A(nimal Cros)SCII
I took the time to map the character encoding for Animal Crossing GC town, player, and passwords to Unicode characters. I’m calling the resulting encoding...
Voicemail for notifications
What if notifications are going the way of phone calls as a many-to-many attention-demanding “network” with a worsening value-to-noise ratio? Voicemail for...
Better boosting on Mastodon with smart clients
Happy May Day (aka International Workers’ Day) Today I wrote about how smarter Mastodon clients could improve the “boosting” experience, a-la TCP congestion...
Add Mastodon toot templates to your phone home screen
Are you attending #PyConUS (or any event) and want to keep Mastodon hashtag templates on your phone home screen? Here's what I'm doing this year to make...
Nintendo Switch 2 thoughts: DRM, digital/physical, prices, and GameCube?
I quickly wrote some thoughts about yesterdays' Switch 2 announcement, including a few things not included in the presentation like the prices, the physical...
Don't bring slop to a slop fight
I hear a common refrain whenever I talk about generative AI being abused in every communication channel: “just use AI to detect the AI”. This article...
I fear for the unauthenticated web
LLM and AI companies continue to be in the news for destroying public goods like the open web (not mentioned: climate, water, social media, democracy). But...
Fediverse Donut Club (#FediDonutFriday)
I’m creating a Fediverse Donut Club! Follow the #FediDonutFriday hashtag on your Fediverse instance to join. I'm interested in how we can make online...
Your GitHub Copilot access has been renewed 🤡
It's that magical time of the month again: “Your GitHub Copilot access has been renewed”.
Building software for connection (#2: Consensus)
This is the second article in a series about building “software for connection”. This article examines the “secret code system” in Animal Crossing for the...
New 7-part article series on “Software for Connection”
Hey friends! I'm excited to be publishing the first article in a 7-part series about “Software for Connection”. Let's explore some software paradigms for...
urllib3 2024 Annual Report
The 2024 annual report for urllib3 is now available, this year on co-maintainer Quentin Pradet’s blog instead of my own to switch things up. This was a...
Disabling Copilot on GitHub
Finally! GitHub has released the first feature I’ve enjoyed in months: a way to disable the annoying GitHub Copilot prompt on the home screen. Read more:...
Slop security reports for open source
I've noticed a concerning trend of "slop security reports" being sent to open source projects, whether because of LLMs, spurious scanning results, or a lack...
New article: How do I pay for a web page?
I'm working on a personal project for paying my favorite creators on the web. Part of that work includes trying to find /how/ to pay the hundreds of web...
New article: Visualizing the end-to-end Python package SBOM data flow
Happy Friday! As a part of my work to create a standard for including SBOM documents in Python packages I realized that it can be tough to “see the forest...
New article: SEGA Genesis & Mega Drive games and ROMs from Steam
SEGA is discontinuing the “Genesis and Mega Drive Classics Collection” on Steam on December 9th. This set of games is a cheap way to purchase ROMs for these...
New article: Promising early results for SBOMs in Python packages
Today I published some early validation results from my "SBOM for Python packages" project. TLDR: I forked auditwheel and added some rudimentary SBOM record-...
Writing a blog on the internet (Blog-iversary!)
Today is my 5-year blog-iversary! 😊 Writing had a positive impact on my life, I would love to see more people writing and sharing on the internet. I wrote...
Omnivore is shutting down soon: Migrate data and subscriptions
Omnivore recently announced they were bought by ElevenLabs, which is an AI company funded by Trump-supporting VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. As a part of this...