Recovering BIOS Firmware on the Star Labs StarBook

As I described in my latest quarterly update, a perfectly routine firmware update managed to turn my Star Labs StarBook Mk VI (AMD) into an expensive paperweight. I had simply copy-pasted the curl ... | bash one-liner from Star Labs' official documentation, the script did its thing for about half a minute, shut the device down, and from that point on the StarBook refused to boot. Black screen, keyboard backlight on, the power LED lit, and the speakers occasionally producing a clacking sound. Sadly no amount of the usual turn-it-off-and-on-again rituals or battery disconnects brought it back.

The only way out of this situation is to re-flash the BIOS...

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Forgejo + XMPP

I recently decided to leave Codeberg and run my own Forgejo instance instead. After finishing the initial setup, I realized that a forge I host myself is a forge that I get to shape, and that I no longer have to settle for whatever feature set someone else considered reasonable. I can now make it truly mine, and switch on the things I have always wanted a Git host to do.

The first of those things concerns the registration. Right now Forgejo, like pretty much every other forge, wants an email address and sends a verification link to it, because apparently a clicked link is still considered...

GL.iNet Mudi 7

tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is close to what I measure, and the LTE reception alone is a clear upgrade over the M2. Sadly the Tri-band...

The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services

Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece and most of it is speculation about a future that has not arrived (yet?), based on a few data points that have. As usual, summary at the end.

A few years ago I would have laughed at anyone telling me that there is a serious market for ten-dollar drills, two-dollar dresses, and one-dollar pairs of shoes shipped from a warehouse on the other side of the planet. Today, however, that market exists and it has a name, and it is even publicly traded (sort of, through holdings). TEMU, Shein and a few others have built frankly mind-boggling businesses around the idea that...

Recreating a Titanic Spark-Gap Transmitter with Python, High Voltage, and ESP32

Let’s Bring Back Some Wireless History

Continue reading on Level Up Coding »

2026-07-27

This friday (31 july) there will be scheduled maintenance of the suckless servers.

It's estimated this will take about 1 hour.

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

Update: the update was performed on saturday (1 august). Everything should work again.

2026-07-27

slock 1.7 released: download

This contains an important security and reliability fix: https://git.suckless.org/slock/commit/55d985a354048e14f408dd731faaf1acbdc277f4.html

A GTK4 ssh-askpass in Zig

I run hardened Gentoo on my laptop, and most of the time I never touch ssh-askpass because I’m using -sk keys for most of the systems. There is one class of situation where I do need it, though, which is when a program wants an SSH key passphrase for a regular ED25519 key, but has no terminal to read it from. The usual case is go get, or the go toolchain in general, fetching a private module over SSH during a build that runs without a TTY. OpenSSH can’t prompt on a pipe, so it runs whatever SSH_ASKPASS points at and puts the passphrase prompt in a...

AI in Linux

The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development.

I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and reviewing code. There are, at the time of writing, just over 1,200 kernel commits with an “Assisted-by” tag, from September 2025 to the present, most of which indicate patches which were written or assisted by LLM tools.

The second important use of AI for Linux comes with a new code review...

Build a HTML5 game like Geometry Dash using Phaser 4 and TypeScript, with a simple custom physics engine

The cube in Geometry Dash always lands perfectly square. It's not rigid-body physics: the spin is purely cosmetic. The hitbox never rotates, and the game snaps the angle to 90 degrees on landing. I rebuilt it as an HTML5 game in Phaser 4 + TypeScript, with my own physics engine.