Kevin Boone's website

There was a time when we didn't hate printers.

As the Microsoft Windows user experience continues to worsen, what should Linux advocates do?

There was a time when merely being a Linux user set you apart from the common herd.

Wayland isn't new, but many of us have been able to avoid it until recently.

I don't want to post yet another anti-systemd rant, but I think the ubiquity of systemd could eventually create real problems for embedded Linux.

Java decompilers usually make a good job of recovering program structure and the names of classes and methods; why do they make such a bad job of recovering variable names?

What can the software industry learn from the Log4J security debacle?

It isn't easy to run Linux well on ten-year-old laptops -- Linux distribution maintainers no longer see this as a worthwhile endeavour.

Lineage OS is based on the Android Open-Source Project, whose primary maintainer is Google.

Can you fit an NVMe solid-state drive into a computer that was made long before NVMe was invented?

This article is about how programming for CP/M, usng a 40-year-old C compiler, differs from modern C development, even for console applications.

For a Linux user in particular, which of these popular services is the most effective?

What's the real reason that cellphone manufacturers stopped fitting this simple, robust connector?

Although Lineage OS installation is pretty well-documented, there are a few things that might benefit from some more detailed explanation.

The Vim text editor is almost ubiquitous on Linux systems, and for good reasons.

The elegant simplicity and serviceability of this compact power ampliifer has given it an enthusiastic following for nearly forty years.

The REX was the world's first, and last, credit-card-sized personal computing device.

Will my Gentoo journey be coming to an end after the first month?

Not everybody likes Pulse audio or PipeWire.

Regardless of the subjective merits of 'bit-perfect' audio, is it technically possible on Linux?

It's not that difficult, but there's no built-in support.

Even seasoned Linux developers speak of Gentoo in hushed tones.

'Separation of variables' is one of the first methods usually taught to math and engineering students for solving differential equations, and yet the method as taught is mathematically very sloppy.

Is it safe to sell a used hard drive without securely erasing all the data?

How Java's "container awareness" feature works with simple (Docker/Podman) containers, and OpenShift pods.

This article provides a very simple example of setting up the Apache Artemis message broker to authenticate against a Keycloak server.

What happens when we have to make real-world construction match unrealistic mathematical models, that we happen to know how to simulate?

The Vectrex used an entirely novel display technology that was superior to the TV-based displays of the time.

Camel's IRC support makes it relatively easy to implement an IRC conversation agent, that can process IRC messages and produce responses.

Artix is a low-resource Linux that can be configured to run well on old, low-powered computer hardware.

There are relatively few good reasons for writing C code without using a standard C library.

Many of the standard Java APIs make extensive use of anonymous inner classes, to provide features that in other language would be provided using lambda functions or closures.

Using Linux date calculations to displaying a running countdown time in the terminal.

Encryption of home directories is out of favour in modern Linux distributions, but it offers some compelling advantages over the alternatives, if used with care.

The first part in a series on concurrency management in multi-threaded Java programs.

Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you'd think they had no earthly reason to.

Modern portable media players are generally smartphones without an antenna.

Using a Raspberry Pi as a media player is by no means a new idea.

Some thoughts on my first experiments with the design of electronics enclosures for laser cutting.

Following on from my article on the rudiments of the Kafka Streams API, this one introduces stateful operations like counting and aggregation.

Kafka Streams is a Java library and framework for creating applications that consume, process, and return Apache Kafka messages.

One of the earliest mass-market car satnav units, the Garmin Nuvi 300 still has features that modern devices lack.

About RSS support on this website

How to use Bash shell arithmetic, along with the 'date' utilty, to calculate the phase of the Moon on a particlar day.

The Bold 9700 was a premium cellphone from a company at the top of its game.

This article describes what I think is the simplest possible Kafka Connect on Strimzi -- the Kubernetes implementation of Kafka.

This article describes what I think is the simplest possible Kafka Connect set-up, using a single-node Kafka installation.

Attaching high-capacity hard disks has always been a bit of a problem for the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi has a bunch of GPIO pins we can use to connect push-buttons.

This article is part of a series on building a custom Linux installation for a Raspberry Pi-based appliance.