Ploum.net
le blog de Lionel Dricot
I’m Ploum, a writer alternating between a bépo keyboard and old mechanical typewriters on which I imagine our futures. My latest novel, Bikepunk, is available in every good (French-speaking) book store. Without a keyboard, you can find me underwater or on a bike.
As « Lionel Dricot », I pretend to be respectable to teach software freedom at École Polytechnique de Louvain.
2025
- 2025-05-23 : Reducing the digital clutter of chats
- 2025-04-01 : Goodbye Offpunk, Welcome XKCDpunk!
- 2025-03-28 : The candid naivety of geeks
- 2025-03-08 : 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3)
- 2025-02-27 : The Engagement Rehab
2024
- 2024-12-23 : My colleague Julius
- 2024-12-16 : 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2)
- 2024-10-20 : 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1)
- 2024-07-01 : On Open Source and the Sustainability of the Commons
- 2024-04-08 : About Freedom and Power
- 2024-03-18 : A Society That Lost Focus
2023
- 2023-11-25 : Announcing Offpunk 2.0
- 2023-11-10 : The gift of time
- 2023-10-01 : The future of Offpunk: UNIX command-line heaven and packaging hell
- 2023-08-01 : Splitting the Web
- 2023-07-06 : Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
- 2023-06-23 : How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
- 2023-06-19 : We need more of Richard Stallman, not less
- 2023-03-09 : Losing Signal
- 2023-03-03 : About Bluesky and Decentralisation
- 2023-02-22 : We need to talk about your Github addiction
- 2023-02-15 : Modern AI and the end of privacy
- 2023-02-11 : On Humans and Machines
2022
- 2022-12-05 : Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting
- 2022-12-03 : Reinventing How We Use Computers
- 2022-11-15 : Offpunk 1.7 : Offpunk and Sourcehut
- 2022-11-09 : Evolution of the Web.
- 2022-11-07 : Our responsibility as software engineers
- 2022-11-06 : Thank you rawtext.club (and the whole Gemini sphere)!
- 2022-10-21 : How to manage a mailing list?
- 2022-10-10 : Be angry against institutions, be nice to people
- 2022-10-07 : A Technological Analogy
- 2022-10-06 : RE: Archiving the smallnet & fantasizing about a free mesh based internet
- 2022-10-05 : There Is No Content on Gemini
- 2022-09-29 : My Chrissy Teigen Moment
- 2022-09-28 : Creating Against Consuming
- 2022-09-20 : MAGMA Monopolies
- 2022-08-04 : Offpunk 1.5 : A Huge Thank You to Packagers
- 2022-06-22 : Removing the "packaging cruft" from the web. Or buying without packaging with Gemini.
- 2022-04-25 : Why Gemini Is Essential
- 2022-04-05 : The Theological Problem Behind Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04
- 2022-04-02 : Offpunk 1.3 : Making it Easy and Useful
- 2022-04-01 : Small OpenBSD and FreeBSD Experiment
- 2022-03-29 : A Call to Packagers
- 2022-03-25 : Where To Live?
- 2022-03-24 : Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal : more than you would like to know about HTML, ANSI and the philosophy of communication.
- 2022-03-14 : Offpunk and Cyberpunk : Text and Voice
- 2022-03-05 : This is Madness! No, This is Offpunk 0.9!
- 2022-02-21 : Offpunk 0.4 - RSS Reading and Knowledge Management
- 2022-02-11 : Offpunk 0.3 : Gopher, Pictures and Feeds
- 2022-01-31 : Announcing Offpunk 0.2 : What is Offline?
- 2022-01-18 : RE: Design vs Evolution
- 2022-01-13 : How I Dropped Pocket to Go Offline
- 2022-01-11 : Implementing a web browser in a weekend (and in Offpunk)
- 2022-01-07 : Adventures With Less
- 2022-01-06 : 2022-01-06 : Discussing about Gemini on Gemini ?
- 2022-01-04 : Aborting Instead of Getting Stuck
- 2022-01-03 : Announcing Offpunk 0.1 and a year offline
2021
- 2021-12-24 : New features for AV-98-offline
- 2021-12-17 : Browsing Gemini Offline
- 2021-12-10 : Need help: Offline and sync-only modes for AV-98
- 2021-12-07 : Frustration is the best teacher, choosing tools to focus on
- 2021-12-06 : Offline support in AV-98
- 2021-11-19 : Start:ing my offline-tools…
- 2021-11-09 : Teaching Gemini at university, dreaming of moving out of Wordpress, simplifying my tools and thinking about learning emacs
- 2021-10-28 : RE: Reading "The Mysteries of Udolpho"
- 2021-10-25 : Offmini (part 2): Designing a Simple Offline and Decentralised Mail and Web
- 2021-10-20 : The Monstrosity Email Has Become
- 2021-10-10 : Offmini, My Dream of Making Gemini Offline and Distributed
- 2021-10-07 : Astrohaus Freewrite vs reMarkable
- 2021-09-30 : Is Fairphone repairability just marketing ?
- 2021-09-24 : Looking for offline-first tools
- 2021-09-20 : Back to paper (and typewriters)
- 2021-02-04 : The computer built to last 50 years
- 2021-01-22 : I don’t smoke Gemini
- 2021-01-12 : Offline-First, Typewriters, Emails and Gemini
- 2021-01-10 : The Offline-First Quest
2020
- 2020-07-07 : The Story Behind an Open Source Software Un-Maintenance
- 2020-02-24 : Despair and Hope: From the Stupidity of Academic Bureaucracy to the Poetry of Bitcoin
2019
2017
2016
2014
- 2014-11-12 : Dear 2002’s self,
- 2014-06-18 : Flattr: Decentralized Payments Paving A Roadless Web
- 2014-06-04 : The Blogger from Tomorrow (Part II)
- 2014-01-08 : My 2014 Terra Incognita
2013
- 2013-11-22 : Louis Michel Affair: Lobbies Switch From Influencing To Directly Writing European Laws
- 2013-10-24 : Tintin And The Copyright Sharks
- 2013-10-05 : The Blogger from Tomorrow (Part I)
- 2013-08-28 : The First Global Civil War
- 2013-08-19 : Open Letter to Flight Attendants
- 2013-08-06 : Exploring Artistic Business Models in the 21st Century
- 2013-07-23 : The Last GUADEC?
- 2013-06-24 : Flattr’s biggest problem
- 2013-05-30 : I don’t want to post on Medium…
- 2013-05-27 : Become a Patron of Arts and Letters
- 2013-05-22 : How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web
- 2013-05-17 : The Fight for E-Clothing
- 2013-05-08 : The Cost of Being Convinced
- 2013-03-28 : The Disruptive Free Price
- 2013-03-24 : The Death of My Best Enemy
- 2013-03-22 : The Day I saved A Life
- 2013-03-14 : Feel free to tip free content
- 2013-02-26 : Ripple, making Bitcoin easier (or obsolete)
- 2013-02-22 : Why you are probably not at inbox 0 (but should be)
- 2013-02-13 : The Publisher’s Dilemma
- 2013-02-07 : The Morality of Filesharing and the Thought Police
- 2013-02-05 : Meet John Doe, founder of Blackma.il
- 2013-02-04 : The Winmail.dat Syndrome
- 2013-01-27 : Paying for the web?
- 2013-01-18 : An Open Letter To Pirated Artists
- 2013-01-10 : I don’t care about your business model
- 2013-01-06 : The Ghost Web
- 2013-01-03 : Stay on top of your inbox in 2013
2012
- 2012-12-29 : The future of book publishing
- 2012-12-21 : In the year 292,277,026,596
- 2012-12-19 : Changing the world, one task at a time
- 2012-12-11 : A Google’s world
- 2012-12-05 : Murder is a terrible thing…
- 2012-11-26 : XKCD’s law
- 2012-11-16 : On usability, free software and perfection
- 2012-11-08 : Liblarch, a python library to handle trees and acyclic graphs
- 2012-10-15 : For a fistfull of votes
- 2012-09-27 : When technical experts do the job of politicians
- 2012-08-30 : Writing on a smartphone: review of 8pen and MessagEase
- 2012-08-07 : A freasy future for GNOME
- 2012-05-24 : France gives 700,000 blank votes to one private company
- 2012-04-19 : Being selected as a Summer of Code student
- 2012-03-19 : What if Ubuntu were right?
- 2012-03-12 : My experience working with patents
- 2012-03-09 : The Quest for the Best GNOME 3 distribution
- 2012-02-15 : The Backyard Digging (and filling it back afterwards) Point
- 2012-02-13 : Getting Thing GNOME is alive (and released)!
- 2012-01-27 : FlattrStat, a small statistic tool for Flattr
- 2012-01-18 : Why I’m a Pirate!
- 2012-01-17 : The End of the Revolution
2011
- 2011-11-21 : Crosscompiling LibreOffice for Windows on Linux
- 2011-11-06 : What happened during GSoC 2011?
- 2011-11-05 : The aristocratic desktop (part 4) : Kill The Double Click
- 2011-10-22 : So long Ubuntu, and thanks for all the fish
- 2011-10-19 : One year of LibreOffice
- 2011-06-29 : Proposal for a decentralized and open online payment protocol
- 2011-05-30 : Elections 2011: fostering the GNOME commercial ecosystem
- 2011-05-18 : Open Discussion Day 2011 : Why Decentralization Matters
- 2011-05-17 : Emacs Intosh
- 2011-04-27 : The Bitcoin Bubble
- 2011-04-15 : Visionary
- 2011-04-06 : Cricket, cows and GNOME 3
- 2011-03-16 : How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Shell
- 2011-02-07 : The Official European Joke
- 2011-02-02 : Building your web identity
2010
2009
- 2009-12-12 : Getting GTG 0.2 released – Done !
- 2009-10-24 : In bed with Ryan Lortie
- 2009-10-13 : Gpager 0.3 « Scenes From a Memory – Finally Free »
- 2009-09-23 : Why I don’t contribute to Wikipedia anymore
- 2009-08-26 : How to be a lazy but successful Google SoC mentor
- 2009-08-25 : Board of columns of keys
- 2009-08-05 : The aristocratic desktop (part 3) : There’s no tray icon in GNOME!
- 2009-03-11 : Modify your application to use XDG folders
- 2009-03-07 : Getting Things Gnome! 0.1 – « Just 5 minutes more »
- 2009-02-26 : Alone
- 2009-02-04 : Upgrading an existing Ubuntu : the kill-your-desktop machine !
- 2009-01-31 : The signals and threads flying circus
- 2009-01-05 : The aristocratic desktop (part 2) : Home is Desktop
2008
- 2008-12-23 : Happy Newtonmas 2142 !
- 2008-08-31 : The aristocratic desktop (part 1)
- 2008-07-30 : Hardy is a hard time…
- 2008-04-08 : I’m not a virgin anymore/there’s always a first time
- 2008-02-28 : Very simple video editing/DVD burning in Ubuntu
- 2008-02-24 : Cleaning user preferences, keeping user data
- 2008-01-30 : Somewhere in the 21st century : a little Bongo history
2007
- 2007-05-24 : Ubuntu Live … without me
- 2007-05-18 : Open Discussion Day this Saturday May 19th – Just take off !
- 2007-05-10 : The Invisible Captcha Mechanism (ICM) against Form Spam
- 2007-05-08 : 2nd Open Discussion Day this May 19th
- 2007-05-02 : Do I have to protect my content with DRM ? (The DRM equation)
- 2007-04-24 : FLISOL 2007 in Guadalajara
- 2007-04-19 : Ubuntu Feisty, where things starts + Party in Guadalajara
- 2007-03-29 : Conseil 0.2 « Zapopan »
- 2007-03-11 : Conferences, life, ties, stuffs like that…
- 2007-02-07 : Moving to Guadalajara…
- 2007-01-31 : Putting the keyboard to rest…
2006
- 2006-07-15 : Conseil 0.1 « Grand Canal »
- 2006-07-07 : Conseil 0.0.1 « In The Middle of The Boxes »
- 2006-06-20 : Les spammeurs vont se faire bayeser !
- 2006-06-01 : The Long Term Support Flying Car
- 2006-05-17 : The captive clown
- 2006-04-06 : May 19th – The Open Discussion Day – 19 mai
- 2006-04-01 : Official Ubuntu ID cards announced
- 2006-03-15 : Why you should try Epiphany as your default browser with GNOME 2.14
- 2006-03-01 : It’s a long way to the top…
- 2006-02-23 : Say hello to your planet !
- 2006-01-11 : The Ploum’s Ultimate Anti-Spam Solution
2005
- 2005-10-04 : A brief « Linux on the desktop » retrospective
- 2005-08-30 : The bulb and the flower…
- 2005-05-31 : [Oneliner 13]
- 2005-02-03 : [Oneliner 9]
2004
- 2004-11-29 : Do you want to come for a dinner tomorrow ?
- 2004-11-21 : [Oneliner 6]
- 2004-11-09 : Don’t be fooled ! Keep Internet Explorer at all cost !
- 2004-11-05 : [Oneliner 4]
- 2004-11-02 : [Oneliner 2]
- 2004-10-31 : Too early in Sweden
- 2004-10-25 : I don’t want people to use Gnome applications anymore…