gnome-terminal describes itself as $TERM="xterm" even though it is capable of displaying more than 8 colors. You can fix this by pasting this code into ~/.bashrc:

if [ -n "$DISPLAY" -a "$TERM" == "xterm" ]; then
export TERM=xterm-256color
fi

Verify that the fix worked by doing source ~/.bashrc, then tput colors; it should print 256.

Helpful illustrated explanation of an electric bicycle conversion. Lots of details and discussion of the reasons for each design decision.

The little book about OS development, by Erik Helin and Adam Renberg, dated May 2012. 76 pages, straightforward and practical.

This is a bar made from half of an old M113 APC.

Some day, I will own a tank*.

*an APC would be sufficiently tank-like to satisfy this life goal

I just heard from my lawyer: fourteen months after Ava and I broke up, our divorce is finally over.

WOOT! Such a relief.

A moment of inspiration hit just after I finished up with Mylio and had some time to act on it. I’ve had this idea brewing in the back of my head for three or four years now, and the whole thing came flying out in a nearly non-stop rush. I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it for months to come but it feels pretty good to have built a usable tool in just a couple of weeks.

I’ve posted the code on github:
Lindi, an editor shell for software development

I smashed a directory browser, a pico-inspired text editor, and a simple shell console together inside a terminal-mode window manager to create a kind of lightweight IDE where the current working directory plays the role of the project file.

The immediate problem was that I want to work on a project which has to be compiled on a Mac using Xcode, but I don’t want to be stuck at my desk all the time, and my laptop is a Thinkpad running Ubuntu. I considered VNC, but it’s hilariously insecure, tunneling it over SSL looks like a nuisance, and anyway Xcode feels cramped on the Thinkpad’s 1024×768 screen. In a classic fit of programmer laziness I decided that spending a couple of weeks building a new tool was the easiest solution.

Result: I can ssh into my Mac, run Lindi, and drive everything from a single xterm. Yay!

Lindi is unapologetically idiosyncratic and not at all configurable. Tabs are 4 columns wide, text files are 80, and control-C means “copy”, not “cancel”. The world is awash in editors, and everyone has their favorite; I just thought it’d be nice to build my own, tailored to the way I like to work.

It’s up on github now, though, and I’ll probably post a link on reddit or hackernews once I’ve knocked some more of the rough edges off; I’m curious whether anyone else happens to share my particular taste.

I’d call it maybe 75% baked, but it has enough that I’ve been using it to edit its own code. Long term plans: make the directory browser git/svn aware, beef up the console until it can run lldb/gdb, add syntax highlighting, use syntax highlighting to do project-wide identifier lookup.

The software product I spent the last two years on has just shipped:

Mylio is Here.
The next generation photo management system is now available.
All of your photos. All of your devices. Always protected.

The press release has this fun little remark:

“We recognized a growing need for photographers and consumers to protect, access and share all their photos everywhere they go and on every device they own,” explains David Vaskevitch, CEO of MyLO, creators of Mylio. “We formed a unique team of world-class software developers, designers and photographers to build a solution that satisfies this need and allows people to enjoy their photos again.”

People seem to like it.

idea: connect a Beaglebone Black single-board Linux computer to a SM5100B GSM radio module mounted on an evaluation board.

This device runs a VPN relay (using your home internet connection as uplink) and a server which relays GSM audio and SMS messages.

Next, delete the SMS and voice-call apps on your phone, replacing them with some yet-to-be-determined app designed to work through the relay server above.

Configure your phone’s internet connection to use a VPN, routing all data traffic – which now includes all voice and SMS traffic – through the relay box at home.

This allows you to run a firewall on the relay box which can whitelist or blacklist anything you want. Worried that your apps are phoning home behind your back? Block ’em. You could have different firewall rule sets, like “allow nothing”, “allow email only”, “allow email and these web sites”, “allow everything but block known malware sites”, etc.

Further idea: take the SIM out of your phone, put it in the relay box, and cancel your data plan. Buy a prepaid SIM with cash and put it in your phone. Now people who know your phone number and have the ability to track phones can see that your phone is sitting at your house, 24/7, but unless they know about your prepaid SIM, they can’t track your physical location. Bonus: travelling internationally? All your web sites continue to think you’re logging in from home, and you don’t have to worry about geo-restrictions.

Terminals are weird: quirks of the ways control and alt keys are represented in a standard unix style terminal.

I bought a used Thinkpad to replace my long-lived but now-dead netbook, and while it’s a much better machine in relative terms, it’s still kind of a weenie compared to the Mac on my desk. It’ll be a fine coding/email/browsing device, but I have this fantasy of remoting in to the Mac, using the Thinkpad as a dumb terminal, so I can also drive Xcode from afar. I’ve set my desk up to be as comfortable a coding station as I can manage, but there are many other places I’d like to be as well…

My question for the interwebs: is it possible to set up a VNC server on a Mac such that there is no way to log in with a password, that authentication is only possible through some pre-set key pair? I know that one can do this sort of thing with Git but I am hazy on the details. I imagine that I would generate a file, copy it onto the laptop via USB stick, set some configuration somewhere, open the relevant port on my home router, and then control my desktop machine without worrying that it is protected by something so flimsy as a password.

Now that its metacarpal bone contains a couple of screws, my thumb appears to have developed the ability to detect changes in barometric pressure. Cool! I am a human weather station!

Okay, to be honest it’s annoying and it kind of hurts, but if it’s the worst I have to deal with as a long-term consequence of last year’s motorcycle crash then I think I am OK with that.

One fire pit to rule them all.

Thorough and clever analysis of Python interop resulting in an API for asychronous I/O managed across multiple cores.

It’s funny to watch my creative outlets shift back and forth over time, since the activities themselves are about as conscious and intentional as they could be, and yet the overall course of the river seems to meander through loops I can only see in retrospect.

I did a ton of sewing last spring, but I haven’t touched a machine in months. The middle of the summer was all about organizing Floodland, which went off really well, but exhausted me. Since then I’ve been cruising through a more than usually quiet and solitary mode, spending most of my free time deep in the guts of some really enjoyable compiler hacking.

Now the weather is turning, I seem to have a resurging interest in connecting with my friends, and I’m thinking about starting up weekly Rock Star Thursday Dinners. Perhaps this also has something to do with the changing of the seasons and the approaching dark months, but I’m feeling a spark of interest in some lighting projects that have been neglected during this bright summer.

Delightful. By Mark Morford:
Burning Man is so very wrong

Here’s what you need to know about Burning Man in this fine year of our unchecked chaos, 2014: Nothing.

I mean, just forget everything, all right? Whatever you’re heard, read, seen, rumored, teased, whispered, Facebooked, Instagrammed, linked to, thought about or had muttered in your general direction in an Uber fever dream anytime in the past month. Year. Decade.

Because it’s almost certainly wrong. Delightfully, hatefully, stupidly, shamelessly, deliberately, resentfully, innocently or even inadvertently, it doesn’t matter – there’s almost nothing the slightest bit accurate in what the modern media has said recently about the famed art/camping/dance/survival festival – now in its 28th year – happening right now out in the Nevada desert.

Ready for Rain:
Why Seattleites Crave the End of Summer

It’s not simply the arrival of rain, but the transition to a different environment and way of life. The drear has a certain dark beauty; a low-contrast softness. There’s no need to squint or close the blinds. Even the sound of the rain on our house is music to my ears, a lullaby.

MailInABox: a script for setting up your own mail server on an Ubuntu 14.04 machine.

note to self: this cheap subwoofer unit looks useful for that Rover project

Charles Stross’ essay about his support for Scottish independence illustrates a view of geopolitics which seems entirely sensible, and which accords with my feelings about Cascadian independence.

My feeling is that we’d be better served by a group of much smaller nations working in a loose confederation or treaty structure. Their job should be to handle local issues (yes, this is localism) while compartmentalizing failure modes: the failure modes of a gigantic imperial power are almost always far worse than those of a smaller nation (compare the disintegration of the Soviet Union with that of Czecheslovakia). Rather than large monolithic states run by people at the top who are so remote from their constituents that they set policy to please lobbyists rather than their electors, I’d prefer to see treaty organizations like NATO and the EU emerging at consensus after discussions among numerous smaller stakeholder entities, where representatives are actually accountable to their electors. (Call me a utopian, if you will.)

Cascadia from space.

Here is a note I sent to the Floodland mailing list, thanking everyone who helped make it happen. No sense rewriting it when it sums my feelings up pretty clearly:

I have yet to start unpacking my car, but I’ve had a shower, a good night’s sleep in my own bed, and just now I’ve had a chance to upload some pictures:

Floodland 2014 on Flickr

I don’t know how to describe the experience I had this weekend without gushing. Not only did you all pick up the Floodland vision and run with it, but you took it off in a bunch of other directions I’d never expected, and you did it all with a smooth, comfortable competence that left me feeling like I shouldn’t have spent quite so much energy worrying about the details.

But I wasn’t just watching the kind of well-oiled machine that a close-knit crew can become: while many of us have worked on each other’s projects before, one of the big reasons for creating a new event is to welcome new people in, giving them a platform to explore their own ideas and develop their own skills along with us old-timers. I was happy to see good friends at Floodland but I was also glad that I got to make some new friends too.

We had beautiful weather, and even the little bursts of rain were welcome; we had the most consistently gorgeous sunsets I can ever remember seeing; we had lovely spaces to relax and to dance, we had art and costumes and performances and fire. It was all there. Everywhere you could see the potential hanging in the air, and everyone I talked to expressed enthusiasm about coming back and doing it again next year.

If all we accomplished was a proof-of-concept camping trip, that’d have still been success: but we went far beyond that and actually threw ourselves a full-on burn event. Thank you for all the energy you put into this, the good attitudes and adaptable creativity you brought to the various obstacles we encountered. Thank you for trusting me when I came to you with this crazy plan in the first place, and thank you for the honest, thoughtful, enthusiastic feedback so many of you shared as we all started to imagine what next year’s festival can be.

I have a new phone. It is Divide’s old Nexus S. (Thanks!) Alas, since I’m a paranoid freak who doesn’t believe in giving all my data to Google, I lost all my numbers. Entire address book: gone.

Have we ever communicated by phone? Does your phone contain my contact information? Text me, please! Send me your name. Thanks.

Floodland 2014 happens next weekend.

I’ve been trying to keep it small and focused, and these sorts of events have a way of getting out of control if you announce them too broadly. But we’re nearly down to the wire, this has been one of my major free-time activities for the last couple of months, and I’m really excited, so it’s time to spill.

We have art, music, shade, performance, cushy lounging, and awesome people. We’re going to go spend a long weekend in the sagebrush and make a beautiful temporary village there.

There will be a big “center camp” area for low-key lounging, workshops, craft projects, and socializing. We’ll have a big custom propane bonfire set up nearby – not that it gets very cold at night out in Eastern Washington during the summer, but a fire is still an important social center. And we’ll have some art projects, LED sculptures and the like.

A bit further away, we’ll have another big shade, covering a sound system and a DJ booth, with fabric and lights and some really impressive LED matrix displays…

It’s going to be a really fun weekend. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, this will become a new yearly event, akin to a “regional burn“. But this year will be special; it’s full of wide open possibility, and nobody really knows what to expect.