A quick #FOSDEM guide from someone who's been attending since it was still called OSDEM:

1. Be mindful of other people. This is an extremely busy conference.
2. If a talk is in progress and you want to enter the room: don't. Wait until the next talk.
3. If you didn't read 2, try to enter as quietly as humanly possible, and ideally even quieter. Many of the rooms have terrible acoustics and you will annoy hundreds of people.
4. The hallway track is very busy. Take it outside when possible.

Why is it that every Android release gets progressively uglier? Who designed those awful icons? They're wildly inconsistent. It's supposedly "Material 3 Expressive", but drying paint is more expressive than this garbage.

It's a shame @GrapheneOS does not have a way to opt out of pointless redesigns, but I guess that would require tons of manpower.

That the EU is often more business than ideals oriented, was illustrated once more today.

The Parliament voted to ban words like ‘burger’ and ‘sausage’ when no ‘edible parts of animals’ are involved, because it would ‘misinform’ consumers. Absurd!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/business/europe-veggie-vegan-meat-food-names.html

🎂 Happy 23rd birthday, Firefox

(Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 but the first version of the thing that lead up to it – Phoenix 0.1 – was released on September 23, 2002)

Conference organisers, if you have talks on AI, please make sure they aren't uncritical hype.

Invite people from non-CS backgrounds: people who did philosophy, linguistics, arts, (cognitive) psychology and maths are all likely to provide very useful insights on AI.

Suddenly have more free time on my hands. Looking for an interesting FOSS #java project to sink my teeth into. Not interested in AI or annotation-driven programming.

Suggestions and boosts appreciated.

Ah fun with Lenovo again. In need of a new laptop. The P14s Gen 4 AMD is available with a 2.8k screen, but *only* if you select Windows as an OS. If you configure the machine *without* an OS, the screen isn't available and you're stuck with 1920x1200.

What the fuck.

I guess their laptop configurator was generated by AI or some such nonsense. Truly awful shopping experience, again.

Twelve years ago two publishers reached out to me to get me to write a book in the Java sphere. I now regret not taking them up on the offer. I spent a decade working on a great product for a great company, giving it my all, neglecting my personal projects. Then they got acquired and I got booted. The severance package wasn't worth the many sacrifices over the years.

Sometimes I'm a bit slow in realising the important things.

I'm getting tired of the direction the EU is taking. #chatcontrol #privacy