Tao of Mac

Sep 7th 2026 · 1 min read · #eu #lg #privacy #regulation #surveillance #tv

LG is watching you watch TV ➹

Sep 6th 2026 · 10 min read · #apple #hardware #ipad #kuycon #monitors #reviews

The Kuycon P20

The desire to own an Apple Studio Display has probably been hanging over most Mac desktop users since time immemorial (well, since 1998 at least, but most people are more familiar with the “modern” 2022-era look) for two reasons:

  • It defines what a desktop Mac display should, ideally, look like–a black-edged, aluminium-backed slab with zero frills and impeccable image quality.
  • It has, traditionally, been hilariously expensive along every single dimension, including polishing cloths, until the historic date of August 27th this year.

And I, too, have always wanted one. But economics and insularity are part of the reason I never got one, although that hasn’t stopped me: I’ve always been curious about what it would be like to use a credible approximation of one, but with a twist: I like taller displays.

And now, I can confirm that this is probably the best single monitor set-up I’ve used for a long while:

Kuycon P20 with iPad and desk setup
The P20 on my living room desk.

Disclaimer: Kuycon supplied me with a P20 free of charge (well, actually two, but that’s part of the story) and this follows .

Getting here took several months. The first panel flickered, and pressing on a corner of the monitor improved things. I suspected a partially disconnected internal connector, but couldn’t confirm the cause, although I very strongly suspect shipment damage.

I returned the first unit, but the replacement arrived without a stand, so I couldn’t use it for many weeks. And then I went on vacation, and that further delayed things…

I finally set it up (again) on our living room desk (the space I now retire to whenever I’m not working, either due to needing clear separation from work or to my 3D printers making the office too noisy) and have now been using it properly for a few weeks.

And (spoiler) it’s pretty great.

Why the P20

First of all, I’ve always been a fan of the Microsoft Surface Studio–not the computer itself (which was far too feeble), but its screen size and 3:2 aspect ratio. Its 4500x3000 resolution was also exactly the same as the Kuycon P20.

My preference for taller displays goes back a long way–all the way back to the huge, monochrome 4:3 DECstations I used in college, and I still prefer those proportions to the modern 16:9 default that we seem to be saddled with in this age of video consumption.

Second, I’ve been using LG panels and a combo and setup at my office desk for quite some time now, largely because ultra-wides, despite their popularity for gaming and video editing, are actually a slow-burning hindrance when researching, writing or coding because of their comparatively limited screen height. I use my portrait display for coding, researching, final page layout stuff, and, increasingly, CAD and 3D modelling.

However, it’s a bit annoying to flip windows to and fro (even with ), so when I realised I had a shot at using a subtly taller, better balanced display with what I still think are the right proportions for me, I jumped at the chance.

Why do I care about this so much? Well, for three reasons, two of which are related to my physical health:

  • I have high myopia, which makes the vertical space on my displays particularly important since anything off-centre, being invariably distorted by my corrective lenses, requires actual neck movement to view properly–even if my widescreen were curved, I would still have trouble seeing it clearly without moving my head.
  • My back and neck have been giving me trouble, so being able to raise the screen to the centre of my visual field matters a lot to me.
  • I simply prefer taller displays for productivity, as they allow me to see more content vertically without constantly scrolling.

Viewing Area

In order to better convey my point of view on this, I had my “assistant” draw up this comparison:

Active display areas of the Kuycon P20, LG ultrawide, LG DualUp and a 14-inch MacBook Pro drawn to the same physical scale
Active display areas, shown at the same physical scale.

The rectangles above are drawn to the same physical scale (which took some doing), leaving out bezels and stands.

I’ve also added a couple of insets showing how 4K and 1080p images fit at native 1:1 pixels, rather than the physical sizes of other monitors. You can futz with desktop scaling to change how much content fits and how large the text is, but the panel proportions stay the same–and the comparison makes those much clearer than diagonal sizes alone.

The P20 has a 28.2-inch IPS panel running at 4500x3000 and 60Hz, with a 3:2 aspect ratio (also written as 4.5:3). That gives it about 22% more pixels than my 5120x2160 LG ultra-wide, arranged in a much taller, narrower workspace–and a bit sharper, too.

In The Box
Kuycon P20 display and stand shipping boxes
Separate boxes for the display and stand.

The monitor and stand come in separate boxes (even though the illustration on the monitor box shows both, the stand is in the box on the right).

Inside the main box, everything’s neatly packed:

Kuycon P20 protected by foam inside its box
The foam insets have all the accessories.

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, this is very heavily based on what we’ve come to consider Apple design language, from the glossy display, thin black bezels and all-aluminium look to the back vents:

Kuycon P20 rear vents
The rear vents are part of the all-aluminium look.

And yes, that is part of the reason I was intrigued by the P20 in the first place, and a controversial aspect for some, but what matters is what the hardware can do for you, and how.

Mounting Options and Ergonomics

Besides the sturdy aluminium stand (which I like the look of, and which allows the P20 to be rotated 90°, if you want), the monitor itself ships with a stylish VESA mounting bracket:

Kuycon P20 VESA mounting bracket showing the top catch and retaining-screw hole
The top catch holds the mount in place; the screw locks it.

The bracket itself appears to be machined out of a couple of solid plates of aluminium and is well designed in terms of strain relief, but as it happens none of my monitor arms was strong enough to hold the monitor without noticeably straining and drooping (my LGs are, after all, encased in light plastic), so I had to wait for the replacement stand.

The solid aluminium stand holds it steady. It does require some assembly, but nothing overly complicated:

Kuycon P20 stand assembly
Assembling the solid aluminium stand for the P20 takes 5 minutes.

Once the stand arrived, its height adjustment let me put the screen at the centre of my visual field–the top stop is high enough to get it where I want it.

Compatibility

You get 2 HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, and a USB-C port as inputs, plus a USB-C hub with 2 additional ports for peripherals (I plugged a Logitech Brio 4K into one of them) and a headphone jack.

Kuycon P20 ports
The available ports, in line with the power connection at the centre of the monitor’s back panel.

Note that there are no speakers on this monitor (and likely no good place to put them inside the chassis), so you’ll need to rely on external audio solutions.

As you would expect, we plugged everything we could into the monitor to see how it would handle different connections:

  • All our Macs (including old Intel ones) worked without any issues.
  • Our Windows machines, both Intel and ARM, also had no trouble detecting and using the monitor at full resolution (and HDR where supported, which was the usual hit-and-miss in Windows).
  • Our Linux machines also detected and used the monitor without any major issues–I even wrote a Noctalia shell extension for my for managing monitor placement in Niri.
  • The iPad Pro worked seamlessly, as discussed in the next section.
  • And a Chromebook I tested also worked without any issues (except for resolution limitations due to its ARM hardware).

The only input I was unable to test was DisplayPort, simply because we have zero machines in the house with it–most of the laptops and SBCs I used connected to the monitor’s USB-C input, including those with Thunderbolt ports.

My trusty old had no real trouble driving it at full resolution (albeit at 30Hz) via HDMI. I also tried a few USB-C to HDMI adapters, including one of my trusty travel cables, without any significant issues (other than 4K limitations in some of the converters, which was expected).

iPad Use

To put it bluntly, this thing is glorious to use with my . Completely overkill, but also completely right as far as screen proportions and resolution are concerned, even if Apple still provides essentially zero control over any monitor features other than HDR:

iPadOS display settings being its usual dense self
External display settings for the P20 on iPadOS.

I worked on this draft on the P20 itself using my iPad Pro ( on the right of the display, references on the left, and Notes on my iPad just below the monitor), and I would make that a habit if it were easier to manage and split windows on :

iPadOS split-view, also being its usual dense self
Working my way back in time through my notes and references on the P20 with my iPad Pro.

Colour Accuracy

One of my teens, who is just as obsessively attuned to colour as I am, spent an afternoon trying to adjust the P20 to a close match of what our MacBook screens can do and eventually gave up–with or without HDR, our unit had a salmon/pink/warm tint that we just couldn’t get to go away for a while.

I don’t have any colour calibration hardware and I tend to only edit photos on my iPad these days out of sheer convenience (and, let’s face it, due to having given up any pretence at doing “pro” photography over the years), but that tint was something I noticed immediately, even after trying the various DCI-P3 profiles macOS offered in its settings window.

The monitor’s own DCI-P3 and sRGB modes didn’t resolve it either, so we’ve settled on turning off HDR and using its “User” and “Cool” colour settings instead–that and some more judicious tweaking of other settings finally removed the tint, so expect spending some time fiddling with settings on both ends if you’re fussy.

It was impossible to do a true side-by-side with my LG monitors because of plain physics (I don’t have a big enough desk, and swapping one of my monitors for testing the P20 alongside would require me to rewire a bunch of things), but we still haven’t been able to get the colours quite right, in any setup.

HDR

HDR mode was… OK, I guess.

But with HDR enabled, I couldn’t adjust the monitor’s colour settings (and the iPad offered no help there, either):

HDR settings for the Kuycon P20
The OSD in HDR mode on the P20.

Note that I’ve mostly given up on it on computers both due to the wide variation in colour gamuts and the fact that it only really works for me on the Mac (and even then mostly on internal displays), so none of my machines are set to output HDR–but letting YouTube HDR videos play out at 4K on the P20 while I worked provided some uncanny “this feels like a window” moments, even if some of it was over-saturated until I settled on a colour space I liked.

In my tests, switching to HDR made the desktop look washed out, with muted colours on regular screen elements, and switching back made the difference particularly obvious on the P20. Even on the Mac, some YouTube footage was completely washed out in HDR mode–I couldn’t isolate whether that was down to the content, the software or the monitor.

Things I Missed, Occasionally

Feature-wise, the one thing I found myself missing in the P20 was the ability to display two inputs–although it would likely have been pretty awkward in this 4.5:3 aspect ratio, I do use that capability a lot on my LG ultra-wide (to have work and personal machines alongside, in an approximately 4:3 ratio) and on my LG Dual Up (to have my Mac and an SBC, or a TV dongle to watch the news in more troubled times).

The Remote

I was not a fan of the remote:

The remote for the Kuycon P20.
The remote for the Kuycon P20.

My objection is to having another remote at all: it’s the kind of loose end that I invariably end up losing or finding with a dead battery in between the three times I am likely to use it every year (which has been the fate of most non-TV remotes in the house). I already have three of these things for different kinds of portable monitors and gadgets, and those never work reliably.

I’d have much preferred an LG-like five-way switch to another remote to keep track of.

Speakers

There are no built-in speakers, so if you want audio beyond what your computer or tablet provides, you’ll need separate speakers or headphones.

I didn’t miss them myself–the MacBook, my iPad and the Surface Laptop I was working on all have great speakers, and the only mild annoyance was when any of the machines forgot to keep using its internal speakers.

Verdict
The Kuycon P20 on my living room desk.
A reminder that any monitor is no match for sunlight and reflections, especially if it’s glossy…

After all the delays, the P20 has actually been a very good fit for the way I work. I like the height, the resolution and being able to write or research without shuffling windows between two displays, and I particularly like using it with the iPad–so much that it is going to stay on my living room desk (where I retire to focus and write) for the foreseeable future.

And not just for myself, since with college-aged children around, having an extra display in the living room has proven to be extremely useful for everyone in the household–although fights haven’t broken out over it yet.

The colour tint is the only reservation I’d have before recommending it to anyone doing colour-critical work. I don’t have calibration measurements, but both of us could see it, and settling on a cooler preset isn’t the same as correcting it. But we did manage to offset it, so I would rate it as “finicky”.

But for my purposes–writing, coding and everyday use, plus occasional sessions–the proportions are still perfect to my eyes.

Sep 5th 2026 · 5 min read · #ai #dev #macos #virtualization

Notes for August 29–September 5

As many people have remarked, the moat between ideas and technical execution is narrower than ever, and that has a number of consequences–both when it comes to investment (in this case, personal, although …) and focus. And I think I need to be more selective about what gets my evenings, since I am back at work and already spending too much of my free time building things on a computer.

I Need To Stop Using AI

Why? Because I am right back where I was before my break, spending too little time doing anything but sitting at a computer, or using a computer to do things that only work on a computer.

I keep having ideas, and even though I finish my workdays achy and drained, I inevitably get caught up in the excitement of being able to build stuff quickly. And since my free Codex subscription is due to end this month, I’m trying to make the most of it…

I need to get back to electronics, hardware, and reading (maybe even music) as a hobby, and stop spending so much time glued to a screen–which is something I have been trying to balance against my writing backlog, and part of the reason the notes this week are relatively sparse.

But there are some hints of progress in finding a better balance between screen time and other activities:

More Time In The Big Blue Room

I finally hit my daily step goal for several days in a row, which has been a small but satisfying victory and has eased some of the strain from sitting at my desk for long periods (albeit not completely).

The trick? Doing the grocery shopping myself. You end up walking more than you would if you relied on delivery, and it adds a bit of variety to your daily routine. Not to mention milk carton lifting, which is a surprisingly effective upper-body workout.

Review Backlog

I spent some time (re)setting up test machines and going through my review backlog, trying to catch up on notes and tasks that had accumulated while I was focused on other projects–even though I have little to show for it in terms of output, I managed to at least organize most of my notes, some of which date back several months now…

A Legion Of My Own

As an offshoot of the work I did with , I’ve been poking at two related problems for a while: getting agents to preserve their state, and tackling the holy grail of freeing computing environments from being tied to a particular machine.

legion takes that idea and gives it a twist. Rather than packing everything into one portable process, it is a self-hosted runtime for durable agents backed by a Raft cluster, with WASM and Bun functions (making those available across the whole cluster is still work in progress):

  • every agent turn is event-sourced
  • nodes form a Raft cluster
  • code is deployed as content-addressed WASM modules or Bun bundles
  • it’s all organized as a 9P namespace

The namespace provides a uniform way to manage the whole thing, and was, I confess, a whimsical choice. But my intention is that crashes, restarts and individual machines going away should not make an agent stop or lose track of ongoing work, and so far this seems like a moderately sane way to do it.

This is still at an early design stage and might end up going nowhere, but there are already enough runnable examples to exercise most of the architecture:

Legion Web Chat showing a durable conversation across reconnects
Legion’s web chat reconnecting to a durable conversation

Keeping Track of Meeting Agendas

I had an epiphany about how to keep track of meeting agendas without relying on my memory alone: give the computer the talking points and have it listen for what we’ve already covered, leaving me to pay attention to the conversation.

And yes, [Teams] does that, but I wanted something that works entirely on my Mac and was fully local, without relying on any cloud services, plus I was curious to see how far I could push Apple’s on-device models for better privacy and responsiveness.

Which is why swift-smart-prompter started as a little demo of how much useful work Apple’s on-device speech and language models can do, even on relatively low-end hardware.

Then , and it grew into a Mac app that listens to both sides of a call, tracks which topics have come up and suggests a short next response in a floating cue panel (which I can keep above the meeting window, instead of continually looking away to consult my notes):

Sometimes I am just too tired to keep track of meeting agendas
Sometimes I am just too tired to keep track of meeting agendas

And, of course, there’s a hack: instead of using diarization, I rely on the audio split: ScreenCaptureKit gives me the microphone and system audio separately, so the transcripts are labelled “You” and “Call”–it doesn’t try to distinguish individual people at the other end at all.

And although I’ve been hacking on on-device translation and semantic understanding, that’s still a bit slow, so topic matching has a keyword-based fallback, with Apple Intelligence adding contextual cues and coverage classification that so far seems to work regardless of the language being spoken. Mostly. Ok, for English and Portuguese, at least for now.

Plus, I can manually correct the checklist when it gets things wrong. Without Apple Intelligence, it still shows the next uncovered point.

It all stays on the Mac, with no cloud API or account, and neither audio nor transcripts are written to disk. It does need macOS 26 and the appropriate on-device speech models, and multilingual use is a bit of a chore, since you have to fish around to enable everything.

Poor Man’s Screen Sharing

On a more pragmatic note, I have a “me” problem with Azure Virtual Desktop: meetings happen inside it, but sometimes I need to share something that is on my local desktop, which the remote machine obviously cannot see.

My poor man’s fix is provisionally called ShareCam: select a region locally and pipe it into AVD as a camera. Crude, but it works, and once I clean it up I will put it up on GitHub someplace:

Sharecam selecting a region of the local desktop to share inside Azure Virtual Desktop
Selecting part of my local desktop to send into Azure Virtual Desktop

And yes, this shows up instead of my camera view, but that is perfectly acceptable for my use case. The only real challenge is that screen sharing typically has a dedicated pane in Teams and Zoom, whereas my solution just replaces the camera feed and people have to arrange it themselves accordingly.

This was also based on rcarmo/swift-app-template, which I’ve been tweaking to build all my new little Mac tools. It took me all of… 25 minutes to get it working end-to-end, including a second pass for individual window selection and capture that still needs some UX tweaks. gpt-6-astra did the core implementation in less than 15 minutes–having the template ready certainly helped.

And this, I think, is what I should be doing more of: investing my personal development time in satisfying life hacks and little tools I will actually use instead of trying to boil small oceans–those I can always keep doing at work…

Sep 1st 2026 · 5 min read · #agents #clojure #gi #go #interpreters #lisp #performance #wasm

Not a Joke

I have a long and somewhat embarrassing history with that goes back to the years when it was fading from academia and LISP machines were giving way to and DECstations (a transition that should be familiar to anyone who read the UNIX-HATERS Handbook), so I got properly hooked on when it came out.

But had the huge disadvantage of being tied to the virtual machine. That dependency was also one of its superpowers, but I always saw it as its biggest flaw.

Despite that, I used it in production for a few years and have been mourning the fact that you can’t have it without the ever since. On a or an ARM SBC, starting a just to run a REPL feels like bringing a shipping container to a picnic.

Joker was the escape hatch I’d been looking for–a standalone binary that understands most of syntax and needs no external runtime. I started using it for scripting and linting years ago, and when I began thinking about building gi (my own lightweight coding agent), embedding Joker as the extension language was the obvious choice.

There was just a tiny little problem: it was slow. Not “a bit slow”–it was orders of magnitude slower than on anything involving loops, arithmetic or recursion. Fine for linting, but useless for anything else.

I forked it and spent two very intense days making it fast over a bank holiday. I’ve written about go-joker before, including :

go-joker notebook with Mandelbrot rendering
The Go-Joker notebook rendering Mandelbrot through the WASM-backed imaging path.

But I recently realised that I never really put together all of my notes from last April, and it’s long overdue to write a proper post about it, so here it is.

The Approach

My deep, dark past poking at the (did you know that had one audited externally in Europe? Ask me how I know) and my limited time working on internals–plus a lot of reading about the tiered compilation–all told me the same thing: the path from “slow interpreter” to “fast interpreter” follows a fairly predictable arc. First you identify the hot paths, then you lower them to a simpler representation, then you specialise that representation for the common types. If you’re lucky, you can go further and compile to native code for the innermost loops.

This isn’t something I’ve done often (not for a few decades, really), but I used to discuss it with one or two compiler nerds I worked with ages ago–we had long, weird phone calls about gcc, of all things–so I had an idea of how to do it.

The trick was getting a coding agent to do most of the mechanical work while I steered the architecture. I had gpt-5.5 implement each layer while I provided the design constraints, which initially boiled down to:

  • flat bytecode
  • register-based execution
  • no heap allocation for primitives
  • a tree-walker fallback for anything weird

A few hours of thumbing through ancient books, interspersed with liberal swearing and infected by relative madness, eventually got me to a tiered execution engine:

The final thing, in a very rough sketch
Go-Joker’s tiered execution pipeline, including WASM, typed IR, boxed IR and tree-walker fallbacks.

Each tier handles what it can and drops to the next for anything more complex. Early on, execution would start in the tree-walker and be promoted as the interpreter recognised patterns it could optimise, and the implementation grew progressively more intricate from there.

And since I needed something to compile, I went out and grabbed The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, which has a range of computational scenarios that resist trivial optimisation (to a degree), along with ready-made comparisons.

Phase 1: IR Bytecode

The first step, heavily inspired by , was compiling hot loops and functions to flat bytecode–an intermediate representation with fixed-size opcodes, a value stack and no allocation for integer/float operations. This alone got mandelbrot from 450ms down to about 40ms. The key insight (which I stole from the JIT literature) was that most loops are either purely numeric or purely structural–they rarely mix–so you can have a typed path that handles Int/Double without boxing and a boxed path for everything else.

And my old JVM tricks also paid off: stripping Int and Double down to single-field structs (8 bytes, stack-allocable) cut allocations by half across the board. That is the kind of change an won’t suggest unless you ask very specifically, because it breaks the type hierarchy in ways that it “feels” are wrong until you measure.

Phase 2: WASM Compilation

The realisation that pure numeric loops could go further came when I noticed that wazero (a pure- runtime) could JIT-compile to native code–with zero cgo, another requirement of mine. If the tree-walker detected a loop that was purely integer/float arithmetic, we could emit WASM bytecode for it, hand it to wazero and get native-speed execution (well, almost) without leaving the process.

This was huge fun: the arithmetic benchmarks went from 12ms (IR) to 0.24ms (WASM), giving what used to be a interpreter pretty much / speed. It’s limited–it only handles cases where every value is a known numeric type and there are no collection operations–but when it applies, it’s great.

Phase 3: Polishing

The rest was just grinding out the hotspots. Per-instance function compilation caches (irGetFnProg), capture-slot optimisation for closures (captureSlotSet), a StringCursor native type for zero-allocation string iteration (because, well, it was getting embarrassing to append stuff to strings…), transient vectors for non-escaping loop mutations and tail-call rewriting at parse time–I had to ask piclaw to check the ordering, but this was all done by systematically going through the benchmarks.

Given my fondness for profiling, I wanted this thing to be self-diagnosing, so I asked gpt-5.5 to add a runtime introspection namespace (joker.runtime) so scripts can inspect their own IR, output, escape analysis and allocation profiles.

By the end, I had some pretty nice results:

benchmark comparison
Current CLBG and micro-benchmark results in milliseconds per operation; lower is better.

Why This Matters (for me, at least)

The original goal wasn’t really to build a fast (well, not this fast, at least), but as usual I wandered off big time. Eventually I had to get back to what I wanted in the first place: an extension language for gi that:

  • compiles into the binary (no external runtime)
  • starts instantly (no , no Node.js)
  • is fast enough for real work (not just config parsing)
  • has a REPL for interactive debugging
  • can introspect its own execution

I now have all five. Scripts and extensions for gi can be written in , stored in the database alongside everything else, and executed at speeds that range from “competitive with ” to “competitive with JIT-compiled ”, depending on the workload.

I’m not doing anything with gi right now, but the above is close enough to the dream that I still use go-joker quite frequently.

The AI Angle

Two days–that’s how long this took, from “Joker is too slow” to “Joker beats on Mandelbrot.”

I could not have done this in two days without AI–the mechanical work of implementing 30+ IR opcodes, writing typed dispatch paths, plumbing emission, and generating benchmark harnesses would have taken weeks by hand.

But (and this is the interesting bit for me) I also could not have done it with AI alone–the architectural decisions (tiered execution, typed vs. boxed split, for numeric leaves, the fallback chain) came from knowing how the and work internally, remembering that I had a copy of Smith & Nair and the wazero source (kudos), and spending years thinking about what makes interpreters fast and (let’s face it) taking a few shortcuts.

All in all, I think this ratio of thinking to execution (and, by the way, go-joker comes with a massive battery of tests I would never have thought of writing) is what I want to get out of most of my projects. It’s never going to be as popular as the in , but it was a lot of fun.

Sep 1st 2026 · 1 min read · #apple #ceo #management #services #software

Tim Cook's Final Message as Apple CEO ➹

Aug 30th 2026 · 3 min read · #eink #productivity #readers #supernote #xteink

My E-ink Summer Report

I’m now back to work and already embroiled in far too much, so I’m going through my infinite set of mental checklists and trying to relax by offloading some of the stuff I never got around to writing down. While I was on vacation, one of the things I did was tune out (as much as possible), which meant relying more on my e-ink devices.

They look great together
They look great together

Nomadism, Redux

I’ve written a bit about , but that was almost a year ago, and in the meantime there have been quite a few software updates–plus additional tweaks of my own.

But the interesting thing is that none of that changed the way I use the device. It’s definitely replaced my for nearly everything (and more). It’s been by my bedside for a year and a half now, and I still use it to take notes and catch up on the news. Catching up on the news has become somewhat more frequent, as I don’t need (or want) the additional features (or distractions) afforded by my iPad.

I haven’t used it more even though I do most of my reading on it, but I also haven’t used it less, despite a fairly long hiatus in my regular reading habits. It is very handy, virtually weightless when detached from its cover and frictionless for noting down stuff–even during work calls, when I mostly take notes to reinforce my memory of the event rather than for accuracy.

So it was a no-brainer to take it along for a week in Spain, but the new environment reminded me of three shortcomings:

  • The lack of a front light makes it hard to use for late-night reading marathons (and it’s still the thing I miss the most, even if I love how light and crisp the screen is).
  • It can be slow (and crashy) when running Android apps (the Kindle app crashed a few times).
  • I still can’t read or annotate PDFs on it comfortably (going “back” to it instead of an iPad makes the screen size and speed differences pretty obvious).

I still wish it had a fingerprint reader, too. And, these days, I would probably appreciate a microphone for privacy-respecting dictation (I haven’t played with Bluetooth on it enough to tell if that would be a viable option).

But a bit of hacking on picoflux made it trivial to read the daily news comfortably over hotel Wi-Fi, and there are a lot of small hacks that I can pull off, even if the base system is already well polished. And even though I don’t use it often as a regular tablet, , , Termux and let me do the few things I need to keep tabs on my home lab and “regular” notes.

The Mightiest Tiny Book

But based on screen time alone, the e-ink device I used the most on vacation wasn’t the Nomad–it was the .

I installed a nightly build of CrossPoint Reader on a whim to see if it fixed my Wi-Fi problems (spoiler: 1.5.0-rc didn’t, 1.6.0-rc apparently does now that I am back). The X4 worked perfectly, and I carried it almost everywhere we went.

At this point, I would consider it the perfect travel and beach gadget. It is easy to pick up/put down/put away, has absolutely zero distractions, and gave me everything I needed for entertainment and learning. My 3D-printed hard cover protected it, and I added a little rubber USB-C plug to keep sand out.

Toning Down

Vacations and trips are self-contained periods when it’s pretty easy to cut down on noise and distractions by shifting to different devices for quieter, more focused downtime. It doesn’t surprise me that this went so well.

And although it is impossible to gauge how much time I’ve spent on e-ink devices over the year, I want to spend more time with them as I try to stay focused and productive. Doing more on low-end devices is going to be harder, of course, but the quality of the downtime also matters, and at least I can build my own solutions.

For instance, I’ve been making a few notes about improvements to my OPDS and syncing server, and I’ve been meaning to investigate Bluetooth audio and put together a dictation plugin for the Nomad–the SDK seems straightforward enough…

Aug 28th 2026 · 3 min read · #3d printing #ai #home automation #notes #weekly

Notes for August 24–28

I came back to work this week, started catching up on everything, and decided to go out for groceries without an umbrella (it is still August, right?) and got drenched.

That might be why I ended up having to take a day off–the fact that there was a virus rampaging through the household for a few days might have been entirely coincidental. But it removed all the momentum from my return to work and didn’t improve my ongoing shopping list of ailments (back, plantar fasciitis, etc.).

Trying to get some exercise in by going to the pharmacy was not on my bingo card.

Musings On Poverty

Since misery loves company, I followed up on by pulling up a spreadsheet and trying to figure out how deep I would be in the hole if I bought a new desktop Mac, and… nope. I don’t think I am going to buy any new Apple hardware this year (unless something critical breaks). In fact, maybe no hardware whatsoever except for reviews, which just feels weird.

I got some very generous recently, though, so expect interesting hardware write-ups soon.

Squeezing H.264 into Unlikely Places

In that spirit, I revisited a little hack that let me keep using old hardware: we’ve had M5Stack ESP32 cameras in the house , but Apple, in their wisdom, broke repeatedly until they stopped working (to be fair, they probably shouldn’t have worked in the first place).

I’ve used them to keep tabs on 3D printers, chimneys (it’s extremely irritating when your upstairs neighbours decide to renovate their kitchen), and other things, but they had become kind of useless since didn’t support their MJPEG streams and I really don’t want to use anything but the Home app.

Well, it turns out that paid off: I realised that, yes, an ESP32 can do H.264 encoding, and spent a while iterating on the problem with gpt-5.6-sol–first getting encoding to work, then trying to figure out why didn’t like the stream and mapping out all the parameters involved, and finally adding caching and interleaving encoding with streaming until I got 5fps (which is enough for most uses).

This led to a somewhat off-the-cuff HN comment, which I reproduce below:

As I was reading this, I realized that the ESP32 HomeKit debugging session I had running was taking a while, and this happened:

Me: What are you doing?

Agent: I’m resolving Apple’s private video-resolution lookup table to determine whether iOS 26 supports 320×240 for HomeKit live streaming. The decompiled source hides the numeric constants, so I:

  • Downloaded/extracted the iOS 26.1 arm64e dyld cache to /workspace/tmp/ios26-dyld/.
  • Built and installed the read-only apfs-fuse utility needed to mount Apple’s APFS image.
  • Planned to extract HomeKitDaemon and decode its resolution table.

Me: Oh, OK. Carry on then.

These are weird times.

I was using piclaw for this, but a few days later Codex pulled a very similar stunt on me–I am increasingly of the opinion that sol is perhaps a bit too proactive…

Unsocial

This week I cancelled my LinkedIn Premium subscription, which is ironic in to comment here, but doing so felt long overdue. The reason I did it is that even with a corporate discount I was getting negative value from it:

  • It has devolved into a vanity fair that is worse than Twitter (if that is possible, solely because I still get some value from my daily 15 minutes of Twitter).
  • There was absolutely zero sense in paying for any of the “perks” it offers, all of which I have used approximately zero times.
  • The spam was getting really annoying, even after I patiently disabled everything.
  • People I meet at work can use my e-mail address to connect with me, so contact discovery is moot.
  • And, in a shocking, shocking development over the past few years, recruiters don’t really use it for recruiting any more–they just spam you without even checking if you’re a match.

None of that is worth the money–unless they were paying me to use it.

I can’t really remove it from my phone yet, but… we’re getting there.

Cleaning Up

I also spent a fair amount of my downtime filing e-mail and poking at a few interesting things, largely to keep myself organised.

For good measure, I decided to take another stab at the “personal CRM” thing–doing reviews is great, but you end up asking yourself “what is the state of X?” too often, so I got piclaw to whip up a moderately sensible data schema:

Entity relationship diagram for contacts, organisations, messages and work pipelines
The data model behind my personal CRM experiment.

The key thing here is that there is no UI and no integrations–I just drop e-mails (or entire mailboxes) into a chat, and piclaw files them away and reasons about them. Retrieving data is, as you’d expect, trivial:

  • If I want to see the overall status, I get an interactive Kanban board in the piclaw UI.
  • If I ask about someone or something, I get search results and a little table of our correspondence, including a plain-English summary of what transpired.

I thought about adding this to Memento, but the transactional and threading parts wouldn’t be a good fit (the CRM handling skills and modus operandi went there automatically, though, which was nice).

Addendum: Apparently It Can Ship Things Now

Turns out sol’s proactivity has manifested again. I asked it to review and test the secure P2P messaging add-on, and, without any intervention on my part, it provisioned two additional piclaw instances, tested the add-on across all three and then cut the 2.15.0 release.

Sol provisioning two additional Piclaw instances, testing Remote Peer across all three and publishing Piclaw 2.15.0
I only asked it to review and test the add-on.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams on children and off switches, I may need to work out where sol’s is…

Aug 28th 2026 · 1 min read · #hardware #open source #reinforcement learning #robotics #rockchip

Microduck ➹

Aug 28th 2026 · 1 min read · #ai #hardware #ram #semiconductors #tariffs #trump

Trump Plans to Tax Chips in the “Single Dumbest Way Imaginable” ➹

Aug 27th 2026 · 1 min read · #acquisitions #ai #hugging face #nvidia #open source

NVIDIA Is Buying Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion ➹

Aug 25th 2026 · 1 min read · #ai #apple #apple silicon #mac #mac mini

M5 Pro and M6 Mac minis ➹

Aug 25th 2026 · 1 min read · #ai #legal #llm #open weights #privacy

Thomson Reuters Builds Its Own Frontier Model ➹

Aug 23rd 2026 · 4 min read · #3d printing #ai #home automation #notes #weekly

Notes for August 17–23

Tomorrow I’m going back to work after a rather lopsided summer break (not feeling up to it physically or mentally), and the social network pendulum is swinging back into a bit of normalcy as I progressively tune nearly all of them out.

Twitter (which I refuse to name otherwise) is still a controversial (but time-boxed) part of my news intake since has turned into a desert for any serious discussions other than violent opposition, LinkedIn is still crammed with sales-y ego trips and keeps peddling glitz rather than substance, but I do need to figure out what is going on.

For science, I dipped into a few of them over the weekend, which did not improve my general mood–it doesn’t look like I am going “back” into a saner industry (rather the opposite), but at least I sort of got my book reading habits back over the break, and I can finally say I did more productive stuff than just doomscrolling.

3D Stuff

First my shaver broke in the most subtly annoying way (the retaining latch was clearly not designed to outlive the mechanism), then I decided to do something about designing and printing cases for a bunch of SBCs and realised I no longer need to buy dust mesh for those:

A few things that needed fixing
A few things that needed fixing

Turns out I can print 0.1 mm-thick dust filters with zero issues using PLA and a 0.4 mm nozzle, even if the prints themselves are a bit susceptible to minor flaws if the filament is aged. But being able to design them to size (and shape) is promising.

The Future Is Not Evenly Distributed

I ended up trying on the only machine I have that can somewhat run it at speed (my MacBook Pro M3, which has 36GB RAM), and… it sort of worked (with RAM to spare, which is nice), but quickly reminded me why I prefer doing on servers as the battery visibly drained and the machine became warm enough on my lap to be noticeable.

Doing small programming tasks (algorithms or singleton functions) without an agentic harness context was doable (so I could probably rely on it if I was doing the same stuff I needed three years ago), but it takes forever (something like 30 minutes) to churn through a basic sub-32Ktok agent context, so… I still need better hardware.

Claw in a Bun

Under the pretext of upgrading to , I did some of the long-standing cleanup work in piclaw, dropped in a few fixes and dependency updates, and let it loose.

As recounted , I just want to use the thing now, so unless there’s some amazing new frontier model out or some critical fix, I’m going to try to throttle back on it–also, my free Codex subscription is running out soon, so when that goes I’ll have to re-think how to keep my work and hobbies separate.

But things are looking up–RAM use seems lower, most of the annoyances I had seem to have been fixed, and there are (crosses fingers) no immediate issues.

Homebridge 2.4

After a very careful waiting period, I finally updated to homebridge 2.x, which, of course, broke things. In my case I am using homebridge-webos-tv to control my living room TV and homebridge-mqtt to create virtual HomeKit devices from , and they both broke instantly when I upgraded to 2.4.0 (yeah, I waited that long) because they seem to be fairly niche and not fully tested with 2.x yet.

The solution (which took a while to figure out) was to disable their child bridges and force the use of the bonjour-hap advertiser in the top config stanza:

"bridge": {
  "name": "Homebridge",
  "username": "0E:…",
  "port": 51826,
  "pin": "123-45-678",
  "advertiser": "bonjour-hap" <- ADDED THIS
}

At this time, nearly all of my automations are pure native HomeKit, with only a few things patched through (which I upgraded to 5.0.4 this week as well), which is great except that it exposes me to Apple’s general penchant for breaking things every now and then.

But everything “just worked” aside from a minor configuration glitch in a “Virtual Bell” accessory that I use to merge our doorbells into a single alert, and my usual fiends, the ESP32 cameras that we still use to check on open windows and stuff.

Those tiny and slow cameras are long overdue for replacement, possibly with something like the Aqara G100. The M5Stack hardware was never really meant to be compatible, but I’ve been hacking at the firmware for years and they have suffered through years of Apple breaking things subtly (without even documenting the right behaviour for camera devices), so at this point I keep them around for a sort of sport.

Minor Annoyances

If you’ve missed my , well, I’ve been trying to get a lot of writing done on my iPad, and… stuff happened. I’ve also put together a swift-app-template to see if I can standardise a bit the stuff I am doing, and made a point of cramming in as many quality-control steps as possible so I don’t keep reinventing the wheel, starting with SwiftPM defaults and ending with a comprehensive set of agent skills consolidated from my library.

I also pinned down and fixed a site rendering bug (images inserted using certain ancient formats of references would be interpreted as page links).

Reading

Building on last week’s book marathon, I finished The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi, which was a nice, fun romp, and got started (again) on Norse Mythology, still one of my favourite reads.

I think I’m ready for whatever Loki tosses at me tomorrow when I log back in.

Aug 23rd 2026 · 1 min read · #editors #macos #markdown #writing

Dinkus ➹

Aug 22nd 2026 · 2 min read · #apple #ipad #ipados

Apple Papercuts Summer Edition

This is a short follow-up to my piece, wherein I bunched together a few more annoyances that I’ve come across while using my extensively on vacation.

If you needed any more proof that doesn’t really do QA testing, I think just two of these would be enough. And I’ve confirmed they are all still there in 26.6.1, freshly released last week.

The Spotlight Near Miss

At first, I thought this was a hardware problem. My brand new had been giving me some odd glitches of late (I keep having to physically reconnect it for keypresses to register), but after a few days of using a desktop Bluetooth keyboard I am positive that all the input glitches I’m having are a software problem.

One of the main symptoms is that invoking Spotlight with Cmd+Space works but then typing inside Spotlight fails to register. But a second attempt works, so my attempts at invoking Mail every day have the same outcome:

  • First attempt at Cmd+Space, M… does nothing useful–Spotlight appears but doesn’t show “m”
  • Hit Cmd+Space, M again–“m” appears and, lo and behold, “Mail (open)” is suggested (after an embarrassingly long pause, but hey, at least it happens)

Yes, I could tap the icon. But if the above doesn’t convince you that nobody at Apple actually tested this, then I don’t know what would. Oh, wait, I have a couple more:

The North Star Is Portrait Orientation

Another interesting bug that has surfaced recently is that nearly every time I use a Bluetooth mouse with my iPad when it’s plugged into an external display, iPadOS swaps the X and Y axes, which is just… ridiculous.

The steps are always the same:

  • Wake up the iPad while it’s plugged into an external display (typically by swiping the Home Screen up so that Face ID begrudgingly notices I’m here).
  • Turn the mouse on, move it up
  • Wonder why the cursor is moving left

You know why that happens? Because my iPad is in landscape mode, not portrait, and when the mouse is detected, iPadOS does not take that into account. But the Home Screen was in landscape mode. I swiped “up”. This is not fucking rocket science, guys.

And, again, for this one there are zero excuses.

SpringBoard Needs Frequent Breaks

Every now and then, while my iPad is plugged into an external display, my entire iPadOS “session” crashes–black screen, emergency spinner on the iPad display, everything gone (well, fake gone, just like the fake iPadOS multitasking).

Over my break, I mostly ran , , and , with some cameos by various terminal emulators and the usual social media garbage. None of them are particularly taxing, and the vast majority of my external display time was spent writing or looking up references.

This is not a stability story. It’s not even a reliability story. Having your session wipe out like this is simply unacceptable.

You Want to Do What With Your Windows?

This one’s a twofer: We all know iPad window management is sub-par––but there are two things that annoy me to no end:

  • Swiping up on your iPad display to flip through applications completely kills keyboard input on the external screen until you Cmd+Tab back to the application you were typing in
  • You cannot even think about picking which windows get assigned to quarter screens.

This last one is tantamount to the Odyssey, and it should probably be on IMAX due solely to its dramatic plot.

After painstakingly inching your mouse towards the almost invisible semaphores, clicking on them to make them actually usable even though they pulse and expand when moused over just to tease you, you then have to play the green button roulette.

That may, according to its internal whims and in a complete travesty of UX polish (that we, the elders, remember from ancient times), either maximise the current window or (maybe) show you a menu.

If you are worthy of the gods (or just plain lucky), you will finally get a window layout menu and get to pick “Fill and Arrange”, which has completely random behaviour, making it impossible to figure out where your windows will end up, and leading you to believe you have any choice in the matter when you later try to arrange them manually.

And no, you can’t have a right-first half-screen arrangement, either. You are not that worthy.

Aug 22nd 2026 · 1 min read · #ai #ios #software #swift

Stop Making TUIs ➹

Aug 21st 2026 · 15 min read · #agents #ai #architecture #arm64 #bun #pi #piclaw #typescript

Building Piclaw on Top of an Opinionated Coding Agent

I’ve spent the better part of six months building piclaw–my personal AI assistant, workspace and, occasionally, agent swarm–on top of Mario Zechner’s engine, and I think it’s time to write about not just my motivation but also how I feel about having invested that much time into the whole thing.

Read More...

Aug 20th 2026 · 1 min read · #ai #bun #javascript #rust

Bun 1.4 ➹

Aug 20th 2026 · 2 min read · #ai #llm #saas #software #web

The Age of Infinite Software

I am most definitely not the first person to mention this, but the past year has seen a Cambrian explosion of two things: AI deniers who base their judgement on very limited exposure (or effort to use it) and thousands of variations on software of all kinds, from the perennial to-do list to AI-infused toothpicks.

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Aug 18th 2026 · 1 min read · #app store #apple #developer #dma #eu #ios #sideloading

Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union ➹

Aug 18th 2026 · 1 min read · #frasier #games #television

Frasier Fantasy ➹

Aug 17th 2026 · 1 min read · #hardware #llm #local inference #quantisation #qwen

Qwen 3.8 27B Is Excellent, But Slow ➹

Aug 16th 2026 · 4 min read · #agents #ai #archivebox #golang #homelab #inference #notes #rust #weekly

Notes for August 9–16

This was a different week, partly because we decided to watch the eclipse from a Spanish beachfront and partly because I actually read three books. There is an entire sub-thread around my back and neck aching worse than ever and my sleep patterns looking like a game of Splatoon that I will spare my readership, though.

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Aug 12th 2026 · 1 min read · #apple #chess #design #icons #macos

Nature Is Healing ➹

Aug 8th 2026 · 4 min read · #agents #ai #calibre #eink #homelab #jellyfin #notes #reading #weekly #youtube

Notes for August 3–8

I have a problem. Or, rather, I have two problems:

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Aug 7th 2026 · 1 min read · #gaming #id software #machinegames #memoirs #quake

Quake: Dawn of the Machine ➹

Aug 6th 2026 · 6 min read · #3d printing #flashforge #hardware #kingroon #klipper #two trees

3D Printing State of the Union

Since I got and I’ve been documenting my endeavours in this realm in a rather haphazard way, I thought it would be useful to do a sort of catch-up/snapshot of where things are (and have been) for a while now.

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Aug 6th 2026 · 1 min read · #arm64 #homelab #proxmox #servers #virtualization

Proxmox VE Gets Official Arm64 Support ➹

Aug 5th 2026 · 1 min read · #agents #ai #cloudflare #piclaw #self-hosting

Cloudflare OS ➹

Aug 5th 2026 · 1 min read · #ai #apple silicon #llm #local inference #quantization #ternary

Maple-Preview ➹

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