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Álex Córcoles (coding)

@coder@alex.femto.pub

This is the profile where I talk about coding and technology in English.

139 Posts Posts & Replies 43 Following 12 Followers Search
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My "production stuff":

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

Usable WIPs:

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

Another gem from Hillel:

www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-ar

Part two of three comparing software engineering to other engineering disciplines. Mostly dispelling myths about "real engineering" that us software people often have, but also highlighting some differences, etc.

Straight into my list of interesting articles.

Also "We are not special" is a great title.

I believe declarative Linux distributions to be the future. I find GNU Guix very interesting, but it's adherence to free software means most wireless networking is unsupported.

Nonguix adds the necessary proprietary firmware and drivers, but still I required handholding and effort to get it to work on my experimentation laptop.

So trying to get Nonguix to have clearer instructions:

gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix/-/m

Sounds like small praise, but "just works" and "well thought of" is not something you see frequently nowadays.

I won't use @tailscale for personal things, but work is different. Been doing a proof of concept with it (with AWS EKS), and it's nearly as good as the hype!

I have some experience with setting up VPNs, and definitely Tailscale has the smoothest setup I've seen and it works out of the box.

Only small nags:

- Kubernetes egress seems undesirably complex.
- Didn't figure out how to configure tags using Terraform.
- Not a fan that each Kubernetes ingress counts as a device.

A few days on WezTerm by @wez and I'm very happy.

ctrl+shift+space to copy URLs works quite well. Sometimes I still copy with the mouse instead of using ctrl+shift+x, but I'm getting better.

Multiplexing integrated into the terminal is very nice!

Also I didn't know it did predictive local echo. Sometimes it's distracting, but sometimes it really helps!

I think Gnome Terminal is fantastic, but I'm kinda happy to have dared to experiment!

MS Teams has a really nice feature (that is probably an antitrust problem) where you can present a PowerPoint deck directly using the JavaScript version of PowerPoint. The slide deck is popped into Sharepoint, you get the presenter view and everyone else gets the slides. The slides are rendered locally, so they're scaled properly to your display and all of the accessibility features work.

And this is exposed in the UI in two ways. In the 'share' tray, you can select PowerPoint presentations instead of screens or windows, and you get this view. In PowerPoint, there's a huge 'Present in Teams' button right next to the share button.

And yet, 90% of meetings I'm in where people present PowerPoint slides over Teams, they don't use this. And that was even true when I worked at Microsoft.

I honestly don't know how you'd make this more discoverable.

So now I have a lot more sympathy with the MS Office team's problem that 90% of the feature requests that they get are for things that have already shipped.

@david_chisnall Google Drive has a similar feature, but it's Chrome-only and luckily I work in a company where I'm far from being the only non-Chrome user, so I won't use it :(

Agreed that this should be a bigger thing. It's surprising no one has figured this out, because most of the pieces are already in place!

(Did some incarnation of Cisco WebEx had this?)

(Someone else's idea of using PDFs is brilliant. Jitsi Meet should do that!)

I love the fact that modern browsers have a button I can press that works out what the page would have looked like if it were designed to be viewed in Nescape 1.0 and renders it like that ('reader mode'). The fact that there is mainstream tooling to undo all of the work that people put into making something annoying is a microcosm of the tech industry.

Today, we’re officially introducing Kagi News: a once-a-day press review that cuts through the noise. Global stories, community-curated sources, and zero tracking.

Full announcement: blog.kagi.com/kagi-news

iOS download: apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-new

Android: play.google.com/store/apps/det

Web: kite.kagi.com/

Giving WezTerm a chance to replace Gnome Terminal, which I've been using since... forever.

I want to stick to defaults as much as possible, but "ctrl+shift+t to open a new session in the same context, even SSH" is too tempting.

Had to adjust fonts, because the default bold is excessively subtle, and numeric tab switching does not work well for me in Gnome, though.

But there's a chance I'll stick to WezTerm.

Duck Duck Go has added a tremendously useful feature to their search -- a permanent block. Any site can be added to a block list to never show up in any of your search results again.

I will be using this on any site that is obviously spitting out AI generated "articles."

Making Meshtastic work on a C64 is a brilliant idea I'd never would have thought of:

64jim64.blogspot.com/2025/09/m

Wondering if a PiKVM could be turned into a screen reader for BIOS screens and the like.

PiKVM already has an OCR feature to copy regions of a screen as text.

Seven pages is a lot to ask nowadays, but if you've ever had an interest in software development,

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1464122

is worth the time to read. This was written 11 years before The Mythical Man-Month, decades before we "discovered" short feedback cycles.

I miss LTS modern distros, but they are coming docs.projectbluefin.io/blog/bl

Interesting, I noticed after updating to Debian 13 that many binaries I install got autocompletion magically without any configuration.

The bash-completion maintainers have started adding completions that know how to extract completions from specific binaries, you can see them at /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/_*

It's a bit weird and a bit hackish, but it's superconvenient!

"I'm willing to choose a less evil alternative, however only once that alternative is better, cheaper and works *exactly* like the evil thing I'm using right now, including integrations with all the other questionable suppliers I rely on" And we wonder why alternatives do not succeed. .

If you ever want to release a bunch of new crates to crates.io, I'm letting you know there's a low rate limit for that :D

Anytime I read something like “10,000 requests in a few hours” or “one million requests in a week” I‘m immediately skeptical of the framing.

That’s ~0.5 rps and ~1.7 rps, respectively. The disposable vape on HN right now claims 6.25 rps (160 ms page loads).

Yes, it's a bit of a cheap excuse, but usable ForgeFed is one of the things that I'm waiting for to migrate away from GitHub.

GitHub is not a Git forge, it's an addictive social network :)

Honestly, I prefer SourceHut's ideas, but it's too scary to selfhost.

Good news for everyone working with and containers: Rocky and Alma Linux 10 container are now available!

The official image server of the project added version 10 of and at the end of August.

www.geekersdigest.com/rocky-al

When developing software, I've long been jealous of system administration's "error budgets". If you are above your reliability target, you should be looser and faster. If you are below, you should be more careful and slower (address "tech debt").

This needs to be refined, but I think deadlines work to create a similar self-regulated system; management should be aware that setting deadlines or not having deadlines regulates the development process, like setting the error budget does.

@mjd oh, so you are looking for a specific one! I searched a couple of lists of streets, and I only found the "Rambla", not even the second one.

I'll try to keep an eye out, but I don't spend so much time around that zone...