Nelson's Linkblog

about • archive • mastodon • feed

More Secure Boot failures

Microsoft never revoked some shim signing keys that were compromised years ago

2026-07-15 computers • linux • microsoft • secureboot • security

A tiny part of Australia has a timezone 45 minutes ahead of the rest of the region

2026-07-15 australia • time • timezone

Tailscale remote root

Big bug in popular security software: "a user with ssh access can obtain a root session"

2026-07-15 linux • security • tailscale

A statement in favor of using AI tools for working on the Linux kernel

2026-07-15 ai • culture • linus • linux • programming

Canada and the US in 2092

A funny fictional map that was in the NYTimes in 1992, by Douglas Coupland of all people

2026-07-15 canada • funny • maps • nytimes

A little toy: draw Conway's Life patterns and the webapp plays sounds related to them

2026-07-14 ca • cellularautomata • life • sonification

Global Privacy Control

A modern Do-Not-Track system, which has some legal teeth in California. Every HTTP request adds a header asking to opt out of data collection.

2026-07-14 ads • advertising • california • legal • privacy

California DROP

New California program to opt out of data brokers, looks promising. Goes live August 1.

2026-07-14 ads • advertising • california • optout • privacy

lobste.rs on sqlite

Medium-big online community ports its Rails app to use sqlite as the database

2026-07-13 database • lobsters • sqlite

Another gaming focussed Linux distribution, this one based on Debian

2026-07-13 debian • gaming • linux

American wine history

A nice overview of the history of wine in the United States

2026-07-13 america • history • wine

New Food & Wine article captures what makes Houston dining so exciting. (The print version has more stuff in it.)

2026-07-13 food • houston • travel

Remarkable video of a bison flipping a man eight feet in the air

2026-07-13 idaho • video • wildlife • yellowstone

A Linux desktop environment with some aggressive aesthetic choices, but thoughtfully designed

2026-07-12 desktop • graphics • gui • linux • ux • wayland

A de-Googling alternative for Android notifications that's privacy and open source

2026-07-12 android • foss • messaging • notification • opensource • push

Soviet control rooms

Lovely photos of vintage industrial design

2026-07-11 design • industrial • soviet • ussr • via:hackernews

Report from a large AI coding project, porting a Javascript transpiler from Zig to Rust

2026-07-09 agents • ai • bundler • coding • llm • rust

A short piece on medieval medical illustrations

2026-07-09 anatomy • book • engraving • history • medical • via:kottke

A very thorough history of Emacs variants, going back to TECO Emacs and including variants like Gosling and Lucid.

2026-07-09 editors • emacs • history • via:amitp

Making randomization in generative art interesting by giving it some texture

2026-07-09 generative • procgen • randomness • via:amitp

US people's roots

Analysis of census data showing where USians say their people are from: Mexican, Chinese, German, etc.

2026-07-09 america • culture • immigration • maps • uspol

Fiber optic birds nests

Warscape of Ukraine includes miles and miles of fiber optics cables from drones, now being used by birds to build nests.

2026-07-06 birds • drones • fiberoptic • nature • ukraine • via:metafilter • war

Web-centric OpenStreetMap with a focus on usability including mobile.

2026-07-05 maps • openstreetmap • osm • webapp

Relaunch of an Internet-based travel guide, this one using AI to help people keep travel guides updated

2026-07-02 ai • douwe • travel • wiki

Details of a fabled psychedelic from my college, apparently actually 2C-B?

2026-06-29 drugs • mescaline • psychedelics • reed • reedcollege • shulgin

St. John's tombstones

Detailed map and graphic library of all the amazing tombstones in the Baroque co-cathedral in Valetta, Malta

2026-06-29 churches • graves • malta • tourism • travel

Trump's rolling coup

A sober argument about the Republican effort to subvert American democracy

2026-06-24 coup • democracy • politics • trump • uspol

Economist on GLM 5.2

High level reporting on the latest open weights model out of z.ai in China, main theme is that Chinese AIs are only a few months behind the US ones in terms of quality

2026-06-22 ai • china • llm

GLM-5.2 evaluated

Detailed look at the new open weights LLM applied to a real world programming task

2026-06-22 ai • llm • openweights • programming • via:hackernews • zai

Tesla kills woman at home

A car on full self driving drove into a house and killed the woman inside.

2026-06-21 autopilot • cars • elonmusk • killerrobots • tesla

Haikei generator

A little SVG app for making abstract colored patterns, like for screen wallpaper

2026-06-20 design • generative • svg • wallpaper

Big Freedia x SOPHIE

Playlist of the recently released EP

2026-06-20 bounce • electronica • music • queer

Factorio Nullius

An overhaul mod for Factorio that significantly changes gameplay.

2026-06-20 factorio • games • mods

Recursive improvement

Good civilian explainer on AIs programming to improve themselves

2026-06-20 ai • llm • singularity

Beelink SER8 cooling

Details on BIOS settings for a particular miniPC.

2026-06-20 cooling • fans • hardware • linux • pc

Juneteenth and Black troops

The U.S. Colored Troops were among the first to arrive in Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation—yet their story has long been overlooked.

2026-06-20 black • civilrights • civilwar • history • texas

Open source AI agent under the Linux Foundation umbrella. My friend Douwe works on it.

2026-06-19 agent • ai • douwe • llm

Qontour plagiarism

Some sleazy marketing agency has lifted someone's entire book and is republishing it without permission, adding AI embellishments

2026-06-18 ai • copyright • dictionary • ethics • llm • plagiarism

Free, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging, a nice little new community

2026-06-18 blogs • community • hosting • indie • weblogs

RCS for Business

The open iMessage alternative for text messaging has a special business product with fancier messages

2026-06-17 ads • business • imessage • rcs • sms • texting • textmessage

A new leaderboard / list of 5000 independent personal bogs

2026-06-17 blogs • culture • socialmedia

Some 9 outages in a month because of PG&E's badly maintained power infrastructure

2026-06-17 corruption • nevadacounty • pge • power

Relentlessly proactive

A story of a coding agent going through absurdly complex lengths to accomplish something. It's mostly scary and cautionary, but also exciting?

2026-06-17 agent • ai • claude • llm

Noobs Are Coming

A funny little Brotato clone, a casual shooter that's surprisingly fun to play.

2026-06-16 brotato • games • shooter

Bennet Foddy strikes again

2026-06-16 awkward • foddy • games • qwop • walkingsimulator

A tool to save a full web page, as you see in your browser, for later archiving. Can also integrate with linkding.

2026-06-16 archive • bookmarks • linkblog • research

Linkblog on linkding

I switched the backend for my linkblog.

2026-06-16 blogs • linkblog • linkding • me • pinboard • tech

Alberta rat control

Alberta has no rats. It has set up a border at Saskatchewan to keep them out.

2026-06-16 alberta • canada • rats

Billionaire group chat

Gossip from a Signal group of billionaires freaking out about a one time California tax

2026-06-15 california • guillotine • politics • taxes • uspol

Hockney paintings

Guardian with a lovely gallery of some of Hockney's most loved paintings

2026-06-14 hockney • art • obituary • gay • lgbt

Ben Franklin canoodling

A 1767 sketch by Charles Peale showing Ben Franklin with a young lady in his lap

2026-06-14 sex • funny • history • benfranklin • franklin • sketch

Fable jailbreak?

Swift shutdown of Anthropic's new LLM may have been based on Amazon researchers figuring out how to circumvent safeguards

2026-06-14 uspol • politics • anthropic • llm • ai • alignment • jailbreak

Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History

Thoughtful essay on how same-sex love is not synonymous with liberalism or progressivism

2026-06-14 history • weimar • nazi • politics • queer • lgbt

More Arch malware

Popular package repository has another wave of malware. It will keep doing so until the AUR folks change their security model.

2026-06-14 malware • arch • linux • supplygain • aur

176 chili peppers

A beautifully written and illustrated guide to chile

2026-06-13 chile • chili • pepper • heat • capsicum • scoville • food • via:metafilter

David Hockney appreciation

Lovely essay from someone who knew the artist well

2026-06-13 hockey • obituary • art • aids • gay • lgbt • newyorker

Bright Data botnet

"Legitimate" malware bundled with TV streaming apps turns your TV into a content-pilfering web scraper

2026-06-13 ai • llm • malware • botnet • internet • tv

Arch AUR attack ongoing

Major package repository keeps getting infected with new malware

2026-06-12 arch • linux • security • badtech • aur

Arabic typography

Detailed article about the complications of rendering Arabic text correctly, rooted in history

2026-06-11 arabic • via:lobsters • fonts • typography • typesetting • culture

Florida's surgeon general

Top medical government official is spreading crank ideas about "structured water"

2026-06-11 medicine • science • florida • politics • uspol • water • batshitinsane

Arch supply chain attacks

Arch Linux has a popular package repository called AUR. It's a frequent target of attacks to inject malware, so KDE is going to stop including it

2026-06-11 badtech • security • supplychain • arch • linux • aur • kde

A fun queer history podcast

2026-06-11 podcast • history • gay • lgbt • queer

Working with Mythos

A poetic, slightly awed account of using Anthropic's newest LLM to build complex software products

2026-06-10 claude • mythos • ai • llm • programming • via:waxy

Corrupting a ZFS File

Fun exploration of figuring out how to bash the bits on a raw disk to deliberately trigger file corruption for ZFS to detect and correct

2026-06-10 zfs • disk • filesystem • hacking

Claude self-sabotage

New AI is deployed with a guardrail that if you try to use it to improve AIs, you will get silent corruption. Protecting their IP? Preventing the singularity? It's a bit baffling.

2026-06-10 ai • llm • claude • singularity • training • intelligence

Maurice Terminal Note

The 1913 gay novel had an afterword written in 1960

2026-06-08 gay • lgbt • novel • maurice • forster

A collection of free ebooks, I think mostly things out of copyright. They have been proofread and edited

2026-06-08 books • ebooks • free • culture • epub • copyright • canada

Roundup of hardware to remotely access a PC

2026-06-05 kvm • ipkvm • via:hackernews • hardware • homelab

GPS numbers station

Navigation satellites have been broadcasting encrypted data for over a decade. Really neat analysis.

2026-06-05 gps • cryptopgraphy • steganography • military • security • via:lobsters • cool

Fedora Silverblue hacking

Nice notes about working with an immutable OS while also heavily tinkering and customizing

2026-06-05 via:lobsters • linux • desktop • fedora • immutable • atomic • overlay

Unsloth Gemma 4 QAT

Some deep-in-the-weeds details about boiling down an LLM to a small size you can run on a single desktop computer (or phone)

2026-06-05 llm • quant • unsloth • google • ai

A popular Linux desktop environment is dropping the choice of using the old X-Windows system. It's Wayland now, although an X11 compatibility system will continue

2026-06-05 linux • kde • plasma • x11 • wayland • graphics • gui • unix • history

Arch Linux Gay Mirror

Install Linux with LGBT pride!

2026-06-05 gay • arch • linux • lgbt • russia • protest

Remove Paywalls

Yet another service, seems to be working now

2026-06-04 paywall • web • internet • informationwantstobefree

LEGO Sagrada Familia

$800 lego sculpture, some assembly required

2026-06-04 lego • architecture • sagradafamilia • cathedral

Starlink 1200 connections

ISP discloses that their CGNAT is limited to 1200 open connections per customer

2026-06-04 starlink • spacex • cgnat • internet • isp

rsync and outrage

Author of important tool answers people criticizing him for using AI tooling

2026-06-04 ai • tridge • rsync • llm • coding • engineering

A browser-based tool for facilitating file transfers on a LAN

2026-06-03 filesharing • webrtc • wormhole • lan • utility

The Jesus Trip (1971)

The unlikely source of a lengthy sample in the new Boards of Canada album

2026-06-02 music • sampling • jesus • cult • boardsofcanada • religion

NixOS generators

Build Nix images for a variety of deployment targets like Amazon EC2 or DigitalOcean

2026-06-01 nixos • nix • vps • hosting

Fix encrypted downloads of books so they can be read with standard tools

2026-05-31 books • ebooks • epub • kobo • adobe • reading

Guidelines for Respectful Use of AI

Thoughtful comments on not letting prolix AI make work for people

2026-05-31 ai • work • management • culture • llm

Satellite ISP lists addresses for all its terrestrial exchanges

2026-05-30 internet • isp • starlink • pop • datacenter

Experimental UI for Linux: a tiling window manager that also has an infinite scrolling system

2026-05-30 windowmanager • ui • hci • tiling • pad++

Essential and reliable sysadmin tool has had some bugs recently that seem related to using AI to code

2026-05-29 ai • slop • rsync • correctness • claude

Factorio open source?

Interview with game lead saying he likes the idea of an open source release for Factorio some day

2026-05-29 games • factorio • opensource

Some bits about a gay couple of Nevada City who were graphic designers

2026-05-28 gay • lgbt • history • nevadacity • osbornwoods • prints • silkscreens

Can we have the day off?

A human cry for some relief in the face of AI escalation

2026-05-28 work • ai • culture • jobs • vacation

How to Screenshot

Simple instructional site for teaching people how to take screenshots on a variety of computers

2026-05-27 tutorial • screenshot • computers

Heather Cairns on Google

Employee #4 at Google and their first HR person, she is now working on a book.

2026-05-27 google • startup • hr

A typing teacher / test webapp, very nicely designed

2026-05-26 typing • keyboard • wpm • training • ergonomics

Funny list of common AI errors

2026-05-25 funny • ai • llm • via:hackernews • parody • errno • unix

State of Local AI

A buying guide to running local LLMs on Wintel hardware

2026-05-24 llm • ai • selfhosting • gpu

Street art duo, did a fun piece in Houston

2026-05-23 streetart • houston • graffiti • mural

PenDown vector fonts

Someone making a new set of idiosyncratic fonts for plotters, etc

2026-05-23 fonts • text • rendering • plotter • plotterart • hersheyfont • via:lobsters

A remarkably impressive EE hacker building various USB devices

2026-05-23 hardware • hacking • ee • newzealand

A self-hosted cloud file service, sort of like a private Dropbox

2026-05-22 sync • filesharing • network • syncthing • dropbox • nextcloud

Felicity Chandelle

A remarkable person, a pilot and also a committed crossdresser

2026-05-22 trans • lgbt • history • aviation • pilot • crossdresser

Datasette Agent

Database exploration tool now has a thoughtful AI integration with SQL-aware agent tools

2026-05-21 agent • sqlite • datasette • simonw • ai • rag

Scrapers vs Wikis

Person who runs a bunch of custom Wiki websites writes about abuse from scrapers

2026-05-21 via:lobsters • web • scaling • scraping • ai • wiki • robotstxt