medienbaecker.com has become my personal site. It’s a place where I talk about topics that are important to me, not strictly limited to web stuff. Read more

I think Deep Data Security (DDS) is one of the most promising additions to Oracle 26ai. The idea is straightforward: describe who may read or change which data with SQL, and let the database enforce it.

When it comes to optical disc testing, while tests done “at home” are not as reliable as tests done on professional analysers, they are still better than no test at all. I’ve often been looking for ways to increase my testing capabilities, especially as there are “holes” in the capabilities of each drive – for example, I hadn’t any means of doing TE/FE tests reliably on CDs and the number of drives that report jitter on CDs was fairly limited. While I had a fantasy of owning a “true” Plextor…

I made the same resolution a few weeks ago. I’m getting better at trusting that inner voice. PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart. Alan Jacobs https://social.ayjay.org/2026/10/13/psa-i-will-post-nothing.html

I'm considering making Pagecord invite only for November to eradicate spam signups once and for all. I mean, I'll probably get few legit signups but at this point I'm actually comfortable with that. If you really want to use Pagecord, you still can. Thoughts?

So we’ve entered the era of personal AI agents as assistants. The most famous one being, of course, Meta’s new assistant Muse. What’s the obsession with personal assistants? Is this a generational thing? In my dad’s generation, having a secretary was a marker that you had made it. You were important enough for someone else to take drudge work off your hands, to guard your time against intrusions. It was a status marker as much as it was a means to increase efficiency. I feel like I came up on…

MonsterID as Gravatar Fallback Today I stumbled across a link at Simon Willison's blog: Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification Smart (and pretty) trick for showing a representation tied to a commenter’s IP address without affecting their privacy It is very cool indeed. Don Park's idea is to use a commenter's IP address to generate a pretty graphic from a few basic shapes. By combining multiple types of shapes, different colors and rotation it is possible create a lot of different graphics.…

CrUX adds experimental Core Web Vitals for SPA soft navigations, while Firefox and Safari improve cache evidence, image delivery, and rendering.

For the last couple of months a lot of my spare time has gone into Cheltenham Open Data. It started because I wanted one place to check things about where I live: house prices, planning applications, fuel prices, flood warnings, bus disruption. All of it is public, but it’s scattered across council PDFs, government spreadsheets and APIs that nobody outside a dev team would ever look at. So it pulls everything together and refreshes on a schedule. Fuel prices update hourly, care home ratings…

For the next 30 days, a few billion of you will get an extra header in honor of Eric Binnion. The code in Nginx to do this is poetic: add_header X-Remembering "Eric Binnion <https://friendsofericbinnion.wordpress.com/>" always; Our design team will make that less AI and more humane in the coming days. Automattic.com will have a mourning band for 30 days. Eric was the 21st recipient of the Distinguished Janitor Award, Automattic’s highest honor, and in our hangs the last few months we’ve been…

Tab grouping and auto-tiling aren’t new by any means, but zooming to a subset of windows is very, very neat. It isn’t worth paying a subscription fee for (and if it proves to be really productive it might get Sherlocked within a couple of years, depending on whether Apple manages to shrug off the mess that is Stage Manager), and is likely to have three open-source clones tomorrow, so I’ll let the hype settle and give the concept a try once I find an implementation I can hack.

This morning I got a GitHub notification. It was on an issue about Brushes app drawing files. It’s this comment: I realise this is a very old thread, but thought this might be of interest to some of you. Someone asked us recently about recovering paintings from the original Brushes app. We’d worked with Brushes files before, so decided to see if we could build something from scratch to get the older files opening and exporting again. We’ve had some success so far, including exporting…

I am a habitual tab hoarder so I created a Firefox addon to help me manage every one of my very special browser tabs. Sort tabs by oldest, unload them, find duplicates, and consolidate tabs to a single window — buncha useful stuff in there! Download from Mozilla Addons Source code on GitHub Features Go directly to a tab by clicking on it. Shows Duplicate tabs open more than once. Supports Multi-account containers for a tab (and the color of the container too) Filter tabs by title, URL or…

As I’m working with an agent to upgrade a repo from vibe-coded to something I can understand and dig into, I am reminded that Programming is Theory Building. By “theory” we mean: an understanding of the world, the software and how they relate that’s good enough to let us work intelligently on them, answer questions about them, and argue about them. Like: we have a theory about what the world needs (I need to be able to comment on this HTML!), how the software meets those needs (a server injects…

I have been looking for a network protocol stack that can be run in addition to the regular TCP/IP network at TVC. Kiran has been exploring Meshtastic, mainly to connect the sensors to the Home Assistant that TVC runs. We have very poor cell phone connection and two BSNL wired internet connections, one of which is mostly down. Kiran has been laying OFC across TVC to share that network. I took a bit off-route and started looking for a protocol that can work in adverse conditions; I was okay with…

Is it still worth to code or should I learn to use ai instead? What do you actually need to be able to do without AI? Today I went to Reddit for inspiration and found almost the same question all over the place: Should I still learn to code? Yes! Here’s why: #1. Coding teaches you transferable skills. Like problem solving and troubleshooting. #2. Coding teaches you how to learn any skill. You can’t simply learn all “coding” at once. You have to divide a skill into subskills and other learning…

Every few months someone declares that management is dead. Big Tech is in the middle of a Great Flattening, and there are companies that have a single Director managing 80 engineers and a fleet of agents with nobody in between. I think it’s the opposite. Management is becoming more important as AI changes how businesses work, and the job itself is shifting faster than most managers have noticed. Let’s talk about what’s changing and how to deal with it. Changes Here are the biggest themes of…

I am a Plex lifetime subscriber. Within the last week, I’ve started seeing unskippable ads before and during movies I’m playing off my home server. Oh hell no. Jellyfin, here I come. I’ll be damned if I’m watching ads injected between my home server and my own TV via a service I already paid a lot of money for. See ya, Plex. You were good before the enshittification.

A message to Apple from the W3C Technical Architecture Group: We expect user agents to make installation an obvious affordance to users. Specifically, we expect the install option to clearly name the action, and to be easily reachable from the browser’s UI. An entry inside a menu with an unrelated label (such as Share), or several menu layers deep, does not meet this expectation. adactio.com/links/22799

First reaction: Whoa, I didn’t realize I’d clicked an AOL link. Second: LOL, so that’s what they’re up to these days. Third: clicks Back button

Pluggable Authentication Modules can be pronounced: As an initialism: “P-A-M” As an acronym: “Pam” I’ve always pronounced it as the acronym “Pam”, but I’ve been on enough calls with people from different age groups and regions to know this isn’t universal. I was curious to know how widespread this difference is. I have a Mastodon poll open for the next couple of days, or feel free to email. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-14.

One thing that might be fun to add to the ⌘1/2/3 tab post is this: while ⌘1–8 select tabs from the left, ⌘9 doesn’t jump to the ninth tab, but to the last tab: I think it’s thoughtful – a recognition that both edges are important. (Previously we’ve seen Bear understanding that, too.) Why not ⌘0, though? Sure, you can say it’s not as elegant (0 is smaller than 9), or that it wouldn’t work in Hungary… …but I think the Occam’s Razor is simply that ⌘0 has already been taken by a popular “zoom to…

Do you remember “Everything is a Remix,” the series of work by Kirby Ferguson? His main premise is that almost all the creative work we see in the world derives inspiration from what came before it. I think Apple’s just-announced HomeView may be the latest entry in the list of things that prove Ferguson’s point. To put it in another set of terms: the HomeView is “new but somehow familiar,” to borrow a Jony Ive phrase. I think it applies to just about every aspect of this product. The product…

For the past several months, I’ve been reviewing Hall effect keyboards exclusively. Now I’m branching out into the world of mechanical boards, which I’ve stayed away from up to now because I find their action unpleasant and, and, for me, contusive to mistakes. In Hall effect boards, I like long actuation distances. In mechanical boards, the actuation distance is set by the switch, and cannot be configured after the fact. However, there are a wide variety of switches available for mechanical…

I’ve decided to change course a bit while I catch up on prompts, by doing the current day’s prompt, then filling in the other older ones as time and will permits. Today’s prompt is Flimsy.

The model I would choose for coding may differ from the one I would choose for writing. I built Model Atlas with Codex to compare LLM benchmarks. It started as a Codex artifact. Model Atlas lets me set weights for those capabilities and compare published results for specific model configurations. Something I couldn’t find anywhere else so far. Loading evidence… Weights run from 0 to 10. Profiles have equal weight within each capability. Scores compare a fixed group of observed models. A score…

I spent a week creating a new deflate implementation from scratch in C named tugz to provide an Info-ZIP-compatible zip program for w64devkit 2.10.1 (released today). I also replaced busybox-w32’s deflate-based unzip, gzip, gunzip, and zcat apps as well. My new deflate performs better than zlib but worse than libdeflate (so far). In general the new programs are substantially faster and produce slightly smaller outputs than the BusyBox equivalents, which is optimized for size than speed after…

TLDR; I'm cheap and sad that Apple isn't giving HomePod mini 2's for free to everyone who clapped for their iLife presentations in 2003.For as long as I've used Apple products, and even when I used to sell them while working at a local computer store in a previous life, I've said that Apple engineers have an idea of what families are like, but don't have actual families themselves. I know this isn't literally true, but after years of using Apple software with my family and three kids, it's…

I bought a lamp from the UK, and it came with this plug… … which turns out to be a normal EU plug inside an adapter. Which is nice, but I’ve never seen this solution before. This adapter looks sturdy, but still so… janky. Is this normal?

@manton.org has already shipped a @socialspec.org plugin for @micro.blog! 🤯