dirkf

I worked on an OpenWrt-derived product for some years and I found their build system quite good. If I remember correctly it's based on buildroot but they went separate ways somewhere in the past?

In any case, I found it quite easy to add new packages, update existing ones, rebuild as needed, add support for new devices, image generation, ... Also, saving the build config and used package versions to rebuild the same image later was easy. Documentation could be better (obviously...) but there are plenty examples and one could always ask advice on IRC or mailing list.

I don't have experience with Buildroot, Yocto, OpenEmbedded, ... but at least the OpenWrt build system was much better than the homegrown stuff I worked with before...

So if you're looking to build software for a Linux-based device that has some networking functionality then you might want to look at OpenWrt. If not for OpenWrt as such then perhaps just the build system.

Can confirm this is a nice introduction to network programming; it's how I got started. Once you know the basics you can switch to the man pages for more details.

With a household of 4 and doing everything electrical (cooking, heating, hot water but no electric car) we use on average about 9-10 kWh per day. A bit more in the winter, a bit less in summer. This is a well-insulated, relatively recent house in western Europe. 100kWh seems excessive to me.

Devin Townsend? Floor Jansen?

I use https://blokada.org/index.html on Android.

But you have to keep an eye on it because it can get killed when Android(?) thinks it needs the resources for something else. The app has some options to help prevent this but it doesn't always seem to work.

Here in Belgium kindergarten and primary schools were reopened in June for about 3 weeks until summer holiday started. The kids didn't have to wear masks, nor the teachers while in front of their class. Teaching was more or less like before, albeit with a bit more distancing between teacher and kids.

Outside the classroom the kids from one class were not allowed to mix with kids from another. The playground was divided up in several areas and each class was assigned one. Breaks were in two shifts and all toys were washed in between (and rotated between areas). Dropping off and picking up the kids was also in two shifts and spread over as much entrances as possible to reduce contact with other bubbles. No parents allowed on the school premises.

As far as could be judged from those few weeks this didn't seem to impact the infection numbers. Even better was that the kids could have a more or less normal ending of the school year. If nothing changes my guess is that in September schools will start again in the same modus operandi, which I'm okay with.

But high school and up, that's a different matter...

It's still being developed: https://www.portsofcall.de/

Same thing here. I'm in Flemish Brabant, very close to the Antwerp border. Google Maps geoip puts me even more north. I have an English browser and OS (granted, with some Belgian regional settings). Yet a lot of web sites choose to show their French version as default.

And to top it off the language switch is often hidden away in some bottom corner so it takes you way too long to find it.

Give me back my old internet!

I work with (consumer) internet gateways and the like. In Broadcom's SoCs the main chip is ARM. They have been moving away from MIPS for a number of years.

I'm less familiar with other vendors but I briefly worked with a Qualcomm-based device a few years ago and that was also ARM.

There might be some dedicated cores in those SoCs or devices for e.g. accelerators or Wi-Fi handling. I've seen ARC there but I have the feeling these are also moving to ARM.

I've done something similar. At the side of the house I had a patch of around 50m^2 (I think...). Last year in spring I sowed a bunch of wildflower seeds bought from a local garden supplies store. It already bloomed quite nicely last summer but this spring it has already turned into an explosion of colorful flowers.

Also doesn't require much maintenance so far (which was one of the goals for that patch :) ). Before sowing it last spring I had it covered up for the winter with this tarp that still allows water through, after carefully removing all the weeds and plowing it in the fall. This year, as spring was slowing setting on, I removed the bigger pieces of dead material and sowed some extra seeds on bald spots. Still waiting if that is taking hold.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out so far, as are the (humble)bees, butterflies, ...

It doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

I've contributed a few small patches to some well-known open-source projects. In the months after that I've received a few automated mails from some CI systems informing me about some (un)successful build. Probably because somewhere somebody integrated a new version of said open-source projects in their product and the system is configured to mail every committer the outcome of the CI pipeline, regardless of whether that committer is actually an employee... Still sloppy ops though.

At work we also cache all 3rd party dependencies locally. Not because the 3rd party servers might be down but to be sure that one/two/... years from now we can still recreate the same software we delivered at that time to a customer. Our build machines typically didn't even have internet access. If a dependency was not available offline (due to developer error or whatever) we would know quickly.

In certain industry branches this is even mandatory if you want to be seriously considered as a supplier. If a build tool does not support reproducible builds in such a way (both fixing dependency version and getting it from a cache somehow) or makes it difficult then it is considered as a hobby toy that has no place in the workplace.

Even for small businesses I would advocate to take this seriously from the beginning. It's not that hard and will save you headaches later on when suddenly reproducible builds become important.

I work in that area. All consumer-grade router/gateway SoCs from Broadcom have been exclusively ARM for several years now. They were MIPS before.

Take a look at the other articles from the same author where he investigated some popular anti-virus products. In particular Kaspersky is/was a mess:

- https://palant.de/2019/08/19/kaspersky-in-the-middle-what-co...

- https://palant.de/2019/11/25/kaspersky-the-art-of-keeping-yo...

- https://palant.de/2019/11/26/internal-kaspersky-api-exposed-...

- https://palant.de/2019/11/27/assorted-kaspersky-vulnerabilit...

McAfee:

- https://palant.de/2019/12/02/rendering-mcafee-web-protection...

And I expect that he will publish more articles in the future.

If you want to use anti-virus I would stick to their on-access scanning and stay away from their web protection...

And please write proper commit messages!

A short summary, preferably including a hint at which subsystem is impacted by the change. Then explain in detail the context of the change: root cause of a bug and the gist of the solution, use case(s) behind a new feature and how it can be used, ...

Yes, often there's a bug/project tracking tool being used and the commit message contains a reference to the relevant entry there. But from experience I know these tools tend to change: old one gets decommissioned, data gets migrated, what was once the primary identifier is now a mere field or comment in the new system, access rights get messed up, ... Trying to understand the history then turns into an archeological expedition through various eras long gone... unless the commit messages are sufficiently self-containing.

Here in Belgium it is mandatory (for quite some years) with every new building development to install a tank capturing rain water from the roof. This water must be used for flushing toilets and you typically also use it to water the garden, wash your car, etc. With some extra (carbon) filters people also use it for their washing machine.

I have a 10000L tank which is more than sufficient for a household of 4 and some garden. The minimum size is calculated based on your roof surface but normally people install a bigger tank. The extra cost for a few 1000L more really isn't that much and it can save you the cost of a fallback system in case the tank runs dry.

The overflow of the tank goes to a separate sewage system that usually ends in a local stream. This way it doesn't dilute the actual grey/black water which, incidentally, makes a water treatment plant more effective (or so they say). It also allows the water to infiltrate into the ground and there's less risk of flooding the streets during a downpour. At least, this is the theory. Work is still very much in progress to split the sewage systems but we're getting there.

Air is a pretty bad transport agent for heat compared to water. To heat a house (and especially poorly insulated ones) the air either has to be rather hot or flow pretty fast. The former is not very comfortable because of the large temperature gradients and it can cause a 'scorched dust' smell. The latter is also not very comfortable when you're in the flow path, it's noisy and the increased flow of air in the room means more heat is escaping to outside.

It can work for well insulated and airtight houses but I'm not a fan (pun not intended) because you're tying two different functions (heating and ventilation) together.

In our case it's something like five tons of cellulose. It's supposedly a good buffer against summer heat getting into the house but it doesn't really store heat to release it slowly when the temperature goes down again. I can imagine it works well high up north but here I think it would make it more difficult to control the temperature. It's one of the reasons why we have chosen a wood-based construction using I-joints. We do have a concrete foundation slab, screed everywhere and ceramic tiles on the ground floor.

The big stratified water tank is a well known concept but you need to have room for such a big tank. Here in Belgium space is at a premium so houses tend to be on the small side. Solar thermal panels are often connected to a tank of 500 litres or less, simply because of space constraints...

There are several possible construction models; it's a matter of selecting one that fits your local climate and your habits. Not everybody likes a stove for example.

The last couple of years we've seen a shift happening from applying the passive house concepts on new houses (pretty much a solved problem) to renovating existing ones. Here in Belgium there's a massive amount of old houses constructed before the seventies/eighties which is when they finally started putting in insulation. Now that all new houses are energy efficient it's time to tackle the massive waste in those old houses. Most people buy such an old house and start renovating so there's a lot to be gained.

I'm currently living in a passive house (in Belgium, Europe). We've only moved in two months ago so we haven't experienced a winter yet but even in the current summer climate it has already been an order of magnitude more comfortable than any of the other places I've lived in. When the temperature hit 30 degrees Celsius for a couple of days last week the house was at a comfortable 23 degrees. Everywhere.

Key design points:

- Insulation, insulation, insulation. We have 30cm cellulose in the walls and 36cm in the roof plus some 5cm fiberglass in the space between the walls and drywall.

- Airtightness, in combination with a ventilation system (with heat recovery).

- Large windows (triple glazing) on east, south and west sides to get free heat from the sun in the winter but have some screens to keep the sun out in the summer.

- We use a geothermal heat pump to prepare hot water and to be able to heat the house a little bit in the winter when needed, using underfloor heating pipes. Extra bonus that has turned out to be essential: we can use this system to passively cool the house by simply pumping the water through the pipes and into the ground. This can lower the temperature in the house by several degrees in an energy efficient way.

Based on our energy consumption for the two months we've lived here we'll end up at around 3500-4000kWh per year. And that includes everything: heat pump, ventilation, all electrical appliances, ...

Building such a house isn't rocket science. The materials and techniques are well known and readily available (at least here); it's mostly a matter of good planning upfront and paying attention to the details when executing. Not all construction companies are up to speed but they're slowly getting there (or they'll disappear).

As a matter of fact: the EU has mandated that by 2020 every newly built house must be more or less equivalent to a passive house.