Petter Reinholdtsen: Publish Hargassner wood chip boiler state to MQTT
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Publish_Hargassner_wood_chip_boiler_state_to_MQTT.html
March 12, 2022, 5:30 AM
Recently I had a look at a
Hargassner
wood
chip boiler, and what kind of free software can be used to monitor
and control it.  The boiler can be connected to some cloud service via
what the producer call an Internet Gateway, which seem to be a
computer connecting to the boiler and passing the information gathered
to the cloud.  I discovered the boiler controller got an IP address on
the local network and listen on TCP port 23 to provide status
information as a text line of numbers.  It also prov...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.8.2: Hotfix release per CRAN request
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/11#rcpp_1.0.8.2
March 12, 2022, 12:00 AM
A new hot-fix release 1.0.8.2 of Rcpp just got to CRAN. It will also be uploaded to Debian shortly, and Windows and macOS binaries will appear at CRAN in the next few days. This release breaks with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020 as CRAN desired an update to silence nags from the newest clang version which turned a little loud over a feature deprecated in C++11 (namely std::unary_function() and std::binary_function()). This was easy to replace with std::function() wh...
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Santiago García Mantiñán: tcpping-nmap a substitute for tcpping based on nmap
http://blog.manty.net/2022/03/tcpping-nmap-substitute-for-tcpping.html
March 11, 2022, 11:20 PM
I was about to setup a tcpping based monitoring on smokeping but then I discovered this was based on tcptraceroute which on Debian comes setuid root and the alternative is to use sudo, so, anyway you put it... this runs with root privileges.I didn't like what I saw, so, I said... couldn't we do this with nmap without needing root?And so I started to write a little script that could mimic what tcpping and tcptraceroute were outputing but using nmap.The result is tcpping-nmap which does this. The ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: dtts 0.1.0 on CRAN: New Package
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/10#dtts_0.1.0
March 11, 2022, 2:14 AM
Leonardo and I are thrilled to announce the first CRAN release of dtts. The dtts package builds on top of both our nanotime package and the well-loved and widely-used data.table package by Matt, Arun, Jan, and numerous collaborators.
In a very rough nutshell, you can think of dtts as combining both these potent ingredients to produce something not-entirely-unlike the venerable xts package by our friends Jeff and Josh—but using highest-precision nanosecond increments rather than not-quite-micro...
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Holger Levsen: 20220310-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220310-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022/
March 10, 2022, 12:04 PM
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 from May 23 to 30
As last year there will be a Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 event taking place at the same location as previous years, from May 23rd until the 30th.
This is just a preliminary announcement to get the word out, that this event will happen, so you can ponder attending. The wiki page has more information and some fine folks have even already registered!
A few things still need to be sorted out, eg a call for papers and a call for sponsors. If you want t...
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Michael Ablassmeier: fscom switch shell
https://abbbi.github.io//fscom/
March 10, 2022, 12:00 AM
fs.com s5850 and s8050 series type switches have a secret mode which
lets you enter a regular shell from the switch cli, like so:
hostname # start shell
Password:
The command and password are not documented by the manufacturer,
i wondered wether if its possible to extract that password from
the firmware. After all: its my device, and i want to have access
to all the features!
Download the latest firmware image for those switch types and let binwalk do
its magic:
$ wget https://img-en.fs.com/
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Jonathan Dowland: Broken webcam aspect ratio
https://jmtd.net/log/webcam_aspect_ratio/
March 9, 2022, 2:21 PM
Sony RX100-III, relegated to a webcam
Sometimes I have remote meetings with Google Meet. Unlike the other
video-conferencing services that I use (Bluejeans, Zoom), my video
was stretched out of proportion under Google Meet with Firefox.
I haven't found out why this was happening, but I did figure out a
work-around.
Thanks to Daniel Silverstone, Rob Kendrick, Gregor Herrmann and Ben Allen for
pointing me in the right direction!
Hardware
The lovely Sony RX-100 mk3 that I bought in 2015 has
s...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppRedis 0.2.0: Major Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/08#rcppredis_0.2.0
March 9, 2022, 2:09 AM
A new major release of RcppRedis arrived on CRAN today. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads for several years now.
This release integrates support for pub/sub, a popular...
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François Marier: Using a Streamzap remote control with MythTV on Debian Bullseye
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/using-streamzap-remote-with-mythtv-debian-bullseye/
March 9, 2022, 12:00 AM
After upgrading my MythTV machine to Debian
Bullseye and MythTV
31, my Streamzap remote
control stopped working correctly: the up and down buttons were
working, but the OK button wasn't.
Here's the complete solution that made it work with the built-in kernel
support (i.e. without LIRC).
Button re-mapping
Since some of the buttons were working, but not others, I figured that the
buttons were probably not mapped to the right keys.
Inspired by these old v4l-utils-based
instructions,
I made my o...
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Ayoyimika Ajibade: Progress Report!! Modifying Expectations... 📝
https://ayoyimika.hashnode.dev/progress-report-modifying-expectations
March 7, 2022, 1:09 PM
Wait!  Just like yesterday when I was accepted as an Outreachy intern and the first half of the internship is finished😲. How time flies when you are having a good time🎃
As part of the requirements for the final application during the contribution period for the Outreachy internship, I needed to provide a timeline to achieve our goal on my outreachy task which is transitioning of dependencies in node16 and webpack5. Having consulted my mentors who implied that the packages depending on webp...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.6 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/06#nanotime_0.3.6
March 6, 2022, 8:20 PM
Leonardo and I are pleased to another update to our nanotime package bringing it to version 0.3.6 which landed on CRAN earlier today.
nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leona...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/03/my-debian-activities-in-february-2022/
March 5, 2022, 12:43 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 484 and rejected 73 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 495.
The overall number of rejected packages was 76, which is about 15% of the uploads to NEW. While most of the maintainers do a great job when creating their debian/copyright, others are a bit lax. Unfortunately those people seem to be more enthusiastic when fighting for changes in NEW processing or even removing NEW.
One argument in discussions about NEW is that the copyright ve...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-02/
March 5, 2022, 11:17 AM
Welcome to the February 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports, we try to round-up the important things we and others have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

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