< Notes...

The one thing I wanted and planned to do during the holidays that I did not do was migrate to a new VPS. It simply didn’t happen. And that’s fine; it will have to be. In fact, it’s for the best, because I am certain I don’t want to be on the Fediverse anymore—which is a service I would have migrated had I proceeded as planned.

I don’t quite have my bearings in 2026 yet, but I trust I will soon.

“Verify you are human by completing the action below.” No. It was a 50-50 before; I would either verify, or navigate away. Nowadays I just close the tab.

Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density, enabling longer range, lighter structures, and unprecedented flexibility in vehicle and product design. It can be charged to full in just five minutes without limiting charging to 80%, and supports full discharge safely, repeatedly, and reliably.

And:

Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries, the Donut Battery experiences minimal capacity fade over its lifetime, with a design life of up to 100,000 cycles, offering practical longevity that far exceeds existing technologies. Safety is built in at the core: no flammable liquid electrolytes, no thermal runaway chains, and no metallic dendrites. This eliminates the root causes of battery fires, making the Donut Battery extremely safe and truly revolutionary.

And:

Performance has been rigorously tested across extreme conditions. At –30°C, the battery retains over 99% of its capacity, and when heated to temperatures exceeding 100°C, it continues to retain over 99% capacity with no signs of ignition or degradation.

The Donut Lab solid state battery is made entirely from abundant, affordable, and geopolitically safe materials, does not rely on rare or sensitive elements, and demonstrates a lower cost than lithium-ion.

I had to quote all of that because it sounds incredible; it addresses battery issues found in the current leading EVs. I truly want to believe: we need better, affordable, and abundant batteries. Yet, we will have to wait and see.

➝ Via Hacker News.

Halloy has come a long way since I first saw it posted on Hacker News. It does looks really good, and it is quite customisable. Hard to beat a web based one, but still.

“MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (December 4, 1995) – Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: NSCP) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW), today announced JavaScript, an open, cross-platform object scripting language for the creation and customization of applications on enterprise networks and the Internet. The JavaScript language complements Java, Sun’s industry-leading object-oriented, cross-platform programming language. The initial version of JavaScript is available now as part of the beta version of Netscape Navigator 2.0, which is currently available for downloading from Netscape’s web site. "

➝ Via Hacker News.

AT&T is offering us, for a bargain price of $25 in addition to what we already pay, to upgrade to their “most advanced Wi-Fi package”, which is pretty much a device upgrade to one that supports Wi-Fi 7. The thing is, we don’t use their Wi-Fi, we have our own router, and access point, and almost none of our devices supports Wi-Fi 7 yet. I wonder how many will bite on that offer not knowing any better.

I forgot to note that this issue with the Spotlight was fixed on macOS 26.1. I know we tend to complain, and blame Apple for the obvious gaffes they make, but they will eventually get their act together, and come through.

The problem I have with feeds (not feed readers) is that most will only give us a small summary—if we are lucky! RSS/Atom/JSON feeds with next to no content are simply, and unequivocably, worthless.

“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”

Cloudflare’s entire blog post goes on to explain that they made a “boo-boo”, and how they are not going to do it again. At least not the same way.

“Based on replacement costs, Eugen’s time and effort, and the fair market value of the Mastodon brand, its associated properties, and the social network, we settled on a one-time compensation of €1M.”

Eugen Rochko is stepping down as Mastodon’s CEO, staying “in an advisory role” with Mastodon’s team. €1M ain’t much, but I figure he enjoyed what he did.

It is next to impossible to get an account on Hetzner. I have tried twice in the past, and just when I thought I was home free, the account gets locked, and/or extra ridiculous¹ documentation is requested (which I refuse to furnish). Great prices they have, innaccessible they are for the rest of us.

I now have a plan to—finally!—migrate to a new VPS. Well, I have a timeframe, actually. I will be using some of the free time I will have during the holidays to end this saga. I will also add a couple of other services to my selfhosted collection. Running my own IRCd is on the tentative list, as I am not quite sure about it.

On this one, which I use every once in a while to count the amount of notes per year, Lyse came up with a much more streamlined solution. Thanks, mate!

(for file in *.md; do \
    grep --max-count=1 'date:' "$file" | \
    sed 's/date.*\([[:digit:]]\{4\}\).*/\1/'; \
done) | sort | uniq -c

After so much wait for iOS 26.1, and the inclusion of Vietnamese for use in Live Translation, I feel nothing short of dissappointed. Mum says the translation is an abomination, and begged me to, please, not to use it. Sometimes she gets confused with the service being used, but the end result is what matters. She messaged me, using her classical english:

“Stop writing in Vietnamese. Translate from google, totally different from what you think or what you want to say.”

I completely agree with the OP on this need for attention to details. I like it, and I try to adhere to it as much as I can. See the #elders tag, for example. Compare it to the #family tag. See the “1 note”, and the “5 notes”. A small detail, but it shows caring.

➝ Via Hacker News.

If this comes true, that is, front facing camera and Face ID components becoming invisible on a 20th Anniversary iPhone, then it will be my time to upgrade.

With extremely very few devices supporting Wi-Fi 7, it doesn’t make much sense to advertise it with cymbals and trumpets—as seeing yesterday at Costco. A year from now? For sure. Maybe.

“Imagine applying for a job. You know you’re a strong candidate with a standout résumé. But you don’t even get a call back.

You might not know it, but an artificial intelligence algorithm used to screen applicants has decided that you are too risky. Maybe it inferred you wouldn’t fit the company culture or you’re likely to behave in some way later on that might cause friction (such as joining a union or starting a family). Its reasoning is impossible to see and even harder to challenge.”

➝ Via The New York Times .

Today, after an unfriendly IRC exchange, @prologic deleted all mentions of twtxt.net, the Yarn.social repository (or made it hidden), and shutdown Twtxt.net—yes, it is unreachable. I am hoping that this was a decision taken emotionally in haste, and that the site and service will eventually come back online. 🤞🏻

I have rewritten the Hugo shortcode I was using to rate movies and series, adjusting it so that it goes from 1 to 5 stars. No more fractional ones, which means I will need to pay closer attention now when rating.

Having implemented BIMI for my most commonly used email domain (because I saw it on the emails I get from The New York Times), I briefly considered getting a VMC, just to realise it is all, but a racket. A huge racket.

Every once in a while while jumping from one site to another—starting from a link on Hacker News, more often than not—I come across what I see as a small oasis in the middle of a desert. This morning is PERSONALSIT.ES. It is a blogroll for tastefully designed personal websites. So many gems! 😍

It seems that Hacker News is now running a direct advertising of some sorts. This is the first time I see this, and thought it is text, and tech related, and one can hide it, it sets a precedent with a bad outcome potential.

Though I use vim for almost every CLI editing today, there are times when I use nano too. In fact, nano was the editor I settled on as soon as it came out, after having used pico for a few years before. What I didn’t know, though, was how amazingly customisable nano is!

➝ Via Hacker News.

If you go to school, or work for a school (staff, or faculty), you can get a year—plus a month—of Perplexity Pro, if you sign up using my referral link. Doing so will also grant me an extra month. A win-win!

When it comes to encryption, I have always used PGP, now GnuPG. All my files, now stored on Apple’s iCloud, are encrypted with it. Using that tool has widthstood the test of time. Lately, mostly because of size (program and key), portability, and lack of dependencies, I have been considering re-encrypting everything with age. My only worry is, will age widthstand the test of time too?

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.