The recording of my EndBASIC talk at BSDCan 2025 is now available: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZFY... — Watch to learn about the inner makings of the "EndBASIC OS" RPI disk image. Thanks to the A/V team for getting it out!

Happy Friday! The instructions to build your very own EndBASIC microcomputer (aka the EndBOX), including links to components AND the very first public disk images 😱, are now available. Have fun! www.endbasic.dev/2025/07/endb...

Instructions for the DIY kit ready and the very first release builds are in the oven. Interested in early, privileged access? coff.ee/jmmv !

Work on the EndBOX continues (and you've seen some of it via tweets here), so... here is the first weekly progress report! buymeacoffee.com/jmmv/weekly-...

TIL about Tildes. Do any of you have an invite? I see the EndBOX has been shared there and I ought to engage!

My talk about the OS powering the EndBOX is coming quick next week, so I had to rush getting this out so... I guess it's official now? www.endbasic.dev/2025/06/unve... Join me in this craziness and let's make it happen!

This shall be the next piece of hardware to add support for! But… after the conference, and finishing the plan on what to actually do about producing this box “for real”.

Time to resurface this! I found a draft update I prepared on Nov 8th to fix the text around username mapping and I published it now. I could not publish it back then because the CDN involved was being dumb and silently banned my updates due to a "dangerous substring".

Ooooh look! Someone is featuring EndBASIC in their Game Development summer course! moosadee.gitlab.io/courses/camp...

After ALL morning of fighting DTBs, I finally got the WiFi on the Pi Zero 2 W to work on NetBSD. Perfect for showtime at BSDCan.

The EndBASIC dev kit presentation for BSDCan ain't gonna write itself. Two weeks to go!

I've been tinkering with 3D printing as a complete beginner for the last two weeks as you may have seen around here, so I wrote a thing. jmmv.dev/2025/05/begi...

It’s the weekend again so it’s time to continue iterating! Looking better now, I think? ☺️ … but the base warped again and I need to do some internal tweaks. Each iteration takes about 12 hours to print which doesn’t make it easy…

Have you played VVVVVV? Did you know that its soundtrack is called PPPPPP? And... did you know that there is a metal remix called MMMMMM? I did not know the later and discovered it via the orange site! Amazing stuff. open.spotify.com/album/67mFUe...

EndBASIC dev kit finally shaping up—literally. But this is my first 3D design+print, so bear with me...

The SDL2-compat library in F42 (an SDL2 API shim on top of SDL3) isn't as "compat" as one would want, so I just wasted 2 hours figuring out why the EndBASIC console regression tests started failing 😒

I hadn't booted Fedora on my laptop for a few months now. I did last week, upgraded to 42 KDE Plasma, and OH WOW. I forgot how fast everything feels compared to Win 11. And Fedora 42 works _really_ well, especially now that the KDE spin is official.

Alrighty! I should have added this "project browser" a long time ago to the EndBASIC site... but better late than never. Next up: adding tiles for featured projects, with screenshots and the like.

Got a cheapo luggage bag for the kid and, while packing, noticed this. Like… HTF does this happen?! The fix was two screws away but I wonder if this is why it was so cheap?

Is that bump on the wall a trigger for a secret room? Or have I played too much Doom and Quake?

For the Googlers and Xooglers around here… I found the Noogler hat store and the auth system building.

My brain wasn’t very happy trying to continue sleeping at 3am due to jet lag (but didn’t want to wake up either) and it ended up designing the next feature I have to add to EndBASIC. And it actually makes sense. Maybe I’ll have time to code it on the flight back home.

This (via HN) looks like a great read for tomorrow's long flight. I've wanted to learn Elisp "properly" for a long time, but then... I've never actually felt the need to use it other than for configuration. "Coding my editor" is not how I think about it...

Aaah, the joys of using a non-mainstream OS: having to learn and understand random stuff when you most need it. Today's edition: how profiling works under the covers. TBF this is how I learned A LOT about systems ~25 years ago, but it gets old.

BSDCan is just 2 months away so that’s the time I’ve got to learn me some CAD and figure out 3D printing…

Huh, I knew Debian's approach to packaging Rust apps was "weird", but I didn't know it allowed you to essentially develop without crates.io and network access. Pretty neat TBH. thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/11...

Back to basics tonight. I’ve tried many, many PNW IPAs, and there are very nice ones, but I still find them too… sweet or juicy.

AI's take on what unifying code into a monorepo looks like. And this is after saying "please no graphs or diagrams", just a concept picture. lul wat

For your bsky following convenience... @justine.lol / @ak47.io / @hillelwayne.com / @danluu.com / @jmmv.dev / @ltratt.bsky.social / @eudoxia.bsky.social / @jaffray.bsky.social / @tanelpoder.com / @alexmillerdb.bsky.social / @andygrove.io / @muratdemirbas.bsky.social / @vanlightly.bsky.social

Happy 10th anniversary, Bazel! It has been quite a ride and I hope you don't take what I wrote here in the wrong way. There is always room for even faster builds 🙃 jmmv.dev/2025/03/baze...

Playing with cloudflared to stop paying an unnecessary ~$30 monthly cloud bill. Because... I should be doing my taxes instead.

It was really hard to find the date and only Gemini was able to guide me to a reliable source, but it seems like tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of Bazel's public announcement—and I have a treat ready for you!

I've somehow decided to try this "remap ESC to Caps Lock" thingy. And oh wow, it's so comfortable. But retraining my hands for the new keys (including not reaching for the Ctrl+[ clutch), will be difficult.

The second book in the 8080 Books “series” is out. I read the first and it got pretty boring with all of the LLMs stuff. Not sure if I should get this one. Any reviews so far?

Now with support for font and default colors selection, plus functional reboot and power off options!

TIL that the V6 Unix shell came with a goto(1) binary to jump around. How it worked is "neat": the shell spawned goto(1) and _shared_ the descriptor of the running script with it. goto(1) then seek(2)-ed to the label, affecting the shell's next reads. v6sh.org

Not quite the same, but I get a similar vibe from the question style 😜 (The privilege separation via an RPC mechanism I was posting about yesterday works!)

I'm having "fun" "over"engineering the EndBASIC dev kit image. Here, a sample of the new background daemon for privilege escalation that the shell calls into. But... why? The thought of running everything as root in an embedded device that may not get updates makes me uneasy.

After two years in the making, we at Snowflake ❄️ have completed the migration of our build system to Bazel, leading to faster and reliable builds. Here is the recap of our journey. www.snowflake.com/en/engineeri...

Well, I guess I'm going to @bsdcan.bsky.social this year 🙃. Now I need to push for the final stretch to get this toy ready for showtime!

And now I think I've found another tweak to support configuring the WiFi from _within_ EndBASIC as well (keeping the CONFIG.BAS accessible via the FAT partition) 😁 Weekend goal: make this work.

Oh wow. The handling of merge conflicts in a chain of commits with Jujutsu VCS is mindblowing-ly good.

I had the day off and... I spent it flushing an article idea that was at the back of my mind and that I had been wanting to write for ~2 weeks. I'm not an expert on this topic but I think the content is a reasonable intro! Happy read and happy weekend! blogsystem5.substack.com/p/hardware-a...

This wall just needs a memory test counter next to it.

After the last painful weekend getting this to work… I spent the week cleaning up the code and the experience. All done! 😎 Next up: pairing the LCD with the Pi Zero, which is probably going to give me some grief…

Based on recent articles and discussions, I _know_ I should spend some time mastering Jujutsu or Magit... but then I'm too comfortable with the Git CLI on a day-to-day basis and I can't make the time for either. I know I'm inefficient though.

I was writing a parser, in Rust, to extract structured fields from a string. Think "driver:k1=v1,k2=v2,..." The parser was represented by a struct that, upon initialization, chunked the input string and stored it as various String objects. 🤔 Inefficient, yes. 🧵

ALL MORNING spent in figuring out why I couldn’t make this LCD work on NetBSD while my code worked OK on Linux. It finally did the right thing just now so I’m released to go for a run.

"Light" read for the long weekend ahead (for those of you that have one). ioctls, from Rust? Yes, they are possible! But they are tricky: in fact, this is the first time I've had to reach out for "unsafe" since I started learning the language 7 years ago. blogsystem5.substack.com/p/ioctls-rust

Coming up tomorrow morning on Blog System/5, right at the start of the school winter break for some of us. Don't miss out!