Everything I saw (and didn’t see) at FOSDEM 2024

If you share my interests, you might be able to consider this a curated list of FOSDEM talks from this year. But unless you’re actually me, you probably don’t. Maybe it’s useful as an indication of the kind of things you can see while traipsing across the ULB campus, up and down staircases and through occasionally dark and mysterious corridors.

Saturday

From the lab to Jupyter : a brief history of computational notebooks from a STS perspective

This talk was less substantial than I’d hoped.
Open Food Facts: Learning and using Perl in 2024 to transform the food system!

Open Food Facts started out as a collaborative project to gather nutrition data, but manufacturers are now contributing data on their own products. It’s been adopted in France, while the Italian government is apparently, pushing to have it banned at EU level.

I’m not entirely convinced by the concept (especially around vague notions like “ultra-processed”) but I thought it was especially interesting as an example of success.
GnuCOBOL, the Free Industrial-ready Alternative for COBOL!

COBOL will never die, but you don’t have to be stuck with the same legacy suppliers. There are good, free, compatible implementations.
Ensuring Longevity: Strategies for Sustainable FLOSS Projects.

This talk was a bit vague, and not helped by the lack of visual materials.
Privacy-respecting usage metrics for free software projects

Argued that measurement has its use, and that there are ways to collect useful information without intruding on privacy, even if it restricts what you can collect. I think it’s a nice idea in theory, but whether it can survive contact with management I’m not sure.
Liquid Prompt: yes, we can drastically rethink the design of a shell prompt

Some people put a lot of effort into their terminal prompts. (Mine is just exit status if not zero, Git branch, and current directory, with a different colour on each computer so I know where I am.)
One way forward: finding a path to what comes after Unix

Why have we settled on Unix-like systems? Perhaps we should look at the successor system from the research lab that originally developed Unix.

This was an excellent talk despite the speaker being unable to connect his MacBook to the display and having to deliver it without slides. It’s worth observing that it’s not Linux that has a problem with external displays.
Magic and Software

An entertaining end to the day from a professional magician.

Sunday

How do you write an emulator anyway?

Some tips for how to get started writing emulators.
Comprehensible Open Hardware: Building the Open Book

The Open Book is an interesting project. I was hoping for a talk that went deeper into the technical details.
FreeCAD - state of the union

They’ve solved the topological naming problem! At least, that’s the claim. It’s a big deal if it works as advertised.
KiCad Status Update

Even though I’ve been using KiCad for years, I’ve been pronouncing it wrong. I had been saying /ˈkaɪkæd/ (like “sky”) but apparently it’s /ˈkikæd/ (like “key”), to rhyme with FreeCAD.
LibrePCB Status Update

LibrePCB looks like it has promise as a simpler PCB CAD system for people with less complicated requirements.
Live coding music with MicroBlocks and microcontrollers.

This was a light demo of live coding using a block-based visual programming system.
Gameboy Advance hacking for retrogamers

The GBA is surprisingly capable. You can even write games in Lua.
Running DOS & Unix on an 8-bit Commodore

This was an impressive presentation. First, the speaker showed how he built hardware and software to enable DOS to run on an oddball Commodore business computer from 1983, using a length of wire to trigger an interrupt every time I/O was accessed, and thus to simulate access to a different set of peripherals.

Then he did the same thing with a Z8001 and Z8010 MMU and ran Coherent on it.
A Game Boy and his cellphone

For a brief moment, in Japan, you could buy a peripheral that would let you download Game Boy games and play them against other people online.

Now, you can simulate that connection and play people across the internet, although many of those download-only games are lost in time.
Neo6502 in the Matrix - open source hardware and software modern retro computer with software defined architecture

This uses an RP2040 microcontroller to simulate the external world to which a 6502 CPU is connected. The name alludes to the simulated reality of the Matrix films. It’s clever, but I wasn’t sure who it’s for. If everything is emulated, is it really retrocomputing? And at that point, why not emulate the CPU as well?
PiStorm - The evolution of an open source Amiga accelerator

This speaker presented directly from an Amiga A1200 with a PiStorm fitted. It replaces the CPU with some glue and a Raspberry Pi running a Motorola emulator at about 1300 times the speed of the original A1200 CPU.
A journey documenting the Sanco 8003 computer

This was a fun story about an electronic engineeer who found an obscure 8-bit computer by the side of the road – so obscure, in fact, that there was no mention of it on the internet. He took it home, and with a friend reverse-engineered everything about it and got it working again, running its original CP/M.

Everything I wanted to see but couldn’t

On a couple of occasions, I was physically unable to get into a room, but I missed most of these due to schedule clashes and the distance between rooms in different parts of the campus.

Most of these seem to be available as videos. I’m going to catch up on talks I missed.