I love music. My family, friends, colleagues love music. I am in quite a few music-related Facebook groups. A returning question everywhere in the past couple of weeks in various wordings was: what are the five albums you would bring to a desert island? This list is of course changing almost each and every year. And also depends on the number of albums, and if live concert recordings, “best of”, etc. albums can be included. So, this is the 2024 January edition with just studio albums :-)

You are what you listen to. I read several articles with this or similar titles. Well, almost all focused on the lyrics of music, and how that is related to the personality of the listener. This approach has multiple problems with me. The majority of music I listen to does not have any lyrics. I prefer instrumental music. And even if a music has a lyrics, I do not care. I can turn of interpreting English almost completely, and even my native Hungarian to a degree. To me the human voice is just yet another instrument. Probably the only exception is The War of the Worlds, but that’s another story.

The first album on my list comes from Vangelis. “Chariots of Fire” was the first CD I ever bought, and it is one of my favorite albums ever since. There were times when I listened to it almost daily. Nowadays I listen to it a few times in a year. I learned only years later that it is a film soundtrack. I also watched the movie. Not bad at all, but its soundtrack is much better :-) After 32 years I still have the CD, and it plays perfectly well.

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/103208768

The second album comes from Pink Floyd. Many say that the album “Atom Heart Mother” is the odd one out in the Pink Floyd discography. Probably they are right, but that’s why I love this album. The first song, the “Atom Heart Mother Suite” almost sounds like classical music. Oh, and it’s definitely the odd one out on my list: the only album with lyrics. Not that I have any idea what is it about, I just enjoy the music. The last song begins with a couple of sound effects. Listening to those on a quality pair of headphones or speakers can be scary :-)

If you take a look at my CDs, you will see that the largest collection is from Mike Oldfield. The various Tubular Bells albums are among my favorites. Of course I like the original version the most. But not the original recording. “Tubular Bells 2003” is a rerecording of the original version, and sounds much better than the original recording. It was not always this way. For many years the original recording was so much in my ears that I could hear all the little changes. It took some time before I could really enjoy the added quality of the new recording.

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/2115739

The most recent album on my list comes from Japan. “Spectrum” by Hiromi is a solo piano jazz album. Most songs are her originals, and show off her virtuosity on the keyboard. The only exception is the song “Rhapsody in various shades of blue”. I hope you can guess from the title where the main motives of this song are coming from :-)

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/119047902

Last but not least, an album from Hungary. To quote myself from a month ago: “One of my favorite albums is Vedres Csaba és a Kairosz kvartett – Áldott Idő / Blessed Time. It was made by Hungarian pianist Csaba Vedres, who worked together with a string quartet. Their music taught me that string quartets playing alone, with a piano, or with any other instrument can do some fantastic music.”

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/27780222

You can also find the CD at the publisher http://perifericrecords.com/hun/catalogue.php?cont=artist&artist_id=1002, together with other albums from Csaba Vedres.

Obviously, this selection is just the tip of the iceberg. With more than five possible albums I would add many others: Philip Glass, King Crimson, ELP, Jean Michel Jarre, Kitaro, Kraftwerk and Rick Wakeman from abroad, or Solaris and After Crying from Hungary. These are just my most listened music, and we did not even mention classical music.

Finally, a question to all the amateur psychologists out there. If the statement “You are what you listen to” is true, what does this selection of music show about me? Am I a scary person or I’m a lovely person? Or both? :-) You can share your opinion with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Mastodon. My accounts are listed in the top right corner of my blog.

Many Linux distributions provide build services under various names: openSUSE Build Service (OBS), Fedora Copr, and so on. These resources are indispensable for upstream developers, and also for their users. I will demonstrate this through some examples from the syslog-ng project.

Note: this blog is loosely based on a talk idea I had for the FOSDEM Distributions Devroom. There is no deep technical information about syslog-ng in this blog. This is more like a history of syslog-ng packaging, and how the fantastic tools by openSUSE and Fedora made it a lot easier and made me an active part of these communities.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/how-build-services-make-life-easier-for-upstream-developers

The openSUSE Project will have a workshop on Jan. 16 at 15:30 UTC on meet.opensuse.org/meeting that will focus on this year’s Google Summer of Code application and mentorship efforts.

The openSUSE Project has a long tradition of participating in GSoC and community members that want to participate as a mentor should attend or update their project they want listed on 101.opensuse.org by opening up an issue on openSUSE’s GitHub Mentoring project.

The workshop will follow the openSUSE community meeting to determine the amount of projects can be listed for this year’s application, which is open between Jan. 22 and Feb 6.

The workshop will give mentors and people who would like to get involved with mentoring enough time to describe several project ideas before the administrators submit the GSoC application.

Participants are encouraged to create an outline of some project ideas before the workshop on the event’s etherpad.

Mentors and administrators who participated in previous Google Summer of Code programs will attend the workshop.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Welcome to the year 2024! I hope you had a great start and did not get too anxious about the few snapshots you received during the last two weeks. I’m sure many of you had better things to do than running zypper dup on their machines. Since I was having some days off myself, I missed the weekly review of week 2023/52 – so I will include this here as well. I will cover the six snapshots 1222, 1225, 1226, 1228, 0103, and 0104, which have all been released since my last reviews. 0104 is hot off the press!

The main changes in those snapshots were:

• Mozilla Firefox 121.0
• Postfix 3.8.4
• Linux kernel 6.6.7 & 6.6.9
• BlueZ 5.71
• Poppler 23.12.0
• Sudo 1.9.15p5
• Qt 5.15.12
• PHP 8.2.14

This week is still quiet, as many developers stretch the holiday period over the first week of the new year. So, it’s not a big surprise that many things on the to-do list are identical to the previous weeks. Things currently being tested in staging include:

• meson 1.3.1
• GStreamer 1.22.8
• RPM 4.19.x: llvm17 fails to build (?)
• Ruby 3.3: yast failures are being debugged
• libxml 2.12.x: slow progress
• openSSL 3.2.0
• c-ares 1.21.0: breaks nodejs
• dbus-broker: no progress: openQA fails to launch the network stack in the installer

If you’re using copilot and by luck also use pass to manage your passwords, you will find that the default configuration, or rather the configuration where you want copilot enabled everywhere, basically creates a risk for your precious passwords… As Copilot will be enabled by default, on text files.

So here’s the snippet I use:

-- initialize copilot
local copilot = {
	"zbirenbaum/copilot.lua",
	"ofseed/copilot-status.nvim",
	cmd = "Copilot",
	build = ":Copilot auth",
	event = "InsertEnter",
	opts = {
		filetypes = {
			sh = function()
				if string.match(vim.fs.basename(vim.api.nvim_buf_get_name(0)), "^%.env.*") then
					-- disable for .env files
					return false
				end
				return true
			end,
			text = function()
				if
					vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES") or vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "PASS_VERSION")
				then
					-- disable for .env files
					return false
				end
				return true
			end,
		},
	},
}

I should eventually add this too to my dotfiles… Once I have the time to do so.

If you’re using copilot and by luck also use pass to manage your passwords, you will find that the default configuration, or rather the configuration where you want copilot enabled everywhere, basically creates a risk for your precious passwords… As Copilot will be enabled by default, on text files.

So here’s the snippet I use:

-- initialize copilot
local copilot = {
  "zbirenbaum/copilot.lua",
  "ofseed/copilot-status.nvim",
  cmd = "Copilot",
  build = ":Copilot auth",
  event = "InsertEnter",
  opts = {
    filetypes = {
      sh = function()
        if string.match(vim.fs.basename(vim.api.nvim_buf_get_name(0)), "^%.env.*") then
          -- disable for .env files
          return false
        end
        return true
      end,
      text = function()
        if
          vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES") or vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "PASS_VERSION")
        then
          -- disable for .env files
          return false
        end
        return true
      end,
    },
  },
}

I should eventually add this too to my dotfiles… Once I have the time to do so.

Congratulations on finishing yet another ride around the Sol with me. Here's some noteworthy events from it from the perspective of a dust spec.

Music

While of course I'm stuck in my young taste like everybody else, I do try to pick up some new music. This year I've discovered Venjent doing a silly skit (he's fully aware of that being how people discover his music and really leans into it). In surreal turn of events I went to see him in a club, looking like a misplaced pensioner at 1am, when he finally spun his set. But I seriously enjoy how he can transform the absolute silliness into a total banger I play on repeat.

I've published some music of my own as well. After Desync assembled from material from weeklybeats 22 came Solar Coffee and Take Frequent Breaks right at the end of the year. I doubt I'll release anything this year, because Weekly Beats 24 will probably suck all my energy for music production. Hopefully I'll enjoy it as much as the first half of 22 :)

FPV

From about 3 videos a week in 2018 I'm down to about 3 a year. One might say I've thrown the towel in, but I still enjoy a decent tree surf from time to time.

I've completely dropped the ball when it comes to racing though. Didn't even qualify in Klatovy this year, because absolutely everyone has been training like crazy. It's been lovely to hang around with the weirdos in the three competitions I attended.

Congratulations on finishing yet another ride around the Sol with me. Here’s some noteworthy events from it from the perspective of a dust spec.

Music

While of course I’m stuck in my young taste like everybody else, I do try to pick up some new music. This year I’ve discovered Venjent doing a silly skit (he’s fully aware of that being how people discover his music and really leans into it). In surreal turn of events I went to see him in a club, looking like a misplaced pensioner at 1am, when he finally spun his set. But I seriously enjoy how he can transform the absolute silliness into a total banger I play on repeat.

I’ve published some music of my own as well. After Desync assembled from material from weeklybeats 22 came Solar Coffee and Take Frequent Breaks right at the end of the year. I doubt I’ll release anything this year, because Weekly Beats 24 will probably suck all my energy for music production. Hopefully I’ll enjoy it as much as the first half of 22 :)

FPV

From about 3 videos a week in 2018 I’m down to about 3 a year. One might say I’ve thrown the towel in, but I still enjoy a decent tree surf from time to time.

I’ve completely dropped the ball when it comes to racing though. Didn’t even qualify in Klatovy this year, because absolutely everyone has been training like crazy. It’s been lovely to hang around with the weirdos in the three competitions I attended.