Terracrypt

A brief aside on structured messaging

2026-04-11T14:29:00Z

I just had a realization on a walk this morning that feels obvious in hindsight, but that I figured I should write down somewhere. I've been thinking about object-capability messaging apps for a while now, and something that's been bugging me is: how do you represent messages such that you can safely embed a capability in a message?

And I feel a little bit silly having not really internalized the connection until now, because I had all the pieces this whole time, but the answer is: you represent the message as structured data, not as a string! With techniques like those in Structurally fixing injection bugs, if your data is in a structured format, you can stick an object reference right in the middle of it in the same way you would put one in any other data structure. For a concrete example, assume you create the following message as a quasiquoted s-expression, with lamp in the environment:

(Hi Alice! Here's a capability to my lamp: ,lamp)

And in Alice's UI, this might be rendered as:

Hi Alice! Here's a capability to my lamp:

Office Lamp

There are more complexities to consider here, of course. What do you do with a capability you receive from someone via a message? Do you aggregate them together into a wallet of sorts? How do you detect what sort of capability you've received so you can show a meaningful UI for interacting with it? But this little insight cleared up a bit of confusion I had about how you might build this sort of thing.

Also: I wrote this blog post in Skribe format, because that involves writing a structured document. Gives me a better idea of what that might feel like. You can see the source code of this post here!

What's in my bag? (And wait, what is my bag?)

2026-04-05T15:38:00Z

I've settled on a bit of a peculiar everyday setup, driven by my choice of devices and some of my particular needs. At the encouragement of some internet friends, I figured I'd write something up to go through what I use, in case others find it interesting or useful.

As a note, this genre of posts on the web can at times encourage consumerism, and I'd like to be mindful of that. So right up front, I'd like to say: I'm not recommending that you go out and buy any of these things! As I say, this setup is pretty specific to my own needs. While I hope this gives someone some inspiration, consider your actual needs before opening up your wallet.

Similarly, while I'll include links to the various components so the specs are easy to find, none of them are affiliate links. I'm not selling anything here.

So, here it is:

The main device I keep with me, and what I needed to make sure to accommodate, is the MNT Pocket Reform. I've used several tiny computers over the years and have always been fond of them. One of the first laptops I ever used was my dad's Toshiba Libretto 70ct back in the day, which I later got as a hand-me-down once it had gotten pretty outdated. Later, in high school and early in college, I would use an Eee PC 1000.

The netbook trend died for a number of reasons, but I always missed them - so when I heard that MNT was making what was effectively a modern open hardware netbook, I just had to give it a try. And, well, I've been using it as basically my main non-work machine out of the house since I got it.

It has its flaws (I should really do a long-term review soon), but it's close enough form-factor-wise to my ideal computer that I hope I'll be able to continue using, maintaining, and upgrading it in the long run.

Now, the Pocket Reform is tiny enough to fit in nearly any bag, so why do I have this weird-looking pouch system? Well...

I've had chronic back pain for well over a decade now, and it's exacerbated by (unfortunately) nearly any backpack, including small sling bags. Despite my best efforts, I've never been able to do much to eliminate it. I've discovered that backpacks with a hip belt and sternum strap can be less of a problem, because they shift more of the weight to my hips, but you need a pretty big backpack to make that practical and it becomes more cumbersome to put on and take off. I do now use one of these when I head into the office, because my company-issued laptop is not as small as the Pocket Reform. But outside work, I have more options. :)

Besides bags with hip belts, I've also found that lightweight enough shoulder bags that put the weight more to the side and in front give me fewer problems. For a while, I was using a Tom Bihn cafe bag. This worked pretty well, but had two problems:

It only had one large compartment, which meant I also tended to keep the Pocket Reform in its sleeve to keep it from getting scratched by other things in the bag. That took up a lot of internal space.
It didn't have enough room for both the Pocket Reform and a water bottle, and I also get dehydrated very easily so I wanted to have an easy way to keep a water bottle with me.

So when I stumbled upon this modular pouch sling from DSPTCH, the gears in my head started turning.

It's basically a shoulder sling with a strip of MOLLE webbing on it. The same company also sells a bunch of things that can attach to MOLLE webbing, including a water bottle holder - which has turned out to be very nice, because it keeps my water bottle in reach all the time when I'm out walking.

Aside from the water bottle holder, I have three pouches on this thing. The smallest two, also from DSPTCH, are where I keep various odds and ends. One of them is the unit zipper pouch, which is stackable as it has webbing on both sides. So I have a second pouch attached to the front of that one, which is an older model they no longer sell that I got on clearance. The zipper pouch holds some cheap (but quite good!) Koss headphones and a screwdriver; the pouch in front holds a small USB-C power brick and some cables.

Then there's the larger pouch - that's where I keep the Pocket Reform. That one's this utility pouch from Condor. This is also where I keep a long (10-ft) USB-C cable and a small bag with some adapters that are useful for the Pocket Reform. It's a bit snug, but it all fits.

And a cassette tape patch on the front to add a little bit of personality, and in a (perhaps futile) attempt to make it all look just a little bit less tacticool.

Probably the thing I'm least happy about with this setup is the larger pouch, because it has velcro holding it shut. That makes it obnoxiously loud to open in a quiet room, which isn't often an issue for me day to day, but it's something I occasionally need to consider. (The Pocket Reform's keyboard is also pretty loud in those situations though thanks to its clicky mechanical switches. MNT's working on a newer revision of the Pocket keyboard, and I'll probably get the DIY kit and install quieter switches once that's out.)

This has worked well enough for me that I think I'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable future. It doesn't put much extra strain on my back, and it puts everything I need within reach. And I have come to appreciate how much customization potential there is when things are modular. I like that in my hardware, and it's kinda nice to have in my, ah, soft wear too.

As always, my inbox is open. Do you have a similar setup? Do you have suggestions for how I could improve this? I'd love to hear about them!

A vision of computing in the near future

2026-03-01T20:44:00Z

This is a vision of a future that could be - one among many.

August 1, 2040

I wake up from a good night's sleep to a gentle alarm from my pocket computer sitting across the room. Yawning, I get out of bed and turn off the alarm.

I'm a programmer, fresh out of college. There was a time when some said we wouldn't need programmers anymore and that AI would do all the work. That turned out not to work quite so well - those companies that went all-in and fired their development teams found they had an unmaintainable mess on their hands a few years later. AI's still around in places, and some people do use it and like it, but it's far from universal.

The AI datacenters aren't around anymore, though. Casualties of the AI crash.

But the RAM crisis of the mid-2020s never quite ended. After years of super high demand from the AI companies for memory and initial hesitation, the few companies manufacturing DRAM finally gave in and ramped up production... just in time for the bubble to burst. Nearly all of them went bust, and RAM these days is especially hard to come by.

I get dressed, make sure I have my pocket computer, wallet, and keys, and head to the local coworking space.

When I get there, I sit down at one of the displays and plug my computer in. Years ago, most developers would have looked at this setup and found it unbearable. Surely that tiny computer can't be enough for programming, they'd say? But the RAM crisis would force something of a mindset change: we'd need to do more with less.

See, in the mid-2020s, the amount of RAM and storage in smartphones was already starting to approach that in laptops. And with the price of RAM on the rise, more and more people had to make the tradeoff: between only having a smartphone or only having a laptop, which would you choose? Most people, especially at the time, were going to pick the smartphone.

So a lot of people started finding ways to get their work done with only a smartphone, and it turned out to work better than a lot of people expected. There had been a small cadre of (perhaps somewhat masochistic) folks trying to make this work for years, and the result was that by and large, the software was mostly ready by the time it started to matter. Between spending $1500 on a laptop that would have been $500 just a few years before, or plugging your phone into a monitor with a $15 dongle, for most people it was an easy choice.

By 2027, Google had already put a desktop mode on most Android phones that could run Linux apps through a software update, and mobile Linux distros (which already had useful desktops) were starting to be capable phones on more and more hardware. Apple was the holdout, but it only took them a few more years to make iPhones act as Macs when plugged in after they realized people weren't likely to spend $1500 on an entry-level MacBook with an iPhone chip after having just spent $1500 on their iPhone.

It didn't take long for people to start thinking of their smartphones as just "computers," and calling them that.

It was true, though, that pocket computers didn't quite have the power for every task. Programmers using interpreted languages were often able to work locally without problems, but anything with long compile times got increasingly painful. So companies started setting up build servers for their employees, and hackerspaces got in the game shortly after for their members. Sharing memory and compute between multiple people turned out to be more economical than giving everyone a ton of RAM locally.

This did take a lot of adjustment on the part of build tools. Offloading builds to more powerful machines was something that had always been possible (distcc had been around for decades after all), but it wasn't common.

When I finish up work for the day, I ride my bike across town to the local library. I've got some writing I'd like to do, and I've been feeling a bit cooped up at home lately.

The library has a bunch of displays set up on desks as well, but I've just been working at a desk all day and I'd rather chill in a window nook, so I check out a lapdock from the front desk. The library bought these things about a decade ago (pretty cheaply since they don't have RAM or storage), and other than needing a few battery replacements over the years they still work just fine.

Once I'm done writing, I hit a switch in the corner to connect up to the social net. My computer starts syncing with my relay at home, and I start catching up on what my friends have posted lately.

Years ago, we were mostly using social networks hosted in datacenters somewhere. But when fascism was on the rise in the mid-2020s, governments started putting pressure on the big social networks to control the narrative. X was captured from the start of course, but Meta fell in line pretty quickly. Bluesky held out for a while, but their centralized AppView was a pretty big target, and eventually they capitulated. The few other providers that could afford to run alternative AppViews fell under similar pressure.

The Fediverse made for a harder network to control, without having just a few large companies to put pressure on. A lot of people moved there, and many of them stuck with it. But in part because of the RAM shortage and increasing hosting costs, a lot of small server admins found it hard to keep up with.

Thankfully, though, development on peer-to-peer social networking tools like Spritely's has progressed to the point where running a social network without servers in a datacenter is more and more practical. Instead of living on one server, your profile lives on your local device. You still need a relay somewhere with a more reliable network connection and power source, but it can live just about anywhere, can't see your messages, and you can switch relays whenever you want.

Some people use relays run by one of their neighbors or their local library, and some people run their own relays at home. I have my own, running on my old pocket computer. The last time I upgraded, I took the battery out of my old one and set it up as a relay. It's usually pretty easy to set one up these days if you have a device to put it on, it's pretty much like installing any other app. Then you plug it in, scan a QR code, and you're good to go.

Some devices are more locked down, but on most there are ways to unlock them, and there's a pretty good network of folks helping others out with that.

That weekend, I head over to my local hackerspace to help some folks repurpose their old pocket computers. Manufacturers got better about repairability after a while (nobody wants to be told they need to buy a new expensive device when it just needs a new battery) but a lot of earlier models with non-removable batteries are still floating around. You don't necessarily want to keep those plugged in 24/7 because of the fire risk, but that's what you need to do to use it as a relay. So those of us with the repair skills to do so have been volunteering to take those older devices apart and get them running without their batteries. Sometimes they can already run without a battery, and sometimes they need a dummy battery of sorts installed, but we've been doing this long enough that we've pretty much gotten it down to a science.

When I get home, I pop a controller on the back of my pocket computer and play some video games. I've been mostly playing retro games lately, but most contemporary games run fine on this thing too. Game graphics kinda leveled out around the PS5 era, since a lot of people couldn't afford new dedicated game consoles after that. But it didn't take too long for phones to catch up, and as with desktops, nowadays most people have one device to do it all.

I certainly don't expect everything in this little vignette to happen. Maybe RAM prices do actually recover in a few years (actually probably pretty likely). Maybe AI turns out not to be a bubble and it's just ever-present from now on. Maybe we do all lose our jobs in a few years. Who knows.

Maybe phones get so locked down that you can't run unapproved software on anything but a Linux phone, and manufacturers manage to close all workarounds. Likely Apple will never actually open up a desktop mode on their phones.

Maybe, hopefully, we successfully push back fascism, and hold on to democracy.

My goal in this piece was to explore a particular "what if" - what if some of the problems we're facing right now get worse from here? What if computers stay expensive? What if we need alternative social networks, because the ones we have today get captured?

And how can we collectively try to make the most of that possible future?

Terracrypt

A brief aside on structured messaging

What's in my bag? (And wait, what *is* my bag?)

A vision of computing in the near future

What's in my bag? (And wait, what is my bag?)