https://scotthelme.co.uk/passkeys-are-not-a-trap/

Useful analysis, but as always, consider your own priorities and trade-offs.

LetsEncrypt default certificate-lifetime reducing to 64 days in February 2027.

If you are using scheduled refreshes, you may want to adjust your schedule.

https://scotthelme.co.uk/the-first-reduction-in-their-history-64-day-lets-encrypt-certificates/

Discoveries, adventures and frustrations. Well worth keeping tabs on how the 2026/10 RetroChallenge entrants are doing:

https://forum.acms.org.au/c/retrochallenge-2026-10/19

Some people are born mediocre, some achieve mediocrity, and some have mediocrity thrust upon them.

There have recently been quite a few posts about oddball pinouts of ICs. Do any of you remember things like the NEC UPD78PG11E?

Quad-In-Line with additional 28-pin DIL socket-contacts on top...

#pinout #icpackage #oddball

Unsurprising:

SpaceX StarLink support page which appears to only be available in Swahili, for some reason.

Five years after Windows 11 launched and silently removed taskbar features that users had relied on since Windows 7, Microsoft has quietly brought some of them back. This is the most Microsoft thing that has ever happened. They took your stuff, made you suffer, and then acted magnanimous about returning parts of it.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/five-years-later-windows-11-brings-back-much-missed-taskbar-options-and-more/

Yesterday's main local news, as reported on the national radio bulletin, was that several of the main dining/catering businesses on the island were stopping weekday daytime meals due to a "truly massive chef shortage".

Some wag called the radio station during the phone-in program to suggest that those businesses should try to recruit small and medium-sized chefs instead.

I've been giggling at that for the last 24 hours.

As incredible as it may seem, these batteries are real:

making sure my codebase is properly agentic

"Microsoft’s pivot back to platform fundamentals proves that while AI might be the future, you cannot build that future on a crumbling foundation. The market forced Microsoft to listen, and for frustrated Windows users, that is arguably the best thing that could have possibly happened."

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/05/17/former-microsoft-vp-says-microsoft-missed-the-ai-wave-like-the-internet-and-mobile-as-copilot-scales-back-in-windows-11/

From the Retrocomputing mailing list:

For those not presently able to visit Bletchley Park, and who can make use of a visual experience, there is a virtual tour of The National Museum of Computing.

There are, it seems, 77 locations you can navigate around. Also a floorplan and a dollshouse view.

https://www.tnmoc.org/3d-virtual-tour-2026

Well, LOL. Hubris strikes again.

https://protos.com/hyperbridge-exploited-less-than-two-weeks-after-april-fools-day-hack-prank/

Your persona's incidental music?

News:

Pope Leo XIV told priests to stop using ChatGPT to write sermons because AI "will never be able to share faith"

https://e-e.beehiiv.com/p/ai-goes-to-war-steals-25m-via-zoom-then-attacks-hospitals

Gold.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/i-switched-to-esim-in-2025-and-i-am-full-of-regret/

TIL: the COMx (complement accumulator) instruction on the MC68HC11 also unconditionally sets the C (carry/borrow) condition-code flag to 1, ****for backward-compatibility with the (broken, here) MC6800****.

The official Motorola MC68HC11 reference manual description of the COMx instruction helpfully advises:

"To complement a value without affecting the C bit, EXclusive-OR the value with $FF."

Sheesh.

Microsoft does it *again*.

History of buggy monthly mandatory Windows updates triggering reboot into erroneous Bitlocker recovery:

August 2022
July 2024
May 2025
October 2025

And this particular oops is getting more frequent...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-october-windows-updates-trigger-bitlocker-recovery/

From the ByteSize newsletter, Tuesday 4th November 2025:

"On this day in 1952, Remington Rand put their UNIVAC computer on live TV to predict the 1952 presidential election. UNIVAC nailed Eisenhower's landslide victory after just 3 million votes. The stunt worked brilliantly—people started calling all computers "UNIVACs," it landed on Superman comics, and sparked the election prediction industry. Today, we have AI that struggles with basic counting but can write poetry about server downtime. Progress!"

https://e-e.beehiiv.com/p/tee-fail-vpn-fail-bullet-fail