Weeknote: 20 October 2026 – wired headphones, Apple Indie Games Week, Apple TV, Apple HomeView, all the iPhones and AI brain slop

reverttosaved.com · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

Wired headphones are making a comeback. Apparently. This isn’t a ‘year of the Linux desktop’ thing either, because an increasing number of people are embracing the cable once again. I’ve never…

Dystopia isn't assured

willhopkins.dev · Oct 20 · 🎤 Politics ·

Get out there and vote.

Back Behind the Screen

olddungeonmaster.com · Oct 20 · 🎭 Pop Culture ·

A quick greeting to my readers: after taking a pause from blogging back in February, I’m glad to say I’m back behind the DM screen! Thank you all for your patience, support, and kind messages while…

A Tang Dynasty judge solves a string of baffling murders

malwarwickonbooks.com · Oct 20 · 🎭 Pop Culture ·

For readers in the USA or Europe, it can be a challenge to understand law enforcement policies and procedures in countries grounded in non-Western values and assumptions. In China, for example. The…

The Underpants Gnomes' Step 2

blog.dshr.org · Oct 20 · 🎲 Economy ·

Source Barry Ritholtz posted this up-and-right chart, which is a classic of exponential extrapolation. Given the difficulty, delays, and cost of bringing the current generation of data center…

[Talks] Guest Lecture in CS5914/6604 Virginia Tech and Talk for Badgers in Tech Coffee

yohan.beugin.org · Oct 20 · 🛡️ Sysadmin & Security ·

I am giving two remote talks this week: - "From Promises to Reality: Independent Verification of Web Privacy Claims" in CS5914/6604 (Securing the Modern Internet) at Virginia Tech on Oct 20th. -…

The Scoville Ladder

notesfromtheroad.com · Oct 20 · 🧑‍🍳 Food & Drink ·

Every chili pepper in my illustrated field guide, ranked on the Scoville scale from the sweet bell to the Carolina Reaper, with the history of how pepper heat is measured.

NacatamalOn HTML5 SameGame powered by samegame-engine, a headless TypeScript class

emanueleferonato.com · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

The same headless samegame-engine that powers my Phaser 4 SameGame, unchanged, now rendered with NacatamalOn: Mega Drive dithering, a CRT tube and art painted entirely in code, with the full…

Back From A Land Of Fire And Ice

bxblackrazor.blogspot.com · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

I'm writing this Thursday morning, but I'm probably posting it around...mm...Tuesday? Wednesday? After all, I had a series of five Cauldron posts to get up on Ye Old Blog. But right now, Dear Reader,…

Balcon d’octobre

i.never.nu · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

Mini billet, just pour avoir une note que les 19 et 20 octobre 2026, j’ai travaillé du balcon pendant une heure en après-midi. La catastrophe climatique est plaisante une fois de temps en temps.

Precious pauses

birming.com · Oct 20 · ✈️ Travel & Outdoors ·

The photo above is from Skogskyrkogården (The Woodland Cemetery) this morning. It’s an incredibly beautiful place, famous for its architecture and design, and included on the UNESCO World Heritage…

Beyond Smarter Models: Gemini 4 Argon, Hermes Agent and the Power of Multi-Agent AI

kiledjian.com · Oct 20 · ✨ AI ·

Google’s Gemini 4 Argon has given me another reason to revisit a question I’ve been exploring for some time: Are we approaching the point where orchestrating multiple AI models becomes…

Note 01 — October 20, 2026

maxriffner.com · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

Loving these crisp fall mornings and sitting outside for a cup of coffee while it is still tolerable.

Faster Code, Same Release Date: What Gives?

liviutudor.com · Oct 20 · 💼 Work & Business ·

Engineering leaders say AI agents write code much faster, yet their release cycles are no faster than before. Typing was never the bottleneck: here's where the time really goes, and what I'd change…

Elm's Never type and Html.map

blog.poleprediction.com · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

I’ve written before regarding the conflict between using Elm’s Html.lazy and extensible records. Today I wish to highlight a similar mild conflict between Elm’s Never type and Html…

Precious pauses

robertbirming.com · Oct 20 · ✈️ Travel & Outdoors ·

The photo above is from Skogskyrkogården (The Woodland Cemetery) this morning. It’s an incredibly beautiful place, famous for its architecture and design, and included on the UNESCO World Heritage…

France is Burning—and the Second Coming of Kristallnacht

andrewaustin.blog · Oct 20 · 🎤 Politics ·

French President Emmanuel Macron posed a question to the French people: “Looking at these images, we have all asked ourselves: What was going through their minds? How can French people do this to…

Working out loud is making your work observable while you do it and narrating it as you go

jeroensangers.com · Oct 20 · 💼 Work & Business ·

Working out loud is more than telling people what you’re doing. It has two halves, and each one on its own falls short. The first half is observable work: your documents, drafts and decisions…

The best tools for editing a thesis or manuscript yourself

revise.io · Oct 20 · 📱 Technology ·

The best software for editing a thesis, dissertation, or research manuscript yourself, compared on Word and Overleaf support, reviewable edits, long documents, academic checks, and price: Paperpal,…

RTFM: TeamUpdraft (UpdraftPlus) and WordPress Hack on the RTFM Blog

rtfm.co.ua · Oct 20 · 🛡️ Sysadmin & Security ·

The morning of October 19 didn’t start with coffee – but there was plenty of adrenaline. The first thing I saw when I woke up was Telegram alerts telling me that something had gone wrong with…

Documentation-Driven Development

gomakethings.com · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

Last week, I needed to make some pretty major updates to a web component in a design system I use for clients. I’m a big fan of TDD, but I wasn’t mentally in a place to write my tests…

For the Beautiful People Who Read My Blog

blog.absurdpirate.com · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

You're all wonderful, and I want you to know that.

PANGBURN’S SYMPOSIUM I: Two-day event in San Francisco, featuring Stephen Hicks, Steven Pinker, Justin Sledge, and Steven Bonnell. PHILOSOPHY • SCIENCE • RELIGION • POLITICS.

stephenhicks.org · Oct 20 · 🏺 Humanities ·

“In the spirit of ancient Athens, where the greatest minds gathered to question the gods, challenge the powerful, and pursue the nature of truth, a new symposium rises. “Four disciplines.…

Pending Home Sales

numbernomics.com · Oct 20 · 🎲 Economy ·

October 20, 2026 Pending home sales declined 5.2 points in September to 66.0 after having risen 0.2 point in August. In the past year pending home sales have fallen 11.3%. The National Association of…

ClickHouse Will Let You Be Wrong at Scale

matduggan.com · Oct 20 · 🛡️ Sysadmin & Security ·

So I've posted before how I think ClickHouse is great. Its columnar storage is fast, it has amazing compression. I won't bore you with those details, you can see them all here:…

Removing The Chest Tube

thetraumapro.com · Oct 20 · ⚛️ Science ·

Chest tubes are a common tool in managing thoracic injury. Inserting them is relatively straightforward. However, there is considerable variation in practice around their management. Standard…

Ask LukeW: Instant Content Indexing

lukew.com · Oct 20 · ✨ AI ·

The Ask LukeW feature on my website has been answering people's questions about digital product design for over three years. How well it answers depends on the content available to it. So in addition…

PEAKS No 66: Gemini 4 Argon, Muse Spark Open and Ledger’s Spy Chips

bogdandeac.com · Oct 20 · 🛡️ Sysadmin & Security ·

Hi there!🛡️ Security & PrivacyScott Helme rebuts the “passkeys are a trap” claim: synced passkeys send no attestation, and falling back to TOTP leaves you…

Stack It Up

coffeespoons.me · Oct 20 · 📐 Design & UX ·

Normally I am not a fan of stacked bar charts. They do not allow users to easily compare the constituent elements of the stack. In spending a number of years working with economists I became familiar…

The Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry by Amy Azzarito.

diamondsinthelibrary.com · Oct 20 · 🎭 Pop Culture ·

My lovelies, have you read The Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry, the new jewelry book by Amy Azzarito? Because I just did, and I could not be more impressed. Let’s discuss. The Secret…

Using GraphViz to Build Complex Models Bottom-Up

zettelkasten.de · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

Complexity is a difficult beast to deal with. One of the core challenges of complexity is the strange independence between the parts and the whole. You may find yourself in a situation where learning…

Do I Need to Reprint?

blog.cani.ne.jp · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

Merge a change, get a versioned Cults3D listing. How a catalog of printable models ships itself from GitHub, what a version number should mean for a thing you print, nine traps in Cults3D's API, and…

I've integrated the Sveltia CMS to this site to make it easier to publish more often

ianmonroe.com · Oct 20 · 🕸️ Web & Internet ·

Turns out, a Github based publishing workflow comes with its own headaces.

Why Shops in Portugal Ask for Your NIF (and What You Get Back)

jeangalea.com · Oct 20 · ✈️ Travel & Outdoors ·

Buy a coffee, a tank of fuel or a bag of groceries in Portugal and the cashier will ask “contribuinte?” or “quer número de contribuinte na fatura?” before printing the…

Do not iptables-translate

allddd.onl · Oct 20 · 🛡️ Sysadmin & Security ·

Many users, including some large projects, migrate to nftables by running their existing iptables rules through iptables-translate and leaving it at that. It works, sure, but it only changes the…

The availability of work, switching off Claude and more notes from 14th October 2026

brightonfarm.com · Oct 20 · 💼 Work & Business ·

On the 14th October, fifteen freelancers met up in the beer garden of the Battle of Trafalgar pub to talk freelancing, tech, AI and motor racing. This is some of what we talked about: Switching from…

Protected: My Kernel (and Compiler) Work This Year — Jan-Sep 2026

embeddedor.com · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The Centrists Love To Lose

badfaithtimes.com · Oct 20 · 🎤 Politics ·

James Carville finally admitted it.

Making an LLM gateway is as cheap as making an HTTP server

blog.elliotmurphy.com · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

There was a time when a reasonably proper, performant HTTP server was a thing that required a significant investment. Apache, Lighthttpd, Nginx. To make your own was a multi-year commitment, so you…

status 102026

angrybunnyman.com · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

some people have hidden their up votes and I unhide them in dev tools just to upvote them when I like that Out of spite of course

Please stop your dog from urinating on my scooter

undermanager.com · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

You don't want to miss Dave's Interesting Assemble II. I've had a sneak preview and it's going to be great. it's free! Tickets are hereHere's a video (sound from the…

Pyramid Review – Children of Fire

thealexandrian.net · Oct 20 · 🎭 Pop Culture ·

Originally Published July 14th, 2000 When you think about the typical roleplaying game made available over the internet for free, the thing that springs to mind is that it is, above all else, free.…

Here are my thoughts on Apple HomeView...

jasonjournals.com · Oct 20 · 📱 Technology ·

Here are my thoughts on Apple HomeView. It’s interesting to see Apple kinda sorta enter the smart-home category; will watch what else happens over the years. The price seems okay...

Unlock Your Infinite Potential (And Other Doors Better Left Shut)

angrybunnyman.com · Oct 20 · ☀️ Life & Personal ·

in which our hero emits

Necci dal 1924

jeremycherfas.net · Oct 20 · 🏃 Health & Fitness ·

#coffeeneuring2026 No. 3 20.1km round-trip I needed some new inner tubes for the Brompton, and although local bicycle shops stock them in the right size, only the LBS seems to stock Schwalbes which,…

Teaching NullG to race: the reinforcement-learning journey so far

projectable.me · Oct 20 · ✨ AI ·

From native driving controls and road guidance to Turbo preservation and weapon combat: the experiments, references and repeated adjustments behind NullG’s learning pilots.

Why Be Kink Aware? Squicked, Refugees, Minority Stress

ruthcohnmft.com · Oct 20 · 🏃 Health & Fitness ·

When I began my sex therapy training in 2000, I thought of myself as reasonably sex positive. I remember hearing a celebrated and renowned sex therapist/researcher say at a conference, that people…

Introducing the Brett Codes Show & coding a simple podcast site generator with Ruby

brettcodes.com · Oct 20 · 🧩 Programming ·

Explaining why I'm hosting my monologues in a podcast feed to support the independent web and how I went about coding the static site generator.

GHOST CHILDREN IN THE WOODS

theunexplained51.blogspot.com · Oct 20 · 🎭 Pop Culture ·

Few stories are as unsettling as reports of ghostly children appearing deep in the woods. Across the United States and around the world, hikers, campers, and local residents have shared accounts of…

The Future of CSS ✨

joshwcomeau.com · Oct 20 · 🕸️ Web & Internet ·

Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this…