HP USB 3.2 Type C OTG Flash Drive x5600c For people who have had read this blog they know that most of the flash drives today are MLC Drives and do not have the longevity of the SLC Drives. For those who maybe are new, this short brochure/explainer from Kingston should enhance your understanding. SLC Drives are rare and expensive. There are also a huge number of counterfeit flash drives available in the market and almost all the companies efforts whether it s Kingston, HP or any other manufacturer, they have been like a drop in the bucket. Coming back to the topic at hand. While there are some tools that can help you to figure out whether a pen drive is genuine or not. While there are products that can tell you whether they are genuine or not (basically by probing the memory controller and the info. you get from that.) that probably is a discussion left for another day. It took me couple of days and finally I was able to find time to go Vishal s place. The journey of back and forth lasted almost 6 hours, with crazy traffic jams. Tells you why Pune or specifically the Swargate, Hadapsar patch really needs a Metro. While an in-principle nod has been given, it probably is more than 5-7 years or more before we actually have a functioning metro. Even the current route the Metro has was supposed to be done almost 5 years to the date and even the modified plan was of 3 years ago. And even now, most of the Stations still need a lot of work to be done. PMC, Deccan as examples etc. still have loads to be done. Even PMT (Pune Muncipal Transport) that that is supposed to do the last mile connections via its buses has been putting half-hearted attempts

Vishal Rao While Vishal had apparently seen me and perhaps we had also interacted, this was my first memory of him although we have been on a few boards now and then including stackexchange. He was genuine and warm and shared 4-5 distros with me, including Knoppix and System Rescue as shared by Arun Khan. While this is and was the first time I had heard about Ventoy apparently Vishal has been using it for couple of years now. It s a simple shell script that you need to download and run on your pen drive and then just dump all the .iso images. The easiest way to explain ventoy is that it looks and feels like Grub. Which also reminds me an interaction I had with Vishal on mobile. While troubleshooting the issue, I was unsure whether it was filesystem that was the issue or also systemd was corrupted. Vishal reminded me of putting fastboot to the kernel parameters to see if I m able to boot without fscking and get into userspace i.e. /home. Although journalctl and systemctl were responding even on tty1 still was a bit apprehensive. Using fastboot was able to mount the whole thing and get into userspace and that told me that it s only some of the inodes that need clearing and there probably are some orphaned inodes. While Vishal had got a mini-pc he uses that a server, downloads stuff to it and then downloads stuff from it. From both privacy, backup etc. it is a better way to do things but then you need to laptop to access it. I am sure he probably uses it for virtualization and other ways as well but we just didn t have time for that discussion. Also a mini-pc can set you back anywhere from 25 to 40k depending on the mini-pc and the RAM and the SSD. And you need either a lappy or an Raspberry Pi with some kinda visual display to interact with the mini-pc. While he did share some of the things, there probably could have been a far longer interaction just on that but probably best left for another day. Now at my end, the system I had bought is about 5-6 years old. At that time it only had 6 USB 2.0 drives and 2 USB 3.0 (A) drives.

The above image does tell of the various form factors. One of the other things is that I found the pendrive and its connectors to be extremely fiddly. It took me number of times fiddling around with it when I was finally able to put in and able to access the pen drive partitions. Unfortunately, was unable to see/use systemrescue but Knoppix booted up fine. I mounted the partitions briefly to see where is what and sure enough /dev/sda8 showed my /home files and folders. Unmounted it, then used $fsck -y /dev/sda8 and back in business. This concludes what happened. Updates Quite a bit was left out on the original post, part of which I didn t know and partly stuff which is interesting and perhaps need a blog post of their own. It s sad I won t be part of debconf otherwise who knows what else I would have come to know.

1. One of the interesting bits that I came to know about last week is the Alibaba T-Head T-Head TH1520 RISC-V CPU and saw it first being demoed on a laptop and then a standalone tablet. The laptop is an interesting proposition considering Alibaba opened up it s chip thing only couple of years ago. To have an SOC within 18 months and then under production for lappies and tablets is practically unheard of especially of a newbie/startup. Even AMD took 3-4 years for its first chip.It seems they (Alibaba) would be parceling them out by quarter end 2023 and another 1000 pieces/Units first quarter next year, while the scale is nothing compared to the behemoths, I think this would be more as a matter of getting feedback on both the hardware and software. The value proposition is much better than what most of us get, at least in India. For example, they are doing a warranty for 5 years and also giving spare parts. RISC-V has been having a lot of resurgence in China in part as its an open standard and partly development will be far cheaper and faster than trying x86 or x86-64. If you look into both the manufacturers, due to monopoly, both of them now give 5-8% increment per year, and if you look back in history, you would find that when more chips were in competition, they used to give 15-20% performance increment per year.

2. While Vishal did share with me what he used and the various ways he uses the mini-pc, I did have a fun speculating on what he could use it. As shared by Romane as his case has shared, the first thing to my mind was backups. Filesystems are notorious in the sense they can be corrupted or can be prone to be corrupted very easily as can be seen above . Backups certainly make a lot of sense, especially rsync. The other thing that came to my mind was having some sort of A.I. and chat server. IIRC, somebody has put quite a bit of open source public domain data in debian servers that could be used to run either a chatbot or an A.I. or both and use that similar to how chatGPT but with much limited scope than what chatgpt uses. I was also thinking a media server which Vishal did share he does. I may probably visit him sometime to see what choices he did and what he learned in the process, if anything. Another thing that could be done is just take a dump of any of commodity markets or any markets and have some sort of predictive A.I. or whatever. A whole bunch of people have scammed thousands of Indian users on this, but if you do it on your own and for your own purposes to aid you buy and sell stocks or whatever commodity you may fancy. After all, nowadays markets themselves are virtual. While Vishal s mini-pc doesn t have any graphics, if it was an AMD APU mini-pc, something like this he could have hosted games in the way of thick server, thin client where all graphics processing happens on the server rather than the client. With virtual reality I think the case for the same case could be made or much more. The only problem with VR/AR is that we don t really have mass-market googles, eye pieces or headset. The only notable project that Google has/had in that place is the Google VR Cardboard headset and the experience is not that great or at least was not that great few years back when I could hear and experience the same. Most of the VR headsets say for example the Meta Quest 2 is for around INR 44k/- while Quest 3 is INR 50k+ and officially not available. As have shared before, the holy grail of VR would be when it falls below INR 10k/- so it becomes just another accessory, not something you really have to save for. There also isn t much content on that but then that is also the whole chicken or egg situation. This again is a non-stop discussion as so much has been happening in that space it needs its own blog post/article whatever. Till later.

Tilburg, Netherlands. October 2022. St-Cergue, Switzerland. January 2023 Montreal, Canada. February 2023 In January, Debian India hosted the MiniDebConf Tamil Nadu in Viluppuram, Tamil Nadu, India (Sat 28 - Sun 26). The following month, the MiniDebConf Portugal 2023 was held in Lisbon (12 - 16 February 2023). These events, seen as a stunning success by some of their attendees, demonstrate the vitality of our community.

• Gifts for attendees (stickers, cups, lanyards);
• Workshop on how to contribute to the translation team;
• Workshop on packaging;
• Key signing party;
• Information about the project;

• main: Contains DFSG-compliant packages, which do not rely on software outside this area to operate.
• contrib: Contains packages that contain DFSG-compliant software, but have dependencies not in main.
• non-free: Contains software that does not comply with the DFSG.
• non-free-firmware: Firmware that is otherwise not part of the Debian system to enable use of Debian with hardware that requires such firmware.

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware

• Marius Gripsgard (mariogrip)
• Mohammed Bilal (rmb)
• Emmanuel Arias (amanu)
• Robin Gustafsson (rgson)
• Lukas M rdian (slyon)
• David da Silva Polverari (polverari)

Manipur Lot of news from Manipur. Seems the killings haven t stopped. In fact, there was a huge public rally in support of the rapists and murderers as reported by Imphal Free Press. The Ruling Govt. both at the Center and the State being BJP continuing to remain mum. Both the Internet shutdowns have been criticized and seems no effect on the Government. Their own MLA was attacked but they have chosen to also be silent about that. The opposition demanded that the PM come in both the houses and speak but he has chosen to remain silent. In that quite a few bills were passed without any discussions. If it was not for the viral videos nobody would have come to know of anything . Internet shutdowns impact women disproportionately as more videos of assaults show Of course, as shared before that gentleman has been arrested under Section 66A as I shared in the earlier blog post. In any case, in the last few years, this Government has chosen to pass most of its bills without any discussions. Some of the bills I will share below. The attitude of this Govt. can be seen through this cartoon

The above picture shows the disqualified M.P. Rahul Gandhi because he had asked what is the relationship between Adani and Modi. The other is the Mr. Modi, the Prime Minister who refuses to enter and address the Parliament. Prem Panicker shares how we chillingly have come to this stage when even after rapes we are silent

Data Leakage According to most BJP followers this is not a bug but a feature of this Government. Sucheta Dalal of Moneylife shared how the data leakage has been happening at the highest levels in the Government. The leakage is happening at the ministerial level because unless the minister or his subordinate passes a certain startup others cannot come to know. As shared in the article, while the official approval may take 3-4 days, within hours other entities start congratulating. That means they know that the person/s have been approved.While reading this story, the first thought that immediately crossed my mind was data theft and how easily that would have been done. There was a time when people would be shocked by articles such as above and demand action but sadly even if people know and want to do something they feel powerless to do anything

PAN Linking and Aadhar Last month GOI made PAN Linking to Aadhar a thing. This goes against the judgement given by the honored Supreme Court in September 2018. Around the same time, Moneylife had reported on the issue on how the info. on Aadhar cards is available and that has its consequences. But to date nothing has happened except GOI shrugging. In the last month, 13 crore+ users of PAN including me affected by it I had tried to actually delink the two but none of the banks co-operated in the same Aadhar has actually number of downsides, most people know about the AEPS fraud that has been committed time and time again. I have shared in previous blog posts the issue with biometric data as well as master biometric data that can and is being used for fraud. GOI either ignorant or doesn t give a fig as to what happens to you, citizen of India. I could go on and on but it would result in nothing constructive so will stop now

IRCv3 I had been enthused when I heard about IRCV3. While it was founded in 2016, it sorta came on in its own in around 2020. I did try matrix or rather riot-web and went through number of names while finally setting on element. While I do have the latest build 1.11.36 element just hasn t been workable for me. It is too outsized, and occupies much more real estate than other IM s (Instant Messengers and I cannot correct size it like I do say for qbittorrent or any other app. I had filed couple of bugs on it but because it apparently only affects me, nothing happened afterwards But that is not the whole story at all. Because of Debconf happening in India, and that too Kochi, I decided to try out other tools to see how IRC is doing. While the Debian wiki page shares a lot about IRC clients and is also helpful in sharing stats by popcounter ( popularity-contest, thanks to whoever did that), it did help me in trying two of the most popular clients. Pidgin and Hexchat, both of which have shared higher numbers. This might be simply due to the fact that both get downloaded when you install the desktop version or they might be popular in themselves, have no idea one way or the other. But still I wanted to see what sort of experience I could expect from both of them in 2023. One of the other things I noticed is that Pidgin is not a participating organization in ircv3 while hexchat is. Before venturing in, I also decided to take a look at oftc.net. Came to know that for sometime now, oftc has started using web verify. I didn t see much of a difference between hcaptcha and gcaptcha other than that the fact that they looked more like oil paintings rather than anything else. While I could easily figure the odd man out or odd men out to be more accurate, I wonder how a person with low or no vision would pass that ??? Also much of our world is pretty much contextual based, figuring who the odd one is or are could be tricky. I do not have answers to the above other than to say more work needs to be done by oftc in that area. I did get a link that I verified. But am getting ahead of the story. Another thing I understood that for some reason oftc is also not particpating in ircv3, have no clue why not :(I

Account Registration in Pidgin and Hexchat This is the biggest pain point in both. I failed to register via either Pidgin or Hexchat. I couldn t find a way in either client to register my handle. I have had on/off relationships with IRC over the years, the biggest issue being IIRC is that if you stop using your handle for a month or two others can use it. IIRC, every couple of months or so, irc/oftc releases the dormant ones. Matrix/Vector has done quite a lot in that regard but that s a different thing altogether so for the moment will keep that aside. So, how to register for the network. This is where webchat.oftc.net comes in. You get a quaint 1970 s IRC window (probably emulated) where you call Nickserv to help you. As can be seen it one of the half a dozen bots that helps IRC. So the first thing you need to do is /msg nickserv help what you are doing is asking nickserv what services they have and Nickserv shares the numbers of services it offers. After looking into, you are looking for register /msg nickerv register Both the commands tell you what you need to do as can be seen by this

Let s say you are XYZ and your e-mail address is xyz@xyz.com This is just a throwaway id I am taking for the purpose of showing how the process is done. For this, also assume your passowrd is 1234xyz;0x something like this. I have shared about APG (Advanced Password Generator) before so you could use that to generate all sorts of passwords for yourself. So next would be /msg nickserv register 1234xyz;0x xyz@xyz.com Now the thing to remember is you need to be sure that the email is valid and in your control as it would generate a link with hcaptcha. Interestingly, their accessibility signup fails or errors out. I just entered my email and it errors out. Anyway back to it. Even after completing the puzzle, even with the valid username and password neither pidgin or hexchat would let me in. Neither of the clients were helpful in figuring out what was going wrong. At this stage, I decided to see the specs of ircv3 if they would help out in anyway and came across this. One would have thought that this is one of the more urgent things that need to be fixed, but for reasons unknown it s still in draft mode. Maybe they (the participants) are not in consensus, no idea. Unfortunately, it seems that the participants of IRCv3 have chosen a sort of closed working model as the channel is restricted. The only notes of any consequence are being shared by Ilmari Lauhakangas from Finland. Apparently, Mr/Ms/they Ilmari is also a libreoffice hacker. It is possible that their is or has been lot of drama before or something and that s why things are the way they are. In either way, doesn t tell me when this will be fixed, if ever. For people who are on mobiles and whatnot, without element, it would be 10x times harder. Update :- Saw this discussion on github. Don t see a way out It seems I would be unable to unable to be part of Debconf Kochi 2023. Best of luck to all the participants and please share as much as possible of what happens during the event.

RISC -V Motherboard, SBC While I didn t want to, a part of me is hyped about this motherboard. This would probably be launched somewhere in November. There are obvious issues in this, the first being unlike regular motherboards you wouldn t be upgrade as you would do.You can t upgrade your memory, can t upgrade the CPU (although new versions of instructions could be uploaded, similar to BIOS updates) but as the hardware is integrated (the quad-core SiFive Performance P550 core complex) it would really depend. If the final pricing is around INR 4-5k then it may be able to sell handsomely provided there are people to push and provide support around it. A 500 GB or 1 TB SSD coupled with it and a cheap display unit and you could use it anywhere although as the name says it s more for tinkering as the name suggests. Another board that could perhaps be of more immediate use would be the beagleboard. They launched the same couple of days back and called it Beagle V-Ahead. Again, costs are going to be a concern. Just a year before the pandemic the Beagleboard Black (BB) used to cost in the sub 4k range, today it costs 8k+ for the end user, more than twice the price. How much Brexit is to be blamed for this and how much the Indian customs we would never know. The RS Group that is behind that shop is head-quartered in the UK. As said before, we do not know the price of either board as it probably will take few months for v-ahead to worm its way in the Indian market, maybe another 6 months or so. Even so, with the limited info. on both the boards, I am tilting more towards the other HiFive one. We should come to know about the boards say in 3-5 months of time.

CHIPS Act I had shared about the Chips Act a few times here as well as on SM. Two articles do tell how the CHIPS Act 2023 is more of a political tool, an industrial defence policy rather than just business as most people tend to think.

Cancelation of Books, Books Burning etc. Almost 2400 years ago, Plato released his work called Plato s Republic and one of the seminal works within it is perhaps one of the most famous works was the Allegory of the Cave. That is used again and again in a myriad ways, mostly in science-fiction though and mostly to do with utopian, dystopian movies, webseries etc. I did share how books are being canceled in the States, also a bit here. But the most damning thing has happened throughout history, huge quantities of books burned almost all for politics But part of it has been neglect as well as this time article shares. What we have lost and continue to lose is just priceless. Every book has a grain of truth in it, some more, some less but equally enjoyable. Most harmful is the neglect towards books and is more true today than any other time in history. Kids today have a wide variety of tools to keep themselves happy or occupied, from anime, VR, gaming the list goes on and on. In that scenario, how the humble books can compete. People think of Kindle but most e-readers like Kindle are nothing but obsolescence by design. I have tried out Kindle a few times but find it a bit on the flimsy side. Books are much better IMHO or call me old-school. While there are many advantages, one of the things that I like about books is that you can easily put yourself in either the protagonist or the antagonist or somewhere in the middle and think of the possible scenarios wherever you are in a particular book. I could go on but it will be a blog post or two in itself. Till later. Happy Reading.

Update:Manipur Extremely horrifying visuals, articles and statements continue to emanate from Manipur. Today, 19th July 2023, just couple of hours back, a video surfaced showing two Kuki women were shown as stripped, naked and Meitei men touching their private parts. Later on, we came to know that this was in response of a disinformation news spread by the Meitis of few women being raped although no documentary evidence of the same surfaced, no names nothing. While I don t want to share the video I will however share the statement shared by the Kuki-Zo tribal community on that. The print gives a bit more context to what has been going on.

Update, Few hours later : The Print also shared more of a context about six days ago. The reason we saw the video now was that for the last 2.5 months Manipur was in Internet shutdown so those videos got uploaded now. There was huge backlash from the Twitter community and GOI ordered the Manipur Police to issue this Press Release yesterday night or just few hours before with yesterday s time-stamp.

IndianExpress shared an article that does state that while an FIR had been registered immediately no arrests so far and this is when you can see the faces of all the accused. Not one of them tried to hide their face behind a mask or something. So, if the police wanted, they could have easily identified who they are. They know which community the accused belong to, they even know from where they came. If they wanted to, they could have easily used mobile data and triangulation to find the accused and their helpers. So, it does seem to be attempt to whitewash and protect a certain community while letting it prey on the other. Another news that did come in, is because of the furious reaction on Twitter, Youtube has constantly been taking down the video as some people are getting a sort of high more so from the majoritarian community and making lewd remarks. Twitter has been somewhat quick when people are making lewd remarks against the two girl/women. Quite a bit of the above seems like a cover-up. Lastly, apparently GOI has agreed to having a conversation about it in Lok Sabha but without any voting or passing any resolutions as of right now. Would update as an when things change. Update: Smriti Irani, the Child and Development Minister gave the weakest statement possible

As can be noticed, she said sexual assault rather than rape. The women were under police custody for safety when they were whisked away by the mob. No mention of that. She spoke to the Chief Minister who has been publicly known as one of the provocateurs or instigators for the whole thing. The CM had publicly called the Kukus and Nagas as foreigners although both of them claim to be residing for thousands of years and they apparently have documentary evidence of the same . Also not clear who is doing the condemning here. No word of support for the women, no offer of intervention, why is she the Minister of Child and Women Development (CDW) if she can t use harsh words or give support to the women who have gone and going through horrific things Update : CM Biren Singh s Statement after the video surfaced

This tweet is contradictory to the statements made by Mr. Singh couple of months ago. At that point in time, Mr. Singh had said that NIA, State Intelligence Departments etc. were giving him minute to minute report on the ground station. The Police itself has suo-moto (on its own) powers to investigate and apprehend criminals for any crime. In fact, the Police can call for questioning of anybody in any relation to any crime and question them for upto 48 hours before charging them. In fact, many cases have been lodged where innocent persons have been framed or they have served much more in the jail than the crime they are alleged to have been committed. For e.g. just a few days before there was a media report of a boy who has been in jail for 3 years. His alleged crime, stealing mere INR 200/- to feed himself. Court doesn t have time to listen to him yet. And there are millions like him. The quint eloquently shares the tale where it tells how both the State and the Centre have been explicitly complicit in the incidents ravaging Manipur. In fact, what has been shared in the article has been very true as far as greed for land is concerned. Just couple of weeks back there have been a ton of floods emanating from Uttarakhand and others. Just before the flooding began, what was the CM doing can be seen here. Apart from the newspapers I have shared and the online resources, most of the mainstream media has been silent on the above. In fact, they have been silent on the Manipur issue until the said video didn t come into limelight. Just now, in Lok Sabha everybody is present except the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. The PM did say that the law will take its own course, but that s about it. Again no support for the women concerned. Update: CJI (Chief Justice of India) has taken suo-moto cognizance and has warned both the State and Centre to move quickly otherwise they will take the matter in their own hand.

Update: Within 2 hours of the CJI taking suo-moto cognizance, they have arrested one of the main accused Heera Das

The above tells you why the ban on Internet was put in the first place. They wanted to cover it all up. Of all the celebs, only one could find a bit of spine, a bit of backbone to speak about it, all the rest mum

Just imagine, one of the women is around my age while the young one could have been a daughter if I had married on time or a younger sister for sure. If ever I came face to face with them, I just wouldn t be able to look them in the eye. Even their whole whataboutery is built on sham. From their view Kukis are from Burma or Burmese descent. All of which could be easily proved by DNA of all. But let s leave that for a sec. Let s take their own argument that they are Burmese. Their idea of Akhand Bharat stretches all the way to Burma (now called Myanmar). They want all the land but no idea with what to do with the citizens living on it. Even after the video, the whataboutery isn t stopping, that shows how much hatred is there. And not knowing that they too will be victim of the same venom one or the other day Update: Opposition was told there would be a debate on Manipur. The whole day went by, no debate. That s the shamelessness of this Govt. Update 20th July 19:25 Center may act or not act against the perpetrators but they will act against Twitter who showed the crime. Talk about shooting the messenger

We are now in the last stage. In 2014, we were at 6

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al The work on /usr-merge continues from May. The lengthy discussion was condensed into a still lengthy rewrite of DEP17 listing all known problems and proposed mitigations. An initial consensus call did not resolve all questions, but we now have rough consensus on finalizing the transition without relying on major changes to dpkg. Other questions still have diverging opinions and some matters such as how to not break backports are still missing satisfying answers.

DebConf Bursary prep, by Utkarsh Gupta DebCamp and DebConf is happening from 03rd September to 17th September in Kochi, India, and the DebConf Bursary team is gearing up for that. After extending the bursary deadline (catering to the requests coming in from various people), we ve finally managed to clock over 260 bursary requests. The team is set up and we re starting to review the applications. The team intends to roll out the result as soon as possible.

debci, by Helmut Grohne As Freexian is working on deploying autopkgtests for the LTS and ELTS services, debci and autopkgtests were improved in Debian to better deal with derivatives (e.g. by better supporting external package signing keyrings). Other aspects that are not deployed on ci.debian.net such as the qemu backend were also improved. We express thanks to the relevant maintainers Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers and Simon McVittie for their timely reviews and merges of our changes.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Following the release of Debian 12, Rapha l Hertzog updated tracker.debian.org to be aware of trixie. He also pushed some fixes to distro-tracker (the software powering tracker.debian.org) and released version 1.2.0 (since the former release was lacking fixes to run on Debian 12 bookworm).
• Following the release of Debian 12, Helmut Grohne updated crossqa.debian.net systems. He also sent 7 patches for cross build failures and continued adapting rebootstrap to changes in unstable.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n started to work on how to improve the robustness of Salsa CI s pipeline for some jobs failing frequently.
• Thorsten Alteholz did security updates of cpdb-libs in Unstable and Bookworm.
• Stefano Rivera upgraded pixelfed.debian.social to bookworm.
• Stefano started an re2 library transition, and started preparation for the next transition.
• Helmut Grohne updated debvm in unstable releasing changes that accumulated during the freeze.
• Stefano did some work on the website and infrastructure for DebConf 23.
• Utkarsh Gupta helped review and fix open redmine bugs and fix them all in unstable.

A personal reflection on how I moved from my Debian home to find two new homes with Trisquel and Guix for my own ethical computing, and while doing so settled my dilemma about further Debian contributions. Debian s contributions to the free software community has been tremendous. Debian was one of the early distributions in the 1990 s that combined the GNU tools (compiler, linker, shell, editor, and a set of Unix tools) with the Linux kernel and published a free software operating system. Back then there were little guidance on how to publish free software binaries, let alone entire operating systems. There was a lack of established community processes and conflict resolution mechanisms, and lack of guiding principles to motivate the work. The community building efforts that came about in parallel with the technical work has resulted in a steady flow of releases over the years. From the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) during the 1980 s and early 1990 s, there was at the time already an established definition of free software. Inspired by free software definition, and a belief that a social contract helps to build a community and resolve conflicts, Debian s social contract (DSC) with the free software community was published in 1997. The DSC included the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which directly led to the Open Source Definition.

One of my earlier Slackware install disk sets, kept for nostalgic reasons.

PLIO I have been looking for an image viewer that can view images via modification date by default. The newer, the better. Alas, most of the image viewers do not do that. Even feh somehow fails. What I need is default listing of images as thumbnails by modification date. I put it up on Unix Stackexchange couple of years ago. Somebody shared ristretto but that just gives listing and doesn t give the way I want it. To be more illustrative, maybe this may serve as a guide to what I mean.

There is an RFP for it. While playing with it, I also discovered another benefit of the viewer, a sort of side-benefit, it tells you if any images have gone corrupt or whatever and you get that info. on the CLI so you can try viewing that image with the path using another viewer or viewers before deleting them. One of the issues is there doesn t seem to be a magnify option by default. While the documentation says use the ^ key to maximize it, it doesn t maximize. Took me a while to find it as that isn t a key that I use most of the time. Ironically, that is the key used on the mobile quite a bit. Anyways, so that needs to be fixed. Sadly, it doesn t have creation date or modification date sort, although the documentation does say it does (at least the modification date) but it doesn t show at my end. I also got Warning: UNKNOWN command detected! but that doesn t tell me enough as to what the issue is. Hopefully the developer will fix the issues and it will become part of Debian as many such projects are. Compiling was dead easy even with gcc-12 once I got freeimage-dev.

Mum s first death anniversary I do not know where the year went by or how. The day went in a sort of suspended animation. The only thing I did was eat and sleep that day, didn t feel like doing anything. Old memories, even dreams of fighting with her only to realize in the dream itself it s fake, she isn t there anymore Something that can never be fixed

Debconf Kochi I should have shared it few days ago but somehow slipped my mind. While it s too late for most people to ask for bursary for Debconf Kochi, if you are anywhere near Kochi in the month of September between the dates. September 3 to September 17 nearby Infopark, Kochi you could walk in and talk to people. This would be for people who either have an interest in free software, FOSS or Debian specific. For those who may not know, while Debian is a Linux Distribution having ports to other kernels as well as well as hardware. While I may not be able to provide the list of all the various flavors as well as hardware, can say it is quite a bit. For e.g. there is a port to RISC-V that was done few years back (2018). Why that is needed will be shared below. There is always something new to look forward in a Debconf.

Pressure Cooker and Potatoes This was asked to me in the last Debconf (2016) by few people. So as people are coming to India, it probably is a good time to sort of reignite the topic :). So a Pressure Cooker boils your veggies and whatnot while still preserving the nutrients. While there are quite a number of brands I would suggest either Prestige or Hawkins, I have had good experience with both. There are also some new pressure cookers that have come that are somewhat in the design of the Thai Wok. So if that is something that you are either comfortable with or looking for, you could look at that. One of the things that you have to be sort of aware of and be most particular is the pressure safety valve. Just putting up pressure cooker safety valve in your favorite search-engine should show you different makes and whatnot. While they are relatively cheap, you need to see it is not cracked, used or whatever. The other thing is the Pressure Cooker whistle as well. The easiest thing to cook are mashed potatoes in a pressure cooker. A pressure Cooker comes in Litres, from 1 Ltr. to 20 Ltr. The larger ones are obviously for hotels or whatnot. General rule of using Pressure cooker is have water 1/4th, whatever vegetable or non-veg you want to boil 1/2 and let the remaining part for the steam. Now the easiest thing to do is have wash the potatoes and put 1/4th water of the pressure cooker. Then put 1/2 or less or little bit more of the veggies, in this instance just Potatoes. You can put salt to or that can be done later. The taste will be different. Also, there are various salts so won t really go into it as spices is a rabbit hole. Anyways, after making sure that there is enough space for the steam to be built, Put the handle on the cooker and basically wait for 5-10 minutes for the pressure to be built. You will hear a whistling sound, wait for around 5 minutes or a bit more (depends on many factors, kind of potatoes, weather etc.) and then just let it cool off naturally. After 5-10 minutes or a bit more, the pressure will be off. Your mashed potatoes are ready for either consumption or for further processing. I am assuming gas, induction cooking will have its own temperature, have no idea about it, hence not sharing that. Pressure Cooker, first put on the heaviest settings, once it starts to whistle, put it on medium for 5-10 minutes and then let it cool off. The first time I had tried that, I burned the cooker. You understand things via trial and error.

Poha recipe This is a nice low-cost healthy and fulfilling breakfast called Poha that can be made anytime and requires at the most 10-15 minutes to prepare with minimal fuss. The main ingredient is Poha or flattened rice. So how is it prepared. I won t go into the details of quantity as that is upto how hungry people are. There are various kinds of flattened rice available in the market, what you are looking for is called thick Poha or zhad Poha (in Marathi). The first step is the trickiest. What do you want to do is put water on Poha but not to let it be soggy. There is an accessory similar to tea filter but forgot the name, it basically drains all the extra moisture and you want Poha to be a bit fluffy and not soggy. The Poha should breathe for about 5 minutes before being cooked. To cook, use a heavy bottomed skillet, put some oil in it, depends on what oil you like, again lot of variations, you can use ground nut or whatever oil you prefer. Then use single mustard seeds to check temperature of the oil. Once the mustard seeds starts to pop, it means it s ready for things. So put mustard seeds in, finely chopped onion, finely chopped coriander leaves, a little bit of lemon juice, if you want potatoes, then potatoes too. Be aware that Potatoes will soak oil like anything, so if you are going to have potatoes than the oil should be a bit more. Some people love curry leaves, others don t. I like them quite a bit, it gives a slightly different taste. So the order is

1. Oil
2. Mustard seeds (1-2 teaspoon)
3. Curry leaves 5-10
4. Onion (2-3 medium onions finely chopped, onion can also be used as garnish.)
5. Potatoes (2-3 medium ones, mashed)
6. Small green chillies or 1-2 Red chillies (if you want)
7. Coriander Leaves (one bunch finely chopped)
8. Peanuts (half a glass)

Make sure that you are stirring them quite a bit. On a good warm skillet, this should hardly take 5 minutes. Once the onions are slighly brown, you are ready to put Poha in. So put the poha, add turmeric, salt, and sugar. Again depends on number of people. If I made for myself and mum, usually did 1 teaspoon of salt, not even one fourth of turmeric, just a hint, it is for the color, 1 to 2 teapoons of sugar and mix them all well at medium flame. Poha used to be two or three glasses. If you don t want potato, you can fry them a bit separately and garnish with it, along with coriander, coconut and whatnot. In Kerala, there is possibility that people might have it one day or all days. It serves as a snack at anytime, breakfast, lunch, tea time or even dinner if people don t want to be heavy. The first few times I did, I did manage to do everything wrong. So, if things go wrong, let it be. After a while, you will find your own place. And again, this is just one way, I m sure this can be made as elaborate a meal as you want. This is just something you can do if you don t want noodles or are bored with it. The timing is similar. While I don t claim to be an expert in cooking in anyway or form, if people have questions feel free to ask. If you are single or two people, 2 Ltr. Pressure cooker is enough for most Indians, Westerners may take a slightly bit larger Pressure Cooker, maybe a 3 Ltr. one may be good for you. Happy Cooking and Experimenting I have had the pleasure to have Poha in many ways. One of my favorite ones is when people have actually put tadka on top of Poha. You do everything else but in a slight reverse order. The tadka has all the spices mixed and is concentrated and is put on top of Poha and then mixed. Done right, it tastes out of this world. For those who might not have had the Indian culinary experience, most of which is actually borrowed from the Mughals, you are in for a treat. One of the other things I would suggest to people is to ask people where there can get five types of rice. This is a specialty of South India and a sort of street food. I know where you can get it Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai but not in Kerala, although am dead sure there is, just somehow have missed it. If asked, am sure the Kerala team should be able to guide. That s all for now, feeling hungry, having dinner as have been sharing about cooking.

RISC-V There has been lot of conversations about how India could be in the microprocesor spacee. The x86 and x86-64 is all tied up in Intel and AMD so that s a no go area. Let me elaborate a bit why I say that. While most of the people know that IBM was the first producers of transistors as well as microprocessors. Coincidentally, AMD and Intel story are similar in some aspects but not in others. For a long time Intel was a market leader and by hook or crook it remained a market leader. One of the more interesting companies in the 1980s was Cyrix which sold lot of low-end microprocessors. A lot of that technology also went into Via which became a sort of spiritual successor of Cyrix. It is because of Cyrix and Via that Intel was forced to launch the Celeron model of microprocessors.

Lawsuits, European Regulation For those who have been there in the 1990s may have heard the term Wintel that basically meant Microsoft Windows and Intel and they had a sort of monopoly power. While the Americans were sorta ok with it, the Europeans were not and time and time again they forced both Microsoft as well as Intel to provide alternatives. The pushback from the regulators was so great that Intel funded AMD to remain solvent for few years. The successes that we see today from AMD is Lisa Su s but there is a whole lot of history as well as bad blood between the two companies. Lot of lawsuits and whatnot. Lot of cross-licensing agreements between them as well. So for any new country it would need lot of cash just for licensing all the patents there are and it s just not feasible for any newcomer to come in this market as they would have to fork the cash for the design apart from manufacturing fab.

ARM Most of the mobiles today sport an ARM processor. At one time it meant Advanced RISC Machines but now goes by Arm Ltd. Arm itself licenses its designs and while there are lot of customers, you are depending on ARM and they can change any of the conditions anytime they want. You are also hoping that ARM does not steal your design or do anything else with it. And while people trust ARM, it is still a risk if you are a company.

RISC and Shakti There is not much to say about RISC other than this article at Register. While India does have large ambitions, executing it is far trickier than most people believe as well as complex and highly capital intensive. The RISC way could be a game-changer provided India moves deftly ahead. FWIW, Debian did a RISC port in 2018. From what I can tell, you can install it on a VM/QEMU and do stuff. And while RISC has its own niches, you never know what happens next.One can speculate a lot and there is certainly a lot of momentum behind RISC. From what little experience I have had, where India has failed time and time again, whether in software or hardware is support. Support is the key, unless that is not fixed, it will remain a dream On a slightly sad note, Foxconn is withdrawing from the joint venture it had with Vedanta.

 
  "m.homeserver":  
    "base_url": "https://luv.asn.au"
   
  "jitsi":  
    "preferredDomain": "jitsi.perthchat.org"
   
  "im.vector.riot.jitsi":  
    "preferredDomain": "jitsi.perthchat.org"
   
 

 
  "m.server": "luv.asn.au:8448"
 

setsebool -P httpd_setrlimit 1
setsebool -P httpd_can_network_relay 1
setsebool -P matrix_postgresql_connect 1

suppress_key_server_warning: true

public_baseurl: https://luv.asn.au:8448/

#!/bin/bash
# usage: matrix_new_user USER PASS
synapse_register_new_matrix_user -u $1 -p $2 -a -k THEPASSWORD

tls_certificate_path: "/etc/letsencrypt/live/www.luv.asn.au-0001/fullchain.pem"
tls_private_key_path: "/etc/letsencrypt/live/www.luv.asn.au-0001/privkey.pem"

  name: "psycopg2"
  args:
    user: WWWWWW
    password: XXXXXXX
    database: YYYYYYY
    host: ZZZZZZ
    cp_min: 5
    cp_max: 10

create role WWWWWW login password 'XXXXXXX';
create database YYYYYYY with owner WWWWWW ENCODING 'UTF8' LOCALE 'C' TEMPLATE 'template0';

<VirtualHost *:8448>
  SSLEngine on
...
  ServerName luv.asn.au;
  AllowEncodedSlashes NoDecode
  ProxyPass /_matrix http://127.0.0.1:8008/_matrix nocanon
  ProxyPassReverse /_matrix http://127.0.0.1:8008/_matrix
  AllowEncodedSlashes NoDecode
  ProxyPass /_matrix http://127.0.0.1:8008/_matrix nocanon
  ProxyPassReverse /_matrix http://127.0.0.1:8008/_matrix
</VirtualHost>

  ProxyPass /_matrix http://127.0.0.1:8008/_matrix nocanon

deb https://packages.riot.im/debian/ default main

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2ddl5nvw
• [3] https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/latest
• [4] https://app.element.io/#/welcome
• [5] https://federationtester.matrix.org/
• [6] https://element.io/get-started
• [7] https://schildi.chat/
• [8] https://github.com/fabianonline/matrix.sh
• [9] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
• [10] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/integrations/
• [11] https://wiki.debian.org/Matrix
• [12] https://view.matrix.org/

Goals Primarily I want to design a CO2 monitor which allows the majority of the production process to be outsourced. In particular, the PCB should be able to be assembled in an automated fashion (PCBA). As a secondary goal, I d like to improve the aesthetics of the monitor while retaining the unique feature of displaying clear visual indication of the current ventilation level through coloured lights. Overall, I ll consider the project successfull if I can achieve a visually attractive CO2 monitor which takes me less than 10 minutes per monitor to assemble/box/ship and whose production cost has the potential to be lower than the current model.

PCB

Schematic The existing CO2 monitor design provides a solid foundation but relies upon the ESP32 Devkit board, which is intended for evaluation purposes and is not well suited to automated assembly. Replacing this devkit board with the underlying ESP32 module is the major change needed to enable PCBA production, which then also requires moving the supporting electronics from the devkit board directly onto the primary PCB. The basic ESP32 chipset used in the devkit boards is no longer available as a discrete module suitable for placement directly onto a PCB which means the board will also have to be updated to use a more modern variant of the ESP32 chipset which is in active production such as the ESP32-S3. The ESP32-S3-WROOM1-N4 module is a very close match to the original devkit and will be suitable for this project. In addition to the change of ESP module, I made the following other changes to the components in use:

• Added an additional temperature/humidity sensor (SHT30). The current monitors take temperature/humidity measurements from the SCD40 chipset. These are primarily intended to help in the calculation of CO2 levels and rely on an offset being subtracted to account for the heat generated by the electronic components themselves. I ve found their accuracy to OK, but not perfect. SHT30 is a cheap part, so its addition to hopefully provide improved temperature/humidity measurement is an easy choice.
• Swapped to USB-C instead of USB-B for the power connector. USB-C is much more common than USB-B and is also smaller and not as tall off the board which provides more flexibility in the case design.

With major components selected the key task is to draw the schematic diagram describing how they electrically connect to each other, which includes all the supporting electronics (e.g. resistors, capacitors, etc) needed. I started out trying to use the EasyEDA/OSHWLab ecosystem thinking the tight integration with JLCPCB s assembly services would be a benefit, but the web interface was too clunky and limiting and I quickly got frustrated. KiCad proved to be a much more pleasant and capable tool for the job. The reference design in the ESP32 datasheet (p28) and USB-C power supply examples from blnlabs were particularly helpful alongside the KiCad documentation and the example of the existing monitor in completing this step (click the image to enlarge).

Layout The next step is to physically lay out where each component from the schematic will sit on the PCB itself. Obviously this requires first determining the overall size, shape and outline of the board and needs to occur in iteration with the intended design of the overall monitor, including the case, to ensure components like switches and USB sockets line up correctly. In addition to the requirements around the look and function of the case, the components themselves also have considerations that must be taken into account, including:

• For best WiFi reception, the ESP32 antenna should be at the top of the monitor and should not have PCB underneath it, or for a specified distance either side of it.
• The SHT30 temperature sensor should be as far from any heat generating components (e.g. the ESP32, BME680 and SCD40 modules) as possible and also considering that any generated heat will rise, as low on the monitor as possible.
• The sensors measuring the air (SCD40, BME680 and SHT30) must have good exposure to the air outside the case.

Taking all of these factors into account I ended up with a square PCB containing a cutout in the top right so that the ESP32 antenna can sit within the overall square outline while still meeting its design requirements. The SCD40 and BME680 sit in the top left corner, near the edges for good airflow and far away from the SHT30 temperature sensor in the bottom left corner. The LEDs I placed in a horizontal row across the center of the board, the LCD in the bottom right, a push button on the right-hand side and the USB-C socket in the center at the bottom. Once the components are placed, the next big task is to route the traces (aka wires) between the components on the board such that all the required electrical connections are made without any unintended connections (aka shorts) being created. This is a fun constraint solving/optimisation challenge and takes on an almost artistic aspect with other PCB designers often having strong opinions on which layout is best. The majority of the traces and routing for this board were able to be placed on the top layer of the PCB, but I also made use of the back layer for a few traces to help avoid conflicts and deal with places where different traces needed to cross each other. It s easy to see how this step would be much more challenging and time consuming on a larger and more complex PCB design. The final touches were to add some debugging breakouts for the serial and JTAG ports on the ESP32-S3 and a logo and various other helpful text on the silkscreen layer that will be printed on the PCB so it looks nice.

Production For assembly of the PCB, I went with JLCPCB based out of China. The trickiest part of the process was component selection and ensuring that the parts I had planned in the schematic were available. JLCPCB in conjunction with lcsc.com provides a basic and extended part library. If you use only basic parts you get quicker and cheaper assembly, while using extended parts bumps your order into a longer process with a small fee charged for each component on the board. Initially I spent a lot of time selecting components (particularly LEDs and switches) that were in the basic library before realising that the ESP32 modules are only available in the extended library! I think the lesson is that unless you re building the most trivial PCB with only passive components you will almost certainly end up in the advanced assembly process anyway, so trying to stay within the basic parts library is not worth the time. Unfortunately the SCD40 sensor, the most crucial part of the monitor, is not stocked at all by JLCPCB/LCSC! To work around this JLCPCB will maintain a personal component library for you when you ship components to them to for use in future orders. Given the extra logistical time and hassle of having to do this, combined with having a number of SCD40 components already on hand I decided to have the boards assembled without this component populated for the initial prototype run. This also had the benefit of lowering the risk if something went wrong as the cost of the SCD40 is greater than the cost of the PCB and all the other components combined! I found the kicad-jlcpcb-tools plugin for KiCad invaluable for keeping track of what part from lcsc.com I was planning to use for each component and generating the necessary output files for JLCPCB. The plugin allows you to store these mappings in your actual schematic which is very handy. The search interface it provides is fairly clunky and I found it was often easier to search for the part I needed on lcsc.com and then just copy the part number across into the plugin s search box rather than trying to search by name or component type. The LCD screen is the remaining component which is not easily assembled onto the PCB directly, but as you ll see next, this actually turned out to be OK as integrating the screen directly into the case makes the final assembly process smoother. The final surprise in the assembly process was the concept of edge rails, additional PCB material that is needed on either side of the board to help with feeding it through the assembly machine in the correct position. These can be added automatically by JLCPCB and have to be snapped off after the completed boards are received. I hadn t heard about these before and I was a little worried that they d interfere or get in the way of either the antenna cut-out at the top of the board, or the switch on the right hand side as it overhangs the edge so it can sit flush with the case. In the end there was no issue with the edge rails. The switch was placed hanging over them without issue and snapping them off once the boards arrived was a trivial 30s job using a vice to hold the edge rail and then gently tipping the board over until it snapped off - the interface between the board and the rails while solid looking has obviously been scored or perforated in some way during the production process so the edge breaks cleanly and smoothly. Magic! The process was amazingly quick with the completed PCBs (picture above) arriving within 7 days of the order being placed and looking amazing.

Case

Design I mocked up a very simple prototype of the case in FreeCAD during the PCB design process to help position and align the placement of the screen, switch and USB socket on the PCB as all three of these components interface directly with the edges of the case. Initially this design was similar to the current monitor design where the PCB (with lights and screen attached) sits in the bottom of the case, which has walls containing grilles for airflow and then a separate transparent perspex is screwed onto the top to complete the enclosure. As part of the aesthetic improvements for the new monitor I wanted to move away from a transparent front panel to something opaque but still translucent enough to allow the colour of the lights to show through. Without a transparent front panel the LCD also needs to be mounted directly into the case itself. The first few prototype iterations followed the design of the original CO2 monitor with a flat front panel that attaches to the rest of the case containing the PCB, but the new requirement to also attach the LCD to the front panel proved to make this unworkable. To stay in place the LCD has to be pushed onto mounting poles containing a catch mechanism which requires a moderate amount of force and applying that force to the LCD board when it is already connected to the PCB is essentially impossible. As a result I ended up completely flipping the design such that the front panel is a single piece of plastic that also encompasses the walls of the case and contains appropriate mounting stakes for both the screen and the main PCB. Getting to this design hugely simplified the assembly process. Starting with an empty case lying face down on a bench, the LCD screen is pushed onto the mounting poles and sits flush with the cover of the case - easily achieved without the main PCB yet in place. Next, the main PCB is gently lowered into the case facing downwards and sits on the mounting pole in each corner with the pins for the LCD just protruding through the appropriate holes in the PCB ready to be quickly soldered into place (this took significant iteration and tuning of dimensions/positioning to achieve!). Finally, a back panel can be attached which holds the PCB in place and uses cantilever snap joints to click on to the rest of the case. Overall the design is a huge improvement over the previous case which required screws and spacers to position the PCB and cover relative to the rest of the case, with the spacers and screws being particularly fiddly to work with. The major concern I had with the new design was that the mount to attach the monitor to the wall has moved from being attached to the main case and components directly to needing to be on the removable back panel - if the clips holding this panel to the case fail the core part of the monitor will fall off the wall which would not be good. To guard against this I ve doubled the size and number of clips at the top of the case (which bears the weight) and the result seems very robust in my testing. To completely assemble a monitor, including the soldering step takes me about 2-3 minutes individually, and would be even quicker if working in batches.

Production Given the number of design/testing iterations required to fine tune the case I chose not to outsource case production for now and used my 3D printer to produce them. I ve successfully used JLCPCB s 3D printing service for the previous case design, so I m confident that getting sufficient cases printed from JLCPCB or another supplier will not be an issue now that the design is finalised. I tried a variety of filament colours, but settled on a transparent filament which once combined in the necessary layers to form the case is not actually transparent like perspex is, but provides a nice translucent medium which achieves the goal of having the light colour visible without exposing all of the circuit board detail. There s room for future improvement in the positioning of the LEDs on the circuit board to provide a more even distribution of light across the case but overall I really like the way the completed monitor ends up looking.

Evaluation Building this monitor has been a really fun project, both in seeing something progress from an idea, to plans on a screen to a nice physical thing on my wall, but also in learning and developing a bunch of new skills in PCB design, assembly and 3D design. The goal of having a CO2 monitor which I can outsource the vast majority of production of is as close to being met as I think is possible without undertaking the final proof of placing a large order. I ve satisfied myself that each step is feasible and that the final assembly process is quick, easy and well below the level of effort and time it was taking me to produce the original monitors. Cost wise it s also a huge win, primarily in terms of the time taken, but also in the raw components - currently the five prototypes I ordered and built are on par with the component cost of the original CO2 monitor, but this will drop further with larger orders due to price breaks and amortisation of the setup and shipping expenses across more monitors. This project has also given me a much better appreciation for how much I m only just scratching the surface of the potential complexities and challenges in producing a hardware product of this type. I m reasonably confident I could successfully produce a few hundred and maybe even a few thousand monitors using this approach, but it s also clear that getting beyond that point is and would be a whole further level of effort and learning. Hardware is hard work. That s not news to anyone, including me, but there is something to be said for experiencing the process first hand to make the reality of what s required real. The PCB and case designs are both shared and can be found at https://github.com/co2monnz/co2monitor-pcb and https://github.com/co2monnz/cad, feedback and suggestions welcome!

Crossing the ocean of stars we leave our home behind us.
We are the spears cast at the furious heaven
And we will burn one by one into ashes
As with the last sparks we vanish.
This memory we carry to our own death which awaits us
And from which none of us will return.
Do not forget. Goodbye forever.

1. Plug both your Solo V2 and your OpenPGP smartcard
2. To get a list of the tokens scdaemon sees, run the following command: $ echo scd getinfo reader_list gpg-connect-agent --decode awk '/^D/ print $2 '
3. Identify your OpenPGP smartcard. For example, my Nitrokey Start is listed as 20A0:4211:FSIJ-1.2.15-43211613:0
4. Create a file in ~/.gnupg/scdaemon.conf with the following line reader-port $YOUR_TOKEN_ID. For example, in my case I have: reader-port 20A0:4211:FSIJ-1.2.15-43211613:0
5. Reload scdaemon: $ gpgconf --reload scdaemon

Demonetization 2.0 Few days back, India announced demonetization 2.0. Surprised, don t be. Apparently, INR 2k/- is being used for corruption and Mr. Modi is unhappy about it. He actually didn t like the INR 2k/- note but was told that it was needed, who told him we are unaware to date. At that time the RBI Governor was Mr. Urjit Patel who didn t say about INR 2k/- he had said that INR 1k/- note redesigned would come in the market. That has yet to happen. What has happened is that just like INR 500/- and INR 1k/- note is concerned, RBI will no longer honor the INR 2k/- note. Obviously, this has made our neighbors angry, namely Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan etc. who do some trading with us. 2 Deccan herald columns share the limelight on it. Apparently, India wants to be the world s currency reserve but doesn t want to play by the rules for everyone else. It was pointed out that both the U.S. and Singapore had retired their currencies but they will honor that promise even today. The Singapore example being a bit closer (as it s in Asia) is perhaps a bit more relevant than the U.S. one. Singapore retired the SGD $10,000 as of 2014 but even in 2022, it remains as legal tender. They also retired the SGD $1,000 in 2020 but still remains legal tender.

So let s have a fictitious example to illustrate what is meant by what Singapore has done. Let s say I go to Singapore, rent a flat, and find a $1000 note in that house somewhere. Both practically and theoretically, I could go down to any of the banks, get the amount transferred to my wallet, bank account etc. and nobody will question. Because they have promised the same. Interestingly, the Singapore Dollar has been pretty resilient against the USD for quite a number of years vis-a-vis other Asian currencies. Most of the INR 2k/- notes were also found and exchanged in Gujarat in just a few days (The PM and HM s state.). I am sure you are looking into the mental gymnastics that the RW indulge in :(. What is sadder that most of the people who try to defend can t make sense one way or the other and start to name-call and get personal as they have nothing else

Disability questions dropped in NHFS-6 Just came to know today that in the upcoming National Family Health Survey-6 disability questions are being dropped. Why is this important. To put it simply, if you don t have numbers, you won t and can t make policies for them. India is one of the worst countries to live if you are disabled. The easiest way to share to draw attention is most Railway platforms are not at level with people. Just as Mick Lynch shares in the UK, the same is pretty much true for India too. Meanwhile in Europe, they do make an effort to be level so even disabled people have some dignity. If your public transport is sorted, then people would want much more and you will be obligated to provide for them as they are citizens. Here, we have had many reports of women being sexually molested when being transferred from platform to coach irrespective of their age or whatnot The main takeaway is if you do not have their voice, you won t make policies for them. They won t go away but you will make life hell for them. One thing to keep in mind that most people assume that most people are disabled from birth. This may or may not be true. For e.g. in the above triple Railways accidents, there are bound to be disabled people or newly disabled people who were healthy before the accident. The most common accident is road accidents, some involving pedestrians and vehicles or both, the easiest is Ministry of Road Transport data that says 4,00,000 people sustained injuries in 2021 alone in road mishaps. And this is in a country where even accidents are highly under-reported, for more than one reason. The biggest reason especially in 2 and 4 wheeler is the increased premium they would have to pay if in an accident, so they usually compromise with the other and pay off the Traffic Inspector. Sadly, I haven t read a new book, although there are a few books I m looking forward to have. People living in India and neighbors please be careful as more heat waves are expected. Till later.

Welcome to the May 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

When using open-source NPM packages, most developers download prebuilt packages on npmjs.com instead of building those packages from available source, and implicitly trust the downloaded packages. However, it is unknown whether the blindly trusted prebuilt NPM packages are reproducible (i.e., whether there is always a verifiable path from source code to any published NPM package). [ ] We downloaded versions/releases of 226 most popularly used NPM packages and then built each version with the available source on GitHub. Next, we applied a differencing tool to compare the versions we built against versions downloaded from NPM, and further inspected any reported difference.

• If binwalk is not available, ensure the user knows they may be missing more info. [ ]
• Factor out generating a human-readable comment when missing a Python module. [ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Alper Nebi Yasak:
  • #1035375 filed against mtools (forwarded upstream).
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • snobol4 (datetime-related issue)
  • python310 (.pyc ordering issue)
  • xmvn (randomised issue)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1036220 filed against refnx.
  • #1036221 filed against mfem.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1035365 filed against lombok.
  • #1035394 filed against lcov.
  • #1035400 filed against lucene8.
  • #1035405 filed against bnd.
  • #1035630 filed against clc-intercal.
  • #1035704 filed against proj.
  • #1036367 filed against gcc-13.
  • #1036521 filed against pygopherd.
  • #1036522 filed against pytorch-audio.
  • #1036571 & #1036572 filed against vcmi.
  • #1036939 filed against proj.

In addition, Jason A. Donenfeld filed a bug (now fixed in the latest alpha version) in the Android issue tracker to report that generateLocaleConfig in Android Gradle Plugin version 8.1.0 generates XML files using non-deterministic ordering, breaking reproducible builds. [ ]

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Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Update the kernel configuration of arm64 nodes only put required modules in the initrd to save space in the /boot partition. [ ]
• A huge number of changes to a new tool to document/track Jenkins node maintenance, including adding --fetch, --help, --no-future and --verbose options [ ][ ][ ][ ] as well as adding a suite of new actions, such as apt-upgrade, command, deploy-git, rmstamp, etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ] in addition a significant amount of refactoring [ ][ ][ ][ ].
• Issue warnings if apt has updates to install. [ ]
• Allow Jenkins to run apt get update in maintenance job. [ ]
• Installed bind9-dnsutils on some Ubuntu 18.04 nodes. [ ][ ]
• Fixed the Jenkins shell monitor to correctly deal with little-used directories. [ ]
• Updated the node health check to warn when apt upgrades are available. [ ]
• Performed some node maintenance. [ ]

In addition, Vagrant Cascadian added the nocheck, nopgo and nolto when building gcc-* and binutils packages [ ] as well as performed some node maintenance [ ][ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus updated the openQA configuration to specify longer timeouts and access to the developer mode [ ] and updated the URL used for reproducible Debian Live images [ ].

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If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

• Archives can be restored using Linux or Windows (even though I don t use Windows, this requirement will ensure the broadest compatibility in the future)
• The archival system must be able to accommodate periodic updates consisting of new files, deleted files, moved files, and modified files, without requiring a rewrite of the entire archive dataset
• Archives can ideally be mounted on any common OS and the component files directly copied off
• Redundancy must be possible. In the worst case, one could manually copy one drive/disc to another. Ideally, the archiving system would automatically track making n copies of data.
• While a full restore may be a goal, simply finding one file or one directory may also be a goal. Ideally, an archiving system would be able to quickly tell me which discs/drives contain a given file.
• Ideally, preserves as much POSIX metadata as possible (hard links, symlinks, modification date, permissions, etc). However, for the archiving case, this is less important than for the backup case, with the possible exception of modification date.
• Must be easy enough to do, and sufficiently automatable, to allow frequent updates without error-prone or time-consuming manual hassle

• Dar can both read and write files sequentially (streaming, like tar), or with random-access (quick seek to extract a subset without having to read the entire archive)
• Dar can apply compression to individual files, rather than to the archive as a whole, faciliting both random access and resilience (corruption in one file doesn t invalidate all subsequent files). Dar also supports numerous compression algorithms including gzip, bzip2, xz, lzo, etc., and can omit compressing already-compressed files.
• The end of each dar file contains a central directory (dar calls this a catalog). The catalog contains everything necessary to extract individual files from the archive quickly, as well as everything necessary to make a future incremental archive based on this one. Additionally, dar can make and work with isolated catalogs a file containing the catalog only, without data.
• Dar can split the archive into multiple pieces called slices. This can best be done with fixed-size slices ( slice and first-slice options), which let the catalog regord the slice number and preserves random access capabilities. With the execute option, dar can easily wait for a given slice to be burned, etc.
• Dar normally stores an entire new copy of a modified file, but can optionally store an rdiff binary delta instead. This has the potential to be far smaller (think of a case of modifying metadata for a photo, for instance).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Das is nicht gut.

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

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

Thank you to Holger for organising this event yet again!