Wesley Moore

JSON Feed is a specification for representing an RSS-style feed in JSON. I wanted to add one as an alternative alongside the Atom feed on a new website I’m building. The website is built with Zola, which unfortunately doesn’t support the format, so this is how I went about adding one.

I have set up a mirror of repo.chimeralinux.org on a server in Australia (Brisbane). It’s been running well for a couple of weeks now. The root of the mirror shows an index of what is hosted and when it was last synced. /chimera is where the Chimera data lives.

It mirrors the packages as well as ISO and rootfs downloads. Using the mirror greatly speeds up package downloads, which in-turn makes things like apk upgrade a lot faster. Some rudimentary testing suggests this this server may also provide a speed improvement for folks in parts of Asia too.

My latest project, Feedlynx, is a self-hosted tool that allows you to collect links in an RSS feed^[1]. You subscribe to the feed in your RSS reader of choice and read or watch later at your leisure. Plus it has an adorable mascot!

Feedlynx runs on most mainstream operating systems including Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows and has no runtime dependencies. Check out the latest release to download pre-compiled binaries for some common platforms.

After a few weeks using Feedlynx myself I think it’s ready for others to check out. Read on for more information about my motivations behind building Feedlynx.

For the last two weeks I’ve been testing out my new laptop, a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x (14", Gen 9) Snapdragon. This laptop is interesting because it’s one of the initial batch based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPUs. In this post I aim to provide a detailed review of the device and the experience of using it from the perspective of a software developer. This post was written on the Yoga 7x.

I received a reply to my Tech Stack 2024 post asking: Why Chimera Linux? I wrote a response that turned out longer than anticipated and figured I may as well post it here too. I’m not trying to convince you to use Chimera with this post, just note down why it appeals to me. That’s really the crux of it: there’s dozens of distros out there all with different goals and values and Chimera really speaks to me, for you it might be something else.

Apparently people are excited about funding independent browser efforts this week. I have little interest in funding yet another browser built in C++ in 2024 but Servo is still alive. Since Mozilla refuse to let us directly fund Firefox I shall set up a recurring donation to Servo.

The next question is how much is a web browser worth to me? Based on minutes spent using a browser, quite a lot!

Inspired by Alex Chan’s Tools of the trade post I thought I’d note down my current tech stack and then revisit it in a few years to see how things evolve. As per Alex’s post I’ll break it down into three sections: software, (development) tech stack, and hardware.

This post describes how I exported my 500+ YouTube subscriptions to an OPML file so that I could import them into my RSS reader. I go into fine detail about the scripts and tools I used. If you just want to see the end result the code is in this repository, which describes the steps needed to run it.

I was previously a YouTube Premium subscriber but I cancelled it when they jacked up the already high prices. Since then I’ve been watching videos in NewPipe on my Android tablet or via an Invidious instance on real computers.

Today I compiled my titlecase Rust crate to Web Assembly and wrapped a web-page around it so that it can be used online. It’s published on my “projects domain”, 7bit.org. After I published it I realised I hadn’t written about the other projects that are on 7bit.org. They are Dew Point Forecast, MacBinary, RSS Please, and Titlecase.

I needed three low capacity micro SD cards for an upcoming project. There’s plenty of these available on AliExpress but its very difficult to know if you if the actual capacity will match the packaging. I did some research and came across this interesting video that tested 16 different cards. Their recommendation was the Lexar ones. So I found some 32Gb ones for AU$4.13 and placed an order^[1].

As per the video’s suggestion I tested one with an open-source tool called F3 (Fight Flash Fraud) when they arrived. F3 verifies the capacity against what the drive advertises and verifies that that amount of data can be written and read back without error.