dali VS ppp_thing

Tangentially related, I've written a barebones assembler for Android .apk files once (strictly speaking, the assembler is for .dex files, but it also comes with a set of tools to package and sign .apk files). It's written mainly in Nim and provides enough primitives to allow creating Java "stubs" for native .so libraries, so that .apk-s can be built in Nim WITHOUT JDK AT ALL. The Android NDK is still kinda needed/useful, though IIRC mainly for access to adb, and especially adb logcat (which you'll need A LOT for debugging if you try to use this contraption).

I'd love to One Day™ Rewrite It In Rust.

The .dex assembler itself is at: https://github.com/akavel/dali — you may like to check out the tests at: https://github.com/akavel/dali/tree/master/tests to see how using it looks like.

An example project with a simple .apk written purely in Nim (NO JDK) is at: https://github.com/akavel/hellomello/tree/flappy (unfortunately, given Nim's poor packaging story, it's most probably already bitrotten to the extent that it can't be quickly and easily built & used out of the box). I recorded a presentation about this for an online Nim conference — see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr9X5NCwPlI&list=PLxLdEZg8DR...

https://github.com/akavel/dali was one (a fully hand-written assembler for Android .apk files); I managed to write a rudimentary flappy-bird-like prototype in it and did a presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr9X5NCwPlI&list=PLxLdEZg8DR... but on shelf now, didn't get much attention, and I don't feel bad about it. Had some roadblocks, but managed to overcome them, and I'm honestly surprised how the core effort was basically easy to implement and how the formats were open and relatively simple. (The main real issues I had were that debugging via adb logs was tiresome when something was not working.) What was funny about this project was that I started it with basically a thought of: "there will be probably some annoying roadblock at some point that will make it unviable to continue; I accept that and will be ok with stopping once I stumble upon it; but I don't see one clearly from the start [I did some quick initial research how the formats & the bytecode look and they seemed rather simple], and I'm really curious how far I can get if I decide to not think about this possible roadblock". Turns out I was able to get all the way to the end :D

I wrote a PPPoE client with failover so I can keep the session even when one of my gateways fails or is rebooted (this lets me do regular maintenance without interrupting my internet connection); I put it on github[1], but I doubt anyone will use it. I hope there are few people left with the scourge that is PPPoE, and my OS choice means many people would need to switch OSes to use it, so yeah. Also, I don't care to make it easy to use or to promote it, really. (I've mentioned it once or twice and did a Show HN that got less than ten votes, which I kind of expected).

I've also got my personal (network) monitoring software, some 'IoT' stuff to capture temperature and humidity data around my house, and I'm working on a ESP32 based alarm clock pulling data from iCalendar.

[1] https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing

I just published https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing which lets me (and maybe you) failover my PPPoE session between two FreeBSD hosts, so I can do regular maintenance without losing my IP or impacting TCP sessions.

I used to let my DSL modem handle PPPoE and NAT, so failover was easy, but found out fragmented IPv6 crashed the leased modem, and the replacement modem also sucks, so bridge mode + a custom PPPoE client (but from netgraph pieces) it is. Sadly useful in 2021, because PPPoE is somehow still a thing.