Marcin Juszkiewicz

3D printing at home

2026-05-22T09:17:00+02:00

After ten years of thinking about buying a 3D printer, I finally bought one.

First time: Anet A6

Around 2016 I was playing with some 3D printer at my friend’s company office. But no one there knew how to run it and I felt weird sitting at their place.

So started checking the market and found Anet A6 printer. Reviews were mixed. I got the impression that once you build the printer you need to print half of it again and repeat until it gets acceptable quality. I decided to skip it.

Some months later, at some local event, I saw Anet A6/A8 printers. Ouch, they were terrible!

Second moment: Ender 3

A few years passed, Creality launched Ender 3 line of 3D printers. Reviews were quite positive, printers looked more like a product than DIY hobby.

And then I got a message from brother-in-law that he bought one. So I did not have to.

Over the years, I printed countless items with his help.

Third case

A few months ago I started thinking about buying a 3D printer to have one at home, eliminating the need to go ~30km each way to collect prints.

Checked the market options and started watching reviews. Some models started to appear on a list of considered ones:

Anycubic Kobra S1
Bambu Lab P1S
Creality K2
Elegoo Centauri Carbon

Crossing out models

The more reviews I watched/read, the more I started to cross out.

Bambu Lab P1S

Bambu Lab P1S went out due to lack of communication between OrcaSlicer running on AArch64 desktop system — their networking plugin is a closed binary available only for x86-64 architecture.

Also there was a lot of noise about license violations.

And sorry, but Bambu Lab users give off a vibe similar to the Apple users. You know, “there is only one god” kind.

Elegoo Centauri Carbon 1/2

Carbon 1 has enclosure but, at the time I looked, it lacked any multimaterial solution. Instead they produced Centauri Carbon 2 (CC2) printer. Which looks weird.

The Carbon 2 requires its own slicer as it looks like more and more things done by other printers are being moved to slicing software. Anyone remember the HP 710c “winprinter”?

Creality K2

This printer did not vanish from the list — I decided to buy Anycubic Kobra S1.

First day

It took almost two weeks from order to delivery but yesterday I got Anycubic Kobra S1 Combo at home. I unpacked it, set it up, and played a bit with printing some basic stuff.

Rinkhals

I would not be myself without modifying the software of a device I just bought. And a 3D printer is no different.

So I took USB thumbdrive and installed Rinkhals to gain more control over my new device.

I do not care much about what exactly this project installs on my printer. Do not have to know what Klipper, Mainsail or Moonraker are. What matters to me is the ability to print directly from the OrcaSlicer running on my AArch64 desktop.

What to print?

My list of things to print has about twenty entries. Ranging from some small home improvements or replacing missing/broken pieces, to cases for my DIY keyboards and devices.

In the beginning, it gives instant gratification. I printed a piece in 3 minutes and one thing at home works better. Another piece, and my Lenovo thin terminal no longer moves because it is secured in three places.

Trivia

As one of things I got was ability to log in via SSH I had to check what hardware is used:

root@kobra-ks1-02ab:/root# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
BogoMIPS        : 48.00
Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xc07
CPU revision    : 5

Yes, this is single Cortex-A7 core. Rockchip RV1106G SoC.

I was hoping to never see 32-bit Arm hardware again…

New Fedora package: fedora-active-user

2026-05-04T08:37:00+02:00

During my work on the RISC-V 64-bit architecture port of Fedora, I created several pull requests to Fedora packages. And some were stalled…

Non-responsive maintainer process

Fedora project has a process called ‘non-responsive maintainer’. You check is maintainer on vacation, check latest activity and open a bug asking for action.

The problem was that it linked to fedora_active_user.py script which does not work since Fedora 41. During cycle of that release the python-fedora package got retired and no one updated the script.

Let me look

As my actions brought some complains (and some discussions) I decided to take a look at the script and make it work with current Fedora releases. Created pull request, mailed original author etc.

There was no answer of any kind so I decided to take over maintaining the script. Rewrote it to be Python 3 only, moved from urllib to requests, refactored some repeated code into functions etc.

Then started checking service by service how to get things working better. Turned out that script had several assumptions which not always apply.

FAS has separate email for Bugzilla

Fedora Accounts Service (FAS) has a separate field for the Bugzilla email. I did not had to look for testing accounts for this because that’s my case — I use ‘short’ Red Hat email in Bugzilla due to Single Sign-On (SSO) service we use and my ‘long’ one for the rest. So fedora-active-user script grabs user information from FAS and checks for separate Bugzilla email and use it if present.

FAS query requires Kerberos

To query FAS you need Kerberos ticket. Both urllib and requests packages have a way to use it for authentication — one extra package is needed to make it work.

Lack of valid ticket is caught and info is provided to the user.

Bugzilla is tricky

Querying Bugzilla service is the trickiest part. You can request data but there is no warranty that you get the latest one. Sure, there is the ‘order’ field for a query but it feels like a mere suggestion. It is nothing strange to get 2008 entries next to 2023 ones.

Wanna help?

For now, I am hosting fedora-active-user on GitHub. Will move it to Fedora Forge later this year. Feel free to open issues, send pull requests if you have suggestions or changes.

Current version is not the best one. It is a bit better than it was two weeks ago.

At the moment package is present in Fedora rawhide. I am waiting for branches for stable releases and updates will follow.

Example output

$ fedora-active-user --user hrw

Last action on koji:
   2026-05-04 built fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45
   2024-09-12 built python-system-calls-6.11.0-1.fc42
   2024-01-08 built python-system-calls-6.7.0-1.fc40
   2023-09-18 built python-system-calls-6.6.0-1.fc40
   2023-05-08 built python-system-calls-6.4.0-2.fc39
   2022-08-06 built python-system-calls-5.19.0-2.fc37
   2022-07-25 built python-system-calls-5.19.0-1.fc36
   2022-07-25 built python-system-calls-5.19.0-1.fc37
   2022-01-10 built python-system-calls-5.16.2-1.fc36
   2021-11-15 built python-system-calls-5.16.0-1.fc35

Last package updates on bodhi:
   2026-05-04 fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45
   2024-09-12 python-system-calls-6.11.0-1.fc42
   2024-01-08 python-system-calls-6.7.0-1.fc40
   2023-09-18 python-system-calls-6.6.0-1.fc40
   2023-05-08 python-system-calls-6.4.0-2.fc39
   2022-08-06 python-system-calls-5.19.0-2.fc37
   2022-07-25 python-system-calls-5.19.0-1.fc36
   2022-07-25 python-system-calls-5.19.0-1.fc37
   2022-01-10 python-system-calls-5.16.2-1.fc36
   2021-11-15 python-system-calls-5.16.0-1.fc35
   2021-11-15 python-system-calls-5.16.0-1.fc36
   2021-09-21 python-system-calls-5.15.5-1.fc36

Last actions performed according to fedmsg:
   2026-05-04 hrw commented on the pull-request rpms/prusa-slicer#67
   2026-05-04 hrw's Badges rank changed from 272 to 260
   2026-05-04 hrw was awarded the badge `Missed the Train`
   2026-05-04 hrw commented on update fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45 (karma: 0)
   2026-05-04 fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45 was tagged into f45 by bodhi
   2026-05-04 fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45 was untagged from f45-updates-candid
   2026-05-04 hrw's fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45 bodhi update has met stable te
   2026-05-04 fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45 was untagged from f45-updates-testin
   2026-05-04 fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45 was tagged into f45-updates-testing-
   2026-05-04 fedora-active-user-26.05.04-1.fc45 was untagged from f45-signing-pendin

Last emails on Fedora mailing lists:
   2026-04-29 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora
   2026-04-17 mjuszkiewicz@redhat.com as Marcin Juszkiewicz mailed devel@lists.fedora

Bugzilla activity (may not be the latest):
   No activity found on Bugzilla

Looks like I still need to work on querying Bugzilla ;D

Twenty-one years of blogging

2026-04-01T10:13:00+02:00

Twenty-one years ago I wrote:

This is 3th (or 4th) version of my website and I hope that this time it will stay for much longer and that I will use it more often to publish some OpenEmbedded related articles and informations.

And here we are, 21 years later. With the same website.

Time flows

For sure I managed to keep it running “for much longer” than any earlier version of my website. The previous one existed for about two years. Older ones were more Lynx bookmarks split into several files rather than a website.

Engines

When I started this website in 2005, WordPress was something new. Easy to use, no HTML knowledge needed etc.

In 2006, I created my own consulting company and moved to WordPress MU (MultiUser). I had two separate websites then — one for my company and my personal blog. Merged them into one a few years later.

In the meantime WPMU got integrated into WordPress. And one day I recreated the whole website on a fresh install of WP to cut more than half of the database size — there was a lot of unused data left from several plugins I used through all those years.

And then, in 2019, I said “good bye” to WordPress and moved to Pelican, static page generator. It was a good move. It cost me a day or two of handling WP export, cleaning posts, sorting out tags, images etc. It was worth it — I still use Pelican to generate this website.

Grammar and language

Reading old posts (especially pre-2010 ones) shows how awful my English grammar and vocabulary were. In 2010, when I signed contract with Canonical to work at Linaro, I went to language school to work on improving both grammar and vocabulary. And it paid off.

I am not going to edit language of my old posts. I may alter tags, formatting or fix/remove links in them. But not how they were written. I keep them as a reminder how my English looked in the past. Not that it is fluent and nice nowadays :D

Markdown all the time

I have never been a fan of using HTML to edit blog posts. So when I discovered Markdown I started using it. With PHP Markdown Extra extensions.

My current Pelican configuration for Markdown is simple:

MARKDOWN = {
    'extension_configs': {
        'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
        'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
        'markdown_del_ins': {},
        'yafg': {},
    },
    'output_format': 'html5',
}

It gives me abbreviations, attribute lists, definition lists, fenced code blocks, footnotes, markdown in html, tables, meta-data, delete and insert tags and the ‘yafg’ extension wraps images into the <figure> tag with a caption. In other words: all stuff I ever used in any post.

Social Media

Around 2009 - 2011 I started using social media and blog slowly started getting fewer short entries as those went to twitter, facebook and google+ services.

Still kept the rule of posting long texts on my website with links shared rather than posting only on social media.

Article	Hacker News	Lobster	points	comments
RISC-V Is Sloooow	thread	thread	317	379 + 111
64-bit ARM desktop hardware?	thread		243	169
Bought myself an Ampere Altra system	thread	thread	206	97 + 9
Arm desktop: emulation	thread	thread	98	50 + 7
Twenty years of my work with Arm architecture	thread		94	54
What is wrong with all those AArch64 desktops?	thread		90	141
AArch64 Boards and Perception	thread	thread	67	31
How to Survive FOSDEM	thread	thread	42	15 + 5

Popular tags

It is easier to check which tags were the most popular during all those 21 years:

tag name	number of articles
Linaro	177
Ubuntu	170
AArch64	154
OpenEmbedded	129
Fedora	114
Nokia	90
development	84
Debian	82
Openmoko	70
conferences	64
life	64
phone	58
travels	52
Linux	51
Maemo	47
OpenZaurus	45
Arm	44
website	41
Poky	40
Zaurus	40
Red Hat	31

The high position of the Ubuntu tag suggests a need for review as for some posts it was used to get them placed on the Planet Ubuntu aggregator.

With the Nokia-related posts comes a story. Each post bumped ‘karma’ on Maemo.org website. And I mostly complained in them. But ‘karma is a beach’, right? I got it high enough to get invitation to the Nokia N900 developer program. It was a nice phone with software written to gather complaints.

Requested edits

During all those years there were some requests to edit some of my posts. I rejected some and fulfilled others.

No camera, please

In 2009 I received NHK15 developer board from ST-Ericsson. As I had not signed any NDA, I decided to show them the post before publishing to make sure I do not mention too much.

Can you remove the camera module from it? It will not be in a boxes we give out during the event.

I took one photo again, removed mentions of a camera module and published.

Move forward two months to the ST-Ericsson Community Workshop 2009 event. A day before it, decision was made to include that camera module. One guy was going through each box to add it…

Pre-announced SBC

Most of Linaro Connect events had a ‘Demo day’ event where companies, projects and developers presented some interesting things related to our work. I was there walking, looking and asking questions.

And one year I asked a company (sorry, no names this time) will they have an SBC similar to the Beagleboard. And the answer was “yes, it will be called A_NAME”. I asked was this information public and can I write about it on my blog. Got confirmation, so an hour later I mentioned it in a blog post.

A few minutes later, when I was going to the hotel bar for an evening event, I was asked by my manager where I got that info from. And then got a request to remove it “because they plan to announce it next week on some BIG trade show”.

I took my phone from my pocket, edited and we went for a beer.

Lessons learnt

Whenever non-public information is shared, wait until it is properly announced publicly. Then, check how much information was released. My work is related to many non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). So, if I know something, it needs to be checked against public information before I can disclose any of it. You may also want to confirm with an official source that the public disclosure was not due to a leak or other incorrect source of information.

Fewer technical posts

If you look into archives page you may notice that there are fewer technical posts than there were in previous years. There is a simple explanation for it:

Well, you are some kind of influencer, get over it. People do pay attention to what you write.

Writing a technical post nowadays means:

asking a few people who know stuff to check whether I was right or wrong
asking a few people who do not know stuff to check what I missed
doing some technical review and correction

This changes writing a post for a personal blog into writing a technical article.

And then publishing still means a lot of online comments where maybe 25% of them make any sense.

Plans for the future

I do not have any special plans for the future of this website. Will keep it operational and add posts from time to time. I still have some ideas for the content and have some drafts which wait for my retirement.

Upgraded to OpenWRT 25.12

2026-03-24T08:18:00+01:00

I upgraded my router to OpenWRT 25.12. Nothing strange right?

And then I realized that I use OpenWRT for over twenty years…

All started with Linksys WRT54GS

Long, long time, when I worked from an office, I got Linksys WRT54GS as a donation. IIRC I got money to buy it as this was simpler than sending device from abroad.

Having Wi-Fi at home allowed me to test more stuff on Sharp Zaurus devices. Or install/upgrade packages in an easy way.

It was running OpenWRT WhiteRussian for quite a while as device upgrades were quite problematic at that time.

Other devices

During next years I used a mix of devices running OpenWRT. Routers, access points or devices which served both those functions at the same time.

Netgear WNDR4300 N750 brought 5GHz Wi-Fi network to my flat. Running MiniPC + Belkin BT3200 (aka Linksys E8450) combo brought network separation as I started using VLANs. Etc. etc.

Why OpenWRT?

Having a unified way of doing network setup was a key for me when I was choosing next router/AP device. Or ability to install additional packages which brings more functions. Especially since 512 MB RAM became popular in a router.

Why it matters to me? I am not a network admin. Never planned to be. So being able to switch to a new device and restore configuration from a previous one saves my time.

There are no limitations on how I name my Wi-Fi networks (national characters, emojis, spaces), how many of them will be, what kind of firewall zones I want and which devices/networks are in which zone. Etc…

RISC-V is sloooow

2026-03-10T18:53:00+01:00

About 3 months ago I started working with RISC-V port of Fedora Linux. Many things happened during that time.

Triaging

I went through the Fedora RISC-V tracker entries, triaged most of them (at the moment 17 entries left in NEW) and tried to handle whatever possible.

Fedora packaging

My usual way of working involves fetching sources of a Fedora package (fedpkg clone -a) and then building it (fedpkg mockbuild -r fedora-43-riscv64). After some time, I check did it built and if not then I go through build logs to find out why.

Effect? At the moment, 86 pull requests sent for Fedora packages. From heavy packages like the “llvm15” to simple ones like the “iyfct” (some simple game). At the moment most of them were merged, and most of these got built for the Fedora 43. Then we can build them as well as we follow ‘f43-updates’ tag on the Fedora koji.

Slowness

Work on packages brings the hard, sometimes controversial, topic: speed. Or rather lack of it.

You see, the RISC-V hardware at the moment is slow. Which results in terrible build times — look at details of the binutils 2.45.1-4.fc43 package I took from koji (Fedora and RISC-V Fedora):

Architecture	Cores	Memory	Build time
aarch64	12	46 GB	36 minutes
i686	8	29 GB	25 minutes
ppc64le	10	37 GB	46 minutes
riscv64	8	16 GB	143 minutes
s390x	3	45 GB	37 minutes
x86_64	8	29 GB	29 minutes

That was StarFive VisionFive 2 board, while it has other strengths (such as upstreamed drivers), it is not the fastest available one. I asked around and one of porters did a built on Milk-V Megrez — it took 58 minutes.

Also worth mentioning is that the current build of RISC-V Fedora port is done with disabled LTO. To cut on memory usage and build times.

RISC-V builders have four or eight cores with 8, 16 or 32 GB of RAM (depending on a board). And those cores are usually compared to Arm Cortex-A55 ones. The lowest cpu cores in today’s Arm chips.

The UltraRISC UR-DP1000 SoC, present on the Milk-V Titan motherboard should improve situation a bit (and can have 64 GB ram). Similar with SpacemiT K3-based systems (but only 32 GB ram). Both will be an improvement, but not the final solution.

Hardware needs for Fedora inclusion

We need hardware capable of building above “binutils” package below one hour. With LTO enabled system-wide etc. to be on par with the other architectures. This is the speed-related requirement.

There is no point of going for inclusion with slow builders as this will make package maintainers complain. You see, in Fedora build results are released into repositories only when all architectures finish. And we had maintainers complaining about lack of speed of AArch64 builders in the past. Some developers may start excluding RISC-V architecture from their packages to not have to wait.

And any future builders need to be rackable and manageable like any other boring server (put in a rack, connect cables, install, do not touch any more). Because no one will go into a data centre to manually reboot an SBC-based builder.

Without systems fulfilling both requirements, we can not even plan for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture to became one of official, primary architectures in Fedora Linux.

I still use QEMU for local testing

Such long build times make my use of QEMU useful. My AArch64 desktop has 80 cores, so with the use of QEMU userspace riscv64 emulation, I can build the packages without buying RISC-V hardware. Still, there are timed out tests because single thread is slower than native one.

btop shows 80 cores being busy

There are package (like LLVM) which make real use of both available cores and memory. I am wondering how fast would it go on 192/384 cores of Ampere One-based system.

Still, I used QEMU for local builds/testing only. Fedora, like several other distributions, does native builds only.

Future plans

We plan to start building Fedora Linux 44. If things go well, we will use the same kernel image on all of our builders (the current ones use a mix of kernel versions). LTO will still be disabled.

When it comes to lack of speed… There are plans to bring new, faster builders. And probably assign some heavier packages to them.

Books I read in 2025

2025-12-30T23:06:00+01:00

I enjoy reading and I am known for being a fast reader. In 2025, I read one hundred books…

So what kind of books did I read? Mostly science-fiction, but also some biographies, thrillers and a few random ones.

Space operas

As in previous years, I continued reading the “Undying Mercenaries” series by B.V. Larson. It is an easy to read series — I can read a book in the evening and forget what was there during sleep.

There was “The Murderbot Diaries” by Martha Wells. Mostly because there was an announcement of a TV series (which (surprise, surprise) turned out to be worse than the books). I read the first five books in Polish and the last two in English, as they had not been published yet. If you plan to read them, I recommend the “1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 5, 7” order as “System Collapse” (7th book) starts at the end of “Network Effect” (5th one), while “Fugitive Telemetry” is more a single story happening before “Network Effect” one.

I started reading “Expeditionary Force” by Craig Alanson. It was an interesting space opera, but became boring at some point so I ended on “Aftermath” (the 17th book). How long you can keep up with a series where humans keep playing with other galactic civilisations, all thanks to the help of an ancient AI?

After many years, I collected all parts of “Sector General” by James White. All twelve books. It was fun to read but it feels old. And recently Russ Allbery mentioned “Machine” and “Ancestral Night” by Elisabeth Bear as a modern series with similar vibe.

When it comes to old authors, I also read “To the Stars” series by Harry Harrison.

The other series was “Shadow Raptors” by Sławomir Nieściur. Common theme: humans fighting some other species. In space.

Military fiction

Another space series was “Stark’s War” by John G. Hemry (as Jack Campbell). A war on the Moon over the control of resources.

There were two series by Vladimir Wolff: “Nowy porządek świata” (“A new world order”) and “Armaggedon”. It is hard to tell how they differ cause they share some ideas. The world as we know it ends, old forces vanish, and new ones appear. It is fun to read about a “near future” where Poland becomes a new global force, while the United States vanishes due to a virus killing nearly entire population.

The “All You Need Is Kill” by Hiroshi Sakurazaka shows how much story can be changed before film adaptation is created (the “Edge of Tomorrow” was based on this book). Highly recommend.

Other fiction

There were books by Andrzej Kwiecień — “Metamorf” and “Dori”. Some kind of cyberpunk stories in a world where androids can take human’s form and personality. Light read.

“Kaori” by Marta Sobiecka was a cyberpunk crime story. Reading reviews does not remind me a book, which shows that it was mediocre one.

Other cyberpunk was set of stories called “Cyberpunk Girls”. Some were good, some were not.

Another collection was the “Frostpunk, Antologia” — a set of four stories in the steampunk world of the Frostpunk game (which I have never played).

And while we are around alternative world of XXI century I have to mention “Ciepło-zimno” by Joanna Mazur. Deeper in climate change, with nine months long summer, no electricity during some parts of a day, main character is a freelance worker, happy to have some work at all.

There was “Czarownica znad Kałuży” postapo story by Artur Olchowy. Small village in a middle of nowhere, with “a witch” living just outside of it. And one day a priest arrives and tries to change the way those people live. It was an interesting read, despite common oversimplifications (as usual in postapo stories).

Then was Blake Crouch with his “Dark matter” and “Recursion” books. Both are about travelling to the other versions of the world. In “Dark matter” those are parallel universes, where the main character can meet the other selves. “Recursion” loops the live of the main character to his younger self. Both were a good read.

“Good Omens” by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman was a must after watching TV series.

“Senni zwycięzcy” by Marek Oramus about multi-generation spaceship flying towards the Earth. Society there is in terrible state and there are mysterious people with paranormal abilities trying to change things. And it turns out to be transmitted as some sick reality TV. Good book from 1970s.

And “Triplet” by Timothy Zahn. Fantasy book in space.

Literary Role-Playing Game (LitRPG)

Some time ago, someone suggested me to check books by Василий Маханенко (Vasily Mahanenko in one transcription, Wasilij Machanienko in the other). His “Way of Shaman” series was an interesting one. Kind of reading how someone plays the game instead of watching it on Twitch or Youtube.

History

Between science fiction books I smuggled some history ones. Mostly around the Second World War.

There was “Wojna oczami wroga, sojusznicy Hitlera” by Grzegorz Bobrek. A book showing WW2 from a view of German allies: Italy, Hungary, Romania or Japan. And Germany itself. Was boring at some points but if someone wants to see the other view, I recommend this book.

Friedrich Sander’s book titled “Blood, Dust and Snow: Diaries of a Panzer Commander in Germany and on the Eastern Front, 1938-1943” was another one showing WW2 from the German side.

The “Operation Paperclip” by Annie Jacobsen is about secret US project of gathering as much of German research and scientists as possible during the end of WW2. If you were deemed valuable enough, you were moved to the USA with a new identity as long as you were ready to work for “your new country”.

The “Ludzie na mydło” (“Humans for soap”) by Tomasz Bonek is about German anatomists turning human corpses into school material. And that soap made from human fat was more of a side effect of that work rather than primary purpose.

There was also something not about WW2: “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston. Worth reading book about the Ebola virus.

The end of the world

There were some books which can be described as “the end of the world we know”.

“The End of Men” by Christina Sweeney-Baird shows the world where 90% of men died due to unknown disease. When vaccination arrives, international travel is allowed only between countries with 99.9% of population being vaccinated. And that book was written before COVID-19 pandemic. Very interesting position to read.

The “Blackout: Tomorrow Will Be Too Late” by Mark Elsberg was another book in this category. Imagine Europe without electricity. Which means no water, no fuel, no food, no hospitals, no communication etc.. All because of a cyberattack.

Biographies

I read some biographies during 2025.

There was “The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue” by Frederick Forsyth. From the youngest pilot in RAF, to journalist, almost a spy and the author. Quick read, despite 368 pages.

And then were books about Jan Himilsbach (“Ja to chętnie napiłbym się kawy”) and Zdzisław Maklakiewicz (“Zaczęło się od tego, że jestem brzydki…”). Both by Ryszard Abraham. Add “Rejs na krzywy ryj” by Anna Poppek and you have three interesting books about famous Polish duo and the film which started their common career. I was also reading stories written by Jan Himilsbach but did not finished it in 2025 so it was not counted.

The book by Chrysta Bilton “A Normal Family: The Surprising Truth About My Crazy Childhood (And How I Discovered 35 New Siblings)” was a fun read. Author described her crazy childhood and later finding out that author’s father was a sperm donor. Which ended with her “expanded family” of 35 brothers and sisters…

Another book from this category was “American Sniper” by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice.

Journalism

A few books here. Starting with “ZATO” by Alice Lugen — a book about closed cities in Soviet Union (and later Russia). Very good read, describing how Soviet maps were falsified to hide those cities even from neighbours, how life there was different etc.

“Głusza” by Anna Goc described world of deaf people. Their language, culture and problems. How world of “those who hear” tries to force them “to fit”. Highly recommend.

Edyta Żemła in “Armia w ruinie” described how Polish Armed Forces changed during last years. To worse.

“Miła robótka” by Ewa Stusińska describes how everything around sex and porn arrived in Poland during 1990s. From VHS films to sex toys. How people started explore new areas of sexual freedom.

“Breasts” by Corien van Zweden is a wonderful book about breasts. Their role, how they change during life and what breast cancer can mean. Highly recommend. Even if you lack them yourself.

And the last entry: “Pogo” by Jakub Sieczko describes life of an ambulance workers.

Summary

It might look that I had a lot of free time in 2025, because reading all those books takes time.

I mostly read in the evening. Lying in bed, with my Onyx Nova2 e-book reader. Sometimes during day (there was lot of reading during time when I had a problem with my arm).

In those one hundred books, I read a few of them in English. Rest was in Polish (I had to look out for English titles for most of this post).

How many books I will read inn 2026? No idea. Probably fewer.

From the diary of AArch64 porter — RISC-V

2025-12-04T18:47:00+01:00

Wait, what? RISC-V? In ‘the diary of AArch64 porter’? WTH?

Yes, I started working on Fedora packaging for the 64-bit RISC-V architecture port.

All started with discussion about Mock

About a week ago, one of my work colleagues asked me about my old post about speeding up Mock. We had a discussion, I pointed him to the Mock documentation, and gave some hints.

It turned out that he was working on RISC-V related changes to Fedora packages. As I had some spare cycles, I decided to take a look. And I sank…

State of the RISC-V Fedora port

The 64-bit RISC-V port of Fedora Linux is going quite well. There are over 90% of Fedora packages already built for that architecture. And there are several packages with the riscv64 specific changes, such as:

patches adding RISC-V support
disabling some parts of test suites
disabling some build options due to bootstrapping of some languages being in progress (like Java)
disabling of debug information due to some toolchain issues (there is a work-in-progress now to solve them)

Note that these changes are temporary. There are people working on solving toolchain issues, languages are being bootstrapped (there was a review of Java changes earlier this week), patches are being integrated upstream and in Fedora, and so on.

There is the Fedora RISC-V tracker website showing the progress of the port:

package name
current status (new, triaged, patch posted, patch merged, done)
version in RISC-V port Koji
version in Fedora Koji (F43 release is tracked now)
version in CentOS Stream 10
notes

This is a simple way to check what to work on. And there are several packages, not built yet due to use of “ExclusiveArch” setting in them.

My work

The quick look at work needed reminded me of the 2012-2014 period, when I worked on the same stuff but for AArch64 ports (OpenEmbedded, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RHEL). So I had a knowledge, I knew the tools and started working.

In the beginning, I went through entries in the tracker and tried to triage as many packages as possible, so it will be more visible which ones need work and which can be ignored (for now). The tracker went from seven to over eighty triaged packages in a few days.

Then I looked at changes done by current porters. Which usually meant David Abdurachmanov. I used his changes as a base for the changes needed for Fedora packaging, while trying to minimise the amount of them to the minimum required.

I did over twenty pull requests to Fedora packages during a week of work.

Hardware?

But which hardware did I use to run those hundreds of builds? Was it HiFive Premier P550? Or maybe Milk-V Titan or another RISC-V SBC?

Nope. I used my 80-core, Altra-based, AArch64 desktop to run all those builds. With the QEMU userspace helper.

You see, Mock allows to run builds for foreign architectures — all you need is the proper qemu-user-static-* package and you are ready to go:

$ fedpkg mockbuild -r fedora-43-riscv64

You can extract the “fedora-43-riscv64” Mock config from the mock-riscv64-configs.patch hosted on Fedora RISC-V port forge. I hope that these configuration files may be found in the “mock-core-configs” in Fedora soon.

At some point I had 337 qemu-user-static-riscv processes running at same time. And you know what? It was still faster than a native build on 64-bit RISC-V hardware.

But, to be honest, I only compared a few builds, so it may be better with other builders. Fedora RISC-V Koji uses wide list of SBCs to build on:

Banana Pi BPI-F3
Milk-V Jupiter
Milk-V Megrez
SiFive HiFive Premier P550
StarFive VisionFive 2

Also note that using QEMU is not a solution for building a distribution. I used it only to check if package builds, and then scrap the results.

Future

Will I continue working on the RISC-V port of Fedora Linux? Probably yes. And, at some point, I will move to integrating those changes into CentOS Stream 10.

For sure I do not want to invest in RISC-V hardware. Existing models are not worth the money (in my opinion), incoming ones are still old (RVA20/RVA22) and they are slow. Maybe in two, three years there will be something fast enough.

Wałek na Inpost

2025-11-12T19:47:00+01:00

Dawno nie pisałem tutaj po polsku ale dzisiaj “pani Antonina” próbowała kupić ode mnie telefon.

Wprowadzenie

Nabyłem w okazyjnej cenie telefon Xiaomi Redmi Note 14 Pro+ 5G. A że nie mam potrzeby go używać to postanowiłem go sprzedać.

Na początek wrzuciłem go na Facebook Marketplace. Bo wiecie: “za darmo”. No tak sobie tam leżał, co jakiś czas ktoś pytał czy aktualne lub zadawał więcej pytań.

Po czym dzisiaj pojawiła się “pani Antonina” (w cudzysłowie bo to przejęte konto raczej). Na początek zadała klasyczne pytania o aktualność oferty, stan telefonu itp…

A może być InPostem?

Czy jest możliwość wysyłki kurierem Inpost po wcześniej wpłacie na konto? Zamówię kuriera i pokryję koszty wysyłki.

Lub paczkomatom zapłacę +20.

Nie wiem jak Wy, ja lubię usługi InPostu. W promieniu 15 minut piechotą mam pewnie z 10 ich “automatów paczkowych”. Więc owszem, czemu by nie miało być.

Parę minut później dostałem info:

Gotowe. Zaplaciłam na InPost powinieneś otrzymać list na swój adres maila.

Sprawdź swoją skrzynkę mail proszę.

I okazała potwierdzenie przelewu:

potwierdzenie przelewu

I tu już zaczęło śmierdzieć…

Potwierdzenie przelewu

Uznałem, że nie wiem, może i potwierdzenie z banku Pekao SA tak powinno wyglądać. Popytałem znajomych, czy ktoś ma tam konto.

Dostałem informację, że zawsze jest data i godzina wystawienia dokumentu. Zawsze jest numer rachunku nadawcy, dane właściciela rachunku itp.

Na potwierdzeniu powyżej jest jeszcze kilka innych błędów ale co ja będę naprowadzać scammerów…

Mail

Skoro była prośba o sprawdzenie skrzynki to sprawdziłem. Nie było nic. No to zaglądam GMailowi do spamu, a tam owszem jest mail “od InPostu”.

O ile InPost używa adresów email w domenie tp5142.com :D

pierwszy spam: InPost Pay - podsumowanie

Link “Otwórz panel InPost Pay” to 320 znaków prowadzących do jeszcze innej domeny. Poza adresem był blok “onload=eval(decodeURIComponent(atob(ZNACZKI)))”. Po zdekodowaniu otrzymałem kolejny “eval(decodeURIComponent(atob(InneZnaczki)))” który dał mi url:

h00ps://confirm-orderNUMERKI.xyz/LosoweZnaczki=InneLosoweZnaczki

Tu już zacząłem szukać po sieci artykułów w temacie “wałek na InPost”…

Dziwne literki

Tymczasem “pani Antonina”:

To jest numer śledzenia przesyłki kսrіеrѕkіеј. Zaplaciłam na ǏnΡost. Proszę odebrać pieniądze na konto przez zamówienie.

Tam jest przycisk Dalej i wybierz bank i wprowadź dane, aby zweryfikować i otrzymać pieniądze. Po potwierdzeniu zaⅿóԝіеոіа kսrіеr zadzwoni się w celu dogadania kiedy przyjechać i pod jaki adres.

Nie wiem czy widzicie to co ja: “Ǐ” w “ǏnΡost” to nie jest nasze “I” tylko “duże łacińskie i z caronem”. Przyznaję, że nie wiem w jakim języku używa się tej litery.

Do tego “m” w “zaⅿóԝіеոіа” też nie jest naszym “m” tylko “Small Roman Numeral One Thousand” czyli “małe rzymskie oznaczenie liczby tysiąc”.

Oba znaczki złapałem bo mi edytor podświetlił słowa z nimi jako błędne.

Drugi mail

W międzyczasie dostałem jeszcze jednego maila — ten przeszedł filtry antyspamowe. Tym razem adres nadawcy był zbudowany z losowych literek w domenie zohomail.in.

Nic tylko czytać i klikać co nie?

drugi spam: Odbierz etykietę nadawczą

Tym razem link prowadzi prosto do h00ps://elektrizitaet-muenchen.com/LosoweLiterki który także kieruje do znanego już adresu: