PinePhone review

tl;dr: Holy shit! This is the phone I have always wanted. I have never been this excited about the mobile sector before. However: the software side is totally absent — phone calls are very dubious, SMS is somewhat dubious, LTE requires some hacks, and everything will have to be written from the ground up.

I have a PinePhone developer edition model, which I paid for out of pocket1 and which took an excruciatingly long time to arrive. When it finally arrived, it came with no SIM or microSD card (expected), and the eMMC had some half-assed version of Android on it which just boot looped without POSTing to...

Status update, December 2019

It’s December 15th and it still hasn’t snowed here. Why did I move to this godforsaken den of unholy heat and rain? I think I have chosen a latitude just southerly enough to deprive me of the climate I yearn for. I take some comfort in the knowledge that I’m travelling home to see the family in a couple of weeks, and sure enough Colorado has been covered in snow for some time now. Anyway, none of this is relevant to my work, which is what you came here for. Let’s take a look at this past month.

I’ve started a couple of new projects this month,...

Developers shouldn't distribute their own software

An oft-heard complaint about Linux is that software distribution often takes several forms: a Windows version, a macOS version, and… a Debian version, an Ubuntu version, a Fedora version, a CentOS version, an openSUSE version… but these complaints miss the point. The true distributable form for Linux software, and rather for Unix software in general, is a .tar.gz file containing the source code.

Note: This article presumes that proprietary/nonfree software is irrelevant, and so should you.

That’s not to imply that end-users should take this tarball and run ./configure && make && sudo make install themselves. Rather, the responsibility for end-user software distribution is on the distribution itself. That’s...

Strike Commander: Interview with Frank Savage

There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't...

2019-12-01

On Wednesday, 2019-12-04 there will be scheduled maintenance of the suckless servers. It's estimated this will take about 2-3 hours from about 19:00 to 21:00 - 22:00 UTC+01:00.

The mailinglist, website and source-code repositories will have some downtime.

Update: the maintenance was finished at 2019-12-04 20:00 UTC+01:00.

Take action to save .org and prosecute those who sold out the internet

As many of you have no doubt heard, control of the .org registry has been sold to private interests. There have been attempts to call them to reason, like Save .ORG, but let’s be realistic: they knew what they’re doing is wrong, the whole time. If they were a commercial entity, our appeals would fall on deaf ears and that would be the end of it. But, they’re not a commercial entity - so our appeals may fall on deaf ears, but that doesn’t have to be the end of it.

The level of corruption on display by the three organizations involved in this scam: ICANN (Internet Corporation...

Software developers should avoid traumatic changes

A lot of software has gone through changes which, in retrospect, I would describe as “traumatic” to their communities. I recognize these sorts of changes by their effect: we might have pulled through in the end, but only after a lot of heartbreak, struggle, and hours of wasted hacking; but the change left a scar on the community.

There are two common cases in which a change risks introducing this kind of trauma:

Let’s call...

China

This article will be difficult to read and was difficult to write. I hope that you can stomach the uncomfortable nature of this topic and read my thoughts in earnest. I usually focus on technology-related content, but at the end of the day, this is my personal blog and I feel that it would betray my personal principles to remain silent. I’ve made an effort to provide citations for all of my assertions.

Note: if you are interested in conducting an independent review of the factuality of the claims expressed in this article, please contact me.

The keyboard I’m typing these words into bears “Made in China” on...

Status update, November 2019

Today’s update is especially exciting, because today marks the 1 year anniversary of Sourcehut opening it’s alpha to public registration. I wrote a nice long article which goes into detail about what Sourcehut accomplished in 2019, what’s to come for 2020, and it lays out the entire master plan for your consideration. Be sure to give that a look if you have the time. I haven’t slowed down on my other projects, though, so here’re some more updates!

I’ve been pushing hard on the VR work this month, with lots of help from Simon Ser. We’ve put together wxrc - Wayland XR Compositor - which does what it says...

An old-school shell hack on a line printer

https://spacepub.space/videos/embed/d8943b2d-8280-497b-85ec-bc282ec2afdc

It’s been too long since I last did a good hack, for no practical reason other than great hack value. In my case, these often amount to a nostalgia for an age of computing I wasn’t present for. In a recent bid to capture more of this nostalgia, I recently picked up a dot matrix line printer, specifically the Epson LX-350 printer. This one is nice because it has a USB port, so I don’t have to break out my pile of serial cable hacks to get it talking to Linux 😁

This is the classic printer style, with infinite paper and a lovely noise during printing....