For the fourth year in a row, I've asked Soci t de Transport de Montr al, Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic.

• Orange line (top10)
• Green line (top10)
• Blue line
• Yellow line
• Global Top 10

Licences

• The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
• The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. I re-used last's year converter script and although I had to clean some of the data by hand, it worked pretty well.

With the end of the year approaching fast, I thought putting my year in retrospective via music would be a fun thing to do. Albums In 2022, I added 51 new albums to my collection nearly one a week! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them. I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available¹. Browsing through the albums, I can see my tastes really shifted a lot in the last few years. I used to listen to a lot of Hip-Hop, but the recent trends in this genre² really turn me off. In fact, it seems I didn't add a single Hip-Hop album to my collection this year... Metal also continues to dominate the list. Many thanks to Angry Metal Guy for being the best metal reviewing website out there. Concerts 2022 was also a big change for me, as I started going to much more concerts than I previously did. metalfinder has been working great and I'm really happy with it. Here are the concerts I went to in 2022:

• April 26th: Arch Enemy, Unto Others, Behemoth, Napalm Death
• September 16th: NOFX
• November 4th: Aeternam
• November 7th: Jordi Savall & Hesp rion XXI
• November 13th: VOLA
• November 19th: Vulgaires Machins, Anti-Flag
• November 26th: Soen
• December 12h: Oddisee
• December 16th: Jail, B ton Arm , Reckless Upstarts, Union Thugs, La Gachette

I'm looking forward continuing to go to a lot of concerts in 2023!

Review: Trust, by Mary Sisson

Series:	Trang #2
Publisher:	Mary Sisson
Copyright:	2012
Printing:	December 2013
ASIN:	B0087KQDQ0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	375

Trust is a direct sequel to Trang and should not be read out of order. Both the primary and secondary plot deal with the consequences of the ending of Trang and thus spoil it heavily. After a dodgy and unethical debriefing under mental probe (which took far too long to become relevant to the story) Philippe Trang is back at work as the human diplomat to a space station full of aliens in intergalactic space. At first, interspecies relations have not changed much, but soon Philippe will be drawn farther into the consequences of Trang's dramatic conclusion than he would have expected. And there are other complications: a new group of Special Forces soldiers, an extremely grumpy alien who disapproves of his species' current culture, and the continuing incomprehensible behavior of the Magic Man. I was hoping this series would be a hidden gem of diplomatic SF, a subgenre that I want to exist. Unfortunately, this entry takes a strong turn towards more conventional territory: a Star Trek plot. One of the merits of the first novel is that Trang, and the humans in general, didn't have much power. Humans were meeting aliens as equals or inferiors, and both sides were attempting to understand. Although the humans became central to the plot (probably unavoidable when they're the protagonists), it was somewhat by accident. I was hoping Sisson would lean into that setup, stress the equal footing, and focus on the complex diplomacy. Instead, Trust puts Trang in a position of considerable authority over one of the alien races. Like most Star Trek plots, this book is primarily about mapping strange alien behavior onto human morality to solve the problem of the week. As an entry in that genre, it's... okay. I still like Trang as a character, Sisson does an adequate job showing how weird aliens can be (although mostly by jumbling together extremes of human behavior instead of finding something truly alien), and the opinions of the aliens continue to matter. But I feel like this series is sliding towards making the humans central to everything, and I was not enthused by a plot that requires Trang sort out complex political problems for an entire alien race he knows next to nothing about. This book also adds more viewpoints, giving us several chapters from the perspective of one of Trang's escort soldiers and one from one of the aliens. I liked the alien perspective; it was probably the best chapter of the book. Seeing the human characters from an external perspective was amusing, and I liked how both the humans and the aliens surprised and confused each other. That said, it also felt like a bit of a cheat to tell the reader about the cultural forces at play that Trang was missing. I already thought Trang was being exceptionally dim about the alien gifts he was given, pocketing them without attempting to understand them and then never studying them later. Being shown more things he should have tried to figure out didn't help. You're a diplomat in an extended first contact situation: please have some basic curiosity about what's going on and talk it over with the people around you, rather than treating aliens like children. The soldier perspective adds a secondary plot that was okay but a bit silly, and I'm not sure why Sisson needed to introduce a second perspective to tell it. I think the same secondary plot would have been more interesting if she'd stuck with Trang's perspective and forced him to reconstruct what had been happening when he wasn't paying attention. As is, the plot relied too much on people being stupid and not talking to each other. There was nothing seriously wrong with this book, but it's also not fulfilling the potential of the first book of the series. It felt like okay self-published science fiction; that's not nothing, but there are a lot of books like that, and I wanted diplomatic science fiction that goes somewhere different. I may give the third book a chance, but I'm feeling less enthused now. Followed by Tribulations. Rating: 6 out of 10

This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022. Many thanks to those who participated, namely:

• tienne Mollier (emollier)
• Taihsiang Ho (tai271828)
• Athos Ribeiro (athos)
• Stuart Prescott (stuart)
• Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo)
• Ileana Dumitrescu (ildumi)
• James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
• Emmanuel Arias (eamanu)
• Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
• Mohammed Bilal (rmb)
• Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
• Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)

Here is a list of issues we worked on: pybuild autodep8 feature About a year ago, Antonio Terceiro contributed code to pybuild to make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests. This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list relatively soon. Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build. Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature is removed from pybuild. if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Fixing packages that use nose nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015. During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240 packages affected by this issue in the archive. Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Removal of the remaining Python2 packages With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in sid/bullseye" bug. It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2 removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the Bookworm release. Working on Lintian tags for the Team During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had targeted, namely:

• the addition of a "missing-cpython-extension" tag to flag packages that do not build CPython extensions for all the supported Python versions.
• fixing a false-positive in the "missing-prerequisite-for-pyproject-backend" tag.

I also worked on a few other Lintian tags, but they were unrelated to the Debian Python Team itself. I'm also happy to report many of the tags I wrote for the team in the past few months were merged by the awesome Russ Allbery and should land in unstable as soon as a new release is made. I'm particularly looking forward the new "uses-python-distutils" tag that should help us flag packages that still use the deprecated distutils library. Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when a MR is opened. Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed. During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page. Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in python3-selenium has broken the test suite. Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now. As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release. To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful of packages that were not team-maintained. Other work Many other things were done during the sprint, such as:

• improving existing packages (for example, adding or fixing autopkgtests)
• triaging and fixing Python 3.11 bugs
• updating packages to the latest upstream release
• sponsoring uploads

Thanks Thanks again to everyone who joined the sprint, and three big cheers for all the folks who donate to Debian and made it possible for us to have a food budget for the event.

The Debian Videoteam has been sprinting in Cape Town, South Africa -- mostly because with Stefano here for a few months, four of us (Jonathan, Kyle, Stefano, and myself) actually are in the country on a regular basis. In addition to that, two more members of the team (Nicolas and Louis-Philippe) are joining the sprint remotely (from Paris and Montreal). (Kyle and Stefano working on things, with me behind the camera and Jonathan busy elsewhere.) We've made loads of progress! Some highlights:

• We did a lot of triaging of outstanding bugs and merge requests against our ansible repository. Stale issues were closed, merge requests have been merged (or closed when they weren't relevant anymore), and new issues that we found while working on them were fixed. We also improved our test coverage for some of our ansible roles, and modernized as well as improved the way our documentation is built. (Louis-Philippe, Stefano, Kyle, Wouter, Nicolas)
• Some work was done on SReview, our video review and transcode tool: I fixed up the metadata export code and did some other backend work, while Stefano worked a bit on the frontend, bringing it up to date to use bootstrap 4, and adding client-side filtering using vue. Future work on this will allow editing various things from the webinterface -- currently that requires issuing SQL commands directly. (Wouter and Stefano)
• Jonathan explored new features in OBS. We've been using OBS for our "loopy" setup since DebConf20, which is used for the slightly more interactive sponsor loop that is shown in between talks. The result is that we'll be able to simplify and improve that setup in future (mini)DebConf instances. (Jonathan)
• Kyle had a look at options for capturing hardware. We currently use Opsis boards, but they are not an ideal solution, and we are exploring alternatives. (Kyle)
• Some package uploads happened! libmedia-convert-perl will now (hopefully) migrate to testing; and if all goes well, a new version of SReview will be available in unstable soon.

The sprint isn't over yet (we're continuing until Sunday), but loads of things have already happened. Stay tuned!

Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent bookstore, in Montr al. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written with Rebecca Giblin¹. Titled Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, it focuses on the impact of monopolies and monopsonies (more on this later) on creative workers. The book is divided in two main parts:

• Part one, Culture has been captured (chapters 1 to 11), is a series of case studies that focus on different examples of market failure. The specific sectors analysed are the book market, the news media, the music industry, Hollywood, the mobile apps industry and the online video platforms.
• Part two, Braking anticompetitive flywheels (chapters 12 to 19), looks at different solutions to try to fix these failures.

Although Doctorow is known for his strong political stances, I have to say I'm quite surprised by the quality of the research Giblin and he did for this book. They both show a pretty advanced understanding of the market dynamics they look at, and even though most of the solutions they propose aren't new or groundbreaking, they manage to be convincing and clear. That is to say, you certainly don't need to be an economist to understand or enjoy this book :) As I have mentioned before, the book heavily criticises monopolies, but also monopsonies a market structure that has only one buyer (instead of one seller). I find this quite interesting, as whereas people are often familiar with the concept of monopolies, monopsonies are frequently overlooked. The classic example of a monopsony is a labor market with a single employer: there is a multitude of workers trying to sell their labor power, but in the end, working conditions are dictated by the sole employer, who gets to decide who has a job and who hasn't. Mining towns are good real-world examples of monopsonies. In the book, the authors argue most of the contemporary work produced by creative workers (especially musicians and writers) is sold to monopsonies and oligopsonies, like Amazon² or major music labels. This creates a situation where the consumers are less directly affected by the lack of competition in the market (they often get better prices), but where creators have an increasingly hard time making ends meet. Not only this, but natural monopsonies³ are relatively rare, making the case for breaking the existing ones even stronger. Apart from the evident need to actually start applying (the quite good) antitrust laws in the USA, some of the other solutions put forward are:

• Transparency Rights giving creative workers a way to audit the companies that sell their work and make sure they are paid what they are due.
• Collective Action
• Time Limits on Copyright Contracts making sure creators that sell their copyrights to publishers or labels can get them back after a reasonable period of time.
• Radical Interoperability forcing tech giants to make their walled-gardens interoperable.
• Minimum Wages for Creative Work enforcing minimum legal rates for workers in certain domains, like what is already done for screenplays in the US by members of the Writers Guild of America.
• Collective Ownership

Overall, I found this book quite enjoying and well written. Since I am not a creative worker myself and don't experience first-hand the hardships presented in the book, it was the occasion for me to delve more deeply in this topic. Chances are I'll reuse some of the expos s in my classes too.

Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday October 30th to chat, work on Debian and do other, non-Debian related hacking :) This time around, we met at EfficiOS's¹ offices. As you can see from the following picture, it's a great place and the view they have is pretty awesome. Many thanks for hosting us! This was our 4th meeting this year and once again, attendance was great: 10 people showed up to work on various things. Following our bi-monthly schedule, our next meeting should be in December, but I'm not sure it'll happen. December can be a busy month here and I will have to poke our mailing list to see if people have the spoons for an event. This time around, I was able to get a rough log of the Debian work people did: pollo:

• followed up with the DPL for upcoming Debian Python Team Sprint
• opened a wishlist bug (#1023140) on the devscripts package for uscan to verify git tags signed with SSH keys
• updated python-mediafile and mutagen to the latest upstream version

mjeanson:

• fixed RC bug #1022419 on babeltrace
• kindly hosted us, with the help of Mathieu Desnoyers

viashimo:

• started updating puppet-strings to 3.0.1
• was blocked in the process by tests requiring ruby-mdl, which is not packaged yet
• was blocked in packaging ruby-mdl by rubocop not being >= ~1.2x

lavamind:

• updated jnffi to 1.3.9, as part of the work on jruby he's been doing

anarcat:

• updated g10k to latest upstream

babelouest:

• updated node-jose to 4.10.4
• worked on bug #1021779 in libical3

tvaz:

• worked on updating apticron

As always, thanks to the Debian project for granting us a budget to buy some food!

I've been a fan of the products manufactured by Schiit Audio for a while now. They are affordable (for high-end audio gear), sound great, are made in the USA¹ and I think their industrial design looks great. I first started with one of their classic "Schiit Stack"², but eventually upgraded to the Modi Multibit (I wanted the TOSLINK input), added a physical EQ (the Loki) and eventually got a Sys when I bought a Vidar speaker amp. The original Schiit Stack being 2 devices high was pretty manageable as-is. With my current 4-high stack though, things became unstable and I had to resort to finding a way to bolt them together. Mooching from a friend with a 3D printer, I printed this clever mount from Thingiverse. It worked well enough, but was somewhat imperfect for multiple reasons:

1. The plastic tabs had a tendency of breaking in two when the screws where tight enough for the stack to feel solid.
2. The plastic wasn't really rigid enough to support the 4 devices properly and the stack, being back-heavy from the cables, was unstable and tipped over easily.
3. Due to the plastic tabs being fragile, it was pretty much impossible to disassemble the stack.

This last issue was what killed this solution for me. When I tried to replace my Modi 2 by the Modi Multibit, the mount pretty much crumbled away. Sadly, my friend warped a bunch of pieces on his 3D printer while trying to print ABS and I couldn't have him print me replacement parts either. After a while, I grew tired of having these four devices laying around my desk and wasting valuable space. I had tasted the 4-stack and knew how better things could be! That's when I realised the solution was to ditch 3D printing altogether, use aluminum framing extrusions and build my own stack out of metal. This was my first time working with aluminium frame extrusions and I had tons of fun! I specced the first version using 10mm x 10mm rails from McMaster-Carr, but discovered they do not ship to residential addresses in Canada... After looking at local options, I then decided to use 15mm x 15mm rails from Misumi. I went with this option since the rails are still small enough not to be an eyesore, but also because this system uses M3 screws, which the Schiit mini series also uses, making assembly much easier. I choose to make the assembled stack quite a bit taller than the previous one made with 3D printed plastic, as I found the headphone amp got pretty hot during the summer and I wanted to provide better airflow. If you are interested in replicating this stack, here are the parts I used, all from Misumi:

• 4 x HFS3-1515 230mm long rails
• 16 x HPTBS3 brackets
• 1 x pack of HNSQ3-3 M3 framing nuts

I didn't order any since I had some already, but you'll also need M3 screws, namely:

• 16 x M3-10 screws, to replace the ones in the Schiit devices
• 16 x M3-6 screws, for the aluminium framing brackets

You can also cheap out and use only M3-10 screws (as I did), but you'll have to use the extra nuts you ordered as spacers. For the curious ones, the cabling is done this way: The Vidar is not part of the actual stack, as it's a 600W amp that weights 10kg :D. The last thing I think I want to change in this setup is the cables. The ones I have are too long for the stack. Shorter ones would reduce the wasted space in the back and make the whole thing more elegant.

Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday August 28th¹ at the very hackish Foulab for the August 2022 edition of our "Debian & Stuff" meetings. As always, the event was a success and we had lots of fun. Nine people showed up, including some new faces and people I hadn't seen in a while: On my side, although I was badly sleep-deprived ², I still managed to be somewhat productive! One of the WiFi Access Points we use in our 4-apartment LAN had been boot-looping for a few weeks, after a failed sysupgrade to the latest version of OpenWRT. lavamind and I suspect the flash got corrupted in a way or another during the upgrade process... Lucky for us, this model has a serial port and runs U-Boot. After a bit of tinkering, some electrical tape and two different serial adapters³, we managed to identify the pin layout and got a shell on the machine. The device has a reset button, but since the kernel panic was happening too soon in the boot process, we weren't able to get into OpenWRT's failsafe mode this way. Once we had serial access, wiping the flash and re-installing OpenWRT fixed our problem. A quick ansible-playbook run later, the device was back to being usable and configured :) I was too tired to keep track of what others did, but I took some nice pictures of the pizza we got, and of this nice blow-up Tux wearing a Foulab t-shirt. Enjoy! As always, thanks to the Debian project for granting us a budget to rent the venue and to buy some food.

Review: Trang, by Mary Sisson

Series:	Trang #1
Publisher:	Mary Sisson
Copyright:	2011
Printing:	December 2013
ASIN:	B004I6DAQ8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	374

In 2113, a radio mapping satellite near the Titan station disappeared. It then reappeared five days later, apparently damaged and broadcasting a signal that made computers crash. The satellite was immediately sent back to the Space Authority base in Beijing for careful examination, but the techs on the station were able to decode the transmission: a request for the contents of databases. The general manager of the station sent a probe to the same location and it too vanished, returning two days later with a picture of a portal, followed shortly by an alien probe. Five years later, Philippe Trang has been assigned as the first human diplomat to an alien space station in intergalactic space at the nexus of multiple portals. Humans will apparently be the eighth type of intelligent life to send a representative to the station. He'll have a translation system, a security detail, and the groundwork of five years of audiovisual communications with the aliens, including one that was able to learn English. But he'll be the first official diplomatic representative physically there. The current style in SF might lead you to expect a tense thriller full of nearly incomprehensible aliens, unexplained devices, and creepy mysteries. This is not that sort of book. The best comparison point I could think of is James White's Sector General novels, except with a diplomat rather than a doctor. The aliens are moderately strange (not just humans in prosthetic makeup), but are mostly earnest, well-meaning, and welcoming. Trang's security escort is more military than he expects, but that becomes a satisfying negotiation rather than an ongoing problem. There is confusion, misunderstandings, and even violence, but most of it is sorted out by earnest discussion and attempts at mutual understanding. This is, in other words, diplomat competence porn (albeit written by someone who is not a diplomat, so I wouldn't expect too much realism). Trang defuses rather than confronts, patiently sorts through the nuances of a pre-existing complex dynamic between aliens without prematurely picking sides, and has the presence of mind to realize that the special forces troops assigned to him are another culture he needs to approach with the same skills. Most of the book is low-stakes confusion, curiosity, and careful exploration, which could have been boring but wasn't. It helps that Sisson packs a lot of complexity into the station dynamics and reveals it in ways that I found enjoyably unpredictable. Some caveats: This is a self-published first novel (albeit by an experienced reporter and editor) and it shows. The book has a sort of plastic Technicolor feel that I sometimes see in self-published novels, where the details aren't quite deep enough, the writing isn't quite polished, and the dialog isn't quite as tight as I'm used to. It also meanders in a way that few commercial novels do, including slice-of-life moments and small asides that don't go anywhere. This can be either a bug or a feature depending on what you're in the mood for. I found it relaxing and stress-relieving, which is what I was looking for, but you may have a different experience. I will warn that the climax features a sudden escalation of stakes that I don't think was sufficiently signaled by the tone of the writing, and thus felt a bit unreal. Sisson also includes a couple deus ex machina twists that felt a bit predictable and easy, and I didn't find the implied recent history of one of the alien civilizations that believable. The conclusion is therefore not the strongest part of the book; if you're not enjoying the journey, it probably won't get better. But, all that said, this was fun, and I've already bought the second book in the series. It's low-stakes, gentle SF with a core of discovery and exploration rather than social dynamics, and I haven't run across much of that recently. The worst thing in the book is some dream glimpses at a horrific event in Trang's past that's never entirely on camera. It's not as pacifist as James White, but it's close. Recommended, especially if you liked Sector General. White's series is so singular that I previously would have struggled to find a suggestion for someone who wanted more exactly like that (but without the Bewitched-era sexism). Now I have an answer. Score another one for Susan Stepney, who is also how I found Julie Czerneda. Trang is also currently free for Kindle, so you can't beat the price. Followed by Trust. Rating: 8 out of 10

As planned, we held our second local Debian meeting of the year last Sunday. We met at the lovely Eastern Bloc (an artists' hacklab) to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise. Although there were fewer people than at our last meeting¹, we still did a lot of work! I worked on fixing a bunch of bugs in Clojure packages², LeLutin worked on podman and packaged libinfluxdb-http-perl and anarcat worked on internetarchive, trocla and moneta. Olivier also came by and worked on debugging his Kali install. We are planning to have our next meeting at the end of August. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec's Agenda du libre. Many thanks to Debian for providing us a budget to rent the venue for the day and for the pizza! Here is a nice picture anarcat took of (one of) the glasses of porter we had afterwards, at the next door brewery:

A short while after getting a Pixel 3a, I decided to root it, mostly to have more control over the charging procedure. In order to preserve battery life, I like my phone to stop charging at around 75% of full battery capacity and to shut down automatically at around 12%. Some Android ROMs have extra settings to manage this, but LineageOS unfortunately does not. Android already comes with a fairly complex mechanism to handle the charge cycle, but it is mostly controlled by the kernel and cannot be easily configured by end-users. acc is a higher-level "systemless" interface for the Android kernel battery management, but one needs root to do anything interesting with it. Once rooted, you can use the AccA app instead of playing on the command line to fine tune your battery settings. Sadly, having a rooted phone also means I need to re-root it each time there is an OS update (typically each week). Somehow, I keep forgetting the exact procedure to do this! Hopefully, I will be able to use this post as a reference in the future :) Note that these instructions might not apply to your exact phone model, proceed with caution! Extract the boot.img file This procedure mostly comes from the LineageOS documentation on extracting proprietary blobs from the payload.

1. Download the latest LineageOS image for your phone.
2. unzip the image to get the payload.bin file inside it.
3. Clone the LineageOS scripts git repository: $ git clone https://github.com/LineageOS/scripts
4. extract the boot image (requires python3-protobuf): $ mkdir extracted-payload $ python3 scripts/update-payload-extractor/extract.py payload.bin --output_dir extracted-payload

You should now have a boot.img file. Patch the boot image file using Magisk

1. Upload the boot.img file you previously extracted to your device.
2. Open Magisk and patch the boot.img file.
3. Download the patched file back on your computer.

Flash the patched boot image

1. Enable ADB debug mode on your phone.
2. Reboot into fastboot mode. $ adb reboot fastboot
3. Flash the patched boot image file: $ fastboot flash boot magisk_patched-foo.img
4. Disable ADB debug mode on your phone.

Troubleshooting In an ideal world, you would do this entire process each time you upgrade to a new LineageOS version. Sadly, this creates friction and makes updating much more troublesome. To simplify things, you can try to flash an old patched boot.img file after upgrading, instead of generating it each time. In my experience, it usually works. When it does not, the device behaves weirdly after a reboot and things that require proprietary blobs (like WiFi) will stop working. If that happens:

1. Download the latest LineageOS version for your phone.
2. Reboot into recovery (Power + Volume Down).
3. Click on "Apply Updates"
4. Sideload the ROM: $ adb sideload lineageos-foo.zip

After going to an incredible Arch Enemy / Behemoth / Napalm Death / Unto Others concert a few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to go to more concerts. I like music, and I really enjoy concerts. Sadly, I often miss great performances because no one told me about it, or my local newspaper didn't cover the event enough in advance for me to get tickets. Some online services lets you sync your Spotify account to notify you when a new concert is announced, but I don't use Spotify. As a music geek, I have a local music collection and if I need to stream it, I have a supysonic server. Introducing metalfinder, a cli tool to find concerts using your local music collection! At the moment, it scans your music collection, creates a list of artists and queries Bandsintown for concerts in your town. Multiple output formats are supported, but I mainly use the ATOM one, as I'm a heavy feed reader user. The current metalfinder version (1.1.1) is a MVP: it works well enough, but I still have a lot of work to do... If you want to give it a try, the easiest way is to download it from PyPi. metalfinder is also currently in NEW and I'm planning to have something feature complete in time for the Bookworm freeze.

This is the report for the Debian Clojure Team remote sprint that took place on May 13-14th. Looking at my previous blog entries, this was my first Debian sprint since July 2020! Crazy how fast time flies... Many thanks to those who participated, namely:

• Rob Browning (rlb)
• Elana Hashman (ehashman)
• J r me Charaoui (lavamind)
• Leandro Doctors (allentiak)
• Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo)

Sadly, Utkarsh Gupta although having planned on participating ended up not being able to and worked on DebConf Bursary paperwork instead. rlb Rob mostly worked on creating a dh-clojure tool to help make packaging Clojure libraries easier. At the moment, most of the packaging is done manually, by invoking build tools by hand. Having a tool to automate many of the steps required to build Clojure packages would go a long way in making them more uniform. His work (although still very much a WIP) can be found here: https://salsa.debian.org/rlb/dh-clojure/ ehashman Elana:

• Finished the Java Team VCS migration to the Clojure Team namespace.
• Worked on updating Leiningen to 2.9.8.
• Proposed an upstream dependency update in Leiningen to match Debian's most recent version.
• Gave pollo Owner access on the Clojure Team namespace and added lavamind as a Developer.
• Uploaded Clojure 1.10.3-1.
• Updated sjacket-clojure to version 0.1.1.1 and uploaded it to experimental.
• Added build tests to spec-alpha-clojure.
• Filed bug #1010995 for missing test dependency for Clojure.
• Closed bugs #976151, #992735 and #992736.

lavamind It was J r me's first time working on Clojure packages, and things went great! During the sprint, he:

• Joined the Clojure Team on salsa.
• Identified missing dependencies to update puppetdb to the 7.x release.
• Learned how to package Clojure libraries in Debian.
• Packaged murphy-clojure, truss-clojure and encore-clojure and uploaded them to NEW.
• Began to package nippy-clojure.

allentiak Leandro joined us on Saturday, since he couldn't get off work on Friday. He mostly continued working on replacing our in-house scripts for /usr/bin/clojure by upstream's, a task he had already started during GSoC 2021. Sadly, none of us were familiar with Debian's mechanism for alternatives. If you (yes you, dear reader) are familiar with it, I'm sure he would warmly welcome feedback on his development branch. pollo As for me, I:

• Fixed a classpath bug in core-async-clojure that was breaking other libraries.
• Added meaningful autopkgtests to core-async-clojure.
• Uploaded new versions of tools-analyzer-clojure and trapperkeeper-clojure with autopkgtests.
• Updated pomegranate-clojure and nrepl-clojure to the latest upstream version and revamped the way they were packaged.
• Assisted lavamind with Clojure packaging.

Overall, it was quite a productive sprint! Thanks to Debian for sponsoring our food during the sprint. It was nice to be able to concentrate on fixing things instead of making food :) Here's a bonus picture of the nice sushi platter I ended up getting for dinner on Saturday night:

After two long years of COVID hiatus, local Debian events in Montreal are back! Last Sunday, nine of us met at Koumbit to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise. Even though these events aren't always the most productive, it was super fun and definitely helps keeping me motivated to work on Debian in my spare time. Many thanks to Debian for providing us a budget to rent the venue for the day and for the pizzas! Here are a few pictures I took during the event: If everything goes according to plan, our next meeting should be sometime in June. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec's Agenda du libre.

I'm happy to announce the Debian Clojure Team will hold a remote sprint from May 13th to May 14th 2022. The goal of this sprint is to improve various aspects of the Clojure ecosystem in Debian. As such, everyone is welcome to participate! Here are a few items we are planning to work on, in no particular order:

• Update leiningen to the latest upstream version, to let some libraries in experimental migrate to unstable.
• Work towards replacing our custom Clojure script with upstream's and package clj clojure-cli.
• Update clojure to the latest upstream version.
• Work on debugging autopkgtest failures on a bunch of puppetlabs-* libraries.
• Work on lintian tags for the Clojure Team.

You can register for the sprint on the Debian Wiki. We are planning to ask the DPL for a food budget. If you plan on joining and want your food to be sponsored, please register before April 2nd.

I first started using ledger the original plain-text accounting software in 2017. Since then, I had been pretty happy with my accounting routine, but grew a little annoyed by the repetitive manual work I had to do to assign recurring transactions to the right account. To make things easier, I had a collection of bash scripts to parse and convert the CSV files from my bank's website¹ into ledger entries. They were of course ugly, unreadable piles of sed-grep-regex and did not let met achieve the automation complexity I longed for. Dissatisfied with ledger's features, I decided to migrate to hledger. Contrary to ledger, hledger comes with a CSV parser one can use to import and classify recurring transactions automagically. Having a proper DSL for this makes all the difference: I can easily add new rules and understand the old ones. In the end, I get a very consistent result, something my old bash scripts weren't great at. Here is what my debit.csv.rules file looks like. It is used to tell hledger how CSV data from my debit card should be parsed: As you can see, the rules matching transactions to specific accounts are imported from another file, matchers.rules. I'm doing this since I want to be able to use the same set of rules for debit and credit and use the cards interchangeably. Here's a snippet of my matchers.rules file: Using this ruleset, a transaction looking like this: Would be transformed into: Sadly, hledger's CSV rules won't let you do arithmetics. This can be useful when you know a certain transaction needs to be split between accounts. This is where auto postings come in. They are a way to specify arbitrary rules when an account is encountered. Going back to my previous rent example, I split it 50/50 with my SO using this rule: After it is applied, the final transaction looks like this: Neat eh? Here is the little bash script I've written to automate all these steps: Migrating to hledger, I've cut down the time I spend on accounting from 1 hour per month to about 10 minutes, all while making my workflow much cleaner. Many thanks to the kind folks on #hledger @irc.libera.chat for the help!

I've blogged a few times already about my Nexus 5, the Android device I have/had been using for 8 years. Sadly, it died a few weeks ago, when the WiFi chip stopped working. I could probably have attempted a mainboard swap, but at this point, getting a new device seemed like the best choice. In a world where most Android devices are EOL after less than 3 years, it is amazing I was able to keep this device for so long, always running the latest Android version with the latest security patch. The Nexus 5 originally shipped with Android 4.4 and when it broke, I was running Android 11, with the November security patch! I'm very grateful to the FOSS Android community that made this possible, especially the LineageOS community. I've replaced my Nexus 5 by a used Pixel 3a, mostly because of the similar form factor, relatively affordable price and the presence of a headphone jack. Google also makes flashing a custom ROM easy, although I had more trouble with this than I first expected. The first Pixel 3a I bought on eBay was a scam: I ordered an "Open Box" phone and it arrived all scratched¹ and with a broken rear camera. The second one I got (from the Amazon Renewed program) arrived in perfect condition, but happened to be a Verizon model. As I found out, Verizon locks the bootloader on their phones, making it impossible to install LineageOS². The vendor was kind enough to let me return it. As they say, third time's the charm. This time around, I explicitly bought a phone on eBay listed with a unlocked bootloader. I'm very satisfied with my purchase, but all in all, dealing with all the returns and the shipping was exhausting. Hopefully this phone will last as long as my Nexus 5!

Looking at my blog, it seems I haven't written anything about homebrewing in a while. In fact, the last time I did was when I had a carboy blow out on me in the middle of the night... Fear not, I haven't stopped brewing since then. I have in fact decided to publish my homebrew recipes. Not on this blog though, as it would get pretty repetitive. So here are my recipes. So far, I've brewed around 30 different beers! The format is pretty simple (no fancy HTML, just plain markdown) and although I'm not the most scientific brewer, you should be able to replicate some of those if that's what you want to try. Cheers!

For the third time now, I've asked Soci t de Transport de Montr al, Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. I think this has become an annual thing now :) The original blog post and the 2019-2020 edition can be read here:

• Original blog post (2001 to 2018)
• 2019-2020 edition (2001 to 2020)

By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic.

• Orange line (top10)
• Green line (top10)
• Blue line
• Yellow line
• Global Top 10

Licences

• The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
• The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. I've also added a converter script this time around. I takes the manually cleaned 2021 source data and turns it into something that can be merged with the global dataset. I had one last year and deleted it, for some reason...