News from the Planet

In our efforts to create a Tiny Build Farm for Guix, that is supposed to report on the status of the packages assigned to the science team, so far we have seen how to set up the required infrastructure. On a dedicated machine with Guix as its operating system, we have added several Shepherd…

This fictional story begins more than 10 years ago. I was a student at technical university and was confused by how outdated some of the programming-related courses are. I was checking out a few first lections and usually skipping the rest of them (except a couple courses that were fun and…

Hello! Earlier this summer I was talking to a friend about how much I love using fish, and how I love that I don’t have to configure it. They said that they feel the same way about the helix text editor, and so I decided to give it a try. I’ve been using it for 3 months now and here are a few…

Free Software for Correctness;Correctness for Free Software.

A cloud-init service for Guix is still a work in progress. Meanwhile, here's how you can deploy Guix on DigitalOcean right away.

Complex end-to-end tests in development repositories involving packages written in several languages are a chore to describe and maintain. Often, the only recourse is to pull in pre-built binaries or haul around heavy Docker images. Could there be a better way? Could it be Guix (spoiler alert:…

In the last few months, I have installed and upgraded my second preferred GNU/Linux system, GNU Guix, on multiple boxes. Regarding that system, I have already written a few introductory posts in the recent past. This is an update about my experiences as a user and developer. I still think Guix is a…

What is the ubiquitous with-imported-modules in G-expressions? Why do you need it when you already have use-modules?

Indent generated G-expression scripts with this trick to aid in debugging!

One of the oft-cited reasons people give for not switching to Guix is that their favourite software is too outdated, and a look at Repology shows that they are not wrong. Now the number of active committers in the Guix project is amazingly small, and even counting all contributors I am impressed by…

Mes 0.27.1 is a bug-fix release. It represents 53 commits by four people over one year. This release resurrects supports development builds with gcc-14 and adds support for using NYACC versions 0.99.0 through 2.02.2.

Recently I changed my ISP, and the new one uses Carrier-grade NAT, or CGNAT, by default. While this sounds fancy and professional, it is in fact even worse than conventional NAT: Not only do all my devices share the same IPv4, but I share one IPv4 with several other customers! Apparently I am only…

Using Guix with Container Toolbox on an atomic Fedora distrbution.

Hello! After many months of writing deep dive blog posts about the terminal, on Tuesday I released a new zine called “The Secret Rules of the Terminal”! You can get it for $12 here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal, or get an 15-pack of all my zines here. Here’s the cover: the table…

I have never been a C programmer but every so often I need to compile a C/C++ program from source. This has been kind of a struggle for me: for a long time, my approach was basically “install the dependencies, run make, if it doesn’t work, either try to find a binary someone has compiled or give…

Using Mailutil's Sieve to filter email

Bonfire is a new framework to build federated applications that just reached RC1. It is written in Elixir, a nice functional language, and allows communities to create custom flavored Fediverse applications, that can be tailored for their specific needs. I have been in touch with the core team and…

How fast is GNU Mes’ scheme interpreter really?

I had two goals: to count AI crawlers DDoSing my nginx infrastructure and to see if anybody reads at least one of my three posts in the blog. To achieve both, I needed to gather data and transform it into meaningful insights, so basically I needed web analytics.

Using Goimapnotify for new email automation

Multiple Accounts and colours in Neomutt

Multiple accounts, colours and maildir in Neomutt

Using IMAP in Neomutt and options for sending email using SMTP

Introduction to using Neomutt. Emailing like it's 1995 in 2025!

Part 3 of an introduction to regular expressions in Guile Scheme: anchors, grouping and backslash escaping