I’ve done a proper unboxing before on this blog, and since SuSE Linux 7.2 is contained in a box, it needs unboxing. But where normally for any box six sides are plenty to make clear what’s inside, advertise logos and paint one corner red with the word “New” (or translations thereof), SuSE apparently needed two more sides, so they simply added them. A box with eight sides This box was for the Dutch market, so it’s in Dutch, but the contents are mostly not. On the back side (not visible) a price…

Download Now Intro In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum. It features all…

Hey friend. It's great to see you, a big welcome to new readers this week. I have something exciting to share today - a new site that I hope you'll find useful. Let me know what you think, MattStuff I've WrittenThe Values Finder. An exercise I use with coaching clients, rebuilt as a free tool. If you give it a try, save the results, because the next few posts are about what you do with the report.From the Archive: Stop Overthinking Career Decisions. Use this Test. A quick test for when you are…

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Sheets.works: People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003". We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we…

I have a friend who aspires to have his own startup. He intended to do it alone so used AI to prepare all his business, marketing and operation plans. AI helped him to write a fantastic business plan. When he shared the plans to our group of friends. We all told him that we are not sure about his idea because he has not tested his ideas. He has not fully explored how users feel about using his solutions. Through vibecoding, he created a prototype. Our group of friends used the app and gave some…

Let’s run large language models locally, without too much time spent fiddling with it versus time spent building. I touched on this a tiny bit earlier in the year in “You didn’t miss the boat on AI in Cybersecurity”, as I run a few LLMs locally to save on cloud costs and maintain control of my data. These skills came from prior roles and continue to be useful. I don’t have a ton of time to s...

5th october to 11th october what i did i am continuing to try to figure out how to fix my sabbatical project ｢mirror｣ into something bigger. at first i considered using photoshop, as i really can’t bear procreate’s stupid limitations when it comes to text.1 i ended up going with affinity, which was apparently bought by canva and enshittified. affinity is a photoshop clone2, and other than the fact that it crashes less frequently than photoshop now and again, it works well.3 but all is not well:…

I collected this quote and formed my guiding principle when I was let go at Twitter in 2015. I had to reach out to this after the similar incident where I was let go with layoffs at Uber in 2026.

Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery / UnsplashI was cleaning up my Google Photos and saw a photo I took on November 29, 2014 in the middle of Overland Park, Kansas. It was a receipt from Smashburger that had a Classic Smash ($4.99) and a Classic Big Smash ($5.39) and it was a nice refresher to remember the prices of the past.Random Smashburger cropped receipt from 2014The Tampa location a decade later now has that Classic ($7.79) and Big ($10.29), which doesn't really reflect the past of sizes (small,…

It’s been nearly a week since the dump of the GitHub repository with over 700 documents and (far fewer) Lean formalisations of AI-generated proofs, but it’s felt a lot longer. My own views on use of AI are mixed. I use it for my day job, we formalise things (previously in Isabelle, now in Lean) that we are implementing, and which will never be made public. I have played around with AI to fill in my understanding of background material for a research paper I’m writing, and to try to hunt for…

Yesterday, I wrote a diary entry on Dreamwidth cataloguing the computers I own after my 2015 MacBook Pro died due to a swollen battery I couldn't afford to repair. While this was meant to be a simple inventory, writing it made me pause and realize that I really have so much, and that I've been under-utilizing both my time and what I own. And I think most of us underestimate what we can do, starting right now, with the things we already have. We tell ourselves that we need the better tool, the…

This Refurb Weekend is a sequel in two ways. Six years ago I fixed the power supply and case fan in my 68EC030-based Alpha Microsystems Eagle 300, a more modernized and substantially faster Alpha Micro running AMOS, their unique DEC-inspired multiuser operating system. These blue-collar boxes were very common in many vertical markets due to their tightly integrated business-specific software packages, and are especially unusual for running their big-endian 68000-series processors little-endian…

Mark Gurman, writing two day before Apple’s event this week: The centerpiece is a new smart home hub called the HomeView. Equipped with a display and an A18 chip, the product essentially serves as the Siri command center for an Apple-powered household… The HomeView comes in two versions: a countertop model with a metal speaker base and a wall-mounted version with a flat, square base that sits against the wall beneath the display. The countertop offering will come in four colors: space gray,…

I am running even more behind on prompts, but I will catch up! Here’s Prompt #7, Panic. It’s the trolley problem but with two changes: One of the potential victims is wearing a hat Instead of having a switch control, the man facing the problem has 7 switch controls. Who knows which one, if any, is the right one!

Bryan Caplan recently asked ChatGPT to do a sentiment analysis of his writing alongside Tyler Cowen’s, Robin Hanson’s, and Paul Krugman’s. As I discussed in my guest post on Bryan’s Substack, AI’s agentic modes (such as Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work) allow for very extensive research - they can gather data, write scripts, and systematically go through sources. While Claude merged Claude Cowork and Chat mode, ChatGPT for now still has separate chat and work modes,.I figured I could redo the…

TLDR: I trained an LLM reasoning agent to play chess, with model sizes 0.8B, 3B and 9B. The agent calls tools which help it keep track of the board state, which enables good performance with a relatively small number of parameters. The demo code is available on Github. Your browser does not support the video tag. Background I became excited about the power of RLVR after the Deepseek R1 paper came out. They demonstrated that through the use of “thinking” tokens, an LLM could solve verifiable…

I upgraded Ubuntu this week. Looking back at my previous operating system upgrades, I see these notes: 2014: Ubuntu 14.04 and grub: I had to get a boot-repair disk image and do emergency repair work with sudo boot-repair to recover from a system that wouldn’t boot. But I was philosophical: “When upgrading a system we must be prepared for possible problems. We cannot expect it to always go smoothly. Even in the face of such technical problems we must try to remain tranquil.” 2018: Ubuntu upgrade…

Would you use AI to change 1 line of code? The other day, I reviewed a PR that solved a bug in a Blazor app. It had only 1 line of code to change a framework setting. Nothing from another world. Until I noticed the commit authors in GitHub: Claude was in there too. I felt like Really?! and closed the browser tab. That explained the property formatted comment on top of the 1-line change. Comment I’d trust even less. If we’re only redirecting anything to a LLM, agent, chat, or whatever, anyone…

NOTE: The world wide web is not inside your phone. It never was.

How another go at keeping a plain text calendar is helping me clarify what goes where Making and using calendars is viscerally satisfying to me. I love the sense of stability and preparedness I get from seeing dates laid out in neat rows! Along with that comes the irresistible idea of writing notes to my future self. This could mean recording tasks that need to be done on or by on specific dates, but it’s much more that that. In as real a sense as I can muster, my calendar is an attempt to…

I came to realize that attempting to wrap up the “Wordcraft” section (as I call it) in Emacs is a fool’s errand. Emacs is Wordcraft. It’s what it’s all about. By the time I finish a draft, a new config or setting changes what I have. This here is an attempt to stay true to my conclusion in the last section. Abbrevs In my opinion, Abbrevs in Emacs is one of its fundamental features. It’s one of those things I’d show someone coming from other word-processing programs to show them the magic of…

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My favourite piece of writing I’ve done about motor memory remains “Shift + Shift” from 2018. I have linked to it over the years, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you might find it interesting. Just this week, I have had another similar moment, and amazing in a slightly new way. How many of you tap ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3 to switch between tabs? This convention has been there for as long as I remember, and so has been my fingers’s embrace of it. The system works in Chrome and Safari, in the Terminal…

Underlined text has always been a bit of an issue in HTML and CSS. For example: The colour of the underline could only be inherited from the text. The CSS specification doesn’t define an underline thickness, leaving it to vendors to decide how to derive it. The end result was some browsers rendering thicker underlines than others, especially at larger font sizes. The workaround for decades was to eschew (gesundheit) underlines entirely, and use a border as a pseudo underline: a { border-bottom:…

This post is my entry for October’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Marisabel. The infinity concept of a blank page is an interesting one to explore. I’ve heard it in many flavors, but the assertion that a blank page is either terrifying or liberating to a writer feels like a layered point of discussion to the first point. In my case, the combination of these lead to just about every psychological outcome imaginable. The infinite expanse of a blank page is more rooted in the digital realm of…

i like using my microblog to send thoughts directed to a handful of people in my life directly into the void instead bc i want to be alone 🤍 just for a little bit

how do i like someone in a normal way

AI Literacy is having its day in the sun. A quick google search will reveal at least 679 different frameworks from pretty much every organization, every state department of education and ed-tech company with a PDF budget. They may come with a list of competencies, a handful of principles, but they most definitely will have […] Source

I participated in an only workshop at the weekend and the organisers kindly provided the recording as an unlisted YouTube video. As I wanted to watch the video again at a later time I used my MeTube installation to download the YouTube video. Or rather: Tried to. As the download would fail. MeTube would say no available formats could be found. The video however played nicely on YouTube!? The setup I use a self-hosted web frontend for yt-dlp in Docker called MeTube, configured through the…