Review: How to Steal a Galaxy, by Beth Revis

How to Steal a Galaxy is a far-future science fiction caper short novel (maybe a novella?) and the sequel to Full Speed to a Crash Landing. You don't have to remember the details of the previous book to enjoy this one. There's an excellent inline summary at the start of this installment.

After an annoying negotiation with people who keep trying to preach at her about causes, Ada Lamarr has a new contract. She is going undercover, after a fashion, at a charity gala and auction on Rigel-Earth. While she's there, she's going to steal something. What, precisely, she keeps a mystery from both the other characters and from the reader until the end of the story.

Government agent Rian White is working security at this charity gala. Due to its link with the plot of Full Speed to a Crash Landing, he was fairly certain Ada would be there, as indeed she is. What she is planning, however, is maddeningly unclear. Also maddening is how good Ada looks in a dress.

As with the previous book, How to Steal a Galaxy is told by Ada in the first person using the same teasing tone and constant misdirection that she uses when verbally fencing with Rian and the other characters. I found this novella even more entertaining and satisfying than the previous one. The charity gala is supposedly intended to benefit the poor people of Earth, and is run with exactly the sort of condescension and disguised capitalist looting typical of such exercises in elite charity. Ada's narration is scathing in a deeply relatable way.

Also, there is a trillionaire tech-bro fake philanthropist who is smug and condescending and accustomed to getting exactly what he wants.

"I don't think anyone should have enough personal wealth to decimate a large country's income just because he's going through a midlife crisis."

Ada's interactions with Strom Fetor are an absolute delight. He is so sure of himself that he is incapable of registering her as a threat, and she effortlessly deceives him by hiding in plain sight.

"You really shouldn't be talking about this," Rian starts.

Fetor waves aside his concerns. "We're all friends here."

"Not me," I say. "I hate you. Remember?"

Fetor laughs in a tone I'm sure he thinks is charming.

Fetor's complete inability to realize that a beautiful woman might both sincerely not like him and not be flirting with him is perfect. I was cackling through half of this book.

Like any good heist story, there are twists and turns, surprises, double agents, unexpected complications, and a delightful amount of verbal fencing. I adore the narrative tone Revis uses for these stories. Ada has just the right mix of idealism, cynicism, professionalism, and irreverence to carry off the feeling that she's a step ahead of everyone else. Underneath the bones of a delightful plot is a character who cares deeply but is very aware of her limitations, and therefore has taught herself to laugh at and be ruthless with her own emotions. I am finding it an incredibly compelling type of competence porn.

I enjoyed the first book of this series, but this one was so much better. These stories are exactly the right length to keep the reader engrossed throughout and satisfied but wanting more at the end. How to Steal a Galaxy ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, to be resolved in the next and final book. I can hardly wait to start it.

Highly recommended.

Followed by Last Chance to Save the World.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote a disturbing and informative article about the use of AI by the US government [1].

Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting blog post about corporate liability for AI decisions and the German court ruling about Google’s AI summaries [2].

Cybersecurity News has an interesting article about how Pliny the Liberator succeeded in jailbreaking Anthropic’s latest LLM to give instructions on writing exploits, writing exploitable code (backdoors?), and making meth [3].

Andrew Pam wrote about the number of cars with internal combustion engines in NSW decreasing for the first time since 1910, EVs are taking over [4].

Cory Doctorow wrote an informative blog post about Facebook’s attempts to silence whistleblowers and what a pathetic little loser Zuckerberg is [5].

Scott Santens wrote an insightful article about how to effectively levy taxes in the future when “AI” significantly reduces the number of workers [6].

Ron Garrett wrote an insightful post about birthright citizenship in the US and his status as a US citizen who was not born there [7].

The BBC has an interesting article about the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit and how treating violence as a disease can significantly address the problem [8].

The LA Times has an interesting article about Covid19 causing cancer that had been in remission to return, sparking some new research into the effects of viruses on mammals [9].

CMU has an interesting video about ways to physically modify QR codes and how they could be used in real life [10].

Tim Retout wrote an informative post about the pervasive forms of advertising on the Internet, even on the BBC’s site and how some of it can be blocked [11].

The Intercept Fund is a project to address respiratory illnesses and the long term mostly unnoticed costs they cause to society, we need governments and corporations to get on board with this [12].

The German news site DW has an interesting article about activists registering neo-nazi slang as trademarks to prevent the sale of nazi merchanise which funds racism [13].

The Conversation has an insightful article about how in South Sudan and other war ravaged countries the peace process usually just allocates the spoils of war and therefore encourages more war [14].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/26cnn3og
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/22fewyml
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2a5t693d
• [4] https://glasswings.com.au/blog/2026-07/05-185304.html
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/26qzcadm
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2csg4huw
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2blnzzxg
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/25v5j7v9
• [9] https://archive.md/Gq2jB
• [10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ddTIa-AhXE
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2xt9dgfp
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2y5f26rj
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/29ok2qsu
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/2yxzsp7s

While many Western democracies seem to be in a state of decay and are no longer the safe, civilized and prosperous countries they once were, there are still some European countries that are governed well. One of those that stand out is Estonia.

Estonia is probably most well known for multiple software companies that originated from there, such as Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive and Skype. The government itself is also famous for being early in issuing government IDs with an embedded smart chip for online authentication already in the 1990s. Via the national portal at eesti.ee all residents can access extensive eServices ranging from viewing their health benefits to filing taxes.

Estonia has also been running an e-Residency program since 2014, where they issue digital ID cards to foreigners, making it easy for them to remotely log into the government portals and for example, establish businesses, file annual reports and so forth. Note that the e-Residency is not a path to physical residency. Estonia does, however, have a separate Digital Nomad visa program that makes it easy for non-EU citizens to also physically establish themselves in Estonia, assuming, of course, you meet the criteria, which includes, among others, a minimum monthly income of 3960 € from outside Estonia. EU citizens naturally have free mobility inside the EU and can simply get an apartment and register as a resident in Estonia if they so choose. And there are plenty of reasons to do so.

Estonians value health, education and entrepreneurship

I moved to Estonia about one and a half years ago. In my observations Estonia strikes me as a country that values health, education (in particular programming and natural sciences) and entrepreneurship highly.

I don’t know how Estonians achieve it, but they look pretty fit and rarely obese. Estonia has rye bread and sauna in their culture just like Finland, and in addition the flat terrain and well-planned bike routes and extensive network of parks (and pull-up bars everywhere) seem to create an environment where it is easy to live in a healthier way. The consumption of processed foods and candy also seems relatively low among Estonians.

The gym chain MyFitness also seems to be present everywhere. Even the Tallinn airport has a calisthenics workout station right at the departure gates, which anyone is free to use while waiting for their flight to take off. One of the top longevity influencers in Europe, Siim Land, is Estonian.

Estonians also seem to value the school system highly. The government has been actively raising teacher pay and has a stated goal of reaching 120% of the national average by 2027. The students are also expected to value the education and respect their teachers. According to the TALIS 2024 survey (OECD’s international teacher survey), Estonian teachers spend significantly more time on actual teaching and learning and waste less time on interruptions or keeping classroom order compared to the OECD average. This is among the highest rates internationally, meaning they spend relatively little time on maintaining order or dealing with disruptions. While the international education benchmark PISA scores have been dropping globally, Estonia has consistently been climbing the ranks in past decades. In the latest PISA study (from 2022), Estonia ranked number one in Europe for reading, mathematics and science. In the overall results, Estonia ranked seventh globally, only behind countries such as Japan, Korea and Singapore.

Valuing entrepreneurship is evident in how the taxation system is set up in Estonia. Famously, in Estonia, companies can defer taxes on annual earnings and reinvest all of their profit in growing the company. Taxes are due only later, when paid out from the company, for example as dividends. For individuals, receiving dividends from any Estonian or foreign company is tax-free as long as the company paying dividends already paid corporate tax on the same income.

The tax system is also very simple. For all individuals, all types of income, including salary and capital gains, are always taxed at a flat rate of 22%. This removes the incentive for anyone to try to convert income into different types, setting up holding company structures and other optimizations as there is no gain. All entrepreneurs can simply focus on growing their business and forget extra bureaucracy. There is also no marginal tax rate cliff to stop working at – everyone is encouraged to always try to produce as much value as they can. A simple tax system is also reflected in the fact that anyone can easily read all tax rules that apply to individuals in plain English on the Estonian tax authority website, and one does not need to hire any accountants simply to file taxes.

Estonia also has a very straightforward investment account system: any person can freely open a self-directed investment account at any brokerage at no extra cost and report it as such to the tax authority, and then use it to save for an apartment, retirement, or other purposes, and defer all income taxes until withdrawal. There are no caps or time limits, and all residents are encouraged to save and invest as much as they can and thus take responsibility for their own wealth accumulation.

It seems that culturally Estonians respect people who are active and progress in their careers and businesses more than in other countries. Unlike in Finland, successful people are admired and living on government welfare is not romanticized. At the same time, the government benefits are less generous so people can’t live comfortably on them and, for example, many of the asylum seekers Estonia accepted have since left on their own initiative to other European countries in search of better benefits.

Low crime, high trust

Another thing that strikes me when walking the streets of Tallinn is that there are no drug addicts, beggars, thugs or the like. The difference compared to, for example, Vancouver (where I lived previously) is stark. In public buildings, people leave their coats and bags hanging in the lobby while visiting. Private houses and apartment block yards are not fenced. In my building, I noticed people even leave their bikes unlocked in the bike shed. I have also seen the staff of a coffee stall in a shopping mall going for a break and leaving everything unattended, not worrying that anyone would take anything while the staff is away.

This is not just my personal experience. According to the Numbeo crime index, Estonia has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Also, comparing drug and property crime stats, for example, Finland has twice as much crime per capita, and places like Vancouver in Canada almost five times more.

I don’t have any clear explanation for why crime is so much lower in Estonia, but some suggest that higher social cohesion and lower levels of welfare contribute to people standing to lose more if they behave antisocially. Compared to Finland, Estonia also more readily jails repeat offenders, and those who are put on trial will experience a swifter court process thanks to simplified legal processes and more efficient governance.

Moving to Estonia: quick checklist

Moving to Estonia is very easy for any EU citizen, in particular if your work is not location-dependent (e.g., remote work or an online business) and you are simply looking for the cleanest and safest environment to live in.

First, check into a hotel in Tallinn, check out various neighborhoods to figure out what area you like (my favorites are Kalaranna, Kalamaja, Noblessner and Volta) and start browsing available apartments in English at kv.ee. Most professionals speak fluent English, so there should not be any difficulty in reaching out to people by email or phone.

The next step is to buy a local prepaid SIM card at e.g., an R-Kiosk or a convenience store as signing up for other matters later on will require an Estonian phone number. Once you have an apartment and e.g., signed a rental agreement, you can register in the population registry online.

After that, you have proof you are a local resident with an address and telephone number in Estonia. With local resident status, you can go to the police station to get a local ID card. Don’t bother scheduling an appointment, just go to the Tammesaare police station in Tallinn, take a queue number and wait. Once it is your turn, they will guide you on how to use the photo booth, fingerprint registration device, and file your application. A few days later you will receive an email confirming whether your application was accepted, and after a few more days, you will get another email notifying you that your ID card has been printed and is available for pick-up at the same location. This will also be your first practical experience of how fast and efficient the government in Estonia is.

Once you have the local ID card, you can use the smart card feature to log into all the government eServices and sort out the rest of the relocation process, such as registering tax residency and getting a family doctor.

How did Estonia evolve to be like this?

After Estonia regained its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the first elected government in 1992 was led by a very progressive 31-year-old Prime Minister Mart Laar, who managed to set up some very good policies and laid the foundation of a society that has evolved well in the decades since. Estonia was very lucky to have people in power in the 1990s who didn’t simply copy what other Western countries were doing, but who tried to think about things from first principles and create Estonia’s own model for efficient and fair governance. As a post-Soviet country, the population had also been vaccinated against overly socialist and unrealistic ideals, and everyone had a healthy distrust of the government’s ability to solve problems and emphasis was placed on people’s liberty to work for themselves as they best see fit. The improvement in living standards over the past 35+ years has also been witnessed by the population, and voting behavior supports keeping the country on the same trajectory.

General living standards still continue to improve as the nominal wage growth sits at around 6%, clearly above the annual inflation rate of about 3%. In 2026, the Estonian economy is expected to grow about 2.4%, which is faster than the EU average. The growth in Estonia is not the result of any accounting tricks - Estonia is part of the euro and can’t print its own currency, nor has it been funding the public sector with excessive debt. With a 24% debt-to-GDP ratio, Estonia consistently ranks as one of the most responsibly managed countries among advanced Western economies.

As wages in Estonia soon catch up with the EU average, and higher defence spending has forced the government to raise taxes in recent years, the economic growth that Estonia has enjoyed for 35+ years since it exited the Soviet Union might slow down a bit in future years. The policies that fueled this growth in living standards, however, are likely to stay.

The tiger leap

There is one specific government policy in Estonia’s history that I think should be highlighted in particular. Estonia was very progressive by announcing the Tiigrihüpe (Tiger Leap) program in 1996 with the goal of equipping all schools with computers and teaching all students the basics of programming. This surely had a large influence on why Estonia has so many successful software companies, why the government eServices are so mature that even neighboring countries like Finland are striving to copy the Estonian government’s IT architecture called X-road.

The Tiigrihüpe project was originally suggested in the mid-1990s by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, then ambassador of Estonia to the United States, Canada and Mexico, and later President of Estonia in 2006–2016. While he was a psychologist by education, he was also a self-taught amateur programmer and used his political influence to promote sensible adoption of information technology in both Estonia and the EU.

The history of Estonia has several prominent figures who were not lawyers by profession but engineers, scientists and historians who were very practical in their political decisions, which I think is now reflected in how government processes were formed.

The video below shows how the Estonian government advertises itself and what values they choose to highlight:

Should other countries adopt policies from Estonia?

Of course, not everything is perfect in Estonia either. The fertility rate of 1.16 in Estonia is very low. This trend is present globally, but in Estonia it is way below the EU average. Also, the service culture is something that needs to improve in Estonia. While services are in general fast and efficient, the attitude of people working in cafes and stores does not reflect a willingness to fill in gaps if the standard process falls short, nor are visitors actively made to feel welcome as individual humans, but are treated as mere process inputs.

However, many of the things listed earlier I think should be studied by policymakers elsewhere. Societies are complex systems and there is of course no guarantee that copying a single policy to another country with different ethnicities, history and ingrained culture would lead to the same policy outcomes. But considering that Estonia is a small country without favorable geography and no natural resources, and that it started out from a place of total chaos, low economic activity and high crime in 1992 to rise to what it is now in 2026, the success it has seen is surely largely a result of good policies, governance and culture that other countries can and should mimic.

Review: Painting the Blues in Gretna Green, by Linzi Day

Painting the Blues in Gretna Green is a self-published fantasy novel and the second in the Midlife Recorder series. It picks up immediately after the end of Midlife in Gretna Green. I also read it almost immediately after, so I didn't pay attention to how good the recap of previous events was.

As before, this is urban fantasy except not urban. Day calls it paranormal women's fantasy, which I suppose is as good of a genre label as any. The other book I can think of off-hand that would go into that genre would be Nancy Springer's Larque on the Wing, although it is considerably more literary.

I suspect I'm going to read this whole series and it's going to be impossible to review these books without talking about Niki's job, so I'm not going to treat that as a spoiler. It's fairly well-advertised in the marketing for the book, so that feels justified. If you're particularly averse to any spoilers, though, you may want to stop reading here until you've gotten to the reveal in the first book.

Niki is now officially the Recorder, with the power, advice book, and sentient house to go with it. She's about to face her first test in managing interworld politics: There's something amiss in the world of the Picts. Her allies are dropping hints, there's a petition from a group on the Pict world that she can't make sense of, and although she likes the queen of the Picts, there is a great deal of tension beneath the surface that she doesn't understand. Meanwhile, after the incompetent disaster that she uncovered in the first book, Niki is determined to pick her new staff by her own criteria.

The second book leans even harder into giving Niki both a tangled mess created by previous incompetence and enough power to fix it. Watching that happen is very satisfying, particularly when it involves surprising people who are rather too used to getting their own way.

I was somewhat less convinced that Niki is getting the right training to make the decisions that she's making. Diplomacy and staff management are real skills that one needs to learn, not just wing on vibes and gut instinct. My love of competence porn occasionally wishes that Niki had a bit more structure around her competence. We do at least get a new fictional self-help book on how to rule that contributes the quotes that open each chapter. Not the ethics and management training that I would have chosen, but it's something!

In defense of Niki's technique, it becomes clear in this book that the last few recorders have been far too cautious, conservative, and content with a status quo that involved a minimum of work. One of the delights of this book is that Niki thinks power exists to be used to fix things and is determined to use it, not just sit on it. I had more suspension of disbelief issues with this book than with the first — some of the problems Niki is solving seem far too obvious to have been in stasis for this long while also having this easy of a solution, and the level of political power given to the Recorder is a bit unbelievable — but it is so satisfying to see Niki cajole and bully people into being sensible.

I have no idea if this is intentional on Day's part, but I will not be at all surprised if adult-diagnosed ADHD comes up at some point in this series. The way that Niki's focus jumps, her tendency to veer between focusing on a problem and forgetting about it, and something about the way she switches between trains of thought or misses important context because she's jumping to conclusions is making me wonder. This, to be clear, is not a complaint; I think it makes Niki more relatable and more interesting. It's a good thing that she has a sentient house to serve as her assistant. The glee with which she's delegating any task that involves keeping track of details or following up with other people feels like a bit of an indicator by itself.

I did get a bit frustrated with the plot structure of this book. Niki keeps mentioning that a critical petition submitted to her office makes no sense, but it takes half of this (rather long) book before she finally explains to anyone else, even the reader, what's deficient about it. The excuse within the book is that she's having a rather busy day, but by the third time Niki mentions and then fails to do anything about the petition, I was wishing Day would stop bringing it up until she was ready for that part of the plot.

This, as with a few issues in the previous book, feels partly like an editing problem. There is something joyful in indulgent, sprawling books, but only up to the point where they become repetitive. Painting the Blues was right at that line, and once again I wish someone had helped Day trim about fifty pages out of it.

All that said, and despite having more quibbles with this book than the previous one, this continues to be great fun. It's satisfying wish-fulfillment about fixing long-standing problems and having the power to not have to put up with abusive nonsense and ridiculous bullshit, and I am so here for that. I hope Niki realizes she's eventually going to need more refined skills than a heart-to-heart over wine, but she's learning on the job and I'm happily along for the ride. She's also capable of recognizing skill in other people, and that goes a long way.

Recommended if you liked the first one and are in the mood for another fantasy of "no, we're not going to leave it that way, we're going to fix that right now."

Followed by Ties that Bond in Gretna Green.

Rating: 7 out of 10

I built my current house server back in 2019. It had an upgrade from the original Ryzen 2700 to a 5700G in late 2021, but otherwise is still running with the original setup. Back in November it developed some erratic behaviour (initially manifesting as problems with the TPM, which is ironic as I’ve spent a bunch of time at my day job trying to improve TPM reliability), culminating in unreliable reboots. I had a limited amount of ability to swap parts out, but ultimately decided it was a motherboard issue (thinking perhaps VRM problems), found a replacement locally, and everything seemed fine.

Until May.

At that point I rebooted the machine for a Debian point release, and it failed to come back. Fans would spin, but there was no sign of actual life. I ended up pressing a temporary machine into service (that could at least run the Home Assistant container, and a few other critical bits) while I tried to work out what was wrong. I’d kept the previous motherboard, and still had the Ryzen 2700, so I did a bunch of swaps (and obtained a motherboard buzzer to try and get some indication about whether there were useful beep codes being emitted), and ultimately came to the conclusion that the CPU had died.

I’m not quite clear what happened here. I played it safe and replaced the PSU at the same time, in case that was the original cause back in November and ultimately damaged the CPU, but both old + new motherboards worked just fine with the 2700.

That left a decision about what to do. This previous server was from 2013, so this machine has now lasted longer than that and I could justifiably upgrade. However when I went to look at what the equivalent modern machine would be it’s only a couple of generations later (Zen 5 vs Zen 3), and 64GB RAM alone would have set me back ~ £1k. For not a lot of gain. So I ended up buying a replacement Ryzen 5700G, hopefully allowing me to put off thinking about an upgrade until Zen 6 is out, and RAM prices are saner (though I understand that might take a couple of years).

It’s not the first time I’ve had a faulty PSU be the cause of a dead machine, but it was a pretty frustrating experience.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 326. This version includes the following changes:

[ Vagrant Cascadian ]
* Add external tool reference for "pedump" to use the "mono" package on
  GNU guix.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Review: In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns, by Elizabeth Bear

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns is a science fiction police procedural set in relatively near-future India. This novella was originally published in Asimov's SF and collected in several anthologies as well as Bear's Shuggoths in Bloom collection, which I have on my shelf but have not yet read. I probably should have checked that before I got another copy. It is the first story of a series in the sense that there is an Audible-only sequel available.

Like many police procedurals, this one opens with a crime scene. Sub-Inspector Ferron and her partner are inspecting a tube of human meat in the middle of the rug of a luxurious apartment in Bengaluru. The tube is apparently the remains of one Dexter Coffin, an American with a high tech workspace who was apparently mangled beyond recognition in his locked apartment near a table set for two.

Dexter's cat is a witness. In this future world of cats enhanced with limited language skills, this would have been very useful, but the cat's memory was apparently wiped. Ferron will have to get to the bottom of the mystery some other way. Also, she apparently now has a new cat.

Meanwhile, Ferron is worrying about her partner's mental health, her partner is worrying about her use of stimulants to stay on duty for this murder investigation, and Ferron's mother is harassing her for money to pay the bills of her virtual reality addiction. Her job is a good distraction from other problems she'd rather not deal with.

I am trying to come up with something insightful to say about this story, and I'm not having much success. It's a police procedural with a bit of a science fiction twist. The characters are fine but not, at least for me, particularly engaging. There is some deft world-building, but nothing that grabbed my attention or made me desperate to read more stories in this world.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the background, and the reason why I picked up this novella, is that this is the universe that eventually becomes the setting of the White Space series. There is an early version of right-minding handled entirely through medicine without the later invention of the fox implant, and there are some signs that humanity is slowly digging itself out of the hole of climate change and antisocial behavior that it had dug. I found this mildly interesting, but it doesn't add much to the later series and is very skippable.

The source of the title is a bright light originating in the Andromeda galaxy, which is contained in Uttara Bhādrapadā in Vedic astrology. Ferron says this is under the influence of the god Aryaman. This is unrelated to the plot; it's just a background event that prompts some introspective musing from Ferron at the end of the story. It's a nice moment, but I would have been more interested in the full story of first contact between Earth and the Synarche.

This was a mildly pleasant way to spend a few hours and I'm already forgetting all of the details. It's a competent story, but not one I feel a need to recommend to others.

Followed by A Blessing of Unicorns, which appears to be an Audible audiobook exclusive.

Rating: 6 out of 10

I enjoyed reading this post by Marginalia "Your harddrive is probably full"

You can construct an entropic argument that there are simply more ways for a harddrive to be full than ways in which it can be empty.

Of course it made me check how full my laptop drive is, and indeed it was more than 75% full, as predicted.

But, I almost never feel that my hard drive is full. I can very easily free up almost any amount of disk space at any time, without any thought. While writing this blog post, I ran a single command and now my harddrive is 50% empty.

The other part of the equation is that a full disk isn’t a problem until it’s so full you can’t put more stuff on it, and at the point it’s so irredeemably cluttered that when you do clean it up, you only have the patience to clean up enough to bide your time, judging the fate of every file on the harddrive is simply too much work.

Why doesn't this apply to me? Because I have put in the up-front thought to organize things, so that I never have to do that anymore.

I have 3 categories of files that I can remove at any time I need more space, without any thought:

1. Any files that are stored in git-annex. This is one of git-annex's superpowers; you can git-annex drop any file and stop it using disk space, but the file is still there (as a broken symlink) so you don't risk losing or forgetting about it.
2. Caches.
3. Files in ~/tmp/, which is reserved for any files I only want to have a passing acquaintance with. If I'm not comfortable with something being deleted at any time, I don't put it there.

Not only do I only have these 3 categories, these are the only 3 categories for everything except OS files and files I have decided I never want to remove (eg dotfiles and other files stored in git repos).

Computer scientists invented caches (and of course cache invalidation is no problem lol) so I only needed to learn about that one. Unix gave me /tmp/ as an example that I long ago used as the basis for the rules for my ~/tmp/. I hope that git-annex might also serve as an example that moving files between drives is not the best way to manage disk space use.

Review: Midlife in Gretna Green, by Linzi Day

Midlife in Gretna Green is a self-published fantasy novel. It's urban fantasy in the sense that it's set in our world but with magic that most people don't know about, but the primary setting is a parish in rural Scotland and therefore the genre is not urban in that sense. It was Linzi Day's published first novel.

As the story opens, Niki McKnight is a widow in Manchester, England with a job in the Register Office she likes, a boss she hates, and a Bichon Frise dog she adores. In the year since her husband Nick died, she's put her life on hold and made as few decisions as possible, despite some concerned pushing from her best friend Aysha. The death of her grandmother is not entirely unexpected, but her inheritance is about to upend her life.

Niki assumes that her grandmother has a modest cottage and a small estate, and therefore being the named heir will mostly involve cleaning up the details of a modest life. She is caught by surprise by a requirement in the will that she live in Gretna Green for a year and a day in order to inherit. Her initial reaction is to treat this as an absurd impossibility given her life and job in Manchester, but she slowly realizes something strange is going on. Her grandmother's lawyer is lying to her, he refuses to tell her the value of the estate and seems to think it's more valuable than she expected, and her grandmother's tiny cottage does not seem to be following the seasons of the rest of the world. There is something magical at work.

I will not spoil the rest of the reveal. I will say that this is a magical house book because, if you are anything like me, that is why you will want to read this series. There are not enough magical house books, and this is one of the better kind that allow the house to be a full speaking character.

Midlife in Gretna Green is an unapologetic fantasy of personal agency. Niki starts the novel with a miserable manager, a messy pile of unread mail she doesn't want to deal with, and a lot of personal emotional baggage. She gets handed a position that requires and rewards standing up for herself and being decisive. It comes with a pile of unresolved but not horribly complex problems that were waiting for someone who would listen, make sensible decisions, and treat other people with respect. Oh, and there are a few assholes in the way, but they seriously underestimate the power she has to put a stop to their bullshit.

This is the sort of book that traditional publishers tended not to buy (although Day apparently did get an offer for this one and turned it down), and I'm not sure why. Editors thought protagonists should have to work harder for their payoff? Some lingering Calvinist dourness in English language publishing mistrusted triumphant books? Obvious wish fulfillment was considered embarrassing or low-class and thus didn't warrant publication? This didn't apply to the endless bildungsromans about magically talented boys, so some level of sexism was probably in play. Maybe this is finally changing? It reminds me of the bias against romance novels and their guaranteed happily ever after, and in the case of romance there was too much money for publishers to leave it on the table.

In any case, the growth of self-publishing has created an alternative market that let these books reach an audience and I for one am here for it. A lot of wish-fulfillment books, and a lot of self-published books, are not very good, but the ones that have a spark of originality and character can be a delight worth tolerating the somewhat rocky editing and pacing problems that a full editorial staff might have cleaned up.

I loved reading books about kickass women who took no crap and fixed their lives up exactly how they wanted them to be. But how did they get to be that way? They always started out awesome in the books. Seriously, did they kick ass at sixteen? Or did their superpower kickassery not kick in until they were thirty? Forty? If so, then I was screwed. Would I need to wait till I was fifty or until a genie arrived offering wishes? I already felt as if I’d spent my whole life waiting for something wild and wonderful to happen.

Niki is a Specific Type to a somewhat hilarious degree, and I'm not sure if Day is playing into that intentionally or if she's projecting herself into the book. The amount of self-insertion is not zero: Day also lives in Gretna Green, owns a Bichon Frise, and worked as an assistant registrar and civil celebrant. Niki also drinks wine regularly, has a psychic gift, occasionally reads tarot cards, is an accommodating pushover at work who struggles to say no to her abusive boss, has impostor syndrome problems, and swears by a fictional self-help book about grief that provides the quotes at the starts of chapters. There is a cat, because of course there's a cat.

(The fictional self-help book is a spot-on parody played entirely straight in the story. I think Day is having some fun with the reader? I can't tell!)

This is what I mean by unapologetic. It's easy to read Niki as a stereotype, but she's a stereotype a lot of real people can identify with and there's something highly satisfying in watching her find her footing. I like wish fulfillment books; it's fun to see someone's wishes come true! Particularly in the year of 2026, there's something immensely satisfying in seeing an ordinary, insecure person get a massive amount of power and use it to make the world better. I don't need everything to be hard, fraught, and laden with costs in fiction, although I wouldn't want every book I read to be like this.

Also, the world building is great. It's not polished; there's a bit of a grab bag feeling to it, I'm dubious the magic system has any underlying rigorous rule set, and Niki's powers, once she has access to them, are more of a semi-sentient genie than a skill she has to learn with hard practice. But the magic is fun. The sentient house is one of the best characters, particularly after Niki realizes how underused it has been, and I am a sucker for any good sentient house book. The cat is a far more interesting character than I first thought she would be. And Niki's new magical job is more complicated and less typical than the normal Celtic-inspired fantasy that I thought it was going to be at first.

My primary warning about this book is that Niki starts out beaten down and grieving her dead husband, and it took me about five pages to decide that her dead husband was a complete piece of shit who was not worth any of the grief Niki puts into him. She also doesn't stand up for herself for the first hundred pages or so, which made me want to yell at the book a few times. Both of these problems go away farther into the book, and Niki does eventually figure out that Nick was abusive trash, but I was relieved when the "make endless excuses for worthless men" portion of the story was finally over. You have to stick with it until Niki gets brave enough to try being the protagonist; once that happens, it becomes great fun.

It is fairly obvious that Midlife in Gretna Green was self-published, and I wish it had gotten the editing that it deserved. My copy had a couple of obvious formatting errors, the plot veers about more than was strictly necessary, and I think a careful editing pass could have tightened the writing by about fifty pages or so without losing any important detail. If that sort of thing bothers you, make sure you're in self-published fiction mode before starting this one. But it also has that irrepressible, bubbling-with-ideas feeling of a book where nothing has suppressed the author's enthusiasm. It's a very grabby book; once Niki starts embracing her new life, I could barely put it down.

If you're in the mood for a good fantasy wish-fulfillment story that has no romance and a whole lot of "why are things run this way, no, we're changing that," highly recommended. I had so much fun with this book, and the series is currently making the rounds of my whole family. Don't read this when you're looking for something challenging and literary and deep; save it for when you desperately want to watch someone just fix something for once, damn it.

Followed by Painting the Blues in Gretna Green, which I have already read, breaking my usual rule of writing reviews before reading the next book in a series.

Rating: 8 out of 10

RcppDate ships the featureful date library written by Howard Hinnant to enable use from R packages. This header-only modern C++ library has been in pretty wide-spread use for a while now, and adds to C++11, C++14 and C++17 what is (with minor modifications) the ‘date’ library in C++20. The RcppDate package adds no extra R or C++ code and can therefore be a zero-cost dependency for any other project; yet a number of other projects decided to re-vendor it resulting in less-efficient duplication. Oh well. C’est la vie.

This release syncs with upstream release 3.0.5 made yesterday. We also made two routine updates to the continuous integration since the last release a good year ago. The Debian and r2u packages for this new release have already been uploaded too.

Changes in version 0.0.7 (2026-07-27)

• Updated to upstream version 3.0.5

• Regular updates to continuous integration setup

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

Welcome to post 57 in the R⁴ series.

R packages with compiled codes can use the file src/Makevars to set compilation flags. We often rely on this to set libraries, include directories or compilation options. When using external libraries, be it header-only or via headers and linking, we are often experiencing ‘compilation noise’ when these libraries tickle warnings under generally-recommended flags such as -Wall -pedantic. Two packages I maintain are clearly repeat offenders here: Eigen, and BH. Both cam generate pages and pages of compiler output. This is generally not great as it may hide genuine warnings from our own code.

What makes matters worse is that some of the available and specific options for the compilers are treated by R CMD check as ‘non-portable’ leading to a nag on package checking. Examples are -Wno-parentheses, -Wno-maybe-uninitialize or -Wno-nunnull.

I have long resorted to adding these to my per-user ~/.R/Makevars. When added there, compilation is quieter, but R CMD check still nags here where the option is set but not at CRAN or r-universe. A situation that is not ideal but what somewhat ‘stable’.

More recently, I realized there was an available check we can use to conditionally add extra compilation flags but leave them off by default. That makes local development quiet allowing us to focus on the quality of our additions here without noise from third-party libraries we may use. At the same time we do not need to do anything else to let CRAN do its work.

The check we now use is whether there is a .git/ directory present. If so, we are indeed building from local sources and can add extra flags. If not, we are likely building from a tar.gz source archive—which is the case for CRAN—and hence do not set these.

An example use is this recent additional to package qlcal where this bit of R code is invoked from a minimal shell script configure and replaces the stub @XTRAFLAGS@ in src/Makevars.in (or src/Makevars.win.in)

if (dir.exists(".git")) {
    ## development from a .git directory can use these flags
    xtraflags <- "-Wno-nonnull -Wno-deprecated-declarations"
} else {
    ## else build from tarball so stick with existing flags
    xtraflags <- ""
}
win <- if (Sys.info()[["sysname"]] == "Windows") ".win" else ""
infile <- file.path("src", paste0("Makevars", win, ".in"))
outfile <- file.path("src", paste0("Makevars", win))
lines <- readLines(infile)
lines <- gsub("@XTRAFLAGS@", xtraflags, lines)
writeLines(lines, outfile)

With this change, local compilation is quiet, yet CRAN has nothing to nag about (as seen at the qlcal results page).

Similarly, one can also check from an actual configure file written in autoconf. Here is a similar example from RcppEigen (showing some relevants parts of the whole file)

# PKG_CXXFLAGS initialized earlier ...

## Check if building locally
AC_MSG_CHECKING([whether .git/ exists])
if test -d "$srcdir/.git"; then
    AC_MSG_RESULT([yes, adding extra flags])
    AC_SUBST([PKG_CXXFLAGS],["${PKG_CXXFLAGS} -Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-maybe-uninitialized"])
else
    AC_MSG_RESULT([no, consider adding '-Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-maybe-uninitialized' to ~/.R/Makevars])
fi

AC_SUBST([PKG_CXXFLAGS], ["${PKG_CXXFLAGS}"])
AC_CONFIG_FILES([src/Makevars])
AC_OUTPUT

Once again, with this change compilation is quiet locally, yet unaffected at CRAN. Just what we want. Give it a try in your packages.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

TL;DR: What a great DebConf! I managed to recharge my Debian batteries, and my talks / BoF sessions all went fine. Already looking forward to DebConf in Japan next year!

DebCamp

The evening before DebCamp started, we had a nice bbq (we taught some locals to call it a “braai” at an organiser’s house and went for a walk around the river as the sun set. It was a very peaceful lead-in to DebCamp.

• I set up and sent out the call for Forky desktop artwork:
  • https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/910906f3-7ce4-4884-a49f-4b4a5975471b@debian.org
• Had many nice discussions about various Debian topics with all the Debian people around. It’s really fun being around people who are natural problem solvers who care deeply about both technical and social issues. At one point Jonas told me “Holy shit, these people are motivated!” and I appreciate that so much too!

Debian LTS wine

• Most of my DebCamp was dedicated to preparing for my demo and main talk that followed at DebConf.
• Sadly, we had no loopy this year, I just didn’t have the time, and the people who stepped up to help last year were either overwhelmed with other issues or couldn’t make it. I’ll try to make it happen again for next year by kicking it off long before DC27.

View of Santa Fe city from hotel

DebConf

Talk – Is it even possible to build a truly universal system installer?

In this talk I do a very quick comparison of system installers based on my experience with them. It’s hard to directly compare all of them, since there are so many, and each have their own niche that they attempt to satisfy.

I also introduce Yasi – my attempt to answer the question of whether we could build a universal installer, which can also better cover advanced installations, automated installations and niche setups.

It’s very early days for the project, and I didn’t quite feel ready to share the code with the world, but it was nice that I did a quick demo where I could install a Debian system… and the resulting system actually booted up. *phew*.

This is also going to be my main focus for the mid-term future. I aim to have all the basic partitioning options working by the time Debian 14 (Forky) is released, and by the time Debian 15 is released, I have a long list of features that I aim to have working. So, my timeline for having something that’s generally useful is around a year from now, and in around 3 years it should be a fully fledged installer that should cover a very large amount of Debian use cases and architectures.

Day Trip

For the day trip, we did a tour across Santa Fe, visited Constitución de la Nación Argentina, had lunch where we tried various dishes based on local fish from the river, and then went on a boat ride on the river.

BoF Sessions:

Funding in Free Software Projects: I initially registered this BoF because I’m increasingly concerned about how upstreams are asking for donations in their software. I increased the scope to talk about funding in free software in general. It followed Marga’s talk about funding, which focussed more about how developers are funded in general. We didn’t dive very deep into this, but we certainly need some further discussion (and action) on this within Debian.

Debian Social Team: My most important issue for this team is a carry-over from last year, I want to set up barman (packaged in Debian) for live postgres syncing for our larger databases. For the smaller DBs, doing a daily dump is quite cheap. But for Matrix, it’s very expensive in terms if i/o and CPU, so it would be ideal to do less regular complete dumps and use live replication for the first line of redundancy instead.

Images Team: I wasn’t initially planning to say much during this session, I have some ideas to reduce both size and count of images, without losing any benefits, but I don’t have any work to show for that yet. I ended up talking a lot more than I anticipated, the topics covered were quite good and representative of the current state of Debian images built. I don’t have time to create a full summary, so I suggest checking the etherpad / video recording if you’re interested.

Some more wine variety during the conference dinner

Debianites in the main hacklab

Rosario

I’m spending two days in Rosario before I head home. Exploring a bit, catching up with sleep, finishing this blog post, signing keys and exploring some ideas I made note of during DebConf.

Thank you to the DebConf26 Team!

It was a little surreal not being part of any DebConf team for the first time ever, I’ve just been too focussed on getting Yasi ready for my talk (no regrets!). I hope to be more involved again next year, in the meantime, I’m very grateful to everyone who has made this happen, you did a stellar job! I hope to see many of you again next year in Japan!

The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian’s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for June.

Activity summary

During the month of June, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below).

The team released 48 DLAs fixing 231 CVEs.

Debian 12 (“bookworm”) has been handed over to the LTS Team on June 11th. During this handover Sylvain helped to update relevant tools and documentation. If you benefit from Debian, especially during the full 5-year lifecycle, please consider subscribing as a sponsor of Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/.

Moreover, Debian 11 (“bullseye”) will reach the end of the Debian LTS period on August 31st. After that, Freexian will continue the security support under the Extended LTS offer.

The team published several notable updates:

• haveged update (DLA-4616-1), prepared by Thorsten, to address local privilege escalation.
• tomcat9 update (DLA-4619-1), prepared by Markus, to address, among others, an authentication bypass.
• apache2 update (DLA-4620-1), prepared by Bastien, to address a HTTP/2 bomb.
• apache2 update (DLA-4629-1), prepared by Bastien, to address, among others, remote code execution and privilege escalation.
• libinput update (DLA-4626-1), prepared by Santiago, to address local privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution.
• asterisk update (DLA-4631-1), prepared by Thorsten, to address, among others, wrong processing of invalid or untrusted certificates.
• nginx update (DLA-4634-1), prepared by Charles, to address a remote code execution and denial of service.
• firefox-esr update (DLA-4635-1), prepared by Emilio, to address dozens of CVEs, among other things, related to arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation.
• thunderbird update (DLA-4636-1), prepared by Emilio, to address dozens of CVEs, among other things, related to arbitrary code execution.
• chromium update (DLA-4654-1), prepared by Emilio, to address dozens of CVEs, among other things, related to arbitrary code execution.

Contributions from outside the LTS Team:

We are greatly thankful for the contributions from people outside the LTS Team:

• Salvatore Bonaccorso prepared a libhttp-daemon-perl update, that was released by Santiago as DLA-4639-1.
• Salvatore also directly uploaded libgd-perl DLA-4638-1 and libconfig-inifiles-perl DLA-4637-1.
• Peter Palfrader prepared a tor update, that was released by Santiago as DLA-4656-1.
• Pieter Lenaerts prepared a beets update, that was released by Emmanuel as DLA-4641-1.
• Noah Meyerhans prepared a cloud-init update DLA-4645-1.

The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:

• Besides publishing DLA-4642-1 for package u-boot Andreas also prepared an NMU for an upload to sid and prepared a stable-proposed-update (SPU) bug for trixie, which was already acknowledged by a stable release manager (SRM).
• Andreas also prepared an upload of package atril for trixie, which was handled by the security team as DSA-6349-1.
• Besides publishing DLA-4620-1 for package apache Bastien also prepared an upload for trixie, which was handled by the security team as DSA-6323-1.
• Tobi uploaded package mesa to trixie and bookworm.
• Thorsten fixed some (not security related but RC) issues in package dahdi-linux. This was in preparation to fix lots of security issues in asterisk. Unfortunately the maintainer ignored the corresponding debdiff and prefered to upload a new upstream version. Anyway, the concerns of the security team about security support of asterisk could be overcome and asterisk can migrate to tesing and again be part of a Debian release.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

• Abhijith PA
• Andreas Henriksson
• Arnaud Rebillout
• Bastien Roucariès
• Ben Hutchings
• Carlos Henrique Lima Melara
• Chris Lamb
• Daniel Leidert
• Emmanuel Arias
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort
• Guilhem Moulin
• Jochen Sprickerhof
• Lee Garrett
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Markus Koschany
• Santiago Ruano Rincón
• Sylvain Beucler
• Thorsten Alteholz
• Tobias Frost
• Utkarsh Gupta

Thanks to our sponsors

Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • Toshiba Corporation (for 129 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 97 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 61 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG (for 139 months)
  • CONET Deutschland GmbH (for 123 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 79 months)
  • EDF SA (for 51 months)
  • Dataport AöR (for 26 months)
  • CERN (for 24 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 144 months)
  • Nantes Métropole (for 138 months)
  • Akamai - Linode (for 133 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 130 months)
  • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 130 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 124 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 114 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 108 months)
  • Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères (for 92 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 79 months)
  • Upsun Formerly Platform.sh (for 73 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 67 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 65 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 63 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 63 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 54 months)
  • THINline s.r.o. (for 27 months)
  • Copenhagen Airports A/S (for 21 months)
  • Conseil Départemental de l’Isère (for 7 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 144 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 144 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 141 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 141 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 140 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 139 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 138 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 138 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 137 months)
  • Entr’ouvert (for 129 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 126 months)
  • Plat’Home (for 122 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 121 months)
  • Tesorion (for 121 months)
  • Bearstech (for 112 months)
  • LiHAS (for 112 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 107 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 101 months)
  • Université Grenoble Alpes (for 87 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 79 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 76 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 72 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (for 63 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 58 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 57 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU Résif (for 56 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 51 months)
  • Alter Way (for 49 months)
  • SOBIS Software GmbH (for 24 months)
  • Tuxera Inc. (for 15 months)
  • OPM-OP AS (for 7 months)
  • LU-CIX Management G.I.E.

Review: Radiant Star, by Ann Leckie

Radiant Star is a science fiction novel set in the Imperial Radch universe without being a direct sequel to the other books in that universe. It will badly spoil the end of Ancillary Mercy, and I recommend reading that trilogy first, but it's independent of the other books in the same universe.

In the 3,008th year after the manifestation of the Radiant Star (the 1,024th since the founding of the Consorority itself), Zaved, a newly minted consoror, disappeared a mere two days after the ceremony that elevated her to womanhood. She left a note that read, Bored. Back whenever. This was not normal or even remotely acceptable behavior in a consoror, particularly one who held as much promise as Zaved had, but what could the consorors do?

Zaved, faced with the unpleasant prospect of running out of money during her galactic tour, plied a rich benefactor with tales of how talented, polite, and obedient the boys of the Consorority are. Her plan worked brilliantly. After funding further non-boring adventures, she arrived home in Ooioiaa with a chest full of money and a pregnancy. Great for Zaved and the Consorority; kind of a shame for her son Jonr, who is to be delivered to her benefactor after proper training. Oh well, telling Jonr about that is a problem for future Zaved.

After a strained childhood in which he convinces himself he is a misfit with few redeeming qualities, Jonr ends up in a suspension pod. Before shipping can be arranged, however, external events intervene, leaving Jonr sitting unnoticed in a warehouse.

The planet of Aaa is in a highly inconvenient location, drifting as it does through interstellar space unattached to any star. It would be as irrelevant and overlooked as any other random interstellar object except for two critical properties. The first is that Aaa and its sole city of Ooioiaa are sacred to a religion of obscure origin. Its primary population are members of a religious cult who believe the Radiant Star manifested in the Temporal Location on Ooioiaa and will eventually return to bring light to the galaxy. The second interesting property of Aaa is that it is drifting ever so slowly towards a strategic system of military importance.

The first property brings pilgrims and their accompanying bounty of money, food, and other resources necessary to dig a small city out of rock, make it habitable, and supplement the sparse and strange native edible life. The second property brings the Radchaai, who easily conquer the city of Ooioiaa and are now faced with the unpleasant task of running it.

Some decades after the Radchaai conquest, having never left Aaa, Jonr is woken up. He will not be sent off into the broader galaxy as a slave to pay off a vacation debt. Instead, he will be one of the many protagonists in this novel about the perils of living through supply chain disruptions on a planet full of status-obsessed religious fanatics who would drown in a rain shower.

The other books set in this universe make abundantly clear that the Radch is a voracious colonial power that enslaves native populations and enforces their own cultural preferences at the point of a gun. A reader familiar with this series is predisposed to take whatever side is not the Radch.

Radiant Star adds a complication, however. Charak Svo, the Radchaai governor, is impatient with native inhabitants and strongly dislikes their religion, but she is reasonably competent. The religious factions that ran Ooioiaa before the arrival of the Radchaai, on the other hand, are dogmatic authoritarians with the collective wisdom of a sack of turnips. Charak does not get everything right and is arguably responsible for at least one catastrophe. By the end of the book, though, I was firmly convinced that had the original religious government still been in charge, everyone would have died.

I found the structure of this book a little odd. The omniscient narrator tells the story in the form of a history. The target audience appears to be future inhabitants of Ooioiaa and adherents to the Radiant Star religion, and the narrator is often maddeningly uninterested in topics that a reader of the rest of the Imperial Radch books is intensely curious about. This same property carries through to the plot: I was interested in how all of the tensions in this obviously absurd society could be resolved or, preferably, overturned entirely. The narrator, on the other hand, is far more interested in Serque Tais's intent to become the last saint in the Temporal Location, and in the details of the subsequent political, economic, and religious fallout.

Leckie has written three novels set in the Imperial Radch after the original trilogy: Provenance, Translation State, and now Radiant Star. I am sure that I'm not the only person who wants a direct continuation of the original trilogy, but I'm drawing the conclusion that Leckie doesn't want to write that. Instead, she's writing around the edges of the subsequent events, in effect showing readers the shape of them and their broader implications without showing the details.

Now that I can see what she's doing, I kind of like it. Given what we now know from the books written around the edges, the ensuing events in the center of galactic politics are chaotic in a way that could easily devolve into tedious accounts of messy conflicts. Seeing the effects from afar lets the reader fill in some of the blanks and speculate, and it makes the moments where we get a concrete update (such as at the end of this book) all the more rewarding. I still find it odd, though, to read a book where the narrator's interests so sharply diverge from mine.

I wish I could say that Radiant Star sucked me in as the story developed, but it never did. Part of the problem is that I think this book is intended as a very dry farce, and farce often doesn't work with my reading style. I prefer to attach myself to a protagonist and hope they do competent things, and this book is full of characters who are being themselves far too aggressively and loudly to have time to be competent at anything. My favorite moments were therefore the small pockets of people with sense: The governor, Jonr, his charge, and the delightfully strange Justice of Albis. I enjoyed all of them, but I had trouble caring about the overall plot and kept putting this book down for days between chapters.

I think this is mostly personal taste, though. Like all of Leckie's novels since the original Imperial Radch trilogy, Radiant Star is competently executed and a little strange. When that strangeness aligns with your tastes, it's a great deal of fun and rather unlike other science fiction novels. In this case, it didn't quite work for me, but I suspect it will for others.

I still want another Leckie novel with a ship as a protagonist, though.

Content notes: Rather disturbing (although bloodless) religious practices, mass death.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1293 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 47.8 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 710 times according to Google Scholar.

This versions updates to the 15.4.2 upstream Armadillo release made this week, as well as to included 15.4.1 version we released only to GitHub and r-universe so do not exceed the (roughly) monthly cadence. For this release, we had run the usual complete reverse-dependency check which came back spotless, and did CRAN so no email exchange needed despite nearly 1300 reverse dependencies. Automation can be helpful when used with a well-maintained software stack. The package has also already been updated for Debian, built for r2u, and will build shortly at CRAN for the different binary releases.

All changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.4.2-1 (2026-07-25)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.4.2 (Medium Roast Agave)

  • Fix speed regressions in diagvec() and diagmat()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.4.1-1 [github-only] (2026-07-09)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.4.1 (Medium Roast Agave)

  • Fix for rare infinite recursion bug in sparse version of diagmat()

  • More efficient checks for aliasing

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

So it will not play cyberpunk 2077, but if you prefer opensource drivers for your hardware, nouveau is certainly an option for some opensource gaming.

Using kernel 7.0 from debian backports, I could run opensource classics requiring 3D acceleration flawlessly with nouveau:

• Supertux (Debian package)
• SuperTux Kart (Debian package)
• LibreQuake (Flatpak with ironquake engine, Full HD and 60 fps)

I would like to highlight here how good is LibreQuake.
It is an horror cosmic 3D shooter, using the Quake engine, but with newly made game assets under the GPL, thus creating a 100% opensource Quake-based first person shooter. Although their documentation mentions it is a work in progress, as of 2026 I find it very much of a finished product.

Dismal shores, my preferred game level.

I missed Quake in the 90s, happy to discover such a classic today.

Killing Processes

One of the features of systemd that is most controversial is the option to kill user processes when the user logs out. That initially killed screen/tmux/nohup processes too. In recent Debian releases the default configuration of systemd-logind (the login manager for systemd) is to allow processes to keep running, the configuration file /etc/systemd/logind.conf has an option KillUserProcesses that can be enabled to have user processes killed. If you do that then there are options to only kill processes for certain users and to exclude some users (default to excluding root). If using that option you can apparently use a systemd unit to start screen which prevents it being killed on logout.

This is a very handy feature for some particular user cases. One situation was that I was supporting some people who weren’t very good at computers on a system running KDE and some KDE processes would linger. So the option of logout and login again to deal with an issue of akonadi or some other KDE service misbehaving didn’t work. On that system I enabled the option to kill user processes which reduced the number of problems they had while not requiring rebooting.

It is widely believed that the “linger” feature is required to allow screen/tmux/nohup to work, in Debian (and probably most distributions) that is not the case. It might be that some combinations of configuration requires “linger” to allow screen/tmux to work but I am not interested in trying to discover them. Of all the people I have directly supported for Linux desktop use (which numbers in the hundreds) none of them have had the ability to use screen/tmux and also the cluelessnes that makes me want to automatically kill their processes when the logout.

Controlling Linger

You can enable and disable “linger” for your own account with the following commands if polkit is installed and in a typical configuration:

loginctl enable-linger
loginctl disable-linger

If running as root you can enable and disable it for another user with the following commands:

loginctl enable-linger $ACCOUNT
loginctl disable-linger $ACCOUNT

There doesn’t seem to be any documented way of discovering if an account has linger enabled or for listing accounts that have it, it seems that “ls /var/lib/systemd/linger” is the only option.

Linger on Debian

On a Debian system with close to default settings the processes won’t be killed on logout and the only difference “linger” makes is to start programs in the user’s context BEFORE they login. A friend was recently testing out a bunch of LLM programs on one of my servers and the account he used for that ended up with “linger” enabled, presumably one of the install scripts he ran was written on the assumption that enabling linger was necessary for nohup to work and it did so automatically without being asked.

One benefit I’ve found from this behaviour is on my laptop. I’m currently testing out new SE Linux policy on my laptop and rebooting it a lot. When I enabled linger on my account it caused the laptop to connect to wifi on boot without needing to login which is convenient. I can then ssh to it even when the X11/Wayland login configuration is broken.

I will leave it enabled after finishing these tests. Having background processes like Pipewire and Bluetooth start before I login will presumably make things slightly faster when I do login.

My Current Thinkpad

In 2018 I reviewed a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen6 that was assigned to me for work [1].

In April last year I wrote about the failings of my Thinkpad Yoga Gen 3 and how I was going back to the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 [2]. The Gen5 in question has 8G of RAM and a 1920*1080 display compared to 16G and 2560*1440 for the Yoga but runs reliably on battery without crashing. The Yoga in question has been used by relatives who don’t need to do much when on battery and is currently being used by a relative who runs Windows so the occasional crash is something they are used to.

In mid last year I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen6 for $350 which has 16G of RAM and a 2560*1440 display. The higher resolution display is a significant benefit and while 8G of RAM is still usable for medium to heavy Linux desktop use it does cause problems sometimes. The new laptop I now have is significantly better than the one I had for work in 2018!

I realised that my previous review of that laptop was incorrect in one aspect, there are two USB-C ports it’s just that one may be covered by a rubber stopper when you get it. When I received this one the Ethernet dongle port was covered by a rubber stopper and the seller was unaware of the possibility of using a dongle and didn’t have such a dongle. It’s not a big deal as I have a collection of USB Ethernet devices but would still be handy to have while not worth the $20 it costs to buy one (a 2.5Gbit USB Ethernet device cost me $16 two years ago).

Laptop Displays

Today I saw a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen9 with 3840*2400 display and 16G of RAM for $550 on Facebook marketplace, which is a very tempting deal. 3840*2400 is 2.5* as many pixels as 2560*1440 while 2560*1440 is only 77% more pixels than 1920*1080. So if my eyes were able to properly distinguish pixels that that high DPI then the benefits of getting the 3840*2400 laptop would be greater than going to what I currently have from FullHD. But as a 1440p display in a 14″ form factor is already past the stage where I can see individual pixels the benefits of 4K are more about making curves more rounded which improves readability and allows slightly smaller font sizes but doesn’t give anything like the benefits that going from a FullHD desktop monitor to a 4K desktop monitor.

Also I have different usage patterns for my laptop than for my desktop. I use my laptop for reading blog posts and ebooks for which even FullHD would be fine as the amount of text that can be usefully displayed on screen isn’t that great. I also use my laptop for emergency sysadmin work, ssh to a server to restart a daemon, run ping while changing network hardware, and other things where I don’t have a lot of text on screen.

I also use my laptop for light coding tasks while watching TV. It’s not possible to effectively do complex debugging tasks while watching TV or while using a small screen. But a very large portion of coding time is spent dealing with things like testing builds with different versions of libraries, applying patches to a new upstream release of software, fixing issues related to functions being renamed, testing to see if a new version has really fixed a bug it’s supposed to fix, and other things that don’t require a lot of skill.

I am not claiming that 4K displays aren’t great for laptops. Merely that at the current time it’s not worth $550 of my money.

Future Thinkpads

I like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line and plan to continue buying them as they get cheap.

The Gen11 is the first one to have a minimum of 16G of RAM, the reason this is important to me is that the ones I buy aren’t the lowest model because I want more than the minimum display resolution. As people who get above the minimum spec in one area tend to get above the minimum in others that means that there will be plenty of Gen11s on the market with 32G of RAM when I’m ready to buy one of that era. Presumably by that time Linux software will have become more bloated and make me want more RAM. Yes soldered RAM has some downsides, but if you want an ultra-light laptop it’s a trade-off you need to deal with. One problem with the Gen11 is that the maximum display resolution is 2880*1800, it’s still a reasonable improvement over what I’ve currently got but not close to the 4K I desire.

The Gen12 has support for 8K display at 60Hz over Thunderbolt which is nice. By the time the Gen12 is in my price range it’s quite likely that I will have a monitor with higher than 5120*2160 resolution (the maximum video out resolution of Gen11 and previous models in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon range) on my desk.

The Gen13 still has 2880*1800 as the maximum resolution but has OLED as an option.

So it looks like a Gen9 or Gen10 may be ideal for me as they are the last ones in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon series to support 4K displays. Another option is the Thinkpad Yoga Gen8 which is of the same era as the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen11 but has a 3840*2400 OLED touch screen, I might be able to get one of those cheap with the touch screen damaged.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2018/09/11/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-6/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/04/23/last-yoga-gen3/

The twenty-first release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN just now, and has been built for r2u. It comes a week after the 0.1.2 release.

qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over seventy country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.

This releases includes a one-line fix we also sent upstream as a now-merged PR: one of the calendar files added in QuantLib 1.43 also needed to include the vector header file. And every compiler appears to be lenient (QuantLib itself has fourty different continuous integration jobs, we test with all builds at r-universe) apart from the CRAN macOS x86-64 machine. Sigh. This is now fixed. We also included a neat little local trick I should blog about: if the build is detected as a non-CRAN local build (simply by checking for a .git directory) then compiler flags can be updated to quieten the build. We cannot do that in the package because we would get our fingers slapped over so-called ‘non-portable compiler flags’. Sigh again. Anyway, the trick helps.

The full details from NEWS.Rd follow.

Changes in version 0.1.3 (2026-07-21)

• Add missing 'vector' header to new IslamicHolidays calendar file, also PRed upstream and merged there

• In local compilation out of git repo add additional compiler flags

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

(no, this isn't a blog post about Joy Division songs)

Last time I wrote about Interzone, I was discussing issue #294, the first published under new management in a paperback-sized format ("JB6"). The format and presentation of the magazine was fantastic: it fit in a lot of my pockets, and was packed with 15 stories as well as the regular columns, in full colour with fantastic layouts and illustrations. Sadly there was only one more physical issue before Interzone was forced to become a digital-only publication.

IZ issues 294 and 295

I don't want to dwell on the sad necessity to move to digital. Interzone continues on, celebrating the milestone issue #300 in 2024. Subscriptions are managed via Patreon. Issue #305 just came out.

Instead I wanted to write a small bit about how I engaged with the paper magazine, and the difficulties I've had trying to engage with not just Interzone but any magazine-style publication in a digital context.

With most fiction, I read linearly: start the beginning and read to the end, in order. That works well for me with e-readers. But for magazines (and most non-fiction) I don't, I jump around: usually starting with the table of contents, I might pick a short column to start, or jump into the middle of the "book reviews" section to read about a specific book. I might skip sections entirely. I find it very difficult to read like this with an e-reader. I think this is partly because I reference the depth of the paper book or magazine, its thickness, to orient myself. But it's also partly the limitations of e-ink.

My tick-list for an issue of IZ

For print-Interzone, I used to start by inserting a small piece of paper inside the cover (the delivery slip was ideal). On this I listed the stories within and ticked them off when I read them (sometimes I double-ticked if I really liked a story). That helped me to remember, perhaps months or years later, whether I'd read all the stories or not, and which I liked. I could do something similar on some e-readers: the Remarkable for instance. But it's far from convenient to do on most e-ink devices.

Interzone digital is available as both ePUB, the most common format for e-books, and PDF. For reading on my regular Kobo e-reader, PDFs don't work very well at all. I think this is generally true of most e-readers.

Interzone was (and is) a well-designed magazine. The value of it was not just the content of the text, but the context: how the stories were presented; the accompanying art (most often colour in recent decades), but also the typesetting. ePUB doesn't specify much of that stuff exactly: it leaves that up to the client and the client's preferences. And there's a lot of advantages to that: Prefer a different font face or size? No problem. And most importantly for accessibility: If reading in ePUB makes Interzone available to more readers then that's a great thing. But sadly a lot is lost, IMHO.

IZ #305 on iPad Mini

The solution I'm trying is to read the PDF version on the iPad Mini I resurrected earlier in the year. Despite being an Internet tablet, since it's not really usable for browsing the web anymore it's strangely still a distraction-free device. In fact it's pretty much single-purpose for reading Interzone and the odd other book which benefits from being read as PDF. I can appreciate the stylistic choices made in the page-setting as they were intended; I can quickly jump around the issue without waiting for an e-ink refresh; I get full colour; and whilst it would be tiring to read for a long time on the iPad screen, for the length of articles or stories in a magazine, this isn't a problem.

It's not a solution for tracking what I've read (that version of ipadOS is too old to support clumsily scrawling on PDF pages with your fingers, at least in the Books app) but it otherwise seems to work well, so I'll see how it goes.

When you pass an AWS certification exam, sometimes it can extend the life of related lesser AWS certifications. But I could not find an illustration of exactly which ones, so here’s an up-to-date diagram:

Figure: Renewal relationships between AWS certifications.

Each arrow is a ‘renews’ relation – there’s no obligation to pass lesser exams before the harder ones, but you could also follow the arrows backwards if you want to learn easier material before sitting the more difficult exams.

I have made two important simplifications to the graph:

1. The ‘Advanced Networking – Specialty’ certification is being retired soon, so I’ve omitted it entirely. The last date to take that exam is 25th August 2026. But Specialty certs don’t renew anything else anyway.

2. I have left out transitive relationships in order to simplify the graph – so e.g. if you pass a ‘Solutions Architect – Professional’ exam, it also renews any Cloud Practitioner certificate you might hold, even if you do not currently hold the relevant Associate certificate.

You also have the option of sitting each exam again to renew of course, and there’s a new scheme to ‘maintain’ various certs via AWS Skill Builder which can extend them by one year rather than three.

DebConf26, the 27th annual Debian Developer Conference, is taking place at Santa Fe, Argentina from 20 to 25 July 2026. Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at the Facultad de Ingeniería en Ciencias Hídricas (Faculty of Engineering in Water Sciences), one of the faculties that belong to the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (National University of the Littoral), to participate and work in a conference exclusively ran by volunteers.

Today the main conference starts with around 300 expected attendants and over 80 scheduled activities, including 45-minute and 20-minute talks, Bird of a Feather ("BoF") team meetings, workshops, a job fair, as well as a variety of other events. The full schedule is updated each day, including activities planned ad-hoc by attendees over the course of the conference.

If you would like to engage remotely, you can follow the video streams available from the DebConf26 website for the events happening in the three main talk rooms: Aula Magna - FADU, Aula Magna - FBCB and Aula 0.3 - FICH accessible from the DebConf26 homepage. You can also join the conversations happening inside the talk rooms via the OFTC IRC network in the #debconf-fadu, #debconf-fbcb, and #debconf-fich3 channels. Please also join us in the #debconf channel for common discussions related to DebConf.

You can also follow the live coverage of news about DebConf26 provided by our micronews service or the @debian profile on your favorite social network.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcoming environment for all participants. Please see our Code of Conduct page for more information on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf26, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak and Proxmox.

This is the latest release of the Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules and their supporting scripts, which convert POD documentation to text and *roff output.

The major change in this release is a workaround for a groff bug in the 1.24.0 release that breaks compatibility between the .IP and .TP macros and misrenders .IP by removing all space between the tag and the text. Ideally groff bugs should be fixed in groff, but apparently this rendering bug was introduced intentionally by the groff maintainer to force authors who were using .IP with text tags to switch to .TP for correct formatting, allowing future introduction of a semantic distinction between the two macros. I didn't see a good alternative at this relatively late date after the release other than changing Pod::Man accordingly.

This will at least work around this problem for Pod::Man users, although it won't help with existing manual pages.

This release also works around another backwards-incompatible change to groff that attempts to force the default enabling of hyphenation and full justification after every occurrence of the .TH macro. The groff upstream position is currently that the end user should be able to set registers and strings to override the defaults of hyphenation and full justification, but the man page author has no control over the defaults for these settings. Pod::Man ignores the admonishment in groff_man(7) and overrides these registers anyway to restore its long-standing historic behavior of always using left justification and disabling hyphenation, because there is currently no way to change the default without overriding the new user preference. Should some mechanism be provided in the future, I'll be happy to adopt it and thus honor user configuration as well.

New in this release is support for an encoding of none, which tells Pod::Man and Pod::Text to do no character set encoding in their output and leave the output in Perl's internal representation. This is useful in combination with output_string() when the output will be used internally by a Perl program.

Pod::Man also adopts CR as the default fixed-width font instead of its long-standing default of CW, originally chosen for compatibility with Solaris. This avoids warnings with newer groff at the cost of breaking troff (not nroff) output on Solaris 10. I believe this platform is now sufficiently old, and this use case sufficiently obscure, that no one will miss it. Solaris 11 and later will render man pages correctly with troff, and --fixed=CW will restore the previous behavior.

This release also has a few other bug fixes, particularly for quoting heuristics in C<> blocks, and various documentation improvements.

You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the podlators distribution page.

Hamming Codes

ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit errors and detect double-bit errors in messages with 2^R-R-1 bits of data. For PC use that means if you want to protect 32bits of data you need R=6 and with 64bits you need R=7. The standard for DDR4 and similar RAM is 72 bits of data width on the bus and Hamming codes to correct single bit errors and detect double bit errors for 65bits of data. The computers we use have 64bits of data so that allows an extra bit that could be an extra parity, I don’t know what if anything is done with this extra bit.

RDIMM vs UDIMM

One point of confusion in such things is the difference between Registered memory AKA RDIMMs [2] and regular PC/laptop memory which is often referred to as UDIMMs. The “register” is just a buffer which due to complex issues that aren’t relevant to this post means that DIMMs can be larger and you can have more DIMMs in a system but latency may be slightly worse. It is technically quite possible to create RDIMMs without ECC (64bits wide instead of 72) but I have never seen a system that used such RAM.

I have used more than a few systems with ECC UDIMMs and I recommend avoiding them if convenient as ECC UDIMMs are expensive on the second hand market while ECC RDIMMs can get very cheap. There are servers with ECC RDIMMs that are very unsuitable for home use (such as dual-CPU 1RU servers which are very noisy) so once they are past the 5 year tax write-off period the server chassis gets sent to ewaste and the RAM goes on the second hand market, the glut of RAM without systems to use it forces the price down.

For the systems most commonly seen there are RDIMM systems with ECC and UDIMM systems without ECC.

Chipkill

If every bit in RAM was independent of every other bit then the basic Hamming code would solve most problems. However multiple bits in the same chip may be affected by the same problem, or one chip on the DIMM might entirely fail. With every RDIMM having 18 or 36 DRAM chips there are 2 or 4 bits per chip. On DIMMs with 36 DRAM chips one chip could fail and have the errors reliably detected with a Hamming code. On DIMMs with 18 DRAM chips one failed chip can’t necessarily be detected with Hamming codes. IBM trademarked the term ChipKill for ECC systems which can cope with a single DRAM chip failing [3]. This is referred to as “Advanced ECC” on Dell and HP servers which require an even number of DIMMs. If anyone knows what coding method is used for “ChipKill” type systems then please let me know.

Systems with advanced ECC also often have features like hot-spare for RAM and RAID-1 type functionality which is interesting but not something most people who read my blog will ever want to use.

DDR5

DDR5 has on-die ECC to deal with the increased error incidence from smaller and faster memory [4], this is specified as 8 bits of error correction per 128 bits of data which implies basic Hamming codes.

The on-die ECC is not a replacement for regular ECC, it’s a mitigation for new problems introduced. My experience of memory errors is that the majority of repeatable errors (where a system would get an error with Memtest86+ or an ECC error report repeatedly) were DIMM seating issues, I could unplug and reinsert the DIMM in question and then the same tests would pass. Those errors would not be affected by on-die ECC.

One thing that concerns me is the possibility of on-die ECC interacting with ECC on the motherboard and reducing it’s effectiveness. I haven’t been able to find out enough about how this works to determine if that’s the case. My concern is that an error of 3+ bits that’s corrected with a basic Hamming code might be more likely to create an error condition that “Advanced ECC” can’t fix than the original error.

Currently the best published research on the effectiveness of ECC on RAM errors is the Google paper published in 2009 which is based on DDR and DDR2 RAM [5]. So I don’t expect that we will see published research about even DDR4 ECC any time soon. I presume that Google and the other cloud providers are still doing such research and providing the information to DRAM vendors under NDA so we have to just hope that the DRAM vendors do what’s required to make things work correctly and allow us to buy products based on that research.

DDR5 EC4 vs EC8

DDR5 supports 2*32bit “subchannels” instead of just supporting 64bit words [6]. For DDR5 ECC RAM there are variants EC4 which has 36bits of data per subchannel and EC8 which has 40 bits. EC8 allows Hamming codes on each subchannel indepdendently. I haven’t found a reference on how exactly EC4 works, it could be reading 64bits at a time (not taking advantage of the subchannels) to use Hamming codes or it could have 1 parity bit for each subchannel and just assume that there’s no need to check Hamming codes unless the subchannel parity fails. EC8 allows full Hamming code checks on 32bits of data and presumably ChipKill on 64bits.

It’s widely claimed that all DDR5 RDIMMs are EC8 and all DDR5 ECC UDIMMs are EC4. A quick search on ebay turned up adverts for EC4 and EC8 RDIMMs and links to apparently reliable sites confirming that some of the RDIMMs are EC4. There are reports of EC8 UDIMMs even though I couldn’t find any advertised. This seems to mirror the situation with DDR4 where non-ECC RDIMMs are apparently available somewhere and ECC UDIMMs are something I’ve used a few times but most people have never seen.

I then searched for information on what servers support. The Dell R760 server supports both EC4 and EC8 RDIMMs but you can’t have both in the same system.

The existence of EC4 DIMMs is wrong. They shouldn’t make substandard gear, the manufacturing price difference between 72 and 80 bit wide DIMMs isn’t going to be great and the end result is some systems with inadequate specs and extra difficulty in upgrading systems with more things to check for compatibility.

Why ECC is Needed

Here’s an interesting article about Mozilla’s claim that 15% of Firefox crashes are due to RAM hardware errors [7], this seems to be based on repeatable errors and therefore won’t count errors where a bit flip happens once a day or less.

Some years ago I reported a BTRFS corruption issue on my desktop PC to the BTRFS developers and one of them stated that the corruption in question didn’t match any pattern expected from a BTRFS bug and recommended that I run Memtest86+. The memory test revealed that I was getting about one memory corruption per 5 hours so if I had used Firefox on that system any crashes probably wouldn’t have been regarded as hardware errors with RAM. Those errors caused filesystem corruption and some data loss, if I hadn’t been using BTRFS that could have gone unnoticed for years.

On another occasion I had a VM I was using for testing software I was developing that had some unexpected errors. After working on it for a day I had shared the errors with a mailing list of other developers who also spent some time investigating it. Eventually I began to suspect a hardware problem, I went on site and when I rebooted the system to run Memtest86+ it didn’t even boot as it had errors that stopped the BIOS from even working correctly. It was strange that the system was apparently working correctly and restarting the KVM VM resulted in the same errors happening in the same code and nothing else on the VM apparently having a problem. It turned out that the system had a motherboard problem that made all but one of the DIMM sockets unusable so I ended up sending it to e-waste. That wasted a day of my time and some hours of other people’s time. Presumably on other occasions developer time is wasted due to hardware errors and no-one even realises.

What Society Needs

We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expensive when bought new than ECC RAM.

We need to have greater knowledge of the benefits of ECC RAM among computer experts, people need to recommend that computers be purchased with ECC RAM whenever possible and that systems which can’t have ECC RAM (laptops and phones) shouldn’t be used for storing important data.

We need to avoid silly things like having so many variants of RAM to confuse people and make it needlessly difficult to get ECC RAM working.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_memory
• [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipkill
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2aj7oztw
• [5] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
• [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR5_SDRAM#Subchannels
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/yv4of7hz

DebConf26, the 27th edition of the Debian conference is taking place at the Facultad de Ingeniería en Ciencias Hídricas of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, in Santa Fe, Argentina. We appreciate the organizers for their hard work, and hope this event will be highly beneficial for those who attend in person as well as online.

This event would not be possible without the help from our generous sponsors. We would like to warmly welcome the sponsors of DebConf26, and introduce them to you.

We have two Platinum sponsors.

• Our first Platinum sponsor is Proxmox. Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use open-source server solutions. The comprehensive open-source ecosystem is designed to manage divers IT landscapes, from single servers to large-scale distributed data centers. Our unified platform integrates server virtualization, easy backup, and rock-solid email security ensuring seamless interoperability across the entire portfolio. With the Proxmox Datacenter Manager, the ecosystem also offers a "single pane of glass" for centralized management across different locations. Since 2005, all Proxmox solutions have been built on the rock-solid Debian platform. We are proud to return to DebConf26 as a sponsor because the Debian community provides the foundation that makes our work possible. We believe in keeping IT simple, open, and under your control.

• Infomaniak is the second Platinum sponsor. Infomaniak is an independent, employee-owned Swiss technology company that designs, develops, and operates its own cloud infrastructure and digital services entirely in Switzerland. With over 300 employees — more than 70% engineers and developers — the company reinvests all profits into R&D. Its public cloud is built on OpenStack, with managed Kubernetes, Database as a Service, object storage, and sovereign AI services accessible via OpenAI- compatible APIs, all running on its own Swiss infrastructure. Infomaniak also develops a sovereign collaborative suite — messaging, email, storage, online office tools, videoconferencing, and a built-in AI assistant — developed in- house and as a privacy-respecting solution to proprietary platforms. Open source is central to how Infomaniak operates. Its latest data center (D4) runs on 100% renewable energy and uses no traditional cooling: all the heat generated by its servers is captured and fed into Geneva's district heating network, supplying up to 6,000 homes in winter and hot water year-round. The entire project has been documented and open-sourced at d4project.org.

Our Gold sponsors are:

• Freexian, Freexian specializes in Free Software with a particular focus on Debian GNU/Linux. Freexian can assist with consulting, training, technical support, packaging, or software development on projects involving use or development of Free software. All of Freexian's employees and partners are well-known contributors in the Free Software community, a choice that is integral to Freexian's business model.

• Viridien an advanced technology, digital and Earth data company that pushes the boundaries of science for a more prosperous and sustainable future. Viridien has been using Debian-based systems to power most of its HPC infrastructure and its cloud platform since 2009 and currently employs two active Debian Project Members.

Our Silver sponsors are:

• Arm: leading technology provider of processor IP, Arm powered solutions have been supporting innovation for more than 30 years and are deployed in over 280 billion chips to date.
• Pexip brings the ease of commercial video platforms to secure and sovereign environments without compromising control or performance.
• The Bern University of Applied Sciences with around 7,959 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital.
• Ubuntu, the Operating System delivered by Canonical.
• OS-Sci, Open Source Science is a world-leading institution dedicated to teaching computer science through Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
• gcoop, a free software development company with over 19 years of market experience, organized as a worker cooperative, promoting best practices in software development.
• Qualcomm Technologies, one of the world's leading companies in field of mobile technology, sponsors and contributes to Open Source developer communities that drive collaboration.
• Civil Infrastructure Platform, a collaborative project hosted by the Linux Foundation, establishing an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software.
• Siemens is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure and transport.
• Collabora, a global consultancy delivering Open Source software solutions to the commercial world.
• NERDEARLA, the largest free tech event in the Spanish-speaking world.

Bronze sponsors:

• Loongson,
• credativ,
• Google,
• SpacemiT,

And finally, our Supporter level sponsors:

• Altus Metrum,
• Loongson Hobbyists Community,
• Secretaría de Tecnologías para la Gestión de la Provincia de Santa Fe

A special thanks to the Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas - FICH UNL, our Venue Partner!

Thanks to all our sponsors for their support! Their contributions enable a diverse global community of Debian developers and maintainers to collaborate, support one another, and share knowledge at DebConf26.

Running Graphical Applications in Incus Containers

I didn't know how easy it is to display the graphical console of a virtual machine until I tried recently.

$ sudo apt install virt-viewer
$ incus launch images:debian/trixie test --vm
$ incus console test --type=vga

That's it.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 325. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix tests to work with zipdetails 4.0008. (Closes: #1141359)
* Downgrade debhelper compatibility level to 13 for now.
* Update copyright years.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.