On Nov 18 of this year, the Voyager 1 spacecraft will be one light-day from Earth -- more than 16 billion miles. Voyager 2 will be nearly 14 billion miles away.

There's a quiet, heroic effort by NASA techs to keep these 49-year-old spacecraft functioning. The technology and parts we knew how to make in 1977 can still talk to us. It is a small engineering miracle.

Linking directly to the Hackaday story on this, but click through to The Register.

https://hackaday.com/2026/08/06/nasas-just-prolonged-voyager-2s-science-mission-with-a-big-bang/

Love me some engineers.

New blog post: Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug 🐞

For many years, I sometimes discovered that commands I was sure I had run were no longer present in my Z shell history file (~/.zsh_history). In this article, I will show you how I tracked down the bug. Spoiler: ultimately, patching Zsh to make it crash loudly and analyzing the crash’s core dump was the winning strategy!

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-08-09-zsh-history-truncation-bug/

#Meme #Humour

What if we ban computers from using kids instead?

Ah, I see your problem right here. It has code.

I feel like this whole Anthropic export ban thing should be a wakeup call to anyone outside the US that if you've been newly developing a dependency on a proprietary US cloud service the government could decide to restrict export access to at any moment, you've made a strategic error and should probably reconsider that.

After enough years in software, you learn that LGTM doesn't actually stand for "Looks Good To Me".

Only the pros know its real meaning:

"Looked. Got tired. Merged."

GitHub Copilot got 25x more expensive over night.

I just felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of low-effort PRs suddenly cried out and were silenced.

Maintainers worldwide breathe a sigh of relief. Businesses are about to wake up to some very interesting invoices.

Dear politicians,

your push for surveillance is wrong! Not just morally, but also from a strategic perspective. In a geopolitical environment shaped by digital warfare, the data you collect on citizens will become a threat. Adversaries will try to weaponize those data, and sooner or later, they will succeed.

A transparent society is vulnerable to all sorts of malicious influence.

Privacy supports resilience! Data you don't have cannot be used by or against anyone!
--
#privacy #DataProtection

Tired: “Dogfooding”: Using the software you work on with unbridled happiness and glee, no consideration what it is
Wired: “Catfooding”: Looking at the software and saying “Fuck that shit. I ain’t using that”, and then going for a nap.

🌟 Project Release Announcement Time! 🎉

I wrote a WebUSB extension for Firefox.

This lets web pages access USB devices (with your permission). This has long been supported by Chrome, but Mozilla has not wanted it, at least by default. Fortunately, because add-ons are a thing (for now. make sure to keep fighting for this!), it's possible to change that!

Common reasons for wanting this include programming microcontrollers, 3d-printers, smartphone bootloaders, and similar "physical computing" projects.

This works on Windows, Linux, and macOS

You can get the source code here: https://github.com/ArcaneNibble/awawausb

In order to make this work, you will need to install a small program on your computer. This is explained in the README. You can then install the .xpi file (on the GitHub Releases page) into your browser (which was _just_ auto-approved while I was typing this announcement up).

Please boost (if you want), test, report bugs, etc. etc. (although do keep in mind that this code is entirely written by a single catgirl)

i think this is the perfect type of project to drop late on a sunday / very early on a monday?