Recently I was making sure my main laptop is ready for travel1, which mostly just entails syncing up the latest version of my music collection. This laptop is a Thinkpad X200, which turns 11 years old in July and is my main workstation away from home (though I bring a second monitor and an external ...

Sorry for posting two articles so close to each other - but this is important! As I’m certain many of you know, I maintain a large collection of free software projects, including sway, wlroots, sr.ht, scdoc, aerc, and many, many more. I contribute to more still, working on projects like Alpine Linux...

Sorry for posting two articles so close to each other - but this is important! As I’m certain many of you know, I maintain a large collection of free software projects, including sway, wlroots, sr.ht, scdoc, aerc, and many, many more. I contribute to more still, working on projects like Alpine Linux...

sr.ht1 is 100% open source and I encourage people to install it on their own infrastructure, especially if they’ll be sending patches upstream. However, I am equally thrilled to host sr.ht for you on the “official” instance, and most users find this useful because the maintenance burden is non-trivi...

sr.ht1 is 100% open source and I encourage people to install it on their own infrastructure, especially if they’ll be sending patches upstream. However, I am equally thrilled to host sr.ht for you on the “official” instance, and most users find this useful because the maintenance burden is non-trivi...

Happy new year! This is always a weird “holiday” for me, since all of the fun happened last night. Today is just kind of… I guess a chance for everyone to sober up before work tomorrow? It does tend to invite a sense of reflection and is the ideal time to plan for the year ahead. One of my goals in ...

Happy new year! This is always a weird “holiday” for me, since all of the fun happened last night. Today is just kind of… I guess a chance for everyone to sober up before work tomorrow? It does tend to invite a sense of reflection and is the ideal time to plan for the year ahead. One of my goals in ...

I’ve been contributing where I can to Simon Ser’s mrsh project, a work-in-progress strictly POSIX shell implementation. I worked on some small mrsh features during my holiday travels and it’s in the forefront of my mind, so I’d like to share some of its design details with you. There are two main co...

I’ve been contributing where I can to Simon Ser’s mrsh project, a work-in-progress strictly POSIX shell implementation. I worked on some small mrsh features during my holiday travels and it’s in the forefront of my mind, so I’d like to share some of its design details with you.There are two main com...

I recently received my HiFive Unleashed, after several excruciating months of waiting, and it’s incredibly cool. For those unaware, the HiFive Unleashed is the first consumer-facing Linux-capable RISC-V hardware. For anyone who’s still lost, RISC-V is an open, royalty-free instruction set architectu...

I recently received my HiFive Unleashed, after several excruciating months of waiting, and it’s incredibly cool. For those unaware, the HiFive Unleashed is the first consumer-facing Linux-capable RISC-V hardware. For anyone who’s still lost, RISC-V is an open, royalty-free instruction set architectu...

It’s no secret that maintaining free and open source software is often a burdensome and thankless job. I empathise with maintainers who lost interest in a project, became demotivated by the endless demands of users, or are no longer blessed with enough free time. Whatever the reason, FLOSS work is v...

It’s no secret that maintaining free and open source software is often a burdensome and thankless job. I empathise with maintainers who lost interest in a project, became demotivated by the endless demands of users, or are no longer blessed with enough free time. Whatever the reason, FLOSS work is v...

I’m happy to announce today that I’m opening sr.ht (pronounced “sir hat”, or any other way you want) to the general public for the remainder of the alpha period. Though it’s missing some of the features which will be available when it’s completed, sr.ht today represents a very capable software forge...

I’m happy to announce today that I’m opening sr.ht (pronounced “sir hat”, or any other way you want) to the general public for the remainder of the alpha period. Though it’s missing some of the features which will be available when it’s completed, sr.ht today represents a very capable software forge...

Unfortunately, I find myself writing about the Commons Clause again. For those not in the know, the Commons Clause is an addendum designed to be added to free software licenses. The restrictions it imposes (you cannot sell the software) makes the resulting franken-license nonfree. I’m not going to l...

Unfortunately, I find myself writing about the Commons Clause again. For those not in the know, the Commons Clause is an addendum designed to be added to free software licenses. The restrictions it imposes (you cannot sell the software) makes the resulting franken-license nonfree. I’m not going to l...

Virtual memory is an essential part of your computer, and has been for several decades. In my earlier article on pointers, I compared memory to a giant array of octets (bytes), and explained some of the abstractions we make on top of that. In actual fact, memory is more complicated than a flat array...

Virtual memory is an essential part of your computer, and has been for several decades. In my earlier article on pointers, I compared memory to a giant array of octets (bytes), and explained some of the abstractions we make on top of that. In actual fact, memory is more complicated than a flat array...

1,173 days ago, I wrote sway’s initial commit, and 8,269 commits followed1, written by hundreds of contributors. What started as a side project became the most fully featured and stable Wayland desktop available, and drove the development of what has become the dominant solution for building Wayland...

1,173 days ago, I wrote sway’s initial commit, and 8,269 commits followed1, written by hundreds of contributors. What started as a side project became the most fully featured and stable Wayland desktop available, and drove the development of what has become the dominant solution for building Wayland...

I took a few looks at Go over the years, starting who knows when. My first serious attempt to sit down and learn some damn Go was in 2014, when I set a new personal best at almost 200 lines of code before I got sick of it. I kept returning to Go because I could see how much potential it had, but eve...

I took a few looks at Go over the years, starting who knows when. My first serious attempt to sit down and learn some damn Go was in 2014, when I set a new personal best at almost 200 lines of code before I got sick of it. I kept returning to Go because I could see how much potential it had, but eve...

A large minority of open-source projects come with a CLA, or Contributor License Agreement, and require you to sign one before they’ll merge your patch. These agreements typically ask you to go above and beyond the rights you afford the project by contributing under the license the software is distr...

A large minority of open-source projects come with a CLA, or Contributor License Agreement, and require you to sign one before they’ll merge your patch. These agreements typically ask you to go above and beyond the rights you afford the project by contributing under the license the software is distr...

Just got my first full night of sleep after the return flight from Spain after attending XDC 2018. It was a lot of fun! I attended along with four other major wlroots contributors. Joining me were Simon Ser (emersion) (a volunteer) and Scott Anderson (ascent12) of Collabora, who work on both wlroots...

Just got my first full night of sleep after the return flight from Spain after attending XDC 2018. It was a lot of fun! I attended along with four other major wlroots contributors. Joining me were Simon Ser (emersion) (a volunteer) and Scott Anderson (ascent12) of Collabora, who work on both wlroots...

I often get asked questions about using my software, particularly sway, on hypervisors like VirtualBox and VMWare, as well as for general advice on which hypervisor to choose. My answer is always the same: qemu. There’s no excuse to use anything other than qemu, in my books. But I can admit that it ...

I often get asked questions about using my software, particularly sway, on hypervisors like VirtualBox and VMWare, as well as for general advice on which hypervisor to choose. My answer is always the same: qemu. There’s no excuse to use anything other than qemu, in my books. But I can admit that it ...

Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It started by downloading a megabyte of data as it rendered the page over the course of eight full seconds. The page opens with an advertisement 281 ...