources (in a nicer format) and second, it now really requires a key (which is good practice). As it took me a few minutes to regather how to meet both requirements, I reckoned I might as well script this. Et voil the following script does that: 
#!/bin/sh

## Update does not hurt but is not strictly needed
#apt update --quiet --quiet
#apt upgrade --yes

## wget -qO- https://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key   sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/apt.llvm.org.asc
## or as we are root in container
wget -qO- https://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/apt.llvm.org.asc

cat <<EOF >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/llvm-dev.sources
Types: deb
URIs: http://apt.llvm.org/unstable/
# for clang-21 
#   Suites: llvm-toolchain-21
# for current clang
Suites: llvm-toolchain
Components: main
Signed-By: /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/apt.llvm.org.asc
EOF

test -d ~/.R   mkdir ~/.R
cat <<EOF >~/.R/Makevars
CLANGVER=-22
# CLANGLIB=-stdlib=libc++
CXX=clang++\$(CLANGVER) \$(CLANGLIB)
CXX11=clang++\$(CLANGVER) \$(CLANGLIB)
CXX14=clang++\$(CLANGVER) \$(CLANGLIB)
CXX17=clang++\$(CLANGVER) \$(CLANGLIB)
CXX20=clang++\$(CLANGVER) \$(CLANGLIB)
CC=clang\$(CLANGVER)
SHLIB_CXXLD=clang++\$(CLANGVER) \$(CLANGLIB)
EOF

apt update
apt install --yes clang-22
Once the script is run, one can test a package (or set of packages) against clang-22 and clang++-22. This may help R package developers. The script is also generic enough for other development communities who can ignore (or comment-out / delete) the bit about ~/.R/Makevars and deploy the compiler differently. Updating the softlink as apt-preferences does is one way and done in many GitHub Actions recipes. As we only need wget here a basic Debian container should work, possibly with the addition of wget. For R users r-base hits a decent sweet spot.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Jonathan Dowland: Tron: Ares (soundtrack)

photo of Tron: Ares vinyl record on my turntable, next to packaging
There's a new Nine Inch Nails album! That doesn't happen very often. There's a new Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross soundtrack! That happens all the time! For the first time, they're the same thing. The new one, Tron: Ares, is very deliberately presented as a Nine Inch Nails album, and not a TR&AR soundtrack. But is it neither fish nor fowl? 24 tracks, four with lyrics. Singing is not unheard of on TR&AR soundtracks, but it's rare (A Minute to Breathe from the excellent Before the Flood is another). Instrumentals are not rare on NIN albums, either, but this ratio is very unusual, and has disappointed some fans who were hoping for a more traditional NIN album. What does it mean to label something a NIN album anyway? For me, the lines are now further blurred. One thing for sure is it means a lot of media attention, and this release, as well as the film it's promoting, are all over the media at the moment. Posters, trailers, promotional tie-in items, Disney logos everywhere. The album is hitched to the Disney marketing and promotion machine. It's a bit weird seeing the NIN logo all over the place advertising the movie. On to the music. I love TR&AR soundtracks, and some of my favourite NIN tracks are instrumentals. Despite that, three highlights for me are songs: As Alive As You Need Me To Be, I Know You Can Feel It and closer Shadow Over Me. The other stand-out is Building Better Worlds, a short instrumental and clear nod to Wendy Carlos. My main complaint here applies to some of the more recent soundtracks as well: the tracks are too short. They're scored to scenes in the movie, which makes a lot of sense in that presentation, but less so for independent listening. It's not a problem that their earlier, lauded soundtracks suffered (The Social Network, Before the Flood, Bird Box Extended). Perhaps a future remix album will address that.

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities September 2025

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Nothing stands out too much, I enjoyed doing the OSK changes the most as that helped to improve the typing experience further. Also doing a small bit of kernel work again was fun (still need to figure out the 6mq's touch controller repsonsiveness though). See below for details on the above and more: phosh phoc phosh-mobile-settings stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub) xdg-desktop-portal-phosh pfs libphosh-rs Phrog feedbackd feedbackd-device-themes Debian gnome-settings-daemon git-buildpackage govarnam Sessions twenty-twenty-hugo tuwunnel Linux mutter Phosh debs phosh-site Reviews This is not code by me but reviews I did on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions! Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

2 October 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: tinythemes 0.0.4 at CRAN: Micro Maintenance

tinythemes demo A tiniest of tiny violins micro maintenance release 0.0.4 of our tinythemes arrived on CRAN today. tinythemes provides the theme_ipsum_rc() function from hrbrthemes by Bob Rudis in a zero (added) dependency way. A simple example is (also available as a demo inside the package) contrasts the default style (on the left) with the one added by this package (on the right): This version adjusts to the fact that hrbrthemes is no longer on CRAN so the help page cannot link to its documentation. No other changes were made. The set of changes since the last release follows.

Changes in tinythemes version 0.0.4 (2025-10-02)
  • No longer \link to now-archived hrbrthemes

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the repo where comments and suggestions are welcome.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

John Goerzen: A Twisty Maze of Ill-Behaved Bots

Like many, bot traffic has been causing significant issues for my hosted server recently. I ve been noticing a dramatic increase in bots that do not respect robots.txt, especially the crawl-delay I have set there. Not only that, but many of them are sending user-agent strings that are quite precisely matching what desktop browsers send. That is, they don t identify themselves. They posed a particular problem on two sites: my blog, and the lists.complete.org archives. The list archives is a completely static site, but it has many pages, so the bots that are ill-behaved absolutely hammer it following links. My blog runs WordPress. It has fewer pages, but by using PHP, doesn t need as many hits to start to bog down. Also, there is a Mastodon thundering herd problem, and since I participate on Mastodon, this hits my server. The solution was one of layers. I had already added a crawl-delay line to robots.txt. It helped a bit, but many bots these days aren t well-behaved. Next, I added WP Super Cache to my WordPress installation. I also enabled APCu in PHP and installed APCu Manager. Again, each step helped. Again, not quite enough. Finally, I added Anubis. Installing it (especially if using the Docker container) was under-documented, but I figured it out. By default, it is designed to block AI bots and try to challenge everything with Mozilla in its user-agent (which is most things) with a Javascript challenge. That s not quite what I want. If a bot is well-behaved, AI or otherwise, it will respect my robots.txt and I can more precisely control it there. Also, I intentionally support non-Javascript browsers on many of the sites I host, so I wanted to be judicious. Eventually I configured Anubis to only challenge things that present a user-agent that looks fully like a real browser. In other words, real browsers should pass right through, and bad bots pretending to be real browsers will fail. That was quite effective. It reduced load further to the point where things are ordinarily fairly snappy. I had previously been using mod_security to block some bots, but it seemed to be getting in the way of the Fediverse at times. When I disabled it, I observed another increase in speed. Anubis was likely going to get rid of those annoying bots itself anyhow. As a final step, I migrated to a faster hosting option. This post will show me how well it survives the Mastodon thundering herd! Update: Yes, it handled it quite nicely now.

1 October 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #052: Running r-ci with Coverage

Welcome to post 52 in the R4 series. Following up on the post #51 yesterday and its stated intent of posting some more here The r-ci setup (which was introduced in post #32 and updated in post #45) offers portable continuous integration which can take advantage of different backends: Github Actions, Azure Pipelines, GitLab, BitBuckets, and possibly as it only requires a basic Ubuntu shell after which it customizes itself and runs via shell script. Portably. Now, most of us, I suspect still use it with GitHub Actions but it is reassuring to know that one can take it elsewhere should the need or desire arise. One thing many repos did, and which stopped working reliably is coverage analysis. This is made easy by the covr package, and made fast, easy, reliable (as we quip) thanks to r2u. But transmission to codecov stopped working a while back so I had mostly commented it out in my repos, rendering the reports more and more stale. Which is not ideal. A few weeks ago I gave this another look, and it turns that that codecov now requires an API token to upload. Which one can generate in the user -> settings menu on their website under the access tab. Which in turn then needs to be stored in each repo wanting to upload. For Github, this is under settings -> secrets and variables -> actions as a repository secret . I suggest using CODECOV_TOKEN for its name. After that the three-line block in the yaml file can reference it as a secret as in the following snippet, now five lines, taken from one of my ci.yaml files: 
      - name: Coverage
        if: $  matrix.os == 'ubuntu-latest'  
        run: ./run.sh coverage
        env:
          CODECOV_TOKEN: $  secrets.CODECOV_TOKEN
It assigns the secret we stored on the website, references it by prefix secrets. and assigns it to the environment variable CODECOV_TOKEN. After this reports flow as one can see on repositories where I re-enabled this as for example here for RcppArmadillo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in September 2025

Last month I attended and spoke at Kangrejos, for which I will post a separate report later. Besides that, here s the usual categorised list of work:

Birger Schacht: Status update, September 2025

Regarding Debian packaging this was a rather quiet month. I uploaded version 1.24.0-1 of foot and version 2.8.0-1 of git-quick-stats. I took the opportunity and started migrating my packages to the new version 5 watch file format, which I think is much more readable than the previous format. I also uploaded version 0.1.1-1 of libscfg to NEW. libscfg is a C implementation of the scfg configuration file format and it is a dependency of recent version of kanshi. kanshi is a tool similar to autorandr which allows you define output profiles and kanshi switches to the correct output profile on hotplug events. Once libscfg is in unstable I can finally update kanshi to the latest version. A lot of time this month in finalizing a redesign of the output rendering of carl. carl is a small rust program I wrote that provides a calendar view similar to cal, but it comes with colors and ical file integration. That means that you can not only display a simple calendar, but also colorize/highlight dates based on various attributes or based on events on that day. In the initial versions of carl the output rendering was simply hardcoded into the app.
Screenshot of carl
This was a bit cumbersome to maintain and not configurable for users. I am using templating languages on a daily basis, so I decided I would reimplement the output generation of carl to use templates. I chose the minijinja Rust library which is based on the syntax and behavior of the Jinja2 template engine for Python . There are others out there, like tera, but minijinja seems to be more active in development currently. I worked on this implementation on and off for the last year and finally had the time to finish it up and write some additional tests for the outputs. It is easier to maintain templates than Rust code that uses write!() to format the output. I also implemented a configuration option for users to override the templates. Additional to the output refactoring I also fixed couple of bugs and finally released v0.4.0 of carl. In my dayjob I released version 0.53 of apis-core-rdf which contains the place lookup field which I implemented in August. A couple of weeks later we released version 0.54 which comes with a middleware to show pass on messages from the Django messages framework via response header to HTMX to trigger message popups. This implementation is based on the blog post Using the Django messages framework with HTMX. Version 0.55 was the last release in September. It contained preparations for refactoring the import logic as well as a couple of UX improvements.

30 September 2025

Jonathan McDowell: Local Voice Assistant Step 5: Remote Satellite

The last (software) piece of sorting out a local voice assistant is tying the openWakeWord piece to a local microphone + speaker, and thus back to Home Assistant. For that we use wyoming-satellite. I ve packaged that up - https://salsa.debian.org/noodles/wyoming-satellite - and then to run I do something like: 
$ wyoming-satellite --name 'Living Room Satellite' \
    --uri 'tcp://[::]:10700' \
    --mic-command 'arecord -r 16000 -c 1 -f S16_LE -t raw -D plughw:CARD=CameraB409241,DEV=0' \
    --snd-command 'aplay -D plughw:CARD=UACDemoV10,DEV=0 -r 22050 -c 1 -f S16_LE -t raw' \
    --wake-uri tcp://[::1]:10400/ \
    --debug
That starts us listening for connections from Home Assistant on port 10700, uses the openWakeWord instance on localhost port 10400, uses aplay/arecord to talk to the local microphone and speaker, and gives us some debug output so we can see what s going on. And it turns out we need the debug. This setup is a bit too flaky for it to have ended up in regular use in our household. I ve had some problems with reliable audio setup; you ll note the Python is calling out to other tooling to grab audio, which feels a bit clunky to me and I don t think is the actual problem, but the main audio for this host is hooked up to the TV (it s a media box), so the setup for the voice assistant needs to be entirely separate. That means not plugging into Pipewire or similar, and instead giving direct access to wyoming-satellite. And sometimes having to deal with how to make the mixer happy + non-muted manually. I ve also had some issues with the USB microphone + speaker; I suspect a powered USB hub would help, and that s on my list to try out. When it does work I have sometimes found it necessary to speak more slowly, or enunciate my words more clearly. That s probably something I could improve by switching from the base.en to small.en whisper.cpp model, but I m waiting until I sort out the audio hardware issue before poking more. Finally, the wake word detection is a little bit sensitive sometimes, as I mentioned in the previous post. To be honest I think it s possible to deal with that, if I got the rest of the pieces working smoothly. This has ended up sounding like a more negative post than I meant it to. Part of the issue in a resolution is finding enough free time to poke things (especially as it involves taking over the living room and saying Hey Jarvis a lot), part of it is no doubt my desire to actually hook up the pieces myself and understand what s going on. Stay tuned and see if I ever manage to resolve it all!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #051: A Neat Little Rcpp Trick

Welcome to post 51 in the R4 series. A while back I realized I should really just post a little more as not all post have to be as deep and introspective as for example the recent-ish two cultures post #49. So this post is a neat little trick I (somewhat belatedly) realized somewhat recently. The context is the ongoing transition from (Rcpp)Armadillo 14.6.3 and earlier to (Rcpp)Armadillo 15.0.2 or later. (I need to write a bit more about that, but that may require a bit more time.) (And there are a total of seven (!!) issue tickets managing the transition with issue #475 being the main parent issue, please see there for more details.) In brief, the newer and current Armadillo no longer allows C++11 (which also means it no longer allowes suppression of deprecation warnings ). It so happens that around a decade ago packages were actively encouraged to move towards C++11 so many either set an explicit SystemRequirements: for it, or set CXX_STD=CXX11 in src/Makevars .win . CRAN has for some time now issued NOTEs asking for this to be removed, and more recently enforced this with actual deadlines. In RcppArmadillo I opted to accomodate old(er) packages (using this by-now anti-pattern) and flip to Armadillo 14.6.3 during a transition period. That is what the package does now: It gives you either Armadillo 14.6.3 in case C++11 was detected (or this legacy version was actively selected via a compile-time #define), or it uses Armadillo 15.0.2 or later. So this means we can have either one of two versions, and may want to know which one we have. Armadillo carries its own version macros, as many libraries or projects do (R of course included). Many many years ago (git blame points to sixteen and twelve for a revision) we added the following helper function to the package (full source here, we show it here without the full roxygen2 comment header) 
// [[Rcpp::export]]
Rcpp::IntegerVector armadillo_version(bool single)  

    // These are declared as constexpr in Armadillo which actually does not define them
    // They are also defined as macros in arma_version.hpp so we just use that
    const unsigned int major = ARMA_VERSION_MAJOR;
    const unsigned int minor = ARMA_VERSION_MINOR;
    const unsigned int patch = ARMA_VERSION_PATCH;

    if (single)  
        return Rcpp::wrap(10000 * major + 100 * minor + patch) ;
      else  
        return Rcpp::IntegerVector::create(Rcpp::Named("major") = major,
                                           Rcpp::Named("minor") = minor,
                                           Rcpp::Named("patch") = patch);
It either returns a (named) vector of the standard major , minor , patch form of the common package versioning pattern, or a single integer which can used more easily in C(++) via preprocessor macros. And this being an Rcpp-using package, we can of course access either easily from R: 
> library(RcppArmadillo)
> armadillo_version(FALSE)
major minor patch 
   15     0     2 
> armadillo_version(TRUE)
[1] 150002
>
Perfectly valid and truthful. But cumbersome at the R level. So when preparing for these (Rcpp)Armadillo changes in one of my package, I realized I could alter such a function and set the S3 type to package_version. (Full version of one such variant here) 
// [[Rcpp::export]]
Rcpp::List armadilloVersion()  
    // create a vector of major, minor, patch
    auto ver = Rcpp::IntegerVector::create(ARMA_VERSION_MAJOR, ARMA_VERSION_MINOR, ARMA_VERSION_PATCH);
    // and place it in a list (as e.g. packageVersion() in R returns)
    auto lst = Rcpp::List::create(ver);
    // and class it as 'package_version' accessing print() etc methods
    lst.attr("class") = Rcpp::CharacterVector::create("package_version", "numeric_version");
    return lst;
Three statements each to and return the value. And now in R we can operate more easily on this (using three dots as I didn t export it from this package): 
> RcppDE:::armadilloVersion()
[1]  15.0.2 
> RcppDE:::armadilloVersion() >= "15.0.0"
[1] TRUE
>
An object of class package_version inheriting from numeric_version can directly compare against a (human- but not normally machine-readable) string like 15.0.0 because the simple S3 class defines appropriate operators, as well as print() / format() methods as the first expression shows. It is these little things that make working with R so smooth, and we can easily (three statements !!) do so from Rcpp-based packages too. The underlying object really is merely a list containing a vector: 
> unclass(RcppDE:::armadilloVersion())
[[1]]
[1] 15  0  2

>
but the S3 glue around it makes it behave nicely. So next time you are working with an object you plan to return to R, consider classing it to take advantage of existing infrastructure (if it exists, of course). It s easy enough to do, and may smoothen the experience at the R side.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Antoine Beaupr : Proper services

During 2025-03-21-another-home-outage, I reflected upon what's a properly ran service and blurted out what turned out to be something important I want to outline more. So here it is, again, on its own for my own future reference.
Typically, I tend to think of a properly functioning service as having four things:
  1. backups
  2. documentation
  3. monitoring
  4. automation
  5. high availability (HA)
Yes, I miscounted. This is why you need high availability. A service doesn't properly exist if it doesn't at least have the first 3 of those. It will be harder to maintain without automation, and inevitably suffer prolonged outages without HA.

The five components of a proper service

Backups Duh. If data is maliciously or accidentally destroyed, you need a copy somewhere. Preferably in a way that malicious Joe can't get to. This is harder than you think.

Documentation I have an entire template for this. Essentially, it boils down to using https://diataxis.fr/ and this "audit" guide. For me, the most important parts are:
  • disaster recovery (includes backups, probably)
  • playbook
  • install/upgrade procedures (see automation)
You probably know this is hard, and this is why you're not doing it. Do it anyways, you'll think it sucks, it will grow out of sync with reality, but you'll be really grateful for whatever scraps you wrote when you're in trouble. Any docs, in other words, is better than no docs, but are no excuse for doing the work correctly.

Monitoring If you don't have monitoring, you'll know it fails too late, and you won't know it recovers. Consider high availability, work hard to reduce noise, and don't have machine wake people up, that's literally torture and is against the Geneva convention. Consider predictive algorithm to prevent failures, like "add storage within 2 weeks before this disk fills up". This is also harder than you think.

Automation Make it easy to redeploy the service elsewhere. Yes, I know you have backups. That is not enough: that typically restores data and while it can also include configuration, you're going to need to change things when you restore, which is what automation (or call it "configuration management" if you will) will do for you anyways. This also means you can do unit tests on your configuration, otherwise you're building legacy. This is probably as hard as you think.

High availability Make it not fail when one part goes down. Eliminate single points of failures. This is easier than you think, except for storage and DNS ("naming things" not "HA DNS", that is easy), which, I guess, means it's harder than you think too.

Assessment In the above 5 items, I currently check two in my lab:
  1. backups
  2. documentation
And barely: I'm not happy about the offsite backups, and my documentation is much better at work than at home (and even there, I have a 15 year backlog to catchup on). I barely have monitoring: Prometheus is scraping parts of the infra, but I don't have any sort of alerting -- by which I don't mean "electrocute myself when something goes wrong", I mean "there's a set of thresholds and conditions that define an outage and I can look at it". Automation is wildly incomplete. My home server is a random collection of old experiments and technologies, ranging from Apache with Perl and CGI scripts to Docker containers running Golang applications. Most of it is not Puppetized (but the ratio is growing). Puppet itself introduces a huge attack vector with kind of catastrophic lateral movement if the Puppet server gets compromised. And, fundamentally, I am not sure I can provide high availability in the lab. I'm just this one guy running my home network, and I'm growing older. I'm thinking more about winding things down than building things now, and that's just really sad, because I feel we're losing (well that escalated quickly).

Side note about Tor The above applies to my personal home lab, not work! At work, of course, it's another (much better) story:
  1. all services have backups
  2. lots of services are well documented, but not all
  3. most services have at least basic monitoring
  4. most services are Puppetized, but not crucial parts (DNS, LDAP, Puppet itself), and there are important chunks of legacy coupling between various services that make the whole system brittle
  5. most websites, DNS and large parts of email are highly available, but key services like the the Forum, GitLab and similar applications are not HA, although most services run under replicated VMs that can trivially survive a total, single-node hardware failure (through Ganeti and DRBD)

Russell Coker: Links September 2025

Werdahias wrote an informative blog post about Dark Mode for QT programs on non-QT environments (mostly GNOME based), we need more blog posts about this sort of thing [1]. Astral Codex Ten has an interesting blog post about the rise of Christianity, trying to work out why it took over so quickly [2]. Frances Haugen s whistleblower statement about Facebook is worth reading, Facebook seems to be one of the most evil companies in the world [3]. Interesting blog post by Philip Bennett about trying to repair a 28 player Galaxian game from 1990 [4]. Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an insightful article about AI in Government [5]. Krebs has an interesting analysis of Conservatives whinging about alleged discrimination due to their use of spam lists [6]. Nick Cheesman wrote an insightful article on the failures of Meritocracy with ANU as a case study [7]. I am mystified as to why ABC categorised it under Religion. David Brin wrote an interesting short SciFi story about dealing with blackmail [8]. Charles Stross has an interesting take on AI economics etc [9]. Corey Doctorow wrote an interesting blog post about the impending economic crash becuase of all the money tied up in AI investments [10].
Related posts:
  1. Links March 2025 Anarcat s review of Fish is interesting and shows some benefits...
  2. Links February 2025 Oliver Lindburg wrote an interesting article about Designing for Crisis...
  3. Links July 2025 Louis Rossman made an informative YouTube video about right to...

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in September 2025

Here s my monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
Whilst I didn t get a chance to do much, here s still a few things that I worked on:

Ubuntu
I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time back in February 2021. Whilst I can t give a full, detailed list of things I did, here s a quick TL;DR of what I did:
  • Successfully and timely released 25.10 (Questing Quokka) Beta! \o/
  • Continued to hold weekly release syncs, et al.
  • Granted FFe and triaged a bunch of other bugs from both, Release team and Archive Admin POV. :)
  • 360s were fab - I was a peak performer again. Yay!
  • Preparing for the 25.10 Release sprints in London and then the Summit.
  • Roadmap planning for the Release team.

Debian (E)LTS
This month I have worked 16.50 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 05.50 hours on its sister Extended LTS project and did the following things:
  • [E/LTS] Frontdesk duty from 22nd September to 28th September.
    • Triaged lemonldap-ng, ghostscript, dovecot, node-ip, webkit2gtk, wpewebkit, libscram-java, keras, openbabel, gegl, tiff, zookeeper, squid, ogre-1.12, mapserver, ruby-rack.
    • Auto-EOL d a few packages.
    • Also circled back on previously opened ticket for supported packages for ELTS.
    • Partially reviewed and added comment on Emilio s MP.
    • Re-visited an old thread (in order to fully close it) about issues being fixed in buster & bookworm but not in bullseye. And brought it up in the LTS meeting, too.
  • [LTS] Partook in some internal discussions about introducing support for handling severity of CVEs, et al.
    • Santiago had asked for an input from people doing FD so spent some time reflecting on his proposal and getting back with thoughts and suggestions.
  • [LTS] Helped Lee with testing gitk and git-gui aspects of his git update.
  • [LTS] Attended the monthly LTS meeting on IRC. Summary here.
    • It was also followed by a 40-minute discussion of technical questions/reviews/discussions - which in my opinion was pretty helpful. :)
  • [LTS] Prepared the LTS update for wordpress, bumping the package from 5.7.11 to 5.7.13.
    • Prepared an update for stable, Craig approved. Was waiting on the Security team s +1 to upload.
    • Now we ve waited enough that we have new CVEs. Oh well.
  • [ELTS] Finally setup debusine for ELTS uploads.
    • Since I use Ubuntu, this required installing debusine* from bookworm-backport but that required Python 3.11.
    • So I had to upgrade from Jammy (22.04) to Noble (24.04) - which was anyway pending.. :)
    • And then followed the docs to configure it. \o/
  • [E/LTS] Started working on new ruby-rack CVE.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

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