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  Bets open as to whether we will discover soon that NORAD has rewritten its Santa tracker using AI, and that now Santa - and also Satan, due to lack of QA - has been grounded.

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  Sorry, but perhaps Microsoft should not be running its own mailserver?

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  RE: https://mastodon.babb.no/@km/117606036767811103 And here's a great write-up (by Kirill / @km@mastodon.babb.no, who runs a Norwegian law firm) of how they run their business on Free software, without a dependency on Microsoft. #lawfedi

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  Ah, the season of "sorry mate; I didn't see you*" begins. Me, cycling, in a reflective jacket, with bright lights on my helmet and my bike. I'm fine, and it was a miss not a hit, but *sigh* all the same. * left unsaid was "because I haven't bothered to defrost and wipe my windows"

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  It is often amusing to see someone throwing "anti-AI zealot" around as if it were an insult.

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  It arrived too late for Halloween, but never mind!

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  Well that scared me for a moment...

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  > Standing charges from [UK] household gas bills will be removed for around 23 million homes. ... Instead, these fixed costs will be paid on the unit rate. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/chancellor-abolishes-standing-charges-on-gas-bills-to-make-payments-fairer

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  So while everyone was patching their php installations and adjusting the certificate stores, what other naughtiness has gone unnoticed?!

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  A lot of my job is just... listening to people. They literally ask for just this. I think that I'm pretty good at this - and I've plenty of practice - but I can always do better. So I've bought a book about counselling, in case this has any useful tips.

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  > "A guide to running a stand at FOSDEM" Here's a very useful blogpost from @rubenwardy@hachyderm.io, especially for anyone who has not staffed a FOSDEM stand before. If I could add just one thing, it would be "and wear a decent mask; pack a spare / replacement filter". Air flow was dreadful, and it was *rammed* with people. https://blog.rubenwardy.com/2026/10/05/running-a-fosdem-stand/ #FOSDEM #FOSS

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  Question for other professionals: How do you *genuinely* identify your own learning and development needs? Not in a box-ticking sort of a way - actual, genuine, "this would be useful", development. Stuff that it is worth spending your time on. (I have no colleagues. I've asked clients for feedback, specifically what I can do better, or things they'd like me to do differently, or things that they have valued in other professional advisors, and I have turned up nothing.)

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  If you walked into a room (which is not a room for storing elephants) and there was an elephant in that room, would you mention that there was an elephant in the room?

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  Self-hosting is a dreadful choice for many people, for anything that they actually care about. Annoyingly, *not* self-hosting stuff is also not a panacea, and generally entails picking the least worst option (which can be challenging in itself), and then understanding what one *still* needs to do to mitigate the risks of that choice. There is no single good choice and - sadly - do I see that changing any time soon. I'd love to be wrong here.

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  New blogpost: "On Free software project boards and governance" My reflections on what it takes for a board of a FOSS project to be effective. They probably apply equally to other, non-FOSS, volunteer boards too. https://neilzone.co.uk/2026/09/on-free-software-project-boards-and-governance/ #Linux #tech #FOSS #blog

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  I am off to play Airsoft today! First mission: get out of the bedroom and get ready for Airsoft without waking my sleeping wife. *stealth mode on*

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  We have had solar panels for a few months now, and I still get joy from the idea that we are making use of energy which would otherwise just being going to waste. As the price and complexity of PV systems (e.g. via balcony solar) decreases, hopefully this will be available to more and more people. It is quite wonderful to me that, so far today, everything I have done has been powered by sunlight, with enough spare to pop some into our battery.

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  Happy Friday, especially to those of who you haven't been around so much recently because life has been challenging. 💚

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  Let's say that a distro comes with a package management / software installation tool, with default repositories (sources of software which can be installed). Anyone can run their own repo to distribute whatever software they want. Any user can add whatever repo they wish. Some people involved in the distro do not wish to support software created with (any) genAI in its default repos, and other people involved in the distro feel that some users might want to install such software. Does th...

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  > KDE and AI, and you, and me Am I misreading this? Someone involved in KDE *banned someone* for pointing out another user's "odious Twitter posts", and has not unbanned them and apologised to them? https://pointieststick.com/2026/09/23/kde-and-ai-and-you-and-me/

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  My first impression of a £135 colour eInk Android tablet (well, eReader) is pretty impressive. It can run Tor Browser (installed via F-Droid) just fine, and browsing the web is more than tolerable! More fiddling to do, but so far, so good.

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  > Many law firms set to fail without interest income Honestly, this baffles me. I am not a conveyancer, and I do not have a client account, but I struggle, ethically, with the idea of law firms pocketing the interest earned on their clients' money. https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/many-law-firms-set-to-fail-without-interest-income-benchmarking-survey/5127964.article

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  Genuine question: what are people seeing in an "agentic operating system", that I am obviously missing?

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  I would be interested to hear specific recommendations, from your own personal experience, for a computer to act as a low-powered server: * relatively small form factor * low power consumption * amd64 * runs Linux nicely (i.e. all hardware supported) * available to buy new in the UK, but without needing an account manager / any sort of nonsense like that * has ongoing firmware updates from the manufacturer, via fwupd It doesn't need more than 16GB of RAM, nor a beefy processor. Thank you!

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  One thing I heard a lot about, and hear nothing about now: VR headsets. I thought that they were the future - of gaming, especially - but, unless I have completely missed something, they seem to have fizzled out. High price and limited, novelty value, perhaps?

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  Do you procrastinate?

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  When I see statements like "teenagers are spending 4-6 hours online, instead of going outside and meeting people" as a justification for further web regulation, I wonder to myself: - if it had been 4-6 hours reading books, practising musical instruments, creating art, or similar, would they be demanding that books, instruments etc. have a watershed? If not, why not? - what is the "acceptable" amount of time for a teenager to spend online each day? What makes it so? - &quot...

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  For anyone thinking about age verification, identification, privacy, safety, and such like online, please may I *highly* recommend this wonderful book, "Queer Privacy", edited by @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social: https://leanpub.com/queerprivacy I cannot speak highly enough of it. It is pay what you like, and is DRM-free. #EUKIDSAct

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  > EU KIDS Act to restrict social media platforms’ access to children in the EU Another fine mess... https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/eu-kids-act-restrict-social-media-platforms-access-children-eu

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  Due to new legislation prohibiting addictive social media features, my admin had told me to be less fun and interesting online.