mort’s mythopœia

And so, time passes and all things come to an end.

This is one of those bookmarks for future me, from https://infosec.exchange/@hal_pomeranz/115220370083388046, wherein it is stated that the following incantation against the /proc filesystem will trigger a hard reboot: echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq echo…

Another one of those weeks that did not feel productive but actually several things did get done and I shouldn’t ignore them.

I am still generally enjoying using Wayland with the sway window manager on NixOS.

Although it now generally seems to work, audio on Linux seems to have been a consistent mess for decades.

OK, so even for me that was a long break from this.

Well.

A quiet couple of weeks, as I more or less anticipated.

I recently decided to make a push on trying out jujutsu as an alternative to git.

Some progress this week, as I enter the last third of the sabbatical so the end is really starting to feel imminent.

Quieter week with a flurry at the end.

Quite a travelling week in the end.

Another delayed one—must try harder… :/ Spent some time doing more paper reviewing: EdgeSys’26 and ICDCS’26 this time, plus a couple of UKRI research funding proposals (none for 10 years then two turn up at once…).

Wednesday’s hump day, Hump day’s Wednesday, Over the hump, The week’s half done – J.J.

OK, this one was mildly irritating but happily the solution is dead easy.

…and with that, the end of the second term1 of my sabbatical leave.

A few weeks ago I published some remarks I’d given on the risks of lawful access.

Slightly belatedly,1 a more normal week.

UIS recently rolled over the certificate for the University’s VPN service, and the same update was applied to the Computer Lab’s service at the same time.

Well, it was less runny.

So.

More personal and suchlike stuff going on the last two weeks, hence the week’s gap.

Last summer I was invited to participate in an informal meeting of the EU Standing Committee on Operational Cooperation on Internal Security (COSI).

I run, at least for the time being, NixOS, generally from the main / unstable branch rather than a stable release.

That feels like it was a relatively productive week :) I interviewed a couple of Ph.D. candidates—good luck!

Over a number of years—in fact, my word, decades—recorded my GPS tracks and taken photos when I go walking.1 Over the years I’ve used a range of apps with associated cloud services to capture and render this data, predominantly EveryTrail and (until recen…

I run NixOS for the time being, usually tracking unstable.

The calendar year started with some sysadmin work.

The University recently rolled its public certificate for eduroam and the old one was dropped a couple of days ago.

Nothing of note done, work-wise, for the last week or so.

Another two weeks gone, and suddenly we’re at the end of the Calendar Year.1 Not an idle two weeks but not the most productive either.

Having gone home to visit my parents for Christmas, I am pleasantly surprised to find that their village has finally acquired fibre broadband.

An odd week that.

1At the start of the month, I was away at the final EU EDGELESS project plenary meeting.

Hmm.

Another week gone, a little more done.

This is another one of those that’s largely documenting something for myself, but I’m sharing it in case others find it useful.

Well, that was a slightly slower week: it was school half-term so I had the children for three days.

Following on from an earlier post about Tree-sitter, Eglot is the Emacs Language Server Protocol (LSP) client.

Not much to say this week – largely more of the same.

First, some background that it took me longer than I would’ve hoped to piece together.

As predicted, this week was some Emacs configuration polishing interspersed with some writing using typst.

Well, the sabbatical began.

New (academic) year, new responsibilities.

Ok, so this is one of those that comes about because I found myself saying the same thing to different people a couple of times within a week or so.

This is a bit of a niche one but – here in Cambridge we have a number of quaint / historic / weird / cool (take your pick) traditions.

I recently decided that I had over-egged the pudding and allocated too much space to my swap partition (mounted as /tmp) under NixOS.

As all right-minded people must, I remap the historic, redundant, absurd CAPSLOCK key1 to be a more conveniently accessible current, useful, sleek CTRL (control) key on any given keyboard.

I am hardly the first person to comment1 on this – I am given to understand AI has been a topic of some interest to many for a few years now.

Our inestimable and most excellent Chaplain, Revd Dr Helen Orchard, likes to have a theme for the Sunday evensong services for the term.