today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 18, 2026

• Server

  • Jan-Lukas Else ☛ My updated Home Server setup

    I just have to tell you my current state with my migration to OpenCloud…

    For a few months now, I have used a second-hand HP T640 Thin Client as my home server for Home Assistant and Uptime Kuma. The T640 is a nice little and fanless device. Especially being fanless was my argument to replace the HP EliteDesk 800 G1 USDT and ASRock Deskmini A300 I used before. Even though they are unused now (the Deskmini was already unused for quite some time anyway), I reused some of their components.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Matters 75: Mark's Meshing About

    Alan builds a website (link soon), Martin reviews Zed Editor, and Mark joins the mesh life.

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Linux kernel 7.0 finally abandons the 28-year-old Intel 440BX chipset's EDAC driver — removal marks goodbye to the legendary motherboard chipset

    The code hasn't been functional since 2007 due to incompatibilities with the more widely used Intel AGP driver. The lack of EDAC meant that 440BX machines with ECC RAM would still fix errant bit flips, but without software-side notifications. The Intel AGP driver, on the other hand, is used by dozens of older chipsets. Now, 440BX EDAC support has been officially removed, not just disabled.

• Graphics Stack

  • Paul Hinze ☛ Level of Detail · phinze.com

    In 3D graphics, there’s a technique called Level of Detail (LoD). The idea is simple: why spend GPU cycles rendering every vertex of a distant mountain when the player can’t tell the difference between ten thousand triangles and a hundred? So the engine swaps in a lower-polygon model. As you get closer, it swaps in a higher one. Done well, the player never notices.

    The algorithms have gotten wildly sophisticated over the decades. Modern engines don’t just swap between a few discrete models. They can continuously stream geometry, dissolve between levels, even procedurally generate detail on the fly. But the core insight hasn’t changed: don’t compute what nobody’s looking at.

    I keep coming back to this idea because I think it describes one of the central activities of building software. Not the code part—the thinking part.

• Games

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ High-end Android phones are now powerful enough to emulate the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 — YouTuber gets 2020's hottest PC game running at playable frame rates on Red Magic 11 Pro

    Cyberpunk 2077 may have required a powerful gaming PC to enjoy at its 2020 release, but YouTuber ETA Prime has shown that the game can now be played on a high-end smartphone with decent performance with x86 emulation.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD Jumpstart ☛ bsd.rd

      Every OpenBSD admin has booted bsd.rd at least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns out bsd.rd is a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything.

      That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll go from the raw gzip file all the way down to the miniroot filesystem, exploring each layer with standard tools. Everything is documented in the man pages — we’re just following the trail.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ A year of documentation-driven development

      A little over one year ago, our team began to recognize this pattern in our own work. Features generally functioned as intended but were difficult to use or explain. Documentation lagged behind releases. Important design decisions lived mostly in conversation or code, rather than in shared artifacts that could be reviewed, challenged, or built upon by others.

    • Ubuntu ☛ Announcing FIPS 140-3 for Ubuntu Core22

      As part of this certification process, we have also included Ubuntu Core as a fully certified Operating Environment for the first time, starting with Ubuntu Core 22, and will continue to support Ubuntu Core with future FIPS certifications. In this article, we’ll explore what Ubuntu Core is, and how to use it with FIPS.