Hacker and an occasional adventurer. Author of Create.js and NoFlo, founder of Flowhub UG. Decoupling software, one piece at a time. This blog tells the story of that.
It all started innocently enough: sometime last summer, I ran into the blog post Start your own Internet Resiliency Club on Hacker News. …communicate with each other across a few kilometers without any centralized infrastructure using cheap, low-power, unlicensed LoRa radios and open source Meshtastic text messaging software. The idea of a local, infrastructure-free communications mesh sounded…
Time is a precious resource for open source maintainers, especially if you aren’t doing it as part of paid work. The constant churn of changing development tools steals a huge chunk of that time. For example, I’m running NoFlo on a daily basis, but do changes to the library itself quite rarely. There were nearly six years between releases recently. The other day I wanted to add some functionality,…
We cruise on a small boat, a 31ft double-ender . As we’re off-grid the vast majority of the time, all electricity needs to be produced from renewable sources. Solar produces a lion’s share, but other sources are needed for overcast days. We don’t have space for a permanently mounted wind generator, so we converted a Superwind 350 to rigging-suspended. Why wind? As our 2024 cruise to the…
This blog has been running more or less continuously since mid-nineties. The site has existed in multiple forms, and with different ways to publish. But what’s common is that at almost all points there was a mechanism to publish while on the move. Psion, documents over FTP In the early 2000s we were into adventure motorcycling. To be able to share our adventures, we implemented a way to publish…
I think by now everybody reading this will have seen how the new generation of Large Language Models like ChatGPT are able to produce somewhat useful code . Like any advance in software development—from IDEs to high-level languages—this has generated some discussion on the future employment prospects in our field. This made me think about how these new tools could fit the world of Flow-Based…
Maintaining a proper ship’s logbook is something that most boats should do, for practical, as well as legal and traditional reasons. The logbook can serve as a record of proper maintenance and operation of the vessel, which is potentially useful when selling the boat or handling an insurance claim. It can be a fun record of journeys made to look back to. And it can be a crucial aid for getting…
Just in time for a new cruising season to start, the story of our 2021 Baltic shakedown cruise is now online. This was a 666NM trip that we did on our new-to-us Amigo 40 cruising boat in August-September 2021. Apart from engine trouble in the beginning, this was a very enjoyable little adventure on the coasts of Sweden and Bornholm. The trip even earned us the first prize in the cruising log…
I haven’t mentioned this on the blog earlier, but in the end of 2018 we bought a small cruising sailboat. After some looking, we went with a Van de Stadt designed Oceaan 25 , a Dutch pocket cruiser from the early 1980s. S/Y Curiosity is an affordable and comfortable boat for cruising with 2-4 people, but also needed major maintenance work. The refit has so far included osmosis repair, some fixes…
The 35th Chaos Communication Congress is now over, and it is time to write about how we built the software side of the c-base assembly there. c-base at 35C3 The Chaos Communication Congress is a major fixture of the European security and free software scene, with thousands of attendees. As always, the “ mother of all hackerspaces ” had a big presence there, with a custom booth that we spend nearly…
When I’m not in Flowhub-land , I’m used to developing software in a quite customized command line based development environment. Like for many, the cornerstones of this for me are vim and tmux . As customization increases, it becomes important to have a way to manage that and distribute it across the different computers. For years, I’ve used a dotfiles repository on GitHub together with GNU Stow…