My old 2017 Huawei MateBook X has been my most reliable laptop and has continued to be my daily-use workstation despite trying half a dozen others (and a desktop or two) in the past four years. Every time I’d try a new laptop, certain components wouldn’t work properly, or the keyboard would feel strange, or the screen would look bad, or the fan or some coil-whine noise would drive me nuts. And every time, I’d return to my MateBook X and everything would just work silently.

I finally have a newer model of the MateBook X and I’m happy to say it lives up to its predecessor and will replace my 2017 model.

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Framework is a new company offering a laptop that is designed to be repairable and upgradeable, both in terms of internal components like the screen and motherboard, and in pluggable expansion cards.

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After the disappointment of my X1 Nano and learning that all future Intel “Evo”-branded laptops would lack S3 suspend, I started thinking about returning to my M1 MacBook full-time or building an OpenBSD desktop. I chose the latter, building my first desktop machine in many years.

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I’ve created an adapter for the Cidco MailStation Z80 computer which adds the ability to use WiFi for data transfer, code uploading, and to act as a WiFi modem for my msTERM terminal emulator.

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Lenovo has finally made a smaller version of its X1 Carbon, something I’ve been looking forward to for years.

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On the modern web, everything must be encrypted. Unencrypted websites are treated as relics of the past with browsers declaring them toxic waste not to be touched (or even looked at) and search engines de-prioritizing their content.

While this push for security is good for protecting modern communication, there is a whole web full of information and services that don’t need to be secured and those trying to access them from older vintage computers or even through modern embedded devices are increasingly being left behind.

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Fifteen years ago, NetBSD’s Bluetooth audio stack was imported into OpenBSD. From what I remember using it back then, it worked sufficiently well but its configuration was cumbersome. It supported Bluetooth HID keyboards and mice, audio, and serial devices. Six years ago, however, it was tedu'd due to conflicts with how it integrated into our kernel.

While we still have no Bluetooth support today, it is possible to play audio on Bluetooth headphones using a small hardware dongle.

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Returning to the development of my IMAP client, I add SOCKS5 support to be able to connect through a network proxy, particularly the one I made that is able to convert TLS-encrypted data from my real mailserver into plaintext that the Mac’s slow CPU can support.

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In the previous episode I quickly ported OpenBSD’s diff(1) but there wasn’t any interface to select files or scroll through the output. I’ve since added a proper GUI with the ability to select files or folders, and in this episode I walk through the GUI and filesystem code and then add a proper Edit menu. I also make a formal release of the code and binary available for download.

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I’ve wanted a simple revision control system on my Mac since starting development of my IMAP client. Porting a large system like Git or even CVS would be overkill (and very slow), but maybe something small like OpenBSD’s RCS implementation would suffice. For now, just having a diff utility would be helpful so in this video I port the guts of OpenBSD’s diff(1) and show it generating a unified diff between revisions of a C file.

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In this episode, I fetch the flags of each message and for unseen messages, make them appear in the list in bold. That introduces an off-by-one which I run out of time to fix while recording.

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Today, I implement plaintext message viewing and hook it up to the message list. I also review a cleanup of int variables to make them either short or long throughout the project.

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I wrote a utility function to parse RFC822 dates/times sent by the IMAP server, which then converts them to a UTC time. In this video, I hook it into the IMAP parser and add a resource string for the local timezone offset setting, so these UTC times can then be converted to a local time and displayed in the message list.

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I recently read about using a jump instruction as an LDEF resource to allow keeping the list definition function in the main program executable/project, so in this video I implement the technique for the message list.

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In this video, I get the list of messages displaying again and fix a bug that occurred when closing a mailbox. I provide a quick summary of creating LDEF procedures in THINK C for drawing custom list cells, which I will expand upon on in a future video.

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