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Articles by Johan Thelin
Vibing fitness tracking
LLM assisted development, vibing, agentic coding – many names for the same thing. The technology has taken huge strides forward and it is interesting to see what it can do. In my mind, one-offs where a solved problem a while ago, and thin vertical applications without too much complexity is another one. To test the last hypothesis, I set out to create a fitness tracker app.
The Great Video Migration
I just realized it has been a full year since I blogged last. Time flies and I will try to do (much much) better this year. My last entry was about foss-north 2025 and now foss-north 2026 has just passed. It was a successful event and Tobias really helps bringing new energy to the event – including a whole crew of volunteers. During the foss-north events all talks are recorded. These are then made available on YouTube and on a peertube instance.
foss-north 2020 take ii made virtual
2020-09-16 10:00:00 by Johan Thelin The foss-north 2020 take ii event will be a virtual event in light of the current COVID-19 situation. This spring we were hoping to be able to enjoy a physical event the autumn of 2020, but things are still not back to normal. In light of this, the foss-north 2020 event will be held as a one day virtual event taking place on November 1. We are still looking forward to having you all over and hope to bring you a day of exciting speakers!
New Infrastructure
2019-07-15 09:00:00 by Johan Thelin Today we launch the new foss-north infrastructure. In the past years we've gone from a single day event with 100 visitors, to a four day chaos with 260 visitors, 35+ speakers, numerous workshops, and two training sessions. The web site has slowly progressed from a handmade static site with dynamic parts outsourced to google forms and Eventbrite, to a Jekyll-based site, but still outsourced services. The new system is based on the pgeu's conference system.
Polished site and new pod cast
Polished site and new pod cast 2020-08-10 22:00:00 by Johan Thelin Today we're happy to launch a slightly updated site, combined with a pod cast. The pod is derived from our Copyright and Licensing YouTube series and already consists of 15 episodes. Subscribe to the RSS feed and enjoy your FOSS news, info and interviews! We know that there are some rough edges - if you bump into anything - give us a shout and we will try to fix it asap.
foss-north 2025 - Life of a Developer
It’s been a bit over a week since the last foss-north conference. This year it really felt like the energy has returned after Covid. We’re back to double tracks and we had almost 200 attendees. For those of you how don’t know, foss-north is an annual conference held every spring in Gothenburg, Sweden. It is split into a community day, and then two conference days. The first conference was held back in 2016, to fill the void when fscons changed format.
I just got myself a brand new car: an ID.Buzz with seven seats so that I can fit the whole family at once. I’m very happy with the car this far, but since it has connectivity, I want to see if I can integrate it into HomeAssistant. To do this, I wanted to use the CarConnectivity project by Till Steinbach. It is a Python package that comes in a few parts. The main project, a Volkswagen connector, an MQTT bridge and a HomeAssistant MQTT discovery helper.
Migrating Databases
Last week I decided to clean up a bit of digital cruft. That is, I moved a few of my websites onto a single VPS, saving quite a bit of monthly server hosting costs. What I did was that I moved VPSes from Linode (Akamai) to DigitalOcean, but also migrated a full web hotel from One to DigitalOcean (converting email accounts to email forwards). As this is something that I do very rarely, I decided to document the process here so that I don’t have to look everything up again next time around.
Upgrading Home Assistant
I run Home Assistant Core on a Raspberry Pi. I installed it in a Python venv and now and then I feel a need to upgrade. Today was such a day. So, having backed everything up, I went for the plunge.
Life of a Developer
I’ve had my Creality CR-6 SE for quite some while now and it’s worked very well. I’ve even moved with it a couple of times. However, it seems that now was the time for it to give up the ghost, as the extruder casing developed a crack. Apparently something not completely uncommon. So I searched the internet for spare parts before I realized that this is a common failure mode and that there are all-metal replacements. A few clicks later, I had one ordered from Amazon.
Life of a Developer
I recently blogged about my departure from MBition after a four year stint helping to build a software department within Mercedes Benz. Having contemplated various possible paths, I decided to leave my comfort zone and move away from automotive on-board software, which has been my life for the past 11 years. Instead, I will help Autoliv Research’s ML/AI team to help them build awesome detection tools to help save more lives.
Sharing dimensions
Continuing my adventures in FreeCAD, I now had to design a top to my Raspberry Pi enclosure. The FreeCAD people were friendly and told me to checkout spreadsheets. Nice. FYI, to make a model parametric check out the FreeCAD Spreadsheet workbench: https://t.co/da3i2gdJq8 pic.twitter.com/gUQAacJ4Nk — FreeCAD (@FreeCADNews) November 13, 2021 However, since I already started down another path, I decided to name my constraints.
Life of a Developer
I just got myself a 3D printer. It is my second one – I built a reprap back in 2013 – but this one is slightly more convenient to use. I went for the Creality CR6-SE. It works good enough for me out of the box, even though 3D printing is a topic where you can spend infinite time tweaking things. I used to use OpenSCAD to create my models, as it maps well to my way of thinking (i.e. coding). However, I’ve decided to take some time to learn some new skills and this time around I went for FreeCAD.
XmlListModels in Qt 6
I had a look at a small XmlListModel based project of mine and started migrating the code from Qt 5.12 to Qt 6.2. The code ports pretty cleanly, but there are some caveats to be aware of. As I’m lazy, I started by changing the imports from 2.12 to 6.2 and tried running the code. The first changes I had to make was to change the import from QtQuick.XmlListModel to QtQml.XmlListModel.
Some Vue + Django tips
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2021-01-02 As I wrote last time, I currently develop a web app based on Django and Vue using the django-compressor-parceljs. I’d like to mention some small things that I’ve learned since last. Vue in development mode I found it interesting that parceljs described how to get Vue into development mode for several bundlers, but failed to mention parcel.
Looking at Vue
All applications are more or less connected today. The time of files on a disk, or moving them with a USB stick (or floppy) are over. Even file based programs are often synced using Nextcloud, dropbox, google drive, etc. At Eperoto I’m busy building a backend for a React frontend, but there I stay in my comfort zone at the backend. It is Python, databases and files, just as I know and like things to be.
foss-north pod - a look at the stats
The foss-north pod about Licenses and Copyright has been around since May 1st, so I decided to talk a look at the stats. We gather very little statistics, but what I know is that we have 635 followers on YouTube and 108 over at conf.tube (a peertube instance). We also serve the pod directly from foss-north.se/pod, where we keep 14 days of access logs. What can we read out from them?
Advent of Code and Learning
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2020-12-04 So, I decided to do Advent of Code this year too. I usually get stuck part of the way, but I still think that it is a fun exercise. This year the plan is to use python and pytest the whole way through. Every day that i learn something that I want to remember, I add a til.txt file in that sub-directory. You can follow my progress and learnings in the git repository.
QmlBook: Felgo Service Integration
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2020-11-10 Felgo has kindly sponsored the QmlBook, which has resulted in a new chapter. The topic this time around is the Felgo Qt extensions for integrating various services that are commonly used by app developers, the Felgo cloud builds, as well as their live reloading technology.
Intense weeks
End of October turns out to be one of the highs when it comes to workload this year. Everything happens at once – there are two public events that I’d like to tell you about. The first one is running lights. This is an annual running competition organized by AIF Friidrott, the sports club my kids are active in. This year, this means organized by me and postponed due to COVID-19, but the virtual races started this weekend and the arena race will take place on the 24th.
Felgo in the QML Book
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2020-09-21 Over the past year I’ve been bumping into the Felgo crew at various Qt events. They take Qt to the next level. It all started as a game development framework for Qt, but has turned into a powerful app development framework taking a lot of the rough corners of Qt, and extending the tooling with a powerful live reloader at the same time.
The API wars - 16 years later
It is more than 16 years since Joel Spolsky wrote How Microsoft Lost the API War. The bonds of the win32 API lock-in is broken and the free web is here to take over. The web has come a long way in the past 16 years. Richer APIs, dramatic performance improvements, and an ubiquity that surpasses anything else that we as a human race have experienced. Easy of deployment is king and the easiest deployment of all is to simply browse to a web page.
Linux App Summit Goes Online in November
Once again, KDE and GNOME are teaming up to bring you THE conference for people interested in establishing Linux as a great end-user platform. At the Linux App Summit we work on making app creation for users easy and worthwhile. Since travel is complicated nowadays, we decided to make LAS 2020 a virtual conference. The event will open Thursday, 12th November and we'll wrap up on Saturday, 14th November.
Adventures in (Dyn)DNS
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2020-07-31 So, I made the silly move to rely on my hardware supplier to provide me with a dynamic DNS service. Naturally, this offer expired, and I could no longer reach my home server. Because of Murphy, this naturally took place when I was away from home with no access to anything. So – how does one find the way back home? Luckily, I have a VPS that I log in to now and then.
KDE Slimbook: Plasma, KDE Apps and the Power of the AMD Ryzen CPU
Today Slimbook and KDE launch the new KDE Slimbook. The third generation of this popular ultrabook comes in a stylish sleek magnesium alloy case that is less than 20 mms thick, but packs under the hood a powerful AMD Ryzen 7 4800 H processor with 8 cores and 16 threads. On top of that runs KDE's Plasma desktop, complete with a wide range of preinstalled, ready-to-use Open Source utilities and apps.
It finally arrived
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2020-07-19 After waiting a bit over a month, followed by an agonizing week when the new gizmo was at my DHL pickup point and I was some 2h by car away in our summer house. What gizmo? A Pinebook Pro! Outer layer Next layer Two boxes One contained the power adapter The other contained another box Containing a letter And the Pinebook Pro The Pinebook comes in many layers. Like, properly many. I guess this means that it is safe during transport.
foss-north kdenlive workflow
As some of you might already have noticed, we’ve complemented foss-north with a new pod / vod / vlog – I’m not sure what to call it. Basically, it is a video based pod cast (making it available as a audio only pod-cast is high on the todo). Our main focus right now is a series on licenses and copyright, but there is more to come. As a part of this, I’ve started editing videos in kdenlive on a weekly basis, and I’m very happy with it so far. In this blog, I want to share my workflow.
Photoframe Hack
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2020-05-26 Sometimes you just want to get something done. Something for yourself. You do not intend it to be reused, or even pretty. You build a tool. My tool was a photoframe with some basic overlays. I wanted the family calendar, some weather information (current temperature + forecast), time, and the next bus heading for the train station. To make this acceptable in a home environment, I built it as a photoframe.
The Cost of no Architecture
Like many others, I enjoy various reverse engineering and tear-down stories. Personally, I mean things like iFixit tear-downs and Ken Shirriff’s blog, so I started following this tweet thread by foone. I'm trying to get this Logitech Harmony 900 remote working, but it keeps telling me the battery level is extremely low… pic.twitter.com/v3CRE2BUD9 — foone (@Foone) April 18, 2020 This continues with another tweet sequence about getting software running on the remote control.
NextCloud on Pi Adventures
By Johan Thelin | Published: 2019-10-22 I spent yesterday *finally* setting up a NextCloud instance of my own. It’s been on my todo since I installed fiber at home and got a decent Internet connection. I started out with Rasbian Lite and combined it with the NextCloudPi install script from ownyourbits. I then used certbot to install certificates from let’s encrypt before migrating the data directory using these instructions.
Free software and the wish to be good
The free software movement has recently been going through a lot. From the introduction of Commons Clause, to the resignation of Stallman. It seems like the mood in the air is that now is the time for a redefinition of what free and open source software actually is. My view on this is that free software, and open source, is about software. For instance, I agree to Roman Gilg’s great post about activism. What we share within the FOSS movement is our passion for software licensing.
foss-north call for papers
The summer is flying by and it is already August. The call for papers for foss-north IoT and Security Day is still open for a few more days, so make sure to get your talk in. We are looking for talks touching on connected embedded devices and how to do them securely. The foss-north IoT and Security Day will be a one day event, October 21st, in central Stockholm. The venue, WTC, is located right by the central train station, so it is very easy to get there. Tickets will be made available soon.
Complicating Licensing
I’ve recently seen a couple of attempts to present non-open source licensing as almost open source. What I’m talking about is Commons Clause and fair source. This sounds a lot like the failed shared source model promoted by companies such as Microsoft in the early 2000. Yes, I’m looking at you redis and neo4j. What I find particularly disturbing is the way that both, but especially Commons Clause, attempts to piggyback on the good name of open source.
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