Jonathan Pallant

As a general rule, worldwide famous power brands don’t feel the need to write “world famous power brand” on the label.

Today I bought a 386SX machine made by Sanyo. It was £50. It has brought much joy.

Ah the sweet sweet smell of buying new (old) hardware, and it immediately blowing the RIFA filter capacitor.

It's the Bring and Buy at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England tomorrow. These always have a bunch of interesting stuff available, and it's a great way to avoid delivery fees, stuff getting broken in transit, and outrageous ebay markup.

this is a QUARTER CENTURY old now youtu.be/GAv1EwoRnec Back to 2001 on LGR today for a retrospective on Windows XP! Reminiscing on its release, unboxing and setting it up, new features, games, screensavers, and a bunch of nifty early 2000s things. Still a truly enjoyable eXPerience decades later!

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

I like PHP. I made a bunch of websites with it and it was fun.

I'm a security professional, and I can tell you that security professionals only talk about PHP when they're very distressed

"All Systems Operational" says Github status, as I'm looking at Unicorns and pages that don't load. But it's fine, I'm only trying to push out a product release for an important customer.

Back on my Mac Mini at home after EuroRust, and the reboot means I've picked up the new @firefox.com, which means I have the horrendous new Container Tab styling and ARGH MY EYES, MAKE IT STOP. At work I went back to Firefox ESR, but that forces me to make a whole new profile.

I am sorry, which company is this? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Happy to share news of Ferrocene 26.08.0, the latest release of the quality-managed, TÜV SÜD-qualified, open source Rust toolchain. What's new: - Updates from Rust 1.96 and 1.97 - Three newly qualified targets 🔗 Read more: ferrocene.dev/blogs/ferroc... #Ferrocene #RustLang #SafetyCriticalSoftware

Wild

Sometimes complaining to GitHub works! Org owners can now prevent even users with their own Copilot license from summoning it in your repos. Thanks @cassidoo.co for putting me in touch with someone! github.blog/changelog/20...

Super busy day at High Integrity Systems Conference today at the NEC in Birmingham. Off to Eurorust in Barcelona tomorrow.

You know, the thing is, I had drafted this piece a month ago, and then never published it, because I thought maybe it was too mean.

I might need to drive to Manchester at short notice to pick up a couple of Alphastations. Someone is liquidating a warehouse full of them.

The YouTube app is playing one video whilst showing me the description and comments for the previous one. How do you screw something up this badly? (Do not tell me, we all know)

here is a riddle, what do you call it when you copy what other people seem to make work without understanding why and having limited success in repeating results with different team and goals you may be thinking "cargo cult" but no it's "software methodologies"

svd2rust is 10 years old today github.com/rust-embedde...

How do I write CFI directives for an Arm interrupt assembly routine that rounds the stack pointer down to a multiple of 8?

BIG NEWS: Today I’m excitedly launching The Small Ideas Initiative. We want you to submit ideas for non-controversial fixes, e.g “live sewage updates for beaches” or “standardised allergen menus” to turn into proper policy. Full info here... blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2026/10/mart...

Wow, that actually happened. here's a link with a timestamp to save you scrolling through this trash fire: www.youtube.com/live/ilmBGeG...

When I was in library school, we all had to make a Second Life account; because it was The Future! The only person I ever met/ talked to during my mandatory time using the game was someone in a different library class doing the same thing.

When I went to college it was considered critically important for blogs to be integrated into every curriculum, because blogs were the future. We had to maintain a separate blog for every class. I guarantee you that not a single student ever looked at a single one of those blogs ever again

Has anyone here actually tried the Macintosh HAL for Windows NT?

The container tab styling is horrendous so I've switched to ESR whilst they sort it out. Which means I had to make a new profile and sign into everything again :/

Charismatic Voice is doing Blues Brothers, clabretro has an HP Visualize workstation (looks just like mine, can’t want to see if it is a B or a C class) and retrobytes has a deep dive on Cray. What a day.

I'm on the Embedded Insiders podcast this week, talking about what Rust is all about and how teams are adopting it. embeddedcomputing.com/technology/s... I apologise, I bring up the "broken elevator" legend as the origin story.

Existing in online groups is increasingly difficult when half the people think all LLM generated code is bad, and half the people think that expressing that opinion is bad. I don’t see how this can be reconciled.

Humanists UK mourns Dame Esther Rantzen (1940–2026) Esther was a great champion of human dignity. She approached her final years with the same fearless determination that defined her career of advocacy, using her own experience to shine a light on the suffering caused by our outdated laws.

I'm declining to publish the next PR for my open-source project because it's just too good and I don't think you're ready for it. It's not because it's simply not finished. Trust me.

Universal Signalling and the Ferrocene team are developing the first railway certification package for Rust under EN 50716, establishing a pathway for Rust in safety-critical railway applications. Read more: bit.ly/4z193o6 #UniversalSignalling #Ferrocene #RustLang #RailTech

The Observer’s editorial today is about how Andy Burnham should “channel the white heat of AI to make the government more responsive, make the economy more attractive to investors, and – as promised – improve people’s lives” What would improve my life is not having to read this bollocks.