Still here - a catchup of the last two years

It's been a while since I posted on Gemini, but I'm still here!

It's been two years since I last posted on my Gemini capsule, but I have not abandoned it! Nor have I stopped browsing Geminispace. I don't like to post personal details in this public space, so I tend to come up with post ideas and then abandon them. This is also why the posts tend to be almost entirely technical, because any other topic will reveal personal details or preferences, so I self-censor. Since my last post, I left my job at a research lab to go back to freelancing, and also started a business to host Nextcloud for clients.

AI

I've been exploring a lot in techspace. It's been a struggle to keep the AI hype under control, requiring me to abandon Hacker News and Lobste.rs entirely, for my own sanity. I now rely on my curated podcast and RSS feed subscriptions to find the signal amidst the noise.

I've been using duck.ai and Hugging face Spaces for my AI explorations and needs, as well as llamacpp running locally for coding assistance. I am happy with the balance of using these tools only as needed (as opposed to integrated AI in all my tools), and as long as the online ones don't require me to log in, I'll keep using them.

Text-based computing

I drifted away from my fascination with text-only computing (as outlined in my previous posts), although I still spend most of my time in a terminal. I ended up building yet another Raspberry Pi tablet, this time with the goal of using it for graphical browsing and reading e-books. This replaced my text-only Pi cyberdeck as my main mobile computing device.

Android

It is becoming almost impossible to find an Android phone I can buy which allows me to unlock the bootloader and install LineageOS on it. The Google Pixel is not available locally and it's too expensive. I ended up buying Nokia phones for my wife and I, since they have the least bloatware from the phones I could find locally. I use Android Debloater NG to then disable as much stuff as I can without boot-looping the phone (including all the com.google.xxx packages). So far this has worked well. I recently discovered Rethink firewall app on F-Droid that finally allows me to disable internet access for all apps other than the ones I allow. Highly recommended. I'm not sure if I will be able to buy any Android device again, as it is becoming impossible to remove proprietary software from it.

Linux

I've been a very happy Linux user for decades, and after leaving my job, switched to ZorinOS on all the laptops and desktops at home. I find it polished, beautiful, and smooth, and it does not get in the way of me using it as a power user. Lately though, I've been getting a little disillusioned with the direction Linux is going, e.g. abandoning X11, tools like ifconfig and netstat, etc. and systemd taking over the whole OS. It still works well though, but I wanted to explore alternatives, and so ended up trying out OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

Pinephone Pro

An opportunity arose where I could get access to a Pinephone Pro if I was willing to try porting FreeBSD to it. Given the above frustrations with Linux and Android, I decided to give it a go. It was a steep learning curve, but over a few months I managed to write drivers for critical hardware and patch the FreeBSD kernel to get it to boot up on the Pinephone Pro, into an X11 session, and with a working touch keyboard. Along the way I earned a Pinephone Pro as a bounty, which I am enjoying exploring.

My fascination with the Pinephone Pro is not over. I've been working on modifying the battery driver to fix the one problem that prevents me from daily driving it - a bug in the battery driver that reduces battery life by a lot. Using the Pinephone Pro as a mobile computing device works really well, as well as my Raspberry Pi tablet, albeit with a smaller screen and poorer battery life, but I can use the same apps on both.

FreeBSD

I hard-switched from Linux to GhostBSD on my main desktop to develop the Pinephone Pro port (almost a year ago now), and I really love GhostBSD/FreeBSD. I'm working on switching some of my Linux servers to FreeBSD, especially for my Nextcloud hosting business. The main reason is that I have finally got over my resistance (based on complexity) to ZFS (thanks to 2.5admins podcast), and now find it a critial part of my server infrastructure, without which things like regular off-site backups, quotas, and disk encryption would be difficult. I know, because I was using LVM, MD RAID, encfs, and rsync before. There are many other reasons for preferring FreeBSD to Linux, like simpler administration, jails, etc. that I won't get into here. I wrote a sandboxing script in FreeBSD to mimick what I was doing with Bubblewrap on Linux.

Wrap

So that's some of what I was doing during my posting silence. I was thinking of posting each of the above topics as it's own post, but then procrastination set in and I moved on to the next thing. I finally decided to just sit down and ramble for a bit and see what happens, and at least I have a post out now :-) I usually post little updates on my tinylog, so you can find more things there:

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