These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

🔖 Peaceable Kingdom by Patti Smith

Performing on Colbert, November 7, 2025.

🔖 Don’t buy a DAC for lossless audio. Get this instead

So yes, a DAC makes sense, but only if you stop there. If you’re trying to build an organized, reliable desktop listening setup, an audio interface makes far more sense than stacking separate DACs, amps, and adapters. Most standalone DACs focus solely on digital-to-analog conversion and little else. Meanwhile, an audio interface, even a simple one like the Focusrite Scarlett Solo, does that job and adds features you’ll actually use every day.

🔖 Postgres Internals Hiding in Plain Sight

The Postgres catalog is how Postgres keeps track of itself. Of course, Postgres would do this in a relational database with its own schema. Throughout the years several nice features have been added to the internal tables like psql tools and views that make navigating Postgres’ internal tables even easier.

Today I want to walk through some of the most important Postgres internal data catalog details. What they are, what is in them, and how they might help you understand more about what is happening inside your database.

🔖 A House of Dynamite

A House of Dynamite is a 2025 American apocalyptic political thriller film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Noah Oppenheim. The film features an ensemble cast led by Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, and Tracy Letts. Its plot follows the U.S. government navigating an official response to a single nuclear missile launched by an unidentified enemy.

🔖 The Legacy Code Survival Guide: Add Features Without Fear

In 2025, Steven Diamante delivered a talk on Legacy Code at the Seattle Crafter Meetup. Although I’m familiar with these techniques, I thought they were particularly well articulated.

🔖 L’inspirothèque d’un numérique plus écologique

L’inspirothèque de Limites Numériques est une bibliothèque d’idées, d’expérimentations et de projets inspirants pour penser un numérique plus écologique. Ce travail est alimenté au fur et à mesure par notre veille, nos réflexions, vos retours et vos contributions

🔖 Linked Open Usable Data for Cultural Heritage: Community Building and Semantic Interoperability in Practice

This presentation shares key findings from my PhD thesis Linked Open Usable Data for Cultural Heritage: Perspectives on Community Practices and Semantic Interoperability defended at the University of Basel in 2024.

My research examined how Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD) specifications like IIIF APIs and Linked Art fostered collaborative knowledge creation in cultural heritage, focusing on implementations in both the Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives (PIA) project and Yale’s LUX platform.

🔖 AI Search Has A Citation Problem

The findings of this study align closely with those outlined in our previous ChatGPT study, published in November 2024, which revealed consistent patterns across chabots: confident presentations of incorrect information, misleading attributions to syndicated content, and inconsistent information retrieval practices.

🔖 Demystifying AI

In this webinar I cover:

• The difference between AI, Generative AI and Machine Learning and why it matters
• How generative AI tools used for daily tasks actually work – and what they can and can’t do
• What to be aware of when using generative AI tools or commissioning work that uses generative AI tools

🔖 Community-based development of a metadata profile for educational resources

In October 2023 the first official version of the General Metadata Profile for Educational Resources (AMB – Allgemeines Metadatenprofil für Bildungsressourcen) was published, a schema.org-based specification on how to describe educational resources with structured data in JSON-LD. Though the metadata profile was developed by and for German-speaking OER initiatives, it may well be worth adapting in other contexts.

🔖 alrpal / TinyETL

Transform and move data between any format or database instantly. No dependencies, no config files, just one command.

🔖 lychee: Catch broken links in seconds

Fast, async, stream-based link checker written in Rust. Finds broken URLs and mail addresses inside Markdown, HTML, reStructuredText, websites and more!

🔖 Crusty Interpreter

Challenge yourself by implementing an interpreter for a programming language that you don’t know (Lox) in a programming language that you might not know (Rust) from a book that uses a programming language that a lot of people used to know (Java).

🔖 Pluribus (TV series)

Pluribus (stylized as PLUR1BUS) is an American post-apocalyptic science fiction psychological thriller television series created by Vince Gilligan for Apple TV. The series stars Rhea Seehorn in the lead role, who previously worked with Gilligan on the AMC series Better Call Saul.[4]

🔖 Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities

“A Machine-Shaped Hand” is a clever piece of propaganda. Its elevation of AI to the status of the quasi-sentient and its reduction of human subjects to interchangeable avatars for the reader’s grief provide a convenient distraction from the grief of real people mourning the wholesale denigration of the values and assumptions that Altman’s end-of-millennial predecessors and Silicon Valley contemporaries have systematically laid waste to in the name of dynamic innovation: namely, the right to a fair wage, stability of employment, and scope to think (the latter of which depends on the former two), not to mention the basic premise that writing is a craft and should, in fact, require effort.

🔖 TRMNL

TRMNL is an e-ink companion that helps you stay focused.

🔖 Pikaday

A friendly guide to front-end date pickers!

🔖 Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core

In examining entanglements between IP and public interest issues, Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core illuminates how technical infrastructure is now a proxy for political and economic power. Ongoing global controversies over the Internet Protocol ecosystem hint at its importance and why IP is a flashpoint mediating broader conflicts in various cultural and historic contexts.

🔖 ufotofu

Ufotofu is a Rust library of abstractions (“streams” and “sinks”) for asynchronously working with series of data — except we call them producers and consumers, and have strong opinions about the API designs.

An ufotofu sequence consists of an arbitrary number of repeated items, terminated by at most one final value. A producer yields these values one at a time; a consumer receives them one at a time. Both traits can emit an error on any method call.

🔖 Docling

Docling simplifies document processing, parsing diverse formats — including advanced PDF understanding — and providing seamless integrations with the gen AI ecosystem.

🔖 Bumble Berry Pi

A cheap, easy-to-build Raspberry Pi Handheld Cyberdeck

🔖 dani-garcia/vaultwarden

An alternative server implementation of the Bitwarden Client API, written in Rust and compatible with official Bitwarden clients [disclaimer], perfect for self-hosted deployment where running the official resource-heavy service might not be ideal.

🔖 From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy

When Microsoft opened a data center in central Mexico last year, nearby residents said power cuts became more frequent. Water outages, which once lasted days, stretched for weeks. The shortages led to school cancellations and the spread of stomach bugs in the town of Las Cenizas, said Dulce María Nicolás, a resident and mother of two. She has considered moving.

🔖 drones run linux: the free software movement isn’t enough

but stallman is an old man now. the world moved on without him. he beats the same war drum, but nobody is listening. groups of capital formed, and two libertarians started the open source movement[1] as a corporate-friendly free software alternative.

and they won.

and won. and won. and won and won and fucking won. the accidental benefits of the free software movement: a global community working asynchronously, sharing code without pay. these important, critical benefits, which were responsible for the absolute dominance of things like gcc, the gnu coreutils, and linux - have been hopelessly devoured

🔖 Animal

Uxía has a pet store and employs her uncle Antón, a rural veterinarian.