<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
<atom:link href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
+ <item>
+ <title>The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 4 May 2016 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description>A friend of mine made me aware of
+<a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
+handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled. I
+would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
+
+<p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
+plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
+LCD touch screen. The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
+day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
+confirming this. The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
+last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
+production started.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
+Debian. Please let me know if you know of any others. Is it the
+first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 18 Apr 2016 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
+member association for those of us believing in free software, open
+standards and unix-like operating systems. NUUG announced today it
+will
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml">try
+to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
+unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
+controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
+pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
+police. The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
+for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
+a month ago. I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
+the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
+as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Ny utgave (v2.2) av den frie norske stavekontrollen gitt ut</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ny_utgave__v2_2__av_den_frie_norske_stavekontrollen_gitt_ut.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ny_utgave__v2_2__av_den_frie_norske_stavekontrollen_gitt_ut.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 15 Apr 2016 21:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I dag tok jeg mot til meg og pakket sammen en ny versjon av den
+frie norske stavekontrollen, ca. tre og et halvt år etter forrige
+gang. Resultatet kan lastes ned fra
+<a href="http://no.speling.org/">no.speling.org-prosjeksiden</a>, både
+som kildekodepakke og som "pack"-fil som kanskje fortsatt kan brukes
+av OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice. Byggesystemet trenger oppussing, men i
+denne omgang hadde jeg bare tid til å fikse byggefeil forårsaket av
+endringer i GNU grep. De øvrige endringene var gjort tidligere i
+påvente av en ny utgave.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Her er det som er nytt (fra NEWS-fila i
+kildekodepakken):</strong></p>
+
+<p>Release 2.2 (2016-04-15)</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Rewrite how scripts/speling2words handle tripple consonants, to
+ avoid importing duplicate words from no.speling.org, and getting
+ rid of the existing duplicates in norsk.words.</li>
+ <li>Remove duplicate entries with tripple consonants from norsk.words.</li>
+ <li>Update frequency for entries in norsk.words based on
+ <URL:http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/nta/ordlistf.zip> (ran 'make
+ freq-update').</li>
+ <li>Correct nn ispell build, avoid crash in munchlist causing lots of
+ words to fall out of the database.</li>
+ <li>Use grep -a to convince grep it is working on text files, to work
+ with newer grep versions.</li>
+
+ <li>Remove some words disputed in the no.speling.org review process:
+ <ul>
+ <li>apparent (nb)</li>
+ <li>likke (nb)</li>
+ <li>ugjest, ugjesten, ugjestens (nb)</li>
+ </ul></li>
+
+</ul>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 13 Apr 2016 21:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
+Schwarz on The Intercept
+<a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
+his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
+USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
+(<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
+<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
+I found both truly fascinating. It is amazing what he was able to
+find by digging up public sources and government papers. He
+documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
+<a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
+inspiring to read even today.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
+<br>- I. F. Stone
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
+and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
+much as possible. I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
+to follow the principles of I. F. Stone. They are definitely in short
+supply. If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
+check him out.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I'm happy to report that
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
+French paperback edition</a> of
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
+project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
+Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
+Lulu.com. Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
+should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
+book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
+
+<p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
+<a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
+Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
+available from
+<a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
+wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
+the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
+coordinated the proof reading of the final result. I believe the end
+result look great, but I am biased and do not read French. In
+addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
+and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
+
+<p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
+triple the price to allow the book stores some profit. I also had to
+accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
+But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
+(CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem. To bypass the problem I
+discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
+that the revenue for these editions go to the
+<a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
+Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
+So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
+and
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
+Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com. They will get the revenue
+for the French edition too. Their revenue is higher if you buy the
+book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
+recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
+The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
+technical bar to enter is fairly low. Get in touch if you would like
+to make this happen.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 10 Apr 2016 23:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>During this weekends
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
+squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
+to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
+Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
+<a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
+project</a> to get started. If you want to help out, please start
+contributing using
+<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
+hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
+translators mailing list</a>. Please also check out
+<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
+contributors</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
+Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
+Bokmål too. In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
+Mobi versions available. And there are incomplete translations
+available for many more languages.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html</link>
<p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
-packages, and the current blocker is to get he debian/copyright file
+packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
to help out the team. This was the background for my blog post about
<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
<p><strong>Oppdatering 2016-04-07</strong>: En nærmere undersøkelse av
OEP-oppføringene til Utenriksdepartementet viste at det var en teknisk
-feil måten jeg laget statistikken, der alle oppføringer med '-' i
-unntakgsgrunnlagsfeltet ble talt opp som unntatt offentlighet. Det
+feil i måten jeg laget statistikken, der alle oppføringer med '-' i
+unntaksgrunnlagsfeltet ble talt opp som unntatt offentlighet. Det
var UD ikke alene om. Det viste seg å gjelde Barne-, likestillings-
og inkluderingsdepartementet (4), Helse- og omsorgsdepartementet
(3525), Landbruks- og matdepartementet (1753), Nærings- og
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sat, 19 Mar 2016 09:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Back in 2013 I proposed
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
-way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
-adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>. I
-suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
-for name and address, but any format would work. I did not do
-anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
-something like it. It would make it possible to efficiently send
-machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
-
-<p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
-specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
-<a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
-<a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>. Their PDF invoices contain
-a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
-This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
-specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
-get a more bogus entry). I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
-to read. Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
-
-<p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
-{
- "vh":500.00,
- "vm":0,
- "vl":0,
- "uqr":1,
- "tp":1,
- "nme":"Din Leverandør",
- "cc":"NO",
- "cid":"997912345 MVA",
- "iref":"12300001",
- "idt":"20151022",
- "ddt":"20151105",
- "due":2500.0000,
- "cur":"NOK",
- "pt":"BBAN",
- "acc":"17202612345",
- "bc":"BIENNOK1",
- "adr":"0313 OSLO"
-}
-</pre></p>
-
-</p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
-<a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
-specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014). The format seem to
-have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
-of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
-Norway.</p>
-
-<p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
-the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
-specification. Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
-November to clarify. Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
-visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
-protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
-usage limitations for the format. I urged her to make sure this was
-explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
-unfortunately this has not happened yet. So I guess if there is
-submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
-infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
-risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
-the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so. At least
-with patents, there is always
-<a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
-chance of getting sued...</a></p>
-
-<p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
-independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
-they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
-with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this. Their plan was
-to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
-evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular. I hope
-they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
-<a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
-maintain such specification.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
-<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
-about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
-similar systems. In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
-standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
-information. More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
-<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
-Payment Descriptor</a>. And in Germany, there is a system named
-<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
-(<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
-v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
-URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
-provide the payment information. There is also the
-<a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
-file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
-not sure if it is done already. Last, in Bolivia there are reports
-that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
-format on invoices. I have not been able to track down a
-specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
-sets.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2016 15:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Back in September, I blogged about
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
-system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
-how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced). I
-created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
-but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
-package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
-a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
-fixed instead. I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
-hoped someone would step in and fix it. But no-one did.</p>
-
-<p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
-hands. The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
-battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
-battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
-able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
-information provided by the Linux kernel. If you install the
-battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
-graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
-status of the battery. The source package build and work just fine in
-Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
-tested). The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
-
-<p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
-
-<p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
-battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
-about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream
-battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
-yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a
-bit more before I make a new release.</p>
-
-<p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
-suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
-impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
-and graphing.</p>
-
-<p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
-battery, check out the battery-stats package in
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
-on
-<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
-I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2016 15:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
-details. And one of the details is the content of the
-debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
-the code in the package in question, preferably in
-<a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
-readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
-
-<p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
-and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
-package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters. So getting it right
-the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
-both you and the ftpmasters some work.. Today, while trying to figure
-out what was wrong with
-<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
-zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
-figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
-semi-automatically.</p>
-
-<p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
-file based on the code in the source package,
-<tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
-and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>. I'm
-not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
-create a sensible draft file. As far as I can tell, none of them can
-be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
-polished a bit before the file is OK to upload. I found the debmake
-option in
-<a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
-blog posts from 2014</a>.
-
-<p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
-
-<p><pre>
-debmake -cc > debian/copyright
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
-this might not be the best option.</p>
-
-<p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
-this approach in
-<a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
-blog post from 2015</a>. To generate using cme, use the 'update
-dpkg-copyright' option:
-
-<p><pre>
-cme update dpkg-copyright
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>This will create or update debian/copyright. The cme tool seem to
-handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
-
-<p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
-check if the file is correct. For this I found two good options,
-<tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>. The former seem
-to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
-ineffective blocks in the copyright file. The latter reports missing
-copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
-names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0). I suspect it is good to use both and
-fix all issues reported by them before uploading. But I do not know
-if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
-copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
-
-<p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning. It
-will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
-It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
-can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
-
-<p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
-debian/copyright file. Please let me know, or blog about it on
-planet.debian.org.</p>
-
-<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
-activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
-<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
-on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
-
-<p><pre>
-licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
- /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
-version control system to make it easier to discover license and
-copyright changes in the upstream source. I will try to do the same
-with my packages in the future.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
-against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
-command line.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Thu, 4 Feb 2016 16:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
-is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
-convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
-firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it. This can
-be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
-about. :)</p>
-
-<p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
-file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
-picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
-unstable. In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
-by the kernel during kernel module loading. To find the package
-providing the example file, do like this:</p>
-
-<blockquote><pre>
-% apt install appstream
-[...]
-% apt update
-[...]
-% appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
- awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
-firmware-qlogic
-%
-</pre></blockquote>
-
-<p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
-appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
-a way appstream can use.</p>
-
-<p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
-given MIME type. This is very useful when you get a file you do not
-know how to handle. First find the mime type using <tt>file
---mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
-it. Lets say you got an SVG file. Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
-and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
-
-<blockquote><pre>
-% apt install appstream
-[...]
-% apt update
-[...]
-% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
- awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
-bkchem
-phototonic
-inkscape
-shutter
-tetzle
-geeqie
-xia
-pinta
-gthumb
-karbon
-comix
-mirage
-viewnior
-postr
-ristretto
-kolourpaint4
-eog
-eom
-gimagereader
-midori
-%
-</pre></blockquote>
-
-<p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
-packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jan 2016 10:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
-with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
-position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
-time (like every time a SMS is received or sent). And if their
-computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
-mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
-also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
-during installation). And when these programs send out information to
-central collection points, the location is often included, unless
-extra care is taken to not send the location. The provided
-information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
-good and bad, depend on your point of view). What is certain, is that
-the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
-perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
-when they share their whereabouts with private and public
-entities.</p>
-
-<p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
-
-<p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
-when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing. It is
-unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
-officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
-unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information. But the
-public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
-tool to do so is called
-<a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>. I
-discovered it when I read
-<a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
-article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
-November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
-The python program was in Debian, but
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
-Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained. I
-uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
-have time to fix it then. This Christmas I decided to finally try to
-get Creepy operational in Debian. Now a fixed version is available in
-Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
-are now included
-<a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
-Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
-complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
-given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
-these services. Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
-least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
-days it is impossible. This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
-configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
-information to them about your search interests. This should be taken
-into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
-about yourself with the services.</p>
-
-<p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
-geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
-of Norway. One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
-information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
-information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
-I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
-twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
-Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
-making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
-things. A similar technique have been
-<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
-to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
-tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
-understand the value of the private information they provide to the
-public.</p>
-
-<p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
-it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
-least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
-python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
-
-<p>(I have uploaded
-<a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
-screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
-Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
-<a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
-that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
-believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
-security fix from a Debian mirror. This is a good reason to always
-use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
-listening do not know which IP address to attack. In August, Richard
-Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
-to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
-download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
-<a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
-to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>. He
-was not the first to propose this, as the
-<tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
-package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
-to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
-aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
-
-<p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
-sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
-Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
-it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
-making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
-
-<p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
-installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
-urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
-of the official Debian mirror site. I recommend installing
-<tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
-done in /etc/.</p>
-
-<blockquote><pre>
-apt install apt-transport-tor
-sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
-sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
-</pre></blockquote>
-
-<p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
-the sed commands for these too. The sed command is assuming your are
-using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror. Adjust the command (or just
-edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
-
-<p>This work in Debian Jessie and later. Note that tools like
-<tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
-system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs. For
-<tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
-which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable. So if you
-need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
-
-<p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
-using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
-update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
-masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine. Using Tor will
-become normal for the machine in question.</p>
-
-<p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
-is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
-enabled. It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
-system.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
</channel>
</rss>
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