Hi I’m Wes 👋. I like warm weather and tinkering with computers; ranging from small microcontrollers, up to large servers and the operating systems that run upon them. I’m a Rustacean with a fondness for mechanical keyboards. Read more on the about page →
For the last two weeks I’ve been testing out my new laptop, a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x (14", Gen 9) Snapdragon. This laptop is interesting because it’s one of the initial batch based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPUs. In this post I aim to provide a detailed review of the device and the experience of using it from the perspective of a software developer. This post was written on the Yoga 7x.
I received a reply to my Tech Stack 2024 post asking: Why Chimera Linux? I wrote a response that turned out longer than anticipated and figured I may as well post it here too. I’m not trying to convince you to use Chimera with this post, just note down why it appeals to me. That’s really the crux of it: there’s dozens of distros out there all with different goals and values and Chimera really speaks to me, for you it might be something else.
Apparently people are excited about funding independent browser efforts this week. I have little interest in funding yet another browser built in C++ in 2024 but Servo is still alive. Since Mozilla refuse to let us directly fund Firefox I shall set up a recurring donation to Servo.
The next question is how much is a web browser worth to me? Based on minutes spent using a browser, quite a lot!
Inspired by Alex Chan’s Tools of the trade post I thought I’d note down my current tech stack and then revisit it in a few years to see how things evolve. As per Alex’s post I’ll break it down into three sections: software, (development) tech stack, and hardware.
This post describes how I exported my 500+ YouTube subscriptions to an OPML file so that I could import them into my RSS reader. I go into fine detail about the scripts and tools I used. If you just want to see the end result the code is in this repository, which describes the steps needed to run it.
I was previously a YouTube Premium subscriber but I cancelled it when they jacked up the already high prices. Since then I’ve been watching videos in NewPipe on my Android tablet or via an Invidious instance on real computers.
Today I compiled my titlecase Rust crate to Web Assembly and wrapped a
web-page around it so that it can be used online. It’s published on my
“projects domain”, 7bit.org. After I published it I realised I hadn’t
written about the other projects that are on 7bit.org. They are
Dew Point Forecast, MacBinary, RSS Please, and Titlecase.
I needed three low capacity micro SD cards for an upcoming project. There’s plenty of these available on AliExpress but its very difficult to know if you if the actual capacity will match the packaging. I did some research and came across this interesting video that tested 16 different cards. Their recommendation was the Lexar ones. So I found some 32Gb ones for AU$4.13 and placed an order.
As per the video’s suggestion I tested one with an open-source tool called F3 (Fight Flash Fraud) when they arrived. F3 verifies the capacity against what the drive advertises and verifies that that amount of data can be written and read back without error.
I took a few hours this weekend to experiment with building a hybrid native app with Gleam and Tauri. This post is a summary of that project. If you’d just like to see the code, I have published that at:
https://forge.wezm.net/wezm/gleam-tauri-experiment
I use Chimera Linux as the primary OS on my laptop (as opposed to my desktop, which is still running Arch Linux for now). Chimera was created in 2021 and reached alpha status in June 2023. Chimera was built from scratch and as the name suggests it comprised of a motley crew of components:
The project and its development is proving very useful to me for seeing how a Linux distribution is built and evolved over time. Watching it progress (and helping a little by maintaining some packages) has helped expose some lesser known (to me) components that make up a typical Linux system, and their role.
Recently systemd-sysusers was introduced. Some folks might find this surprising as Chimera does not use systemd for the role of pid 1/init. As mentioned above it uses Dinit for this. Some standalone parts of systemd are used though. Currently:
udevsystemd-tmpfilessystemd-sysusersI had not encountered systemd-sysusers previously (even though it’s probably
used on the systemd based distros I’ve used before), so I thought I’d jot down
what I learned about it and how it’s used (at the time of writing) in Chimera.
I tried creating an OpenBSD 7.3 virtual machine on my new computer (Arch Linux host) and the installer kept crashing with the error:
dc_atapi_start: not ready, st = 50
fatal protection fault in supervisor mode trap type 4 code 0 rip ffffffff810089d9 cs 8 rflags 10282 cr2 287eb3000 cpl 6 rsp ffff800014fd11a0
gssbase Oxffffffff818fbff0 kgsbase Ox0
panic: trap type 4, code=0, pc=ffffffff810089d9
syncing disks...12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 _
A selection of projects I've built or contributed to:
Generate RSS feeds from web pages.
Allsorts
Font parser, shaping engine, and subsetter implemented in Rust.
View a 7-day dewpoint forecast for a selected location.
Clone a git repository into a standard location organised by domain and path.
A blog about operating system exploration.
A personal knowledge base.