Flipper BUSY Bar

Yes, it is in fact real, I’m holding it in my hands, and after what feels like years of Flipper teasing everyone with this ominous device in various online posts, I can finally confirm that it is real.

The BUSY Bar is a 250 gram desk device by Flipper Devices, the company behind the Flipper Zero and the still very much in-development Flipper One. It’s basically a little display that shows various things on a 72x16 RGB LED matrix, and as of writing this its main selling point is that it can run a Pomodoro-style focus timer, and that it has a full-blown HTTP API that’s available over...

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

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

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...