Calculating your donation's value following Patreon's fee changes

In January 2018, I wrote a blog post which included a fee calculator. Patreon changes their fee model tomorrow, and it’s time for an updated calculator. I’m grandfathered into the old fees, so not much has changed for me, but I want to equip Patreon users - creators and supporters - with more knowledge of how their money is moving through the platform.

Patreon makes money by siphoning some money off the top of a donation flow between supporters and creators. Because of the nature of its business (a private, VC-backed corporation), the siphon’s size and semantics are prone to change in undesirable ways, since VC’s expect infinite growth and...

Announcing Wio: A clone of Plan 9's Rio for Wayland

For a few hours here and there over the past few months, I’ve been working on a side project: Wio. I’ll just let the (3 minute) screencast do the talking first:

Note: this video begins with several seconds of grey video. This is normal.

In short, Wio is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots which has a similar look and feel to Plan 9’s Rio desktop. It works by running each application in its own nested Wayland compositor, based on Cage - yet another wlroots-based Wayland compositor. I used Cage in last week’s RDP article, but here’s another cool use-case for it.

The behavior this allows for (each window...

The "shut up and get back to work" coding style guide

So you’re starting a new website, and you open the first CSS file. What style do you use? Well, you hate indenting with spaces passionately. You know tabs are right because they’re literally made for this, and they’re only one byte, and these god damn spaces people with their bloody spacebars…

Shut up and use spaces. That’s how CSS is written1. And you, mister web programmer, coming out of your shell and dipping your toes into the world of Real Programming, writing your first Golang program: use tabs, jerk. There’s only one principle that matters in coding style: don’t rock the boat. Just do whatever the most common...

Using Cage for a seamless remote Wayland session

Congratulations to Jente Hidskes on the first release of Cage! Cage is a Wayland compositor designed for kiosks - though, as you’ll shortly find out, is useful in many unexpected ways. It launches a single application, in fullscreen, and exits the compositor when that application exits. This lets you basically add a DRM+KMS+libinput session to any Wayland-compatible application (or X application via XWayland) and run it in a tiny wlroots compositor.

I actually was planning on writing something like this at some point (for a project which still hasn’t really come off the ground yet), so I was excited when Jente announced it in December. With the addition of the...

Choosing a VPN service is a serious decision

There’s a disturbing trend in the past year or so of various VPN companies advertising to the general, non-technical public. It’s great that the general public is starting to become more aware of their privacy online, but I’m not a fan of these companies exploiting public paranoia to peddle their wares. Using a VPN in the first place has potentially grave consequences for your privacy - and can often be worse than not using one in the first place.

It’s true that, generally speaking, when you use a VPN, the websites you visit don’t have access to your original IP address, which can be used to derive...

Status update, April 2019

Spring is here, and I’m already miserable in the heat. Crazy weather here in Philadelphia - I was woken up at 3 AM by my phone buzzing, telling me to take immediate shelter from a tornado. But with my A/C cranked up and the tornado safely passed, I’ve been able to get a lot of work done.

The project with the most impressive progress is aerc2. It can now read emails, including filtering them through arbitrary commands for highlighting diffs or coloring quotes, or even rendering HTML email with a TUI browser like w3m.

Here’s another demo focusing on the embedded terminal emulator which makes this possible:

Keybindings are also...

Announcing first-class Mercurial support on Sourcehut

I’m pleased to announce that the final pieces have fallen into place for Mercurial support on SourceHut, which is now on-par with our git offering. Special thanks are owed to SourceHut contributor Ludovic Chabant, who has been instrumental in adding Mercurial support to SourceHut. You may have heard about it while this was still experimental - but I’m happy to tell you that we have now completely integrated Mercurial support into SourceHut! Want to try it out? Check out the tutorial.

Mercurial support on SourceHut includes all of the trimmings, including CI support via builds.sr.ht and email-driven collaboration on lists.sr.ht. Of course, it’s also 100% free-as-in-freedom, open source software (hosted on itself)...

The story of the 3dfx Voodoo 1

The story of how the 3dfx Voodoo 1 which ruled 3D gaming from 1996 to 1998.

2019-04-04

Registrations are now open for slcon6 that will be held in Bad Liebenzell, Germany on 2019-10-(04-06).

The CfP for interested participants will end on 2019-06-30.

NewPipe represents the best of FOSS

NewPipe is a free and open-source Android application for browsing & watching YouTube. In my opinion, NewPipe is a perfect case-study in why free & open source software is great and how our values differ from proprietary software in important ways. There’s one simple reason: it’s better than the proprietary YouTube app, in every conceivable way, for free.

NewPipe is better because it’s user-centric software. It exists to make its users lives better, not to enrich its overseers. Because of this, NewPipe has many features which are deliberately omitted from the proprietary app, such as: