Again at FOSDEM (2026)

It's the time of the year again. FOSDEM came around again and I had something to talk about. This time thanks to my employer (AiNekko), a large part of the company was flown to FOSDEM (we also run the AI plumber's devroom) and my boss being supportive that he even pushed me to give my talk about my previous company's hardware. I truly appreciate the opportunity and him. See my previous post for more details.

This time I learned my lesson and landed at Amsterdam Schiphol instead of going Brussels Airport - it's faster (there's a direct flight from Taiwan) and I rather be on the train then at some transferring airport.

Ofc, after CCC, oh man I miss European bread. I grabbed the first hot thing I can find after entering the Netherlands. Be it it's on the expensive side, but that's airport pricing for you. I truly cannot tell you how crap bread in Asia is. Sweet, overly soft, oily but not the right kind of oil. It's like eating cake then bread. Bread! I miss you.

Moving on, trained myself to Brussels and walked around for dinner (I ended up just buying whatever was available right before local Carrefours closing). While walking around - talk about FOSDEM! There's a (dead) Raspberry Pi used at a display somewhere near where I staied.

Brussels, is as beautiful as I remember. Sometimes you just feels like it's ancient Europe then 2026. I certainly the Belgian didn't invent a time machine and no one knows about it.

Obviously at FOSDEM, cool things are happening. There's this free cookie (pun intended) for everyone by Mozilla.

And FuriLabs is having their stand again. Pretty cool stuff there -- I only realzied after the fact that I don't have a photo of their's but the neighboring stand on Linux phones.

Though a bit expensive and I don't really need a new phone (the previous FuriLabs FLX1 is serving me well). I bought a FLX1s (s standing for slim) from them on the spot as a form of support. They are doing the work no one is doing.. actually building hardware and integrating proper Linux into it. The FLX1s is much lighter then the FLX1 with a better display (though 60FPS vs 120FPS on the FLX1, it has better timing) and killswitchs. At the cost of worse camera and what not. I'll likely write a review at some point. The reduced weight makes it more comfortable to use and would be replacing my FLX1 as my work phone.

Though I have to say color is still... kinda bad even for modern mid-range phone standards

I have to give my talk. So there's that, It is interesting to see that generally there's 2 types of talk in the devroom this year. Either "this sucks, we can do better" or "this is so cool". My talk is of the former.

The AI Plumber's fringe was great - ever had the idea to run AI on Plan 9? Someone made it happen, did live demo and that works legit. Hell yeah.

And.. when I'm back in Amsterdam, very unluckily there's an alarm triggered while I was heading to the airport on the way back. No trains could arrive at the airport. Had to go to another station and take a bus and almost missed my flight. That was scary but luckily I was able to catch it.

Allright, that's enough low effort posts for today. Back to the regularly scheduled computer science and what not.