Why I Don’t Need a Steam Machine
For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining their Steam Deck line-up: a new controller, a VR headset, and the GameCube—no wait, GabeCube—no wait, Steam Machine. The shiny little cube is undoubtedly Valve’s (second) attempt to break into the console market. This time, it might just […]
Maybe You’re Not Actually Trying
On selective agency in capable people Illustration by Alexander Naughton Two things happened for me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I acquired a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who’d started following me when I was playing poker, who came to believe […]
Bypassing the Branch Predictor
A couple of days ago I was thinking about what you can do when the branch predictor is effectively working against you, and thus pessimizing your program instead of optimizing it. Let’s work with something relatively simple & concrete: consider that we want to write some kind of financial system (maybe a trading system) and […]
Hyundai Paywalls Brake Pads replacement on Ioniq 5 N
The biggest car news and reviews, no BS Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday. Terms of Service & Privacy Policy. A 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N owner was venting on Reddit recently about not being able to change his brake pads without specialized computer equipment. […]
Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure
15 November, 2025 In 2007, I was spending a my norther-hemisphere summer experimenting with UI automation. Born of those efforts, xdotool came into being when I separated it from another project. The goal was modest – write some scripts that execute common keyboard, mouse, and window management tasks. The first commit had only a few […]
IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs
IDEmacs aims to be a set of Emacs configurations which provide an out-of-the-box experience similar (if not identical) to popular GUI IDEs and editors. It is aimed at… Programmers coming to Emacs from other IDEs, or even first-time programmers familiar with only office applications. Beginner Common Lisp and Scheme programmers, who need the functionality of […]
AirPods Libreated from Apple’s Ecosystem
What is LibrePods? LibrePods unlocks Apple’s exclusive AirPods features on non-Apple devices. Get access to noise control modes, adaptive transparency, ear detection, hearing aid, customized transparency mode, battery status, and more – all the premium features you paid for but Apple locked to their ecosystem. Device Compatibility Status Device Features ✅ AirPods Pro (2nd Gen) […]
When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is here for that. We can all enjoy our geriatric little silicon artifacts together regardless of your electoral persuasion. But I was hopping mad this week, and the […]
The inconceivable types of Rust: How to make self-borrows safe (2024)
One of the first things any Rust programmer learns is that you can’t pass an object and a reference to that object around at the same time. It’s impossible to do, even indirectly. This limitation has been the subject of countless questions on Stack Overflow and posts on Reddit and the Rust forums and anywhere […]
Blocking LLM crawlers without JavaScript
By Uggla, 5 November 2025 Here’s an easy way to block crawlers, which demands no JS capabilities or proof of work from visitors, and is computationally cheap for the server. Name a poisoned path on your website, and disallow crawling of this path in robots.txt. I will use /heck-off/ in this post. For every cookie-less […]