+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Invidious_add_on_for_Kodi_20.html">Invidious add-on for Kodi 20</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 10th August 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I still enjoy <a href="https://kodi.tv/">Kodi</a> and
+<a href="https://libreelec.tv/">LibreELEC</a> 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 <a href="https://archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>
+available, and it has
+<a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:Internet_Archive">not been
+working</a> for many years. The second most wanted add-on is one
+using <a href="https://invidious.io/">the Invidious privacy enhanced
+Youtube frontent</a>. 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
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kodi-invidious-plugin">have
+go at improvimg the Invidious add-on</a>. As
+<a href="https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872">Google has
+already attacked</a> the Invidious concept, so it need all the support
+if can get. My small contribution here is to improve the service
+status on Kodi.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Because I only use Kodi 20 myself, I only test on version 20 and am
+only motived to ensure version 20 is working. Because of API changes
+between version 19 and 20, I suspect it will fail with earlier Kodi
+versions.</p>
+
+<p>I already
+<a href="https://github.com/xbmc/repo-plugins/pull/4363">asked to have
+the add-on added</a> to the official Kodi 20 repository, and is
+waiting to heard back from the repo maintainers.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html">What did I learn from OpenSnitch this summer?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 11th June 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>With yesterdays
+<a href="https://www.debian.org/News/2023/20230610">release of Debian
+12 Bookworm</a>, I am happy to know the
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
+application firewall OpenSnitch</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>I suspect some application developers should rethink when then need
+to use network connections or DNS lookups, and recommend testing
+OpenSnitch (only <tt>apt install opensnitch</tt> away in Debian
+Bookworm) to locate and report any surprising Internet connections on
+your desktop machine.</p>
+
+<p>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.</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 2023-06-12</strong>: I got a tip about
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues">a list of privacy
+issues in Free Software</a> and the
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-privacy">#debian-privacy IRC
+channel</a> discussing these topics.</p>
+
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/wmbusmeters__parse_data_from_your_utility_meter___nice_free_software.html">wmbusmeters, parse data from your utility meter - nice free software</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 19th May 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>There is a European standard for reading utility meters like water,
+gas, electricity or heat distribution meters. The
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meter-Bus">Meter-Bus standard
+(EN 13757-2, EN 13757-3 and EN 13757–4)</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The free software systems in question,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rtl-wmbus">rtl-wmbus</a> to
+read the messages from a software defined radio, and
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/wmbusmeters">wmbusmeters</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>If you got a infrastructure meter supporting the Meter Bus
+standard, I strongly recommend having a look at these nice
+packages.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html">The 2023 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 14th May 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days. A lot of
+patches and issues have seen activity on
+<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/">the project github
+pages</a> recently. A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering
+over at the <a href="https://tormach.com/">Tormach</a> headquarter in
+Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway. If you
+wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+"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)."
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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
+<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/emc/mailman/emc-developers/thread/sa64jp06nob.fsf%40hjemme.reinholdtsen.name/#msg37837251">the
+developer mailing list thread</a> where the gathering was announced.
+Thanks to the good people at
+<a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>,
+<a href="https://www.redpill-linpro.com/">Redpill-Linpro</a> and
+<a href="https://www.nuugfoundation.no/no/">NUUG Foundation</a>, 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.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html">OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 13th May 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A bit delayed,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
+application firewall OpenSnitch</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <tt>apt
+install opensnitch</tt> in Bookworm and see what you think.</p>
+
+<p>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.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html">Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 23rd April 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>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
+<a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/">OpenAI Whisper</a>, 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've so far used an old
+X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its
+CPU.</p>
+
+<p>As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers
+under control of someone else (aka a "cloud" 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,
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034307">tiktoken</a>,
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034144">triton</a>, and
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034091">openai-whisper</a>. For a while
+I also believed
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034286">ffmpeg-python</a> was
+needed, but as its
+<a href="https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python/issues/760">upstream
+seem to have vanished</a> I found it safer
+<a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1242">to rewrite
+whisper</a> to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python
+into Debian. I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of
+<a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team">the Debian Deep
+Learning Team</a>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>All required code packages have been now waiting in
+<a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the Debian NEW
+queue</a> 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
+<tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt> on first invocation. This obviously would
+fail <a href="https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html">the
+deserted island test of free software</a> as the Debian packages would
+be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar
+powered computer on a deserted island.</p>
+
+<p>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
+"source", aka the model training set, according to the creators
+consist of "680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised
+data collected from the web", 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/openai-whisper-model">OpenAI
+Whisper model package</a> and
+<a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1257">modified the
+Whisper code base</a> to prefer shared files under <tt>/usr/</tt> and
+<tt>/var/</tt> over user specific files in <tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt>
+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).</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+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 > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list <<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
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html">rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux - nice free software</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 7th April 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>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'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
+<a href="https://www.kali.org/tools/rtlsdr-scanner/">rtlsdr-scanner
+over at the Kali site</a>, and was able to track down
+<a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/rtlsdr-scanner.git">the
+Kali package git repository</a> 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,
+<a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-visvis.git">python-visvis</a>
+and
+<a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-rtlsdr.git">python-rtlsdr</a>
+had to be built and installed separately. Luckily '<tt>gbp
+buildpackage</tt>' handled them just fine and no further packages had
+to be manually built. The end result worked out of the box after
+installation.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png"><img src="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png" width="100%"></a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a href="https://github.com/CdeMills/RTLSDR-Scanner/">upstream</a>
+later to fix this exception:</p>
+
+<pre>
+Traceback (most recent call last):
+ File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
+ save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
+ File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
+ handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
+TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
+Traceback (most recent call last):
+ File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
+ save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
+ File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
+ handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
+TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
+</pre>
+
+<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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available_in_Debian_Sid_and_Bookworm.html">OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 25th February 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo
+Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
+application firewall OpenSnitch</a> is now available in Debian
+Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian.</p>
+
+<p>This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more
+machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will
+ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local
+network or the Internet. If some background daemon is trying to dial
+home, it can be blocked from doing so with a simple mouse click, or by
+default simply by not doing anything when the GUI question dialog pop
+up. A list of all programs discovered using the network is provided
+in the GUI, giving the user an overview of how the machine(s) programs
+use the network.</p>
+
+<p>OpenSnitch was uploaded for NEW processing about a month ago, and I
+had little hope of it getting accepted and shaping up in time for the
+package freeze, but the Debian ftpmasters proved to be amazingly quick
+at checking out the package and it was accepted into the archive about
+week after the first upload. It is now team maintained under the Go
+language team umbrella. A few fixes to the default setup is only in
+Sid, and should migrate to Testing/Bookworm in a week.</p>
+
+<p>During testing I ran into an
+<a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/813">issue
+with Minecraft server broadcasts disappearing</a>, which was quickly
+resolved by the developer with a patch and a proposed configuration
+change. I've been told this was caused by the Debian packages default
+use if /proc/ information to track down kernel status, instead of the
+newer eBPF module that can be used. The reason is simply that
+upstream and I have failed to find a way to build the eBPF modules for
+OpenSnitch without a complete configured Linux kernel source tree,
+which as far as we can tell is unavailable as a build dependency in
+Debian. We tried unsuccessfully so far to use the kernel-headers
+package. It would be great if someone could provide some clues how to
+build eBPF modules on build daemons in Debian, possibly without the full
+kernel source.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_desktop_recommending_your_program_for_opening_its_files_.html">Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 29th January 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Linux desktop systems
+<a href="https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html">have
+standardized</a> how programs present themselves to the desktop
+system. If a package include a .desktop file in
+/usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop
+environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the
+menu of available programs in the system. A lesser known fact is that
+a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the
+files created by the program in question, and use it to open these
+files on request, for example via a GUI file browser.</p>
+
+<p>A while back I ran into a package that did not tell the desktop
+system how to recognize its files and was not used to open its files
+in the file browser and fixed it. In the process I wrote a simple
+debian/tests/ script to ensure the setup keep working. It might be
+useful for other packages too, to ensure any future version of the
+package keep handling its own files.</p>
+
+<p>For this to work the file format need a useful MIME type that can
+be used to identify the format. If the file format do not yet have a
+MIME type, it should define one and preferably also
+<a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">register
+it with IANA</a> to ensure the MIME type string is reserved.</p>
+
+<p>The script uses the <tt>xdg-mime</tt> program from xdg-utils to
+query the database of standardized package information and ensure it
+return sensible values. It also need the location of an example file
+for xdg-mime to guess the format of.</p>
+
+<pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+#
+# Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
+# License: GPL v2 or later at your choice.
+#
+# Validate the MIME setup, making sure motor types have
+# application/vnd.openmotor+yaml associated with them and is connected
+# to the openmotor desktop file.
+
+retval=0
+
+mimetype="application/vnd.openmotor+yaml"
+testfile="test/data/real/o3100/motor.ric"
+mydesktopfile="openmotor.desktop"
+
+filemime="$(xdg-mime query filetype "$testfile")"
+
+if [ "$mimetype" != "$filemime" ] ; then
+ retval=1
+ echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file MIME type is $filemine, not $mimetype"
+else
+ echo "success: xdg-mime report correct mime type $mimetype for motor file"
+fi
+
+desktop=$(xdg-mime query default "$mimetype")
+
+if [ "$mydesktopfile" != "$desktop" ]; then
+ retval=1
+ echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file should be handled by $desktop, not $mydesktopfile"
+else
+ echo "success: xdg-mime agree motor file should be handled by $mydesktopfile"
+fi
+
+exit $retval
+</pre>
+
+<p>It is a simple way to ensure your users are not very surprised when
+they try to open one of your file formats in their file browser.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opensnitch__the_application_level_interactive_firewall__heading_into_the_Debian_archive.html">Opensnitch, the application level interactive firewall, heading into the Debian archive</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 22nd January 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>While reading a
+<a href="https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/">blog
+post claiming MacOS X recently started scanning local files and
+reporting information about them to Apple</a>, even on a machine where
+all such callback features had been disabled, I came across a
+description of the Little Snitch application for MacOS X. It seemed
+like a very nice tool to have in the tool box, and I decided to see if
+something similar was available for Linux.</p>
+
+<p>It did not take long to find
+<a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch">the OpenSnitch
+package</a>, which has been in development since 2017, and now is in
+version 1.5.0. It has had a
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/909567">request for Debian
+packaging</a> since 2018, but no-one completed the job so far. Just
+for fun, I decided to see if I could help, and I was very happy to
+discover that
+<a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/304">upstream
+want a Debian package too</a>.</p>
+
+<p>After struggling a bit with getting the program to run, figuring
+out building Go programs (and a little failed detour to look at eBPF
+builds too - help needed), I am very happy to report that I am
+sponsoring upstream to maintain the package in Debian, and it has
+since this morning been waiting in NEW for the ftpmasters to have a
+look. Perhaps it can get into the archive in time for the Bookworm
+release?</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_MQTT_publisher_component.html">LinuxCNC MQTT publisher component</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 8th January 2023
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I watched <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jmKUV3aNLjk">a 2015
+video from Andreas Schiffler</a> the other day, where he set up
+<a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">LinuxCNC</a> to send status
+information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix. As I also use MQTT for
+graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component
+would be useful and I set out to implement it. Today I got the first
+draft limping along and submitted as
+<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/2253">a patch to the
+LinuxCNC project</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The simple part was setting up the MQTT publishing code in Python.
+I already have set up other parts submitting data to my Mosquito MQTT
+broker, so I could reuse that code. Writing a LinuxCNC component in
+Python as new to me, but using existing examples in the code
+repository and the extensive documentation, this was fairly straight
+forward. The hardest part was creating a automated test for the
+component to ensure it was working. Testing it in a simulated
+LinuxCNC machine proved very useful, as I discovered features I needed
+that I had not thought of yet, and adjusted the code quite a bit to
+make it easier to test without a operational MQTT broker
+available.</p>
+
+<p>The draft is ready and working, but I am unsure which LinuxCNC HAL
+pins I should collect and publish by default (in other words, the
+default set of information pieces published), and how to get the
+machine name from the LinuxCNC INI file. The latter is a minor
+detail, but I expect it would be useful in a setup with several
+machines available. I am hoping for feedback from the experienced
+LinuxCNC developers and users, to make the component even better
+before it can go into the mainland LinuxCNC code base.</p>
+
+<p>Since I started on the MQTT component, I came across
+<a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Bqa2grG0XtA">another video from Kent
+VanderVelden</a> where he combine LinuxCNC with a set of screen glasses
+controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and it occured to me that it would
+be useful for such use cases if LinuxCNC also provided a REST API for
+querying its status. I hope to start on such component once the MQTT
+component is working well.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ONVIF_IP_camera_management_tool_finally_in_Debian.html">ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 24th December 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Merry Christmas to you all. Here is a small gift to all those with
+IP cameras following the <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">ONVIF
+specification</a>. There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool
+in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras. After working with upstream for
+a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that
+the <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/libonvif">libonvif package</a>
+entered Debian Sid last night.</p>
+
+<p>The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a
+command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the
+cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as
+preview the video from the camera. Libonvif is available on Both
+Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library. The main
+competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed.
+I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras
+using a free software system provided by Debian. But the ONVIF world
+is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to
+follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration
+values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the
+time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while
+before it completely work with your camera. Upstream seem eager to
+improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just <a
+href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">a bug report away</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload
+before it can enter testing. This will happen in the next few
+days.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html">Managing and using ONVIF IP cameras with Linux</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 19th October 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Recently I have been looking at how to control and collect data
+from a handful IP cameras using Linux. I both wanted to change their
+settings and to make their imagery available via a free software
+service under my control. Here is a summary of the tools I found.</p>
+
+<p>First I had to identify the cameras and their protocols. As far as
+I could tell, they were using some SOAP looking protocol and their
+internal web server seem to only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer
+with some proprietary binary plugin, which in these days of course is
+a security disaster and also made it impossible for me to use the
+camera web interface. Luckily I discovered that the SOAP looking
+protocol is actually following <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">the
+ONVIF specification</a>, which seem to be supported by a lot of IP
+cameras these days.</p>
+
+<p>Once the protocol was identified, I was able to find what appear to
+be the most popular way to configure ONVIF cameras, the free software
+Windows tool named
+<a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/">ONVIF Device
+Manager</a>. Lacking any other options at the time, I tried
+unsuccessfully to get it running using Wine, but was missing a dotnet
+40 library and I found no way around it to run it on Linux.</p>
+
+<p>The next tool I found to configure the cameras were a non-free Linux Qt
+client <a href="https://www.lingodigit.com/onvif_nvcdemo.html">ONVIF
+Device Tool</a>. I did not like its terms of use, so did not spend
+much time on it.</p>
+
+<p>To collect the video and make it available in a web interface, I
+found the Zoneminder tool in Debian. A recent version was able to
+automatically detect and configure ONVIF devices, so I could use it to
+set up motion detection in and collection of the camera output. I had
+initial problems getting the ONVIF autodetection to work, as both
+Firefox and Chromium <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1001188">refused
+the inter-tab communication</a> being used by the Zoneminder web
+pages, but managed to get konqueror to work. Apparently the "Enhanced
+Tracking Protection" in Firefox cause the problem. I ended up
+upgrading to the Bookworm edition of Zoneminder in the process to try
+to fix the issue, and believe the problem might be solved now.</p>
+
+<p>In the process I came across the nice Linux GUI tool
+<a href="https://gitlab.com/caspermeijn/onvifviewer/">ONVIF Viewer</a>
+allowing me to preview the camera output and validate the login
+passwords required. Sadly its author has grown tired of maintaining
+the software, so it might not see any future updates. Which is sad,
+as the viewer is sightly unstable and the picture tend to lock up.
+Note, this lockup might be due to limitations in the cameras and not
+the viewer implementation. I suspect the camera is only able to
+provide pictures to one client at the time, and the Zoneminder feed
+might interfere with the GUI viewer. I have
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1000820">asked for the tool to be
+included in Debian</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, I found what appear to be very nice Linux free software
+replacement for the Windows tool, named
+<a href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">libonvif</a>. It
+provide a C library to talk to ONVIF devices as well as a command line
+and GUI tool using the library. Using the GUI tool I was able to change
+the admin passwords and update other settings of the cameras. I have
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1021980">asked for the package to be
+included in Debian</a>.</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 2022-10-20</strong>: Since my initial publication of
+this text, I got several suggestions for more free software Linux
+tools. There is <a href="https://github.com/quatanium/python-onvif">a
+ONVIF python library</a> (already
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/824240">requested into Debian</a>) and
+<a href="https://github.com/FalkTannhaeuser/python-onvif-zeep">a python 3
+fork</a> using a different SOAP dependency. There is also
+<a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/onvif/">support for
+ONVIF in Home Assistant</a>, and there is an alternative to Zoneminder
+called <a href="https://www.shinobi.video/">Shinobi</a>. The latter
+two are not included in Debian either. I have not tested any of these
+so far.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 12th September 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
+
+<p>(The picture is of the previous edition.)</p>
+
+<p>Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of
+the "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
+Handbook</a>" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The
+english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the
+translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one
+way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster
+edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%. The
+complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has
+been published in several languages over the years. The translations
+are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue. The
+last time I checked, it complete text was available in English,
+Norwegian Bokmål, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish.
+In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan,
+Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
+Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish,
+Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.</p>
+
+<p>The translation is conducted on
+<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
+hosted weblate project page</a>. Prospective translators are
+recommeded to subscribe to
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
+translators mailing list</a> and should also check out
+<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
+contributors</a>.</p>
+
+<p>I am one of the Norwegian Bokmål translators of this book, and we
+have just started. Your contribution is most welcome.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html">Automatic LinuxCNC servo PID tuning?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 16th July 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller">PID
+controller</a>, I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values
+that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is. It
+proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded
+in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X
+and Y to move accurately and reliably. But while climbing up this
+rather steep learning curve, I discovered that some motor control
+systems are able to tune their PID controllers. I got the impression
+from the documentation that LinuxCNC were not. This proved to be not
+true.</p>
+
+<p>The LinuxCNC
+<a href="http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/pid.9.html">pid
+component</a> is the recommended PID controller to use. It uses eight
+constants <tt>Pgain</tt>, <tt>Igain</tt>, <tt>Dgain</tt>,
+<tt>bias</tt>, <tt>FF0</tt>, <tt>FF1</tt>, <tt>FF2</tt> and
+<tt>FF3</tt> to calculate the output value based on current and wanted
+state, and all of these need to have a sensible value for the
+controller to behave properly. Note, there are even more values
+involved, theser are just the most important ones. In my case I need
+the X, Y and Z axes to follow the requested path with little error.
+This has proved quite a challenge for someone who have never tuned a
+PID controller before, but there is at least some help to be found.
+
+<p>I discovered that included in LinuxCNC was this old PID component
+at_pid claiming to have auto tuning capabilities. Sadly it had been
+neglected since 2011, and could not be used as a plug in replacement
+for the default pid component. One would have to rewriting the
+LinuxCNC HAL setup to test at_pid. This was rather sad, when I wanted
+to quickly test auto tuning to see if it did a better job than me at
+figuring out good P, I and D values to use.</p>
+
+<p>I decided to have a look if the situation could be improved. This
+involved trying to understand the code and history of the pid and
+at_pid components. Apparently they had a common ancestor, as code
+structure, comments and variable names were quite close to each other.
+Sadly this was not reflected in the git history, making it hard to
+figure out what really happened. My guess is that the author of
+<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/at_pid.c">at_pid.c</a>
+took a version of
+<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/pid.c">pid.c</a>,
+rewrote it to follow the structure he wished pid.c to have, then added
+support for auto tuning and finally got it included into the LinuxCNC
+repository. The restructuring and lack of early history made it
+harder to figure out which part of the code were relevant to the auto
+tuning, and which part of the code needed to be updated to work the
+same way as the current pid.c implementation. I started by trying to
+isolate relevant changes in pid.c, and applying them to at_pid.c. My
+aim was to make sure the at_pid component could replace the pid
+component with a simple change in the HAL setup loadrt line, without
+having to "rewire" the rest of the HAL configuration. After a few
+hours following this approach, I had learned quite a lot about the
+code structure of both components, while concluding I was heading down
+the wrong rabbit hole, and should get back to the surface and find a
+different path.</p>
+
+<p>For the second attempt, I decided to throw away all the PID control
+related part of the original at_pid.c, and instead isolate and lift
+the auto tuning part of the code and inject it into a copy of pid.c.
+This ensured compatibility with the current pid component, while
+adding auto tuning as a run time option. To make it easier to identify
+the relevant parts in the future, I wrapped all the auto tuning code
+with '#ifdef AUTO_TUNER'. The end result behave just like the current
+pid component by default, as that part of the code is identical. The
+<a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/1820">end result
+entered the LinuxCNC master branch</a> a few days ago.</p>
+
+<p>To enable auto tuning, one need to set a few HAL pins in the PID
+component. The most important ones are <tt>tune-effort</tt>,
+<tt>tune-mode</tt> and <tt>tune-start</tt>. But lets take a step
+back, and see what the auto tuning code will do. I do not know the
+mathematical foundation of the at_pid algorithm, but from observation
+I can tell that the algorithm will, when enabled, produce a square
+wave pattern centered around the <tt>bias</tt> value on the output pin
+of the PID controller. This can be seen using the HAL Scope provided
+by LinuxCNC. In my case, this is translated into voltage (+-10V) sent
+to the motor controller, which in turn is translated into motor speed.
+So at_pid will ask the motor to move the axis back and forth. The
+number of cycles in the pattern is controlled by the
+<tt>tune-cycles</tt> pin, and the extremes of the wave pattern is
+controlled by the <tt>tune-effort</tt> pin. Of course, trying to
+change the direction of a physical object instantly (as in going
+directly from a positive voltage to the equivalent negative voltage)
+do not change velocity instantly, and it take some time for the object
+to slow down and move in the opposite direction. This result in a
+more smooth movement wave form, as the axis in question were vibrating
+back and forth. When the axis reached the target speed in the
+opposing direction, the auto tuner change direction again. After
+several of these changes, the average time delay between the 'peaks'
+and 'valleys' of this movement graph is then used to calculate
+proposed values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain, and insert them into the
+HAL model to use by the pid controller. The auto tuned settings are
+not great, but htye work a lot better than the values I had been able
+to cook up on my own, at least for the horizontal X and Y axis. But I
+had to use very small <tt>tune-effort<tt> values, as my motor
+controllers error out if the voltage change too quickly. I've been
+less lucky with the Z axis, which is moving a heavy object up and
+down, and seem to confuse the algorithm. The Z axis movement became a
+lot better when I introduced a <tt>bias</tt> value to counter the
+gravitational drag, but I will have to work a lot more on the Z axis
+PID values.</p>
+
+<p>Armed with this knowledge, it is time to look at how to do the
+tuning. Lets say the HAL configuration in question load the PID
+component for X, Y and Z like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+loadrt pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>Armed with the new and improved at_pid component, the new line will
+look like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+loadrt at_pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>The rest of the HAL setup can stay the same. This work because the
+components are referenced by name. If the component had used count=3
+instead, all use of pid.# had to be changed to at_pid.#.</p>
+
+<p>To start tuning the X axis, move the axis to the middle of its
+range, to make sure it do not hit anything when it start moving back
+and forth. Next, set the <tt>tune-effort</tt> to a low number in the
+output range. I used 0.1 as my initial value. Next, assign 1 to the
+<tt>tune-mode</tt> value. Note, this will disable the pid controlling
+part and feed 0 to the output pin, which in my case initially caused a
+lot of drift. In my case it proved to be a good idea with X and Y to
+tune the motor driver to make sure 0 voltage stopped the motor
+rotation. On the other hand, for the Z axis this proved to be a bad
+idea, so it will depend on your setup. It might help to set the
+<tt>bias</tt> value to a output value that reduce or eliminate the
+axis drift. Finally, after setting <tt>tune-mode</tt>, set
+<tt>tune-start</tt> to 1 to activate the auto tuning. If all go well,
+your axis will vibrate for a few seconds and when it is done, new
+values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain will be active. To test them,
+change <tt>tune-mode</tt> back to 0. Note that this might cause the
+machine to suddenly jerk as it bring the axis back to its commanded
+position, which it might have drifted away from during tuning. To
+summarize with some halcmd lines:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+setp pid.x.tune-effort 0.1
+setp pid.x.tune-mode 1
+setp pid.x.tune-start 1
+# wait for the tuning to complete
+setp pid.x.tune-mode 0
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>After doing this task quite a few times while trying to figure out
+how to properly tune the PID controllers on the machine in, I decided
+to figure out if this process could be automated, and wrote a script
+to do the entire tuning process from power on. The end result will
+ensure the machine is powered on and ready to run, home all axis if it
+is not already done, check that the extra tuning pins are available,
+move the axis to its mid point, run the auto tuning and re-enable the
+pid controller when it is done. It can be run several times. Check
+out the
+<a href="https://github.com/SebKuzminsky/MazakVQC1540/blob/bon-dev/scripts/run-auto-pid-tuner">run-auto-pid-tuner</a>
+script on github if you want to learn how it is done.</p>
+
+<p>My hope is that this little adventure can inspire someone who know
+more about motor PID controller tuning can implement even better
+algorithms for automatic PID tuning in LinuxCNC, making life easier
+for both me and all the others that want to use LinuxCNC but lack the
+in depth knowledge needed to tune PID controllers well.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_free_software_activity_of_late__2022_.html">My free software activity of late (2022)</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 20th June 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I guess it is time to bring some light on the various free software
+and open culture activities and projects I have worked on or been
+involved in the last year and a half.</p>
+
+<p>First, lets mention the book
+<a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/">releases I managed to
+publish</a>. The Cory Doctorow book "Hvordan knuse
+overvåkningskapitalismen" argue that it is not the magic machine
+learning of the big technology companies that causes the surveillance
+capitalism to thrive, it is the lack of trust busting to enforce
+existing anti-monopoly laws. I also published a family of
+dictionaries for machinists, one sorted on the English words, one
+sorted on the Norwegian and the last sorted on the North Sámi words.
+A bit on the back burner but not forgotten is the Debian
+Administrators Handbook, where a new edition is being worked on. I
+have not spent as much time as I want to help bring it to completion,
+but hope I will get more spare time to look at it before the end of
+the year.</p>
+
+<p>With my Debian had I have spent time on several projects, both
+updating existing packages, helping to bring in new packages and
+working with upstream projects to try to get them ready to go into
+Debian. The list is rather long, and I will only mention my own
+isenkram, openmotor, vlc bittorrent plugin, xprintidle, norwegian
+letter style for latex, bs1770gain, and recordmydesktop. In addition
+to these I have sponsored several packages into Debian, like audmes.</p>
+
+<p>The last year I have looked at several infrastructure projects for
+collecting meter data and video surveillance recordings. This include
+several ONVIF related tools like onvifviewer and zoneminder as well as
+rtl-433, wmbusmeters and rtl-wmbus.</p>
+
+<p>In parallel with this I have looked at fabrication related free
+software solutions like pycam and LinuxCNC. The latter recently
+gained improved translation support using po4a and weblate, which was
+a harder nut to crack that I had anticipated when I started.</p>
+
+<p>Several hours have been spent translating free software to
+Norwegian Bokmål on the Weblate hosted service. Do not have a
+complete list, but you will find my contributions in at least gnucash,
+minetest and po4a.</p>
+
+<p>I also spent quite some time on the Norwegian archiving specification
+Noark 5, and its companion project Nikita implementing the API
+specification for Noark 5.</p>
+
+<p>Recently I have been looking into free software tools to do company
+accounting here in Norway., which present an interesting mix between
+law, rules, regulations, format specifications and API interfaces.</p>
+
+<p>I guess I should also mention the Norwegian community driven
+government interfacing projects Mimes Brønn and Fiksgatami, which have
+ended up in a kind of limbo while the future of the projects is being
+worked out.</p>
+
+<p>These are just a few of the projects I have been involved it, and
+would like to give more visibility. I'll stop here to avoid delaying
+this post.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html">LinuxCNC translators life just got a bit easier</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 3rd June 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a> system, I
+proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for
+translators. The original system consisted of independently written
+documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track
+changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to
+know how much was left to translated. By using
+<a href="https://po4a.org/">the po4a system</a> to generate POT and PO
+files from the English documentation, this can be improved. A small
+team of LinuxCNC contributors got together and today our labour
+finally payed off. Since a few hours ago, it is now possible to
+translate <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/linuxcnc/">the
+LinuxCNC documentation on Weblate</a>, alongside the program itself.</p>
+
+<p>The effort to migrate the documentation to use po4a has been both
+slow and frustrating. I am very happy we finally made it.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html">geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 20th April 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
+located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
+not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
+information that I would like). The
+<a href="https://support.lenovo.com/no/en/search?query=thinkpad firmware bios upgrade iso&SearchType=Customer search&searchLocation=Masthead">download
+from Lenovo</a> is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
+when all I got available is a USB memory stick. I tried booting the
+ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work. But genisoimage came to
+the rescue.</p>
+
+<P>The geteltorito program in
+<a href="http://tracker.debian.org/cdrkit">the genisoimage binary
+package</a> is able to convert the bootable ISO image to a bootable
+USB stick using a simple command line recipe, which I then can write
+to the most recently inserted USB stick:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+geteltorito -o usbstick.img lenovo-firmware.iso
+sudo dd bs=10M if=usbstick.img of=$(ls -tr /dev/sd?|tail -1)
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>This USB stick booted the firmware upgrader just fine, and in a few
+minutes my machine had the latest and greatest BIOS firmware in place.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Playing_and_encoding_AV1_in_Debian_Bullseye.html">Playing and encoding AV1 in Debian Bullseye</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 16th April 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Inspired by the recent news of
+<a href="https://slashdot.org/story/22/04/03/2039219/intel-beats-amd-and-nvidia-with-arc-gpus-full-av1-support">AV1
+hardware encoding support from Intel</a>, I decided to look into
+the state of AV1 on Linux today. AV1 is a
+<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160618103850/http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free
+and open standard</a> as defined by Digistan without any royalty
+payment requirement, unlike its much used competitor encoding
+H.264. While looking, I came across an 5 year
+<a href="https://askubuntu.com/questions/1061908/how-to-encode-and-playback-video-with-the-av1-codec-on-bionic-beaver-18-04">old
+question on askubuntu.com</a> which in turn inspired me to check out
+how things are in Debian Stable regarding AV1. The test file listed
+in the question (askubuntu_test_aom.mp4) did not exist any more, so I
+tracked down a different set of test files on
+<a href="https://av1.webmfiles.org/">av1.webmfiles.org</a> to test them
+with the various video tools I had installed on my machine. I was
+happy to discover that AV1 decoding and playback worked with almost
+every tool I tested:
+
+<table align="center">
+<tr><td>mediainfo</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>dragonplayer</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>ffmpeg / ffplay</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>gnome-mplayer</td> <td>fail</td></tr>
+<tr><td>mplayer</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>mpv</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>parole</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>vlc</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>firefox</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+<tr><td>chromium</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>AV1 encoding is available in Debian Stable from the aom-tools
+version 1.0.0.errata1-3 package, using the aomenc tool. The encoding
+using the package in Debian Stable is quite slow, with the frame rate
+for my 10 second test video at around 0.25 fps. My 10 second video
+test took 16 minutes and 11 seconds on my test machine.</p>
+
+<p>I tested by first running ffmpeg and then aomenc using the recipe
+provided by the askubuntu recipe above. I had to remove the
+'--row-mt=1' option, as it was not supported in my 1.0.0 version. The
+encoding only used a single thread, according to <tt>top</tt>.</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+ffmpeg -i some-old-video.ogv -t 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p video.y4m
+aomenc --fps=24/1 -u 0 --codec=av1 --target-bitrate=1000 \
+ --lag-in-frames=25 --auto-alt-ref=1 -t 24 --cpu-used=8 \
+ --tile-columns=2 --tile-rows=2 -o output.webm video.y4m
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>As version 1.0.0 currently have several
+<a href="https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/aom">unsolved
+security issues in Debian Stable</a>, and to see if the recent
+backport <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/aom">provided in
+Debian</a> is any quicker, I ran <tt>apt -t bullseye-backports install
+aom-tools</tt> to fetch the backported version and re-encoded the
+video using the latest version. This time the '--row-mt=1' option
+worked, and the encoding was done in 46 seconds with a frame rate of
+around 5.22 fps. This time it seem to be using all my four cores to
+encode. Encoding speed is still too low for streaming and real time,
+which would require frame rates above 25 fps, but might be good enough
+for offline encoding.</p>
+
+<p>I am very happy to see AV1 playback working so well with the
+default tools in Debian Stable. I hope the encoding situation improve
+too, allowing even a slow old computer like my 10 year old laptop to
+be used for encoding.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Publish_Hargassner_wood_chip_boiler_state_to_MQTT.html">Publish Hargassner wood chip boiler state to MQTT</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 12th March 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Recently I had a look at a
+<a href="https://www.hargassner.at/">Hargassner</a>
+<a href="https://www.hargassner.at/en/products/wood-chip-boiler.html">wood
+chip boiler</a>, 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 provide a HTTP server
+listening on port 80, but I have not yet figured out what it can do
+beside return an error code.</p>
+
+<p>If I am to believe various free software implementations talking to
+such boiler, the interpretation of the line of numbers differ between
+type of boiler and software version on the boiler. By comparing the
+list of numbers on the front panel of the boiler with the numbers
+returned via TCP, I have been able to figure out several of the
+numbers, but there are a lot left to understand. I've located several
+temperature measurements and hours running values, as well as oxygen
+measurements and counters.</p>
+
+I decided to write a simple parser in Python for the values I figured
+out so far, and a simple MQTT injector publishing both the interpreted
+and the unknown values on a MQTT bus to make collecting and graphing
+simpler. The end result is available from the
+<a href="https://gitlab.com/petterreinholdtsen/hargassner2mqtt">hargassner2mqtt
+project page</a> on gitlab. I very much welcome patches extending the
+parser to understand more values, boiler types and software versions.
+I do not really expect very few free software developers got their
+hands on such unit to experiment, but it would be fun if others too find
+this project useful.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html">Run your industrial metal working machine using Debian?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2nd March 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>After many months of hard work by the good people involved in
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>, the
+system was accepted Sunday
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linuxcnc">into Debian</a>.
+Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from
+<a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=linuxcnc">its
+popularity-contest numbers</a> that people have been reporting its use
+since 2012. <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/">Its project site</a> might
+be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting
+via Tor.</p>
+
+<p>But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering? Perhaps a
+Wikipedia quote is in place?</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+"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)."
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>It can even control 3D printers. And even though the Wikipedia
+page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel
+features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features
+provided by the Debian kernel.
+<a href="https://github.com/linuxcnc/linuxcnc">The source code</a> is
+available from Github. The last few months I've been involved in the
+translation setup for the program and documentation. Translators are
+most welcome to
+<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/linuxcnc/">join the
+effort</a> using Weblate.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_vlc_bittorrent_plugin_in_Debian__version_2_14_.html">Updated vlc bittorrent plugin in Debian (version 2.14)</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 14th February 2022
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I am very happy to report that a new version of the
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent">VLC
+bittorrent plugin</a> was just uploaded into debian. The changes
+since last time is mostly code clean in the download code. The package
+is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian
+testing son. To test it, simply install it like this:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file
+downloaded live via bittorrent like this:
+
+<p><pre>
+vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>It can also use magnet links and local .torrent files like the ones
+provided by the Internet Archive. Another example is the <a
+href="https://archive.org/details/LoveNest">Love Nest</a> Buster
+Keaton movie, where one can click on the 'Torrent' link to get going.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Brazilian_Portuguese_translation_of_the_book_Made_with_Creative_Commons.html">A Brazilian Portuguese translation of the book Made with Creative Commons</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 3rd December 2021
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A few days ago, a productive translator started working on a new
+translation of <a href="https://madewith.cc">the Made with Creative
+Commons book</a> for Brazilian Portuguese. The translation take place on
+<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/madewithcc/translation/">the
+Weblate web based translation system</a>. Once the translation is
+complete and proof read, we can publish it on paper as well as in PDF,
+ePub and HTML format. The translation is already 16% complete, and if
+more people get involved I am conviced it can very quickly reach 100%.
+If you are interested in helping out with this or other translations
+of the Made with Creative Commons book, start translating on
+Weblate. There are partial translations available in Azerbaijani,
+Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Polish,
+Simplified Chinese, Swedish, Thai and Ukrainian.</p>
+
+<p>The <a href="https://gitlab.com/gunnarwolf/madewithcc-es.git">git
+repository for the book</a> contain all source files needed to build
+the book for yourself.
+<a href="https://gunnarwolf.gitlab.io/madewithcc-es/">HTML editions</a>
+to help with proof reading is also available.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/madewithcc">madewithcc</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_still_an_excellent_choice_for_Lego_builders.html">Debian still an excellent choice for Lego builders</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 24th October 2021
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>The Debian Lego team saw a lot of activity the last few weeks. All
+the packages under the team umbrella has been updated to fix
+packaging, lintian issues and BTS reports. In addition, a new and
+inspiring team member appeared on both the
+<a href="https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-lego-team">debian-lego-team
+Team mailing list</a> and
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC channel
+#debian-lego</a>. If you are interested in Lego CAD design and LEGO
+Mindstorms programming, check out the
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">team wiki page</a> to
+see what Debian can offer the Lego enthusiast.</p>
+
+<p>Patches has been sent upstream, causing new upstream releases, one
+even the first one in more than ten years, and old upstreams was
+released with new ones. There are still a lot of work left, and the
+team welcome more members to help us make sure Debian is the Linux
+distribution of choice for Lego builders. If you want to contribute,
+join us in the IRC channel and become part of
+<a href="https://salsa.debian.org/debian-lego-team/">the team on
+Salsa</a>.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Mechanic_s_words_in_five_languages__English__Norwegian_and_Northern_S_mi_editions.html">Mechanic's words in five languages, English, Norwegian and Northern Sámi editions</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 4th August 2021
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Almost thirty years ago, some forward looking teachers at Samisk
+videregående skole og reindriftsskole teaching metal work and Northern
+Sámi, decided to create a list of words used in Northern Sámi metal
+work. After almost ten years this resulted in a dictionary database,
+published as the book
+"<a href="https://ovttas.no/nb/girji_mekanikerord">Mekanihkkársánit :
+Mekanikerord = Mekaanisen alan sanasto = Mechanic's words</a>" in
+1999. The
+<a href="http://www.skuvla.info/skolehist/sveinl-n.htm">story of this
+work</a> is available from the pen of Svein Lund, one of the leading
+actors behind this effort. They even got the dictionary approved by
+the Sámi Language Council as the recommended metal work words to use.</p>
+
+<p>Fast forward twenty years, I came across this work when I recently
+became interested in metal work, and started watching educational and
+funny videos on the topic, like the ones from
+<a href="https://yewtu.be/channel/UCKLIIdKEpjAnn8E76KP7sQg">mrpete222</a>
+and <a href="https://yewtu.be/channel/UC5NO8MgTQKHAWXp6z8Xl7yQ">This
+Old Tony</a>. But they all talk English, but I wanted to know what
+the tools and techniques they used were called in Norwegian. Trying
+to track down a good dictionary from English to Norwegian, after much
+searching, I came across the database of words created
+almost thirty years ago, with translations into English, Norwegian,
+Northern Sámi, Swedish and Finnish. This gave me a lot of the
+Norwegian phrases I had been looking for. To make it easier for the
+next person trying to track down a good Norwegian dictionary for the
+metal worker, and because I knew the person behind the database from
+my Skolelinux / Debian Edu days, I decided to ask if the database
+could be released to the public without any usage limitations, in
+other words as a Creative Commons licensed data set. And happily,
+after consulting with the Sámi Parliament of Norway, the database is
+now available with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
+license from
+<a href="https://gitlab.com/petterreinholdtsen/mekanikerord">my gitlab
+repository</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The dictionary entries look slightly different, depending on the
+language in focus. This is the same entry in the different editions.
+
+<p><em>English</em></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<dl>
+ <dt><strong>lathe</strong></dt>
+
+ <dd><p>dreiebenk (nb) várve, várvenbeaŋka, jorahanbeaŋka, vátnanbeaŋka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi) </p></dd>
+
+</dl>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><em>Norwegian</em></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<dl>
+ <dt><strong>dreiebenk</strong></dt>
+
+ <dd><p>lathe (en) várve, várvenbeaŋka, jorahanbeaŋka,
+ vátnanbeaŋka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi) </p></dd>
+
+ <dd><p>(nb): sponskjærande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med
+ skjæreverktøy lausgjør spon frå eit roterande
+ arbetsstykke</p></dd>
+
+</dl>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><em>Northern Sámi</em></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<dl>
+ <dt><strong>várve, várvenbeaŋka, jorahanbeaŋka, vátnanbeaŋka</strong></dt>
+
+ <dd><p>dreiebenk (nb) lathe (en) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi) </p></dd>
+
+ <dd><p>(se): mašiidna mainna čuohppá vuolahasaid jorri
+ bargoávdnasis</p></dd>
+
+ <dd><p>(nb): sponskjærande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med
+ skjæreverktøy lausgjør spon frå eit roterande
+ arbetsstykke</p></dd>
+
+<dl>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The database included term description in both Norwegian and
+Northern Sámi, but not English. Because of this, the Northern Sámi
+edition include both descriptions, the Norwegian edition include the
+Norwegian description and the English edition lack a descripiton.</p>
+
+<p>Once the database was available without any usage restrictions, and
+armed with my experience in publishing books, I decided to publish a
+Norwegian/English dictionary as a book using the database, to make the
+data set available also on paper and as an ebook. Further into the
+project, it occurred to me that I could just as easily make an English
+dictionary, and talking to Svein and concluding that it was within
+reach, I decided to make a Northern Sámi dictionary too.</p>
+
+<p>Thus I suddenly find myself publishing a Northern Sámi dictionary,
+even though I do not understand the language myself. I hope it will
+be well received, and can help revive the impressive work done almost
+thirty years ago to document the vocabulary of metal workers. If I
+get some help, I might even extend it with some of the words I find
+missing, like collet, rotary broach, carbide, knurler, arbor press and
+others. But the first edition build from a lightly edited version of
+the original database, with no new entries added. If you would like
+to check it out, visit
+<a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/">my list of published
+books</a> and consider
+<a href="https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Petter+Reinholdtsen">buying
+a paper or ebook copy from lulu.com</a>. The paper edition is only
+available in hardcover to increase its durability in the workshop.</p>
+
+<p>I am very happy to report that in the process, and thanks to help
+from both Svein Lund and Børre Gaup who understand the language, the
+docbook tools I use to create books, dblatex and docbook-xsl, now
+include support for Northern Sámi. Before I started, these lacked the
+needed locale settings for this language, but now the patches are
+included upstream.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Six_complete_translations_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_for_Buster.html">Six complete translations of The Debian Administrator's Handbook for Buster</a>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff