I recently helped some friends set up Thunderbird and OpenPGP; the combination is much more user-friendly now. OpenPGP is end-to-end encryption for email. Each user generates a private and public key. Each user imports a copy of the other user’s public key in their Thunderbird setup (they can copy the keys onto a USB drive …
Author Archives: Thomas Fitzsimmons
Mastodon and HTML
Request to Mastodon instance operators: Provide a read-only anonymous HTML-only mode. Update 2022-11-17: Mastodon supports RSS; try just tacking “.rss” onto the end of a Mastodon URL. It doesn’t seem to work for comment threads, but it does work for main threads. For example will create a Gnus group containing the author’s Mastodon posts. This …
uLisp on the SMART Response XE
The Lisp Badge mini computer has turned out to be quite useful and fun for little hardware hacking projects. Its designer, David Johnson-Davies, suggested that the SMART Response XE would make a good off-the-shelf uLisp computer, eliminating the need to build one from scratch. I ordered a few SMART Response XEs from an auction site …
Mezzano on Librebooted ThinkPads
I decided to try running Mezzano on real hardware. I figured my Librebooted ThinkPads would be good targets, since, thanks to Coreboot and the Linux kernel, I have reference source code for all the hardware. On boot, these machines load Libreboot from SPI flash; included in this Libreboot image is GRUB, as a Coreboot payload. …
Excorporate 1.0.0
I released Excorporate 1.0.0 recently and declared the API stable. I was careful not to break API compatibility throughout Excorporate’s development so the API version stays the same at “0”. The project is now in a state where it does everything I want it to do, API-wise. The UI is still missing features like meeting …
Quickly Start a Common Lisp Script
So you want to write a utility script, and you want to write it in Common Lisp. I created a template Common Lisp script called start.lisp. It’s meant to be renamed and hacked up but it provides a starting point for a new Common Lisp script, with some utility libraries included. Here’s a “one-liner” that …
Hosting Jitsi on ppc64le
I recently tried self-hosting Jitsi on Debian on the Talos II. I had to apply some small workarounds for ppc64le, so I thought I’d post them here. The cause of the first issue, no audio or video in a call, was reported in the Jitsi Videobridge log, /var/log/jitsi/jvb.log: […] Exception in thread “Smack-Single Threaded Executor …
Pocket Lisp Computer
I recently built three Lisp Badge computers with some help from my kids. I bought a hot air soldering station and learned TQFP soldering. The kids did some through-hole and SMT soldering and really enjoyed it! The hardware assembly and debugging process was really fun, other than worrying several times that I had put too …
Lisp on Talos II
I’ve been following the status of Lisp on ppc64le lately. I’m running ppc64le Debian sid. Just after I had set up my system, I did some experimentation with what Debian packages had to offer. ECL was the only Lisp that worked, so I started using it for various projects. (I’ve since learned on #sbcl that …
An excellent machine
I finished building my Talos II system, and I decided to post my thoughts on it here. This is an excellent machine, the best workstation I’ve ever used. It’s very fast — it compiles Emacs and the kernel in 2 minutes, and just spins up the fans a little bit while doing so (under normal …