My previously mentioned C.H.I.P. repurposing has been partly successful; I ve found a use for it (which I still need to write up), but unfortunately it s too useful and the fact it s still a bit flaky has become a problem. I spent a while trying to isolate exactly what the problem is (I m still seeing occasional hard hangs with no obvious debug output in the logs or on the serial console), then realised I should just buy one of the cheap ARM SBC boards currently available. The C.H.I.P. is based on an Allwinner R8, which is a single ARM v7 core (an A8). So it s fairly low power by today s standards and it seemed pretty much any board would probably do. I considered a Pi 2 Zero, but couldn t be bothered trying to find one in stock at a reasonable price (I ve had one on backorder from CPC since May 2022, and yes, I know other places have had them in stock since but I don t need one enough to chase and I m now mostly curious about whether it will ever ship). As the title of this post gives away, I settled on a Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero, which is based on an Allwinner H3. That s a quad-core ARM v7 (an A7), so a bit more oompfh than the C.H.I.P. All in all it set me back 25, including a set of heatsinks that form a case around it. I started with the vendor provided Debian SD card image, which is based on Debian 9 (stretch) and so somewhat old. I was able to dist-upgrade my way through buster and bullseye, and end up on bookworm. I then discovered the bookworm 6.1 kernel worked just fine out of the box, and even included a suitable DTB. Which got me thinking about whether I could do a completely fresh Debian install with minimal tweaking. First thing, a boot loader. The Allwinner chips are nice in that they ll boot off SD, so I just needed a suitable u-boot image. Rather than go with the vendor image I had a look at mainline and discovered it had support! So let s build a clean image: I had the advantage here of already having a host setup to cross build armhf binaries, but this was all done on a Debian bookworm host with packages from main. I ve put my build up here in case it s useful to someone - everything else below can be done on a normal x86_64 host. Next I needed a Debian installer. I went for the netboot variant - although I was writing it to SD rather than TFTP booting I wanted as much as possible to come over the network. Then I took a suitable microSD card and set it up with a 500M primary VFAT partition, leaving the rest for Linux proper. I could have got away with a smaller VFAT partition but I d initially thought I might need to put some more installation files on it. The bootloader image gets written 8k into the SD card (our first partition starts at sector 2048, i.e. 1M into the device, so there s plenty of space here): Copy the Debian installer files onto the VFAT partition: Unmount the SD from the build host, pop it into the M2 Zero, boot it up while connected to the serial console, hit a key to stop autoboot and tell it to boot the installer: At this point the installer runs and you can do a normal install. Well, except the wifi wasn t detected, I think because the netinst images don t include firmware. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to include it but ultimately ended up installing over a USB ethernet dongle, which Just Worked and was less faff. Installing firmware-brcm80211 once installation completed allowed the built-in wifi to work fine. After install you need to configure u-boot to boot without intervention. At the u-boot prompt (i.e. after hitting a key to stop autoboot): This is assuming you have /boot on partition 2 on the SD - I left the first partition as VFAT (that s where the u-boot environment will be saved) and just used all of the rest as a single ext4 partition. I did have to do an e2label /dev/sdb2 BPI-ROOT to label / appropriately; otherwise I occasionally saw the SD card appear as mmc1 for Linux (I m guessing due to asynchronous boot order with the wifi). You should now find the device boots without intervention.

It's been quiet here (I hope to change that), but I want to share some good news: I've been promoted to Principal Software Engineer! Next February will start my 9^th year with Red Hat. Time flies when you're having fun!

Yesterday I tagged a new version of onak, my OpenPGP compatible keyserver. I d spent a bit of time during DebConf doing some minor cleanups, in particular an annoying systemd socket activation issue I d been seeing. That turned out to be due completely failing to compile in the systemd support, even when it was detected. There was also a signature verification issue with certain Ed225519 signatures (thanks Antoine Beaupr for making me dig into that one), along with various code cleanups. I also worked on Stateless OpenPGP CLI support, which is something I talked about when I released 0.6.2. It isn t something that s suitable for release, but it is sufficient to allow running the OpenPGP interoperability test suite verification tests, which I m pleased to say all now pass. For the next release I m hoping the OpenPGP crypto refresh process will have completed, which at the very least will mean adding support for v6 packet types and fingerprints. The PostgreSQL DB backend could also use some love, and I might see if performance with SQLite3 has improved any. Anyway. Available locally or via GitHub.

0.6.3 - 26th September 2023

• Fix systemd detection + socket activation
• Add CMake checking for Berkeley DB
• Minor improvements to keyd logging
• Fix decoding of signature creation time
• Relax version check on parsing signature + key packets
• Improve HTML escaping
• Handle failed database initialisation more gracefully
• Fix bug with EDDSA signatures with top 8+ bits unset

Last week tragedy struck, and I saw the very best of the Debian community at work. I heard first hand testimony about how helpless so many people felt at being physically unable to help their friend. I heard about how they couldn t bear to leave and had to be ushered away to make space for rescue services to do their work. I heard of those who continued the search with private divers, even after the official rescue was called off. I saw the shock and grief which engulfed everybody who I saw that night and in the following days. I watched friends comfort each other when it became too much. I read the messages we wrote in memory and smiled at how they described the person I d only just started to know. When I felt angry, and helpless, and frustrated that I couldn t do more, the people around me caught me, comforted me, and cared for me. Debian, you are like family and nobody can claim otherwise. You bicker and argue about the silliest things and sometimes it feels like we ll never get past them. But when it comes to simple human compassion for each other, you always surprise me with your ability to care.

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.

Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)

Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.

View from the hotel window.

Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).

This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.

Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.

My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.

Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.

Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.

This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.

Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.

Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.

A selfie in memory of Abraham.

We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.

Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)

This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.

Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.

Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal

Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.

I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.

Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA

I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.

From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.

I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.

Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda

Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.

Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

I very, very nearly didn t make it to DebConf this year, I had a bad cold/flu for a few days before I left, and after a negative covid-19 test just minutes before my flight, I decided to take the plunge and travel. This is just everything in chronological order, more or less, it s the only way I could write it.

DebCamp I planned to spend DebCamp working on various issues. Very few of them actually got done, I spent the first few days in bed further recovering, took a covid-19 test when I arrived and after I felt better, and both were negative, so not sure what exactly was wrong with me, but between that and catching up with other Debian duties, I couldn t make any progress on catching up on the packaging work I wanted to do. I ll still post what I intended here, I ll try to take a few days to focus on these some time next month: Calamares / Debian Live stuff:

• #980209 installation fails at the install boot loader phase
• #1021156 calamares-settings-debian: Confusing/generic program names
• #1037299 Install Debian -> Untrusted application launcher
• #1037123 Minimal HD space required too small for some live images
• #971003 Console auto-login doesn t work with sysvinit

At least Calamares has been trixiefied in testing, so there s that! Desktop stuff:

• #1038660 please set a placeholder theme during development, different from any release
• #1021816 breeze: Background image not shown any more
• #956102 desktop-base: unwanted metadata within images
• #605915 please mtheake it a non-native package
• #681025 Put old themes in a new package named desktop-base-extra
• #941642 desktop-base: split theme data files and desktop integrations in separate packages

The Egg theme that I want to develop for testing/unstable is based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme that was used for Bullseye. Egg, as in, something that hasn t quite hatched yet. Get it? (for #1038660) Debian Social:

• Set up Lemmy instance
  • I started setting up a Lemmy instance before DebCamp, and meant to finish it.
• Migrate PeerTube to new server
  • We got a new physical server for our PeerTube instance, we should have more space for growth and it would help us fix the streaming feature on our platform.

Loopy: I intended to get the loop for DebConf in good shape before I left, so that we can spend some time during DebCamp making some really nice content, unfortunately this went very tumbly, but at least we ended up with a loopy that kind of worked and wasn t too horrible. There s always another DebConf to try again, right?

So DebCamp as a usual DebCamp was pretty much a wash (fitting with all the rain we had?) for me, at least it gave me enough time to recover a bit for DebConf proper, and I had enough time left to catch up on some critical DPL duties and put together a few slides for the Bits from the DPL talk.

DebConf Bits From the DPL I had very, very little available time to prepare something for Bits fro the DPL, but I managed to put some slides together (available on my wiki page). I mostly covered:

• A very quick introduction of myself (I ve done this so many times, it feels redundant giving my history every time), and some introduction on what it is that the DPL does. I declared my intent not to run for DPL again, and the reasoning behind it, and a few bits of information for people who may intend to stand for DPL next year.
• The sentiment out there for the Debian 12 release (which has been very positive). How we include firmware by default now, and that we re saying goodbye to architectures both GNU/KFreeBSD and mipsel.
• Debian Day and the 30th birthday party celebrations from local groups all over the world (and a reminder about the Local Groups BoF later in the week).
• I looked forward to Debian 13 (trixie!), and how we re gaining riscv64 as a release architecture, as well as loongarch64, and that plans seem to be forming to fix 2k38 in Debian, and hopefully largely by the time the Trixie release comes by.
• I made some comments about Enterprise Linux as people refer to the RHEL eco-system these days, how really bizarre some aspects of it is (like the kernel maintenance), and that some big vendors are choosing to support systems outside of that eco-system now (like CPanel now supporting Ubuntu too). I closed with the quote below from Ian Murdock, and assured the audience that if they want to go out and make money with Debian, they are more than welcome too.

Job Fair I walked through the hallway where the Job Fair was hosted, and enjoyed all the buzz. It s not always easy to get this right, but this year it was very active and energetic, I hope lots of people made some connections! Cheese & Wine Due to state laws and alcohol licenses, we couldn t consume alcohol from outside the state of Kerala in the common areas of the hotel (only in private rooms), so this wasn t quite as big or as fun as our usual C&W parties since we couldn t share as much from our individual countries and cultures, but we always knew that this was going to be the case for this DebConf, and it still ended up being alright. Day Trip I opted for the forest / waterfalls daytrip. It was really, really long with lots of time in the bus. I think our trip s organiser underestimated how long it would take between the points on the route (all in all it wasn t that far, but on a bus on a winding mountain road, it takes long). We left at 8:00 and only found our way back to the hotel around 23:30. Even though we arrived tired and hungry, we saw some beautiful scenery, animals and also met indigenous river people who talked about their struggles against being driven out of their place of living multiple times as government invests in new developments like dams and hydro power.

Photos available in the DebConf23 public git repository. Losing a beloved Debian Developer during DebConf To our collective devastation, not everyone made it back from their day trips. Abraham Raji was out to the kayak day trip, and while swimming, got caught by a whirlpool from a drainage system. Even though all of us were properly exhausted and shocked in disbelief at this point, we had to stay up and make some tough decisions. Some initially felt that we had to cancel the rest of DebConf. We also had to figure out how to announce what happened asap both to the larger project and at DebConf in an official manner, while ensuring that due diligence took place and that the family is informed by the police first before making anything public. We ended up cancelling all the talks for the following day, with an address from the DPL in the morning to explain what had happened. Of all the things I ve ever had to do as DPL, this was by far the hardest. The day after that, talks were also cancelled for the morning so that we could attend his funeral. Dozens of DebConf attendees headed out by bus to go pay their final respects, many wearing the t-shirts that Abraham had designed for DebConf. A book of condolences was set up so that everyone who wished to could write a message on how they remembered him. The book will be kept by his family.

Today marks a week since his funeral, and I still feel very raw about it. And even though there was uncertainty whether DebConf should even continue after his death, in hindsight I m glad that everyone pushed forward. While we were all heart broken, it was also heart warming to see people care for each other in all of this. If anything, I think I needed more time at DebConf just to be in that warm aura of emotional support for just a bit longer. There are many people who I wanted to talk to who I barely even had a chance to see. Abraham, or Abru as he was called by some people (which I like because bru in Afrikaans is like bro in English, not sure if that s what it implied locally too) enjoyed artistic pursuits, but he was also passionate about knowledge transfer. He ran classes at DebConf both last year and this year (and I think at other local events too) where he taught people packaging via a quick course that he put together. His enthusiasm for Debian was contagious, a few of the people who he was mentoring came up to me and told me that they were going to see it through and become a DD in honor of him. I can t even remember how I reacted to that, my brain was already so worn out and stitching that together with the tragedy of what happened while at DebConf was just too much for me. I first met him in person last year in Kosovo, I already knew who he was, so I think we interacted during the online events the year before. He was just one of those people who showed so much promise, and I was curious to see what he d achieve in the future. Unfortunately, we was taken away from us too soon. Poetry Evening Later in the week we had the poetry evening. This was the first time I had the courage to recite something. I read Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keely). The first time I heard about this poem was in an interview with Julian Assange s wife, where she mentioned that he really loves this poem, and it caught my attention because I really like the Weezer song Return to Ithaka and always wondered what it was about, so needless to say, that was another rabbit hole at some point. Group Photo Our DebConf photographer organised another group photo for this event, links to high-res versions available on Aigar s website.

BoFs I didn t attend nearly as many talks this DebConf as I would ve liked (fortunately I can catch up on video, should be released soon), but I did make it to a few BoFs. In the Local Groups BoF, representatives from various local teams were present who introduced themselves and explained what they were doing. From memory (sorry if I left someone out), we had people from Belgium, Brazil, Taiwan and South Africa. We talked about types of events a local group could do (BSPs, Mini DC, sprints, Debian Day, etc. How to help local groups get started, booth kits for conferences, and setting up some form of calendar that lists important Debian events in a way that makes it easier for people to plan and co-ordinate. There s a mailing list for co-ordination of local groups, and the irc channel is #debian-localgroups on oftc.

If you got one of these Cheese & Wine bags from DebConf, that s from the South African local group!

In the Debian.net BoF, we discussed the Debian.net hosting service, where Debian pays for VMs hosted for projects by individual DDs on Debian.net. The idea is that we start some form of census that monitors the services, whether they re still in use, whether the system is up to date, whether someone still cares for it, etc. We had some discussion about where the lines of responsibility are drawn, and we can probably make things a little bit more clear in the documentation. We also want to offer more in terms of backups and monitoring (currently DDs do get 500GB from rsync.net that could be used for backups of their services though). The intention is also to deploy some form of configuration management for some essentials across the hosts. We should also look at getting some sponsored hosting for this. In the Debian Social BoF, we discussed some services that need work / expansion. In particular, Matrix keeps growing at an increased rate as more users use it and more channels are bridged, so it will likely move to its own host with big disks soon. We might replace Pleroma with a fork called Akkoma, this will need some more home work and checking whether it s even feasible. Some services haven t really been used (like Writefreely and Plume), and it might be time to retire them. We might just have to help one or two users migrate some of their posts away if we do retire them. Mjolner seems to do a fine job at spam blocking, we haven t had any notable incidents yet. WordPress now has improved fediverse support, it s unclear whether it works on a multi-site instance yet, I ll test it at some point soon and report back. For upcoming services, we are implementing Lemmy and probably also Mobilizon. A request was made that we also look into Loomio. More Information Overload There s so much that happens at DebConf, it s tough to take it all in, and also, to find time to write about all of it, but I ll mention a few more things that are certainly worth of note. During DebConf, we had some people from the Kite Linux team over. KITE supplies the ICT needs for the primary and secondary schools in the province of Kerala, where they all use Linux. They decided to switch all of these to Debian. There was an ad-hoc BoF where locals were listening and fielding questions that the Kite Linux team had. It was great seeing all the energy and enthusiasm behind this effort, I hope someone will properly blog about this! I learned about the VGLUG Foundation, who are doing a tremendous job at promoting GNU/Linux in the country. They are also training up 50 people a year to be able to provide tech support for Debian. I came across the booth for Mostly Harmless, they liberate old hardware by installing free firmware on there. It was nice seeing all the devices out there that could be liberated, and how it can breathe new life into old harware.

Some hopefully harmless soldering.

Overall, the community and their activities in India are very impressive, and I wish I had more time to get to know everyone better. Food Oh yes, one more thing. The food was great. I tasted more different kinds of curry than I ever did in my whole life up to this point. The lunch on banana leaves was interesting, and also learning how to eat this food properly by hand (thanks to the locals who insisted on teaching me!), it was a fruitful experience? This might catch on at home too less dishes to take care of!

Special thanks to the DebConf23 Team I think this may have been one of the toughest DebConfs to organise yet, and I don t think many people outside of the DebConf team knows about all the challenges and adversity this team has faced in organising it. Even just getting to the previous DebConf in Kosovo was a long and tedious and somewhat risky process. Through it all, they were absolute pro s. Not once did I see them get angry or yell at each other, whenever a problem came up, they just dealt with it. They did a really stellar job and I did make a point of telling them on the last day that everyone appreciated all the work that they did. Back to my nest I bought Dax a ball back from India, he seems to have forgiven me for not taking him along.

I ll probably take a few days soon to focus a bit on my bugs and catch up on my original DebCamp goals. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And thanks to everyone for being such fantastic people.

(I wrote this up for an internal work post, but I figure it s worth sharing more publicly too.) I spent last week at DebConf23, this years instance of the annual Debian conference, which was held in Kochi, India. As usual, DebConf provides a good reason to see a new part of the world; I ve been going since 2004 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), and while I ve missed a few (Mexico, Bosnia, and Switzerland) I ve still managed to make it to instances on 5 continents. This has absolutely nothing to do with work, so I went on my own time + dime, but I figured a brief write-up might prove of interest. I first installed Debian back in 1999 as a machine that was being co-located to operate as a web server / email host. I was attracted by the promise of easy online upgrades (or, at least, upgrades that could be performed without the need to be physically present at the machine, even if they naturally required a reboot at some point). It has mostly delivered on this over the years, and I ve never found a compelling reason to move away. I became a Debian Developer in 2000. As a massively distributed volunteer project DebConf provides an opportunity to find out what s happening in other areas of the project, catch up with team mates, and generally feel more involved and energised to work on Debian stuff. Also, by this point in time, a lot of Debian folk are good friends and it s always nice to catch up with them. On that point, I felt that this year the hallway track was not quite the same as usual. For a number of reasons (COVID, climate change, travel time, we re all getting older) I think fewer core teams are achieving critical mass at DebConf - I was the only member physically present from 2 teams I m involved in, and I d have appreciated the opportunity to sit down with both of them for some in-person discussions. It also means it s harder to use DebConf as a venue for advancing major changes; previously having all the decision makers in the same space for a week has meant it s possible to iron out the major discussion points, smoothing remote implementation after the conference. I m told the mini DebConfs are where it s at for these sorts of meetings now, so perhaps I ll try to attend at least one of those next year. Of course, I also went to a bunch of talks. I have differing levels of comment about each of them, but I ve written up some brief notes below about the ones I remember something about. The comment was made that we perhaps had a lower level of deep technical talks, which is perhaps true but I still think there were a number of high level technical talks that served to pique ones interest about the topic. Finally, this DebConf was the first I m aware of that was accompanied by tragedy; as part of the day trip Abraham Raji, a project member and member of the local team, was involved in a fatal accident.

Talks (videos not yet up for all, but should appear for most)

• Opening Ceremony
  Not much to say here; welcome to DebConf!
• Continuous Key-Signing Party introduction
  I ended up running this, as Gunnar couldn t make it. Debian makes heavy use of the OpenPGP web of trust (no mass ability to send out Yubikeys + perform appropriate levels of identity verification), so making sure we re appropriately cross-signed, and linked to local conference organisers, is a dull but important part of the conference. We use a modified keysigning approach where identity verification + fingerprint confirmation happens over the course of the conference, so this session was just to explain how that works and confirm we were all working from the same fingerprint list.
• State of Stateless - A Talk about Immutability and Reproducibility in Debian
  Stateless OSes seem to be gaining popularity, so I went along to this to see if there was anything of note. It was interesting, but nothing earth shattering - very high level.
• What s missing so that Debian is finally reproducible?
  Reproducible builds are something I ve been keeping an eye on for a long time, and I continue to be impressed by the work folks are putting into this - both for Debian, and other projects. From a security standpoint reproducible builds provide confidence against trojaned builds, and from a developer standpoint knowing you can build reproducibly helps with not having to keep a whole bunch of binary artefacts around.
• Hello from keyring-maint
  In the distant past the process of getting your OpenPGP key into the Debian keyring (which is used to authenticate uploads + votes, amongst other things) was a clunky process that was often stalled. This hasn t been the case for at least the past 10 years, but there s still a residual piece of project memory that thinks keyring is a blocker. So as a team we say hi and talk about the fact we do monthly updates and generally are fairly responsive these days.
• A declarative approach to Linux networking with Netplan
  Debian s /etc/network/interfaces is a fairly basic (if powerful) mechanism for configuring network interfaces. NetworkManager is a better bet for dynamic hosts (i.e. clients), and systemd-network seems to be a good choice for servers (I m gradually moving machines over to it). Netplan tries to provide a unified mechanism for configuring both with a single configuration language. A noble aim, but I don t see a lot of benefit for anything I use - my NetworkManager hosts are highly dynamic (so no need to push shared config) and systemd-network (or /etc/network/interfaces) works just fine on the other hosts. I m told Netplan has more use with more complicated setups, e.g. when OpenVSwitch is involved.
• Quick peek at ZFS, A too good to be true file system and volume manager.
  People who use ZFS rave about it. I m naturally suspicious of any file system that doesn t come as part of my mainline kernel. But, as a longtime cautious mdraid+lvm+ext4 user I appreciate that there have been advances in the file system space that maybe I should look at, and I ve been trying out btrfs on more machines over the past couple of years. I can t deny ZFS has a bunch of interesting features, but nothing I need/want that I can t get from an mdraid+lvm+btrfs stack (in particular data checksumming + reflinks for dedupe were strong reasons to move to btrfs over ext4).
• Bits from the DPL
  Exactly what it says on the tin; some bits from the DPL.
• Adulting
  Enrico is always worth hearing talk; Adulting was no exception. Main takeaway is that we need to avoid trying to run the project on martyrs and instead make sure we build a sustainable project. I ve been trying really hard to accept I just don t have time to take on additional responsibilities, no matter how interesting or relevant they might seem, so this resonated.
• My life in git, after subversion, after CVS.
  Putting all of your home directory in revision control. I ve never made this leap; I ve got some Ansible playbooks that push out my core pieces of configuration, which is held in git, but I don t actually check this out directly on hosts I have accounts on. Interesting, but not for me.
• EU Legislation BoF - Cyber Resilience Act, Product Liability Directive and CSAM Regulation
  The CRA seems to be a piece of ill informed legislation that I m going to have to find time to read properly. Discussion was a bit more alarmist than I personally feel is warranted, but it was a short session, had a bunch of folk in it, and even when I removed my mask it was hard to make myself understood.
• What s new in the Linux kernel (and what s missing in Debian)
  An update from Ben about new kernel features. I m paying less attention to such things these days, so nice to get a quick overview of it all.
• Intro to SecureDrop, a sort-of Linux distro
  Actually based on Ubuntu, but lots of overlap with Debian as a result, and highly customised anyway. Notable, to me, for using OpenPGP as some of the backend crypto support. I managed to talk to Kunal separately about some of the pain points around that, which was an interesting discussion - they re trying to move from GnuPG to Sequoia, primarily because of the much easier integration and lack of requirement for the more complicated GnuPG features that sometimes get in the way.
• The Docker(.io) ecosystem in Debian
  I hate Docker. I m sure it s fine if you accept it wants to take over the host machine entirely, but when I ve played around with it that s not been the case. This talk was more about the difficulty of trying to keep a fast moving upstream with lots of external dependencies properly up to date in a stable release. Vendoring the deps and trying to get a stable release exception seems like the least bad solution, but it s a problem that affects a growing number of projects.
• Chiselled containers
  This was kinda of interesting, but I think I missed the piece about why more granular packaging wasn t an option. The premise is you can take an existing .deb and chisel it into smaller components, which then helps separate out dependencies rather than pulling in as much as the original .deb would. This was touted as being useful, in particular, for building targeted containers. Definitely appealing over custom built userspaces for containers, but in an ideal world I think we d want the information in the main packaging and it becomes a lot of work.
• Debian Contributors shake-up
  Debian Contributors is a great site for massaging your ego around contributions to Debian; it s also a useful point of reference from a data protection viewpoint in terms of information the project holds about contributors - everything is already public, but the Contributors website provides folk with an easy way to find their own information (with various configurable options about whether that s made public or not). T ssia is working on improving the various data feeds into the site, but realistically this is the responsibility of every Debian service owner.
• New Member BOF
  I m part of the teams that help get new folk into Debian - primarily as a member of the New Member Front Desk, but also as a mostly inactive Application Manager. It s been a while since we did one of these sessions so the Front Desk/Debian Account Managers that were present did a panel session. Nothing earth shattering came out of it; like keyring-maint this is a team that has historically had problems, but is currently running smoothly.

just testing, please ignore

I had to make the hard decision to put snaps on hold. I am working odd jobs to stay alive and to pay for my beautiful scenery. My Project should move forward, as I have done everything asked of me including finding a super awesome management team to take us all the way through. But until it is signed sealed and delivered, I have to survive. In my free time I am helping out Jonathan and working on KDE Neon, he has done so much for me over the years, it is the least I can do! So without further ado! Carlos and I have been working diligently on new Frameworks 5.110, Plasma 5.27.8, and Applications 23.08.1! They are complete and ready in /user! With that, a great many fixes to qml dependencies and packaging updates. Current users can update freely and the docker images and ISO are building now. We are working on Unstable as it is a bit unstable right now, but improving On the Debian front I am wrapping up packaging of new upstream release of squashfuse. Thanks for stopping by! If you can spare some change, consider a donation Thank you! https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

I ve just finalised the OpenPGP key list for the DebConf 23 Keysigning party. This will follow the new style approach of being a continuous keysigning throughout the course of the conference, with an introduction session up front to confirm no one s fingerprint is corrupted and that we all calculated the same hash of the file. Participants will then verify each other s identities over the conference week, hopefully being able to build up a better level of verification than a one shot key signing session. Those paying attention will note that my key details have changed this year; I am finally make a concerted effort to migrate to an elliptic curve based key. I managed to bootstrap it sufficiently at OMGWTFBBQ, but I m keen to ensure it s well integrated into the web of trust, so please do come talk to me at DebConf so we can exchange fingerprints! (I ve no reason to suspect problems with my old key and will be making a graceful changeover in the Debian keyring at some point in October after I ve performed the September keyring update; that ll give things a couple of months to catch up before it s my turn to do an update again.)

I designed and printed a replacement knob for the wing-mirror adjustment on a Volkswagen Lupo.

• mirrorknob.scad
• mirrorknob.stl

The original had a "pineapple" style texture on it. For my print, I sliced with Prusa Slicer and turned on "fuzzy surfaces" to get a texture on the grip-side of the knob.

I discovered Gazelle Twin last year via Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone (two of her tracks ended up on my 2022 Halloween playlist). Through her website I learned of The Horror Show! exhibition at Somerset House¹ in London that I managed to visit earlier this year. I've been intending to write a 5-track blog post (a la Underworld, the Cure, Coil) for a while but I have been spurred on by the excellent news that she's got a new album on the way, and, she's performing at the Sage Gateshead in November. Buy tickets now!! Here's the five tracks I recommend to get started:

1. Anti-Body, from 2014's UNFLESH. I particularly love the percussion. Perc did a good hard-house-style remix on Fleshed Out, the companion remix album. Anti-Body by Gazelle Twin
2. Fire Leap, from Gazelle Twin and NYX's collaborative album Deep England. The album is a re-interpretation of material from Gazelle Twin's earlier album, Pastoral, with the exception of this track, which is a cover of Paul Giovanni's song from The Wicker Man. There's a common aesthetic in all three works: eerie-folk, England's self-mythologising as seen through a warped and cracked lens. Anti-Body by Gazelle Twin There's a fantastic performance video of the whole album, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, available on YouTube.
3. Better In My Day, from the aforementioned Pastoral. This track and this album are, I think, less accessible, more challenging than the re-interpreted material. That's not a bad thing: I'm still working on digesting it! This is one of the more abrasive, confrontational tracks. Better In My Day by Gazelle Twin
4. I am Shell I am Bone, from way back to her first release, The Entire City in 2011. Composed, recorded, self-produced, self-released. It's remarkable to me how different each phase of GT's work are to one another. This album evokes a strong sense of atmosphere and place to me. There's a hint of possible influence of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures (or New Order's Movement) in places. The b-side to this song is a cover of Joy Division's The Eternal. I Am Shell I Am Bone by Gazelle Twin
5. GT re-issued This Entire City in 2022 along with a companion-piece EP of newly-released material from the same era, The Wastelands. This isn't cutting room floor stuff, though, as evidenced by the strength of my final pick, Hole in my Heart. Hole In My Heart by Gazelle Twin

It's hard to pick just five tracks when doing these (that's the point I suppose). I note that I haven't picked anything from her wide-ranging soundtrack work: her last three or four of her releases have been soundtrack works, released on the well-respected UK label Invada, as will be her forthcoming album. You can find all the released stuff on Gazelle Twin's Bandcamp Page.

As is traditional for the UK August Bank Holiday weekend I made my way to Cambridge for the Debian UK BBQ. As was pointed out we ve been doing this for more than 20 years now, and it s always good to catch up with old friends and meet new folk. Thanks to Collabora, Codethink, and Andy for sponsoring a bunch of tasty refreshments. And, of course, thanks to Steve for hosting us all.

Now that it's more convenient for me to run containers at home, I thought I'd write a bit about web apps I am enjoying. First up, FreshRSS, a web feed aggregator. I used to make heavy use of Google Reader until Google killed it, and although a bunch of self-hosted cloned sprung up very quickly afterwards, I didn't transition to any of them. Then followed a number of years within which, in retrospect, I basically didn't do a great job of organising reading the web. This lasted until a couple of years ago when, on a whim, I tried out NetNewsWire for iOS. NetNewsWire is a well-established and much-loved feed reader for Mac which I've never used. I used the iOS version in isolation for a long time: only dipping into web feeds on my phone and never on another device. I'd like to see the old web back, and do my part to make that happen. I've continually published rss and atom feeds for my own blog. I'm also trying to blog more: this might be easier now that Twitter (which, IMHO, took a lot of the energy for quick writing out of blogging) is mortally wounded. So, I'm giving FreshRSS a go. Early signs are good: it's fast, lightweight, easy to use, vaguely resembles how I remember Google Reader, and has a native dark-mode. It's still early days building up a new list of feeds to follow. I'll be sure to share interesting ones as I discover them!

Inspired by the fine Debian Local Groups all over the world, I ve long since wanted to start one in Cape Town. Unfortunately, there s been many obstacles over the years. Shiny distractions, an epidemic, DPL terms these are just some of the things that got in the way. Fortunately, things are starting to gain traction, and we re well on our way to forming a bona fide local group for South Africa. We got together at Woodstock Grill, they have both a nice meeting room, and good food and beverage, also reasonably central for most of us.

Cake Starting with the important stuff, we got this Debian cake made that ended up much bigger than we expected, at least we all got to take some home too! (it tasted great too)

Yes, cake.

Talk This event was planned very last minute, so we didn t do any kind of RSVP and I had no idea who exactly would show up, so I went ahead and prepared one of my usual introduction to Linux and Debian talks, and how these things are having an impact on the world out there. I also talked a bit about the community and how we intend to grow our local team here in South Africa. It turned out most of the audience were already experienced Linux users, but I was happy to see that they were very enthusiastic about the local group concept!

While reading through some material to find some inspiration for this talk, I came across an old quote from the original Debian Manifesto that I found very poignant again, so I feel compelled to share (didn t use it in my talk this time though since I didn t cover much current events): The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather than on the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire Linux community and its future. Ian Murdock, 1994

Debian-ZA logo Tammy spent some time creating a whole bunch of logo concepts, that she presented to us. They aren t meant as final logo choices, but as initial concepts, and they worked well to invoke a very lively discussion about logos and design!

Here are just some of her designs that I cherry picked since they were the most discussed. We still haven t decided if it will be Debian ZA or Debian-ZA or Debian South Africa, although the latter will probably cause least confusion internationally.

Personally, the last one on this image that I referred to as the carpet is my personal favourite :-)

Happy Birthday Song John and Heila wrote a happy birthday song. After seeing the lyrics (and considering myself an amateur lyricist) I thought it was way too tacky and I told John to put it away. But when the cake came out, someone said we should sing! and the lyrics quickly re-emerged and was handed out to everyone. It s also meant to be a loopy clip for the upcoming DebConf23. I ll concede that it worked out alright in the end! You judge for yourself:

Mousepads People still use mousepads? That was my initial reaction when Heila told me that she was going to make some commemorative 30 year Debian mousepads for our birthday event, and they ended up being popular. It s probably a safer surface to put dev boards on than on my desk directly, so at least I do have a use for one!

Group Photo The group photo, complete with disco ball! We should ve taken this earlier because it was already getting late and some people had to head back home. Lesson learned for next time!

30th Birthday Interview with The Changelog I also did an interview with The Changelog for Debian s 30th birthday. It was late, and I haven t had a chance to listen to it yet, so I hope their producers managed to edit something coherent out of my usual Debian babbling:

More later There s so much more I d like to say about Debian, the last 30 years, local groups, the eco-system that we find ourselves in. And, Lemmy! But I ll see if I can get an instance up over the weekend and will then talk about that some more another time.

One of the annoyances I had when I upgraded from Buster to Bullseye (yes, I m talking about an upgrade I did at the end of 2021) is that I ended up moving from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3. Which is fine, I guess, but it meant I could no longer use listadmin to deal with messages held for moderation. At the time I looked around, couldn t find anything, shrugged, and became incredibly bad at performing my list moderation duties. Last week I finally accepted what I should have done at least a year ago and wrote some hopefully not too bad Python to web scrape the Mailman 3 admin interface. It then presents a list of subscribers and held messages that might need approved or discarded. It s heavily inspired by listadmin, but not a faithful copy (partly because it s been so long since I used it that I m no longer familiar with its interface). Despite that I ve called it listadmin3. It currently meets the bar of extremely useful to me so I ve tagged v0.1. You can get it on Github. I d be interested in knowing if it actually works for / is useful to anyone else (I suspect it won t be happy with interfaces configured to not be in English, but that should be solvable). Comment here or reply to my Fediverse announcement. Example usage, cribbed directly from the README: There s Debian packaging in the repository (dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b will spit you out a .deb) but I m holding off on filing an ITP + actually uploading until I know if it s useful enough for others before doing so. You only really need the listadmin3 file and to ensure you have Python3 + MechanicalSoup installed. (Yes, I still run mailing lists. Hell, I still run a Usenet server.)

I designed and printed a "terrain" base for my 3D castle in OpenSCAD. The castle was the first thing I designed and printed on our (then new) office 3D printer. I use it as a test bed if I want to try something new, and this time I wanted to try procedurally generating a model. I've released the OpenSCAD source for the terrain generator under the name Zarchscape. mid 90s terrain generation Back in the 90s I spent some time designing maps/levels/arenas for Quake and its sibling games (like Half-Life), mostly in the tool Worldcraft. A lot of beginner maps (including my own), ended up looking pretty boxy. I once stumbled across an article blog post that taught my a useful trick for making more natural-looking terrain. In brief: tessellate the floor region with triangle polygons, then randomly add some jitter to the z-dimension for their vertices. A really simple technique with fairly dramatic results. OpenSCAD Doing the same in OpenSCAD stretched me, and I think stretched OpenSCAD. It left me with some opinions which I'll try to write up in a future blog post. Final results I've generated and printed the result a couple of times, including an attempt a multicolour print. At home, I have a large spool of brown-coloured recycled PLA, and many small lengths of samples in various colours (that I picked up at Maker Faire Czech Republic last year), including some short lengths of green. My home printer is a Prusa Mini, and I cheaped out and didn't buy the filament runout sensor, which would detect when the current filament ran out and let me handle the situation gracefully. Instead, I added several colour change instructions to the g-code at various heights, hoping that whatever plastic I loaded for each layer was enough to get the print to the next colour change instruction. The results are a little mixed I think. I didn't catch the final layer running out in time (forgetting that the Bowden tube also means I need to catch it running out before the loading gear, a few inches earlier than the nozzle), so the final lush green colour ends prematurely. I've also got a fair bit of stringing to clean up. Finally, all these non-flat planes really show up some of the limitations of regular Slicing. It would be interesting to try this with a non-planar Slicer.

This is a short announcement to say that I have changed my main OpenPGP key. A signed statement is available with the cryptographic details but, in short, the reason is that I stopped using my old YubiKey NEO that I have worn on my keyring since 2015. I now have a YubiKey 5 which supports ED25519 which features much shorter keys and faster decryption. It allowed me to move all my secret subkeys on the key (including encryption keys) while retaining reasonable performance. I have written extensive documentation on how to do that OpenPGP key rotation and also YubiKey OpenPGP operations.

Warning on storing encryption keys on a YubiKey People wishing to move their private encryption keys to such a security token should be very careful as there are special precautions to take for disaster recovery. I am toying with the idea of writing an article specifically about disaster recovery for secrets and backups, dealing specifically with cases of death or disabilities.

Autocrypt changes One nice change is the impact on Autocrypt headers, which are considerably shorter. Before, the header didn't even fit on a single line in an email, it overflowed to five lines:

Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
 keydata=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 YG7YEobMjX0CThKe6AV2118XNzRBw/S2IO1LWnL5qaGYPZONUa9Pj0OaErdKIk/V1wge8Zoav2fQPautBcRLW5VA33PH1ggoqKQ4ES1hc9HC6SYKzTCGixu97mu/vjOa8DYgM+33TosLyNy+bCzw62zJkMf89X0tTSdaJSj5Op0SrRvfgjbC2YpJOnXxHr9qaXFbBZQhLjemZi6zRzUNeJ6A3Nzs+gIc4H7s/bYBtcd4ugPEhDeCGffdS3TppH9PnvRXfoa5zj5bsKFgjqjWolCyAmEvd15tXz5yNXtvrpgDhjF5ozPiNp/1EeWX4DxbH2i17drVu4fXwauFZ6lcsAcJxnvCA28RlQlmEQu/gFOx1axVXf6GIuXnQSjQN6qJbByUYrdc/cFCxPO2/lGuUxnufN9Tvb51Qh54laPgGLrlD2huQeSD9Sxa0MNUjNY0qLqaReT99Ygb2LPYGSLoFVx9iZz6sZNt07LqCx9qNgsJwsdmwYsNpMuFbc7nkWjtlEqzsXZHTvYN654p43S+hcAhmmOzQZcew6h71fAJLciiqsPBnCEdgCGFAWhZZdPkMA==

After the change, the entire key fits on a single line, neat!

Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
 keydata=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

Note that I have implemented my own kind of ridiculous Autocrypt support for the Notmuch Emacs email client I use, see this elisp code. To import keys, I pipe the message into this script which is basically just:

sq autocrypt decode   gpg --import

... thanks to Sequoia best-of-class Autocrypt support.

Note on OpenPGP usage While some have claimed OpenPGP's death, I believe those are overstated. Maybe it's just me, but I still use OpenPGP for my password management, to authenticate users and messages, and it's the interface to my YubiKey for authenticating with SSH servers. I understand people feel that OpenPGP is possibly insecure, counter-intuitive and full of problems, but I think most of those problems should instead be attributed to its current flagship implementation, GnuPG. I have tried to work with GnuPG for years, and it keeps surprising me with evilness and oddities. I have high hopes that the Sequoia project can bring some sanity into this space, and I also hope that RFC4880bis can eventually get somewhere so we have a more solid specification with more robust crypto. It's kind of a shame that this has dragged on for so long, but Update: there's a separate draft called openpgp-crypto-refresh that might actually be adopted as the "OpenPGP RFC" soon! And it doesn't keep real work from happening in Sequoia and other implementations. Thunderbird rewrote their OpenPGP implementation with RNP (which was, granted, a bumpy road because it lost compatibility with GnuPG) and Sequoia now has a certificate store with trust management (but still no secret storage), preliminary OpenPGP card support and even a basic GnuPG compatibility layer. I'm also curious to try out the OpenPGP CA capabilities. So maybe it's just because I'm becoming an old fart that doesn't want to change tools, but so far I haven't seen a good incentive in switching away from OpenPGP, and haven't found a good set of tools that completely replace it. Maybe OpenSSH's keys and CA can eventually replace it, but I suspect they will end up rebuilding most of OpenPGP anyway, just more slowly. If they do, let's hope they avoid the mistakes our community has done in the past at least...

The long running British¹ SF Magazine Interzone has a new home and new editor, Gareth Jelley, starting with issue 294. It's also got a swanky new format ("JB6"): a perfect-bound, paperback novel size, perfect for fitting into an oversize coat or jeans pocket for reading on the train. I started reading Interzone in around 2003, having picked up an issue (#176) from Feb 2002 that was languishing on the shelves in Forbidden Planet. Once I discovered it I wondered why it had taken me so long. That issue introduced me to Greg Egan. I bought a number of back issues on eBay, to grab issues with stories by people including Terry Pratchett, Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and others. A short while later in early 2004, after 22 years, Interzone's owner and editorship changed from David Pringle to Andy Cox and TTA Press. I can remember the initial transition was very jarring: the cover emphasised expanding into coverage of Manga, Graphic Novels and Video Games (which ultimately didn't happen) but after a short period of experimentation it quickly settled down into a similarly fantastic read. I particularly liked the move to a smaller, perfect-bound form-factor in 2012. I had to double-check this but I'd been reading IZ throughout the TTA era and it lasted 18 years! Throughout that time I have discovered countless fantastic authors that I would otherwise never have experienced. Some (but by no means all) are Dominic Green, Daniel Kaysen, Chris Beckett, C cile Cristofari, Aliya Whiteley, Tim Major, Fran oise Harvey, Will McIntosh. Cox has now retired (after 100 issues and a tenure almost as long as Pringle) and handed the reins to Gareth Jelley/MYY Press, who have published their first issue, #294. Jelley is clearly putting a huge amount of effort into revitalizing the magazine. There's a new homepage at interzone.press but also companion internet presences: a plethora of digital content at interzone.digital, Interzone Socials (a novel idea), a Discord server, a podcast, and no doubt more. Having said that, the economics of small magazines have been perilous for a long time, and that hasn't changed, so I think the future of IZ (in physical format at least) is in peril. If you enjoy short fiction, fresh ideas, SF/F/Fantastika; why not try a subscription to Interzone, whilst you still can!

My daughter Beatrice asked for me to print her a 3D printer. Most of the model is from https://www.printables.com/model/355917-miniature-3d-printer-model-toy, and the unicorn is from https://www.printables.com/model/385926-unicorn.