For historical reasons some projects I maintain are still hosted at my "personal" page http://ludovic.rousseau.free.fr/ in the My computer programs page.

They are:

• ifd-GemPC: serial GemPC 410 and USB GemPC 430 reader drivers.
• pcsc-perl: wrapper to use PC/SC in Perl.
• pcsc-tools: some tools to be used with smart cards and PC/SC.

Why the change?

My personal pages, hosted by my ISP (Internet Service Provider), are still not using https. I have no access to the web server so I can't change that.

The new pages will be independent from the ISP. The projects will use a DNS name I maintain myself.

According to the Internet Archive the "My computer programs" page exists since August 2001. I don't think the personal pages hosted by Free will disappear soon, but who knows. Maybe Elon Musk will buy Iliad (parent company of Free) and... anything can happen next.

I will be able to get some access statistics, in particular for the file smartcard_list.txt containing the list of ATRs used by the pcsc_scan tool.

Now hosts

The projects are now in subdomains of apdu.fr. They are at:

• https://ifd-gempc.apdu.fr/
• https://pcsc-perl.apdu.fr/
• https://pcsc-tools.apdu.fr/

The old pages redirect to the new web sites.

The URL http://ludovic.rousseau.free.fr/softwares/pcsc-tools/smartcard_list.txt is used by (old) versions of ATR_analysis used by pcsc_scan. This file will be maintained up to date for the next months/years.

Conclusion

I continue my migration to self-hosting. Thanks to all the sponsors that allow me to do that.

I just released a new version of pcsc-tools, a suite of tools for PC/SC. 

I updated ATR_analysis to use the new location of the smart card ATR list.

Changes:

Since January 2020 I am part of the Github sponsors program. See my previous articles: GitHub Sponsors, GitHub Sponsors: first payment and GitHub Sponsors: US$ 20 per month.

I wanted to update you about the years 2021 and 2022.

Public data

My Github sponsor page is available at Become a sponsor to Ludovic Rousseau.

You can see that I currently have 7 sponsors, and 4 past sponsors. A big thank you to all of them.

The amount of money is not public. That is why I wrote the next chapter.

Private data

In 2022 I received a total of 628 €. Compared to 394 € in 2021 that is an increase of 59%.

The amount I receive monthly is slowly growing since 2021.

To be fully transparent to my sponsors and everybody else (full disclosure?) I publish below the monthly results since the beginning of the experience:

It is far from a full time salary. But that is enough to pay for the infrastructure I use to host my different web sites.

Conclusion

Again a big thank you to my present and past sponsors.

If you want to help and become a sponsor then go to Become a sponsor to Ludovic Rousseau.

Dear readers,

I wish you a happy new year for 2023.

In 2022 I published 32 articles on this blog.

 

Audience in 2022

 You can notice a spike around 17th December. That is the article "AlcorMicro AU9560 reader and fast smart cards: help from crowd needed". I added the article URL in different bug reports so it gained some extra visibility.

Again, a large part of the audience comes from the United States.

 

Surprisingly, a large part of the audience uses Windows.

For a blog that talks about Free Software that is strange. I guess Windows users are interested by my projects that are also available on Windows like PySCard or PyKCS11.

Or maybe Windows developers are looking for serious information they do not find elsewhere like sample codes to use PC/SC in an application?

Most read articles

The post number one, by far, is about the AlcorMicro AU9560 (bogus) reader.

Conclusion

Thank you to you, readers.

This blog has no advertising. If you want to support me you can become a github sponsor (or send me some bitcoins but with the current electric energy crisis and bitcoin impact on the climate it may not be a good choice).

 I just released a new version of pcsc-tools, a suite of tools for PC/SC. 

Changes:

1.6.1 - 30 December 2022, Ludovic ROUSSEAU

• 196 new ATRs
• use colors on NetBSD ("wsvt25" terminal)
• pcsc_scan: always print the version in verbose mode

The documentation for the PySCard API was not updated since 2017 (5 years ago).

epydoc → pydoctor

The tool used to generate the HTML documentation is epydoc. The latest epydoc version was released in 2008 (14 years ago). This tool is no more available in Debian so I had to move to something else.

The (new) tool to replace epydoc is pydoctor. It is actively maintained and generates nicer HTML pages.

For example, nice changes are:

• use of HTML list
• use syntax colorization for sample source code
• provide indexes for names, classes and modules
• no use of HTML frame so the URL is always correct and can be shared
  

Previous documentation

 

The old (epydoc) documentation is still available online at https://pyscard.sourceforge.io/epydoc/

New documentation

Conclusion

The new API documentation is available at https://pyscard.sourceforge.io/apidocs/index.html or from the project main documentation page https://pyscard.sourceforge.io/index.html

I guess I could improve the documentation. Feel free to report issues or suggest improvements.