Since I wrote about my fly30 ice skates, I'd continued to battle pain around the navicular bone in my feet. The action that seems to have finally fixed it was to perform a "punch out": a very localized remoulding of the area of the boot that presses against the sore area.

I basically followed the process from this helpful YouTube video.

I narrowed down the exact spot by borrowing some lipstick and transferring it from my navicular bone to the boot lining, then making that more permanent with a sharpie.

My punch was a spare part from a radiator valve which I packed with US cents (I couldn't fit any UK coins in). For the receiving-end, I tried another part from the radiator valve but I think it wasn't sufficiently larger than the punch to work well, so I swapped that out for a spoon.

take 2

I didn't have a temperature sensor I could use and I used a heat gun rather than a hairdryer, so I YOLO'd it a little. Some of the wrap on one of my boots is now distorted from where I didn't move the heat gun enough. It only took a minute or two to get the boot hot enough to be flexible. I set a 15 minute timer once the clamp was in place.

I've only skated one session since I did this but the pain seems to have gone! It's remarkably freeing to be skating without constantly trying to manage pain. Now I can focus on technique.

Debian Contributions: 2026-07

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf 26 organization, by Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano Rincón, Stefano Rivera and Antonio Terceiro

The 27th Annual Debian Conference was held in Santa Fe, Argentina, and several Freexian fellows were quite busy by being involved in the organization team.

• Santiago continued helping with duties related to the local team, e.g. preparing or proof-reading some announcements, reviewing the proposed food and the menus for the different diet required.
• During the conference, Kanashiro and Santiago also carried over tasks related to the content of the conference, including updating the schedule as it became necessary during the event.
• Stefano worked within the core video team, setting up equipment in talk rooms and coordinating the live video streaming. Stefano also supported the front desk and local organisers as a website developer and conference book-keeper.
• Antonio kept working on website maintenance, specially in support of the content team. During DebConf he also ran a hands-on workshop to help interested contributors get started with developing the DebConf websites.

d-i VLAN support, by Colin Watson

In environments that use IEEE 802.1Q VLANs, some hosts (such as routers attached to “trunk” ports) may need to apply VLAN tags themselves rather than relying on switches to do so. There has been a long-running request to add support for these to the Debian installer with a proposed patch set put together by several people over the years, and a Freexian customer asked us to help get this over the line. Colin reviewed the latest version of the patch set, applied a number of corrections, added Netplan support, spent some time testing a variety of possible paths through the installer, and landed this. There’s also now documentation for this in the next version of the installation guide.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles wrote documentation for installing Mailman3 and migrating from Mailman2. Added it into Mailman3 upstream documentation.
• Carles, using po-debconf-manager: reviewed 2 packages, submitted 2 packages
• Carles organized Catalan translation update. Created a Debian Wiki page to have an overview of the work / coordination during next months. Reviewed and submitted some pages.
• Carles improved the documentation for building the debian.org Web in MR 1154 and MR 1557. Fixed debian-reference documentation. Added sections on Mutt Wiki page (handling of mailto, viewing HTML parts web browser), update and improve bash-completion Wiki page. Added a troubleshooting section in Signal Wiki.
• Thorsten did another upload of hplip to fix RC bugs. He also spent some time taking care of older bugs. Most of the time such bugs had been fixed in a previous upload but haven’t been closed in the BTS. He also uploaded a new upstream version of foomatic-db. Last but not least, he gave some user support with the package epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. There seems to be a new software available for Epson printers. Unfortunately the license is not compatible with DFSG and so this software will never make it into Debian.
• During DebCamp 26, the Golang team had a dedicated Sprint to transition the Golang toolchain (namely on dh-golang) to make builds aware of the module defined upstream with the aim of solving important issues. To help in these efforts, Santiago made changes in the Salsa CI pipeline and documented on how to use it to check if a package requires adjustments after the toolchain update.
• Santiago continued co-mentoring Aryan Karamtoth on the Linux livepatching project, specifically providing feedback about the implementation of dlp-tools.
• Stefano reviewed and merged a migration of Debian reimbursements from wkhtmltopdf to weasyprint, unblocking an upgrade to Debian trixie.
• Stefano’s cPython upstream merge request adding multiarch tags to stable ABI extensions was finally merged.
• Stefano iterated on his upstream cPython merge request to add CI coverage for Debian’s multi-arch expectations.
• Stefano uploaded Python 3.15.0 beta 4 to Debian experimental.
• Stefano uploaded Python 3.13 to trixie, fixing a regression in a previous trixie point update he made.
• Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts.
• Helmut sent patches for three cross build failures.
• Helmut proposed a MR to port piuparts to pathlib.
• Antonio has done quite some work on Debian CI, including rebuilding the Debian CI armhf/armel worker VMs, and releasing debci 4.2, implementing a backup scheme, and several improvements to the codebase such as improving the incus-lxc backend in preparation for switching to the upcoming switch to using it by default as announced in the latest bits from the ci.debian.net operators.
• Emilio helped with transitions, particularly with Python 3.14 as default and Perl 5.42. During the Perl transition, an issue was identified with how britney schedules autopkgtests for binNMUs, and that testing was reverted for the time being.
• Colin restructured openssh-* binary packages to better support the upcoming GSS-API package split. This caused several autopkgtest regressions in other packages because openssh-server no longer depends on openssh-client, all of which have fixes either pending review or merged now.
• Lucas started a discussion around the creation of a Debian packaging video course for newcomers in the context of the Outreach team.
• Lucas reviewed some contributions to ruby3.4 and provided feedback.
• Anupa worked with Jean-Pierre Giraud on the point release announcements for Debian 13.6 and Debian 12.15.
• Anupa joined Jean-Pierre Giraud to prepare the Micronews for DebConf 26 press coverage.

This event is happening soon — see below for registration instructions!

We are extremely pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds summit, which will take place from September 22nd—24th 2026 in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden.

This year, we are thrilled to host the tenth edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Vienna (2025), Hamburg (2023—2024), Venice (2022), Marrakesh (2019), Paris (2018), Berlin (2017), Berlin (2016) and Athens (2015).

If you’re excited about joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page which has more details about the event and location. As in previous years, we will be sending invitations to all those who attended our previous summit events or expressed interest to do so. However, even if you do not receive a personal invitation, please do email the organizers and we will find a way to accommodate you.

About the event

The Reproducible Builds Summit is a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving.

Schedule

Although the exact content of the meeting will be shaped by the participants, the main goals will include:

• Update & exchange about the status of reproducible builds in various projects.
• Improve collaboration both between and inside projects.
• Expand the scope and reach of reproducible builds to more projects.
• Work together and hack on solutions.
• Establish space for more strategic and long-term thinking than is possible in virtual channels.
• Brainstorm designs on tools enabling users to get the most benefits from reproducible builds.
• Discuss how reproducible builds will be usable and meaningful to users and developers alike.

Logs and minutes will be published after the meeting.

Location & date

• Clarion Hotel Draken, Olof Palmes Plats 2, 413 30 Göteborg, Sweden. (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps)
• September 22nd to September 24th 2026.

Registration instructions

Please reach out if you’d like to participate in hopefully interesting, inspiring and intense technical sessions about reproducible builds and beyond!

We look forward to what we anticipate to be yet another extraordinary event!