News from the Planet

Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by <ar the cheapest way to get a…

I've got a new homeserver/NAS (Network Attached Storage), previously I was using some Raspberry Pis, but I've wanted for a while a low power board that has SATA ports for attaching hard drives and one that could run GNU Guix, and the ZimaBoard 2 looked like it might be a good option.

Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC'…

In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras. The…

Guile Knots is a library providing higher-level patterns and building blocks for programming with Guile Fibers.

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.

A complete tutorial on using instance segmentation and the Fields of the World dataset to delineate agricultural field boundaries with GeoAI, from data preparation to batch inference.

A step-by-step tutorial on detecting clouds and cloud shadows from satellite imagery using OmniCloudMask and GeoAI, with post-processing, vectorization, and cloud-free mask generation.

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…

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.

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"…

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…

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…

A step-by-step tutorial on creating an interactive spinning 3D globe with raster and vector data overlays using a web-based tool or Jupyter Notebook, no coding required.

A tutorial on accessing, visualizing, and downloading free satellite imagery from the Vantor Open Data Program using a web app or QGIS plugin.

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

Announcing GeoAI QGIS Plugin v1.0 with one-click installation, SAM 3, water segmentation, forest segmentation, and export to vector, raster, COCO, YOLO, and Pascal VOC formats.

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…

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…

A step-by-step tutorial on searching, loading, and visualizing massive NOAA coastal LiDAR point clouds directly in your browser without downloading any data.

I've been meaning to write up a post on how I manage my Guix System configurations for a while, because I've hit on a solution that feels kinda nice, inspired by how folks do things in NixOS.

Recently I've been trying to get a PR merged with some fixes for Lua. I thought this would be a pretty straightforward thing to merge, but it turns out that modifying the Lua packages leads to 990 packages needing to be rebuilt. This is more than the 300 limit for a merge to master, so instead of…

Last week, from Monday to Tuesday was Guix days! Guix days is an annual FOSDEM fringe event, where Guix hackers from Europe and abroad meet. This year was my second time going, and I was waiting for it all year! In this post, I’ll do a quick retrospective of what happened, and my thoughts on…

Introducing anymap-ts, a new Python package built on MapLibre and TypeScript for interactive geospatial visualization in both web apps and Jupyter Notebooks.