Do you manage email for your family? Do you run Home Assistant at home? What happens if you're no longer around to manage it? Will your family be able to cope or will they resent your "smart home"? Documenting all of this makes everyones life just that little bit easier when shit hits the fan. This topic might seem a bit morbid to you but I honestly do feel like it's one worth talking about. Passwords and two-factor authentication The biggest problem has to be passwords and two-factor…

Brevity comes easy this year iPhone 18 Pro. A few weeks after this article’s publication, a much more exciting iPhone will go on sale: iPhone Duo, the hotly anticipated foldable iPhone that leaves room for many more words and photographs. But its flagship sibling, iPhone 18 Pro, deserves at least a few notes. There’s not much to discuss here, but the little there is makes iPhone 18 Pro the default iPhone to buy heading into the busy holiday season. I’m keeping this review short — much shorter…

Readeck is a great tool Readeck is a self-hosted open source read-it-later webapplication. Readeck calls itself "Your Own Content Hub". Save the story, cut the clutter Readeck helps you keep all that web content you’ll want to revisit in an hour, tomorrow, or in 20 years. Readeck uses the slogan "Save the story, cut the clutter". Which is totally true. When you save an URL in Readeck, it is cleared of bloat. When you open a saved URL you get to see it like in the reader-mode of your browser. As…

October 9–16, 2026 This week, my open-source work ranged from interpreter compatibility across the django CMS ecosystem to performance improvements, security maintenance, and two major releases in the json2xml project. There were some satisfying milestones: json2xml 8.0.0, the first stable major release of its Rust accelerator, performance work landing in django CMS, and substantial django-filer improvements moving through review. There was also the less visible work that makes those milestones…

Ok, people who read my post on the Anthropic science blog: we need to talk. It’s understandable. You saw me write about AI being used to tackle a serious, publishable physics problem. Naturally, some of you want to share that you accomplished something even more impressive with AI, something the scientific journals and arXiv moderators won’t acknowledge. Maybe you’re hoping I’ll write about it, maybe you want me to check your math. Maybe you just think it’s neat. But here’s the thing: most of…

Welcome to my first little foray into reverse engineering an AES ECB-128 decryption key found within an earlier version (v1.1) of the desired firmware (v2.2) for the W2250A wifi extender. This was uncovered by analysing the entropy of both the versions, which (upon comparison) shows that v2.2. is likely encrypted (high level of entropy) whereas v1.1 contains a readable/extractable filesystem that we can analyse. (let's see where this bouncing ball takes us...) Disclaimer: Before we go on -…

I haven't been this excited about an iPhone launch since the days when I'd actually get up at 4 AM to line up outside the Apple Store and get my hands on an iPhone 5 or whatever on launch day. Since then, I've preordered most of my iPhones and always received them on day one. So the fact that, of all iPhones, it's the iPhone Duo I won't be getting on launch day has genuinely put a dent in my mood today.

I mentioned in the previous post that I watched 2010: The Year We Make Contact last night and got nerd-sniped by the mention of Lagrange points at the beginning. I got nerd-sniped again in a scene describing a password. The instructions are Put in nine nines, take the square root and press the integer. I looked up the line just now to get it right. When I was watching the movie I thought the instructions said to take the integers, i.e. ignore the decimal point. I wondered at the time why not…

Greg Iacurci, CNBC Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Saturday called for advanced artificial intelligence systems to be built with containment, independent controls and an “emergency brake” that lets authorized people pause or shut a model down mid-task. “We need to surround non-deterministic models with strong, deterministic system design, human controls, and reliable operating procedures, and establish industry standards where existing ones are insufficient,” Nadella wrote in a post…

Meta: Drive people directly to your website, shop or latest offer by adding a clickable link to your Instagram posts and reels. People can visit the website from your post or reel. If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based on your plan: […] It seems utterly bananas to me that Meta is pitching links as a feature people need to pay for, but here we are. Instagram has never supported links of any kind in individual posts, so that is…

Most exploratory questions against a large table only need a rough answer, but without an index on status, even "roughly how many shipped orders" costs a full scan. On the two-million-row orders table, Postgres has to read every single 8 kB page, all 18,085 of them (141 MB), just to count matching rows. EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) SELECT count(*) FROM orders WHERE status = 'shipped'; Aggregate Buffers: shared hit=18085 -> Seq Scan on orders (actual rows=500000.00 loops=1) Filter: (status =…

Organising your notes is the thinking itself, not a chore you get out of the way first. When you decide that one note belongs next to another, or that an idea fits one topic rather than another, you have to ask yourself what it means, what it clashes with and what it is good for. Only you can make those connections, because they grow out of your context: what you already know and what you care about. That is why handing the job to AI costs more than it seems to save. The machine gives you back…

OverviewRemote-support appliances, VPN gateways, firewalls, email security, document collaboration, Windows, backup software, refrigeration controls, and the advertising supply chain all failed in ways that turned trusted infrastructure into an attack path this week. Most of these incidents did not begin on an ordinary user workstation. They began in systems allowed to broker credentials, inspect traffic, deliver updates, or manage physical equipment.That changes the response order. An…

People have complained for years about buggy software. To be honest I think the internet and the ability to update software quickly is partly to blame. When I first started my career in software engineering, part of my job was to create releases. This involved putting together installers for new versions and burning them onto CDs ready to be sent out to customers. There was no download mechanism to get updates for the software. The software had to be bug free first time round. The company also…

I had been feeling a bit two-dimensional. Coding agents, too many attention-hungry algorithms making my feeds a bit predictable. Maybe (finally) fallout out from video games. Distractions (apps and social media) too close at hand. Indicators of doom in our daily news. I wanted to find more shape, variety, and liveliness in my life. Keep the coding, technology, writing, and reading. Add more of the city and novelty and exploring. Bring depth and pacing back to my life. Spoiler alert, I have…

Something that I've hit time and time again over the years - but seemingly have never blogument'd - is that when you add a required status check on GitHub (in branch protection or a Ruleset), it needs to report back as successful before you can merge a given Pull Request. This is absolutely reasonable, and I don't think there are many complaints folks would have about this requirement. That is, until you want to consider how to handle checks that you don't necessarily want to run all the time.…

A recurring problem in many organisations I've worked in is that a project is set up by a few developers, and from then on they are "the project's devs". Later, one leaves, another goes on holiday and the last is off ill for the day. This is the bus factor in action. Then a ticket comes in. Another developer on the team clones the repo and discovers: They don't have the .env file. They don't have a database. They have the code, but none of the very specific, undocumented things needed to…

A world that doesn’t need new software is a world without ideas.

It’s time for something a little different. Or rather, time to do something I haven’t done in a long time. I’m going to just write off the cuff, straight into a CMS today. Into WordPress, in fact.

If you’ve been following the space these past few weeks, you’ve probably seen decision models pop up everywhere in your feed. It started in mid-September with TypeSafe’s Jev, a model that, unlike LLMs, doesn’t write a single word as its output (it only picks between options you give it, and tells you how sure it is).Since the release of Jev, I haven’t gone a day without reading something new about it. LangChain plugged it into their agent harness, someone built a copy and paste that understands…

Wanted to respond to one of the top blog posts in the Bear Blog Discover feed recently. The author says it would be nice to be able to limit a phone's ability to access only one app and to hide photos. Both of these features exist, the author simply imagines them in too an abstract manner.The first feature can be achieved through IOS's Guided Access features where you can set a passcode to limit the phone to only accessing one app. If the user wants to leave the app they must input the code.The…

I wrote recently about a wave of vibe-coded apps replacing proprietary utilities with slicker faster and less bloated free alternatives. A month ago we were talking about smaller helpers, like mouse button remapping, but it has already started getting bigger with external camera monitor or audio streaming. The scale of operation has got significantly bigger now. ArtCraft is a suite of apps reimplementing the functionality of the whole Adobe Creative Suite (think image, photo, sound, and video…

It's crazy to me how many tech people don't understand the entirety of the software delivery landscape at all. Especially developers often suffer from having a very narrow lens through which they watch the (work) world around them. It's like they have blinders on, preventing them from seeing a bigger picture. As a tester, I do not have that luxury. And I'm tired of hearing the same language from developers, over and over. Let me give some examples. These are all comments sourced from one Ars…

Here’s a tidbit of OpenZFS Mastery about replication. Replication also greatly simplifies migrating data, even huge amounts of data over ridiculous distances. With enough data, even 40-gigabit Ethernet in the same datacenter seems slow! Maybe you have to migrate a massive dataset to the other side of the country, or across the planet. Suppose you have many tebibytes of data undergoing constant minor churn, such as an orders database for a busy ecommerce site. Copying that data across the…

At the cat lab, it has been a banner year for moving away from surveillance capitalism ecosystems and toward privacy-respecting alternatives. From operating systems and office suites to streaming platforms, home automation, and security cameras, the goal stays simple. We want tools that respect your personal boundaries and your data. One area that often gets overlooked is the humble RSS reader. RSS is a simple way to subscribe to websites, blogs, news outlets, and more so new posts come…

events: communication operations as values Wrapping events Composing choice Building on events Guard events Handling cancellation Cancellation in the print service Wrapping up loose threads closeing thoughts References Appendix: Events beyond channels LLM use disclosure: This post is primarily written by a human. However, I've used LLMs for speech-to-text, basic grammar correction, feedback about the writing and for adding inline API documentation links automatically. The Go programming…

by Nolan Lawson This complements the previous link I shared nicely: most developers don’t properly use the platform, but why? This goes into possible reasons without being judgemental, and to me they make a lot of sense. When I first started going all-in into front-end development I’ve been a part of all of those cases, I guess. In a way, writing less code and relying on the platform are signs of development experience (or battle scars).

“Users want…” Said by someone senior. In a meeting with no users in it.Personas. Made up in a workshop, laminated, never met.Research to validate. The decision’s already made. Research is the receipt.Insight. A quote picked to back up a slide already written.User needs. Written after the thing was built.Co-design. Everyone gets a pen. The decisions were made last month.Empathy. A day in the life, for an hour.Usability testing. With colleagues. The happy path only.Data driven. Clicks counted.…

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for audio as well as video. I dutifully filled my slides with with demo videos containing sound. None of them worked. Somewhere between the HDMI output of the presentation laptop and the speakers, the audio…

I’m fairly certain that most software should be open source. Over several decades I’ve developed the habit of starting projects that I strongly desire to be around for many years only to find them difficult to maintain and host securely and within a budget. For example, 14 years ago I built a personal side project called Nilai, a to-do app for bookmarks. My vision for that app, at the time, was to build something that would be around well into the future. So I decided to charge for it in the…