as the kids say "six seven"

Excited to announce that @fedipub (formerly known as Federails), the Rails engine for #ActivityPub that powers (amongst other things) @manyfold, has been awarded a grant in the latest round from @NGIZero. I’ll be building community, docs, rounding out features, and ideally making it usable in non-Rails Ruby apps too!

https://nlnet.nl/project/Fedipub/

There's been some discussion recently of what motivates free software authors.

#PuTTY was originally just a Telnet client. It became really useful when I added an SSH backend, during my last year at university. I did that partly because I thought network security seemed like a good idea, but mostly because I had exams coming up, and it seemed like more fun than revising for them.

Three years earlier, #NASM started off as a long design discussion with about 17 people on an email list. Eventually the time came to write code. I volunteered to write an initial prototype for everyone to work on improving. Another member of the mailing list – also a student – suggested that he'd write one too, and then we could decide which one to use. He was at Oxford and I was at Cambridge, so naturally I went all-out to make sure mine would be better. (He never finished his, as it turned out.)

In other words, my two biggest serious free software projects were motivated significantly by Oxbridge rivalry and by revision avoidance.

I'm not quite sure that's how a university education is _supposed_ to bring benefit to the world, but I'll take it!

AppSignal are our Accessibility Sponsors for DevOpsDays London 2026! 🎉

If you want to see their booth and learn what AppSignal is about, come get your tickets at: https://ti.to/devopsdays-london/2026

UK folks: If you are organising a petition that you want to be presented to the government and you use any platform that isn't https://petition.parliament.uk, then I assume it's just a data-harvesting organisation. I don't care if it's some charity that hasn't had all of their systems compromised (or not simply sold the data to Facebook) yet. I don't care that 48rabbitfeet or whatever is a really good organisation that's totally trustworthy and promises not to sell this valuable data to anyone.

Hey. You. I know you've been wanting to give a talk. What if you do it in the Best British City™️?

TechMids is a one day, community-run developer conference on Nov 27th. Submit your talk ideas (but no salespitch slop) below to come hang out in glamorous Birmingham.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeObgsfBymBPghhuMrzJyr5-kpBpHyFY2L7vVVPZTv0R-K8WQ/viewform

given who one of our prospective sponsors for @DevOpsDaysLondon is. I'm very tempted to give @Floppy and @pikesley free tickets and insist they suggest an open space about the incident.

@anon_opin it’s ok I only understood half of it myself

August is Black Business Month. Here’s a great opportunity to support a Black-owned business…

Do you use Goodreads? If so, you can migrate to @thestorygraph. You can even import all of your Goodreads data.

Nadia Odunayo is the founder and sole developer. Together with her small team, they’re making a great product that’s slowly improving over time.

So go support Nadia and co. instead of a fascist billionaire.

https://thestorygraph.com

#BlackBusinessMonth #BlackMastodon #Books #Reading #TheStoryGraph #Goodreads

Rice is not anonymous white ballast for transporting sauce.

Jasmine, basmati, brown, parboiled, Arborio, Carnaroli. They all have different jobs. And yes, the way you cook them matters.

A short argument against the German Kochbeutel, plus my rice-cooker method for fluffy, chopstick-friendly jasmine rice. 🍚

https://blog.hofstede.it/rice-deserves-better-than-a-kochbeutel/

#food #cooking #rice #FoodNerd #OffTopic

A rabbit hole I fell down this morning, a website that archives the maps they hand out at theme parks and the like.

This is the internet we really need.

https://www.themeparkbrochures.net/

There’s an unusual telephone box outside. I wish John were still alive to tell me all about it.

@jonty brings back less problematic memories: When we released geotagged photos at Flickr 20 years ago, someone spelled out FUCK with geotagged photos across the arctic ice cap where it would be very visible on the public map. 😂

I remember when Monday Markov was a thing

In the tetrapod phase of post EMF mourning #emfcamp2026 #emfcamp

drinking milds at the hope. milds come in many colours. #AlwaysDrinkMild

Google Earth added a weird "edit with AI" mode, so I fixed the biggest error in London.

The Ghostty non-profit has signed our first long-term paid contributor via a 12-month agreement with @vancluever. He's a top-quality engineer, has been part of the Ghostty community for years, and has consistently demonstrated an extremely high quality and judgement bar.

He is the creator and maintainer of z2d, the vector graphics library that Ghostty uses. He has contributed upstream to Zig and Arocc dozens of times.

The way Ghostty contributor contracts work is that there is no stated or mandated area of focus. I trust Chris to work on worthwhile tasks, and Chris has demonstrated he does so far, so there's no need to push him one way or the other. He chooses what to work on and describes his work to the non-profit (so it's all aligned and legal to compensate).

As I spend more time focused on libghostty, I want to ensure that the broader Ghostty project continues to be staffed and healthy. We'll be signing more contributor contracts soon!

552) MrTeabot. A Teabot variant that pities the fool who don't drink tea. Like all Teabots, it won't accept any other beverage except, in this case, milk for some reason. Don't even try to take it abroad on holiday with you, unless you go by boat. #SmallRobotsRemastered