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Fosdem 2026 recap

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5#SPARCstation_4 This year I was lucky again and was able to attend FOSDEM. This turned out to be more of a social conference than a technical one for me this year. I mean:  I had a bunch of really great conversations, with peers and users of Firefox. I was there to man the Mozilla booth . The idea was to engage people and have them fill up a bingo, in exchange they might go back home with a T-shirt a baseball cap or a pair of socks. Most people that I saw on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Some people complained about AI, but not as many as I was expecting. Explaining why and that https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/firefox-will-soon-let-you-block-all-of-its-generative-ai-features/ would soon be available made them all understand and think that they could keep Firefox as their main browser. Our sticker stock melts like snow under the sun. The people from mozilla.ai had some pretty interesting discussions with some users that ...
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Are mozilla's fork any good?

To answer that question, we first need to understand how complex, writing or maintaining a web browser is.  A "modern" web browser is : a network stack, and html+[1] parser,  and image+[2] decoder, a javascript[3] interpreter compiler, a User's interface, integration with the underlying OS[4], And all the other things I'm currently forgetting.   Of course, all the above point are interacting with one another in different ways. In order for "the web" to work, standards are developed and then implemented in the different browsers, rendering engines. In order to "make" the browser, you need engineers to write and maintain the code, which is probably around 30 Million lines of code[5] for Firefox. Once the code is written, it needs to be compiled [6] and tested [6]. This requires machines that run the operating system the browser ships to (As of this day, mozilla officially ships on Linux, Microslop Windows and MacOS X - community builds for *BSD do ex...
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Donnations 2025

In the last few years, we all saw funding issues with FOSS. I've taken the habit to donate ~ 20 euros per month to diverse projects based on how interesting I find them or how I would like to show my support. The company, I currently work for, uses benevity  to double some of my donations, depending on whom I'm giving to. I started recording this in the middle of the year in order to share with the rest of the world. Here's what/when/how with or without comments : 29/04/2025 - 20 € - Dotclear - a blogging platform I use. 02/06/2025 - 20 € - Tor - because privacy matters 27/06/2025 - 20 € - Fosdem - the best OSS conference in Europe. 28/07/2025 - 20 € - Apache Software Foundation - We need servers side projects 01/09/2025 - 20 € - Internet Archive - We need to preserve our digital world 02/12/2025 - 05 € - NetBSD - because it runs on almost everything and diversity is good 02/12/2025 - 20 € - Signal - because privacy matters 02/12/2025 - 20 € - Wikipedia - because sharin...
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15 + years remote and counting

I've been working since 2009 full remote. I've changed jobs twice, I've moved from one country to another one while being full remote. Here are some thoughts, tips and tricks to make your life easier if you end up working remotely.  During this time I have lived in four places, and worked differently in these places I'll start be describing each of them and how I managed to work, what was good, bad and ugly. My apartment - I had a room with a desk, but I was living alone. I could organize my workspace the way I wanted without impeding on other people potentially living with me.  As I started working remote, setting limits and boundaries was hard. Not working was easy but made my guilt go high, so I would end catching up. I remember one Friday not working and then guilt making me work for the whole weekend. In order to manage my new way of life, I created a schedule. At 7, I would get up, by 7:30 I would have breakfast and so on. Issue was stopping in the evening. I was ...
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Remise en état du NAS

Aujourd'hui sur ma to-do list il y avait remise en état du NAS. Celui-ci est off depuis début septembre, la clef USB qui contenait l'OS avait un secteur défectueux, que `fsck` n'arrivait pas à corriger. La structure du Nas est la suivante : une clef USB avec l'OS ( zvault après une migration/upgrade depuis FreeNas Core) quatre disques formant un zpool sous ZFS.  Comme c'est la clef USB qui avait des soucis, mes copies de fichiers étaient sans doute intacte.  J'ai donc ouvert la boite, changé la clef. Et refermé le châssis (c'est le truc pour lequel j'ai le plus galéré). Ensuite réinstallation de Zvault. Restauration du backup de configuration que j'avais eu la bonne idée de prendre. Et hop, tout fonctionne de nouveau comme avant.  Je me suis posé la question de passer à FreeBSD et d'y importer les pools zfs, mais il aurait fallu que je revois tous mes scripts de copie, j'ai donc évité pour le moment. 
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