A photo of an AM4 CPU socket on a broken motherboard.

A photo of some random part of a broken motherboard. There's loads of tiny components. There's also dust.

A photo of a specific chip from the broken motherboard. The chip is labeled PI3PCIE 3415A, which appears to be a PCIe multiplexer.

A picture of a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU. It's pretty old at this point, but as far as I know it still works.

*Today* I got to play with a busted MSI Tomhawk MAX II motherboard and Ryzen 7 1700 that probably works.

So I did some more macro photography. 🙂

pup-e.com/photos/msi-m...

The bottom of a malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF, with some kind of powder smeared across part of it.

The bottom of a malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF, zoomed in on the part with the weird white powder.

The bottom of a malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF, zoomed in on the part with the weird white powder, and at an angle.

A picture of the malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF with more aggressive lighting from the left side. I don't think it's quite as pretty, but you can spot interesting details you couldn't in the other pictures. There's color differences in the pins, visible as patterns/shapes. Some of these patterns/shapes look like (approximate) circles, dots, or wavy lines.

Got to look at a busted i9-13900KF today, used it as a chance to do some macro photography. 🙂

pup-e.com/photos/i9-13...

A photo of an AM4 CPU socket on a broken motherboard.

A photo of some random part of a broken motherboard. There's loads of tiny components. There's also dust.

A photo of a specific chip from the broken motherboard. The chip is labeled PI3PCIE 3415A, which appears to be a PCIe multiplexer.

A picture of a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU. It's pretty old at this point, but as far as I know it still works.

*Today* I got to play with a busted MSI Tomhawk MAX II motherboard and Ryzen 7 1700 that probably works.

So I did some more macro photography. 🙂

pup-e.com/photos/msi-m...

The bottom of a malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF, with some kind of powder smeared across part of it.

The bottom of a malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF, zoomed in on the part with the weird white powder.

The bottom of a malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF, zoomed in on the part with the weird white powder, and at an angle.

A picture of the malfunctioning Core i9-13900KF with more aggressive lighting from the left side. I don't think it's quite as pretty, but you can spot interesting details you couldn't in the other pictures. There's color differences in the pins, visible as patterns/shapes. Some of these patterns/shapes look like (approximate) circles, dots, or wavy lines.

Got to look at a busted i9-13900KF today, used it as a chance to do some macro photography. 🙂

pup-e.com/photos/i9-13...

(... it only took me *3* tries to get that post correct. Maybe I should go to bed lol)

I'm not sure I'd have jumped ship to a fork based on them using AI. I sincerely don't know.

But the total lack of comments in the +2,121/-2 AI-generated PR they seem happy with makes me think I was misguided in trusting their judgement.

That's a lot of code for *nobody* to understand later on.

also i was tired when posting this and so missed a link: keepasschi.org

KeePassXC asks us to be skeptical of them if we are skeptical of LLMs. This is a convincing argument. A password manager doesn't need 300 regular contributors armed with 14 LLMs; it just needs to do its job, be stable, and be ported to Qt 6 already. We are a small group of engineers with extensive open source maintenance and information security experience, and we forked KeePassχ from KeePassXC 2.7.10, the last release before the advent of the LLM policy linked above. We like using a robust, secure, and trustworthy password manager, so that's what we'll focus on. Anything on top of that is a bonus.

in case you missed it, we decided to fork KeePassXC.

(post linked in the screenshot below: keepassxc.org/blog/2025-11...)

join us @ #keepasschi on libera.chat!

(you'll never guess what i've had problems with 3 times in like 2 weeks, and at least 7 times in the last year.)

Realtek: giving zero nines of availability to systems with 98% uptime since at least 2005.

Realtek: it makes your network itchy.

Realtek: you probably have one on your network *right now*, and it's probably doing the network equivalent of coughing up a hairball.

Realtek: for when you want a NIC that fails whenever a room drops below 50°F, and won't recover without completely disconnecting the computer from power for multiple minutes.

Realtek: for when you want your networking to be interesting.

Realtek: for when you want your NICs to be the most fragile part of a 50+ device network with some systems that are over a decade old.

Realtek: that sure is an ethernet-shaped hole, but whatever's on the other end of that cable won't like what comes out of it.

me: [fidgeting with the 5lb sledge hammer that i've kept by my desk for like 3 months]

@kayila.bsky.social, perfectly describing what she is witnessing: "the autistic urge to hold something slightly heavier than you should currently be holding"

They shouldn't have ruled out griefing OOPS LOL

My harmless prank to friends got way out of hand

you got us good. 😂

A screenshot of Minecraft, with a 2x2 block pillar of deepslate, with torches on the top 3 rows.

Another Minecraft screenshot, showing a different 2x2x30 infested deepslate pillar with torches at the top.

Yet another Minecraft screenshot, showing a third 2x2x30 pillar with torches at the top.

Anyone play modded #Minecraft and know what would cause 30-block-tall 2x2 pillars of infested deepslate, with torches at the top, to show up *two weeks* into the server running?

Griefing is ruled out.

We suspect it's a mod, but not sure which bc we have 219 mods: gist.github.com/duckinator/9...

i have to say, i'm incredibly frustrated that the only decent CI service i've encountered in the last *decade* is shutting down with *two months notice*.

Real possum found among plush toys in Hobart airport gift shop The possum was escorted back out, unstressed by the incident…

I bring to you, important possum news: pulsetasmania.com.au/news/real-po...

Anyone know who I should inform that the opensuse/leap:latest image on Docker Hub is pointing at 15.6 instead of 16.0?

openSUSE Desktop Distributions Learn about the openSUSE distributions and download them for free

that's what i thought at first, so i checked the openSUSE website. their openSUSE Leap download is for 16, so it seems to be officially released: get.opensuse.org/desktop/

I suspect they forgot to tell their 15.x stuff to not update the "latest" tag on Docker Hub. (I've certainly done it before.)

Anyone know who I should inform that the opensuse/leap:latest image on Docker Hub is pointing at 15.6 instead of 16.0?

@drquuxum.bsky.social I fear I may have perturbed a friend of yours.

Few experiences compare to encountering the incoherent screeching of a skunk as it flails around in its den under your house.

i'm not really interested in discussing the Shit™ because it's dominated the last half-year of my life, to the point i had to take time off work to address it.

the details of it are well-documented online if you're interested. my name will come up a lot, since i'm the one who first made it public.

the short version is Fucked Up Shit Happened™ and most of the folks who maintained RubyGems + rubygems[.]org from 2015-2025 are instead working on Gem Coop. (myself included.)

we decided to use it as a chance to solve long-standing problems that we never had the opportunity to prioritize before.

i just realized — those are basically an un-stacked American Foursquare.

neat.