Posted on March 28, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, topic:inks

Note

This post will be updated in the next weeks with the test results as they become available.

Note

Most of the images in this post have no real alt-text: they are all scans of the test sheet at various stages through the test, and the results visible on them are described in detail at the end of the post.

Most of the time, what people write by hand will either end up inside a notebook in a drawer or cupboard where it s well protected, or thrown in the recycling where it doesn t matter. There are times, however, when things will be exposed to light: it doesn t matter whether it s a work of artistic calligraphy that you want to frame or a passive-aggressive notice left in the atrium of a building; it is useful to know whether the work will remain legible or it will fade into nothing in a short time. A few inks are tested by the producers for lightfastness according to some established standard, a few others are declared lightfast in a generic way, but a lot come with no indication at all. Proper testing according to the standard scales requires significant equipment to precisely control the exposure, but it s significantly easier and fun to do a simple test to divide the inks into three categories:

• suitable for framed calligraphy, i.e. it looks the same after 3 months of direct sun exposure;
• suitable for complaining about the way your neighbours deal with the trash, i.e. still readable after 3 months of exposure;
• not suitable for either, i.e. has faded significantly in the same time.

In the past I ve done some such tests by taping some sheets to a south-east facing window, and I ve noticed that most of the results were already apparent after a month, and there was basically no difference between two and three months of exposure, but spring equinox to summer solstice is a nice timeframe to use for such a test (and it leaves time for a second test of different materials from summer solstice to autumn equinox), so this is what I ve chosen to do this year. Rather than a window, now I have access to a south-facing covered balcony that is protected from rain but receives quite a bit of direct sun, so instead of taping sheets to the windows¹ I ve prepared a sturdy cardboard panel that I can leave on a table on the balcony, hopefully safe from the rain, but well exposed to the sun. And then made a quick test, and realized that without the window glass in front, the black strip used to cover the unexposed half of the sample doesn t lay flat and lets some sun in, so I used an old cheap² glass frame instead of the panel. The next step, already in January, was mentioning in a fountain-pen enthusiasts forum that I planned such a test, and asking if people were interested in having me buy a few samples of more inks when I was buying my next pen. The word enthusiasts is probably a hint of the reason why soon afterwards I received a package with the pen I had planned to buy, its converter, and a couple dozens ink samples. And then a couple envelopes with additional samples of inks that weren t available on the shops, from said enthusiasts. Added to the inks I already had acquired since the last lightfastness test, it meant that they couldn t all fit in one single page, and thus I had some room to add some inks I had already tested: some were requests, and for others I tried to select ones that felt relevant. Since I m changing the test setup, I ve decided I should probably keep doing this until I ve tested again all of the inks I still have available. For the paper, I ve used A4 sheets of Clairefontaine Dessin Croquis 160 g/m , one of my staples that I m sure I will have available in the next years, printed with a dot pattern with a laser printer, using this pdf. And as for the pen I ve used a fresh Brause n 361 nib: loading a fountain pen with all of these inks wouldn t be a reasonable effort, and the 361 is one of the writing implements I use most anyway. I also used a glass pen to fill a couple of squares on the paper with more ink. One side of each sheet was then covered with a strip of 300 g/m black paper (also from Clairefontaine), kept in place with three dots of non-permanent two sided tape, put in the frame and set out in the sun on the morning of 2026-03-20, the day of the spring equinox.

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While I was filling the sheet for the lightfastness tests, I decided to also prepare a second set of sheet, for a liquid resistance drop test. On each line, beside the name of the ink, I added five sets of crossing parallel lines, and let everything dry for a few days. Then I used a syringe to put a drop of a liquid on each set of lines, waited for it to be absorbed into the paper and to dry, at least overnight, but sometimes also for a day or two (life happened), and then looked at the results and did the next test. The first liquid was water, with the usual wild difference between washable and permanent inks, and all of the intermediate possibilities. The second liquid was isopropyl alcohol, and I was surprised to see that, with very few exceptions, most inks didn t change at all. I wonder whether that s related to the fact that instead of forming a drop it was absorbed almost immediately into the paper, and dried in a very short time. The third liquid was hydrogen peroxide: beside the individual results I noticed that its column yellowed visibly; I wonder whether that means that the paper I used has optical brighteners, and it will also yellow under the sun: that wouldn t be ideal, but it would also be a surprise, for paper that is acid free and sold for arts. The fourth liquid was citric acid, by mixing a bit less than a teaspoon of citric acid granules in just enough very warm water (heated to 70 C, i.e. the lowest temperature available on my kettle) to dissolve most of the acid. I forgot that I had some old PH strips until one hour after I ve put the drop on the paper, and I don t know whether something had changed, but when I did remember about them it showed a deep red between 1 and 2. I don t think I can trust those strips too much, however. This backfired badly: the drop of citric acid never dried out, but formed a sticky paste that prevented me from scanning the results, and I m not sure whether I ll do the last test, which was supposed to be household bleach. Luckily I had scanned the partial results, and they are shown here.

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After one full day with plenty of sun, nothing really had changed, except possibly for a vague hint that the Herbin Bleu Myosotis may have have been a bit lighter than it started, but it may also have been a suggestion.

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After three days, however, some results started to show, with the most fugitive inks starting to be visibly changed, becoming either paler or in some case duller.

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And the full week showed more of that, with a few more inks starting to show visible change.

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After two weeks the paper had significantly yellowed, something I did not expect from drawing paper (and which means that I will probably use a different paper when making similar tests in the future). As for the inks, there were a couple more inks with visible changes, but mostly it was more of the same as seen in the previous week.

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Three weeks started to show changes in the black and most irongall inks, and of course more changes in the even less resistant inks.

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Week four saw a bit more clouds and rain than the first few weeks, and there weren t big changes, but mostly more of what had already started to happen earlier.

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A month didn t change much compared to the four weeks, but I did the scans for completeness, and from now on I m going to update monthly.

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These are the inks I ve tested, and here I ll add notes on the results, as soon as they will be available, keeping this section updated. When nothing is mentioned, it means that there were no changes, either under the light or under the various liquids.

Lamy Sepia

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After one week it started to be just slightly paler, more so after three weeks.

Sheaffer Skrip Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After one week it started to be just slightly paler, more so after three weeks.

Waterman Audacious Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After three days it started to be just slightly paler, after a week visibly so. After four weeks it was very pale.

Waterman Harmonious Green

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop looks a bit lighter than the one with just water. After one week it started to be just slightly paler, more so after three weeks. After four weeks it was very pale.

Waterman Mysterious Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is significantly lighter and tends towards green. After two weeks it started to be just slightly paler, after three weeks it was more gray. After four weeks it was very pale.

Waterman Serenity Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow. After one week it started to be a bit duller. After four weeks it was paler and duller.

Visconti Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After one week it was visibly duller, looking darker than the original. After three weeks it was duller, and lighter. After a month it was just a pale gray.

Montblanc Royal Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow. After one week it started to be just slightly duller, more so after two weeks. After three weeks it was also paler. After a month it was just a pale gray.

Montblanc Mystery Black

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After three weeks it started to be a bit paler.

Aurora Nero

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After three weeks it started to be a bit more brown.

Online Duft Blueberry

Not resistant to water, the drop looks very washed out, although a hint of the original shape can be guessed; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow. After one week it was visibly paler and duller. After three weeks significantly so. After a month it was a pale grey.

Diamine Forever Ink - Smoky Mauve

After a month it looked a bit more purple.

Diamine Forever Ink - Honey Pot

.

Diamine Forever Ink - Coral Blaze

.

Diamine Forever Ink - Red Ochre

.

Diamine Graphite

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

Diamine Rustic Brown

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After three weeks it started to be very slightely paler.

Diamine China Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is almost completely bleached to a light yellow. After three weeks it started to be paler and duller.

Diamine Inkvent Purple Edition - Glacier

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape. After three weeks it started to be lighter.

Fountainfeder STEVE

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape. After two weeks the base colour had changed to a pink rather than purple.

Pilot Iroshizuku Syo Ro

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape. After four weeks it was very slightely paler.

Pilot Iroshizuku Shin-Kai

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a somewhat recognisable shade of the original shape. After two weeks it had become lighter and more purple. After four weeks it was a purple gray.

Rohrer & Klingner IG Ebony

Not resistant to water, there is a drop of uniform colour, but it maintains a recognisable shade of the original shape; under hydrogen peroxide the shade is significantly lighter. After four weeks it was a bit lighter

KWZ IG Orange

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide drop is significantly bleached to a light orange.

Kallipos.de Schwarze Eisengallus-Tinte

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is it almost completely bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three weeks it started to be very slightely lighter.

Kallipos.de Blaue Eisengallus-Tinte

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is it almost completely bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After two weeks it had started to become lighter and more gray.

Rohrer & Klingner IG Salix

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is it almost completely bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After two weeks it had become lighter and significantly more gray. After a month it was a yellowish gray.

Rohrer & Klingner IG Scabiosa

Water stains the paper with a significant purple spot, leaving however the original shape quite visible; is is a bit bleached by hydrogen peroxide, but still quite readable.

Pelikan Edelstein Tanzanite

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, but there is a visible trace of the original shape. After three weeks it started to be slightly paler.

Montblanc Burgundy Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; slightly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three weeks it started to be paler.

Cifra inchiostro finissimo verde alla lavanda

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; quite bleached to a light yellowish green by hydrogen peroxide. After one week it was visibly paler. After a month it was a still readable pale trace.

Sennelier Abstract acrylic ink 917 purple

.

The Feather Pen Ink

.

Eloquentia Inchiostro nero

.

DeAtramentis Document Blue

.

DeAtramentis Document BlueGrey

.

DeAtramentis Document Brown

.

DeAtramentis Document Fuchsia

.

DeAtramentis Document Grau

.

DeAtramentis Document Green Grey

.

DeAtramentis Document Light Grey

.

DeAtramentis Document Moosgr n

.

DeAtramentis Document Orange

.

DeAtramentis Document Purpurviolett

.

DeAtramentis Document Urban Sienna

.

KWZ Sheen Machine

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; the hydrogen peroxide bleached away the red sheen. This was one of the only two inks to react to isopropyl alcohol, which caused a pale cyan halo around the lines. After three days it was still perfectly readable, but had visibly lost some red sheen, after one week the red had completely gone and it looked very dark blue (but still shiny)

KWZ Walk over Vistula

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After four weeks it looked a bit darker and duller.

KWZ Warsaw Dreaming

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After a month it started to be a bit lighter.

Octopus Neon Violett

Water very lightly stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible. The other ink that reacted to isopropyl alcohol, with a pale purple halo around the lines. After two weeks it was paler, more pink.

Octopus Write & Draw Elephant Black

.

Platinum blue black

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; it is significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three weeks it started to become gray.

Pelikan 4001 Brillant-Schwarz

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot. After three weeks it was a bit more brown than black, after a month noticeably so.

Pelikan 4001 Blau-Schwarz

Water stains the paper, leaving however the original shape quite visible; it is significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three weeks it started to become gray.

Pelikan 4001 K nigsblau

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three days it had started to be slightly paler. After three weeks it was significantly desaturated.

Herbin Bleu Myosotis

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform pink spot, significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three days it was already visibly paler, after one week it was a pale grey. After a month it was still somehow readable, but as a trace.

Faber Castell Royal Blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three days it was slightly duller, after two weeks definitely so. After a month it was also quite paler.

Koh-I-Noor Fountain pen ink blue

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with just a hint of the original shape; significantly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three days it had started to be slightly paler, more so after one week when it had also turned grey. After four weeks it was very pale.

Koh-I-Noor Document Ink Blue

.

Koh-I-Noor Document Ink Black

Water leaves a very light stain, but the original shape doesn t look changed.

DeAtramentis Document Black

.

Waterman Intense Black

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with a trace of the original shape still visible; very lightly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three weeks it started to look a bit more brown, noticeably so after a month.

Herbin Perle Noir

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot, with a trace of the original shape still visible. After three weeks it started to look a bit more brown, noticeably so after a month.

Parker Quink black

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot.

Platinum Carbon black

.

Rohrer & Klingner Documentus Black

.

Sailor Pigment Kiwaguro

.

Platinum Dyestuff Red

Not resistant to water, the drop becomes an uniform colour spot; very lightly bleached by hydrogen peroxide. After three weeks it was a bit paler.

Noodler s Eternal Polar Blue

.

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1. which would be spend the day covered by mostly closed shutters anyway, because they receive quite a bit of direct sun, and we don t want that to enter the house during the summer.
2. and thus, I hope, not especially UV-filtering.

Posted on February 3, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, madeof:bits

Today I had a day off. Some of it went great. Some less so. I woke up, went out to pay our tribute to NotOurCat, and it was snowing! yay! And I had a day off, so if it had snowed enough that shovelling was needed, I had time to do it (it didn t, it started to rain soon afterwards, but still, YAY snow!). Then I had breakfast, with the fruit rye bread I had baked yesterday, and I treated myself to some of the strong Irish tea I have left, instead of the milder ones I want to finish before buying more of the Irish. And then, I bought myself a fancy new expensive fountain pen. One that costs 16 ! more than three times as much as my usual ones! I hope it will work as well, but I m quite confident it should. I ll find out when it arrives from Germany (together with a few ink samples that will result in a future blog post with some SCIENCE). I decided to try and use bank transfers instead of my visa debit card when buying from online shops that give the option to do so: it s a tiny bit more effort, but it means I m paying 0.25 to my bank¹ rather than the seller having to pay some unknown amount to an US based payment provider. Unluckily, the fountain pen website offered a huge number of payment methods, but not bank transfers. sigh. And then, I could start working a bit on the connecting wires for the LED strips for our living room: I soldered two pieces, six wires each (it s one RGB strip, 4 pins, and a warm white one requiring two more), then did a bit of tests, including writing some micropython code to add a test mode that lights up each colour in sequence, and the morning was almost gone. For some reason this project, as simple as it is, is taking forever. But it is showing progress. There was a break, when the postman delivered a package of chemicals ² for a future project or two. There will be blog posts! After lunch I spent some time finishing eyelets on the outfit I wanted to wear this evening, as I had not been able to finish it during fosdem. This one will result in two blog posts! Meanwhile, in the morning I didn t remember the name of the program I used to load software on micropython boards such as the one that will control the LED strips (that s thonny), and while searching for it in the documentation, I found that there is also a command line program I can use, mpremote, and that s a much better fit for my preferences! I mentioned it in an xmpp room full of nerds, and one of them mentioned that he could try it on his Inkplate, when he had time, and I was nerd-sniped into trying it on mine, which had been sitting unused showing the temperatures in our old house on the last day it spent there and needs to be updated for the sensors in the new house. And that lead to the writing of some notes on how to set it up from the command line (good), and to the opening on one upstream issue (bad), because I have an old model, and the board-specific library isn t working. at all. And that s when I realized that it was 17:00, I still had to cook the bread I had been working on since yesterday evening (ciabatta, one of my favourites, but it needs almost one hour in the oven), the outfit I wanted to wear in the evening was still not wearable, the table needed cleaning and some panicking was due. Thankfully, my mother was cooking dinner, so I didn t have to do that too. I turned the oven on, sewed the shoulder seams of the bodice while spraying water on the bread every 5 minutes, and then while it was cooking on its own, started to attach a closure to the skirt, decided that a safety pin was a perfectly reasonable closure for the first day an outfit is worn, took care of the table, took care of the bread, used some twine to close the bodice, because I still haven t worked out what to use for laces, realized my bodkin is still misplaced, used a long and sharp and big needle meant for sewing mattresses instead of a bodkin, managed not to stab myself, and less than half an hour late we could have dinner. There was bread, there was Swedish crispbread, there were spreads (tuna, and beans), and vegetables, and then there was the cake that caused my mother to panic when she added her last honey to the milk and it curdled (my SO and I tried it, it had no odd taste, we decided it could be used) and it was good, although I had to get a second slice just to be 100% sure of it. And now I m exhausted, and I ve only done half of the things I had planned to do, but I d still say I ve had quite a good day.

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1. Banca Etica, so one that avoids any investment in weapons and a number of other problematic things.
2. not food grade, except for one, but kitchen-safe.

Posted on November 17, 2025
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing

After cartridge pleating and honeycombing, I was still somewhat in the mood for that kind of fabric manipulation, and directing my internet searches in that vague direction, and I stumbled on this: https://katafalk.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/patternmaking-for-the-kampfrau-hemd-chemise/ Now, do I want to ever make myself a 16th century German costume, especially a kampfrau one? No! I m from lake Como! Those are the enemies who come down the Alps pillaging and bringing the Black Death with them! Although I have to admit that at times during my day job I have found the idea of leaving everything to go march with the J germonsters attractive. You know, the exciting prospective of long days of march spent knitting sturdy socks, punctuated by the excitement of settling down in camp and having a chance of doing lots of laundry. Or something. Sometimes being a programmer will make you think odd things. Anyway, going back to the topic, no, I didn t need an historically accurate hemd. But I did need a couple more shirts for daily wear, I did want to try my hand at smocking, and this looked nice, and I was intrigued by the way the shaping of the neck and shoulder worked, and wondered how comfortable it would be. And so, it had to be done. I didn t have any suitable linen, but I did have quite a bit of cotton voile, and since I wasn t aiming at historical accuracy it looked like a good option for something where a lot of fabric had to go in a small space. At first I considered making it with a bit less fabric than the one in the blog, but then the voile was quite thin, so I kept the original measurement as is, only adapting the sleeve / sides seams to my size. With the pieces being rectangles the width of the fabric, I was able to have at least one side of selvedge on all seams, and took advantage of it by finishing the seams by simply folding the allowances to one sides so that the selvedge was on top, and hemstitching them down as I would have done with a folded edge when felling. Also, at first I wanted to make the smocking in white on white, but then I thought about a few hanks of electric blue floss I had in my stash, and decided to just go with it. The initial seams were quickly made, then I started the smocking at the neck, and at that time the project went on hold while I got ready to go to DebConf. Then I came back and took some time to get back into a sewing mood, but finally the smocking on the next was finished, and I could go on with the main sewing, which, as I expected, went decently fast for a handsewing project. While doing the diagonal smocking on the collar I counted the stitches to make each side the same length, which didn t completely work because the gathers weren t that regular to start with, and started each line from the two front opening going towards the center back, leaving a triangle with a different size right in the middle. I think overall it worked well enough. Then there were a few more interruptions, but at last it was ready! just as the weather turned cold-ish and puffy shirts were no longer in season, but it will be there for me next spring. I did manage to wear it a few times and I have to say that the neck shaping is quite comfortable indeed: it doesn t pull in odd ways like the classical historically accurate pirate shirt sometimes does, and the heavy gathering at the neck makes it feel padded and soft. I m not as happy with the cuffs: the way I did them with just honeycombing means that they don t need a closure, and after washing and a bit of steaming they lie nicely, but then they tend to relax in a wider shape. The next time I think I ll leave a slit in the sleeves, possibly make a different type of smocking (depending on whether I have enough fabric) and then line them like the neck so that they are stable. Because, yes, I think that there will be another time: I have a few more project before that, and I want to spend maybe another year working from my stash, but then I think I ll buy some soft linen and make at least another one, maybe with white-on-white smocking so that it will be easier to match with different garments.

Posted on May 25, 2025
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear, GNU Terry Pratchett

After cartridge pleating, the next fabric manipulation technique I wanted to try was smocking, of the honeycombing variety, on a shirt. My current go-to pattern for shirts is the 1880 menswear one I have on my website: I love the fact that most of the fabric is still cut as big rectangles, but the shaped yoke and armscyes make it significantly more comfortable than the earlier style where most of the shaping at the neck was done with gathers into a straight collar. In my stash I had a cut of purple-blue hopefully cotton [#cotton] I had bought for a cheap price and used for my first attempt at an historically accurate pirate / vampire shirt that has now become by official summer vaccine jab / blood test shirt (because it has the long sleeves I need, but they are pretty easy to roll up to give access to my arm. That shirt tends to get out of the washing machine pretty wearable even without ironing, which made me think it could be a good fabric for something that may be somewhat hard to iron (but also made me suspicious about the actual composition of the fabric, even if it feels nice enough even when worn in the summer). Of course I wanted some honeycombing on the front, but I was afraid that the slit in the middle of it would interfere with the honeycombing and gape, so I decided to have the shirt open in an horizontal line at the yoke. I added instructions to the pattern page for how I changed the opening in the front, basically it involved finishing the front edge of the yoke, and sewing the honeycombed yoke to a piece of tape with snaps. Another change from the pattern is that I used plain rectangles for the sleeves, and a square gusset, rather than the new style tapered sleeve , because I wanted to have more fabric to gather at the wrist. I did the side and sleeve seams with a hem + whipstitch method rather than a felled seam, which may have helped, but the sleeves went into the fitted armscyes with no issue. I think that if (yeah, right. when) I ll make another sleeve in this style I ll sew it into the side seam starting 2-3 cm lower than the place I ve marked on the pattern for the original sleeve. I also used a row of honeycombing on the back and two on the upper part of the sleeves, instead of the gathering, and of course some rows to gather the cuffs. The honeycombing on the back was a bit too far away from the edge, so it s a bit of an odd combination of honeycombing and pleating that I don t hate, but don t love either. It s on the back, so I don t mind. On the sleeves I ve done the honeycombing closer to the edge and I ve decided to sew the sleeve as if it was a cartridge pleated sleeve, and that worked better. Because circumstances are still making access to my sewing machine more of a hassle than I d want it to be, this was completely sewn by hand, and at a bit more than a month I have to admit that near the end it felt like it had been taken forever. I m not sure whether it was the actual sewing being slow, some interruptions that happened when I had little time to work on it, or the fact that I ve just gone through a time when my brain kept throwing new projects at me, and I kept thinking of how to make those. Thanks brain. Even when on a hurry to finish it, however, it was still enjoyable sewing, and I think I ll want to do more honeycombing in the future. Anyway, it s done! And it s going straight into my daily garment rotation, because the weather is getting hot, and that means it s definitely shirt time.

Review: Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke

Publisher:	Erewhon
Copyright:	November 2024
ISBN:	1-64566-099-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	443

Metal from Heaven is industrial-era secondary-world fantasy with a literary bent. It is a complete story in one book, and I would be very surprised by a sequel. Clarke previously wrote the Scapegracers young-adult trilogy, which got excellent reviews and a few award nominations, as H.A. Clarke. This is his first adult novel.

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions.

Marney Honeycutt is twelve years old, a factory worker, and lustertouched. She works in the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry in Ignavia City, alongside her family and her best friend, shaping the magical metal ichorite into the valuable industrial products of a new age of commerce and industry. She is the oldest of the lustertouched, the children born to factory workers and poisoned by the metal. It has made her allergic, prone to fits at any contact with ichorite, but also able to exert a strange control over the metal if she's willing to pay the price of spasms and hallucinations for hours afterwards. As Metal from Heaven opens, the workers have declared a strike. Her older sister is the spokesperson, demanding shorter hours, safer working conditions, and an investigation into the health of the lustertouched children. Chauncey's response is to send enforcer snipers to kill the workers, including the entirety of her family.

The girl sang, "Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of the new morning." An enforcer shot her in the belly, and when she did not fall, her head.

Marney survives, fleeing into the city, swearing an impossible personal revenge against Yann Chauncey. An act of charity gets her a ticket on a train into the countryside. The woman who bought her ticket is a bandit who is on the train to rob it. Marney's ability to control ichorite allows her to help the bandits in return, winning her a place with the Highwayman's Choir who have been preying on the shipments of the rich and powerful and then disappearing into the hills. The Choir's secret is that the agoraphobic and paranoid Baron of the Fingerbluffs is dead and has been for years. He was killed by his staff, Hereafterist idealists, who have turned his remote territory into an anarchist commune and haven for pirates and bandits. This becomes Marney's home and the Choir becomes her family, but she never forgets her oath of revenge or the childhood friend she left behind in the piles of bodies and to whom this story is narrated. First, Clarke's writing is absolutely gorgeous.

We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony's legal edge, the place where land was and wasn't Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike. There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in planter's rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather, the ground was lineless.

The rhythm of it, the grasp of contrast and metaphor, the word choice! That climactic word "lineless," with its echo of limitless. So good. Second, this is the rarest of books: a political fantasy that takes class and religion seriously and uses them for more than plot drivers. This is not at all our world, and the technology level is somewhat ambiguous, but the parallels to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are unmistakable. The Hereafterists that Marney joins are political anarchists, not in the sense of alternative governance structures and political theory sanitized for middle-class liberals, but in the sense of Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin. The society they have built in the Fingerbluffs is temporary, threatened, and contingent, but it is sincere and wildly popular among the people who already lived there. Even beyond politics, class is a tangible force in this book. Marney is a factory worker and the child of factory workers. She barely knows how to read and doesn't magically learn over the course of the book. She has friends who are clever in the sense rewarded by politics and nobility, who navigate bureaucracies and political nuance, but that is not Marney's world. When, towards the end of the book, she has to deal with a gathering of high-class women, the contrast is stark, and she navigates that gathering only by being entirely unexpected. Perhaps the best illustration of the subtlety of this is the terminology in the book for lesbian. Marney is a crawly, which is a slur thrown at people like her (and one of the rare fictional slurs that work exactly as the author intended) but is also simply what she calls herself. Whether or not it functions as a slur depends on context, and the context is never hard to understand. The high-class lesbians she meets later are Lunarists, and react to crawly as a vile and insulting word. They use language to separate themselves from both the insult and from the social class that uses it. Language is an indication of culture and manners and therefore of morality, unlike deeds, which admit endless justifications.

Conversation was fleeting. Perdita managed with whomever stood near her, chipper about every prettiness she saw, the flitting butterflies, the dappled light between the leaves, the lushness and the fragrance of untamed land, and her walking companions took turns sharing in her delight. It was infectious, how happy she was. She was going to slaughter millions. She was going to skip like this all the while.

The handling of religion is perhaps even better. Marney was raised a Tullian, which sits alongside two other fleshed-out fictional religions and sketches of several more. Tullians tend to be conservative and patriarchal, and Marney has a realistically complicated relationship with faith: sticking with some Tullian worship practices and gestures because they're part of who she is, feeling a kinship to other Tullians, discarding beliefs that don't fit her, and revising others. Every major religion has a Hereafterist spin or reinterpretation that upends or reverses the parts of the religion that were used to prop up the existing social order and brings it more in line with Hereafterist ideals. We see the Tullian Hereafterist variation in detail, and as someone who has studied a lot of methods of reinterpreting Christianity, I was impressed by how well Clarke invents both a belief system and its revisionist rewrite. This is exactly how religions work in human history, but one almost never sees this subtlety in fantasy novels. Marney's allergy to ichorite causes her internal dialogue to dissolve into hallucinatory synesthesia when she's manipulating or exposed to it. Since that's most of the book, substantial portions read like drug trips with growing body horror. I normally hate this type of narration, so it's a sign of just how good Clarke's writing is that I tolerated it and even enjoyed parts. It helps that the descriptions are irreverent and often surprising, full of unexpected metaphors and sudden turns. It's very hard not to quote paragraph after paragraph of this book. Clarke is also doing a lot with gender that I don't feel qualified to comment in detail on, but it would not surprise me to see this book in the Otherwise Award recommendation list. I can think of three significant male characters, all of whom are well-done, but every other major character is female by at least some gender definition. Within that group, though, is huge gender diversity of the complicated and personal type that doesn't force people into defined boxes. Marney's sexuality is similarly unclassified and sometimes surprising. My one complaint is that I thought the sex scenes (which, to warn, are often graphic) fell into the literary fiction trap of being described so closely and physically that it didn't feel like anyone involved was actually enjoying themselves. (This is almost certainly a matter of personal taste.) I had absolutely no idea how Clarke was going to end this book, and the last couple of chapters caught me by surprise. I'm still not sure what I think about the climax. It's not the ending that I wanted, but one of the merits of this book is that it never did what I thought I wanted and yet made me enjoy the journey anyway. It is, at least, a genre ending, not a literary ending: The reader gets a full explanation of what is going on, and the setting is not static the way that it so often is in literary fiction. The characters can change the world, for good or for ill. The story felt frustrating and incomplete when I first finished it, but I haven't stopped thinking about this book and I think I like the shape of it a bit more now. It was certainly unexpected, at least by me. Clarke names Dhalgren as one of their influences in the acknowledgments, and yes, Metal from Heaven is that kind of book. This is the first 2024 novel I've read that felt like the kind of book that should be on award shortlists. I'm not sure it was entirely successful, and there are parts of it that I didn't like or that weren't for me, but it's trying to do something different and challenging and uncomfortable, and I think it mostly worked. And the writing is so good.

She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power.

Metal from Heaven is not going to be everyone's taste. If you do not like literary fantasy, there is a real chance that you will hate this. I am very glad that I read it, and also am going to take a significant break from difficult books before I tackle another one. But then I'm probably going to try the Scapegracers series, because Clarke is an author I want to follow. Content notes: Explicit sex, including sadomasochistic sex. Political violence, mostly by authorities. Murdered children, some body horror, and a lot of serious injuries and death. Rating: 8 out of 10

Last month, I traveled to Kenya to attend a conference called State of the Map 2024 ( SotM for short), which is an annual meetup of OpenStreetMap contributors from all over the world. It was held at the University of Nairobi Towers in Nairobi, from the 6th to the 8th of September.

University of Nairobi.

I have been contributing to OpenStreetMap for the last three years, and this conference seemed like a great opportunity to network with others in the community. As soon as I came across the travel grant announcement, I jumped in and filled the form immediately. I was elated when I was selected for the grant and couldn t wait to attend. The grant had an upper limit of 1200 and covered food, accommodation, travel and miscellaneous expenses such as visa fee. Pre-travel tasks included obtaining Kenya s eTA and getting a yellow fever vaccine. Before the conference, Mikko from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team introduced me to Rabina and Pragya from Nepal, Ibtehal from Bangladesh, and Sajeevini from Sri Lanka. We all booked the Nairobi Transit Hotel, which was within walking distance of the conference venue. Pragya, Rabina, and I traveled together from Delhi to Nairobi, while Ibtehal was my roommate in the hotel.

Our group at the conference.

The venue, University of Nairobi Towers, was a tall building and the conference was held on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors. The open area on the fifth floor of the building had a nice view of Nairobi s skyline and was a perfect spot for taking pictures. Interestingly, the university had a wing dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, who is regarded in India as the Father of the Nation.

View of Nairobi's skyline from the open area on the fifth floor.

A library in Mahatma Gandhi wing of the University of Nairobi.

The diversity of the participants was mind-blowing, with people coming from a whopping 54 countries. I was surprised to notice that I was the only participant traveling from India, despite India having a large OpenStreetMap community. That said, there were two other Indian participants who traveled from other countries. I finally got to meet Arnalie (from the Phillipines) and Letwin (from Zimbabwe), both of whom I had only met online before. I had met Anisa (from Albania) earlier during DebConf 2023. But I missed Mikko and Honey from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, whom I knew from the Open Mapping Guru program. I learned about the extent of OSM use through Pragya and Rabina s talk; about the logistics of running the OSM Board, in the OSMF (OpenStreetMap Foundation) session; about the Youth Mappers from Sajeevini, about the OSM activities in Malawi from Priscilla Kapolo, and about mapping in Zimbabwe from Letwin. However, I missed Ibtehal s lightning session. The ratio of women speakers and participants at the conference was impressive, and I hope we can get such gender representation in our Delhi/NCR mapping parties.

One of the conference halls where talks took place.

Outside of talks, the conference also had lunch and snack breaks, giving ample time for networking with others. In the food department, there were many options for a lacto-ovo vegetarian like myself, including potatoes, rice, beans, chips etc. I found out that the milk tea in Kenya (referred to as white tea ) is usually not as strong compared to India, so I switched to coffee (which is also called white coffee when taken with milk). The food wasn t spicy, but I can t complain :) Fruit juices served as a nice addition to lunch.

One of the lunch meals served during the conference.

At the end of the second day of the conference, there was a surprise in store for us a bus ride to the Bao Box restaurant. The ride gave us the experience of a typical Kenyan matatu (privately-owned minibuses used as share taxis), complete with loud rap music. I remember one of the songs being Kraff s Nursery Rhymes. That day, I was wearing an original Kenyan cricket jersey - one that belonged to Dominic Wesonga, who represented Kenya in four ODIs. This confused Priscilla Kapolo, who asked if I was from Kenya! Anyway, while it served as a good conversation starter, it didn t attract as much attention as I expected :) I had some pizza and chips there, and later some drinks with Ibtehal. After the party, Piyush went with us to our hotel and we played a few games of UNO.

Minibus which took us from the university to Bao Box restaurant.

This minibus in the picture gave a sense of a real matatu.

I am grateful to the organizers Laura and Dorothea for introducing me to Nikhil when I was searching for a companion for my post-conference trip. Nikhil was one of the aforementioned Indian participants, and a wildlife lover. We had some nice conversations; he wanted to go to the Masai Maara Natural Reserve, but it was too expensive for me. In addition, all the safaris were multi-day affairs, and I wasn t keen on being around wildlife for that long. Eventually I chose to go my own way, exploring the coastal side and visiting Mombasa. While most of the work regarding the conference was done using free software (including the reimbursement form and Mastodon announcements), I was disappointed by the use of WhatsApp for coordination with the participants. I don t use WhatsApp and so was left out. WhatsApp is proprietary software (they do not provide the source code) and users don t control it. It is common to highlight that OpenStreetMap is controlled by users and the community, rather than a company - this should apply to WhatsApp as well. My suggestion is to use XMPP, which shares similar principles with OpenStreetMap, as it is privacy-respecting, controlled by users, and powered by free software. I understand the concern that there might not be many participants using XMPP already. Although it is a good idea to onboard people to free software like XMPP, we can also create a Matrix group, and bridge it with both the XMPP group and the Telegram group. In fact, using Matrix and bridging it with Telegram is how I communicated with the South Asian participants. While it s not ideal - as Telegram s servers are proprietary and centralized - but it s certainly much better than creating a WhatsApp-only group. The setup can be bridged with IRC as well. On the other hand, self-hosted mailing lists for participants is also a good idea. Finally, I would like to thank SotM for the generous grant, enabling me to attend this conference, meet the diverse community behind OSM and visit the beautiful country of Kenya. Stay tuned for the blog post on Kenya trip. Thanks to Sahilister, Contrapunctus, Snehal and Badri for reviewing the draft of this blog post before publishing.

• For the Debian kernel security tracker:
  • I implemented some static checks in CI.
  • I continued work on automated handling of kernel CVEs, but it is still not quite ready to merge.
  • I implemented improved reporting on top of those changes.
• For the Debian linux package:
  • I reviewed and merged the following merge requests:
    • Update to 6.8.X + 6.8.X-rtY
    • [arm*,riscv64] drivers/pps/clients: Enable PPS_CLIENT_GPIO as module
    • [arm64,riscv64] drivers/leds/rgb: Enable LEDS_GROUP_MULTICOLOR and LEDS_PWM_MULTICOLOR as modules
    • [arm64] Further improve support for SolidRun HoneyComb
    • sound: Enable TAS2781 Smart Amp modules
    • [arm64] net/rfkill: Enable RFKILL_GPIO as module
    • [arm64] Increase max CPU count to 512
    • Enable SND_VIRTIO as module
    • d/templates: Change firmware-linux-free from Recommends to Suggests
  • I reviewed but did not merge:
    • Enable UBSAN_BOUNDS and UBSAN_SHIFT
  • I responded to the following bug reports:
    • linux: Do we still need sched-autogroup-disabled.patch in 2024?
    • linux-image-6.5.0-0.deb12.1-arm64: arm64 kernel upgrade makes systems unresponsive
    • fat-modules: SD corruption upon opening file on Linux desktop
    • bpftool: please build from https://github.com/libbpf/bpftool
  • I opened my own merge requests:
    • d/b/gencontrol.py, d/rules.real: Restore config checks on kernels to be signed
    • d/salsa-ci.yml: Restore Python static checks on scripts
    • Move modules under /usr in signed kernel packages
    • firmware_loader: Remove most Debian-specific logging changes
  • I uploaded:
    • linux-5.10 version 5.10.216-1~deb10u1 to buster-security.
    • linux version 6.1.90-1~bpo11+1 to bullseye-backports.
    • linux version 6.7.12-1~bpo12+1 to bookworm-backports.
    • linux version 6.8.9-1 to unstable.
• I attended the mini-DebConf in Berlin and very much enjoyed it. Thanks to all the organisers, volunteers and presenters.
• I supported Salvatore Bonaccorso s proposal of regular kernel team meetings, and attended the first one.
• I answered Andreas Tille s questions about the kernel team.
• I uploaded ktls-utils version 0.10-1 to unstable.
• I uploaded wireless-regdb version 2024.05.08-1 to unstable.
• I reviewed all open merge requests for initramfs-tools, and merged most of them.
• For the Debian firmware-nonfree package:
  • I started reviewing Diederik de Haas s major (non-upstream) update to firmware-nonfree.
  • I opened a merge request intended to simplify future work: Add support for and start using wildcards in package file lists.
• I uploaded iw version 6.9-1 to unstable.

Finally there is a thing people can agree on:

• 2023-08-28, OSNews: The end of the Googleverse
• 2023-07-28, Cory Doctorow: Microincentives and Enshittification
• 2023-10-03, Cory Doctorow: Google s enshittification memos
• 2024-01-15, Tim Bray: Mourning Google

Apparently, Google Search is not good anymore. And I m not the only one thinking about decentralization to fix it: Honey I federated the search engine - finding stuff online post-big tech - a lightning talk at the recent chaos communication congress The speaker however did not mention, that there have already been many attempts at building distributed search engines. So why do I think that such an attempt could finally succeed?

• More people are searching for alternatives to Google.
• Mainstream hard discs are incredibly big.
• Mainstream internet connection is incredibly fast.
• Google is bleeding talent.
• Most of the building blocks are available as free software.
• Success depends on your definition

My definition of success is:

A mildly technical computer user (able to install software) has access to a search engine that provides them with superior search results compared to Google for at least a few predefined areas of interest.

The exact algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites is a secret even to most Googlers. Still it is clear, that it relies heavily on big data: billions of queries, a comprehensive web index and user behaviour data. - All this is not available to us. A distributed search engine however can instead rely on user input. Every admin of one node seeds the node ranking with their personal selection of trusted sites. They connect their node with nodes of people they trust. This results in a web of (transitive) trust much like pgp. For comparison, imagine you are searching for something in a world without computers: You ask the people around you. They probably forward your question to their peers. I already had a look at YaCy. It is active, somewhat usable and has a friendly maintainer. Unfortunately I consider the codebase to show its age. It takes a lot of time for a newcomer to find their way around and it contains a lot of cruft. Nevertheless, YaCy is a good example that a decentralized search software can be done even by a small team or just one person. I myself started working on a software in Haskell and keep my notes here: Populus:DezInV. Since I m learning Haskell along the way, there is nothing there to see yet. Additionally I took a yak shaving break to learn nix. By the way: DuckDuckGo is not the alternative. And while I would encourage you to also try Yandex for a second opinion, I don t consider this a solution.

It s official, the Kubuntu Council has hired me part time to work on the 24.04 LTS release, preparation for Plasma 6, and to bring life back into the Distribution. First I want thank the Kubuntu Council for this opportunity and I plan a long and successful journey together!!!! My first week ( I started midweek ): It has been a busy one! Many meet and greets with the team and other interested parties. I had the chance to chat with Mike from Kubuntu Focus and I have to say I am absolutely amazed with the work they have done, and if you are in the market for a new laptop, you must check these out!!! https://kfocus.org Or if you want to try before you buy you can download the OS! All they ask is for an e-mail, which is completely reasonable. Hosting isn t free! Besides, you can opt out anytime and they don t share it with anyone. I look forward to working closely with this project. We now have a Kubuntu Team in KDE invent https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu if you would like to join us, please don t hesitate to ask! I have started a new Wiki and our first page is the ever important Bug triaging! It is still a WIP but you can check it out here: https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu/docs/-/wikis/Bug-Triage-Story-WIP , with that said I have started the launchpad work to make tracking our bugs easier buy subscribing kubuntu-bugs to all our packages and creating proper projects for our packages missing them. We have compiled a list of our various documentation links that need updated and Rick Timmis is updating kubuntu.org! Aaron Honeycutt has been busy with the Kubuntu Manual https://github.com/kubuntu-team/kubuntu-manual which is in good shape. We just need to improve our developer story I have been working on the rather massive Apparmor bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/2046844 with testing the fixes from the ppa and writing profiles for the various KDE packages affected ( pretty much anything that uses webengine ) and making progress there. My next order of business staging Frameworks 5.114 with guidance from our super awesome Rik Mills that has been doing most of the heavy lifting in Kubuntu for many years now. So thank you for that Rik I will also start on our big transition to the Calamaras Installer! I do have experience here, so I expect it will be a smooth one. I am so excited for the future of Kubuntu and the exciting things to come! With that said, the Kubuntu funding is community donation driven. There is enough to pay me part time for a couple contracts, but it will run out and a full-time contract would be super awesome. I am reaching out to anyone enjoying Kubuntu and want to help with the future of Kubuntu to please consider a donation! We are working on more donation options, but for now you can donate through paypal at https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Thank you!!!!!

Cory Doctorow has an insightful article Gig Work is the Opposite of Steampunk [1] about the horrors that companies like Amazon are forcing on their employees. Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell wrote an insightful article about the al Capone theory of sexual harassment [2]. Why people who sexually harass others usually perform other anti-social activity that is also easier to prosecute. The IEEE has an interesting article about using ML for parts of the CPU design process, both the technical issues and the controversy about competing ideas which is probably caused by sexism [3]. Love and taxes are forever my heart is a line from an anime dating sim game that prepares US taxes [4]. Unfortunately it was removed from Steam. The existence of the game is a weird social commentary and removing the game because you can t have an anime hottie do taxes is bizarre but also understandable given liability issues. There s no mention in the review of whether male hotties are available for people who prefer dating guys. As an aside my accountant looks like he is allergic to exercise The Killdozer Book web site (which has an invalid SSL certificate so you have to click on advanced in Chrome to get to the content) has an insightful article debunking some of the stories about the Killdozer [5]. He wasn t some sort of hero of freedom, he was just a jerk who reneged on a deal hoping to get more money, thought that laws shouldn t apply to him, and killed himself because of it. Apparently some big tech companies are knowingly hiring people to not work unlike the usual large corporate case of unknowingly hiring people to not work [6]. Silicon Valley is a good TV show, and it s apparently realistic. Ron Garrett wrote in insightful blog post about theoretical attacks on Bitcoin and how Bitcoin could be used [7]. The conclusion is not good for Bitcoin. Compiler Explorer is a program that shows how various C++ compilers produce assembly code for various architectures, this site hosts the main active instance [8]. There are other instances, here is an instance that produces code for the Ruzzian Elbrus architecture [9]. The Elbrus Wikipedia page is interesting [10]. Apparently the Ruzzians don t want this information to be spread, LOL. The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article about pet parrots being taught to video call each other [11]. Apparently parrots are social animals and can develop psychological problems if kept alone, so the video calls can be good for them. Also the owners had to monitor the chats to ensure that they played nicely together, just like play-dates for kids! Phoronix has an amusing article about the drama regarding the AMD Spectral Chicken bit in the Linux kernel source [12]. This page listing bad free software licenses is amusing [13]. The ACS has an interesting article about how Samsung fakes photos of the moon and presumably could fake other photos of notable objects that don t change [14]. The way that they proved the forgery was interesting.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2fer3f5j
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2q4wgc26
• [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-design-controversy
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2mslyfcv
• [5] https://killdozerbook.com/2018/07/fake-news/
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/25qtqyn4
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2dhq5qrx
• [8] https://godbolt.org/
• [9] https://ce.mentality.rip/
• [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2bktn42p
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/24pqhlf6
• [13] https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/2eo65py7

What is Ubuntu Touch? (And what does sunweaver have to do with it?) With Ubuntu Touch, the UBports Foundation offers a truly unique mobile experience - a viable alternative to Android and iOS. The UBports community provides a free and open-source GNU/Linux-based mobile operating system. One that can be installed and used today. Currently, there is an intensive effort going on lifting Ubuntu Touch from its current Ubuntu 16.04 base up to an Ubuntu 20.04 base. (And very soon after that to an Ubuntu 22.04 base...). With the Ubuntu Touch 20.04 base the progress bar is already at (I'd say) 89%, but we recently got hit by a drawback. I am currently involved in the Ubuntu Touch core development team at UBports and on medium short notice our current ARM64 server sponsor has announced to decommission our ARM64 build server that currently powers all the ARM64 and armhf CI builds. Call for Hardware Sponsoring So, the UBports core development team is currently desperately looking for a sponsor (or a few sponsors) who can provide us with (datacenter-hosted) ARM-based CPU power. It is important, that also 32-bit ARM builds are possible with the hardware provided. For testing, I recently ordered a HoneyComb LX2 (by SolidRun) as a possible solution (multi-node in the end), but the board arrived in a non-usable state, it seems. So this also didn't work out as easy as expected. As the former provider/sponsor is about to pull the plug, this call for help is kind of urgent. Please get in touch if you can help us out or know people who can. Thanks!!!
Mike (sunweaver at debian.org, libera.chat, OFTC, Telegram, matrix.org, etc.)

The sublime One, by Be is a pastoral, English summer time instrumental improvisation around field recordings and the theme of the honey bee. A lovely piece to accompany deep thinking. I m reminded of Virginia Astley. Be are associated with Caught by the River, a collective who explore ways of setpping out of daily digital live and embrace, nature, walks, calm, etc.

For those, who haven't realized, yet: MATE 1.26 has now been uploaded to Debian and should be available in Debian testing to all happy testers. During December, me and the whole family, we had been infected with Covid-19. All of us have recovered well, by now. In fact, I was very happy about a proper fever which I haven't had in years. (Fever is a well-known form of cancer prevention / prophylaxis). Drinking a lot (of warm water!), not eating for five days, and additionally following some health practices from the natural healing context supported the recovery process really well. The MATE 1.26 DEB package preparations had been done while sitting in bed with my hot water bottle in the back and a pot of honeyed thyme tea next to me on the window sill. Things were getting too boring while being sick, so the monotonous wrapping up of +/- 40 desktop environment DEB packages was a welcome change then (and not too complex for the reduced brain activity of mine, either). Hope, that MATE 1.26 in Debian works well for many Debian users. I also plan to bring MATE 1.26 to bullseye-backports soon (second half of January, probably). light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org)

This year I finally bought an e-reader: a "Kobo Libra H2O": a 7" 300ppi screen with an adjustable colour temperature front light, waterproof, physical buttons on a "margin"/spine which pushes the case dimensions up to 8", which is sadly a little too big for most jeans pockets. In fact this is the second time I've bought one. Sarah and I bought a pair of Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2^nd generation) readers as Honeymoon gifts for each other in 2013. Sarah took to hers, but after giving mine a try and reading a couple of books on it I ended up giving it to my Father-in-law. The main problem I had with it was the colour temperature of the backlight: it was too blue and "clinical". It's interesting to me to realise how the environment that I read in can become indelibly linked to the memory of that book. One book in particular that I read on the Kindle was James Smythe's "The Machine", a modern twist on a classic horror story. This was perfectly complemented by the somewhat pallid, sick colour of the backlight, especially on its lowest brightness settings. It didn't go so well with other stories. I got on much better with the Libra H2O. For me, e-books and e-reading has not replaced traditional paper books, but complemented them, giving me an opportunity to read in contexts and situations where I couldn't manage with a real book (such as in the pitch black, lying on my back with a toddler on my chest). I feel that being able to read more often thanks to the e-reader has spurred me on to read even paper books more frequently as well. Unfortunately the screen broke, about 10 months after I bought it! After a bit of soul-searching on what to do about replacing it, and briefly considering the latest Amazon Paperwhite (which now has a 300ppi display and adjustable-colour temperature front-light). This looks like a very nice e-reader: no physical buttons which is a bit of a shame but narrower without the margin/spine of the Kobo, so possibly more pocket-friendly. On the other hand, I really felt that I wanted to avoid giving Amazon the money, for a whole variety of reasons. So I instead settled on the "Kobo Libra 2", which is a slight refresh of the Libra H2O, but almost identical. I'm going to pair it with a nice cover for when its not in use and hopefully it will last longer than its predecessor. My current favourite feature on the Libra 2, that I don't remember on the H2O and I'm fairly sure doesn't exist on Kindles is it supports a "night mode", which is effectively a reverse video, white-on-black mode. This is fantastic for keeping the light levels down at night. I was already using the backlight at about 2% brightness and occasionally found even that too bright.

Review: The Past is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente

Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-30112-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	151

Tetley is nineteen and is the most hated person in Garbagetown. That's kind of horrible, but life is otherwise great. As she puts it:

I'm awfully lucky when you think about it. Garbagetown is the most wonderful place anybody has ever lived in the history of the world, even if you count the Pyramids and New York City and Camelot. I have Grape Crush and Big Bargains and my hibiscus flower, and I can fish like I've got bait for a heart so I hardly ever go hungry, and once I found a ruby ring and a New Mexico license plate inside a bluefin tuna. Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated hope and butchered our future, but I know better, and anyway, it's a lie. Some people are just born to be despised. The Loathing of Tetley began small and grew bigger and bigger, like the Thames, until it swallowed me whole.

Garbagetown is a giant floating pile of garbage in the middle of the ocean, and it is, so far as anyone knows, the only "land" left in the world. Global warming has flooded everything until the remaining Fuckwits (as their future descendants call everyone who was alive at the time) took to the Misery Boats and searched hopelessly for land. Eventually they realized they could live on top of the now-massive Pacific Garbage Patch and began the Great Sorting, which is fifty years into Tetley's past. All of the types of garbage were moved into their own areas, allowing small micronations of scavengers to form and giving each area its own character.

Candle Hole is the most beautiful place in Garbagetown, which is the most beautiful place in the world. All of the stubs of candles the Fuckwits threw out piled up into hills and mountains and caverns and dells, votive candles and taper candles and tea lights and birthday candles and big fat colorful pillar candles, stacked and somewhat melted into a great crumbling gorgeous warren of wicks and wax. All the houses are cozy little honeycombs melted into hillside, with smooth round windows and low golden ceilings. At night, from far away, Candle Hole looks like a firefly palace. When the wind blows, it smells like cinnamon, and freesia, and cranberries, and lavender, and Fresh Linen Scent, and New Car Smell.

Two things should be obvious from this introduction. First, do not read this book looking for an accurate, technical projection of our environmental future. Or, for that matter, physical realism of any kind. That's not the book that Valente is writing and you'll just frustrate yourself. This is science fiction as concretized metaphor rather than prediction or scientific exploration. We Fuckwits have drowned the world with our greed and left our descendants living in piles of our garbage; you have to suspend disbelief and go with the premise. The second thing is that either you will like Tetley's storytelling style or you will not like this book. I find Valente very hit-and-miss, but this time it worked for me. The language is a bit less over-the-top than Space Opera, and it fits Tetley's insistent, aggressive optimism so well that it carries much of the weight of characterization. Mileage will definitely vary; this is probably a love-it-or-hate-it book. The Past is Red is divided into two parts. The first part is the short story "The Future is Blue," previously published in Clarkesworld and in Valente's short story collection of the same name. It tells the story of Tetley's early life, how she got her name, and how she became the most hated person in Garbagetown. The second part is much longer and features an older, quieter, more thoughtful, and somewhat more cynical Tetley, more life philosophy, and a bit of more-traditional puzzle science fiction. It lacks some of the bubbly energy of "The Future is Blue" but also features less violence and abuse. The overall work is a long novella or very short novel. This book has a lot of feelings about the environment, capitalism, greed, and the desire to let other people solve your problems for you, and it is not subtle about any of them. It's satisfying in the way that a good rant is satisfying, not in the way that a coherent political strategy is satisfying. What saves it from being too didactic or self-righteous is Tetley, who is happy to record her own emotions and her moments of wonder and is mostly uninterested in telling other people what to do. The setting sounds darkly depressing, and there are moments where it feels that way in the book, but the core of the story and of Tetley's life philosophy is a type of personal resilience: find the things that make you happy, put one foot in front of the other, and enjoy the world for what it is rather than what it could be or what other people want to convince you it might be. It's also surprisingly funny, particularly if you see the humor in bizarrely-specific piles of the detritus of civilization. The one place where I will argue with Valente a bit is that The Past is Red thoroughly embraces an environmental philosophy of personal responsibility. The devastating critique aimed at the Fuckwits is universal and undistinguished except slightly by class. Tetley and the other inhabitants of Garbagetown make no distinction between types of Fuckits or attempt to apportion blame in any way more granular than entire generations and eras. This is probably realistic. I understand why, by Tetley's time, no one is interested in the fine points of history. But the story was written today, for readers in our time, and this type of responsibility collapse is intentionally and carefully constructed by the largest polluters and the people with the most power. Collective and undifferentiated responsibility means that we're using up our energy fretting about whether we took two showers, which partly deflects attention from the companies, industries, and individuals that are directly responsible for the vast majority of environmental damage. We don't live in a world full of fuckwits; we live in a world run by fuckwits and full of the demoralized, harried, conned, manipulated, overwhelmed, and apathetic, which is a small but important difference. This book is not the right venue to explore that difference, but I wish the vitriol had not been applied quite so indiscriminately. The rest, though, worked for me. Valente tends to describe things by piling clauses on top of adjectives, which objectively isn't the best writing but it fits everything about Tetley's personality so well that I think this is the book where it works. I found her strange mix of optimism, practicality, and unbreakable inner ethics oddly endearing. "The Future is Blue" is available for free on-line, so if in doubt, read some or all of it, and that should tell you whether you're interested in the expansion. I'm glad I picked it up. Content warning for physical and sexual abuse of the first-person protagonist, mostly in the first section. Rating: 7 out of 10

I had been meaning to write on the above topic for almost a couple of months now but just kept procrastinating about it. That push came to a shove when Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu shared their understanding, wisdom, and all in the new book called Absolute Power Inside story of the National Stock Exchange s amazing success, leading to hubris, regulatory capture and algo scam . Now while I will go into the details of the new book as currently, I have not bought it but even if I had bought it and shared some of the revelations from it, it wouldn t have done justice to either the book or what is sharing before knowing some of the background before it.

Before I jump ahead, I would suggest people to read my sort of introductory blog post on banking history so they know where I m coming from. I m going to deviate a bit from Banking as this is about trade and capital markets, although Banking would come in later on. And I will also be sharing some cultural insights along with history so people are aware of why things happened the way they did. Calicut, Calcutta, Kolkata, one-time major depot around the world Now, one cannot start any topic about trade without talking about Kolkata. While today, it seems like a bastion of communism, at one time it was one of the major trade depots around the world. Both William Dalrymple and the Chinese have many times mentioned Kolkata as being one of the major centers of trade. This was between the 13th and the late 19th century. A cursory look throws up this article which talks about Kolkata or Calicut as it was known as a major trade depot. There are of course many, many articles and even books which do tell about how Kolkata was a major trade depot. Now between the 13th and 19th century, a lot of changes happened which made Kolkata poorer and shifted trade to Mumbai/Bombay which in those times was nothing but just a port city like many others.

The Rise of the Zamindar Around the 15th century when Babur Invaded Hindustan, he realized that Hindustan is too big a country to be governed alone. And Hindustan was much broader than independent India today. So he created the title of Zamindars. Interestingly, if you look at the Mughal period, they were much more in tune with Hindustani practices than the British who came later. They used the caste divisions and hierarchy wisely making sure that the status quo was maintained as far as castes/creed were concerned. While in-fighting with various rulers continued, it was more or less about land and power other than anything else. When the Britishers came they co-opted the same arrangement with a minor adjustment. While in the before system, the zamindars didn t have powers to be landowners. The Britishers gave them land ownerships. A huge percentage of thess zamindars especially in Bengal were from my own caste Banias or Baniyas. The problem and the solution for the Britishers had been this was a large land to control and exploit and the number of British officers and nobles were very less. So they gave virtually a lot of powers to the Banias. The only thing the British insisted on were very high rents from the newly minted Zamindars. The Zamindar in turn used the powers of personal fiefdom to give loans at very high interest rates when the poor were unable to pay the interest rate, they would take the land while at the same time slavery was forced on both men and women, many a time rapes and affairs. While there have been many records shedding light on it, don t think it could be any more powerful as enacted and shared by Shabana Azmi in Ankur:the Seedling. Another prominent grouping was formed around the same time was the Bhadralok. Now as shared Bhadralok while having all the amenities of belonging to the community, turned a blind eye to the excesses being done by the Zamindars. How much they played a hand in the decimation of Bengal has been a matter of debate, but they did have a hand, that much is not contested.

The Rise of Stock Exchanges Sadly and interestingly, many people believe and continue to believe that stock exchanges is recent phenomena. The first stock exchange though was the Calcutta Stock Exchange rather than the Bombay Stock Exchange. How valuable was Calcutta to the Britishers in its early years can be gauged from the fact that at one time it was made the capital of India in 1772 . In fact, after the Grand Trunk Road (on which there had been even Train names in both countries) x number of books have been written of the trade between Calcutta and Peshawar (Now in Pakistan). And it was not just limited to trade but also cultural give-and-take between the two centers. Even today, if you look at YT (Youtube) and look up some interviews of old people, you find many interesting anecdotes of people sharing both culture and trade.

The problem of the 60 s and rise of BSE
After India became independent and the Constitutional debates happened, the new elites understood that there cannot be two power centers that could govern India. On one hand, were the politicians who had come to power on the back of the popular vote, the other was the Zamindars, who more often than not had abused their powers which resulted in widespread poverty. The Britishers are to blame, but so do the middlemen as they became willing enablers to the same system of oppression. Hence, you had the 1951 amendment to the Constitution and the 1956 Zamindari Abolition Act. In fact, you can find much more of an in-depth article both about Zamindars and their final abolition here. Now once Zamindari was gone, there was nothing to replace it with. The Zamindars ousted of their old roles turned and tried to become Industrialists. The problem was that the poor and the downtrodden had already had experiences with the Zamindars. Also, some Industrialists from North and West also came to Bengal but they had no understanding of either the language or the cultural understanding of what had happened in Bengal. And notice that I have not talked about both the famines and the floods that wrecked Bengal since time immemorial and some of the ones which got etched on soul of Bengal and has marks even today The psyche of the Bengali and the Bhadralok has gone through enormous shifts. I have met quite a few and do see the guilt they feel. If one wonders as to how socialist parties are able to hold power in Bengal, look no further than Tarikh which tells and shares with you that even today how many Bengalis still feel somewhat lost.

The Rise of BSE Now, while Kolkata Stock Exchange had been going down, for multiple reasons other than listed above. From the 1950s onwards Jawaharlal Nehru had this idea of 5-year plans, borrowed from socialist countries such as Russia, China etc. His vision and ambition for the newly minted Indian state were huge, while at the same time he understood we were poor. The loot by East India Company and the Britishers and on top of that the division of wealth with Pakistan even though the majority of Muslims chose and remained with India. Travel on Indian Railways was a risky affair. My grandfather had shared numerous tales where he used to fill money in socks and put the socks on in boots when going between either Delhi Kolkata or Pune Kolkata. Also, as the Capital became Delhi, it unofficially was for many years, the transparency from Kolkata-based firms became less. So many Kolkata firms either mismanaged and shut down while Maharashtra, my own state, saw a huge boon in Industrialization as well as farming. From the 1960s to the 1990s there were many booms and busts in the stock exchanges but most were manageable.

While the 60s began on a good note as Goa was finally freed from the Portuguese army and influence, the 1962 war with the Chinese made many a soul question where we went wrong. Jawaharlal Nehru went all over the world to ask for help but had to return home empty-handed. Bollywood showed a world of bell-bottoms and cars and whatnot, while the majority were still trying to figure out how to put two square meals on the table. India suffered one of the worst famines in those times. People had to ration food. Families made do with either one meal or just roti (flatbread) rather than rice. In Bengal, things were much more severe. There were huge milk shortages, so Bengalis were told to cut down on sweets. This enraged the Bangalis as nothing else could. Note If one wants to read how bad Indians felt at that time, all one has to read is V.S. Naipaul s An Area of darkness . This was also the time when quite a few Indians took their first step out of India. While Air India had just started, the fares were prohibitive. Those who were not well off, either worked on ships or went via passenger or cargo ships to Dubai/Qatar middle-east. Some went to Russia and some even to States. While today s migr s want to settle in the west forever and have their children and grandchildren grow up in the West, in the 1960s and 70s the idea was far different. The main purpose for a vast majority was to get jobs and whatnot, save maximum money and send it back to India as a remittance. The idea was to make enough money in 3-5-10 years, come back to India, and then lead a comfortable life. Sadly, there has hardly been any academic work done in India, at least to my knowledge to document the sacrifices done by Indians in search of jobs, life, purpose, etc. in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1970s was also when alternative cinema started its journey with people like Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah who portrayed people s struggles on-screen. Most of them didn t have commercial success because the movies and the stories were bleak. While the acting was superb, most Indians loved to be captured by fights, car-chases, and whatnot rather than the deary existence which they had. And the alt cinema forced them to look into the mirror, which was frowned upon both by the masses and the classes. So cinema which could have been a wake-up call for a lot of Indians failed. One of the most notable works of that decade, at least to me, was Manthan. 1961 was also marked by the launch of Economic Times and Financial Express which tells that there was some appetite for financial news and understanding. The 1970s was also a very turbulent time in the corporate sector and stock exchanges. Again, the companies which were listed were run by the very well-off and many of them had been abroad. At the same time, you had fly-by-night operators. One of the happenings which started in this decade is you had corporate wars and hostile takeovers, quite a few of them of which could well have a Web series or two of their own. This was also a decade marked by huge labor unrest, which again changed the face of Bombay/Mumbai. From the 1950s till the 1970s, Bombay was known for its mills. So large migrant communities from all over India came to Bombay to become the next Bollywood star and if that didn t happen, they would get jobs in the mills. Bombay/Mumbai has/had this unique feature that somehow you will make money to make ends meet. Of course, with the pandemic, even that has gone for a toss. Labor unrest was a defining character of that decade. Three movies, Kaala Patthar, Kalyug, and Ankush give a broad outlook of what happened in that decade. One thing which is present and omnipresent then and now is how time and time again we lost our demographic dividend. Again there was an exodus of young people who ventured out to seek fortunes elsewhere. The 1970s and 80s were also famous for the license Raj which they bought in. Just like the Soviets, there were waiting periods for everything. A telephone line meant waiting for things anywhere from 4 to 8 years. In 1987, when we applied and got a phone within 2-3 months, most of my relatives both from my mother and father s side could not believe we paid 0 to get a telephone line. We did pay the telephone guy INR 10/- which was a somewhat princely sum when he was installing it, even then they could not believe it as in Northern India, you couldn t get a phone line even if your number had come. You had to pay anywhere from INR 500/1000 or more to get a line. This was BSNL and to reiterate there were no alternatives at that time.

The 1990s and the Harshad Mehta Scam The 90s was when I was a teenager. You do all the stupid things for love, lust, whatever. That is also the time you are introduced really to the world of money. During my time, there were only three choices, Sciences, Commerce, and Arts. If History were your favorite subject then you would take Arts and if it was not, and you were not studious, then you would up commerce. This is how careers were chosen. So I enrolled in Commerce. Due to my grandfather and family on my mother s side interested in stocks both as a saving and compounding tool, I was able to see Pune Stock Exchange in action one day. The only thing I remember that day is people shouting loudly with various chits. I had no idea that deals of maybe thousands or even lakhs. The Pune Stock Exchange had been newly minted. I also participated in a couple of mock stock exchanges and came to understand that one has to be aggressive in order to win. You had to be really loud to be heard over others, you could not afford to be shy. Also, spread your risks. Sadly, nothing about the stock markets was there in the syllabus. 1991 was also when we saw the Iraq war, the balance of payments crisis in India, and didn t know that the Harshad Mehta scam was around the corner. Most of the scams in India have been caught because the person who was doing it was flashy. And this was the reason that even he was caught as Ms. Sucheta Dalal, a young beat reporter from Indian Express who had been covering Indian stock market. Many of her articles were thought-provoking. Now, a brief understanding is required to know before we actually get to the scam. Because of the 1991 balance of payments crisis, IMF rescued India on the condition that India throws its market open. In the 1980s itself, Rajeev Gandhi had wanted to partially make India open but both politicians and Industrialists advised him not to do the same, we are/were not ready. On 21st May 1991, Rajeev Gandhi was assassinated by the LTTE. A month later, due to the sympathy vote, the Narsimha Rao Govt. took power. While for most new Governments there is usually a honeymoon period lasting 6 months or so till they get settled in their roles before people start asking tough questions. It was not to be for this Govt. Immediately, The problem had been building for a few years. Although, in many ways, our economy was better than it is today. The only thing India didn t do well at that time was managing foreign exchange. As only a few Indians had both the money and the opportunity to go abroad and need for electronics was limited. One of the biggest imports of the time then and still today is Energy, Oil. While today it is Oil/Gas and electronics, at that time it was only OIl. The Oil import bill was ballooning while exports were more or less stagnant and mostly comprised of raw materials rather than finished products. Even today, it is largely this, one of the biggest Industrialists in India Ambani exports gas/oil while Adani exports coal. Anyways, the deficit was large enough to trigger a payment crisis. And Narsimha Rao had to throw open the Indian market almost overnight. Some changes became quickly apparent, while others took a long time to come.

Satellite Television and Entry of Foreign Banks Almost overnight, from 1 channel we became multi-channel. Star TV (Rupert Murdoch) bought us Bold and Beautiful, while CNN broadcasted the Iraq War. It was unbelievable for us that we were getting reports of what had happened 24-48 hours earlier. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was still very much a teenager to understand the import of what was happening. Even in my college, except for one or two-person, it wasn t a topic for debate or talk or even the economy. We were basically somehow cocooned in our own little world. But this was not the case for the rest of India and especially banks. The entry of foreign banks was a rude shock to Indian banks. The foreign banks were bringing both technology and sophistication in their offerings, and Indian Banks needed and wanted fast money to show hefty profits. Demand for credit wasn t much, at least nowhere the level it today is. At the same time, default on credit was nowhere high as today is. But that will require its own space and article. To quench the thirst for hefty profits by banks, Enter Harshad Mehta. At that point in time, banks were not permitted at all to invest in the securities/share market. They could only buy Government securities or bonds which had a coupon rate of say 8-10% which was nowhere enough to satisfy the need for hefty profits as desired by Indian banks. On top of it, that cash was blocked for a long time. Most of these Government bonds had anywhere between 10-20 year maturity date and some even longer. Now, one loophole in that was that the banks themselves could not buy these securities. They had to approach a registered broker of the share market who will do these transactions on their behalf. Here is where Mr. Mehta played his game. He shared both legal and illegal ways in which both the bank and he would prosper. While banking at one time was thought to be conservative and somewhat cautious, either because they were too afraid that Western private banks will take that pie or whatever their reasons might be, they agreed to his antics. To play the game, Harshad Mehta needed lots of cash, which the banks provided him in the guise of buying securities that were never bought, but the amounts were transferred to his account. He actively traded stocks, at the same time made a group, and also made the rumor mill work to his benefit. The share market is largely a reactionary market. It operates on patience, news, and rumor-mill. The effect of his shenanigans was that the price of a stock that was trending at say INR 200 reached the stratospheric height of INR 9000/- without any change in the fundamentals or outlook of the stock. His thirst didn t remain restricted to stocks but also ventured into the unglamorous world of Govt. securities where he started trading even in them in large quantities. In order to attract new clients, he coveted a fancy lifestyle. The fancy lifestyle was what caught the eye of Sucheta Dalal, and she started investigating the deals he was doing. Being a reporter, she had the advantage of getting many doors to open and get information that otherwise would be under lock and key. On 23rd April 1992, Sucheta Dalal broke the scam.

The Impact The impact was almost like a shock to the markets. Even today, it can be counted as one of the biggest scams in the Indian market if you adjust it for inflation. I haven t revealed much of the scam and what happened, simply because Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu wrote The Scam for that purpose. How do I shorten a story and experience which has been roughly written in 300 odd pages in one or two paragraphs, it is simply impossible. The impact though was severe. The Indian stock market became a bear market for two years. Sucheta Dalal was kicked out/made to resign out of Indian Express. The thing is simple, all newspapers survive on readership and advertisements with advertisements. Companies who were having a golden run, whether justified or not, on the bourses/Stock Exchange. For many companies, having a good number on the stock exchange was better than the company fundamentals. There was supposed to be a speedy fast-track court setup for Financial crimes, but it worked only for the Harshad Mehta case and still took over 5 years. It led to the creation of NSE (National Stock Exchange). It also led to the creation of SEBI, perhaps one of the most powerful regulators, giving it a wide range of powers and remit but on the ground more often that proved to be no more than a glorified postman. And the few times it used, it used on the wrong people and people had to go to courts to get justice. But then this is not about SEBI nor is this blog post about NSE. I have anyways shared about Absolute power above, so will not repeat the link here. The Anecdotal impact was widespread. Our own family broker took the extreme step. For my grandfather on the mother s side, he was like the second son. The news of his suicide devastated my grandfather quite a bit, which we realized much later when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer s. Our family stockbroker had been punting, taking lots of cash from the market at very high rates, betting on stocks wildly as the stock market was reaching for the stars when the market crashed, he was insolvent. How the family survived is a tale in itself. They had just got married just a few years ago and had a cute boy and girl soon after. While today, both are grown-up, at that time what the wife faced only she knows. There were also quite a few shareholders who also took the extreme step. The stock markets in those days were largely based on trust and even today is unless you are into day-trading. So there was always some money left on the table for the share/stockbroker which would be squared off in the next deal/transaction where again you will leave something. My grandfather once thought of going over and meeting them, and we went to the lane where their house is, seeing the line of people who had come for recovery of loans, we turned back with a heavy heart. There was another taboo that kinda got broken that day. The taboo was that the stock market is open to scams. From 1992 to 2021 has been a cycle of scams. Even now, today, the stock market is at unnatural highs. We know for sure that a lot of hot money is rolling around, a lot of American pension funds etc. Till it will work, it will work, some news something and that money will be moved out. Who will be left handing the can, the Indian investors? A Few days back, Ambani writes about Adani. Now while the facts shared are correct, is Adani the only one, the only company to have a small free float in the market. There probably are more than 1/4th or 1/3rd of well-respected companies who may have a similar configuration, the only problem is it is difficult to know who the proxies are. Now if I were to reflect and compare this either with the 1960s or even the 1990s I don t find much difference apart from the fact that the proxy is sitting in Mauritius. At the same time, today you can speculate on almost anything. Whether it is stocks, commodities, derivatives, foreign exchange, cricket matches etc. the list is endless. Since 2014, the rise in speculation rather than investment has been dramatic, almost stratospheric. Sadly, there are no studies or even attempts made to document this. How much official and unofficial speculation is there in the market nobody knows. Money markets have become both fluid and non-transparent. In theory, you have all sorts of regulators, but it is still very much like the Wild West. One thing to note that even Income tax had to change and bring it provisions to account for speculative income.So, starting from being totally illegitimate, it has become kind of legal and is part of Income Tax. And if speculation is not wrong, why not make Indian cricket officially a speculative event, that will be honest and GOI will get part of the proceeds.

Conclusion I wish there was some positive conclusion I could drive, but sadly there is not. Just today read two articles about the ongoing environmental issues in Himachal Pradesh. As I had shared even earlier, the last time I visited those places in 2011, and even at that time I was devastated to see the kind of construction going on. Jogiwara Road which they showed used to be flat single ground/first floor dwellings, most of which were restaurants and whatnot. I had seen the water issues both in Himachal and UT (Uttarakhand) back then and this is when they made huge dams. In U.S. they are removing dams and here we want more dams

Host to Kanchenjunga, the world s third-highest mountain peak and the endangered Red Panda, Sikkim is a state in northeastern India. Nestled between Nepal, Tibet (China), Bhutan and West Bengal (India), the state offers a smorgasbord of cultures and cuisines. That said, it s hardly surprising that the old spice route meanders through western Sikkim, connecting Lhasa with the ports of Bengal. Although the latter could also be attributed to cardamom (kali elaichi), a perennial herb native to Sikkim, which the state is the second-largest producer of, globally. Lastly, having been to and lived in India, all my life, I can confidently say Sikkim is one of the cleanest & safest regions in India, making it ideal for first-time backpackers.

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Reaching Sikkim

• Gangtok, being the capital, is easiest to reach amongst other regions, by public transport and shared cabs.
• By Air:
  • Pakyong (PYG) :
    • Nearest airport from Gangtok (about 1 hour away)
    • Tabletop airport
    • Reserved cabs cost around INR 1200.
    • As of Apr 2021, the only flights to PYG are from IGI (Delhi) and CCU (Kolkata).
  • Bagdogra (IXB) :
    • About 20 minutes from Siliguri and 4 hours from Gangtok.
    • Larger airport with flights to most major Indian cities.
    • Reserved cabs cost about INR 3000. Shared cabs cost about INR 350.
• By Train:
  • New Jalpaiguri (NJP) :
    • About 20 minutes from Siliguri and 4 hours from Gangtok.
    • Reserved cabs cost about INR 3000. Shared cabs from INR 350.
• By Road:
  • NH10 connects Siliguri to Gangtok
  • If you can t find buses plying to Gangtok directly, reach Siliguri and then take a cab to Gangtok.
• Sikkim Nationalised Transport Div. also runs hourly buses between Siliguri and Gangtok and daily buses on other common routes. They re cheaper than shared cabs.
• Wizzride also operates shared cabs between Siliguri/Bagdogra/NJP, Gangtok and Darjeeling. They cost about the same as shared cabs but pack in half as many people in luxury cars (Innova, Xylo, etc.) and are hence more comfortable.

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Gangtok

• Time needed: 1D/1N
• Places to visit:
  • Hanuman Tok
  • Ganesh Tok
  • Tashi View Point [6,800ft]
  • MG Marg
  • Sikkim Zoo
  • Gangtok Ropeway
  • Enchey Monastery
  • Tsuklakhang Palace & Monastery
• Hostels: Tagalong Backpackers (would strongly recommend), Zostel Gangtok
• Places to chill: Travel Cafe, Caf Live & Loud and Gangtok Groove
• Places to shop: Lal Market and MG Marg

Getting Around

• Taxis operate on a reserved or shared basis. In case of the latter, you can pool with other commuters your taxis will pick up and drop en-route.
• Naturally shared taxis only operate on popular routes. The easiest way to get around Gangtok is to catch a shared cab from MG Marg.
• Reserved taxis for Gangtok sightseeing cost around INR 1000-1500, depending upon the spots you d like to see
• Key taxi/bus stands :
  • Deorali stand: For Darjeeling, Siliguri, Kalimpong
  • Vajra stand: For North & East Sikkim (Tsomgo Lake & Nathula)
  • Rumtek taxi: For Ravangla, Pelling, Namchi, Geyzing, Jorethang and Singtam.

Exploring Gangtok on an MTB

• If you'd like to explore Gangtok at your own pace, you could rent a cycle from Hub Outdoor or HillBike. I paid INR 600 for a day at HillBike.
• These are well-maintained geared mountain bikes, so adapting to inclines and declines should be a breeze, even for beginners.
• Cycling down from Ganesh Tok to Tashi View Point is an absolute delight and in my opinion, the best thing you can do in Gangtok.
• While it is a little unconventional and exhausting (uphill stretches), but a 100% recommended unless you ve been skipping leg day
• Pro tip : Make sure you use the right/back brake while decelerating downhill and not the left/front brake.
• Recommended route [3-5hrs, 20.3Km, 1770-2081ft] : Chandmari (HillBike) -> Sera Jhe Dro-Phen-Ling Monastery > Ganesh Tok > Tashi View Point > Bakthung Falls > Vajra Stand > Tsuklakhang Palace & Monastery > Enchey Monastery > Chandmari

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North Sikkim

• The easiest & most economical way to explore North Sikkim is the 3D/2N package offered by shared-cab drivers.
• This includes food, permits, cab rides and accommodation (1N in Lachen and 1N in Lachung)
• The accommodation on both nights are at homestays with bare necessities, so keep your hopes low.
• In the spirit of sustainable tourism, you ll be asked to discard single-use plastic bottles, so please carry a bottle that you can refill along the way.
• Zero Point and Gurdongmer Lake are snow-capped throughout the year

3D/2N Shared-cab Package Itinerary

• Day 1
  • Gangtok (10am) - Chungthang - Lachung (stay)
• Day 2
  • Pre-lunch : Lachung (6am) - Yumthang Valley [12,139ft] - Zero Point - Lachung [15,300ft]
  • Post-lunch : Lachung - Chungthang - Lachen (stay)
• Day 3
  • Pre-lunch : Lachen (5am) - Kala Patthar - Gurdongmer Lake [16,910ft] - Lachen
  • Post-lunch : Lachen - Chungthang - Gangtok (7pm)
• This itinerary is idealistic and depends on the level of snowfall.
• Some drivers might switch up Day 2 and 3 itineraries by visiting Lachen and then Lachung, depending upon the weather.
• Areas beyond Lachen & Lachung are heavily militarized since the Indo-China border is only a few miles away.

---

East Sikkim

Zuluk and Silk Route

• Time needed: 2D/1N
• Zuluk [9,400ft] is a small hamlet with an excellent view of the eastern Himalayan range including the Kanchenjunga.
• Was once a transit point to the historic Silk Route from Tibet (Lhasa) to India (West Bengal).
• The drive from Gangtok to Zuluk takes at least four hours. Hence, it makes sense to spend the night at a homestay and space out your trip to Zuluk

Tsomgo Lake and Nathula

• Time Needed : 1D
• A Protected Area Permit is required to visit these places, due to their proximity to the Chinese border
• Tsomgo/Chhangu Lake [12,313ft]
  • Glacial lake, 40 km from Gangtok.
  • Remains frozen during the winter season.
  • You can also ride on the back of a Yak for INR 300
• Baba Mandir
  • An old temple dedicated to Baba Harbhajan Singh, a Sepoy in the 23rd Regiment, who died in 1962 near the Nathu La during Indo China war.
• Nathula Pass [14,450ft]
  • Located on the Indo-Tibetan border crossing of the Old Silk Route, it is one of the three open trading posts between India and China.
  • Plays a key role in the Sino-Indian Trade and also serves as an official Border Personnel Meeting(BPM) Point.
  • May get cordoned off by the Indian Army in event of heavy snowfall or for other security reasons.

---

West Sikkim

• Time needed: 3N/1N
• Hostels at Pelling : Mochilerro Ostillo

Itinerary

Day 1: Gangtok - Ravangla - Pelling

• Leave Gangtok early, for Ravangla through the Temi Tea Estate route.
• Spend some time at the tea garden and then visit Buddha Park at Ravangla
• Head to Pelling from Ravangla

Day 2: Pelling sightseeing

• Hire a cab and visit Skywalk, Pemayangtse Monastery, Rabdentse Ruins, Kecheopalri Lake, Kanchenjunga Falls.

Day 3: Pelling - Gangtok/Siliguri

• Wake up early to catch a glimpse of Kanchenjunga at the Pelling Helipad around sunrise
• Head back to Gangtok on a shared-cab
• You could take a bus/taxi back to Siliguri if Pelling is your last stop.

---

Darjeeling

• In my opinion, Darjeeling is lovely for a two-day detour on your way back to Bagdogra/Siliguri and not any longer (unless you re a Bengali couple on a honeymoon)
• Once a part of Sikkim, Darjeeling was ceded to the East India Company after a series of wars, with Sikkim briefly receiving a grant from EIC for gifting Darjeeling to the latter
• Post-independence, Darjeeling was merged with the state of West Bengal.

Itinerary

Day 1 :

• Take a cab from Gangtok to Darjeeling (shared-cabs cost INR 300 per seat)
• Reach Darjeeling by noon and check in to your Hostel. I stayed at Hideout.
• Spend the evening visiting either a monastery (or the Batasia Loop), Nehru Road and Mall Road.
• Grab dinner at Glenary whilst listening to live music.

Day 2:

• Wake up early to catch the sunrise and a glimpse of Kanchenjunga at Tiger Hill. Since Tiger Hill is 10km from Darjeeling and requires a permit, book your taxi in advance.
• Alternatively, if you don t want to get up at 4am or shell out INR1500 on the cab to Tiger Hill, walk to the Kanchenjunga View Point down Mall Road
• Next, queue up outside Keventers for breakfast with a view in a century-old cafe
• Get a cab at Gandhi Road and visit a tea garden (Happy Valley is the closest) and the Ropeway. I was lucky to meet 6 other backpackers at my hostel and we ended up pooling the cab at INR 200 per person, with INR 1400 being on the expensive side, but you could bargain.
• Get lunch, buy some tea at Golden Tips, pack your bags and hop on a shared-cab back to Siliguri. It took us about 4hrs to reach Siliguri, with an hour to spare before my train.
• If you ve still got time on your hands, then check out the Peace Pagoda and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (Toy Train). At INR 1500, I found the latter to be too expensive and skipped it.

---

Tips and hacks

• Download offline maps, especially when you re exploring Northern Sikkim.
• Food and booze are the cheapest in Gangtok. Stash up before heading to other regions.
• Keep your Aadhar/Passport handy since you need permits to travel to North & East Sikkim.
• In rural areas and some cafes, you may get to try Rhododendron Wine, made from Rhododendron arboreum a.k.a Gurans. Its production is a little hush-hush since the flower is considered holy and is also the National Flower of Nepal.
• If you don t want to invest in a new jacket, boots or a pair of gloves, you can always rent them at nominal rates from your hotel or little stores around tourist sites.
• Check the weather of a region before heading there. Low visibility and precipitation can quite literally dampen your experience.
• Keep your itinerary flexible to accommodate for rest and impromptu plans.
• Shops and restaurants close by 8pm in Sikkim and Darjeeling. Plan for the same.

Carry

• a couple of extra pairs of socks (woollen, if possible)
• a pair of slippers to wear indoors
• a reusable water bottle
• an umbrella
• a power bank
• a couple of tablets of Diamox. Helps deal with altitude sickness
• extra clothes and wet bags since you may not get a chance to wash/dry your clothes
• a few passport size photographs

Shared-cab hacks

• Intercity rides can be exhausting. If you can afford it, pay for an additional seat.
• Call shotgun on the drives beyond Lachen and Lachung. The views are breathtaking.
• Return cabs tend to be cheaper (WB cabs travelling from SK and vice-versa)

Cost

• My median daily expenditure (back when I went to Sikkim in early March 2021) was INR 1350.
• This includes stay (bunk bed), food, wine and transit (shared cabs)
• In my defence, I splurged on food, wine and extra seats in shared cabs, but if you re on a budget, you could easily get by on INR 1 - 1.2k per day.
• For a 9-day trip, I ended up shelling out nearly INR 15k, including 2AC trains to & from Kolkata
• Note : Summer (March to May) and Autumn (October to December) are peak seasons, and thereby more expensive to travel around.

---

Souvenirs and things you should buy

Buddhist souvenirs :

• Colourful Prayer Flags (great for tying on bikes or behind car windshields)
• Miniature Prayer/Mani Wheels
• Lucky Charms, Pendants and Key Chains
• Cham Dance masks and robes
• Singing Bowls
• Common symbols: Om mani padme hum, Ashtamangala, Zodiac signs

Handicrafts & Handlooms

• Tibetan Yak Wool shawls, scarfs and carpets
• Sikkimese Ceramic cups
• Thangka Paintings

Edibles

• Darjeeling Tea (usually brewed and not boiled)
• Wine (Arucha Peach & Rhododendron)
• Dalle Khursani (Chilli) Paste and Pickle

Header Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY

Krebs on Security has an informative article about web notifications and how they are being used for spamming and promoting malware [1]. He also includes links for how to permanently disable them. If nothing else clicking no on each new site that wants to send notifications is annoying. Michael Stapelberg wrote an insightful posts about inefficiencies in the Debian development processes [2]. While I agree with most of his assessment of Debian issues I am not going to decrease my involvement in Debian. Of the issues he mentions the 2 that seem to have the best effort to reward ratio are improvements to mailing list archives (to ideally make it practical to post to lists without subscribing and read responses in the archives) and the issues of forgetting all the complexities of the development process which can be alleviated by better Wiki pages. In my Debian work I ve contributed more to the Wiki in recent times but not nearly as much as I should. Jacobin has an insightful article Ending Poverty in the United States Would Actually Be Pretty Easy [3]. Mark Brown wrote an interesting blog post about the Rust programming language [4]. He links to a couple of longer blog posts about it. Rust has some great features and I ve been meaning to learn it. Scientific America has an informative article about research on the spread of fake news and memes [5]. Something to consider when using social media. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post on whether there should be limits on persuasive technology [6]. Jonathan Dowland wrote an interesting blog post about git rebasing and lab books [7]. I think it s an interesting thought experiment to compare the process of developing code worthy of being committed to a master branch of a VCS to the process of developing a Ph.D thesis. CBS has a disturbing article about the effect of Covid19 on people s lungs [8]. Apparently it usually does more lung damage than long-term smoking and even 70%+ of people who don t have symptoms of the disease get significant lung damage. People who live in heavily affected countries like the US now have to worry that they might have had the disease and got lung damage without knowing it. Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book Because Internet about modern linguistics [9]. The topic is interesting and I might read that book at some future time (I have many good books I want to read). Jonathan Carter wrote an interesting blog post about CentOS Streams and why using a totally free OS like Debian is going to be a better option for most users [10]. Linus has slammed Intel for using ECC support as a way of segmenting the market between server and desktop to maximise profits [11]. It would be nice if a company made a line of Ryzen systems with ECC RAM support, but most manufacturers seem to be in on the market segmentation scam. Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book Can t Even about millenials as the burnout generation and the blame that the corporate culture deserves for this [12].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/y37jh9t4
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/y45o88ma
• [3] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/broke-in-america-ending-us-poverty
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/y98llves
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/yy67g9nq
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/y99wjkvx
• [7] https://jmtd.net/log/git_rebasing_and_lab_books/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yy6l22x4
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/yxtwtbhe
• [10] https://jonathancarter.org/2020/12/10/centos-stream-or-debian/
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/y3kolzzs
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/y4v9xglj

Review: The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow

Publisher:	Redhook Books
Copyright:	October 2020
ISBN:	0-316-42202-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	515

Once upon a time there were three sisters. They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough. But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and scattered.

The Once and Future Witches opens with Juniper, the youngest, arriving in the city of New Salem. The year is 1893, but not in our world, not quite; Juniper has witch-ways in her pocket and a few words of power. That's lucky for her because the wanted posters arrived before she did. Unbeknownst to her or to each other, her sisters, Agnes and Bella, are already in New Salem. Agnes works in a cotton mill after having her heart broken one too many times; the mill is safer because you can't love a cotton mill. Bella is a junior librarian, meek and nervous and uncertain but still fascinated by witch-tales and magic. It's Bella who casts the spell, partly by accident, partly out of wild hope, but it was Juniper arriving in the city who provided the final component that made it almost work. Not quite, not completely, but briefly the lost tower of Avalon appears in St. George's Square. And, more importantly, the three sisters are reunited. The world of the Eastwood sisters has magic, but the people in charge of that world aren't happy about it. Magic is a female thing, contrary to science and, more importantly, God. History has followed a similar course to our world in part because magic has been ruthlessly suppressed. Inquisitors are a recent memory and the cemetery has a witch-yard, where witches are buried unnamed and their ashes sown with salt. The city of New Salem is called New Salem because Old Salem, that stronghold of witchcraft, was burned to the ground and left abandoned, fit only for tourists to gawk at the supposedly haunted ruins. The women's suffrage movement is very careful to separate itself from any hint of witchcraft or scandal, making its appeals solely within the acceptable bounds of the church. Juniper is the one who starts to up-end all of that in New Salem. Juniper was never good at doing what she was told. This is an angry book that feels like something out of another era, closer in tone to a Sheri S. Tepper or Joanna Russ novel than the way feminism is handled in recent work. Some of that is the era of the setting, before women even had the right to vote. But primarily it's because Harrow, like those earlier works, is entirely uninterested in making excuses or apologies for male behavior. She takes an already-heated societal conflict and gives the underdogs magic, which turns it into a war. There is likely a better direct analogy from the suffrage movement, but the comparison that came to my mind was if Martin Luther King, Jr. proved ineffective or had not existed, and instead Malcolm X or the Black Panthers became the face of the Civil Rights movement. It's also an emotionally exhausting book. The protagonists are hurt and lost and shattered. Their moments of victory are viciously destroyed. There is torture and a lot of despair. It works thematically; all the external solutions and mythical saviors fail, but in the process the sisters build their own strength and their own community and rescue themselves. But it's hard reading at times if you're emotionally invested in the characters (and I was very invested). Harrow does try to balance the losses with triumphs and that becomes more effective and easier to read in the back half of the book, but I struggled with the grimness at the start. One particular problem for me was that the sisters start the book suspicious and distrustful of each other because of lies and misunderstandings. This is obvious to the reader, but they don't work through it until halfway through the book. I can't argue with this as a piece of characterization it made sense to me that they would have reacted to their past the way that they did. But it was still immensely frustrating to read, since in the meantime awful things were happening and I wanted them to band together to fight. They also worry over the moral implications of the fate of their father, whereas I thought the only problem was that the man couldn't die more than once. There too, it makes sense given the moral framework the sisters were coerced into, but it is not my moral framework and it was infuriating to see them stay trapped in it for so long. The other thing that I found troubling thematically is that Harrow personalizes evil. I thought the more interesting moral challenge posed in this book is a society that systematically abuses women and suppresses their power, but Harrow gradually supplants that systemic conflict with a villain who has an identity and a backstory. It provides a more straightforward and satisfying climax, and she does avoid the trap of letting triumph over one character solve all the broader social problems, but it still felt too easy. Worse, the motives of the villain turn out to be at right angles to the structure of the social oppression. It's just a tool he's using, and while that's also believable, it means the transfer of the narrative conflict from the societal to the personal feels like a shying away from a sharper political point. Harrow lets the inhabitants of New Salem off too easily by giving them the excuse of being manipulated by an evil mastermind. What I thought Harrow did handle well was race, and it feels rare to be able to say this about a book written by and about white women. There are black women in New Salem as well, and they have their own ways and their own fight. They are suspicious of the Eastwood sisters because they're worried white women will stir up trouble and then run away and leave the consequences to fall on black women... and they're right. An alliance only forms once the white women show willingness to stay for the hard parts. Black women are essential to the eventual success of the protagonists, but the opposite is not necessarily true; they have their own networks, power, and protections, and would have survived no matter what the Eastwoods did. The book is the Eastwoods' story, so it's mostly concerned with white society, but I thought Harrow avoided both making black women too magical or making white women too central. They instead operate in parallel worlds that can form the occasional alliance of mutual understanding. It helps that Cleopatra Quinn is one of the best characters of the book. This was hard, emotional reading. It's the sort of book where everything has a price, even the ending. But I'm very glad I read it. Each of the three sisters gets their own, very different character arc, and all three of those arcs are wonderful. Even Agnes, who was the hardest character for me to like at the start of the book and who I think has the trickiest story to tell, becomes so much stronger and more vivid by the end of the book. Sometimes the descriptions are trying a bit too hard and sometimes the writing is not quite up to the intended goal, but some of the descriptions are beautiful and memorable, and Harrow's way of weaving the mythic and the personal together worked for me. This is a more ambitious book than The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and while I think the ambition exceeded Harrow's grasp in a few places and she took a few thematic short-cuts, most of it works. The characters felt like living and changing people, which is not easy given how heavily the story structure leans on maiden, mother, and crone archetypes. It's an uncompromising and furious book that turns the anger of 1970s feminist SF onto themes that are very relevant in 2021. You will have to brace yourself for heartbreak and loss, but I think it's fantasy worth reading. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

I recently took part in an interview with Vladimir Bejdo, an intern at the Software Freedom Conservancy, in order to talk about the Reproducible Builds project, my own participation in software freedom, the importance of reproducibility in software development and to have a brief discussion on the issues facing free software as a whole:

VB: To start off with, it might be useful to first ask you this how would you relate the importance of reproducibility to a user who is non-technical? CL: I sometimes use the analogy of the food supply chain to quickly relate our work to non-technical audiences. The multiple stages of how our food reaches our plates today (such as seeding, harvesting, picking, transportation, packaging, etc.) can loosely translate to how software actually ends up on our computers, particularly in the way that if any of the steps in the multi-stage food supply chain has an issue then it quickly becomes a serious problem. For example, even if we could guarantee that only the most wholesome apples were picked in our orchards, if they became tainted on the way to the supermarket it will be a real problem for us at the end of the day. We may not even be able to even tell by simply inspecting our Pink Ladies or Honeycrisps, and washing them thoroughly under the tap may not be enough either. In an ideal world, we would be able to personally inspect the provenance of our food at all of the stages of manufacturing and transportation. But at some point, we must place our trust in the process and in brands, as well as various regulatory bodies to ensure that potential problems in our food are minimized, possibly even paying a time/effort premium by growing our own or buying direct from local markets in order to minimize the number of steps, etc. However, when we use free software we can do better: Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices, ideas and tools that create an independently-verifiable path all the way from the original source code to what actually runs on our machines. Reproducible builds can reveal the injection of back-doors introduced by the hacking of developers own computers, build servers and package repositories, and also expose where volunteers or companies have been coerced into making changes via blackmail, court order, and so on. With reproducible builds, there is no longer any need to trust any particular source of authority. In the same way that, say, a Mr Smith might check that his calculator is giving him the right answer to 2+2=4 by asking enough of his friends to check theirs too, users and developers of a reproducible build can verify the software they are using by creating a collective consensus instead.

The full interview can be found on the Conservancy webpages.