Paul Sutton

Debconf 2021 – Planning meeting : August 9th Reminder

The next planning meeting for this years Debian Conference will TODAY. Monday 9th August @ 18:00 UTC (19:00 United Kingdom time UTC+1) on IRC.

LINKS

1 Debconf 2021 Website 1a Contact info 2 Mailing list sign up 3 OFTC IRC 4 Poster (work in progress)

5 Salsa Gitlab

TAGS

#Debian,#Conference,#Developer,#Planning,#Meeting

CONTACT

The Mailing list sign up page has a sign up form, however you can just send a message to the e-mail address given to request more information, you need to ask for replies to be cc'd to you.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

DebConf 21 Schedule

The schedule for this years DebConf has been published. The following is from the announcement e-mail

The schedule for DebConf21 Online has just been finalized, and is now public.

DebConf21 will run from Tuesday, August 24th, to Saturday, August 28th. Despite that, we have a schedule full of activities, and those 5 days will be full of content for the Debian community.

Talks will be presented in two parallel “rooms”. “Talks 1” will have talks in
English, while “Talks 2” will host some talks English, but also talks in the
Indian languages (Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu), organized by the Debian India community, and well as talks in Portuguese, organized by the Debian Brazil team.

You can check out the [1]full schedule, and the full [2]list of talks. For
those interested, we also provide a [3]mobile-friendly schedule.

[1] https://debconf21.debconf.org/schedule/ [2] https://debconf21.debconf.org/talks/ [3] https://debconf21.debconf.org/schedule/mobile/

#DebConf,#Debian,#Online,#Developer,#Conference

15,000-year-old viruses discovered in Tibetan glacier ice

Another interesting article from Science Daily [1] [2]

Summary:
    Scientists who study glacier ice have found viruses nearly 15,000 years old in two ice samples taken from the Tibetan Plateau in China. Most of those viruses, which survived because they had remained frozen, are unlike any viruses that have been cataloged to date. 

So if life can exist in these extreme environments on Earth, could life also exist on other planets, moons in the solar system or Exoplanets and or Exomoons around other stars that have similar conditions.

“These are viruses that would have thrived in extreme environments,” said Matthew Sullivan, co-author of the study, professor of microbiology at Ohio State and director of Ohio State’s Center of Microbiome Science

So while the question of life out side of Earth is not the subject of this paper it does, for me at least, prompts the question could those conditions support life (even viruses) under any frozen surfaces.

I have created a discourse discussion for this [3]. The article is under Biology.

There is also a link here and on discourse to an explanation of 'habitable zone' means. [4] so this states “neither too hot nor too cold”

Links

1 Science Daily 2 Article Link 3 Discourse Link 4 Habitable zome

Tags

#Science,#Virus,#Cold,#Exoplanets,#Life,#Exomoons,#Questions

Springboks v British & Irish Lions – 3rd Test

Date : 07/08/2021 Venue : Johannesburg, FNB Stadium Time : 17h00 (BST)

• Lions Tour Website
• Fixtures

#RugbyUnion,#British,#Irish,#Lions,#Tour,#SouthAfrica,#2021

DEBIAN CONSOLE FONTS

I have found another way to change the Default Linux console font to something that is more readable, from the default which is really small text. The instructions are at [1]. This works on my current Debian [2] 11.0 set up, but as usual Your mileage may vary. If you ask on a forum, social media or IRC about this, please quote the website below [1] and not this blog post.

The contents of my /etc/default/console-setup are now as follows:-

 1 # CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON
  2 
  3 # Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.
  4 
  5 ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"
  6 CHARMAP="UTF-8"
  7 CODESET="guess"
  8 FONTFACE="TerminusBold"
  9 FONTSIZE="16x32"
 10 SCREEN_WIDTH="80"
 11 
 12 VIDEOMODE=
 13 
 14 # The following is an example how to use a braille font
 15 # FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz brl-8x8.psf'
 16 

Hopefully this is useful.

For the record my settings are:-

ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"

CHARMAP="UTF-8"

CODESET="guess"
FONTFACE="TerminusBold"
FONTSIZE="16x32"
SCREEN_WIDTH="80"

VIDEOMODE=

REFERENCES

1. How to change your linux console fonts 2 Debian 3 Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#FreeSoftware,#Debian,#Console,#Fonts,#Change

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, AND SPACE: TEACHING SECONDARY SCIENCE

Just completed the above course with Future Learn. Hoping this will help me as a Teaching Assistant or Lab technician in a school.

Links

• FutureLearn

Tags

#Physics,#Astronomy,#Space,#Secondary,#Science,#Learning, #FutureLearn

Materials Science Development 2/8/2021

Manganese could make luminescent materials and the conversion of sunlight more sustainable

Sounds like an interesting development. You can read more on Science Daily [2]. I think the significant part of this discovery is that Manganese [2] is cheaper and more readily available. Please feel free, to open a thread on Discourse [3] in order to discuss further.

Links

1 Main Article 2 Royal Society of Chemistry – Manganese 3 Discourse

Tags

#Science,#ScienceDaily,#Materials,#Managnese,#Liminescent,#Sunlight,#Chemistry

LibreOffice 7 – File open with content problem

I was recently sent some files by my local library in relation to Code Club. Essentially some draft flyers. Upon opening, I seem to be getting the content, plus remnants of some previous file content.

• file 1
• file 2

Both are docx files. Hopefully these can be downloaded, however I do acknowledge gitlab is not the best place for these types of files generally as it is meant to be for code. I am not sure how else to easily share files.

These seem to appear as

I am not too sure what is causing this. I am using Debian 11 and LibreOffice 7.

I know that MS office can keep previous versions of a file, so not sure if this issue has something to do with that.

This is what it should look like

Happy to try and diagnose further with some help.

This has now been reported as a bug here

Freedom ladder – From the Free Software Foundation 5/8/2021

Introduction

The “freedom ladder” is a new method the FSF campaigns team has developed to help users get their first start in software freedom.

One problem with most guides introducing newcomers to GNU/Linux is that they stop them too soon on their “journey to freedom,” and end up suggesting that a partially nonfree setup is a desirable outcome. By contrast, our guides focus is to encourage users to not rest content with nonfree software, while at the same time recognizing that they have other pressures and obligations. We want to help them stay both motivated and determined in their gradual process to eliminate nonfree software from their lives. 

• Details here

Previous meetings have been excellent with lots to chat and think about.

Next meeting is Thursday 5th August 2021. 16:00 to 17:00 Eastern Time on IRC (chat) and will be looking at *Learning how to find help / Trying a free operating system *.

This is going to be 21:00 UK time I think.

#FreeSoftwareFoundation,#Promotion,#Assstance,#Software

The Importance of Small Objects: Exocomets

This is the August public lecture from the Space Telescope Science Institute

• Space Telescope Science Institute
• Lecture page
• Discourse Discussion

#Science,#Space,#stsci,#Telescope,#Astronomy