April 2026

Yurt, from the inside

Yurt assembly, Early May 2026

Different projects, one direction.

April was really nice. I've had lots of time off that I used to rest, play and give a hand to a few folks with their houses (moving, disassembling, building) during weekends.

It's great to feel spring. I mean, feel it flowing in me, bringing me some sense of reconnection.

I've found what I think I should call "peace", in ways I didn't thought I would, which is at the same time great and weird.

Great because I see this world a bit differently than I saw it before; at the — exact — same time some are pushing this world into a disaster, others are extremely brilliant and human.

Weird because this is a disconnect with my previous way of seeing things, where I think I stopped seeing the good part. I need to readapt.

I guess that's the humanity I'm looking for.

Dangerzone - Freedom of the Press Foundation

It's now possible to reuse the dangerzone container image for other uses than dangerzone-the-software.

This enables derivative works, like using the container to do something else than getting pixels out of documents, while still benefiting from having a hardened sandbox that runs gVisor and is updated frequently for you.

This change make things easier for alternative implementations (dangerzone-rs is one), and allowed us to make our main test suite simpler and faster. As one of our goals is to make contribution easier, I believe it should help.

We're also making changes to how the packaging is done for Linux (Debian and Fedora): future versions will ship dangerzone without the container image. This is a long-standing blocker to get inclusion of dangerzone in mainstream Debian, while making our packages slimmer by 700MiB!

While doing so, I've made a proof of concept of reproducible Debian packages, which would be a cherry on the cake, helping us build packages locally and sign them in simpler ways.

As a side note, I've also updated the stats dashboard, and it's now possible to see the total number of downloads for the container images over time, in addition to who is contributing to the repository.

Festival des Médias Indépendants

Earlier this month, Free Press enthusiasts gathered together for a festival in Rennes, where I presented Dangerzone to journalists.

The event was great, but the workshop wasn't crowded. It was reserved to professionals, and most of them where already handling their booth.

Anyway, the feedback was great: people were genuinely interested in the software, and so I think it might be a good idea to do more presentations like this in the future.

More broadly, it's nice to see such a dynamic around here. It was a good opportunity to meet with journalists from all around France.

Meshtastic

I've started experimenting with long-range radio (LoRa), after Tracks did a short documentary about it.

I found the first user experience very satifying: ordering the hardware, powering it, connecting it to my phone and then I was able to communicate with another node right away.

It's still the early days for me, but it looks there is potential: I've found interested folks pretty easily, remotely and locally.

I've been using Meshtastic so far, but I want to experiment with other implementations, like reticulum which aren't tied to a specific hardware, making it possible to bridge network of different forms together, which is where I think things could be practical; especially given that everything is encrypted.

Feelings

Publié le 07 mai 2026 - Posté dans la catégorie weeknotes