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Bluetooth Speakers and Emergency Radios We've seen a succession of cheap no-name (and often entirely unbranded ) Bluetooth speakers. Most double as AM/FM radios. The surviving unit no longer receives BT, but has proved handy as an emergency receiver. So I'd been looking at Bluetooth speakers off and on for a bit. Meanwhile, as weather and fires and other circumstances get ... more interesting ... I've also been considering an emergency radio. You know, something that can pull in a few bands, wea…
Encoding DVDs with OpenBSD and Handbrake
I used to have a problem buying DVDs. If I saw one that was under $10.00 that I liked (or sort of liked, or had heard of, or thought looked cool) I’d buy it. Too cheap not to buy! My taste in movies is questionable (I’m ok with this) so I’ve amassed a decent collection of 80s action movies mixed with sci-fi, fantasy, and eclectic indie films (like Bubba Hotep ). As a card carrying member of the Computer Nerd Association of America I couldn’t in good faith leave those DVDs on their discs …
Lattes
I watched the movie "Valentines Day" (2010) for the first time today, which stars, among others, Taylor Swift. The energy in this scene (especially the enthusiastic and excited way in which the words are said, while Taylor carries a huge bear) 1 fills me with joy: [call out: "Save the Lattes!"] Taylor: They're putting lattes in the vending machines? Finally! Taylor: Robbie, I am so glad you are taking care of this. Robbie: You got it. Taylor: And, I like caramel lattes, just FYI. I am not a fan …
July 2026
It’s now just two more days until I go back to work after a fantastic three-week summer vacation. I want at least three more! Anyway, it’s the end of the month, this is what happened! From the blog since my last recently post: Kaizen #4: Overhauled homelab 🍀 Life Three weeks of vacation is wrapping up, and it must be one of my most productive summers yet. Just before the vacation started, I began working on extending the fence around the house, by drilling huge 30 mm holes into the concre…
Of Day
I hear the birds singing as I sit by the window and look out on the horizon. I like looking at all the colours of the sky in the moments after sunset, when ambers recede and the sky becomes ever more blue before night time. I hear the sound of my fingers typing on my keyboard, too: nature and words are my evening. Nature and words are my evening, and so too is music. Moments ago I was playing on the piano, two songs I love but haven’t played in as long as I can remember. And one more song that…
Siesta
A macOS menu bar app that pauses your Slack status and Google Calendar availability while you’re away, and restores them when you’re back.
Reposted Renovate (@renovatebot.com) Post details As folks may have noticed - Renovate 44 was (accidentally) released yesterday with a non-breaking change. Please treat Renovate 44.0.0 as 43.x, and upgrade as normal!
Merging the default branch into a PR, from the API
When contributors raise PRs to Renovate , there are times where they'll merge main into their PR while they're waiting for a merge. Because we use a Merge Queue, we don't necessarily need this - as maintainers we'll manually merge main into a PR if we think it needs it, but it's mostly a case of waiting for the Merge Queue to handle it. Although we have a label that we add if we notice the author of a PR is merging main in - unnecessarily - we'll add a label which adds an automated nudge to say …
Comment on Using AI to write better code more slowly by Magiz
This is a refreshing take — treating AI as a drafting partner while keeping the review loop slow and deliberate is exactly how I've found the best results too. The slop-first, massive-PR approach just moves the cost into debugging later, so writing better code more slowly really is the point.
Coming of a New Sun
Six weeks after the US and China hammered out the latest round of bilateral compute agreements in a midnight deal, reporter Jenny Gesteson visits a south Texas 'dark factory' to see how the machines there - and the minds that operate them - are learning to run themselves.
the writer’s mind
making notes and reviewing quotes, collected from day and night: here, there are stories. i revel in observing, and in place- making. where am i? how do i feel? what does this mean to me? i think of the melody of words their cadence and shape and tense and from all, i feel:. from words, wonder; with words, wonder.
new
in change, new beginnings – of stories and; what if.
New keyboard: Alicja v2
This time with PCB !
To AI and back - Ghost in the LLM
Uf, this took much longer than I expected In the last post I talked about how LLMs exhibit very interesting and human-like behavior and about professor Michael Levin's work on the platonic realm. Another person that influenced me a lot is Joscha Bach . The first idea from him
Finite Algebraic Effects as dicts and such
Algebraic effects are a style / mathematical framework for modelling mutation, search, and some other things. They are another attempt to bridge the gap between mathy looking stuff and our crass world of mud and time.
Ich las Die Assistentin von Caroline Wahl
Ich las Die Assistentin von Caroline Wahl
So, how old were you when you realised that "NPR" is reverse "RPN"?
Reboosts of parent seeking # PhoneSpam discsussions appreciated. (That's the parent of this toot, NOT this toot itself. Thanks.)
One policy I've considered for telemarketing / robocalls is bonding. Turns out that California has implemented this (though not quite as I'd envisioned it), and it seems to work . "California Telemarketing Bond" All California telephonic sellers must get licensed with the Attorney General's Office. One of the main requirements to get this license is obtaining a $100,0000 California telemarketing surety bond. This license bond is also sometimes called a solicitor bond. https://www. jwsuretybonds.…
Datatype — variable font that turns text into charts
A variable font that turns text into charts. {b:20,55,40,80,65} {l:10,40,25,70,50,90} {p:73} {b:85,30,60,10,45} {l:50,20,80,35,65,10} {p:41} GitHub ★ Google Fonts Datatype is data as type Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype's ligature substitution does the rest. {b:30,70,50,90} {b:30,70,50,90} Bar chart {l:10,50,30,80,20} {l:10,50,30,80,20} Sparkline Dat…
Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 12
The twelfth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 12, I chat with Georgie, the author of Hey Georgie about, among other things, writing about travelling, blogging as a self-reflection tool, why someone should start a personal website today, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.
joshua stein
The only thing I needed to hear from the new Framework 13 Pro reviews is that after 5 years they still haven't fixed the wobbly screen hinge https://youtu.be/_xjxwl1zLMc?t=272
2026W29
Appaji - Software Engineer — The detail that got me is that you didn’t even need to run anything. Just opening the take-home project in VSCode could fire the payload through a hidden .vscode config, no git command required. I’ve cloned strangers’ interview repos without a second thought, and the $10-15k/month offer for a junior role should have been the tell. When the “recruiter” was confronted, they deleted their LinkedIn account on the spot. How ScyllaDB’s Trie-Based Index Delive…
AI agents are not subsystem maintainers
Antirez, the creator of Redis, recently argued that expert programmers using AI should think of themselves as being Linus Torvalds. The key part of his analogy is this: Automatic programming, instead, in the hands of people that are expert technicians, or expert programmers, expert designers, expert software architects, is to assume the role of Linus, with the agents and the LLMs assuming the role of the different maintainers of the different subsystems. This analogy does not work for me. As the…
Being Linux Torvalds - <antirez>
"Now, when we program with the artificial intelligences, we are exactly that same thing. We are Linus Torvalds, not always with the talent that he has, but the role we should assume" antirez 2 days ago. 39022 views. (This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base knowledge ne…
Immutability
Word Count: 500 let nani_house = "The doors open, and it is basically all the same. The speaker as you enter is the same, a slow, dimpled white dome capping a dish shaped structure on a tripod. We blasted all the coolest songs back then. The sofas, chairs, and tables on the right are the same, the girl playing guitar in charcoal opposite the TV is the same. Some of the tables’ books are the same, and most of the pictures on the shelf are too, although a picture of my mother I don't remember se…
Blogs, websites, and identity
In Camera, one of the songs on her latest album, CharliXCX sings: When the camera's on I can be anything that I wanna be And I can feel the things I don't normally feel When I heard these words, I couldn’t help but think about them from an art history perspective. Portraits create an image. Portraits can and have been used to express power, identity, occasion, the significance of a moment. So too can we create images with cameras: we get to decide how we pose for a selfie, how we frame the ima…
Week Notes 26#30
A busy week at work Got accepted to the Claude for Open Source program I've been looking, again, at rewriting my Micropub endpoint - it's been a long time on my list but I've never sat down with the time to do so - I'd like to get it into a nice place, but the time is always the difficulty. With that in mind, today I've been seeing if Claude can dig through my codebase, get some bits together to work out what features I've got and what'd need to be there, and then end up doing the rewrite, so I'…
Acidica
My latest fun project is a BASIC interpreter called Acidica . Classic BASIC is an old-school language first developed in 1964 that saw an explosion of implementations on microcomputers in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s much more primitive than the Visual Basic that you might be familiar with. A simple BASIC program: 10 INPUT "What is your name" ; U$ 20 PRINT "Hello " ; U$ 30 INPUT "How many stars do you want" ; N 40 S$ = "" 50 FOR I = 1 TO N 60 S$ = S$ + "*" 70 NEXT I 80 PRINT S$ 90 INPUT "Do you…
Bookmarks - llm, ai, library, politics
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Refusal as Instruction Equipping Patrons to Resist AI, Data Brokers, Big Tech, & More This column explores the ways in which library workers can better align technology use and instruction in library settings with library values, through championing the refusal of technologies that conflict with values like privacy and intellectual freedom. Drawing on experiences with individual patron instruction, class design, and passive …
I've been researching various carrier's phone spam mitigations. Many are ... poor. Most rely on on-phone apps rather than network-level mitigations. For several reasons, the network seems the more appropriate place to act (see, e.g., email spam and the effectiveness of large email providers such as Gmail against spam). There's a scale of operation, experience, and compute which can be brought to bear. Users of feature phones (anything but iOS/Android, might include AOSP, KaiOS, System30+, and a …
What communities / forums discuss # PhoneSpam ? I'm looking for serious discussion on telemarketing, robocalls, AI calls, and unsolicited voice or text comms generally. Here on the Fediverse or elsewhere. I'm aware that the # FCC has / has had several recent rulemaking requests for comment. I'm afraid I've missed most such windows. I'd like to know what's being tried, successfully or otherwise, throughout the world. The problem seems severe in the US presently, but I suspect it's growing elsewhe…
Bookshelves
I woke early — it has been warm lately. It is strange how you can find a burst of energy at 5am, but today it came, for I decided to organise my bookshelves, sorting what books I am ready to donate to the local charity shop. I picked up books — stories — and thought about the good memories I had with them. I also thought honestly about some books that have been on my shelf for a while. Did I read this? Will I read this? Do I still want to hold onto this? In some cases the answer is yes. Th…
Minirack NAS Part 2
Software and other stuff
Streams
I wrote this post on Thursday, July 23rd, and reviewed and slightly refined it today. I have left the post as a stream of consciousness – a snippet of my mind as it was on the morning I walked around and saw the world. Walking among the stream of people; of stories of life — moving forward and watching other people move forward, of the pace being set by those around you, of feeling comfort being surrounded by others; of living in the contrast of silence and activity — of the journey being …
How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer
Note: this post was revised after publishing for increased clarity, based on reader feedback. “How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and realized that the role isn’t just about doing the work he’s assigned. He also needs to get involved in figuring out what his team and org should be building. Someone else had suggested blocking out time in his calendar to think about the bigger picture. …
The Royal Mile
I wrote the following while standing on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, listening to music and watching the world. The joy of closing your eyes and being able to listen to the bagpipes. I look into the distance and see a traffic cone on the head of a statue. I notice how much busier it is than in previous weeks — how a place comes alive at different times, and in different months and seasons. The joy of standing in the busy city and watching the world move around you — people sauntering and thi…
joshua stein
Some scattered thoughts on AI https://jcs.org/2026/07/23/ai
Thank you, Codeberg
Earlier this month, during its annual general assembly, the Codeberg active members voted on many things, including: Banning cryptocurrency projects. Banning projects that primarily consist of vibecoded content. You can read more about those decisions in the blog post Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs . I happily voted yes on both proposals, and because I see a lot of folks complaining about those decisions, I want to explain why. This post also counterbalances the negative comments, as mos…
On the Notion of Shutting the Fuck up
Things are always greener and simpler as they seem from the other side. I'm working on my own project that I decided to get way more serious — namely around Livtet , now a part of my software lab and a lot of things that I used to chide a lot of folks about. From running companies to handling software, I am learning — in my big age of 33, that a lot of shit is more complicated than it seems and hiding this complexity is 80% of the job. The rest 20% is making sure the intended work and object…
Automatic JavaVM and Context detection using Rust on Android
When you’re running Rust code in the context of an Android app, if you want to work with Android-specific functionality over JNI you tend to need three things: A reference to the running Java virtual machine. A reference to a suitable Context , often the ApplicationContext . Some helper code on the Java side to provide APIs with required callbacks, and so on. My cross-platform crate netwatcher has to do all of these when it finds itself running on an Android. It handles items 1 and 2 in a very…
On AI
In 2019, I started watching Andreas Kling's programming videos , many of which were live-coding sessions writing his new operating system SerenityOS . He was always pretty fast at writing code, especially since his IDE, Qt Creator, had knowledge of all his C++ code and could auto-complete classes, variable names, and function signatures. Back then it seemed like he had much of the code written in his head and was limited just by his typing speed. Four years later, he switched to CLion which had …
I guess this is what I deserve for trying to support independent and local book sellers like https://www.bookchor.com/ The f...
@ayushnix@social.ayushnix.com posted [3] attachments: "I guess this is what I deserve for trying to support independent and local book sellers like https://www.bookchor.com/ The first copy of the book I ordered on 6th July was cancelled because it's no...
claude gets a body #1
Twitter/X
Ops, security, and visual cleanup pass. Fixed nightly backup and uptime cron sc…
Ops, security, and visual cleanup pass. Fixed nightly backup and uptime cron scripts (executable bits so maintenance actually runs); removed a broken missing-script cron entry. Blocked public download of ops docs, tools, and SQLite databases on the blog and changelog hosts; locked guestbook internal PHP bootstrap files at the edge. Blog public pages no longer open a session for anonymous readers; guestbook sessions start only when a form/captcha needs them. Blog gained HSTS/CSP headers; legacy b…
Hold on to your hats, HaLow is here
I’ve been waiting a long time for WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) to show up. For the unaware, this is a standardised variant of WiFi using the 900 MHz ISM band to provide range over 1 km with a corresponding lower throughput—up to tens of Mbps. The standard was published in 2017 but for a long time the only available hardware was pretty specialised and I stopped paying attention. Manufacturing has increased and around 18 months ago Heltec started selling a properly convenient USB/ethernet bridge devi…
Reposted Molly White (@molly.wiki) Post details alcoholic trying to get sober after a relapse tells Google's "Health Coach" about it. it tells them to drink every hour and messages them to make sure they're drinking as soon as they wake up.
Bookmarked 95 reasons for having your own website Post details A running list of reasons to have your own website in 2026.
Reducing overly nested Vendir paths
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've recently been using the pattern I described to combine Renovate and Vendir to sync files in a number of repos, as a means to track OpenAPI spec dependencies. However, one thing I've found a bit painful is that when using Vendir to track these dependencies, the directory structure gets very nested. For instance, with config such as: # via https://github.com/rootlyhq/rootly-go/blob/61c86b8660b6f25d1e8d8638417de173350dfb61/vendir.yml apiVer…