What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?
Maybe not what you think. Over on X, Ben Dicken asked: What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions […]
Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Exclusive Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider. The aerospace manufacturer, which has already consolidated its datacenter estate and uses services like Google Workspace, now wants to move key on-premises applications including […]
A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London

Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London. New power cables map (c) National Rail The first of two new circuits that connect National Grid’s New Cross substation in Southwark with its Hurst substation in Bexley is now live, running for 18km beneath South London through tunnels up […]
Skills Officially Comes to Codex

Agent Skills let you extend Codex with task-specific capabilities. A skill packages instructions, resources, and optional scripts so Codex can perform a specific workflow reliably. You can share skills across teams or the community, and they build on the open Agent Skills standard. Skills are available in both the Codex CLI and IDE extensions. A […]
The Polyglot NixOS
Recently a colleague mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart and cross-compiling NixOS, I decide to give this a go. tl;dr You can find a quick’n’dirty implementation here. Check the repo for details on how to build and run it. So do we […]
NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

reposting from the Internet time service list jeff.s…@nist.gov : Dec 19 05:18PM -0800 Dear colleagues, In short, the atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage. One impact is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference. At time of writing […]
Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

We have many names to describe personal tools. Malleable software speaks to how it behaves. Home-cooked software speaks to who makes it. I wanted a name that speaks to something deeper: how it feels. Perfect Software. I mean “perfect” in the way I mean a “perfect coffee”. There’s no such thing as the world’s best […]
Charles Proxy
11 Jun 2023 Charles 5 public beta 9 is now available for testing, featuring more UI improvements and bug fixes. Read more. 11 Apr 2023 Charles 5 public beta is now available for testing, featuring major UI improvements and technology upgrades. Read more. 4 Apr 2023 Charles 4.6.4 released with macOS crash fixed and Windows […]
Data Bank – Nuforc – Latest UFO Sightings

The NUFORC Databank is the largest independently collected set of UFO / UAP sighting reports available on the internet. For 25 years, it has been the go-to resource for researchers and the general public interested in following the most recent first hand UFO witness accounts, or delving into a deep archive of historical reports. The […]
Android introduces $2-4 install fee and 10–20% cut for US external content links
Developers currently using links to app downloads or transactions need to enroll in this program and meet these requirements by January 28, 2026. In the future, Google intends to apply a service fee on successful transactions and downloads completed via external content links. At this time, however, Google is not assessing these fees and is […]