My "production stuff":
- https://github.com/festivus-es/festivus - public holidays calendars for Spanish cities
- https://github.com/remote-es/remotes - companies hiring in Spain for remote positions
Usable WIPs:
- https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/ - track self-hosting package updates (such as YunoHost)
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/ubpkg/ - package manager for "upstream binaries"
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/termflux - Miniflux terminal client
Another gem from Hillel:
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/
Part two of three comparing software engineering to other engineering disciplines. Mostly dispelling myths about "real engineering" that us software people often have, but also highlighting some differences, etc.
Straight into my list of interesting articles.
Also "We are not special" is a great title.
I believe declarative Linux distributions to be the future. I find GNU Guix very interesting, but it's adherence to free software means most wireless networking is unsupported.
Nonguix adds the necessary proprietary firmware and drivers, but still I required handholding and effort to get it to work on my experimentation laptop.
So trying to get Nonguix to have clearer instructions:
I won't use @tailscale for personal things, but work is different. Been doing a proof of concept with it (with AWS EKS), and it's nearly as good as the hype!
I have some experience with setting up VPNs, and definitely Tailscale has the smoothest setup I've seen and it works out of the box.
Only small nags:
- Kubernetes egress seems undesirably complex.
- Didn't figure out how to configure tags using Terraform.
- Not a fan that each Kubernetes ingress counts as a device.
A few days on WezTerm by @wez and I'm very happy.
ctrl+shift+space to copy URLs works quite well. Sometimes I still copy with the mouse instead of using ctrl+shift+x, but I'm getting better.
Multiplexing integrated into the terminal is very nice!
Also I didn't know it did predictive local echo. Sometimes it's distracting, but sometimes it really helps!
I think Gnome Terminal is fantastic, but I'm kinda happy to have dared to experiment!
MS Teams has a really nice feature (that is probably an antitrust problem) where you can present a PowerPoint deck directly using the JavaScript version of PowerPoint. The slide deck is popped into Sharepoint, you get the presenter view and everyone else gets the slides. The slides are rendered locally, so they're scaled properly to your display and all of the accessibility features work.
And this is exposed in the UI in two ways. In the 'share' tray, you can select PowerPoint presentations instead of screens or windows, and you get this view. In PowerPoint, there's a huge 'Present in Teams' button right next to the share button.
And yet, 90% of meetings I'm in where people present PowerPoint slides over Teams, they don't use this. And that was even true when I worked at Microsoft.
I honestly don't know how you'd make this more discoverable.
So now I have a lot more sympathy with the MS Office team's problem that 90% of the feature requests that they get are for things that have already shipped.
I love the fact that modern browsers have a button I can press that works out what the page would have looked like if it were designed to be viewed in Nescape 1.0 and renders it like that ('reader mode'). The fact that there is mainstream tooling to undo all of the work that people put into making something annoying is a microcosm of the tech industry.
Today, we’re officially introducing Kagi News: a once-a-day press review that cuts through the noise. Global stories, community-curated sources, and zero tracking.
Full announcement: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-news
iOS download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-news/id6748314243
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kagi.news
Giving WezTerm a chance to replace Gnome Terminal, which I've been using since... forever.
I want to stick to defaults as much as possible, but "ctrl+shift+t to open a new session in the same context, even SSH" is too tempting.
Had to adjust fonts, because the default bold is excessively subtle, and numeric tab switching does not work well for me in Gnome, though.
But there's a chance I'll stick to WezTerm.
Duck Duck Go has added a tremendously useful feature to their search -- a permanent block. Any site can be added to a block list to never show up in any of your search results again.
I will be using this on any site that is obviously spitting out AI generated "articles."
Making Meshtastic work on a C64 is a brilliant idea I'd never would have thought of:
https://64jim64.blogspot.com/2025/09/meshtastic-64-meshtastic-radio-for.html
Wondering if a PiKVM could be turned into a screen reader for BIOS screens and the like.
PiKVM already has an OCR feature to copy regions of a screen as text.
Seven pages is a lot to ask nowadays, but if you've ever had an interest in software development,
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1464122.1464146
is worth the time to read. This was written 11 years before The Mythical Man-Month, decades before we "discovered" short feedback cycles.
I miss LTS modern distros, but they are coming https://docs.projectbluefin.io/blog/bluefin-lts-ga/
Interesting, I noticed after updating to Debian 13 that many binaries I install got autocompletion magically without any configuration.
The bash-completion maintainers have started adding completions that know how to extract completions from specific binaries, you can see them at /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/_*
It's a bit weird and a bit hackish, but it's superconvenient!
"I'm willing to choose a less evil alternative, however only once that alternative is better, cheaper and works *exactly* like the evil thing I'm using right now, including integrations with all the other questionable suppliers I rely on" And we wonder why alternatives do not succeed. .
If you ever want to release a bunch of new crates to crates.io, I'm letting you know there's a low rate limit for that :D
Anytime I read something like “10,000 requests in a few hours” or “one million requests in a week” I‘m immediately skeptical of the framing.
That’s ~0.5 rps and ~1.7 rps, respectively. The disposable vape on HN right now claims 6.25 rps (160 ms page loads).
Good news for everyone working with #LXC and #Incus containers: Rocky and Alma Linux 10 container are now available!
The official image server of the #linuxcontainers project added version 10 of #rockylinux and #almalinux at the end of August.
https://www.geekersdigest.com/rocky-alma-linux-10-images-available-for-lxc-and-incus-containers/
When developing software, I've long been jealous of system administration's "error budgets". If you are above your reliability target, you should be looser and faster. If you are below, you should be more careful and slower (address "tech debt").
This needs to be refined, but I think deadlines work to create a similar self-regulated system; management should be aware that setting deadlines or not having deadlines regulates the development process, like setting the error budget does.
whoever implemented KDE's "waggle the mouse to make it bigger" thing and decided it should have no end point of getting bigger should win a software engineering award
5️⃣0️⃣ Here's the 50th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v258 release of systemd. #systemd258
User namespaces are weird beasts: on one hand they are supposed to be something that you can acquire without privileges, but on the other hand if you want more than a single UID mapped into them, you need multiple UIDs, and that's a resource you cannot acquire without privs.
To deal with that multiple systems have been devised.
The computing industry is weird about history. People fail to understand it in two opposite ways:
A lot of things just fail to pay attention to the fact that other people have seen and solved the same problem before. You get people not just reinventing the wheel, but ignoring the huge design space of wheels that’s been explored and deciding that cubes are ideal shapes for wheels and concrete the ideal building material. See pretty much every recent GUI for hundreds of examples.
But at the other extreme you get a weird worship of the past. Smart people in the past did something this way, therefore we must do things that way! The fact that their target audience was PhD students and their constraints included a processor that was barely faster than a pen and paper and had 128 KiB of RAM is irrelevant. Early UNIX did glob expansion in the shell not because that’s more sensible than providing a glob and option parsing API in the standard library, but because they didn’t have enough disk space or RAM to duplicate code and they didn’t have shared libraries. If you have shared libraries, the right choice is very different. Similarly, ‘everything is a text stream’ is a good idea when you have a computer that you connect to via a serial terminal because everything that the user produces or consumes is a text stream. When you have a system that has graphical displays, speakers, cameras, microphones, and network connections, it is much less sensible.
It’s easy to forget that these days we may have colleagues in the software industry for whom an iPad was their first ever computing device.
So just to remind you: The idea that software should come from a central authority is new, it’s radical, and it’s wrong.
https://guild.pmdcollab.org/@StaticR/115098597647157516
[Continuation of my previous post about QEMU-Wasm]
Also check out elfconv (AOT ELF-to-Wasm translator) by Masashi Yoshimura
More than 60 times faster than emulation.
https://yomaytk.github.io/elfconv-demo/
My daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
