Enrico's blog

“That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.” — Carl Jung

Emotional support of others can take the form of surface-level consolation. But compassion means being willing to listen and feel, even when it's uncomfortable.

Ultimately, the driving force behind the “power of positive thinking” meme is the word “power.” But what about those whose bodies are not powerful? What about those who are vulnerable? What about those who are tired, isolated, and struggling? What about those who are ill? What about those who lack

I have often been dismissive or unhelpful when someone close to me was dealing with painful circumstances, having learned to “accentuate the positive.” In the more recent past, I have recognized these behavioral patterns as part of what some mental health professionals term, “toxic positivity.”

Toxic positivity is the overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state resulting in the denial & invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.

Snap guides

Dragging from the rulers does not always create snap guides. If it doesn't, click on the slide background, "Snap guides", "Insert snap guide". In my case, after the first snap guide was manually inserted, it was possible to drag new one from the rulers.

Master slides

How to edit a master slide

• Show master slides side pane
• Right click on master slide
• Edit Master...
• An icon appears in the toolbar: "Close Master View"
• Apply to all slides might not apply to the first slide created as the document was opened

Change styles in master slide

Do not change properties of text by selecting placeholder text in the Master View. Instead, open the Styles and formatting sidebar, and edit the styles in there.

This means the style changes are applied to pages in all layouts, not just the "Title, Content" layout that is the only one editable in the "Master View".

How to duplicate a master slide

There seems to be no feature implemented for this, but you can do it, if you insist:

• Save a copy of the document
• Rename the master slide
• Drag a slide, that uses the renamed master slide, from the copy of the document to the original one

It's needed enough that someone made a wikihow: https://www.wikihow.com/Copy-a-LibreOffice-Impress-Master-Slide archive.org

How to change the master slide for a layout that is not "Title, Content"

I could not find a way to do it, but read on for a workaround.

I found an ask.libreoffice.org question that went unanswered.

I asked on #libreoffice on IRC and got no answer:

Hello. I'm doing the layout for a presentation in impress, and I can edit all sorts of aspects of the master slide. It seems that I can only edit the "Title, Content" layout of the master slide, though. I'd like to edit, for example, the "Title only" layout so that the title appears in a different place than the top of the page. Is it possible to edit specific layouts in a master page?

In the master slide editor it seems impossible to select a layout, for example.

Alternatively I tried creating multiple master slides, but then if I want to create a master slide for a title page, there's no way to remove the outline box, or the title box.

My work around has been to create multiple master slides, one for each layout. For a title layout, I moved the outline box into a corner, and one has to remove it manually after create a new slide.

There seems to be no way of changing the position of elements not found in the "Title, Content" layout, like "Subtitle". On the other hand, given that one's working with an entirely different master slide, one can abuse the outline box as a subtitle.

Note that if you later decide to change a style element for all the slides, you'll need to go propagate the change to the "Styles and Formatting" menu of all master slides you're using.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly#Sex_ratios:

Sex ratios

The sex ratio of male to female dragonflies varies both temporally and spatially. Adult dragonflies have a high male-biased ratio at breeding habitats. The male-bias ratio has contributed partially to the females using different habitats to avoid male harassment.

As seen in Hine's emerald dragonfly (Somatochlora hineana), male populations use wetland habitats, while females use dry meadows and marginal breeding habitats, only migrating to the wetlands to lay their eggs or to find mating partners.

Unwanted mating is energetically costly for females because it affects the amount of time that they are able to spend foraging.

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.

After having had some success with a sysroot in having a Qt5 cross-build environment that includes QtWebEngine, the next step is packaging the sysroot so it can be available both to build the cross-build environment, and to do cross-development with it.

The result is this Debian source package which takes a Raspberry Pi OS disk image, provisions it in-place, extracts its contents, and packages them.

Yes. You may want to reread the last paragraph.

It works directly in the disk image to avoid a nasty filesystem issue on emulated 32bit Linux over a 64bit mounted filesystem.

This feels like the most surreal Debian package I've ever created, and this saga looks like one of the hairiest yaks I've ever shaved.

Integrating this monster codebase, full of bundled code and hacks, into a streamlined production and deployment system has been for me a full stack nightmare, and I have a renewed and growing respect for the people in the Qt/KDE team in Debian, who manage to stay on top of this mess, so that it all just works when we need it.

Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others' consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected---even by their parents and other relatives. And if children of two or four can be expected to read the nonverbal cues and expressions of children not yet old enough to talk in order to assess whether there is consent, what excuse do full grown adults have?

Small children have no sense of shame or disgust or fear of their bodies. A body is what it is. It does what it does.

About commonly accepted violation of children boundaries

Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave towards them and how they will respond when someone passes those limits.[1] They are built out of a mix of conclusions, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning.[2][3] This concept or life skill has been widely referenced in self-help books and used in the counseling profession since the mid-1980s.[4]

While traveling around Germany, one notices that most towns have a Greek or Italian restaurant, and they all kind of have the same names. How bad is that lack of fantasy?

Let's play with https://overpass-turbo.eu/. Select a bounding box and run this query:

node
  [cuisine=greek]
  ({{bbox}});
out;

Export the results as gpx and have some fun on the command line:

sed -nre 's/^name=([^<]+).*/\1/p' /tmp/greek.gpx \
   | sed -re 's/ *(Grill|Restaurant|Tavern[ae]) *//g' \
   | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > /tmp/greek.txt

Likewise, with Italian restaurants, you can use cuisine=italian and something like:

sed -nre 's/^name=([^<]+).*/\1/p' /tmp/italian.gpx \
   | sed -re 's/ *(Restaurant|Ristorante|Pizzeria) *//g' \
   | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > /tmp/italian.txt

Here are the top 20 that came out for Greek:

    162 Akropolis
     91 Delphi
     86 Poseidon
     78 Olympia
     78 Mykonos
     78 Athen
     76 Hellas
     74 El Greco
     71 Rhodos
     57 Dionysos
     53 Kreta
     50 Syrtaki
     49 Korfu
     43 Santorini
     43 Athos
     40 Mythos
     39 Zorbas
     35 Artemis
     33 Meteora
     29 Der Grieche

Here are the top 20 that came out for Italian, with a sadly ubiquitous franchise as an outlier:

     66 Vapiano
     64 Bella Italia
     59 L'Osteria
     54 Roma
     43 La Piazza
     38 La Dolce Vita
     38 Dolce Vita
     35 Italia
     32 Pinocchio
     31 Toscana
     30 Venezia
     28 Milano
     28 Mamma Mia
     27 Bella Napoli
     25 San Marco
     24 Portofino
     22 La Piazzetta
     22 La Gondola
     21 Da Vinci
     21 Da Pino

One can play a game while traveling: being the first to spot a Greek or Italian restaurant earns more points the more unusual its name is. But beware of being too quick! If you try to claim points for one of the restaurant with the top-5 most common names, you will actually will actually lose points!

Have fun playing with other combinations of areas and cuisine: the Overpass API is pretty cool!

Update:

Rather than running xml through sed, one can export geojson, then parse it with the excellent jq:

jq -r '.features[].properties.name' italian.json \
   | sed -re 's/ *(Restaurant|Ristorante|Pizzeria) *//g' \
   | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > /tmp/italian.txt

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.

The previous rounds of attempts ended in one issue too many to investigate in the allocated hourly budget.

Andreas Gruber wrote:

Long story short, a fast solution for the issue with EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID is to remove libraspberrypi-dev from your sysroot and do a full rebuild. There will be some changes to the configure results, so please review them - if they are relevant for you - before proceeding with your work.

That got me unstuck! dpkg --purge libraspberrypi-dev in the sysroot, and we're back in the game.

While Qt5's build has proven extremely fragile, I was surprised that some customization from Raspberry Pi hadn't yet broken something. In the end, they didn't disappoint.

More i386 issues

The run now stops with a new 32bit issue related to v8 snapshots:

qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/release$ /usr/bin/g++ -pie -Wl,--fatal-warnings -Wl,--build-id=sha1 -fPIC -Wl,-z,noexecstack -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -Wl,-z,defs -Wl,--as-needed -m32 -pie -Wl,--disable-new-dtags -Wl,-O2 -Wl,--gc-sections -o "v8_snapshot/mksnapshot" -Wl,--start-group @"v8_snapshot/mksnapshot.rsp"  -Wl,--end-group  -ldl -lpthread -lrt -lz
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible //usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so when searching for -lz
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible //usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.a when searching for -lz
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lz
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

Attempted solution: apt install zlib1g-dev:i386.

Alternative solution (untried): configure Qt5 with -no-webengine-v8-snapshot.

It builds!

Installation paths

Now it tries to install files into debian/tmp/home/build/sysroot/opt/qt5custom-armhf/.

I realise that I now need to package the sysroot itself, both as a build-dependency of the Qt5 cross-compiler, and as a runtime dependency of the built cross-builder.

Conclusion

The current work in progress, patches, and all, is at https://github.com/Truelite/qt5custom/tree/master/debian-cross-qtwebengine

It blows my mind how ridiculously broken is the Qt5 cross-compiler build, for a use case that, looking at how many people are trying, seems to be one of the main ones for the cross-builder.

Question: what does this command do?

# Don't do this
nc localhost 12345 | sudo tar xf -

Answer: it sends the password typed into sudo to the other endpoint of netcat.

I can reproduce this with both nc.traditional and nc.openbsd.

One might be tempted to just put sudo in front of everything, but it'll mean that only nc will run as root:

# This is probably not what you want
sudo nc localhost 12345 | tar xf -

The fix that I will never remember, thanks to twb on IRC, is to close nc's stdin:

<&- nc localhost 12345 | sudo tar xf -

Or flip the table and just use sudo -s:

$ sudo -s
# nc localhost 12345 | tar xf -

Updates

Harald Koenig suggested two alternative spellings that might be easier to remember:

nc localhost 12345 < /dev/null | sudo tar xf -
< /dev/null nc localhost 12345 | sudo tar xf -

And thinking along those lines, there could also be the disappointed face variant:

:| nc localhost 12345 | sudo tar xf -

Matthias Urlichs suggested the approach of precaching sudo's credentials, making the rest of the command lines more straightforward (and TIL: sudo id):

sudo id
nc localhost 12345 | sudo tar xf -

Or even better:

sudo id && nc localhost 12345 | sudo tar xf -

Shortcomings of nc | tar

Tomas Janousek commented:

There's one more problem with a plain tar | nc | tar without redirection or extra parameteres: it doesn't know when to stop. So the best way to use it, I believe, is:

tar c | nc -N

nc -d | tar x

The -N option terminates the sending end of the connection, and the -d option tells the receiving netcat to never read any input. These two parameters, I hope, should also fix your sudo/password problem.

Hope it helps!

I noticed an odd effect, that reminds me of screen ghosting on old CRT monitors, when my laptop screen is locked:

Those faint white vertical lines one can see, are actually window borders, and the lock screen is leaking contents of my unlocked desktop! Here is the same screen, unlocked:

However, moving the windows around does not reflect on the ghost image on top of the lock screen: reshuffling windows then locking, produces always the same ghost image. The white border reflects where the window has been at some time in the past.

The lock screen does not seem to be responsible, either: dragging a solid colored window on the laptop screen has the same effect:

But taking a screenshot of it does not show the time traveling ghost windows:

This is happening on two different laptops, an HP EliteBook x360 G1, and a Lenovo ThinkPad X240, one that I've been using since 3 years, one that I've been using since a week, and whose only thing in common is a 1920x1080 IPS screen and an Intel GPU.

I have no idea where to start debugging this. Please reach out to me at enrico@debian.org if any of this makes sense to you.

Update: Jim Paris pointed me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_persistence which looks pretty much like what is happening here.

Jim Paris also pointed out that a black background doesn't show the ghosting.

I changed the lock screen background by editing /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf and adding background=#000000 to the [greeter] section, to limit information leakage through ghosting in the lock screen.

René Carmille (8 January 1886 – 25 January 1945) was a French humanitarian, civil servant, and member of the French Resistance. During World War II, Carmille saved tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied France. In his capacity at the government's Demographics Department, Carmille sabotaged the Nazi census of France, saving tens of thousands of Jewish people from death camps.

Gino Strada (born Luigi Strada; 21 April 1948) is an Italian war surgeon and founder of Emergency, a UN-recognized international non-governmental organization.

Il morbo di K è una malattia inventata nel 1943, durante la Seconda guerra mondiale, da Adriano Ossicini insieme al dottor Giovanni Borromeo per salvare alcuni italiani di religione ebraica dalle persecuzioni nazifasciste a Roma.[1][2][3][4]

Stage races