Posts from June 2020

IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, is unquestionably the progenitor of modern online chat systems. IRC preceded instant messaging platforms like ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger, and in doing so connected people in real-time in a way that would lay the groundwork, not for just those instant messaging platforms that would follow, but for modern social media platforms as we know them today. And today, while certainly diminished, IRC still plays an important role in connected communities of people, particularly in the IT space.

But IRC isn’t without its flaws, and those flaws created openings for many competitors:

1. Chatting is ephemeral. If you’re not connected there’s no way to receive messages that were sent while you were away.
2. Text-based. No images or giphy animations here, and file sharing is direct, client-to-client only.
3. The mobile story in general, and notifications in particular, are weak.

Now, the IRC community has worked hard to address the first problem with bouncers and changes to the IRC protocol (I’ll dig into this later).

Issue two… well, bluntly, I actually view that as a benefit rather than a drawback, but obviously that’s a matter of personal taste.

As for issue three, it’s still true that the mobile story isn’t great, though there is slow steady progress (Android now boasts a few pretty decent mobile IRC clients).

But IRC also has some enormous benefits:

1. It’s open and federated. Running a server yourself is trivial.
2. Clients are heavily customizable for power users.
3. It’s fast and lightweight.

And these various other products (like Slack, Signal, etc) have some mirror image drawbacks:

1. Closed walled gardens.
2. Zero ability to customize.
3. Heavy, memory- and CPU-intensive clients.

And then there is the fragmentation. My god the fragmentation. Every app is its own beast, with its own UX quirks, performance issues, bugs, and so on. Even the way they issue notifications varies from product to product. And some (I’m looking at you, Whatsapp) don’t offer a desktop client product at all.

I spend every day working with these messaging products, and I wanted to find out: Is there some way I could use an IRC client of my choice to interact with these various walled gardens (recognizing that, yes, that would come with some loss of functionality)?

Well, with a lot of hacking and elbow grease, I can definitely say the answer is yes! Though… this is, as is the case with many of my projects these days, probably not for the faint of heart…

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Way back in the before time, in the long long ago of 2008, I decided to participate in the One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One program. The vision of the program was compelling: play a small part in enabling childhood education by providing children in the poorest parts of the world access to cheap, simple, rugged computers. Load them with electronic books and educational software. Add support for wifi and mesh networking to enable connectivity. Unlock creativity in kids the way computers unlocked creativity in me.

Things didn’t exactly pan out as everyone had hoped, but I still ended up with my very own OLPC XO-1, and it’s sat quietly in a closet ever since, a toy that I take out and play with occasionally.

Well, we recently did a top-to-bottom purge of our house, and in doing so I once again ran across my XO-1. So I decided to take it out and play with it again. In particular, I was curious: what would it take to run the very latest version of Debian on this modest little device?

Turns out not much! But where it got tricky, it got really tricky…

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