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Planet FSFE

Decentralise (in a kind of centralised way)

Once a month I am involved in running an informal session, loosely affiliated with Open Rights Group and FSFE, called Cryptonoise. Cryptonoise explores methods for protecting your digital rights, with a leaning towards focusing on privacy, and provides a venue for like minded people to meet up and discuss the state of the digital landscape and those that may try to infringe on the rights of digital citizens.

We’ve all made it easy for large enterprises and governments to collect masses of data about our online activities because we perform most of those activities in the same place. Facebook, Google and Twitter spring to mind as examples of companies that have grown to dangerous sizes with little competition. This is not paranoia. This is real. We make it a lot more difficult when we spread out.

Azure from Debian

Around a week ago, I started to play with programmatically controlling Azure. I needed to create and destroy a bunch of VMs over and over again, and this seemed like something I would want to automate once instead of doing manually and repeatedly. I started to look into the azure-sdk-for-python and mentioned that I wanted to look into this in #debian-python. ardumont from Software Heritage noticed me, and was planning to package azure-storage-python. We joined forces and started a packaging team for Azure-related software.

Burgers 2016

Me and Ana travelled to Cambridge last weekend for the Debian UK BBQ. We travelled by train and it was a rather scenic journey. In the past, on long journeys, I’ve used APRS-IS to beacon my location and plot my route but I have recently obtained the GPS module for my Yaesu VX-8DE and I thought I’d give some real RF APRS a go this time.

While the APRS IGate coverage in the UK is a little disappointing, as is evidenced by the map, a few cool things did happen. I recieved a simplex APRS message from a radio amateur 2M0RRT with the text “test test IO86ML” (but unfortunately didn’t notice until we’d long passed by, sorry for not replying!) and quite a few of my packets, sent from a 5 watt handheld in Cambridge, were heard by the station M0BPQ-1 in North London (digipeated by MB7UM).

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