nullfs is such a pile of hacks, it’s great.

Reduced chezmoi apply time from 15 seconds to 70 milliseconds by moving the binary externals (fonts and a binary application) to a local ansible role. Should have investigated that sooner.

The compelling part about these command-line coding assistants is that anything with a specific textual representation is game: DNS configurations in DNSControl? Wildly refactorable, able to enforce descriptive sorting conventions, etc. It’s so much easier to structure thought for mundane tasks.

Release v3.41.0 · qdm12/gluetun Video of me reading out this release Thank you all for your patience for this release which took its sweet time 🙏⏲️ I have been rather absent in a good part of 2025 due to work and life getting in ...

I empathize with the “ranting section” portion of the gluetun release notes. There’s something special about working on open source software which touches corporate interests.

Quad9’s IPv6 addresses are the first that stand a real chance of being memorable. 2620:fe::fe! It’s beautiful.

A couple fun ways I’ve used Claude Code recently: updating my backup script to create and download UniFi backups; and reverse-engineering an obscure Bluetooth home automation protocol from Wireshark logs followed by generating an ESPHome configuration.

My LG dryer doesn’t support delaying start, just remotely starting when preconfigured. A fun little automation I made this week is triggering remote start when electricity prices hit their lowest overnight. A few minutes of work for something a 30¢/kWh difference.

I have to check out the IKEA thread stuff! The Tapo ones are for outdoor use so WiFi seems to he the only game in town. But I could use some indoor plugs.

Tapo smart plug energy monitoring is great: exportable data & graphs of usage ranging from hourly to yearly. Although it’s WiFi not Thread, Matter support is solid.

Booooooo

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking ★★★★☆: I stumbled upon this “I should read that some day” book and enjoyed it. He does a phenomenal job explaining concepts from the ground up. The updates from years later were inspiring about humanity’s progress.

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: I actually finished this shortly after it was released, but sat with it in my head for a while, not sure how I felt about my time with it. Incredibly compelling story, I couldn’t stop for a moment. The characters were just so fun!

Great totally unspellable idea for an assistant app from the wonderful Rob Words newsletter:

"NOMENCLATOR: a servant employed to ensure their master doesn’t forget anyone’s name"

Haven’t been very successful with AI assistants writing production Swift or Objective-C, but I did find a valuable debug use: annotating code paths and methods in a file with print statements. Helps those gnarly timing or ordering bugs.

The age plugin paper-age looks to be neat way to print small secrets on paper. I don’t see myself writing the passphrase onto it, though.

There’s something really soothing to my brain that Fedora 42 came out on the same day that baseball players were wearing #42 for Jackie Robinson Day.

Stalwart has Proton-like on-receipt encryption which encrypts incoming messages against a destination’s public PGP key. I’m not sure I have the willpower to self-host email but it’ll be tempting once it gains calendar/contact syncing and push on iOS.

The original SF MART sign; white on red

The Twitter version, with a projection of jack is complicit next to it

The new SF MAT sign; white on black

It’s nice to see the former Twitter building return its sign and clock to normal.

I never thought I’d see any of these RSNs allow this. Truly a sign of the cable-is-dying times.

Starting off the season by emailing NBC Sports to ask that they please use a monospace digit font for the centered pitch clock countdown so it stops bouncing around.

Continuing what would be my normal complaining about baseball streaming costs, this year is such an improvement:

$20/mo for MLB.tv Giants. No commercials‽ This is heaven.
$26/mo for Peacock+Giants. Bad quality video, frustrating app. Easy “no.”
$85+/mo for anything else.

Unlike macOS, iOS and Linux, Android does not support a CNAME to private domains (in this case a Tailscale ts.net) because its resolver doesn’t request after it encounters one; it just fails. A tad frustrating since it means a significantly more complicated DNS setup just for the one OS.

“AI-free since 1990” is a great tag line for SiriusXM; doubling-down on not doing algorithmic radio is hopefully a long-term strategic success for them. Human-curated just hits differently.

Enclosed is the platonic ideal of an encrypted pastebin: beautiful, performant, scriptable, open source and easy to self-host. It even supports file uploads.

Starting February 26, 2025, the "Download & Transfer via USB" option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting the "Deliver or Remove from Device" option. Learn more about managing downloads

Amazon is removing the ability to download purchased Kindle content, which is the only way to read it on my Kobo or elsewhere. What this means is I will no longer be purchasing (“a license to”–ick) any books by the mostly independent authors who exclusively publish there; just cancelled preorders.

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (Dark Lord Davi #1) by Django Wexler ★★★★☆: What a surprise! I went in somewhat blind expecting something softer like his Forbidden Library series and it is quite not. It’s a funny, violent, isekai-... https://zacwe.st/2025/01/07/how-to-become-the-dark.html

I’ve been using my phone for sysadmin tasks as laptops are tough around young kids. Vim keybindings are so good! Significantly reduces the toil of editing on a phone. I want it in every app.

I’m guessing the protocol supports it so micro.blog takes advantage of that when cross-posting.

The new year means 20 new books on Standard Ebooks after entering the public domain. Nice assortment this year as well.

My meal kit delivery is arriving 3 days late tomorrow. I wonder what temperature the contents will arrive at: clearly unsafe, of course, but how unsafe?