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I’ve seen a lot of talk about this stuff: “Check out my FOSS project (hosted on Github)” “Wayland is a great innovation and boon to the community! Also, there are very few tools/alternatives available yet for your favorite X11 tool!” “We love open source! Also, we develop the most popular proprietary operating system!” “Do as I say, not as I do.” We love to poke fun at and expose this kind of stuff, which is all fine and dandy.

There are many that say (and I tend to agree) that free software is the best there could be. But please don’t mistake using software that’s free as a right to superiority. There are many that go from day to day living and don’t give a thought to what they are using. Are they worse for this? Are you better for caring? Sometimes the truth can be quite baring. That not every human

Void Linux recently announced that they were going to move back to OpenSSL after originally switching to LibreSSL in 2014. It seems that there are a lot of things at play here. It seems that the main focus of the recent announcement is on the maintainability and other difficulties of not using the one true SSL/TLS library. To me, this pragmatically makes sense. However, every time something like this happens I get this lingering feeling of worry…

After talking about the hardware and software problems of digital permanence, I’m struck by a classical Sci-Fi motif with a conundrum: the Generation Ship; a ship outfitted with all of the technology, infrastructure, and storage to support lightyear-scale human travel. But what about that technology on the ship? If we build one of these ships, we need to accomplish one of several things in regards to information storage: 1. Innovate to the point where the lifetime of the storage devices is able to support lightyear scale travel.

Note: This is a continuation of the thoughts I started thinking about in my Volatile Mediums blog post. The next level up from physical mediums for data storage is the way that the data is stored. In the digital age, we have a plethora of formats for storing information. For me, one of the most interesting areas of information storage is the analog-digital space. The fundamental problem of storing audio, video, and other replications of the physical world is that there is so much information that we can collect with sensors (think microphones, video cameras, etc.

I decided to do some work on my Linksys WRT32X running OpenWRT to make it a little more useful. Unbound is a DNS resolver which I like because it’s recursive, meaning it directly queries the root servers instead of relying on existing DNS servers run by Google, Cloudflare, your ISP, or the like. I already have it running on several of my servers and computers, but I figured it would be great if everything on my network can use Unbound and be, well, unbound from all of those intermediary DNS servers.

Today, I switched my workstation from sudo to doas. I’m running Void Linux, and the process was fairly easy. First, I needed to figure out how to remove sudo (yes, I realize I could have installed doas first, then removed sudo, but I decided to do it the hard way.) As it turns out, the advanced usage section of the XBPS manual details how to use the ignorepkg entry in xbps.

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about storage mediums [1] – especially in the long-term. Technology has made a lot of progress. Digital storage mediums started out only being able to store 224KB on a tape drive for an average lifetime of up to 30 years. Now, we can store terrabytes of data on hard drives and solid-state drives. However, no one ever really answered the question about long-term storage.