Mike Gabriel: MATE 1.26 has finally landed in Debian testing
https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/140
December 23, 2021, 2:54 PM
For those, who haven't realized, yet: MATE 1.26 has now been uploaded to Debian and should be available in Debian testing to all happy testers.
During December, me and the whole family, we had been infected with Covid-19. All of us have recovered well, by now. In fact, I was very happy about a proper fever which I haven't had in years. (Fever is a well-known form of cancer prevention / prophylaxis). Drinking a lot (of warm water!), not eating for five days, and additionally following some healt...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Empress of Salt and Fortune
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-75029-6.html
December 23, 2021, 4:43 AM
Review: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo
      Series:
    Singing Hills Cycle #1
        Publisher:
    Tordotcom
        Copyright:
    March 2020
        ISBN:
    1-250-75029-6
        Format:
    Kindle
        Pages:
    119
  Cleric Chih is a record-keeper and historian from the Singing Hills abbey.
They have come to Lake Scarlet with their neixin, the hoopoe Almost
Brilliant, because the magical imperial lock placed on the site by the
Empress In-yo has just bee...
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Molly de Blanc: kindle
http://deblanc.net/blog/2021/12/21/kindle/
December 21, 2021, 11:43 PM
I have a Kindle. I’ve spent a lot of time saying this sheepishly — it’s Amazon, it’s proprietary, DRM is bad, etc, etc. It was a very thoughtful gift from my parents, taking into account things like my travel schedule, preference for traveling lighter, love of reading, and small apartment.
I wanted to share some observations from my experience owning a Kindle.
I don’t like to read for school on it. I really markup the papers I read for school, underlining things, notes in the margins, ...
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Joey Hess: Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Volunteer_Responsibility_Amnesty_Day/
December 21, 2021, 7:40 PM
Happy solstice, and happy
Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day!
After my inventory of my code today, I have decided it's time to pass
on moreutils to someone new.
This project remains interesting to people, including me. People still send
patches, which are easy to deal with. Taking up basic maintenance of this
package will be easy for you, if you feel like stepping forward.
People still contribute ideas and code for new tools to add to moreutils.
But I have not added any new tools to it sinc...
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Jonathan Dowland: Vim plugins by Tim Pope
https://jmtd.net/log/vim_plugins/
December 21, 2021, 2:39 PM
I've been using Vim as my main text editor for 18 years, but for most of that
time I've been using something very close to the default configuration: my
vimrc contained not much more than preferences for indentation and how to
visually indicate white space characters like tabs.
Last but not least, I've used a single colour scheme for most of that time:
Zenburn.
In 20151 I started exploring a few Vim plugins2. To manage
them, I started by choosing a plugin manager,
Pathogen3. Recently I
noticed ...
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Thomas Lange: New ISO images using Debian 11
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/new-iso-fai-5.10/
December 21, 2021, 10:18 AM
I've created new ISO images for FAI. Now, they install Debian 11 using
kernel 5.10. The ISOs are available from
   https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
There's also a Ubuntu version of the FAI CD which installs Ubuntu LTS
20.04 in two variants. A desktop and a server installation is
available.
If you want to install the Debian oldstable version (Debian 10),
please use the FAI.me service.
FAI...
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Craig Small: WordPress 5.8.2 Debian packages
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/20/wordpress-5-8-2-debian-packages/
December 20, 2021, 11:14 AM
After a bit of a delay, WordPress version 5.8.2 packages should be available now. This is a minor update from 5.8.1 which fixes two bugs but not the security bug.
The security bug is due to WordPress shipping its own CA store, which is a list of certificates it trusts to sign for websites. Debian WordPress has used the system certificate store which uses /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt  for years so is not impacted by this change. That CA file is generated by update-ca-certificates and is ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSMC 0.2.6 on CRAN: Compiler Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/19#rcppsmc_0.2.6
December 20, 2021, 3:26 AM
A new maintenance RcppSMC release 0.2.6 arrived at CRAN yesterday. It chiefly updates the code to comply with g++-11 which default to C++17 – which brings us std::data(). And if one is not careful, as we weren’t in three files, this can clash with other uses of data as I tweeted a good week ago. Otherwise some JSS URLs now sport the preferred shorter doi form.
RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his J...
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Bastian Venthur: Managing dotfiles with GNU Stow
https://venthur.de/2021-12-19-managing-dotfiles-with-stow.html
December 19, 2021, 1:00 PM
Many developers manage their user-specific application configuration – also
known as dotfiles – in a version control system such as git. This allows
for keeping track of changes and synchronizing the dotfiles across different
machines. Searching on github, you’ll find thousands of dotfile
repositories.
As your dotfiles are sprinkled all over your home directory, managing them in
a single repository is not trivial, i.e. how do you make sure that your
bashrc, .tmux.conf, etc. that life in y...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Raybearer
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-68335-719-1.html
December 19, 2021, 4:17 AM
Review: Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko
      Series:
    Raybearer #1
        Publisher:
    Amulet Books
        Copyright:
    2020
        ISBN:
    1-68335-719-1
        Format:
    Kindle
        Pages:
    308
  Tarisai was raised alone in Bhekina House by an array of servants and
tutors who were not allowed to touch her.  Glimpses of the world were
fleeting and sometimes ended by nailed-shut windows.  Her life revolved
around her rarely-seen mother, The Lady, who treats her w...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, November 2021
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-november-2021.html
December 18, 2021, 8:37 PM
In November I was assigned 0.75 hours of work by Freexian's Debian
  LTS initiative and carried over 15.25 hours from earlier months. I
  mistakenly worked 20 hours, which we'll try to resolve.
  I continued work on an update to the linux (4.9) package, but did
  not make an upload this month.
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Andrew Cater: Debian media team - testing and releasing Debian 11.2 20211218 2030
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2021/12/debian-media-team-tesing-and-releasing.html
December 18, 2021, 8:34 PM
 We've more or less finished the release of the Debian CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and other media for Bullseye 11.2 release. This is one of the (roughly) quarterly point releases and roll-up releases.Thanks firstly to the developers, users, helpers, bug filers who help to keep Debian moving and working and to the release team and press team who more or less finish their job before the media team start theirs. Thanks to Sledge and RattusRattus and Isy in Cambridge and to Schweer who single-handedly clears a...
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Bits from Debian: 2,000 fonts for Debian
https://bits.debian.org/2021/12/2000-fonts-debian.html
December 17, 2021, 5:45 PM
Debian comes with tons of fonts for all kinds of purposes,
you can easily list them (almost) all with: apt-cache search ^fonts-.
However, sometimes they are not in their latest version, or as a user you would like
to get access to new fonts that are not present in Debian stable yet.

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