Kiwix returns in Debian Bullseye

(This is my belated #newindebianbullseye post.)

The latest version of the Debian distro, 11.0 aka Bullseye, was released last week and after a long absence, includes Kiwix! Previously in Debian 10/Buster, we only had the underlying C/C++ libraries available.

If you're not familiar with it, Kiwix is an offline content reader, providing Wikipedia, Gutenberg, TED talks, and more in ZIM (.zim) files that can be downloaded and viewed entirely offline. You can get the entire text of the English Wikipedia in less than 100GB.

apt install kiwix will get you a graphical desktop application that allows you to download and read ZIMs. apt install kiwix-tools installs kiwix-serve (among others), which serves ZIM files over an HTTP server.

Additionally, there are now tools in Debian that allow you to create your own ZIM files: zimwriterfs and the python3-libzim library.

All of this would not have been possible without the support of the Kiwix developers, who made it a priority to properly support Debian. All of the Kiwix and repositories have a CI process that builds Debian packages for each pull request and needs to pass before it'll be accepted.

Ubuntu users can take advantage of our primary PPA or the bleeding-edge PPA. For Debian users, my goal is that unstable/sid will have the latest verison within a few days of a release, and once it moves into testing, it'll be available in Debian Backports.

It is always a pleasure working with the Kiwix team, who make a point to send stickers and chocolate every year :)




Trying GNOME again

Originally posted on mastodon.technology.

Fedora dropped me in GNOME 40 today after I rebooted for updates instead of my normal Cinnamon.

So I gave it a shot and after fiddling with keyboard shortcuts and the tweak tool it's....fine so far? I just need to get used to the menu bar on top instead on bottom.


LEGO Discovery Space Shuttle

Originally posted on mastodon.technology.

Took a little over 5 hours to build the LEGO Discovery Space Shuttle set plus Hubble Telescope, with help from family members. Largest set (by piece count) that we've ever done before, was a blast.

Timelapse was captured using gphoto2 and stitched with Kdenlive. Lighting is wack sorry, I probably shouldn't have left the camera on auto.


Last month's Wikimedia Datacenter switchover

Originally posted on mastodon.technology.

New blog post about last month's #Wikimedia Datatcenter switchover: techblog.wikimedia.org/2021/07

"In June 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Site Reliability Engineering team switched most user traffic from our primary datacenter in Virginia (“eqiad”) to our secondary one in Texas (“codfw”). This is an exercise we’ve done multiple times over the past 5 years, and this was the smoothest and fastest one yet."