I ripped out a dependency and then I found out what it did. I wrote an RSS parser for a very simple project, and then figured, how hard could it be to use in a real feed reader? Well, not very hard, but it was somewhat time consuming, and offers another perspective on using other people’s code.
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Not just a new server, a news server, although ironically I think only the olds use the news now. It was really just an experiment in why not. It took me about three hours from opening a blank main.go to mostly done, which was good to cover the Becket joins Dr. Cuddy at the FBI arc on Castle. Then an afternoon faffing about making scripts to load up some content.
The first and most important thing to discuss is the name, nuset. It’s got all the same pheromones as Usenet, subliminally exerting mind control over the reader. In the local dialect, it’s pronounced more like newsd, rhymes with used, as if it’s used news. About right. I was thinking of telling people it’s named after the Assyrian god of information, and could probably get someone to believe that. Or maybe it’s nu-Set, the reincarnation of Set.
The NNTP protocol is specified by RFC 3977. It’s a pretty easy read, and filled with lots of examples, which I found very helpful. Read a section, then copy the client line into the parser and copy the server line into the output. There’s words, too, but it’s much less ambiguous to always see exactly the format of commands and results.
In hindsight, this would have been a good project to experiment with a new language. But I was lazy and already know where go keeps the textproto.DotWriter.
I’m not super into Gemini, the tiny web alike, in part because I think it’s fun to interact with people. But a tiny usenet, without all the spams and trolls, I could get into. Although I’m not there yet. I’ve only got enough commands working to allow local posting, not federation. A little more effort, and we could get there, though.
For now, I’m just mirroring content. You can check it out at nntp://flak.tedunangst.com. Subscriber exclusive: see the behind the scenes markdown I use to write posts!
It’s been one year since our previous adventure, so it’s time for another round of guess why that dependency shows up in the tarball. This time we’re looking at honk, an ActivityPub server that’s supposed to be idiosyncratic with minimal dependencies, so you can keep all your attention focused where it’s needed.
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Poking through layers of indirection in go trying to recover some efficiency.
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ASUS laptops generally have a feature that lets the user toggle the fan speed. Fn-F5 on some models, Fn-F on others. The direct effect is to limit the fan speed, from whisper mode to megablast, and indirectly control performance. But it doesn’t work in OpenBSD, so I needed to write an ASUS ACPI WMI driver.
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As I move around, I roam between wifi networks, but sometimes lose the connection. Then I click a link and watch in vain as it fails to load. So I’d like an easy way to check which, if any, wifi network I’m connected to, such as by putting it in my dwm status bar. I could run ifconfig and parse the output, but that’s excessively wasteful. I need to get the info myself.
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It’s been three years since our previous counting of lines, so let’s check back in and see how OpenBSD is growing. Instead of just looking at the kernel, this time we’ll zoom out and look at the entire src tree.
. 20.54M lines 954.56M bytes
├──sys 9.70M lines 627.17M bytes
│ ├──dev 8.49M lines 593.52M bytes
│ │ ├──pci 7.14M lines 549.14M bytes
│ │ │ └──drm 6.58M lines 532.33M bytes
│ │ │ ├──amd 5.81M lines 509.00M bytes (7)
│ │ │ └──(other) 696.08k lines 21.03M bytes (7)
│ │ └──(other) 1.33M lines 43.74M bytes (36)
│ └──(other) 1.21M lines 33.66M bytes (22)
├──gnu 7.65M lines 238.82M bytes
│ ├──usr.bin 4.72M lines 140.19M bytes
│ │ ├──binutils 1.42M lines 42.64M bytes (12)
│ │ ├──binutils-2.17 1.14M lines 39.34M bytes (12)
│ │ ├──gcc 1.18M lines 35.25M bytes (3)
│ │ └──(other) 981.74k lines 22.96M bytes (5)
│ ├──llvm 1.52M lines 55.85M bytes (8)
│ ├──gcc 1.25M lines 37.88M bytes (11)
│ └──(other) 164.69k lines 4.89M bytes (3)
└──(other) 3.19M lines 88.57M bytes (12)As some of the more knowing members of the audience may have predicted, the AMD GPU driver wins the prestigious Most Growth award, nearly doubling in size. It’s gone from being more than the half the kernel to more than half of the entire operating system. Quite the achievement! No other subdirectory even comes close.
AMD was up against some stiff competition in the past, including Team Toolchain featuring two copies of binutils, two copies of gcc (4.2 and 3.old), and llvm, but even their combined efforts now come in at only half an AMD.
There are some other programs and utilities included in OpenBSD as well, but at less than 10% of the codebase, they’re probably not worth further consideration. Too far out of competition.
I don’t usually recommend budget laptops, which end up being useful for little more than getting online and ordering a real replacement, but occasionally there’s exceptions. Like the ASUS Vivobook 14 (X1404ZA) from 2023, which apparently was made in great numbers but didn’t sell very well, because stores are still trying to unload it. It’s not a great laptop, but for $225 or so, it’s better than most of the alternatives. (Unless you find a good deal on an ebay thinkpad, etc. An X1 Carbon G3 from 2015 seems to be about the same price.) I picked it up specifically because I wanted an Alder Lake CPU for reasons, and I’m happy that it hasn’t been a waste of money.
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I haven’t had much use for Windows for a while, but I like to keep abreast of whatever fuckery Redmond has in store for everyone else. I picked up a new laptop with the dreaded Copilot key, and thus had to figure out how to make it useful. And along the way, found a bunch of other settings to adjust. The plan is that I won’t need any of this knowledge until it becomes obsolete, but the only way to ensure that outcome is to write it all down; thus by being available it will never be necessary.
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