Replacing the cartridge was indeed successful! Refreshing that some tech over 10 years old can be made new again just by replacing the relevant part.

Trying to explain Linux to gf

"It's like Windows and Mac, but it's neither of those, a separate one"

"Which company makes it? "

"No company, it's open... It's free.  Ah.. nevermind"

"Sounds dodgy"

2025/2026: What happens when you take your most engaged and talented industry contributors and make them hate the industry they’re in: a research project

Heh, Keepass not having a public repo might have been a prescient move.

"An important takeaway for leaders, teams, and organizations […] is that we should expect solving complex problems in software to be inherently diverse and to benefit from diverse approaches"

Which means not just asking the average machine to churn out everything and submitting it for review...

One interesting thing this book points out is the different role of automation plays depending on whether you're learning or already familiar. When learning, automation is bad because you need to do it yourself. But when you know the game, automation can augment your abilities.

HOWEVER, this is my own thought, it's also a known phenomenon that people over-rate their own expertise, especially in areas they are unfamiliar with. There is more you don't understand than you can ever imagine. So I feel like most people are likely to over-rate their abilities and automate too much, foregoing the opportunity for learning and development. This is probably especially true with AI.

"When we're trying to learn we often default to passively consuming information, robbing ourselves of the learning-boosting impact of generation".

AKA if you want to learn, you've got to do it yourself.

ITerm2, Neovim, 1password, MacOS

Services I want to migrate away from but all take significant effort with the result of not getting me anywhere towards actually doing something cool. But the tools we use are important, so worth the effort, I guess, and there's a 5-day weekend coming up in a couple of weeks...

Software development decided not to have an engineering culture, largely, in the 1980s and 1990s, chasing first the PC app opportunities and then the Web boom, where branding territory in a hurry was the driver. Moore's Law provided vertical headroom for not having to engineer things in many segments of software, and the cloud platform proprietors provided horizontal scaling elbow room.

We barely know how to talk with each other rather than past each other.

I am begging my field for clarity and community building over quarterly revenue and territory chasing.

During renovations at the 'Torentje', the Dutch Prime Minister's office, workers uncovered an incredible piece of history: a complete 16th-century oak roof structure. Tree-ring analysis shows that the hand-sawn beams were harvested in Southern Sweden during the winter of 1546/1547.

Amazingly, the timber is completely original and has barely needed any repairs over the last 500 years.

Photo credit RVB

https://www.rijksvastgoedbedrijf.nl/actueel/nieuws/2026/09/10/ruwe-eiken-balken-verraden-leeftijd-van-het-torentje

I might switch away from iTerm2 tbh

https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_7_0.changelog

Day two of doing the breathing and static stretches from here. Day one I was just laughing because my body is so stiff there was no hope of achieving the pose in the pictures. Day two and I seem to turn into angry Scotsman when attempting to wake up muscles that appear to be clamped in a vice...

Anyway, hoping this will get better if I'm persistent enough to keep at it a little bit every morning.

https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/how-to-be-more-flexible

Electricity company sent me a postcard saying they've lost a device that stored their smart meter data including customer names and addresses. Not so smart after all, maybe? At least I've moved house now 🤗

I feel like we might be entering the "Jedi knights practice in exile" phase of the Galactic Empire soon...

"Cat's Law: The more a software team fixates on demonstrating short-term performance in their environment, the less they are able to protect the foundation on which long-term performance depends." -- Cat Hicks

#softwareteams

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/117241250895962141

The only way this ongoing influx of large corporate sponsorships makes any sense to me is that they're betting on Omarchy doing to Linux what Rails did for webdev, AND to have a seat at the table guiding how that happens. DHH's abhorrent political views are not a problem (to these sponsors), if at least some of them have publicly expressed/supported not too different views/people previously. They're seeing an opening & alignment and they're seizing it to finally have a version of Linux which can be more actively shaped to their own needs: AI/agent-friendly infra/workspaces, sandboxing, pre-installed/opinionated desktop/software etc. Of course, the money could have wider impact if given to Arch directly, but that way they'd never achieve the same amount of leverage/benefits...

@ailurocrat @wod0bow @aphedges @paulshryock Copyright does far more harm than good and should be abolished. It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies. It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright and to restrict people being able to use/repair/modify/backup their property. Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs.

Time to move away from DigitalOcean.

Password manager as a side project with potential to turn into something more?

Probably don't have the security know-how to make it feasible, but definitely seems like there's a demand.

Turns out living in an ivory tower on a windy day is a bit like living in a trumpet...