Thicket data repository for the EEG
anil.recoil.org
1{
2 "id": "https://ryan.freumh.org/fosdem.html",
3 "title": "FOSDEM",
4 "link": "https://ryan.freumh.org/fosdem.html",
5 "updated": "2024-02-13T00:00:00",
6 "published": "2024-02-13T00:00:00",
7 "summary": "<div>\n \n <span>Published 13 Feb 2024.</span>\n \n \n <span>Last update 13 Feb 2024.</span>\n \n </div>\n \n <div> Tags: <a href=\"/conferences.html\" title=\"All pages tagged 'conferences'.\">conferences</a>. </div>\n \n \n\n <p><span>I attended the Free and Open source Software\nDevelopers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium last weekend.\nThere are hundreds of hours of talks in 35 rooms over a period of two\ndays, and rooms are often full to capacity, so it’s impossible to see\neverything! Thankfully every room is live-streamed and recordings made\navailable after the fact, so you can catch up on anything you\nmiss.</span></p>\n<p><img src=\"./images/fosdem-schedule.png\"></p>\n<h2>Friday</h2>\n<p><span>On the Eurostar over my travelling companion\nand I were lamenting about the Nix DSL, and we heard a French accent\nfrom behind:</span></p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span>Ah, NixOS. See you at FOSDEM\nthen!</span></p>\n</blockquote>\n<h2>Saturday</h2>\n<p><span>The day started with a coffee and a banana\n(probably not substantial enough in hindsight), an absolutely packed\nnumber 71 bus to the ULB Solbosch Campus, and arriving in plenty of time\nto get a seat for the 09:30 CET opening ceremony. I kicked off the day\nby attending:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3242-screen-sharing-on-raspberry-pi-5-using-vnc-in-weston-and-wayland-with-the-yocto-project-and-openembedded/\">Screen\nSharing on Raspberry Pi 5 Using VNC in Weston and Wayland with the Yocto\nProject and OpenEmbedded</a></li>\n<li>and <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1798-improving-ipv6-only-experience-on-linux/\">Improving\nIPv6-only experience on Linux</a></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span>Having, during my January tradition, spent\nsome time revisiting my technical (in addition to non-technical) habits,\nafter getting sufficiently frustrated with thunderbird I’ve started\nusing the <a href=\"https://aerc-mail.org/\">aerc</a> mail client along\nwith <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/nixos/blob/3cd20b3b874b70b53cd894a533fe44b589f8eeea/modules/personal/home/mail/default.nix\">isync\n(mbsync)/goimapnotify/mu</a>. So naturally I then moseyed on over to the\nModern Email <a href=\"https://www.ietf.org/how/bofs/\">BoF</a>.</span></p>\n<p><span>I was a little early and caught the end of\nthe NGI Zero network meetup, and met someone who works for the Dutch\nStandardisation Forum on, amoung other things, a neat website and\nmailserver tester at <a href=\"https://internet.nl/\">internet.nl</a>. My\nwebsite and mailserver had a couple of flagged issues including a DMARC\npolicy of none (which should really quarantine or reject once it’s\nworking properly), and DNSSEC support due my nameserver <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/eon\">EON</a> not (<a href=\"https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-dns/issues/302\">yet</a>)\nsupporting DNSSEC. Switching to bind with a couple of configuration\nchanges got me scoring 100% on my apex <code>freumh.org</code>. The\n<code>www</code> subdomain was a CNAME to the apex, which meant it also\nserved an MX record. I don’t serve any significant website on my apex\ndomain, so I simply dropped the subdomain. Now I’m told a free\n<code>internet.nl</code> T-Shirt is on its way to my Cambridge\naddress!</span></p>\n<p><span>I’ve been working on a <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/eon/tree/a442c424ea06b2c819dd48c9e69838e09675b22b/bin/acme\">nameserver\nto provision TLS certificates</a> recently for inclusion into my\none-stop-shop self-hosting solution <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/eilean-nix\">Eilean</a>. By including\nthe DNS zonefile data in the Nix configuration we can automatically\nprovision the necessary records for new services, as well as manage\nrecords for e.g. DKIM/DMARC/SPIF. It would be great if I could get a\nscore of 100% on <code>internet.nl</code> on an out-of-the box Eilean\ndeployment as this would simplify the experience of self-hosting these\nservices greatly.</span></p>\n<h3>Modern Email devroom</h3>\n<p><span>When the Email discussion\nstarted I sat next to a person who develops the <a href=\"https://github.com/emersion/go-imap\">Go IMAP</a> library used by\nmy mail client aerc. They also just so happen to be the lead maintainer\nof <a href=\"https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/\"><code>wlroots</code></a>,\na library which I was writing bindings to OCaml on the train over in\nhopes of writing a performant, functional, modern <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/oway\">display server</a>. I’ve since\nbeen added as a maintainer to the <a href=\"https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots-ocaml/pull/7\">dormant bindings\nlibrary</a>.</span></p>\n<p><span>I then joined he JMAP\ndiscussion section and got some insight to the chicken-and-egg problem\nof Internet protocol ossification in a discussion between Dovecot\ndevelopers and salespeople, and JMAP proponents. Talking to one such\nJMAP proponent developing a <a href=\"https://codeberg.org/iNPUTmice/lttrs-android\">JMAP client for\nAndroid</a> was very educational. It seems like JMAP is essentially an\nopen standard for implementing a lot of functionality that comes from\npropriety client/server solutions like Gmail. For example, it supports\nthe use of notification services of instead of polling (and not just\nmaintaining an open TCP connection). I’ve heard this can be an issue\nusing non-Google android distributions like <a href=\"https://grapheneos.org/\">GraphineOS</a>, but apparently there are\nnumerous alternatives such as <a href=\"https://microg.org/\">microG</a>.\nAnother example is that it supports search on server functionality\nwithout having to download emails. I like to keep all my mail locally on\nmy main machine, but the JMAP seems particularly well suited to mobile\ndevices where that is not the case.</span></p>\n<p><span>They also mentioned the <a href=\"https://stalw.art/\">Stallwart</a> JMAP-compatible mailserver. This\nwas mentioned by <a href=\"https://nlnet.nl/\">nlnet.nl</a> in the NixOS\ndevroom on Sunday as well. I might try deploying it for myself and\nintegrating it into Eilean.</span></p>\n<h3>OS Stands</h3>\n<p><span>After the Modern Email devroom I had a\nlook around the <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/\">stands</a> in\nthe AW building which were mainly OS related. A couple of really cool\nprojects were PostmarketOS and SailfishOS building Linux (not Android)\ndistributions for mobile devices, though apparently SailfishOS has some\nclosed-source components such as for Android emulation. It seems Gnome\nand KDE both have mobile display environments, and Phosh is the on\nPostmarketOS. <a href=\"https://sxmo.org/\">Sxmo</a> is cool project that\nencourages allows the use of e.g. sway. It also allows SSHing to your\nphone and sending SMS messages! I can’t figure out how to send texts\nfrom the command line with KDE, It also looks to be possible to deploy\n<a href=\"https://gitlab.com/beeper/android-sms/\">a</a> <a href=\"https://github.com/mautrix/gmessages\">number</a> <a href=\"https://github.com/benkuly/matrix-sms-bridge\">of</a> matrix\nbridges for this.</span></p>\n<h3>Firefox</h3>\n<p><span>My choice of browser was vindicated with a\nfree ‘cookie’ stand:</span></p>\n<p><img src=\"./images/fosdem-cookies.jpg\"></p>\n<h3>More talks</h3>\n<p><span>I attended a bunch more talks after\nlunch (but still far less than I wanted too):</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3163-copyleft-and-the-gpl-finding-the-path-forward-to-defend-our-software-right-to-repair/\">Copyleft\nand the GPL</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2213-brewing-free-beer-with-esphome-and-home-assistant/\">Brewing\nFree Beer with ESPHome and Home Assistant</a>. Being both a home-brewer\n(blog post incoming) and a Home Assistant user this was really cool! It\nmay be worth exploring something like this if I ever get really into\nfull-mash brewing.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2972-wayland-s-input-method-is-broken-and-it-s-my-fault/\">Wayland’s\ninput-method is broken and it’s my fault</a>. The speaker of this talk\nhad written the Wayland <a href=\"https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/master/unstable/text-input/text-input-unstable-v3.xml\">text-input-unstable-v3\nproposal</a> for the Phosh mobile UI, which is by their description\nhorribly broken. I was intrigued about this talk as I spent a while\nfiguring how to get Fcitx5 pop-up menus for international text input\nworking on Sway and ended up using a patch set from an <a href=\"https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7226\">open PR</a>.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3062-i-want-my-own-cellular-network-having-fun-with-lte-networks-and-open5gs-/\">I\nwant my own cellular network! Having fun with LTE networks and\nOpen5Gs</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2906-dnsconfd-system-integrated-dns-cache/\">dnsconfd:\nsystem integrated DNS cache</a></li>\n</ul>\n<h2>Tailscale Meetup</h2>\n<p><span>After the conference proper we\nwere in want of something to do so we went to a Tailscale meetup for\nfree drinks. To collect said drinks, one had to connect to a printer <a href=\"https://tailscale.com/blog/sharing-over-tailscale\">shared via\nTailscale</a>. Unfortunately as I’m using a self-hosted headscale\ncontrol server I wasn’t able to have this machine shared with me.\nThankfully my companions were more than happy to print a ticket on my\nbehalf. Though, this reminded that my idea of a ‘federated tailscale’\nwould be really cool. In the bar I met some lovely people and got some\npodcast recommendations (e.g. <a href=\"https://selfhosted.show/\">Self\nHosted</a>).</span></p>\n<h3>Sun</h3>\n<p><span>After another coffee breakfast, I headed to the\nULB for the final day of conferencing. I mainly camped out in two rooms\n– the Nix and NixOS devroom and the Matrix devroom.</span></p>\n<h3>Nix and NixOS</h3>\n<p><span>In this devroom I\nattended:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li>In <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2204-fortifying-the-foundations-elevating-security-in-nix-and-nixos/\">Fortifying\nthe Foundations: Elevating Security in Nix and NixOS</a> they mentioned\nthey got funding for this project from the <a href=\"https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/\">Sovereign Tech Fund</a>.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3058-nix-for-genetics-powering-a-bioinformatics-pipeline/\">Nix\nfor genetics : powering a bioinformatics pipeline</a> was a lightning\ntalk about using Nix to provide reproducible dependencies for their\npipelines. They don’t manage the mutable state like datasets with Nix,\nthough.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3045-automatic-boot-assessment-with-boot-counting/\">Automatic\nboot assessment with boot counting</a> described a mechanism for falling\nback to old NixOS generations in the case where a boot of a new\nconfiguration fails. I experienced the exact problem this solves with my\nnew NAS (blog post incoming) after creating a <code>fstab</code> entry\nfor an invalid ZFS pool, which required asking a family member to be my\nremote KVM to boot an old generation for me to fix the entry.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><span>During an intermission, I was hacking\non my VPS deploying DNSSEC with BIND9 for a free\n<code>internet.nl</code> T-Shirt when I started to experience some\nstrange network issues. All requests to <code>freumh.org</code> were\nbeing directed to\n<code>http://135.181.100.27:6080/php/urlblock.php?args=<hash>&url=http://135.181.100.27%2f</code>\non eduroam. I wasn’t able to connect to my site on the IPv6-only\n<code>fosdem</code> network either, despite it working the previous day.\nSwitching the dual-stack IPv4 compatible network seemed to alleviate the\nissues, but before I uncovered these underlying network issues this\nmanifested itself in my being unable to connect to my headscale\nTailscale control server, which I exclaimed to my friend next to me.\nThen the <a href=\"https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/goheadscale/\">lead\ndeveloper for headscale</a>, sitting <em>right</em> behind me, piped up\nand said something along the lines of “I know it’s rude to look at other\npeople’s screens but if headscale is causing you any issues I\napologise”.</span></p>\n<p><span>The talks continued with:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1692-running-nlnet-on-nixos/\">Running\nNLnet on NixOS</a> which was an unexpectedly interesting talk on <a href=\"https://nlnet.nl/\">NLnet</a>‘s experience using NixOS to run their\nsystems. They observed that once you realise everything in Nix is just a\nfunction, as suggested by the tag-line of a ’purely functional package\nmanager’, all becomes very conceptually simple. NLnet use borg for\nbackups and btrbk for snapshots, which might be worth looking into for\nEilean. They noted that Nix is great at handling the software setup, but\nthat it has no notion of the mutable runtime state like databases and\nsecrets. This is where I see a lot of people having issues with Nix,\ne.g. with database migrations. I think a ‘Nix for data’ story would be\nvery useful. Perhaps it could utilize some form of snapshots associated\nwith NixOS generations.</li>\n</ul>\n<h3>Matrix</h3>\n<p><span>Having self-hosted a Matrix homeserver for\n(<em>checks logs</em>) 2 years this February, I was keen to attend the\nMatrix devroom, where I learnt about:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3285-the-matrix-state-of-the-union\">The\nMatrix State of the Union</a> including a bit of the history of the\nproject, how <a href=\"https://thirdroom.io/\">Third Room</a> is\napparently dead due to lack of funding, PseudoIDs <a href=\"https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/4014\">MSC4014</a>\n& Crypto IDs <a href=\"https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/4080\">MSC4080</a>\nwhich should provide account portability (though I don’t completely\nunderstand how yet) and which are a pre-requisite for <a href=\"https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/\">P2P\nMatrix</a> which uses a very cool <a href=\"https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone\">overlay network</a> that\naims to provide end-to-end encrypted connectivity over any medium and\nproviding multi-hop peer-to-peer connectivity between devices in places\nwhere there is no Internet connectivity. Some of this talk reminded me\nof discussions I’ve had about using Matrix as a communication channel\nfor the Internet of Things.</li>\n<li>In <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3157-interoperability-matrix/\">Interoperability\n& Matrix</a> I learnt that the new EU Digital Markets Act (DMA)\nrequires an open standard for interoperable communications, how <a href=\"https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ralston-mimi-linearized-matrix-03\">Linearised\nMatrix</a> is one such proposal, and about the <a href=\"https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ralston-mimi-protocol-01\">MIMI</a>\nIETF working group.</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n<p><span>All in all, attending FOSDEM was a great\nexperience where I learnt a bunch about topics I’m passionate about and\nmet some really cool people.</span></p>",
8 "content": "<div>\n \n <span>Published 13 Feb 2024.</span>\n \n \n <span>Last update 13 Feb 2024.</span>\n \n </div>\n \n <div> Tags: <a href=\"/conferences.html\" title=\"All pages tagged 'conferences'.\">conferences</a>. </div>\n \n \n\n <p><span>I attended the Free and Open source Software\nDevelopers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium last weekend.\nThere are hundreds of hours of talks in 35 rooms over a period of two\ndays, and rooms are often full to capacity, so it’s impossible to see\neverything! Thankfully every room is live-streamed and recordings made\navailable after the fact, so you can catch up on anything you\nmiss.</span></p>\n<p><img src=\"./images/fosdem-schedule.png\"></p>\n<h2>Friday</h2>\n<p><span>On the Eurostar over my travelling companion\nand I were lamenting about the Nix DSL, and we heard a French accent\nfrom behind:</span></p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span>Ah, NixOS. See you at FOSDEM\nthen!</span></p>\n</blockquote>\n<h2>Saturday</h2>\n<p><span>The day started with a coffee and a banana\n(probably not substantial enough in hindsight), an absolutely packed\nnumber 71 bus to the ULB Solbosch Campus, and arriving in plenty of time\nto get a seat for the 09:30 CET opening ceremony. I kicked off the day\nby attending:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3242-screen-sharing-on-raspberry-pi-5-using-vnc-in-weston-and-wayland-with-the-yocto-project-and-openembedded/\">Screen\nSharing on Raspberry Pi 5 Using VNC in Weston and Wayland with the Yocto\nProject and OpenEmbedded</a></li>\n<li>and <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1798-improving-ipv6-only-experience-on-linux/\">Improving\nIPv6-only experience on Linux</a></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span>Having, during my January tradition, spent\nsome time revisiting my technical (in addition to non-technical) habits,\nafter getting sufficiently frustrated with thunderbird I’ve started\nusing the <a href=\"https://aerc-mail.org/\">aerc</a> mail client along\nwith <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/nixos/blob/3cd20b3b874b70b53cd894a533fe44b589f8eeea/modules/personal/home/mail/default.nix\">isync\n(mbsync)/goimapnotify/mu</a>. So naturally I then moseyed on over to the\nModern Email <a href=\"https://www.ietf.org/how/bofs/\">BoF</a>.</span></p>\n<p><span>I was a little early and caught the end of\nthe NGI Zero network meetup, and met someone who works for the Dutch\nStandardisation Forum on, amoung other things, a neat website and\nmailserver tester at <a href=\"https://internet.nl/\">internet.nl</a>. My\nwebsite and mailserver had a couple of flagged issues including a DMARC\npolicy of none (which should really quarantine or reject once it’s\nworking properly), and DNSSEC support due my nameserver <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/eon\">EON</a> not (<a href=\"https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-dns/issues/302\">yet</a>)\nsupporting DNSSEC. Switching to bind with a couple of configuration\nchanges got me scoring 100% on my apex <code>freumh.org</code>. The\n<code>www</code> subdomain was a CNAME to the apex, which meant it also\nserved an MX record. I don’t serve any significant website on my apex\ndomain, so I simply dropped the subdomain. Now I’m told a free\n<code>internet.nl</code> T-Shirt is on its way to my Cambridge\naddress!</span></p>\n<p><span>I’ve been working on a <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/eon/tree/a442c424ea06b2c819dd48c9e69838e09675b22b/bin/acme\">nameserver\nto provision TLS certificates</a> recently for inclusion into my\none-stop-shop self-hosting solution <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/eilean-nix\">Eilean</a>. By including\nthe DNS zonefile data in the Nix configuration we can automatically\nprovision the necessary records for new services, as well as manage\nrecords for e.g. DKIM/DMARC/SPIF. It would be great if I could get a\nscore of 100% on <code>internet.nl</code> on an out-of-the box Eilean\ndeployment as this would simplify the experience of self-hosting these\nservices greatly.</span></p>\n<h3>Modern Email devroom</h3>\n<p><span>When the Email discussion\nstarted I sat next to a person who develops the <a href=\"https://github.com/emersion/go-imap\">Go IMAP</a> library used by\nmy mail client aerc. They also just so happen to be the lead maintainer\nof <a href=\"https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/\"><code>wlroots</code></a>,\na library which I was writing bindings to OCaml on the train over in\nhopes of writing a performant, functional, modern <a href=\"https://github.com/RyanGibb/oway\">display server</a>. I’ve since\nbeen added as a maintainer to the <a href=\"https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots-ocaml/pull/7\">dormant bindings\nlibrary</a>.</span></p>\n<p><span>I then joined he JMAP\ndiscussion section and got some insight to the chicken-and-egg problem\nof Internet protocol ossification in a discussion between Dovecot\ndevelopers and salespeople, and JMAP proponents. Talking to one such\nJMAP proponent developing a <a href=\"https://codeberg.org/iNPUTmice/lttrs-android\">JMAP client for\nAndroid</a> was very educational. It seems like JMAP is essentially an\nopen standard for implementing a lot of functionality that comes from\npropriety client/server solutions like Gmail. For example, it supports\nthe use of notification services of instead of polling (and not just\nmaintaining an open TCP connection). I’ve heard this can be an issue\nusing non-Google android distributions like <a href=\"https://grapheneos.org/\">GraphineOS</a>, but apparently there are\nnumerous alternatives such as <a href=\"https://microg.org/\">microG</a>.\nAnother example is that it supports search on server functionality\nwithout having to download emails. I like to keep all my mail locally on\nmy main machine, but the JMAP seems particularly well suited to mobile\ndevices where that is not the case.</span></p>\n<p><span>They also mentioned the <a href=\"https://stalw.art/\">Stallwart</a> JMAP-compatible mailserver. This\nwas mentioned by <a href=\"https://nlnet.nl/\">nlnet.nl</a> in the NixOS\ndevroom on Sunday as well. I might try deploying it for myself and\nintegrating it into Eilean.</span></p>\n<h3>OS Stands</h3>\n<p><span>After the Modern Email devroom I had a\nlook around the <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/\">stands</a> in\nthe AW building which were mainly OS related. A couple of really cool\nprojects were PostmarketOS and SailfishOS building Linux (not Android)\ndistributions for mobile devices, though apparently SailfishOS has some\nclosed-source components such as for Android emulation. It seems Gnome\nand KDE both have mobile display environments, and Phosh is the on\nPostmarketOS. <a href=\"https://sxmo.org/\">Sxmo</a> is cool project that\nencourages allows the use of e.g. sway. It also allows SSHing to your\nphone and sending SMS messages! I can’t figure out how to send texts\nfrom the command line with KDE, It also looks to be possible to deploy\n<a href=\"https://gitlab.com/beeper/android-sms/\">a</a> <a href=\"https://github.com/mautrix/gmessages\">number</a> <a href=\"https://github.com/benkuly/matrix-sms-bridge\">of</a> matrix\nbridges for this.</span></p>\n<h3>Firefox</h3>\n<p><span>My choice of browser was vindicated with a\nfree ‘cookie’ stand:</span></p>\n<p><img src=\"./images/fosdem-cookies.jpg\"></p>\n<h3>More talks</h3>\n<p><span>I attended a bunch more talks after\nlunch (but still far less than I wanted too):</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3163-copyleft-and-the-gpl-finding-the-path-forward-to-defend-our-software-right-to-repair/\">Copyleft\nand the GPL</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2213-brewing-free-beer-with-esphome-and-home-assistant/\">Brewing\nFree Beer with ESPHome and Home Assistant</a>. Being both a home-brewer\n(blog post incoming) and a Home Assistant user this was really cool! It\nmay be worth exploring something like this if I ever get really into\nfull-mash brewing.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2972-wayland-s-input-method-is-broken-and-it-s-my-fault/\">Wayland’s\ninput-method is broken and it’s my fault</a>. The speaker of this talk\nhad written the Wayland <a href=\"https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/master/unstable/text-input/text-input-unstable-v3.xml\">text-input-unstable-v3\nproposal</a> for the Phosh mobile UI, which is by their description\nhorribly broken. I was intrigued about this talk as I spent a while\nfiguring how to get Fcitx5 pop-up menus for international text input\nworking on Sway and ended up using a patch set from an <a href=\"https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7226\">open PR</a>.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3062-i-want-my-own-cellular-network-having-fun-with-lte-networks-and-open5gs-/\">I\nwant my own cellular network! Having fun with LTE networks and\nOpen5Gs</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2906-dnsconfd-system-integrated-dns-cache/\">dnsconfd:\nsystem integrated DNS cache</a></li>\n</ul>\n<h2>Tailscale Meetup</h2>\n<p><span>After the conference proper we\nwere in want of something to do so we went to a Tailscale meetup for\nfree drinks. To collect said drinks, one had to connect to a printer <a href=\"https://tailscale.com/blog/sharing-over-tailscale\">shared via\nTailscale</a>. Unfortunately as I’m using a self-hosted headscale\ncontrol server I wasn’t able to have this machine shared with me.\nThankfully my companions were more than happy to print a ticket on my\nbehalf. Though, this reminded that my idea of a ‘federated tailscale’\nwould be really cool. In the bar I met some lovely people and got some\npodcast recommendations (e.g. <a href=\"https://selfhosted.show/\">Self\nHosted</a>).</span></p>\n<h3>Sun</h3>\n<p><span>After another coffee breakfast, I headed to the\nULB for the final day of conferencing. I mainly camped out in two rooms\n– the Nix and NixOS devroom and the Matrix devroom.</span></p>\n<h3>Nix and NixOS</h3>\n<p><span>In this devroom I\nattended:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li>In <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2204-fortifying-the-foundations-elevating-security-in-nix-and-nixos/\">Fortifying\nthe Foundations: Elevating Security in Nix and NixOS</a> they mentioned\nthey got funding for this project from the <a href=\"https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/\">Sovereign Tech Fund</a>.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3058-nix-for-genetics-powering-a-bioinformatics-pipeline/\">Nix\nfor genetics : powering a bioinformatics pipeline</a> was a lightning\ntalk about using Nix to provide reproducible dependencies for their\npipelines. They don’t manage the mutable state like datasets with Nix,\nthough.</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3045-automatic-boot-assessment-with-boot-counting/\">Automatic\nboot assessment with boot counting</a> described a mechanism for falling\nback to old NixOS generations in the case where a boot of a new\nconfiguration fails. I experienced the exact problem this solves with my\nnew NAS (blog post incoming) after creating a <code>fstab</code> entry\nfor an invalid ZFS pool, which required asking a family member to be my\nremote KVM to boot an old generation for me to fix the entry.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><span>During an intermission, I was hacking\non my VPS deploying DNSSEC with BIND9 for a free\n<code>internet.nl</code> T-Shirt when I started to experience some\nstrange network issues. All requests to <code>freumh.org</code> were\nbeing directed to\n<code>http://135.181.100.27:6080/php/urlblock.php?args=<hash>&url=http://135.181.100.27%2f</code>\non eduroam. I wasn’t able to connect to my site on the IPv6-only\n<code>fosdem</code> network either, despite it working the previous day.\nSwitching the dual-stack IPv4 compatible network seemed to alleviate the\nissues, but before I uncovered these underlying network issues this\nmanifested itself in my being unable to connect to my headscale\nTailscale control server, which I exclaimed to my friend next to me.\nThen the <a href=\"https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/goheadscale/\">lead\ndeveloper for headscale</a>, sitting <em>right</em> behind me, piped up\nand said something along the lines of “I know it’s rude to look at other\npeople’s screens but if headscale is causing you any issues I\napologise”.</span></p>\n<p><span>The talks continued with:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1692-running-nlnet-on-nixos/\">Running\nNLnet on NixOS</a> which was an unexpectedly interesting talk on <a href=\"https://nlnet.nl/\">NLnet</a>‘s experience using NixOS to run their\nsystems. They observed that once you realise everything in Nix is just a\nfunction, as suggested by the tag-line of a ’purely functional package\nmanager’, all becomes very conceptually simple. NLnet use borg for\nbackups and btrbk for snapshots, which might be worth looking into for\nEilean. They noted that Nix is great at handling the software setup, but\nthat it has no notion of the mutable runtime state like databases and\nsecrets. This is where I see a lot of people having issues with Nix,\ne.g. with database migrations. I think a ‘Nix for data’ story would be\nvery useful. Perhaps it could utilize some form of snapshots associated\nwith NixOS generations.</li>\n</ul>\n<h3>Matrix</h3>\n<p><span>Having self-hosted a Matrix homeserver for\n(<em>checks logs</em>) 2 years this February, I was keen to attend the\nMatrix devroom, where I learnt about:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3285-the-matrix-state-of-the-union\">The\nMatrix State of the Union</a> including a bit of the history of the\nproject, how <a href=\"https://thirdroom.io/\">Third Room</a> is\napparently dead due to lack of funding, PseudoIDs <a href=\"https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/4014\">MSC4014</a>\n& Crypto IDs <a href=\"https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/4080\">MSC4080</a>\nwhich should provide account portability (though I don’t completely\nunderstand how yet) and which are a pre-requisite for <a href=\"https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/\">P2P\nMatrix</a> which uses a very cool <a href=\"https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone\">overlay network</a> that\naims to provide end-to-end encrypted connectivity over any medium and\nproviding multi-hop peer-to-peer connectivity between devices in places\nwhere there is no Internet connectivity. Some of this talk reminded me\nof discussions I’ve had about using Matrix as a communication channel\nfor the Internet of Things.</li>\n<li>In <a href=\"https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3157-interoperability-matrix/\">Interoperability\n& Matrix</a> I learnt that the new EU Digital Markets Act (DMA)\nrequires an open standard for interoperable communications, how <a href=\"https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ralston-mimi-linearized-matrix-03\">Linearised\nMatrix</a> is one such proposal, and about the <a href=\"https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ralston-mimi-protocol-01\">MIMI</a>\nIETF working group.</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n<p><span>All in all, attending FOSDEM was a great\nexperience where I learnt a bunch about topics I’m passionate about and\nmet some really cool people.</span></p>",
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