I just had a closer look at https://git.mills.io/prologic/mu and it motivated me to do some compiler building myself again. Hopefully, I find some time in the next free days. I’m bad at it, but it’s always great fun.

Are ‘Geek Gifts’ Becoming Their Own Demographic?
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland wonders if “gifts for geeks” is the next big consumer demographic:

For this year’s holiday celebrations, Hallmark made a special Christmas tree ornament, a tiny monitor displaying screens from the classic video game “Oregon Trail.” (“Recall the fun of leading a team of oxen and a wagon loaded with provisions from Missouri to the West … ⌘ Read more

Does AI Really Make Coders Faster?
One developer tells MIT Technology Review that AI tools weaken the coding instincts he used to have. And beyond that, “It’s just not fun sitting there with my work being done for me.”

But is AI making coders faster? “After speaking to more than 30 developers, technology executives, analysts, and researchers, MIT Technology Review found that the picture is not as straightforward as it might seem…”
… ⌘ Read more

Alright, Advent of Code is over:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-12/0/POSTING-en.html

It’s been quite the time sink, especially with the DOS games on top, but it was fun. 🥳

In case you’re wondering: All puzzles (except for part 2 of day 10) were doable in Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4 and ran in a finite time on the Pentium 133. Puzzle 10/2 might have been doable as well if I had better education. 🤣

Bring Falling Snow & Christmas Lights to Mac with Snowy
If you ever wished your Mac could feel a bit more seasonal and festive for the holidays and Christmas, you might just appreciate a fun app called Snowy. Snowy brings falling snow, twinkling Christmas lights, and some holiday ambiance, directly to your Mac desktop. You can have dangling twinkling Christmas lights hanging from your menu … Read More ⌘ Read more

Chernobyl’s Protective Shield Can No Longer Confine Radiation, UN Nuclear Watchdog Says
“A structure designed to prevent radioactive leakage at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine is no longer operational,” reports Politico, “after Russian drones targeted it earlier this year, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog has found.”

[T]he large steel structure “lost its primary safety fun … ⌘ Read more

Watch the Fun Apple Holiday 2025 Commercial: A Critter Carol
Apple has launched their official 2025 holiday advertisement for the season. This years commercial comes in at 2 minutes and features two friends taking a snowy hike, one of whom drops their iPhone into the snow, which is soon picked up by a forest creature, who proceeds to gather even more forest creatures to use … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/12/02/watch-the-fun-apple-holiday-2025-commercial-a-critter-c … ⌘ Read more

Put the fun back into fungi. Test your mushroom facts in our quiz
Mushrooms hit the headlines this year, but not for the best reasons. It’s time to change that — take our quiz to see how many fun fungi facts you know. ⌘ Read more

Steam Machine, Continued Open-Source Rust Usage & Linux Kernel Happenings In November
It was an eventful past month with Valve announcing the new Steam Machine, a lot of new Linux kernel activity, the continued increase of Rust programming language adoption by open-source projects, a lot of fun hardware benchmarks, and more. There were 283 original news articles on Phoronix the past month about Linux/open-source software and hardware plus another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. … ⌘ Read more

Add Christmas Lights to Home Screen, Dock, & Desktop with Festivitas for iPhone & Mac
Festivitas is a fun app that brings some holiday spirit directly to your iPhone or Mac, by allowing you to add some animated holiday lights to your Home Screen or desktop. And if you’re using it on a Mac, you can even make it snow, or add Christmas lights to your Dock too. Deck the … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/11/30/add-christmas-lights-to-home-scre … ⌘ Read more

** Sticker party, November **
Some random thoughts including how the band Imagine Dragons is kinda like Metal for kids; distributing apps, even without involving Apple at all, is deeply annoying on macOS; Pokemon ZA is fun, but I think that I’m a turn-based girlie at heart; my partner has been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom lately, it has been a lot of fun for me to watch, and hair-pullingly frustrating for our nearly 10 year old who has strong opinions about the correct order of operations in that game; I wrote, but am cu … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I couldn’t have phrased it any better than @bender@twtxt.net. :-)

Twice or three times the money as before sounds a bit suspicious to me. Of course, I could be wrong, but I always was under the impression, that your last jobs weren’t all that badly salaried. If the new offer is really paid this highly, it might be a shit job. For me, money isn’t everything, I’d rather opt for a lower income where the job is fun than hating to go to work every day. But if the new job ticks all boxes, go for it. :-)

Also: Consult your pillow, don’t rush it.

Grab a Fun  Beijing Wallpaper from Apple to Celebrate a New Store Opening
Apple is opening a new store in Beijing China, and to celebrate they have released a series of wallpapers for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The wallpaper features the retro six-color  Apple logo with some embellishments and patterns, giving it both a retro and modern feel. You can snag the wallpaper below by clicking on … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/11/18/grab-a-fun-%ef%a3% … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I prefer something like the logo on https://twtxt.dev, for example, instead. But hey, it is your pod, have fun!

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

Visualize FastAPI endpoints with FastAPI-Voyager
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Using the Web Monetization API for fun and profit
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macOS Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
An anonymous reader shares a report: On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.

[…] While Apple had previously urged developers to use … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net All good. ✌️ It’s just that I’ve been through several iterations of this (on other platforms), AI output back and forth, pointing out what’s wrong, but in the end people were just trolling (not saying that’s what you had in mind), because apparently that’s “fun”.

MacOS 26’s new icons are a step backwards
On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail. ↫ Paul Kafasis The downgraded icons listed in this article are just… Sad. While there’s no accounting for tastes, Apple’s new gla … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I requested an invitation. There are many like this, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. I also hope you are not hosting this on your infrastructure, at least not once you decide to monetise. I know self hosting is fun and all, but it also introduces variables that directly collide with a business model.

** Delta chatting **
I’m trying out delta chat. If that’s your jam, feel free to say“hi.” ⌘ Read more

Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
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Show HN: Strange Attractors
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors( https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js.

Working on it reminded me of the little “maths for fun” exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but i … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)

Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.

The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.

A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.

I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.

Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.

It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.

Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png

This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.

@bender@twtxt.net Kaboom! Hahaha, I did not think of that at all, thanks for pointing it out, mate! :‘-D

But let me clarify just in case: I honestly do not want to bash this project. In fact, it’s a great little invention. It’s just that I’m not conviced by the current user interface decisions. Anyway, web design isn’t right up my alley. I just wanted to add some fun. And luckily, at least someone liked it so far. :-)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com yeah, it looks tedious because it is. LOL. I can twt no matter where I am because a) with Yarn is as easy as opening a web browser, and b) with jenny is as easy at SSHing to my VPS. But, the keyword is fun. That’s what matters!

Just typing twts directly into my twtxt file.

Details:

• Opening my twtxt file remotely using vim scp://user@remote:port//path/to/twtxt.txt
  
• Inserting the date, time and tab part of the twt with :.!echo "$(date -Is)\t"
  
• In case I need to add a new line I just Ctrl+Shift+u, type in the 2028 and hit Enter
  
• In order to replay, you just steal a twt hash from your favorite Yarn instance.
  

It looks tedious, but it’s fun to know I can twt no matter where I am, as long as can ssh in.

How to Avoid Fighting Rust Borrow Checker | qouteall notes
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@prologic@twtxt.net No pressure! This is meant to be fun. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think if I was younger, with more energy, and wasn’t blind with leber’s disease (look it up) I’d be fine™ But yeah I get the whole “exhausting” apart. I’ll join you this year, since there’s only 12 puzzles and as you say, we can “take our time” it might actually be fun! (as opposed to exhausting and pressured).

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, lots of people are welcoming this change, saying they are relieved that there are fewer puzzles. And ngl, I, too, have been very exhausted at the end of the month. It’s a lot of fun and I loved it each time, but yeah, it can be exhausting.

What about the icons in pifmgr.dll?
Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out they’re random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files. The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun. They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They w … ⌘ Read more

awesome-tiny-crates: A bunch of small crates that make writing Rust more fun
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Why is Halloween starting so much earlier each year? A business professor explains
Halloween is a fun, scary time for children and adults alike—but why does the holiday seem to start so much earlier every year? Decades ago, when I was young, Halloween was a much smaller affair, and people didn’t start preparing until mid-October. Today, in my neighborhood near where I grew up in Massachusetts, Halloween decorations start appearing in the middle of summer. ⌘ Read more

That was a very non-fun day at work.

We’re not using AWS directly, but soooooooooooooooo much other stuff does.

Space Elevator
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Sam Whited: Coffeeneuring 2025
This year I haven’t blogged much at all, but it’s time for the 15th annual
Coffeeneuring and who-knows-how-many-annual Biketober challenges so here we go!
This post will be updated with each of my Coffeeneuring rides as the month goes
on, and may (or may not) contain a few fun C+1 rides that count towards
Biketober, but not for Coffeeneuring.
… ⌘ Read more

London mosque faces criticism over ‘men and young girls below 12 only’ charity fun run ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Is dealing with spam fun though? DDoS attacks? DoS attacks? Scans for all kinds of stupid shit™? Malware? Advertising? Tracking? Spying? ..

Intranets have been around since Jesus times (well, not quite 😂, but you get the idea). They are fun to play with, but that’s about it. I mean, the “fun” of the Internet comes from its variety.

Is my cat having fun, or annoyed? ⌘ Read more

Cycling is fun in itself, but doing it to perform a task is extremely satisfying. It feels so good to load up the cargo rack with groceries, or to opt for a bicycle instead of a car to go visit a friend. Biking with a purpose makes my desire to live green feel much more tangible.

Play Super Mario Bros Remastered for Some Retro Gaming Fun
Gamers and Mario enthusiasts in particular are sure to get a kick out of Super Mario Brothers Remastered, a fan-made unofficial remake of the original Nintendo Super Mario Bros game that includes new levels, new options and game modes, new characters, a level editor, physics improvements, and more. Super Mario Bros Remastered is not meant … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/09/28/play-super-mario-bros-remastered-for-r … ⌘ Read more

Great. Yet another messed up plain text e-mail part. The URL was actually HTML-escaped. Took me five attempts to figure this out, because of course it had to be several kilometers long. In fact, the e-mail stated: “Please do not be surprised that the link is particularly long. It contains your personal configuration.”

A normal person is completely lost (that’s why I got involved). Visting the broken URL opens a popup dialog suggesting to deactivate script blockers. Which I had already done upfront as a matter of prudence.

Fun bonus on top: The JWT in the link has identical iat (issued at) and exp (expiry) claims. The expiry is definitely not checked, it’s well in the past.

Medical software just has to be horrible. It’s a law.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Fun fact, inhabitants of this town are nicknamed „Brandstifter“ (arsonists). In the 19th century, a firebug caused a number of big fires here.

i know yarn has a CLI client in yarnc but ngl i wish there was a TUI client. that’d be really fun

@bender@twtxt.net thank youuuu bender i missed your fun posts!!!! yeah i have been INSANELY BUSY with fujocoded work (see those newsletter posts!) it’s been tough but i’ve been making my way through it 🫡🫡🫡

i’ve been sooo obsessed with the second a-side from my favorite idol group’s latest single. it’s a super fun and energetic latin pop track — i highly recommend giving it a listen, it’s really catchy!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RtbnP1onaM

Hmm, gnu.org is slow as heck. Shorter HTML pages load in about ten seconds. This complete AWK manual all in one large HTML page took a full minute: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html Is there maybe some anti AI shenanigans going on?

In any case, I find the user guide super interesting. My AWK skills are basically non-existent, so I finally decided to change that. This document is incredibly well written and makes it really fun to keep reading and learning. I’m very impressed. So far, I made it to section 1.6, happy to continue.