news
today's leftovers
-
Server
-
Kenneth Reitz ☛ Self-Hosting Adventures
I run a photo site, and its library is about 166 gigabytes of originals and thumbnails. For a while it lived on a fast block-storage volume, which is the most expensive way to store cold images that has ever been devised. So I moved it to object storage, where static files belong, and watched the volume bill shrink.
-
-
Distributions and Operating Systems
-
Debian Family
-
Thorsten Alteholz ☛ My Debian Activities in May 2026
This was my hundred-forty-third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: [...]
-
-
Devices/Embedded
-
Will Cooke ☛ The hidden Home Assistant setting that frees your Bluetooth proxy connection slots
If you control Bluetooth devices through ESPHome Bluetooth proxies, some integrations connect once and then never let go, holding a precious proxy connection slot open forever. There is a built-in, per-device Home Assistant setting that fixes this: turn off “Enable polling for changes” on the config entry. The integration stops polling, the underlying library is finally allowed to drop the idle connection, and the slot is freed for something else. Commands reconnect on demand. The catch is that the toggle is buried behind Advanced Mode in a “System options” dialog that, depending on your frontend version, can be genuinely hard to find. If you can’t find it, you can flip it via the WebSocket API instead.
-
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
Ken Shirriff ☛ Powering up a module from the IBM 604: an electronic calculator from 1948
1948 was an interesting time for computing. For decades, businesses had used punch card equipment that added and sorted electromechanically. Now these electromechanical relays and counting wheels were being used to build room-filling general-purpose computers such as Harvard Mark I (1944) and IBM's SSEC (1948). But slow electromechanical mechanisms were already becoming obsolete. World War II had fostered the development of electronics and vacuum tubes for radio, radar, and navigation. Electronic technology was being used in massive electronic computers, such as Colossus (1943) and ENIAC (1946). The first stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby, was built in 1948.
-
-