Review: Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #33
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	October 2004
Printing:	November 2014
ISBN:	0-06-233497-2
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	471

Going Postal is the 33rd Discworld novel. You could probably start here if you wanted to; there are relatively few references to previous books, and the primary connection (to Feet of Clay) is fully re-explained. I suspect that's why Going Postal garnered another round of award nominations. There are arguable spoilers for Feet of Clay, however. Moist von Lipwig is a con artist. Under a wide variety of names, he's swindled and forged his way around the Disc, always confident that he can run away from or talk his way out of any trouble. As Going Postal begins, however, it appears his luck has run out. He's about to be hanged. Much to his surprise, he wakes up after his carefully performed hanging in Lord Vetinari's office, where he's offered a choice. He can either take over the Ankh-Morpork post office, or he can die. Moist, of course, immediately agrees to run the post office, and then leaves town at the earliest opportunity, only to be carried back into Vetinari's office by a relentlessly persistent golem named Mr. Pump. He apparently has a parole officer. The clacks, Discworld's telegraph system first seen in The Fifth Elephant, has taken over most communications. The city is now dotted with towers, and the Grand Trunk can take them at unprecedented speed to even far-distant cities like Genua. The post office, meanwhile, is essentially defunct, as Moist quickly discovers. There are two remaining employees, the highly eccentric Junior Postman Groat who is still Junior because no postmaster has lasted long enough to promote him, and the disturbingly intense Apprentice Postman Stanley, who collects pins. Other than them, the contents of the massive post office headquarters are a disturbing mail sorting machine designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson that is not picky about which dimension or timeline the sorted mail comes from, and undelivered mail. A lot of undelivered mail. Enough undelivered mail that there may be magical consequences. All Moist has to do is get the postal system running again. Somehow. And not die in mysterious accidents like the previous five postmasters. Going Postal is a con artist story, but it's also a startup and capitalism story. Vetinari is, as always, solving a specific problem in his inimitable indirect way. The clacks were created by engineers obsessed with machinery and encodings and maintenance, but it's been acquired by... well, let's say private equity, because that's who they are, although Discworld doesn't have that term. They immediately did what private equity always did: cut out everything that didn't extract profit, without regard for either the service or the employees. Since the clacks are an effective monopoly and the new owners are ruthless about eliminating any possible competition, there isn't much to stop them. Vetinari's chosen tool is Moist. There are some parts of this setup that I love and one part that I'm grumbly about. A lot of the fun of this book is seeing Moist pulled into the mission of resurrecting the post office despite himself. He starts out trying to wriggle out of his assigned task, but, after a few early successes and a supernatural encounter with the mail, he can't help but start to care. Reformed con men often make good protagonists because one can enjoy the charisma without disliking the ethics. Pratchett adds the delightfully sharp-witted and cynical Adora Belle Dearheart as a partial reader stand-in, which makes the process of Moist becoming worthy of his protagonist role even more fun. I think that a properly functioning postal service is one of the truly monumental achievements of human society and doesn't get nearly enough celebration (or support, or pay, or good working conditions). Give me a story about reviving a postal service by someone who appreciates the tradition and social role as much as Pratchett clearly does and I'm there. The only frustration is that Going Postal is focused more on an immediate plot, so we don't get to see the larger infrastructure recovery that is clearly needed. (Maybe in later books?) That leads to my grumble, though. Going Postal and specifically the takeover of the clacks is obviously inspired by corporate structures in the later Industrial Revolution, but this book was written in 2004, so it's also a book about private equity and startups. When Vetinari puts a con man in charge of the post office, he runs it like a startup: do lots of splashy things to draw attention, promise big and then promise even bigger, stumble across a revenue source that may or may not be sustainable, hire like mad, and hope it all works out. This makes for a great story in the same way that watching trapeze artists or tightrope walkers is entertaining. You know it's going to work because that's the sort of book you're reading, so you can enjoy the audacity and wonder how Moist will manage to stay ahead of his promises. But it is still a con game applied to a public service, and the part of me that loves the concept of the postal service couldn't stop feeling like this is part of the problem. The dilemma that Vetinari is solving is a bit too realistic, down to the requirement that the post office be self-funding and not depend on city funds and, well, this is repugnant to me. Public services aren't businesses. Societies spend money to build things that they need to maintain society, and postal service is just as much one of those things as roads are. The ability of anyone to send a letter to anyone else, no matter how rural the address is, provides infrastructure on which a lot of important societal structure is built. Pratchett made me care a great deal about Ankh-Morpork's post office (not hard to do), and now I want to see it rebuilt properly, on firm foundations, without splashy promises and without a requirement that it pay for itself. Which I realize is not the point of Discworld at all, but the concept of running a postal service like a startup hits maybe a bit too close to home. Apart from that grumble, this is a great book if you're in the mood for a reformed con man story. I thought the gold suit was a bit over the top, but I otherwise thought Moist's slow conversion to truly caring about his job was deeply satisfying. The descriptions of the clacks are full of askew Discworld parodies of computer networking and encoding that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. This is also the book that introduced the now-famous (among Pratchett fans at least) GNU instruction for the clacks, and I think that scene is the most emotionally moving bit of Pratchett outside of Night Watch. Going Postal is one of the better books in the Discworld series to this point (and I'm sadly getting near the end). If you have less strongly held opinions about management and funding models for public services, or at least are better at putting them aside when reading fantasy novels, you're likely to like it even more than I did. Recommended. Followed by Thud!. The thematic sequel is Making Money. Rating: 8 out of 10

Thunderbird in Debian stable (Bookworm) has received Thunderbird v115.3.1 as a security update. With it comes "Supernova", a UI redesign. There is a Mozilla blogpost with a walk-through of the new UI. Unfortunately it features a super eye-catching "New Message" button that - thankfully - can be disabled. Even the whole space above the email folder pane can be recovered by disabling the folder pane header at Burger Menu ( ) -> View -> Folders -> Folder Pane Header. Unfortunately there is no way to remove the same eye-catching "New Event" button for the Calendar view via a UI setting. This needs a user CSS file to override the button as non-visible. To make it process the user CSS Thunderbird needs a config setting to be enabled:

1. Burger Menu ( ) -> Settings -> General
2. Scroll down all the way
3. Click the Config editor... button on the bottom right
4. Accept that hell will freeze over because you configure software
5. Search for toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
6. Toggle the value to true to enable the user CSS

You can manually add user_pref("toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets", true); to ~/.thunderbird/abcdefgh.default/prefs.js to the same effect (do this while Thunderbird is not running; replace abcdefgh with your Thunderbird profile ID). Now create a new directory ~/.thunderbird/abcdefgh.default/chrome/, again replacing abcdefgh with your profile ID. Inside the new directory create a userChrome.css file with the following content: Restart Thunderbird. And enjoy less visual obstruction when using the Calendar.

Since my initial review of the PineTime 10 days ago [1] I ve used it in more situations. My initial tests were done connecting to a Huawei Nova 7i [2], I am now using it with a Huawei Mate 10 Pro. I ve also upgraded the PineTime from version 1.11 (from memory) of the Infinitime software that runs on the watch to version 1.13 [3]. To upgrade it I had to download the file pinetime-mcuboot-app-dfu-1.13.0.zip to the Android phone and then use the File Installer option of the GadgetBridge Android app to upload it. The zip file does NOT need to be extracted first, I don t know if GadgetBridge extracts it before upload or if the PineTime firmware has a copy of unzip, but it just works. Version 1.13 is purported to take less battery, I haven t directly verified this as I turned on the new feature of measuring my pulse 24*7 which significantly increases battery use. The end result is that the battery is being used up at about the same rate as before, overall adding a new battery-hungry feature while reducing battery use for other things to compensate is a good thing and strongly suggests that battery use has decreased overall. I have noticed that now with a different phone and different version of the firmware it doesn t reconnect as reliably. Sometimes I need to turn bluetooth on the watch off and on before it works (which indicates an issue with the firmware) and sometimes I need to turn bluetooth off and on on the phone which indicates a phone issue. Also I often unlock my phone to find the GadgetBridge notification saying that it s disconnected and it usually connects fine, but I get the impression it s often disconnected. Does the Mate 10 Pro have a problem that triggers a bug in the PineTime? Does the 1.13 version of InfiniTime have a problem that triggers a bug in the Mate 10 Pro? Are they both independently buggy? Is the new version of InfiniTime just disconnecting when it s not doing stuff to save battery and triggering bugs that weren t obvious before? I ve tested the media control which basically works, sometimes it gets out of sync and displays the name of the previous track which is annoying. The PineTime is IP67 rated and there are reports on Reddit of people wearing it in the shower and swimming pool. I wouldn t recommend those things although it should work OK. It might be an option for controlling music when in the bath or when having a pool party. When the watch is running normally and displays a new notification it s not possible to swipe it away. You have to go to the notifications menu afterwards to swipe them which I find annoying. Also the notification of an inbound call remains in the notification list indefinitely while I think a more appropriate action is to have it disappear in an amount of time where it s already been answered or gone to voicemail. Voicemail timeouts are as low as 15 seconds so having the notification disappear after 1 minute would be reasonable. I have configured my PineTime to take 2 taps on the screen to wake up. I previously had it set to 1 tap and had problems with accidentally doing something it registered as a tap while in bed and waking me up. Also I found that if I want to turn the screen on when my hands are dirty so I don t want to touch it with a finger then tapping it on my nose works well. Apparently it is programmed to ignore taps on large areas so I can t wake it with my elbow. I ve setup a PineTime for an elderly relative who is greatly enjoying it. I don t expect them to flash new firmware or do any other complex things, but they are doing well with using the device. They are considering getting a different band as they don t like rubber. I m sure their local jeweler has some leather and metal bands that could fit. There is a design on Thiniverse for a PineTime case [4], this could be used for making an adaptor to fit a PineTime to a greatly different type of band, an instrument console, etc. Generally I think the PineTime is an OK smart watch for someone who s not into FOSS for it s own sake. My relative could have been happy with a slightly cheaper watch, but it s still significantly cheaper than the Samsung and Apple options so it s not particularly expensive. A benefit for them is that having the same type of SmartWatch as me they will get better tech support.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinetime/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/04/20/android-without-play/
• [3] https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime/releases
• [4] https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4172849

Review: The Cassini Division, by Ken MacLeod

Series:	Fall Revolution #3
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	1998
Printing:	August 2000
ISBN:	0-8125-6858-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	305

The Cassini Division is the third book in the Fall Revolution series and a fairly direct sequel (albeit with different protagonists) to The Stone Canal. This is not a good place to start the series. It's impossible to talk about the plot of this book without discussing the future history of this series, which arguably includes some spoilers for The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. I don't think the direction of history matters that much in enjoying the previous books, but read the first two books of the series before this review if you want to avoid all spoilers. When the Outwarders uploaded themselves and went fast, they did a lot of strange things: an interstellar probe contrary to all known laws of physics, the disassembly of Ganymede, and the Malley Mile, which plays a significant role in The Stone Canal. They also crashed the Earth. This was not entirely their fault. There were a lot of politics, religious fundamentalism, and plagues in play as well. But the storm of viruses broadcast from their transformed Jupiter shut down essentially all computing equipment on Earth, which set off much of the chaos. The results were catastrophic, and also politically transformative. Now, the Solar Union is a nearly unified anarchosocialist society, with only scattered enclaves of non-cooperators left outside that structure. Ellen May Ngewthu is a leader of the Cassini Division, the bulwark that stands between humans and the Outwarders. The Division ruthlessly destroys any remnant or probe that dares rise out of Jupiter's atmosphere, ensuring that the Outwarders, whatever they have become after untold generations of fast evolution, stay isolated to the one planet they have absorbed. The Division is very good at what they do. But there is a potential gap in that line of defense: there are fast folk in storage at the other end of the Malley Mile, on New Mars, and who knows what the deranged capitalists there will do or what forces they might unleash. The one person who knows a path through the Malley Mile isn't talking, so Ellen goes in search of the next best thing: the non-cooperator scientist Isambard Kingdom Malley. I am now thoroughly annoyed at how politics are handled in this series, and much less confused by the frequency with which MacLeod won Prometheus Awards from the Libertarian Futurist Society. Some of this is my own fault for having too high of hopes for political SF, but nothing in this series so far has convinced me that MacLeod is seriously engaging with political systems. Instead, the world-building to date makes the classic libertarian mistake of thinking societies will happily abandon stability and predictability in favor of their strange definition of freedom. The Solar Union is based on what Ellen calls the true knowledge, which is worth quoting in full so that you know what kind of politics we're talking about:

Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil. This is the true knowledge. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things. Things we could use.

This is certainly something that some people will believe, particularly cynical college students who love political theory, feeling smarter than other people, and calling their pet theories things like "the true knowledge." It is not even remotely believable as the governing philosophy of a solar confederation. The point of government for the average person in human society is to create and enforce predictable mutual rules that one can use as a basis for planning and habits, allowing you to not think about politics all the time. People who adore thinking about politics have great difficulty understanding how important it is to everyone else to have ignorable government. Constantly testing your power against other coalitions is a sport, not a governing philosophy. Given the implication that this testing is through violence or the threat of violence, it beggars belief that any large number of people would tolerate that type of instability for an extended period of time. Ellen is fully committed to the true knowledge. MacLeod likely is not; I don't think this represents the philosophy of the author. But the primary political conflict in this novel famous for being political science fiction is between the above variation of anarchy and an anarchocapitalist society, neither of which are believable as stable political systems for large numbers of people. This is a bit like seeking out a series because you were told it was about a great clash of European monarchies and discovering it was about a fight between Liberland and Sealand. It becomes hard to take the rest of the book seriously. I do realize that one point of political science fiction is to play with strange political ideas, similar to how science fiction plays with often-implausible science ideas. But those ideas need some contact with human nature. If you're going to tell me that the key to clawing society back from a world-wide catastrophic descent into chaos is to discard literally every social system used to create predictability and order, you had better be describing aliens, because that's not how humans work. The rest of the book is better. I am untangling a lot of backstory for the above synopsis, which in the book comes in dribs and drabs, but piecing that together is good fun. The plot is far more straightforward than the previous two books in the series: there is a clear enemy, a clear goal, and Ellen goes from point A to point B in a comprehensible way with enough twists to keep it interesting. The core moral conflict of the book is that Ellen is an anti-AI fanatic to the point that she considers anyone other than non-uploaded humans to be an existential threat. MacLeod gives the reader both reasons to believe Ellen is right and reasons to believe she's wrong, which maintains an interesting moral tension. One thing that MacLeod is very good at is what Bob Shaw called "wee thinky bits." I think my favorite in this book is the computer technology used by the Cassini Division, who have spent a century in close combat with inimical AI capable of infecting any digital computer system with tailored viruses. As a result, their computers are mechanical non-Von-Neumann machines, but mechanical with all the technology of a highly-advanced 24th century civilization with nanometer-scale manufacturing technology. It's a great mental image and a lot of fun to think about. This is the only science fiction novel that I can think of that has a hard-takeoff singularity that nonetheless is successfully resisted and fought to a stand-still by unmodified humanity. Most writers who were interested in the singularity idea treated it as either a near-total transformation leaving only remnants or as something that had to be stopped before it started. MacLeod realizes that there's no reason to believe a post-singularity form of life would be either uniform in intent or free from its own baffling sudden collapses and reversals, which can be exploited by humans. It makes for a much better story. The sociology of this book is difficult to swallow, but the characterization is significantly better than the previous books of the series and the plot is much tighter. I was too annoyed by the political science to fully enjoy it, but that may be partly the fault of my expectations coming in. If you like chewy, idea-filled science fiction with a lot of unexplained world-building that you have to puzzle out as you go, you may enjoy this, although unfortunately I think you need to read at least The Stone Canal first. The ending was a bit unsatisfying, but even that includes some neat science fiction ideas. Followed by The Sky Road, although I understand it is not a straightforward sequel. Rating: 6 out of 10

I have completed the the Big move ! There are still a few lingering MR s, but I am sure they will be approved so I can merge soon. With the move I was also able to release 23.08.2 for most release service applications. Enjoy! You can find them all here: https://snapcraft.io/search?q=KDE I still need to raise a bit more to pay the Internet bill. If you can spare some change please consider a donation. Thank you! <script src= https://liberapay.com/sgmoore/widgets/button.js ></script> <noscript><a href= https://liberapay.com/sgmoore/donate ><img alt= Donate using Liberapay src= https://liberapay.com/assets/widgets/donate.svg ></a></noscript> Donate https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

Review: A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #32
Publisher:	HarperTrophy
Copyright:	2004
Printing:	2005
ISBN:	0-06-058662-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	407

A Hat Full of Sky is the 32nd Discworld novel and the second Tiffany Aching young adult novel. You should not start here, but you could start with The Wee Free Men. As with that book, some parts of the story carry more weight if you are already familiar with Granny Weatherwax. Tiffany is a witch, but she needs to be trained. This is normally done by apprenticeship, and in Tiffany's case it seemed wise to give her exposure to more types of witching. Thus, Tiffany, complete with new boots and a going-away present from the still-somewhat-annoying Roland, is off on an apprenticeship to the sensible Miss Level. (The new boots feel wrong and get swapped out for her concealed old boots at the first opportunity.) Unbeknownst to Tiffany, her precocious experiments with leaving her body as a convenient substitute for a mirror have attracted something very bad, something none of the witches are expecting. The Nac Mac Feegle know a hiver as soon as they feel it, but they have a new kelda now, and she's not sure she wants them racing off after their old kelda. Terry Pratchett is very good at a lot of things, but I don't think villains are one of his strengths. He manages an occasional memorable one (the Auditors, for example, at least before the whole chocolate thing), but I find most of them a bit boring. The hiver is one of the boring ones. It serves mostly as a concretized metaphor about the temptations of magical power, but those temptations felt so unlike the tendencies of Tiffany's personality that I didn't think the metaphor worked in the story. The interesting heart of this book to me is the conflict between Tiffany's impatience with nonsense and Miss Level's arguably excessive willingness to help everyone regardless of how demanding they get. There's something deeper in here about female socialization and how that interacts with Pratchett's conception of witches that got me thinking, although I don't think Pratchett landed the point with full force. Miss Level is clearly a good witch to her village and seems comfortable with how she lives her life, so perhaps they're not taking advantage of her, but she thoroughly slots herself into the helper role. If Tiffany attempted the same role, people would be taking advantage of her, because the role doesn't fit her. And yet, there's a lesson here she needs to learn about seeing other people as people, even if it wouldn't be healthy for her to move all the way to Miss Level's mindset. Tiffany is a precocious kid who is used to being underestimated, and who has reacted by becoming independent and somewhat judgmental. She's also had a taste of real magical power, which creates a risk of her getting too far into her own head. Miss Level is a fount of empathy and understanding for the normal people around her, which Tiffany resists and needed to learn. I think Granny Weatherwax is too much like Tiffany to teach her that. She also has no patience for fools, but she's older and wiser and knows Tiffany needs a push in that direction. Miss Level isn't a destination, but more of a counterbalance. That emotional journey, a conclusion that again focuses on the role of witches in questions of life and death, and Tiffany's fascinatingly spiky mutual respect with Granny Weatherwax were the best parts of this book for me. The middle section with the hiver was rather tedious and forgettable, and the Nac Mac Feegle were entertaining but not more than that. It felt like the story went in a few different directions and only some of them worked, in part because the villain intended to tie those pieces together was more of a force of nature than a piece of Tiffany's emotional puzzle. If the hiver had resonated with the darker parts of Tiffany's natural personality, the plot would have worked better. Pratchett was gesturing in that direction, but he never convinced me it was consistent with what we'd already seen of her. Like a lot of the Discworld novels, the good moments in A Hat Full of Sky are astonishing, but the plot is somewhat forgettable. It's still solidly entertaining, though, and if you enjoyed The Wee Free Men, I think this is slightly better. Followed by Going Postal in publication order. The next Tiffany Aching novel is Wintersmith. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: A Killing Frost, by Seanan McGuire

Series:	October Daye #14
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	0-7564-1253-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	351

A Killing Frost is the 14th book in the October Daye urban fantasy series and a direct plot sequel to the events of The Brightest Fell. You definitely cannot start here. This review has some relationship spoilers here for things that you would be expecting after the first five or six books, but which you wouldn't know when reading the first few books of the series. If you haven't started the series yet but plan to, consider skipping this review; if you haven't started reading this series, it will probably be meaningless anyway. Finally, events seem to have slowed, enough trauma has been healed, and Toby is able to seriously consider getting married. However, no sooner is the thought voiced than fae politics injects itself yet again. In order to get married without creating potentially substantial future problems for herself and her family, Toby will have to tie up some loose ends. Since one of those loose ends is a price from the Luidaeg that has been haunting her family for decades, this is easier said than done. The Brightest Fell had a very unsatisfying ending. This, after a two book interlude, is the proper end to that story. I picked this up when I had a bunch of stressful things going on and I wanted to be entertained without having to do much work as a reader. Once again, this series delivered exactly that. The writing is repetitive and a bit clunky, McGuire hammers the same emotional points into the ground, and one does wonder about Toby's tendency to emulate a half-human battering ram, but every book has me engrossed and turning the pages. Everyone should have at least one book series on the go that offers reliable, low-effort entertainment. The initial lever that McGuire uses to push Toby into this plot (fae marriage requirements that had never previously been mentioned) felt rather strained and arbitrary, and I spent the first part of the book grumbling a bit about it. However, there is a better reason for this complication that is revealed with time, and which implies some interesting things about how the fae see heroes and how they use them to solve problems. Now I'm wondering if McGuire will explore that some more in later books. This is the "all is revealed" book about Simon Torquill. As we get later into the series, these "all is revealed" books are coming more frequently. So far, I'm finding the revelations satisfying, which is a lot harder than it looks with a series this long and with this many hidden details. There are a few directions the series is taking that aren't my favorite (the Daoine Sidhe obsession with being the Best Fae is getting a bit boring, for example), but none of them seem egregiously off, and I'm deeply invested in the answers to the remaining questions. Toby hits a personal record here for not explaining the dangerous things she's doing because people might talk her out of it. It makes for a tense and gripping climax, but wow I felt for her friends and family, and substantial parts of that risk seemed unnecessary. This is pointed out to her in no uncertain terms, and I'm wondering if it will finally stick. Toby's tendency to solve complicated problems by bleeding on them is part of what gives this series its charm, but I wouldn't mind her giving other people more of a chance to come up with better plans. I did not like this one as well as the previous two books, mostly because I prefer the Luidaeg-centric stories to the Daoine-Sidhe-centric stories, but if you're enjoying the series to this point, this won't be an exception. It's a substantial improvement on The Brightest Fell and did a lot to salvage that story for me, although there are still some aspects of it that need better explanations. Followed by When Sorrows Come. As usual, there is a novella included in at least the Kindle edition. "Shine in Pearl": I was again hoping for more Gillian, but alas. Instead, and breaking with the tendency for the novellas to be side stories unrelated to the main novel, this fleshes out Simon's past and the other primary relationship driving the novel's plot. It's... fine? The best parts by far are the scenes from Dianda's viewpoint, which are just as refreshingly blunt as Dianda is elsewhere. Neither of the other two characters are favorites of mine, and since the point of the story is to describe the tragedy that is resolved in the plot of the main novel, it's somewhat depressing. Not my favorite of the novellas; not the worst of them. (6) Rating: 7 out of 10

It s that time of year already! We have hit our first freeze of the year. While the kitties keep warm by the wood burning stove, I have been busy with many updates and fixes in a variety of projects. KDE neon: It s true, Neon unstable has been very unstable. Due to a few factors including a builder being out of space, timed with a new Qt release. There is a cost with living in unstable land with bleeding edge releases. It takes time and finesse to get everything happy, especially with major transitions such as Qt. The drive issue was just bad timing. We worked night and day ( quite literally with people spanning from the US, Europe and Australia ) to get everything happy again. I know it s frustrating when things are broken, but please keep in mind, most of us are volunteers. I am happy to report, it is once again stable. If you continue to experience issues please report them on https://bugs.kde.org there have been a few cases where there were rogue apt sources lists creating issues. We also have the User edition which is much more stable!

KDE Snaps: The big move to snapcraft files per repo continues. With that comes a new version 23.08.2. This big win this week was Audiotube! I have finally got this snap working. With a combination of snappy-debug and snap run gdb audiotube I was able to find all the hidden dependencies such as yt-dlp needed to be built with ffmpeg support and it needed a newer ytmusicapi as the version it called for was broken with gettext translations. I also had to fix the dbus name as it was not the standard org.kde.app. The final fix was it required the alsa plug and layouts adjusted to point to the snap alsa libraries ( which fixed the very important sound feature ). Who says you can t teach an old dog new tricks. Unfortunately, it still requires devmode to run, as it has one last network issue even with all the network plugs. I have to set it aside for now, as I have many more snaps to migrate. However, if you want to enjoy youtube music with this super awesome app you can, just append devmode when installing. Enjoy! The following apps have now migrated to their respective KDE repos and have the snap recipes in launchpad for automated builds:

• Blinken
• Bovo
• Calindori
• Dragon
• Dolphin ( still needs work )
• Digikam ( still needs work )
• Elisa ( Working on new qml issue )
• Falkon
• Filelight
• GCompris
• Granatier
• Ghostwriter
• Gwenview ( working on missing dependency )
• Haruna ( still needs work )
• isoimagewriter ( working on gpg support )
• Itinerary
• Juk
• K3b ( still needs work )

A new content pack with the latest Frameworks 5.110 and Qt 5.15.11 is complete and the neon extension update will follow after the required global autoconnect is approved from the store. Debian: I have caught up on my dashboard with new releases, fixed test failures, and FTBFS on the more obscure arches. The following debian packages have been uploaded to unstable:

description
umbrello
squashfuse
golang-github-muesli-mango
golang-github-muesli-roff
speechpy-fast
lingua-franca

If you have made it this far, thank you! As you can see I am quite busy and there is still much to do. If you can possibly spare a donation so I can continue my efforts in KDE neon / KDE Snaps / and Debian, it would be so appreciated. I enjoy doing this work and I hope it benefits someone out there. Have a lovely day and thanks for stopping by. Donate https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

Review: Chilling Effect, by Valerie Valdes

Series:	Chilling Effect #1
Publisher:	Harper Voyager
Copyright:	September 2019
Printing:	2020
ISBN:	0-06-287724-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	420

Chilling Effect is a space opera, kind of; more on the genre classification in a moment. It is the first volume of a series, although it reaches a reasonable conclusion on its own. It was Valerie Valdes's first novel. Captain Eva Innocente's line of work used to be less than lawful, following in the footsteps of her father. She got out of that life and got her own crew and ship. Now, the La Sirena Negra and its crew do small transport jobs for just enough money to stay afloat. Or, maybe, a bit less than that, when the recipient of a crate full of psychic escape-artist cats goes bankrupt before she can deliver it and get paid. It's a marginal and tenuous life, but at least she isn't doing anything shady. Then the Fridge kidnaps her sister. The Fridge is a shadowy organization of extortionists whose modus operandi is to kidnap a family member of their target, stuff them in cryogenic suspension, and demand obedience lest the family member be sold off as indentured labor after a few decades as a popsicle. Eva will be given missions that she and her crew have to perform. If she performs them well, she will pay off the price of her sister's release. Eventually. Oh, and she's not allowed to tell anyone. I found it hard to place the subgenre of this novel more specifically than comedy-adventure. The technology fits space opera: there are psychic cats, pilots who treat ships as extensions of their own body, brain parasites, a random intergalactic warlord, and very few attempts to explain anything with scientific principles. However, the stakes aren't on the scale that space opera usually goes for. Eva and her crew aren't going to topple governments or form rebellions. They're just trying to survive in a galaxy full of abusive corporations, dodgy clients, and the occasional alien who requires you to carry extensive documentation to prove that you can't be hunted for meat. It is also, as you might guess from that description, occasionally funny. That part of the book didn't mesh for me. Eva is truly afraid for her sister, and some of the events in the book are quite sinister, but the antagonist is an organization called The Fridge that puts people in fridges. Sexual harassment in a bar turns into obsessive stalking by a crazed intergalactic warlord who frequently interrupts the plot by randomly blasting things with his fleet, which felt like something from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The stakes for Eva, and her frustrations at being dragged back into a life she escaped, felt too high for the wacky, comic descriptions of the problems she gets into. My biggest complaint, though, is that the plot is driven by people not telling other people critical information they should know. Eva is keeping major secrets from her crew for nearly the entire book. Other people are also keeping information from Eva. There is a romance subplot driven almost entirely by both parties refusing to talk to each other about the existence of a romance subplot. For some people, this is catnip, but it's one of my least favorite fictional tropes and I found much of the book both frustrating and stressful. Fictional characters keeping important secrets from each other apparently raises my blood pressure. One of the things I did like about this book is that Eva is Hispanic and speaks like it. She resorts to Spanish frequently for curses, untranslatable phrases, aphorisms, derogatory comments, and similar types of emotional communication that don't feel right in a second language. Most of the time one can figure out the meaning from context, but Valdes doesn't feel obligated to hold the reader's hand and explain everything. I liked that. I think this approach is more viable in these days of ebook readers that can attempt translations on demand, and I think it does a lot to make Eva feel like a real person. I think the characters are the best part of this book, once one gets past the frustration of their refusal to talk to each other. Eva and the alien ship engineer get the most screen time, but Pink, Eva's honest-to-a-fault friend, was probably my favorite character. I also really enjoyed Min, the ship pilot whose primary goal is to be able to jack into the ship and treat it as her body, and otherwise doesn't particularly care about the rest of the plot as long as she gets paid. A lot of books about ship crews like this one lean hard into found family. This one felt more like a group of coworkers, with varying degrees of friendship and level of interest in their shared endeavors, but without the too-common shorthand of making the less-engaged crew members either some type of villain or someone who needs to be drawn out and turned into a best friend or love interest. It's okay for a job to just be a job, even if it's one where you're around the same people all the time. People who work on actual ships do it all the time. This is a half-serious, half-comic action romp that turned out to not be my thing, but I can see why others will enjoy it. Be prepared for a whole lot of communication failures and an uneven emotional tone, but if you're looking for a space-ships-and-aliens story that doesn't take itself very seriously and has some vague YA vibes, this may work for you. Followed by Prime Deceptions, although I didn't like this well enough to read on. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: The Far Reaches, edited by John Joseph Adams

Publisher:	Amazon Original Stories
Copyright:	June 2023
ISBN:	1-6625-1572-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1622-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1503-0
ISBN:	1-6625-1567-7
ISBN:	1-6625-1678-9
ISBN:	1-6625-1533-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	219

Amazon has been releasing anthologies of original short SFF with various guest editors, free for Amazon Prime members. I previously tried Black Stars (edited by Nisi Shawl and Latoya Peterson) and Forward (edited by Blake Crouch). Neither were that good, but the second was much worse than the first. Amazon recently released a new collection, this time edited by long-standing SFF anthology editor John Joseph Adams and featuring a new story by Ann Leckie, which sounded promising enough to give them another chance. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. As with the previous anthologies, each story is available separately for purchase or Amazon Prime "borrowing" with separate ISBNs. The sidebar cover is for the first in the sequence. Unlike the previous collections, which were longer novelettes or novellas, my guess is all of these are in the novelette range. (I did not do a word count.) If you're considering this anthology, read the Okorafor story ("Just Out of Jupiter's Reach"), consider "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey, and avoid the rest. "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey: Humans have invented a new form of physics called "slow light," which can duplicate any object that is scanned. The energy expense is extremely high, so the result is not a post-scarcity paradise. What the technology does offer, however, is a possible route to interstellar colonization: duplicate a team of volunteers and a ship full of bootstrapping equipment, and send copies to a bunch of promising-looking exoplanets. One of them might succeed. The premise is interesting. The twists Corey adds on top are even better. What can be duplicated once can be duplicated again, perhaps with more information. This is a lovely science fiction idea story that unfortunately bogs down because the authors couldn't think of anywhere better to go with it than relationship drama. I found the focus annoying, but the ideas are still very neat. (7) "Void" by Veronica Roth: A maintenance worker on a slower-than-light passenger ship making the run between Sol and Centauri unexpectedly is called to handle a dead body. A passenger has been murdered, two days outside the Sol system. Ace is in no way qualified to investigate the murder, nor is it her job, but she's watched a lot of crime dramas and she has met the victim before. The temptation to start poking around is impossible to resist. It's been a long time since I've read a story built around the differing experiences of time for people who stay on planets and people who spend most of their time traveling at relativistic speeds. It's a bit of a retro idea from an earlier era of science fiction, but it's still a good story hook for a murder mystery. None of the characters are that memorable and Roth never got me fully invested in the story, but this was still a pleasant way to pass the time. (6) "Falling Bodies" by Rebecca Roanhorse: Ira is the adopted son of a Genteel senator. He was a social experiment in civilizing the humans: rescue a human orphan and give him the best of Genteel society to see if he could behave himself appropriately. The answer was no, which is how Ira finds himself on Long Reach Station with a parole officer and a schooling opportunity, hopefully far enough from his previous mistakes for a second chance. Everyone else seems to like Rebecca Roanhorse's writing better than I do, and this is no exception. Beneath the veneer of a coming-of-age story with a twist of political intrigue, this is brutal, depressing, and awful, with an ending that needs a lot of content warnings. I'm sorry that I read it. (3) "The Long Game" by Ann Leckie: The Imperial Radch trilogy are some of my favorite science fiction novels of all time, but I am finding Leckie's other work a bit hit and miss. I have yet to read a novel of hers that I didn't like, but the short fiction I've read leans more heavily into exploring weird and alien perspectives, which is not my favorite part of her work. This story is firmly in that category: the first-person protagonist is a small tentacled alien creature, a bit like a swamp-dwelling octopus. I think I see what Leckie is doing here: balancing cynicism and optimism, exploring how lifespans influence thinking and planning, and making some subtle points about colonialism. But as a reading experience, I didn't enjoy it. I never liked any of the characters, and the conclusion of the story is the unsettling sort of main-character optimism that seems rather less optimistic to the reader. (4) "Just Out of Jupiter's Reach" by Nnedi Okorafor: K rm n scientists have found a way to grow living ships that can achieve a symbiosis with a human pilot, but the requirements for that symbiosis are very strict and hard to predict. The result was a planet-wide search using genetic testing to find the rare and possibly nonexistent matches. They found seven people. The deal was simple: spend ten years in space, alone, in her ship. No contact with any other human except at the midpoint, when the seven ships were allowed to meet up for a week. Two million euros a year, for as long as she followed the rules, and the opportunity to be part of a great experiment, providing data that will hopefully lead to humans becoming a spacefaring species. The core of this story is told during the seven days in the middle of the mission, and thus centers on people unfamiliar with human contact trying to navigate social relationships after five years in symbiotic ships that reshape themselves to their whims and personalities. The ships themselves link so that the others can tour, which offers both a good opportunity for interesting description and a concretized metaphor about meeting other people. I adore symbiotic spaceships, so this story had me at the premise. The surface plot is very psychological, and I didn't entirely click with it, but the sense of wonder vibes beneath that surface were wonderful. It also feels fresh and new: I've seen most of the ideas before, but not presented or written this way, or approached from quite this angle. Definitely the best story of the anthology. (8) "Slow Time Between the Stars" by John Scalzi: This, on the other hand, was a complete waste of time, redeemed only by being the shortest "story" in the collection. "Story" is generous, since there's only one character and a very dry, linear plot that exists only to make a philosophical point. "Speculative essay" may be closer. The protagonist is the artificial intelligence responsible for Earth's greatest interstellar probe. It is packed with a repository of all of human knowledge and the raw material to create life. Its mission is to find an exoplanet capable of sustaining that life, and then recreate it and support it. The plot, such as it is, follows the AI's decision to abandon that mission and cut off contact with Earth, for reasons that it eventually explains. Every possible beat of this story hit me wrong. The sense of wonder attaches to the most prosaic things and skips over the moments that could have provoked real wonder. The AI is both unbelievable and irritating, with all of the smug self-confidence of an Internet reply guy. The prose is overwrought in all the wrong places ("the finger of God, offering the spark to animate the dirt of another world" would totally be this AI's profile quote under their forum avatar). The only thing I liked about the story is the ethical point that it slowly meanders into, which I think I might agree with and at least find plausible. But it's delivered by the sort of character I would actively leave rooms to avoid, in a style that's about as engrossing as a tax form. Avoid. (2) Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: The Last Watch, by J.S. Dewes

Series:	Divide #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-23634-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	476

The Last Watch is the first book of a far-future science fiction duology. It was J.S. Dewes's first novel. The station of the SCS Argus is the literal edge of the universe: the Divide, beyond which there is nothing. Not simply an absence of stars, but a nothing from a deeper level of physics. The Argus is there to guard against a return of the Viators, the technologically superior alien race that nearly conquered humanity hundreds of years prior and has already returned once, apparently traveling along the Divide. Humanity believes the Viators have been wiped out, but they're not taking chances. It is not a sought-after assignment. The Sentinels are the dregs of the military: convicts, troublemakers, and misfits, banished to the literal edge of nowhere. Joining them at the start of this book is the merchant prince, cocky asshole, and exiled sabateur Cavalon Mercer. He doesn't know what to expect from either military service or service on the edge of the universe. He certainly did not expect the Argus to be commanded by Adequin Rake, a literal war hero and a far more effective leader than this post would seem to warrant. There are reasons why Rake is out on the edge of the universe, ones that she's not eager to talk about. They quickly become an afterthought when the Argus discovers that the Divide is approaching their position. The universe is collapsing, and the only people who know about it are people the System Collective would prefer to forget exist. Yes, the edge of the universe, not the edge of the galaxy. Yes, despite having two FTL mechanisms, this book has a scale problem that it never reconciles. And yes, the physics do not really make sense, although this is not the sort of book that tries to explain the science. The characters are too busy trying to survive to develop new foundational theories of physics. I was looking for more good military SF after enjoying Artifact Space so much (and still eagerly awaiting the sequel), so I picked this up. It has some of the same elements: the military as a place where you can make a fresh start with found family elements, the equalizing effects of military assignments, and the merits of good leadership. They're a bit disguised here, since this is a crew of often-hostile misfits under a lot of stress with a partly checked-out captain, but they do surface towards the end of the book. The strength of this book is the mystery of the contracting universe, which poses both an immediate threat to the ship and a longer-term potential threat to, well, everything. The first part of the book builds tension with the immediate threat, but the story comes into its own when the crew starts piecing together the connections between the Viators and the Divide while jury-rigging technology and making risky choices between a lot of bad options. This is the first half of a duology, so the mysteries are not resolved here, but they do reach a satisfying and tantalizing intermediate conclusion. The writing is servicable and adequate, but it's a bit clunky in places. Dewes doesn't quite have the balance right between setting the emotional stakes and not letting the characters indulge in rumination. Rake is a good captain who is worn down and partly checked out, Mercer is scared and hiding it with arrogance and will do well when given the right sort of attention, and all of this is reasonably obvious early on and didn't need as many of the book's pages as it gets. I could have done without the romantic subplot, which I thought was an unnecessary distraction from the plot and turned into a lot of tedious angst, but I suspect I was not the target audience. (Writers, please remember that people can still care about each other and be highly motivated by fear for each other without being romantic partners.) I would not call this a great book. The characters are not going to surprise you that much, and it's a bit long for the amount of plot that it delivers. If you are the sort of person who nit-picks the physics of SF novels and gets annoyed at writers who don't understand how big the universe is, you will have to take a deep breath and hold on to your suspension of disbelief. But Dewes does a good job with ratcheting up the tension and conveying an atmosphere of mysterious things happening at the edge of nowhere, while still keeping it in the genre of mysterious technology and mind-boggingly huge physical phenomena rather than space horror. If you've been looking for that sort of book, this will do. I was hooked and will definitely read the sequel. Followed by The Exiled Fleet. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #31
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	October 2003
Printing:	August 2014
ISBN:	0-06-230741-X
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	457

Monstrous Regiment is the 31st Discworld novel, but it mostly stands by itself. You arguably could start here, although you would miss the significance of Vimes's presence and the references to The Truth. The graphical reading order guide puts it loosely after The Truth and roughly in the Industrial Revolution sequence, but the connections are rather faint.

There was always a war. Usually they were border disputes, the national equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge row grow too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving country in the middle of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had to be treacherous, devious, and warlike; otherwise, we wouldn't be fighting them, eh? There was always a war.

Polly's brother, who wanted nothing more than to paint (something that the god Nuggan and the ever-present Duchess certainly did not consider appropriate for a strapping young man), was recruited to fight in the war and never came back. Polly is worried about him and tired of waiting for news. Exit Polly, innkeeper's daughter, and enter the young lad Oliver Perks, who finds the army recruiters in a tavern the next town over. One kiss of the Duchess's portrait later, and Polly is a private in the Borogravian army. I suspect this is some people's favorite Discworld novel. If so, I understand why. It was not mine, for reasons that I'll get into, but which are largely not Pratchett's fault and fall more into the category of pet peeves. Pratchett has dealt with both war and gender in the same book before. Jingo is also about a war pushed by a ruling class for stupid reasons, and featured a substantial subplot about Nobby cross-dressing that turns into a deeper character re-evaluation. I thought the war part of Monstrous Regiment was weaker (this is part of my complaint below), but gender gets a considerably deeper treatment. Monstrous Regiment is partly about how arbitrary and nonsensical gender roles are, and largely about how arbitrary and abusive social structures can become weirdly enduring because they build up their own internally reinforcing momentum. No one knows how to stop them, and a lot of people find familiar misery less frightening than unknown change, so the structure continues despite serving no defensible purpose. Recently, there was a brief attempt in some circles to claim Pratchett posthumously for the anti-transgender cause in the UK. Pratchett's daughter was having none of it, and any Pratchett reader should have been able to reject that out of hand, but Monstrous Regiment is a comprehensive refutation written by Pratchett himself some twenty years earlier. Polly is herself is not transgender. She thinks of herself as a woman throughout the book; she's just pretending to be a boy. But she also rejects binary gender roles with the scathing dismissal of someone who knows first-hand how superficial they are, and there is at least one transgender character in this novel (although to say who would be a spoiler). By the end of the book, you will have no doubt that Pratchett's opinion about people imposing gender roles on others is the same as his opinion about every other attempt to treat people as things. That said, by 2023 standards the treatment of gender here seems... naive? I think 2003 may sadly have been a more innocent time. We're now deep into a vicious backlash against any attempt to question binary gender assignment, but very little of that nastiness and malice is present here. In one way, this is a feature; there's more than enough of that in real life. However, it also makes the undermining of gender roles feel a bit too easy. There are good in-story reasons for why it's relatively simple for Polly to pass as a boy, but I still spent a lot of the book thinking that passing as a private in the army would be a lot harder and riskier than this. Pratchett can't resist a lot of cross-dressing and gender befuddlement jokes, all of which are kindly and wry but (at least for me) hit a bit differently in 2023 than they would have in 2003. The climax of the story is also a reference to a classic UK novel that to even name would be to spoil one or both of the books, but which I thought pulled the punch of the story and dissipated a lot of the built-up emotional energy. My larger complaints, though, are more idiosyncratic. This is a war novel about the enlisted ranks, including the hazing rituals involved in joining the military. There are things I love about military fiction, but apparently that reaction requires I have some sympathy for the fight or the goals of the institution. Monstrous Regiment falls into the class of war stories where the war is pointless and the system is abusive but the camaraderie in the ranks makes service oddly worthwhile, if not entirely justifiable. This is a real feeling that many veterans do have about military service, and I don't mean to question it, but apparently reading about it makes me grumbly. There's only so much of the apparently gruff sergeant with a heart of gold that I can take before I start wondering why we glorify hazing rituals as a type of tough love, or why the person with some authority doesn't put a direct stop to nastiness instead of providing moral support so subtle you could easily blink and miss it. Let alone the more basic problems like none of these people should have to be here doing this, or lots of people are being mangled and killed to make possible this heart-warming friendship. Like I said earlier, this is a me problem, not a Pratchett problem. He's writing a perfectly reasonable story in a genre I just happen to dislike. He's even undermining the genre in the process, just not quite fast enough or thoroughly enough for my taste. A related grumble is that Monstrous Regiment is very invested in the military trope of naive and somewhat incompetent officers who have to be led by the nose by experienced sergeants into making the right decision. I have never been in the military, but I work in an industry in which it is common to treat management as useless incompetents at best and actively malicious forces at worst. This is, to me, one of the most persistently obnoxious attitudes in my profession, and apparently my dislike of it carries over as a low tolerance for this very common attitude towards military hierarchy. A full expansion of this point would mostly be about the purpose of management, division of labor, and people's persistent dismissal of skills they don't personally have and may perceive as gendered, and while some of that is tangentially related to this book, it's not closely-related enough for me to bore you with it in a review. Maybe I'll write a stand-alone blog post someday. Suffice it to say that Pratchett deployed a common trope that most people would laugh at and read past without a second thought, but that for my own reasons started getting under my skin by the end of the novel. All of that grumbling aside, I did like this book. It is a very solid Discworld novel that does all the typical things a Discworld novel does: likable protagonists you can root for, odd and fascinating side characters, sharp and witty observations of human nature, and a mostly enjoyable ending where most of the right things happen. Polly is great; I was very happy to read a book from her perspective and would happily read more. Vimes makes a few appearances being Vimes, and while I found his approach in this book less satisfying than in Jingo, I'll still take it. And the examination of gender roles, even if a bit less fraught than current politics, is solid Pratchett morality. The best part of this book for me, by far, is Wazzer. I think that subplot was the most Discworld part of this book: a deeply devout belief in a pseudo-godlike figure that is part of the abusive social structure that creates many of the problems of the book becomes something considerably stranger and more wonderful. There is a type of belief that is so powerful that it transforms the target of that belief, at least in worlds like Discworld that have a lot of ambient magic. Not many people have that type of belief, and having it is not a comfortable experience, but it makes for a truly excellent story. Monstrous Regiment is a solid Discworld novel. It was not one of my favorites, but it probably will be someone else's favorite for a host of good reasons. Good stuff; if you've read this far, you will enjoy it. Followed by A Hat Full of Sky in publication order, and thematically (but very loosely) by Going Postal. Rating: 8 out of 10

There is an article The Inappropriately Excluded by the Polymath Archives [1] that gets cited a lot. Mainly by Mensa types who think that their lack of success is due to being too smart. The Main Claim is Wrong The main claim is:
The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls by about 1/3 at 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen from its peak by 97%! The first thing to consider is whether taking those professions is a smart thing to do. These are the types of jobs that a school career adviser would tell you are good choices for well paying jobs, but really there s lots of professional positions that get similar pay with less demanding work. Physicians have to deal with people who are sick and patients who die including cases where the physician needs to make a recommendation on incomplete information where the wrong choice will result in serious injury or death, there are significant benefits to being a medical researcher or doing biological engineering. Being a Judge has a high public profile and has a reasonable amount of pressure, good for status but you can probably earn more money with less work as a corporate lawyer. Being a professor is a position that is respected but which in many countries is very poorly paid. In a mid-size company executives probably get about $300k compared to $220k for middle managers and $100k-$180k for senior professional roles in the same company. There has been research on how much happyness is increased by having more money, here is one from CBS saying that income up to $500K can increase happiness[2] which contradicts previous research suggesting that income over $75K didn t provide much benefit. I think that part of this is determined by the conditions that you live in, if you live in a country like Australia with cheap healthcare then you won t feel as great a need to hoard money. Another part is whether you feel obliged to compete with other people for financial status, if driving an old car of a non-prestige brand while my neighbours have new BMWs concerned me then I might desire an executive position. I think that the smart thing to do is to get work that is relatively enjoyable, pays enough for all the essentials and some reasonable luxury, and doesn t require excessive effort or long hours. Unless you have a great need for attention from other people then for every job with a high profile there will be several with similar salaries but less attention. The main point of the article is that people with high IQs all want to reach the pinnacle of their career path and don t do so because they are excluded. It doesn t consider the possibility that smart people might have chosen the option that s best for them. For example I ve seen what my manager and the CIO of my company do and it doesn t look like fun for me. I m happy to have them earn more than me as compensation for doing things I don t want to do. Why is This Happening? This section of the article starts with Because of the dearth of objective evidence, the cause of the exclusion cannot be determined directly which is possibly where they should have given up. Also I could have concluded this blog post with I m not excluded from this list of jobs that suck , but I will continue listing problems with the article. One claim in the article is:
Garth Zietsman has said, referring to people with D15IQs over 152, A common experience with people in this category or higher is that they are not wanted the masses (including the professional classes) find them an affront of some sort. The question I have is whether it s being smart or being a jerk that the masses find to be an affront, I m guessing the latter. I don t recall seeing evidence outside high school of people inherently disliking smarter people. The article claims that We have no reason to conclude that this upper limit on IQ differences changes in adulthood . Schools don t cater well to smart kids and it isn t good for kids to have no intellectual peers. One benefit I ve found in the Free Software community is that there are a lot of smart people. Regarding leadership it claims D.K. Simonton found that persuasiveness is at its maximum when the IQ differential between speaker and audience is about 20 points . A good counter example is Julius Sumner Miller who successfully combined science education and advertising for children s chocolate [3]. Maybe being a little smarter than other people makes it more difficult to communicate with them but being as smart as Julius Sumner Miller can outweigh that. The article goes on to claim that the intellectual elites have an average IQ of 125 because they have to convince people who have an average IQ of 105. I think that if that 20 point difference was really a thing then you would have politicians with an IQ of 125 appointing leaders of the public service with an IQ of 145 who would then hire scientific advisers with an IQ of 165. In a corporate environment a CEO with an IQ of 125 could hire a CIO with an IQ of 145 who could then hire IT staff with an IQ of 165. If people with 165 IQs wanted to be Prime Minister or CEO that might suck for them, but if they wanted to have the most senior technical roles in public service or corporations then it would work out well. For the work I do I almost never speak to a CEO and rarely speak to anyone who regularly speaks to them, if CEOs don t like me and won t hire people like me then it doesn t matter to me as I won t meet them. Inappropriate Educational Options The section on Inappropriate Educational Options is one where I almost agree with the author. I say almost because I don t think that schools are good for anyone. Yes schools have some particular problems for smart kids, but they also have serious problems for kids who are below average IQ, kids who have problems at home, kids who are disabled, etc. Most schools fail so many groups of kids in so many ways that the overall culture of schools can t be functional. Social Isolation The section on Social Isolation is another where I almost agree with the author. But as with schools I think that society overall is poorly structured to support people such that people on the entire range of IQs have more difficulty in finding friends and relationships than they should. One easy change to make would be to increase the minimum wage such that one minimum wage job can support a family without working more than 35 hours a week and to set the maximum work week to something less than 40 hours Atlassian has a good blog post about the data on working weeks [4]. Wired has an article suggesting that 5 hours a day is an ideal work time for some jobs [5]. We also need improvements in public transport and city design to have less wasted time and better options for socialising. Conclusion The blogspot site hosting the article in question also has a very complex plan for funding a magazine for such articles [6]. The problems with that funding model start with selling advertising that converts to shares in a Turks & Caicos company in an attempt to circumvent securities regulations (things don t work that way). Then it goes in to some complex formulas for where money will go. This isn t the smart way to start a company, the smart way is to run a kickstarter with fixed rewards for specific amounts of contributions and then possibly have an offer of profit sharing with people who donate extra or something. As a general rule when doing something that s new to you it s a good idea to look at how others have succeeded at it in the past. Devising an experimental new way of doing something is best reserved to people who have some experience withe the more common methods. Mentioning this may seem like an ad hominem attack, but I think it s relevant to consider this in the context of people who score well in IQ tests but don t do so well in other things. Maybe someone who didn t think that they were a lot smarter than everyone else would have tried to launch a magazine in a more common way and actually had some success at it. In a more general sense I think that people who believe that they are suffering because of being too smart are in a similar category as incels. It s more of a psychological problem than anything else and one that they could solve for themselves.

• [1] http://polymatharchives.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-inappropriately-excluded.html
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/ys2jdzzp
• [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Sumner_Miller
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/yz55u53g
• [5] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/working-day-time-five-hours
• [6] http://polymatharchives.blogspot.com/p/prepaid-footer-ad.html

Part of what I love to do is to play with embedded devices running Linux. And many times I need to juggle with an SD card in order to copy a filesystem to a board... until I found SDWire. This little gadget is an SD muxer: it allows you to use it as a "normal" card reader or switch the SD card to the SD card slot. So next time I need to copy contents to a SD card and then push it to a board I can just do it from the command line. Now the software to control this device was not in Debian, so I fixed that. I am keeping the code and the packaging on GitLab, as "The Tizen project is not anymore really active". At the time of writing the package was just accepted, so it might take a couple of hours to be available on the archive. Enjoy!

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.

After cycling the Northcape 4000 (from Italy to northern Norway) last year, I signed up for the transcontinental race this year. The Transcontinental is bikepacking race across Europe, self-routed (but with some mandatory checkpoints), unsupported and with a distance of usually somewhere around 4000 km. The cut-off time is 15 days, with the winner usually taking 7-10 days. This year, the route went from Belgium to Thessaloniki in Greece, with control points in northern Italy, Slovenia, Albania and Meteora (Greece). The event was great - it was well organised and communication was a lot better than at the Northcape. It did feel very different from the Northcape, though, being a proper race. Participants are not allowed to draft off each other or help each other, though a quick chat here or there as you pass people is possible, or when you re both stopped at a shop or control point.

Debian Celebrates 30 years! We celebrated our birthday this year and we had a great time with new friends, new members welcomed to the community, and the world. We have collected a few comments, videos, and discussions from around the Internet, and some images from some of the DebianDay2023 events. We hope that you enjoyed the day(s) as much as we did!

"Debian 30 years of collective intelligence" -Maqsuel Maqson Brazil

Pouso Alegre, Brazil

Macei , Brazil

Curitiba, Brazil

The cake is there. :) Honorary Debian Developers: Buzz, Jessie, and Woody welcome guests to this amazing party. Sao Carlos, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil Stickers, and Fliers, and Laptops, oh my! Belo Horizonte, Brazil Bras lia, Brazil Bras lia, Brazil Mexico 30 a os! A quick Selfie We do not encourage beverages on computing hardware, but this one is okay by us. Germany

30 years of love

The German Delegation is also looking for this dog who footed the bill for the party, then left mysteriously.

We took the party outside

We brought the party back inside at CCCamp Belgium

Cake and Diversity in Belgium El Salvador

Food and Fellowship in El Salvador South Africa

Debian is also very delicious!

All smiles waiting to eat the cake Reports Debian Day 30 years in Macei - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in S o Carlos - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Pouso Alegre - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Belo Horizonte - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Curitiba - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Bras lia - Brazil Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil Articles & Blogs Happy Debian Day - going 30 years strong - Liam Dawe Debian Turns 30 Years Old, Happy Birthday! - Marius Nestor 30 Years of Stability, Security, and Freedom: Celebrating Debian s Birthday - Bobby Borisov Happy 30th Birthday, Debian! - Claudio Kuenzier Debian is 30 and Sgt Pepper Is at Least Ninetysomething - Christine Hall Debian turns 30! -Corbet Thirty years of Debian! - Lennart Hengstmengel Debian marks three decades as 'Universal Operating System' - Sam Varghese Debian Linux Celebrates 30 Years Milestone - Joshua James 30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros - Liam Proven Looking Back on 30 Years of Debian - Maya Posch Cheers to 30 Years of Debian: A Journey of Open Source Excellence - arindam Discussions and Social Media Debian Celebrates 30 Years - Source: News YCombinator Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian ... Source: News YCombinator Comment: Congrats @debian !!! Happy Birthday! Thank you for becoming a cornerstone of the #opensource world. Here's to decades of collaboration, stability & #software #freedom -openSUSELinux via X (formerly Twitter) Comment: Today we #celebrate the 30th birthday of #Debian, one of the largest and most important cornerstones of the #opensourcecommunity. For this we would like to thank you very much and wish you the best for the next 30 years! Source: X (Formerly Twitter -TUXEDOComputers via X (formerly Twitter) Happy Debian Day! - Source: Reddit.com Video The History of Debian The Beginning - Source: Linux User Space Debian Celebrates 30 years -Source: Lobste.rs Video Debian At 30 and No More Distro Hopping! - LWDW388 - Source: LinuxGameCast Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Debian User Forums Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Linux.org

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.

Much to my dismay, I figured out that my blog has been disabled on the Ubuntu planet since May. If you are curious about what I have been up to, please go to the handy links -> and read up! This post is a continuation of last weeks https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-a-day-in-the-life-of-the-kde-snapcrafter/ IMPORTANT: I am still looking for a super awesome team lead for a super amazing project involving KDE and Snaps. Time is running out and well the KDE world will be a better a better place if this project goes through! I would like to clarify, this is a paid position! A current KDE developer would be ideal as it is a small team so your time will be split managing and coding alike. If you or anyone you know might be interested please contact me ASAP! Snaps: I am wrapping up the 23.04.3 KDE applications release! Head on over to https://snapcraft.io/search?q=KDE and enjoy! We are now up to 180 snaps! PIM snaps will be slowly rolling in as they go through manual reviews for D-Bus. Snapcraft: minor fix in qmake plugin found by ruff. Launchpad: I almost have approval for per application repository snapcraft files, but I have to prove it will work to our benefit and not cause loads of polling etc. So I have been testing various methods of achieving such a task, and so far I have come up with launchpads ability to watch and download release tarballs into a project. I will then need to script getting the tarball and pushing it to a bzr branch from which I can create a proper snap recipe. Unfortunately, my proper snap recipe fails! Hopefully a very helpful cjwatson will chime in, or if anyone wants to take a gander please chime in here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/2031307 As reality sets in that my project may not happen if I don t find anyone, I need help surviving until I find work or funding to continue my snap work ( still much to do! ) If you or anyone else you know enjoys our snaps please consider a donation, anything helps! Please share! Thank you for your consideration!