And for alerts like texts, this single pop for the same reason.

https://freesound.org/people/Vilkas_Sound/sounds/463390/

A recording of me heavily exhaling so that nobody but me notices when it rings. I never have to put my phone on silent.

Maybe severely reduced bandwidth is the idea.

I’m a big aesthetic fan of 1-bit dithered images and art. But it’s hard to believe it’s actually saving any energy.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/17/1114456/toy-armatron-modern-robotics-ai-nostalgia/

Great for giving incantatons for ffmpeg, imagemagick, and other power tools.

“Use ffmpeg to get a thumbnail of the fifth second of a video.”

Anything where syntax is complicated, lots of half-baked tutorials exist for the AI to read, and you can immediately confirm if it worked or not. It does hallucinate flags, but fixes if you say “There is no --compress flag” etc.

HN crowd told me they’re porting to swift. When I asked “why not Rust”, they said the C++ code was very OOP, so it was easier to port to swift.

vim vs. emacs

It doesn’t matter if you personally like emacs more, far fewer people use it.

https://plenz.com/tmp/vi.html

Busuu looked promising.

Fastmail is really, really nice.

For my family member who moved out of country, signal’s voice quality was not very good. WhatsApp’s quality was better than a regular phone call, very impressive.

Also, outside the US WhatsApp is some kind of standard the way rich Americans think iMessage is. Companies will ask her to contact them on WhatsApp, so she’ll have to have it regardless of your personal involvement.

There’s also jitsi.

Tangentially related: Barber also wrote his Adagio for Strings as an Agnus Dei. It’s great.

How?

sudo apt remove ratpoison

“Ubuntu” is Zulu for “can’t install Debian”.

Wait, really? I’ve had it disabled for a while for other reasons. I’m safe from a Win11 forced upgrade?

I discounted this theory the first time I heard it because it’s too cool.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.markuspage.android.atimetracker/

has served me well.

I love the weird fast-scrolling button in Hews.

It’s pretty ironic that a page about bad UX, specifically en mobile, contains a 99 page slidedeck that I can’t zoom in to read on mobile…