Tao of Mac

Nope. I still own the original OP-1 and quite enjoy it, but this is quite a few Euro notches above the Field version and I think I’d rather build my music gadgets from here on out. Still, it’s one heck of a fashion statement. Can’t wait to see it on Bad Gear.

Yeah, I skipped a few weeks’ worth of notes, but the gist of things is that I moved to a new role, had a grueling first week (wasn’t able to leave the house for breaks), slept through most of Saturday and am still trying to figure out where all my free time went. The high point of the week is that I got a TerraMaster F4-424 MAX NAS in the post,...

After my review of the CM3588 running OpenMediaVault, I spent a little while trying to get it to run Proxmox with ZFS enabled. There still isn’t any official version of Proxmox for ARM64, so I stuck to Proxmox-Port, which has been working great for me on all the Rockchip devices I tested it on. Getting ZFS to work proved a bit challenging,...

I had a lot on my mind today (my recent change is taking a much bigger toll than anticipated), but this was, of course, inescapable, even for someone like me who abhors politics and never mentions it. To my US readership: I didn’t get a vote. And I understand that the US is a deeply divided country, and that at least half of you actually thought...

I think this both vindicates my year-long interest in running LLMs on industrial “edge” hardware and signals that it’s time to step back and re-assess how to address that space. 3.2 TOPS isn’t exactly stellar performance when compared to what you can (nominally) get out of a RK35xx’s built-in NPU and way below the target for things like Copilot...

Well, this came completely out of left field. As someone who relies on Pixelmator daily since they shipped 1.0, I am happy for them, but sincerely quite afraid Apple will botch this–their track record with acquisitions is dismal (just look at how they gimped Shortcuts even as they folded it into the OS, how Dark Sky essentially vanished, and what...

Well, this came completely out of left field. As someone who relies on Pixelmator daily since they shipped 1.0, I am happy for them, but sincerely quite afraid Apple will botch this–their track record with acquisitions is dismal (just look at how they gimped Shortcuts even as they folded it into the OS, how Dark Sky essentially vanished, and...

Since I’m changing jobs without even taking a proper break, I haven’t been able to take part in the blow by blow as Apple “phoned in” the Mac updates this week, but I still have feelings about them. I must confess I have zero enthusiasm for the iMac update. I did chuckle at Nilay Patel’s take on Apple’s latest work of art in the unlabelled charts...

As of today, I am back at Microsoft Consulting–or, as it’s known these days, Industry Solutions Delivery, in the role of a Principal Program Architect. And even with today being a local bank holiday, I already had two calls and have a deadline for Monday. The first time it happened I completely re-vamped my office, the pace of things changed...

What little I can use of Apple’s “Intelligence” in the EU right now (mostly on my Mac) is barely useful (especially when compared to the ones I built myself, but iA Writer has an interesting take on how to keep tabs on it (pun intended) and is going a little further. I’ve always liked using it for my drafts (including this one), but I wasn’t...

Given the upcoming demise of botsin.space, I’m in the process of moving this site’s account to mastodon.social. Since Mastodon seems to have trouble with follower migrations, I would advise you to double-check if you’re following the right account. Update: Everything seems to be fixed now.

Given the upcoming demise of botsin.space, I’m in the process of moving this site’s account to mastodon.social. Given that Mastodon seems to have trouble with follower migrations, I would advise you to double-check if you’re following the right account.

I wasn’t terribly excited about Apple’s announcements yesterday, but the fact that the Magic Mouse’s charging port was only “fixed” by making it USB-C was definitely a low point until I read this, which I rate as either a perfect piece of satire or a self-infliced massacre on the one hill you wouldn’t want to die on defending Apple’s design...

Back when I reviewed the Radxa X4, I went to some trouble to go over its thermal characteristics and how well that massive heatsink worked. At the time, I resorted to using my own thermal pad to get the best possible contact between the CPU and the heatsink, but apparently that was not enough, because the board still ran a bit hot under load....

This one took me a long time, and it was actually the third or fourth RK3588 board I got to review–but the timing of its arrival was completely off, and I had to put it on the back burner for a while for a variety of reasons–from the lack of enough SSDs to getting a suitable case. Disclaimer: FriendlyELEC supplied me with a CM3588 compute module...

The reviews for the 2024 iPad mini with A17 Pro are coming out, and Federico’s is, as usual, very positive and optimistic, but IMHO both him and Jason Snell stray a bit too far into the realm of fantasy and try to draw a dotted line to a future foldable iPhone, which I think is a bit of a stretch. A foldable (any foldable) would not replace the...

Other than my link blog, I usually start writing about stuff weeks (if not months) in advance, but due to all the recent changes my stack of drafts hasn’t been tended to properly. I have a lot on my mind (also about industry and tech), but haven’t yet beefed up my reasoning about a few things or whittled down the salient points to be sharp enough...

Dario Amodei’s essay is a fascinating dive into the potential upsides of powerful AI, but it feels a bit like a tech utopia wrapped in a cautionary tale. While he rightly emphasizes the need to address risks, the optimism about AI’s ability to solve complex global issues—like health and governance—might be a touch overzealous. Sure, AI could...

I added the quotes because no matter how they sugarcoat the A17 Pro, it’s not the upgrade I wanted for my mini 5 in either CPU, display, camera or anything else short of the USB-C port and TouchID (yes, I prefer TouchID). Given the PR-only prerelease and outrageously spaced out refreshes it’s obvious the mini isn’t a priority for Apple, so I have...

Let’s not beat about the bush: I have no compunction of classifying this as my worst year at the company (and believe me, there were a few doozies before that). Fortunately, I am certain things are going to improve–after months in a limbo of sorts, things started making sense again yesterday–something I will eventually write about separately....

I don’t think I’ve ever used so many different keyboards in a year. But I am happy that things have been improving so fast that I can actually feel the difference between them. The Keychron K2 HE The Keychron K2 HE is a very different beast from the K11 Max I reviewed earlier this year, and I was lucky enough to try out its Special Edition...

DeskPad creates a virtual display that is mirrored within its application window so that you can create a dedicated, easily shareable workspace.

My initial thought when reading this was “this is just stupid”. Then I thought about the added complexity involved over just mirroring the display, and I thought it was probably a great idea UX-wise (on the lines of Continuity), but, in the end, I still think it’s a profoundly stupid implementation, for the following reasons: Screen mirroring...

I’m down with the first flu of the season, so I thought I’d write up my notes on the Banana Pi M5 Pro and how it’s fared as part of my increasingly eclectic collection of single-board computers in the post-Raspberry Pi age. Disclaimer: Banana Pi sent me a review unit (for which I thank them), and this article follows my Review Policy. Also known...

Gaming hasn’t exactly been one of my most intensive pastimes–it has its highs and lows, and typically tends to be more intensive in the cold seasons. But this year, with the public demise of Switch emulation and my interest in preserving a time capsule of my high-performance Zelda setup, I decided to create a VM snapshot of it and (re)document...

The amazing thing for me is that only last week I heard Nilay Patel say on the VergeCast that virtual nametags would be the killer app for smart glasses. Well, two Harvard students took that notion and ran away with it, using Ray-Ban Meta glasses to dox people in real-time using AI and public databases. And, get this–most of the tech and...

After yuzu and Citra, the last working Nintendo Switch emulator is now officially gone. Fortunately, I had the forethought of writing a release mirror script that was keeping local copies of the latest 5 releases (which I’m also using to also automatically download OrcaSlicer and custom CAD software builds that are squirreled away in weird...

I’m still playing catch-up on a lot of things, and I just noticed Zynthian upgraded to the Raspberry Pi 5. The kit is on the expensive side (even without factoring in the Pi itself), but seems like a solid upgrade–I just wish they had a more compact version with TRS MIDI and smaller audio jacks.

I’m starting to bounce back from the last couple of weeks, but am still not fully there yet. Work remains far too much of a rollercoaster (mostly because I care too much, to be honest), and I’m still trying to find my footing. 3D PrintingI’ve become (too) intimately acquainted with the SK1’s extruder of late, largely because trying to print...

As much as I love virtualizing machines in my homelab and putting the hardware as far away from my desk as possible, the truth of the matter is that there always comes a time when you need “physical” access to the host to deal with boot issues, change BIOS configurations and other types of housekeeping–and regular remote access just won’t cut it...

Godot is a game engine that has risen in popularity over the past few years. It currently supports (officially) its own programming language (GDScript, in both textual and “visual” forms) and C# (via mono), and is able to target most platforms (including mobile, VR headsets and consoles). Unlike Unity or Unreal (which have massive communities,...

Good luck with that. My next TV might still be an LG (just because I usually like their hardware and price points), but like the current one, it will be blocked at my router from accessing the Internet (HomeKit still works, of course, and I use my Apple TV and NVIDIA SHIELD for media). But this is something the EU should really look into and...

The timing for this is great, as I’m starting to get back to shoving LLMs into single-board computers. The 128K token context length seems to be becoming a standard of sorts (which is also nice), and I might actually try the vision models as well (with the usual caveats about SBC NPUs being quite limited in both TOPS and data formats). And, of...

It’s been a harrowing couple of weeks. *Record Scratch* *Freeze Frame* Yep, that's me. Let me tell you... My return to work (such as it is) has had far too many ups and downs for me to enjoy (or even go into any real details), and although I probably shouldn’t really be as stressed as I am, the overall feeling is accurately depicted...

I’ve always loved Dieter Rams’ work and have been considering printing Scott Yu-Jan’s design for a couple of weeks now, but this is so much better–less bulky, more streamlined, more functional, and (a nice bonus for me) provides a nice little tray for me to put my glasses in during the night. The only question right now is what color to print it...

This is pretty amazing, although I am very sad that my Quest 2 isn’t supported. I do like the way you can preview your project alongside, and find the promise of real-time editing and debugging in a virtual space particularly intriguing. And I love that it is Godot doing it, now, on consumer hardware. That quick feedback loop is something that...

AirPlay is a generic name for a number of Apple technologies, the most interesting of which is its HTTP-based photo and video sharing protocol. Resources RPiPlay, a Raspberry Pi-compatible AirPlay mirroring server AirReceiver, an Android application that has mostly worked for me. UxPLay a generic Linux mirroring daemon that has some support for...

Kusto Query Language (KQL) is a powerful query language that is used to query Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and Azure Monitor log data. KQL is used to query data in tables, summarize data, and perform advanced analytics. Resources Category Date Link Notes Libraries 2024 Azure Data Explorer Advanced Analytics Library user functions, sample queries &...

Haiku R1/beta5 is out, and I completely lost track of it until today. Not overly enthusiastic about the cosmetics (dark mode should really have an option to change tab color as well), but as someone who actually ran BeOS in the past I find it… original, for sure. I remain mostly unfazed by the lack of a working ARM port (I’ve been saying this for...

No Apple Intelligence yet, and in the short time I’ve had since installing it I’ve already come up against a couple of bugs and inconsistent behavior in Mail, and pretty much zero visible improvement other than in Safari. Mind you, iOS 18.0 is much worse, a couple of my critical shortcuts have broken already, including the ones I use to post...

Although most single-board computers these days ship in a “full” Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 “B” form-factor or larger, I have been on the lookout for Zero variants for a long time, and the Geniatech XPI-3566-Zero is the latest one I’ve tested. Disclaimer: Geniatech supplied me with a Geniatech XPI-3566-Zero free of charge, for which I thank them. And, as...

I just realized that this is happening, and that they’re effectively going to (finally) Sherlock DeX, although Android apps have a very steep hill to climb before they stop looking like crap on tablet devices–let alone full-size monitors. However, the real test will be how developers adapt their apps to take full advantage of this feature. The...

Well, this was (ahem) unexpected. Seriously now, early commentators seem to be so narrowly focused on the chain-of-thought demos that they completely miss the point that o1 has the potential to bring to the table one thing that most AI-driven systems lack: Explainability–i.e., the ability to lay out the reasoning behind its internal processes in...

Exactly one year ago, Unity’s former CEO shot the entire company in the foot and caused a massive exodus of developers to Unreal and Godot (for which I am grateful), and their new CEO has finally come around to undo the damage and restore some sanity to their ecosystem (better late than never, I guess). This is nice. I mostly liked Unity and...

I’m still digesting this, but I must say I find the knee-jerk reactions from mainstream Apple blogs amusing to say the least, because they all miss the mark where it regards context. Yes, it’s a bucketload of money. No, it’s not to be “paid”, its been in escrow all this time. And yes, it accumulated due to Ireland’s very deliberate setup as a...

OK, fine. Since I upgraded last year, I was quite unfazed by Apple’s 2024 iteration on either the iPhone or the new watches (let alone AirPods), but there were a few things I liked–and some I didn’t. Sizes, for instance. Never mind the lack of an iPhone Mini model (we all know that’s unlikely and almost random), but I don’t need a bigger watch...

And so it came to pass that I took a break from writing (and most other things) for a couple of weeks, and now I’m back. Sort of. Soul CleansingLike last year, I read six or seven books of various genres–some new, some old, some just to try to shake away the blues and try new things. Regretfully, as time goes by, one’s likelihood of finding...

WezTerm is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that supports Sixel graphics and a bunch of other features that make it a saner alternative to most platform-native terminal emulators. In particular, for me, it scratches the following itches: Cross-platform support (macOS, Linux, Windows) with GPU acceleration Lua-based...

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers, allowing you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid (X)HTML. Althought I used to prefer Textile for its table support and other niceties, Markdown has won that war and enjoys indisputably wider adoption, as well as making...

I thought this was worthy of note not just because of the overwhelming success it seems to be having but also because it’s so visually gorgeous that I’ve actually been watching multi-hour YouTube play-throughs. Besides being visually stunning and refreshingly free of in-game monetization gimmicks, another reason I like it is that it feels a lot...

I’m probably going to be the only one saying this, but the new Reeder is a massive disappointment. I pretty much live inside what is now “Reeder Classic”, since it is the first app I fire up every morning on my iPad mini to catch up on 200+ RSS feeds. And the new Reeder just doesn’t do what I need it to. In fact, it doesn’t even do what it tries...

CodeEdit is a fully native macOS editor heavily inspired by Xcode UX conventions that is very interesting to me as an alternative to Visual Studio Code on the Mac.

27 years I’ve been a reader and now it’s come to this, either due to the rise of bite-sized tech videos (which turned into a cottage industry of their own) or the torrents of advertising-driven revenue we have to wade through. And Anandtech had a commitment to quality that seems increasingly rare in today’s clickbait-driven environment. But...

I had added Skip to my Swift resource list a while back, and consider it to be a conceptually brilliant solution to bridge the gap between iOS and Android development with a single codebase while trying to keep things as native as possible at either end. Still, given how it converts things into Kotlin and the fact that it is free for Open-Source...

I have a slightly different take on this, since one of the reasons I instantly took to iOS was that I was sure I would have the same experience regardless of carrier, and later I felt my choice further justified by the balkanization of Android, because homogeneity of user experience was a sort of grand equalizer. The regulation game breaks all...

Anthropic’s decision to publish Claude’s system prompts is a curious mix of transparency and marketing, as it attempts to position itself as the ethical choice in AI. While it’s refreshing to see some behind-the-scenes insight, one can’t help but wonder if this is just a clever way to distract from the fact that these models are still just...

Besides the obvious curiosity about what will happen to entry-level pricing, I’m curious to see if 16GB RAM as the new standard will translate in a stepwise shift in their (sometimes grating) incremental improvement approach across other product lines (like the iPad, of course). But it does feel like they could have done this a long while ago...

The week turned out to be far from auspicious, and I ended up spending an unwholesome chunk of it pondering a recent setback that is still too fresh in my mind. Getting back into AI stuff seems frivolous in comparison, so I got back into reading again, with minimal more electronics stuff and hardware maintenance (continued heat is still a problem...

The key highlight for me is the new “drop zones” functionality, which looks a lot like the Windows PowerToys’ FancyZones feature I have come to rely on. I’ve been using BetterSnapTool solely for replicating FancyZones, so adding that feature to Moom makes upgrading a no-brainer for me. On my laptop, I’ve been using AeroSpace instead–because,...

Secure Shell, of course. Besides the obvious OpenSSH link, this page will hold some of the less obvious (and more useful) stuff: Resources Category Date Link Notes Clients MIDP SSH SSH Tools includes a secure VNC client in Java, sources JavaSSH another (smaller) applet PuTTY Symbian port MindTerm oldie but goodie Java applet PuTTY ssheven a...

I’ve grown quite annoyed at whomever owns the Bloo/1.0.0 bot (I assume it’s a bot given the aggressive scraping of my site), so I’ve added it to robots.txt (for whatever that’s worth these days) and bumped up Cloudflare bot protection a tad. This may inconvenience people with custom RSS aggregators that also don’t behave nicely enough and pop up...

I’m not the target market for this, and neither are the projects I’ve been investigating RK3588 chips for, but I can see this being of interest for lower-end, single purpose projects – but considering the lower RAM and the lack of hardware video encoding on the 5 series, a Raspberry Pi 4 might still be a better choice.

These little modules have taken hobby electronics by storm, so of course I grabbed a few of them and have been hacking away quietly on both the ESP8266 and the ESP32. Resources Category date Link Notes Displays 2023 ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display a set of libraries for the ESP32-2432S028R and similar displays Documentation ESP32 Buyer's Guide an...

It was a quiet week, but still devoted to (pretty literally) mopping up stuff and checking off some long-standing items from my TODO lists. AII finally got around to adding InvokeAI to my AI stack, mostly so that my kids could play with it when I’m not fiddling with ollama. Progress on my own AI projects has been slow both due to the lack of...

The language that helped coin the moniker Rust Evangelism Strike Force, and which is slowly starting to get to me. Resources Category Date Link Notes Data 2021 ballista an Apache Spark-like distributed execution environment 2023 lance a modern columnar data format that is optimized for ML workflows and datasets, compatible with pandas Embedded...

As a sort of quick follow-up to my earlier post on running NixOS on ARM LXC/LXD I decided to do the same on Proxmox and document the process for its LXC environment. Although I have both ARM and Intel machines running Proxmox, I focused on Intel since I wanted to replace the NixOS VM I had running with something lighter, and LXC containers have...

I never expected to review this many keyboards in a year, but it’s Summer, and here we are. Well, this was unexpected. Disclaimer: Hexgears reached out to me and sent me a preview unit of the A3 (for which I thank them), and as usual this post follows my review policy. I’ve been focusing on minimizing my keyboard footprint (sometimes to ludicrous...

PostgreSQL is the unsung hero of database engines, soundly trouncing mySQL in al,ost every aspect. Resources Category Date Link Notes Extensions 2023 pgvector Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres 2016 cstore_fdw a columnar store that supports the ORC format Ports 2024 pglite Lightweight Postgres packaged as WASM for the browser Tools...

This is great fun–and I’m a bit sad that it took me all of 10 minutes to get Windows 95 running very snappily (if a little buggy) on it, and yet I still cannot “legally” run legacy Mac OS versions on an iPad. I would pay good money for the ability to run Basilisk II and Mac OS 7/8 era software on my iPad Pro just as easily as I can do today,...

There isn’t a lot to report this week, other that I had a few setbacks at work and decided to re-focus on reading and doing some hardware projects to decrease my screen time. This entailed, among many other things: Peering at Wireshark dumps of both Ethernet and USB traffic Spending another hour debugging the SK1’s latest firmware upgrade–the...

Stapler is an intriguing Mac app that tries to replicate the workflow of the Classic Mac OS app of the same name–i.e., open a set of related documents and folders simultaneously to cater to a specific project/activity.

A few months ago, I wrote a piece on the TP-Link switches I’d been using so far, and I can finally tell you why: I’ve been testing a 9-port Sodola Multi-Gigabit Switch and its 6-port homelab-focused counterpart, and after three largely uneventful months using them in several configurations with great success, it’s time to post my notes. Both...

This is interesting. A trifle more expensive, a little faster, more RAM, flash and PIO, and a bonus set of two RISC-V cores you can use instead of the slightly faster ARM ones (both sets already come on the chip, and the active set is selected upon boot). Oh, and signed boot. Plus the kind of backward compatibility you’d expect from them–even...

I honestly don’t know what AMD is thinking here, only a few months after this being released and making decent progress. They’re definitely not buying themselves any goodwill (it looks like a legal self-justifying hack job, the kind of thing that an org will do to avoid having hassles for their own sake) and it’s not as if this was endangering...

This is the weirdest, most delightful thing I’ve seen in the musical gadget space in years (well, besides my OP-1 and the Arturia MicroFreak I’ve yet to write about), and this awesome video overview has a simply hilarious intro that is a great spoof of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As someone who hacked together two PiKVMs based on the (now unsupported) Pi Zero W software and loves them to bits, I have been looking at more modern alternatives, and the SIPEED NanoKVM seem really nice–except for these (fixable) issues, of course. I expect to get my hands on a couple eventually–shipping costs are a tad outrageous at the...

I have a vague recollection of the week going by, but August is having its inescapable effect of turning things into a hot, sunny blur, and it’s tough to keep track of everything. AI I switched my news summariser to gpt-4o-mini for a couple of days, but ended up being lazy and switching it back to gpt-3.5-turbo because there was some API...

Proxmox Virtual Environment is a Debian-based system that focuses on providing enterprise-grade LXC and KVM management capabilities, and that I have been using for my homelab. Resources Category Date Link Notes Add-ons 2023 kproximate A Kubernetes autoscaler for Proxmox Documentation cloud-init Support Templates Proxmox VE helper scripts scripts...

I’ve seen a lot of interest in Radxa’s new X4 over the past few weeks, and since it fits very nicely in between my ongoing quest for efficient ways to run LLMs at the edge (which I’ve been pursuing with ARM devices) and my overall interest in small form factor computing and industrial applications, I reached out to Radxa and got a review...

This page lists some CSS resources I find of interest, most notably minimalist layout frameworks. Resources Category Date Link Notes Framework 2012 Tailwind CSS extremely flexible, based on inline classes and with a very large set of components. 2024 Tachyons Functional CSS for humans Minimalist 2020 Bonsai another classless framework...

This is great–I have been following its development for a while, and hope to have it integrated into one of my projects very soon, since I see no reason to use a single-purpose database or maintain a background service for most of the simple stuff.

I pretty much live inside RDP, so getting almost constant “encryption errors” when trying to work on my xrdp machines from my Mac has been driving me crazy, because it instantly terminates the connection and completely breaks my flow. Now, the Mac Remote Desktop client is… well, a work in progress. It regularly crashes when I reconnect to...

This was a moderately productive week, although to be fair I feel like I could have achieved a fair bit more if I hadn’t decided to add more side projects. AI With the release of both llama 3.1 and ollama 0.3.0, I finally have a nice, clean way to do tool calling across a bigger range of models, so I did some tests and… Everything broke, as...

So I decided to simultaneously clean up some site content and refactor the frontmatter parsing code to handle timezones “better”. The definition of “better” was up for debate for a few hours (and then the definition of “indexable” as well), but things should be back in working order now–so apologies for any inconvenience in the meantime.

I have been keeping tabs on this since Wendell’s video, and with huge potential for future trouble as CPUs start failing down the line in either laptops or desktops. Mainstream users are going to be in for a world of hurt, since degradation has the potential to be so slow as to fall outside normal warranty periods (even in the EU). Fortunately...

This is a follow-up to a couple of previous ramblings (last week and before) about the iPad and its limitations, and is a list of things that I would love to have on an iPad, but that Apple doesn’t really want us to. Call it product vision, use cases, or just plain old monopolistic behaviour, but I’m going to list them here in the hope that...

As someone who who (sometimes to the horror of his colleagues) regularly breaks out Ghidra to reverse engineer binaries, I blame it on RedEdit for having introduced me to the fine art of picking apart early Mac applications and figuring out out how they worked in such an elegant, genius way. I loved it dearly, and dimly remember later editions of...

Scheme is a LISP dialect that has not just gone its own way (as is usual with LISPs) but also achieved IEEE standardization. With a focus on lexical scope and tail call optimization, it actually contributed many of its ideas back into Common LISP. Resources Category Date Link Notes Compilers 2023 whiffle a minimal Scheme-to-C compiler guile-hoot...

I’ve already started playing with this inside my ollama sandbox, and even the smaller set of weights is more adroit in responses than the previous version. As usual, I’m going to have to re-do all my tooling prompts, but what I really want to test is the expanded context length.

One of Leopard’s new features, aimed at ensuring people improve their backup habits and enabling intuitive restore. Freeing up local snapshotsIf you find that the hourly snapshotting feature (which uses your internal storage) is taking up too much storage for your liking, you can toggle it off and on again to free up space: sudo tmutil...

This was a very productive week in personal terms (and otherwise), partly because I paused my reading spree and partly because I decided to clear out my To-Do list as quickly as possible. Productivity Tweaks Resumed my regular cleaning of my desk at the start of the week, which resulted in a (short) bit of Zen-like calm. Removed the battery from...

A while back during my spate of RK3588 reviews, I came across Luckfox and found their development boards intriguing, so I reached out to them and got a sample. Disclaimer: Luckfox provided me with a Luckfox Pico Mini board and a CSI camera (for which I thank them), and this article follows my review policy. What followed has been a surprisingly...

The RP2040 is a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It is used in the Raspberry Pi Pico and other boards, and has become a popular choice for embedded projects due to its low cost and ease of use (dethroning the ESP8266 and ESP32 in many cases). Resources Category Date Link Notes AI 2024 pico-tflmicro...

This is why I keep telling people that third-party kernel extensions should be banned from production servers, period. Even though there is a “fix” out, recovery still consists mostly of mounting the system volume and removing \Windows\System\System32\Drivers\CrowdStrike\C00000219*.sys. But since most of the affected systems are in a boot loop...

This almost slipped by. My podcast consumption habits were considerably (and consciously) pared down this year, but I still very much rely on Overcast on all my devices, and I’m happy to see it keeps thriving.

I decided to build a little NixOS sandbox to take with me when traveling, and investigated how to do that on my Radxa Zero without breaking the entire thing. Since it runs Armbian with LXD and a couple of sandboxes on it already (including a full Fedora environment), that was the way to go. It’s not a particularly well documented approach (as...

This is hilarious. They’re certain to be cloned six ways from Sunday (so I’ll just wait for the cheap Chinese knockoffs, especially since shipping costs for me seem outrageous), but full marks for ingenuity–that wheel has to be driving the crown through some pretty clever gearing. It also reminds me I can probably use an older Apple Watch as a...

My not having written about the R1 or the Humane Pin doesn’t mean I haven’t been following their respective (downward) trajectories–merely that I have been too preoccupied with other matters to give airtime to these products of delusional AI hype. But this piece is the kind of stuff I love reading and that I can learn something from–a detailed,...

Erlang is a language I’ve studiously avoided despite actually having been trained to use it by Ericsson, back when we lived in caves and had no mobile data. Obviously, these days I have trouble even reading it. Resources Category Date Link Notes Derivatives 2015 Lisp Flavored Erlang Insanely awesome, or awesomely insane, I’m not quite sure. 2024...

I decided to make post tags visible again across the entire site. Those had originally been removed from the layout because I wasn’t a fan of the visual clutter, but I realized that for some posts they provide additional hints to the people landing here from places like HN or Mastodon and who, having never visited before or lacking the will to...

Work keeps taking unusual turns, and I have an uneasy feeling (OK, a dead certainty) that the recent saga isn’t finished yet–and yes, I’m considering various alternatives, but the current context is very far from ideal. The old adage of “if you have nothing nice to say, then (it’s certainly wiser to) say nothing at all” rings true–but it’s pretty...

I spent a few hours trying out UTM SE on my M1 iPad Pro, and quickly came to the conclusion that it is not really usable to do local development out of the box. It might be great to, say, run Windows 95 or older DOS games (and I’m still sore that the Mac OS 9.2.1 image vanished), but unlike the “real” UTM, using UTM SE on iOS or an iPad is...

At long last. I’m really sad Apple still forbids shipping apps with a JIT, but we are so close to having a usable Linux sandbox on an iPad that I will take whatever I can get.

This weekend I took the time to assemble the enclosure for my TwoTrees SK1 CoreXY 3D printer. I had been looking forward to this for a while, but I had to wait until I had a few hours to spare and a clear workspace to do it. Disclaimer: TwoTrees supplied me with a full enclosure kit free of charge, and as usual this piece follows my review...

I’ve been reading up on this (The Verge has more details, or at least a complementary take), and in my opinion the people behind this kind of plagiarist content farming (some of whom have been already identified as repeat offenders) ought to be sued so hard their posteriors get nailed to sewage pipes in perpetuity. There have been several...

This is interesting to see, especially given the renewed interest in ARM GPU performance. It’s still a stopgap, but having it baked in to gaming stacks of all kinds will certainly help, and I find it quite amusing that they are effectively MIT licensing AMD’s FSR tech.

It’s a new fiscal year at work, and the mood is still extremely sour due to both layoffs and the usual amount of reorgs. I spent a lot of time and energy actively avoiding thinking about all of it outside working hours–along with US politics, warfare, and other heavy topics. That way lies more burnout, so I reset my expectations for what I wanted...

This is a problem. I’ve borne witness to the mismatches between overly optimistic technology mavens and the rest of the world before, and there are a lot of people quietly distancing themselves from AI right now because the business value can be incredibly hard to quantify, let alone deliver.

The bright new future of Linux desktop rendering, which ditches all the niceties of X11 along with all its problems. Category Date Link Notes Compositors 2023 Hyprland a dynamic tiling composer based on wlroots Tools 2024 cage a kiosk setup for Wayland

This is a stub to start gathering some resources on Swift. I’ve yet to have a reason for building something with it (other than the occasional test), but it pays to keep an eye on things. Category Date Link Notes Libraries 2024 SyndiKit A Swift library for RSS and Atom feeds Async-Channels Performant channels for Swift concurrency 2016...

It’s time for another hardware “review”, this time about an Intel N100 machine–and yes, I definitely have too many machines at this point, but there’s a method to my madness. I hope. Note: I bought the G2 with my own money, so this is not really a review but I’m sticking to the same overall approach in describing my experience with it. ...

I haven’t activated this feature here yet because, as a fully static site, it’s not significantly affected by badly behaved crawlers. However, I’ve been moderately annoyed by random spikes in activity from seemingly normal user agents as reported by Azure storage stats. This clearly indicates that there are quite a few misbehaving,...

The other day I was trying to use my iPad to do some work and realized that WWDC had come and gone without any mention of a single feature that would actually make it easier for me to do what most people would consider real work on it, and started typing a few notes. Somehow, that balooned into a full-blown rant… TL;DR: I Miss NetbooksI miss...

I’m just going to leave this here.

We are now dipping into into the early throes of the final stage hype cycle, just like the Big Data revolution almost a decade ago now. Watch your NVDA stock closely.

I spent most of my free time this week mostly talking to people, since I would like to have a bunch of things sorted out before Summer sets in (the season itself appears somewhat indecisive since it’s been raining for a couple of days now, but I know what I want). But I did manage to scrounge enough time to read and make a little progress on my...

A great systems-oriented programming language I’ve taken up to complement Python due to its ability to cross-compile and produce (mostly) self-contained static binaries. TricksShrinking executables via gccgo and upx: go build -mod=vendor -gccgoflags '-Os -s' -o main && upx --best --lzma main Resources Category Date Link Notes AI 2023 agency an...

This is going to be an unusual one, partly because it is about a Microsoft thing (which I typically avoid) and because it’s going to be a bit of a brain dump. In short, Kusto is the original name for the engine behind Azure Data Explorer. Henceforth referred to as ADX, it is a high-performance distributed database for timeseries analytics that I...

The Dirtywave M8 is a Teensy-based device that provides a tracker-like interface for music creation in a portable device. Its firmware is freely available and can be run on a standalone Teensy 4.1 (which negates a lot of the advantages of having standalone hardware, but makes for a very nice teaser to assess if it is the right tool for you), and...

This week I ended up spending a surprising amount of time out and about and have patiently been cleaning my office throughly (there’s a couple of construction sites nearby and I like to have the windows open, so dust has accumulated too much), so personal productivity is still sub-optimal. SandboxingSince I wanted to have a Jupyter notebook...

Called it a week ago. Sometimes it’s depressing to understand how the industry works.

HomeKit is Apple’s home automation solution, which revolves around the Home Accessory Protocol (HAP). Category Date Link Notes Gateways 2017 homekit2mqtt A straightforward two-way bridge between HAP and MQTT homebridge a very popular bridge with many plugins for specific devices Libraries 2024 HomeSpan a HomeKit Library for the Arduino-ESP32 2023...

SQLite is my database engine of choice for simple, no-frills stuff, and has of late become popular enough for me not to have to bother compiling it from scratch anywhere. Category Date Link Notes Extensions 2023 sqlite-vss an extension for efficient vector search sqlean.py a bundle of pre-packaged extensions for Python Unofficial SQLite package...

This is an utterly amazing hack–a 128K Mac emulator that can run on an Raspberry Pi Pico and run System 1.0 at usable speeds while outputting 640x480 monochrome VGA. Building something along these lines has been on by bucket list for a while (and I have several similar things in my Emulation page), but this is compounded genius.

My quest for high-powered ARM development boards has progressed a bit spottily over the past few months, but after almost three months of testing, here are my notes on the Banana Pi M7. This is a long overdue post that was delayed for a bunch of reasons, but the short version is that I think this is the nicest, most compact RK3588 board I’ve...

One of my pursuits of yore and for ever more (in the sense that I stopped short of joining the Conservatorium when I was a kid and still maintain a somewhat active - if diffuse - interest in it). Resources Category Date Link Notes Books 2020 Fundamentals of Piano Practice Lots of pracice tips (and tuning of physical pianos) DAWs Non a lightweight...

These past two weeks were too messy and haphazard to consider as even remotely productive–the layoffs and the ensuing chaos took over most of it, and having two bank holidays this past week was only helpful in the sense that it dampened down things a bit–but still made it hard to relax. I had just started a couple of new hardware projects, so I...

Genius move by Apple to make AI synonymous with… AI. Yes, there’s a partnership with OpenAI, but the interesting thing is how they manage to make it all a seamless part of the user experience without compromising privacy.

As you may have read in the news, Microsoft decided to lay off several hundred people from Strategic Missions and Technologies and reorganize the Azure for Operators unit. Life right now. I can’t go into any details about what happened internally, but I can certainly describe what the fallout from this looks like at a personal level: I was,...

Yes, again. Let’s just say this Monday sucked, and skip the details.

It’s definitely getting summery, and this week marks the first time I turned on the office AC this year1. Other than that, a couple of bank holidays (in the US and here) made for a slower week than usual, which I have been taking advantage of to make my life somewhat more orderly. Foam, My Obsidian Killer I have been trying to use Obsidian for...

Rewind is an iOS and Mac application that records what is in your screen (in iOS, it is implemented mostly as a browser extension that only records what you browse) and affords the ability to go back in time. It predates Windows 11’s “Recall” feature by around a year, and has inspired a number of other implementations. Resources Platform Date...

Apache Spark is an advanced distribution execution data for large-scale data processing that differs from Hadoop by privileging in-memory compute and further enforcing the decoupling between compute and storage. I’ve been an early adopter and spent far too long messing about with it in low-powered machines, and am rather partial to the DataBricks...

It’s been a while since I wrote about networking gear, largely because I used to spend a good while working on it and that broke my disclaimer. But home networking being what it is these days, I thought it would be a nice change from my usual fare. So here’s a quick write-up on the TP-Link L-SG108E gigabit switches I’ve been using for a while...

This page is a stub.

See VideoLAN

This week I spent a fair bit of time watching Microsoft Build recordings–partly because it has some impact on work, and partly because it was brimming with AI stuff I can actually use. And yes, you need to cherrypick. Here’s a few I am taking as inspiration: Enhancing VS Code extensions with GitHub Copilot (source code) – I’ve been thinking of...

A few weeks after I posted my review of the K7 Max, Keychron reached out to ask if I wanted to try out the K11 Max, a compact Alice layout keyboard–and I ended up saying yes. Note: Keychron sent me an early review unit of the Keychron K11 Max and a travel pouch, and this piece follows my review policy–and was written after about a month of daily...

A little language that can. Category Link Notes IDE ZeroBrane Studio a very nice IDE for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux Automation Hammerspoon a macOS desktop automation tool that can be used for window management Embedding LuaCore A framework for Cocoa embedding. GUI TekUI a cross-platform GUI toolkit IUP a GUI toolkit...

Window managers on macOS (and Windows) are auxiliary programs that try to complement the system’s own handling of windows, and are not as powerful as X11 window managers. However, there are a few exceptions, and as I started using bigger and bigger (and more) displays I’ve been using them more and more. ResourcesApps are listed as primarily...

My summer break in 2014 had a theme of sorts, which was “back to basics”. I wanted to forget everything I could about work and fiddle with more interesting stuff – less abstractions, less wondering, more concrete, down-to-earth stuff. For some reason I gravitated back towards Plan9/Inferno again. Call it dissatisfaction with present day...

A relatively underwhelming ARM development board that was upgraded to a very reasonably performing quad-core CPU in February 2015 and got built-in Wi-Fi in February 2016 (last updated in 2020 with incremental improvements), and which eventually became a entire family of devices, from the Pi Pico MCU to aarch64 boards. Resources Category Date Link...

Emulation and hardware virtualization software of various descriptions, most of them obsolete by now: Category Date Link Notes Amiga 2008 MaxUAE Somewhat dead, with only Power PC binaries available. UAE Cross-platform Amiga emulator 2021 amiberry optimized for ARM cpus Arcade 2010 Open Emu A modular emulator that can be used as a Quartz Composer...

Python is one of my favorite programming languages due to its terseness and amazing flexibility. See also Django for more. My Stuff Year Item Notes 2016 Sushy my current wiki engine 2015 rss2imap The way I used read my news a while back 2009 PNG Canvas a native Python PNG creation module, suitable for use in Google App Engine 2007 Yaki my...

I’m a bit skeptical on the concept (even though I did use Windows 10 timeline a fair bit), but I find it rather telling that a key future Windows feature is tied to ARM processors (plus their NPUs, sure, but it’s a key sign that Intel lost the plot here).

This was a moderately intense week work-wise, but I had a few hours in the evenings to continue my tests of RK3588 boards and, of course, fiddle with GPT-4o’s API. GPT-4o ImpressionsI’m pretty impressed by the sheer speed of the responses, although I must say correctness hasn’t improved that much over GPT-4 (for the kind of stuff I put it...

This is a tale of ancient wizardry, yearning for control, failed prototypes, and just plain bad timing. Let us begin. A long time ago, in what seems like an alternate universe right now, I got a Logitech Cyberman 2 as part of my extended dabbling with 3D modeling software like Caligari TrueSpace. It looked like this: This is indeed a child of the...

wxHex Editor is a cross-platform hex editor that can edit entire disk partitions. It’s not as polished as HexFiend, but serviceable enough.

Someone said on Twitter that “The Apple TV has just become 1000% more useful”, and I tend to agree. We already played Apple Arcade games on it occasionally, but great classic arcade emulation (like R-Type) is just a fabulous thing to have. Apple’s restrictions on JITs make it a little less efficient than my NVIDIA SHIELD, but with the right...

With RetroArch (and PPSSPP) in the App Store, I think it’s time to start discussing system emulators again. I’d love to see Basilisk II, Amiga and even PC emulators in the App Store–and right now, about the only reason I would consider using the Alt Store is if they (by some miracle) were the only ones distributing UTM. Come on, Apple, take the...

Aside from the overly enthusiastic Californian attitude and several cringe-inducing moments, this felt a lot like a trailer for Her (which was an intentional subtext, I’m sure). I can’t see why I’d need a singing AI (let alone two doing it badly), but a few of the demos hinted at some interesting applications for multimodal models that regular...

Thanks to the lethargy brought upon by allergies and the beginning of the warm season, this was a week where most of my free time was spent fixing things and building tools. The Third LlamaSince the ollama instance on my little Ryzen APU has turned out to be fast enough to run llama3 for most practical uses (even though the RTX 3060 on borg is...

This started out as a mere stub while I put together some more resources, and over the years became a quite large list of LISP/Scheme implementations I have kept an eye on (besides Clojure). Almost everybody has their own lisp implementation. Some programmers’ dogs and cats probably have their own lisp implementations as well. This is great, but...

Another technique for boosting inference speeds–this time at the expense of a little more fine-tuning effort, which seems fairly easy to justify for a 3.5x speed gain.

SteerMouse is a macOS utility that lets you freely customize buttons, wheels and cursor speed, and that has recently (in 2024) risen to fame due to the fact that Logitech began adding extraordinarily bloated and useless features to their otherwise quite decent mouse control software. This uses effectively zero extra RAM and CPU power and is a...

Considering the rumor mill had already laid out pretty much everything that was going to be presented, today’s “event” could almost have been an e-mail–except for this, and the way it makes the new iPad Pro look like an even more insanely powered tablet held back by an overly simplified OS. Yes, the lack of feature parity between iPadOS and macOS...

Following up on my display hackery, I upgraded my SK1’s firmware to the latest iteration, which didn’t really fix its display (it now displays thumbnails, but all the responsiveness bugs I mentioned in my review are still there). The upgrade essentially patches a few things in Klipper, replaces the proprietary binary that talks to the display,...

A couple of months ago, Deepsounds reached out to ask if I could have a look at their Novation Circuit Tracks patch editor, to which I enthusiastically agreed since I was actually in the process of adding a MIDI IN interface to my MiniDexed and designing printable DIN to TRS adapters so I could use both together. Then stuff happened, and it took...

While tracking down what turned out to be a caching issue, I realized that CSS inlining in RSS (which I use for making tables more readable) and the og:image attribute for social media previews were broken–when there was no “hero” image (or any image at all) the code fell back to generating a text-based preview, and failed. As it turns out, PIL...

This page is a reference table for resources I’m keeping tabs on. That grand, spacious (and long ignored) branch of computing that, these days, deals not just with thinking machines (so-called “hard” AI), but mostly with enhancing the usefulness of machines in general by exploring mechanisms to express and manipulate harvested knowledge. Or just...

OpenSCAD is a solid 3D modeling program that generates 3D shapes from a simple scene description language and can directly output STL files for 3D printing. It is extraordinarily precise, quite flexible and free, but can have a somewhat frustrating learning curve. Resources Category Date Link Notes Alternatives 2023 ImplicitCAD a Haskell-based...

HyperCard was one of the staples of early Mac application “development”, and is to this day the subject of many attempts at recreating its ease of use and visual approach. These days, the likely best analog is Decker.

Sometimes I leave the house and go to exciting places, meet great people… and have lunch with them.

Like I wrote on my review, the TwoTrees SK1 comes with a somewhat serviceable, but quite buggy screen that uses the Nexion UI toolkit. At the time I was already able to use CYD-Klipper to have a remote display, but I’ve been investigating ways to get KlipperScreen working, and finally set up a single-cable, plug-and-play solution: All it needs is...

I loved my Palm devices, end even though I am actually writing this with scribble on my iPad, I miss the simplicity and speed of Graffiti almost every day–and wish I could use it on an IPhone.

I had my own suspicions back when HashiCorp changed the Terraform licensing (and, yes, I’ve pretty much switched to OpenTofu on the one or two things I use that require infra nuke & pave), but I can’t say that IBM did a bad deal here - even though I don’t see that much value in the enterprise market (multi-cloud is very much a reality, but once...

Just updated my Ideapad Flex, and it’s nice to see how it’s improved since I started using Fedora 36. So yes, I’ve definitely settled on Fedora as my laptop distribution of choice, even if I still target Ubuntu on the server. (I’ve resisted moving my laptop to Silverblue or Bluefin for now, but I suspect it won’t take long.)

This week’s notes come a little earlier, partly because of an upcoming long weekend and partly because I’ve been mulling the LLM space again due to the close release of both llama3 and phi-3. Thanks to my recent AMD iGPU tinkering I’ve been spending a fair bit of time seeing how feasible it is to run these “small” models on a slow(ish), low-power...

Back when I last tried it (on the Apple TV, quite a few years back), Provenance was very nice. I just hope it won’t follow Delta’s footsteps and discriminate against EU users.

I ended up throwing my back out on early in the week, so most of my time was spent in comical pain, moving around like a crab on stilts and trying to get some work done in between bouts of lying down, watching Fallout and reading Scalzi’s Starter Villain, which was actually quite fun. Since then I only managed to spend a bit of time fiddling with...

Since it seems to be iOS emulator season, I thought I’d rewind back to my Easter break, when as a concession to the need to relax I decided to pack some form of gaming device. But since I also wanted to minimize packing, I settled on a game controller and using my iPad Pro for light gaming. Might not look like it, but it does stretch out...

Since it seems to be iOS emulator season, I thought I’d rewind back to my Easter break, when as a concession to the need to relax I decided to pack some form of gaming device. But since I also wanted to minimize packing, I settled on a game controller and using my iPad Pro for light gaming. Error: Could not find image d8.png Might not...

I know I am very late to this party, but the stupidest thing about this for me is that as a EU resident, if I want to download Delta (which is a free app), I have to install AltStore and pay Eur. 1.50 + VAT a year, which is definitely something I don’t agree with in principle. And it’s all Apple’s fault to begin with, regardless of the fact that...

I’ve been pointing out that LLMs are barely optimized for ages now, so here’s another example of possible inference speedups that seems very promising (it works somewhat like on-the-fly distillation). If this technique checks out and ends up implemented in mainstream tooling like ollama, it’s going to significantly lower compute and memory...

CardDAV is a sister protocol to CalDAV for synchronizing contact information between a server and a client. Resources

In short, I spent a fair chunk of my time dabbling with LLMs again, but also still dealing with shifting priorities at work. As noted in my update on the am18, iGPU compute is still fraught with issues–and the apparent bottleneck in data transfer between CPU and GPU plus fragmentation when reserving memory doesn’t help, so I’ll be going back to...

As part of my forays into LLMs and GPU compute “on the small” I’ve been playing around with the AceMagic AM18 in a few unusual ways. If you missed my initial impressions, you might want to check them out first. Note: This is the second part of my review of the AceMagic AM18. In this post, I’ll be focusing on GPU compute and how well the AM18...

Battery is a macOS CLI and menu bar application that limits the battery charge to 80% to extend battery life. It is available via brew install battery.

This is what I’d splurge on if I had free rein on my budget (and the time to relax and actually play with it). Only thing it seems to be missing is using the USB port for audio (which seems kind of silly, since it would let people do away with their audio interfaces). Also, it would be nice if Arturia ever bothered to ship V-Collection as iOS...

Guess what, I just kept writing notes anyway. Easter Break helped reset my expectations towards work and this week I managed to get back into the swing of things, with a fair bit of writing and documentation work done on my own time. Monday, 2024-04-01Spent the first day back at work clearing out my inbox and catching up on various bits of...

This one is going to be a bit of a nostalgia trip, so bear with me. The VT220 was a popular computer terminal in the 1980s and 1990s, since it was widely used in (and sold with) their “mini-computer” systems, and there were literally dozens of them in the computer labs I frequented in the early 1990s. Its keyboard had a distinctive look and feel,...

I found this rather amusing, and wonder when we’ll be able to, say, download Mini vMac (or even UTM) for iOS straight from the App Store. And yes, of course there are caveats.

Easter break was a bit different this year, but we still managed to pop over to the countryside for a (wet) couple of days. A break from the rain. Quality sleep, alas, eluded me, but my heartbeat went down almost 20bpm on average, and there was definitely a lot less to worry about. We had an Easter Egg hunt, too. LogisticsIt’s...

Tailscale is a centrally-managed overlay network VPN service that provides seamless connectivity across your devices no matter where they reside, with a few interesting features: Support for direct access to other LANs (and outbound Internet connections) via “exit nodes” Support for every single operating system I use (including both major mobile...

OpenWRT is a Linux distribution for embedded devices that is optimized for routers and other network appliances and that I have been tinkering with for a long time (starting with the WRT54G and its 3G variant back in the day). I have a few devices running it, including a pair of NEXX WT3020s that are still, for my money, the nicest low-power...

I am so, but so sorry to see this happen. I paid my way through college doing design, but decided I would never again use Adobe software after Creative Cloud became the mess it is today. Even though I don’t do graphical design as part of my profession (well, not explicitly at least), I willingly paid for Affinity to sponsor them as a viable...

I have been having a highly unusual couple of weeks (which included recovering from a bout of food poisoning that hit the day after my last post), and I am now taking a break from my usual routine to try to get some perspective on things. Including spherical cows. Seriously. The gist of the matter is that more stuff has happened, I am not at all...

Redis is a high-performance key-value store originally developed by Salvatore Sanfilippo. It is widely used as a caching layer and message broker, and known for its speed and simplicity. Over the years it has evolved into a full-fledged data structure server, supporting a wide range of data types and operations, and recently (March 2024) there...

Instabuy. I’ve been a long-term PICO-8 fan, and this, even in such an early stage, is simply sublime. I can’t wait to see what people come up with. I’m a bit worried that one of my kids joked that he wanted to do a PowerPoint clone, though. The only flaw I can see is that it’s not available for ARM Linux yet (so I can’t run it on a Pi or any of...

I’ve read through a bunch of articles on this and a fair chunk of the filing, and it seems like the DOJ doesn’t really have that much of a case here. Their accusations are so broad and have so many holes (well, most of the technical ones, and except some of the paywalls) that it’s almost as if they wanted to make the European Commission look good...