Improve/rework household chore tracker `chorazon` by gniebler

Description

I wrote a household chore tracker named chorazon, which is meant to be deployed as a web application in the household's local network.

It features the ability to set up different (so far only weekly) schedules per task and per person, where tasks may span several days.

There are "tokens", which can be collected by users. Tasks can (and usually will) have rewards configured where they yield a certain amount of tokens. The idea is that they can later be redeemed for (surprise) gifts, but this is not implemented yet. (So right now one needs to edit the DB manually to subtract tokens when they're redeemed.)

Days are not rolled over automatically, to allow for task completion control.

We used it in my household for several months, with mixed success. There are many limitations in the system that would warrant a revisit.

It's written using the Pyramid Python framework with URL traversal, ZODB as the data store and Web Components for the frontend.

Goals

• Add admin screens for users, tasks and schedules
• Add models, pages etc. to allow redeeming tokens for gifts/surprises
• …?

Resources

tbd (Gitlab repo)

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Help Create A Chat Control Resistant Turnkey Chatmail/Deltachat Relay Stack - Rootless Podman Compose, OpenSUSE BCI, Hardened, & SELinux by 3nd5h1771fy

Description

The Mission: Decentralized & Sovereign Messaging

FYI: If you have never heard of "Chatmail", you can visit their site here, but simply put it can be thought of as the underlying protocol/platform decentralized messengers like DeltaChat use for their communications. Do not confuse it with the honeypot looking non-opensource paid for prodect with better seo that directs you to chatmailsecure(dot)com

In an era of increasing centralized surveillance by unaccountable bad actors (aka BigTech), "Chat Control," and the erosion of digital privacy, the need for sovereign communication infrastructure is critical. Chatmail is a pioneering initiative that bridges the gap between classic email and modern instant messaging, offering metadata-minimized, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communication that is interoperable and open.

However, unless you are a seasoned sysadmin, the current recommended deployment method of a Chatmail relay is rigid, fragile, difficult to properly secure, and effectively takes over the entire host the "relay" is deployed on.

Why This Matters

A simple, host agnostic, reproducible deployment lowers the entry cost for anyone wanting to run a privacy‑preserving, decentralized messaging relay. In an era of perpetually resurrected chat‑control legislation threats, EU digital‑sovereignty drives, and many dangers of using big‑tech messaging platforms (Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Instagram, SMS, Google Messages, etc...) for any type of communication, providing an easy‑to‑use alternative empowers:

• Censorship resistance - No single entity controls the relay; operators can spin up new nodes quickly.
  
• Surveillance mitigation - End‑to‑end OpenPGP encryption ensures relay operators never see plaintext.
  
• Digital sovereignty - Communities can host their own infrastructure under local jurisdiction, aligning with national data‑policy goals.
  

By turning the Chatmail relay into a plug‑and‑play container stack, we enable broader adoption, foster a resilient messaging fabric, and give developers, activists, and hobbyists a concrete tool to defend privacy online.

Goals

As I indicated earlier, this project aims to drastically simplify the deployment of Chatmail relay. By converting this architecture into a portable, containerized stack using Podman and OpenSUSE base container images, we can allow anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving communications node in minutes.

Our goal for Hack Week: package every component into containers built on openSUSE/MicroOS base images, initially orchestrated with a single container-compose.yml (podman-compose compatible). The stack will:

• Run on any host that supports Podman (including optimizations and enhancements for SELinux‑enabled systems).
  
• Allow network decoupling by refactoring configurations to move from file-system constrained Unix sockets to internal TCP networking, allowing containers achieve stricter isolation.
• Utilize Enhanced Security with SELinux by using purpose built utilities such as udica we can quickly generate custom SELinux policies for the container stack, ensuring strict confinement superior to standard/typical Docker deployments.
• Allow the use of bind or remote mounted volumes for shared data (/var/vmail, DKIM keys, TLS certs, etc.).
  
• Replace the local DNS server requirement with a remote DNS‑provider API for DKIM/TXT record publishing.
  

By delivering a turnkey, host agnostic, reproducible deployment, we lower the barrier for individuals and small communities to launch their own chatmail relays, fostering a decentralized, censorship‑resistant messaging ecosystem that can serve DeltaChat users and/or future services adopting this protocol

Resources

• The links included above
• https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/
• https://delta.chat/en/help
• Project repo -> https://codeberg.org/EndShittification/containerized-chatmail-relay

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Enhance git-sha-verify: A tool to checkout validated git hashes by gpathak

Description

git-sha-verify is a simple shell utility to verify and checkout trusted git commits signed using GPG key. This tool helps ensure that only authorized or validated commit hashes are checked out from a git repository, supporting better code integrity and security within the workflow.

Supports:

• Verifying commit authenticity signed using gpg key
  
• Checking out trusted commits
  

Ideal for teams and projects where the integrity of git history is crucial.

Goals

A minimal python code of the shell script exists as a pull request.

The goal of this hackweek is to:

• Add more unit tests
  
• Make the python code modular
  
• Add code coverage if possible
  

Resources

• Link to GitHub Repository: https://github.com/openSUSE/git-sha-verify

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Song Search with CLAP by gcolangiuli

Description

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is an open-source library that enables the training of a neural network on both Audio and Text descriptions, making it possible to search for Audio using a Text input. Several pre-trained models for song search are already available on huggingface

Goals

Evaluate how CLAP can be used for song searching and determine which types of queries yield the best results by developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Python. Based on the results of this MVP, future steps could include:

• Music Tagging;
• Free text search;
• Integration with an LLM (for example, with MCP or the OpenAI API) for music suggestions based on your own library.

The code for this project will be entirely written using AI to better explore and demonstrate AI capabilities.

Resources

• CLAP: The main model being researched;
• huggingface: Pre-trained models for CLAP;
• Free Music Archive: Creative Commons songs that can be used for testing;
• Colab: To be used as the development environment;
• hw25-song-search: Github repo of the project.

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Improve chore and screen time doc generator script `wochenplaner` by gniebler

Description

I wrote a little Python script to generate PDF docs, which can be used to track daily chore completion and screen time usage for several people, with one page per person/week.

I named this script wochenplaner and have been using it for a few months now.

It needs some improvements and adjustments in how the screen time should be tracked and how chores are displayed.

Goals

• Fix chore field separation lines
• Change screen time tracking logic from "global" (week-long) to daily subtraction and weekly addition of remainders (more intuitive than current "weekly time budget method)
• Add logic to fill in chore fields/lines, ideally with pictures, falling back to text.

Resources

tbd (Gitlab repo)

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Casky – Lightweight C Key-Value Engine with Crash Recovery by pperego

Description

Casky is a lightweight, crash-safe key-value store written in C, designed for fast storage and retrieval of data with a minimal footprint. Built using Test-Driven Development (TDD), Casky ensures reliability while keeping the codebase clean and maintainable. It is inspired by Bitcask and aims to provide a simple, embeddable storage engine that can be integrated into microservices, IoT devices, and other C-based applications.

Objectives:

• Implement a minimal key-value store with append-only file storage.
• Support crash-safe persistence and recovery.
• Expose a simple public API: store(key, value), load(key), delete(key).
• Follow TDD methodology for robust and testable code.
• Provide a foundation for future extensions, such as in-memory caching, compaction, and eventual integration with vector-based databases like PixelDB.

Why This Project is Interesting:

Casky combines low-level C programming with modern database concepts, making it an ideal playground to explore storage engines, crash safety, and performance optimization. It’s small enough to complete during Hackweek, yet it provides a solid base for future experiments and more complex projects.

Goals

• Working prototype with append-only storage and memtable.
• TDD test suite covering core functionality and recovery.
• Demonstration of basic operations: insert, load, delete.
• Optional bonus: LRU caching, file compaction, performance benchmarks.

Future Directions:

After Hackweek, Casky can evolve into a backend engine for projects like PixelDB, supporting vector storage and approximate nearest neighbor search, combining low-level performance with cutting-edge AI retrieval applications.

Resources

The Bitcask paper: https://riak.com/assets/bitcask-intro.pdf The Casky repository: https://github.com/thesp0nge/casky

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GRIT: GRaphs In Time by fvanlankvelt

Description

The current implementation of the Time-Travelling Topology database, StackGraph, has served SUSE Observability well over the years. But it is dependent on a number of complex components - Zookeeper, HDFS, HBase, Tephra. These lead to a large number of failure scenarios and parameters to tweak for optimal performance.

The goal of this project is to take the high-level requirements (time-travelling topology, querying over time, transactional changes to topology, scalability) and design/prototype key components, to see where they would lead us if we were to start from scratch today.

An example would be to use RocksDB to persist topology history. Its user-defined timestamps seem to match well with time-travelling, has transaction support with fine-grained conflict detection.

Goals

Determine feasibility of implementing the model on a whole new architecture. See how to model the graph and its history such that updates and querying are performant, transactional conflicts are minimized. Build a prototype to validate the model.

Resources

Backend developers, preferably experienced in distributed systems. Programming language: scala 3 with some C++ for low-level.

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Work on kqlite (Lightweight remote SQLite with high availability and auto failover). by epenchev

Description

Continue the work on kqlite (Lightweight remote SQLite with high availability and auto failover).
It's a solution for applications that require High Availability but don't need all the features of a complete RDBMS and can fit SQLite in their use case.
Also kqlite can be considered to be used as a lightweight storage backend for K8s (https://docs.k3s.io/datastore) and the Edge, and allowing to have only 2 Nodes for HA.

Goals

Push kqlite to a beta version.
kqlite as library for Go programs.

Resources

https://github.com/kqlite/kqlite

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Uyuni read-only replica by cbosdonnat

Description

For now, there is no possible HA setup for Uyuni. The idea is to explore setting up a read-only shadow instance of an Uyuni and make it as useful as possible.

Possible things to look at:

• live sync of the database, probably using the WAL. Some of the tables may have to be skipped or some features disabled on the RO instance (taskomatic, PXT sessions…)
• Can we use a load balancer that routes read-only queries to either instance and the other to the RW one? For example, packages or PXE data can be served by both, the API GET requests too. The rest would be RW.

Goals

• Prepare a document explaining how to do it.
• PR with the needed code changes to support it

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