Review: What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2026
ISBN:	1-250-36474-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	339

What We Are Seeking is a bit hard to classify beyond science fiction. I think I would call it anthropological science fiction, but it's also a first contact story and a planetary colony story. It is a standalone novel (well, so far as I know; see later in the review for caveats). This is Cameron Reed's second novel after the excellent and memorable cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall, first published in 1996 under Reed's former name of Raphael Carter. John Maraintha is a doctor from the world of Essius. He took what he thought was a temporary job on the Free Ship Edgar's Folly, where he's endured considerable culture shock. As the novel opens, John learns that the colonists on Scythia have requested a translator to talk to one of the native life forms, and a doctor since they're down to only one. John will be that doctor. The captain has decided, and by the rules of the free ships, John does not get a choice in the matter. The Scythian colony is about four hundred people, now located in a desert climate since the complex native life forms destroyed their previous settlement. The colonists are a split between Ischnurans and Zandaheans, two other human civilizations from the scatter of colony worlds left after Earth embraced AIs (aiyis here) and turned inward. Both of those groups marry, something John considers a moral abomination. Neither of them seem likely to understand Essian sexual ethics. More devastatingly, John had intended to spend some time as a ship doctor and then return home to a new place in Essian society. Once he lands on Scythia, the chances of that are gone; it is highly unlikely any ship would pick him up again and take him home. I have been trying to find the right books to compare What We Are Seeking with ever since I read it. The best I've come up with are Ursula K. Le Guin (particularly The Dispossessed), Eleanor Arnason's A Woman of the Iron People, and Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, If Fortunate. The start of the book felt like an intentional revisiting of an earlier era of science fiction, with somewhat updated science and politics, but the last half of the book, where the action picks up considerably, is a meditation on gender, social systems, religion, and small-group politics. All of that is mixed with biological exploration and a first-contact story with some quite-alien aliens. This is the sort of novel where the protagonist's culture is as foreign to the reader as any of the other cultures he counters, so the reader is assembling several jigsaw puzzles at once. John is dropped into an established colony with its own social norms and established hierarchies. The one other outsider, the translator Sudharma Jain, is, as his name implies, a Jain who keeps very strict religious observances. Half of the colony is from something akin to a fundamentalist Christian religious sect that practices patriarchy and strict marriage codes. The other half is more gently sexist (but still sexist) and has its own tradition of a third gender that becomes central to the story. John, meanwhile, is a strong believer in the Essian approach to social organization: Any two partners of any gender freely have sex by mutual consent and without obligation, and family is based solely on blood relations. These beliefs do not fit comfortably together, even when people are trying (as they mostly do) to be welcoming. The first half of this book is very slow. This gives all of the characters space to breathe and become comfortable, and the characterization is superb, but it is a book to start when you're in the mood for something slow and observational. There is a plot that gradually becomes apparent, or rather there are several plots that are intertwined, but tension and urgency are mostly reserved for the second half of the book. Instead, the book opens with a lot of close observation of alien flora and fauna and the untangling of subtle social dynamics among the Scythians. There is also a visitor from earth, much to the distress of the Scythians. Earth presence means the ships will not return and the colony may be cut off from any sort of technological resupply. Despite speaking a common language, that visitor is as mutually alien to the other groups as they are to the native flora. Her life is fully integrated with aiyis, giving her essentially godlike powers and the ability to turn off inconvenient emotions and disregard anything she doesn't want to see. What she and the Earth aiyis are doing on the planet is one of the early mysteries. The dialogue in this book is truly excellent. Each characters has their own voice, there are fascinating digressions on different words that lead to tidbits of world-building, and some of the culture-specific idioms are delightful.

"I'm making a mess of this. None of that matters. Let me fall out the window and come in the door again. This is how my story ought to start:"

The challenges for the characters in this story are slow but deep ones: belonging and self-definition, the conflict between cultural tradition and personal circumstance, and the sacrifices required to live with small groups in situations where civil war is viscerally attractive. It has one of the most comprehensive and fascinating treatments of transgender issues that I've read in science fiction. Its commentary on current politics is subtle and estranged in the way that science fiction does best, but still pointed and satisfying. And, well, there are passages like this that I absolutely adore:

"I wouldn't go that far. It could be they are right, the universe we see exists because a mind like ours created it at least, a mind enough like ours that we can say it wants one thing and not another, and when it acts it does so with intent. That's as good an idea as any. But it is certainly not plausible that such a being believes that people everywhere should marry, or that men should never visit men, or no one should become a jess. Look at what they have created. The universe could have been nothing at all, or one atom of hydrogen floating in a void, or a diamond crystal infinite in all directions, if their mind cared for simplicity or tidiness. Instead we have stars and planets and black holes and nebulas. It could have all been cold and dead, but there is life. They could have made one species for each world, or just a few, which could have stayed the same forever, but instead we have millions and millions, all of which are changing every moment, varying among themselves and boiling off in all directions. Such a god is like an artist who fills up a library of sketchbooks with their drawings of strange creatures, and when every scrap of paper in the place is used up, goes back with a different color ink and scribbles over them again. They are obsessed with variation they gorge themselves with it and never grow full. Do you really think a mind like that could want us all to live in the same way?"

I had one problem with this book, though, and for me it was a big one: There is no ending. Reed effectively builds tension, gets me caring about all of the characters, sets up several problems, starts down a path towards resolution, and then the book just... ends. Long-time readers of my reviews will know that I'm a denouement fanatic. I want the scouring of the shire, I want the chapter set in the happily ever after, I want the catharsis of an ending. This made me so grumpy! To be clear, this is not sequel bait (at least so far as I can tell). I can write a philosophical defense of the ending. The types of problems and lives that Reed set up don't have clear endings; this is, to some extent, the point. We muddle through, and then those who come after us muddle through some more, and the cumulative effect is called human civilization. And there is some denouement; Reed doesn't leave the reader at a cliffhanger or anything that egregious. But still, I wanted the happy ending, even though that was unrealistic for the style of story this is, because I'm a happy ending reader. This is not an ending sort of book; it's the sort of book where I get a sinking feeling at the 95% mark because there aren't enough pages left for the number of remaining unresolved problems. I've gotten less annoyed in the days since I finished the book, and I can appreciate the thematic point made by how the book ends, but I still feel like it's worth an advance warning if you're a reader like I am. I would be delighted by a sequel, but it didn't feel like that was the intent. Apart from that, this was both excellent and rather unlike a lot of current science fiction. I think the closest comparison I can make among recent novels I've read is Sue Burke's Semiosis. What We Are Seeking has a similar sort of world-building, but I liked these characters so much more. It felt like a classic literary science fiction novel, but very much written in 2026. Highly recommended, just beware of the lack of closure. Content notes: Sexism, homophobia, stomach illness, and some religious abuse. Rating: 8 out of 10

On June 19 and 20, I will cycle a little over 100 miles from downtown Chicago and its wonderful Millenium Park to New Buffalo, Michigan, as part of the Tour de Shore 2026. The ride passes through northwest Indiana and the extended Indiana Dunes National Park ending the next morning in the southwestern Michigan town of New Buffalo. I rode Tour de Shore once before in 2024 and had a generally wonderful time (even considering some soreness after a century of miles over 1 1/2 days). Tour de Shore is riding in support of Maywood Fine Arts Center, a local arts and sports center in Maywood, Illinois, a suburb one over from where I live and hence just a few good miles west of downtown. Maywood, Illinois is home to legends such as the late John Prine as well as several NBA players such as player and coach Doc Rivers. But Maywood, Illinois is also little less well off than other western suburbs. The Maywood Fine Arts Center is simply legendary is what they do for this community (and surrounding communities), and especially the youth support. They can use a dollar a two. Their story about Tour de Shore is worth a read too for background and motivation. I have bootstrapped my donation page page with a dollar for each mile to be cycled. It would be simply terrific if you could join me. A nickel, a dime, or a quarter per mile cycled would help. Multiples of that help too: More is of course still always better. Anything you can afford will go a long way towards a worthy goal in a community that could use the help. Of and if you are local to the area, I believe you can still register for Tour de Shore 2026. So see you out there in June? And if not, maybe help with a dollar or two?

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog.

Review: Code Blue Emergency, by James White

Series:	Sector General #7
Publisher:	Orb
Copyright:	1987
Printing:	May 2003
ISBN:	0-7653-0663-8
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	252

Code Blue Emergency (annoying em-dash in original title) is the seventh book of James White's Sector General science fiction series about a vast multi-species hospital station. While there are some references to (and spoilers for) earlier books in the series, you don't have to remember the previous books to read this one. I had no trouble despite a nine-year gap. I read this as part of the Orb General Practice omnibus, which collects this novel and The Genocidal Healer. Cha Thrat is a Sommaradvan warrior-surgeon, member of a newly-discovered species that is beginning the process of contact with the Federation. She saved a Monitor corps human after an accident on her world, performing some some highly competent surgery on a species she had never seen before. That plus her somewhat outcast status on her own world due to her very traditional attitude towards medical ethics led Sector General to extend an offer of medical internship, and led her to leap into the unknown by accepting. This may have been a mistake; there is a great deal that Sector General does not understand about Sommaradvan medical ethics. This series entry is another proper (if somewhat episodic) novel and the first book of the series that doesn't primarily focus on Conway. He makes an appearance in his new role as Diagnostician, but only as a supporting character. Code Blue Emergency is told in the tight third-person perspective of Cha Thrat, an alien who finds many things about Sector General baffling, confusing, and ethically troubling (and who therefore provides a good reader surrogate for reintroducing the basics of how the hospital works). Using an alien viewpoint is a more sophisticated narrative technique than White has used previously. I'm glad he tried it, and it mostly works, although I have some complaints. Cha Thrat comes from the middle caste of a strictly hierarchical society of three castes, but is also immensely stubborn and used to a medical system in which doctors take sole responsibility for their patients. This creates a lot of cultural conflicts, and I do enjoy science fiction where the human attitudes are portrayed as the strange ones, but the cultural analysis offered by this novel is not very deep. The pattern of this book is for Cha Thrat to stumble into a successful approach to a problem while being either oblivious to or hostile to the normal hierarchical structure expected of medical trainees. This is believable as far as it goes. She is a skilled and intelligent doctor with some good instincts and a strong commitment to patient care, but is also culturally inclined to not ask for help. It makes sense for that to be a serious problem in a hospital. Unfortunately, no one says this directly. Sector General staff get quite upset in ways that seem more territorial than oriented towards patient safety, no one directly explains to Cha Thrat why following a process is important or shows examples of what could go wrong, and plot armor means that her mistakes usually have positive outcomes. One can extrapolate the reasons why she is not a good medical student, but the reader is forced to do the extrapolation. This is the sort of book where the narration makes clear there are unresolved cultural clashes that are going to cause problems but hides the details. To Cha Thrat, her perspective is so obvious she never bothers to explain it to the reader, so the specifics come as a surprise. As with the alien perspective, I've seen this technique used with more subtlety and sophistication in other books, but White's version mostly works. Cha Thrat is a sympathetic protagonist because she is truly trying to take the most ethical and empathetic action in every situation and is clearly competent. Most of my frustration as a reader, ironically, lands on the other Sector General doctors who seem to make little to no effort to understand her perspective when she fails to conform to their expectations. This is believable in the abstract, but the whole point of Sector General is that they're supposed to be wiser about interspecies difference than this. Also, sometimes their reactions just seem petty. Cha Thrat has a very hierarchical concept of medicine that matches the social classes of her culture. For her, the highest tier of doctor are wizards who treat rulers, because the work of rulers is mostly mental and intellectual and therefore the diseases of rulers are treated with magic spells performed with words to reshape their thinking rather than surgery on their bodies. O'Mara and the other Sector General psychologists take great offense at this, muttering about being called witch doctors, which I found completely absurd. This is a comprehensible, if odd, description of psychology from a wholly alien species. Surely one's first reaction should be that words like "wizard" or "magic" are translation errors. Don't get offended; look to see if the underlying substance matches, which it clearly does. Apart from cultural and psychological clashes, Code Blue Emergency has the standard episodic Sector General structure of interesting medical mysteries that require lateral thinking. I find this sort of puzzle story satisfying, particularly given the firm belief of every character in an essentially pacifist and empathetic approach to even the most alien of creatures. This determined non-violence is one of the more interesting things about this series, and it continues here. White does tend towards both biological and gender essentialism for everyone other than the protagonist and main supporting characters, but he seemed to be walking back some of the more outrageous limitations on women that appeared in previous books. There is still some nonsense in here about how females of any species can't be Diagnosticians, but then Cha Thrat, who is female, seems to violate the justification for that rule over the course of this novel (sadly without comment). Perhaps he's setting up for proving Sector General wrong about this prejudice. I picked this up after reading Elizabeth Bear's Machine, which is essentially a (better written) Sector General novel that got me in the mood for reading more. I wouldn't give Code Blue Emergency any awards, but it delivered exactly what I was looking for. This series is not as deep or well-written as some more recent SF, but it is reliably itself and reliably entertaining. There are worse things in a series. Recommended if you're in the mood for alien ER in space. The omnibus edition that I read has an introduction to both novels by John Clute. It does add some interesting insights, but (as is somewhat typical for Clute) it also spoils parts of both books. You may want to read it after you read the novels. Followed by The Genocidal Healer. Rating: 7 out of 10

AI sure is a hot topic right now, and I see a lot of people arguing about it. To a lot of people around here, I m the computer person they know and I get asked a lot about AI. I m going to suggest a lot of things can be true at once. For instance:

• LLMs are changing how we work and will continue to do so.
• LLMs are vastly over-hyped by vested interests, and may be in a bubble.

Or how about:

• Huge investment in GenAI is having many negative consequences, ranging from environmental to causing affordability problems in many industries that use hardware (ie, everywhere)
• Useful results can be had from models that run on local hardware, even battery-powered hardware, which may have negligible harm or even some benefit

And:

• GenAI is further concentrating wealth and power in megacorps, with the effect of squeezing out the smaller players even more.
• GenAI is lowering the cost of entry for people without a lot of resources already.

I have sympathy for the naysayers; those that say it s nothing but a stochastic parrot. But I don t have a lot of sympathy for the naysayers that deny ever using it; you can t form a credible argument against something without having an understanding of it informed by experience. I also have sympathy for the cheerleaders. I have seen some impressive things from AI; for instance, a story from an engineer who has a child with a rare disease without a credible cure. The engineer did a lot of research on it, started feeding research papers into AI to analyze, and the AI started finding correlations between different areas of research that humans hadn t yet found leading to a positive result for the child. To be fair, I have rarely seen an AI deliver a 100% correct answer on anything with any real level of complexity. I have seen it both waste more time than it saves, and save a ton of time. My point here is: It is neither always fantastic nor always terrible. Let me talk you through an example. I am a fan of inbox zero for email. That is, the inbox should be empty. Unfortunately, mine has 8000 messages in it. According to the oldest messages in my inbox, I last had inbox zero 8 years ago. But really, only a handful are older than 2020. I guess something must have happened that year I ve been chipping away at this for quite some time now. The problem is, there are certain emails in there that really do still need some action maybe it s photos to save off into our photo collection, for instance. But when looking at things sorted by date or thread, there are old shipping confirmations next to phishing attempts and family photos. One can t just scan down the list. I ve tried all the usual tricks, most of which involve selecting groups of message that are easy to bulk erase, or at least easy to scan visually for the occasional thing worth saving. Sort by sender or subject line, for instance. Then I can, for instance, delete all the old messages from the shopping sites I commonly use all at once. But then they start using different senders and different subject lines and that doesn t get all of them. I ve tried keyword searches for this sort of thing too. Still, that got me down to about 8000 messages. So I thought: why not see if an LLM could help me classify these? Maybe it could categorize them, and then I could look at emails grouped by category. I have one machine with a discrete GPU, an Nvidia RTX 4070. It s a desktop machine I don t use all that often. But I set up Ollama on it, running in a Docker container. Ollama runs models locally. I should also mention at this point that we are solar-powered, and this time of year is a time of peak production of excess solar, because it is sunny and not much heat or AC is required. So that machine is solar-powered and isn t causing environmental harm. In any case, charging the EV uses much more power than that GPU. I figured I would do this in two passes. First, ask the LLM to classify each message (or a sampling of them would probably work too), letting it pick its own categories for each. Then, look at the patterns that emerge and give it a single, much smaller, set of broad categories to use and rerun it over that. Then I can easily select messages from my Maildirs by category and process them in bulk. I used open-interpreter pointing to that GPU on my network to help me write the scripts for this. It didn t get things right on its own; for instance, it didn t call the Ollama API correctly, and insisted on appending /cur to the path to the Maildir (which was not going to fly with Python s maildir module). It took roughly an hour to classify those 8000 messages (or, as I had it do, the first 2000 characters of them), and then the same to do it a second time. I had it output lines in the form of filename\tcategory and hand-wrote the shell script that processed those. In the end, was it useful? Yes, quite. Its classifications weren t perfect (and it didn t even follow my prompt perfectly; sometimes it would give me a long discussion on why it picked a certain category rather than just that category, and occasionally it picked categories not on the list). But then, neither were my manual keyword searches. So far I ve gotten rid of nearly 1000 more messages. Several categories were a visual scan for sanity and then delete all sort of thing. My emails never left my network. I didn t rely on a cloud AI to process them. I didn t contribute to global warming (this may have even been a case of saving energy, since it no doubt will offset quite a bit of manual time that would keep screens and room lights energized and so forth). I used about as much energy as watching a movie on a TV. Did it complete the task for me entirely autonomously? Also no. AI isn t a mind reader and it can t possibly evaluate exactly what my thought process would be for a given task. But it can do a decent enough job to save me some time. Still, this didn t require hyperscaler datacenters. AI even runs on-phone (Google Translate being one of the most useful AI-driven apps I ve ever seen, and it can run on-device).

On Friday May the 13th OpenSSL project has published advisory details for CVE-2026-2673. The CVE is treated as non-important by the project. The patches are only provided as commits on the stable branches. No git tag, no precise fixed version, and no source tarballs provided.The patches that were merged to openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches were not based on top of the last stable point release and did not split code changes & documentation updates. It means that cherry-picking the commits referenced in the advisory will always lead to conflicts requiring manual resolution. It is not clear if support is provided for snapshot builds off the openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches. As the builds from the stable branches declare themselves as dev builds of the next unreleased point release. For example, in contrast to projects such as vim and glibc, with every commit to stable branches explicitly recommended for distributors to ship and is supported.I have requested OpenSSL upstream in the past for the security fixes to branch off the last point release, commit code changes separate from the NEWS.md / CHANGES.md updates, and then merge that into the stable branches. This way the advisory that recommends cherry-picking individual commits, would actually apply conflict free - at no additional maintenance burden to the OpenSSL project and everyone who has to cherry-pick these updates. There is a wide support voiced for such strategy by the OpenSSL distributors and the OpenSSL Corporation. But this is not something that OpenSSL Project is yet choosing to provide.To avoid duplication of work, I am starting to provide stable OpenSSL re-releases of the last upstream tagged stable point release with security only patches split into code-change only; documentation update; version update to create security only source tarball releases that are easy to build; easy to identify by the security scanners; and which cherry-pick changes without conflicts. The first two releases are published on GitHub as immutable releases with attestations:

• OpenSSL 3.6.1+1 - OpenSSL 3.6.1 with fix for CVE-2026-2673
• OpenSSL 3.5.5+1 - OpenSSL 3.5.5 with fix for CVE-2026-2673

Krebs has an interesting article about the Kimwolf botnet which uses residential proxy relay services [1]. cory Doctorow wrote an insightful blog post about code being a liability not an asset [2]. Aigars Mahinovs wrote an interesting review of the BMW i4 M50 xDrive and the BMW i5 eDrive40 which seem like very impressive vehicles [3]. I was wondering what BMW would do now that all the features they had in the 90s have been copied by cheaper brands but they have managed to do new and exciting things. Arstechnica has an interesting article about the recently declassified JUMPSEAT surveillance satellites that ran from 1971 to 1987 [4]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting blog post about OgApp which briefly allowed viewing Instagram without ads and the issues of US corporations misusing EU copyright law [5]. ZDNet has an interesting article about new planned developments for the web of trust for Linux kernel coders (and others) [6]. Last month India had a 300 million person strike, we need more large scale strikes against governments that support predatory corporations [7]. Techdirt has an insightful article on the ways the fascism is bad for innovation and a market based economy [8]. The Acknowledgements section from the Scheme Shell (scsh) reference is epic [9]. Vice has an insightful article on research about do your own research and how simple Google searches tend to reinforce conspiracy theories [10]. A problem with Google is that it s most effective if you already know the answer. Issendai has an interesting and insightful series of blog posts about estranged parents forums which seems a lot like Incel forums in the way they promote abuse [11]. Caitlin Johnstone wrote an interesting article about how the empire caused the rebirth of a real counterculture by their attempts to coerce support for Israeli atrocities [12]. Radley Balko wrote an interesting article about the courage to be decent concerning the Trump regime s attempts to scare lawyers into cooperating with them [13]. Terry Tan wrote a useful resource on the API for Google search, this could be good for shell scripts and for 3rd party programs that launch a search [14]. The Proof has an interesting article about eating oysters and mussels as a vegan [15]. All Things Linguistic has an interesting and amusing post about Yoda s syntax in non-English languages [16].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2ypyzh5w
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2b9kyl5x
• [3] https://aigarius.com/blog/2026/01/07/sedan-experience/
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/23ekabmj
• [5] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/29j6zzyc
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2xvfmslu
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2b7m8pwa
• [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsh
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2aajkoyv
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/ywd3kqel
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2cqep7cj
• [13] https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-courage-to-be-decent
• [14] https://serpapi.com/blog/every-google-udm-in-the-world/
• [15] https://theproof.com/eating-oysters-and-mussels-as-a-vegan/
• [16] https://tinyurl.com/229soykv

I just made up a Debian trixie setup that has no need for a GUI. In fact, I rarely use the text console either. However, because the machine is dual boot and also serves another purpose, it s connected to my main monitor and KVM switch. The monitor has three inputs, and when whatever display it s set to goes into powersave mode, it will seek out another one that s active and automatically switch to it. You can probably see where this is heading: it s really inconvenient if one of the inputs never goes into powersave mode. And, of course, it wastes energy. I have concluded that the Linux text console has lost the ability to enter powersave mode after an inactivity timeout. It can still do screen blanking setting every pixel to black but that is a distinct and much less useful thing. You can do a lot of searching online that will tell you what to do. Almost all of it is wrong these days. For instance, none of these work:

• Anything involving vbetool. This is really, really old advice.
• Anything involving xset, unless you re actually running a GUI, which is not the point of this post.
• Anything involving setterm or the kernel parameters video=DPMS or consoleblank.
• Anything involving writing to paths under /sys, such as ones ending in dpms.

Why is this? Well, we are on at least the third generation of Linux text console display subsystems. (Maybe more than 3, depending on how you count.) The three major ones were:

1. The VGA text console
2. fbdev
3. DRI/KMS

As I mentioned recently in my post about running an accurate 80 25 DOS-style console on modern Linux, the VGA text console mode is pretty much gone these days. It relied on hardware rendering of the text fonts, and that capability simply isn t present on systems that aren t PCs or even on PCs that are UEFI, which is most of them now. fbdev, or a framebuffer console under earlier names, has been in Linux since the late 1990s. It was the default for most distros until more recently. It supported DPMS powersave modes, and most of the instructions you will find online reference it. Nowadays, the DRI/KMS system is used for graphics. Unfortunately, it is targeted mainly at X11 and Wayland. It is also used for the text console, but things like DPMS-enabled timeouts were never implemented there. You can find some manual workarounds for instance, using ddcutil or similar for an external monitor, or adjusting the backlight files under /sys on a laptop. But these have a number of flaws making unwanted brightness adjustments, and not automatically waking up on keypress among them. My workaround I finally gave up and ran apt-get install xdm. Then in /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup, I added one line:

xset dpms 0 0 120

Now the system boots into an xdm login screen, and shuts down the screen after 2 minutes of inactivity. On the rare occasion where I want a text console from it, I can switch to it and it won t have a timeout, but I can live with that. Thus, quite hopefully, concludes my series of way too much information about the Linux text console!

exfatprogs 1.3.0 added a new defrag.exfat utility which turned out to be not reliable and cause data loss. exfatprogs 1.3.1 disabled the utility, and I followed that decision with the upload to Debian/unstable yesterday. But as usual it will take some time until it's migrating to testing. Thus if you use testing do not try defag.exfat! At least not without a vetted and current backup. Beside of that there is a compatibility issue with the way mkfs.exfat, as shipped in trixie (exfatprogs 1.2.9), handles drives which have a physical sector size of 4096 bytes but emulate a logical size of 512 bytes. With exfatprogs 1.2.6 a change was implemented to prefer the physical sector size on those devices. That turned out to be not compatible with Windows, and was reverted in exfatprogs 1.3.0. Sadly John Ogness ran into the issue and spent some time to debug it. I've to admit that I missed the relevance of that change. Huge kudos to John for the bug report. Based on that I prepared an update for the next trixie point release. If you hit that issue on trixie with exfatprogs 1.2.9-1 you can work around it by formating with mkfs.exfat -s 512 /dev/sdX to get Windows compatibility. If you use exfatprogs 1.2.9-1+deb13u1 or later, and want the performance gain back, and do not need Windows compatibility, you can format with mkfs.exfat -s 4096 /dev/sdX.

Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over one hundred individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 41.5 million package downloads. Version 1.90.0 of Boost was released a few days ago following the regular Boost release schedule of April, August and December releases. As before, we packaged it almost immediately and started testing following our annual update cycle which strives to balance being close enough to upstream and not stressing CRAN and the user base too much. The reverse depends check revealed only one really minor issue among the over three hundred direct reverse dependencies. And that issue was addressed yesterday within hours by a truly responsove maintainer (and it helped that a related issue had been addressed months earlier with version 1.89.). So big thanks to Jean-Romain Roussel for the prompt fix, and to Andrew Johnson for the earlier test with 1.89.0. As last year with 1.87.0, no new Boost libraries were added to BH so the (considerable) size is more or less unchanged. It lead to CRAN doing a manual inspection but as there were no other issues it sailed through as is now in the CRAN repository. The short NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 1.90.0-1 (2025-12-13)

• Upgrade to Boost 1.90.0, patched as usual to comment-out diagnostic suppression messages per the request of CRAN
• Minor upgrades to continuous integration

Via my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to the previous release. Comments and suggestions about BH are welcome via the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Quiete some things made progress last month: We put out Phosh 0.50 release, got closer to enabling media roles for audio by default in Phosh (see related post) and reworked our images builds. You should also (hopefully) notice some nice quality of life improvements once changes land in a distro near you and you're using Phosh. See below for details: phosh

• Switch back to default them when disabling automatic HighContrast (MR)
• Hande gnome-session 49 changes so OSK can still start up (MR)
• Release 0.50.0, 0.50.1
• Don't forget to apply corner-shift to gear icon (MR)
• Fix startup warning (MR)
• Update doap (MR)
• DBus codegen cleanups (MR, MR, MR)
• Add Autobrightness handling (MR), (MR), (MR)

phoc

• Dispatch idle loop in prepare (MR)
• Release 0.50.0

phosh-mobile-settings

• Allow to hide plugins (MR)
• Release 0.50~rc1, 0.50.0
• Hide demo plugins by default (MR)
• Sink floating refs properly (MR)
• Simplify includes (MR)
• Allow to configure alarm sound if clock app likely supports it (MR)
• Use shared check CI images (MR)
• Release 0.50.1
• Fix ringtone role (MR)

stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub)

• Ship sytemd user unit so things work with gnome-session 49 (MR)
• Fix fallback to default OSK size with multiple outputs (MR)
• Improve character styling a bit (MR)
• Consolidate input surface creation (MR)
• Release 0.50.0, 0.50.1
• Don't trigger backspace key repeat in keypad or emoji layouts (MR)
• Better restore layout after swipe closing (MR)

phosh-tour

• Release 0.50.0

meta-phosh

• Build shared CI image MR

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Use pfs subproject for Rust portal (MR)

libphosh-rs

• Fix doc build (MR)

Calls

• Release 49.1
• Fix plugin loading (MR)
• Fix debug logging (MR)

Phrog

• Allow OSKs to run with gnome-session 49 (MR)
• Release 0.50.0 (MR)

phosh-recipes

• Fix build (MR)
• Simplify and cleanup docs (MR)
• Fix mkosi build (MR)
• Install Recommends: (MR)
• Draft: Add support for initial-setup (MR)
• Add version option (MR)
• Drop debos build (MR, MR)

feedbackd

• Fix compatiblility with systemd >= 258 (MR)
• Use meson.options (MR)
• Add phone role (MR)

feedbackd-device-themes

• Add support for Google Pixel 3A (MR)

Chatty

• Fix failing CI build (MR)

Squeekboard

• Add systemd unit to start with gnome-session 49 (MR)

Debian

• Upload phosh-tour 0.50.0
• Upload stevia 0.50.0, 0.50.1
• Upload phosh-mobile-settings 0.50.0
• Upload feedbackd 0.8.6
• Prepare phrog upload (MR)
• gnome-session Breaks (MR, MR)
• cellbroadcastd: Backport our upstream deadlock fix (MR)
• Upload wlroots 0.19.2
• Upload iio-sensor-proxy 3.8 (MR)

Cellbroadcastd

• Release 0.0.3
• Fix deadlock on start MR)

gnome-settings-daemon

• Fix brightness values (MR)

gnome-control-center

• Ignore role based loopbacks (MR)

gnome-initial-setup

• Use AdwSwitchRow to reduce horizonatal allocation (MR)
• Quit when done (and not under GDM) (MR)

sdm845-mainline

• shift6mq: Switch to mainline panel driver (MR)

gnome-session

• RequiredComponents is now gone (MR)

alpine

• stevia: Add hunspell-en-us dependency (MR)

droid-juicer

• Install sensor firmware for SHIFT6mq (MR)
• Install sensor firmware for Oneplus 6T (MR)
• Fix clippy complaints (MR)

phosh-site

• Mention mirror (MR)
• Update for hugo 150 (MR, MR)
• Embed some ouf our peertube videos (MR)
• Add donations item (MR)
• Update osk post to mention systemd unit (MR)
• Update list of distributions and users (MR)
• Switch nightly builds to forky (MR)
• Lint more markdown (MR)
• Release 0.50.1 (MR)
• Notes on audio (MR)

phosh-debs

• Switch to Debian forky (MR)
• Add g-i-s (MR)

Linux

• shift6mq: Add missing panel driver dependency (MR)
• shift6mq: Fix DTS warning (MR)

Wireplumber

• Update media-role volume MR (MR)
• Allow to set a default target for e.g. alerts and alarms (MR)

Phosh.mobi e.V. demo-phones

• Add demo videos (MR)
• Add demo epubs (MR)

Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions!

• phoc: Use correct format specifiers (MR)
• phoc: seat: Use the getter to access focused layer's output (MR)
• phosh: Upcoming events empty state (MR)
• phosh: Caffeine duration (MR)
• phosh: Location service quick setting (MR)
• phosh: UI check fix (MR)
• phosh: Autobrightness toggle (MR)
• p-m-s: Empty tweaks page test (MR)
• p-m-s: Symlink backend (MR)
• p-m-s: Return boolean from value setters (MR)
• p-m-s: conf-tweaks: Make setting_data a prop in Xresources backend (MR)
• p-m-s: conf-tweaks: Add gtk3settings backend (MR)
• gmobile: xiaomi-sweet support (MR)
• xdg-d-p: Use clippy (MR), MR)
• libcmatrix: various tweaks ([MR (https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libcmatrix/-/merge_requests/110))
• libcmatrix: Release 0.0.4 (MR](https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libcmatrix/-/merge_requests/115)
• meta-phosh: Add cellbroadcasts (MR)
• calls: Unload plugin test (MR)
• calls: Sip proxy support (MR)
• calls: Build system cleanups (MR)
• m-b-p-i: JP MVNO (MR)

Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

Review: Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart

Publisher:	Penguin Books
Copyright:	2023, 2025
Printing:	2025
ISBN:	979-8-217-06167-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	429

Rory Stewart is a former British diplomat, non-profit executive, member of Parliament, and cabinet minister. Politics on the Edge is a memoir of his time in the UK Parliament from 2019 to 2019 as a Tory (Conservative) representing the Penrith and The Border constituency in northern England. It ends with his failed run against Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. This book provoked many thoughts, only some of which are about the book. You may want to get a beverage; this review will be long. Since this is a memoir told in chronological order, a timeline may be useful. After Stewart's time as a regional governor in occupied Iraq (see The Prince of the Marshes), he moved to Kabul to found and run an NGO to preserve traditional Afghani arts and buildings (the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, about which I know nothing except what Stewart wrote in this book). By his telling, he found that work deeply rewarding but thought the same politicians who turned Iraq into a mess were going to do the same to Afghanistan. He started looking for ways to influence the politics more directly, which led him first to Harvard and then to stand for Parliament. The bulk of this book covers Stewart's time as MP for Penrith and The Border. The choice of constituency struck me as symbolic of Stewart's entire career: He was not a resident and had no real connection to the district, which he chose for political reasons and because it was the nearest viable constituency to his actual home in Scotland. But once he decided to run, he moved to the district and seems sincerely earnest in his desire to understand it and become part of its community. After five years as a backbencher, he joined David Cameron's government in a minor role as Minister of State in the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. He then bounced through several minor cabinet positions (more on this later) before being elevated to Secretary of State for International Development under Theresa May. When May's government collapsed during the fight over the Brexit agreement, he launched a quixotic challenge to Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party. I have enjoyed Rory Stewart's writing ever since The Places in Between. This book is no exception. Whatever one's other feelings about Stewart's politics (about which I'll have a great deal more to say), he's a talented memoir writer with an understated and contemplative style and a deft ability to shift from concrete description to philosophical debate without bogging down a story. Politics on the Edge is compelling reading at the prose level. I spent several afternoons happily engrossed in this book and had great difficulty putting it down. I find Stewart intriguing since, despite being a political conservative, he's neither a neoliberal nor any part of the new right. He is instead an apparently-sincere throwback to a conservatism based on epistemic humility, a veneration of rural life and long-standing traditions, and a deep commitment to the concept of public service. Some of his principles are baffling to me, and I think some of his political views are obvious nonsense, but there were several things that struck me throughout this book that I found admirable and depressingly rare in politics. First, Stewart seems to learn from his mistakes. This goes beyond admitting when he was wrong and appears to include a willingness to rethink entire philosophical positions based on new experience.

I had entered Iraq supporting the war on the grounds that we could at least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein's. It was one of the greatest mistakes in my life. We attempted to impose programmes made up by Washington think tanks, and reheated in air-conditioned palaces in Baghdad a new taxation system modelled on Hong Kong; a system of ministers borrowed from Singapore; and free ports, modelled on Dubai. But we did it ultimately at the point of a gun, and our resources, our abstract jargon and optimistic platitudes could not conceal how much Iraqis resented us, how much we were failing, and how humiliating and degrading our work had become. Our mission was a grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and democracy.

This quote comes from the beginning of this book and is a sentiment Stewart already expressed in The Prince of the Marshes, but he appears to have taken this so seriously that it becomes a theme of his political career. He not only realized how wrong he was on Iraq, he abandoned the entire neoliberal nation-building project without abandoning his belief in the moral obligation of international aid. And he, I think correctly, identified a key source of the error: an ignorant, condescending superiority that dismissed the importance of deep expertise.

Neither they, nor indeed any of the 12,000 peacekeepers and policemen who had been posted to South Sudan from sixty nations, had spent a single night in a rural house, or could complete a sentence in Dinka, Nuer, Azande or Bande. And the international development strategy written jointly between the donor nations resembled a fading mission statement found in a new space colony, whose occupants had all been killed in an alien attack.

Second, Stewart sincerely likes ordinary people. This shone through The Places in Between and recurs here in his descriptions of his constituents. He has a profound appreciation for individual people who have spent their life learning some trade or skill, expresses thoughtful and observant appreciation for aspects of local culture, and appears to deeply appreciate time spent around people from wildly different social classes and cultures than his own. Every successful politician can at least fake gregariousness, and perhaps that's all Stewart is doing, but there is something specific and attentive about his descriptions of other people, including long before he decided to enter politics, that makes me think it goes deeper than political savvy. Third, Stewart has a visceral hatred of incompetence. I think this is the strongest through-line of his politics in this book: Jobs in government are serious, important work; they should be done competently and well; and if one is not capable of doing that, one should not be in government. Stewart himself strikes me as an insecure overachiever: fiercely ambitious, self-critical, a bit of a micromanager (I suspect he would be difficult to work for), but holding himself to high standards and appalled when others do not do the same. This book is scathing towards multiple politicians, particularly Boris Johnson whom Stewart clearly despises, but no one comes off worse than Liz Truss.

David Cameron, I was beginning to realise, had put in charge of environment, food and rural affairs a Secretary of State who openly rejected the idea of rural affairs and who had little interest in landscape, farmers or the environment. I was beginning to wonder whether he could have given her any role she was less suited to apart perhaps from making her Foreign Secretary. Still, I could also sense why Cameron was mesmerised by her. Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of any of this for the way that government would work, she didn't reveal it.

And finally, Stewart has a deeply-held belief in state capacity and capability. He and I may disagree on the appropriate size and role of the government in society, but no one would be more disgusted by an intentional project to cripple government in order to shrink it than Stewart. One of his most-repeated criticisms of the UK political system in this book is the way the cabinet is formed. All ministers and secretaries come from members of Parliament and therefore branches of government are led by people with no relevant expertise. This is made worse by constant cabinet reshuffles that invalidate whatever small amounts of knowledge a minister was able to gain in nine months or a year in post. The center portion of this book records Stewart's time being shuffled from rural affairs to international development to Africa to prisons, with each move representing a complete reset of the political office and no transfer of knowledge whatsoever.

A month earlier, they had been anticipating every nuance of Minister Rogerson's diary, supporting him on shifts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But it was already clear that there would be no pretence of a handover no explanation of my predecessor's strategy, and uncompleted initiatives. The arrival of a new minister was Groundhog Day. Dan Rogerson was not a ghost haunting my office, he was an absence, whose former existence was suggested only by the black plastic comb.

After each reshuffle, Stewart writes of trying to absorb briefings, do research, and learn enough about his new responsibilities to have the hope of making good decisions, while growing increasingly frustrated with the system and the lack of interest by most of his colleagues in doing the same. He wants government programs to be successful and believes success requires expertise and careful management by the politicians, not only by the civil servants, a position that to me both feels obviously correct and entirely at odds with politics as currently practiced. I found this a fascinating book to read during the accelerating collapse of neoliberalism in the US and, to judge by current polling results, the UK. I have a theory that the political press are so devoted to a simplistic left-right political axis based on seating arrangements during the French Revolution that they are missing a significant minority whose primary political motivation is contempt for arrogant incompetence. They could be convinced to vote for Sanders or Trump, for Polanski or Farage, but will never vote for Biden, Starmer, Romney, or Sunak. Such voters are incomprehensible to those who closely follow and debate policies because their hostile reaction to the center is not about policies. It's about lack of trust and a nebulous desire for justice. They've been promised technocratic competence and the invisible hand of market forces for most of their lives, and all of it looks like lies. Everyday living is more precarious, more frustrating, more abusive and dehumanizing, and more anxious, despite (or because of) this wholehearted embrace of economic "freedom." They're sick of every complaint about the increasing difficulty of life being met with accusations about their ability and work ethic, and of being forced to endure another round of austerity by people who then catch a helicopter ride to a party on some billionaire's yacht. Some of this is inherent in the deep structural weaknesses in neoliberal ideology, but this is worse than an ideological failure. The degree to which neoliberalism started as a project of sincere political thinkers is arguable, but that is clearly not true today. The elite class in politics and business is now thoroughly captured by people whose primary skill is the marginal manipulation of complex systems for their own power and benefit. They are less libertarian ideologues than narcissistic mediocrities. We are governed by management consultants. They are firmly convinced their organizational expertise is universal, and consider the specific business of the company, or government department, irrelevant. Given that context, I found Stewart's instinctive revulsion towards David Cameron quite revealing. Stewart, later in the book, tries to give Cameron some credit by citing several policy accomplishments and comparing him favorably to Boris Johnson (which, true, is a bar Cameron probably flops over). But I think Stewart's baffled astonishment at Cameron's vapidity says a great deal about how we have ended up where we are. This last quote is long, but I think it provides a good feel for Stewart's argument in this book.

But Cameron, who was rumoured to be sceptical about nation-building projects, only nodded, and then looking confidently up and down the table said, "Well, at least we all agree on one extremely straightforward and simple point, which is that our troops are doing very difficult and important work and we should all support them." It was an odd statement to make to civilians running humanitarian operations on the ground. I felt I should speak. "No, with respect, we do not agree with that. Insofar as we have focused on the troops, we have just been explaining that what the troops are doing is often futile, and in many cases making things worse." Two small red dots appeared on his cheeks. Then his face formed back into a smile. He thanked us, told us he was out of time, shook all our hands, and left the room. Later, I saw him repeat the same line in interviews: "the purpose of this visit is straightforward... it is to show support for what our troops are doing in Afghanistan". The line had been written, in London, I assumed, and tested on focus groups. But he wanted to convince himself it was also a position of principle. "David has decided," one of his aides explained, when I met him later, "that one cannot criticise a war when there are troops on the ground." "Why?" "Well... we have had that debate. But he feels it is a principle of British government." "But Churchill criticised the conduct of the Boer War; Pitt the war with America. Why can't he criticise wars?" "British soldiers are losing their lives in this war, and we can't suggest they have died in vain." "But more will die, if no one speaks up..." "It is a principle thing. And he has made his decision. For him and the party." "Does this apply to Iraq too?" "Yes. Again he understands what you are saying, but he voted to support the Iraq War, and troops are on the ground." "But surely he can say he's changed his mind?" The aide didn't answer, but instead concentrated on his food. "It is so difficult," he resumed, "to get any coverage of our trip." He paused again. "If David writes a column about Afghanistan, we will struggle to get it published." "But what would he say in an article anyway?" I asked. "We can talk about that later. But how do you get your articles on Afghanistan published?" I remembered how the US politicians and officials had shown their mastery of strategy and detail. I remembered the earnestness of Gordon Brown when I had briefed him on Iraq. Cameron seemed somehow less serious. I wrote as much in a column in the New York Times, saying that I was afraid the party of Churchill was becoming the party of Bertie Wooster.

I don't know Stewart's reputation in Britain, or in the constituency that he represented. I know he's been accused of being a self-aggrandizing publicity hound, and to some extent this is probably true. It's hard to find an ambitious politician who does not have that instinct. But whatever Stewart's flaws, he can, at least, defend his politics with more substance than a corporate motto. One gets the impression that he would respond favorably to demonstrated competence linked to a careful argument, even if he disagreed. Perhaps this is an illusion created by his writing, but even if so, it's a step in the right direction. When people become angry enough at a failing status quo, any option that promises radical change and punishment for the current incompetents will sound appealing. The default collapse is towards demagogues who are skilled at expressing anger and disgust and are willing to promise simple cures because they are indifferent to honesty. Much of the political establishment in the US, and possibly (to the small degree that I can analyze it from an occasional news article) in the UK, can identify the peril of the demagogue, but they have no solution other than a return to "politics as usual," represented by the amoral mediocrity of a McKinsey consultant. The rare politicians who seem to believe in something, who will argue for personal expertise and humility, who are disgusted by incompetence and have no patience for facile platitudes, are a breath of fresh air. There are a lot of policies on which Stewart and I would disagree, and perhaps some of his apparent humility is an affectation from the rhetorical world of the 1800s that he clearly wishes he were inhabiting, but he gives the strong impression of someone who would shoulder a responsibility and attempt to execute it with competence and attention to detail. He views government as a job, where coworkers should cooperate to achieve defined goals, rather than a reality TV show. The arc of this book, like the arc of current politics, is the victory of the reality TV show over the workplace, and the story of Stewart's run against Boris Johnson is hard reading because of it, but there's a portrayal here of a different attitude towards politics that I found deeply rewarding. If you liked Stewart's previous work, or if you want an inside look at parliamentary politics, highly recommended. I will be thinking about this book for a long time. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Space Trucker Jess, by Matthew Kressel

Publisher:	Fairwood Press
Copyright:	July 2025
ISBN:	1-958880-27-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	472

Space Trucker Jess is a stand-alone far-future space fantasy novel. Jess is a sixteen-year-old mechanic working grey-market jobs on Chadeisson Station with a couple of younger kids. She's there because her charming and utterly unreliable father got caught running a crypto scam and is sitting in detention. This was only the latest in a long series of scams, con jobs, and misadventures she's been dragged through since her mother disappeared without a word. Jess is cynical, world-weary, and infuriated by her own sputtering loyalty to her good-for-nothing dad. What Jess wants most in the universe is to own a CCM 6454 Spark Megahauler, the absolute best cargo ship in the universe according to Jess. She should know; she's worked on nearly every type of ship in existence. With her own ship, she could make a living hauling cargo, repairing her own ship, and going anywhere she wants, free of her father and his endless schemes. (A romantic relationship with her friend Leurie would be a nice bonus.) Then her father is taken off the station on a ship leaving the galactic plane, no one will tell her why, and all the records of the ship appear to have been erased. Jess thinks her father is an asshole, but that doesn't mean she can sit idly by when he disappears. That's how she ends up getting in serious trouble with station security due to some risky in-person sleuthing, followed by an expensive flight off the station with a dodgy guy and a kid in a stolen spaceship. The setup for this book was so great. Kressel felt the need to make up a futuristic slang for Jess and her friends to speak, which rarely works as well as the author expects and does not work here, but apart from that I was hooked. Jess is sarcastic, blustery, and a bit of a con artist herself, but with the idealistic sincerity of someone who knows that her life is been kind of broken and understands the value of friends. She's profoundly cynical in the heartbreakingly defensive way of a sixteen-year-old with a rough life. I have a soft spot in my heart for working-class science fiction (there isn't nearly enough of it), and there are few things I enjoy more than reading about the kind of protagonist who has Opinions about starship models and a dislike of shoddy work. I think this is the only book I've bought solely on the basis of one of the Big Idea blog posts John Scalzi hosts. I really wish this book had stuck with the setup instead of morphing into a weird drug-enabled mystical space fantasy, to which Jess's family is bizarrely central. SPOILERS below because I can't figure out how to rant about what annoyed me without them. Search for the next occurrence of spoilers to skip past them. There are three places where this book lost me. The first was when Jess, after agreeing to help another kid find his father, ends up on a world obsessed with a religious cult involving using hallucinatory drugs to commune with alien gods. Jess immediately flags this as unbelievable bullshit and I was enjoying her well-founded cynicism until Kressel pulls the rug out from under both Jess and the reader by establishing that this new-age claptrap is essentially true. Kressel does try to put a bit of a science fiction gloss on it, but sadly I think that effort was unsuccessful. Sometimes absurdly powerful advanced aliens with near-telepathic powers are part of the fun of a good space opera, but I want the author to make an effort to connect the aliens to plausibility or, failing that, at least avoid sounding indistinguishable from psychic self-help grifters or religious fantasy about spiritual warfare. Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5 failed on the first part but at least held the second line. Kressel gets depressingly close to Seth territory, although at least Jess is allowed to retain some cynicism about motives. The second, related problem is that Jess ends up being a sort of Chosen One, which I found intensely annoying. This may be a fault of reader expectations more than authorial skill, but one of the things I like to see in working-class science fiction is for the protagonist to not be absurdly central to the future of the galaxy, or to at least force themselves into that position through their own ethics and hard work. This book turns into a sort of quest story with epic fantasy stakes, which I thought was much less interesting than the story the start of the book promised and which made Jess a less interesting character. Finally, this is one of those books where Jess's family troubles and the plot she stumbles across turn into the same plot. Space Trucker Jess is far from alone in having that plot structure, and that's the problem. I'm not universally opposed to this story shape, but Jess felt like the wrong character for it. She starts the story with a lot of self-awareness about how messed up her family dynamics were, and I was rooting for her to find some space to construct her own identity separate from her family. To have her family turn out to be central not only to this story but to the entire galaxy felt like it undermined that human core of the story, although I admit it's a good analogy to the type of drama escalation that dysfunctional families throw at anyone attempting to separate from them. Spoilers end here. I rather enjoyed the first third of this book, despite being a bit annoyed at the constructed slang, and then started rolling my eyes and muttering things about the story going off the rails. Jess is a compelling enough character (and I'm stubborn enough) that I did finish the book, so I can say that I liked the very end. Kressel does finally arrive at the sort of story that I wanted to read all along. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the path he took to get there. I think much of my problem was that I wanted Jess to be a more defiant character earlier in the novel, and I wanted her family problems to influence her character growth but not be central to her story. Both of these may be matters of opinion and an artifact of coming into the book with the wrong assumptions. If you are interested in a flawed and backsliding effort to untangle one's identity from a dysfunctional family and don't mind some barely-SF space mysticism and chosen one vibes, it's possible this book will click with you. It's not one that I can recommend, though. I still want the book that I hoped I was getting from that Big Idea piece. Rating: 4 out of 10

On mail.quux, a node of NNCPNET (the NNCP-based peer-to-peer email network), I started noticing emails not being delivered. They were all in the queue, frozen, and Exim s log had entries like:

unable to set gid=5001 or uid=5001 (euid=100): local delivery to [redacted] transport=nncp

Weird. Stranger still, when I manually ran the queue with sendmail -qff -v, they all delivered fine. Huh. Well, I thought, it was a one-off weird thing. But then it happened again. Upon investigating, I observed that this issue was happening only on messages submitted by SMTP. Which, on these systems, aren t that many. While trying different things, I tried submitting a message to myself using SMTP. Nothing to do with NNCP at all. But look at this:

 jgoerzen@[redacted] R=userforward defer (-1): require_files: error for /home/jgoerzen/.forward: Permission denied

Strraaannnge . All the information I could find about this, even a FAQ entry, said that the problem is that Exim isn t setuid root. But it is:

-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 1533496 Mar 29  2025 /usr/sbin/exim4

This problem started when I upgraded to Debian Trixie. So what changed there? There are a lot of possibilities; this is running in Docker using my docker-debian-base system, which runs a regular Debian in Docker, including systemd. I eventually tracked it down to Exim migrating from init.d to systemd in trixie, and putting a bunch of lockdowns in its service file. After a bunch of trial and error, I determined that I needed to override this set of lockdowns to make it work. These overrides did the trick:

ProtectClock=false
PrivateDevices=false
RestrictRealtime=false
ProtectKernelModules=false
ProtectKernelTunables=false
ProtectKernelLogs=false
ProtectHostname=false

I don t know for sure if the issue is related to setuid. But if it is, there s nothing that immediately jumps out at me about any of these that would indicate a problem with setuid. I also don t know if running in Docker makes any difference. Anyhow, problem fixed, but mystery not solved!

Like and subscribe! Help us get our next thousand (or million) followers! I was using Linux before it was popular. Back in the day where you had to write Modelines for your XF86Config file and do it properly, or else you might ruin your monitor. Back when there wasn t a word processor (thankfully; that forced me to learn LaTeX, which I used to write my papers in college). I then ran Linux on an Alpha, a difficult proposition in an era when web browsers were either closed-source or too old to be useful; all sorts of workarounds, including emulating Digital UNIX. Recently I wrote a deep dive into the DOS VGA text mode and how to achieve it on a modern UEFI Linux system. Nobody can monetize things like this. I am one of maybe a dozen or two people globally that care about that sort of thing. That s fine. Today, I m interested in things like asynchronous communication, NNCP, and Gopher. Heck, I m posting these words on a blog. Social media displaced those, right? Some of the things I write about here have maybe a few dozen people on the planet interested in them. That s fine. I have no idea how many people read my blog. I have no idea where people hear about my posts from. I guess I can check my Mastodon profile to see how many followers I have, but it s not something I tend to do. I don t know if the number is going up or down, or if it is all that much in Mastodon terms (probably not). Thank goodness. Since I don t have to care about what s popular, or spend hours editing video, or thousands of dollars on video equipment, I can just sit down and write about what interests me. If that also interests you, then great. If not, you can find what interests you also fine. I once had a colleague that was one of these plugged into Silicon Valley types. He would periodically tell me, with a mixture of excitement and awe, that one of my posts had made Hacker News. This was always news to me, because I never paid a lot of attention over there. Occasionally that would bring in some excellent discussion, but more often than not, it was comments from people that hadn t read or understood the article trying to appear smart by arguing with what it or rather, what they imagined it said, I guess. The thing I value isn t subscriber count. It s discussion. A little discussion in the comments or on Mastodon that s perfect, even if only 10 people read the article. I have the most fun in a community. And I ll go on writing about NNCP and Gopher and non-square DOS pixels, with audiences of dozens globally. I have no advertisers to keep happy, and I enjoy it, so why not?

Like many, bot traffic has been causing significant issues for my hosted server recently. I ve been noticing a dramatic increase in bots that do not respect robots.txt, especially the crawl-delay I have set there. Not only that, but many of them are sending user-agent strings that are quite precisely matching what desktop browsers send. That is, they don t identify themselves. They posed a particular problem on two sites: my blog, and the lists.complete.org archives. The list archives is a completely static site, but it has many pages, so the bots that are ill-behaved absolutely hammer it following links. My blog runs WordPress. It has fewer pages, but by using PHP, doesn t need as many hits to start to bog down. Also, there is a Mastodon thundering herd problem, and since I participate on Mastodon, this hits my server. The solution was one of layers. I had already added a crawl-delay line to robots.txt. It helped a bit, but many bots these days aren t well-behaved. Next, I added WP Super Cache to my WordPress installation. I also enabled APCu in PHP and installed APCu Manager. Again, each step helped. Again, not quite enough. Finally, I added Anubis. Installing it (especially if using the Docker container) was under-documented, but I figured it out. By default, it is designed to block AI bots and try to challenge everything with Mozilla in its user-agent (which is most things) with a Javascript challenge. That s not quite what I want. If a bot is well-behaved, AI or otherwise, it will respect my robots.txt and I can more precisely control it there. Also, I intentionally support non-Javascript browsers on many of the sites I host, so I wanted to be judicious. Eventually I configured Anubis to only challenge things that present a user-agent that looks fully like a real browser. In other words, real browsers should pass right through, and bad bots pretending to be real browsers will fail. That was quite effective. It reduced load further to the point where things are ordinarily fairly snappy. I had previously been using mod_security to block some bots, but it seemed to be getting in the way of the Fediverse at times. When I disabled it, I observed another increase in speed. Anubis was likely going to get rid of those annoying bots itself anyhow. As a final step, I migrated to a faster hosting option. This post will show me how well it survives the Mastodon thundering herd! Update: Yes, it handled it quite nicely now.

Here, in classic Goerzen deep dive fashion, is more information than you knew you wanted about a topic you ve probably never thought of. I found it pretty interesting, because it took me down a rabbit hole of subsystems I ve never worked with much and a mishmash of 1980s and 2020s tech. I had previously tried and failed to get an actual 80x25 Linux console, but I ve since figured it out! This post is about the Linux text console not X or Wayland. We re going to get the console right without using those systems. These instructions are for Debian trixie, but should be broadly applicable elsewhere also. The end result can look like this: (That s a Wifi Retromodem that I got at VCFMW last year in the Hayes modem case)

What s a pixel? How would you define a pixel these days? Probably something like a uniquely-addressable square dot in a two-dimensional grid . In the world of VGA and CRTs, that was just a logical abstraction. We got an API centered around that because it was convenient. But, down the VGA cable and on the device, that s not what a pixel was. A pixel, back then, was a time interval. On a multisync monitor, which were common except in the very early days of VGA, the timings could be adjusted which produced logical pixels of different sizes. Those screens often had a maximum resolution but not necessarily a native resolution in the sense that an LCD panel does. Different timings produced different-sized pixels with equal clarity (or, on cheaper monitors, equal fuzziness). A side effect of this was that pixels need not be square. And, in fact, in the standard DOS VGA 80x25 text mode, they weren t. You might be seeing why DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI replaced VGA for LCD monitors: with a VGA cable, you did a pixel-to-analog-timings conversion, then the display did a timings-to-pixels conversion, and this process could be a bit lossy. (Hence why you sometimes needed to fill the screen with an image and push the center button on those older LCD screens) (Note to the pedantically-inclined: yes I am aware that I have simplified several things here; for instance, a color LCD pixel is made up of approximately 3 sub-dots of varying colors, and that things like color eInk displays have two pixel grids with different sizes of pixels layered atop each other, and printers are another confusing thing altogether, and and and . MOST PEOPLE THINK OF A PIXEL AS A DOT THESE DAYS, OK?)

What was DOS text mode? We think of this as the standard display: 80 columns wide and 25 rows tall. 80x25. By the time Linux came along, the standard Linux console was VGA text mode something like the 4th incarnation of text modes on PCs (after CGA, MDA, and EGA). VGA also supported certain other sizes of characters giving certain other text dimensions, but if I cover all of those, this will explode into a ridiculously more massive page than it already is. So to display text on an 80x25 DOS VGA system, ultimately characters and attributes were written into the text buffer in memory. The VGA system then rendered it to the display as a 720x400 image (at 70Hz) with non-square pixels such that the result was approximately a 4:3 aspect ratio. The font used for this rendering was a bitmapped one using 8x16 cells. You might do some math here and point out that 8 * 80 is only 640, and you d be correct. The fonts were 8x16 but the rendered cells were 9x16. The extra pixel was normally used for spacing between characters. However, in line graphics mode, characters 0xC0 through 0xDF repeated the 8th column in the position of the 9th, allowing the continuous line-drawing characters we re used to from TUIs.

Problems rendering DOS fonts on modern systems By now, you re probably seeing some of the issues we have rendering DOS screens on more modern systems. These aren t new at all; I remember some of these from back in the days when I ran OS/2, and I think also saw them on various terminals and consoles in OS/2 and Windows. Some issues you d encounter would be:

• Incorrect aspect ratio caused by using the original font and rendering it using 1:1 square pixels (resulting in a squashed appearance)
• Incorrect aspect ratio for ANOTHER reason, caused by failing to render column 9, resulting in text that is overall too narrow
• Characters appearing to be touching each other when they shouldn t (failing to render column 9; looking at you, dosbox)
• Gaps between line drawing characters that should be continuous, caused by rendering column 9 as empty space in all cases

Character set issues DOS was around long before Unicode was. In the DOS world, there were codepages that selected the glyphs for roughly the high half of the 256 possible characters. CP437 was the standard for the USA; others existed for other locations that needed different characters. On Unix, the USA pre-Unicode standard was Latin-1. Same concept, but with different character mappings. Nowadays, just about everything is based on UTF-8. So, we need some way to map our CP437 glyphs into Unicode space. If we are displaying DOS-based content, we ll also need a way to map CP437 characters to Unicode for display later, and we need these maps to match so that everything comes out right. Whew. So, let s get on with setting this up!

Selecting the proper video mode As explained in my previous post, proper hardware support for DOS text mode is limited to x86 machines that do not use UEFI. Non-x86 machines, or x86 machines with UEFI, simply do not contain the necessary support for it. As these are now standard, most of the time, the text console you see on Linux is actually the kernel driving the video hardware in graphics mode, and doing the text rendering in software. That s all well and good, but it makes it quite difficult to actually get an 80x25 console. First, we need to be running at 720x400. This is where I ran into difficulty last time. I realized that my laptop s LCD didn t advertise any video modes other than its own native resolution. However, almost all external monitors will, and 720x400@70 is a standard VGA mode from way back, so it should be well-supported. You need to find the Linux device name for your device. You can look at the possible devices with ls -l /sys/class/drm. If you also have a GUI, xrandr may help too. But in any case, each directory under /sys/class/drm has a file named modes, and if you cat them all, you will eventually come across one with a bunch of modes defined. Drop the leading card0 or whatever from the directory name, and that s your device. (Verify that 720x400 is in modes while you re at it.) Now, you re going to edit /etc/default/grub and add something like this to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT:

video=DP-1:720x400@70

Of course, replace DP-1 with whatever your device is. Now you can run update-grub and reboot. You should have a 720x400 display. At first, I thought I had succeeded by using Linux s built-in VGA font with that mode. But it looked too tall. After noticing that repeated 0s were touching, I got suspicious about the missing 9th column in the cells. stty -a showed that my screen was 90x25, which is exactly what it would show if I was using 8x16 instead of 9x16 cells. Sooo . I need to prepare a 9x16 font.

Preparing a font Here s where it gets complicated. I ll give you the simple version and the hard mode. The simple mode is this: Download https://www.complete.org/downloads/CP437-VGA.psf.gz and stick it in /usr/local/etc, then skip to the Activating the font section below. The font assembled here is based on the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.2, which is (c) 2016-2020 VileR and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. My psf file is derived from this using the instructions below.

Building it yourself First, install some necessary software: apt-get install fontforge bdf2psf Start by going to the Oldschool PC Font Pack Download page. Download oldschool_pc_font_pack_v2.2_FULL.zip and unpack it. The file we re interested in is otb - Bm (linux bitmap)/Bm437_IBM_VGA_9x16.otb. Open it in fontforge by running fontforge BmPlus_IBM_VGA_9x16.otb. When it asks if you will load the bitmap fonts, hit select all, then yes. Go to File -> generate fonts. Save in a BDF, no need for outlines, and use guess for resolution. Now you have a file such as Bm437_IBM_VGA_9x16-16.bdf. Excellent. Now we need to generate a Unicode map file. We will make sure this matches the system s by enumerating every character from 0x00 to 0xFF, converting it from CP437 to Unicode, and writing the appropriate map. Here s a Python script to do that:

for i in range(0, 256):
    cp437b = b'%c' % i
    uni = ord(cp437b.decode('cp437'))
    print(f"U+ uni:04x ")

Save that file as genmap.py and run python3 genmap.py > cp437-uni. Now, we re ready to build the psf file:

bdf2psf --fb Bm437_IBM_VGA_9x16-16.bdf \
  /dev/null cp437-uni 256 CP437-VGA.psf

By convention, we normally store these files gzipped, so gzip CP437-VGA.psf. You can test it on the console with setfont CP437-VGA.psf.gz. Now copy this file into /usr/local/etc.

Activating the font Now, edit /etc/default/console-setup. It should look like this:

# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON

# Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.

ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"

CHARMAP="UTF-8"

CODESET="Lat15"
FONTFACE="VGA"
FONTSIZE="8x16"
FONT=/usr/local/etc/CP437-VGA.psf.gz

VIDEOMODE=

# The following is an example how to use a braille font
# FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz brl-8x8.psf'

At this point, you should be able to reboot. You should have a proper 80x25 display! Log in and run stty -a to verify it is indeed 80x25.

Using and testing CP437 Part of the point of CP437 is to be able to access BBSs, ANSI art, and similar. Now, remember, the Linux console is still in UTF-8 mode, so we have to translate CP437 to UTF-8, then let our font map translate it back to CP437. A weird trip, but it works. Let s test it using the Textfiles ANSI art collection. In the artworks section, I randomly grabbed a file near the top: borgman.ans. Download that, and display with:

clear; iconv -f CP437 -t UTF-8 < borgman.ans

You should see something similar to but actually more accurate than the textfiles PNG rendering of it, which you ll note has an incorrect aspect ratio and some rendering issues. I spot-checked with a few others and they seemed to look good. belinda.ans in particular tries quite a few characters and should give you a good sense if it is working.

Use with interactive programs That s all well and good, but you re probably going to want to actually use this with some interactive program that expects CP437. Maybe Minicom, Kermit, or even just telnet? For this, you ll want to apt-get install luit. luit maps CP437 (or any other encoding) to UTF-8 for display, and then of course the Linux console maps UTF-8 back to the CP437 font. Here s a way you can repeat the earlier experiment using luit to run the cat program:

clear; luit -encoding CP437 cat borgman.ans

You can run any command under luit. You can even run luit -encoding CP437 bash if you like. If you do this, it is probably a good idea to follow my instructions on generating locales on my post on serial terminals, and then within luit, set LANG=en_us.IBM437. But note especially that you can run programs like minicom and others for accessing BBSs under luit.

Final words This gave you a nice DOS-type console. Although it doesn t have glyphs for many codepoints, it does run in UTF-8 mode and therefore is compatible with modern software. You can achieve greater compatibility with more UTF-8 codepoints with the DOS font, at the expense of accuracy of character rendering (especially for the double-line drawing characters) by using /usr/share/bdf2psf/standard.equivalents instead of /dev/null in the bdf2psf command. Or you could go for another challenge, such as using the DEC vt-series fonts for coverage of ISO-8859-1. But just using fonts extracted from DEC ROM won t work properly, because DEC terminals had even more strangeness going on than DOS fonts.

Six years ago, I was inspired to buy a DEC serial terminal. Since then, my collection has grown to include several DEC models, an IBM 3151, a Wyse WY-55, a Televideo 990, and a few others. When you are running a terminal program on Linux or MacOS, what you are really running is a terminal emulator. In almost all cases, the terminal emulator is emulating one of the DEC terminals in the vt100 through vt520 line, which themselves use a command set based on an ANSI standard. In short, you spend all day using a program designed to pretend to be the exact kind of physical machine I m using for this experiment! I have long used my terminals connected to a Raspberry Pi 4, but due to the difficulty of entering a root filesystem encryption password using a serial console on a Raspberry Pi, I am switching to an x86 Mini PC (with a N100 CPU). While I have used a terminal with the Pi, I ve never before used it as a serial console all the way from early boot, and I have never installed Debian using the terminal to run the installer. A serial terminal gives you a login prompt. A serial console gives you access to kernel messages, the initrd environment, and sometimes even the bootloader. This might be fun, I thought. I selected one of my vt510 terminals for this. It is one of my newer ones, having been built in 1993. But it has a key feature: I can remap Ctrl to be at the caps lock position, something I do on every other system I use anyhow. I could have easily selected an older one from the 1980s. Kernel configuration To enable a serial console for Linux, you need to pass a parameter on the kernel command line. See the kernel documentaiton for more. I very frequently see instructions that are incomplete; they particularly omit flow control, which is most definitely needed for these real serial terminals. I run my terminal at 57600 bps, so the parameter I need is console=ttyS0,57600n8r. The r means to use hardware flow control (ttyS0 corresponds to the first serial port on the system; use ttyS1 or something else as appropriate for your situation). While booting the Debian installer, according to Debian s instructions, it may be useful to also add TERM=vt102 (the installer doesn t support the vt510 terminal type directly). The TERM parameter should not be specified on a running system after instlalation. Booting the Debian installer When you start the Debian installer, to get it into serial mode, you have a couple of options:

1. You can use a traditional display and keyboard just long enough to input the kernel parameters described above
2. You can edit the bootloader configuration on the installer s filesystem prior to booting from it

Option 1 is pretty easy. Option 2 is hard mode, but not that bad. On x86, the Debian installer boots in at least two different ways: it uses GRUB if you re booting under UEFI (which is most systems these days), or ISOLINUX if you are booting from the BIOS. If using GRUB, the file to edit on the installer image is boot/grub/grub.cfg. Near the top, add these lines:

serial --unit=0 --speed=57600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal_input console serial
terminal_output console serial

Unit 0 corresponds to ttyS0 as above. GRUB s serial command does not support flow control. If your terminal gets corrupted during the GRUB stage, you may need to configure it to a slower speed. Then, find the linux line under the Install menuentry. Edit it to insert console=ttyS0,57600n8r TERM=vt102 right after the vga=788. Save, unmount, and boot. You should see the GRUB screen displayed on your serial terminal. Select the Install option and the installer begins. If you are using BIOS boot, I m sure you can do something similar with the files in the isolinux directory, but haven t researched it. Now, you can install Debian like usual! Configuring the System I was pleasantly surprised to find that Debian s installer took care of many, but not all, of the things I want to do in order to make the system work nicely with a serial terminal. You can perform these steps from a chroot under the installer environment before a reboot, or later in the running system. First, while Debian does set up a getty (the program that displays the login prompt) on the serial console by default, it doesn t enable hardware flow control. So let s do that. Configuring the System: agetty with systemd Run systemctl edit serial-getty@ttyS0.service. This opens an editor that lets you customize the systemd configuration for a given service without having to edit the file directly. All you really need to do is modify the agetty command, so we just override it. At the top, in the designated area, write:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --wait-cr -8 -h -L=always %I 57600 vt510

The empty ExecStart= line is necessary to tell systemd to remove the existing ExecStart command (otherwise, it will logically contain two ExecStart lines, which is an error). These arguments say:

• wait-cr means to wait for the user to press Return at the terminal before attempting to display the login prompt
• -8 tells it to assume 8-bit mode on the serial line
• -h enables hardware flow control
• -L=always enables local line mode, disabling monitoring of modem control lines
• %I substitutes the name of the port from systemd
• 57600 gives the desired speed, and vt510 gives the desired setting for the TERM environment variable

The systemd documentation refers to this page about serial consoles, which gives more background. However, I think it is better to use the systemctl edit method described here, rather than just copying the config file, since this lets things like new configurations with new Debian versions take effect. Configuring the System: Kernel and GRUB Your next stop is the /etc/default/grub file. Debian s installer automatically makes some changes here. There are three lines you want to change. First, near the top, edit GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add console=tty0 console=ttyS0,57600n8r. By specifying console twice, you allow output to go both to the standard display and to the serial console. By specifying the serial console last, you make it be the preferred one for things like entering the root filesystem password. Next, towards the bottom, make sure these two lines look like this:

GRUB_TERMINAL="console serial"
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=0 --speed=57600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

Finally, near the top, you may want to raise the GRUB_TIMEOUT to somewhere around 10 to 20 seconds since things may be a bit slower than you re used to. Save the file and run update-grub. Now, GRUB will display on both your standard display and the serial console. You can edit the boot command from either. If you have a VGA or HDMI monitor attached, for instance, and need to not use the serial console, you can just edit the Linux command line in GRUB and remove the reference to ttyS0 for one boot. Easy! That s it. You now have a system that is fully operational from a serial terminal. My original article from 2019 has some additional hints, including on how to convert from UTF-8 for these terminals. Update 2025-09-17: It is also useful to set up proper locales. To do this, first edit /etc/locale.gen. Make sure to add, or uncomment:

en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.IBM437 IBM437
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 

Then run locale-gen. Normally, your LANG will be set to en_us.UTF-8, which will select the appropriate encoding. Plain en_US will select ISO-8859-1, which you need for the vt510. Then, add something like this to your ~/.bashrc:

if [  tty  = "/dev/ttyS0" -o "$TERM" = "vt510" ]; then
        stty -iutf8
        # might add ixon ixoff
        export LANG=en_US
        export MANOPT="-E ascii"
        stty rows 25
fi
if [ "$TERM" = "screen" -o "$TERM" = "vt100" ]; then
    export LANG=en_US.utf8
fi

Finally, in my ~/.screenrc, I have this. It lets screen convert between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1:

defencoding UTF-8
startup_message off
vbell off
termcapinfo * XC=B%, -,
maptimeout 5
bindkey -k ku stuff ^[OA
bindkey -k kd stuff ^[OB
bindkey -k kr stuff ^[OC
bindkey -k kl stuff ^[OD

Update 2025-09-18: I figured out how to do this, at least for many non-laptop screens. This post still contains a lot of good background detail, however. Somehow along the way, a feature that I ve had across DOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, and Linux and has been present on PCs for more than 40 years is gone. That feature, of course, is the 80 25 text console. Linux has, for awhile now, rendered its text console using graphic modes. You can read all about it here. This has been necessary because only PCs really had the 80 25 text mode (Raspberry Pis, for instance, never did), and even they don t have it when booted with UEFI. I ve lately been annoyed that:

• The console is a different size on every screen both in terms of size of letters and the dimensions of it
• If a given machine has more than one display, one or both of them will have parts of the console chopped off
• My system seems to run with three different resolutions or fonts at different points of the boot process. One during the initrd, and two different ones during the remaining boot.

And, I wanted to run some software on the console that was designed with 80 25 in mind. And I d like to be able to plug in an old VGA monitor and have it just work if I want to do that. That shouldn t be so hard, right? Well, the old vga= option that you are used to doesn t work when you booted from UEFI or on non-x86 platforms. Most of the tricks you see online for changing resolutions, etc., are no longer relevant. And things like setting a resolution with GRUB are useless for systems that don t use GRUB (including ARM). VGA text mode uses 8 16 glyphs in 9 16 cells, where the pixels are non-square, giving a native resolution of 720 400 (which historically ran at 70Hz), which should have streched pixels to make a 4:3 image. While it is possible to select a console font, and 8 16 fonts are present and supported in Linux, it appears to be impossible to have a standard way to set 720 400 so that they present in a reasonable size, at the correct aspect ratio, with 80 25. Tricks like nomodeset no longer work on UEFI or ARM systems. It s possible that kmscon or something like it may help, but I m not even certain of that (video=eDP1:720 400 produced an error saying that 720 400 wasn t a supported mode, so I m unsure kmscon would be any better.) Not that it matters; all the kmscon options to select a font or zoom are broken, and it doesn t offer mode selection anyhow. I think I m going to have to track down an old machine. Sigh.

In my post yesterday, ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V), I described my desire to find ARM hardware with AES instructions to support full-disk encryption, and the poor state of the OS ecosystem around the newer ARM boards. I was anticipating buying either a newer ARM SBC or an x86 mini PC of some sort. More-efficient AES alternatives Always one to think, what if I didn t have to actually buy something , I decided to research whether it was possible to use encryption algorithms that are more performant on the Raspberry Pi 4 I already have. The answer was yes. From cryptsetup benchmark:

root@mccoy:~# cryptsetup benchmark --cipher=xchacha12,aes-adiantum-plain64 
# Tests are approximate using memory only (no storage IO).
#            Algorithm         Key        Encryption        Decryption
xchacha12,aes-adiantum        256b       159.7 MiB/s       160.0 MiB/s
xchacha20,aes-adiantum        256b       116.7 MiB/s       169.1 MiB/s
    aes-xts                   256b        52.5 MiB/s        52.6 MiB/s

With best-case reads from my SD card at 45MB/s (with dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 status=progress), either of the ChaCha-based algorithms will be fast enough. Great, I thought. Now I can just solve this problem without spending a dollar. But not so fast. Serial terminals vs. serial consoles My primary use case for this device is to drive my actual old DEC vt510 terminal. I have long been able to do that by running a getty for my FTDI-based USB-to-serial converter on /dev/ttyUSB0. This gets me a login prompt, and I can do whatever I need from there. This does not get me a serial console, however. The serial console would show kernel messages and could be used to interact with the pre-multiuser stages of the system that is, everything before the loging prompt. You can use it to access an emergency shell for repair, etc. Although I have long booted that kernel with console=tty0 console=ttyUSB0,57600, the serial console has never worked but I d never bothered investigating because the text terminal was sufficient. You might be seeing where this is going: to have root on an encrypted LUKS volume, you have to enter the decryption password in the pre-multiuser environment (which happens to be on the initramfs). So I started looking. First, I extracted the initrd with cpio and noticed that the ftdi_sio and usbserial modules weren t present. Added them to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and rebooted; no better. So I found the kernel s serial console guide, which explicitly notes To use a serial port as console you need to compile the support into your kernel . Well, I have no desire to custom-build a kernel on a Raspberry Pi with MicroSD storage every time a new kernel comes out. I thought well I don t stricly need the kernel to know about the console on /dev/ttyUSB0 for this; I just need the password prompt which comes from userspace to know about it. So I looked at the initramfs code, and wouldn t you know it, it uses /dev/console. Looking at /proc/consoles on that system, indeed it doesn t show ttyUSB0. So even though it is possible to load the USB serial driver in the initramfs, there is no way to make the initramfs use it, because it only uses whatever the kernel recognizes as a console, and the kernel won t recognize this. So there is no way to use a USB-to-serial adapter to enter a password for an encrypted root filesystem. Drat. The on-board UARTs? I can hear you know: The Pi already has on-board serial support! Why not use that? Ah yes, the reason I don t want to use that is because it is difficult to use that, particularly if you want to have RTS/CTS hardware flow control (or DTR/DSR on these old terminals, but that s another story, and I built a custom cable to map it to RTS/CTS anyhow). Since you asked, I ll take you down this unpleasant path. The GPIO typically has only 2 pins for serial communication: 8 and 10, for TX and RX, respectively. But dive in and you get into a confusing maze of UARTs. The mini UART , the one we are mostly familiar with on the Pi, does not support hardware flow control. The PL011 does. So the natural question is: how do we switch to the PL011, and what pins does it use? Great questions, and the answer is undocumented, at least for the Pi 4. According to that page, for the Pi 4, the primary UART is UART1, UART1 is the mini UART, the secondary UART is not normally present on the GPIO connector and might be used by Bluetooth anyway, and there is no documented pin for RTS/CTS anyhow. (Let alone some of the other lines modems use) There are supposed to be /dev/ttyAMA* devices, but I don t have those. There s an enable_uart kernel parameter, which does things like stop the mini UART from changing baud rates every time the VPU changes clock frequency (I am not making this up!), but doesn t seem to control the PL011 UART selection. This page has a program to do it, and map some GPIO pins to RTS/CTS, in theory. Even if you get all that working, you still have the problem that the Pi UARTs (all of them of every type) is 3.3V and RS-232 is 5V, so unless you get a converter, you will fry your Pi the moment you connect it to something useful. So, you re probably looking at some soldering and such just to build a cable that will work with an iffy stack. So, I could probably make it work given enough time, but I don t have that time to spare working with weird Pi serial problems, so I have always used USB converters when I need serial from a Pi. Conclusion I bought a fanless x86 micro PC with a N100 chip and all the ports I might want: a couple of DB-9 serial ports, some Ethernet ports, HDMI and VGA ports, and built-in wifi. Done.

I ve long been interested in new and different platforms. I ran Debian on an Alpha back in the late 1990s and was part of the Alpha port team; then I helped bootstrap Debian on amd64. I ve got somewhere around 8 Raspberry Pi devices in active use right now, and the free NNCPNET Internet email service I manage runs on an ARM instance at a cloud provider. ARM-based devices are cheap in a lot of ways: they use little power and there are many single-board computers based on them that are inexpensive. My 8-year-old s computer is a Raspberry Pi 400, in fact. So I like ARM. I ve been looking for ARM devices that have accelerated AES (Raspberry Pi 4 doesn t) so I can use full-disk encryption with them. There are a number of options, since ARM devices are starting to go more mid-range. Radxa s ROCK 5 series of SBCs goes up to 32GB RAM. The Orange Pi 5 Max and Ultra have up to 16GB RAM, as does the Raspberry Pi 5. Pine64 s Quartz64 has up to 8GB of RAM. I believe all of these have the ARM cryptographic extensions. They re all small and most are economical. But I also dislike ARM. There is a terrible lack of standardization in the ARM community. They say their devices run Linux, but the default there is that every vendor has their own custom Debian fork, and quite likely kernel fork as well. Most don t maintain them very well. Imagine if you were buying x86 hardware. You might have to manage AcerOS, Dellbian, HPian, etc. Most of them have no security support (particularly for the kernel). Some are based on Debian 11 (released in 2021), some Debian 12 (released in 2023), and none on Debian 13 (released a month ago). That is exactly the situation we have on ARM. While Raspberry Pi 4 and below can run Debian trixie directly, Raspberry Pi has not bothered to upstream support for the Pi 5 yet, and Raspberry Pi OS is only based on Debian bookworm (released in 2023) and very explicitly does not support a key Debian feature: you can t upgrade from one Raspberry Pi OS release to the next, so it s a complete reinstall every 2 years instead of just an upgrade. OrangePiOS only supports Debian bookworm but notably, their kernel is mostly stuck at 5.10 for every image they have (bookworm shipped with 6.1 and bookworm-backports supports 6.12). Radxa has a page on running Debian on one specific board, they seem to actually not support Debian directly, but rather their fork Radxa OS. There s a different installer for every board; for instance, this one for the Rock 4D. Looking at it, I can see that it uses files from here and here, with custom kernel, gstreamer, u-boot, and they put zfs in main for some reason. From Pine64, the Quartz64 seems to be based on an ancient 4.6 or 4.19 kernel. Perhaps, though, one might be able to use Debian s Pine A64+ instructions on it. Trixie doesn t have a u-boot image for the Quartz64 but it does have device tree files for it. RISC-V seems to be even worse; not only do we have this same issue there, but support in trixie is more limited and so is performance among the supported boards. The alternative is x86-based mini PCs. There are a bunch based on the N100, N150, or Celeron. Many of them support AES-NI and the prices are roughly in line with the higher-end ARM units. There are some interesting items out there; for instance, the Radxa X4 SBC features both an N100 and a RP2040. Fanless mini PCs are available from a number of vendors. Companies like ZimaBoard have interesting options like the ZimaBlade also. The difference in power is becoming less significant; it seems the newer ARM boards need 20W or 30W power supplies, and that may put them in the range of the mini PCs. As for cost, the newer ARM boards need a heat sink and fan, so by the time you add SBC, fan, storage, etc. you re starting to get into the price range of the mini PCs. It is great to see all the options of small SBCs with ARM and RISC-V processors, but at some point you ve got to throw up your hands and go this ecosystem has a lot of problems and consider just going back to x86. I m not sure if I m quite there yet, but I m getting close. Update 2025-09-11: I found a performant encryption option for the Pi 4, but was stymied by serial console problems; see the update post.