I'm doing a clearance sale of the Libreboot 9020. *Heavy* price reduction:

Minifree Ltd – Libreboot T480 with 4-core i5-8250u, Intel UHD 630 graphics, 32GB/64GB DDR4 RAM, Intel AX210 WiFi, 1TB/2TB NVMe SSD and Debian Linux

Minifree Ltd – Libreboot T480 with 4-core i5-8250u, Intel UHD 630 graphics, 32GB/64GB DDR4 RAM, Intel AX210 WiFi, 1TB/2TB NVMe SSD and Debian Linux

Minifree Ltd – Libreboot T480 with 4-core i5-8250u, Intel UHD 630 graphics, 32GB/64GB DDR4 RAM, Intel AX210 WiFi, 1TB/2TB NVMe SSD and Debian Linux

I'll have two new products in November, but I still have a lot of 9020 in the lab. *All 9020's must go!* The base 16GB RAM and 240GB SSD Libreboot 9020 setup with i5 is £138, plus shipping/VAT. It's quite a nice Haswell (Intel 4th gen) machine with free initialisation including raminit. Libreboot preinstalled, replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI. Your choice of Linux/BSD setup (Debian by default).

Was chatting with one of my buddies on jitsi meet. he showed me this:

MPC One

MPC One delivers the standalone MIDI sequencing power of the flagship MPC X in a smaller footprint for any music production studio.

Music sampler thingy. I was super bored so I went to their downloads section:

MPC Software & Firmware Downloads | Akai Pro

AKAI Professional entered the electronic music industry in 1984 with one purpose - to give artists the tools they need to express and explore new m...

I started gutting it; the Windows updater app contains lzma archive inside. Inside *that*, from a specific offset, another lzma archive. extracted it and it was a ext2 file system image. Mounted it It's Linux. with glibc and busybox. No source code or written offer of source. GPL violation anyone?

Hah. Our man @npub1ns5c...ah7f is at it again: I've hinted at it in previous posts: I'm working on a new fork of DuckStation from before it went proprietary, and I will have it ready in a few days. I've heavily archived everything from Duckstation, even pull requests, wikis etc - I can't re-publish all of it, e.g. wiki text has no license. A number of contributors have reached out to me, who indeed confirm they *did not* authorise DuckStation's recent licensing changes.

Been playing with macOS for a new opensource project I'm working on. I only care about Linux/BSD, but the code I'm working on has Linux, Mac, Windows and Android ports, so I need to handle those. I'm teaching myself how to build software on macOS. I don't see how anyone stays sane using it. Windows is next. I've never used MacOS except briefly in 2007. I haven't used Windows since 2009. I now appreciate my Debian LXDE setup much more. So much simpler and easier to use. Superior in every way.

New Libreboot release soon.

I've been informed that a popular PlayStation emulator, called DuckStation, became proprietary software (was GPLv3, now PolyForm Strict 1.0.0 which restricts non-commercial usage and modification). DuckStation was Free Software. I've decided to archive DuckStation from before the license change. Please see:

Codeberg.org

duckstation

duckstation, but archived from the revision just before upstream changed it to a proprietary software project. this version is the libre one.

If you were using it, please ask the devs to change it back to GPL. Hardware preservation matters, as is preserving that preservation in a free-as-in-freedom way.

I watched this excellent speech today, though it was made in 2019:

Aral Balkan

The Future of Internet Regulation at the European Parliament

A brief write-up of my talk at the EU Parliament last week with embedded videos of my talk and a link to my slides.

In it, @npub1p095...m5vl makes the case in favour of smaller, more federated communication infrastructure within Europe, making use of p2p protocols like ActivityPub (which mastodon uses). He's talking to representatives within the EU parliament, on the issue of how best to fund investment in communication technology, warning against funding companies like FaceBook. The points he makes there are still true in 2024.