Just had to explain to my teenage daughter than phone calls used to cost money…

my husband made it so the home assistant voice assistant can use full-on ollama to interpret instructions. then he told it to turn the lights on. it's been explaining its thought process for over five minutes now and the lights are still off.

If anyone out there uses @feedbin but is annoyed at certain tech blogs being 50% adverts, then you can filter the bulk of them out with an Action. I use `**title:(("nearly" OR "almost" OR "practically") ("pennies" OR "peanuts" OR "free" OR "nothing" OR "pocket change" OR "giving away")) OR […]

obviously I'm not paying you for this advice so feel free to ignore, but do you feel a git hosting service geoblocking the UK (eg https://repo.or.cz) due to the OSA is a misunderstanding of the law, or sensible?

Typographical question for the internets: ..? or …? Is the dot in a question mark part of a questioning ellipsis, or not?

So I'm zsh-curious. Is there a good introduction to zsh that doesn't drown you with mad hacks but does explain all of the useful features?

#nowplaying Trance Frendz by Ólafur Arnals and Nils Frahm. Best loud, and the video version is just a delight.

Drinking a pint of warm Ribenna because this stupid meeting room keeps on trying to cool itself to 15C.

Someone put this "blue plaque" on a London Tesla showroom to mark his becoming the world's first trillionaire. “World’s first trillionaire Elon Musk. Could have solved world hunger but funded fascists instead. Bellend.” […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

Just did a blind taste test and FYI the M&S Salami Sticks are much superior to Pepperami.

Someone more organised would have posted this last week, but if you fancy playing a spooky game of #MausRitter this weekend then may I humbly suggest https://rossburton.itch.io/a-ghostly-tail or https://rossburton.itch.io/the-bloody-burrows?

endianness is just a plot by big endian to sell more byte swap operations

Any Ubuntu developers to hand? Curious how uuutils/coreutils interacts with dpkg-buildpackage/fakeroot...

In an interview with Bloomberg, Farage has said that Nathan Gill was "one bad apple" - unintentionally being accurate because he forgot the rest of the proverb.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Today's ironic observation is that patchwork is maintained in GitHub.

Finally managed to reduce my thoughts on Three Body Problem to a few words. It's Pretentious Star Trek, but sold as much more.

So, everyone saying that Online Safety was the reason #imgur blocked the UK is going to update their posts now, right? https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs/2025/09/statement-update-on-imgur-investigation/

3. ⁠this is not the moment for an incredibly expensive increase in state surveillance infrastructure to be run for profit by private tech firms just before Labour ushers in an (even more) authoritarian right wing government. FIX THE GODDAMN COST OF LIVING INSTEAD YOU FREAKS.

2. Countries that have ID cards - like the whole of Europe - still have the same irregular migration problem (you may have heard!!!) & in fact the UK has the lowest share of its economy estimated as irregular economy in Europe so if it fixes the issue WHY DIDNT IT FIX IT THERE?

Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

Obviously I've been a bad person and have terrible karma because I just had to look at the perf build system again and if I wasn't so busy trying to fix shit, I'd be writing my essay titled Why You Should Never Use Make.

Well https://www.backmarket.co.uk/en-gb/e/obsolete-computer is very interesting. Basically, refurbished laptops that Win11 won't run on (no TPM) running ChromeOS Flex instead, for £99.

Today's fun: cross-building with clang and `-march=native` produces *really* weird results.

Today in build systems: wondering why CMake is passing `-Wl,-rpath,:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::`.

I'm refusing to link to twitter, but Ed Davey wins Reply Of The Day.

Remember this one, Street Design Nerds? One of the most intriguing cities in recent years at reconsidering streets for people instead of just for cars, Oslo Norway, translated their great Street Design Manual into English and put it on-line. Worth digging into. www.oslo.kommune.no/getfile.php/...

Thank you I guess to the flag shaggers, the mini roundabouts in my town needed a fresh coat of paint and the council finally did it.

New Banksy! Royal Courts of Justice (1/2) London

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door. Source code and a downloadable app to try it yourself […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It's way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things. This is real code someone sent to me for review.

Your mother paints roundabouts and your father shouts at hotels.

My favourite thing about Docker is how it doesn't really care about architecture and acts like it's my fault that I'm trying to run x86-64 binaries on an arm64 machine.

Spent a week in Amsterdam. Ignoring the tourist/weed trap around Centraal, this is what a proper city looks like. This is the end of my TED talk.

The true airport experience: Flight delayed an hour, then terminal display says Go To Gate. Gate display says Boarding, but there’s no plane. Airline tracker shows the plane is still on the previous route and is on the ground in another country still.

OMFG, I own a piece of history.

Is it too early to prepare for my mini session at OSS-EU? Absolutely.

So I've decided that ZFS is basically terrible for non-enterprise as you can't just grow a pool by adding disks *one at a time*. Is there anything like TrueNAS that isn't ZFS-centric (beyond just using Debian)?

Today in Maintaining A Distro, did the bash tarballs get compromised in a supply chain attack? The answer, this time, is no they did not.

Before it goes on eBay, can I interest anyone in a Viltrox 23mm F1.4 lens for Fujifilm? Used a few times, great condition, just planning a downsize.

Nooooooooooooooo #openembedded

I don’t suppose I know anyone going to the MVA picnic in Battersea Park today?

I don't suppose if anyone knows if the BBC have finalised their Glastonbury 2025 streams on iPlayer or are they still splitting the individual acts out?

I can’t say for sure that Affinity Publisher was used to make this poster, I’m just saying that I’ve seen this table behaviour before…

Absolutely howling that our son's prom had an award for "most likely to end up in prison" (as voted for by the students).

Do I know anyone using sujo as an IRC bouncer?