I m really enjoying getting back into ice skating, but I can only get to the rink once a week (at least over the summer -- I'm aiming for twice weekly once Schools re-open) and I have the itch to do more skating than that. Where I live we re blessed with a seaside park with lots of smooth paths, a recently resurfaced beachside promenade, and a newly-built pedestrian/cycle path stretching up and down the coast: all great surfaces for roller skates. I convinced myself to buy some inline skates whilst the weather is good. I wanted something as close to my ice skating experience as possible. Bauer actually make an inline version of my ice boot, but the chassis is an unusual composite plastic thing which put me off. (here's a great video of a fantastic inline skater trying out the chassis). CCM have a new inline range for 2026, but sadly (much like their Jetspeed ice range) the fit wasn't good for me. I found a clearance pair of Bauer vapors from the previous generation: the Bauer Vapor x4. Very similar to my Fly30, but the difference in quality between the tiers is very apparent: boot stiffness, the comfort and quality of the liner. They fit well (possibly better), the rolling motion is really smooth (I think that's the bearings) and they looked pretty good to me: yellow highlights instead of the red used across the ice range. I've done a couple of miles in them so far. Time will tell if they prove useful for off-ice training! Many inline hockey players buy ice skates and convert them to inline. If I end up not using them enough I could consider doing the opposite.

Since I wrote about my fly30 ice skates, I'd continued to battle pain around the navicular bone in my feet. The action that seems to have finally fixed it was to perform a "punch out": a very localized remoulding of the area of the boot that presses against the sore area. I basically followed the process from this helpful YouTube video. I narrowed down the exact spot by borrowing some lipstick and transferring it from my navicular bone to the boot lining, then making that more permanent with a sharpie. My punch was a spare part from a radiator valve which I packed with US cents (I couldn't fit any UK coins in). For the receiving-end, I tried another part from the radiator valve but I think it wasn't sufficiently larger than the punch to work well, so I swapped that out for a spoon. I didn't have a temperature sensor I could use and I used a heat gun rather than a hairdryer, so I YOLO'd it a little. Some of the wrap on one of my boots is now distorted from where I didn't move the heat gun enough. It only took a minute or two to get the boot hot enough to be flexible. I set a 15 minute timer once the clamp was in place. I've only skated one session since I did this but the pain seems to have gone! It's remarkably freeing to be skating without constantly trying to manage pain. Now I can focus on technique.

I enjoy reading The Guardian's monthly round-up of new SF novels, which can be found in their Science Fiction Books section, and can also be read via feed. Since the round-up is of new books, at the time the round-up is published they're usually only available in hardback. When it comes to choosing a book to read, these days I am tending towards paperbacks: I've largely ran out of room for hardbacks. So I decided to apply a time delay to their feed. Six months is roughly enough that a book mentioned in a round-up should be shortly available in paperback. The first obstacle was that The Guardian only publish roughly the last six months of articles in their feed, and so the posts I want have disappeared. However, my Feed Reader (FreshRSS) had older copies stored in its database, and I am able to re-publish those using User Queries. (This also gives me an opportunity to filter out non-roundup articles from the Guardian's feed). It's then a nice short piece of scripting (this time, using Ruby) to filter the republished feed on the publication date. To make the most recent articles appear new, I also modify the metadata for filtered entries to appear 6 months newer than they are.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rss'
# replace with the user query feed URI
uri       = 'https://www.theguardian.com/books/science-fiction/rss'
now       = Time.now
sixMonths = 6 * 30 * 24 * 60 * 60
feed      = RSS::Parser.parse(uri)
feed.items.select! do  item 
  item.date + sixMonths < now
end
feed.items.collect! do  item 
  item.date += sixMonths
  item
end
puts "Content-Type: text/xml\r\n\r"
puts feed

I stuck that up on my private web server, subscribed to it in my FreshRSS and voila, a time-delayed list of books to read, most likely available in paperback.

(no, this isn't a blog post about Joy Division songs) Last time I wrote about Interzone, I was discussing issue #294, the first published under new management in a paperback-sized format ("JB6"). The format and presentation of the magazine was fantastic: it fit in a lot of my pockets, and was packed with 15 stories as well as the regular columns, in full colour with fantastic layouts and illustrations. Sadly there was only one more physical issue before Interzone was forced to become a digital-only publication. I don't want to dwell on the sad necessity to move to digital. Interzone continues on, celebrating the milestone issue #300 in 2024. Subscriptions are managed via Patreon. Issue #305 just came out. Instead I wanted to write a small bit about how I engaged with the paper magazine, and the difficulties I've had trying to engage with not just Interzone but any magazine-style publication in a digital context. With most fiction, I read linearly: start the beginning and read to the end, in order. That works well for me with e-readers. But for magazines (and most non-fiction) I don't, I jump around: usually starting with the table of contents, I might pick a short column to start, or jump into the middle of the "book reviews" section to read about a specific book. I might skip sections entirely. I find it very difficult to read like this with an e-reader. I think this is partly because I reference the depth of the paper book or magazine, its thickness, to orient myself. But it's also partly the limitations of e-ink. For print-Interzone, I used to start by inserting a small piece of paper inside the cover (the delivery slip was ideal). On this I listed the stories within and ticked them off when I read them (sometimes I double-ticked if I really liked a story). That helped me to remember, perhaps months or years later, whether I'd read all the stories or not, and which I liked. I could do something similar on some e-readers: the Remarkable for instance. But it's far from convenient to do on most e-ink devices. Interzone digital is available as both ePUB, the most common format for e-books, and PDF. For reading on my regular Kobo e-reader, PDFs don't work very well at all. I think this is generally true of most e-readers. Interzone was (and is) a well-designed magazine. The value of it was not just the content of the text, but the context: how the stories were presented; the accompanying art (most often colour in recent decades), but also the typesetting. ePUB doesn't specify much of that stuff exactly: it leaves that up to the client and the client's preferences. And there's a lot of advantages to that: Prefer a different font face or size? No problem. And most importantly for accessibility: If reading in ePUB makes Interzone available to more readers then that's a great thing. But sadly a lot is lost, IMHO. The solution I'm trying is to read the PDF version on the iPad Mini I resurrected earlier in the year. Despite being an Internet tablet, since it's not really usable for browsing the web anymore it's strangely still a distraction-free device. In fact it's pretty much single-purpose for reading Interzone and the odd other book which benefits from being read as PDF. I can appreciate the stylistic choices made in the page-setting as they were intended; I can quickly jump around the issue without waiting for an e-ink refresh; I get full colour; and whilst it would be tiring to read for a long time on the iPad screen, for the length of articles or stories in a magazine, this isn't a problem. It's not a solution for tracking what I've read (that version of ipadOS is too old to support clumsily scrawling on PDF pages with your fingers, at least in the Books app) but it otherwise seems to work well, so I'll see how it goes.

I used to ice skate as a teenager but I stopped at University. I tried to pick it back up in 2024 but had to stop when I got ill. I restarted in 2025, initially with a weekly skate session but last month I started group hockey skate lessons. I've been skating in a pair of Bauer¹ Nexus N77s that I bought 7 years ago on a work trip to Toronto. These did a great job of getting me back into the hobby for 6 years but recently I felt it was time to step up to a better quality pair. Despite being a size down from my shoe size, the Nexuses are too large: I had been compensating with thick socks but still struggling to get the boots tight enough. I'd have to wear gloves to lace up because I'd cut my hands pulling the laces otherwise. After too long researching/deliberating/kvetching (very much on trend for me) I upgraded to Bauer Vapor Fly30s another half-size down (and nearly ten times as much). The fit is much better, in almost every respect. They actually go on easier and I don't have to tear my hands tightening the laces. They feel like a natural extension of my feet. I seem to be using a different set of muscles to skate, so the first few sessions were very fatiguing, but that settled. The Vapor line is speed-oriented, which I thought would fit my skate style best. I have unfortunately gained a common problem: arch pain. More precisely, my navicular bone seems to be quite prominent², and that part is pressing uncomfortably into the boot. Boots typically take a few sessions to break in, but after 7-8 sessions the pain was getting to the stage that I couldn't skate for a full session without being in agony. The last time I skated I tried to throw everything at the problem: I'd had the skates baked³; bought some orthotic insoles; then some "Bunga" pads over the sore bit and an attempt to more loosely tie the laces over the affected area. I tried a ten minute skate, and it seemed a bit better. I then tried experimentally to swap back to my old skates, and I felt like Bambi: I just couldn't do it! They didn't press on the navicular, and they're softer so you can compensate for the size with tight lacing, but I had no confidence in them, I couldn't lean into the turns. They just felt weird. I realised there's no way back. I switched back to the fly30s, adjusted the bunga pad positioning, tweaked the lacing and went back on for about 40 minutes. It went well: the rink was quiet, it was cool whilst we had a heat wave outside, so I worked up a sweat. By the end there was some discomfort, but not too much, and I think partly the area is currently sensitive so just about anything will cause discomfort. Fingers (or toes) crossed that I've mitigated the problem! If not, it might be time to try a punch out.

I bought a new synth! Kind-of. I've traded my Minilogue-XD (full-size version with integrated keyboard) for the desktop/modular alternative. Why? Partly, because it fits on my desk better. Partly, because it changes the way you engage with the instrument. It makes a huge difference: the ivory keys come with so much cultural precedent. The module version of the synth gains a switch that lets you use the 16 sequencer step buttons as note inputs, so you can still play the thing solo. But the emphasis moves away from note generation and more firmly towards tone. Both versions have a lovely stained wood back, which you never see; the modular one has a hint of that at the front as well (which you do see). I plan to eventually buy a MIDI keyboard that could drive it, and other things: possibly an Arturia KeyStep or Minilab, but there's no rush on that. (It's about time I recorded and shared something I produced on this)

My youngest daughter and I recently started playing the tabletop game HeroQuest. Specifically, the recently-issued, cut-down variant HeroQuest: First Light. This is quite advanced for her age, and I'm a little surprised she's taken to it, but she's really loving it, It's pushed her to read bits of lore on cards and quest books that is way above her expected reading level, and we've been exercising her maths by adding up the gold we find on our quests and calculating what the heroes can buy with it in the store afterwards. Originally from 1989, Hasbro re-issued HeroQuest in 2020. I read about it at the time but didn't buy it. I wasn't sure who I would play it with. It also seemed expensive to me. It probably wasn't unusually expensive in 2020, nor now, for the sheer volume of finely-sculpted miniatures included. I also knew I had the original game in the loft, and I wasn't that keen on buying something I already had, although untangling the contents from several similar boxed games would take me many hours, and I wasn't sure how much of the game I would find. First Light was compelling because it is much, much cheaper than the full remake, so I was happy to take a punt. It's cheaper because it doesn't have any plastic monsters or furniture: instead cardboard cut-outs that stand up on plastic stands. For us, that is a significant drawback: 3D miniatures are much more immersive, But I can re-use the plastic miniatures I can find from the original game. First Light has a newly written adventure, better suited to beginners than the original game. The re-issue(s) have new art and new model sculpts that look fantastic. They've changed anything which tied into Games Workshop's IP and I'm really happy about that. They've made an effort to add women, almost entirely absent from the original. I'm certain my daughter wouldn't have tried it otherwise.

It's been ten years since I configured mount on demand backups to reduce the risk of my backups being zapped by mistake. Way back then I wanted to go one step further and use dedicated mount namespaces for backup jobs, but systemd didn't provide the necessary support (and still doesn't, despite the promisingly-named JoinsNameSpaceOf= configuration option.) I recently updated my setup to achieve this by hand. All backup jobs now have an extra pre-start instruction ExecStartPre=mkbackupns which runs a shell script to either set up a persistent mount namespace, or exit quietly if it already exists.

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
nsdir=/var/namespaces
nsfile=$nsdir/backup
nsfilex="$(echo $nsfile   sed 's#/#\\/#'g)"
private_propagation()  
    findmnt -o+PROPAGATION "$nsdir"   grep -q private
 
nsfs_is_mounted()  
    test "nsfs" = "$(awk "/$nsfilex/   print \$3  " /proc/mounts)"
 
if ! nsfs_is_mounted; then
    if ! private_propagation; then
        mkdir -p "$nsdir"
        mount --bind --make-private "$nsdir" "$nsdir"
    fi
    touch "$nsfile"
    unshare --mount="$nsfile" true
    nsenter --mount=/var/namespaces/backup mount /dev/phobos_backup/backup /backup
fi

I should note that I don't have the backup filesystem described in /etc/fstab to reduce the risk of it being mounted errantly in the main namespace. The other change is to prefix an invocation of nsenter for every backup job command. E.g.:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/nsenter \
        --mount=/var/namespaces/backup \
        borgmatic -v 1 prune create

next steps My backup scheme has lasted a decade with few tweaks (I moved it to Borg in 2020) which I am very grateful for. I want reliable, boring and robust. Persistent mount namespaces are a lot less convoluted if you have a persistent process to associate them with. I didn't, but a subsequent improvement I am making is introducing one, so I will likely simplify the above accordingly.

In January 2025, as a pre-requisite for something else, I published a minimal neovim plugin called nvim- wiki. It's essentially just the features from vimwiki that I regularly use, which is a small fraction them. I forgot to blog about it. I recently dusted it off and cleaned it up. You can find it here, along with a longer list of its features and how to configure it: https://github.com/jmtd/nvim-microwiki I had a couple of design goals. I didn't want to define a new filetype, so this is designed to work with the existing markdown one. I'm using neovim, so I wanted to leverage some of its features: this plugin is written in Lua, rather than vimscript. I use the parse trees provided by TreeSitter to navigate the structure of a document. I also decided to "plug into" the existing tag stack navigation, rather than define another dimension of navigation (along with buffers, etc.) to track: Following a wiki-link pushes onto the tag stack, just as if you followed a tag. This was my first serious bit of Lua programming, as well as my first dive into neovim (or even vim) internals. Lua is quite reasonable. Most of the vim and neovim architecture is reasonable. The emerging conventions about structuring neovim plugins are mostly reasonable. TreeSitter is, well, interesting, but the devil is very much in the details. Somehow all together the experience for me was largely just frustrating, and I didn't really enjoy writing it.

Royals are my favourite ships in No Man's Sky. The HMS Blueberry is not my first Exotic/Royal ship (that was the Gravity Hirakao XVI, and a story for another time). After years of on-off playing, I recently found my first Royal multitool: Blue, with gold detailing. I have a Royal-style jetpack (I don't remember where I got that). I thought I'd try and colour-match my multitool, ship, jetpack and outfit. Since I only had one multitool, I matched the others to it. And the HMS Blueberry (credit for the name goes to Beatrice) was the Exotic in my collection which matched. The HMS Blueberry is in viewable in my showroom, Honest Jon's Lightly-Used Starships.

In or around 2014 I bought an iPad Mini (2), and following the normal lifecycle of iOS devices, a major OS update eventually killed it as a useful, general-purpose device: operating it was just too sluggish. It remained useful as a streaming media player for a little while longer until eventually the big streamers (BBC iPlayer, Netflix, etc.) stopped supporting the version of their app which the iPad could install: the last officially supported iOS was 12.4.8 in July 2020, and by November it was officially dead. During its useful life, the iPad Mini witnessed Apple's transition from 32 to 64 bit apps. In the 32 bit days, there was a little cottage industry of app developers, and in particular, game developers. There were even several independent websites (App Shopper, Pod Gamer, Free-App Hero), which aided in sorting through the morass of apps to find the good ones (then as now, the App Store itself was almost impossible to effectively browse). This all went away during the 32/64 transition, as many small-scale developers weren't actively developing their applications or games any more, and weren't prepared to pay the time or apple tax to rebuild and publish them as 64 bit. The last version of iOS that supported 32 bit apps on this device was 10.3.3, and by luck, there are some methods available to install this old version of iOS on the Mini 2 Today. A couple of years ago I did so, and I kept no notes so sadly I can't report on which method I used. But it worked, and I was able to install a bunch of old 32 bit games that I had no access to on more modern devices. Prior to John Carmack's¹ departure from iD Software, he'd been responsible for publishing several experimental iD software games on iOS. These mostly disappeared in the 64 bit transition. Amongst them are ports of Wolfenstein 3D, classic Doom, some RAGE tie-ins, but perhaps most interestingly. at least two original games, designed for the phone form factor: Doom 2 RPG and Wolfenstein RPG. Another notable game that disappeared was "Civilisation Revolution", a cut-down Civ game that for a while I was obsessed with. Rather than port it to 64 bit, the publisher withdrew it, and then published a "new" game "Civilisation Revolution 2", requiring a separate purchase. Sadly, it is rubbish, nowhere near as good as the first one. Anyway, having managed to downgrade it to the 32 bit iOS and install these old lost games, I then, of course, never played them and the device continued to gather dust. I should make clear that, running such an old unpatched iOS version means it's not safe at all to put any kind of sensitive information on this, including entering passwords. I don't recommend even opening the web browser. However, this 12 year old device does have some use as an e-reader, especially for certain types of ebook or magazine, that I've struggled to engage with on other devices. That's a topic for another blog post.

I was reading a post on Alex Chan's website¹ that referenced the concept of digital gardens, a concept/analogy for organising information which dates back to the 90s. This old concept is getting new traction today by contrasting the approach with "endless stream" as used and abused by social media, but also how blogs are typically presented. This site, my homepage, has a blog, and that's the bit that most people who interact with the site will experience. Partly, because it's the bit that gets syndicated out: via feeds; on Planet Debian and downstream from it; once upon a time on Twitter; nowadays on the Fediverse. However there's more to my homepage than that. The rest of it may be of little interest to anyone beside me, but it's useful to me, at least. So I may switch focus a little bit from mainly writing blog posts, and tend to the rest of the garden a bit more. Some recent seeding and pruning: Recently my guest status at Newcastle University came up for renewal, so I wrote down my goals in the Historic Computing Committee for the next year or so, and put them here: nuhcc. I've also been pondering what I'm up to in Debian at the moment, so took some time to add my current projects to that page.

I saw Ladytron perform in Digital, Newcastle last night. The last time I saw them was, I think, at the same venue, 18 years ago. Time flies! Back in the day (perhaps their heyday, perhaps not!) Ladytron ploughed a particular sonic furrow and did it very well. Going into the gig I had set my expectations that, should they play just these hits, I'd have a good time. The gig exceeded my expectations. The setlist very much did not lean into their best-known period: the more recent few albums were very well represented and to me this felt very confident. The lead singer, Helen Marnie, demonstrated some excellent range, particularly on some of the new songs. Daniel Hunt did a lot of backing vocals and they were really complementary to Helen's: underscoring but not overpowering. I enjoyed nerding out watching Mira Ayoro's excellent wrangling of her Korg MS-20. One highlight was an encore performance of Light & Magic, which was arguably the "alternate version" as available on the expanded versions of that album or the Remixed and Rare companion. I thought I'd try to put together a 5-track playlist for a friend who attended the gig but isn't super familiar with them. As usual this is hard. I'm going to avoid the obvious hits, try to represent their whole career and try to ensure the current trio each get a vocal turn in the selection. They actually released their latest album, Paradises, yesterday as well. One track from it is in the list below. I'm Not Scared by Ladytron Kingdom Undersea by Ladytron Blue Jeans by Ladytron He took her to a movie by Ladytron Transparent Days by Ladytron (If you can't see anything, the bandcamp embeds have been stripped out by whatever you are viewing this with)

Oh dear! I've been suffering print reliability issues on my Prusa Mini+ for quite a while, roughly since they introduced Input Shaping (although that might not be the culprit). Whilst trying different things to resolve it, I managed to sheer off the brass nozzle within the heatblock. I now have half the nozzle stuck in the ratchet spanner, and half in the heatblock. What to do next? I can try and get the nozzle out of the heatblock, by screwing something into it or using an extraction screw. I've been warned this could be messy and dangerous. Less risky might be to change out the whole heatblock. They don't seem to be expensive. Back in FOSDEM I asked the Prusa folks what cool projects I could do with the Mini+ they looked a little blank (I think the Mini+ is now a somewhat forgotten product) but they did say somebody had managed to port over the "Nextruder" from the more recent Prusa XL/MK4. I could take a look at that. Another thing I've always wanted to explore (although I had intended it to be temporary/reversible) was converting it into a plotter, for plotter art. Somehow this is my first 3d printing blog post in over a year. The printables.com feed I linked to is still going, I'm happy to report (as is the one I wrote but didn't publish, slightly more surprisingly)

When I wrote about the redhat logo in a shell prompt, a commenter said it would be nice to achieve something similar for Debian, and suggested " " (U+1F365 FISH CAKE WITH SWIRL DESIGN) which, in some renderings, looks to have a red swirl on top. This is not bad, but I thought we could do better. On Apple systems, the character " " (U+F8FF) displays as the corporate Apple logo. That particular unicode code point is reserved: systems are free to use it for something private and internal, but other systems won't use it for the same thing. So if an Apple user tries to send a document with that character in it to someone else, they won't see the Apple unless they are also viewing it on an Apple computer. (Some folks use it for Klingon). Here's a font that maps the Debian swirl to the same code point. It's covered by the Debian logo license terms. Nerd Font maps the Debian swirl logo to codepoints e77d, f306, ebc5 and f08da (all of which are also in the Private Use Area). I've gone ahead and mapped it to all those points but the last one (simply because I couldn't find it in FontForge.) Note that, unless your recipients have this font, or the Nerd Font, or similar set up, they aren't going to see the swirl. But enjoy it for private use. Getting your system to actually use the font is, I'm afraid, left as an exercise for the reader (but feel free to leave comments) Thanks to mirabilos for chatting to me about this back in 2019. It's taken me that long to get this blog post out of draft!

Mathmos had a sale on spare Lava lamp bottles around Christmas, so I bought a couple of new-to-me colour combinations. The lamp I have came with orange wax in purple liquid, which gives a strong red glow in a dark room. I bought blue wax in purple liquid, which I think looks fantastic and works really nicely with my Rob Sheridan print. The other one I bought was pink in clear, which is nice, but I think the coloured liquids add a lot to the tone of lighting in a room. Recently, UK vid-blogger Techmoan did some really nice videos about Mathmos lava lamps: Best Lava Lamp? and LAVA LAMPS Giant, Mini & Neo.

I want to get back into the habit of blogging, but I've struggled. I've had several ideas of topics to try and write about, but I've not managed to put aside the time to do it. I thought I'd try and bash out a one-take, stream-of-conciousness-style post now, to get back into the swing. I'm writing from the lounge of my hotel room in Lanzarote, where my family have gone for the School break. The weather at home has been pretty awful this year, and this week is traditionally quite miserable at the best of times. It's been dry with highs of around 25 . It's been an unusual holiday in one respect: one of my kids is struggling with Autistic Burnout. We were really unsure whether taking her was a good idea: and certainly towards the beginning of the holiday felt we may have made a mistake. Writing now, at the end, I'm not so sure. But we're very unlikely to have anything resembling a traditional summer holiday for the foreseeable. Managing Autistic Burnout and the UK ways the UK healthcare and education systems manage it (or fail to) has been a huge part of my recent life. Perhaps I should write more about that. This coming week the government are likely to publish plans for reforming Special Needs support in Education. Like many other parents, we wait in hope and fear to see what they plan. In anticipation of spending a lot of time in the hotel room with my preoccupied daughter I (unusually) packed a laptop and set myself a nerd-task: writing a Pandoc parser ("reader") for the MoinMoin Wiki markup language. There's some unfinished prior art from around 2011 by Simon Michael (of hledger) to work from. The motivation was our plan to migrate the Debian Wiki away from MoinMoin. We've since decided to approach that differently but I might finish the Reader anyway, it's been an interesting project (and a nice excuse to write Haskell) and it will be useful for others. Unusually (for me) I've not been reading fiction on this trip: I took with me Human Compatible by Prof Stuart Russell: discussing how to solve the problem of controlling a future Artificial Intelligence. I've largely avoided the LLM hype cycle we're suffering through at the moment, and I have several big concerns about it (moral, legal, etc.), and felt it was time to try and make my concerns more well-formed and test them. This book has been a big help in doing so, although it doesn't touch on the issue of copyright, which is something I am particularly interested in at the moment.

FOSDEM 2026 was great! I hope to blog a proper postmortem in due course. But for now, The video of my talk is up, as are my slides with speaker notes and links.

I'm going to FOSDEM 2026! I'm presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it's scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I'm the warm-up act! The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), but sadly there's no Java devroom this year. There's a story about that, but it's not mine to tell. Please recommend to me any interesting talks! Here's a few that caught my eye: Debian/related:

• Package managers la carte: A Formal Model of Dependency Resolution
• 32 years of Debian: how a do-ocracy keeps evolving
• Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source?

Containers:

• Who s reproducing the reproducible images?

Research:

• Data science from the command line: a look back at 2 years of using xan
• Research software engineering: a movement and its instantiation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Other:

• Window Managers after Xorg (Mir)
• Charming Gray Buttons of the XX century: how widget toolkits evolved with computer architectures
• PAW, a programmable DAW

No man s Sky (or as it s known in our house, "spaceship game") is a space exploration/sandbox game that was originally released 10 years ago. Back then I tried it on my brother s PS4 but I couldn t get into it. In 2022 it launched for the Nintendo Switch¹ and the game finally clicked for me. I play it very casually. I mostly don t play at all, except sometimes when there are time-limited expeditions running, which I find refreshing, and usually have some exclusives as a reward for play. One of the many things you can do in the game is collect star ships. I started keeping a list of notable ones I ve found, and I ve decided to occasionally blog about them. The Horizon Vector NX is a small sporty ship that players on Nintendo Switch could claim within the first month or so after it launched. The colour scheme resembles the original neon switch controllers. Although the ship type occurs naturally in the game in other configurations, I think differently-painted wings are unique to this ship. For most of the last 4 years, my copy of this ship was confined to the Switch, until November 2024, when they added cross-save capability to the game. I was then able to access the ship when playing on Linux (or Mac).