today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 07, 2026

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ Phorge – powerful developer toolkit

    Phorge is an opinionated, community-driven platform for collaborating, managing, organizing and reviewing software development projects.

• Games

  • Xe's Blog ☛ Life pro tip: a Steam Deck can be a bluetooth speaker

    Your headphones may only let you get audio from one source at once, but GNU/Linux has no such limitations!

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Valve delays Steam Machine and says it is reconsidering pricing — critical component shortage and costs behind the move

    Valve is reportedly delaying the latest Steam hardware due to uncertainty with memory chip pricing, but it seems to still be on track to arrive during the first half of 2026.

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Dumping Nintendo e‑Reader Card “ROMs”

    The Nintendo e‑Reader was a peripheral released for the Game Boy Advance in 2001. The Nintendo e‑Reader allowed scanning “dotcode strips” to access extra content within games or to play mini-games. Today I'll show you how to use the GB Operator, a Game Boy ROM dumping tool, in order to access the ROM encoded onto e‑Reader card dotcodes.

    I'll be demonstrating using a new entrant to e‑Reader game development for the venerable platform: Retro Dot Codes by Matt Greer. Matt regularly posts about his process developing and printing e‑Reader cards and games in 2026. I was a recipient for one of his free e‑Reader card giveaways and purchased Retro Dot Cards “Series 1” pack which I'm planning to open and play for the blog.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS HWE update is now available

      The Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS hardware enablement stack (HWE) has finally hit the updates repo, bringing Linux kernel 6.17 and Mesa 25.2.7 to users on the current long-term support release.

      All users on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS can install this newer kernel version and updated GPU driver set as a regular software update. The stack will also be baked into the Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS ISO when released on February 12, 2026.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Mozilla

      • It's FOSS ☛ Finally! Firefox Is Getting a Kill Switch for Its (Unwanted) Hey Hi (AI) Features

        Maybe this will bring back some of those lost users.

  • Licensing / Legal

    • Hackaday ☛ How Industrial Robot Safety Was Written In Blood

      It was January 25th of 1979, at an unassuming Michigan Ford Motor Company factory. Productivity over the past years had been skyrocketing due to increased automation, courtesy of Litton Industry’s industrial robots that among other things helped to pick parts from shelves. Unfortunately, on that day there was an issue with the automated inventory system, so Robert Williams was asked to retrieve parts manually.

      As he climbed into the third level of the storage rack, he was crushed from behind by the arm of one of the still active one-ton transfer vehicles, killing him instantly. It would take half an hour before his body was discovered, and many years before the manufacturer would be forced to pay damages to his estate in a settlement. He only lived to be twenty-five years old.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Nick Heer ☛ The CIA Killed the World Factbook

        Bad news from the CIA. I mean, probably not what Senator Ron Wyden was referring to and, on a relative scale for the CIA, this is pretty tame. But, still, disappointing: [...]

      • Hidde de Vries ☛ WCAG-EM 2.0 lets you report on accessibility of more than just websites

        WCAG-EM is the most commonly used accessibility reporting methodology in The Netherlands. The Dutch government runs a dashboard that collects conformance reports of thousands of government websites and apps, of which almost all were created by following WCAG-EM. It's used less outside The Netherlands, but my hope is that will change and others find it useful.

        WCAG-EM will not tell you how to make a website accessible, it gives you a consistent process to check. WCAG has the requirements, WCAG-EM has steps to report on them. With its sampling process, it helps reliably and consistently report on websites that are too big to evaluate page by page.