Brandon Philips

VotingWorks is making American voting machines right: open source, built for accessibility, and paper based. Excited for their continued success. www.voting.works/machines

Voting machines should be open source with a paper audit trail. And the @voting.works is making it a reality: recently achieving the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) 2.0 standard. 🇺🇸 What an enormous milestone! www.eac.gov/voting-equip...

The Hobbit with Tove Jansson's illustrations was finally released in English in a new printing! Attached are the illustrations of the first two chapters. I love it so much. bookshop.org/a/91498/9780...

Some @golang.org programmers must be nearby.

I built a system to send handwritten notes and diagrams to my @pi.dev agent from my @supernote.com epaper tablet. It is simple but surprisingly ergonomic way to build. ifup.org/blog/handwri...

I guess now orthopedics AND immunology can share a hatred of trampoline parks. @glaucomflecken.bsky.social (vaccinate your kids!)

A few days ago, due to the threat of a chemical explosion, 50,000 people in Orange County were under evacuation orders. In the midst of this, there was a primary election with early voting. How did tens of thousands of evacuated voters cast their ballot? how.voting.works/when-you-can...

Been on kagi for close to a year. I can filter out blog spam and prioritize wikipedia and reddit. Heal nature. Plant native plants. Stop using Google search.

Vanguard offers different policies you can choose on your proxy vote for mutual funds. corporate.vanguard.com/content/corp... Seems very practical to insist my vote goes towards ensuring the board of directors is at least 2/3 independent. Wish that was enforced by being on a public market 😑

Repaired my kids headphones after the speaker wire disconnected (more glue than solder). Here is my guide. www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iCl... I love @ifixit.com and their model of selling good tools (used their solder station on this repair!) and providing a hub for people to share guides.

I love the idea of links that go off to somewhere that doesn't exist yet but might in the future: github.com/BaderBC/halu...

A LLM session reminds me of my teen years getting help on IRC when the manpages failed me. The patient person on the other side walking me through the knowledge gaps that a list of flags have difficulty filling. I don't thank the LLM though. Do you?

It feels gross to hear executive speak like "effective content targeting" in the context of children. Particularly when some of the "content" is gambling (e.g. loot boxes). EU has 16 or older for loot boxes which is still wayyyy too young IMHO. www.cnbc.com/2026/05/01/r...

the fencing visualization system i worked on with rhizomatiks is coming to los angeles this weekend 🤗

I guess it is nice that privately held companies are just flailing capital around just like public companies?

Google Photos product managers please listen: ensuring a basic level of offsite backup for your most important photos has turned into drudgery. Please help. support.google.com/photos/threa...

I can't believe @sanders.senate.gov is making a distillation attack on Claude like this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3At...

Trying to pay US corporate taxes. EFTPS won't let me log in. Spent 1.5 hours on hold. Finally get a IRS rep on the phone: the entire backend system is offline and the rep can't assist with anything. No ETA.

A kid walking near my home was ran off the road into a ditch by a reckless driver (sidewalk-less road). The driver didn't stay at the scene to check on the kid. When called the Sheriff's office told me that unless the vehicle made contact there was nothing they could charge the driver with anyways.

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

There needs to be some secrete handshake for software engineers to file detailed bug reports to site owners. I currently can't pay a bill because of some AngularJS app missing a dependency. I debugged it and threw some code into my console to fix: window._satellite.kpCustomEvent = function() { };

Wow! OrbStack is a great VM/container manager for macOS. Every few months I have tried to use Podman Desktop or Docker Desktop and always hit some work stopping bug. But, OrbStack has been great. Nice work @kdrag0n.dev and team. Wish y'all success. orbstack.dev

Quick Hack: Fix epub's for early reader books. github.com/philips/kids... The HTML/CSS of kids early reader books is atrocious and impossible for koreader to render correctly. So, just throw it all out and repack the epub.

Yesterday, news broke that Dominion Voting Systems was sold to a new company, Liberty Vote. Dominion, the second-largest voting systems vendor in the US that currently tabulates 1 in 5 American votes, is no more. www.voting.works/news/public-...

With how bad robot detection has become across the internet and AI crawling everything in sight it makes me wonder if the future is more like @tailscale.com ACLs and less like the wide default routed internet. Off I go emailing support and asking for an IP whitelist like it is 1999.

It is remarkable a software and brand we (CoreOS team) created 12 years ago (!!!) is still relevant enough for people to debate on Hacker News.

I love this. A bike designed for long term maintenance with limited supply chain: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV88...

An actually useful GMail AI integration: forcing users to Reply All unless the body contains sensitive documents or shit talk.

In 2025 and you can't buy a light switch without brand advertising on it. Lutron, Leviton and Legrand are not high fashion brands- they are light switches. Product manager from Leviton saying "Well everyone else is doing it" www.reddit.com/r/homeautoma...

Also. Apparently Nest Protect are being shutdown by google. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

I am in the market for smoke alarms. When I think smoke alarms I think of @bradfitz.com ❤️ But, does anyone else have recommendations? I like Nest Protect but would consider other options. Must be battery powered. Must have push notifications. Ideally no subscriptions.

Excellent overview video of Apple Containerization by Michael Crosby (who played a critical role in getting opencontainers.org to v1.0) Amazing to see these standards used in such a well integrated way 8 years later. developer.apple.com/videos/play/...

There are many reasons I limit Disney in my house. And here is another one. Disney adds Newsmax to Hulu. www.msn.com/en-us/entert...

And now, a note on Bill Owens who, until this past week, was the executive producer of 60 Minutes. We’ll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.

@bsky.app next up, tshirts that say: Facilitate is an active verb

Photo apps need the UX equivalent for "sifting through the shoe box". I want to collect the photos worth backing up forever. Google Photos "favorites" doesn't work: you can't bulk favorite items. Adding the photos to an "album" doesn't give indication if they are in or not in "the box".

This is nonsense. A district court decision holds just as much legal weight as a Supreme Court decision. The only difference is the district court’s ruling is appealable. But until you WIN an appeal a district court’s decision binds all parties, including the executive branch.

Google is playing the same "you don't get your own incremental backups" with Google Drive too. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4178... What are people using instead of Google Photos and Drive?