Nim

Most break reminders rely on a plain clock, so the alarm still fires the instant a fifty minute timer runs out, even if you spent thirty of those minutes away from the desk getting a coffee, because the timer has no way of knowing that you already sat back down. I already wear a smartwatch that vibrates on my wrist whenever I have been sitting too long, which helps, although it tracks the wrong thing, since it watches my wrist rather than my desk, so that a handful of arm movements is enough to convince it that I got up while I am still in the same chair, in front of the same screen. I am also the kind of person who concentrates hard enough to lose track of time entirely, so that eyestrain is usually the first sign I get that I went too far. Because I wanted something that watches the desk instead, I turned to a piece of 2009 e-waste sitting in the corner of it: a Samsung N130 netbook with a single core Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM. It runs Void Linux, and it is the same machine that I turned into a basement WiFi router a few months ago. I made it a desk sentinel that checks whether I am really sitting in front of the workstation, counts work time only while I am there, and speaks up once I stay too long. Image credits to: Bananayota, found on Pixabay TL;DR The basic idea: when something moves in the webcam frame, it means I am at the desk. If I stay at the desk too long without a break, the netbook speaks up. An old Samsung N130 netbook running Void Linux works as that desk sentinel. motion watches the built-in webcam and, on every start and stop of movement, writes active or idle into a plain state file. A small Nim daemon reads that file and tracks continuous desk time with a live one line progress bar, so that once the limit is reached, it calls espeak-ng and wall, while an absence under 5 minutes never resets the clock. Nothing is recorded, because the video feed never leaves the netbook and no frame is written to disk. The daemon runs as an unprivileged supervised runit service that costs 0.01% of one core and 2 MB of RAM, since motion is the real cost on this hardware. ...

👋 Intro If you have ever spent time hardening Linux applications, you probably know the frustration of the all-or-nothing permission model. In the standard Linux environment, once a process starts running, it usually has far more filesystem access than it actually needs. While we have tools like seccomp, chroot, or heavy-duty modules like SELinux and AppArmor, they often feel too complex for simple, application-level sandboxing. Landlock changes this. Since its merge into the Linux kernel in version 5.13, it has become a game-changer for developers. It allows a process to restrict itself without requiring root privileges, moving security away from global system policies and directly into your application code. ...

The problem When we write our programs or libraries, usually we ship to the end user a packaged binary. If a user wants to report a bug or ask for a feature, one of the most important information to have is “which version of the software are you using ?” Since as any good programmer you likely use a source code control system, you should not rely only on the numeric version, but it’s practical to include also the git commit hash of the software you are actually shipping. ...

The Good 😇 Today I decided to submit an openSUSE package update for the nim compiler. It went almost all well but unfortunately I faced a problem: on the i586 platform it fails to build. ...