June 2026

You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs a browser built by thousands of engineers just to show you a paragraph. Machines get the clean version.

The real danger isn’t only that these events are happening. It’s that we’re learning to live with them. Not by adapting in the serious, science-based, justice-based sense. But by emotionally accommodating them. Politically absorbing them. Lowering our expectations. Shrinking our imaginations. Forgetting what abundance felt like. Forgetting what safety felt like. Forgetting that this was preventable.

Over millennia of following us into new habitats, crows also learned that we are a fickle species. Humans provide food, but sometimes we harass or kill them. Our settlements can be alternately deadly or sheltering. To “avoid danger and take advantage of riches,” Marzluff says, “they can’t not be interested in people.” So they’ve evolved to watch closely what humans do. And their keen attention may be key to a friendship that’s singular.

Mozilla built an AI kill switch into Firefox after its users demanded one. Only 1% have used it. Another 3% turned off some AI features selectively. The rest left everything on. CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo says the point is not the percentage but the choice.

Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces. The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape.

It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.

Since miniaturization hasn’t advanced far enough to hide chips and batteries inside normal-looking frames, all of them have those thick rims. They bring to mind the late Shelley Berman’s glasses as Larry David’s father in Curb your enthusiasm.

Over the past few months I’ve been exploring what I think of as the agentic web stack — the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence with the open web. As part of that exploration, I built a small experiment for my personal website: an AI chatbot called Ask Ricmac. Its purpose is simple: instead of searching my site manually, a visitor can ask a question and receive an AI-generated answer based on the articles I’ve written over the years.

Simple RTSP (streaming image) server for the ESP32CAM. Easy configuration and monitoring through the web interface.

Display your OpenClaw / Clawdbot / MoltBot AI assistant's activity on a portable e-ink display in real-time using a Clawdbot skill.

Made an anonymous confession board that lives in your terminal. Go ahead and post your confession 🫶🏼

Probably the same issue using Fedora-KDE-Desktop-Live-43-1.6.x86_64.iso , using a nvidia card too (not sure if related). slitherer is crashing. I edited /usr/libexec/anaconda/webui-desktop: line 172: to DEFAULT_BROWSER_CMD=firefox and I was able to complete the installation. If there is interest in solving the bug, I can run the installer again to get the exact hardware info and stack/core dump for slitherer.

Workarounds Don’t start the installer (or quit it if you started it already). Start terminal (Konsole in KDE) and edit a config file: sudo nano /etc/anaconda/profile.d/fedora.conf Find this part: # The default browser for the Web UI. webui_web_engine = slitherer and change it to: # The default browser for the Web UI. webui_web_engine = firefox Close the editor (Ctrl+X → Y → Enter), and run the installer, either from a desktop launcher, or from a terminal: liveinst The installer should no longer crash when using drop-down lists.

I had this exact issue attempting to install Fedora 44 KDE live ISO on an older laptop with a GeForce GTX 970 GPU. I resolved it by forcing Anaconda to use Firefox instead of Slitherer. I can confirm that Firefox was the selected default browser, but for some reason the indicated variable doesn’t seem to work Instead of editing /usr/libexec/anaconda/webui-desktop I changed the following line inside /etc/anaconda/profile.d/fedora.conf: webui_web_engine = slitherer to webui_web_engine = firefox this allowed me to start Anaconda GUI normally and proceed with installing Fedora 44.

JSON-LD, also known as JSON Linked Data, is a format for adding structured data to webpages. It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking.

I recently got a new phone and thus had to re-do the setup of my mobile blogging pipeline. So, basically, allow me to checkout, modify, test, commit and push the sources of this Hugo based static page under Android. While doing so I noticed some necessary changes and improvements, and also wanted to make use of my Taskfile which does most of the heavy lifting now, so here are my updated steps.

A blog written by hand

LES ORCHARD IS IN THE WEIGHTS — Mozilla software developer

Sliders, pointer position, element visibility, viewport size, battery, network, sensors — JavaScript can read all of it; CSS can't. prop-for-that writes that runtime state into --live-* and --const-* custom properties — batched and diffed down to one setProperty per frame — so your CSS can compose and react to it with plain calc() and var().

A platform-agnostic specification of the technical features every decent website should have — from <title> to /.well-known/security.txt, from WCAG contrast to llms.txt. Written for humans and agents.

Briefly, in Spire 1, the game used several distinct pseudorandom number generators, to prevent e.g. randomness within a combat from influencing future card rewards. However, they were all initialized to the same starting state, which meant they produced the same sequence of numbers. A crafty player could therefore pay attention to the results of past random events and gain information about future random events.

Portmaster put hundreds of free, community-ported games on Linux handhelds. Starboard brings huge swathes of that catalogue to the Android ones — the Odin, Retroid, RG and dual-screen Thor class of device — by running them in a real Linux environment under the bonnet. Phones are welcome too.

Build real-time multiplayer for Phaser, PixiJS, Three.js, or any browser game. Open-source Node.js framework — rooms, actors, typed binary protocol. Free for commercial use, forever.

Loop engineering is replacing yourself as the person who prompts the agent. You design the system that does it instead. A loop here can be thought of a recursive goal where you define a purpose and the AI iterates until complete. I believe this may be the future of how we work with coding agents. However, its still early, I’m skeptical and you absolutely have to be careful about token costs (usage patterns can vary wildly if you are token rich or poor), so I want to unpack what it is and what it means.

It is not acceptable to bounce users on old browsers, users with bad network connections, users using assistive technologies. Certainly not from a monopoly public service. A lot of hype and noise is pressing us to extend the cowboy, wild-west phase of the software industry’s expansion. We should set that aside, and take ourselves seriously as a mature industry. Build a web application that works on a playstation portable on a 3G connection - if you do, it will work for all your users, and it will still work 30 years from now.

In many jobs, employees must manage multiple projects or tasks at the same time. A typical workday often entails switching between several work activities, including projects, tasks, and meetings. This paper explores how such work design affects individual performance by focusing on the challenge of switching attention from one task to another. As revealed by two experiments, people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers. Being able to finish one task before switching to another is, however, not enough to enable effective task transitions. Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.

Running a handful of agents and switching between them is its own kind of tired. Harvard Business Review has started calling it “AI brain fry”: the strain of supervising systems that move faster than you can think. It isn’t burnout. For me, burnout is feeling responsible for something you can’t affect, shoving at an immovable object. Brain fry is almost the reverse. You have all the help you could ask for, a row of agents that will do whatever you tell them, and the thing that gives out is your own capacity to hold context and decide.4 We spend all our attention on what the tools can do. We’ve barely started on what running them does to the person doing it.

ntfy (pronounced notify) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API. It's infinitely flexible, and 100% free software.

A long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to modify the device to have an open WiFi access point and a web server hosting banned books. The idea was that if you lived somewhere that banned books you thought were important, you could theoretically stick a digital copy of the book on one of these light bulbs. Then you could go install it somewhere in your community. As long as the light bulb is switched on, then anyone in the vicinity can still access the banned material assuming they have an electronic device with WiFi. Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed. A cyberpunk digital dead drop. These devices are also fairly inexpensive, so leaving them around town as is hopefully not very cost prohibitive.

That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.

Private, on-device AI meeting notetaker that runs entirely in your browser — live transcription, speaker ID, and note extraction with no audio leaving your machine (WebGPU + WASM).

My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.

DOCTOR WHO is gone. STAR TREK has reached the end of its cycle. The STARGATE reboot was cancelled. The new STAR WARS film did not do well, and I believe they only have one more film in the pipeline. The MCU is not in a great place and the shape of its future will balance on the two new AVENGERS films. SUPERMAN’s takings were soft and SUPERGIRL is tracking at less than half of SUPERMAN’s opening. And the two biggest films of the last month were made for less than a million each by directors in their twenties. One or two swallows don’t make a summer, but right now it looks like old science fiction inflected IP is reaching a hiatus point.

That creates a real supply chain risk for businesses. If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in. Anthropic has explicitly chosen not to tell users when this is happening.

10-unit split-flap display. 3D-printed flaps. Modular. | Download free 3D printable STL models

The Hershey fonts are a collection of vector fonts developed c. 1967 by Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey at the Naval Weapons Laboratory, and originally designed to be rendered using vectors on early cathode ray tube displays. Decomposing curves to connected straight lines allowed Hershey to produce complex typographic designs. In their original form the font data consists simply in a series of coordinates, meant to be connected by straight lines on the screen. We forked hersheytextjs and made it a program that defines strokes in css, then exports it as a font.

A Storybook Addon, Save the screenshot image of your stories 📷 via puppeteer.

See, what makes Mastodon less worse than something like Twitter or Bluesky or, god forbid, fucking Threads, is that it has escape hatches. You may not like being told “go find another instance,” but you can go find another instance, and that is fucking spectacular. Twitter started going into the shitter even before Elon Seig Heil Musk painted a big “X” on it with his dick, but did you all just say “sucks, man,” and fuck off to another Twitter instance? No! Why not? Because there were no other fucking Twitter instances!

Obs.js reads a handful of browser signals (Navigator and Battery APIs) to infer connection strength, battery status, and device capability. It exposes those signals as CSS classes on the <html> element, and as properties on window.obs, so you can adapt delivery accordingly: serve lower-resolution media, forgo web fonts, disable auto-playing video… you name it.

AI-native React components for AI startup Components that signal how oversubscribed your funding round is.

Cabel Sasser found a great easter egg in the new Lego Batman game. (Audio on!)

Two years ago, the question I was trying to answer was how to think alongside a new kind of intelligence. Now the questions are weirder: When should you refuse AI’s help, even when it is offering? When should you hand over the keys entirely? And what do you do when the AI is no longer just your assistant, but your reader, your critic, and the gatekeeper standing between your work and its audience? Writing this book meant living with all three questions at once, and I suspect your job will involve them soon, if it doesn’t already.

A Hardware Hacking Tool with Web-Based CLI That Speaks Every Protocol

We broke the web so badly for humans that we had to build a clean web for machines, and now humans will have to use machines to experience a clean web again.

Amiga Wifi Internet Access via the Floppy Drive Port

A collection of agent skills for CAD, robotics and hardware design

Hektor’s light and fragile mechanism consists only of two motors, toothed belts and a spray can holder. By the means of geometric triangulation and gravity, a custom software moves the spray can along predefined drawing paths and remotely activates the can’s nozzle.

The AI coding agent that runs on stolen Chipotle compute 🌯 Fork of OpenCode with Pepper AI as default model. Community project to add providers from Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Starbucks & more.

On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.

I'm hopeful that the critical skill to develop here is discipline. That’s not great news for me: I’ve been trying to figure that one out for decades!