MC's journal
Evening, computer! Location: Dining room. Input device: Thinkpad x230 with Emacs in Linux console mode. Visual: A large oak table and some chairs. On top of the table there's some dark chocolate (Ocelot Black Cherry. Mmmm!), a bowl of cherries, a jug of water, a water glass, and, naturally, piles of books. Behind the table grey walls with bookcases. State: Slightly apprehensive about work…
It's almost exactly 25 years since the EU Summit Protests in Gothenburg, Sweden. The event was, at least informally, called GBG 2001 and most activist meetings took place at something most people called Forum 2001. Many, many thousands of activists gathered in Gothenburg. During the week: Over 20,000 people marched through the city during the largest march, among several very large protest…
LLC I recently attended the Lund Linux Conference (LLC) . LLC is a small invite-only Linux conference in Lund, Sweden, about 20 km from Malmö, where I live. Despite its local name it's still an international conference with about 200 attendees, mostly Linux kernel developers. There's a surprising number of kernel developing companies around here (Axis, Arm, Ericsson, Intel, Western Digital,…
I didn't attend FOSDEM in Brussels this year. I doubt I will ever go back willingly. Most likely my visit last year will be my only visit. See that post for details. I have friends who visit FOSDEM and I cherish these friends. I would very much like to keep seeing them, but perhaps somewhere else? TL;DR of the last post: I'm spoiled by the Chaos events. FOSDEM, in comparison, suffers from bad…
I recently quit LinkedIn. Ironically, the post I made about why I was quitting was probably the most viewed thing I ever posted. Haha. If you need to see my CV it's right here on my website: https://hack.org/~mc/cv.html This is what I wrote back in November: I'm terminating my account on LinkedIn next week. This is possibly some kind of career suicide. I'm very seldom visiting LinkedIn, so I'm…
I need to write something about this or I'll burst. I have a new phone. It's an old iPhone SE 2022. Yes, I know. Evil, evil Apple. Won't someone please think of the privacy issues? Right, well, Apple has at least better reputation about these things than Google does, but we'll come to that. It feels like I'm betraying the FLOSS cause. I feel horrible, although probably not just because of this.…
Greetings, programs! I have an eye infection and I think I'm down with a cold. Not feeling my happiest. Spending time with you, looking at green text in Emacs, typing on my trusted HHKB, drinking warm beverages, and listening to Bad Religion and Tuba Skinny (nice mix of styles, eh?) might be a way to cure at least the melancholia… September was time for the Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging…
They say it doesn't have to be crazy at work. For once, it appears I sort of made it true. I stretched my summer vacation by taking a couple of days off every week instead of taking the full weeks. P says she has read studies about burnout that makes this a better recovery strategy. Maybe it worked? This was the last week with Mondays and Tuesdays off. This week I managed to keep my hours on…
Another one from the vaults. The 37C3 conference took place in December, 2023. This report was mostly written in January, 2024. Mostly finished it at night in my cottage between 28 and 29th December, then edited and added some stuff in July, 2025. So… Only 1.5 years late? It was a little ironic, and a little sad, that I was finishing the 37C3 report during 38C3. I didn't manage to get any…
Yet another Static Site Generator (SSG), but this one is mine. It's a stupidly simple Go program ( wc says 229 lines), more like a hack, really, but I don't need something like Hugo. Most of the real work is done by the goldmark package, of course. This is mostly just a wrapper, deciding if something needs to be rebuilt. I've been using a Perl script together with cmark (originally Markdown.pl )…
Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out. Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I'm writing, after all. Intro I'm back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I'm still going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break. It's been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I'm nominally working 80% (~6 hour days), so I figure I've been…
Not speaking for my employer, just as an interested developer in an interesting open source project. As you might have noticed, the platform repo of the Tillitis TKey has some alpha tags for the next generation, Castor: https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1/tags An alpha tag means that all planned features for the platform are in place, but there's not yet a complete audit and a lot of testing…
I bought a Satechi X1 Slim for dad's iPad about a year ago. It's a 60% scissor switch Bluetooth keyboard that you can use wired (USB-C), too (Fn + Eject). The feel is rather close to the Apple Magic Keyboard. Yeah, not even mechanical! I know, I know. For reasons dad's not using this keyboard so when I recently visited I brought it back with me. It's decent enough but in the ISO version some keys…
This weekend I went to the cottage with P on Friday. I hoped I would have a nice weekend reading in front of the wood stove, but I had also planned to spend at least a few hours trying to configure Maddy as the new mail server for hack.org et al. Then the web server I moved to the new VPS died. Again. I connected to the VNC console and, like before, the Linux kernel couldn't find its root disk. A…
I attended foss-north , a free / open source conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective, at Chalmers Conference Center in Gothenburg on April 14 & 15. A great conference. Lots of interesting talks: https://foss-north.se/2025/speakers-and-talks.html My own presentation was "Forking QEMU to emulate and secure the Tillitis TKey". Recording is here:…
Introduction A much shorter version of this post was initially published on 2022-05-23 (Pungenday, the 70 day of Discord in the YOLD 3188) in my gemlog at: gemini://gem.hack.org/log/computers-in-school.gmi The text has been edited after speaking with some old school mates and trying to remember more. I also added a few photos. The beginning When I started upper secondary school as a sixteen…
As some of you may have noticed my web page is now under /~mc instead of just /mc . This is a return to olden times. The Apache web server, and probably many other web servers, had a simple way of adding personal web pages for local users. This meant that an URL ending with ~mc led directly to a subdirectory of user mc's home directory. Whatever they put in that directory was immediately available…
I recently attended the large Free and Open Source Software conference FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. I went there by train, of course, via Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Cologne. The same route back. Figure 1: Kölner Dom in rain. I lived in the rather expensive, allegedly fancy hotel Le Châtelain in Brussels. It was really not that fancy, but they had a 24/7 reception and perhaps five(?) people…
Some of my usual readers will have to excuse me. This post will be in Swedish. It's about proposed Swedish legislation for forcing someone who offers a message system to the public to cooperate with the law. — — — Ändring Första version: 2025-03-10 07:55 Ändrad: 2025-03-12 18:01 +0100: Listan i "En bugg?" hade automatiskt numrerats av blogverktyget och HTML så poängen försvann. Nu citerad mer…
I wrote a stupidly simple SSH certificate authority that can you can use directly over SSH to buy new certificates. It can be used with a Tillitis TKey both for the private key of the CA itself and for the user authentication to get a SSH certificate: https://github.com/tillitis/tkey-ssh-ca SSH certificates, as you my know, is a way of using not just key pairs for user authentication, but also…
I'm leaving by train for FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium tomorrow morning, arriving tomorrow evening, Goddess willing. During FOSDEM I'll probably mostly be in the Security devroom. My presentation about the Tillitis TKey is on Saturday at 14:30. I'm bringing some TKeys, both enduser and unlocked, and a couple of TKey flash programmers if you want to buy something directly from me. If you want to…
A version of this post was initially published on 2022-05-30 (Setting Orange, the 4 day of Confusion in the YOLD 3188) in my gemlog at: gemini://gem.hack.org/log/collectives.gmi The text has been edited and I added a few photos. Posted on the blog on 2024-12-15 02:33 +0100. Later updated with how Area 41 ended. — — — I dreamt about Dial House last night. I've never been there, but it was like I…
This is based on a story I wrote during upper-secondary school, which in turn was based on real events. I translated it recently from Swedish and edited it. I removed most (all?) elements of fiction. Not a typical night, since it's at an event in another city, two train stops away, but it gives a taste of what partying in Sweden in, say, 1989(?) was like, at least in my crowd. I was maybe 17 or…
This has been in my draft folder since September. Sorry! It's been a few months with ups and downs, mostly downs. Energy to spend time on blogging has been low. Hell, energy to do much of anything has been low. I'm trying to clean out the drafts folder and will post more stuff. — — — I attended the security conference sec-t 2024 in Stockholm the other week. I held a presentation during the…
I recently read Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism . It really resonated with me, despite (or because of?) being glued to my computer many hours of the day. Cal suggests a month of digital decluttering, at first cutting off everything that your job and other obligations don't depend on. At the end of the month you evaluate what, if anything, is to be let back inside. I did a decluttering plan…
Evening, hackers! I feel a column coming on! TL;DR: In which we learn about the EU parliament election, some ruminations about the death of XMPP, MC's flat being without drains for two months, a visit at the Lund Linux Conference, another at the Security Fest conference, fighting against a Supermicro server, and some other recent shenanigans, Introduction I voted today. Yes, I know. The EU is…
I love Daniel Bogan's Uses This blog, even though it seems a bit Apple heavy at times. People sharing what tools, both hardware and software, that work for them is very helpful. A lot of things I never knew about came from this or similar sites, or just people's own home pages copying Uses This' questions and giving their own answers. I love to see photos of people's setup, like Reddit's…
Morning, computer! Slow morning in the cottage. P and #3 left hours ago. I'm alone for the weekend celebrating the goddesses Freyja, Ostara, Vesna, or whomever it is we're off work for. Maybe it's so everyone can watch the stream from Revision ? I've been slowly working through a french press of coffee and reading the morning paper, Dagens Nyheter . This time, however, I didn't just read on the…
I'm on a train again. This time I'm going home from Hudiksvall after a grueling weekend. I went from Malmö on Thursday morning and worked the entire day on trains. I arrived in Ljusdal after close to nine hours. I checked in at the only hotel in town again and, after a quick meal and glass of wine, went over to a very sad dad with a bottle of Macallan. We didn't empty it but we sure tried. I got…
Status report again! Figure 1: A visitor this morning. Sitting in front of the wood stove in my country cottage. It's nice and quiet. Meanwhile it seems NordicFuzzCon is going on in Malmö. 4,000 furries. I had no idea! That seems fun! On the other hand I just read that at least 10,000 were protesting in Malmö today against the Israel-Palestine conflict. I've seen the much smaller protests in Malmö…
I was invited by Mats, a teacher at the Sundsgymnasiet school in Vellinge, to give a talk to his students, all three years of the Technical Programme. Sundsgymnasiet is an upper secondary school, probably what in the US would be called senior highschool, with students normally starting in the year they turn 16 and finishing at 19. I didn't know what to expect, really. Mats told me I could talk…
I've updated my article about keyboard layouts with XKB after 13 years! https://hack.org/mc/writings/xkb.html I've edited it so the focus is on the layouts if you just want to grab them and don't need any handholding. Also added Thinkpad layouts along with the original HHKB layouts. It now also includes instructions for use with the River and Sway Wayland compositors as well as X11. I will…
Greetings, programs! Last weekend and for the most of this week I've mainly spent my free time with the Dad Computer Project. It's a bit stressful, but then again, what isn't? Dad Computer Project Ordered Internet for dad, in his name. Talked to him first, of course, to let him know what to expect. He called me later and said that the ISP would need to visit him and install something, probably a…
We have a decent 3D printer (Prusa MK4) at dayjob so we printed some foldable(!) laptop stands . Here they are: Here's my laptop on the stands: It's printed in PLA and printed in one piece! Written by MC on Setting Orange, the 30 day of Chaos in the YOLD 3190 ( 2024-01-30 ).
Friday is my day off from work, as usual. So when I'm typing this I'm in front of the hackstation (not a battlestation, obviously) with my third cup of coffee, writing an update again. I've been doing these status updates on my Gemini log (gemini://gem.hack.org/mc/log/, but I'm increasingly aware of the dropping amounts of traffic, so I'm thinking about doing them on the blog instead, but see…
I attended the Open Source Firmware Conference (OSFC) on Oct 10-12 in Sunnyvale, spent a long weekend in San Francisco, took a very long train ride to Seattle, spent a week in the Seattle area, and held an intimate talk at Microsoft. Managed to meet friends, drink some nice beverages, and even see a show but came home with a heavy heart. Then tried to relax in the cottage. Going to the US "Dress…
Figure 1: First production TKey being tested The Tillitis TKey, which I first wrote about in September last year , is now available for sale at the the Tillitis webshop . Note that this is a locked down end-user version! It's not possible to update the FPGA bitstream (or read it, or the Unique Device Secret, out) on this one. The TKey is a small bare-bones RISC-V computer in a USB stick form…
[Updated with correct Gemlog link.] A version of this was posted on Gemini 2023-01-06 but I thought it might also fit here. Go to my gemlog for somewhat more personal takes and see what I publish first. IPv6 only! gemini://gem.hack.org/mc/log/ As long-time readers know I have participated in the Chaos Communication Congress (C3) in Germany every year since 2008. Since C3 was cancelled this year I…
This week we presented the Tillitis Key 1 at the Open Source Firmware Conference . What we unveiled is a new kind of security device in the form of a USB stick and a new company, a sister company to Mullvad VPN : Tillitis . Yes, this means I now work for a new company. The stick is a small computer that can load and run small programs uploaded to it from a host computer. It always measures every…
Gemini is a lightweight Internet protocol. It's heavier than Gopher but lighter than HTTP(S), especially if combined with all other web technologies. The name makes sense if Gopher is Project Mercury and the web is the Apollo program. One of its uses is to serve gemtext, which is a lightweight Markdown-like markup language, instead of HTML. Gemini browsers don't have support for neither…
Tomorrow is my last day at Netnod after seven years. While at Netnod I have mostly spent my time helping build several different anycast DNS solutions, but I also did some IX provisioning stuff, some security work, and in some small way also helped bring the Network Time Security protocol forward. A few years back I was the team leader for the developers for a while, but I refused to have…
On July 6 the EU parliament voted yes to a proposal from the EU commission (PDF) on a temporary law to allow services to automatically search messages for suspicious content with a focus on child exploitation. We have quite strict confidentiality laws within EU even when it comes to electronic communication. Its current basis is the 2002/58/EC "ePrivacy Directive" (PDF) from 2002. On 21 December…
Year of our Lady Discordia 3186, 2020 of the common era. The year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The year began with a colleague visiting me from Stockholm for some intense pair programming. In person! Imagine when that was possible! Then I went with Ludvig and Gabriel to the mountains to ski for a week and then off to visit mom with #3. This was the only time I met my mom this year. I didn't meet my…
Figure 1: Robert Aitken rōshi holding his typical sign I just shaved my head for the first time in weeks. It got me thinking about my religious practise (or lack thereof), as the wannabe monk that I once was. My mother once asked me "You're not religious, are you!?" Of course I am. I've been a practising Zen Buddhist since 1988, the year I started secondary school. I was once a co-founder and a…
HOPE 2020 is going on. I watched a talk about Bildschirmtext , the German version of Videotex, aka Datavision, aka Prestel systems, aka CEPT . I've hated these systems with a vengeance. So much wasted possibilities. So much wasted money. I believe Videotex or Datavision was the first online experience I ever had. Like many times before I had taken the bus with a friend some 60 km to the nearby…
I apologize for my strange RSS feed lately. You have likely seen old, in some cases very old, posts marked unread in your feed reader. I am, again, using org-static-blog to render my blog. I have converted all the posts from Markdown to Org Mode. I experimented for a few days with the pre-amble and post-amble when generating HTML and some, but not all, feed readers marked the posts as unread. The…
The fever hit on the evening of March 12. Wife and #3 got sick a little later. I have a clear vector, so it's probably C-19. We were already kind of isolated in our holiday home so we decided to stay here. Very few neighbours and not much real contact. It's not really that remote so we're close to big hospitals, just in case. Figure 1: The house a couple of years ago. We're all still here and…
Originally published 2020-04-08 20:45 +0200. Republished with links to videos instead of just embedding them so the people in the feed can follow them. Republished again 2020-09-28 when Invidious had closed down. And again in 2024-08-02 when I realized that embedding Youtube adds a lot of tracking. Sorry! Looking through some old RFCs I came across this in RFC 900 from June 1984: R 192.005.050.rrr…
From my Sway configuration: xwayland disable In January I finally stopped using the X Window System. I had found native Wayland programs for most of my needs, so I turned off the Xwayland X server in my Sway configuration and removed both the Xwayland and the X.org X server from my personal laptop. I've been waiting for this moment a long time. I was never very happy with X and for a long time I…
Figure 1: Unnamed, me and Johan in the Apps subteam. Photo by Anders G Warne. Locked Shields is an annual blue team computer security exercise organised by NATO's Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) . Many countries, both NATO and non-NATO, participate in the exercise. This year there were 24 teams. The narrative during the exercise is that there is some tension between two…