I’ve changed my alias again from ’eonn’ to ‘shmage’ (cool hacker name), in an effort to have a name that’s a little more easier to say or spell phonetically. Redirects from eonn.xyz to shmage.xyz will work for the next year or so. If you cloned any of my repos on my git server, make sure the url and repo name is correct. Some of my accounts that were called eonn will be changed to shmage over the next few weeks as well. Read more...

The following is a mirror of a post I wrote for my university’s Linux Club, here. What does ‘Free Software’ mean? I aim to be a campus advocate for Free Software, especially in the context of education. Free Software, in short, is software that is licensed to you with the freedom to Use the program for any purpose, Study the program (including viewing the ‘source code’ of the program, or a human-readable copy), Redistribute copies of the program, and Distribute modified copies of the program to benefit others. Read more...

I’m currently writing this as I’m downloading all of my music from Bandcamp in FLAC format after seeing their recent acquisition by Epic Games, of all things. I loved Bandcamp as an independent provider of DRM-free music. I also would have never thought they would sell-out to a tech behemoth because of their identity as a safe service for musicians to share and sell their work. In their acquisition letter, Ethan Diamond calls Epic Games “champions for a fair and open Internet,” and this is all I need to see to know this is another humdrum case of an independent project throwing themselves at gobs of cash for maximum upward velocity. Read more...

Last December, I volunteered to help run the Free Software Foundation’s table at Ohio LinuxFest, and it was a great experience. I met a lot of professionals and excellent people who shared some of my passions. One thing I needed to do to be able to represent the FSF was to make sure any computer I was taking to the event was for the most part running Free Software- that is, that the laptop I brought with me was running a Free operating system. Read more...

You might have noticed already that I’ve changed the domain of the website (and links in pages) to https://eonn.xyz some time ago. For the time being https://eonndev.com will redirect to https://eonn.xyz, maybe the next year or so, but from now on I will use eonn.xyz as my domain for mail and my website. I’ve also redone the git server from scratch (I will post about it soon) since I haven’t touched it in a long time. Read more...

The reason that “The Year of The ‘Linux Desktop’” is mostly a meme and thrown around as a buzzword in blogs is because we fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of the phrase ‘Linux Desktop’. The ‘Linux Desktop’ as most people think of it is a myth and something that will never happen, not because the open model of the Free Software desktop isn’t viable, but rather because most have the wrong idea of how a desktop that affords you freedom should be. Read more...

The situation I was in had me dealing with a set of about 550k png images in a single directory extracted from a recovery image. The images were extracted by Foremost on a partition that used to contain a root filesystem. Since filenames weren’t preserved, they weren’t named in any way I could pick out the ones I wanted, and I could only go off of image metadata. There was only a small portion of this massive library of images I needed to recover, and there was no way I could browse that many pictures to pick what I wanted. Read more...

One of the aspects of computing that I lament most is the current state of the mobile smart phone market. Nearly all cell phones are made to limit the user’s capabilities and freedoms. Most phones are designed to be replaced later, and restrict the user with an operating system that limits what the user can do with the computer they’ve just bought. Pine64’s Pinephone and Purism’s Librem 5 are examples of some products that are designed with extensibility or freedom in mind. Read more...

I was finally ready to make my first pull request. After double checking, and checking again, I knew my changes were ready to merge. I typed up a short summary of what I did, and how it was implemented. I refreshed the pull request page on Github every ten minutes for a few hours until I finally got the response I was waiting for: “Please fix the indentation problems. Github diff page should show you. Read more...

I was frustrated with my update flow. For all my computers, I would essentially be installing the same things on different systems manually with different package managers. I use Gentoo and Portage on my “faster” machines, but usually leave less powerful computers on systems that rely on binary package providers. Loving the Portage philosophy and hating redundancy, I wanted to reduce the number of different tools I was using to keep all of my systems up-to-date. Read more...