Snowless winter in Himalayas – another sign of climate change

Lack of snow could mean water shortages for millions across Asia

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/environment/tibet-snowless-winter-01232024144224.html

#MassExtinction #pollution #ecology #environment #climate #Himalayas

This is great! Cars going over the safe speed limits is legitimately dangerous, and automatically preventing that from happening seems like it’s worthwhile. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/car-speed-governors-bill-18624126.php

Many years ago, my father set out to create a book that would help new spinal-cord-injury victims come to terms with (and love) their new life. The result, called Options, was widely distributed in rehabilitation centers for years and helped thousands of people before finally going out of print.

Inspired by the creation of the Full Circle film, which quotes extensively from the book, we have been working to bring Options back. Now, we're happy to say that Options is available, under the Creative Commons SA 4.0 license, in a number of forms. Enjoy!

As an aside, I have to say that the tools for scanning and OCR work have gotten pretty good. All of this was made possible by SANE, unpaper, tesseract, Sphinx, and surely some other tools I'm forgetting now.

Folks, I can't take this on. If you want to take it on, I'll give advice.

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/zip/d/san-francisco-vhs-tapes/7707937218.html

Linux v6.8-rc1 comes with new document describing coding style for DTS (Devicetree sources):
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/bindings/dts-coding-style.html

This marks the end of many unwritten rules, varying between subsystems and maintainers. At least, like with every coding style document, in theory. :)

Whenever I read Nathan Chancellors recaps I always go and look at what
my contributions look like (see https://nathanchance.dev/posts/2023-cbl-retrospective/
for his far more comprehensive retrospective than my own brief look).

In 2023 this is what they looked like:

Authored: 123
Reported: 8
Tested: 29
Acked: 412
Reviewed: 372

In comparison, 2022 looked like:

Authored: 181
Reported: 21
Tested: 28
Acked: 45
Reviewed: 92

Two rather different years in terms of my kernel contributions, that's
for sure. In March or April I started co-maintaining dt-bindings, which
is the reason for the massive growth in terms of ack/review tags.
The number that is there is probably also underselling the amount of
reviewing actually done, since I usually avoid leaving a tag on vN of a
patch when one of the other maintainers already has, even if I spent a
bunch of time reviewing v(N-1).

On another note, the number of reported-by tags dropped considerably - I
like to chalk that up to the riscv port becoming more stable :)

Bryan O'Donoghue and and Hans de Goede will be presenting "A fully open source stack for MIPI cameras" at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February at 13:30 in UD2.120 (Chavanne) as part of the Embedded Mobile and Automotive Devroom.

https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3013-a-fully-open-source-stack-for-mipi-cameras/

Released picolibc version 1.8.6 today.
Highlights: ctype avoids a static array, fenv functions are inlined (except on x86).
Full release notes here: https://github.com/picolibc/picolibc/releases/tag/1.8.6

"mq-deadline doesn't scale!" complaints are apparently rampant, so I spent a bit of time looking into that and wrote a few patches to address the basics. 100+% improvement, obviously the complaints were right.

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-block/20240118180541.930783-1-axboe@kernel.dk/

Now waiting for folks to poke holes in it.

After 4 years the strlcpy() API has been fully removed from the Linux kernel. Long live strscpy().
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d26270061ae66b915138af7cd73ca6f8b85e6b44

Next up, strncpy()!
https://github.com/KSPP/linux/issues/90

The @kicad Fund Drive bar is already at 10% with $10576 donated, keep it coming :)

"We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value [replacement value for each firm that uses the software] is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148

“A publisher told me that his (successful) business operated on the rule of thumb that 80% of books were not read by the purchaser - they were either gifts or found their way onto glass tables or dusty bookshelves

…That's why we like to say a record collection defines who you are, and a book collection defines who you really want to be.”

Will Page in the Winter 2023 issue of The Author

Camembert is an endangered species! It relies on a mold that had lost the ability to reproduce sexually... and now, thanks to inbreeding, this mold has also lost the ability to reproduce using spores. Roquefort is also in trouble, but for Camembert it's worse:

"The world over, this other symbol of French gastronomy is inoculated exclusively with one single strain of Penicillium camemberti, a white mutant that was selected for Brie cheeses in 1898 and Camemberts in 1902.

The problem is that ever since then the strain has been replicated by vegetative propagation only. Until the 1950s, Camemberts still had grey, green or in some cases orange-tinged moulds on their surface. But the industry was not fond of these colours, considering them unappealing, and staked everything on the albino strain of P. camemberti, which is completely white and moreover has a silky texture. This is how Camembert acquired its now-characteristic pure white rind.

Year after year, generation after generation, the albino strain of P. camemberti, which was already incapable of sexual reproduction, lost its ability to produce asexual spores. As a result it is now very difficult for the entire industry to obtain enough P. camemberti spores to inoculate their production of the famous Norman cheese.

Worse still, while the Roquefort PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) standard retains a degree of microbial biodiversity, the PDO specifications for Camembert require farmers and other producers to use P. camemberti exclusively."

What to do about it? Switch to eating American cheese, or Velveeta? Read on....

(1/2)

This is Metsokangas elementary school in the far suburbs of Oulu 🇫🇮. It was -31°C in the morning (-40° windchill). What you see here is just 1 of the 4 parking lots for students. It's not about the cold, it's the safe infrastructure & excellent maintenance. No rocket science.
#MeanwhileInOulu #Oulu #BikeTooter
1/

Day four of no power and no Internet. This big tree is the reason. One among hundreds in the area, but this is the one that took out *our* power and Internet.

PGE (Portland General Electric) claims we should get power back by 10pm today, but the ice storm arrives today, so we'll see.

Edit: well, it looks like PGE fixed the outage by just removing me from the outage database, not by actually reconnecting power. That was the second time that happened, so I re-re-reported the outage. Not that I was hugely optimistic about the 10pm timeframe, but it looks even less likely now.

I'm excited to announce I've joined @olofj's RISC-V Software team at Tenstorrent! If you aren't familiar with Tenstorrent, then check this recent talk from CEO Jim Keller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPX1H3jW8ZQ

I'm against capital punishment in general, but I might be convinced to keep it on the books for product designers who put the screws under glued-on rubber feet

"In #RHEL 9, we upgraded the ISA baseline to the x86-64-v2 microarchitecture level. For RHEL 10, we are exploring whether we can go a step further, to the x86-64-v3 level."

From Florian Weimer: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/01/02/exploring-x86-64-v3-red-hat-enterprise-linux-10