Ploum.net

I’m Ploum, a writer alternating between a bépo keyboard and old mechanical typewriters on which I imagine our futures. My latest novel, Bikepunk, is available in every good (French-speaking) book store. Without a keyboard, you can find me underwater or on a bike.

As « Lionel Dricot », I pretend to be respectable to teach software freedom at École Polytechnique de Louvain.

Software
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Email Newsletter (EN)
RSS (EN)

2025

2025-12-04 : Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?
2025-11-26 : Don’t Do Snake Oil Writing
2025-09-03 : How I fell in love with calendar.txt
2025-07-23 : 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4)
2025-05-23 : Reducing the digital clutter of chats
2025-04-01 : Goodbye Offpunk, Welcome XKCDpunk!
2025-03-28 : The candid naivety of geeks
2025-03-08 : 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3)
2025-02-27 : The Engagement Rehab

2024

2024-12-23 : My colleague Julius
2024-12-16 : 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2)
2024-10-20 : 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1)
2024-07-01 : On Open Source and the Sustainability of the Commons
2024-04-08 : About Freedom and Power
2024-03-18 : A Society That Lost Focus

2023

2023-11-25 : Announcing Offpunk 2.0
2023-11-10 : The gift of time
2023-10-01 : The future of Offpunk: UNIX command-line heaven and packaging hell
2023-08-01 : Splitting the Web
2023-07-06 : Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
2023-06-23 : How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
2023-06-19 : We need more of Richard Stallman, not less
2023-03-09 : Losing Signal
2023-03-03 : About Bluesky and Decentralisation
2023-02-22 : We need to talk about your Github addiction
2023-02-15 : Modern AI and the end of privacy
2023-02-11 : On Humans and Machines

2022

2022-12-05 : Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting
2022-12-03 : Reinventing How We Use Computers
2022-11-15 : Offpunk 1.7 : Offpunk and Sourcehut
2022-11-09 : Evolution of the Web.
2022-11-07 : Our responsibility as software engineers
2022-11-06 : Thank you rawtext.club (and the whole Gemini sphere)!
2022-10-21 : How to manage a mailing list?
2022-10-10 : Be angry against institutions, be nice to people
2022-10-07 : A Technological Analogy
2022-10-06 : RE: Archiving the smallnet & fantasizing about a free mesh based internet
2022-10-05 : There Is No Content on Gemini
2022-09-29 : My Chrissy Teigen Moment
2022-09-28 : Creating Against Consuming
2022-09-20 : MAGMA Monopolies
2022-08-04 : Offpunk 1.5 : A Huge Thank You to Packagers
2022-06-22 : Removing the "packaging cruft" from the web. Or buying without packaging with Gemini.
2022-04-25 : Why Gemini Is Essential
2022-04-05 : The Theological Problem Behind Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04
2022-04-02 : Offpunk 1.3 : Making it Easy and Useful
2022-04-01 : Small OpenBSD and FreeBSD Experiment
2022-03-29 : A Call to Packagers
2022-03-25 : Where To Live?
2022-03-24 : Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal : more than you would like to know about HTML, ANSI and the philosophy of communication.
2022-03-14 : Offpunk and Cyberpunk : Text and Voice
2022-03-05 : This is Madness! No, This is Offpunk 0.9!
2022-02-21 : Offpunk 0.4 - RSS Reading and Knowledge Management
2022-02-11 : Offpunk 0.3 : Gopher, Pictures and Feeds
2022-01-31 : Announcing Offpunk 0.2 : What is Offline?
2022-01-18 : RE: Design vs Evolution
2022-01-13 : How I Dropped Pocket to Go Offline
2022-01-11 : Implementing a web browser in a weekend (and in Offpunk)
2022-01-07 : Adventures With Less
2022-01-06 : 2022-01-06 : Discussing about Gemini on Gemini ?
2022-01-04 : Aborting Instead of Getting Stuck
2022-01-03 : Announcing Offpunk 0.1 and a year offline

2021

2021-12-24 : New features for AV-98-offline
2021-12-17 : Browsing Gemini Offline
2021-12-10 : Need help: Offline and sync-only modes for AV-98
2021-12-07 : Frustration is the best teacher, choosing tools to focus on
2021-12-06 : Offline support in AV-98
2021-11-19 : Start:ing my offline-tools…
2021-11-09 : Teaching Gemini at university, dreaming of moving out of Wordpress, simplifying my tools and thinking about learning emacs
2021-10-28 : RE: Reading "The Mysteries of Udolpho"
2021-10-25 : Offmini (part 2): Designing a Simple Offline and Decentralised Mail and Web
2021-10-20 : The Monstrosity Email Has Become
2021-10-10 : Offmini, My Dream of Making Gemini Offline and Distributed
2021-10-07 : Astrohaus Freewrite vs reMarkable
2021-09-30 : Is Fairphone repairability just marketing ?
2021-09-24 : Looking for offline-first tools
2021-09-20 : Back to paper (and typewriters)
2021-02-04 : The computer built to last 50 years
2021-01-22 : I don’t smoke Gemini
2021-01-12 : Offline-First, Typewriters, Emails and Gemini
2021-01-10 : The Offline-First Quest

2020

2020-07-07 : The Story Behind an Open Source Software Un-Maintenance
2020-02-24 : Despair and Hope: From the Stupidity of Academic Bureaucracy to the Poetry of Bitcoin

2019

2019-09-17 : How I learn to stop worrying and love the decentralized future

2017

2017-11-12 : An “Open Pay Wall”, has Medium lost its mind?

2016

2016-09-01 : Sunrise, the calendar of the future
2016-04-13 : Dreaming of subscript.io

2014

2014-11-12 : Dear 2002’s self,
2014-06-18 : Flattr: Decentralized Payments Paving A Roadless Web
2014-06-04 : The Blogger from Tomorrow (Part II)
2014-01-08 : My 2014 Terra Incognita

2013

2013-11-22 : Louis Michel Affair: Lobbies Switch From Influencing To Directly Writing European Laws
2013-10-24 : Tintin And The Copyright Sharks
2013-10-05 : The Blogger from Tomorrow (Part I)
2013-08-28 : The First Global Civil War
2013-08-19 : Open Letter to Flight Attendants
2013-08-06 : Exploring Artistic Business Models in the 21st Century
2013-07-23 : The Last GUADEC?
2013-06-24 : Flattr’s biggest problem
2013-05-30 : I don’t want to post on Medium…
2013-05-27 : Become a Patron of Arts and Letters
2013-05-22 : How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web
2013-05-17 : The Fight for E-Clothing
2013-05-08 : The Cost of Being Convinced
2013-03-28 : The Disruptive Free Price
2013-03-24 : The Death of My Best Enemy
2013-03-22 : The Day I saved A Life
2013-03-14 : Feel free to tip free content
2013-02-26 : Ripple, making Bitcoin easier (or obsolete)
2013-02-22 : Why you are probably not at inbox 0 (but should be)
2013-02-13 : The Publisher’s Dilemma
2013-02-07 : The Morality of Filesharing and the Thought Police
2013-02-05 : Meet John Doe, founder of Blackma.il
2013-02-04 : The Winmail.dat Syndrome
2013-01-27 : Paying for the web?
2013-01-18 : An Open Letter To Pirated Artists
2013-01-10 : I don’t care about your business model
2013-01-06 : The Ghost Web
2013-01-03 : Stay on top of your inbox in 2013

2012

2012-12-29 : The future of book publishing
2012-12-21 : In the year 292,277,026,596
2012-12-19 : Changing the world, one task at a time
2012-12-11 : A Google’s world
2012-12-05 : Murder is a terrible thing…
2012-11-26 : XKCD’s law
2012-11-16 : On usability, free software and perfection
2012-11-08 : Liblarch, a python library to handle trees and acyclic graphs
2012-10-15 : For a fistfull of votes
2012-09-27 : When technical experts do the job of politicians
2012-08-30 : Writing on a smartphone: review of 8pen and MessagEase
2012-08-07 : A freasy future for GNOME
2012-05-24 : France gives 700,000 blank votes to one private company
2012-04-19 : Being selected as a Summer of Code student
2012-03-19 : What if Ubuntu were right?
2012-03-12 : My experience working with patents
2012-03-09 : The Quest for the Best GNOME 3 distribution
2012-02-15 : The Backyard Digging (and filling it back afterwards) Point
2012-02-13 : Getting Thing GNOME is alive (and released)!
2012-01-27 : FlattrStat, a small statistic tool for Flattr
2012-01-18 : Why I’m a Pirate!
2012-01-17 : The End of the Revolution

2011

2011-11-21 : Crosscompiling LibreOffice for Windows on Linux
2011-11-06 : What happened during GSoC 2011?
2011-11-05 : The aristocratic desktop (part 4) : Kill The Double Click
2011-10-22 : So long Ubuntu, and thanks for all the fish
2011-10-19 : One year of LibreOffice
2011-06-29 : Proposal for a decentralized and open online payment protocol
2011-05-30 : Elections 2011: fostering the GNOME commercial ecosystem
2011-05-18 : Open Discussion Day 2011 : Why Decentralization Matters
2011-05-17 : Emacs Intosh
2011-04-27 : The Bitcoin Bubble
2011-04-15 : Visionary
2011-04-06 : Cricket, cows and GNOME 3
2011-03-16 : How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Shell
2011-02-07 : The Official European Joke
2011-02-02 : Building your web identity

2010

2010-12-02 : Joining Lanedo
2010-10-24 : Migrating an existing LDAP database to a new computer

2009

2009-12-12 : Getting GTG 0.2 released – Done !
2009-10-24 : In bed with Ryan Lortie
2009-10-13 : Gpager 0.3 « Scenes From a Memory – Finally Free »
2009-09-23 : Why I don’t contribute to Wikipedia anymore
2009-08-26 : How to be a lazy but successful Google SoC mentor
2009-08-25 : Board of columns of keys
2009-08-05 : The aristocratic desktop (part 3) : There’s no tray icon in GNOME!
2009-03-11 : Modify your application to use XDG folders
2009-03-07 : Getting Things Gnome! 0.1 – « Just 5 minutes more »
2009-02-26 : Alone
2009-02-04 : Upgrading an existing Ubuntu : the kill-your-desktop machine !
2009-01-31 : The signals and threads flying circus
2009-01-05 : The aristocratic desktop (part 2) : Home is Desktop

2008

2008-12-23 : Happy Newtonmas 2142 !
2008-08-31 : The aristocratic desktop (part 1)
2008-07-30 : Hardy is a hard time…
2008-04-08 : I’m not a virgin anymore/there’s always a first time
2008-02-28 : Very simple video editing/DVD burning in Ubuntu
2008-02-24 : Cleaning user preferences, keeping user data
2008-01-30 : Somewhere in the 21st century : a little Bongo history

2007

2007-05-24 : Ubuntu Live … without me
2007-05-18 : Open Discussion Day this Saturday May 19th – Just take off !
2007-05-10 : The Invisible Captcha Mechanism (ICM) against Form Spam
2007-05-08 : 2nd Open Discussion Day this May 19th
2007-05-02 : Do I have to protect my content with DRM ? (The DRM equation)
2007-04-24 : FLISOL 2007 in Guadalajara
2007-04-19 : Ubuntu Feisty, where things starts + Party in Guadalajara
2007-03-29 : Conseil 0.2 « Zapopan »
2007-03-11 : Conferences, life, ties, stuffs like that…
2007-02-07 : Moving to Guadalajara…
2007-01-31 : Putting the keyboard to rest…

2006

2006-07-15 : Conseil 0.1 « Grand Canal »
2006-07-07 : Conseil 0.0.1 « In The Middle of The Boxes »
2006-06-20 : Les spammeurs vont se faire bayeser !
2006-06-01 : The Long Term Support Flying Car
2006-05-17 : The captive clown
2006-04-06 : May 19th – The Open Discussion Day – 19 mai
2006-04-01 : Official Ubuntu ID cards announced
2006-03-15 : Why you should try Epiphany as your default browser with GNOME 2.14
2006-03-01 : It’s a long way to the top…
2006-02-23 : Say hello to your planet !
2006-01-11 : The Ploum’s Ultimate Anti-Spam Solution

2005

2005-10-04 : A brief « Linux on the desktop » retrospective
2005-08-30 : The bulb and the flower…
2005-05-31 : [Oneliner 13]
2005-02-03 : [Oneliner 9]

2004

2004-11-29 : Do you want to come for a dinner tomorrow ?
2004-11-21 : [Oneliner 6]
2004-11-09 : Don’t be fooled ! Keep Internet Explorer at all cost !
2004-11-05 : [Oneliner 4]
2004-11-02 : [Oneliner 2]
2004-10-31 : Too early in Sweden
2004-10-25 : I don’t want people to use Gnome applications anymore…

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Email:

gemini24@ploum.eu

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