Hi I’m Wes 👋. I like warm weather and tinkering with computers; ranging from small microcontrollers, up to large servers and the operating systems that run upon them. I’m a Rustacean with a fondness for mechanical keyboards. Read more on the about page →
In my quest to make linkedlist.org—my link blog—faster, I set up multiple deployments around the world. I used pyinfra to automate the process and Chimera Linux as the host operating system. Join me on this adventure in over-engineering to see how I dropped the average response time across nine global locations from 807ms to 189ms without spending a fortune.
A digram of what we’re building.[1]
Over the course of the last few months some fine folks in the Linux community have been plugging away implementing support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X based ARM laptops. Recently Canonical published Ubuntu 24.10 Concept for testing on these laptops, which I installed and tested on my Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.
Almost two years ago, in Jan 2023 I migrated from my Fediverse presence from my
self-hosted Pleroma instance to a single user Mastodon instance hosted by
masto.host. Since then I’ve wanted to retire the Pleroma instance, but I
didn’t want to just take it offline. I wanted to preserve my posts and
links to them. That became a priority over the weekend so I built a
tool, pleroma-archive to do it.
I’ve started a new tech focused link blog over at linkedlist.org. “Not another tech blog”, I hear you groan, and rightly so. However my intention is not to cover topics that are already well reported upon like Apple, Google, Microsoft, the latest drama at OpenAI, and other stuff like that. Instead, I plan to focus more open-source, programming, hardware, software, Linux, Rust, retro computing etc. There’s some more details in the welcome post.
In this post I’m going to cover the process I took to the build the site (twice) and some of the considerations that went into it—for a site with only a handful of pages there was a surprising amount of them.
JSON Feed is a specification for representing an RSS-style feed in JSON. I wanted to add one as an alternative alongside the Atom feed on a new website I’m building. The website is built with Zola, which unfortunately doesn’t support the format, so this is how I went about adding one.
I have set up a mirror of repo.chimeralinux.org on a server in Australia (Brisbane). It’s been running well for a couple of weeks now. The root of the mirror shows an index of what is hosted and when it was last synced. /chimera is where the Chimera data lives.
It mirrors the packages as well as ISO and rootfs downloads. Using the mirror
greatly speeds up package downloads, which in-turn makes things like apk upgrade a lot faster. Some rudimentary testing suggests this this server may
also provide a speed improvement for folks in parts of Asia too.
My latest project, Feedlynx, is a self-hosted tool that allows you to collect links in an RSS feed[1]. You subscribe to the feed in your RSS reader of choice and read or watch later at your leisure. Plus it has an adorable mascot!
Feedlynx runs on most mainstream operating systems including Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows and has no runtime dependencies. Check out the latest release to download pre-compiled binaries for some common platforms.
After a few weeks using Feedlynx myself I think it’s ready for others to check out. Read on for more information about my motivations behind building Feedlynx.
For the last two weeks I’ve been testing out my new laptop, a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x (14", Gen 9) Snapdragon. This laptop is interesting because it’s one of the initial batch based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPUs. In this post I aim to provide a detailed review of the device and the experience of using it from the perspective of a software developer. This post was written on the Yoga 7x.
I received a reply to my Tech Stack 2024 post asking: Why Chimera Linux? I wrote a response that turned out longer than anticipated and figured I may as well post it here too. I’m not trying to convince you to use Chimera with this post, just note down why it appeals to me. That’s really the crux of it: there’s dozens of distros out there all with different goals and values and Chimera really speaks to me, for you it might be something else.
Apparently people are excited about funding independent browser efforts this week. I have little interest in funding yet another browser built in C++ in 2024 but Servo is still alive. Since Mozilla refuse to let us directly fund Firefox I shall set up a recurring donation to Servo.
The next question is how much is a web browser worth to me? Based on minutes spent using a browser, quite a lot!
A selection of projects I've built or contributed to:
Feedlynx
Collect links to read or watch later in an RSS feed.
Generate RSS feeds from web pages.
Allsorts
Font parser, shaping engine, and subsetter implemented in Rust.
Clone a git repository into a standard location organised by domain and path.
View a 7-day dewpoint forecast for a selected location.
A blog about operating system exploration.
A personal knowledge base.