No idea what is up, but my Nest Protect smoke detector is having zero problems. Seems like #firstalert pushed a shit update

Everything quieted down for a moment. Then at 11:15 UTC everything went nuts once again. Sirens going off, push notifications, the whole works. Each detector was complaining about smoke, but again not even a candle was lit.

After they appeared in the apps they started pushing notifications and sending emails saying smoke was detected - but no sirens. Each First Alert detector said it sensed a high amount of smoke

The sirens stopped on their own after about 30 seconds. I logged back in to the #firstalert app and it said all my devices were "deleted." Google Home had them marked as offline.

After another few minutes they started appearing in the apps again.

It appears that #firstalert smart smoke + CO2 detectors had a massive software issue this morning. At 10:50 UTC all the First Alert alarms started blazing that smoke was detected - but nothing was going on. I was kicked out of the app and all devices were marked as offline, so I couldn't mute them.

It’s that time in our economy where people have to find new ways to make money to survive. I’m working on a new platform to connect local projects with people looking for work. No platform fees, just connections. Early access signup is live! taskpatch.app #startup #local

New episode! Two former students of @gallaugher.bsky.social, Abby Bergman and Esha Patel, join the show and share their experiences taking the course and the projects they created. Find the show wherever you get your podcast or visit www.circuitpythonshow.com/@circuitpyth...

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

193 million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country.

Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately*

Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code.

GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH

github.com/settings/cop...

A photo of the Adafruit Macropad, running the software Macropad Hotkeys 2. Multi-color LEDs are the keyboard, and a monochrome screen shows some additional details. A rotary encoder is next to the screen at the top right.

Macropad Hotkeys II v4.3.1 is out the door! This is the stable, daily driver release that I've put through the wringer with all my apps.

It goes to sleep! No USB storage (unless you want it)! Send mouse wheel events! A wiki full of macros!

MIT licensed, details at hackaday.io/project/1819...

how diffie hellman key exchange works

(with as little math as possible)

The man who coined Metaverse now says Meta’s glasses are creepy Neil Stephenson has changed his mind about VR and AR.

In his 1992 novel Snow Crash, writer Neal Stephenson coined the phrase "Metaverse" to describe a VR world experienced through goggles.

Now, Stephenson says he no longer believes face-worn computing is the future: “People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do.”

New episode! Adafruit's @johnpark.bsky.social joins the show and shares how he started hosting shows, a peek behind the scenes of his shows, his favorite CircuitPython memories and projects, and more. Find the show wherever you get your podcasts or visit www.circuitpythonshow.com/@circuitpyth...

Not shown in the thumbnail is the Bolt EUV, which I'm a big fan of BTW.

Coming Monday on a new episode of The CircuitPython Show: Adafruit's @johnpark.bsky.social joins the show! He shares some of his favorite memories about CircuitPython, his favorite projects, and a peek behind the scenes of his shows.

Screenshot of a Vox article header in the Policy section. The headline reads in bold, "The fight over transgender rights in America has entered a new phase." Below it, the subheadline says, "The policy fight is moving well beyond sports and youth medicine. The political response hasn't caught up." The article is by Rachel Cohen Booth and dated March 17, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT.

I am going to become the joker.

We've been screaming from the rooftops that this was never about sports or trans youth healthcare. Instead, we were ignored and browbeaten by a bunch of idiot centrists who took the concerns of people who want us eliminated in good faith.

archive.ph/xgwCd

5 years ago, US VCs big ideas were:
* Monkey jpgs are money now
* Trump will be good for the global economy
* We should cut investments in Africa

VCs in China said:
* Money is money. Ban crypto.
* Invest in solar, batteries, and EVs
* Trump is weird
* We should increase investment in Africa

🙂🙃

Key Signature – New in Bitwig Studio 6 YouTube video by Bitwig

Finally upgraded to Bitwig Studio 6 - the new key signature feature set is fantastic. I'm a big fan of editing stuff like it was on the QY-20... I'm all for opinionated DAWs.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YYo...

#bitwig #daw #synth

This is such a great summary of what makes LLMs feel like they understand concepts - and in under three minutes! The encoding portion is so incredibly important to understand since many people pass it off a sentience.

I said what I said.

We're not ready to push forward into the renewable future. We still want to cling to This old silly fossil fuel world that is killing the planet.

If you had an EV that costs under $20K, and subsidized solar cells on your roof, you'd be partially insulated from gas price hikes.

Next make your own filament out of your reusable plastics. Then join the black market. Sell bootleg action figures from your take out containers.

A post for a kids' summer day camp titled "Camp - Dystopian Days." The description is "step into a world where survival, strategy, and stewardship intertwine. You’ll embark on a dystopian adventure that tests your courage, creativity, and connection to the natural world. Each day brings new missions to build shelters, forage for food, and decode messages hidden in the landscape. Through teamwork and imagination, you’ll learn to see nature as both a challenge and a guide, discovering that the true goal isn’t just to survive, but to reimagine and rebuild a brighter world."

"Ah, to be a kid again, during those carefree summer days!"

Summer days in 2026:

Prologue: Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks. Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics - and they are mostly clever fools - seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way. Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.

I had to venture into LinkedIn today and was reminded of this passage from the prologue of "Calculus Made Easy" in 1910, casting asunder the techbros of the era:

Michigan Synth Works has an open-source 303 processor and a new kit - CDM Create Digital Music Call it the Bride of x0xb0x. Michigan Synth Works today teased a new, Arduino-compatible, open-source 303 processor, plus a full DIY kit. They’re both affordable ways to build your own all-analog, mod...

The legacy of the x0xb0x returns! An open-source, Arduino-compatible processor (as powered 303, 606, and 909), plus an upcoming DIY 303 kit, from @michigansynthworks.bsky.social

#303day and some @adafruit.com memories...

GitHub's status page, showing all systems being operational. They are, in fact, not. Not to mention there are several historical outages listed that show 99.82% uptime in February.

The GitHub 500 page which is, unhelpfully, asking me to refresh the page because of an HTTP 500 response.

A tale of two GitHubs.

Seriously... does anyone's status page actually report current status anymore? Or automate status updates? It seems like it's always shows green and then is manually updated hours after recovery...

#github #outage #statuspage

This court specifically avoided bringing up challenges on bans for gender affirming care for trans youth on parental rights grounds so they can weaponize parental rights against trans youth while stripping them from the supportive parents of trans youth. It's obscene.

Bear in mind, this guarantee of sledgehammering food safety is coming at the exact same time they have already shot food safety in the face via DOGE cuts and such.

Like, last *April* they killed tracing salmonella levels in poultry. Last *August* the CDC stopped tracking 6 foodbourne pathogens.

Just got my January electric bill & compared it to my Jan 2025 bill - base rates up 40%, rate above base was up 30%. The reason given is usually costs increasing for "infrastructure upgrades," such as those for datacenter expansion (but also industrial expansion).

The entire anti trans side is basically a few billionaires in a trench coat. It's insane how much money and influence they all have. If you stacked them up it would be trillions in net worth opposing the existence of trans people.

This cosmologist studies dark matter, an invisible part of the universe Katie Mack started out building solar-powered LEGO cars as a kid. Now she studies dark matter to better understand how galaxies form and evolve.

Katie Mack, Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at Perimeter Institute, spoke with ScienceNewsExplores about her journey to becoming a cosmologist, misconceptions about her work, and challenges in her field.

Read the full interview: www.snexplores.org/article/cosm...