I recently wrote about using a Raspberry Pi to remotely monitor an Internet connection, and in my case, to monitor Starlink (SpaceX's satellite Internet service).
One other important thing I wanted to monitor was how much power Starlink used over time, and I was considering just manually taking a reading off my Kill-A-Watt every morning, but that's boring. And not very accurate since it's one point in time per day.
A couple weeks ago, I noticed when running apt-get upgrade on one of my Pi projects that a new repository was added.
It was a little odd, because Linux distributions don't typically 'inject' new repositories like this. And it was even stranger because this particular repository was for VSCode, from Microsoft.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation just posted an article to their blog about Visual Studio Code coming to the Raspberry Pi—but that post didn't address any of the controversy surrounding this change.
There's also a video that goes along with this post: Is Microsoft Spying on your Raspberry Pi?
In late 2020, Microsoft released a version of VSCode compatible with the Raspberry Pi.
I've worked in open source my entire career1. To say that I'm worried about the impact recent events have on the open source ecosystem would be an understatement.
In the past couple months:
People may rightfully refute these statements, but the statements are more complicated than you might think. Killing a project doesn't mean the project will vanish overnight, but what has happened so far is two very large companies in the 'enterprise open source' space have shown the chinks in the armor of the monetization of open source software.
For many years, everyone in the industry pointed at Red Hat as the shining example of 'how to build a company around open source'.
And for the past decade, the open source Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana logging ecosystem was on a tear, becoming a standard in the open source cloud stack.
A week or so ago, I got the following email in my inbox:
Almost exactly one year ago, my GitHub Sponsors account was approved, and I issued a meek call to action:
You can now sponsor my open source work through GitHub Sponsors: https://t.co/h2GXLE9ZP6 #opensource
There are many Raspberry Pi projects where I spend a few hours (or dozens of hours) building something with a Pi, and realize at the end that not only could I have purchased an off-the-shelf product to do the same thing for half the component cost, but it would work better too.
But this is not one of those projects:
The Raspberry Pi and its HQ camera make a surprisingly potent webcam, and if you want to cover the basics, and rival the image quality of all but the highest-end dedicated webcams, you can do it for under $100.
Above is a single frame from a recording I did with the HQ Camera on my Raspberry Pi Zero W connected as a standard USB webcam using the Camera app on Windows 10 on my Dell laptop.
I just spent the past 6 hours migrating some of my open source projects from Travis CI to GitHub Actions, and I thought I'd pause for a bit (12 hours into this project, probably 15-20 more to go) to jot down a few thoughts.
I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects.
I have built projects for Raspberry Pi, PHP, Python, Drupal, Ansible, Kubernetes, macOS, iOS, Android, Docker, Arduino, and more. And almost every single project I built got immediate integration with Travis CI.
Without that testing, and the ability to run tests on a schedule, I would have abandoned most of these projects. But with the testing, I'm able to keep up with build failures induced by bit rot over the years and review PRs more easily.
From the outset, Travis CI was built to integrate with GitHub repositories and offer free open source CI. At one time it was showered with praise on Hacker News and elsewhere for its culture and ethos.
This morning, my YouTube channel passed 25,000 subscribers, and that's only a couple weeks after I was amazed to see it pass ten thousand! I'm working on my next video on the Turing Pi cluster, and it will be out very soon, but I thought I'd try to do something special for 25,000 subscribers.
.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }The videos I make for my YouTube channel wouldn't be possible without me relying on the work of thousands of people, working on thousands of open source projects. I want to see how much I can pay it forward for them in this video.
At the beginning of April, the Drupal Association announced a new #DrupalCares campaign to secure funding to keep the Association's lights on after DrupalCon Minneapolis was mothballed due to certain global events.
Very quickly, many in the Drupal community stepped up, increasing contributions, making one-time donations, or even pledging a generous 2-for-1 match. I decided to pledge $1 for every like on this video, and as of today, it had over 800 likes!
Last month I announced I was going to make my books Ansible for DevOps and Ansible for Kubernetes available free on LeanPub through the end of March, so people who are in self-isolation and/or who have lost their jobs could level up their automation skills.
The response floored me—in less than two weeks, I had given away over 40,000 copies of the two books, and they jumped to the top of LeanPub's bestseller lists.
Purchases (over 99% with price set to 'free') of both books spiked within hours of the announcement.
For the past few years, the number of issues and PRs across all my GitHub repositories has gone from a steady stream to an ongoing deluge. There are currently over 1,500 open issues across my 194 GitHub repositories, and there's no way I can keep up with all of them.
Initially, I went through each issue in each project's issue queue on a monthly basis (mind you, this was—and is still—done on nights and weekends in my spare time). That slipped to a quarterly task... and has now slipped to only happening for higher-profile projects once or twice a year.
