GitPius

A Catholic nerd’s thoughts on technology

An Update on the HyperbolaBSD Project

Back in 2019, the dev team behind the Hyperbola GNU/Linux announced that they would be moving away from the Linux kernel. They decided to fork the OpenBSD kernel. Not only that, they planned to rewrite and replace all code that is not GPL v3 compliant. Back in January of 2020, I interviewed the HyperbolaBSD team for ItsFoss.com. I decided to reach out to them again to see how the project has progressed. I also included some questions from fellow nerds. Enjoy the interview.

Writing Apps for helloSystem

I’ve been wanting to learn how to program for a while. In the past couple of years, I tried many times. Different languages and different tutorials. But I always got distracted, either by another project or another language. I think one of the reasons I didn’t have much luck was that I really didn’t have an end goal, something to work towards. Now, I do.

An Interview with Drew DeVault

Drew DeVault is not your usual software developer. He has a wide range of projects under his belt, including a groundbreaking git hosting service, an operating system for calculators, a tiling window manager, and more. He was nice enough to agree to an interview. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Enjoy!

(Drew originally answered these question back in April, but I wanted to finish rebooting the site before I posted it.)

Website Reboot

First, I’d like to welcome you all to the relaunch of my tech blog. This site was created in July 2016 under the name St. Isidore’s Keyboard. (In case you’re wondering, St. Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of computers, computer users, computer programmers, and the Internet.) The site was built with Hugo and hosted on GitLab. I had big plans for it but got very busy and was not able to act on those plans.

Apple Plans to Get into the Chip Business

Recently, Bloomberg broke the news that Apple is planning to drop Intel and to start manufacturing and using their own chips. According to this report, the end goal of this move is to unify Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms. This is an interesting idea that just might work in this post-PC world.

Publii — Open Source Website Builder

In this day and age, everyone either has a website or wants one. For those who want a website, there are many tools to choose from. Unfortunately, most of these options are not beginner-friendly. Here comes Publii to the rescue.

Why Windows Needs a Package Manager

A couple of days ago, I was building a blog using Hexo (a static site generator built on Nodejs). I created a couple pages and installed a couple plugins. When I entered the command to build a local copy of the site, I got a nice long error message. It looked like one of the plugins was causing the problem, so I filed an issue on GitHub. It turned out that I was getting the error because my version of Nodejs was old, as in two major releases behind the most recent release.

Next Step in ARM Computing

[Please note: The Panther Alpha failed to reach its original Kickstarter goal. They are planning to resubmit the Kickstart campaign in Q4 2018. - 1805 update]

In the history of computing, there have been a number of major milestones. These milestones helped to direct the future direction of computing for years to come. The Panther MPC is shaping up to be one of those milestones.

Microsoft Releases Blogging Application as Open Source

Yes, you read that correctly. I used “Microsoft” and “open-source” in the same sentence, and it’s not a joke. Microsoft under new CEO Satya Nadella has embraced a pro-open-source (and even a pro-Linux) stance that would have been impossible under previous leadership. As part of this new initiative, they created the .NET Foundation to support open-source projects. One of these projects is a fork of the successful but discontinued blogging software Windows Live Writer.