We don’t talk a lot in public about the big vision for Tailscale, why we’re really here. Usually I prefer to focus on what exists right now, and what we’re going to do in the next few months. But let’s look at the biggest of big pictures for a change.

This post outlines how I used a small 2 inch display as a monitor for my pi. Where it can display tty terminals and X desktops and applications as if it was a normal screen connected over hdmi. My overall goal is to have a sort of handheld “console” that I can connect a keyboard to and use as a normal computer. This post implements the display functionality needed to fulfill part of the goal. I lay out the steps needed for interacting with the display over spi and the issues I encountered trying to use it like a monitor. The end result is a system service that runs on startup, consuming 2.5 mb of ram and ~2% of the CPU. It also respects the X display power management system (dpms) to save on battery life by going to sleep and turning the backlight off.

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Hosts Richard and Tobias talk about this new podcast, why open source technology is important for climate change, and what they hope to talk about with future guests!

This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with notes, which may be useful to view together with the text below. In the notes there are also additional URLs that back up the claims I make in what follows.

On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.