I customized a static site generator written in shell script 5 years ago: Minimal Blogging Setup with Orgmode and ssg5.
Last year, I reinstalled my operating system.
On Monday this week, I tried to build this website and the website would not build.
After a whole night of debugging my script, I gave up and decided to migrate to Hugo.
Here is what I learned while migrating the site.
I did not want to lose my old posts and I did not have to!
It was nice to keep my memories of 3D printing ear savers for nurses during the pandemic.
I did a talk at FOSSY 2023 and forgot to post the published video on my blog last year.
Here it is! Most of the information is still correct in 2024 and the demos are still relevant.
I did a talk at SeaGL 2024 this November - Introduction to postmarketOS.
This talk aims to show the flexibility of postmarketOS and it's amazing tooling.
The main issue most people have when daily driving mobile linux is call and text reliability.
A lot of work has been done to get us close to 100% reliability but if I want the best reliability, I have to use android.
On postmarketOS, audio routing has alot of moving parts and for your phone to ring, callaudiod, modemmanager, and the audio subsystem must all work correctly.
Audio never touches pulseaudio/pipewire and is alsa only 1 - there are plans to move audio routing to pipewire.
In #sxmo on OFTC, users often ask why the pinephone pro is less functional on postmarketOS than other distros.
PostmarketOS uses a mainline pinephone pro kernel 1.
There exists a heavily patched fork of the linux kernel called the megi kernel with broader support for the functionality of the pinephone pro 2.
In this blog post, I will explain why postmarketOS has mainline-first approach.
Carrying around forks of the kernel is not sustainable as it becomes impossible to provide security patches after a short time. The only way to truly fix this for a device is mainlining it.
There has been renewed interest in the fediverse 1.
That is websites that you can install on your own hardware, come up with your own rules, and talk to people on other websites with social media like features.
Imagine being able to comment on Youtube with your Facebook account and vice versa or post to your Instagram and have it appear on everyone on Twitter - that is what the fediverse is!
Beyond these technical benefits, all this software is Free software - that is it respects your freedoms to community and rights to inspect what it’s doing.
Lets go over some of the other benefits of using Free software network services.
Recently, I tried to upgrade the modem firmware on my pinephone and failed.
As far as I know, the modem on my pinephone is broken.
I have a developer edition of the pinephone pro but the mainline kernel doesnt even have reliable charging working 1.
On the look out for a replacement device, I saw the poco f1 and oneplus 6 have gained support for calling in postmarketOS.
Since I am tired of dealing with pine64 hardware and the Librem 5 is too expensive, I decided to pick up a poco f1 for 150 Canadian dollars.
So how is the experience?
Overall very good and I have been using it as my daily driver for 2 weeks.
I recently gave a talk about Sxmo at the Free Software Foundation's Libreplanet conference.
Sxmo is a collection of simple programs and scripts used together to create a fully functional mobile UI adhering to the Unix philosophy for phones that run postmarketOS (a Linux distribution).
It's incredible how far Sxmo has come since our presentation at last year's Alpineconf.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to Sxmo and the FSF for having me!
The presentation covers recent developments and future goals with a Q&A at the end.
You can watch the presentation of our project here: