I have been using the QEMU hypervisor on Linux for quite sometime now. However, until recently, I didn't need to convert an image from raw format to qcow2 format. I found the solution on the Arch Wiki (an excellent source of information, by the way). Simply run the following command:

$ qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 input.img output.qcow2

Also, if you need to manually mount a QEMU image, check this page from the Xmodulo website. Although the author discusses two possible methods (libguestfs and qemu-nbd), it's the second one that worked best for me:

$ sudo modprobe nbd max_part=8
$ sudo qemu-nbd --connect=/dev/nbd0 /path/to/qcow2/image
$ sudo fdisk /dev/nbd0 -l
$ sudo mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt
(...)
$ sudo umount /mnt
$ sudo qemu-nbd --disconnect /dev/nbd0

{link to this entry}

Here is a topic where confusion abound: the good folks at Protonmail clealy explain the difference between anonymity and privacy. Basically, as they explain, anonymity is keeping your identity private, but not your actions; and privacy is keeping some things to yourself, which can include your actions. Then, they go on to explain:

For most people, privacy is a great deal more important than anonymity, although there is a limited set of circumstances where anonymity is a valid concern.

Anonymity has become a particularly charged subject in recent years because the lack of accountability it brings has unleashed a torrent of online abuse, hate speech, trolling, and cyberbullying. It has also become associated with unethical marketing practices, such as spamming and phishing — as well as with terrorism.

This is not to say there is no legitimate need for anonymity — for example, whistleblowers and political dissidents might be in personal danger if their identities are revealed. What most people really require, however, is privacy — the ability to keep what you say and do on the internet to yourself and those you wish to share with.

And for most people, the need to be secure against the many threats posed by the internet outweighs any need for anonymity.

Anonymity should also not be viewed as an absolute state. A dissident who needs anonymity from their repressive government does not need the same level of anonymity from the Swiss legal system.

Of course, it all depends on how much faith you have in the openness and transparency (and stability) of your own government. In any case, these days one should also take the big tech into account when thinking about all this. {link to this entry}

Now, this is a pet peeve of mine lately, but I don't have the time to expand. Hopefully, I'll be able to expand on it before it's too late and I forget. The thing is that, overall, I get the impression that modern technology is in a pitiful state, to be honest. Yes, I know we all think we have reached the summit of tech-heaven. And, to be sure, technology is everywhere these days, and it definitely plays a central role in our societies. That's not my point. My point is that it has reached a level of complexity that I get the failing it is way too fragile and it could crumble down any moment. Like I said, I'll expand on this idea at some point. In the meantime, here is some anecdotal evidence (mind you, I run into anecdotal evidence of this maaaany times every single day): a few minutes ago, I was trying to delete a personal project on the GitLab website and, to my surprise, I just couldn't find the way to do it. So, after spending around 10 minutes trying to delete it, I finally decided to do a search and, of course, I'm not the only one who ran into this problem. As a matter of fact, someone already asked on Stack Overflow and got the right answer. Now, let's just consider how insane the whole situation is. This is a user just trying to delete a project on a project management tool. That's all. Creating, renaming and deleting projects on such a tool should be, one would think, quite easy and straightforward, right? Well, not so. No wonder projects like Suckless are gaining so much popularity. {link to this entry}

InfoWorld published a few days ago an article titled How CentOS changes the cloud Linux game that is worth pondering about. Basically, starting with the news that Amazon is now releasing its own Linux distribution for their Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers, the author then goes on to explain how Red Hat's decision to completely change the nature of CentOS is triggering all these changes. The thing is that a lot of enterprise-level customers were running CentOS because it was an almost perfect clone of RHEL that offered practically the same reliability, stability and feature set. The only thing missing was the support, but plenty of people just made sure to buy at least one RHEL license to get that. Now, of course, when Red Hat decides to switch CentOS to a streaming release approach and, to all effects, make it an alpha version of RHEL, it's as if they pulled the rug from under people's feet.

Now, this is no different than the reason that prompted me to look for alternatives to Red Hat Desktop, Fedora and Ubuntu back in the early 2000s. If a sysadmin wants to run a free (as in beer, and also as in freedom) OS that also promises some stability and a lack of backstabbing surprises, I'd say the only choices are long-standing community-based projects that have been running for decades and have a proven record of stability. That pretty much limits the list to Slackware, Debian, and the BSD projects. {link to this entry}

I know I have been writing quite a bit about this topic lately, but I honestly think it's important for the future of a (more or less) free web. Yesterday, the EFF warned us about the perils of Manifest v3, the new framework for Chrome extensions released by Google. This is precisely the danger of a world where one (and only one, or pretty much) web rendering engine dominates the market. It's enough reason to continue using Firefox while it remains relevant. {link to this entry}

Here is a good tutorial on the topic of vim buffers. That's all. {link to this entry}

If you like RSS and need to find out how to add the feeds of your favorite YouTube channels to your app, simply follow these directions. They were written for Newsboat, the CLI-based RSS app that I prefer. But it truly applies to any other RSS app you may run. {link to this entry}

For quite sometime, I was running a little Python script called icalview to directly view calendar invites within mutt. However, it's been broken for months. Perhaps even longer than that. I just didn't have the time to investigate it and, in the meantime, was using other workarounds to view and accept invites. Well, today, I finally searched around, and found another Python script called mutt-ical that seems to work much better. Read the configuration and usage directions on the Gitghub page. {link to this entry}

I have been running Microsoft Teams on Linux for a while now. Overall, I must say it's been a good experience. The app doesn't crash, behaves well, and it allows me to call into work meetings just fine. I see no major differences (feature wise) between the Linux version and the version for other operating systems, at least for what I do (which perhaps is not extensive enough for other users). Mind you, there are a few issues with the interface here and there. Issues that, for the most part, I don't see in other messengers, such as Telegram, which I use all the time too. Well, I just ran into one more such minor issue. Unlike Telegram, when one has multiple sessions open (say, on the smartphone and the desktop) at the same time, receiving a new message may trigger a notification on one of the instances that will not go away when one finally reads the message on the other instance. Again, very minor, but something that other messenger apps got right and Teams didn't for whatever reason. {link to this entry}

A few days ago, while reading an article on the increasing use of cloud technologies in the higher-performance computing market, I found the following statements by the author:

We’re going to start seeing more of these high-performance computing uses of cloud-based platforms. Enterprises understand that the cloud is an economical place to run traditional business applications and store data, and that the purpose-built and highly expensive world of supercomputers can exist in the cloud as well. Moreover, it’s not only that traditional supercomputers can be replaced; they are able to compress the time it takes for deep analytics, such as the drug discovery application but also exploration, medical research, advanced simulations, and other compute-intensive applications.

Small businesses are no longer limited by the price tag of a supercomputer. This allows them to punch above their weight and even leverage this technology as a force multiplier to create market innovations that the larger players may not even think of. I suspect disruptions will be the norm during the next few years, with smaller companies eating the lunch of larger companies that have been market leaders for 100 years or more. Previously, only the big guys had the resources to buy or lease supercomputers. Now it does not matter.

Let's just say that while I agree with the author when he states that "these high-performance computing uses of cloud-based platforms" will be more and more popular, I beg to disagree on his comments about the supposedly equalizing effect all this may have. Simply put, we have seen this many times before. Yes, small companies may come into the scene in a very disruptive manner, but it sure doesn't take long before larger, more established companies simply reach into their pockets and buy them. As a matter of fact, a very good part of the "innovation" we have seen out of large technology corporations the past couple of decades is just like that. {link to this entry}