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
Does anybody else ever think about how "wow, that person is REALLY smart, they are my go-to for tough questions" used to mean knowing lots of stuff in your actual head, whereas now it mostly means you're better at search engines than most people you know?
I think about that rather a lot.
I think containers tend to be used in very debatable ways for self hosting. But playing with Podman quadlets, they seem pretty proper- they integrate cleanly with the system, they have built-in support for automatic image updates...
I still prefer not using containers, but some stuff like Vaultwarden the container is the first-class citizen distribution system.
Infra-as-code example at:
My WezTerm saga continues with having to adopt the Kitty keyboard protocol on Emacs and having to patch stuff to fix some problems. But now I can use Super on Emacs!
But then Kitty keyboard protocol broke Senpai. Asked on IRC and they committed a fix real quick! (But then it broke stuff for other people :(
Three weeks on WezTerm and one of my remaining issues was not being able to press ¿ in Emacs. Activated the Kitty keyboard protocol and installed kkp in Emacs and problem fixed and... now I can use the "super" (Windows key) modifier without interfering with Gnome.
I am still uneasy at how far I'm deviating from defaults and always-installed software, but OTOH, I'm happy.
(I still reach for the mouse, but I'm doing a good amount of keyboard copying and pasting in the shell!)
ForgeFed seems to be far away still, but apparently Forgejo is making some progress there.
Although I played last week with Gitweb and its RSS feeds. Maybe that is all we need?
#Forgejo 13.0.0 was just released!
A new moderation tool is available to report inappropriate user behavior or content that should be looked at by instance administrators. Two factor authentication (TOTP, etc.) can be enforced on the entire instance for all users or instance administrators. Forgejo Actions usability was improved with static checking of workflow files and access to the logs of all run attempts.
Check out the blog post at https://forgejo.org/2025-10-release-v13-0/
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:
Sounds like small praise, but "just works" and "well thought of" is not something you see frequently nowadays.
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.
@david_chisnall Google Drive has a similar feature, but it's Chrome-only and luckily I work in a company where I'm far from being the only non-Chrome user, so I won't use it :(
Agreed that this should be a bigger thing. It's surprising no one has figured this out, because most of the pieces are already in place!
(Did some incarnation of Cisco WebEx had this?)
(Someone else's idea of using PDFs is brilliant. Jitsi Meet should do that!)
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).