Up until the 1960s, telephone calls were carried as analog signals. There was a great deal of frequency division multiplexing onto open wire, and sometimes coaxial cables, but in the post-war period buried multipair telephone cables began to dominate. While the network was surprisingly functional—long distance calls from coast to coast were still quite intelligible—there were fundamental limitations to analog carriers. The quality of the call would degrade with each step, a problem that was…

I remember working in digital prepress decades ago that .eps files were just kinda weird, and I didn’t love it when I had to deal with them. Like, what even made this? Why? I assumed it was some kind of antiquated software or practice, and I’d just deal with it, and eventually the world would improve. But here we are in 2026, and EPS is still here. How I come across EPS files is that it’s the download format from stock art sites that deliver vector artwork. It actually sorta makes sense: Stock…

Unplanned Ten Week HiatusI’m back! Well, technically I haven’t left my internet home; it’s just my weeknotes that went into intermission. It was likely triggered as a respite from Blaugust1 and also time spent on migrating my secondary site from WordPress to Quartz2. It feels like there has been a fair amount that happened in the last ten weeks. I have an inkling that the proverbial page in my life has turned—or perhaps even a new chapter has begun. The unrelenting heat and humidity has also…

The fourth part of a series about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development. This article gives some general guidance on how a Linux developer can make EFI development bearable.

Agentic iOS development changes a lot once your coding agent can see and measure the app it’s building. Without that, an agent writes code, hopes it works, and asks you to run the app. With the right tools, it navigates the app itself, reads the accessibility tree, and checks performance with evidence. I’ve been building … → The post Agentic iOS Development with RocketSim and RocketTrace appeared first on SwiftLee.

Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable articulates a handful of macro technological trends and follows them to their logical conclusions. It's an insightful read -- I highly recommend it. One decade later, here are some AI-related excerpts from the book: "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI." "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences" "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services" "The bulk of AI will be special purpose…

I had the good fortune to attend an Archiving the Black Web meeting last week. The main focus of the few days in St Louis was for fellows to share stories of web archiving work that they had been involved with. A few themes emerged for me while listening to these presentations. We weren’t using Chatham House Rules, but I didn’t ask anyone if I could write about their work here, so these are broad strokes. Fellows were often trying to contact website creators to negotiate consent. This process…

A series of articles about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development.

As many of you know, I started an algorithmic auditing firm ten years ago, after publishing a book called Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. I saw how algorithms and AI were infiltrating every human bureaucracy, making important if not life-altering decisions about our daily lives, and I wanted to set better standards in algorithmic auditing than what I’d seen during the financial crisis, where investment banks essentially bought AAA ratings…

Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration. But, dear reader, I present to you a challenge: how many apps do you have on your phone? Is it less than 50? I know people who may even have 100 or more apps, and most of them are completely useless. Ten apps for restaurants they never visit anymore. 15 apps that came with the phone, which they have never opened. Three apps they needed a year ago and just never deleted. Folders and folders of apps, and they couldn’t name half of them. Myself, I have 33.…

Dark mode I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had read Preethi Sam’s article, Embracing Dark Mode: A User’s Perspective on Accessibility. I wanted to take into account the perspectives that Preethi shared about using light mode and try to align a design with that perspective. I decided to start with a recent project to update the dark color scheme with what I had learned from the article. I chose the True Woman ’27 conference microsite. I have been working on some updates for it recently…

TL;DR - After not having issues for years, I've been having trouble with my alignment for a while now. To resolve it, I installed some cam tab gussets that I probably should have installed a long time ago. Cam tab gusset kit. I've been having a bit of trouble with my alignment, and I've mostly been trying to ignore it. I say mostly because I did purchase an All-Pro cam tab gusset kit, but of course, I just left it sitting in the "to be installed" pile of parts that any good Tacoma owner…

As reported by James Cridland of Podnews, the podcast player app that I am using, Castro, has been sold. Again. If I am counting accurately, this will be the fourth owner. This app has gone through ups and downs, and have been neglected at multiple times. It's not just a lack of updates. There is a server component that is critical to the day-to-day usage of the app, so any problems with the server will directly impact customers. Let's see how the new owner will take care of this app. I am not…

I like to use log/slog in Go. And I use custom LogValue() functions to have more control over how my structs get logged. But sometimes getting the right format is tedious.

In the past couple of months, my focus as a tech writer has shifted from writing to building machines, which in reality are elaborate skills that do things. One skill triages incoming bugs and website feedback on an hourly schedule, and another analyzes AI chat logs to recommend documentation improvements and hands its bugs off to the triage skill. This post describes both skills and reflects on documentation logistics, comparing them to the many processes that keep a city running.

Mojave Paint for Mac is a love letter to image editing programs of the past — a time before generative AI, infinitely customizable tool palettes, and online-required subscription access. With familiar layer-based rendering and powerful typography tools, Mojave Paint works equally well for design or photography. Use masks on any filter or adjustment to get the right look on a photo, or make the best-looking flyer for a lost cat your neighborhood telephone pole has ever seen. Sprinkled…

Have you ever sat down to add "Sign in with Google" to an app, started reading about OAuth, and then half an hour later found yourself reading about something called OpenID Connect, wondering if you're in the right place? The two get mentioned together so often that it's easy to assume they're the same thing, or that they're competing options. They're not, but picking the wrong one (or using one when you actually needed both) is one of the most common mistakes I see in real-world projects. In…

Most of us learned error handling as a binary system: an operation either succeeds, or it fails. And if it fails, somebody should hear about it.

There's no shortage of commentary on LLM usage and I've penned several posts that have never left draft status because in part I can't articulate exactly what I want, and partly because there's so much noise around the subject. That's been true for the last few years but as an senior (and old) developer I think it might be useful to at least put in writing what happens to be true for me this moment in October 2026. Fair notice: this post will only briefly cover any policy I personally hold and…

after weeks of waiting and refreshing various websites and searching for more EU-based stationary stores, i finally found the notebooks i want to make my next year's journal. idk why they're so hard to find - are they not popular enough to keep in stock? are they too popular and keep getting bought out? there's plenty of a5 and b6, i thought we enjoyed a6 as well?? anyway, i ordered them! so now the big question: can i do all my planning, minimal as it is, in joplin? that's the only thing i…

After reading about DeltaDB, I was inspired to experiment with building a process by which I could show someone what my writing process was like, in the same way I used to sit next to someone building software and watch them type every keystroke or invoke every shortcut. Unfortunately, I won’t be available to sit next to you if you have questions about the approach I take (what my actual thoughts are) when writing and editing this piece, but I think it could provide some insight into the messy,…

I linked to Cozy journal back in May, and I've been very happily using it since, ditching Day One completely. I like that it's Markdown, local, and not junked up with new AI “features” constantly. I LOVE that it works with files I've created with Keyboard Maestro, and Hazel. I spent some time hacking together a couple of little Keyboard Maestro macros. One automatically populates my art journal in Cozy with my daily drawing, and the other creates a fresh journal entry set to my chosen location…

We rarely have those Philip J. Fry "Shut up and take my money!" moments, but when Firewalla opened pre-orders for the Firewalla Switch SE beta in early summer 2026, we did exactly that. Managed switches are one of the biggest pain points for people who are not network engineers, because the terminology gets technical fast. We had been watching the community boards for a switch that works natively with Firewalla, so we jumped at the chance to join the early release list. Our unmanaged switch…

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

Two weeks ago a new version of Sobelow was released. Sobelow is a static code analysis tool focused on security and these days it is a de facto standard for providing a minimal security measures to Elixir projects. I am mentioning this release because it contains one feature suggested and developed by me: Github Workflow commands formatter. The strory behind this feature is relatively simple and may sound familiar. When you have Sobelow check added as a Githb Aciton on your PR and the code…

Learn how to use lazy imports to speed up the startup time of your Python applications. Python 3.15 introduced explicit lazy imports. An explicit lazy import is an import statement that starts with the keyword lazy: import json lazy import math lazy from pathlib import Path The module json is imported normally, but math and Path are imported lazily. If an import is lazy, the module will only be loaded when it is needed instead of being loaded immediately when Python encounters the import…

As someone who has, over the years, found himself deep in the Google ecosystem of hardware and services, I had been curious about the Googlebook concept for a while — whether it would be basically a fancy Chromebook, or if it would offer something more, and more useful, than that line of affordable but mostly limited laptops. When the Googlebook models for were announced in September, I decided to go ahead and pre-order one: The Acer Googlebook 14. It turns out, however, that apparently lots of…

This week, we are presenting the Barista paper at ASE'2026, and by 'we', I mean Catarina Gamboa, who is leading this work. When trying to adopt LiquidJava, an annotation-based language that adds refinements to types, in your Java project, you will have to write the annotations for any library that you use, including the Java Standard Library. This is just a huge amount of work for your simple application. This issue is shared by LiquidHaskell, Frama-C's ACML and Java Modeling Language. Roughly…

One thing I’m enjoying over at Bubbles is the non-tech blogs. Every other blog list I visit is usually mostly tech-related stuff, and then it’s usually developers. I’m a techie myself, and I don’t have anything against developers, but it’s nice to see more blogs about humans just being humans.