My "production stuff":
- https://github.com/festivus-es/festivus - public holidays calendars for Spanish cities
- https://github.com/remote-es/remotes - companies hiring in Spain for remote positions
Usable WIPs:
- https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/ - track self-hosting package updates (such as YunoHost)
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/ubpkg/ - package manager for "upstream binaries"
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/termflux - Miniflux terminal client
If anyone is having troubles with the latest EL9 point update and IPA: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7122683
RHEL 10 is out, so I decided to test drive AlmaLinux 10 on my spare laptop. It's pretty nice, had a few bumps with FreeIPA and remote desktop, but I got both working. GNOME has a fresh look.
I'm likely sticking to Debian Stable, but EL clones continue to be respectable desktops.
The negative highlight is that AI was all over the RHEL 10 announcement, but likely that's one of the things that EL clones such as AlmaLinux drop :)
I built for about 40€ a USB device that can virtualize USB bootable ISOs. There's Ventoy, but where's the fun in that?
https://github.com/alexpdp7/rpi-zero-usb-iso/
(MicroSD costs not included, but you could also save some money by using a weaker Raspberry Pi Zero.)
CRUD programming is one of my personal obsessions. Surprisingly, I hadn't written directly about it on my "wiki-like" articles. So I wrote:
, because "Obsidian Bases" looks interesting and similar to a small pet project I made in the past.
How desperate is my current "machete mode" debugging? I put "except: pass" on one line instead of two!
Section 2.B.(iii) of the macOS EULA[1] seems to limit the amount of VMs running macOS that you can run on a single box to 2.
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSequoia.pdf
Very convenient if you want to buy a Mac Mini for an office to let developers not on Apple hardware help their fellow developers on Apple hardware.
Status pages should have real-time traffic stats *of the status page itself*. So you could see that visits to the status page are spiking, although the status page is all green.
https://mmapped.blog/posts/38-static-types-perfectionism.html
The title of this article is "Static types are for perfectionists", but I think it should be "Your code is a reflection of you".
The Galois cover and the last quote made me chuckle.
I've always wondered about terminal accessibility for low/no vision. I guess braille lines work, but they are expensive. And I've heard about "unexpected" problems (e.g. progress bars).
Blind software developers on fedi, I have a question!
Have you used GDB? and if so, do you still use it? I'd love to hear experiences from blind users because I can't tell how good or bad our interface is for users.
For more context, GDB is the main debugger (that I know of, at least) for C, C++, Rust, Ada and Fortran. If you used a debugger for a program in one of those, you probably used GDB with maybe some interface on top.
Because GDB is all text based, I'd think it could reasonably well suited for blind users, but I'm sure being accessible isn't as easy as "the text is there" so I'd love to hear the experience of blind users!
I tried searching online but couldn't find any experiences from GDB users specifically (only general tool advice from coding with eyes closed), so direct experience would be appreciated!
Boosts are welcome!
Lightweight open source Google reCaptcha alternative: ALTCHA leverages a proof-of-work mechanism to safeguard your website, APIs, and online services from spam and abuse. Unlike traditional solutions, ALTCHA is self-hosted, does not rely on cookies or fingerprinting, and ensures complete user privacy. It is fully compliant with GDPR, WCAG 2.2 AA-level, and the European Accessibility Act. https://github.com/altcha-org/altcha
Just realized that Ferrocene publishes a trove of material about safety certification for auto, industry, and medical:
https://public-docs.ferrocene.dev/main/#:~:text=Qualification%20Material
The Goguma IRC mobile client now supports reactions!
(This requires a modern server supporting IRCv3 client message tags, and is only enabled when the server allows reactions.)
I keep my "work" org-mode file on work's Google Drive; I can just C-x C-f /gdrive:me@work:/My Drive/private.org to open it.
(Now, if I learned some convenient bookmarking and persistent layouting.)
How is it 2025, and I am only just now finding out that TRAMP supports GNOME Online Accounts? I can easily access my Nextcloud files in Emacs.
In a new episode of "write your content as plain text", today I discovered https://liascript.github.io/ . You can author courses in a Markdown plus extensions format, and export to SCORM, apparently.
So maybe ARM "open" systems will be here sooner than expected. Now, if we could get CPUs that compete with x86 and have good Linux support...
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/radxa-orion-o6-brings-arm-midrange-pc
The Radxa Orion O6 is the first midrange Arm ITX motherboard... but I can't recommend it. Yet.
See why here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMnCqmM-WKo
So I wanted to try Chimera Linux. But then I realized (again) that it does not have an installer. Well, I installed Gentoo in 2002, I should be able to do this?
But I have not produced a bootable system. Perhaps systemd-boot + ZFS was too daring. Or well, this laptop always gives me issues with booting.
Maybe I'll play with something easier :D
I'm not sure Google is indexing this, but just in case, a Kobo Libra Color does not have a working Internet connection if DHCP pushes multiple routes (as in a VPN setting).
I sometimes wonder if I'm being too stubborn on LLMs. I can acknowledge their utility for certain tasks, but I also look at their many negative externalities. I'm just not on-board with any of that. Also, I derive the most enjoyment from slowly figuring things out for myself and honing my own skills. Maybe an LLM would help me solve problems faster, but I'm much more interested in figuring out how to solve problems better. Of course, maybe it's just a pride thing at this point.
Some time ago I found a company that rented Mac Minis affordably. However, I think the minimum 24h rental that Apple imposes had killed that.
Today I found that Scaleway has Mac Minis from 0.11€ to 0.24€. Of course, this is subject to the 24h Apple rule, *but* 2.64€ for a day is bordering on reasonable for testing. (It works out to 75€/month, which is a lot of money, though.)
I could quote this entire article by Dan North: https://dannorth.net/best-simple-system-for-now
undefined behavior is pretty well understood at this point, but a piece of the puzzle that has always been missing is "how well could a compiler like LLVM optimize, without leaning on UB"
here's a very cool new paper that takes a crack at answering this, for LLVM: