For the past year I’ve been converting archive.org CD/disk rips into modern formats.

I love that archive.org make these available. My goal is to make them accessible. Lots of art, music and animations are locked away in ancient formats that few can access today.

I extract the original CD/disk and recursively extract and convert all sub files. Archives (ZIP/ZOO/SIT) I extract. Images (PCX/TGA/PICT/TIFF) to PNG. Music/Audio (MOD/MID/S3M/AIFF/AU) to MP3. Video (FLC/FLI/AVI/SMK) to MP4. Documents (DOC/WP5/WRI) to PDF. Fonts to OTF/TTF & PNG preview. A single CD ISO can baloon to over 100,000 files.

The converter part currently supports 608 formats: https://github.com/Sembiance/dexvert/blob/master/SUPPORTED.md

The website part is a work in progress. Likely another year of work before I put it live so folks can explore all this content. It has faceted search with a full text index including OCR’ed text from images.

The website does not require JS/CSS/HTML5/HTTPS so it works well in text based and vintage browsers. This allows retro system users like Amiga/Win95/AtariST to directly access the website and download useful shareware/freeware.

If you mean side projects with the intention of making money: none. My side projects are for fun and for things that are useful to me.

Currently I am solving the last bugs in GTE: Getting Things Email. A todo-app/task management system based on IMAP. That is, all the tasks are stored as emails. Basically, I got fed up with the million todo-apps that are already out there, because exactly zero of them can meet the (I think) reasonable requirement that I can use it with clients that are native to my devices. If you work in the terminal and you have a phone that does not run Android or iOS, then… nothing is available. And that is just the first requirement I have.

So the idea is to have something that runs on email, because email is supported on every platform and I can immediately use it from everywhere and later, if I want to, I can build dedicated clients on top of that. But it already works terrific for me, so maybe I’ll never get to that last part.

Working on making a programming language called Garnet. The goal is basically “what if Rust, but small?”. Take an OCaml/Haskell-ish type system, add move semantics and a borrow checker, and see if it can be made small and powerful enough to be usable as a lingua franca similar to how C is used: The ABI works anywhere (one way or another), there are compilers that work even in places they probably shouldn’t, building a simple compiler from scratch can be a medium-sized one-person project, etc.

Currently it looks doable, with your basic language primitives being functions, data types, and namespaces. I want to try to do something about some of the icky/weird parts of Rust (.iter(), .iter_mut(), .into_iter(), .borrow(), .as_ref(), .deref(), .to_owned(), fn(), Fn(), FnOnce(), FnMut(), oh my, how do you tell the differences between these things and where does it end…), which may or may not be possible. I want to nail things down to have as little Undefined Behavior as possible, which may be a fool’s errand but I’m fine with trying. And I want to try to preserve the Totally Awesome things such as macros/derives.

So far the hard part is dealing with generics, one way or another; I want to explore the design space between monomorphic and polymorphic generics a bit more. It looks like you can find a nice middle point of performance, simplicity and generalness with them… until you start adding type bounds of one kind or another at least. Swift provides some interesting inspiration there but not all of it seems suitable for a systems language, so I have work to do. We’ll see how it goes; I haven’t even started figuring out how to write a borrow checker yet. But it can compile and run a Fibonacci function, so how much harder could the rest of that be?

In April, I’ll have hacked on HardenedBSD for eight years. It consumes 100% of my spare time. It’s a heck of fun. There’s so much to do, so it keeps me busy and there’s always something to work on.

My open source side project for almost a year now is GitUI: https://github.com/extrawurst/gitui A fast Terminal-UI for git written in Rust.

It got especially rewarding when people started contributing❤️

Personally been hacking a bit on misc tooling for my secure boot stuff.

sbctl - secure boot control. Essentially aims to provide a nice abstraction over managing your self-enrolled secure boot keys.
https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl

go-uefi - efivarfs bindings written in Golang. Been slacking a bit but the goal is to have integration tests with ovmf/edk2 and qemu using vmtest
https://github.com/Foxboron/go-uefi

EDIT: I almost forgot I had a talk about this on FOSDEM last month :) link

Apart from that I have been implementing support for debug packages and debuginfod in Arch Linux. Debian got it before us so I have been working consistently on this the past week to ensure I don’t bring shame upon my future children generations to come.
https://github.com/archlinux/dbscripts/pull/20

I have been working on a personal replacement for ncurses, for use in my own projects. It does not have a lot of features yet (colour, for example), but I am continually improving it.

https://github.com/opFez/tui-lib

I am trying to find new ways to draw geometric shapes. No comercial intentions.

An ad/junk blocker that:

• Denies by default
• Has hueristics to allow from sites that are likely safe
• Has a denylist to block known bad domains
• Is able to quickly (hotkey) switch to allowing larger categories of content ( block most third-party js / frames > blocklist only > no blocking )

I mentioned it on the “what are you doing this weekend?” thread last week, but it’s the plain-text-file-as-a-datastore lobsters/HN/reddit “clone” here

Yes it is as cursed as it sounds, but it has been quite enjoyable to hack on so far

edit: also building a little web app that will allow me and my wife to keep track of the words my little boy says, because he’s in speech therapy

Most recently I’ve published a basic web app called Vizor for interacting with Google’s Vision API to extract text from images. I have a small backlog of public domain books I’d like to digitize with it, and give them the hypertext treatment on llll.ro.

I mentioned it in the weekend post, but I suppose it’s ok to mention here again. I am working on building a clone of Lobste.rs in Elixir/Phoenix. The application is complex enough to force me to really learn web development, but not too big that I’ll never finish. It has been a lot of fun so far!

I’m working on an website to organize get togethers with friends. Basically it’s an alternative to Facebook events without all the user tracking and more advanced features and customization. It doesn’t require any Javascript to use, and I intend to keep it that way through progressive enhancement. I’d like to monitize it, likely through some sort of restrictions for free users or a more Discord style of better customization for paid users. Another thought was to use ads that don’t have user tracking or sponsors if it gets bigger. Costs are pretty low so I can go for a while without needing it. I stopped working on it when covid started, but I decided to start again recently. I’d like to add features to organize online events as well. It will be open sourced eventually, not sure when though.

Part of my motivation for this is that I’d also like to create some developer tools, but that’s hard to do without dogfooding. I have a basic log ingestion and search service written, and I need logs to test it! I also have a few ideas around CI I’d like to build, such as auto rollback based on metrics.

runson.cloud which is a service that aggregates many of the public IP address range lists published by major cloud providers and CDNs and provides two query interfaces over that data.

The inspiration was icanhazip.com in the sense that the site exist primary to serve the CLI and other lightweight integrations.

The Go libraries for parsing the data for the big 3 clouds are available and come with a CLI interface of their own for local use:

• digaws
• digg
• digaz

My utter frustration to Helm lead me to write dy so that one can use the filesystem to sanely construct YAML documents.

Kapo was written in a similar fashion in order to abuse (at the time) ELBs to health check and autoscale non-HTTP services.

5 years or so ago I wrote a benchmark and functional test harness for ELK stacks.

Currently working on something that can be used to apply linux traffic control setups and planning to eventually build it out into more some kind of QoS control plane daemon. The hardest part has been actually figuring out the operation of this tool that it become easier than a shell script with just tc commands (since that would be the main competition of this tool). It’s been a good excersise in stopping myself from overthinking certain things and just write them to see what happens, since I find myself reworking the same functionality often just because I think it could be done better.

Progress is slow though: sometimes lack of motivation, other times I get nerdsniped into spending the weekends resolving weird bugs and problems in other projects.

I am working on GPS analysis for rowers: it takes a GPS file and computes metrics that are useful to track performance. I’m doing this specifically for rowers in Cambridge UK who are rowing on a narrow river. The feature set is similar to what Strava does. Currently it is a command-line application that generates an HTML report. An example is here: https://lindig.github.io/tmp/example.html

The ideas are not necessarily tied to rowing. They could be also used for running or cycling but these domains are much better served by existing tools than rowing. Main ideas are:

• within a GPS track, find the fastest 100m, 200m, 300m .. these may be overlapping
• within a GPS track, find the fastest non-overlapping 500m intervals - to identify sprints
• within a GPS track, recognise the passing of landmarks and time spent between such landmarks
• summarise time spent within certain speed brackets

I have been working on (and currently extending) these:

• RTFM - a terminal file manager with a ton of features: https://github.com/isene/RTFM

• Astropanel - a terminal dashboard for amateur astronomers that shows weather forecasts, Sun/Moon/planets rise & sets graphically as well as positions in the sky, a starchart, etc to help decide when to bring out your telescope: https://github.com/isene/astropanel

• T-REX - a terminal RPN calculator similar to the range of HP calculator from when they made quality calcs (70s & early 80s): https://github.com/isene/T-REX

I’ve been slowly making progress on a tool for passively monitoring TCP RTTs using eBPF and golang. The basic PoC is done and it just outputs a single RTT derived from SYN/SYN-ACK to stdout, but the plan is to eventually have continuous RTTs for a TCP connection inserted into a timeseries database. https://github.com/MarkPash/flowlat

There are a couple of other small things but the code isn’t open source yet so it’s barely worth mentioning until I make the repos public.

I am working on a SaaS startup to provide tools for boards of directors that will help imrpove the quality of information they need to govern better while reducing the amount of work for staff and management to provide that information. The first implemented is a simple risk registry to replace the spreadsheet file we were using (I am on the board of a small CU here in the Fraser Valley). Others are planned. Working on the marketing site for it and then the TOS and privacy policies.

My most “serious” side project is probably swaylock-effects, though I don’t work that actively on it currently because it does what I want it to do. I mainly just get in there and fix some bugs sometimes.

I’m making a log analyzer called lograt, because that’s something I needed and I didn’t like the existing alternatives I found - plus learning GUI programming is nice.

I’m also working on a programming language, currently under the working title lang2. It’s my first attempt at making a language which compiles source code into bytecode and then interprets the bytecode; previous languages have just built a syntax tree and interpreted the tree directly. I think the syntax of lang2 is pretty cool, and one interesting thing is that it doesn’t ever build a prase tree, the parser just emits bytecode as it goes along. The VM is stack based, so with some careful design, it works out.

Outside of programming, I’m playing with making music. Here’s my current music project. I’m fairly pleased with how it’s turning out.

I’m also working on a game, which I won’t link to right now but it might eventually become something serious.

Both of the side coding projects that I’m actively working on these days are related to amateur radio.

1: An open-source ionospheric mapping website thingy that takes real-time data from ionosondes (think radars pointed straight up that can measure the structure of the ionosphere) and combines it with the IRI-2016 model, by way of some interesting math, to let radio amateurs predict the best times and frequencies to make a contact with a given location. This has been my main focus for a little over the past two years, and it’s a polyglot of mainly Python, Fortran, and Perl. It’s hosted on a machine I bought off of eBay and pay to colo.

Currently I’m working up a poster presentation for the HamSCI Workshop in a little under two weeks, talking to the HamSCI folks about ways we might collaborate, and generally trying to attract contributors and make this less of a solo project.

2: Tools to support the Flex 6000 series of SDR radios on Linux. Flex radios are some of the coolest toys available to the discerning hobbyist (i.e. this with cash to burn) and they do everything over Ethernet, using (more-or-less acceptably) documented protocols. But the only officially supported platforms are Windows, macOS, and iOS, and there was nothing available to use them with Linux, which was a bit problematic for me. So I wrote one app that makes their TCP API accessible to any app that uses the ubiquitous “hamlib” for CAT control (setting frequencies and levels, switching between transmit and receive, etc.), and another one that makes their UDP-based digital audio appear as PulseAudio devices. Together, they’re enough to run the most common “digital mode” apps with a Flex and have it work like a conventional radio plugged directly into your computer.

This one is seeing less active development at the moment, as it’s stable and does most of what I want it to do, but there are a bunch of things to add if I ever get the ambition, like:

• Support for their “SmartLink” tunneling protocol which lets you access a radio that isn’t on the same local network
• Support for Opus audio (in addition to the current uncompressed PCM). Not so great for digital stuff, but useful for speech when bandwidth is limited.
• Easier support for multiple “slices” (independent virtual receivers on the same hardware radio)
• Support for the metering protocol, which provides info like receive levels, output power, and SWR.
• Support for pushing “spots” to the radio (tags for stations that have been recently heard on a given frequency, that can be overlaid on a waterfall display for ease of tuning)
• A full-fledged GUI client? Probably not, writing that thing isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I would love it if someone else wanted to, and would pitch in with library support.

I have three main experimental projects going that will likely never move past the “fun to hack on” stage:

• A template for building “rapid community response websites” to encourage mutual support and resource sharing during natural disasters, social unrest, or even just large gatherings and events. This one is designed to be deployed on a Rapsberry Pi or cheap micro-VPS, run for days or weeks, and then get spun down.

• A sci-fi game that borrows from interactive fiction and classic MUDs and MOOs to let players build influence and resources through dialogue and task automation (so really it’s just a modern workplace simulator wrapped in a game setting)

• Community discussion and link sharing driven by strong (cryptographic) identity and subjective moderation: I subscribe not just to your posts but also your moderation feed, which gives me a filtered view of other posts flowing through the network.

There are also a couple of half-finished robots and handheld open source “communicator” (p2p messaging) hardware projects sitting in my home office that will hopefully see more progress when we move and I have a workbench that isn’t the desk I also use for my day job.

All of them are learning and creative expression projects first and foremost; while I’d love to actually see them out in the world, I’m trying to be realistic about what I can meaningfully commit during during a pandemic when I have two small children at home and my own mental health to maintain.

I’m considering building some kitchen management software. During the pandemic I did a lot more cooking at home and so far all the recipe/menu/inventory/shopping software has been a very poor fit.

I am slowly creating a routing stack in Minecraft.

Here’s a low effort demo I put together over the last holiday season. https://user.fm/files/v2-edf060e617295e76693bf0edc6f4a5e7/carts.mp4 - (carts bouncing around corners slowly is an artifact of how tightly packed I constructed the tracks, it’s not a bug I think)

So far you can statically define layer 3 routing tables and carts will traverse as many hops as necessary to get there. Physical layer is taken care of. I don’t see a need for a data link layer at this point.

This draws inspiration from Craftbook and other plugins that make minecarts more interesting to deal with, but have a fairly inadequate train station system compared to something more packet switched and redundant.

I expect to be reimplementing sad versions of DNS, NAT, OSPF, BGP out of necessity for a robust train network and also just as a learning experience.

Curious to hear if there is interest. Unreleased so far, not sure if it will get off the ground outside my friends’ server. Source at https://git.sr.ht/~phroa/intercart

I made phase.city recently, which is about the level of non-employment technical accomplishment I work up the ambition for these days: An HTML template and a cron job.

I maintain a few small things on the side. There’s a tiny blog engine I make substantial changes to every year or two. Sometimes I push mildly useful stuff to a dotfile repo. Mostly of late I find myself slowly iterating on a collection of notes and the hacky scaffolding around them.

Sometimes I remember a time when I thought my software work might be a way to build some form of lasting value, and daydream about the sort of world in which it might be. Generally though, I try not to kid myself.

I’m working on Piccle, a static site generator for photographers. It uses EXIF metadata embedded in your photos to build an explorable web portfolio. (You can see an example gallery on my website, though some pictures are NSFW.)

As far as I know I’m the only user so far (hence its prerelease tag!) but I’ve been working on it for a while and it’s stable/complete enough for my main uses. Over the past month I’ve focused more on editing photos/tidying my metadata, but I still want to add some extra features soon. I’m also planning to experiment with client-side rendering support – not least because the current rendering pipeline can be drastically simplified if that turns out to be a bad idea.

I have got a few projects lined up:

• I’m working on a configuration macro for Elisp (comparable to use-package), but a few minor things have to be finished before it is added to ELPA
• I wrote an Emacs package for correcting homework as a TA, and started a rewrite a month ago to move more of the functionality out of perl scripts I was provided directly into Elisp
• About two years ago I wrote a little Server in Go to let me synchronize watching misc. videos with friends. Turned out to be helpful during the pandemic, but there are still a few bugs I have to fix and a few improvements I can make with Go 1.16
• I participated in a Kalah Competition at my university and was annoyed that the provided Framework was a mix of Java and Scala. My suggestion to create a language-independent framework was accepted, so me and a friend will be specifying a network protocol and implementing clients.
• I’m thinking about creating an anonymous, no-login Go server because there seems to be no simple, lightweight online solution for this. I’m drawing a few sketches and reading documentation of various things to prepare, if I do decide to do this.

These are the ones I can think of, I probably have more I have forgotten.

I’m currently working on a little tool to help me (and any team) to keep track of the issuing and expiration of all types of certificates, domains, keys, etc. When possible it also should try alert when something has been misused and/or created/changed without consent.

As part of my work on an (unreleased) data interchange language, I recently dug into string literals. Exciting right? Turn out it is… If you spend a lot of time writing in a plain text format, having a language/format that does string literals well is quite nice.

So, I’m all ears if you have comments about string literals you use: what you like, what you don’t, and so on.

I’m working on a minimalist blogging engine. It isn’t a static site generator, because I dislike most of those for reasons I have trouble putting into words. It will be very “web 1.0”, usable from absolutely anything with a browser. It will have an RPC API to make it easy to add frontends. I’ll possibly add support to allow posting and commenting via email.

Essentially it will be a tool to “enable Chris to write and publish frictionlessly.” I’ll put the source up somewhere once it’s usable, on the off-chance that someone else wants to use it.

Tentatively I’m calling it FWB, for “fight writer’s block” or “frictionlessly write blog”. I like overloaded TLAs and double entendre.

The slow-burn project is a desktop-sized PnP for electronics. I’m already aware of OpenPnP and LitePlacer, but from a UX PoV, a miniaturized version of an industrial machine isn’t what I’m looking to make or use.

Naturally, it’s spun off something like a dozen or two sub-projects for things like precision, control, mechanics, optics, fabrication, etc…

Working on a self-hosted music server since I’m unhappy with the discoverability and organizational capabilities of the existing offerings.

I’m not in a rush to get a stable release (read: when i stop editing the migration files) out, so the project turned into a sandbox for tooling and practices experimentation. This is my first $modern_frontend_js_framework project as well, so I fiddled around a lot there.

I’ve enjoyed having a project with no need to execute and deploy. Work is a constant balance between delivery and QC/tooling/practices/whatnot, with a priority on the former, but I can mess around as much as I want here!

https://github.com/azuline/repertoire

I’ve been working on Aft, an indie backend-as-a-service. It’s got an integrated database, with automatic prisma-style REST APIs, fine-grained access controls, user login, and scriptable RPCs.

Most of my software productivity outside of work is for a community for software professionals called Code & Supply that I co-run with a friend.

I am currently writing a Tumblr proxy a la nitter, only for Tumblr not Twitter. It’s basically invite-only for now, because I don’t have the experience to host public-facing infrastructure and am both afraid for my small servers life (cpu load) and livelihood (traffic & susceptibility to being hacked).

It’s pretty fun, has enough bugs to keep me on my toes when I am in the mood, and I am using it daily to read my various feeds on tumblr and other sites.

Technology-wise it is written in Go, has an optional SQLite database, and is mostly generating HTML with some JavaScript thrown in for convenience. It has been up for a few months now, the database has grown to 1.5gb by now which means it tracks 649 feeds and 782148 individual posts by now. As I said, a fun project!

And because I had this architecture in place, it has turned into a more generic feed reader, now supporting Twitter, Instagram, RSS and even AO3 all potentially in one feed.

Oh, and for my next project I want to convert my RaspberryPi 4 into both a pipe organ and a piano, using aeolus and Pianoteq because I recently bought a MIDI keyboard/controller and have had much fun playing it, mostly learning to play it.

I’m working on memcached server rewrite in Rust. I’m doing this because:

• I want to learn Rust and I think the best way to learn is to have some real world project,
• I want to research how it will compare regarding performance with highly optimized C code(and honestly I’m Rust newbie),
• I want to research if such inexperienced Rust developer will be able to avoid vulnerabilities (as for example the one from last year: https://www.cybersecurity-help.cz/vdb/SB2020032418?csh_ref=83),
• In my opinion Rust implementation will be easier to maintain and extend than C implementation, so I plan to add more features (like grpc/REST interfaces, Prometheus metrics integration, safe rust-tls, serializing cache to storage).

I have all binary commands working(except stat) and preliminary performance benchmarks look promising.

At the moment I’m struggling with choosing a license for that project. The problem that I have is that I’d like to have all improvements made by anyone get contributed back to the project even if someone would use it internally. GPL2 seems to be good but on the other hand if someone will make some improvements for his own purposes he doesn’t need to release those improvements to the public. Frankly speaking I’d be happy to “outsource” this problem to someone else.

I have a little cluster of Raspberry Pi 4s in a little tower thingy, and I’ve been working on setting up some self-hosting stuff. And, I have this old Mac G4 Cube case… so this weekend I decided to put them together.

I give you… Apple Pi: https://imgur.com/a/2TyR7Dg

Now I need another project.

https://mkws.sh/ A small, no bloat, minimalist static site generator using sh as a templating language.

I’m working on hanami.run an email forwarding service. Everytime I want to build a new side project, I get a domain then setup email. After doing that 20 times, I said I’m going to solve this email thing once for all. So I simply create a service to handle emails. All you have to do is point MX records to mx1.hanami.run and mx2.hanami.run

Right now I’m trying to make team feature so a team with multiple member can share and manage the same domain.

Hopefully finding the time to add some more features to my rusty daemon controller. It works since ~2 years but I need to test some stuff like hot-reloading before throwing that at my server. (I dread testing stuff that can’t be automated easily, it’s just a pain and if you don’t do it correctly you’ll end up with a false sense of security..)

And hopefully contributing a little bit more to one of the crates I started helping to maintain.

And if I still have time after this maybe finally release a newer version of the app on f-droid that I don’t use at all, but people seem to like based on github interactions. Feels bad to just not do anything for a year. But the project got big enough that I’m in “should I rewrite this to kotlin/flutter” hell. No links on purpose to avoid any advertising.

But ultimately I was told that I’d have to do more for myself and stop doing so much PC work. Covid seems to have been the tipping point for my health regarding sitting in front of a PC all day.

I’m building a 1on1 solution for SSL and domain monitoring called https://siteguardian.dev main goal for me with this project outside of the actual product was to build and validate an Elixir/Phoenix stack for quickly developing micro-saas projects.

Been working on a webapp for managing my financial stuff. The data part is the tedious part because my bank only spews out the transaction details as a .xls file and in an unorganised manner with the account details and all at the top. Had to manually clean that file and converts to csv which again has to be manually cleaned like removing unwanted commas and spaces then it fed to a Postgres db. It’s a lot of work but I get to improve my sql knowledge with it. Uses Go for most part and python for data processing part.

Really wished that the bank could have an API or a better transaction details system.

I have been interested in dynamic malware analysis lately and found that cuckoo-sandbox is too difficult to work with. Still in Python2, many dependencies, many configuration files and software bugs that are not easily understood.

I’m attempting to solve those issues in my own project, we’ll see how it goes.

Hmm, there are two main things I’m poking around with at the moment.

1. Making a vanilla JS scoreboard for NHL games using their public APIs. They have a fair amount of data in there that’s pretty useful.
2. Working on a Xamarin mobile app for single player poker. There are a lot of poker games out there already, so it’s not really meant to break into any market or encourage gambling as such. I like playing and hate ads, so I’ll make my own!

Making scheduled backups of my various git repos. Indexing and applying text summarization to various Google docs that I’ve created over time.

My current project is an application that lets you upload audiobooks, and create a private podcast feed that you can download and stream from.

The basics works fairly well. There are a couple of features that I’m currently working on.

• Split on chapter markers.
• Split on time if no chapters exist.
• Large file upload.

Trying to port GNAT of ada from adacore to PKGSRC

I’ve been playing around with building by own minimal website analytics solution - dashflare. It can be self hosted with minimal effort and it doesn’t require adding a Javascript snippet to the website.

It was born as a toy project for me (and a colleague) to scratch my own itch of getting rid of Google Analytics and getting to play with edge workers.

I am experimenting with blazor server using sqlite. A friend uses a spreadsheet for doing beer recipes commercially, and I would rather like to convert parts of it to be easier to extend and improve.

I’m very slowly working away on a Scala SQL abstraction. I used Slick for several years at my old job, and was both incredibly grateful for the type safety it offered for a large codebase using a large schema, and very frustrated with some of its frustratingly abstraction, especially around transactions, connections, and sessions. https://github.com/stephenjudkins/sqlitis

So I’m trying to replicate the good parts, while simply using backends for the already battle-tested Doobie and up-and-coming Skunk to handle the parts that Slick didn’t do well. Additionally, it includes a SQL generator and parser that could be useful even without the typesafe schema mapping, and should make a much smaller, simpler, and more hackable codebase than Slick.

I was making decent progress, until I had twins and now I don’t have as much time! But it’s been fun to spend some of my free time improving it. If Scala sticks around as a moderately popular language, and I keep writing Scala, I hope someday this could be a valuable tool that others can enjoy.

I’m writing something that will sync my tweets over to Mastodon. A lot of the solutions out there didn’t work so I’m just writing something quick that’ll do it for me.

So far I have it working - and had the classic “post all recent tweets until I hit ctrl-c” happen. So that was embarrassing, but it’s fun either way!

Still geeking out on a rust irc bot with a built-in web server to help make stuff searchable. Rewrite into async/await and latest Tokio was moderately successful. I bought into a server side templating library that I wanna get rid of. Maybe this will be my „excuse“ to learn Vuejs?

I am working on a yet-nameless open-source RPG in Zelda style just for the fun of it, together with a handful of friends. Currently in the planning phase; if you are interested, drop me a PM or an e-mail.

I haven’t written much code, but I’ve been scaffolding out a browser-based decentralized data-stream idea. The concept would function like BitTorrent but for streaming data on top of WebRTC. There’d be no storage, so I believe the only thing required is fast routing and packet signing.

The idea is almost exclusively motivated by not wanting to spin up servers every time I build a silly little interactive app.

Images of VMs and bootable live USB sticks running two different FAT32-capable versions of DOS. Partly because fiddling with DOS is quite fun in this era of vastly-complex multi-everything OSes, partly to see if it can be done, partly because I do have a sort of eventual notional product in mind.

I am using PC DOS 7.1 (not 7.01) and DR OpenDOS for this. I am not a big fan of FreeDOS – partly because it’s a little too different from real 1980s DOS for my preferences, and partly because I find the developer community rather unfriendly and unwelcoming. So, now that IBM offers PC DOS 7.1 as a free download, and Lineo made DR-DOS 7.01 FOSS before changing their minds and closing it again with DR-DOS 7.02, I have some alternatives to play with.

WIP links can be found here and in previous posts. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/78306.html

working on some rust code for scrabble move generation. the hope is to be a library that people writing AI code can just use, rather than having to do all the standard board representation and move generation bits from scratch (as is currently the case).

this is all well-trodden ground from an algorithmic standpoint; i’m pretty sure everyone is using the move generator from this paper. i just want to do it in a way that is fast and reasonably easy to reuse in other projects (hence rust). step 2 will be to define some protocols and networking code to let AIs play each other with minimal extra code.

I’m working on a task management/small data federation/scriptable CMS server for a program called anno. https://github.com/yumaikas/anno-server.

It’s still very early stages, and only gets a fraction of my attention on a given week, but it’s proving an interesting exercise, and has prompted some interesting Janet writing.

I’m working on nachomemes: a declarative meme-generator made for Discord. There are a couple other declarative meme generators for Discord, but this bot aims to be dead simple to use and light + performant. It’s been an interesting exercise in many regards:

• I rarely work with my friends. So it’s been insightful to see how they code + approach a project.
• I really love Python and this has been a great vehicle for constantly trying new language features or implementations (i.e. mypy).
• Working on something entertaining. When you’re doing something purely for the meme and without a pretense of sincerity it offers unfound latitude in decision-making.

I’m working on https://littr.me

It’s a link aggregator and discussion platform similar to lobste.rs and old reddit, much more barebones in the features it offers though. The attraction point is that it is written from the bottom up to be a part of the ActivityPub based fediverse.

Its purpose is to independently host small to medium communities that focus on specific topics (I’ve done away with the concept of “subreddit”) and then allow their users to interact with other communities through the federation mechanism so there is somewhat a “networking effect” in play.

Most active side project that needs some love is a Hugo theme for self hosting recipes.

Other than that, I’ve got a backlog of tasks for my home server setup:

• Recently received 4 HDDs to start using RAID10 for better availability
• Use the above to incorporate ZFS into the server setup
• Migrate from just docker-compose to using Ansible for running different services
• Document, maybe write a blog post about the whole thing.

I’m mostly working on trying to create an alternative game client for an old classic MMORPG game that was part of more than a decade of my life — Ragnarök Online. You can hardly call it a client though, since I’m just finished with parsing GRF files, loading and actually rendering sprites. The work is more directed towards what will potentially be a GRF Explorer app in the more realistic and near future.

Also, during some spare time I still work on creating an app like GitHub and SourceHut, but that’s also still in its very early stages. Not sure it would really be interesting to anyone.

And last, I have been back streaming, and during those I worked on both projects, but mostly the first one.