How to Mount a Balcony Awning
Hi Kris,
I’ve been reading your website for quite a while. It’s one of my favourite blogs. Thank you for what you are doing!
We are currently experiencing a heat wave in Germany, so I drew inspiration from Low-tech Magazine’s article “ How to Dress and Undress your Home” and built an awning on my balcony. I documented the process so that other readers can install one themselves.
The ov … ⌘ Read more
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The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.
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@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I wouldn’t say that. Go code could fall into that category as well.
Maybe this topic could use a blog post / article, that explains what it’s about. I’m finding it hard to really define what “suckless-like software” is. 🤔 (Their own philosophy focuses too much on elitism, if you ask me.)
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The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.
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@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I’m referring to software that’s similar to that of suckless.org: Small, minimal codebases, small tools, but still useful. dmenu is probably the best example and also farbfeld.
Here’s the author of Anubis talking about some of their experiences:
https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05/
(You can skip the long config and keybinds part.)
Ignite Realtime Blog: Empowering Digital Sovereignty with Openfire: A Secure and Customizable Communication Platform
In today’s interconnected world, digital sovereignty has become increasingly important for individuals and organizations seeking to maintain control over their data, infrastructure, and technologies. Openfire, an open-source, real-time collaboration (RTC) server that uses the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence … ⌘ Read more
A good blog post that makes some good points: Can I ethically use LLMs?
Okay, now this is a very interesting Rust feature:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/07/03/stabilizing-naked-functions/
This (and inline assembly) makes Rust really interesting for very low-level stuff. 🥳
** Om nom nom LLMs, in which I respond to Simon Willison’s analogy **
I am hesitant to wade into the tumultuous waters that are the discourse around generative AI and LLMs, but this morning I came across a thing that so thoroughly melted my brain I feel uncontrollably compelled to respond.
This morning, at evidently 4:10 AM (no mention of timezone), Simon Willison shared the following blog post, quoted here in full:
Quitting programming as … ⌘ Read more
@mckinley@mckinley.cc’s blog appears to have gone stale, hm.
I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳
- People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
- Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
- DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
- This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
- At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
- (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.
Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.
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OpenBSD has the wonderful
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pledge() and unveil() syscalls:
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Multi-Threading. Is. Hard. 🤯 And yes, that blog is great. 👌
On my blog: Short Fiction — Transgender Athlete Bans https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/22/title-ix-hope.html #fiction #freeculture #lgbtpridemonth #politics
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — First Woman — Dream to Reality https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/21/first-woman-1.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Toots 🦣 from 06/16 to 06/20 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/20/week.html #linkdump #socialmedia #quotes #week
On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Gambit part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/19/gambit-part-1.html #scifi #startrek #closereading
https://blog.garambrogne.net/kloset.html #kloset disséqué une histoire de #plakar un outil de sauvegarde qui utilise déduplication compression chiffrage et signature
OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E
Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.
Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:
unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);
Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.
I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.
I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():
On my blog: Developer Diary, Day of the African Child https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/16/african-child.html #programming #project #devjournal
On my blog: Go Nowhere Fast https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/15/go-nowhere-fast.html #harm #rant #politics #harm
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@prologic I am finding writing my Notes very therapeutic. Just create a markdown file and commit, push, and it’s live. Whatever comes to mind, whatever I want to keep as relevant. Silly things, more like a dump.
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@prologic@twtxt.net yes, I never understood you using micro.blog (and paying for it, nonetheless!). I don’t like it (as a platform), and have an unexplainable dislike for its creator.
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@prologic I am finding writing my Notes very therapeutic. Just create a markdown file and commit, push, and it’s live. Whatever comes to mind, whatever I want to keep as relevant. Silly things, more like a dump.
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@bender@twtxt.net Maybe one day I’ll take back over my prologic.blog domain from µBlog and redoit with my handy zs tool with some nice CSS 🤣
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@movq why Gopher to babble, and not just HTTP? I mean, may as well just write plain text files on your machine, and leave them there, right?
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@bender@twtxt.net I just babble on Twtxt 🤣 I honestly find that I don’t realy have the time nor the energy to “blog” in full really, I rarely do 😢
On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Tag Team https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/14/tag-team.html #freeculture #bookclub
On my blog: Toots 🦣 from 06/09 to 06/13 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/13/week.html #linkdump #socialmedia #quotes #week
Great article from Tailscale about how security policies we’ve often seen in many large complex organizations that we all love to hate don’t actually provide the security that we assumed.
On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Interface https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/12/interface.html #scifi #startrek #closereading
My Journey to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024: A Story of Volunteering and Growth
My name is Oscar Ayra and I am from Lima, Peru. In 2024, I had the privilege of being part of the volunteer team at Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) Lima. It was an enriching experience where… ⌘ Read more
Newbie No More: Lessons from My First KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as a Speaker
Introduction April in London has never felt so electric. From the first footstep in the ExCeL halls to the hallway conversations, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 was a whirlwind of new ideas, familiar faces, and those… ⌘ Read more
GitOps in 2025: From Old-School Updates to the Modern Way
1. Introduction: Why Everyone’s Talking About GitOps in 2025 It’s 2025, and building software is more cloud-driven than ever. Cloud computing offers incredible speed and flexibility, but it also brings complexity. Companies are expected to ship… ⌘ Read more
Makefile.md - Possibly Use(ful|less) Polyglot Synthesis of Makefile and Markdown
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Enjoying nature and walking through this green and calm scenery. 🌳🚶♂️🌳 ⌘ Read more
Enjoying nature and walking through this green and calm scenery. 🌳🚶♂️🌳 ⌘ Read more
GitHub for Beginners: Code review and refactoring with GitHub Copilot
Learn how to use GitHub Copilot to help review and polish your code.
The post GitHub for Beginners: Code review and refactoring with GitHub Copilot appeared first on The GitHub Blog. ⌘ Read more
Live tracking solution for OsmAnd
I previously shared my transition from Komoot to OsmAnd, and after some time, I’ve grown accustomed to its comprehensive capabilities. Whether for cycling, hiking, or general navigation, OsmAnd truly functions as a versatile “Swiss Army knife” for offline mobile navigation and tracking. ⌘ Read more
On my blog: Generative AI Wish List https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/08/ai-wish-list.html #artificialintelligence #harm #rant