After the announcement of shell access for builds.sr.ht jobs, a few people sent me some questions, wondering how this sort of thing is done. Writing interactive SSH applications is actually pretty easy, but it does require some knowledge of the pieces involved and a little bit of general Unix litera...

Have you ever found yourself staring at a failed CI build, wondering desperately what happened? Or, have you ever needed a fresh machine on-demand to test out an idea in? Have you been working on Linux, but need to test something on OpenBSD? Starting this week, builds.sr.ht can help with all of thes...

Have you ever found yourself staring at a failed CI build, wondering desperately what happened? Or, have you ever needed a fresh machine on-demand to test out an idea in? Have you been working on Linux, but need to test something on OpenBSD? Starting this week, builds.sr.ht can help with all of thes...

Outside my window, the morning sun can be seen rising over the land of the rising sun, as I sip from a coffee purchased at the konbini down the street. I almost forgot to order it, as the staffer behind the counter pointed out with a smile and a joke that, having been told in Japanese, mostly went o...

Outside my window, the morning sun can be seen rising over the land of the rising sun, as I sip from a coffee purchased at the konbini down the street. I almost forgot to order it, as the staffer behind the counter pointed out with a smile and a joke that, having been told in Japanese, mostly went o...

As those who read my status updates have been aware, recently I’ve been working on bringing VR to Wayland (and vice versa). The deepest and most technical part of this work is DRM leasing (Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Restrictions Management), and I think it’d be good to write in detail abo...

As those who read my status updates have been aware, recently I’ve been working on bringing VR to Wayland (and vice versa). The deepest and most technical part of this work is DRM leasing (Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Restrictions Management), and I think it’d be good to write in detail abo...

Just like many companies have different advancement tracks for their employees (for example, a management track and an engineering track), similar concepts exist in free software projects. One of the roles of a maintainer is to help contributors develop into the roles which best suit them. I’d like ...

Just like many companies have different advancement tracks for their employees (for example, a management track and an engineering track), similar concepts exist in free software projects. One of the roles of a maintainer is to help contributors develop into the roles which best suit them. I’d like ...

Today I received the keys to my new apartment, which by way of not being directly in the middle of the city1 saves me a decent chunk of money - and allows me to proudly announce that I have officially broken even on doing free software full time! I owe a great deal of thanks to all of you who have d...

Today I received the keys to my new apartment, which by way of not being directly in the middle of the city1 saves me a decent chunk of money - and allows me to proudly announce that I have officially broken even on doing free software full time! I owe a great deal of thanks to all of you who have d...

Today I’m happy to announce that code annotations are now available for SourceHut! These allow you to decorate your code with arbitrary links and markdown. The end result looks something like this: NOTICE: Annotations were ultimately removed from sourcehut. SourceHut is the "hacker's forge", a 100% ...

Today I’m happy to announce that code annotations are now available for SourceHut! These allow you to decorate your code with arbitrary links and markdown. The end result looks something like this:NOTICE: Annotations were ultimately removed from sourcehut.SourceHut is the “hacker’s forge”, a 100% op...

The other day a friend of mine (an oper on Freenode) wanted to talk about IRC compared to its peers, such as Matrix, Slack, Discord, etc. The ensuing discussion deserves summarization here. In short: I’m glad that IRC doesn’t have the features that are “showstoppers” for people choosing other platfo...

The other day a friend of mine (an oper on Freenode) wanted to talk about IRC compared to its peers, such as Matrix, Slack, Discord, etc. The ensuing discussion deserves summarization here. In short: I’m glad that IRC doesn’t have the features that are “showstoppers” for people choosing other platfo...

Summer is in full swing here in Philadelphia. Last night I got great views of Jupiter and a nearly-full Moon, and my first Saturn observation of the year. I love astronomy on clear Friday nights, there’s always plenty of people coming through the city. And today, on a relaxing lazy Saturday, waiting...

Summer is in full swing here in Philadelphia. Last night I got great views of Jupiter and a nearly-full Moon, and my first Saturn observation of the year. I love astronomy on clear Friday nights, there’s always plenty of people coming through the city. And today, on a relaxing lazy Saturday, waiting...

As I got started writing open source software, I generally preferred the MIT license. I actually made fun of the “copyleft” GPL licenses, on the grounds that they are less free. I still hold this opinion today: the GPL license is less free than the MIT license - but today, I believe this in a good w...

As I got started writing open source software, I generally preferred the MIT license. I actually made fun of the “copyleft” GPL licenses, on the grounds that they are less free. I still hold this opinion today: the GPL license is less free than the MIT license - but today, I believe this in a good w...

After years of painfully slow development, the aerc email client has seen a huge boost in its pace of development recently. This leads to today’s announcement: aerc 0.1.0 is now available! After my transition to working on free software full time allowed me to spend more time on more projects, I was...

After years of painfully slow development, the aerc email client has seen a huge boost in its pace of development recently. This leads to today’s announcement: aerc 0.1.0 is now available! After my transition to working on free software full time allowed me to spend more time on more projects, I was...

The fork button on GitHub - with the little number next to it for depositing dopamine into your brain - is a bit misleading. GitHub co-opted the meaning of “fork” to trick you into participating in their platform more. They did this in a well-intentioned way, for the sake of their pull requests feat...

The fork button on GitHub - with the little number next to it for depositing dopamine into your brain - is a bit misleading. GitHub co-opted the meaning of “fork” to trick you into participating in their platform more. They did this in a well-intentioned way, for the sake of their pull requests feat...

This month, it seems the most exciting developments again come from the realm of email. I’ve got cool email-related news to share for aerc, lists.sr.ht, and todo.sr.ht, and many cool developments in my other projects to share. Let’s start with lists.sr.ht: I have broken ground on the web-based patch...

This month, it seems the most exciting developments again come from the realm of email. I’ve got cool email-related news to share for aerc, lists.sr.ht, and todo.sr.ht, and many cool developments in my other projects to share.Let’s start with lists.sr.ht: I have broken ground on the web-based patch ...

With the availability of new resources like git-send-email.io, I’ve been working on making the email-based workflow more understandable and accessible to the world. One thing that’s notably missing from this tutorial, however, is the maintainer side of the work. I intend to do a full write-up in the...

With the availability of new resources like git-send-email.io, I’ve been working on making the email-based workflow more understandable and accessible to the world. One thing that’s notably missing from this tutorial, however, is the maintainer side of the work. I intend to do a full write-up in the...

In January 2018, I wrote a blog post which included a fee calculator. Patreon changes their fee model tomorrow, and it’s time for an updated calculator. I’m grandfathered into the old fees, so not much has changed for me, but I want to equip Patreon users - creators and supporters - with more knowle...

For a few hours here and there over the past few months, I’ve been working on a side project: Wio. I’ll just let the (3 minute) screencast do the talking first: Note: this video begins with several seconds of grey video. This is normal. In short, Wio is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots which ha...

For a few hours here and there over the past few months, I’ve been working on a side project: Wio. I’ll just let the (3 minute) screencast do the talking first:Note: this video begins with several seconds of grey video. This is normal.In short, Wio is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots which has ...