> And with that CFP for #9 is open - deadline 30 April 2026

Same as taxes… 🤔

Web fonts are a way to add icons ta a webpage. mina86.com/2026/creatin... describes how an SVG image can be easily converted to a font so you’re not limited to third-party icon fonts.
And that’s not all, mina86.com/2026/using-l... elaborates on how ligatures can be used to improve accessibility.

Contrary to popular belief, K in CMYK stands for Key. That’s basically it but if you want to read more about key plates and CMYK head on to mina86.com/2026/k-is-fo...

Years ago I’ve prepared a programming task for DressCode competition. Dusted it off in hope it may be useful to someone, perhaps CS teachers. See Sorting algorithm programming exercise at mina86.com/2026/dressco...

Coincidentally, it is tagentally related to today’s date.

The Biggest Myth in Speedrunning History YouTube video by LunaticJ

Specifically in context of Google sharing data, you might be interested in M. V. Beigi, et al. 2025. DDR5 DRAM Faults in the Field. In DSN 2025. doi: 10.1109/DSN-S65789.2025.00039.

By the way, cosmic ray responsible for the infamous glitch in Super Mario 64 is likely a myth: youtu.be/vj8DzA9y8ls

I hear articles on page 40 and 47 are particularly interesting. ;)

Using character entities to escape #HTML markup is common knowledge, but how about using CDATA sections? Read up what they are, how they may be applicable outside #XML and how they may break your #XHTML documents at mina86.com/2026/escapin...

Good point. I’m thinking of websites/blogs with articles where it’s 50/50 whether link is internal or external.

Also, I sometimes find the opposite annoying. When news site link, say, a product name and I want to go to that product’s site, but it goes to a list of other articles about that product.

Apologies for tagging directly, but I am interested in what pros think about styling outbound links.

cc: @bram.us @kevinpowell.co @nerdy.dev @una.im

Styling external (i.e. outbound) links differently from internal ones (Wikipedia style), yea or nay?
I’m interested in everyone’s thought. Is it useful? Too much visual clutter?

Read more, including description of three #CSS methods of getting such styling, at mina86.com/2026/styling...

You see your coworker write ‘import pickle’ but you don’t stop them? Why?

Read more on how you should have stopped using pickle years ago at mina86.com/2026/pickle-...

Ever wondered what the deal with GMT and UTC is? Aren’t they the same? Short answer is no. Long answer is at mina86.com/2026/are-gmt...

‘Your Screen is Secretly 30 Years Old’ video from @nicklucid.nebula.tv is… How do I put it… Baffling. If you want to see some of the things it got wrong and why 7-bit colour depth has never been enough have a look at mina86.com/2026/7bpc-is....

Soon after I wrote an article about JPEG XL, Chromium team added support for the format. Coincidence?
www.techradar.com/pro/google-r...

Are you a man of culture whose drive bulges at the seams from all the photos in the local gallery? What if I told you, you can save 22% of the storage with just one easy trick. Read more at mina86.com/2025/use-jpe....

Linux distributions are not like cars at mina86.com/2025/linux-d...

If you’re interested in trying out Linux but reached selection paralysis stage of choosing your first GNU/Linux distribution, this article may be for you.

You call it interesting. I call it a matter of course. ;)

By the way, Rust uses a separate seed for each hash table while Python which has a global seed set at interpreter startup.

Which (further by the way) is why HashMap and HashSet are not in `std` part of the Rust standard library.

The code gives expected result with dictionary comprehension (i.e. `a, b, c = {"alice": 2, "has": 1, "a cat": 0}`) but breaks with `set` constructor (i.e. `a, b, c = set(("alice", "has", "a cat"))`).
When 3.7 guaranteed insertion order in dictionaries, did it not cover sets as well? Weird.

ansi-colours A Rust, C and C++ library for converting between 24-bit sRGB colours and ANSI terminal 8-bit palette

Debian’s rxvt-unicode 9.31-3+b2 fails at 8bpp. And in case you need to reduce bit depth here’s a shameless plug: codeberg.org/mina86/ansi-... ;)

Obligatory reference to David Goldber’s ‘What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic’ which can be found at dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1.... This specific issue is called ‘catastrophic cancellation’.

On related note, since #CrossroadsOfRavens has just released internationally there’s been an influx of new readers interested in #Witcher tales. If you’re wondering about the reading order, I got you covered: mina86.com/2022/witcher...

Last week, Andrzej #Sapkowski & Adam Badowski (co-CEO of @cdprojektred.com) met at #MFKiG to discuss what makes a story a #Witcher story. Here’s how the conversation went: mina86.com/2025/essence...

Did we stop killing games yet? freedomtobuy.games teaches us publishers are not the only companies we need to keep in check.

This is not the first time #Visa and #MasterCard try to influence what people can buy or think. And they definitely should not be able to do that.

#collectiveshout #gog

‘Be My Guest’ paper which I’ve presented at DSN 2025 has been published. More info at mina86.com/2025/be-my-g...

Stop Killing Games at mina86.com/2025/stop-ki...

As I describe, #StopKillingGames is about more than games. It’s just a single brick in fight for broader consumer rights.

A tale of two pull requests at mina86.com/2025/a-tale-... with an addendum at mina86.com/2025/a-tale-... to prove I don’t complain about Rust only.

Could this be null? at mina86.com/2025/this-is...

A bit of a follow up from my previous post on undefined behaviour touching on the null pointer dereferences in method calls. (Believe it or not, Microsoft still does that).

Axiomatic view of undefined behaviour at mina86.com/2025/axiomat...

Is Ctrl+D really like Enter? at mina86.com/2025/is-ctrl...

cc: @hackarcana.bsky.social

After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers Waymo has been in dozens of crashes. Most were not Waymo’s fault.

Just days later and this drops on Ars Technica: arstechnica.com/cars/2025/03...