Technology
**Cyberdeck Users Weekly**

A podcast from Paul Miller about how to own technology.

Latest Episodes:

Where AI Ends pt. 1: Hodlbod Jul 30, 2025

Show notes

hodlbod makes nostr stuff like

https://coracle.social

https://flotilla.social

and the thank god for nostr podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/5mGS94vrUz1pjRS6kaYd7n

Lord of the Rings as life advice with Pastor Tim Fox Jul 20, 2024

Show notes

A conversation with my wonderful former pastor, Tim Fox. He's leaving me, so I wanted to scrape together some life advice from him before he went. But really he just wants to talk about Lord of the Rings 24/7.

"Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis

"Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton

Psalm 37

"The Lord of the Rings" trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

2 Corinthians 3

"Return of the Strong Gods" by R.R. Reno

"The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis

"The Chronicles of Narnia" series by C.S. Lewis

Herman Bavinck

Westminster Confession

"Institutes of the Christian Religion" by John Calvin

"Commentary on Revelation" by Peter Leithart

Doug Wilson

Kevin DeYoung

"Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis" by Craig Carter

"Lost in the Cosmos" by Walker Percy

The Verge

"Thank God for Bitcoin" conference

Linux on mobile with Linmob Nov 09, 2021

Show notes

Peter's way to mobile Linux

Motorola A780: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A780
Motorola A910: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A910
Openmoko Neo FreeRunner: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner

Really old stuff

Hardware

2000: Agenda VR3: The first Linux PDA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_VR3
2002: Sharp Zaurus (SL-5500): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus
2004: Motorola E680, A780

Software

Gone Websites

handhelds.org https://web.archive.org/web/20090304221733/http://www.handhelds.org/geeklog/index.php
linuxtogo.org https://web.archive.org/web/20090318024046/http://www.linuxtogo.org:80/

Nokia N900, lineage and offsprings

Maemo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo (apologies for forgetting Maemo Leste, it's awesome. But: As long as it does not ship with a GUI for calling and texting, I doubt it's super relevant.)
http://maemo.org/
Nokia N900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
Nokia N9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9
Sailfish OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS
Jolla https://jolla.com/
10 Year Anniversary blog post: https://blog.jolla.com/happy-birthday-jolla/
Facebook Live Event video: https://www.facebook.com/jollaofficial/ (starts after ~5 minutes)

Running a GNU/Linux userland on an Android kernel

Original Jolla announcement, that they would run Android hardware https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/17/jolla_sailfish_os_android_support/
libhybris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29
Halium https://halium.org/

Ubuntu Touch

Ubuntu Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge
Ubuntu Touch (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch
ArsTechnica coverage of the announcement https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/canonical-unveils-ubuntu-phone-os-that-doubles-as-a-full-pc/
Ubuntu.com:

Jesus and Bitcoin Dec 30, 2020

Show notes

Who is J.M. Bush

@jmbushwrites

Thank God for Bitcoin

Christianity 101

BibleProject

Romans 15:4

The Most Important Commandment

Micah 6:8

The law was our teacher

Bitcoin 101

The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

We reap what we sow

Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

Bretton Woods system

Denial of self

Christian questions about Bitcoin

The rich young ruler

The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil

Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle

Proverbs 30:7-9

Give to Caesar what is Caesar's

Zealot

Vengeance is mine, says the Lord

New FinCEN rule for Bitcoin custody

Daniel 6

Jimmy Song and George Mekhail pod about Thank God for Bitcoin

You Are What You Love

God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish

1 Samuel 22

The poor you will always have with you

Is Bitcoin the mark of the beast?

Revelation 13:11-18

One more book plug

Noded 76 with the Authors of Thank God for Bitcoin

Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money

Our excellent dystopia with Matt Odell Dec 04, 2020

Show notes

Really glad to have Matt Odell as a return guest. Instead of an interview we used this as an opportunity to talk about our wonderful dystopia full of 30 hour battery life, folded proteins, and zero privacy. Enjoy!

SHOW NOTES

Apple Silicon

Mac Mini vs iMac 5K

Syncing Bitcoin on M1

Why it's fast

Community builds of Visual Studio Code

The Verge's MacBook Air review

Redox OS with Jeremy Soller

(I was trying to remember the word "UEFI")

Apple bricks its own hardware

Jailbreaking your T2 Mac

PopOS PopShop

Your Computer Isn't Yours

(Matt's right there's no version with 32GB of RAM)

@bunniestudios - I can't think of anyone better than @marcan42 to be taking on a project like porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs!

GrapheneOS

Chromium OS Verified Boot

bunnie's Precursor open source mobile hardware

The Facebook headcrab

Pod people in Ready Player One

Protein folding is "solved"

Matt shames Paul for using TikTok

The Social Dilemma

Lex on AlphaFold 2

What machine learning isn't

Michael Rectenwald on "The Google Election"

Edward Snowden

Signal

Signal is the Messaging App of the Protests

Apple bans Bitcoin wallets (in 2014)

Follow Matt

mattodell.com

Matt's laptop

(My mnemonic is busted, I bought Micro USB cables)

Local-first and freeform software with James Long Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

In classic podcasting style, I managed to frontload this episode with highly technical questions up front and then we slowly morphed the conversation into a more conceptual what-is-the-future-of-computers sort of thing.

James is a really wonderful guy from what I've learned over the decade or so I've been following him on Twitter and you should def check out Actual if you're in the market for budgeting software.

SHOW NOTES

Silicon Valley season three, episode six

The Local-first software manifesto

CRDT

Clarity Money ewwww

Quantified Self

Roam

"I want Roam to be not just a tool for thought, but a tool for computation" @jlongster

Using CRDTs in the wild

A Visual History of Eve: 2014 - 2018

Microsoft Fluid Framework

Project Xanadu

If you have 100 hours to read a million words, check out this Wired piece on Xanadu

SHOUTOUT Ryan Florence

Is tech actually good tho Aug 29, 2020

Show notes

This is a tough one because I'm fairly undecided. Are we sliding toward an apocalypse? Is too much getting worse to expect anything to get better? Is YouTube actually kind of a great thing? I've been stuck on this long enough that I figured I should just put it out there and let you decide. A lot of different thoughts here but I swear it's all connected.

Thanks to ZappyCode for buying a fake ad this week!

SHOW NOTES

GaryVee still preaches the hustle gospel in the middle of a pandemic

"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." @pierre_rochard (quoting Einstein)

The pleasure of walking tall

"How often does the software you use on a daily basis (including web apps etc) succeed at fulfilling it's core purpose, without unreasonable levels of friction?" @masonremaley

Halo Band

GPT-3 Aug 01, 2020

Show notes

No offense to @jayriverlong, but I think his think piece on GPT-3 is kind of dumb: "In a GPT-3 World, Anonymity Prevents Free Speech"

So I did a whole podcast about it.

Also check out this book: How Innovation Works

Better won't be easy Jul 04, 2020

Show notes

Today's episode is a work-in-progress essay about the role of UX and "ease of use" in tech, with a specific focus on Bitcoin. Here are some links to what I'm talking about in the episode. The full essay will be published on my blog someday. Thank you for your patience.

Bitcoin Node Q+A

Bitcoin Governance

Strike app

Bitcoin bites the bullet

Utreexo

"Don’t make me think" thread

A computer from scratch with Jonathan Pallant Jun 24, 2020

Show notes

So I screwed up and didn't select my nice podcasting microphone for this episode and am instead speaking to you through that joke of a pinhole mic on my MacBook Pro.

The good news is that we're not here to listen to me, we're here to hear from the fascinating Jonathan Pallant: Town Mayor, retro computing enthusiast, and embedded systems engineer.