passkey is imho one of the most important security developments that touch consumers and also one of the worst consumer rollouts i ever witnessed because every company involved treats everything like an enterprise customer solution

i really love solarized light and one time I gave a talk to a group of undergrads and one of them thanked me for being brave enough to use a light mode colour scheme. it was kind of a joke probably but I think it’s interesting how some colour schemes are perceived as “for real hackers”

I have written a blog post about how my blog (and most of the rest of my online presence) is all stuck in a small box that lives under a TV: codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog/...

also I love how the How DNS Works table of contents sort of explains how DNS works a little bit wizardzines.com/zines/dns/

How DNS Works!, by Julia Evans - A cartoon of a person in a cool puffy outfit navigating a futuristic city street. A passer-by has a speech bubble with an IP address in it, and a floating robot is projecting “Wanted: Example cat.com”, with a picture of a cat wearing sunglasses.

just noticed it's How DNS Works' 4th birthday soon! wizardzines.com/zines/dns/

it's still one of my favourite zines, and it comes with a free ★★ playground ★★ at messwithdns.net where you can create DNS records and see what happens!

what’s refreshing about #atmosphereconf is how interdisciplinary the subjects and speakers are - it’s not all code but instead showcasing the roles of scientists, journalists and creators. the community is multi-faceted and have a shared interest in combatting misinformation and abuse.

Nice! A while ago I also wrote about Diffie-Hellman as an illustrated children’s book with no math whatsoever (using a paint mixing analogy) www.amazon.com/dp/173741905X/

i still remember learning this in school and finding it absolutely magical. imagine you and a person you’ve never met sit down at a bar, surrounded by mathematicians. you speak random numbers to each other. in a few minutes, you have agreed on the same random number, and no one else knows what it is

here's a video about elliptic curve diffie hellman, for the elliptic curve "magic function" www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3zz... (i haven't watched it though)

for the prime number version, there's a wikipedia explanation but wikipedia math is always the worst en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%...

anyway this is what your computer is doing every time you make a HTTPS connection, to figure out what secret key to use to encrypt the connection. Just a little bit of weird multiplication with a "magic function" (I wrote more about the details here jvns.ca/blog/2022/03...)

(the above happened because i realized at some point that even though diffie hellman key exchange _uses_ things like "elliptic curves" or "modular arithmetic" to work, you do not need to actually _understand_ those things to understand the basic idea, and I thought that was cool!)

how diffie hellman key exchange works

(with as little math as possible)

I want to have a little anniversary thread about the economics of running a podcast while also being a writer (and in my cohost's case, an academic)

Because I think some people might think I'm living off having written a bestselling book seven years ago and lemme tell you, that doesn't math

wizard zines

I just discovered wizardzines.com by @b0rk.jvns.ca when searching for nginx playground (nginx-playground.wizardzines.com). What a fantastic site (and playground). And incredibly it was the first result that came up in Google. It was like searching the web in 2003. Sometimes the web works very well.

A screenshot of the "zine library" view, with the link to add a new account highlighted below the list of zines

we just added a way to merge accounts to library.wizardzines.com, so that if you've used more than one email to buy zines you can see all your zines in one place!

every so often people report errors in the zines (thank you!). Just made a new page with all the errors that have been reported & fixed so far here: wizardzines.com/errors/

examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages jvns.ca/blog/2026/03...

Parseword - A tricky wordplay game Transform phrases through wordplay to solve cryptic crossword puzzles.

I've released a new word game called Parseword, that tries to make cryptic crosswords more accessible. You can play it here:

www.parseword.com

worked with the tcpdump folks on an updated set of examples for the tcpdump man page www.tcpdump.org/manpages/tcp...

the idea is that if you've forgotten how tcpdump's basic flags work, you can find a quick reference in the man page!

really nice profile of Wizard Zines from the Cambridge Centre for Computing History! www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/76804/Ju...

A great overview of the evolution of #container technology via #Docker. It also provides a quick peek into the various technology bits that enable containers work.

If you want to learn more about how containers work, then consider starting with wizardzines.com/zines/contai... by @b0rk.jvns.ca.

I don't know but i've been thinking about how to improve open source docs a little recently and the main thing I've been doing is just showing up with a small docs contribution that they can merge

So far people overall have been super receptive but it's not easy

free open source software needs fewer engineers and more designers and product people

i love how when I decided that I wanted to Write Some Real Open Source Code in 2018 I thought "I need a new github avatar to communicate that i am a serious person" and made this

i 100% stand by it great job past self

smh.com.au connection is secure Javascript: disabled [reset permission?] Cookies and site data Site settings About this page

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psa: you don't have to use archive dot today or archive dot ph to access SMH or The Age without the paywall; you can disable Javascript on them and the articles load just fine.

yeah my feeling is that making man pages better is much more about process (like get feedback from real users about the issues with the docs, address the feedback, repeat) than about any specific formatting convention

huh I've heard this before but when I run `env MANPAGER=nvim man ls` I get something that looks like this, which doesn't seem right

that's interesting, fish does something similar but for some reason I've never used it

yeah I'm so afraid of rsync

a few thoughts about clarifying man pages jvns.ca/blog/2026/02...