A piecepack set of generic board game pieces is nice to have around in case of a sudden spontaneous need of gaming, but carrying my full set takes some room, and is not going to fit in my daily bag.

I've been thinking for a while that an half-size set could be useful, and between yesterday and today I've actually managed to do the first version.

It's (2d) printed on both sides of a single sheet of heavy paper, laminated and then cut, comes with both the basic suites and the playing card expansion and fits in a mint tin divided by origami boxes.

It's just version 0.1 because there are a few issues: first of all I'm not happy with the manual way I used to draw the page: ideally it would have been programmatically generated from the same svg files as the 3d piecepack (with the ability to generate other expansions), but apparently reading paths from an svg and writing it in another svg is not supported in an easy way by the libraries I could find, and looking for it was starting to take much more time than just doing it by hand.

I also still have to assemble the dice; in the picture above I'm just using the ones from the 3d-printed set, but they are a bit too big and only four of them fit in the mint tin. I already have the faces printed, so this is going to be fixed in the next few days.

Source files are available in the same git repository as the 3d-printable piecepack, with the big limitation mentioned above; updates will also be pushed there, just don't hold your breath for it :)

Andfrnd Uploader Beta

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I think this is a good time to remind the Free Software World, especially the part of it based on a certain programming language¹, of the existence of this Debconf Talk (textual, not (too) titillating discussion of N S F W topics).

¹ one that is not my programming language, but even that programming language is ok if used on your own server with a consenting sysadmin.

When I set up my XMPP server, a friend of mine asked if I was willing to have a virtualhost with his domain on my server, using the same address as the email.

Setting up prosody and the SRV record on the DNS was quite easy, but then we stumbled on the issue of certificates: of course we would like to use letsencrypt, but as far as we know that means that we would have to setup something custom so that the certificate gets renewed on his server and then sent to mine, and that looks more of a hassle than just him setting up his own prosody/ejabberd on his server.

So I was wondering: dear lazyweb, did any of you have the same issue and already came up with a solution that is easy to implement and trivial to maintain that we missed?

From the answer to the last question on fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event…

# this_was_too_epic_not_to_do_this
# what_do_you_mean_this_is_not_tumblr?
# of_course_it's_not,_this_is_federated!
# also_my_screncapping_skills_are_not_tumblr_grade

And, for a person I know who complains about screencaps, this is the transcript:

but remember the GPL was designed to defend your freedom
and the conversation you're actually having is
how much freedom can we take away, please tell us!
and we say "you are not allowed to take away any freedom"
but can we take away a little bit of freedom?
well you have to ask a lawyer
why should we have to ask a lawyer how much freedom we can take away?
you should tell us how much we can oppress you
don't fall in that trap

I may have been sewing myself a new pajama.

It was plagued with issues; one of the sleeve is wrong side out and I only realized it when everything was almost done (luckily the pattern is symmetric and it is barely noticeable) and the swirl moved while I was sewing it on (and the sewing machine got stuck multiple times: next time I'm using interfacing, full stop.), and it's a bit deformed, but it's done.

For the swirl, I used Inkscape to Simplify (Ctrl-L) the original Debian Swirl a few times, removed the isolated bits, adjusted some spline nodes by hand and printed on paper. I've then cut, used water soluble glue to attach it to the wrong side of a scrap of red fabric, cut the fabric, removed the paper and then pinned and sewed the fabric on the pajama top.
As mentioned above, the next time I'm doing something like this, some interfacing will be involved somewhere, to keep me sane and the sewing machine happy.

Blogging, because it is somewhat relevant to Free Software :) and there are even sources, under a DFSG-Free license :)

#Treddi, la stampante 3d del @Gruppo Linux Como , per la prima volta SI MUOVE!!!

Ed altre foto della fiera di Erba su social.gl-como.it/photos/valha…

I will do another post later with the sources[esc]bdwapattern of the skirt (the shirtwaist is adapted from a commercial pattern) and more details, but this is the outfit I wore at Lucca Comics this year.

And this post is completely SFW *even* in an Edwardian workplace!

Andfrnd Uploader Beta

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As the libreboot website warns: there are issues with virtualization on x200 without microcode updated.

Virtualization is something that I use, and I have a number of VMs on that laptop, managed with libvirt; since it has microcode version 1067a, I decided to try and see if I was being lucky and virtualization was working anyway.

The result is that the machines no longer start: the kernel loads, and then it crashes and reboots. I don't remember why, however, I tried to start a debian installer CD (iso) I had around, and that one worked.

So, I decided to investigate a bit more: apparently a new installation done from that iso (debian-8.3.0-amd64-i386-netinst.iso) boots and works with no problem, while my (older, I suspect) installations don't. I tried to boot one of the older VMs with that image in recovery mode, tried to chroot in the original root and got failed to run command '/bin/bash': Exec format error.

Since that shell was lacking even the file command, I tried then to start a live image, and choose the lightweight debian-live-8.0.0-amd64-standard.iso: that one didn't start in the same way as the existing images.

Another try with debian-live-8.5.0-i386-lxde-desktop.iso confirmed that apparently Debian > 8.3 works, Debian 8.0 doesn't (I don't have ISOs for versions 8.1 and 8.2 to bisect properly the issue).

I've skimmed the release notes for 8.3 and noticed that there was an update in the intel-microcode package, but AFAIK the installer doesn't have anything from non-free, and I'm sure that non-free wasn't enabled on the VMs.

My next attempt (thanks tosky on #debian-it for suggesting this obvious solution that I was missing :) ) was to run one of the VMs with plain qemu instead of kvm and bring it up-to-date: the upgrade was successful and included the packages in this screenshot, but on reboot it's still not working as before.

Right now, I think I will just recreate from scratch the images I need, but when I'll have time I'd like to investigate the issue a bit more, so hopefully there will be a part 2 to this article.

found on teh interwebz, no idea where it comes from (if you do, please tell me in the comments)

edit: it was as easy as actually opening imgur with javascript on: the source is brendangregg.com/linuxperf.htm…

@Gruppo Linux Como

Since apparently only the Belgians can have nice things, yesterday made myself a couple of notebooks with removable sheets.

Advantages:

* does not require a trip to Belgium¹.
* Respects one international standard (ISO 838), and the sheets can be stored in a regular binder after I'm done writing them.
* I've had fun making them.

Disadvantages:

* Adding and removing sheets is easy, but not as easy as the real thing.

The .scad file for the rings is quite trivial, but if there are requests I can publish it somewhere.

¹ yes, I know that the website lists distributors for my country, but I've never seen it sold anywhere.

Andfrnd Uploader Beta

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With Debconf being in South Africa, a lot of people (like me) probably weren't able to attend and are missing the cheese and wine party, mao games and general socialization that is happening there.

One thing we don't have to miss, however, are the talks: as usual the video team is doing a great job recording and streaming all talks so that people can still participate a bit from their home.

What they do, however, requires a lot of manpower, so if you are attending Debconf please consider volunteering to help: from my experience last year they are very nice people who are welcoming towards new contributors and they have periodical training sessions to help people getting started with the various tasks. More informations about video team meetings and training session are in the topic of the IRC channel, #debconf-video@OFTC.

I don't think there are cookies involved (which just proves that the video team isn't evil), but you may get a t-shirt and you will get a warm fuzzy feeling of having helped people around the world.

@Debian #debconf

About one year ago, during my first Debconf, I've felt the need for some way to tell people whether I was busy on my laptop doing stuff that required concentration or just passing some time between talks etc. and available for interruptions, socialization or context switches.

One easily available method of course would have been to ping me on IRC (and then probably go on chatting on it while being in the same room, of course :) ), but I wanted to try something that allowed for less planning and worked even in places with less connectivity.

My first idea was a base laptop sticker with two statuses and then a removable one used to cover the wrong status and point to the correct one, and I still think it would be nice, but having it printed is probably going to be somewhat expensive, so I shelved the project for the time being.

Lately, however, I've been playing with hexagonal stickers and decided to design something on this topic, whith the result in the figure above, with the “hacking” sticker being my first choice, and the “concentrating” alternative probably useful while surrounded by people who may misunderstand the term “hacking”.

While idly looking around for sticker printing prices I realized that it didn't necessarly have to be a sticker and started to consider alternatives.

One format I'm trying is inspired by "do not disturb" door signs: I've used some laminating pouches I already had around which are slightly bigger than credit-card format (but credit-card size would also work of course ) and cut a notch so that they can be attached to the open lid of a laptop.

They seem to fit well on my laptop lid, and apart from a bad tendency to attract every bit of lint in a radius of a few meters the form factor looks good. I'll try to use them at the next conference to see if they actually work for their intended purpose.

SVG sources (and a PDF) are available on my website under the CC-BY-SA license.

This evening I've played around a bit with the Sticker Constructor Specification and its template, and this is the result:

Now I just have to:

* find somebody in Europe who prints good stickers and doesn't require illustrator (or other proprietary software) to submit files for non-rectangular shapes
* find out which Debian team I should contact to submit the files so that they can be used by everybody interested.

But neither will happen today, nor probably tomorrow, because lazy O:-)

Edit: now that I'm awake I realized I forgot to thank @Enrico Zini Zini and MadameZou for their help in combining my two proposals in a better design.

Source svg

Una serie di corsi gratuiti su coursera non saranno piu' disponibili a partire dal 30 giugno. Scaricateli prima che scompaiano!

medium.freecodecamp.com/the-da…

Corrispondente primaverile del Linux Day, il Linux Presentation Day è un evento europeo nel corso del quale i gruppi locali di utenti Linux e Software Libero si mettono a disposizione del pubblico per far conoscere il loro mondo, rispondere a domande, mostrare opportunità poco conosciute e — perché no? — divertirsi assieme.

Alcuni gruppi di utenti linux delle province di Varese e Como saranno a disposizione quel sabato pomeriggio, il 30 aprile, dalle 14:30 alle 19 a Tradate, presso il FaberLab in Viale Europa 4/a.

L'evento, a ingresso libero, non è rivolto a professionisti dell'informatica, ma al grande pubblico, e non prevede un programma prefissato di talk formali, ma spazi liberi dove conversare liberamente e senza vincoli di scalette di vari argomenti a seconda degli interessi specifici dei partecipanti.

@Gruppo Linux Como