News from the Planet

Hello there, If you’re an avid reader of blogs, you’ll know this medium is basically dead now. Everyone switched to making YouTube videos, complete with cuts and costume changes every few seconds because, I guess, our brains work much faster now. The YouTube recommendation algorithm, problematic…

Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made, and tl;dw1 it's the 11" MacBook Air. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position:…

I have an old Intel macbook 12 of begin 2016, one of the so-called "Retina Macbooks". It is an ideal couch device but far too slow to run modern OS-X, provided you wanted to run that to begin with.

It’s clear LLMs are one of the biggest changes in technology ever. The rate of progress is astounding: recently due to a configuration mistake I accidentally used Claude Sonnet 3.5 (released ~2 years ago) instead of Opus 4.6 for a task and looked at the output and thought “what is this garbage”? But…

This month in Radicle CI, March 2026 This is a monthly newsletter about the current state of Radicle CI, what has happened recently, and near future plans. Current status Radicle CI is in production use. There are several CI nodes, and Lars runs a public one for open source Rust projects at…

In Chapter 1 I gave the context for this project and in Chapter 2 I showed the bare minimum: an ELF that Open Firmware loads, a firmware service call, and an infinite loop. That was July 2024. Since then, the project has gone from that infinite loop to a bootloader that actually boots Linux kernels.…

Last week, Igalia finally announced Moonforge, a project we’ve been working on for basically all of 2025. It’s been quite the rollercoaster, and the announcement hit various news outlets, so I guess now is as good a time as any to talk a bit about what Moonforge is, its goal, and its constraints. Of…

I always spend too much time setting up a new project and thinking how to structure it. I decided to summuraize my experience, to enhance it with a small research and to write down my thoughts on the topic. So I can come back to it myself or reference in the discussion.

Last week was the end of Malika' internship within Papers about signatures that I had the pleasure to mentor. After a post about the first phase of Outreachy, here is the sequel of the story. Nowadays, people expect to be able to fill and sign PDF documents. We previously worked on features to…

Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1, which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era.</figure class="insert-image"> This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G4<a href="#fn:1"…

Another slow cycle, same as last time. Still, a few new things to showcase. Sidebars The most visible addition is the new sidebar widget. This is a bit confusing, because we already had widgets for creating windows with sidebars - AdwNavigationSplitView and AdwOverlaySplitView, but nothing to…

Open Forms is now 0.4.0 - and the GUI Builder is here A quick recap for the newcomers Ever been to a conference where you set up a booth or tried to collect quick feedback and experienced the joy of: Captive portal logout Timeouts Flaky Wi-Fi drivers on Linux devices Poor bandwidth or dead…

Many of us wonder if the MacBook Neo is 'the one'. Because I have a faster desktop (currently a M4 Max Mac Studio), I've always used a lower-end Mac laptop, like the iBook or MacBook Air, for travel. I've used MacBook Pros in the past, but I like the portability of smaller, cheaper models. In…

My computing life has often been difficult and complicated. I've gone against the mainstream for most of it. In the very early 1990s I chose to use Linux, when it was very new and have stuck with it. I could've chosen MS-DOS and then Windows, or a Mac, and had the benefit of more things working more…

Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an…

After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It?, I wanted to replicate the PTP (Precision Time Protocol) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync: I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only one!), and shortly thereafter, he…

Painkillers are essential. (There are indicators that Neanderthals already used them.) However, many people don’t know about aspects of them, that could be relevant for them in practice. Since I learned some new things recently, here a condensed info dump about painkillers. Many aspects here are…

After migrating this blog from a static site generator into Drupal in 2009, I noted: As a sad side-effect, all the blog comments are gone. Forever. Wiped out. But have no fear, we can start new discussions on many new posts! I archived all the comments from the old 'Thingamablog' version of the…

Fifteen months have passed since our last Guix/Hurd on a Thinkpad X60 post and a lot has happened with respect to the Hurd.

In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case, and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on <y terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required). I've wanted to downsize the setup while…

A cool thing about Guix (and probably functional package managers in general) is, that derivations form a directed acyclic graph, which means that all packages with their dependencies or system configurations can be represented as such. Another, even cooler, thing is, that Guix provides a graphing…

I've raised a few PRs against the Guix Codeberg repository recently, and each time I've done so with Forgejo's AGit workflow. This workflow is pretty nice, and allows me to raise a PR entirely from within Emacs. To do that, I've been using this code in my Emacs config to add an extra option to the…

I run Frigate to record security cameras and detect people, cars, and animals when in view. My current Frigate server runs on a Raspberry Pi CM4 and a Coral TPU plugged in via USB. Raspberry Pi offers multiple AI HAT+'s for the Raspberry Pi 5 with built-in Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L AI coprocessors, and…

Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year, I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page. I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc) which have a man page as their primary documentation. This is because I…

Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer. The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging its AI slop code. It's likely the bot was…