Paul Barker

Completely pointless Sunday project done! Stratum 1 NTP server on a Raspberry Pi 4, with an RMS offset of ~0.5µs.

$ chronyc tracking
Reference ID    : 50505300 (PPS)
Stratum         : 1
Ref time (UTC)  : Sun Jul 05 17:18:17 2026
System time     : 0.000000368 seconds fast of NTP time
Last offset     : +0.000000479 seconds
RMS offset      : 0.000000579 seconds
Frequency       : 10.106 ppm fast
Residual freq   : +0.004 ppm
Skew            : 0.023 ppm
Root delay      : 0.000000001 seconds
Root dispersion : 0.000010284 seconds
Update interval : 16.0 seconds
Leap status     : Normal

Searching for results for the Leeds City Council election results, one of the first hits was the Manchester Evening News website. I wouldn't trust it if I were you...

Time to write a complaint to the IPSO!

An 18.5km walk up hill and down dale justifies a beer... or two!

Good morning #OggCamp2026! My lack of sleep is being made up for with caffeine

Nothing speaks to the disconnect between management, sales and frontline staff better than a hotel chain that will sell you "Early check in from 9AM", leaving the desk staff completely baffled why you're trying to check in so early as they desperately scramble to find a room.

As ever, the fault is with management, not with the person on the front desk who has to deal with this.

This weekend (April 25th-26th) I'll be at OggCamp 2026 in Manchester, UK. If you're around then drop me a message, happy to chat about all things Open Source, Embedded Linux & Yocto Project!

@oggcamp@mastodon.social #OpenSource #OggCamp2026

@jpmens@mastodon.social This is absolutely what I need. I tried MinIO about 18 months ago, but it wanted to continuously scrub data (why not let the underlying filesystem handle this?) and is massively over-engineered unless you have 4 or more physical nodes and some 100's of TBs of data.

I have the privilege of being the first speaker of #EmbeddedRecipes2026! Bright and early, 9:45am on the first day.

I'll be speaking about Yocto Project and the Cyber Resilience Act.

I'll be covering:

- What the CRA means for the Yocto Project
- How the Yocto Project already helps manufacturers meet their obligations with SPDX3 SBoMs, CVE tracking, reproducible builds, etc
- A roadmap of where we can go in the future with your help

https://cfp.embedded-recipes.org/er2026/talk/CUMR8D/

#EmbeddedLinux #YoctoProject #OpenSource

It's a Saturday so I took a break from software development to, err, develop software? Of course.

https://codeberg.org/pbarker/gpxtidy

gpxtidy is a little Rust program to tidy up GPX files for publication - it removes dates, times and personally identifying data so that they can be safely shared online. It simplifies the track by removing points that introduce less than a configurable error threshold. Finally it writes the result as either a GPX file or a GeoJSON LineString.

If you upload tracks of hikes, rides, runs or similar then this might be of interest to you.

I can't publish it to crates.io yet as it relies on an unreleased version of the gpx crate, but hopefully that will get fixed soon.

#OpenSource #Rust #GPX #GeoData

Less than two weeks to go until @fosdem@fosstodon.org 2026 😀

I'm happy to meet up with anyone who wants to talk about @yoctoproject@fosstodon.org and @openembedded@fosstodon.org. If you'll be attending FOSDEM and want to chat, drop me a message and we'll figure out a time to meet.

I'll also likely be bouncing between a couple of devrooms. Looking forward to the "Embedded, Mobile and Automotive" and "Community" tracks as usual!

#FOSDEM2026 #FOSDEM #EmbeddedLinux #OpenSource

I'm excited to announce that I'll be starting a new role as Ecosystem Engineering and Operations Lead for @yoctoproject@fosstodon.org on Monday 8th December.

I started using and contributing to OpenEmbedded & Yocto Project back in 2013 and since then it's been a key part of my career. I've seen the project from many points of view over the last decade-and-a-bit: first as a hobbyist, then working with board vendors, silicon vendors, system integrators and end users. Now I'll be seeing it from inside the project leadership team and helping to shape its future.

Yocto Project has an excellent team and a strong base of members & contributors. This new role will help to coordinate our activities, take pressure off our Software Architect and scale up what we can deliver. I expect to be spending a lot of time thinking about the challenges and opportunities presented by the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). And I'll still be getting my hands dirty on some actual code as needed to help the project move forward!

#EmbeddedLinux #OpenSource #YoctoProject