Open source project contains hidden instruction for “AI” agents: delete my code
It’s no secret there’s a war going on inside the open source community, with people adopting “AI” on one side, and those that want nothing to do with it on the other. While the former are, by nature, using destructive tactics like mass website scraping, license washing, taking people’s creative works without permission, taking all the RAM and GPUs, and oh, destroying the planet, the latter have mostly stuck to fairly benign things like policies banning “AI” use, “AI” bot blockers, and the occasional honey pot mazes to trap “AI” crawlers.

borgstore 0.5.0 was just released!

borgstore is a general purpose key/value store with some nice features, supporting misc. backends (local fs, sftp, REST https, s3, rclone).

it now supports optional caching (usually via an additional posixfs caching backend).

The exemptions in age-verification laws for open source operating systems are bad, actually
We’ve talked about the various age verification laws in the United States, and there’s been a development recently that a lot of people seem to think is a good thing: both the age verification laws in California and Colorado have received exemptions for open source operating systems.
Gemini, gophers, and fingers: alternative internets beyond HTTPS
But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics. finger://, gopher://, and gemini://. Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet.
Microsoft tries to obscure “AI” features behind flowery design language
Now that my one-month sentence of using Windows 11 has begun (you can follow along!), I’m also a bit more perceptive of news and developments regardingMicrosoft’s latest and greatest operating system version.
Sailfish OS reviews are always the same
João Carrasqueira at XDA Developers has taken a look at the current state of Sailfish OS, and concludes: As an idea, I love Sailfish OS. Not only does it bring a wholly unique interface to mobile devices at a time when things seem more unified than ever, but it also has the potential to bring the full power of Linux to a smartphone you actually want to use.

borgstore will get caching. also, that might be used for full local mirroring of remote storage.

github.com/borgbackup/borgstor

Revenge of The Business Idiot

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

Love at first listen

Sometimes you come across a tune and you instantly know. It will be a combination of the melody, the instrumentation, the vocals and the lyrics. And everything else that makes music unique.

Came across Rattlesnake Milk today and it was love at first listen. Both their albums (from Bandcamp and Qobuz).

While listening I looked up their upcoming tour dates. Was mightily disappointed discovering that they're coming to Norway in the fall, but won't be playing in Oslo! Can we get someone on this asap?!

The Nokia N8 has a brand new, modern, actively maintained, and regularly updated Symbian ROM
I have a Nokia N8, and it’s one of my favourite retro (?) devices I own. It was one of Nokia’s last efforts to make Symbian happen in the post-iPhone era, and while the hardware was quite nice, Symbian just wasn’t made for multitouch devices.
Microsoft continues beating the “agentic” Windows drum
We’re a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I’d better take a peek at how things stand with Windows.
On C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers
Anyone who’s written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn’t for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and libraries.
Flatpak will depend on systemd
If you visit the Flatpak website today, it lists, as the very first advantage of the project: “Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.” If you then move on to the list of supported distributions, you’ll see the usual suspects, but also distributions like Void Linux, Guix, and Alpine.
“Long-term support” does not mean what you think it does
You may think you know what “long-term support” means when picking a Linux distribution and version, but judging by the multitude of utterly wrong takes and deeply confused users I come across online, I’m starting to get the feeling that in fact, no, you don’t know what it means.
Gnutella: a protocol outliving the world that created it
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Gnutella is a file sharing protocol that many have forgotten and it has the story of a decentralized technology adopted by millions of casual users who did not care to learn what a peer-to-peer system was.
Time for a new printer

Signed up for updates about Open Printer. Hopefully this project sees the light of day, and soon! Right ready for a printer in the house, and this looks perfect.

Via.

Migrating from Ubuntu 16.04 to FreeBSD
Bruno Croci’s blog had been running on Ubuntu 16.04 for a long time, well past the Linux distribution’s expiration date. As such, it was time to upgrade, but instead of opting for something standard like another Ubuntu release, he opted for FreeBSD instead.
Secure boot and Microsoft CA rollover: a heads-up for distributions
We’ve already talked about the secure boot certificates from Microsoft that are about to become invalid, but Debian EFI team member and longtime Debian contributor Steve McIntyre published a blog post with more information for users and distribution developers alike.
Premium: What If...We're In An AI Bubble? (Part 2)

Last week I ran the first part of my What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? Series, where I asked questions and posed scenarios as to the consequences of the many, many questions I’ve asked over the last few years.

News: OpenAI Had A Negative 122% Non-GAAP Operating Margin In Q1 2026, and ChatGPT Growth Has Stalled

Executive Summary:

Google’s plan for ads in its new “AI” chatbot search engine is to let “AI” generate the ads
After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly.
Twelve ways to be wrong about “AI”-assisted coding
Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why.
“AI” tools shit where they eat
The stories of “AI” bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these “AI” bot and crawler assaults is insane.
Setting up KDE and Wayland on FreeBSD 15.x
Since X11 has moved to legacy status, it’s only a matter of time before the BSDs are going to have to make the move to being Wayland-first as well. This applies particularly to FreeBSD, which has been focusing on improving its suitability for desktop and laptops lately.
Firefox, Vivaldi unveil their UI overhauls
Two popular web browser are overhauling their user interface, and the first to actually ship its new version is Vivaldi. Version 8.0 of this Chromium-based browser completely overhauls its UI, but retains its extensive customisation options, including the option to go back to the old look and feel if the new one doesn’t float your boat.
Inspired Again by Julia Evans

In August 2019 I discovered Tailwind, the CSS framework that makes responsive design relatively easy, thanks to an enthusiastic post by Julia Evans.

Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability:

Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of
Get your passwords out of BitWarden while you still can
I was a long-time Bitwarden user, until a year or so ago when I started migrating my passwords first to Firefox/LibreWolf, and recently from there to a KeePass database I can transfer and use with whatever password manager application is compatible with KeePass’ file format.
Printing with CUPS on OpenBSD
Printing on Linux, macOS, and even on Windows seems to be pretty much a solved problem, but what about printing on OpenBSD? Anyway, to do so I would need to set up my HP OfficeJet printer, connected wirelessly to the network, on OpenBSD.
OSNews fundrasier progress
⁂ A little progress bar to keep track of our fundraiser! ⁂ ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer ➡️ Why a fundraiser? Note that I have to update it manually, and that it includes both Ko-Fi donations, as well as direct bank transfers.
Cruel irony of addiction

Caffeine's negative effects on me are never clearer than when I'm under the influence of caffeine.

(I rewrote that sentence 13 times to get it ‘right’. It still doesn't feel right, but perfect is the enemy of good.)

New blog design

I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it.

The Virtual OS Museum
This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured.
Google kills its search engine
We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
Futhark by example
The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them.
OpenBSD 7.9 released
The world’s best BSD (I’m kidding, I love them all equally) has released version 7.9, now available through your update tools and on mirrors the world over. OpenBSD 7.9 brings a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements, such as delayed hibernation support on amd64.
AI Is Too Expensive

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

Static IP on a Fastgate router

A week ago, I moaned that my Fastgate router kept re-assigning IPs after a power failure, which made my Pi-hole less than wonderful.

The 21 years and 20000 posts OSNews fundraiser: €1 for every post
To celebrate my 21 years and 20000 posts as OSNews’ managing editor, it’s time for a massive fundraiser: €1 for every story I’ve posted over the past 21 years, for a long-term total goal of €20000.
Haiku OS runs on M1 Macs now
Big news from the Haiku forums: the Haiku ARM port is running on M1 Macs now. This is bare metal, no VM. m1n1+u-boot deal with the Apple-specific parts of booting, so we can boot UEFI images from USB like any PC.
You can now run Windows CE 2.11 on the Nintendo 64
I’ve seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious. Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7’s SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card.
How does Flathub even work? The CDN and caching layer
There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure? Like any system that evolved naturally, it’s all over the place.
Microsoft finally brings back moving and resizing the taskbar in Windows 11
Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95.
21 years and 20000 posts later
Almost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement.
Google’s new “AI” Health Coach started making shit up right away
Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an “AI” thing that’s part of the company’s new Fitbit products. Let’s check in with how that’s going. Put simply, Google’s paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I’m the one who actually forgot to input a run.
Microsoft claims it’s fixing Windows Update so it won’t downgrade your graphics drivers
One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: “Windows Update downgrades my drivers.” Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update — allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices.
Premium: What If...We're In An AI Bubble? (Part 1)

Every day I read some sort of wrongheaded extrapolation about the future of AI — that today’s models are somehow indicative of AGI creating a “permanent underclass” of people that stops people from building software companies, or really doing any kind of job on the computer:

Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust

No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:

  • Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
  • The environmental impact of LLMs
  • Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
  • Moral judgements about people who use LLMs

We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.

Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust, GitHub

The performance of blake3 multithreaded is very impressive:

hmac-sha256 1.00 GB 0.327s <-- with hw accelerated sha256

blake2b-256 1.00 GB 0.952s <-- pure sw, used in borg 1.x

blake3 1.00 GB 0.442s <-- pure sw, single-threaded

blake3-mt 1.00 GB 0.078s <-- pure sw, with MT.

🚀 🚀 🚀

The data is abundantly clear: the EU Digital Markets Act is working
The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit.

Looks like rust platform support (blake3-py is implemented in rust) is good now for most platforms.

Couldn't solve the rust-related issues on Haiku OS yet though.

Classic 7 combines Windows 7’s Aero Glass with Windows 10
Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7.

Trying to adopt fast blake3 hashing for borg2.

github.com/borgbackup/borg/pul

Tracking my workouts circa 2012

A couple years before I got my first GPS watch, this was how I tracked my workouts:

Photo of an iPod Nano with the stopwatch active, showing the time 00:44:07.32

This was a ‘10k’ (ish) run. Based on my understanding of what someone had told me was the course of a local 10k race.

To be honest, it worked just fine. I'm not sure adding GPS and other sensors for a multitude of advanced metrics has made me any fitter than I would've been if I'd just continued running with my old iPod Nano in hand. But it does make my workout log look a little better, so there's that.

Haiku gets basic SMP support for ARM64, and unveils its GSoC projects: Bluetooth improvements incoming
The months, they don’t stop coming, so here’s another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team’s added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer’s internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes.
EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process sensitive government data
The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. ↫ Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose.
The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival
A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity.
Google gives early peek at Android laptops: Googlebooks
The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years.
Where Are All The Data Centers?

If you liked this piece, please 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 OpenAI&

Wherever you go

There you'll be

OpenBSD and slopcode: raindrop to a torrent?
Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers.
Windows 11 will start boosting your processor to maximum GHz to make the Start menu open faster
Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11. Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm.
GitHub is sinking
Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop.
Debian embraces reproducible builds
Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds. Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages.
“Building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning”
ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.
Object oriented programming in Ada
Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want.
Sculpt OS 26.04 released
Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we’ve been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode.
Sprite scaling on the Master System: building the new on the ruins of the old
Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites.
extremely low frequencies

The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult.

Google is tying reCAPTCHA to Google Play Services, screwing over de-Googled Android users
The ways in which Google can lock you into their ecosystem are often obvious, but sometimes, they’re incredibly sneaky and easily missed. CAPTCHA tests are annoying, but at the same time, they can help protect websites from bots.
Why don’t lowercase letters come right after uppercase letters in ASCII?
With that context, I always found it strange that the designers of ASCII included 6 characters after uppercase Z before starting the lowercase letters. Then it hit me: we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus 6 additional characters before lowercase starts: 26 + 6 = 32.
Detecting (or not) the use of -l and -c together in Bourne shells
Many Bourne shells go slightly beyond the POSIX sh specification to also support a ‘-l’ option that makes the shell act as a ‘login shell’. POSIX’s omission of -l isn’t only because it doesn’t really talk about login shells at all, it’s also because Unix has a special way of marking login shells that goes back very far in its history.
Premium: AI's Circular Psychosis

In this week’s free newsletter, I explained how bad the circular AI economy is in the simplest-possible terms

Anthropic not have money to pay big cloud bills, because Anthropic company cost lots of money, more money than Anthropic make! So Anthropic only PAY cloud bills if OTHERS
Fedora Project Leader says he doesn’t care about the reputational damage from Fedora embracing “AI”
On the Fedora forums, there’s a long-running thread about a proposal for Fedora to build a variant of the distribution aimed specifically at “AI”. The “problem” identified in the proposal is that setting up the various parts that a developer in the “AI” space needs is currently quite difficult on Fedora, and as such, a bunch of technical steps need to be taken to make this easier.
Redox gets partial window pixel updating, tmux, and more
Another month, another progress report, Redox, etc. etc., you know the drill by now. This past month Redox saw improved booting on real hardware by making sure the boot process continues even if certain drivers fail or become blocked.
Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10
Time for another Sun Ray blog post! I’ve had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there’s been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10.
“My favorite device is a Chromebook, without ChromeOS”
If you’re sick of Chrome OS on your Chromebook, or can find a Chromebook for cheap somewhere but don’t actually want to use Chrome OS, have you considered postmarketOS? Since I was kind frustrated with ChromeOS, I decided to take a look at something that I knew supported my Lenovo Duet 3 for some time: postmarketOS.
Monthly report: April 2026

On the road, as it were, right now, so this report will be updated with the necessaries when possible.

Highlights of the month:

Activities

April:

March:

Daylight savings → less time in bed

Stuff Done

IWC DUS was a lot of fun, seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

Am I Meant To Be Impressed?

If you liked this piece, please 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 OpenAI&

The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility
There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse.
Using duplicity to back up your FreeBSD desktop
Backing up in modern times, we’ve had ZFS snapshots and replication to make this task extremely easy. However, you may not have access to another ZFS endpoint for replication, need to diversify risk by using a non-ZFS tool for backup, or are simply using UFS2, living the old skool life.
Intermezzo bag

I've been reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. It's really beautiful. The perfect kind of novel to read slowly. She manages to write prose that's engaging at the micro and macro levels - beautiful sentences, as well as lovely long narrative arcs.

Testing MacOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs
Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts.
Windows gets a new Run dialog
With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there’s a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that’s another story).
Premium: The AI Compute Demand Story Is A Lie

Everyone, it’s time to talk about AI demand and the capacity constraint issues across the industry.

These constraints are not a result of “incredible demand” for AI, but the desperation of hyperscalers and the avariciousness of two near-trillion-dollar failsons living off their parents’ welfare.

The Blade Itself is 20 years old

Joe Abercrombie in 20 Years:

One observation that blows my mind – The Blade Itself is now twice as old as A Game of Thrones was when The Blade Itself came out. GRRM felt like a long established pillar of the genre to me at that point. Truly I must be part of the fantasy furniture at this one…

That you are, Joe. That you are.

Just this weekend I was visiting a fantasy and science fiction book store with my seven year old son, with whom I'm currently reading Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. As we stumbled upon the First Law books, I told him ‘just wait until you're old enough to read these ones, you'll have a blast’.

I guess The Blade Itself was about 10 years old when I read it. In another decade, he'll be the one reading it.

Recently

I spent a lot of time outside in April. The first two weekends I did long bike rides: from Brooklyn to Tarrytown along the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, and out to Rockaway Beach via the Marine Parkway Bridge & Cross Bay Memorial Bridge.

Then, I ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon.

GNOME is good, actually
While I’m normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they’re fairing, what improvements they’ve made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted.
How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM’s display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Settings.
Front page additions

I mentioned in a recent note that I've been tinkering with the front page setup for a while. The previous iteration of the front page had been mostly identical since I relaunched the blog in late 2023. It showed recent posts and recent notes.

Since then, I've added a couple of content sections to the website. I add books to my reading log several times per month. The workout log is updated daily. The result is that the front page wasn't really reflecting the entirety of the activities that happen on this website. As new visitors tend to drop by the home page, I think it's a good idea to use that page to give them an idea of what's happening on this website.

To that end, I've tried several times the last year to find a way to incorporate updates from the reading and workout logs into the front page. Unsuccessfully! I've created and discarded at least five different mock-ups. Common for all of them is that I've begun with the approach of trying to lift the design elements from the two logs into the front page. As I'm happy with how both sections look, that felt like the natural approach.

The drawback is that every single time I tried this approach, the overall feel of the front page was disjointed. It came off as something haphazardly thrown together. When I tried once more to tackle this challenge the other day, the outcome was the same. But at that point, a lightbulb went off.

‘I don't have to bring the design elements from the logs to the front page. I can just bring the data from the logs and present them in the same way I do the other front page elements!’

The template was essentially already in place. Posts and notes are distinct types of content, and were already presented as such. Doing the same with two more types of content shouldn't be an issue. So I gave it a go. And, to my surprise, it worked just fine. It's not revolutionary or anything out of the ordinary. But that wasn't what I was aiming for. I just wanted to preserve the look and feel of the home page, while also showing the breadth of content I share on the site. And I think I achieved just that.

To spruce it up a little, I decided to reuse the icons from the workout log on the workout log entries. With that little visual in place, it was a short order to just reuse miniature versions of the book covers from the books I'm reading to add a little bit of colour there as well.

One unexpected result is that the posts and notes entries feel a bit flat by comparison without any visuals. But, as I want to err on avoiding anything akin to Apple's icons in menus everywhere, I think I'll leave it as it is for now.

Apologise for the feed interruption

While make some changes to the front page (I finally found a way to include the content I wanted!) I accidentally copied the settings file from my ‘dev’ directory to my actual website directory. The dev version only has a placeholder URL and site name in the settings.

Now I've gotten a reminder where I use those settings.

In addition to the header, the feeds rely on these. When I regenerated the site with the placeholder values in the settings file, every old post in the feeds were given a new URL and unique ID. This would result in your feed reader thinking these old posts were new posts. And a dead link to these posts.

Will try not to do that again! ^_^

Train Dreams

Watched Train Dreams tonight.

Wow!

Another great film. Loved the quiet contemplation of it. The perseverance in the face on unbearable grief. Speaking of, I was, presumably like the protagonist, hoping that it didn't happen. That they simply moved on from the scorched earth, to start anew somewhere.

I still am.

I can't cancel GitHub Copilot

Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free subscription, so I filled it out and gave it a shot.

Email is crazy
Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the ’70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks.
The day I logged 1 in every 2000 public IPv4: visualizing the AI scraper DDoS
What if you run a few online services for you and your friends, like a small git instance and a grocery list service, but you get absolutely hammered by “AI” scrapers? I cannot impress upon you, reader, that this is not only an attack that is coordinated, it is an attack that is distributed.
Designing websites

Been thinking about redoing the front page for a while now. Want to incorporate recent workouts as well as books I'm reading. Perhaps even recent listens from my ListenBrainz profile.

Fiddled around with the inspector trying to land something. But nothing feels right. Yet. Could probably take to Figma or something to get a decent sketch, but ‘designing’ with HTML and CSS feels more like shaping clay or working wood, and that's the way I want to do it.

Earliest 86-DOS and PC-DOS code released as open source
Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today we’ve got a special one. We’re stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC.
Apple gives up on Vision Pro, disbands Vision Pro team
When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded: If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want.
OpenAI Projects ChatGPT Plus subscriptions to drop by 80% from 44 Million in 2025 to 9 Million In 2026, Made Up Using Cheaper Subscriptions (Somehow)

Executive Summary:

Apple wants to kill your Time Capsule, but they run NetBSD so they can’t
It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldn’t impact most people, as it’s highly unlikely you’re using AFP for anything in 2026.
More...