Recent content on Myon's Blog
For the CQ WPX SSB in March 2026, I was a guest operator at DR1A in Goch. For
the event, I got a used Bose QuietComfort 25 headset where the ANC worked well
to dampen the noise from the neighboring operators. The headset also worked
well on a flight to the 2026 pgconf.dev conference in Vancouver. However, on
the way back, the ANC battery went dead about one hour into the flight. I…
Some weeks ago I discovered Immich and was immediately
hooked and started feeding the family photo collection into it. 
 Immich on CIFS 
 It’s running on a VM at Hetzner, and I immediately filled up the disk with too
much data. Looking around, I discovered that Hetzner offers “storage boxes” at
the fraction of the cost of a VM with the same disk space, so I…
Information on this is sparse, so here’s a few notes in case I need this again: 
 To use mods on a Minecraft server, a patched server with a mod loader is
required. There are about 4 different ones, but CurseForge seems to be the most
popular one. 
 Go to https://files.minecraftforge.net/ (redirects to https://files.minecraftforge.net/net/minecraftforge/forge/ )
and…
Debian is running a “ vcswatch ”
service that keeps track of the status of all packaging repositories that have a
 Vcs-Git 
(and other VCSes) header set and shows which repos might need a package upload to push pending changes out. 
 Naturally, this is a lot of data and the scratch partition on qa.debian.org
had to be expanded several times, up to 300 GB in the last…
Back in 2015, when PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha 1 was released, I had posted the
 PostgreSQL data from Debian’s popularity contest . 
 8 years and 8 PostgreSQL releases later, the graph now looks like this: 
 
 Currently, the most popular PostgreSQL on Debian systems is still PostgreSQL 13 (shipped in Bullseye), followed by PostgreSQL 11 (Buster). At the time of…
I had been looking around for some time if someone had already managed to get
I/Q data from Icom’s IC-7610 HF transceiver without going through the
binary-only hdsdr driver provided by Icom, but couldn’t find anything. 
 First attempts at doing that on Debian Linux using libftdi1 didn’t work, so I
resorted to using the (again binary-only) libftd3xx driver from FT,…
To talk to my IC-7610 via wireguard, I set up UDP port forwarding for ports 50001 50002 50003 on a raspi: 
 domain (ip) {
 table filter {
 chain FORWARD {
 policy ACCEPT;
 }
 }

 table nat {
 chain PREROUTING {
 interface (wg0) {
 proto udp dport 50001 DNAT to 192.168.0.6;
 proto udp dport 50002 DNAT to 192.168.0.6;
 proto udp dport 50003 DNAT to…
LoRa APRS iGate 
 The official documentation of
 https://github.com/lora-aprs/LoRa_APRS_iGate 
uses the PlatformIO plugin of MS Visual Studio Code. Here are the commands to
get it running without the GUI: 
 git clone https://github.com/lora-aprs/LoRa_APRS_iGate.git
cd LoRa_APRS_iGate
 
 Edit data/is-cfg.json with your station info 
 Edit platformio.ini: board =…
Classic ham radio transceivers have physical connectors for morse keys and
microphones. When the transceiver is a software defined radio (SDR) device,
voice operation is easy by attaching a headset, but solutions to connect a
morse key, be it a straight key or paddles, to a modern PC are rare. In the old
times, machines had serial ports with RTS/DTR lines, but these do not…
pg_dirtyread 
 Earlier this week, I updated pg_dirtyread 
to work with PostgreSQL 14 .
pg_dirtyread is a PostgreSQL extension that allows reading “dead” rows from
tables, i.e. rows that have already been deleted, or updated. Of course that
works only if the table has not been cleaned-up yet by a VACUUM command or
autovacuum, which is PostgreSQL’s garbage…
The apt.postgresql.org repository has been extended
to cover the arm64 architecture. 
 We had occasionally received user request to add “arm” in the past, but it was
never really clear which kind of “arm” made sense to target for PostgreSQL. In
terms of Debian architectures, there’s (at least) armel, armhf, and arm64.
Furthermore, Raspberry Pis are…
Users had often asked where they could find older versions of packages from
 apt.postgresql.org . I had been
collecting these since about April 2013, and in July 2016, I made the packages
available via an ad-hoc URL on the repository master host, called “the morgue”.
There was little repository structure, all files belonging to a source package
were stuffed into a…
paste is one of those tools nobody uses [1]. It puts two file side by side,
line by line. 
 One application for this came up today where some tool was called for several
files at once and would spit out one line by file, but unfortunately not
including the filename. 
 $ paste <(ls *.rpm) <(ls *.rpm | xargs -r rpm -q --queryformat '%{name} \n' -p)
 
 [1] See…
After quite some time (years actually) of inactivity as
 Debian Account Manager ,
I finally decided to give back that Debian hat.
 I’m stepping down as DAM .
I will still be around for the occasional comment from the peanut gallery, or
to provide input if anyone actually cares to ask me about the old times. 
 Thanks for the fish!
Now that Salsa is in
 beta ,
it’s time to import projects (= GitLab speak for “repository”). This is
probably best done automated. Head to
 Access Tokens 
and generate a token with “api” scope, which you can then use with curl: 
 
$ cat salsa-import
#!/bin/sh

set -eux

PROJECT='${1%.git}'
DESCRIPTION='$PROJECT…
About a week ago, I extended
 vcswatch 
to also look at tags in git repositories. 
 Previously, it was solely paying attention to the version number in the top
paragraph in debian/changelog, and would alert if that version didn’t match the
package version in Debian unstable or experimental. The idea is that “UNRELEASED” 
versions will keep nagging the…
I knew it was about this time of the year 10 years ago when my Debian account
was created, but I couldn’t remember the exact date until I looked it up
earlier this evening: today :). Rene Engelhard had been my advocate, and Marc
Brockschmidt my AM. Thanks guys! 
 A lot of time has passed since then, and I’ve worked in various parts of the
project. I became an…
Today saw the release of PostgreSQL 9.5 Alpha 1. Packages for all supported
Debian and Ubuntu releases are available on apt.postgresql.org : 
 
deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ YOUR_RELEASE_HERE -pgdg main 9.5
 
 The package is also waiting in NEW to be accepted for Debian experimental. 
 Being curious which PostgreSQL releases have been in use over time, I…
At this year’s FOSDEM I gave a talk in the PostgreSQL devroom
about 
Large Scale Quality Assurance in the PostgreSQL Ecosystem .
The talk included a graph about the growth of the
 apt.postgresql.org 
repository that I want to share here as well: 
 
 The yellow line at the very bottom is the number of different source package
names, currently 71. From that, a…
If you think this is confusing … 
 
$ mount
 
 
 
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=1008105,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type…