Leftovers

• LRT ☛ Estonia gets a new small island

  An islet in western Estonia will be upgraded to the status of "small island" and granted additional funding after at least five people have been registered as living on the territory for a year.

• Jake Bauer ☛ Oh Right, I Have A Blog

  It’s been a year since I’ve posted anything on this here blog. I’ve mostly been idle from a lot of computering as I’ve focused on other things in life (reading, gardening, home renovation) and it’s been pretty nice to step back.

  In all honesty, I’ve been pretty burnt out from a lot of the online spaces surrounding tech and computers. The constant black-and-white discussions and moralistic grandstanding coupled with a pressure to perform a certain way (are you using the “right” technologies, what are you working on, etc.) was a great combination to lead to burnout. Since largely stepping back from such places, changing the way I’ve used various platforms, and more intentionally focusing my attention on things I actually want to focus my attention on rather than what I feel I should be focusing my attention on, I’ve been feeling a lot better.

  But, let’s not dwell on the negative things. Here’s what I did in 2025 that brought me joy: [...]

• Science

  • LabX Media Group ☛ How the NIH Became the Backbone of US Medical Research

    The NIH was founded through the Ransdell Act of 1930, which converted the former Hygienic Laboratory of the Marine Hospital Services into the seeds of a new government institution. That laboratory had been established in 1887 to develop public health measures, diagnostics and vaccines for controlling diseases prevalent in the U.S. at the time, such as cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, plague and diphtheria. With the act’s passage, the Hygienic Laboratory was reimagined as the National Institute of Health.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Humans made fire 350,000 years earlier than believed, archaeological study finds

    The evidence, probably produced by some of the oldest Neanderthal groups, consists of a patch of heated clay, heat-shattered flint hand axes and two small pieces of iron pyrite. It has taken the team, led by Nick Ashton and Rob Davis at the British Museum, four years to demonstrate that the heated clay was not caused by wildfire. Geochemical tests show temperatures of more than 700°C with repeated fire-use in the same location of the site—indicating a campfire, or hearth, that had been used by people on several occasions.

• Career/Education

  • Rick Carlino ☛ 2025 Year in Review

    At work, I was promoted to an engineering manager position. After years as an individual contributor, moving into management has been a new challenge. I'm now learning the ropes of leadership from a different angle. My work enrolled me in an Advanced Leadership Program. That program had me reading many leadership books and case studies, which I'll list later. I'm still writing code, but a lot of my day now involves one on ones, hiring, and planning.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Software engineers should be a little bit cynical

    A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what projects you work on”. Alex Wennerberg put the “Sean Goedecke is a cynic” case well in his post Software Engineers Are Not Politicians. Here are some excerpts: [...]

• Hardware

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ A new series of short-form posts: the Elephant Memory Systems entries

    Last week I was looking through my archive of 5¼″ floppies and stumbled on a bunch of disks made by this brand, Elephant Memory Systems. These were the first blank floppies I purchased back in the 1980s to use with my Commodore 64. When I last checked their contents in 2018, they were all still accessible. (That tagline, “Never forgets”, may be on to something).

    This gave me an idea… for this blog.

  • Jay Little ☛ Persistence in the Face of Existential Crisis

    This year has been a painful one. I’ve also been pretty quiet… here anyway. It’s been over a year since I’ve posted here as most of my musings have been published on my new anonymous blog. Nevertheless, I felt like I owed whatever readers remain here at least some sort of update as to what’s been going on with me this year and where my head is at.

  • [Old] Steffen Vogel ☛ Bachelor Thesis: Extended Abstract

    Almost fourteen months ago, I started working on my bachelor thesis. Although I finished it half a year ago, it’s still part of my work as a student research assistant.

    During my initial work, most of the code was written for an internal research kernel. I’m now happy that we were able to port it to an open source kernel called eduOS: /RWTH-OS/eduOS ). This minimal operating system is used for practical demo’s and assignments during the OS course at my university. There’s much more I could write about. So this will probably be another separate blog post.

    The motive for this article is an abstract I wrote for the student research competition of the ASPLOS conference which is held this year in Istanbul, Turkey. Unfortunately my submission got rejected. But as a nice side-effect, I’ve now the chance to present my work to an English audience as well: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Wired ☛ People Who Drink Bottled Water on a Daily Basis Ingest 90,000 More Microplastic Particles Each Year

    Thus, as a doctoral student at Concordia University in Canada, Sajedi reviewed over 140 scientific papers to determine the effects of plastic bottles on the human body. She found that people ingest an average of 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year from food and drinking water, and those who use bottled water on a daily basis ingest nearly 90,000 more microplastic particles into their bodies.

    “Drinking water from plastic bottles is fine in an emergency, but it is not something that should be used in daily life,” Sajedi explains. “Even if there are no immediate effects on the human body, we need to understand the potential for chronic harm.”

  • Michigan News ☛ Dear Annie: I spend more time scrolling than I do living my life

    I am starting to feel like my whole life is lived through a screen, and I am ashamed to admit how much control my phone seems to have over me.

• Proprietary

  • Nikita Lapkov ☛ Media Server Journey

    At some point during experiments with Hyper-V, my external HDDs died. ZFS scrubbing would just hang and the HDDs would stop spinning. I’m not sure what exactly happened, but I wanted to switch to internal HDD anyway, so it was fitting. In total, HDDs served for roughly two years, which funnily enough is exactly their guarantee period. I think they performed well, given the fact that I used them quite extensively.

    With Hyper-V networking problem unresolved, I switched to the boring solution of just running WSL2. Turns out, it has a bunch of very annoying quirks like not supporting ZFS or iptables. I need ZFS because I like ZFS. I need iptables because I wasn’t able to run Docker without it. So for the first time in my life, I compiled a custom kernel. All the hard work was already done by a friendly stranger on the internet, I just enabled a bunch of additional compile flags to have iptables. With the custom kernel, WSL2 runs pretty well. The networking part does, at least. You can configure WSL2 to use the same IP as the host machine and it doesn’t make my router’s brain hurt. No more Plex stream pauses because of that.

    Unfortunately, Plex started to suddenly die because WSL2 shuts down itself if it’s not “used”. The criteria for “used” seems to be “has an open terminal to WSL on the host machine”. I’m sure there is a more elegant way to keep WSL2 running in the background, but this works for now.

  • Social Control Media

    • Android Police ☛ Nobody told me about this hidden YouTube feature — now I can't watch videos without it

      All I have to do is tap and hold anywhere on the video playback screen, and YouTube will start playing at 2x speed.

      It'll keep playing at that speed until you lift your finger off the playback screen. It also works in Incognito mode.

• Security

  • Confidentiality

    • Lorin Hochstein ☛ The dangers of SSL certificates

      In other words, SSL certs are a technology with an expected failure mode (expiration) that absolutely maximizes blast radius (a hard failure for 100% of users), without any natural feedback to operators that the system is at imminent risk of critical failure. And with automated cert renewal, you are increasing the likelihood that the responders will not have experience with renewing certificates.

      Is it any wonder that these keep biting us?

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Statesman ☛ White Christmas: why cocaine is everywhere in December

    None of the Christmas cocaine boom, nor the surge in sales resulting from huge sporting events, would be possible without the involvement of the organised crime groups responsible for moving the drug in bulk from South America into the ports of Europe. But the catch is that the vast profits being made by drug gangs from moving all this cocaine ends up destabilising countries, not just in South America but in Europe too, by spreading corruption and violence. Not so Christmassy after all.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A New Year and a Manifesto for America

    We stand at the edge of a new year and at the edge of an old question: Will this be a republic of citizens or a dominion of oligarchs?

    The answer is not yet written. Not yet. But it will be written by what we do now, by what we do next.

    This is a manifesto for those who choose citizenship. For those who remember that 400,000 Americans died in World War II to defend democracy against fascism. For those who refuse to accept that poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth is inevitable. For those who understand that technology deployed without democratic constraint becomes an infrastructure of extraction, not liberation.

  • The Next Move ☛ The Moscow-Mar-A-Lago Hotline

    Recognizing a pattern: Putin calls, America blinks, and Zelenskyy leaves empty-handed.

  • Wired ☛ The US Must Stop Underestimating Drone Warfare

    In recent years, drones have become an integral part of modern warfare. On the battlefield, we've undeniably entered the age of precise mass in conflict, where low-cost attributable drones, powered by widely available commercial technology, open software, and AI, are now the most effective weapons. They can be hidden in plain sight and then launched to destroy targets thousands of miles away from active battlefields. In June 2025, for instance, they were used by Ukraine to destroy 10 percent of Russia's bombers on the tarmac as part of Operation Spider Web. That same month, Israel also launched clandestine drone attacks from within Iran to destroy military and nuclear sites. In April, Houthi rebels used drones and cruise missiles to attack the USS Harry Truman—a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier—in the Red Sea. The carrier swerved so hard to avoid being struck, it tumbled a $56 million F-18 off its deck.

  • [Old] The Atlantic ☛ AI and the Rise of Techno-Fascism in the United States

    With all the hype and hysteria around AI, it’s important to remember that AI is still just a tool. As powerful as it is, it is not a promise of dystopia or utopia.

    Host Garry Kasparov is joined by cognitive scientist Gary Marcus. They agree that on its own, AI is no more good or evil than any other piece of technology and that humans, not machines, hold the monopoly on evil. They discuss what we all need to do to make sure that these powerful new tools don’t further harm our precarious democratic systems.

    The following is a transcript of the episode: [...]

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump to Europe: embrace Nazi trash or else

    What makes the demand especially grotesque is its ideological clarity. This isn't about abstract free expression; it's about protecting reactionary ecosystems that thrive on harassment, racism, and historical revisionism. Europe's hard-learned lessons about where unchecked fascist speech leads are being dismissed as regulatory overreach. At the same time, American officials position themselves as the global enforcement arm of Silicon Valley's most toxic business models and individual.

  • Daily Kos ☛ Trump to Europe: Let every social media site spew Nazi trash—or else

    The Trump administration is engaged in a full-scale assault on the independence and sovereignty of European countries that dare to try to regulate big tech in a way he doesn’t like. Apparently this is what we are exporting these days.

    European countries are trying to regulate and impose fines on technology companies that aren’t following their laws. This should be a noncontroversial thing, a no-brainer, really. Sure, it’s no fun for big tech overlords to have to follow different rules in different countries, but that’s kind of how being an international presence works?

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump and Epstein: Complete Timeline of Their Friendship

    The issue is that Trump — a close friend of Epstein’s for more than a decade — is named in these documents himself, as the Justice Department informed him in May. That alone is not evidence of wrongdoing, and Trump has denied knowledge of or participation in any of Epstein’s illegal activities. But the association is damaging nonetheless, and the steady trickle of details about their relationship (in November, House Democrats dropped a 2019 email from Epstein in which he wrote that Trump “knew about the girls,” for example) have not played in his favor. Meanwhile, Trump hasn’t ruled out a pardon for Maxwell, who was moved to a minimum-security prison facility this summer as she continues to serve her 20-year sentence.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Michaël ☛ Railway population

      The following map from 2024 by Simon C. Scherrer (via @freakonometrics) indicates that one-third of the Swiss population lives in a five-kilometer-wide strip on either side of the Intercity 1 railway line.

    • Ben Congdon ☛ Notes from Early Flight Training

      I’m about half a dozen flights into training for a Private Pilot’s License and wanted to write some notes while I’m still firmly in the “beginner mindset”.

    • Wired ☛ Billion-Dollar Data Centers Are Taking Over the World

      Now the tech industry is in the fever-dream days of generative AI, which requires new levels of computing resources. Big Data is tired; big data centers are here, and wired—for AI. Faster, more efficient chips are needed to power AI data centers, and chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD have been jumping up and down on the proverbial couch, proclaiming their love for AI. The industry has entered an unprecedented era of capital investments in AI infrastructure, tilting the US into positive GDP territory. These are massive, swirling deals that might as well be cocktail party handshakes, greased with gigawatts and exuberance, while the rest of us try to track real contracts and dollars.

• Finance

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Eurozone: Bulgaria, Russian dirty tricks, Gold & Silver bullion

    Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007 and they anticipate adopting the Euro as their currency on 1 January 2026.

    The decision to use the Euro has been divisive. Polls suggest that a majority of citizens would prefer to defer or completely cancel the decision to adopt the Euro. Everybody from the political parties to the Russians are getting in on the conflict. At the beginning of December, the Bulgarian parliament was asked to consider putting the Euro to a referendum.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Western intelligence lawfare op plotted illegal sting on EU fraud office, leaks reveal

  • Roman Kashitsyn ☛ Advent of Code 2025

    Advent of Code 2025 lasted only 12 days. I liked the shorter format since keeping up with puzzles for over three weeks in previous years was challenging.

    This year, I solved the puzzles in Rust since I didn’t have the capacity to practice a new language. Rust is an excellent fit for Advent of Code: the tooling is mature, and the standard library is rich, so I didn’t need external dependencies.

    This article explains solutions to the puzzles I liked the most.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Louis Gerstner, the man who saved IBM, dies at 83 — industry mourns the passing of transformative CEO

    Louis Gerstner, the executive who engineered one of the most important corporate turnarounds in the history of the high-technology sector, died at the age of 83 on Saturday. Gerstner took control over IBM in 1993 when it was at the brink of breakup and bankruptcy, rebuilt the company into a services-led enterprise, and restored its strategic relevance by 2002. Multiple prominent high-tech leaders worked at IBM under Gertner's leadership, spreading his skills across the industry nowadays.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump's Year of Attacking the Media

    Before 2025, “media capture” was a term used exclusively overseas, describing the compromise of a free press to curry favor with the regime in power. Sometimes this happened through threats and intimidation, greased by partisan group think. Other times, the cudgel was money: wealthy administration allies would buy independent news organizations and neuter them to fall in line with the state-backed version of facts.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CCC ☛ A post-American, enshittification-resistant [Internet]

  We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.

  In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There's plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there's also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.

  Let's take it. '

• Copyrights

  • CopyrightLately ☛ Public Domain Day 2026 Is Coming: Here's What to Know

    Regular observers of copyright law’s favorite holiday know the drill: on January 1, 2026, a new crop of creative works from 1930 (along with sound recordings from 1925) will enter the public domain in the United States—ready to be remixed, recycled, or repurposed into B-grade horror films and ill-advised erotica.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Works entering the U.S. public domain in 2026

    Works of art created in 1930 such as early Betty Boop cartoons depicting her as a dog, Disney's "Rover" prototype for Pluto, and more Mickey Mouse cartoons, all enter the U.S. public domain on Jan 1, 2026. Literary works joining them there include Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and Miss Marple, though only as depicted in first of the many mysteries penned by Agatha Christie.