Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged english

Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian installation system, observing how using eatmydata could speed up the installation quite a bit.

The Coz profiler, a nice profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented multi-threaded program, finally made it into Debian unstable yesterday.

A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end encryption with friends and family.

A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT Mindstorms controller as a birthday present.

In July I wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working without the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).

The Isenkram system provide a practical and easy way to figure out which packages support the hardware in a given machine.

In April we started to work on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on how to set up and administrate a Debian system.

This summer, I read a great article "coz: This Is the Profiler You're Looking For" in USENIX ;login: about how to profile multi-threaded programs.

As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published a French and Norwegian translation of the classic Free Culture book by the founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.

Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf 16 across an entire country?

Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved to be a slight challenge.

For a while now, I have wanted to test the Signal app, as it is said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my friends and family are already using it.

When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out which multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats / MIME types, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types the various players claimed support for.

Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.

A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and the current President of the Tor project, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG).

The isenkram system is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware related packages.

Yesterday I updated the battery-stats package in Debian with a few patches sent to me by skilled and enterprising users.

A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.

I just donated to the NUUG defence "fond" to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news site popcorn-time.no tested in court.

Today, after many years of hard work from many people, ZFS for Linux finally entered Debian.

Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in Debian claim support for most file formats.

A friend of mine made me aware of The Pyra, a handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.

It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of the Norwegian Unix User group, a member association for those of us believing in free software, open standards and unix-like operating systems.

I first got to know I.F.

I'm happy to report that the French paperback edition of my project to translate the Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on Lulu.com.

During this weekends bug squashing party and developer gathering, we decided to do our part to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the Debian Administrator's Handbook project to

Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.

Two years ago, I had a look at trusted timestamping options available, and among other things noted a still open bug in the tsget script included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl as a trusted timestamping client.

Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for later processing and graphing.

Back in 2013 I proposed a way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice.

Back in September, I blogged about the system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery, and how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).

Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to details.

The appstream system is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.

Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).

During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum observed that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to believe a computer have a given security hole if it download a security fix from a Debian mirror.

When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to call the car license plate numbers in those days.

Around three years ago, I created the isenkram system to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing hardware related packages.

A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled "The GPL is not magic pixie dust" explain the importance of making sure the GPL is enforced.

I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to set it up properly.

In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.

People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Free Culture.

Click here to buy the book.

Last year, US president candidate in the Democratic Party Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.

The movie "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" is both inspiring and depressing at the same time.

As I wrap up the Norwegian version of Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great dblatex helper and developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a to try to c…

When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.

Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.

Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few years arrived in the mail.

Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.

I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.