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
Every morning I take my dog outside so she can 3D-print something horrible.
https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/programming/the-content-web-manifesto/README.md
Just a small draft of an idea. I want something to send to websites that annoy me that briefly provides pointers on providing good content.
I recently discovered about LineageOS:
- You can build the Android TV and Android Automotive variants
- You can build the Android emulator and images that supposedly run on QEMU
One result of this is that following their instructions, you could build a vanilla Android TV image that *could* boot on physical x86 hardware (and test if this has better performance than Chromecasts, etc.).
But there's still the issue that streaming services might not like this.
My terminal email client https://github.com/alexpdp7/epistle/ has reached its first milestone; I think I can do all the mail reading that I need (including viewing .docx/.pdf attachments on the terminal).
I just realized it has 0 dependencies. This would "prove" the "batteries-includedness" of Python, but it cheats; epistle does much of the heavy lifting with external programs: notmuch, LibreOffice, and pdftotext.
You also need to get mail to maildir format (I use mbsync).
Besides other LLM observations, a small realization I'm having recently is about people using LLMs to discuss ideas, brainstorm, etc.
We are becoming increasingly isolated. We need to build and rebuild communities.
As someone who loves hearing themself talk, I offer to discuss *your* ideas.
I learned of Python's pathlib.Path.(read|write)_(text|bytes) too late. Now, every time I see a with statement to open a file and read/write the contents in one go, I think that the word should be spreaded more.
Besides the declarative Linux distributions, Talos is another innovation about Linux. Besides being a Kubernetes now operating system, it is also a Linux system without shells, managed instead via APIs https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/discussions/10008
I'm not sure I agree a lot with https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/ , but it's certainly an interesting read.
"Throughout the history of software development, employers have consistently preferred to fund tools that deskill and attempt to abstract expertise away over tools that genuinely improve productivity and the quality of the output, but also happen to require expertise and skill.
This has worked so far because the software industry is usually flooded with money."
- Catching up with @baldur's essay from earlier this year: *"React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity"*
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/
The last couple of days I've been fiddling with Ventoy alternatives. Asking around, I was reminded of hardware devices that do a similar job, but are much more reliable. Researching about them, I see people using Linux USB "gadget" mode to do this.
Just tried, worked in a few minutes. Magical!
(The time I've wasted looking for more esoterical alternatives.)
TL;DR: you can use a Raspberry Pi (or whatever) to present a file with an ISO as a USB disk. Works like a charm.
Stuff I made progress this year:
- selfhostwatch is quite usable, and contains most data from YunoHost, updated daily.
- ubpkg can install 23 different pieces of software and packaging stuff is easy.
- termflux is usable as a Miniflux terminal client
- epistle is a simple email client on top of imapsync/notmuch that can do a few things already
Things I'd like to work on:
- news-rss scrapes articles from Google News RSS
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
I feel I'm a bit out of steam, but the project I posted a month ago:
https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/
Is now IMHO in a useful state. It scrapes daily updates for "official" updates of stuff such as Nextcloud and the corresponding updates from Nextcloud. So you can see how dilligently YunoHost updates packages.
I feel YunoHost and similar stuff are great, but I feel it's daunting to commit to using them if you don't know how they handle updates.
If you come to FOSDEM, don't miss my talk about modern IRC!
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6407-chatting-on-irc-in-2025-grandpa-what-s-up-/
GMail sent the second Copilot email to spam.
(Yes, I need to get off both GitHub *AND* GMail.)
Github telling me that I can now use Copilot is a reminder that you, yes you the free software developers with a project on Github, are the one preventing me to delete my account.
Seriously. Get your public projects out of Github.
https://developers.googleblog.com/en/celebrating-flutters-production-era/
So I rarely do anything that would make sense to do on Flutter, but I'm surprised by how little I hear about it. Dart has a few surprises. Also, the article says:
> In the Apple AppStore it has grown ... to nearly 30% of all tracked free apps in 2024!
Most likely, most of those free apps are not good, so we don't know how much Flutter is used for *good* apps.
https://sfba.social/@drahardja/113672539568958321
leads to:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4757876
> We study the return to office (RTO) policies ... Consistent with the model's predictions, we find that office rents in the firm's headquarters city determine RTO policy ... Finally, we find no significant stock market reaction to policy announcements.
Hello I wrote a thing about how Android made a good privacy improvement and in the process apparently made key attestation far less useful for certain use cases https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70630.html
When it comes to non-free firmware I think there's two reasonable positions - treat it like non-free code running on a remote system (suboptimal, outside the scope of current free software priorities) or treat it like software running on the primary CPU (all code on the local system should be free software, no matter where it's running). I think the FSF's position is unreasonable: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70895.html
Soylent Green is people
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#1-operating-system
27.7% of professional developers use Ubuntu as their "primary operating system for work". (Plus a few other Linux are there.) I don't really trust the survey (how can primary choices total more than 100%, and how WSL and Cygwin are there?), but if it's remotely close to reality, that "Linux is not viable for work"...
(Better data welcome.)
The way that "ChatGPT outputs libel about person X" was solved by adding a kill switch for his specific name doesn't really suggest these AI engineers have much influence over what their models are saying.
Once you're terminally online for a while you realize how much of online discourse is driven by a handful of terminally online people. After you scratch the surface of some "The X community thinks Y" statement, it turns out Y is just the opinion of two guys named John and Mike that are very prolific on some forum, have had a blog for 25 years, and last looked at X in 2012.
Russell Coker's blog is one of the remaining gems from the golden era where following blogs was *the* way to be updated. I still follow it through Planet Debian, which was another *AWESOME* concept that is becoming lost to the mists of time.
The latest link roundup is quite nice. I wasn't aware Nvidia was also on the RISC-V train. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm kinda eager to see if RISC-V shakes things significantly in a couple of years.