About 80% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian, as well as one direct donation via GitHub Sponsors (thanks ). If you appreciate this sort of work and are at a company that uses Debian, have a look to see whether you can pay for any of Freexian s services; as well as the...

   Both R and Python make it reasonably easy to work with compiled extensions. But how to access objects in one environment from the other and share state or (non-trivial) objects remains trickier. Recently (and while r-forge was resting’ so we opened GitHub Discussions) a question was asked...

   I have unearthed a few old articles typed during my adolescence, between 1996 and 1998. Unremarkable at the time, these pages now compose, three decades later, the chronicle of a vanished era.1 The word blog does not exist yet. Wikipedia remains to come. Google has not been born. AltaVista reigns...

   Debian LTS ELTS This was my hundred-thirty-ninth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian (as the LTS- and ELTS-teams have been merged now, there is only one paragraph left for both activities). During my allocated time I uploaded or worked...

   Another year of data from Société de Transport de Montréal, Montreal’s transit agency A few highlights this year: Although the Saint-Michel station closed for emergency repairs in November 2024, traffic never bounced back to its pre-closure levels and is still stuck somewhere around 2022 Q2 levels....

   Welcome to the first monthly report in 2026 from the Reproducible Builds project These reports outline what we’ve been up to over the past month, highlighting items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in...

   January was a slow month, I only did three uploads to Debian unstable: xdg-desktop-portal-wlr updated to 0.8.1-1 swayimg updated to 4.7-1 usbguard updated to 1.1.4 ds-2, which closed #1122733 I was very happy to see the new dfsg-new-queue and that there are more hands now processing the NEW queue....

   The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 312. This version includes the following changes: [ Jelle van der Waa ] Adjust u-boot-tools fit diff to match new lines. You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

   The original FOAAS site provided a rather wide variety of REST access points, but it sadky is no more (while the old repo is still there). A newer replacement site FOASS is up and running, but with a somewhat reduced offering. (For example, the two accessors shown in the screenshot are no more. C...

   The twentythird release of littler as a CRAN package landed on CRAN just now, following in the now twenty year history ( ) as a (initially non-CRAN) package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later. littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It...

   Debian packages: dracut: Bugs: replied to and reassigned #1124400: update-initramfs no longer includes lib modules <kver> updates directory flash-kernel: Bugs: closed #1102690: A higher version (...) is still installed, no reflashing required closed #1125327: since linux 6.18...

   FOSDEM 2026 was great I hope to blog a proper postmortem in due course. But for now, The video of my talk is up, as are my slides with speaker notes and links.

   Posted on February 3, 2026 Tags: madeof:atoms, madeof:bits Today I had a day off. Some of it went great. Some less so. I woke up, went out to pay our tribute to NotOurCat, and it was snowing yay And I had a day off, so if it had snowed enough that shovelling was needed, I had time to do it ...

   Hi there, I’m more than halfway through (8 weeks) my Outreachy internship with Debian, working on the openQA project to test Live Images. My journey into tech began as a software engineering trainee, during which I built a foundation in Bash scripting, C programming, and Python. Later, I worked for...

   If you’d like to have a simple solution for managing all the secrets you’re using in your Ansible Playbooks, keep reading on. Bitwarden’s Secrets Manager provides an Ansible collection, which makes it very easy to use this particular Secrets Manager in Ansible Playbooks. I’ll show you how to set up...

   Hello world I am an intern at Outreachy working with the Debian OpenQA team on images testing. We get to know what career opportunities awaits us when we work on open source projects. In open source, we are constantly learning. The community has different sets of skills and a large network of...

   After years of thinking about and learning about how radios work, I figured it was high-time to start to more aggressively share the things i’ve been learning. I had a ton of fun at DistrictCon year 0, so it was a pretty natural place to pitch an RF-focused introductory talk. I was selected for...

   Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some older published...

   Got rid of documents I had for last year’s Tax return. Now I have the least document in my bookshelf out of the year.

   Review: Paladin’s Faith, by T. Kingfisher Series: The Saint of Steel #4 Publisher: Red Wombat Studio Copyright: 2023 ISBN: 1-61450-614-0 Format: Kindle Pages: 515 Paladin’s Faith is the fourth book in T. Kingfisher’s loosely connected series of fantasy novels about the berserker former...

   You might have seen Policy will reject signature within a year warnings in apt(-get) update runs like this: root 424812bd4556: # apt update Get:1 http: foo.example.org debian demo InRelease [4229 B] Hit:2 http: deb.debian.org debian trixie InRelease Hit:3 http: deb.debian.org debian trixie-updates...

   Me: Do you want your coffee in a Japanese or Western style tea cup? M: Yunomi. Me: Apparently not as well as you think I do

   Review: Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee Series: Thousand Worlds #1 Publisher: Rick Riordan Presents Copyright: 2019 ISBN: 1-368-01519-0 Format: Kindle Pages: 315 Dragon Pearl is a middle-grade space fantasy based on Korean mythology and the first book of a series. Min is a fourteen-year-old girl...

   Snow coming. I’m tuned into the local 24 hour slop weather stream. AI generated, narrated, up to the minute radar and forecast graphics. People popping up on the live weather map with questions snow soon? (They pay for the privilege.) LLM generating reply that riffs on their name. Tuned to keep the...

   Here’s my monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the FOSS world. Debian Whilst I didn’t get a chance to do much, here are still a few things that I worked on: A few discussions with the new DFSG team, et al. Assited a few folks in getting their patches submitted via Salsa....

   Part 3: Building the Keystone - Dataproc Custom Images for Secure Boot & GPUs In Part 1, we established a secure, proxy-only network. In Part 2, we explored the enhanced install gpu driver.sh initialization action. Now, in Part 3, we’ll focus on using the LLC-Technologies-Collier custom-images...

   The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: Aquila Macedo (aquila) Peter Blackman (peterb) Kiran S Kunjumon (hacksk) Ben Westover (bjw) The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Vladimir Petko Antonin Delpeuch...

   Part 2: Taming the Beast - Deep Dive into the Proxy-Aware GPU Initialization Action In Part 1 of this series, we laid the network foundation for running secure Dataproc clusters. Now, let’s zoom in on the core component responsible for installing and configuring NVIDIA GPU drivers and the...

   Part 1: Building a Secure Network Foundation for Dataproc with GPUs & SWP Welcome to the first post in our series on running GPU-accelerated Dataproc workloads in secure, enterprise-grade environments. Many organizations need to operate within VPCs that have no direct internet egress, instead...

   With TLS 1.3 more parts of the handshake got encrypted (e.g. the certificate), but sometimes it’s still helpful to look at the complete handshake. curl uses the somewhat standardized env variable for the key log file called SSLKEYLOGFILE, which is also supported by Firefox and Chrome. wireshark...

   Query Debian changelogs by keyword with the FTP-Master API In my post about tracking my Debian uploads, I used the ProjectB database directly to retrieve how many uploads I had so far. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a message from Joerg Jaspert, who introduced me to the Debian Archive Kit...

   In 2017, I led a series of workshops aimed at teaching beginners a better understanding of encryption, how the internet works, and their digital security. Nearly a decade later, there is still a great need to share reliable resources and guides on improving these skills. I have worked...

   Ubuntu Pro is a subscription offering for Ubuntu users who want to pay for the assurance of getting quick and high-quality security updates for Ubuntu. I tested it out to see how it works in practice, and to evaluate how well it works as a commercial open source service model for Linux. Anyone...

   v2 changelogs - FTP-Master API released and how can it be used to track your uploads

   Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel As I have said in this blog and elsewhere, after putting quite a bit of work into generating the Debian Raspberry Pi images between late 2018 and 2023, I had to recognize I don’t have the time and energy to properly care for it. I even registered a GSoC...

   The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 311. This version includes the following changes: [ Chris Lamb ] Fix test compatibility with u-boot-tools 2026-01. Thanks, Jelle Bump Standards-Version to 4.7.3. Drop implied Priority: optional from debian control....

   In part 1, we discovered the problem of rewriting git history in the presence of nontrivial merges. Today, we’ll discuss the workaround I chose. As I previously mentioned, and as Julia Evans’ excellent data model document explains, a git commit is just a snapshot of a tree (suitably deduplicated by...

   Somehow this whole DevOps thing is all about generating the wildest things from some (usually equally wild) template. And today we’re gonna generate YAML from ERB, what could possibly go wrong? Well, actually, quite a lot, so one wants to validate the generated result before using it to break...

   Back in December, I was working to help organize multiple different conferences. One has already happened; the rest are still works in progress. That’s when the thought struck me: why so many conferences, and why do I work for them? I have been fairly active in the scene since 2020. For most...

   A new (micro) maintenance release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN, coming only a good week after the 0.0.10 release which itself had a two year gap to its predecessor release. RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime...

   Halfway There Hurray I have officially reached the 6-week mark, the halfway point of my Outreachy internship. The time has flown by incredibly fast, yet it feels short because there is still so much exciting work to do. I remember starting this journey feeling overwhelmed, trying to gain momentum....

   Highlights Hello world . I am an intern here at Outreachy working with Debian OpenQA Image testing team. The work consists of testing Images with OpenQA. The internship has reached midpoint and here are some of the highlights that I have had so far. The mentors : Roland Clobus, Tassia Camoes and...

   I’m going to FOSDEM 2026 I’m presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it’s scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I’m the warm-up act The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), but sadly there’s no...

   After experimenting at home, the very first professional-grade NAS from Terramaster arrived at work, too, with 12 HDD bays and possibly a pair of M2s. NVME cards. In this case, I again installed a plain Debian distribution, but HDD monitoring required some configuration adjustments to run smartd...

   The Aim I have just got a Furilabs FLX1s [1] which is a phone running a modified version of Debian. I want to have a phone that runs all apps that I control and can observe and debug. Android is very good for what it does and there are security focused forks of Android which have a lot of potential...

   Standard RAID solutions waste space when disks have different sizes. Linux software RAID with LVM uses the full capacity of each disk and lets you grow storage by replacing one or two disks at a time. We start with four disks of equal size: lsblk -Mo NAME,TYPE,SIZE NAME TYPE SIZE vda disk 101M vdb...

   mrcal 2.5 is out: the release notes. Once again, this is mostly a bug-fix release en route to the big new features coming in 3.0. One cool thing is that these tools have now matured enough to no longer be considered experimental. They have been used with great success in lots of contexts across...

   I’ve been using rsnapshot to take backups of around 10 servers and laptops for well over 15 years, and it is a remarkably reliable tool that has proven itself many times. Rsnapshot uses rsync over SSH and maintains a temporal hard-link file pool. Once rsnapshot is configured and running, on the...

   No man’s Sky (or as it’s known in our house, spaceship game ) is a space exploration sandbox game that was originally released 10 years ago. Back then I tried it on my brother s PS4 but I couldn’t get into it. In 2022 it launched for the Nintendo Switch1 and the game finally clicked for me. I play...

   This post covers my friend Badri and my experiences in Brunei. Brunei officially Brunei Darussalam is a country in Southeast Asia, located on Borneo island. It is one of the few remaining absolute monarchies on Earth. On the morning of the 10th of December 2024, Badri and I reached Brunei...