October 2021 Status update

Today I seek to answer the looming question: “What have you been up to, Zach?” Lounging on the couch with my PinePhone in hand, the question may ought be framed “Have you really just been sitting on your phone for the last month?” Umm, well maybe, but trust me, it's exciting!

PinePhone developments

I've been a happy owner of a Linux-phone since May, and this month I enjoyed using my Pinephone more than in other months. That's because I switched to a new "desktop environment".

SWMO: Wayland for Simple X Mobile

This post is not meant to be a review of SWMO (I pronounce it 'Sway-mo', or 'swimmo', not that anyone asked). Battery life is fantastic; I'm thinking about putting my SIM card in here again. It's alpha quality software composed of many shell scripts, so hacking is easy and there's much to be fixed; I've already gotten my first patch applied. But my main area of focus has been on text input.

After I switched to phosh, I really got into using micro (the text editor) on kgx (the terminal emulator). I was disappointed that foot (default terminal emulator in swmo) didn't support touch-based mouse emulation, so I looked into using kgx. SXMO requires a parameter to set the title in the terminal emulator for the app menu to work. kgx on master has this, but hasn't had a new release tagged. I looked for other terminal projects, and actually discovered the upstream project vte has a really nice sample application, already installed on my system (as vte-2.91)... long story short, some day in the future, swmo might support a vte-based terminal for the app menu due to my interest in this support.

Keyboards

I worked on three different emoji-input sxmo_dmenu.sh implementations. None are very good, and that's mostly do to with delays to stop the menu from sucking up input. With the fastest one, I can type 20 emojis/second. If I have the time, maybe by next update it'll all be in one script, ready for consumption. 🐝

The real big thing I worked on (which may be of interest to others) is swipe-typing with wvkbd.

My dream is for 'suckless' word-completion with contextual awareness. So far, we're missing the contextual part. Idea is to change a symlink to your word list (or word list directory), and so completion would work from a different list. Completing from a small list is reasonable, larger lists are a bit slower, might need some more improvement there.

Check out the repo to learn more.

It would be nice to integrate some word-frequency sorting into the list for better accuracy in large wordlists. Please reach out if you're interested in making this better and/or might want some pointers.

It's already a better experience for me than squeekboard. I can imagine in the future this being used on many other ui's than just SWMO.

App Store?

I've been spending a little bit of time putting together a menu for installing apps. Still in progress (maybe if I didn't spend so much time writing this up, it'd be done 😬)

Servers

I migrated and upgraded my main VPS (which hosts songs.zachdecook.com, zachdecook.com (https only), and my personal nextcloud server) from Ubuntu on DigitalOcean to Alpine on Linode. That went pretty well. Linode's pricing is pretty much the same, though I am paying more for automatic backups here than I was before.

I also switched from MariaDB to Postgres, which has come with its share of learning opportunities 😅.

The certificates used on my gemini sites are due to expire starting next month. This is due to using an early gmnisrv version which only created 1-year-long certificates (which I guess means a soon happy birthday to this capsule 🥳). If your client implements TOFU, it should have a setting to forget the old cert and trust the new one when that happens. I'm not sure if I'll have to manually create a new cert, but I usually notice if my site is broken, then fix it.

Closing remarks

You may have noticed this is my first status update of this sort. This is also the most time-off I've had from working since I was a teenager 😔. I would appreciate prayers for what's next. As long as I'm spending more time on public FOSS projects than any other job, I'll keep up with these updates.

Send me an email with any tips, encouragement, or feedback.