Arcology Garden Site Updates

Updated My "Uses This" page for 2025

2025-07-22T09:07:00Z

Updated My "Uses This" page for 2025

For a long time, the website Uses This has published guest posts from different creative people asking them a few simple questions:

who are you and what do you do?
what software do you use?
and what hardware?
what is your dream setup?

I always enjoyed reading these because sprinkled in between Macbook UX designers and people with important-sounding email jobs were people who had honestly exciting views of computing and the Internet, especially dreaming about what it could be like I enjoy doing. In my view, Uses This posts haven't had an interesting thing to say about computing in the last 2-3 years, it seems like people have lost their ability to dream big about computers and internetworking. So here's mine as of July 2025: rrix "Uses This".

And here are some particularly interesting posts from the past:

mhoye (2019): "What I really want is to be able to not only share all of that but to describe how I've tailored it to my needs in some complex coordinate space. I want some sort of possible-configuration map, a cartography of collective customization. I'd like to be able to start exploring changes to my setup - my workspace, my editor, browser, terminal or keymap, and then put a pin on that map, to plant a flag saying, I am here. I'm learning about the machine, I'm learning about myself and that journey has brought me here. For some value of "here"."
joey.hess (2012): "the whole house runs on 12 volt DC power to avoid the overhead of an inverter; my laptop is powered through a succession of cheap vehicle power adapters, and my home server runs on 5 volt power provided by a USB adapter."
alice.maz (2020): "One of the side benefits of doing most of your work with the people you live with and love is you get to plan infrastructure on decades-long timescales. In this spirit, instead of describing my dream setup, I'll describe the setup I intend to have in five years. If nothing else this will be a fun thing to look back on and see how right or wrong I was!"
clay.shirky (2014): "I actually don't want a "dream setup." I know people who get everything in their work environment just so, but current optimization is long-term anachronism. I'm in the business of weak signal detection, so at the end of every year, I junk a lot of perfectly good habits in favor of awkward new ones."
ryan.north (2012): "Actually if we're talking dreams, the laptop is so tiny it fits in my pocket and unfolds itself, Transformer-style, to full size. Also, it's a phone. And it can call THE FUTURE."
charlie.loyd (2016): "Its weirdness comes from the hand and mind of a master, and it's precious to me. My dream setup has more of that feeling."
lex.gill (2017): "I have almost superstitious ideas about how spaces change the way we think and work. I think being in the right environment can encourage people to be their best selves."
kieran.healy (2010): "There are many things I dislike about the writing/data/coding setup I use. Emacs carries so much baggage with it, it's tiresome. Some of this is my own fault, what with the array of settings that accrete over time. But some of it is just stuff inevitably carried forward from the 1970s and '80s in the application's conventions, interface, core design, and so on. I resent its lack of consistency with the rest of my operating system. I resent the way its preferred means of solving your problems is first to have you surrender to it completely. Mike Hall's brilliant "Org-Mode in your Pocket is a GNU-Shaped Devil" captures this feeling very well."
kicks.condor (2020): "Envision a room full of millions of people holding one giant, hugely sprawling conversation. Such a thing has never been possible. I think if I could one day find myself in that room, even as a simulation, and it felt real - and I knew that it was just my sister and I having a conversation through these myriad expressions of us - it would be a dream come true."
rob.pike (2012): "In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work."
why the lucky stiff (2009): "the other perfect thing would be if the Internet could be hand written. If I ever get a time machine, I'm going to go back and smash the Gutenberg press so that when the Internet arrives, it'll be transcribed by monks the way GOD INTENDED."

What is your dream setup?

Posted: Fuck Time Two: Time Keeping Design Trends from 295BCE to ~2020CE

2024-12-14T10:45:00Z

Posted: Fuck Time Two: Time Keeping Design Trends from 295BCE to ~2020CE

Last week Will Bradley and I presented for David Huerta's birthday party various methods of keeping time poorly, and why one should consider doing so.

Fuck Time 2 on YouTube - Fuck Time 2 Slide Deck

In 2014 shortly after I had moved to Oakland to +join a startup+ live in a warehouse, Prescott Ogden participated in a hackathon hosted at HeatSync Labs which we've taken to calling "Fuck Time" in the ensuing years. Prescott introduces us to the concept of subjective time, we revisit it a decade on after the iPhone-iPhocation of all technology.

Will and I started developing custom watch faces for the 30$ PineTime smart watch over the last few years, and encourage others to do the same and to re-consider their understanding of the possible flows and scales of time in day to day life.

Updated my "rrix uses this" page

2024-11-16T23:05:00Z

Updated my "rrix uses this" page

After getting particularly incensed at another month of "i use a macbook pro and ﬄigma :) and i love it" posts on Uses This, I decided I needed to update rrix "Uses This" for the year 2024. So I did that.

[[id:20240111T122723.179913][Postmortem: 2024-01 Wobserver Downtime]]

2024-01-11T13:31:00Z

Postmortem: 2024-01 Wobserver Downtime

Noticeable service degradation on Last Bank, the Wobserver powering The Complete Computer, began on 2024-01-04 when Matrix Synapse federation latency spiked to multiple minutes and metastasized to a full server outage lasting until 2024-01-11.

This event was improperly root-caused and ultimately the multi-day downtime occurred to unforeseen inventory issues, compatibility with un-tested hardware, and improper observability in to the live-system, and improper operational handling of these scenarios.

Read the Postmortem: 2024-01 Wobserver Downtime for more information and some hijinx including getting locked out of my car at Best Buy in the snow.

Securing and Standardizing Data Rights Requests with a Data Rights Protocol - DRP @ PEPR23 -

2023-11-01T17:55:00Z

Securing and Standardizing Data Rights Requests with a Data Rights Protocol - DRP @ PEPR23 -

A Video of my USENIX PEPR talk on Data Rights Protocol is online, watch as I struggle to describe my work and struggle to talk to a large-ish group of engineers about the work I did with Consumer Reports Innovation Lab.

I got a new smartwatch and wrote a watchface for it in an evening.

2023-09-26T13:15:00Z

I got a new smartwatch and wrote a watchface for it in an evening.

I used Pebble watches for a long time and I really still like them but they're a pain to keep running these days and I never got around to writing custom code or apps or watchfaces for it. After my Pebble Time 2 HR bit the dust, I ended up buying a Amazfit Bip S, and it sort of worked, but I needed to install an extra app to get Sleep as Android sleep tracking working with it and it's a sort of weird, closed ecosystem. I probably should have tried to get GadgetBridge to work with it, oh well.

I bought a PineTime from Ameridroid on a lark when I wanted to get a Radxa Zero and a Pinecil from them. They're 25$ nRF52 smart watches with heart rate sensing, accelerometer, and 8 bit color LCD touch screen.

I don't need a bunch of fancy apps for my Smartwatch, I basically only want it to buzz when I have a calendar event or a chat message, and I want it to count my steps and my sleeps. This thing does all of that out of the box. Maybe I'll code up some other features. I'd like to add a meditation timer next.

So with the PineTime, I decided sooner rather than later I should try to write the watch face I wanted and had on my Pebble, and wrote that in an evening.

Read my PineTime page for details about writing my own watchface and deploying it to my smart watch after less than 6 hours from unboxing.

[[id:20230914T122224.886447][California passed a DELETE Act]]

2023-09-14T12:27:00Z

California passed a DELETE Act

California passed a DELETE Act: summary of the "old" federal bill and brief summary of how this bill will be applied.

California passed a law that would give consumers an easy singular interface to opt-out of processing by data brokers and require them to delete your data. Neat stuff, if it works. There's a lot of overlap between this and what we've been building with the Data Rights Protocol and I'm excited to see those overlaps pursued.

[[id:people/skvidal]["it isn't a contest. Just enjoy the ride." - remembering Seth Vidal]]

2023-07-08T20:10:00Z

"it isn't a contest. Just enjoy the ride." - remembering Seth Vidal

A decade ago we learned of the passing of Red Hat/Fedora Linux software engineer Seth Vidal on 2013-07-08. In "it isn't a contest. Just enjoy the ride." - remembering Seth Vidal, I briefly memorialize a good man.

I made a one-off entry to Fedora Linux's blog aggregator with this post as well.

My [[id:20230429T140217.184029][New Homelab Build]] is basically complete

2023-05-29T23:04:00Z

My New Homelab Build is basically complete

At the beginning of March I started planning for the turndown of my 1U racked with Wobscale Technologies. It is a hilariously un-maintained Fedora Linux that basically exists to run Matrix Synapse and Nginx proxies to the host in my living room. That host was an Gen 8 HP Microserver and is now a SuperMicro + Xeon in a 4U with 256GB of RAM. 1000$ gets you 48 cores of 2012 CPU and 256GB of ECC RAM. It's called Last Bank. It's racked up in a rolling rack with all my networking gear and Window Smoke, My NixOS Tower racked above it.

On top of the rack I have my network gear and a power strip on a rack-mount shelf. All of this is organized with Gridfinity Modular Storage System modules to route the power cables under the gear and fix the networking gear in a compact, organized fashion.

I also set up an old low-power desktop with Home Assistant to act as an ATC for the automations I want to build. It works with basically all the smart devices I have, but I am frustrated with how difficult it is to automate things on my desktop. It would be really neat if you could use KDE Connect plugins with it, one of these days I will figure this out. But I got some Z-Wave Plugs which also have energy monitoring. One of them is hooked up to my audio amplifier so that when I go to bed my soundsystem automatically turns off. I'd like to be able to send a mute command to my desktop (with a KDE connect plugin, perhaps cough), but in the meantime this will suffice. The other is between my wall and the power strip just to do energy management. You'll see a Kill-a-Watt in the photo above, which are useful but in getting accurate measurements and longer-term trend analysis this will be much nicer. I had some issues pairing up the switch which would do the recording and only just got it working today, but you can see when I did a NixOS rebuild and you can see the full setup, both machines and networking gear but not including my desktop monitor pull 300W or so on average.

I was very much on the fence between building something like this out and building basically another PC but with a Ryzen 3700 and a motherboard with a bunch of SATA ports, but the TDP worked out to about the same amount on paper, the multi-core performance was quite similar, and I could afford much more ram due to the low price of DDR3.

I was worried about noise and about heat, and the machines are slightly noisier now that they are in these chassis. They each have 2x 120MM and 2x 80MM case fans which run at full-tilt directly off of the PSU even when I shutdown from the OS because the RSV-R4000U's fans all have big chonky molex connectors which don't attach to the fan controllers on the motherboards. I'll probably replace them with some other fans that can do PWM like these, but really these machines aren't so noisy that it bothers me having them in the living room. Of course I have fans and filters and occasionally AC running all as well right now because Eugene is in the middle of grass pollen season, so it's basically always drown out. And I do need a temperature sensor or thermometer in here so that I can what sort of heat makes it out of the rack. All in due time, but I am done futzing with it for a bit. Oh except I'm thinking about measuring some new Ethernet cables...

Okay maybe I was wrong about 6.x

2023-05-27T13:25:00Z

Okay maybe I was wrong about 6.x

In I am swearing off Kernel 6.x. I thought that it was the fault of 6.x degrading my desktop -- well, I rolled back to 5.15 and the VFIO module was still corrupting my framebuffer but it also broke X11. I spent hours getting mad at this situation after I moved my desktop in to the rack that my New Homelab Build now lives in, fiddling with BIOS settings, blindly typing in my full disk encryption passphrase and sitting in stupid anger when I could SSH in and lightdm was just sitting with its thumb up its ass waiting for an active logind seat to become available for auto-login.

I stumbled on /r/VFIO in the process of trying to un-wind all this stuff and an obscure magic-number error I was getting from QEMU when I tried to attach the PCIe USB-3 controller to my Windows VM. All the weird, difficult/impossible to debug issues these folks report in trying to get these bespoke setups to work mirrored my experience and I decided it is not worth the trouble right now. I got to the point where if i can boot and login, the GPU and network card both attached to the VM, but the USB controller would not so I would boot up and be greeted with a login panel which did not work.

So I have ripped out all of the PCI passthrough stuff in My NixOS Tower Customizations, and I will figure out how I want to move forward. I may invert the setup where my PC boots to Windows and then a QEMU VM presents the NixOS environment that I can work in during the day, but ugh, it's such a bummer. When the PCI passthrough setup was working it worked so well with my monitor acting as USB+Display KVM based on which input I had selected; afaict there is not a solution in Windows which would let me mirror this setup where I can change display inputs and have my USB hub swap over in to the VM as well.

Very sad about the whole thing.