Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org

Tl;dr: After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable, and confusing for everyday users. Development feels directionless, client and server projects are fragmented, and the user experience still lags far behind my expectations. A recent incident that essentially broke my own community channel on the Matrix.org homeserver was the final straw: I’m heading back to XMPP.

For the past few years, I’ve been trying to make Matrix.org, and with it the Element client applications, my...

On _Resistance From the Tech Sector_

This post is only available through the Onion and I2P sites. Why?

Manually Flashing Firmware on the Star Labs StarBook

Note

Unfortunately Star Labs have changed their approach on manual updates and they don’t seem to function any longer.

Consider this post dead on arrival.

Most modern Linux systems no longer need to worry about keeping up with hardware vendors’ firmware upgrades, thanks to the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and fwupd. However, with my somewhat special setup, upgrading my laptop’s firmware via fwupd is finicky and error-prone.

In this short guide, I’ll walk through how to manually upgrade the AMI firmware on my Star Labs StarBook Mk VI (AMD). These steps also apply to most other Star Labs devices, with the only difference being the specific flashrom files required.

I Bought Four “Quantum Energy” Products — Do They Really Work?

Spoiler: It Was Fun And Unexpected

Continue reading on Never Stop Writing »

Just speak the truth

Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.

It is a technical decision.

The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was to reduce the burden on the security team for long-term maintenance of X. Additionally, nobody so far on the security team has expressed any interest in collaborating with xxxxxx on security concerns.

We have a working relationship with Freedesktop already, while we would have to start from the beginning with xxxxxx.

Why...

Some fun engineering advice blog

Found a link toward this fun, but very wise, huh... blog, I guess? I don't know.
Maybe there is a better forum category for this, if so, please move the thread accordingly.
Anyway, here's the link: https://grugbrain.dev
Enjoy!

Do old‑style version numbers still make sense?

Long before the endless scroll of release notes and automatic updates, software came packaged in physical media: floppies, CDs, DVDs. Version numbers were lovingly crafted—Version 3.5.2 meant something. It signaled a meaningful hierarchy: major features, minor improvements, bug fixes. You’d carefully note it in a spreadsheet, or stamp it on the media sleeve, and you knew exactly what you had. Back then, if you were shipping a desktop app on CD, you couldn’t just push a micro‑patch. You needed a build, a test cycle, a labeled release. A three‑part version number made sense: major.minor.patch told a coherent story. Then came...

Build a HTML5 “Helix Jump” prototype with Three.js and TypeScript – Step 4: scoring, animated CSS background and platforms fading away

In the fourth step of the Helix Jump HTML5 prototype with Three.js and TypeScript, I added a clean CSS-based score display, a subtle animated background using only CSS, and made destroyed platforms fade out and fly away with GSAP. These visual touches make the game feel more alive, and as always, you get the full line-by-line commented source code for free.

Photo Walk: Five “Radioactive” Places In Amsterdam Worthy Of Visiting

Let’s Combine Some Fun, Science, and History

Continue reading on Never Stop Writing »

Unionize or die

Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech workforce is meaningfully organized. This is a fatal mistake – and I don’t mean “fatal” in the figurative sense. Tech workers, it’s time for you to unionize, and strike, or you and your loved ones are literally going to die.

In this article I will justify this statement and show that it is clearly not hyperbolic. I will explain exactly what you need to do, and how organized labor can and will save your...