FeedCity

I have already written about how FediMeteo was born, and about how HAProxy helps reduce the number of requests that reach snac. Seen from the outside, FediMeteo almost seems still. There is a static homepage, regenerated every hour. There are the city pages, with their fore...

Today's links No honor among (ad-tech) thieves: Including "and" and "the." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Budweiser nunchuks; GOP vote-suppressor voted illegally; Airbnb enshittifies; Oculus enshittifies; Nintendo copyfrauds its fans; Meritocracy ...

Release: datasette 1.0a30

The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable "Jump to..." menu, described in detail in The extensible "Jump to" menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You can try it out by hitting / on latest.datasette.io - it looks like this:

The new jump_items_sql() plugin hook allows plugins to add their own items to the set that's searched by the plugin.

Tags: projects, datasette, annotated-release-notes

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4

Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this "Start a new agent chat" interface as part of the Jump to menu, any time you hit /:

You can try this out by signing into agent.datasette.io using your GitHub account.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database tables used by Datasette's own tests, intended for plugin test suite...

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child.

These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up of code you could type into your own machine.

I remember playing "Mad House" typed in from the 1983 book "Creepy Computer Games", so I fed that PDF into Claude and had it build an interactive version of that game in JavaScript and HTML:

Build a vanilla JS artifact that exactly recreates the game Mad House from this book, make sure it's mobile friendly and has a suitable retro aesthetic

Credit the book title and link to https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

Tags: computer-history, games, tools

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so ...

An AI interview about explaining hard things simply, conducted on a dog walk

There was once a wizard who lived beside a pond.

Back in January 2025, multiple different security researchers published a total of 6 security vulnerabilities in rsync, some of which allow arbitrary code execution and file leaks, so naturally I was wondering whether/how my gokrazy/rsync implementation was affected. Did imp...

TUF, in-toto, and Sigstore only look pointless while nothing is on fire

I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.

Well, that didn't last long! Recording this on Saturday morning my time, I observed ShinyHunters having gone quiet since the massive haul that would have been the Instructure ransom. It was two weeks almost to the hour since I'd first heard rumour of payment being made,

Pi is now part of Earendil, but in the important sense it is still Mario’s project. He has been living with its issue tracker longer than I have, and he has been exposed to the weirdness of the new form of agent traffic in Open Source projects for longer too. This post is ...

I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing. It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life. ...

Submissions for Australia’s next National Cultural Policy closed in May 2026. I wrote one, on behalf of Tasmanian Game Makers, because I want games taken seriously as what they are: the art form most of us actually play.

Read the full submission on Tas Game Makers

Here are the highlights.

Games are the art form of our time. In 2025, 82% of Australians played them, the average player was 35, and women now make up just over half of all players. On the government’s own data, digital games development has been the fastest-growing of all cultural and creative activities in the country over the past decade. Games are also one of our most export-heavy creative industries: 93% of the Australian sector’s revenue comes from overseas.

On the <dl>

I learned a few new-to-me things about the <dl> element from this article by Ben Meyer:

1. A <dt> can be followed by multiple <dd>
2. You can optionally group the <dt> and <dd> elements in a <div> for styling - but only a <div>.
3. You can label them using ARIA.
4. They've been called "description lists", not "definition lists", since an HTML5 draft in 2008.

So this is valid:

<h2 id="credits">Credits</h2>
<dl aria-labelledby="credits">
  <div>
    <dt>Author</dt>
    <dd>Jeffrey Zeldman</dd>
    <dd>Ethan Marcotte</dd>
  </div>
</dl>

Here's a useful note from Adrian Roselli on screen reader support for description lists.

Via Hacker News

Tags: css, html, screen-readers, web-standards

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments. Spacelab was controlled by a French-built minicomputer, called the Mitra 125 MS. Unlike modern computers, this computer didn't ...

Squatter removal services, Apple finding uses for defective chips, process heat use in California, the brewing Colorado River crisis, and more.

Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world