Jacki's Developer Blog

Hey everyone, welcome to my yearly recap of the year 2024. What happened? What did I work on? Well, quite a lot actually. So let’s start with the biggest project and continue from there. The GNUnet Messenger got funding from NLnet again as I mentioned in the end of last year. The new goal was to improve usability and add new features. What features are we talking about exactly? My concept was to achieve feature parity with most popular messaging apps but sticking to a decentralized context. For example I wanted to add profile pictures. But we can’t simply upload image files to a profile picture server/provider and poll from there for any new contact we get. So the solution required a bit of hacking around in the back-end. I used reclaimID from GNUnet to allow users sharing personal information with selected contacts of their choice and profile pictures may be such personal information for example. That means we can upload encrypted image files to a decentralized file sharing ser...

Hey everyone, welcome to my second (maybe this will become yearly now) overview of what projects I contributed to over the last year. You might remember that I already had enough projects for a filled up schedule but I can ensure you, I found something to derail my focus even more. But let’s call it another little gift to unwrap instead. The graphical Messenger application only got a few fixes, mostly to patch package configurations. I also changed the build system from GNU Autotools to Meson . Hopefully that’s the last time I change the build system. The service in GNUnet got some more contributions from me lately. Partially because I got financial support from NLnet again which I’m thankfully for. Also because I want to bring my studies to an end and it’s a great topic for research. But honestly I want this project to become a practical option for messaging. So you can expect more contributions on this project in the next months as well as my monthly blog posts about its progres...

Over the last months (from April to September) I tinkered around with an Nreal Air. It’s an augmented reality device, essentially a pair of glasses with displays projecting a virtual content into your view. You can connect it to your phone, console or PC via a USB-C cable. Then in theory you can have 360° virtual monitors. But the whole package had a slight flaw. The manufacturer only targets Android, iOS, macOS and Windows with an own proprietary SDK and an app. So even the community on those platforms wasn’t entirely happy with that. Why did I get such a device then? Well, I’ve seen a review of it and it was mentioned to support the Steam Deck. So naturally I thought if any device running GNU/Linux is supported in any way at all, I could likely get it to work with every device running GNU/Linux. Then I received the actual hardware and I had no officially supported device other than my Steam Deck. But with that it worked, right? Well some functionality worked great out of the box. I...