I preordered a Tangara music player from CrowdSupply in October 2024. It arrived in April 2025, and I used it on and off until I sold it as defective on Swedish EBay this February, 2026, for 770 SEK, about 25% of what I paid for the device. I had pretty much the same experience I’ve had with every piece of open source hardware starting with the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner , with the notable exception…
In which yours truly churns through the September/October 2023 archive of CommonCrawl to find all HTML forms validating inputs using regular expressions.
People talk a lot about how they don't like their phones anymore. The general sentiment is that the affordances of the smartphone are somehow engineered nefariously. The best comparison I can think of is the mass relay infrastructure of Mass Effect, which was designed by ancient cosmic horrors to structure intergalactic civilisations to essentially lazily domesticate them by making them grow…
Ingen verkar kunna förklara exakt vad som ska "bli lättare" om förslaget på en ny könsidentitetslag faktiskt går igenom så jag tänkte jämföra rekvisiten i lagtexterna efter bästa förmåga. Jag är varken journalist eller jurist så det är inte en så bra jämförelse, men till skillnad från nästan alla som uttalar sig i media i frågan är jag åtminstone både normalbegåvad och läskunnig. Det är också inte…
In which I try out the only cloud storage provider left to try and find it lacking.
I have added a new ongoing project to the publications section , and added a list of software and hardware I use after noticing that finding such recommendations online is getting increasingly difficult.
Mozilla, the confusing combo of foundation and company behind the web browser Firefox recently laid off a substantial number of workers , citing economic reasons. As far as I know, the full extent of the damage to the organisation is still unknown, but the layoffs seem to have wiped out virtually every team working on the actual future of Firefox, including as the next-generation web engine Servo,…
The reMarkable is very much an early adopter technology . It still has some rough edges, though the integration of an electronic pencil on an e-ink screen works remarkably well . Like most young technologies, it's supporting tech, in particular the system software and the supporting apps, are not yet there in terms of design, coherence, and stability . Navigating PDFs for non-sequential…
Hypothesis is an implementation of Property-based testing for Python, similar to QuickCheck in Haskell/Erlang and test.check in Clojure (among others). Basically, it allows the programmer to formulate invariants about their programs, and have an automated system attempt to generate counter-examples that invalidates them. A Small Query Language During my internship at CERN, I am developing a…
On most of my machines, I treat the default Downloads folder as a staging area: it's where things arrive before being filed away wherever they belong. Most files, however, are only useful for a very brief period of time and belong nowhere really. Therefore, the Downloads folders on my systems tend to accumulate all sorts of meaningless gunk, as sorting and taking out the digital trash is…
This September, I started a one-year internship at CERN's Database department (more specifically the IT-DB-IMS department, as they are clearly very fond of hierarchies). My assignment is related to logging and storage monitoring, and my primary task will be to provide a solution for automatic propagation and reporting of storage-related errors (think dead hard drives, power failures etc).…
I recently got a 10 x 6.25-inch Graphic Monoprice drawing tablet via Massdrop. It turns out that these tablets are actually re-branded Huion devices, supported by recent kernels and by the Digimend driver . Mine is a Huion H610 . ElementaryOS Freya's kernel is apparently patched to contain the necessary drivers, and everything worked out of the box in terms of reading input. However, the…
As Jessie now uses systemd by default, the old trick of editing /etc/default/acpi-support doesn't work. In stead, you have to edit /etc/systemd/logind.conf and add the line HandleLidSwitch=ignore . In my case, suspend was really slow to kick in, and I have no idea why. In other words, in case you have a newly installed laptop server that dies a while after having…
I have a method for teaching myself complex new things that I have developed over my 8 years (and going!) as a university college student. Of course, reality is neither this sequential nor this formal, but something along these lines goes very far. It is also important to note that this process is repeated over several cycles for most university courses, so you can not simply assume that a single…
I like the focus follows mouse focus behaviour. To set it in Elementary OS (including the recently released Freya), one can simply modify the GSettings database from a simple terminal command: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode 'sloppy' .
Install the .deb from steam: sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb . Fix the proken dependencies (because Steam does not just use the default terminal emulator...): sudo apt-get -f install (it will pull in xterm). To run Steam in Freya on a 64-bit machine, you need a 32-bit environment. However, as ElementaryOS is based on Ubuntu LTS, you can't install the "normal" libGL/Mesa libraries as Steam…