Today, you can get low-quality knockoffs of just about any popular smartphone on sites like AliExpress or Temu, whether they be iPhones, Galaxy phones, or whatever else. They have terrible build quality, bottom-of-the-barrel components and specifications, and all run outdated versions of Android – badly.

In the last few days, I built a shoot ’em up game by embedding a tiny custom bytecode VM and rendering the graphics using a fullscreen pixel shader. The result is a 3kB Windows executable. This was done for Langjam Gamejam, a 7-day challenge where you create a programming language and then use it to build a game.

A while back, when chatting with a colleague over their computer, I noticed that a logo did not look exactly the same as it did on mine. It looked thinner on theirs and more faithful to the original image.

I’ve heard from people in the past that my articles are too long, and I wanted to start by saying that, for the most part, they’re going to stay long, because I feel like the only way for me to make my arguments is to be

Another month started almost two weeks ago, so we’ve got a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The month of July – it seems the report was published with a bit of a delay, regardless of what the date on their site says – brought improvements to the installer, with new options commonly found in most installers, such as a choice of installation method, network-based installation, and more.

The OSNews Fundraiser, to celebrate the fact I posted 20000 stories in 21 years, is still underway. The first major incentive was reached, and I, a long-time Linux user, published my experiences using Windows 11 for a month.

Raymond Chen explains what, exactly, the file winstart.bat in Windows 95 is used for. In Windows 95, you could create a winstart.bat file in your Windows directory. During startup, the virtual machine manager initializes and creates the so-called “System virtual machine” (the “System VM”), which is the virtual machine that all Windows programs run in.

Delphi is still very much a thing, and still very much in active development. The current stewards of Delphi, Embarcadero, released the Delphi 13 Community Edition today. Delphi Community Edition is a full-featured, free edition of Delphi for building native applications with the Delphi language.

Does this thing still work?

Edit: Apparently yes, it does still work.

The slow but steady march to the grave for the Android Open Source Project continues. Every few months Google hammers another big nail in the coffin of Android as an open source effort, and I’ve documented them all here on OSNews (nail, nail, nail, nail, nail), coming to the conclusion long ago that for all intents and purposes, Android is no longer an open source operating system.

The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping.

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

This was bound to happen. According to a new report from Taiwanese publication United Daily News (UDC,) Microsoft is raising the cost of Windows license fees for hardware makers by a much higher amount than normal.

I found some ambiguous wording in the c89(/c90) standard, where GCC and Clang disagree on the interpretation. It concerns the behavior of implicit function declarations, which were removed in c99, so this was never disambiguated.

Enlightenment desktop is a low on resources desktop environment without sacrificing on visuals. NetBSD support for this BSD-licensed desktop has been left a few years behind. The aim of this project is to port the newest version of the desktop to pkgsrc and commit upstream portability fixes when necessary to ease future versions updates for NetBSD.

Akihabara, Tokyo’s famous “Electric Town,” is overflowing with foreign tourists these days, drawn by anime shops, maid cafes, and duty-free electronics megastores. But there is one storefront most of them walk past without a glance: Akizuki Denshi Tsusho.

Cookies are ancient technology, and in no way necessary of even particularly desirable to track you. Modern fingerprinting doesn’t need them at all. A live demonstration of everything a website learns about you before you click anything with no cookies.

Back in 2014, Microsoft released the source code to the first Windows version of Word, version 1.1a. Now, Justin Marshall has ported this code to modern versions of Windows, so you can run it as if it were any other modern application.

Top supplier of great articles Nicole Branagan is at it again. We’re back into the strip mahjong games today, here going back to 1991. Video System is a company that’s probably best known in retro-gaming circles for Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings, but mahjong games (usually branded Idol Mahjong) were one of their bigger moneymakers.

As my interest in the micro-wildlife on our terrace has grown I have found myself wanting to know more exactly what I am looking at.

More optimizations and more practical benchmarks (create and extract):

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/discussions/10056#discussioncomment-17952244

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act keeps delivering for EU citizens. Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple’s EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act.

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has put up a new maintenance release, version 4.1.0. It’s got a small number of fixes, two very minor new features, as well a few updated translations. That’s it.

A good month, much of it away from home where, happy to relate, most of the plants survived the endless heat; heat that has been the worst of the time at home.

Highlights of the month:

• The Umbrian week continued into July
• Real lamb for one dinner, not too-young abbacchio
• Kinda sorta got into attempted macro photography
• Bad computer trouble with overheated SSDs, but recovered
• Grape harvest; a little sharp but better than letting the birds feast
• A night in Bari and a week in Puglia
• BirdNET now configurable as a USB gadget and available via Tailscale
• Emergency visit back to Umbria; good to be wanted and useful
• Got phished; phuck
• Launched into Couch to 5k.

Listening to James G talking to Rachel on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast, one thing in particular caught my attention, and that was when she was telling James about her studio.

borg 2.0.0b23-pre benchmarks from some essential components of borg:

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/discussions/10056

#borgbackup #blake3 #hashing #chunking #zstd #compression #algorithms #simd

For a little under a year, everyone — myself included — has compared NVIDIA to Enron, largely because NVIDIA insisted, in detail, that it was nothing like Enron, WorldCom, or Lucent, a potent example of the Streisand Effect that would be much funnier if NVIDIA wasn’t holding up

The CMS engine that drives this site — Grav — has now been updated to version 2.0.18. Kudos to the Grav team for a very smooth process, very well explained.

There’s been a small flurry of articles from a variety of sources, all talking about more or less the same thing: Microsoft is trying to explain why Windows 11 is as difficult to develop as it is, in turn justifying why it’s become such a mess over the years.

Once upon a time in the mysterious lands of Mexico, starting in Fall 1996 and through Spring 1997, I coded a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code, fit it into a floppy, and jumped in excitement as it boot up.

Two years ago, I was Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason. I have since found a reason: making a new N64 game! The result is Xibalba 64 – a Wolfenstein 3D-like FPS. Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual! ↫ Dominic Szablewski The article details the development process, from setting up the correct tooling to actually getting the game to play on a real Nintendo 64, and everything in between – including optimising the game to get it to run at a steady 60fps.

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has been updated with the release of Milestone 41. According to the release notes, it contains the latest security fixes from Illumos, but beyond that it’s just a number of small point releases for certain components.

Executive Summary:

• Microsoft disclosures and Bloomberg analyses show that OpenAI's compute spend and revenue share accounted for 70% or more of Microsoft's FY26 AI revenues, and more than 7% of Microsoft's overall FY2026 revenues.
• Microsoft has spent $261.3 billion in capital expenditures since

In a flash, I was 16 or 17, at my friend’s house round the back of King’s Cross, and trying to work out what in the world to do next. A link from Gwern had sent me to The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds, in which David Hill took his chances at a Diplomacy tournament.

Those days, we didn’t know we were nerds, let alone alpha nerds.

Few things in technology are more complex, convoluted, and riddled with literally decades of drama than the Amiga community. Luckily for all of us, a significant step forward has been made today: several of the key corporate players in the community have struck agreements to settle their legal disputes.

Don’t have enough computing devices on your wish list yet? Do you have a need for a graphing calculator? No? What if it can run Linux and even Windows 10? I see I’ve got your attention. The HP Prime is a graphing calculator on the market since 2013, with a hardware revision in 2018 (the G2 model).

Want to switch to 9front, especially with the new release having just been made available, but really need Wireguard? Fret not! Wireguard is now available on 9front, experimentally.

Today, I wanted to show you one of the most fascinating and surprising operating systems ever created. It’s not another Unix, Linux, or Windows. It is an architecture that went its own way and proved that systems engineering design can look completely different.

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

Having been away from home for a bit, and with nobody here to keep the crows coming by, it took a few days to reestablish our relationship.

The best operating system in the world, 9front, released its latest version, “THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN”. As I’m sure you know, 9front is a fork of plan9, and one that’s actually consistently maintained and developed.

1981 was a different time for computing. It was expensive (both hardware and software), and it was far from a given that machines from one vendor would be able to talk to those from another. In fact, Columbia University had just such a problem, so in 1981, Frank da Cruz and Bill Catchings designed a … Continue reading Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years (and working with a decades-old C codebase) →

Cameron Kaiser’s articles are always a right treat, and this one’s no different. It’s about running MkLinux on the Apple Workgroup Server, the regular Mac rebadged into a server product and predecessor to Apple’s first real server product, the Apple Network Server running AIX.

Whenever the EU steps in to regulate the big technology companies, the response from news outlets and bloggers (often funded or outright owned by right-wing extremists) is to claim it’s just a bunch of dumb , tech-illiterate bureaucrats telling the vastly more intelligent and superior technology companies what to do.

During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of definition.

NetBSD, the operating system specifically designed to run on anything from a supercomputer to a toothpick, just released version 11.0. There’s a ton of changes and improvements here, such as a brand new port to RISC-V, which supports a number of the more popular RISC-V SoCs (sadly, not the one I have just yet).

I have a policy to effectively never link to YouTube videos. I’ll gladly make an exception for this one. Reflection is one of the most powerful concepts in Computer Science. Unfortunately, not every programming language is blessed enough to have it.

In case somebody wonders about the 5-digit issue numbers:

We use the issue tracker not only for bugs, but also for feature ideas, remembering TODOs, user support, discussing stuff, etc.

Also, code updates (pull requests) and github discussions share the same number space.

... and to celebrate that we have 5-digit IDs on Github now, there's that:

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/10000

#borgbackup #startrek #borg

Currently working on borg 2.0.0b23.

Sneak peek: it will be faster!
- zstd and blake3 internal multithreading for big chunks
- by default don't assert id == id_hash(plaintext) for the hot read paths when we already did AEAD authentication
- avoid refetching/reparsing repeated chunks
- serve all-zero chunks without repository access; also cache recently parsed chunks
- likely the default chunker will switch to fastcdc

Tcl, or the “Tool Command Language“, created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit — Tk.

A great deal of the discussion of the so-called benefits or problems with AI comes down to the theoretical jobs that are (or are not) lost as a result of things LLMs can (or cannot do), or the equally theoretical productivity benefits that’ll come from using LLMs

Speaking of OpenBSD: Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures.

As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of relayd(8) and httpd(8) had stalled. Many diffs appeared on the tech@ mailing list from different contributors, but few were committed into the repository.

Concluding the thing I started three entries ago, I've replied to the pile of email I'd let accumulate. And I'm really pleased with my new hand-rolled personal contact database...

When I had to use Windows 11 for a month because you people paid me to do so, the one seemingly small thing that really ground my gears were Windows 11’s terrible right-click (context) menus. They were full of stuff I didn’t put there, slow to open, and in some places, a modern Windows 11 context menu would have its own old Win32 context menu with even more stuff.

We may all have a disdain for Chrome – OSNews users probably use Chrome a lot less than the average public – but that doesn’t mean the browser doesn’t sometimes do interesting things other browsers should copy.

It’s that time of the week again, I guess. The year is 2026, and I’m still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menu’s All apps list for an app I don’t remember installing. This time, it’s Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo viewer and editor for Windows 11 that nobody asked to have installed automatically.

Ubuntu Touch, the mobile Linux operating system originally started by, you guessed it, Ubuntu, but now managed by UBports, released versions 24.04-2.0 and 24.04-1.4. The latter is a maintenance release with some bug fixes and minor changes, while the former is a bigger release with quite a few improvements, so let’s focus on that one.

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment! I just spent three weeks investigating how well that’s currently supported on Linux & Wayland.

Last summer, I noticed an insect bringing a bit of leaf to plug the hole in a bit of bamboo that is part of one of those folding director’s chairs.

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

Dave Farquhar published an article today about Windows NT 3.1’s place in the market when it was originally released, and while the article is interesting and a fun read, it does mention this: Microsoft took its nascent code that it intended to form the base of OS/2 3.0, renamed it Windows New Technology, and eventually released it as Windows NT 3.1.

This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager’s git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments.

Let’s do another article about weird code in video games. The original 1992 Comanche release is extremely picky about memory managers. The game refuses to work with EMM emulators and crashes when EMM386 is active.

Haiku has a Firefox port, but due to Mozilla’s trademark policies, it’s actually called Iceweasel. After some back-and-forth with Mozilla, the browser maker has no given Haiku permission to officially use the Firefox name for the port.

Apple has transitioned its hardware products to the AArch64 processor architecture and is phasing out support for x64. Oracle engineers will thus stop maintaining the macOS/x64 port as of JDK 27. Maintaining the port is a significant burden.

That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard’s Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform. It’s a REMark statement, a comment in that particular language.

The hottest and most promising operating system kernel in development, the GNU Hurd, has published another summary of its most recent quarter of development. Hurd has experimental support for 9pfs now, a work-in–progress port of OpenNTPD, the NTP daemon from OpenBSD, a port of Neovim, and a few more ports here and there.

Given that Android phones have been around for nearly two decades now, there comes a time when Google has to end support for one of its older software versions. For a couple of years now, Google Play services has been supported on devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or newer.

Good morning premium subscribers! As ever, please ping me at ez@betteroffline.com if you have any questions.

---

Oracle has one of the strongest mythologies in the tech industry.

I'm still writing my journals on paper. Makes it about a decade of notebooks, most of them Field Notes, kept in the archival wooden boxes^[1].

A rather unusual announcement was made late last night: the FreeBSD project has frozen their ports repository. For more than 48 hours now, no changes have been accepted or made to the tree, and here’s why.

A podcast I just listened to raised again the thorny issue of blogger’s guilt, and tried to make it seem like nothing, that you are answerable only to yourself, that you can blog at any cadence that suits you.

We all know the original Amiga was far ahead of its time, and the Amiga really doesn’t need more retrospectives and glazing. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t want more Amiga retrospectives and glazing.

This post is about the evolution of Futhark’s type checker, motivated by a large refactoring I am about to merge. It is probably mostly of interest to other language designers, and contains some lessons I wish I had known when we first got started – although I am not particularly well-read in the type checking literature, so it’s possible all of this is old hat.

The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development.

I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and reviewing code.

Honestly, it feels like only yesterday that System76, Linux OEM and the company behind pop!_OS, announced it was going to develop its own desktop environment, COSMIC. We’re about seven months into the more general availability of COSMIC, and the company has put up a nice overview of the various improvements that have already made their way into the code since then.

What happens when programmers get to vote on a complete ban on slopcoded software on their code platform? Members of Codeberg were asked to vote on a proposal to completely ban slopcoded projects from Codeberg, and in what should not be a surprising outcome to anyone not overcome with “AI” hysteria, the vast majority voted in favour of the complete ban: over 70% of Codeberg members voted to ban slopcoded projects entirely (358 in favour, 144 against, 14 abstentions).

Thanks for reading this week’s free Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Friday’s premium newsletter will ask the simple question: Is Oracle dying? 

It’s been one year since I launched the premium newsletter, and I’ve decided to extend the discount

Finally, I have embarked on the Augean task of dealing with my bookmarks and tags, a reminder that link rot is all pervasive and also that rot is evitable if you make the effort.

The worst is when entities that clearly could afford to fix their links simply don't bother.

borgbackup 2.0.0b22 was just released!

First release with packs and also other exciting changes - do not use with production repositories!

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/releases/tag/2.0.0b22

#borgbackup #linux #macOS #freeBSD #openBSD #netBSD #backup

If you want to develop an application for AmigaOS 3.x but don’t want to deal with real hardware, virtualisation and emulation are your friends. Apropos of nothing, I decided to set up an Amiga development environment.

Drivers of cars from the Volkswagen Group using alternative Android versions like GrapheneOS, LineageOS, or /e/OS have been unable to use the VW app for some time. This means they can neither check their vehicle’s remaining range from their phone, schedule service appointments, nor control charging and air conditioning.

Sam Altman seems to be making OpenAI way more non-profit than before: Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream talking point on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker.

Dan Carr in How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music For Airports:

In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airports was created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself.

Wow! This was a fantastic write-up of how Brian Eno went about creating the ‘first’ work of ambient music. Seeing it written down like this, it seems a lot less mysterious than I would've thought.

End of the day, it seems to me that Eno was a guy who fucked around, and found out. And boy am I glad he did, because Music For Airports is still my number one choice for when I'm working and writing.

Via.

In case you find any issues with the new site, here is the issue tracker:

https://github.com/borgbackup/borgbackup.github.io/issues

New https://www.borgbackup.org/ site is live!

Old site is still there at /index_old.html .

Well, it's been a while.

It's not that I haven't had the time to post. It's just that I sort of fell off the wagon and stopped writing and posting regularly. That's something I want to remedy, because both are positive habits that make me feel better about myself. So, instead of procrastinating while waiting for the perfect ‘I'm back!’ post to be delivered through divine intervention directly to my brain (I'll be honest, I've already tried that approach for a couple of months and it's been less than productive) I thought I'd just rip off the band aid and get back to posting with a simple update on what I've been doing lately.

That said, life's been hectic. Chaotic, even! In one of the few posts that I did manage to publish recently, I wrote that ‘I feel like the speed of time has increased tenfold’ and that feels like an accurate summary of the last year. The kids keep growing up, and as they do they become more active. And as I try to keep up with them, time flies.

The odd thing is that, even if it feels like time goes by faster than ever, I somehow feel that I have more of it to spend as I please than I've had in many years. The other side of the coin of the kids growing up, I suppose. Whereas before they needed me (or their mum) present and ready to go at all times, they now keep themselves (relatively) safe and occupied longer and more frequently for each passing day. Oh, make no mistake, they are still annoying little things that hang on to our coattails in idleness as if their sole purpose was to prevent us from getting anything at all done. But then they suddenly disappear for an hour or two, and before you know it you're wondering where did the good, old days when they always wanted you around go? While these moments are just small pockets in an otherwise busy and demanding and rewarding life with my children right now, they are foreshadowing of what's to come.

Getting back to the point, I now have more time to do with as I please than I have in years. And here are some of the things I've been doing with that time in the past half year or so.

Working out

Won't go into the the details – you can find all of them in the workout log which I update every single day. If I work out on the day, which I still aim to do every day. While my overarching goal is still to stay healthy and keep my body in decent shape, I have been trying to improve my running fitness a bit over the past year.

Inspired by other people from around the web, I've wanted to see if it was possible to get back into peak running shape by training in a different way than I did during my marathon running days. So far, the answer is no. I've not been able to train with the required consistency to get anywhere close. Instead, as confirmed by a 5k race I ran recently, I've only been able to maintain fitness since last summer.

There are many things I could point to as reasons, but the cold truth is that it comes down to priorities. And the past year I've not prioritised running fitness. Other things have taken priority, in particular maintaining a healthy weight and participating in social events that disrupt the rhythm of both training and recovery. As my years of being young and promising are now behind me, I notice that these priorities come with a cost in terms of fitness.

And, being honest, it is a price that I am quite comfortable paying.

Entertainment

The reading log contains all the details of my reading. I won't bore you with all of it here.

I've been continuing to read books regularly, as I have for quite a few years now. Fantasy is still my go to for entertainment and relaxation. Right now I am reading the third book of the fourth of five trilogies (the fourth is actually a tetralogy) of Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings. It is enjoyable reading. I am also trying to venture outside of my comfort zone. Reading about Basho and the history of Haiku poetry was an attempt to do just that, as was reading Seneca's letters and a biologist's diary of attempting to encounter a wolverine in the wild.

What's changed over the past year is that I've branched out from just reading books for entertainment. I've rediscovered the joy of watching movies! Some time between watching shows (and then sort of just quitting) and reading books, I lost simply stopped watching movies. Perhaps not following ‘the scene’ as much as I used to back when I had more time meant that I didn't discover the interesting movies that were being made.

Either way, at some point this winter I felt the urge to watch a movie. So I did. And it made me want to watch another. Now I've settled into the routine of Friday nights being movie nights. And I like it! A decade of barely watching movies has given me a lot of material to feast upon. Some highlights so far are Sinners (good), Triangle of Sadness (also good) and Train Dreams (fantastic).

Yet, the highlight is a rewatch. Watching Interstellar again, more than a decade after the initial release, was a profound experience. It was, and remains, one of my favourite films of all time.

As my son continues to develop his interest in football (or soccer, as the yanks say) it has rekindled my own fascination for the beautiful game. We've watched most of Manchester United's games the past season. When the World Cup rolled around this summer, our enthusiasm didn't exactly wane. Add to that the fact that Norway were finally back in the good company, and had an all time campaign as they reached the quarter finals, I've been lucky to share many memorable football moments with both my family and friends this summer.

One of the many reasons why I love sports!

Work

Two years after moving into a role as a Sales Manager Web for Obs, I transitioned to yet another new role this summer. It is my third role change in five years at Coop. I am now employed as an E-commerce Specialist for Obs BYGG.

My day-to-day tasks are much the same, while my overall responsibilities have changed a little. The new role is slightly more specialised and tailored to my strengths. Nevertheless, I found the circumstances of my previous role quite satisfactory, and the reasons for the change were mostly practical. Reducing my commute a few days per week from dreadful to next to non-existent chief among them.

I am happy that I've been able to improve my circumstance without having to change companies. Coop is a stable employer that focuses on provide opportunities for growth and contribution for its employees, and a place that I am happy to remain. A month into my new role, I now see myself staying both in the role and in the company for many years to come. Better yet, I think I'll be able to contribute to the company in a positive manner.

Social life

As I noted in regards to my workouts, I've been happy to participate in more social events than I've done previously. One of the good things about working offers plenty of opportunities to hang out with cool people, and I've take more of these opportunities recently.

I've also attended a couple of concerts this spring, and added three more to the calendar this fall. Live music is another thing that fell of the list of priorities during the most busy years with the kids and training for marathons, that I am now happy to have rediscovered. As the concert experience usually involves a couple of beers to make it even more enjoyable, it certainly isn't a boon for my fitness.

This summer, we also went on vacation with two of my best friends and their families. Making that happen involved us spending quite a few of our vacation days in the car, as we travelled to and from the chosen location. It was all worth it! Seeing your kids become friends and have the time of their lives with your friends' kids is a something special. I hope we can do it again the next couple of years.

Tech things

A few changes here and there, if nothing big. The setup for this website remains mostly the same (documented in detail through a series of posts). When I deleted my Strava account, I exported all of my data. I've imported the workout titles and notes to backfill the workout log with these details for all sessions prior to late 2025, when I began making notes here. The result is that most sessions now contain commentary.

Last year I wrote about building a digital music library. The journey has continued this year, though I've mostly purchased digital music directly. As of now, my modest library consists of 1 030 songs from 97 albums by 67 different artists. I've settled into mainly adding new (to me, I'm very unconcerned about release times) records as I discover them, my library of owned music accounts for the vast majority of my listening. That's something! I would like to write about the music I purchase and listen to, as well as add a way to showcase my library and/or my listening history on the site.

I've also splurged on some new items this year. Not just one, but two sets of headphones: Sony WH-1000XM5 and Powerbeats Pro 2. Different use cases, in theory, but I'm not sure if buying both was worth it. Especially as I found my presumably lost Airpod that prompted me to purchase the Powerbeats… Ah, well. A topic for an upcoming post!

The other purchase I've made is the Polar Loop. I've been wanting to give overnight HRV measuring a go for a while now, to see if this data can help me inform my workout planning to help me be more consistent over time. One option was replacing my nearly decade old Garmin. It was an expensive option. Then there's the fact that I also prefer to wear a plain, old ‘dumb’ watch with actual dial and hands. Polar's subscription free band was a nice and relatively cheap compromise. I definitely need to write a post about how I'm collecting and using the data.

Wrapping up

There are many additional topics I could have covered here. As I'm closing in on two thousand words already, I'm just going to leave it here. If you made it all the way through, congratulations!

Oh and by the way: If I owe you an email, I'll get right to it. Any day now. Probably!

One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there’s the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.

The Verge reviewed the latest Surface Laptop, which only comes with 8GB of RAM at a higher price than the previous 16GB model, and they conclude that Windows isn’t really usable on 8GB of RAM. Whether that’s true or not I do not know – I would assume it depends a lot on your usage – but this quote from the review I found quite peculiar: I was on a Microsoft Teams call (using the app, not a browser) when the host streamed a brief video, which made the whole laptop hang for several seconds.

The NLnet Foundation’s NGI0 Commons Fund supported an effort to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, and the work’s payed off. All drivers which support PMF can use WPA3, which are: iwm, iwx, and qwx.

Speaking of OpenVMS and Alpha – and we like speaking about OpenVMS and Alpha, don’t we? – there’s now a port of DOSBox that runs on the Alpha version venerable operating system.

Well, this is new – but not at all unexpected considering the state of Windows and the wider technology industry. When you connect certain LG monitors to a Windows machine, Windows Update will pull in a bunch of adware promoting antivirus trash.

It was only a few weeks ago that we got a massively improved Alpha emulator, capable of running VMS, Windows 2000, and Tru64, including X11 support and a variety of other exciting features. Today, we’ve got another major emulation milestone (update: sadly, with “AI” support, so odds are this will fizzle out.

Email, one of the most pervasive and enduring technologies of computer networking, was invented in about a dozen places by dozens of people in the 1960s. It's hard to lay out a clear history of the technology because it's just so obvious—pretty much as soon as more than one person could use a computer, there was some kind of mail facility.

#borgbackup 1.4.5 was just released!

Some fixes, including a low severity security fix, some new features, some other changes.

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/releases/tag/1.4.5

#linux #FreeBSD #openBSD #netBSD #macos #omniOS

I love this demonstration from Ghost Font: The Anti-AI Font Only Humans Can Read.

The explanation is very clear and as a proof of concept it works well.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux.