benzblog

At FrOSCon 2026, I gave a talk titled Jiu Jitsu mit dem Quellcode I presented the jj version control system and also tried to make a connection to the ongoing maintenance crisis in open source.

Dieser Vortrag hat zwei Teile: Eine Einführung in jj, die Versionsverwaltung, und einen etwas philosophischen Teil. 1 Es gibt eine schleichende Krise in Open Source Maintenance.

It has been a bit over a year since I wrote Some nuanced thoughts on AI.

A while ago, I made an off-hand remark that got some followup questions.

I recently spent a week in London, as one does.

My email inbox is like the pile of documents on my desk.

Last week, I visited the Bay Area for a business trip.

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 with NetBSD 10, running CI jobs.

I have stuggled with writing this for a while.

I stopped developing pkgsrc with CVS.

My current work project started last summer, as a bit of experimentation.

This is part 3 of my blog post series about emulating BSD operating systems for 32-bit ARM with QEMU.

In Part 1 of this blog post series, I explained how I recently spent some time getting various BSD OSes to run on QEMU, for 32-bit ARM (ARMv7).

In my copious spare time, I maintain the Go CI system for certain platforms.

In my job, I read a lot of code.

A while ago, I installed Fedora Asahi Remix on my M2 MacBook Air, and I was very positive about it.

Over the Easter weekend 2024, there was a big kerfuffle around a compression tool named xz.

I have been following Asahi Linux for a while.

In 2023, the NetBSD project celebrated 30 years since its first release, 0.8.

I installed Fedora 39 the other day.

When I used OpenBSD, I was a big fan of bsd.rd: a kernel that includes a root file system with an installer and a few tools.

Whenever I send around a Call for Papers for an open source conference, some people reply something like Unfortunately, I don’t have anything to present right now.

1.

I have lived outside the country I was born in for more than 17 years now.

All of the dominant commercial operating systems in desktop and mobile computing — macOS, iOS, Windows, Android, Chrome OS — are made in the US, on the West Coast.

I recently made two LinkedIn posts about meetings.

Last weekend, at FOSDEM 2023, I watched a Lightning Talk by Frank Vanbever titled “Lua for the Lazy C developer”.

I have been a pkgsrc developer for several years.

It took me quite a while to realize that I have been here before.

I have used a Mi Band as a smartwatch / fitness tracking device for the last couple years.

Recently, I was thinking about one of my previous software development teams at work.

I have been running the BulkTracker web app for keeping track of pkgsrc bulk package build results since about 2015.

The BSD build system in general, and pkgsrc in particular, have a large number of Makefiles ending in .mk.

This weekend, I made a series of somewhat unusual changes to pkgsrc.

My new NAS at home is running TrueNAS Core.

Back when I was in Engineering school, my first-year internship happened in a refinery.

My desktop PC has two NVMe drives, one for Windows and one for NetBSD.

I never spent much time toiling in the “sysadmin job” mines, though my first job was user support and admin.

Somehow, my contributions to NetBSD and pkgsrc have become monotonous.

Like many ARM CPUs, the one in the Pinebook Pro has a “big.LITTLE” architecture, where some cores are more powerful than others: [ 1.000000] cpu0 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A53 r0p4 (v8-A), id 0x0 [ 1.000000] cpu1 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A53 r0p4 (v8-A), id

If you buy a Pinebook Pro now, it comes with Manjaro Linux on the internal eMMC storage.

Note: This post was written on the Pinebook Pro :) After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use.

I am part of the pkgsrc releng (release engineering) team.

This is a transcript of the talk I gave at pkgsrcCon 2019 in Cambridge, UK.

In a few weeks, on the weekend of July 13 and 14, the annual pkgsrc conference, pkgsrcCon 2019, will take place in Cambridge, UK.

This announcement dropped today: The #golang Module Mirror (~caching proxy), Index, and Checksum DB have launched:https://t.co/IrUZXimjCkhttps://t.co/sO1wvgsKxxhttps://t.co/8XrlUF3cX5 Announcement:https://t.co/kjWK58OKsb Props to team.

After talking to Sijmen Mulder on IRC (thanks, TGV Wi-Fi!)

Go 1.11 introduced a new way of building Go code that no longer needs a GOPATH at all.