Hey Gemi-friends, minor life update for y'all:

I moved!

Actually, I moved twice since my last update, but this should be a more permanent location, I'm now a mortgage-haver.

Often errantly referred to as "homeowner", I've signed the next 15 years of my life away, so I think I'm a lot less likely to have another 10-month vacation to work fulltime on open source.

I also got engaged and married to the beautiful woman who has been so encouraging over the last two years. (We met shortly after I started this capsule, so if you've also started writing in Gemini-space, maybe there are nuptials in your future?)

Updates on the last update

HexBoard button station

My brother's new MIDI controller is shaping up (pun intended). It had a major upgrade to the RP2040 microcontroller, and he's just now gotten the v2 board design.

V2 is about bringing assembly costs down (so he might have a margin and incentive to work on these things more).

If you're interested in buying one of these (assembled or as a kit), sign up on his website.

(We're going to release the firmware as open source).

JMP.chat review

I mentioned switching to JMP.chat. It's once-again nice to have a texting and calling service which I can use from multiple devices. It's even better that it uses open protocols (XMPP), and supports open source development.

The one downside is that group messages are nerfed: You can't *send* messages to groups which have more than 10 participants, which limits my potential reach by quite a bit.

Ideally, I'd get more "IRL"-friends onto my XMPP server, so I wouldn't need to use JMP as much, but my current (often iOS) users have enough troubles receiving notifications that it's hard to make the case for more people to "download a special app to chat with me [encrypted] on my server".

Future topics

I was thinking about writing about my newest daily-driver Linux Phone, the OnePlus 6, but Purism has just sent me my "Librem 5 Evergreen shipping" email, so I might wait to make a comparison post on the three phones.

Since I started daily-driving a Linux Phone, I've carried around a second (wifi-only) android phone for certain use-cases. That is still the case to this day, but I think that will not be the case by the end of this year.

That wraps this post up, as I have new things to care for.

On to crimping some ethernet cords!

-Zach