links & ramblings

• 🌍 Newsboat 2.37 Sep 27, 2024

  6 months later, a new Newsboat release :) This one arrived a little later than expected because of a small mistake by one of the developers, which meant that the source tarball wasn’t available (mailing list reference). Enjoy!

• 📝 Accessing the WSL2 filesystem from outside Windows Sep 19, 2024

  Quick tip I wish was easier to find: how to get access to your WSL2 files when you’re not currently running Windows and need to access a script that’s stored there.

  • Go to Users/<USERNAME>/AppData/Local/Packages/
  • Enter either CanonicalGroupLimited... or TheDebianProject..., depending on whether you got Ubuntu or Debian from the Store
  • Your rootfs is in LocalState/ext4.vhdx

  You can mount it with libvhdi:

  $ sudo apt install vhdiutils
  $ sudo vhdimount ext4.vhd /mnt/vhd
  $ sudo mount -o ro /mnt/vhd/vhd1 /mnt/wsl
  

• 🌍 Booting Linux off of Google Drive Jul 1, 2024

  What it says in the title. This person modified their initramfs to add network and FUSE support, leading to mounting a Google Drive folder as ˋ/`.

  Cloud Native Computing.

  via lobste.rs

• 🌍 Newsboat 2.36 binaries Jun 23, 2024

  New Newsboat release ! Here are some binaries, as always compiled on Debian 12 :)

• 🌍 Clone arbitrary single Git commit May 24, 2024

  Nice nugget found in this Lobste.rs comment chain: cloning a single Git commit.

  $ mkdir repo && cd repo
  $ git init
  $ git fetch --depth=1 REPO_URL COMMIT_ID
  $ git reset --hard COMMIT_ID
  

• 🌍 Borgo Programming Language Apr 30, 2024

  Seen on lobste.rs, a transpiler for Go which gives it Rust-like syntax and functionalities, like algebraic data types (Result and Option) and pattern matching.

  There’s a lot I like in this! I love Go for its GC, channels, and easy-to-grasp syntax, but it can feel a little barebones sometimes. I also like Rust for its nice types, but sometimes I feel it requires too much mental overhead. This looks like the best of both worlds, I’m interested to see how this will evolve, and how easy interoperability with existing Go packages really is.

• 🌍 Pushover: Simple notifications for iOS / Android Mar 24, 2024

  I’ve been using Pushover for 2 years as a general-purpose notification service: it reminds me of my friends’ birthdays, alerts me when there’s an issue on my server, or tells me when a long-running command finishes.

  The API is super-simple, and it only costs $5 for lifetime access. I highly recommend it.

• 🌍 How to make the upcoming Neuromancer adaptation not suck Feb 29, 2024

  I’m sorry, they’re planning a Neuromancer adaptation?!

  Looking into it, it looks like Apple are the ones behind it. Their TV series usually have very good production value, so I’m cautiously optimistic. The press release mentions that they’re adapting the first book, which makes sense as a story with a single main character will be easier to follow than the multi-protagonist, interweaving story from the last two books.

• 📝 Nettoyage de marmite Nov 27, 2023

  J’aime pas Marmiton à cause de sa merdification incroyable: sur PC c’est difficile à utiliser, et sur mobile c’est l’enfer.

  J’ai bidouillé un bookmarklet pour nettoyer tout ça au max: Marmitonnage

  Cliquez-glissez vers votre barre de favoris le bouton, et utilisez le favoris quand vous êtes sur une page Marmiton. Testé et approuvé sous Firefox.

• 🌍 Discworld Reading Order Sep 12, 2023

  I found this picture on Reddit some years ago, and it had been living in my photo library ever since. Here’s the origin, a Discworld fan site!

  The guide was created by Krzysztof Kietzman. Thanks!

• 🌍 AsyncIO - charles leifer Jun 15, 2023

  I agree with this blog post on Python’s asyncio. It adds a lot of complexity, and is ultimately a kludge to work around Python’s inability to do proper concurrency.

  When developing non-trivial Python applications, I often hit a point where it is quicker and easier to just rewrite it in Go instead of losing time fighting with asyncio. I like Python for its large ecosystem and quick iteration capabilities, but asyncio adds too much mental overhead to be valuable for me.

  (from lobste.rs)

• 🌍 Random Access Memories: 10th Anniversary Edition May 19, 2023

  Wow, I somehow missed this: Daft Punk released a 10th Anniversary edition of their latest album, Random Access Memories (has it been 10 years already?!).

  This release includes 9 new tracks, totaling more than 30 minutes.

  (from kottke.org)

• 🌍 The early days of Linux May 5, 2023

  Nice retrospective from a friend’s of Linus Torvalds (Lars Wirzenius) on how Linux started. I remember digging into the history of Linux several years ago, but I still learned new things in this article.

  It’s very nicely written, full of small fun tidbits and anecdotes. I should really subscribe to LWN.

• 🌍 Windows on btrfs Apr 30, 2023

  This blogger created an unholy abomination using the btrfs driver for Windows and an open-source bootlader for Windows 10: dual-booting Windows and Archlinux from the same filesystem. The “Windows” and “usr” directories both live at the root of the drive.

• 🌍 50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World Mar 16, 2023

  Very interesting retrospective on the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer. It is fascinating to see so much good ideas were first invented at a printer manufacturer’s research lab.

  I knew the mouse was invented there, but seeing they also came up with modern WYSIWYG word processing, Smalltalk, and the desktop metaphor, is crazy cool. Here’s a web-based Xerox Alto emulator, based on the cheekily-named ContrAlto.

• 🌍 @TwitterDev - Starting Feb 9, no more free access to the Twitter API Feb 3, 2023

  Just like that, Twitter is announcing the end of their free API. It had already been severely limited in the past years, now requiring a verified phone number and a manual verification by a Twitter employee.

  I’m not on Twitter anymore, but following the evolution from afar is like watching a car crash in slow motion: inevitable, terrible, but for some reason you can’t look away. I hope the funny bots will be able to move to Mastodon, and that amateur data analysts will find a way to scrape the data anyway.

• 🌍 NewsBoat binaries for Debian Dec 29, 2022

  I’m using Newsboat to read RSS feeds on my netbook. Unfortunately, the version in the Debian “stable” repository doesn’t yet support FreshRSS, albeit the latest release does. I have built the last two versions, and will try to follow up when new ones come out (once every 6 months).

  These builds were made on Debian 11 (Bullseye). Enjoy 😊

• 📝 Mastodon RSS feeds Dec 21, 2022

  Cool tip I found online: you can access a Mastodon account’s RSS feed by appending “.rss” at the end of its profile URL. For example, to follow @Gargron@mastodon.social, you would add https://mastodon.social/@Gargron.rss to your RSS feed.

  This is great, because it means I don’t have to create a Mastodon account to follow what people are saying on there 😊.

• 🌍 Apple to Allow Outside App Stores in Overhaul Spurred by EU Laws Dec 16, 2022

  News from Bloomberg tell us that Apple is working on allowing “third-party” App Stores to the iOS ecosystem (i.e. sideloading). In my opinion, that’s a huge customer win, but I’m waiting to see what actually comes out of this: Apple’s “right-to-repair” program had me really excited, but it turned out to be pretty much useless, costing almost the same as taking your iDevice to an Apple Store, with the added risk of breaking it even more.