• SnowCamp 2020

  This is just a late reminder that there are still some seats available for SnowCamp, taking place at the end of this week and during the whole weekend somewhere in the Italian mountains.

  I believe it will be a really nice opportunity to hack on Debian things and thus I'd hope that there won't be empty seats, though atm this is the case.

• Ben Armstrong: Introducing Dronefly, a Discord bot for naturalists

  In the past few years, since first leaving Debian as a free software developer in 2016, I’ve taken up some new hobbies, or more accurately, renewed my interest in some old ones.

  During that hiatus, I also quietly un-retired from Debian, anticipating there would be some way to contribute to the project in these new areas of interest. That’s still an idea looking for the right opportunity to present itself, not to mention the available time to get involved again.

  With age comes an increasing clamor of complaints from your body when you have a sedentary job in front of a screen, and hobbies that rarely take you away from it. You can’t just plunk down in front of a screen and do computer stuff non-stop & just bounce back again at the start of each new day. So in the past several years, getting outside more started to improve my well-being and address those complaints. That revived an old interest in me: nature photography. That, in turn, landed me at iNaturalist, re-ignited my childhood love of learning about the natural world, & hooked me on a regular habit of making observations & uploading them to iNat ever since.

  Second, back in the late nineties, I wrote a little library loans renewal reminder project in Python. Python was a pleasure to work with, but that project never took off and soon was forgotten. Now once again, decades later, Python is a delight to be writing in, with its focus on writing readable code & backed by a strong culture of education.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 618

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 618 for the week of February 9 – 15, 2020.

Sparky 2020.02.1 “Po Tolo” of the (semi-)rolling line is out. It is based on the testing branch of Debian “Bullseye”.

This is a minor update, which temporary fixes a problem of installing Sparky via Calamares with kpmcore 4.

Changes between Sparky 2020.02 and 2020.02.1:
• system upgraded from Debian testing repos as of February 13, 2020
• kpmcore downgraded to version 3.3.0
• Calamares installer rebuild using libkpmcore7 3.3.0

No system reinstallation is required, simply keep Sparky up to date.

Unlike my usual Raspberry Pi hacks, the kiosk would need a monitor and a window system. So instead of my usual Raspbian Lite install, I opted for a full Raspbian desktop image.

Mistake. First, the Raspbian desktop is very slow. I intended to use a Pi Zero W for the kiosk, but even on a Pi 3 the desktop was sluggish.

More important, the desktop is difficult to configure. For instance, a kiosk needs to keep the screen on, so I needed to disable the automatic screen blanking. There are threads all over the web asking how to disable screen blanking, with lots of solutions that no longer apply because Raspbian keeps changing where desktop configuration files are stored.

Incredibly, the official Raspbian answer for how to disable screen blanking in the desktop — I can hardly type, I'm laughing so hard — is: install xscreensaver, which will then add a configuration option to turn off the screensaver. (I actually tried that just to see if it would work, but changed my mind when I saw the long list of dependencies xscreensaver was going to pull in.)

I never did find a way to disable screen blanking, and after a few hours of fighting with it, I decided it wasn't worth it. Setting up Raspbian Lite is so much easier and I already knew how to do it. If I didn't, Die Antwort has a nice guide, Setup a Raspberry Pi to run a Web Browser in Kiosk Mode, that uses my preferred window manager, Openbox. Here are my steps, starting with a freshly burned Raspbian Lite SD card.

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.