Sysadmining These Days It may come as a shock to you, dear reader, that I have quite a lot of gadgets. Gadgets are often a bit wonky. This is just a blog post about how much has changed these days, because I just find it kinda… OK, “mind-blowing” might not be the right word, but it’s a pretty big shift. In the olden days (i.e., before spring 2026), when a gadget was slightly wonky, you either lived with it, spent hours and hours and hours to get it to work, or you ditched it. Much wonkiness is of the kind that it’s just occasionally annoying, so you just live with it for years… but that’s over now. It’s happened many times over the last month, confronted with some wonkiness, and I’ve gone “right, that’s a bit wonky… let’s fix it with Claude!” As an example — take this nice Turn Touch remote that I’ve used for more than a decade to control the stereo. It’s always been slightly wonky, and I’ve just lived with it. The wonkiness consists of it losing touch with the script on the server that executes commands based on the buttons I press. This happens, like, once every three days: I press a button and nothing happens. I grumble, and wait half a minute, and then I press the button again and it works. This time around, instead of grumbling, I just asked Claude what to do. It said to switch Bluetooth logging on for a few hours, which I did and then pasted it into Claude, and it said that the Bluetooth disconnection defaults were way too aggressive for this type of device, and told me how to fix those… and now the connection is 100% rock solid. Could I have found this out myself by dedicating myself to learning how Bluetooth works? Sure. But would I? Well, I have a decade of history that shows that I didn’t. Amusingly enough, having the connection be solid meant that a different annoyance became more problematic: Sometimes when I hit a button, nothing happens. Then I hit another button, and then the previous thing happens. Every time I hit a button (e.g., “pause”) it would do the previous thing (e.g., “skip to next track”). But then it would fix itself… because it dropped connection and restarted, and that flushed the queue. But that doesn’t happen any more, so the remote would be in permanent “previous command” mode. So I asked Claude again, and it downloaded the Python libraries I used, and said that there’s a bug in the main loop: If I hit buttons rapidly, the remote may send several button presses in one event. The event loop only reads one button press per event. The fix is to keep reading button presses until the queue is empty, which was a one-line fix. Again, was this something I could have fixed myself? Sure. Would I? Again, no. Look, I’ve been an LLM hater from the start. I still think LLMs are to be considered toys, because they just can’t be relied on. And people who use them to generate text and images should be sent to re-education camps until they’re sorry for what they’ve done. But for this sort of computery fiddling, we’re in a new era: Whenever we see something annoying, we can probably get an LLM to fix it for us in fifteen minutes. (It depends on the LLM, of course — for giggles, I tried using Opus 5.5 to solve the first Turn Touch problem, and it totally led me down a useless garden path. Fable 5.1 fixed it in one go.) This feels pretty futuristic, finally — I have a problem; the smart computer fixes it itself, and I get stupider and stupider. That’s the future as predicted, right? https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/31/sysadmining-these-days/ #days #claude #bluetooth #again #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Commentapocalypse Nighness Numbers I was kvetching about AI-generated comments the other day — for some reason or other, Akismet anti-spam doesn’t seem to recognise them, so I have to manually mark them as spam, which is annoying. What makes the AI comment spammers especially annoying is that the first few times you see them, you don’t realise that it’s spam, because the comments will respond to what you’ve written in your blog post. So it’s not some generic, general text, like we’re used to recognising. (As an example, above we have an AI comment from a potato blog (!).) But I was idly wondering how prevalent these spammers are — and I suddenly remembered that Ahrefs is something that exists. So let’s see: whisperweb.dev is one of the most prolific AI comment spammers, and… it has only hit 815 web sites!? That’s a lot less than I had expected, really. And similarly, the videotranscriber.dev spammers have only hit 345 web sites. And migos-aivideo.net is only on fifteen sites! If these numbers are to be trusted, I guess the Commentapocalypse isn’t as nigh as I thought? I don’t know how good Ahrefs is, though… One other slightly amusing thing here — when clicking through to some of these blogs to double-check, I note that several of the sites themselves seem suspiciously AI-like… Dead Internet Theory time. (The potato blog (!) seems real, though.) Anyway. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/29/commentapocalypse-nighness-numbers/ #numbers #ahrefs #deadinternet #internettheory #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Goldilocks and the Three Keyboards This is a quick followup to the blog post about having a dedicated li’l keyboard for doing translations. The problem is that this product category — small keyboards — is cursed. It’s not surprising, because it’s not something that the major producers are involved with much (they concentrate on actual, real keyboards), so you get a lot of semi-no-name producers pumping out junk. One of these was the smallest keyboard up there — the M4 — which is complete junk: It drops half the keystrokes. The biggest one up there uses a USB dongle, and works fine. But it’s just a bit too large, really — I just want to be able to have it on my table by my reading chair permanently in case I need some emergency French translation. Today I got this keyboard in the mail. It’s a Rii 518BT Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s very straightforward — it’s got all the normal keys and stuff, and not too many weird ones. And the layout is pretty standard, which is something you can’t always count on with these small keyboards. Rii has a wide range of keyboards, and looking over that list, I recognise several of those keyboards — they’re keyboards I’ve tried and discarded for a previous project (either because the range was awful or because the keyboards were awful to use otherwise)… This one seems fine, though. The only weird design choice they’ve made is that there’s a Bluetooth pairing button on the back? Like… why? Why not have the pairing be Fn+Q or something? But it’s fine — doesn’t matter. It works! The range is good (at least seven metres, which is as far as I tested it), it doesn’t drop any keys, and the keys are pretty good — a bit squishy, but have some click to them. It did take more setup than the keyboard with the USB dongle, but that’s Bluetooth for you — since the input device goes away on the Linux side, I have to listen to D-Bus events and start re-listening to the devices when it reappears so that I can route the keyboard events to the right place, and all that boring stuff… But it seems to be stable. When it wakes up, though, it takes the host/device several seconds to get things up and running, so you type away at the keyboard and apparently nothing happens… But! It buffers up all the keystrokes and then transmits them when everything is up, so you don’t lose any keystrokes. So that’s OK, I think. Darn! The keyboard is just a centimetre too long to fit into the box I have on the table… Oh well. And! Please remember to consider aircraft security while operating this keyboard. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/28/goldilocks-and-the-three-keyboards/ #threekeyboards #bluetooth #usb #rii #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

The thing that goes *boit* in the night (I mean, in the day…) So I was sitting on the couch, minding my own business, when I heard this *boit*-sounding thing. A soft sound… like a polite notification beep or something. I checked all the Firefox tabs, but didn’t see anything — and then switched the sound off on the laptop. Still getting a *boit* every couple of minutes. So then I had to get off the couch — like an animal — and try to locate what device I could possibly have somewhere in the living room that made the sound. Reader, it was a plant: (Sound on to experience the *boit*. The click after the *boit* is me using a keyboard on the other side of the room, I think.) It turns out that this potted plant (which I’ve put in this vase) had been over-watered, and when the sun shines on the vase, it’s probably heating up the water enough for some bubbles to happen? Anyway — *boit*. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/28/the-thing-that-goes-boit-in-the-night/ #boit #thing #sound #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

My New Horticulture Blog In the kitchen, I’ve got this humongous sansevieria plant… Well, actually, it’s a number of plants in the same pot: This sansevieria variety has only a single leaf per plant, and then it propagates by setting out a new rhizome that then has a single leaf. Allegedly. So when I bought it a decade ago, it was just one little leaf that poked up, and I’ve been repotting it gradually until it’s now reached the biggest size of this series of terracotta pots (which is the only series I use — having the same pot series for everything makes things less busy). But now what? Yes, I went to the garden centre and bought this monstrosity — it’s the only pot I could find that even vaguely resembles my go-to series and that has a diameter “one up” from the previous one. But my window sills are too narrow to have a saucer that fits this pot. What to do! Well… perhaps I could just line it with plastic on the inside? I know, I know — drainage. But I’m so lazy with my watering that there’s really no chance of overwatering my plants, so I don’t think it matters much in this case. OK… a very sturdy bag and some excellent scissoring… There! Brilliant. Oh, er, OK, yeah. It was about time that I repotted this thing — the pot contains 60% roots and 40% dirt. There! It fits! Just a slight overhang! Man, plants are a lot of work. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/27/my-new-horticulture-blog-4/ #well #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Are your USB-C gadgets not getting a charge from your PD charger? This might be common knowledge, but I only learned of This One Neat Trick today, so: I’ve got a bunch of gadgets with batteries that need to be charged. All of them are USB-C these days (thanks, Europe), so I’ve got a spiffy GaN PD (i.e., high wattage) charger with lots of ports that I use for that. But some gadgets, like the Sennheiser Momentum 3 wireless headphones, refuse to be charged by this (or any other) PD charger. But if I connect it to a real computer, it charges just fine. So what’s up with that!? I had just lived with this situation (like an animal) — until today, when I finally did some research. It turns out that the problem is that these headphones (probably) do not have the required resistors that announce to the charger that it’s fine to give the device some power, while the computer’s USB ports always deliver 5V no matter what. But we can fix this very easily: First of all, use a USB-C to USB-A adapter. Plug it into the PD charger. Then take a USB-A to USB-C cable… … and plug it into the adapter. And then plug the USB-C plug into the headphones. Tada! A green light! It’s charging! Problem solved. Isn’t the future disappointing? https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/26/are-your-usb-c-gadgets-not-getting-a-charge-from-your-pd-charger/ #neattrick #sennheisermomentum #plug #europe #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

How long can it take to cut a 30x10cm piece of wood? An investigation This is one of those long posts… because I didn’t quite know what to do here, so this took me months and months. Join me on a journey… of… something totally trivial: Adding a front to that red box up there, which has the keyboard to my stereo system on top, and some vinyl thingies and CDs inside. (Or skip to the end to see the stunning result.) In there I’ve got like — a 7″ “holey” adaptor, a clamp for unruly records and a brush. And then some CD box sets — when I buy new albums, I always rip them and listen via flac, and then read the liner notes when I listen to the album the first time. But with box sets, I usually “swap them in” over several months, so I need somewhere accessible to store them until I’ve listened to all the albums in the set. Makes sense, eh? Oh, and there’s a couple of hinges… as one has. Oh! And a totally functional pick-up. Oops! Well, I can throw that away, anyway… But ever since I bought the box (about ten years ago), I’ve wanted to add either a door, or a drawer to the box — because it just looks so untidy the way it is. A drawer would be natural… but a door would be simpler to do. I mean, a whole lot less wood to cut. And besides, the box is pretty small, and I don’t want to make it even smaller, which a drawer would make it. So: A door. If I’m adding a door, what kind of hinge should I use? Let’s take a tour of different kinds of hinges… This is a hidden hinge — they require cutting a groove into the door and they take up quite a bit of space inside the box. And then there’s these… See? Also requires cutting a deep groove, and the walls in the box here just aren’t wide enough. And then there’s these… but how do they work? Have you ever looked at how many kinds of hinges exist? Have you done your hingology classes in school? That’s an Ikea hidden hinge, and also requires a lot of groove cutting. Look at this hinge! What is that even! And this one? Well, or perhaps… I dunno. But there seems to be two kinds in general: Hidden hinges (that require cutting a groove in the door) or normal hinges that have the round hingey part visibly sticking out. I think I have to use the latter. Anyway, while cutting material for the alarm clock I built, I also cut this piece of wood and painted it black. And I found this in a box in the attic. I bought it on Etsy more than a decade ago, and it’s supposed to be a hook to hang on the wall. But the person who made it didn’t know what they were doing, because it’s filled with so much concrete that the hanging bit doesn’t allow a screw to fit into the groove up there. So it’s useless. But I’m thinking I can use it as a door pull! Reuse before throwing away! So my idea is that I can put a screw into the cavity, and then fill it with epoxy, and then drill a hole through the door. See? The screw should be long enough. Epoxy! Is it straight? I think it is! Oops! I didn’t mix the epoxy sufficiently, so it never actually set. It’s been a while since I did any epoxying. OK, redo… and this time around, I mix the epoxy thoroughly. And it feels rock solid. But how does the bit of wood I cut months ago fit? Pretty well — but it’s about a couple of millimetres too long and a bit too tall at one end. And remember all those hinges up there? I decided to go with one of these kinds of hinges — the hinge sticks out in the front, and that should give me a 270-degree swing or something. And a couple of weeks ago I bought this vice — I’ve never had one before, but I’ve always wanted one. And a plane! A proper one! It’s a dream come true. So mount the door in the vice… And this li’l plane is nice, too. I’ve got a lamp! With a looking glass! So that I can actually see what I’m doing when I’m adjusting the plane! Measure once, cut twice… So I used two pieces of wood to protect the door from the vice… … but that left marks. *sigh* I need these. But OK, the door now fits perfectly. And then check whether the concrete pull is gonna work… It does! OK, after sanding the door down again a bit… … it’s time to give it a final coat of paint. There! Such blackness. Back to the “door pull”… I see that it’s not completely flush? Whut? Oh, the epoxy has crept up the shaft of the screw at the bottom there. Gngng. OK, I can use a larger drill and then just drill out a millimetre down… There! Flush as a toilet. (I’m sure that’s a saying.) While pondering all of this, I was wondering whether it would be easier to hinge the door at the top/bottom or left/right. Top/bottom has the advantage that there’s less torque applied on the hinge when the door is open, but screwing the screws into the top/bottom would be impossible with a normal screwdriver. So I bought the above gadget that allows screwing in 80-degree angles. Fun gadget. But since I decided to hinge the door at the left, I don’t need it. Oh well. Yeah, looks like the screws I have are the correct length — won’t poke out on the other side of the wall. The MDF used in this box has a very hard lacquer, so I think I’ll use a drill to get started. Oops! I put the hinge too far up. And the hinge is wider than I thought — I have to plane off a couple more millimetres! Fortunately I only used one screw to test first… Yay! It fits! So now I have to fasten the pull… and I just bought all these lug nut bits because I’ve never had any of those before. The one from Makita seems pretty useless. But the ones from Bosch are perfect. I Bosch. There! Heh heh. It’s original at least — I can guarantee that this is the only thing in the world that looks like this. But I need something to avoid jamming the door too far into the box by accident — and I had this gold-painted wood cube from a previous project, so perhaps just wood-glue it in there? Huh, seems to work… and that gold/red is a nice combo. And then a quick roll-over with some black paint on the side I did the final emergency planing, and then it just needs to dry again and I’m done? WHAT! This project started in May, and it’s now October, so that took *counts on fingers* FOREVER! See? Much tidier now. Heh heh, that whopping huge concrete thing used as a door pull makes me laugh. So stupid! And such smooth action… *clomp* OK, I’ll tidy up tomorrow. FOREVER AND A DAY. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/25/how-long-can-it-take-to-cut-a-30x10cm-piece-of-wood-an-investigation/ #take #long #wood #piece #hidden #see #adding #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

The Commentapocalypse Is Nigher Allowing comments on a WordPress blog is only viable if you have a spam checker. Fortunately Automattic (the people behind WordPress) also provide (free) access to Akismet antispam. Because if you run a WordPress blog, you will be getting hundreds of spam comments per day: Nobody can wade through all of that, but Akismet correctly identifies all of this junk, so you never actually see it. Thanks, Automattic! But ever since LLMs became a thing, I’ve assumed that comment spammers would be using them to post reasonable-sounding comments that would bypass Akismet… and there have been instances of this, but the deluge took longer to arrive than expected. But it seems to have started for real now: This first wave of AI spam is easy enough to identify — they all vaguely agree with something you said in the blog post, and then link to some shady, scammy AI video thing. And Akismet doesn’t identify these for some reason or other. I mean, even though you can’t determine that it’s spam based on the comment itself, the URLs should be a good enough indicator, right? C’mon, Akismet — you can do it! I have faith in you! Heh, while writing this blog post, I got the following comment (correctly identified as spam by Akismet). Amusing, but not LLM spam. I’m dreading the next wave of LLM spam, though — this initial wave is pretty stupid, but the next wave will have better text and no links (to make you approve the comment), and then the next comment will be automatically approved (as per standard WordPress settings), and that is the one that will have the links to the spam site. So I guess you should flip your comments setting to “Comment must be manually approved”: This future is so annoying, man. No flying cars except fake flying cars, and all of this junk we have to deal with. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/24/the-commentapocalypse-is-nigher/ #akismet #wordpress #automattic #llm #fortunatelyautomattic #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

My new career as a seamstress* I didn’t use to have curtains in my living room — the apt. is er south-east facing, so it has sun in the mornings and afternoons when I’m at work. But after I started working more from home, it got to be ridiculous — I had to move around all day to avoid having the sun shining in my face. (Especially in winter when the sun is lower in the sky.) So five years ago I wandered into a curtain store and said “I need some curtains”, and the expeditress said “like, what colour? style? look?”. Never having considered curtain design before in my life, the question was rather sudden and I said “er… something light? and abstract, perhaps” and then she pulled out a fabric sample of this: And I said sure, and a few months later I got them… and… er… I did not like the curtains. At all! What was I thinking! Wut! Gngng. But I just hung them up and lived with my mistake. But we were chatting about curtains on irc one day (as one does) and somebody mentioned Svenskt tenn, a Swedish company that had lots of oldee tymey Swedish designs, like Green birds. Tada! But I thought that this time I would be more cautious and only buy enough fabric for one window, and then I could live with it for a while, and then decide whether to do the other four windows. And this means that I should probably do the first window myself — hiring somebody to do just one window seemed like more bother than it’s worth. How hard can it be to do something like this?! I mean!? Like!??! LITERALLY! Reader, it’s harder than it looks. First of all, how much fabric to buy? The curtains should be 285cm high, and then with 10cm extra for top/bottom hemming. And then the pattern repeats every 92cm, and you want all the curtains to match up vertically, so that means that for two curtains I have to buy OH I GIVE UP And — snip the vertical borders or fold them in? I guess that’s the colours this has been printed with… Six different colours, I guess? Yeah, snipping time. But how do you get a line straight on a fabric like this? I tried following a thread, but… And… Hey, that kinda lines up in two ways? I definitely bought enough fabric if I line them up on the half match like this… But I’ve got 10cm too little if I want to do the “real” match up. Oops! I guess I mathed it wrong… OK, looks good the other way around so I’ll just do that. OK, I’ve got a sewing machine, but I’ve never used it and I don’t know how. But there’s something new-fangled called “hemming tape”, and it’s a tape with a plastic backing that you iron onto the fabric, remove the backing, and then iron on the fabric on the other side. It’s this meshey plastic stuff that melts into the fabric. See? So while this is easier than sewing, it’s still so much wooork. The curtains are 305cm tall, and you fold in the fabric twice: So you get a nice and even hem — but that means that each curtain has about 18 metres of hemming tape applied that has to be ironed on: Took me, like, three hours per curtain. One done! Almost kinda straight! But it would be nice if it was totally straight… I mean, just because… OK, I had a brilliant idea — what if I just peel off threads at the bottom until there are no loose threads? So I did that and you see the result above — I was 3cm off. Snip snip, and then it’s straight at the bottom. I did the same on the side that had been cut at the factory, and that bit wasn’t straight either! *gasp* It was straighter than my cut, but they’re professionals! I have never! And I ran out of the hemming tape in the middle because I miscalculated how much I needed (there’s that maths again), so I got some stuff from a different shop… AND IT SUCKS! The first one was from Kid and went on like a dream, and then I got the stuff from Jysk, and it’s a nightmare. When removing the backing paper, the paper frayed all the time, meaning that I had to sit there picking and picking at it. Took me hours extra. Boo, Jysk! Anyway: It is finished! *phew* Now that’s something I’m never ever doing again. I’ll live with these curtains for a week or so, and if I still don’t hate them, I’m ordering enough fabric for the other four windows, but then I’m going to outsource the cutting and hemming to professionals. I know my limitations. Now. *who doesn’t sew. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/23/my-new-career-as-a-seamstress/ #like #swedish #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

I scanned 21 more issues of the Comics Buyer’s Guide I got them cheap on ebay, and they’re from around 1999-2001. These issues are almost tabloid size, so I had to scan them manually. Like an animal. Where you can learn exciting news, like — Is DC finally going to publish the final issues of Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run!? Nah, never gonna happen. These issues are, of course, on kwakk.info now (if you want to search them), and also on archive.org if you want to read them. If you have issues of CBG that’s not on kwakk.info yet, you can send them to me. https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/10/22/i-scanned-21-more-issues-of-the-comics-buyers-guide/ #comicsbuyer #guide #issues #rickveitch #swampthing #like #cbg #nah #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit