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        <channel>
                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen</title>
                <description></description>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
                <atom:link href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
        
        <item>
                <title>Test framework for DocBook processors / formatters</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Test_framework_for_DocBook_processors___formatters.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Test_framework_for_DocBook_processors___formatters.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 5 Nov 2023 13:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;All the books I have published so far has been using
&lt;a href=&quot;https://docbook.org/&quot;&gt;DocBook&lt;/a&gt; somewhere in the process.
For the first book, the source format was DocBook, while for every
later book it was an intermediate format used as the stepping stone to
be able to present the same manuscript in several formats, on paper,
as ebook in ePub format, as a HTML page and as a PDF file either for
paper production or for Internet consumption.  This is made possible
with a wide variety of free software tools with DocBook support in
Debian.  The source format of later books have been docx via rst,
Markdown, Filemaker and Asciidoc, and for all of these I was able to
generate a suitable DocBook file for further processing using pandoc,
a2x and asciidoctor, as well as rendering using
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xmlto&quot;&gt;xmlto&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dbtoepub&quot;&gt;dbtoepub&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dblatex&quot;&gt;dblatex&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dblatex&quot;&gt;docbook-xsl&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fop&quot;&gt;fop&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Most of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/&quot;&gt;books I
have published&lt;/a&gt; are translated books, with English as the source
language.  The use of
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/po4a&quot;&gt;po4a&lt;/a&gt; to
handle translations using the gettext PO format has been a blessing,
but publishing translated books had triggered the need to ensure the
DocBook tools handle relevant languages correctly.  For every new
language I have published, I had to submit patches dblatex, dbtoepub
and docbook-xsl fixing incorrect language and country specific issues
in the framework themselves.  Typically this has been missing keywords
like &#39;figure&#39; or sort ordering of index entries.  After a while it
became tiresome to only discover issues like this by accident, and I
decided to write a DocBook &quot;test framework&quot; exercising various
features of DocBook and allowing me to see all features exercised for
a given language.  It consist of a set of DocBook files, a version 4
book, a version 5 book, a v4 book set, a v4 selection of problematic
tables, one v4 testing sidefloat and finally one v4 testing a book of
articles.  The DocBook files are accompanied with a set of build rules
for building PDF using dblatex and docbook-xsl/fop, HTML using xmlto
or docbook-xsl and epub using dbtoepub.  The result is a set of files
visualizing footnotes, indexes, table of content list, figures,
formulas and other DocBook features, allowing for a quick review on
the completeness of the given locale settings.  To build with a
different language setting, all one need to do is edit the lang= value
in the .xml file to pick a different ISO 639 code value and run
&#39;make&#39;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/&quot;&gt;test framework
source code&lt;/a&gt; is available from Codeberg, and a generated set of
presentations of the various examples is available as Codeberg static
web pages at
&lt;a href=&quot;https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/&quot;&gt;https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/&lt;/a&gt;.
Using this test framework I have been able to discover and report
several bugs and missing features in various tools, and got a lot of
them fixed.  For example I got Northern Sami keywoards added to both
docbook-xsl and dblatex, fixed several typos in Norwegian bokmål and
Norwegian Nynorsk, support for non-ascii title IDs added to pandoc,
Norwegian index sorting support fixed in xindy and initial Norwegian
Bokmål support added to dblatex.  Some issues still remains, though.
Default index sorting rules are still broken in several tools, so the
Norwegian letters æ, ø and å are more often than not sorted properly
in the book index.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The test framework recently received some more polish, as part of
publishing my latest book.  This book contained a lot of fairly
complex tables, which exposed bugs in some of the tools.  This made me
add a new test file with various tables, as well as spend some time to
brush up the build rules.  My goal is for the test framework to
exercise all DocBook features to make it easier to see which features
work with different processors, and hopefully get them all to support
the full set of DocBook features.  Feel free to send patches to extend
the test set, and test it with your favorite DocBook processor.
Please visit these two URLs to learn more:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/&quot;&gt;https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/&quot;&gt;https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to learn more on Docbook and translations, I recommend
having a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docbook.org/&quot;&gt;the DocBook
web site&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://doccookbook.sourceforge.net/html/en/&quot;&gt;the DoCookBook
site&lt;a/&gt; and my earlier blog post on
&lt;a href=&quot;https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html&quot;&gt;how
the Skolelinux project process and translate documentation&lt;/a&gt;,  a talk I gave earlier this year on
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20230314-oversetting-og-publisering-av-b%c3%b8ker-med-fri-programvare/&quot;&gt;how
to translate and publish books using free software&lt;/a&gt; (Norwegian
only).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;!--

https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/issues/205 (docbook-xsl: sme support)
https://bugs.debian.org/968437 (xindy: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
https://bugs.debian.org/856123 (pandoc: markdown to docbook with non-english titles)
https://bugs.debian.org/864813 (dblatex: missing nb words)
https://bugs.debian.org/756386 (dblatex: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
https://bugs.debian.org/796871 (dbtoepub: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
https://bugs.debian.org/792616 (dblatex: PDF metadata)
https://bugs.debian.org/686908 (docbook-xsl: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&amp;atid=373747&amp;aid=3556630&amp;group_id=21935 (docbook-xsl: nb/nn support)
https://bugs.debian.org/684391 (dblatex: initial nb support)

--&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>«Virkninger av angrefristloven», hovedfagsoppgaven som fikk endret en lov</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Virkninger_av_angrefristloven___hovedfagsoppgaven_som_fikk_endret_en_lov.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Virkninger_av_angrefristloven___hovedfagsoppgaven_som_fikk_endret_en_lov.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Oct 2023 22:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-10-29-bok-angrefrist.svg&quot; width=&quot;20%&quot; align=&quot;center&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I 1979 leverte Ole-Erik Yrvin en hovedfagsoppgave for Cand. Scient.
  ved Institutt for sosiologi på Universitetet i Oslo på oppdrag fra
  Forbruker- og administrasjonsdepartementet. Oppgaven evaluerte
  Angrefristloven fra 1972, og det han oppdaget førte til at loven ble
  endret fire år senere.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Jeg har kjent Ole-Erik en stund, og synes det var trist at hans
  oppgave ikke lenger er tilgjengelig, hverken fra oppdragsgiver
  eller fra universitetet.  Hans forsøk på å få den avbildet og lagt
  ut på Internett har vist seg fånyttes, så derfor tilbød jeg meg for
  en stund tilbake å publisere den og gjøre den tilgjengelig med
  fribruksvilkår på Internett.  Det er nå klart, og hovedfagsoppgaven
  er tilgjengelig blant annet via &lt;a
  href=&quot;http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/&quot;&gt;min liste over
  publiserte bøker&lt;/a&gt;, både som nettside,
  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Ole-Erik+Yrvin&quot;&gt;digital
  bok i ePub-format og på papir fra lulu.com&lt;/a&gt;.  Jeg regner med at
  den også vil dukke opp på nettbokhandlere i løpet av en måned eller
  to.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Alle tabeller og figurer er gjenskapt for bedre lesbarhet, noen
  skrivefeil rettet opp og mange referanser har fått flere detaljer
  som ISBN-nummer og DOI-referanse.  Selv om jeg ikke regner med at
  dette blir en kioskvelter, så håper jeg denne nye utgaven kan komme
  fremtiden til glede.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Som vanlig, hvis du bruker Bitcoin og ønsker å vise din støtte til
det jeg driver med, setter jeg pris på om du sender Bitcoin-donasjoner
til min adresse
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;. Merk,
betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>«underordnet tjenestemann blir inhabil fordi en overordnet er inhabil».</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_underordnet_tjenestemann_blir_inhabil_fordi_en_overordnet_er_inhabil__.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_underordnet_tjenestemann_blir_inhabil_fordi_en_overordnet_er_inhabil__.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 7 Sep 2023 09:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Medlemmene av Norges regjering har demonstert de siste månedene at
habilitetsvureringer ikke er deres sterke side og det gjelder både
Arbeiderpartiets og Senterpartiers representater. Det er heldigvis
enklere i det private, da inhabilitetsreglene kun gjelder de som
jobber for folket, ikke seg selv.  Sist ut er utenriksminister
Huitfeldt.  I går kom nyheten om at
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/riksadvokaten_-okokrim-nestsjef-kan-behandle-huitfeldt-saken-1.16545162&quot;&gt;Riksadvokaten
har konkludert med at nestsjefen i Økokrim kan behandle sak om
habilitet og innsidekunnskap&lt;/a&gt; for Huitfeldt, på tross av at hans
overordnede, sjefen for Økokrim, har meldt seg inhabil i saken.  Dette
er litt rart.  I veilednigen
«&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/krd/vedlegg/komm/veiledere/habilitet_i_kommuner_og_fylkeskommuner.pdf&quot;&gt;Habilitet
i kommuner og fylkeskommuner&lt;/a&gt;» av Kommunal- og regionaldepartementet
forteller de hva som gjelder, riktig nok gjelder veiledningen ikke for
Økokrim som jo ikke er kommune eller fylkeskommune, men jeg får ikke
inntrykk av at dette er regler som kun gjelder for kommune og
fylkeskommune:

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;«&lt;strong&gt;2.1 Oversikt over inhabilitetsgrunnlagene&lt;/strong&gt;

&lt;p&gt;De alminnelige reglene om inhabilitet for den offentlige
forvaltningen er gitt i
&lt;a href=&quot;https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1967-02-10/KAPITTEL_2#KAPITTEL_2&quot;&gt;forvaltningsloven
§§ 6 til 10&lt;/a&gt;. Forvaltningslovens hovedregel om inhabilitet framgår
av § 6. Her er det gitt tre ulike grunnlag som kan føre til at en
tjenestemann eller folkevalgt blir inhabil. I § 6 første ledd
bokstavene a til e er det oppstilt konkrete tilknytningsforhold mellom
tjenestemannen og saken eller sakens parter som automatisk fører til
inhabilitet. Annet ledd oppstiller en skjønnsmessig regel om at
tjenestemannen også kan bli inhabil etter en konkret vurdering av
inhabilitetsspørsmålet, der en lang rekke momenter kan være
relevante. I tredje ledd er det regler om såkalt avledet
inhabilitet. Det vil si at en underordnet tjenestemann blir inhabil
fordi en overordnet er inhabil.»&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Loven sier ganske enkelt «Er den overordnede tjenestemann ugild,
kan avgjørelse i saken heller ikke treffes av en direkte underordnet
tjenestemann i samme forvaltningsorgan.»  Jeg antar tanken er at en
underordnet vil stå i fare for å tilpasse sine konklusjoner til det
overordnet vil ha fordel av, for å fortsatt ha et godt forhold til sin
overordnede.  Men jeg er ikke jurist og forstår nok ikke kompliserte
juridiske vurderinger.  For å sitere «Kamerat Napoleon» av George
Orwell: «Alle dyr er like, men noen dyr er likere enn andre».
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Invidious add-on for Kodi 20</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Invidious_add_on_for_Kodi_20.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Invidious_add_on_for_Kodi_20.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 10 Aug 2023 19:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I still enjoy &lt;a href=&quot;https://kodi.tv/&quot;&gt;Kodi&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://libreelec.tv/&quot;&gt;LibreELEC&lt;/a&gt; as my multimedia center
at home.  Sadly two of the services I really would like to use from
within Kodi are not easily available.  The most wanted add-on would be
one making &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/&quot;&gt;The Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;
available, and it has
&lt;a href=&quot;https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:Internet_Archive&quot;&gt;not been
working&lt;/a&gt; for many years.  The second most wanted add-on is one
using &lt;a href=&quot;https://invidious.io/&quot;&gt;the Invidious privacy enhanced
Youtube frontent&lt;/a&gt;.  A plugin for this has been partly working, but
not been kept up to date in the Kodi add-on repository, and its
upstream seem to have given it up in April this year, when the git
repository was closed.  A few days ago I got tired of this sad state
of affairs and decided to
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kodi-invidious-plugin&quot;&gt;have
a go at improving the Invidious add-on&lt;/a&gt;.  As
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872&quot;&gt;Google has
already attacked&lt;/a&gt; the Invidious concept, so it need all the support
if can get.  My small contribution here is to improve the service
status on Kodi.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I added support to the Invidious add-on for automatically picking a
working Invidious instance, instead of requiring the user to specify
the URL to a specific instance after installation.  I also had a look
at the set of patches floating around in the various forks on github,
and decided to clean up at least some of the features I liked and
integrate them into my new release branch.  Now the plugin can handle
channel and short video items in search results.  Earlier it could
only handle single video instances in the search response.  I also
brushed up the set of metadata displayed a bit, but hope I can figure
out how to get more relevant metadata displayed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because I only use Kodi 20 myself, I only test on version 20 and am
only motivated to ensure version 20 is working.  Because of API changes
between version 19 and 20, I suspect it will fail with earlier Kodi
versions.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I already
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/xbmc/repo-plugins/pull/4363&quot;&gt;asked to have
the add-on added&lt;/a&gt; to the official Kodi 20 repository, and is
waiting to heard back from the repo maintainers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What did I learn from OpenSnitch this summer?</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jun 2023 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;With yesterdays
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/News/2023/20230610&quot;&gt;release of Debian
12 Bookworm&lt;/a&gt;, I am happy to know the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch&quot;&gt;the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch&lt;/a&gt; is available for a wider audience.
I have been running it for a few weeks now, and have been surprised
about some of the programs connecting to the Internet.  Some programs
are obviously calling out from my machine, like the NTP network based
clock adjusting system and Tor to reach other Tor clients, but others
were more dubious.  For example, the KDE Window manager try to look up
the host name in DNS, for no apparent reason, but if this lookup is
blocked the KDE desktop get periodically stuck when I use it.  Another
surprise was how much Firefox call home directly to mozilla.com,
mozilla.net and googleapis.com, to mention a few, when I visit other
web pages.  This direct connection happen even if I told Firefox to
always use a proxy, and the proxy setting is ignored for this traffic.
Other surprising connections come from audacity and dirmngr (I do not
use Gnome).  It took some trial and error to get a good default set of
permissions.  Without it, I would get popups asking for permissions at
any time, also the most inconvenient ones where I am in the middle of
a time sensitive gaming session.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect some application developers should rethink when then need
to use network connections or DNS lookups, and recommend testing
OpenSnitch (only &lt;tt&gt;apt install opensnitch&lt;/tt&gt; away in Debian
Bookworm) to locate and report any surprising Internet connections on
your desktop machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the moment the upstream developer and Debian package maintainer
is working on making the system more reliable in Debian, by enabling
the eBPF kernel module to track processes and connections instead of
depending in content in /proc/.  This should enter unstable fairly
soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2023-06-12&lt;/strong&gt;: I got a tip about
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues&quot;&gt;a list of privacy
issues in Free Software&lt;/a&gt; and the
&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-privacy&quot;&gt;#debian-privacy IRC
channel&lt;/a&gt; discussing these topics.&lt;/p&gt;

</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>wmbusmeters, parse data from your utility meter - nice free software</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/wmbusmeters__parse_data_from_your_utility_meter___nice_free_software.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/wmbusmeters__parse_data_from_your_utility_meter___nice_free_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 19 May 2023 21:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;There is a European standard for reading utility meters like water,
gas, electricity or heat distribution meters.  The
&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meter-Bus&quot;&gt;Meter-Bus standard
(EN 13757-2, EN 13757-3 and EN 13757–4)&lt;/a&gt; provide a cross vendor way
to talk to and collect meter data.  I ran into this standard when I
wanted to monitor some heat distribution meters, and managed to find
free software that could do the job.  The meters in question broadcast
encrypted messages with meter information via radio, and the hardest
part was to track down the encryption keys from the vendor.  With this
in place I could set up a MQTT gateway to submit the meter data for
graphing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The free software systems in question,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rtl-wmbus&quot;&gt;rtl-wmbus&lt;/a&gt; to
read the messages from a software defined radio, and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/wmbusmeters&quot;&gt;wmbusmeters&lt;/a&gt; to
decrypt and decode the content of the messages, is working very well
and allowe me to get frequent updates from my meters.  I got in touch
with upstream last year to see if there was any interest in publishing
the packages via Debian.  I was very happy to learn that Fredrik
Öhrström volunteered to maintain the packages, and I have since
assisted him in getting Debian package build rules in place as well as
sponsoring the packages into the Debian archive.  Sadly we completed
it too late for them to become part of the next stable Debian release
(Bookworm).  The wmbusmeters package just cleared the NEW queue.  It
will need some work to fix a built problem, but I expect Fredrik will
find a solution soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you got a infrastructure meter supporting the Meter Bus
standard, I strongly recommend having a look at these nice
packages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The 2023 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 14 May 2023 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days.  A lot of
patches and issues have seen activity on
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/&quot;&gt;the project github
pages&lt;/a&gt; recently.  A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering
over at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tormach.com/&quot;&gt;Tormach&lt;/a&gt; headquarter in
Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway.  If you
wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&quot;LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
interactive development).&quot;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Norwegian developer gathering take place the weekend June 16th
to 18th this year, and is open for everyone interested in contributing
to LinuxCNC.  Up to date information about the gathering can be found
in
&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/emc/mailman/emc-developers/thread/sa64jp06nob.fsf%40hjemme.reinholdtsen.name/#msg37837251&quot;&gt;the
developer mailing list thread&lt;/a&gt; where the gathering was announced.
Thanks to the good people at
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redpill-linpro.com/&quot;&gt;Redpill-Linpro&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuugfoundation.no/no/&quot;&gt;NUUG Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, we
have enough sponsor funds to pay for food, and shelter for the people
traveling from afar to join us.  If you would like to join the
gathering, get in touch.&lt;/p&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 13 May 2023 12:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A bit delayed,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch&quot;&gt;the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch&lt;/a&gt; package in Debian now got the
latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm.  Because it depend on a
package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the
testing migration script did not understand that the tests were
actually working, so the migration was delayed.  A bug in the package
dependencies is also fixed, so those installing the firewall package
(opensnitch) now also get the GUI admin tool (python3-opensnitch-ui)
installed by default.  I am very grateful to Gustavo Iñiguez Goya for
his work on getting the package ready for Debian Bookworm.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Armed with this package I have discovered some surprising
connections from programs I believed were able to work completly
offline, and it has already proven its worth, at least to me.  If you
too want to get more familiar with the kind of programs using
Internett connections on your machine, I recommend testing &lt;tt&gt;apt
install opensnitch&lt;/tt&gt; in Bookworm and see what you think.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The package is still not able to build its eBPF module within
Debian.  Not sure how much work it would be to get it working, but
suspect some kernel related packages need to be extended with more
header files to get it working.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 23 Apr 2023 09:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that
it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with
transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into
stuff I need to write.  The background is that long drives often bring
up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out
of the question while driving.  With the release of
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper/&quot;&gt;OpenAI Whisper&lt;/a&gt;, this
seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a
go.  OpenAI Whisper is a Linux based neural network system to read in
audio files and provide text representation of the speech in that
audio recording.  It handle multiple languages and according to its
creators even can translate into a different language than the spoken
one.  I have not tested the latter feature.  It can either use the CPU
or a GPU with CUDA support.  As far as I can tell, CUDA in practice
limit that feature to NVidia graphics cards.  I have few of those, as
they do not work great with free software drivers, and have not tested
the GPU option.  While looking into the matter, I did discover some
work to provide CUDA support on non-NVidia GPUs, and some work with
the library used by Whisper to port it to other GPUs, but have not
spent much time looking into GPU support yet.  I&#39;ve so far used an old
X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its
CPU.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers
under control of someone else (aka a &quot;cloud&quot; service) to transcribe
ones thoughts and personal notes, I want to run the transcribing
system locally on my own computers.  The only sensible approach to me
is to make the effort I put into this available for any Linux user and
to upload the needed packages into Debian.  Looking at Debian Bookworm, I
discovered that only three packages were missing,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034307&quot;&gt;tiktoken&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034144&quot;&gt;triton&lt;/a&gt;, and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034091&quot;&gt;openai-whisper&lt;/a&gt;.  For a while
I also believed
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034286&quot;&gt;ffmpeg-python&lt;/a&gt; was
needed, but as its
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python/issues/760&quot;&gt;upstream
seem to have vanished&lt;/a&gt; I found it safer
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1242&quot;&gt;to rewrite
whisper&lt;/a&gt; to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python
into Debian.  I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of
&lt;a href=&quot;https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team&quot;&gt;the Debian Deep
Learning Team&lt;/a&gt;, which seem like the best team to look after such
packages.  Discussing the topic within the group also made me aware
that the triton package was already a future dependency of newer
versions of the torch package being planned, and would be needed after
Bookworm is released.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All required code packages have been now waiting in
&lt;a href=&quot;https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html&quot;&gt;the Debian NEW
queue&lt;/a&gt; since Wednesday, heading for Debian Experimental until
Bookworm is released.  An unsolved issue is how to handle the neural
network models used by Whisper.  The default behaviour of Whisper is
to require Internet connectivity and download the model requested to
&lt;tt&gt;~/.cache/whisper/&lt;/tt&gt; on first invocation.  This obviously would
fail &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html&quot;&gt;the
deserted island test of free software&lt;/a&gt; as the Debian packages would
be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar
powered computer on a deserted island.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I would love to include the models in the Debian
mirror system.  This is problematic, as the models are very large
files, which would put a heavy strain on the Debian mirror
infrastructure around the globe.  The strain would be even higher if
the models change often, which luckily as far as I can tell they do
not.  The small model, which according to its creator is most useful
for English and in my experience is not doing a great job there
either, is 462 MiB (deb is 414 MiB).  The medium model, which to me
seem to handle English speech fairly well is 1.5 GiB (deb is 1.3 GiB)
and the large model is 2.9 GiB (deb is 2.6 GiB).  I would assume
everyone with enough resources would prefer to use the large model for
highest quality.  I believe the models themselves would have to go
into the non-free part of the Debian archive, as they are not really
including any useful source code for updating the models.  The
&quot;source&quot;, aka the model training set, according to the creators
consist of &quot;680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised
data collected from the web&quot;, which to me reads material with both
unknown copyright terms, unavailable to the general public.  In other
words, the source is not available according to the Debian Free
Software Guidelines and the model should be considered non-free.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I asked the Debian FTP masters for advice regarding uploading a
model package on their IRC channel, and based on the feedback there it
is still unclear to me if such package would be accepted into the
archive.  In any case I wrote build rules for a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/openai-whisper-model&quot;&gt;OpenAI
Whisper model package&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1257&quot;&gt;modified the
Whisper code base&lt;/a&gt; to prefer shared files under &lt;tt&gt;/usr/&lt;/tt&gt; and
&lt;tt&gt;/var/&lt;/tt&gt; over user specific files in &lt;tt&gt;~/.cache/whisper/&lt;/tt&gt;
to be able to use these model packages, to prepare for such
possibility.  One solution might be to include only one of the models
(small or medium, I guess) in the Debian archive, and ask people to
download the others from the Internet.  Not quite sure what to do
here, and advice is most welcome (use the debian-ai mailing list).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To make it easier to test the new packages while I wait for them to
clear the NEW queue, I created an APT source targeting bookworm.  I
selected Bookworm instead of Bullseye, even though I know the latter
would reach more users, is that some of the required dependencies are
missing from Bullseye and I during this phase of testing did not want
to backport a lot of packages just to get up and running.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Here is a recipe to run as user root if you want to test OpenAI
Whisper using Debian packages on your Debian Bookworm installation,
first adding the APT repository GPG key to the list of trusted keys,
then setting up the APT repository and finally installing the packages
and one of the models:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
curl https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/D78F5C4796F353D211B119E28200D9B589641240.asc \
  -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pere-whisper.asc
mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
cat &gt; /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
deb https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
deb-src https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
EOF
apt update
apt install openai-whisper
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The package work for me, but have not yet been tested on any other
computer than my own.  With it, I have been able to (badly) transcribe
a 2 minute 40 second Norwegian audio clip to test using the small
model.  This took 11 minutes and around 2.2 GiB of RAM.  Transcribing
the same file with the medium model gave a accurate text in 77 minutes
using around 5.2 GiB of RAM.  My test machine had too little memory to
test the large model, which I believe require 11 GiB of RAM.  In
short, this now work for me using Debian packages, and I hope it will
for you and everyone else once the packages enter Debian.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project.&lt;/p&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux  - nice free software</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 7 Apr 2023 23:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency
scanner for my software defined radio.  Just for fun I tried to locate
the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all
the frequencies to see what is in use.  I&#39;ve tried to find a useful
program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful
tool.  This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I
found a description of
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kali.org/tools/rtlsdr-scanner/&quot;&gt;rtlsdr-scanner
over at the Kali site&lt;/a&gt;, and was able to track down
&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/rtlsdr-scanner.git&quot;&gt;the
Kali package git repository&lt;/a&gt; to build a deb package for the
scanner.  Sadly the package is missing from the Debian project itself,
at least in Debian Bullseye.  Two runtime dependencies,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-visvis.git&quot;&gt;python-visvis&lt;/a&gt;
and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-rtlsdr.git&quot;&gt;python-rtlsdr&lt;/a&gt;
had to be built and installed separately.  Luckily &#39;&lt;tt&gt;gbp
buildpackage&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; handled them just fine and no further packages had
to be manually built.  The end result worked out of the box after
installation.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My initial scans for FM channels worked just fine, so I knew the
scanner was functioning.  But when I tried to scan every frequency
from 100 to 1000 MHz, the program stopped unexpectedly near the
completion.  After some debugging I discovered USB software radio I
used rejected frequencies above 948 MHz, triggering a unreported
exception breaking the scan.  Changing the scan to end at 957 worked
better.  I similarly found the lower limit to be around 15, and ended
up with the following full scan:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png&quot; width=&quot;100%&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Saving the scan did not work, but exporting it as a CSV file worked
just fine.  I ended up with around 477k CVS lines with dB level for
the given frequency.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The save failure seem to be a missing UTF-8 encoding issue in the
python code.  Will see if I can find time to send a patch
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CdeMills/RTLSDR-Scanner/&quot;&gt;upstream&lt;/a&gt;
later to fix this exception:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py&quot;, line 485, in __on_save
    save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py&quot;, line 408, in save_plot
    handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not &#39;str&#39;
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py&quot;, line 485, in __on_save
    save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py&quot;, line 408, in save_plot
    handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not &#39;str&#39;
&lt;/pre&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        </channel>
</rss>