Running FreeBSD using Windows Subsystem for Linux
What if you are forced to use Windows, but want to use a real operating system instead? You could use WSL2 to use Linux inside Windows, but what if FreeBSD is more your thing? It turns out someone is working on making FreeBSD usable using WSL2. This repository hosts work-in-progress efforts to run FreeBSD inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) with minimal to no changes to the FreeBSD base system. The project builds on the open-s … ⌘ Read more

Fedora’s “AI” policy process highlights rift between IBM/Red Hat and Fedora
A lot of open source projects are struggling what to do with the “AI” bubble, and Fedora is no different. This whole past year, the project’s been struggling to formulate any official policies on the use of “AI”, and LWN.net’s Joe Brockmeier has just done an amazing job summarising the various positions, opinions, and people influencing this process. His conclusion: There appears to b … ⌘ Read more

It happened.

“Can you help me debug this program? I vibe coded it and I have no idea what’s going on. I had no choice – learning this new language and frameworks would have taken ages, and I have severe time constraints.”

Did I say “no”? Of course not, I’m a “nice guy”. So I’m at fault as well, because I endorsed this whole thing. The other guy is also guilty, because he didn’t communicate clearly to his boss what can be done and how much time it takes. And the boss and his bosses are guilty a lot, because they’re all pushing for “AI”.

The end result is garbage software.

This particular project is still relatively small, so it might be okay at the moment. But normalizing this will yield nothing but garbage. And actually, especially if this small project works out fine, this contributes to the shittiness because management will interpret this as “hey, AI works”, so they will keep asking for it in future projects.

How utterly frustrating. This is not what I want to do every day from now on.

Servo GTK: a widget to embed Servo in GTK4
Servo, the Rust-based browsing engine spun off from Mozilla, keeps making progress every month, and this made Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wonder: what if we make a GTK widget so we can test Servo and compare it to WebKitGTK? As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was … ⌘ Read more

Stealing Part of a Production Language Model (2024)
We introduce the first model-stealing attack that extracts precise, nontrivial information from black-box production language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s PaLM-2. Specifically, our attack recovers the embedding projection layer (up to symmetries) of a transformer model, given typical API access. For under $20 USD, our attack extracts the entire projection matrix of OpenAI’s ada and babbage language models. We thereby confirm, for the first time, that these black-box … ⌘ Read more

cargo-subspace: Make rust-analyzer work better with very large cargo workspaces
Let me preface all of this by saying that rust-analyzer is an amazing project, and I am eternally grateful for the many people who contribute to it! It makes developing rust code a breeze, and it has surely significantly contributed to Rust’s widespread adoption.

If you’ve ever worked with a very large cargo workspace (think hundreds of crates), you know that rust-analyzer eagerly builds compile time dependencies (e.g. proc macros) and index … ⌘ Read more

Linux, Rust, & NixOS Use Master Branch, Support Human Slavery
Using the term “Master” in our software projects is racist, right? ⌘ Read more

** JavaScript Notebook **
Kartik recently reminded me of my own project playground that I do use from time to time, but that I’ve always been a little frustrated with.

That reminder paired with that frustration lead me to revisit something similar that I’d started a while ago, but hadn’t finished. Notebook is kinda my take on Jupyter Notebooks minus a ton of features and capabilities.

Here is … ⌘ Read more

🏆 How I Passed the Certified Argo Project Associate (CAPA) Exam — And Why It Was Worth It
If you’ve been working with ArgoCD or exploring GitOps, you’ve probably come across the Certified Argo Project Associate (CAPA) exam. I recently passed it, and in this post, I want to share: This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s… ⌘ Read more

Hopefully I can muster up the energy to start this new project:

Put up lots of thermometers and hygrometers in the apartment, have them report their readings wireless to a database.

I suspect that I’ll have to “build” these myself, because ready-to-use kits most like require some sort of cloud service. Dunno, haven’t checked yet.

@prologic@twtxt.net That zs looks pretty cool! I love simple static site generators, and look forward to trying it on my next web site project. Kudos!

Speaking of groff: I’ve been following their mailing list for a while now and this G. Branden Robinson person invests an insane amount of energy into that project. 🤯

@prologic@twtxt.net No, this is a Linux manpage from the man-pages project: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/man/man7/ascii.7

I do have an idea what’s going on. Could be an unfortunate interaction between the table preprocessor tbl and the man macro package. 🤔

ESP32 Bus Pirate Turns Low-Cost Boards into Multi-Protocol Debugging Tools
An open-source project called ESP32 Bus Pirate has been released, inspired by the classic Bus Pirate and adapted for modern ESP32-S3 hardware. Developed by Geo-tp, the firmware transforms low-cost ESP32 boards into versatile debugging devices that can probe, sniff, and interact with a wide range of digital and radio protocols. The firmware supports protocols such […] ⌘ Read more

Leftists Attack Cloudflare Funding of Ladybird & Omarchy Linux
Cloudflare contributes financially to Open Source projects. ⌘ Read more

Autonomous Testing of etcd’s Robustness
As a critical component of many production systems, including Kubernetes, the etcd project’s first priority is reliability. Ensuring consistency and data safety requires our project contributors to continuously improve testing methodologies. In this article, we describe… ⌘ Read more

Legacy Update 1.12 released
If you’re still running old versions of Windows from Windows 2000 and up, either for restrocomputing purposes or because you need to keep an old piece of software running, you’ve most likely heard of Legacy Update. This tool allows you to keep Windows Update running on Windows versions no longer supported by the service, and has basically become a must-have for anyone still playing around with older Windows versions. The project released a fairly major update today. Legacy Up … ⌘ Read more

CNCF’s Helm Project Remains Fully Open Source and Unaffected by Recent Vendor Deprecations
Recently, users may have seen the news about Broadcom (Bitnami) regarding upcoming deprecations of their publicly available container images and Helm Charts. These changes, which will take effect by September 29, 2025, mark a shift to… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for asking!

So, I’ve been working on 2 main twtxt-related projects.

The first is small Node / express application that serves up a twtxt file while allowing its owner to add twts to it (or edit it outright), and I’ve been testing it on my site since the night I made that post. It’s still very much an MVP, and I’ve been intermittently adding features, improving security, and streamlining the code, with an eye to release it after I get an MVP done of project #2 (the reader).

But that’s where I’ve been struggling. The idea seems simple enough - another Node / express app (this one with a Vite-powered front-end) that reads a public twtxt file, parses the “follow” list, grabs (and parses) those twtxt files, and then creates a river of twts out of the result. The pieces work fine in seclusion (and with dummy data), but I keep running into weird issues when reading real-live twtxt files, so some twts come through, while others get lost in the ether. I’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, I’ve been spending far more time than I anticipated just trying to get it to work end-to-end.

On top of it, the 2 projects wound up turning into 4 (so far), as I’ve been spinning out little libraries to use across both apps (like https://jsr.io/@itsericwoodward/fluent-dom-esm, and a forthcoming twtxt helper library).

In the end, I’m hoping to have project 1 (the editor) into beta by the end of October, and project 2 (the reader) into beta sometime after that, but we’ll see.

I hope this has satisfied your curiosity, but if you’d like to know more, please reach out!

A step-by-step guide to modernizing Java projects with GitHub Copilot agent mode
Learn how to use GitHub Copilot agent mode to modernize legacy Java projects with guided upgrades, automated fixes, and cloud-ready migrations.

The post A step-by-step guide to modernizing Java projects with GitHub Copilot agent mode … ⌘ Read more

openSUSE Removes File System Due to Developer “Behavior”
The openSUSE Linux project says they will re-add BCacheFS support “Once the BCacheFS maintainer behaves”. ⌘ Read more

Apologies if I’ve been spamming anyone out there in twtxt-land today.

I’ve been working on a couple of twtxt-related projects, and one of them is a reader (tentatively called twtstrm) written in JS. I used dummy data for the first few stages of development, but now I’m at the point where I need some real data, and that meant hitting up my actual following list.

Of course, it didn’t help that I had a typo in my If-Modified-Since headers, but all that has since been resolved.

Anyways, if I accidentally spammed you with requests today, I am sorry, and it shouldn’t happen anymore.

We thank you for your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience.

💻 Issue 487 - Scala Projects course from Rock the JVM ⌘ Read more

Working on a project that does Augmented Reality and computer vision object detection and QR code and image recognition inside a Web application. Pretty neat what can be done today with a few thousand lines of JavaScript.

XMPP Interop Testing: Lots More Options
Since the last update, we’ve added a lot more options on how to run your tests. We’ve added a slew of new CI systems, this time focussing on freedom-respecting, open source CI systems for your open source projects.

Recent additions include Jenkins, Drone, Harness and Woodpecker.

This brings our total number of CI systems in which you can run XMPP interop tests up to a whopping ELEVEN, plus anywhere else you can run containers!

Whether you’re building … ⌘ Read more

Since Google announced their intentions to heavily limit sideloading on Android, starting end of 2026, I’ve been looking for potential solutions, for this policy change, that threatens the majority of projects I maintain, in some way. Google already killed my browser project years ago, but I have no other choice, than to fight this, any way I can.

The best choice to deal with this, will probably be the Android Debug Bridge, which can be used not only to install apps unrestricted, but also to uninstall, or remove, almost any unnecessary part of the OS. Shizuku, combined with Canta Debloater, is the winning combination for now.

I’ve already removed most Google apps from my device: the annoying AI assistant, the stupid Google app adding the annoying articles, left of your homes screen, Google One, Gboard, Safety app… it’s amazing, no distracting Google slopware, like in the good old Android 2 days! And I absolutely intend to keep it this way, from now on, no new Google apps or services on my devices, unless Google can give me a good enough reason, to allow them there and whenever the app that verifies signatures, to block installing apps not approved by Google, I’ll just remove it from my device and advocate others do so too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @dce@hashnix.club It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter August 2025

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XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of August 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these proj … ⌘ Read more

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, glad you like it, but sadly I’m not sure, if there’s still a way, for this particular project, to continue.

Reducing 38 pixels (previous smallest) to 27, inside of a 7x7 square canvas, is a result I’m really happy with. Now it seems I can only shave off single pixels and get a lot worse looking results - to the point it doesn’t even look like my mascot, to me.

There doesn’t seem to be a hard cap for drawing tiny dogs. It’s possible to arrange 5 pixels, in a way someone recognizes them, as some kind of a dog. The record for cats, is currently a single orange pixel: https://youtu.be/gzeK8NKuzmg

The only way to beat that, is either a monitor, with just a single red diode lit, inside one of its pixels, or an image file that’s broken and empty, on purpose.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter July 2025

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XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of July 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or helping these project … ⌘ Read more

XMPP Providers: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

In May 2025, we ran a small survey to gather feedback from XMPP server operators.
Our main concerns were XMPP Provider’s service and the project itself.
First of all, we would like to thank almost 60 people who participated in this survey.
While the XMPP Providers project currently lists a little more than 70 providers, this is a good turnout.
At this point we can already tell that the gen … ⌘ Read more

XMPP Interop Testing: MOAR TESTS!
Ever heard of XMPP Interop Testing? It’s this cool project that helps make sure different XMPP servers can all work
together smoothly. Our XMPP Interop Testing project provides a suite of automated tests that can be integrated into
CI/CD pipelines to verify the compliance and interoperability of XMPP server implementations.

Late last year, we reported that we had secured funding graciously provided by NLnet that allowed
us to massively build out t … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org YEAH THEY ARE SOOO GOOD SINGING TOGETHER!!! it’s kind of their label (hello project)’s thing :]

Since Fastly acquired and recently shut down glitch.com, some of my ancient webapps are no longer available, nor do I have any plans to make them available again - all had either zero, or very few monthly visits, used outdated libraries and would be a waste of money, to continue hosting and updating elsewhere.

All art archives remain unaffected and all projects shut down before 2025, were already permanently deleted, but if there’s someone out there, still relying on the recently discontinued projects, somehow - you can reach out and request their source code.

These requests will only be honoured, until the end of this year, when we plan to permanently delete, all of this data (both webapps and files only hosted on Amazons CDN).

Canine out °_°

Status 2025-07-21
Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out.
Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I’m writing,
after all.

I’m back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I’m still
going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break.
It’s been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I’m nominally working 80%
(~6 hour days), so I figure I’ve been working a lot for free.

Yeah, well, I like the TKey project to succeed. The ideas behind it
have implicatio … ⌘ Read more

i should work on my PHP project again just so i have an excuse to use htmx

TKey: The Next Generation
Not speaking for my employer, just as an interested developer in an
interesting open source project.

As you might have noticed, the platform repo of the Tillitis TKey has
some alpha tags for the next generation, Castor:

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1/tags

An alpha tag means that all planned features for the platform are in
place, but there’s not yet a complete audit and a lot of testing … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, luckily, there is the suckless project. I couldn’t live without dmenu!

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

Someone did a thing:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114763322251054485

I’ve been silently wondering all the time if this was possible, but never investigated: Keep doing X11 but use Wayland as a backend.

This uses XWayland’s “rootful” mode, which basically just gives you a normal Wayland window with all the X11 stuff happening inside of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-Useful

In other words, put such a window in fullscreen and you (more or less) have good old X11 running in a Wayland window.

(For me, personally, this won’t be the way forward. But it’s a very interesting project.)

It annoys me when I clone a git repository A in order to build and self-host some software, only to realize later that I also needed to clone repos B, C and D. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing–logical separation of code between, say, a client and a server is very handy–but some projects do not communicate very well when you need multiple tools to get it running independently.

I was this 🤏 close to buying a couple of baby-cactus plants but, I couldn’t … I still have to save up for that future screen printing project. 🥲

(Of course, if we’re talking about a project you’re doing for a customer and the customer keeps asking for new stuff, then you’re never done, and you have to think ahead and expect changes. Is that what they mean? 🤔)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahhh, right, my bad, I could have easily found that. 🤦

There’s also a project page which lists some limitations of this study: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/

It certainly sounds plausible. “Use it or lose it.”

On my blog: Developer Diary, Day of the African Child https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/16/african-child.html #programming #project #devjournal

The Project Has Been CANCELLED ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter May 2025

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XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of May 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Int … ⌘ Read more

Current toy project: an image feed generated by mk(1). Still some edges to clean up but it’s nice: http://a.9srv.net/img/_readme.html