Published 21 Apr. 2025. Tags: research, projects, self-hosting. Our digital lives are increasingly fragmented across numerous centralised online services. This model concentrates power, leaving us with minimal technical control over our personal data and online identities.

Published 21 Apr. 2025. I tried using Claude Code while writing Caledonia, and these are the notes I took on the experience. It’s possible some of the deficiencies are due to the model’s smaller training set of OCaml code compared to more popular languages, but there’s work being done to improve this situation. It needs a lot of hand-holding, often finding it very difficult to get out of simple mistakes.

Published 21 Apr. 2025. Tags: research, projects. I started using the Nix package manager and software deployment system as it was great for declaratively defining software deployments for Eilean. But I quickly ran into issues with Nix’s operating system-centric view of packages; like other system packages managers (see Debian’s APT, Arch’s pacman, or OpenBSD’s pkg_add) it maintains a coherent package set.

Previous: 7 Apr. 2025 Next: 21 Apr. 2025 update website X Eilean X Enki X Opam’s depext support for Nix was merged! This creates a Nix environment that Opam manages providing system dependencies from the depext field of Opam packages.

Previous: 31 Mar. 2025 Next: 14 Apr. 2025 X Added an Emacs front end to the Caledonia Calendar Client. X Installed nixos on iphito (codename ‘hippo’) with nixos-anywhere, and got the got repology DB and Enki set up on it. X Working on an Enki MCP server.

Previous: 24 Mar. 2025 Next: 7 Apr. 2025 X Wrote Caledonia, a Command-line Calendar Client X There’s been renewed interest in upstreaming my NixOS depext mechanism for Opam, which creates a Nix environment which Opam manages to provide system dependencies, and was one of the original ideas behind Enki, so I’ve been polishing that up this week.

Published 26 Mar. 2025. Last update 16 Jul. 2025.

Previous: 17 Mar. 2025 Next: 31 Mar. 2025 Babel ~ cargo dynamic loading At the moment this loads the whole index at once which takes a long time, so I need to figure out how to make pubgrub_cargo dynamically load packages.

Previous: 10 Mar. 2025 Next: 24 Mar. 2025 Babel X Model Context Protocol Added a basic Model Context Protocol server for querying dependencies with Babel, since LLMs seem to be particularly bad at managing dependencies. I need to flesh this out with support for metadata queries and solving for platforms.

Previous: 3 Mar. 2025 Next: 17 Mar. 2025 Babel ~ python pubgrub Using Uv’s dependency provider. This isn’t feasible at present, as Uv implements a custom resolver. X cargo pubgrub Got a cargo dependency provider working modified from a repository used to benchmark pubgrub-rs on solving the cargo repository. (Root, ) -> (Cargo Bucket:serde@1.x.y, SemverPubgrub { norml: 1.0.219, pre: ∅ } ) (Cargo Bucket:serde@1.x.y, 1.0.219) ->

Previous: 25 Feb. 2025 Next: 10 Mar. 2025 Babel A Debian encoding in PubGrub X provides with virtual packages here X cross ecosystem resolutions between opam and debian Done in babel. Some examples follow.