< Notes...

The reason for the lack of JMAP “web mail client”, or any other kind, is that there at too few email servers that support JMAP. I say, if JMAP on servers makes it to the mainstream, clients will follow.

Google Finance Beta, yet another Alphabet beta service that will have many adoring fans, and then one day be killed. Yeah, no thanks.

“… we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024. We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

I think this is actually good. That I know of, Wikipedia doesn’t serve advertising. Having a lower traffic means slightly less expenses, right? I am not stopping using it. Wikipedia is one of the few tools I use for research.

OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas today, or yesterday, I am not sure. I gave it a try, under macOS. Without watching their video—because, you know, “ain’t nobody got time for that”—I didn’t realise it is a browser. It wants to be your browser, the default one. That pretty much killed it for me. I still tried it, of course, that’s how I found out that it was a browser, with some “more”. I didn’t like the way it renders web pages, so another notch down for me.

Maybe it will work out for others; it didn’t for me. I am not moving away from Safari for anyone. I would have preferred it to be a Safari extension instead, but even though, I don’t feel like sharing that much with that company.

As a side twist to yesterday’s Amazon outage, and, perhaps, unrelated, I woke up this morning with an extra 127 unread old emails on my iCloud+ inbox. Emails I had already deleted, or archived. Not a warm fuzzy feeling, at all.

Eleven years (11!) after Google bought Nest they have finally integrated it on Google Home. There is no longer a need for having the Nest app installed, all can be done via the Google Home app now. Eleven years!

AWS was down, is down and it is taking half of the Internet with it. So much about resilience, eh? “Move to the Cloud”, they said. “You will seldom be down”, they said.

Looking forward to iOS 26.1 with excitement and anxiety. Vietnamese has been added to Apple Intelligence, and thus it becomes possible to use it on Live Translation.

Now, that could be a total disaster if the person you are translating from Vietnamese to English doesn’t use the proper diacritics. 😬

It is 2025, and most Linux distributions do not ship exclusively i386 ISOs. Yet, people get their amd64 machines, and straight they go to install packages—and their libraries—within the i386 architecture. Currently adding around 1TiB of i386 to our mirrors. 🤦‍♂️

I have a notification on GitHub that I can’t clear out. Someone mentioned me on a repository for which I have no access, or it has since been deleted, or something else. The only “solution” that I have found involves installing and using gh. Why? I don’t want to!

Today was Apple’s Day. They announced a new MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, all with the new M5 Apple silicon SoC. 🥳

On a different topic, it was not F5—“a global scale and industry-leading converged application delivery and security platform”—Day, as they shared they had been breached by a “highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor”. 💀

“Attribution matters to me, I want contributors to always get full credit for their effort. This is how you preserve the git history of a project you are bringing into another project.”

I came across TIL: Merging two git projects—can’t remember how, it was an open tab—which I think is a good note to keep around here. The gist is pretty much:

cd alpha
git remote add -f  beta [beta repository URL]
git merge beta/main --allow-unrelated-histories

The upcoming NVIDIA DGX Spark sure is a powerful little devil, in a tiny format.

“Spark delivers one petaFLOP1 of AI performance in a power-efficient, compact form factor. With the NVIDIA AI software stack preinstalled and 128 GB of memory, developers can prototype, fine-tune, and inference the latest generation of reasoning AI models from DeepSeek, Meta, NVIDIA, Google, Qwen and others with up to 200 billion parameters locally.”

It will “only” set you off $4,000 USD. When you order yours, please order one for me too. After all, it’s a mere pocket change, right?

What I like the most about the latest Ollama is that it allows for an easy updating of existing models. Before one had to delete the outdated model, then re-download. Those days are over now. I also like the simple, yet quite useful, chat interface. Not really into their Cloud offering, but I don’t have to use it.

In case you didn’t notice it, I am back to Open Sans—ah, now you noticed, I bet! I used Ubuntu Sans for a whole almost five months. Love Ubuntu Sans, but Open Sans is more… hmm, uniform? Either way, a change of mind. 😛

I want to go back to start using email more, like I used to. I am looking into participating more on mailing lists, and overall using email more for communication for which I have been using non-asynchronous apps. I prefer to use the apps provided by the OS, as I have mentioned it before. The thing is, macOS mail app has a couple of things that the “email perfectionist” in me dislikes. A lot. I am one of those, yes. Let’s see:

• No strict threading, that is, using in-reply-to and message-id to properly create threads. It seems that the iOS/macOS Mail app will not exclusively use those, often using subjects to group emails.
• No way to set quoted text to start with the venerable > Internet “standard”. Apple Mail insists on using their colored |.

So, that’s the pickle, my pickle. Will I dust off mutt, or Thunderbird? Ugh, I don’t want to, but…

It is not often that I see a rejection of a pull request so politely, and clearly explained. Heck, this one ought to be a first, at least for me. After a thorough explanation, the project’s owner concludes:

“I recommend closing this PR. The original implementation is secure and maintainable. Thank you for your contribution, but we must prioritize security in this security-sensitive codebase.”

My most favourite Spotlight function (search for a word definition on Dictionary) is broken. It is my second most used feature on Spotlight, with the first being to open applications as my Dock has only Finder and Bin. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. I would not mind if that tiny scrollbar shown above also goes away. Thank you, Tim Apple!

Yeah, Bluesky isn’t decentralised, it just wants you to believe it is. It is an illusion.

“Bluesky claims to want decentralization and composable moderation, but they still enjoy abusing the power of arbitrary banishment.”

Behold, the master procrastinator! So shameful! The issue is dire now, and I have planned to use the end of year break—after all, I will not have anything else to do—to get this done, at all cost.

Well, well, well. It is possible, after all, to create a /boot partition on software RAID10, and been able to boot from it just fine—something I tried many times, and couldn’t do. It turns out you need to flag each drive as a bootable disk, before carving out partitions, and creating the RAID10.

I have implemented tags on notes tonight. I am not sure if I truly like them, or whether I will change the way they look, if I decide to keep them. I also need to go back retroactively, and tag notes accordingly. That will be a tedious task, and I refuse to use an LLM to help with it. We’ll see.

Incidentally, the reason that mail will never go away is that it is fully federated, doesn’t require people to be online at the same time, and is easy to archive and search. So far none of the replacements do that.

Ain’t that right?!

Having used Matrix in the past, and even self-hosted my own Matrix “homeserver”, I can categorically say—in my (own) very, very humble opinion—that it sucks eggs.

Having the Apple Watch unlock—and login automatically on—the Mac feels like magic. Yet another reason to have this device on my wrist.

I am wearing a watch (Apple Watch) for the first time in, like, 25 years. It isn’t to tell the time. Not at all. It is almost exclusively for health reasons (95%), and fast communication/keeping up-to-date (5%). Just like the iPhone I have, which I use for almost everything but as a phone, the Apple Watch is almost anything, but a watch. I’ll say, it is a wrist-held computer.

It makes no difference that Google has updated Chrome for iOS with Liquid Glass (the first of their applications to be “adapted”). As a vanillist, it means nothing to me.

On this one, upgraded to Tahoe last night. This time I didn’t do a wipe-install, but a regular upgrade. Simply restarted the mini—which has been running without reboot for a couple of months, or so—and went through the upgrade. Smooth, no issues.

I have macOS 26 to install and play with, and today, out of all days, I am stuck working past 3.5 hours my quitting time.

So, about the Apple Event today, I am planing to get an Apple Watch 11, likely for Christmas, or Epiphany. Tempted by the AirPods Pro 3, but not quite sure I will get them. Excellent event, as always!

Today is “the day”. I will say—or, rather, write—no more.

I am absolutely loving Perplexity AI. I have gotten to a point on which I treat everything with an “AI” on its name with reservation, even disdain. Perplexity is a different kind.

“Perplexity AI is an advanced AI-powered search engine designed to provide accurate, well-sourced, and real-time answers to user questions in a conversational format. It uses cutting-edge language models, such as GPT-4 and Claudine, combined with real-time internet searches to synthesize responses from authoritative sources and always cites these sources for transparency. Unlike traditional search engines that just list links, Perplexity delivers direct summaries and supports features like document uploads, contextual follow-up, and the ability to handle both factual and complex queries for individuals and teams.”

Emphasis mine. Authoritative sources, and citing them, is paramount. This one might be the first AI (ugh, that acronym!) I will be willing to pay for.

Yep, it is happening again—like each year, LOL. Christmas is (might?) coming early, everyone! Add the Apple event to your calendars, and be there or be square!

I wonder why Anthropic decided to pick a serif font for Claudine replies. The user prompt remains sans-serif. Whichever the reason might be, I don’t like it. I prefer sans-serif for this specific use case.

This section from the NetBSD man page for the sleep command cannot be funnier, yet completely valid. I mean, quite useful if you have the time, right?

BUGS

     This sleep command cannot handle requests for durations much longer than
     about 250 billion years.  Any such attempt will result in an error, and
     immediate termination.  It is suggested that when there is a need for
     sleeps exceeding this period, the sleep command be executed in a loop,
     with each individual sleep invocation limited to 200 billion years
     approximately.

This is the first search result—at least for me—on Google when searching for “call bank of america”. A Google sponsored scam. Yup. 🤯

Update: 02 Oct 2025 @ 11:20:24

I reported this to Google, and it took them less than a day to remove it. It doesn’t show on my search results anymore. One down…

Feeling the urge to buy an ortholinear keyboard. If anything else, it is the uniformity, and compactness of it, that has enticed me. The search for one starts.

“hi <my GitHub nick>, I noticed you stargazed <repository I starred>. Seems like you’re interested in the same kind of productivity software. I’d love your feedback for <web page for product they are advertising>.”

Getting more and more of these type of emails. They must be getting that information from some kind of GitHub API, right? I mean, sometimes they are plainly inventing things, but sometimes they are right on the spot. Is GitHub selling us out? Microsoft would never do such thing, wouldn’t they?

“You might not need tmux”, said no one, until now. I don’t subscribe to that point of view, I use tmux heavily. The author’s solution? Install shpool, which adds yet another daemon. No, thank you, tmux is just fine. Heck, tmux is superb!

➝ Via Hacker News.

░▒▓ Having flashbacks to “simpler” times when Extended ASCII was used for just about everything—and yes, that included ASCII art ░▒▓