Álex Córcoles (coding)

My "production stuff":

- https://github.com/festivus-es/festivus - public holidays calendars for Spanish cities
- https://github.com/remote-es/remotes - companies hiring in Spain for remote positions

Usable WIPs:

- https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/ - track self-hosting package updates (such as YunoHost)
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/ubpkg/ - package manager for "upstream binaries"
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/termflux - Miniflux terminal client

"Vendoring" by Carson Gross

https://htmx.org/essays/vendoring/

"You get more of what you make easy, and if you make dependencies easy, you get more of them."

"This demonstrates significant cultural problem with dependency managers:

They tend to foster a culture of, well, dependency."

Some little-used #Python regular expression features that *aren't* confusing punctuation! https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/202504/regex_affordances.html

Tired: Teachers using tools to find students cheating with AI.

Wired: Teachers using tools to figure out how many of their new students are bots who are just there to submit enough AI-completed assignments that they can claim financial aid in someone else's name.

This story from the Voice of San Diego is worth a read:

"When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before. "

"By the end of the first two weeks of the semester, Smith had whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes, including those on the waitlist, to just 15. The rest, she’d concluded, were fake students, often referred to as bots."

"The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud."

"That has put teachers on the front lines of an ever-evolving war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience and thrown up significant barriers to students’ ability to access courses. What has made the situation at Southwestern all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven’t done enough to curb the crisis."

https://voiceofsandiego.org/2025/04/14/as-bot-students-continue-to-flood-in-community-colleges-struggle-to-respond/

Someone accidentally ordered me to write about the problem with containers, and I did:

https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/programming/containers_might_not_be_the_right_answer.md

Today we've added a #Kubernetes Cluster API provider for #Incus to the ever growing list of Linux Containers projects! Thanks to Angelos Kolaitis for leading this great initiative!
https://github.com/lxc/cluster-api-provider-incus

Interesting, beyond sshuttle, apparently NetworkManager has an SSH VPN connection plugin, and it's at least in Debian:

https://github.com/danfruehauf/NetworkManager-ssh/

One thing I will say about Rust, is that simply learning it has made me a better programmer. Similar to how a static-typed language teaches its users concepts about types, (which you may take for granted if you learned programming with Java and have never met a python developer,) Rust has taught me a lot of concepts related to memory safety and concurrency simply from using it to write software.

#rust #softwaredev

I just learned about https://privacypass.github.io/ ... like anything from Cloudflare, better be cautious, but this looks interesting. I wonder how well it works.

Some writing after reading an article about the coding profession some days ago:

https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/programming/the_tragedy_of_the_geeks.md

If you want to ensure your content does not get indexed by big tech LLMs, just keep it in your robots.txt file.

https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/25.04/gettingstarted/scalereleasenotes/

TrueNAS Scale adding Incus to the upcoming 25.04 is huge news. LXC support in Proxmox was my biggest reason to stick to Proxmox. Proxmox is still fantastic, and I have everything set up in it, but having another ZFS-supporting appliance with LXC and VMs is fantastic news.

The upcoming #TrueNASScale release comes with #Incus built-in so I took it for a spin to see how the integration was done!
https://youtu.be/ENrQ1RWKZuI

So Lilygo just released this beauty! I’ve always thought e-paper will go excellent with LoRa. Now I want this, so I can put #meshtastic on it! https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-pro

This could be huge: https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix

I get that issue trackers are hard, but I feel like stale bots that *close issues* come off as so hostile. I shouldn't have to come back to the issue tracker every month to confirm, “Yes, this is still an issue!” to prevent the issue from getting closed.

Tag an issue as “stale” for easier triage—that’s fine! But “oops you aren’t engaged enough, sorry, your issue doesn’t exist anymore” feels like a bit of a slap in the face. Especially if it gets closed as “not planned.”

I don't have the data, but I believe that sending email from anything other than @gmail.com or @outlook.com is much less likely to arrive.

Maybe the key is that we receive much more email than we send, and that not everything we send is critical.

So perhaps the trick is to keep a @gmail.com or @outlook.com only for sending *must arrive* emails, and do everything else in our domain, with a provider to our liking, or even self-hosted.

Apparently there's been a leak of private data from Oracle Cloud hosting, who are very popular because of their very generous free tier:

https://www.cloudsek.com/blog/the-biggest-supply-chain-hack-of-2025-6m-records-for-sale-exfiltrated-from-oracle-cloud-affecting-over-140k-tenants

I'm very happy to remove the code from Lobsters for geoblocking the UK, and my thanks to everyone who contributed to making sense of it. I wrote up everything we learned about it and why the risk seems low enough now, hopefully it's useful to other communities: https://lobste.rs/c/xevn8a

If you’ve ever wanted a Visual Studio Code for Nintendo Switch, definitely check this out. Supports USB keyboards (!), write your own games, great for the kids https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/fuze4-nintendo-switch-switch/

So I just discovered "color-scheme" in CSS and deployed it to my blog to respect light/dark mode (I hope). I have not tested high/low contrast preferences, but I suspect color-scheme will not be enough.

Is there no way to say "just pick the colors that the user prefers"?

Created "lima-actions" for GitHub Actions https://github.com/lima-vm/lima-actions

```
steps:
- uses: lima-vm/lima-actions/setup@v1
- run: limactl start template://fedora
```

Useful for:
- Running commands on non-Ubuntu distros (e.g., Fedora, AlmaLinux 8)
- Emulating multiple hosts

Chimera Linux is an interesting operating system. Today, I used it for the first time. Because it uses a BSD userland, I tested a shell script in a Chimera Linux container and found and addressed a GNU-find-ism. Hopefully this will make the shell script work on macOS (which is not convenient to run without Apple hardware).

- https://chimera-linux.org/
- https://hub.docker.com/r/chimeralinux/chimera

Lots of chatter about the "death" of Firefox today. I continue to believe that we should separate simple "content" browsers from application platforms. But others have more bizarre ideas:

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/WASM_Wayland_Web_WWW/

I think my new project https://github.com/alexpdp7/django-tws can provide some value now, although it's still an alpha.

It guides you towards getting started using Django, smoothening some rough edges and things that are not covered by the Django documentation.