> Coming autumn 2026

I would also never expect this kind of text to be localized. Strange.

0: https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/

Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth.

Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow.

> Gtk

Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful. Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog getting lost behind the main application window) literally ever since Gtk on macOS dropped the XQuartz dependence. And that's the flagship application for the toolkit.

Didn't Google v. Oracle disprove this?

Stealing from FOSS is awful, because it completely violates the social contract under which that code was shared.

Of course, you'll get a bit more out of them if you convert your EPUBs to KEPUBs with Kepubify[0], but the point remains that Kobos are supplemented by their cloud/connected features, not inherently dependent on them.

0: https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/

This idea comes up in every HN conversation about IPv6, and so I suppose this time it's my turn to point out RFC 8981[0]. tl;dr: typically, machines which receive IPv6 address assignment via SLAAC (functional equivalent of DHCP) periodically cycle their addresses. Supposed to offer pretty effective protection against host-counting.

0: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8981

> I tried to boot up Gun Rocket to play it. But it refused. No matter how hard I clicked the game would not open.

> After trying a few times I realize if the ship isn't moving for about 0.5 seconds it explodes. Has that bug existed all this time? Oh bother. I hope not!

Grinds my gears that the game has continued to be listed for sale on Steam with years-old negative reviews pointing out exactly these issues, but the developer still has the gall to act surprised about them.

It does seem like Swiss Gear are now directly represented in Canada (rather than being represented by a third party, like they were a decade ago), and their backpacks now have a five-year warranty. But I guess my point is: if you don't live in the US, make sure that the things that a brand is famous for hold true in your region, too.

I think the safest bet is to pre-renew the domains you really want to keep for as far out as you can (most registries allow you to renew a domain for up to 10 years). That way, if there is some major change to cost structures, you have a decade to either weather the storm or come up with a migration strategy.

DVDs are not well-encoded, and the sources are typically poorer, too.

DVDs store MPEG-2 Part 2 (H.262) video streams. It's an extremely old, inefficient codec. (It was published in 1996! Next month, it'll be 30 years old!) It looks best when the encoder is given a bitrate limit north of 20 megabits per second, but DVD-Video has a hardware limit of 10 Mbps, and that includes the audio and subtitle streams. Most video streams on DVDs get 4-5 Mbps. MPEG-2 also isn't a very good codec; no matter how much bandwidth you get it, it's never really considered to be “transparent” (that is, encoding artifacts are always visible).

If you take a Blu-ray copy of a film (FHD or UHD, doesn't really matter), scale it down to SD resolution, and run it through a good HEVC (H.265) encoder, you'll usually find that a DVD-equivalent encoding takes about a third, maybe a quarter of the space. Or, if you go the other way and let the encode take as much space as the MPEG-2 one on the DVD, you'll almost certainly see an obvious difference, particularly in action scenes.

Starting a physical media collection? Fantastic. Good for you (seriously). But get Blu-rays wherever possible. You'll mostly have to forego the thrift shop, fine, but if you're ever actually going to watch the film, you'll vastly prefer it.

0: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4531

I also appreciate the difficulty of generalizing chamfers/fillets. There's a reason that basically all FOSS CAD packages have struggled with it.

0: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/149

1: https://dune3d.org/