Phys.org has an interesting article about finding evidence for nanohertz gravity waves [1]. 1nano-Herz is a wavelength of 31.7 light years! Wired has an interesting story about OpenAI saying that no further advances will be made with larger training models [2]. Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders wrote an insightful article about the need for government run GPT type systems [3]. He focuses on the US, but having other countries/groups of countries do it would be good too. We could have a Chinese one, an EU one, etc. I don t think it would necessarily make sense for a small country like Australia to have one but it would make a lot more sense than having nuclear submarines (which are much more expensive). The Roadmap project is a guide for learning new technologies [4]. The content seems quite good. Bigthink has an informative and darkly amusing article Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality [5]. From this month in Australia psilocybin (active ingredient in Magic Mushrooms) can be prescribed for depression and MDMA (known as Ecstacy on the streets) can be prescribed for PTSD [6]. That s great news! Slate has an interesting article about the Operation Underground Railroad organisation that purports to help sex trafficed chilren [7]. This is noteworthy now with the controverst over the recent movie about that. Apparently they didn t provide much help for kids after they had been rescued and at least some of the kids were trafficed specifically to fulfill the demand that they created by offering to pay for it. Vigilantes aren t as effective as law enforcement. The ACCC is going to prevent Apple and Google from forcing app developers to give them a share of in-app purchases in Australia [8]. We need this in every country! This site has links to open source versions of proprietary games [9]. Vice has an interesting article about the Hungarian neuroscientist Viktor T th who taught rats to play Doom 2 [10]. The next logical step is to have mini tanks that they can use in real battlefields. Like the Mason s Rats episode of Love Death and Robots on Netflix. Brian Krebs wrote a mind boggling pair of blog posts about the Ashley Adison hack [11]. A Jewish disgruntled ex-employee sending anti-semitic harassment to the Jewish CEO and maybe cooperating with anti-semitic organisations to harass him is one of the people involved, but he killed himself (due to mental health problems) before the hack took place. Long Now has an insightful blog post about digital avatars being used after the death of the people they are based on [12]. Tavis Ormandy s description of the zenbleed bug is interesting [13]. The technique for finding the bug is interesting as well as the information on how the internals of the CPUs in question work. I don t think this means AMD is bad, trying to deliver increasing performance while limited by the laws of physics is difficult and mistakes are sometimes made. Let s hope the microcode updates are well distributed. The Hacktivist documentary about Andrew Bunnie Huang is really good [14]. Bunnie s lecture about supply chain attacks is worth watching [15]. Most descriptions of this issue don t give nearly as much information. However bad you thought this problem was, after you watch this lecture you will realise it s worse than that!

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2a7fbx2t
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/25nkg4zs
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2dm3pl6g
• [4] https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps
• [5] https://bigthink.com/the-future/cryonics-horror-stories/
• [6] https://adf.org.au/insights/magic-mushrooms-medicine/
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/yhxe8aqy
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2z2xecl7
• [9] https://osgameclones.com/
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2jmy2hyc
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2mlhnn3t
• [12] https://longnow.org/ideas/digital-avatars-and-our-refusal-to-die/
• [13] https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html
• [14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYsVeYzbik
• [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As

So it's there on Download on the Debian web site.Thanks to the folk who've done this point release testing. No new major bugs found: a couple of pre-existing ones may still be there.

Thanks very much indeed to the new people who have been in IRC on debian-cd, downloading, testing, editing the wiki page.

This release has gone very well indeed - I'll see some of the same folk at the BBQ in late August but otherwise we'll be back in September or so for the next point release for Bookworm (and probably a release for Bullseye as well).

Now trying various tricks with Raspberry Pi 4s to get them to boot with UEFI and the standard Debian installer.

Lots of tests being tried and passing. The usual bits of finger trouble / misreading the wiki. People are settling into the rhythm. Almost all of the tests for the standard .iso files are done and we're well into testing live images. All's good

And so we're back at Steve's in Cambridge for release testing. A few testers here: we're now well into testing the various iso images.So we have Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, smcv and myself. We've also been joined here by Helen who has just done her first install. Online we've got a couple of new folk - luna, The_Blode. Thanks to everyone involved - we always need all the help we can get.
Cold and grey outside: usual warmth in here. Also the usual snake of cables to trip over across the floor.

People are working quietly, cross-checking, reading back steps and running individual steps - we're really almost there for the install media.Just had a friendly, humorous meal out by the barbeque in Sledge's garden. It's been quite a long day but we're just finished.All this and then we'll probably have the first point release for Bookworm 12.1 in about a month. That will contain some few fixes which came in at the last minute and any other issues we've found today.BOOKWORM IS HERE!!

Most of the install images for Debian media have now been tested.

Various folk are now testing the live media.We have been joined by a couple of people in IRC who have also done a few tests.Useful things to note :)

The release name is Bookworm *not* Bookwork.Debian 13 will be Trixie when it gets here: testing will be re-enabled shortly.

The release notes detail the changes in /etc/apt/sources.list to accommodate the changes to non-free-firmware but also see also Sources List on the Debian wiki.

We've all met up in Cambridge - so there's an egw_, amacater, kibi who has travelled over to join us, Isy, RattusRattus and Sledge mostly sat round a table. The usual number of laptops, three monitors, Rattus' tower machine.Network running well and we're all ready to go, I think - there's normally a flurry of activity to get things started then a wait for a while for the first images
Coffee and tea at the ready - bacon sandwiches are on the way

[And the build process is under way - and smcv has joined us]

This year I attended Debian Reunion Hamburg (aka MiniDebConf Germany) for the second time. My goal for this MiniDebConf was just to talk to people and make the most of the time I have there. No other specific plans or goals. Despite this simple goal, it was a very productive and successful event for me. Tuesday 23rd:

• Arrived much later than planned after about 18h of travel, went to bed early.

Wednesday 24th:

• Was in a discussion about individual package maintainership.
• Was in a discussion about the nature of Technical Committee.
• Co-signed a copy of The Debian System book along with the other DDs

• Submitted a BoF request for people who are present to bring issues to the attention of the DPL (and to others who are around).
• Noticed I still had a blog entry draft about this event last year, and posted it just to get it done.
• Had a stand-up meeting, was nice to see what everyone was working on.
• Had some event budgeting discussions with Holger.
• Worked a bit on a talk I haven t submitted yet called Current events (it s slightly punny, get it?) it s still very raw but I m passively working on it just in case we need a backup talk over the weekend.
• Had a discussion over lunch with someone who runs their HPC on Debian and learned about Octopus and Pac.
• TIL (from #debian-python) about pyproject.toml (https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/build-system/pyproject-toml/)
• Was in a discussion about amd64 build times on our buildds and referred them to DSA. I also e-mailed DSA to ask them if there s anything we can do to improve build times (since it affects both productivity and motivation).
• Did some premium cola tasting with andrewsh
• Had a discussion with Ilu about installers (and luks2 issues in Calamares), accessibility and organisational stuff.

Thursday 25th:

• Spent quite a chunk of the morning in a usrmerge BoF. I m very impressed by the amount of reading and research the people in the BoF did and gathering all the facts/data, it seems that there is now a way forward that will fix usrmerge in Debian in a way that could work for everyone, an extensive summary/proposal will be posted to debian-devel as soon as possible.
• Mind was in zombie mode. So I did something easy and upgraded the host running this blog and a few other hosts to bookworm to see what would break.
• Cheese and wine party, which resulted in a mao party that ran waaaay too late.

Friday 26th:

• Daytrip
• Was very saddened to learn that the Metallica concert in Hamburg that day was not a daytrip option.
• The Museum der Arbeit had lots of interesting machinery and history, there s also a giant drill bit outside it that was used to create the elb tunnels in Hamburg, we had a really nice dinner at a restaurant named after it.

Saturday 27th:

• Attended talks:
  • HTTP all the things The rocky path from the basement into the cloud
  • Running Debian on a Smartphone
  • debvm Ephemeral Virtual Debian Machines
  • Network Configuration on Debian Systems
  • Discussing changes to the Debian key package definition
  • Meet the Release Team
  • Towards collective decision-making and maintenance in the Debian base system
• Performed some PGP key signing.
• Edited group photo.

Sunday 28th:

• Had a BoF where we had an open discussion about things on our collective minds (Debian Therapy Session).
• Had a session on upcoming legislature in the EU (like CRA).
• Some web statistics with MrFai.
• Talked to Marc Haber about a DebConf bid for Heidelberg for DebConf 25.
• Closing session.

Monday 29th:

• Started the morning with Helmut and Jochen convincing me switch from cowbuilder to sbuild (I m tentatively sold, the huge new plus is that you don t need schroot anymore, which trashed two of my systems in the past and effectively made sbuild a no-go for me until now).
• Dealt with more laptop hardware failures, removing a stick of RAM seems to have solved that for now!

• Dealt with some delegation issues for release team and publicity team.
• Attended my last stand-up meeting.
• Wrapped things up, blogged about the event. Probably forgot to list dozens of things in this blog entry. It is fine.

Tuesday 30th:

• Didn t attend the last day, basically a travel day for me.

Thank you to Holger for organising this event yet again!

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

We've been joined by Simon (smcv) - lots of chat bouncing backwards and forwards. Laptops appearing out of backpacks suddenly being repurposed.Settling very much into a rhythm and routine.

Working with two laptops on your lap ends up being quite heavy :)

A switch failure early on: some quick changes of wiring and we're off. The room is very quiet for a few minutes then a burst of chatter, then on we go.Just the noise of keyboards and quiet concentration

Back in Cambridge for a point release weekend. Lots of people turning up - it comes to something when large monitors, a desktop machine require two or three trips to the car and there's still a crate of leads to go.As ever, lots of banter - computer renovations and updates were done yesterday - if they hadn't been, I'd have had at least another expert engineer on hand.This is *definitely* the place to be rather than at the other end of an IRC chat.This is *not* the release for Debian Bookworm: that will be on June 10th/11th - likely to be the same personnel, same place. There was a release of Debian Bookworm RC2 media yesterday incorporating fixes up to date.

I know a few people hold on to the exFAT fuse implementation due the support for timezone offsets, so here is a small update for you. Andrew released 1.4.0, which includes the timezone offset support, which was so far only part of the git master branch. It also fixes a, from my point of view very minor, security issue CVE-2022-29973. In addition to that it's the first build with fuse3 support. If you still use this driver, pick it up in experimental (we're in the bookworm freeze right now), and give it a try. I'm personally not using it anymore beyond a very basic "does it mount" test.

It's been a while since I posted a haul, and I've been reading primarily recent purchases, so I've already read and reviewed a bunch of these. Ilona Andrews Sweep of the Heart (sff)
Becky Chambers A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (sff)
Lauren Groff Matrix (mainstream)
Tendai Huchu The Library of the Dead (sff)
N.K. Jemisin The World We Make (sff)
Courtney Milan The Governess Affair (romance)
Tamsyn Muir Nona the Ninth (sff)
Naomi Novik The Golden Enclaves (sff)
Rebecca Solnit Orwell's Roses (non-fiction)
T. Kingfisher Illuminations (sff) I've been trying to slow down on new acquisitions until I finish more of the recent books I bought (with some success!).

Review: Sweep of the Heart, by Ilona Andrews

Series:	Innkeeper Chronicles #6
Publisher:	NYLA Publishing
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-64197-239-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	440

Sweep of the Heart is the sixth book of the sci-fi urban fantasy, kitchen-sink-worldbuilding Innkeeper series by husband and wife writing pair Ilona Andrews, assuming one counts the novella Sweep with Me as a full entry (which I do). It's a direct sequel to One Fell Sweep, but also references the events of Sweep of the Blade and Sweep with Me enough to spoil them. Needless to say, don't start here. As always with this series, the book was originally published as a serial on Ilona Andrews's blog. I prefer to read my novels as novels, so I wait until the entries are collected and published, but you can read it on-line for free if you want. Sean and Dina's old friend Wilmos has been kidnapped by an enemy who looks familiar from One Fell Sweep. To get him back, they need to get to a world that is notoriously inaccessible. One player in galactic politics may be able to offer a portal, but it will come as a price. That price? Host a reality TV show. Specifically, a sci-fi version of The Bachelor, with aliens. And the bachelor is the ruler of a galactic empire, whose personal safety is now Dina's responsibility. There is a hand-waving explanation for why the Seven Star Dominion does spouse selection for their rulers this way, but let's be honest: it's a fairly transparent excuse to write a season of The Bachelor with strange aliens, political intrigue, inn-generated special effects and wallpaper-worthy backdrops, ulterior motives, and attempted murder. Oh, and competence porn, as Dina once again demonstrates just how good she's become at being an innkeeper. I'm not much of a reality TV fan, have never watched The Bachelor, and still thoroughly enjoyed this. It helps that the story is more about political intrigue than it is about superficial attraction or personal infighting, and the emperor at the center of the drama is calm, thoughtful, and juggling a large number of tricky problems (which Dina, somewhat improbably, becomes privy to). The contestants range from careful diplomats with hidden political goals to eye candy with the subtlety of a two by four, the latter sponsored by sentient murderous trees, so there's a delightful variety of tone and a ton of narrative momentum. A few of the twists and turns were obvious, but some of the cliches are less cliched than they initially look. This series always leans towards "play with every toy in the toy box at once!" rather than subtle and realistic. This entry is no exception, but the mish-mash of science fiction tropes with nigh-unlimited fantasy power is, as usual, done with so much verve and sheer creative joy that I can't help but love it. We do finally learn Caldenia's past, and... I kind of wish we hadn't? Or at least that her past had been a bit more complicated. I will avoid spoiling it by saying too much, but I thought it was an oddly flat and overdone trope that made Caldenia substantially less interesting than she was before this revelation. That was one mild disappointment. The other is that the opening of Sweep of the Heart teases some development of the overall series plot, but that remains mostly a tease. Wilmos's kidnapping and any relevance to deeper innkeeper problems is, at least in this entry, merely a framing story for the reality TV show that constitutes the bulk of the novel. There are a few small revelations in the conclusion, but only the type that raise more questions. Hopefully we'll get more series plot development in the next book, but even if we don't, I'm happily along for the ride. If you like this series, this is more of the thing you already like. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it (start with Clean Sweep). It's not great literature, and most of the trappings will be familiar from a dozen other novels and TV shows, but it's unabashed fun with loads of competence porn and a wild internal logic that grows on you over time. Also, it has one of the most emotionally satisfying sentient buildings in SF. There will, presumably, be more entries in the series, but they have not yet been announced. Rating: 8 out of 10

One of my main musical 'discoveries' in 2022 was British electronic band Underworld. I m super late to the party. Underworld s commercial high point was the mid nineties. And I was certainly aware of them then: the use of Born Slippy .NUXX in 1996 s Trainspotting soundtrack was ubiquitous, but it didn t grab me. In more recent years my colleague and friend Andrew Dinn (with whom I enjoyed many pre-pandemic conversations about music) enthusiastically advocated for Underworld (and furnished me with some rarities). This started to get them under my skin. It took a bit longer for me to truly get them, though, and the final straw was revisiting their BBC 6 Music Festival performance from 2016 (with Rez and it's companion piece "Cowgirl" standing out) So where to start? There s something compelling about their whole catalogue. This is a group with which you can go deep, if you wish. The only album which hasn t grabbed me is 100 days off and it s probably only a matter of time before it does (Andrew advocates the Extended Ansum Edition bootleg here). Here are four career-spanning personal highlights:

• Spikee
  
• King of snake
  
• Nylon strung
  
• Seven music drone
  

A very reasonable entry point to their latest sprawling effort, DRIFT, is ricksdubbedoutdrift experience (live in Amsterdam), only 3 on Bandcamp.

A few days ago, my home network got a refresh that resulted in the enablement of some next-generation technologies for me and my family. Well, next-generation or current-generation, depending on your point of view. Per the ISP standards in Spain (my country), what I ll describe next is literally the most and latest you can get. The post title spoiled it already. I have now 10G internet uplink and native IPv6 since I changed my ISP to https://digimobil.es. My story began a few months ago when a series of fiber deployments started in my neighborhood by a back-then mostly unknown ISP (digimobil). The workers were deploying the fiber inside the street sewers, and I noticed that they were surrounded by advertisements promoting the fastest FTTH deployment in Spain. Indeed, their website was promoting 1G and 10G fiber, so a few days later I asked the workers when would that be available for subscription. They told me to wait just a couple of months, and the wait ended this week. I called the ISP, and a marketing person told me a lot of unnecessary information about how good service I was purchasing. I asked about IPv6 availability, but that person had no idea. They called me the next day to confirm that the home router they were installing would support both IPv6 and Wi-Fi 6. I was suspicious about nobody in the marketing department knowing anything about any of the two technologies, but I decided to proceed anyway. Just 24 hours after calling them, a technician came to my house and 45 minutes later the setup was ready. The new home router was a ZTE ZXHN F8648P unit. By the way, it had Linux inside, but I got no GPL copyright notice or anything. It had 1x10G and 4x1G ethernet LAN ports. The optical speed tests that the technician did were giving between 8 Gbps to 9 Gbps in uplink speed, which seemed fair enough. Upon quick search, there is apparently a community of folks online which already know how to get the most out of this router by unbloking the root account (sorry, in spanish only) and using other tools. When I plugged the RJ45 in my laptop, the magic happened: the interface got a native, public IPv6 from the router. I ran to run the now-classic IPv6 browser test at https://test-ipv6.com/. And here is the result: If you are curious, this was the IPv6 prefix whois information: They were handing my router a prefix like 2a0c:5a80:2218:4a00::/56. I ignored if the prefix was somehow static, dynamic, just for me, or anything else. I ve been waiting for native IPv6 at home for years. In the past, I ve had many ideas and projects to host network services at home leveraging IPv6. But when I finally got it, I didn t know what to do next. I had a 7 months old baby, and honestly I didn t have the spare time to play a lot with the setup. Actually, I had no need or use for such fast network either. But my coworker Andrew convinced me: given the price 30 EUR / month, I didn t have any reason not to buy it. In fact, I didn t have any 10G-enabled NIC at home. I had a few laptops with 2.5G ports, though, and that was enough to experience the new network speeds. Since this write-up was inspired by the now almost-legenday post by Michael Stapelberg My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home, I contacted him, and he suggested running a few speed tests using the Ookla suite against his own server. Here are the results: This is over IPv6. Very satisfying. Bonus point: when I called my former ISP to cancel the old subscription the conversation was like:

• I want to cancel the service.
• What s the reason?
• I got upgraded to 10G by another ISP
• The speed is measured in MB, not G.
• Ok, I got upgraded to 10.000 MB
• That s not possible.
• Well

I didn t even bother mentioning IPv6. Cheers!

RattusRattus, Isy, smcv have all just left after a very long day. Steve is finishing up the final stages. The mayhem has quietened, the network cables are coiled, pretty much everything is tidied away. A new experience for two of us - I just hope it hasn't put them off too much.The IRC channels are quiet and we can put this one to bed after a good day's work well done.

Working a bit more slowly - coming to the end of the process. I've been wrestling with a couple of annoying old laptops and creating mayhem. The others are almost through the process - it's been a very long day, almost 12 hours now.As ever, it's good to be with people who appreciate this work - I'm also being menaced by a dog that wants fuss all the time. It certainly makes a difference to have fast connectivity and even faster remarks backwards and forwards.