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…

I just finished watching the film, KDE: The Documentary — The Story of Free Software Underdogs. I’m not a Linux user as my main computer although I could see myself using Linux very easily. Whether you are a KDE fan or not, this is an interesting film. I enjoyed it!

by Jim Nielsen Jim gives his notes on an amazing talk by Alexander Petros, and the topic is super relevant for any web dev. It goes into how many of us, when modernizing our tech stack just for the sake of modernizing it, end up with objectively worse results than we’d have if we stuck to the tried and true. HTML’s ideological goal is to make websites good for their users. React’s ideological goal is serving Facebook, which mostly wants to serve you ads. Both have completely different…

Now you have found your land, navigated the law, built your cabin, kitted it out with furniture, collected your food, and bought your cheapest possible computer, you might want to include some services that provide connectivity like internet. How about Starlink for £19 up front and £9 monthly? Starlink have given me a personal referral […] The post [non-free] Cheapest possible Off-Grid Connectivity appeared first on Circuspam.Coffee.

Table of Contents Table of Contents What dockurr/windows Actually Is What Was Left in the Storage Directory Bringing It Back With One Command NETWORK=nat Silently Became passt Checking That It Works Without Touching a Mouse Making It Permanent With a Quadlet What It Uses: RAM, CPU and Disk WinBoat or Plain dockurr/windows? Caveats Conclusion A few weeks ago I set up WinBoat on my Fedora laptop. WinBoat is a nice Electron frontend that runs Windows applications as if they were Linux windows. It…

Week #817 We organized three surveys this month. We continue with our monthly student survey. October is usually one of our largest months. We also started a survey for younger students and high school students. For the 1st-5th graders, it is all anonymous, no names, just sex and grade. We send the info to the school contact who keeps track of who’s taken it and hasn’t and hands out the unique codes accordingly. The survey is all text to speech and images. At the other end of the spectrum, we…

I gave my blog a temporary makeover for Halloween. I've been seeing several Bear bloggers giving their blog a revamp for Halloween and I've been inspired! I was only going to change the colors, but I ended up drawing a new avatar for myself, added a new font, restyling the NOTES page, and made a Halloween-themed pixel bear! Header image Color palette Secondary font Background texture Notes Pixel Bear Header image The original image, for reference. What kicked it off was the header image! I…

Jai is a systems programming language focused on performance and compile-time programming. This page tracks resources for the language and its implementations. Resources CategoryLinkNotesCompilersjaicIndependent Jai implementation with compiler, standard library, compile-time execution, language server, formatter and linter; native targets for macOS, Linux and Windows, plus wasm64

Hey there. Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Let’s use AI as much as we like, but we should still write our PR descriptions (7min). #2. The xkcd cartoon is real. A few people hold up the entire internet (15min). Some of them do it on their free time, for free. #3. If we shouldn’t use AI to produce art, what about programming? It isn’t special if it’s art too (10min). Do you think programming is art? #4. As a funny side note, these 6 countries secrelty have the same…

It happens infrequently enough to not investigate too much further, but sometimes I'll end up with my Xorg/X11 session crashing, or something else happening which leads to my existing tmux sessions failing to interact with the new X session, with errors like: % gh repo view --web Opening ... in your browser. Error: cannot open display: :0 % xsel xsel: Can't open display: (null) : Connection refused In this case, the existing panes/windows may end up seeing a related error about failing to…

[Far too few companies do the right thing, but the number is not zero.] For several decades, long before Apple Stores existed, Tekserve in New York City specialized in repairs for Apple products. Their employee handbook contained a simple but profound instruction: “If you are ever in doubt, do the right thing”.1 I think about it often, and I’ve shared it with the support staff at my Mac software company. Given that, I was beyond delighted by a recent Planet Money episode. It features my pal…

The amount of AI generated sales emails I get these days is astonishing. If you can't be arsed to write your own sales pitch, why the fuck should I be arsed about your product? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I designed a harness built on top of dependent types that uses information-flow policies to prevent attacks involving the lethal trifecta. However, expecting users to write liquid types was unrealistic, and creating a custom SDK for every external interface—filesystems, APIs, internet search and MCP tools—was not practical. Following feedback from Lisbon.ai (thanks, Nuno, Fred, Sérgio and David), I started building Fronteira to make these technical ideas accessible to a wider audience. What is…

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple Inc.’s upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc. The products will be part of an ecosystem of devices that work with Apple’s new smart home hub, as well as an upgraded HomePod mini and fresh TV set-top box, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new Apple devices are set to be introduced on Oct. 13. The products…

I am currently traveling, but dutifully set my alarm to order an iPhone Duo. Having multiple devices is the way to go in these situations, so I was at my laptop and had my iPhone. The Apple Store app on my phone loaded first, and that’s when I learned a terrible truth: I could only choose Apple Stores near me for pickup, and uhhh, I am not flying across the country again next week to pick this thing up. I just tried again, out from under the pressure of doing this in the first few minutes of…

In 2024 I replaced the Logitech MX Master 3 that I had been using since 2021 with a Razer Basilisk V3 Pro and Razer’s Mouse Dock Pro. The Basilisk did what the Logitech never managed to do, namely work without connection stutters, lags and dropouts. It also charged wirelessly on its dock and came with the same free-spinning scroll wheel that I had gotten used to on the MX Master, while being lighter and not covered in rubber that got quite disgusting to touch over time. Since then it has been…

This is the seventh post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical or practical reason. Beans. The letter G naturally conjures the wider GNU cinematic universe, though I’ll admit I use only a small selection of their tooling thesedays. I’d be tempted to mess with GNUStep, though. My surprising winner for G is Go. It’s oddly the first programming language since Perl (and Java, admittedly) that “clicks” the way my weird brain works. I’ve tried…

When I want to improve one of my iOS apps, I shake my phone, type in a prompt, and off it goes to Shelley, together with a screenshot! Iteration is eating planning for lunch. I'm finding that grinding down the friction, even as minimal as getting myself to the agent input, enables iteration. Ideally, you could just customize the app from within itself, like Pliable does, but that would be against the app store rules. Philip Z @philz.dev · Oct 5, 2026 · Experimenting with Pliable apps.…

On macOS Tahoe, the Passwords app does put the keyboard focus in the password field on launch. Password field with focus How does Apple mess up something as fundamental as keyboard focus? Are they now vibe-coding macOS? Source: macOS Golden Gate is a buggy mess To be fair, we are still in 27.0.1. However, apart from reverting a terrible UX decision, the raw edges of Golden Gate are showing up more and more.

Over time I bought several V2L adapters for my Volvo EX30, hoping one of them would work (even before software version 2.x), but none ever did. When the official V2L adapter became available (part no. 32411386), I ordered it immediately. This post isn’t about the official adapter, though. It’s about its electrical parameters, so you can build one yourself.

people are failing a curiosity test right now. Armin Ronacher and Ben Vinegar had me on State of Agentic Coding to talk about it, along with DHH coming around, durable agents, a Lisp you program by talking to it, and why the labs cannot afford to fail.Ben Vinegar (co-founder of Modem) and Armin Ronacher (Earendil, and the person most people know from Pi) run a podcast called State of Agentic Coding, and I was the guest for episode 11. Ben and I were in the same room in Toronto. I'd landed the…

There’s a principle in UX design I find helpful: the fidelity of a design should match the fidelity of thought. When you’re still exploring ideas, a low-resolution wireframe is the right tool. A polished mockup, with illustrations and finished copy comes only once the thinking is that far along. The point is to give feedback at the right level, and to set expectations for what people are actually looking at. One problem I keep seeing with AI in writing workflows is that it breaks this principle…

So. They blocked my static, residential IP address. And before you say "did you check that you're not using a VPN?" Yes. Of course I did!The question is: Why?The answer: Who knows?I only learned this had happened a few days ago because I visited their website via a Kagi search result. Then I was greeted with this screen.Well, that's unfortunate. I use StackExchange every single day when I'm coding. I hadn't visited in a few days because I'd been doing some video editing work for a…

Microsoft has decided that Linux desktops need a hug from Redmond. According to recent reports, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is officially expanding to Linux workstations, currently sitting in public preview for distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, and others. If your daily driver is a Linux machine and your employer happens to run in a Windows-heavy ecosystem… Source

I have to say, Peter Steinberg (aka lobster man) is absolutely brilliant. He was so ahead of his time with OpenClaw. I remember when he first tweeted about it last year, and when it turned into utter lobster madness at the beginning of the year. Heck, I even ran OpenClaw for a bit, but I couldn't really see the value because I didn't want to maintain it while the lethal trifecta problem remains unsolved. Categorically, this is a billion-dollar problem, perhaps more. So here's the thing. I kind…

Yesterday evening I was at the first Thought Experiment, a new series of informal evenings on how "AI is changing the way we code, find vulnerabilities, and prove theorems". It was held at the Paris School of AI, which turns out to be a few hundred metres from the Tarides office, and it was cheerfully organised by Caterina Urban and Karthik Bhargavan, with whom we are sending formally verified post-quantum cryptography to space. Message sequence charts for agents Benedikt Bollig (CNRS, LMF)…

The average developer needs to accept that the latest tier of foundation models writes better code than them. Most developers who think they are above average are not. It’s time to learn how to be effective writing code with AI or be left behind.

“Didn’t you already say goodbye to Deno? Get new material!”I know, I know, but not even a week after declaring my friendship over with Deno they actually killed Deno! The runtime is going away, and sorry call me pessimistic, but I highly doubt a community fork of any value will survive for long.We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime.Deno is joining…

I never seem to find a good way to create slides for presentations. I struggle with both the process and the outcome. Should I start by creating the slides, or by writing script for what I want to say—and then do the slides? Or do I make an outline for what I want to talk about, then the slides, and then write down the script? Skip the script, and only do slides? Or the other way around? And for the slides themselves: How much text is too much, and how complex can my charts and diagrams be? How…

Last year I finally ditched my Humax Freeview Recorder for a shiny new Manhattan T4-R – the latest iteration of their own recorder, and I’d heard good thinks about their past devices. However, reporting issues to them has been a combination of frustration and rude responses. Everything is your fault, not theirs. And it seems I’m not the only one with this issue. Bad Wi-Fi. Bad engineer. Just a few months after buying the Manhattan I was experiencing an issue with the Wi-Fi connection, which I…