For the month of June, we did the following:


Not too much to report on my end for the last couple months other than getting back to COAD. The first major piece of news is that DConf 2018 happened in May and Luís Marques gave a talk arguing against OOP:



I also installed Qubes OS on my laptop. Overall, I am happy with it and am going to continue using it on my laptop for the foreseeable future but I'll detail all the pain points I ran into here for anyone curious. Getting an ISO that matched the checksums took numerous tries, getting it copied onto a flash drive without corruption took multiple tries (might be time for me to invest in a new one...) and getting Qubes to install took numerous tries. Right now I'm just using the Fedora and Whonix vm templates. In general, documentation is pretty poor but I've been able to figure everything I've needed out, I had to write some custom scripts to provide a pass menu using dmenu (which was a bit of a trick since it involves clipboard management between vms) and a little one to allow my prtsc key to run ImageMagick's `import`, save the result with a timestamp, and move it to my untrusted vm. I still don't have everything configured just the way I like (so much to do, so little time). The device support is a bit buggy with respect to a usb device being removed unsafely, system being suspended and resumed, and occasionally I run into issues with my webcam and built-in speakers (although I never tried the built-in speakers before using Qubes so that might be a hardware issue). With the webcam, sometimes Qubes loses track of the device, sometimes it goes black randomly and needs to be detached and reattached to the vm, sometimes a suspend and resume will fix it if it's borked, sometimes a full reboot is needed. However, most of the time it works fine so it isn't a major pain. The speakers sometimes do not physically produce sound despite everything looking fine in pulse audio, again, this might actually be a hardware issue. This isn't really an issue for me, as I always wear headphones anyway. The shutdown/reboot/boot times are horrendously slow, like on the same level of bad as MS Windows. I can't interface with my android phone over usb with adb, I have to connect to it over wifi. Qubes OS is not really able to screen share by design, would be nice, but I can live without it (not for a work machine of course). With those complaints out of the way, the system is really great at what it does. I use a work vm, a personal vm, an untrusted vm, a vault with my pass repo, sys-net and sys-firewall marshal access to the network, sys-usb marshals access to usb devices, sys-whonix for whonix vms, and I can launch applications in disposable vms that only live for the life of the program(s) being run in them! It is all seamless and performs great. i3 in dom0 is really great and it even has this slick feature out-of-the-box where M-enter opens a terminal in whatever vm the window with current focus is in (dom0 by default)

Casey had an excellent talk that is worth watching:



I got the HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board purchased in May as well.

In June, Microsoft acquired Github, so I moved to Gitlab. The repos for the series are now on Gitlab and can be found at the usual link (code.riscy.tv). I ran a poll on twitter regarding whether I should tweet before I go live and 2 out of 3 people voted yes, so I now tweet when I go live (twitter.riscy.tv).

The most exciting news of June is that Miblo created an absolutely amazing early access episode guide for the series (guide.riscy.tv). He even went above and beyond and created a RISCY BUSINESS logo!

Within the world of RISC-V videos, Per has been continuing to do absolutely amazing work on his Bitwise series, Robert Baruch has been continuing his LMARV series, and Sam Falvo started a new series about his Kestrel Computer Project. All of these series are listed on links.riscy.tv.

In the coming months I'm excited to work on building my RISC-V PC, hand-assemble some code, and continue working through the books on the Book Club. I'm looking forward to continuing work on pcalc, playing with the hifive1, and doing homework from Bitwise as time permits. I also want to do some community spotlight videos to check out RiskyFive's DHDL and serge_rgb's scc projects.

Stay RISCY!