Mark Twomey

Sat, 02 May 2026 22:42:50 +0100

We’ve moved on from warm halogen bulbs to an array of LEDs. Hopefully tonight’s Lumie Bodyclock sunset will be more golden than the fluorescent white I’ve been putting up with.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:59:36 +0100

So I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.

Bringing back Friendster seems like a lark. But Supabase rate limiting showed up to spoil the post registration fun.

Only the delete key can save Windows 11

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:29:16 +0100

When Microsoft put advertising into Windows you just knew the decline was picking up speed. And decline it did. The aggressive upselling of Microsoft 365 in the OS worked perfectly. Yet File Explorer remains a poorly performing mess. Microsoft’s Windows secrete K2 plan aims to cut Windows 11 bloat and improve gaming performance - VideoCardz.com

The report claims the new Start menu could be up to 60% faster, with Microsoft also planning to remove Start menu ads and stop showing MSN content by default in the Widgets Board.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:03:41 +0100

Token-based billing for AI is inevitable. The subsidies won’t continue. With the drive to use AI where I work, I can’t imagine the token bill versus the payroll. If interns start becoming a thing in tech again, it’ll be because they’re cheaper.

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 03:13:32 +0100

The Commodore 64C took a four-year-old motherboard and put it in a nicer box. Anonymous beige, beautifully so, wrapped around the same clapped out guts. Now they’ve found the original moulds and dropped an FPGA inside. Took me ten seconds to to preorder one.

Hitting snooze on sunrise

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:58:25 +0100

I use a wake-up lamp, because in Ireland it’s an exaggeration to say we get two hours of daylight in winter, but not much of one. The halogen bulb went. No problem, I’ll use a 2700K replacement. Every one I’ve tried looks more like the staff canteen than a sunrise. Turns out the bulbs that actually work have quietly vanished off the market.

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:22:51 +0100

The worst thought about dropping off my old electronics for recycling is they end up in a landfill in some other nation. But European law seems strict on this. Now to wipe any lingering personal data first. If they’ll even power up.

The Downgrade

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:05:55 +0100

At AWS London Summit I was standing on the lower level of London Excel with my personal MacBook Pro M1 balanced on my arm, deploying 20 workshops, when someone tried to get my attention. Before I knew it the MacBook was somersaulting through the air onto the event centre floor.

The external shell is worse for wear, warped on one side, and it’s clearly time for a replacement. I travel with a personal laptop because I’ve been fine with virtual desktops for work since the Sun Ray days, log in and pick up from where you last stopped working. A VDI client doesn’t need a monster spec, so the plan was to downgrade to an Apple MacBook Neo: enough to watch a series on a plane, enough connectivity to reach much more powerful systems in AWS.

What I hadn’t reckoned with is how popular the Neo turned out to be. Not quite G4 iMac popular, but popular enough that I could have the latest M5 MacBook Pro delivered in a quarter of the time. Except I’ve become allergic to dropping expensive things on concrete floors.

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:19:54 +0100

As poorly as Westworld season 3 is regarded by large parts of the audience, I liked Engerraund Serac as the antagonist. He wanted to build a system of invisible control to prevent human extinction. He succeeded up until the moment he failed. Today’s corporate AI plans are heading the same way.

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:41:51 +0100

It’s remarkable to me how connecting to hotel wifi isn’t standardised. The password could be your room number, a captive portal asking for your room number. Or, as here, a code that appears when you turn on the hotel TV. Which I never do, because of streaming.

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 01:11:39 +0100

Computing started out expensive and then got cheap. Now it’s becoming expensive again. People need to get back into their garages to develop affordable personal computers, using parts the AI providers have no need for. We did it during the 8-Bit computing era. We can do it again.

The RAM shortage could last years

According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:49:17 +0100

Planned a two-hour Dungeons & Dragons session but since we haven’t played in months it takes 20 minutes just to get everyone back up to speed. The grand finale then becomes “You open the door two doors away from the boss… and we’ll leave it there for tonight.”

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:21:50 +0100

Lana Del Rey’s “First Light” has a better title sequence than most contemporary Bond films.

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:55:25 +0100

In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead two famous nothings hurtle towards a Shakespearean end. Watching them question their reality when offstage from Hamlet has some interest, but it’s a slog to get to their hangings. “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” 🎬

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:24:07 +0100

Because Dune 3 has every IMAX screen locked this Christmas, Disney have gone the “Corinthian Leather” approach for Avengers Doomsday. They’ve invented a brand certification: Infinity Vision. That non-IMAX screen with its laser projector and Dolby 7.1 surround? It’s “Infinity Vision.”

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:15:20 +0100

Setting up an AI to GM a two-player play-by-email RPG for myself and a friend. It would take less time to just make more friends.

The G5

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:02:47 +0100

21 years ago I was excitedly buying a PowerMac G5 with dual 64-bit 2.5GHz processors, 1GHz front side bus, system controller ASIC and HyperTransport. The system arrived, sounded like a jet engine when the nine fans turned on, and generated enough heat to warm my room and the upstairs landing. Two months after the warranty expired the liquid cooler leaked and destroyed the motherboard. A known design flaw Apple never issued a recall for. Ever since, I spend 15 minutes figuring out what to buy that’ll last me five years. And then I just buy that.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:07:44 +0100

Every time I go to Las Vegas the place looks more and more clapped out. $25 for a bottle of water in your hotel room and the entertainment is a stage show from someone who was popular in 2005. Online gambling must have been incredibly disruptive for Vegas.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:18:24 +0100

I just turned on third-party integration in WhatsApp, an EU interoperability mandate, and now people on BirdyChat and Haiket can message me. One is business only and the other is in waitlist preview. I don’t expect a blizzard of messages. Or any.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:41:40 +0100

Watched: Deadwax Season 1 📺 A short form horror for vinyl record lovers. Like The Ninth Gate a tracker gets drawn into assembling a cursed item at the behest of an obsessed wealthy person. This is soaked in noir dread that builds through the episodes. A good supernatural mystery.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:56:48 +0100

Oil prices are going to be high for a while to come and there will be no quick end to the Iran war.

Trump orders US naval blockade of Strait of Hormuz

US President Donald Trump has ordered a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in response to Iran’s “unyielding” refusal to give up its nuclear ambitions during peace talks in Islamabad. … Yesterday, the US military announced that two US warships had transited the strait at the start of a mine clearance operation.

Small language, big world

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:49:13 +0100

I’m a big fan of Small Language Models. The technology to distill a Large Language Model down to something that generates tokens at decent speed is now there. I had a Python application costing me 17 cents per run in API calls, so I started to muck about with Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512 under llama.cpp, and after some tuning got good results. Ministral is energetic and verbose. I had to be clear that inventing answers when the input was thin was not acceptable. Once we were past that, it started performing well.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:44:28 +0100

The real heat in Ireland’s fuel protests isn’t the Iran war, it’s the rising carbon tax. We’re told it’s ringfenced for climate action, except the base rate of €20 a ton isn’t. The only climate target the state is on track with is the tax take.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:48:05 +0100

Windows 11 is garbage because the top people at Microsoft are all focused on trying to keep Azure from burning to the ground. How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:28:30 +0100

If Elbridge Colby and his team did not threaten the Pope they should come out publicly and say so. But they haven’t.

Reports: Pentagon Delivered “Bitter Lecture” to Vatican Ambassador, Warning that the U.S. “Has the Military Power to do Whatever it Wants”

The newsletter Letters from Leo, which covers the Vatican, reported Wednesday that it had confirmed the Free Press account of the closed-door meeting. At one point during the meeting, the newsletter reported, a Defense Department official reached for a 14th-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, when the French monarchy forced the papacy into exile for nearly seven decades.

The reference alarmed some Vatican officials, who interpreted it as a threat to use military force against the Holy See, Letters to Leo’s Christopher Hale reported, citing unnamed Vatican sources.