The Pepper and Carrot motion comic is almost funded. The pledge from Ethic Cinema put it on good road (as it seemed it would fail). Ethic Cinema is non profit organization that wants to make open source art (as they call it Libre Art). Purism's creative director, François Téchené, is member and co-founder of Ethic Cinema. Lets push final bits so we can get this free as in freedom artwork.

Notice that Pepper and Carrot is a webcomic (also available as book) free as in freedom artwork done by David Revoy who also supports this campaign. Also the support is done by Krita community on their landing page.

Lets do this!

While I was bored on Defcon, I took the smallest VPS in DO offering (512MB RAM, 20GB disk), configured nginx on it, bought domain zlatan.tech and cp'ed my blog data to blog.zlatan.tech. I thought it will just be out of boredom and tear it apart in a day or two but it is still there.

Not only that, the droplet came with Debian 8.5 but I just added unstable and experimental to it and upgraded. Just to experiment and see what time will I need to break it. To make it even more adventurous (and also force me to not take it too much serious, at least at this point) I did something on what Lars would scream - I did not enable backups!

While having fun with it I added letsencrypt certificate to it (wow, that was quite easy).

Then I installed and configured Tor. Ende up adding an .onion domain for it! It is: pvgbzphm622hv4bo.onion

My main blog is still going to be zgrimshell.github.io (for now at least) where I push my Nikola (static site generator written in python) generated content as git commits. To my other two domains (on my server) I just rsync the content now. Simple and efficient.

I must admit I like my blog layout. It is simple, easy to read, efficient and fast, I don't bother with comments and writing a blog in markdown (inside terminal as all good behaving hacker citizen) while compiling it with Nikola is breeze (and yes, I did choose Nikola because of Nikola Tesla and python). Also I must admit that nginx is pretty nice webserver, no need to explain the beauty of git but I can't recommend enough of rsync.

If anyone is interested in doing the same I am happy to talk about it but these tools are really simple (as I enjoy simple things and by simple I mean small tools, no complicated configs and easy execution).

I woke up at 5am. Somehow made myself to soon go back to sleep again. Woke up at 6am. Such is the life of jet-lag. Or I am just getting old for it.

But the truth wouldn't be complete with only those assertion. I woke inspired and tired and the same time. Tired because I am doing very time consumable things. Also in the same time very emotional things. AND at the exact same time things that inspire me.

On paper, I am technical leader of Purism. In reality, I have insanely good relations with my CEO for such a short time. So good that I for months were not leading the technical shift only, but also I overtook operations (getting orders and delivering them while working with our assembly line to automate most of the tasks in this field). I was playing also as first line of technical support (forums, IRC and email). Actually I was pretty much the only line of support for few months. I was doing some website changes: change some wording, updating bunch of plugins and making it sure all works, resolved (hopefully) Tor and Cloudflare issues for it, annoying caching system for forums, stopped forum spam and so on. I worked on better messaging for Purism public relations. I thought my team to use keys for signing and encryption. I interviewed (and read all mails) for people that were interested in working or helping Purism. In process of doing all that, I maybe wasn't the most speedy person for all our users needs but I hope they understand and forgive me.

I was doing all that while I was researching and developing tablets (which ended up not being the most successful campaign but we now do have them as product). I was doing all that while seeing (and resolving) that our kernel builds were failing. Worked on pushing touchpad (not so good but we are still working on) patches upstream (and they ended being upstreamed). While seeing repos being down because of our host. Repos being down because of broken sync with Debian. Repos being down because of our key mis-management. Metadata not working well. PureBrowser getting broken all the time. Tor browser out of date. No real ISO updates. Wrong sources.list entries and so on.

And the hardest part on work was, I was doing all this with very limited scope and even more limited resources. So what kept me on, what is pushing me forward and what am I doing?

One philosophy - Free software. Let me not explain it as a technical debt. Let me explain it as social movement. In age, where people are "bombed" by media, by all-time lying politicians (which use fear of non-existent threats/terror as model to control population), in age where proprietary corporations are selling your freedom so you can gain temporary convenience the term Free software is like Giordano Bruno in age of Inquisitions. Free software does not only preserve your Freedom to software source usage but it preserves your Freedom to think and think out of the box and not being punished for that. It preserves the Freedom to live - to choose what and when to do, without having the negative impact on your or others people lives. The Freedom to be transparent and to share. Because not only ideas grow with sharing, but we, as human beings, grow as we share. The Freedom to say "NO".

NO. I somehow learnt, and personally think, that the Freedom to say NO is the most important Freedom in our lives. No I will not obey some artificially created master that think they can plan and choose my life decision. No I will not negotiate my Freedom for your convenience (also, such Freedom is anyway not real and it is matter of time where you will be blown away by such illusion). No I will not accept your credit because it has STRINGS attached to it which you either don't present or you blur it in mountain of superficial wording. No I will not implant a chip inside me for sake of your research or my convenience. No I will not have social account on media where majority of people are. No, I will not have pacemaker which is a blackbox with proprietary (buggy) software and it harvesting my data without me being able to look at it.

Yin-Yang. Yes, I want to collaborate on making world better place for us all. I don't agree with most of people, but that doesn't make them my enemies (although media would like us to feel and think like that). I will try to preserve everyones Freedom as much as I can. Yes I will share with my community and friends. Yes I want to learn from better than I am. Yes I want to have awesome mentors. Yes, I will try to be awesome mentor. Yes, I choose to care and not ignore facts and actions done by me and other people. Yes, I have the right to be imperfect and do mistakes as long as I will aknowledge and work on them. Bugfixing ourselves as humans is the most important task in our lives. As in software, it is very time consumable but also as in software, it is improvement and incredible satisfaction to see better version of yourself, getting more and more features (even if that sometimes means actually getting read of other/bad features).

This all is blending with my work at Purism. I spend a lot of time thinking about projects, development and future. I must do that in order not to make grave mistakes. Failing hardware and software is not grave mistake. Serious, but not grave. Grave is if we betray ourselves and our community in pursue for Freedom. We are trying to unify many things - we want to give you security, privacy and FREEDOM with convenience. So I am pushing myself out of comfort zones and also out of conventional and sometimes even my standard way of thinking. I have seen that non-existing infrastructure for PureOS is hurting is a lot but I needed to cope with it to the time where I will be able to say: not anymore, we are starting to build our own infrastructure. I was coping with Cloudflare being assholes to Tor users but now we also shifting away from them. I came to team where people didn't properly understand what and why are we building this. Came to very small and not that efficient team.

Now, we employed a dedicated and hard working person on operations (Goran) which I trust. We have dedicated support person (Mladen) which tries hard to work with people. A very creative visual mastermind (Francois). We have a capable Debian Developer (Matthias Klumpp) working on PureOS new infra. We have a capable and dedicated sysadmins (Theo and Stelio) which we didn't even have in past. We are trying to LEVEL UP Free software and unify them in convenient solution which is lead by Joey Hess. We have a hard-working PureOS developer (Hema) who is coping with current non-existent PureOS infra. We have GNOME Boards of Directors person (Jeff) who is trying to light up our image in world (working with James, to try bring some lights into our shadows caused by infinite supply chain delays). We have created Advisory Board for Freedom, Privacy and Security which I don't want to name now as we are preparing to announce soon that (and trust me, we have good people in here).

But, the most important thing here is not that they are all capable or cool people. It is the core value in all of them - they care about Freedom and I trust them on their paths. The trust is always important but in Purism it is essential for our work. I built the workflow without time management (everyone spends their time every single day as they see it fit as long as the work gets done). And we don't create insane short deadlines because everyone else thinks it is important (and rarely something is more important than our time freedom). So the trust is built out of knowledge and the knowledge I have about them and their works is because we freely share with no strings attached.

Because of them, and other good people from our community I have the energy to sacrifice my entire time for Purism. It is not white and black: CEO and me don't always agree, some members of my team don't always agree with me or I with them, some people in community are very rude, impolite and don't respect our work but even with disagreement everyone in Purism finds agreement at the end (we use facts in our judgments) and all the people who just try to disturb my and mine teams work aren't as efficient as all the lovely words of people who believe in us, who send us words of support and who share ideas and their thoughts with us. There is no more satisfaction for me than reading a personal mail giving us kudos for the work and their understanding of underlaying amount of work and issues.

While we are limited with resources we had an occasional outcry from community to help us. Now I want to help them to help me (you see the Freedom of sharing here?). PureOS has now a wiki. It will be a community wiki which is endorsed by Purism as company. Yes you read it right, Purism considers its community part of company (you don't need to get paycheck to be Purism member). That is why a call upon contributors (technical but mostly non-technical too) to help us make PureOS wiki the best resource on net for our needs. Write tutorials for others, gather and put info on wiki, create an ideas page and vote on them so we can see what community wants to see, chat with us so we all understand what, why and how are we working on things. Make it as transparent as possible. Everyone interested please get in touch with our teams by either poking us online (IRC, social accounts) or via emails (our personal or [hr, pr, feedback]@puri.sm.

To finish this writing (as it is 8am here and I still want to rest a bit because I will have meetings for 6 hours straight today) - I wanted to share some personal insight into few things from my point of view. I wanted to say despite all the troubles and people who tried to make our time even harder (and it is already hard by all the limitation which come naturally today with our kind of work), we still create products, we still ship them, we still improved step by step, we still hired and we are still building. Keeping all that together and making progress is for me a milestone greater than just creating a technical product. I just hope we will continue and improve our pace so we can start progressing towards my personal great goal - integrate and cooperate with most of FLOSS ecosystem.

P.S. yes, I also (finally!) became an official Debian Developer - still didn't have time to sit and properly think and cry (as every good men) about it.

I went to Defcon24 as Purism representative. It was (as usual) held in Las Vegas, the city of sin. In the same module as with DebConf, here we go with good, bad and ugly.

Good

Badges are really cool. You can find good hackers here and there (but very small number compared to total number). Some talks are good and workshop + village idea looks good (although I didn't manage to attend any workshop as there was place for 1100 and there were 22000 attendees). The movie night idea is cool and Arcade space (where you can play old arcade games, relax and hack and also listen to some cool music) is really lovely. Also you have a camp/village for kids learning things such as electronics, soldering etc but you need to pay attention that they don't see too much of twisted folks that also gather on this con. And that's it. Oh, yea, Dark Tangent appears actually to be cool dude.

Bad

One does not simply hold a so-called hacker conference in Las Vegas. Having a conference inside hotel/casino where you mix with gamblers and casino workes (for good or for bad) is simply not in hacker spirit and certainly brings all kind of people to the same place. Also, there were simply not enough space for 22000 Defcon attendees, and you don't get proud of having on average ONLY 40min lines. You get proud if you don't have lines! Organization is not the strongest part of Defcon.

Huge majority of attendees are not hackers. They are script kiddies, hacker wannabes, comic con people, few totally lost souls etc etc. That simply brings the quality of a conference down. Yes it is cool to have mix of many diverse people but not for the sake of just having people.

Ugly

They lack Code of Conduct (everyone knows I am not in favor of any writens rules how people should behave but after Defcon I clearly see need for it). Actually, tbh, they do have it but no one gives a damn about it. And you should report to Goons, more about them below. Sexism is huge here. I remember and hear about stories of sexual harassment in IT industry, but Debian somehow mitigated that before me entering its domains, so I never experienced it. The sheer number of sexist behavior on Defcon is tremendous. It appears to me that those people had lonely childhood and now they act as a spoiled 6 year old: they're spoiled, they need to yell to show their point, they have low and stupid sexist jokes and they simply think that is cool.

Majority of Goons (their coordinators or whatever) are simply idiots. I don't know do they feel they have some superpowers, or are drunk or just stupid but yelling on people, throwing low jokes on people, more yelling, cursing all the time, more yelling - simply doesn't work for me. So now you can see the irony of CoC on Defcon. They even like to say, hey we are old farts, let us our con be as we want it to be. So no real diversity there. Either it is their way, and god forsaken if you try to change something for better and make them stop cursing or throwing sexist jokes ("squeeze, people. together, touch each other, trust me it will feel good"), or highway.

Also it appears that to huge number of vocal people, word "fuck" has some fetish meaning. Either it needs to show how "fucking awesome this con or they are" or to "fucking tell few things about random fucking stuff". Thank you, but no thank you.

So what did I do during con. I attended few talks, had some discussion with people, went to one party (great DJs, again people doing stupid things, like breaking invertory to name just one of them) and had so much time (read "I was bored") that I bought domain, brough up server on which I configured nginx and cp'ed this blog to blog.zlatan.tech (yes, recently I added letsencrypt because it is, let me be in Defcon mood, FUCKING AWESOME GRRR UGH) and now I even made .onion domain for it. What can boredom do to people, right?

So the ultimate question is - would I go again to Defcon. I am strongly leaning to no, but in my nature is to give second chance and now I have more experience (and I also have thick skin so I guess I can play calm for one more round).

DebConf16

Finally got some time to write this blog post. DebConf for me is always something special, a family gathering of weird combination of geeks (or is weird a default geek state?). To be honest, I finally can compare Debian as hacker conference to other so-called hacker conferences. With that hat on, I can say that Debian is by far the most organized and highest quality conference. Maybe I am biased, but I don't care too much about that. I simply love Debian and that is no secret. So lets dive into my view on DebConf16 which was held in Cape Town, South Africa.

Cape Town

This was the first time we had conference on African continent (and I now see for the first time DebConf bid for Asia, which leaves only Australia and beautiful Pacific islands to start a bid). Cape Town by itself, is pretty much Europe-like city. That was kinda a bum for me on first day, especially as we were hosted at University of Cape Town (which is quite beautiful uni) and the surrounding neighborhood was very European. Almost right after the first day I was fine because I started exploring the huge city. Cape Town is really huge, it has by stats ~4mil people, and unofficially it has ~6mil. Certainly a lot to explore and I hope one day to be back there (I actually hope as soon as possible).

The good, bad and ugly

I will start with bad and ugly as I want to finish with good notes.

Racism down there is still HUGE. You don't have signs on the road saying that, but there is clearly separation between white and black people. The houses near uni all had fences on walls (most of them even electrical ones with sharp blades on it) with bars on windows. That just bring tensions and certainly doesn't improve anything. To be honest, if someone wants to break in they still can do easily so the fences maybe need to bring intimidation but they actually only bring tension (my personal view). Also many houses have sign of Armed Force Response (something in those lines) where in case someone would start breaking in, armed forces would come to protect the home.

Also compared to workforce, white appear to hold most of profit/big business positions and fields, while black are street workers, bar workers etc etc. On the street you can feel from time to time the tension between people. Going out to bars also showed the separation - they were either almost exclusively white or exclusively black. Very sad state to see. Sharing love and mixing is something that pushes us forward and here I saw clear blockades for such things.

The bad part of Cape Town is, and this is not only special to Cape Town but to almost all major cities, is that small crime is on wide scale. Pickpocketing here is something you must pay attention to it. To me, personally, nothing happened but I heard a lot of stories from my friends on whom were such activities attempted (although I am not sure did the criminals succeed).

Enough of bad as my blog post will not change this and it is a topic for debate and active involvement which I can't unfortunately do at this moment.

THE GOOD!

There are so many great local people I met! As I mentioned, I want to visit that city again and again and again. If you don't fear of those bad things, this city has great local cuisine, a lot of great people, awesome art soul and they dance with heart (I guess when you live in rough times, you try to use free time at your best). There were difference between white and black bars/clubs - white were almost like standard European, a lot of drinking and not much dancing, and black were a lot of dancing and not much drinking (maybe the economical power has something to do with it but I certainly felt more love in black bars).

Cape Town has awesome mountain, the Table Mountain. I went on hiking with my friends, and I must say (again to myself) - do the damn hiking as much as possible. After every hike I feel so inspired, that I will start thinking that I hate myself for not doing it more often! The view from Table mountain is just majestic (you can even see the Cape of Good Hope). The WOW moments are just firing up in you.

Now lets transfer to DebConf itself. As always, organization was on quite high level. I loved the badge design, it had a map and nice amount of information on it. The place we stayed was kinda not that good but if you take it into account that those a old student dorms (in we all were in female student dorm :D ) it is pretty fancy by its own account. Talks were near which is always good. The general layout of talks and front desk position was perfect in my opinion. All in one place basically.

Wine and Cheese this year was kinda funny story because of the cheese restrictions but Cheese cabal managed to pull out things. It was actually very well organized. Met some new people during the party/ceremony which always makes me grow as a person. Cultural mix on DebConf is just fantastic. Not only you learn a lot about Debian, hacking on it, but sheer cultural diversity makes this small con such a vibrant place and home to a lot.

Debian Dinner happened in Aquarium were I had nice dinner and chat with my old friends. Aquarium by itself is a thing where you can visit and see a lot of strange creatures that live on this third rock from Sun.

Speaking of old friends - I love that I Apollo again rejoined us (by missing the DebConf15), seeing Joel again (and he finally visited Banja Luka as aftermath!), mbiebl, ah, moray, Milan, santiago and tons of others. Of course we always miss a few such as zack and vorlon this year (but they had pretty okay-ish reasons I would say).

Speaking of new friends, I made few local friends which makes me happy and at least one Indian/Hindu friend. Why did I mention this separately - well we had an accident during Group Photo (btw, where is our Lithuanian, German based nowdays, photographer?!) where 3 laptops of our GSoC students were stolen :( . I was luckily enough to, on behalf of Purism, donate Librem11 prototype to one of them, which ended up being the Indian friend. She is working on real time communications which is of interest also to Purism for our future projects.

Regarding Debian Day Trip, Joel and me opted out and we went on our own adventure through Cape Town in pursue of meeting and talking to local people, finding out interesting things which proved to be a great decision. We found about their first Thursday of month festival and we found about Mama Africa restaurant. That restaurant is going into special memories (me playing drums with local band must always be a special memory, right?!).

Huh, to be honest writing about DebConf would probably need a book by itself and I always try to keep my posts as short as possible so I will try to stop here (maybe I write few bits in future more about it but hardly).

Now the notes. Although I saw the racial segregation, I also saw the hope. These things need time. I come from country that is torn apart in nationalism and religious hate so I understand this issues is hard and deep on so many levels. While the tensions are high, I see people try to talk about it, try to find solution and I feel it is slowly transforming into open society, where we will realize that there is only one race on this planet and it is called - HUMAN RACE. We are all earthlings, and as sooner we realize that, sooner we will be on path to really build society up and not fake things that actually are enslaving our minds.

I just want in the end to say thank you DebConf, thank you Debian and everyone could learn from this community as a model (which can be improved!) for future societies.

Huh, where do I start. I started working for a great CEO and great company known as Purism. What is so great about it? First of all, CEO (Todd Weaver), is incredible passionate about Free software. Yes, you read it correctly. Free software. Not Open Source definition, but Free software definition. I want to repeat this like a mantra. In Purism we try to integrate high-end hardware with Free software. Not only that, we want our hardware to be Free as much as possible. No, we want to make it entirely Free but at the moment we don't achieve that. So instead going the way of using older hardware (as Ministry of Freedom does, and kudos to them for making such option available), we sacrifice this bit for the momentum we hope to gain - that brings growth and growth brings us much better position when we sit at negotiation table with hardware producers. If negotiations even fail, with growth we will have enough chances to heavily invest in things such as openRISC or freeing cellular modules. We want to provide in future entirely Free hardware&software device that has integrated security and privacy focus while it is easy to use and convenient as any other mainstream OS. And we choose to currently sacrifice few things to stay in loop.

Surely that can't be the only thing - and it isn't. Our current hardware runs entirely on Free software. You can install Debian main on it and all will work out of box. I know I did this and enjoy my Debian more than ever. We also have margin share program where part of profit we donate to Free software projects. We are also discussing a lot of new business model where our community will get a lot of influence (stay tuned for this). Besides all this, our OS (called PureOS - yes, a bit misfortune that we took the name of dormant distribution), was Trisquel based but now it is Debian testing based. Current PureOS 2.0 is coming with default DE as Cinnamom but we are already baking PureOS 3.0 which is going to come with GNOME Shell as default.

Why is this important? Well, around 12 hours ago we launched a tablet campaign on Indiegogo which comes with GNOME Shell and PureOS as default. Not one, but two tablets actually (although we heavily focus on 11" one). This is the product of mine 4 months dedicated work at Purism. I must give kudos to all Purism members that pushed their parts in preparation for this campaign. It was hell of a ride.

I have also approached (of course!) Debian for creation of OEM installations ISOs for our Librem products. This way, with every sold Librem that ships with Debian preinstalled, Debian will get donation. It is our way to show gratitude to Debian for all the work our community does (yes, I am still extremely proud Debian dude and I will stay like that!). Oh yes, I am the chief technology person at Purism, and besides all goals we have, I also plan (dream) about Purism being the company that has highest number of Debian Developers. In that terms I am very proud to say that Matthias Klumpp became part of Purism. Hopefully we soon extend the number of Debian population in Purism.

Of course, I think it is fairly known that I am easy to approach so if anyone has any questions (as I didn't want this post to be too long) feel free to contact me. Also - in Free software spirit - we welcome any community engagement, suggestion and/or feedback.

Free Software Foundation is also in process of funding and if you want them to shine still (or you simply love GNU manifesto or many other things this project has done for us in last 3 decades) then please support their fund raising campaign.

Lets create GNU world!

First: I am in Heidelberg next ~10 days so if anyone wants to meet up for a beer, keysigning and chats about FLOSS world, I am very happy to do that. Mail or ping me!

Second: After partnership with Microsoft, I lost interest and a bit of trust in Linux Foundation. After this move I am in total distrust with them and don't want them even represent Linux at all.

If you really care about FLOSS world and your community (thus being socially responsible person) please do donate to Software Freedom Conservancy.

Yes again, I like it that way. Twice! Anyway, we have here what is called Serbian New Year (it is again, Orthodox by Julian calendar).

So, if you missed or think you can do better New Year's resolutions - feel free to join the party (just a notice, besides firework we have a lot of gun fire here during that time. A LOT.).

Advice for everyone's resolution list: be better version of yourself, have more happy days.

Cheers. (oh, yes, get more involved in Debian)