Construction Physics
• Brian Potter
An enormous amount of ink has been spilled (some of it by me) on the trials and tribulations of complying with the National Environmental Policy Act, better known as NEPA.
Terence Eden’s Blog
• @edent
The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their DV2 camera to review. As their name suggests, this is a thermal / infrared camera - they've specifically designed this for bird watching and animal spotting. Let's put it through its paces and see how it compares to the competition! Straight away you can see it is different from normal IR cameras - they tend to have a small fixed screen and a …
The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
Intel was founded July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore’s law fame) and Robert Noyce and investor Arthur Rock. Intel’s employee #3 was Andrew Grove. Moore, Noyce, and Grove had all worked together at Fairchild Semiconductor in
The post Intel founded July 18, 1968 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet.
• Ernie Smith
With Sony clobbering the physical game market and Grand Theft Auto 6 eschewing discs entirely, it makes one long for kiosks that could make disks on demand—a model that actually once existed in the UK.
Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)
While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs, a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" written in Rust.
I figured it would be fun to try that out in a browser via WebAssembly. Here's the prompt I ran in Claude Code for web (Fable 5), and this is what the resulting tool looks like:
![Screenshot of a Mermaid diagram editor showing source code and rendered flowchart. The code reads: graph TD Start[Request received] --> Auth{Authenticated?} Auth -->|yes| Rate{Rate limit OK?} Auth -->|no| R401[401 Unauthorized] Rate -->|yes| H(Handle request) Rate -->|no| R429[429 Too Many Requests] H -.-> Log[Audit log] H ==> Resp[200 OK]. Below the code are controls labeled Max width: Fit output panel, Copy as text, and Copy link to this diagram. The rendered flowchart on a dark background flows top-down: Request received leads to Authenticated?, which branches yes to Rate limit OK? and no to 401 Unauthorized. Rate limit OK? branches yes to Handle request and no to 429 Too Many Requests. Handle request connects with a dotted arrow to Audit log and a thick arrow to 200 OK.](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/grok-mermaid-wasm.png)
The Old New Thing
• Raymond Chen
Watching the bits disappear.
The post The case of the invalid function pointer when shutting down the display control panel appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
On July 15, 1996, German PC manufacturer Escom declared bankruptcy. But Escom wasn’t necessarily just an ordinary PC manufacturer. Escom went bankrupt less than 2 years after acquiring the Commodore and Amiga brand names and starting to use their technology.
The post Reasons for Escom’s bankruptcy appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
Gedonder op kantoor, de WC blijft maar lopen. En erger nog, hij trekt niet meer door. Strontvervelend!
In een beetje grote organisatie gaat er nu druk gebeld worden, maar met wat pech loopt dat niet soepel. Facilitair beheer meent dat het niet hun probleem is. We bellen de verhuurder, maar die zegt wel over de riolering te gaan, maar niet over de toiletten. Na een weekje driftig telefoneren, betrokkenheid van juridische zaken, en escaleren is uiteindelijk duidelijk wie erover gaat.
Eli Bendersky's website
• Eli Bendersky
The Fourier series is a great tool for analyzing periodic functions. But what about functions that don’t repeat? We’ve seen that we can compute Fourier series for a non-periodic function defined on a finite interval, as long as we don’t care about its behavior beyond that interval …
Troy Hunt
• Troy Hunt
"Build a smart home", they said. "It'll make life so much better", they said. Well, life wasn't very bloody good at 23:00 the other night after travelling 33 hours from Paris only to find the IoT doorlock batteries dead and the
Dependabot now waits until a new release has been available on its registry for at least three days before opening a version update pull request. This cooldown is now the default and requires no configuration.
— GitHub Changeling, embracing dependency cooldowns
Tags: dependency-cooldowns, packaging, security, github
Release: datasette 1.0a37
A minor release. Performance and documentation improvements to the permissions system, plus I reverted a cosmetic API change which caused almost every existing plugin test suite to break.
Tags: datasette
TL;DR: is your refrigerator running malware? If so, you better catch it!
Krebs on Security
• BrianKrebs
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.
