How-To use fwupd
As one cannot use fwupd on Qubes OS to update firmwares this is a quick How-To for using fwupd on Grml for future me.
- boot into Grml.
- mkdir /efi ; mount /boot/efi to /efi or set OverrideESPMountPoint=/boot/efi/EFI if you mount to the usual path.
- apt update ; apt install fwupd fwupd-amd64-signed udisks2 policykit-1
- fwupdmgr get-devices
- fwupdmgr refresh
- fwupdmgr get-updates
- fwupdmgr update
- reboot into Qubes OS.
Small reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 from May 23 to 30
As in previous years there will be a rather small Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 event taking place from May 23rd until the 30th (with the 29th being a public holiday in Germany and elsewhere).
We'll have days of hacking (inside and outside), a day trip and a small cheese & wine party, as well as daily standup meetings to learn what others are doing, and there shall also be talks and workshops. At the moment there are even still some beds on site available and the CfP is still open!
For more information on all of this: please check the above wiki page!
May the force be with you.
Small reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 from May 23 to 30
As in previous years there will be a rather small Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 event taking place from May 23rd until the 30th (with the 29th being a public holiday in Germany and elsewhere).
We'll have days of hacking (inside and outside), a day trip and a small cheese & wine party, as well as daily standup meetings to learn what others are doing, and there shall also be talks and workshops. At the moment there are even still some beds on site available!
For more information on all of this: please check the above wiki page!
May the force be with you.
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 from May 23 to 30
As in the last years there will be a Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 event taking place at the same location as previous years, from May 23rd until the 30th (with the 29th being a public holiday in Germany and elsewhere).
This is just a short announcement to get the word out, that this event will happen, so you can ponder and prepare attending. The wiki page has more information and some fine folks have even already registered! Announcements on the appropriate mailinglists will follow soon.
And once again, a few things still need to be sorted out, eg a call for papers and a call for sponsors. Also this year I'd like to distribute the work on more shoulders, especially dealing with accomodation (there are 34 beds available on-site), accomodation payments and finances in general.
If you want to help with any of that or have questions about the event, please reach out via #debconf-hamburg on irc.oftc.net or via the debconf-hamburg mailinglist.
I'm very much looking forward to meet some of you once again and getting to know some others for the first time! Yay.
I love free software and I ❤️ OSUOSL
So in December 2018 I was approached somewhat out of the blue by someone from OSUOSL who offered eight servers to the Reproducible Builds project and as these machines had 32 cores and 144 GB Ram each (plus 3 TB on a single HDD) and they also offered free hosting, I very happyly said yes.
And since them I'm a very happy Oregon State University Open Source Labs user,
and these days we're switching the setup to different machines, which
is another story to tell some other time...! 
My point now is: since 2018 I got to know OSUOSL and every year I like them more. They are super friendly, reliable (a working ticket system and a great IRC channel), offer help in various ways, be it with DNS names (and renamings...) or finding new hardware suited to our needs or whatever else we come up with. They are really dedicated to help free software projects and I'm grateful having the privilege to enjoy this since more than four years now.
To quote https://osuosl.org/:
"The Open Source Lab is a nonprofit organization working for the advancement of open source technologies.
The lab, in partnership with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, provides hosting for more than 160 projects, including those of worldwide leaders like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation and Drupal. Together, the OSL’s hosted sites deliver nearly 430 terabytes of information to people around the world every month. The most active organization of its kind, the OSL offers world-class hosting services, professional software development and on-the-ground training for promising students interested in open source management and programming."
So, IOW, I'm just seeing a very tiny tip of the iceberg of their awesome work.
Check out https://osuosl.org/communities/ to see what
I mean with very tiny tip. Search for "Debian" and "Reproducible" on that page 
Thank you, everybody at OSUOSL! You rock and make a big difference for many projects! ❤️
youngest LUKS user I know...
So I'm in Berlin currently to attend the fourth Qubes OS Summit, also to discuss the future of the reproducible-builds.org mirror of snapshot.debian.org and in the evening I've met an old Debian friend who told a lovely story about his 5 year old daughter, who since recently is a Debian user using an old laptop with LUKS encryption, knowing her data will be lost when she forgets her passphrase... 😀
The Qubes OS Summit is also very cool, great people and exciting developments!
I had an abortion...
Well, it wasn't me, but when I was 18 my partner thankfully was able to take a 'morning-after-pill' because we were seriously not ready to have a baby. As one data point: We were both still in high school.
It's not possible to ban abortions. It's only possible to ban safe abortions.
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 from May 23 to 30
This is just a quick reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 happening in a bit more than 3 weeks.
So far 43 people have registered and thus there's still some on site accomodation available. There's no real deadline for registration, however if you register after May 1st you might not get a t-shirt in your prefered size.
Also: if you attend to give a presentation but haven't replied to the CfP, please do so.
The wiki page linked above has all the details.
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 from May 23 to 30
As last year there will be a Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 event taking place at the same location as previous years, from May 23rd until the 30th.
This is just a preliminary announcement to get the word out, that this event will happen, so you can ponder attending. The wiki page has more information and some fine folks have even already registered!
A few things still need to be sorted out, eg a call for papers and a call for sponsors. If you want to help with that or have questions about the event, please reach out via #debconf-hamburg on irc.oftc.net or via the debconf-hamburg mailinglist.
I'm very much looking forward to meet some of you again soon and getting to know some others for the first time! Yay. It's been a long time...
Back to the old and new normal: inbox zero
So, a long time ago, on the last two days of January 2020 I had reached zero unread mails in my inbox and all mailing lists and then... some stuff kept me distracted for a (too) long time...
And then two weeks ago on the 29th of January 2022, I've reached inbox zero again, and again on the 30th and then I had a hardware issue and couldn't really use my computer for two days (one day trying to fix, the other copying data around...) and thus only on February 2nd I've hit zero unread mails again and again and again, every day for the last 9 days up until today. Yay!
I'm sure there will be days (and weeks) where I won't manage to deal with all
my incoming mail everyday, but I surely hope I'll manage at least once a month.
As I did in 2019 when I started tracking this
Reaching inbox zero every day is good for several reasons and probably the most important one is peace of mind. Even though the incoming flood of email never really stops, by reaching inbox zero I can achieve the feeling that I've dealt with all my emails for the day and that I can put email off my focus, at least for that day and despite emails coming in...
...and then email is too easy to be used as a todo list. Narf. So I guess I need to improve those workflows eventually as well. And offline days, do you remember those? Fully offline even, and by choice?!!