I’m pleased to announce the release of Python 3.12 alpha 6.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3120a6/

Major new features of the 3.12 series, compared to 3.11

 

The OpenBSD installer now has basic support for configuring disk encryption during the regular installation process. Previously, disk encryption needed to be set up manually by dropping to the shell
from the installer.

Initial support, likely to be expanded upon, was
committed
by Klemens Nanni (kn@) on
March 7, 2023.
The commit reads,

Subject:    CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
From:       Klemens Nanni <kn () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2023-03-07 17:29:42

Read more…

I am delighted to announce the first stable release of GNU a2ps since 2007!

This release contains few user-visible changes. It does however contain a
lot of changes “under the hood”: code clean-up, etc. Therefore, it’s likely
that there are new bugs. Do report them to Savannah[1], or the mailing list
please!

A big thank-you to all those who tested pre-releases, and especially to
Bruno Haible’s tireless work to promote portability: he both tested a2ps on
many systems and found lots of minor portability problems, and advised on
their solution (often, gnulib code that he wrote). Remaining problems are of
course mine!

[1] https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/a2ps

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.tar.gz
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.tar.gz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

807667f838c29bde73bb91fae60ef98826bd460e  a2ps-4.15.tar.gz
pa3FqSIvmESKV8a162lItydD6vmjDGehNN8ILpnHZlI  a2ps-4.15.tar.gz

The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the
hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg –verify a2ps-4.15.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa2048 2013-12-11 [SC]
        2409 3F01 6FFE 8602 EF44  9BB8 4C8E F3DA 3FD3 7230
  uid   Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
  uid   keybase.io/rrt <rrt@keybase.io>

If that command fails because you don’t have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the ‘gpg –verify’ command.

  gpg –locate-external-key rrt@sc3d.org

  gpg –recv-keys 4C8EF3DA3FD37230

  wget -q -O- ‘https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=a2ps&download=1’ | gpg –import –

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg –keyring gnu-keyring.gpg –verify a2ps-4.15.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.71
  Automake 1.16.5
  Gnulib v0.1-5857-gf17d397771

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 4.15 (2023-03-07) [stable]
 * New maintainer, Reuben Thomas.
 * Features:
   – Replace the ‘psmandup’ utility with simpler ‘lp2’ to directly print
     documents to a simplex printer.
   – Remove the outdated ‘psset’ and ‘fixnt’, and simplify ‘fixps’ to
     always process its input with Ghostscript.
   – Use libpaper’s paper sizes. This includes user-defined paper sizes
     when using libpaper 2. It is still possible to define custom margins
     using “Medium:” specifications in the configuration file, and the
     one size defined by a2ps that libpaper does not know about, Quarto, is
     retained for backwards compatiblity, and as an example.
 * Documentation
   – Remove some obsolete explanations.
   – Reformat –help output consistently to 80 columns.
   – Some English fixes.
 * Bug fixes:
   – Avoid a crash when a medium is not specified; instead, use the default
     libpaper size (configured by the user or sysadmin, or the locale
     default).
   – Fix some other potential crashes and compiler warnings.
   – Fixes for security bugs CVE-2001-1593, CVE-2015-8107 and CVE-2014-0466.
   – Minor bugs fixed.
 * Predefined delegations:
   – Remove support for defunct Netscape and proprietary Acrobat Reader.
   – Add lpr wrapper for automatic detection of different printing systems,
     including CUPS support.
 * Encodings:
   – Use libre fonts for KOI-8.
   – Composite fonts support.
 * Build
   – Update build system to more recent autotools and gettext versions.
   – Build man pages in a simpler and more robust way.
   – Document runtime dependencies.
   – Minor code quality improvements.
   – Minor tidy up and removal of obsolete code.
   – Require libpaper.
   – Remove OS/2 support.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might remember back in 2012 when I changed the startup sound on my Power Mac G3 (Blue and White). That was a fun introduction to the Forth programming language. I had to reverse-engineer just enough of Apple’s firmware update script to understand what was going on. Recently, Aidan Halpin, a reader of this site, asked me if I could do the same kind of startup sound customization on his iMac. This particular iMac is officially known as the “iMac (Slot Loading)” and has a model identifier of PowerMac2,1. As you can guess from the name, it has a slot-loading CD-ROM drive unlike the original iMac that had a laptop-style tray-loading drive. By the way, Aidan’s iMac is special because it has a PowerPC G4 processor soldered onto the logic board instead of the original G3. He sent me Apple’s last firmware update for this model: iMac Firmware Update 4.1.9. I went to work looking at the update contents to see if I could figure out how to modify the chime the same way I did with my Power Mac G3. I thought it would be fun to take everyone along for a ride and show exactly what was involved in changing the sound. And of course, this post wouldn’t be complete without also sharing the code for the utility I created to inject the new chime into the firmware update file. This is an insane amount of work for something that doesn’t really matter in the end. I love it.