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
Hot take: "HTML is a programming language" is gatekeeping in effect, if not in intent.
That is, something need not be a programming language to be a the subject of highly useful and important technical skills — viewing all of computing through the lens of programming languages is inherently limiting.
Tech folk complaining that kids don't understand computers after spending decades building completely opaque silos for big tech is just a stunning lack of self awareness.
"Legacy code" is often code that you want to replace because you don't understand it. The problem is, before you can replace it, you need to understand it, and, once you understand it, replacing it is rarely the cheapest option any more.
Documented how to use a RPI Zero as a "programmable" USB device that can act as an installer for multiple operating systems.
(And now, playing with ChromeOS Flex.)
@daniel and anyone can use RSS to follow it without using ActivityPub!
Build a personal website, blog, or portfolio and use your own domain name. Make something that a rich asshole with the cringest haircut and gold chain can't ever take away.
One of the most important things I consider when choosing a social media platform is whether people can read what I post without being nagged or forced to create an account. For many of my friends who don’t really care about #Mastodon, https://gultsch.social is just a website they can drop by occasionally to see what I’m up to.
Experiment with OpenNIC + Yggdrasil + YunoHost was successful in some sense. Managed to exchange emails between two YunoHost instances without any public IPv4 address, nor a traditional DNS domain.
However, the OpenNIC ACME server of course cannot contact a web server running on Yggdrasil, so no easy way of having TLS certificates.
Full writeup here: https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/linux/using_yggdrasil_opennic_yunohost.md
I didn't know about Debian https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/extrepo, but it's quite handy if you do infrastructure as code.
Random tidbit: when trying out Google Workspaces, Google sets up example.com.test-google-a.com. You can use this domain for testdriving GMail without switching MX records.
(Of course, my recommendation is to try to avoid strengthening the Google/Microsoft email duopoly. But you can't always get what you want.)
Despite all, the Google Testing blog is still a gem:
https://testing.googleblog.com/2024/10/smurf-beyond-test-pyramid.html
I think many of us are a bit corrupted due to working on websites with a heavyweight database as a backend, and browsers making things harder. There, the testing pyramid fits somewhat.
But the "SMURF" perspective is IMHO something better than the testing pyramid in every way, and we would do well in adopting it or something similar.
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-/