I've been using an
OpenBSDlaptop
as my workstation a lot more lately, probably because most of my hardware just
works now and I don't have to think too much about it.
The touchpad
works
when I touch it, I can be confident that when I close the lid, the laptop
will fully suspend and then fully resume again when I open it,
WiFi works all throughout my house (although it's not terribly fast), and my
web browser
is fast and stable.
What amazing times we live in.
In the past, one thing that frequently kept me going back to my
Mac,
aside from
iOS and Android
development, was
1Password.
I have a ton of logins for websites and servers, and because my
browsers
are all configured to
clear cookies
for most websites after I close their tabs,
I need frequent access to passwords synced across my laptops and phones, and
1Password has great apps for all of those except OpenBSD.
ThinkPads have sort of a
cult following
among OpenBSD developers and users because the hardware is basic and well supported,
and the keyboards are great to type on.
While
no stranger
to ThinkPads myself, most of my OpenBSD laptops in recent years have been from
various vendors
with brand new hardware components that OpenBSD does not yet support.
As satisfying as it is to write new kernel drivers or extend existing ones to make
that hardware work, it usually leaves me with a laptop that doesn't work very well
for a period of months.
After exhausting efforts trying to debug the I2C touchpad interrupts
on the
Huawei MateBook X
(and other 100-Series Intel chipset laptops), I decided to take a break and use
something with better OpenBSD support out of the box: the fifth generation
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
The
Huawei MateBook X
is a high-quality 13" ultra-thin laptop with a fanless Core i5 processor.
It is obviously biting the design of the
Apple 12" MacBook,
but it does have some notable improvements such as a slightly larger screen, a
more usable keyboard with adequate key travel, and 2 USB-C ports.
It also uses more standard PC components than the MacBook, such as a
PS/2-connected keyboard, Intel WiFi card, etc., so its OpenBSD compatibility is
quite good.
posted on july 10th, 2017
with tags
pushover and
rails
last updated on july 7th, 2017
For the majority of the past five years,
Pushover
has run on one physical OpenBSD server.
It does have a hot spare hosted with another company in another part of the country,
but usually everything has been served from just one machine at a time.
Its MariaDB database is replicated in a master-master configuration over a secure
tunnel between the servers so that either node can become active at any time.
When I wanted to take the primary server down for upgrades or the server's
network provider was having routing troubles, I would update DNS for various
pushover.net entries to point at the other server's IPs where all of the
components were already running.
Within seconds, traffic would start hitting the secondary server and within a half
hour, everyone would be using it, allowing me to take the primary server offline
as long as I needed.
posted on june 23rd, 2017
with tags
hardware,
mac, and
retrocomputing
last updated on august 16th, 2020
Back in 2015, I
created a BBS
for
Lobsters
that worked in a web browser via WebSockets.
After getting an old Mac earlier this year, I wanted a way to access the BBS from
the Mac as natively as I could.
Adding telnet and SSH frontends to the BBS was not too difficult, but being able
to login from my Mac took a bit of work.
In January I got a Macintosh 512Ke on eBay and spent some time fixing it up.
The screen would occasionally flicker and shut off, but banging on the side of
the case would sometimes bring it back.
Some research pointed me to the analog board needing some capacitors replaced,
which has completely solved the problem.
The
Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5"
is a basic fanless 12.5" Ultrabook with good build quality and decent hardware
specs, especially for the money;
while it can usually be
had
for about $600, I purchased mine for $489 shipped to the US during a sale.
posted on february 14th, 2017
with tags
endless,
ios, and
privacy
last updated on february 9th, 2017
Introduced in iOS 9,
Universal Links
allow iOS developers to claim ownership of domain names (including wildcards) that
can be processed by that developer's iOS app.
When an iOS user taps on a link to a URL of that domain name in any app, such as
Safari or Mail, and the user has that 3rd party app installed, that 3rd party app is
immediately launched to service the URL.
For web browsing apps on iOS that route traffic through VPNs or Tor, this feature
can cause traffic to be sent outside of the VPN/Tor network without warning.
For instance, if one has the
eBay app
installed and taps on
this link
from within Safari or any other web browsing app on iOS, the eBay app will be opened
to load that auction page.
posted on january 2nd, 2017
with tags
hardware,
laptops, and
openbsd
last updated on december 30th, 2016
I recently had access to a
Surface Pro 4
and tried to boot OpenBSD on it.
It did not go well, so I am just putting this here for posterity.
The 2016 Surface Pro 4 is basically just a keyboard-less x86 (Core i5 on the model
I had) tablet with some tightly integrated (read: not upgradeable) components.
Its optional
Surface Type Cover
is just a USB-attached keyboard and trackpad, which magnetically secure to the
bottom of the device.
I've been using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary computer for
six years.
It's a great computer that satisfied a lot of requirements I had for a laptop:
thin, lightweight, small form factor, excellent keyboard and touchpad,
mostly silent, but not an Atom or Core M processor.
I've done a lot on this little computer, like compiling and maintaining an
Android ROM,
writing the Rails, iOS, and Android apps for
Pushover,
creating
Lobsters,
recording and editing 40 episodes of
Garbage,
and lots of
OpenBSD development.
The Chromebook Pixel LS (2015) has an Intel Core i7 processor (Broadwell) at 2.4 GHz, 16 GB of RAM, a 2560x1700 400-nit IPS screen (239ppi), and Intel 802.11ac wireless.
It has a Kingston 64 GB flash chip, of which about 54 GB can be used by OpenBSD when dual-booting with a 1 GB Chrome OS partition.
posted on april 2nd, 2015
with tags
retrocomputing and
ruby
last updated on march 28th, 2015
Although it fooled nobody, yesterday for April Fools' Day,
Lobsters users that normally saw a boring
list of story titles and links were greeted with a BBS-style
interface to the site complete with story and comment browsing,
private message reading and sending, and a multi-user chat area.
posted on september 12th, 2014
with tags
linux and
openbsd
I recently activated a new dedicated server that came preinstalled with Linux,
as the hosting provider didn't support OpenBSD. Since they also didn't provide
an IP-based KVM without purchasing
a dedicated hardware module (though most of the IP-KVMs I've used recently
require interfacing with some terrible Java-based monstrosity anyway), I needed
a way to remotely install OpenBSD over the running Linux server.
posted on june 9th, 2013
with tags
openbsd and
travel
I spent a week in Toronto, Canada attending the
OpenBSD t2k13
hackathon hosted at the University of
Toronto.
While these events are put on every year in random places, I have not attended
one since c2k7 in Calgary back in 2007.
I tried to go to the Portugal hackathon last year but my travel plans got all
screwed up.
I wrote about the technical details of what I accomplished at this event at the OpenBSD Journal so I won't duplicate it here, but it was a fairly productive week for me. I remember at c2k7 I didn't really have much to work on and felt out of place but this time I had more things to do than I had time.
It's been a little over 6 months since I releasedPushover, the notification service with Android and iOS apps. I've been asked to post an update on how things have been going since then.
Shortly after the initial release, I received some great feedback from Chad Etzel, one of the creators of Notifo, the notification service that I used until it was shut down (which prompted me to create Pushover in the first place). Chad asked for Pushover to support sending messages with URLs that can open external apps, and Pushover soon gained supplementary URL support which required changes in the API and on both Android and iOS apps.
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
