JulianCalaby

@juliancalaby@treehouse.systems
32 Followers
75 Following
690 Posts

Grumpy clown microdosing chaos. Petter of dogs. Hardware and software sadist. Applied specific curses to their own homelab for fun. Smashes code together for money. Solders together Arduino projects the wrong way. Has been in the presence of the One True Duck. Emigrating to the cloud the hard way.

I do not represent my employer here.

If you're contacting me and I don't know you, please tell me your favourite letter of the Greek alphabet within the first couple of sentences of our first conversation so I know you're serious.

Pronounshe/him
GitLabhttps://gitlab.com/SkUrRiEr
Githubhttps://github.com/SkUrRiEr
Hackaday.iohttps://hackaday.io/SkUrRiEr
JulianCalaby1d ago
Nanoraptor2d ago
JulianCalaby6d ago

I'm getting increasingly sick of the whole X11 vs Wayland argument for a lot of reasons, but the main ones are:

1. X11 is in deep maintenance mode because everyone working on it has moved onto other things and nobody has stepped up to maintain it in their absence. If you feel that it's better than Wayland, please organise funds and personnel to modernise it so it works on new systems. This has not happened in a meaningful way.
2. As I understand it, the Apple Silicon graphics system is fundamentally not usable under X11 without a massive translation layer that maps X11 to it. The rise of Wayland means that this can be accomplished better using a Wayland compositor and XWayland. My understanding is that basically "all" embedded graphics solutions other than Intel's are similarly incompatible.
3. Screen tearing on Intel graphics under X11
4. Any application that still needs X11 for whatever reason should work under XWayland, the X11 compatibility layer built out of Xorg by the developers of Xorg.
5. From what I've seen, nearly every issue people have had with Wayland is because their app is either doing stuff to bypass X11 that doesn't work on Wayland or because they switched to Wayland too soon.
6. Bazzite, Gamescope, KDE, modern graphics APIs, etc. The world is already moving on.
7. As with most Linux graphics things, I understand that the developers are reasonably responsive to collaboration so just talk to them if the thing you're working on doesn't work
8. Writing a new protocol is a way to do things better. There's a lot of stuff that the "grey beards" say is hard that can be made easier if you're starting from scratch with the lessons of the past in mind. Secure screen locking and screensavers is one that springs to mind.

Either spend time actually understanding the problems, compile your app for X11 and lean on XWayland, or talk to the developers. It's not complicated.

JulianCalaby6d ago
Elia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16

What does a 2000 photo of Edward Said throwing a rock at the wall separating newly-liberated southern Lebanon and Israel have in common with the LA protests?

A few thoughts on how 'violence' if framed.

Article version (support if you can) https://www.hauntologies.net/p/framing-violence

🧵 below

JulianCalabyJun 18

Me, trying to be reassuring to a young woman planing to move to Australia who has clearly heard _all_ the stories:

Anyway, if you do see a spider, don't feel bad about killing it, we've got plenty.

JulianCalabyMay 25
Joe NashMay 23
I don’t think any device can match the ThinkPad for weird user bases, with exactly two profiles: person who only experiences computing through their corporate intranet, or person with the most esoteric Linux setup you’ve ever seen
JulianCalabyMay 24
KeyboardsMay 24
JulianCalabyMay 24
Show threadSarah Jamie LewisMay 21

Your one practical option is to actively reject tools that now exist to serve interests other than your own - and to help others do the same; and in doing so support the people who make the tools that put you back in control.

Are there solutions for everything? No - but if we don't start investing in them, and building them, and making them better today then we simply won't have them at all.

Because no tool, no organization, that sells out its users is ever going to stop.

JulianCalabyMay 24
Natasha JayMay 21
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
JulianCalabyMay 19
shleeMay 19

Project 10U – (Neighborhood) Community Cloud Pitch

Part 1: The Pitch

In February 2025, I moved into a half rack with 20U of capacity in a closed/private and secured location in Melbourne Australia.

After installing all of my personal hardware, including routers, switches, and servers – I found myself using 6U of my total available rack, or around 33%, and this is everything I’ll need for at least the next 24 months to host all of my […]

https://shlee.fedipress.au/2025/project-10u-neighborhood-community-cloud-pitch/

Project 10U – (Neighborhood) Community Cloud Pitch

Part 1: The Pitch In February 2025, I moved into a half rack with 20U of capacity in a closed/private and secured location in Melbourne Australia. After installing all of my personal hardware, including routers, switches, and servers - I found myself using 6U of my total available rack, or [...]

Shlee
JulianCalabyMay 12
Rick AltherrMay 11

The "can it run DOOM?" trope has been persistent in the comments for Usagi Electric's Bendix G-15 videos. So, that's what he and a brilliant programmer did. Sort of. https://youtu.be/no0CkQk7id0?si=S7l5fR9mysW_fjgM

#retrocomputing

Doom on the Oldest Digital Computer in America!

YouTube
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Elia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16

What does a 2000 photo of Edward Said throwing a rock at the wall separating newly-liberated southern Lebanon and Israel have in common with the LA protests?

A few thoughts on how 'violence' if framed.

Article version (support if you can) https://www.hauntologies.net/p/framing-violence

🧵 below

Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16

The thing about monopoly of violence is, well, that the state has the monopoly on violence. Journalism can be better at recognising that fact instead of wasting time talking about ‘violent protests'.

Civilians never have the monopoly on violence. The state always does.

Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
The same goes with unseen versus seen violence. You may think that some person with a rock at a protest is the violent one, but to do that you need to erase the daily mass violence inflicted by the state on citizens and non-citizens.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
You need to be able to compare a rock thrown by a protester with tanks and jets and mass incarceration and ICE kidnapping children and border cops letting innocent people die of thirst and teargas and torture and more.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16

If you erase the latter and only look at the rock, you're memory-hole-ing most of reality.

Take an example: Edward Said (photo above) once threw a rock.

Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
Taken without context, as the Right likes to do, it seems bizarre: a famous academic throwing a rock?
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16

Let's add some details: where and when was this?

Southern Lebanon.

3 July 2000.

What was happening then?

Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
Israeli forces had just withdrawn from southern Lebanon, the territory they had been occupying since 1982. Their occupation was marked by widespread torture, disappearances and murder. Edward Said went there a few weeks after those same troops withdrew.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
Back then, we were still learning of the horrors of the 18-year-long occupation. The Khiam prison (look it up) had just been liberated, and so much was still being discovered. Israel had left thousands of mines around.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
Just six years later, during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, Israel dropped an additional 4 million cluster munitions. People still die from these today. Kids still stumble upon mines, farmers (or their animals) still walk into them. People are still maimed or killed as a result of these mines.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
Edward Said was, of course, well aware of the Israeli occupation. He wrote about it many times. So, in July of 2000, he threw a rock at the separation wall dividing the newly-liberated south Lebanon and Israel.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
If you memory-hole 18 years of occupation, and decades more of Israeli violence, it just looks like a man being violent. If you integrate reality, that action becomes symbolic. Nothing even actually ‘happened’ to the Israelis.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
The nuclear-armed and US-funded state that occupied south Lebanon, continues to occupy the Syrian Golan Heights, continues to occupy Palestinian territories, and is now back to occupying parts of south Lebanon and even more of the Syrian Golan Heights
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
while also openly committing a genocide in Gaza and only talking of annexing all of Palestine was not harmed by the throwing of a rock.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
That did not stop ‘the discourse', of course. Here's Caroline Glick for Newsweek. The Israelis were not 'protecting their border', a border which did not exist 5 minutes ago and which, for 18 years, included all of southern Lebanon.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16

A year after that happened, the Freud Society of Vienna canceled a talk by Edward Said - because he threw a rock. Did Viennese high society cancel talks by Israelis for partaking in actual mass violence including genocide? Let me know when you find one example.

https://archive.is/7f1dy#selection-263.4-263.27

Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
What if in addition to everything just mentioned, I added that Edward Said had not been to Lebanon since 1982? Since the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, preceded by the siege of Beirut and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, started?
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
What if I added that Edward Said visited the Khiam prison that day? The prison that served as a torture camp for resistance fighters (look up Soha Bechara's story) and run by Israel and their proxy militia 'the South Lebanon Army'? What does a rock mean with that context in mind?
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
So what does that tell us? When reporting on ‘violence’ caused by much weaker actors against much stronger and much more violent actors, you have a choice: do you contextualise the weaker violence against the backdrop of the stronger violence, or do you not? It's a choice you make.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
It's a choice between seeking to understand and seeking to obfuscate. There could be a 100 articles on a ‘riot’ that start from the premise of ‘riot bad’ instead of seeking to ask the simply question of why.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
Doing so does not require you to ‘like’ the ‘riot'. It just requires you to seek to understand before seeking to explain a situation.
Show threadFermín GrodiraJun 16
@ayoub Hey Elia. You say several times 2020 but I think you mean 2000. Said died in 2003.
Show threadElia Ayoub (he/him)Jun 16
@grodira yes thank you, I edited it now
Show threadLisPiJun 16
@ayoub Another example of monopolies being harmful.
Show threadCats Who Code (cursed)Jun 16
@ayoub I was noticing a lot of parallels between the two; you're right!