Many open source projects are terribly under-resourced and under-funded. Some open source developers even have to sacrifice their financial security to work on their passion.

Some open source projects dream about going from a passionate hobby to a small but sustainable company. This post will look at the different ways these projects can be funded to enable small groups to sustain themselves by working on projects they care about full time.

That technological change can force localised unemployment is unsurprising. But similarly prescient is that those same forces that made so many jobless are snapping at something more fundamental: our ability to create content.

Winter is coming and Collapse OS aims to soften the blow. It is a Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse.

Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi Bilägare. The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.

This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.

A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made an bald and unvarnished statement.

At least I know what it does now.

That’s because SELinux doesn’t enforce my policies. I rely on the Fedora Linux project to develop and maintain policies for the software I rely on. However, I’m not familiar with the policies that are in place on my system. There’s no configuration file or reference tool I can check to see or modify the policies. They’re just there.

It uses good old VT100 instructions.

My written words are my most precious asset. They are also a history of my life. That’s why I only use plain text files. They are the most reliable, flexible, and long-lasting option. Here’s why.

Linux features a whole suite of tools to debug many different aspects from performance to correctness. And here I am assuming that the stutters are not inherent in the game logic, because the 32-bit version works correctly.

We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.

It was the IT folks who brought UML to the table and took it away in a puff of smoke.

MySQL’s “utf8” isn’t UTF-8.

The “utf8” encoding only supports three bytes per character. The real UTF-8 encoding — which everybody uses, including you — needs up to four bytes per character.

MySQL developers never fixed this bug.

In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves. The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX.

I figured this is worth repeating.

GTFOBins is a curated list of Unix binaries that can be used to bypass local security restrictions in misconfigured systems.

MySQL is a pretty poor database, and you should strongly consider using Postgres instead.

We have failed to build an operating system for people who are not like us.

Lot has been said about how the web evolved to become a kind of monstrous entity. The mail protocol has followed a similar evolution but it’s a bit more subtle and has often been summarised as « too much email. ».

The text-based environment in UNIX is incredibly versatile and powerful, programmers and system administrators who log into a UNIX server remotely will typically work exclusively in the console, working on a remote desktop (similar to TeamViewer in Windows) is just too inefficient.

But can a console really function as an everyday desktop? That is what this article will try to explore, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised at just how useful a text-based environment can be!

A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened.