Hi! My name is Michał Góral, I am software developer (currently at Nokia) and
this is my personal website. You can read more about me on a separate
page if you’re curious.
You can contact me by e-mail: dev@goral.net.pl. My PGP key
fingerprint is: 0423 DE59 98D1 2C33 E599 CDCF E3DD DA4D C45F 58CB.
I bought an album: 2 by Jucho.(sidenote: Justyna Chowaniak)
Spoiled by near-instant deliveries
of internet marketplaces, I had nervously waited for 2 weeks until it arrived.
The wait was worth it. The music is great, lyrics are incredible, and release
quality is superb. My whole family loves both Jucho and her previous project,
Domowe Melodie.
But the best part is QR code attached to the album which allows download of
MP3s. It’s… just a link. No password, no personalised download, no session, no
tracking. Ordinary a link. Oh, but it includes a “secret” phrase! I love it!
little things like this makes me feel more like a human being. I feel that
there’s a person on the other end of the cable who trusts me to not share the
link with whole internet. In return this person respects me and doesn’t make my
life miserable with DRM or some other bullshit. No EULAs or privacy policies. I
don’t have to accept anything or sell my kidney. This small link feels like the
original spirit of Free Software translated to the world of music.
Not everything went well after upgrade to Debian Trixy on the server.
Apparently, Trixy is missing OVH DNS plugin for certbot and I learned about it a
month after the upgrade, when my Let’s Encrypt certificates expired.(sidenote: Resolution: install certbot and the plugin from PyPI.)
I didn’t notice it when inspecting removed packages. Good that I have some
experience how communication with server which doesn’t serve valid certificates
looks like from the client side, so I could debug it quickly. God forbid if I
tried to get anything from the bot spam in nginx logs.
I tried niri, which is a “scrollable-tiling”
Wayland compositor. It’s inspired by PaperWM, which lays windows in an infinite,
horizontally-scrolled workspace. The idea sounds neat and I must admit, 10
minutes of my test were rather pleasant and I think it could improve my
workflow…
…Ultimately. Because I guess I’m too old to tinker with new software and some
things required tinkering. For example, gammastep, a blue light filter, didn’t
start when spawned by niri, but it worked from the child terminal. I don’t have
time to hunt environment variables which probably caused the error. On top of
that, I’d have to rewrite all my keybindings and window rules. There’s no added
value in this, so I’ll stick with my trusty sway.
Maybe I’ll try scroll. Apparently it
implements the same “scrollable-tiling” paradigm as niri, but it’s a fork of
Sway and promises that most of existing configurations should just work. It’s
also written in C (contrary to niri being written in Rust), which should also
make it easier to create a proper Debian package for myself.
With direction Android is heading, I see more and more software developers
considering buying two phones. They’re going to keep one in Faraday’s cage and
use it infrequently for banking or age verification,(sidenote: In
European Union)
while the other one will be the actual personal
computing device — a “Linux phone”. This is cool idea and I hate it, because it
throws away needs of everyone else. “I’ll get my privacy no matter what and
fuck everyone else, especially the poor, kids, elders and non tech-savvy, so
circa 95% of smartphone users”. It also doubles the environmental cost of
producing 2 phones instead of one.
We mustn’t agree to limit rights of people to develop and install software on
the phones which they rightfully own. We mustn’t agree to lock down apps only
because we installed OS not affiliated with Google and its partners. It’s
developers’ duty to protect the rights of users, as they are inherently less
privileged ones, even without taking their social standing into account.
Strength before weakness.
It’s a shame that during technical interviews we spend exactly no time
discussing ethics of software development.
Formatting is one of these parts of TWC which I disliked the most. This has
finally changed with release of TWC 0.9 and complete rewrite of formatting
strings syntax.
With markorapp, a script which I wrote, it's easy to create "singletons" in i3. Singletons are applications which should have only one instance, like a particular terminal.
Xsession is a default way of starting X sessions in Debian, but for some
reason it remains a mystery for many people. Here I try to shed some light on
it.
Structured Bindings is a new way to decompose values returned from functions. It's similar to some other programming languages and greatly simplifies the code.
