Arcana Labs

Internet Highlights - April 2026 Edition

2026-05-04T00:00:00-05:00

As is tradition - but equally delayed by a few days because of The Circumstances - I’ve kept a hold of the most interesting things I discovered on our wild and occasionally-wonderful internet in April, and now offer them up to you as a curated offering with only some mild promotional affect. None of these items are on the list as a result of any kind of sponsorship or promotional agreement. I just think they’re neat.

It turns out the Curiosity rover data from Mars indicates yet stronger evidence for a past biosphere, which is both “expected result” and really cool news, which is probably why Popsci are the only ones seeming to cover it.
Studio MOS-8502 has recently released Gridlocker, a tetronimos-meets-pipedream game for the Commodore 64. The game is provided in a format that should allow full compatibility with any emulator or even the original hardware if you have a way to get the file onto the thang ding, and the game itself looks really fun, with a really fast development cycle. MOS is “good people” and I strongly recommend you check this game out.
- Speaking of MOS, he’s also recently released a pretty good manifesto about the current state of computing with which I broadly agree.
Keeping on with FOSS (we do love a bit of FOSS around here), in a very sad turn of events a major Gnome maintainer is “retiring” from their role as maintainer of a bunch of packages listed here which they are currently the sole maintainer on. If you have the spare cycles consider assisting.
Did you know that KDE has a desktop Wikipedia Client? I’m a general fan of wikis, naturally, and I find this idea interesting as I try to peel more and more of my computing workflow out of the web-browser.
Tor still exists, and I haven’t gone on the VPN rant in a while. If you, like me, spend a lot of time on Youtube, even with an ad blocker, you’re probably getting a VPN vendor’s ad read shoved in your face at least once an hour and are filled with psychopathy by the syllables “Nord VPN”. A paid VPN doesn’t solve the problems it claims to solve, at least not all of them. A private VPN solves some of them, but not all of them. Tor solves many of them, but again (say it with me now), not all of them. Getting onion routes set up for the Arcana Labs website and all the other stuff has been a thought for a while now, though of course it’s complicated by the peculiarities of our setup.
At this point it shouldn’t come as surprise that I’m a fan of a journalling RPG, and here’s one I found that’s especially flavourful. You play as an alien member of a hivemind that has landed on a horrifying world of individuals.
In cryptography news:
- Filippo Valsorda Urges Conservative Approaches to Post-Quantum Cryptography; it turns out the “magic bullet” against conventional crypto (which conveniently is, like nuclear fission for civil power generation, forever a decade away) actually doesn’t break as much as we would expect.
- In a similar vein, Soatok would prefer you remain a realist on this topic

And of course we have a couple of longer-format Youtube highlights for you. This sort of thing is why I have such a hard time kicking the platform:

SECTOR 07 3D Prints a biophotoreactor to produce fishfood for an aquaponics setup. As someone who likes over-engineered aquaculture this is a really tempting project to imitate, though as someone with an irrational hatred of solutions involving plastics I probably wouldn’t go hard in the paint on 3D printing if I did.
BPS.space Gyroscopically Stabilizes A GoPRO as part of a long-running series to build the most impressive model rocket I’ve ever seen. The gopro is re-constructed into a cartridge configuration with a spinning brass wheel so that it can be launched sideways out of the rocket and capture footage of the parachute deployment phase of the flight. The plan for retrieving the footage? Crumple zones.

Speaking of Aquaculture I recently came to the realization that, since I now have the entire physical lab to myself, if I cleaned up and organized properly in here I could probably fit a 30-50 US Gallon fish tank in here. I was obsessive about fish-keeping about a decade ago and only gave it up because I couldn’t move the fish tanks into this house with me. I’d love to get back into it.

Spring Growing Season = PETI Updates!

2026-04-06T05:00:00-05:00

I’ve had a particularly lucky break in my professional life, and I’m going to be starting a brand new position with a new-to-me company in a few days. One of the practical upshots of this, though, is that it’s suddenly practical to pursue finishing PETI again. I know I said that I wouldn’t completely abandon the firmware work while I waited for the hardware work to be practical again, but I guess I was mistaken in that regard. Apart for some pie-eyed speculations, the code has sat largely untouched since last October and apart from some git commit messages and very sparse notebook comments, I have no idea what the state of the project is.

And, in keeping with the new stream schedule, I will at the minimum be working on the pet in public on Mondays at 7 PM Atlantic/Halifax time on my Twitch livestreams. We’re going to revive the semi-tradition of that being the technical projects livestream slot now that I have a technical project to work on.

For all my griping, it’s my hope that we could start the development of the 0.6.0 firmware patch relatively quickly, but right now writing this post I genuinely have no idea what the state of that development branch is right now. I doubt we’ll have to roll all the way back to stable and then redo the work, but it’ll be a bit of archeology to find it.

PETI is an ongoing project to develop a 90s-style virtual pet using mostly modern microcontrollers and other hardware. It’s one of Arcana Labs’ longest-running projects, and the project materials have been available as FOSS and OSHW (to the limitations of licensing agreements with other vendors) since the project’s beginning. For over 5 years at this point, the project has largely been a one-person passion project to make a particular object exist, and in doing so hopefully do some small part to democratize that process. Your support of the project is greatly appreciated.

Internet Highlights - 2026-3-31

2026-03-31T00:00:00-05:00

I know we haven’t done it in a couple of months, but in actual fact I have been stockpiling links for you anyway, as though it had been the plan to do it all along. To be honest life has just simply been just enough madhouse lately that on the last of each month when the task would come up to pull this post together, I said “nah”.

So here’s an internet highlight reel for basically the run of 2026 up to this point!

Castpixel Introduces a 3D-Printer Solution to Home PCB Fab - if I had such a printer I would seriously consider this for prototyping and one-offs.
Marshdeer’s XKCD 2501 Generator - For your friends who know too much.
Someone is compiling a list of No-AI software
Good News: Shingles Vaccination May Reduce Dementia Risk
Important News Regarding Privacy in the Surveillance Age:
Some posts from Soatok:
- Everything You Need To Know About Email Encryption in 2026
- Crypto Engineering has an Intrinsic Duty of Care
Some self-hosting news:
- GitGen Provides Resource-Unintensive Git Hosting
- Neil Brown on why I and many others are wrong about self-hosting being a solution to the enshittification crisis
Some Gaming Stuff:
- Christer Enfors of TTRPG Hangout explains his emacs extension for Solo RPGs - May be of some use to Game for Scribes fans!
- A Brand New Gameboy Colour Adventure - Jupiter’s Ghost!
And, the obligatory youtube roll:

These monthly aggregations are also a great time to talk about reading. So far this year I’ve read Cascade by Rachel Rosen and of course Persepolis Rising from J.S.A. Corey, as well as finally finishing my analysis on The Forge and the Crucible.

Bodhidharma’s Social Media Feed

2026-03-11T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been toying for a few months now with the idea of a pithy aphorism, something along the lines of “the curse of sentience is its desire to be self-indulgent”. It’s not a commentary on craving chocolate, but this idea that somehow, in all our self-aware brilliance, there is a compulsive need to know about everything going on, to “monitor the situation”. Sometimes, this drive is taken so seriously that we latch to it as though it were potentially a moral failing not to keep up with goings-on. There’s a whole subset of modern Buddhist discourse concerned with Engagement; keeping an eye on the state of the world and attempting to nudge it in the ways best suited.

To be clear, I don’t think that these are inherently bad ideas; I’m not here to argue that the moral reality is the opposite or that there’s no moral character at all to how much attention we pay to the outside world. I’m not sure there would be much interest in such a document anyway. I’m certainly not here to promote or take down the idea of Engaged Buddhism. I merely want to answer a question I’ve been asking myself slowly for a couple of years now, as I migrated to the Fediverse and started thinking hard about what my goals for the use of Social Media actually are. That question being:

If Bodhidharma had a social media feed, what would that look like?

The short pithy answer is that Bodhidharma’s doctrinal decision to teach zazen as an exercise in staring at blank cave walls probably means he wouldn’t have a social media feed at all. For many of us that’s probably the “best option”. If you have no need of social media I really wouldn’t advise anyone to ever actually use it.

But I’m not sure that anyone exists who has no need for social media. The internet has become a solid contender for a third place for all mankind. I for one, having had social media, would be loathe to give it up even if the only use I had for it was socializing with like-minded peers, and that’s not the only valid use. Creatives of all kinds ply their trades in large part due to being able to promote their work effectively on social media. There’s good reasons to use it.

There’s also bad reasons to use it. Social media platforms which are supported largely by the ad revenue they can generate have a financial incentive to keep you engaged with their platform, scrolling down your infinitely-scrolling feed, so that they can interweave ads into the content. And of course, the more ads they add the more you’ll get annoyed with them, so they have to make sure the feed they’re showing you is so engaging that you’ll actually feel the need to continue scrolling in spite of their advertisements. For this reason, feeds that are algorithmically crafted tend to farm strong emotions - the easiest of which to capitalize on is outrage.

And boy, are we in a time of plentiful reasons to be outraged.

So, whether you’re just a cartoon dog on the internet or a writer doing their best to build a following and engage with their community, you’ve got a few good reasons to be on the social media.

What you don’t really need - what I would certainly advise against - is confusing Social Media with a news source. That isn’t to say that politics should never be discussed and that you shouldn’t have a broad swathe of people you’re paying attention to who might, depending on where they live and who they are, be Going Through It™. What it does mean is that there’s nothing wrong with keeping your social media feeds as pleasant as can be managed.

News Sources aren’t going to be posting their nuanced positions on character-limited ActivityPub and Bluesky feeds. Your favourite Radio Hams aren’t going to have the latest report from Kerson (and even if they did, you don’t likely need the latest report from Kerson). If you want your X feed to be nothing but accounts that automatically post photos of birds native to your special interest continents, that’s not the worst use of bandwidth of all time.

Zazen is Zazen, and Samu is Samu.

It might surprise people to learn that the majority of a Zen monastic’s time is not spent in seated meditation staring at the wall (outside of things like osseshin). Running such a facility takes an enormous amount of work. There’s floors to clean, fields to plow, rounds to make, laundry to fold, and all those things. Such institutions recognize work as a second occasion for meditation - Samu. It’s not the same as Zazen, but it is. It’s an extension built upon it, a recognition that “yes, yes, this is all very well and good on the cushion, but if you can’t bring it into the waking world, what’s the point?”

Your engagement with the world can lso be like this. You are under exactly no obligation to have your social media feeds be the entirety of your day, and even if you can’t help but spend all day with a mastodon tab open or sitting in a matrix chat, you don’t have to let your every conversation be about The Situation™. There’s an old tumblr saw about the internet being a place you visited, because you had to travel to Desktop to get onto a Browser and go to The Internet. I like this thought very much. I think it is wonderfully extended if you remember that the news used to be a thing you got by “Reading the Newspaper”. It was a thing you got by going to a place to get the news and sitting down consciously and engaging with the news. Sure, news conversations would arise at work or at the pub or in the barber shop, but you made a decision to engage with the goings-on.

And I think creating that space for yourself, that distinction between “I am checking in with the situation” and “I am catching up with my friends”, that’s so important to re-create in how we engage with media.

I don’t have a good system for creating that division yet, but I think, looping back to our original question, that it would be something like Bodhidharma’s Social Media Feed. This is a man who cut off his own arm to demonstrate a point to a student. I can’t really picture the red-bearded foreigner exposing himself to a constant stream of the happenings at court.

If you are going to chop wood, chop wood. If you are going to carry water, carry water. If you are going to catch up with friends, catch up with friends. If you’re going to look at films of people’s pet rabbits, do that. If you need to read the news, do that, on purpose.

After all, a huge part of zen is learning how to resist the urge to control the uncontrollable by accepting that it’s out of your control. Unplugging from the constant news and turning it into the news you fetch when you need to know about it is a first step toward realizing that most of this stuff is beyond your control anyway.

Whether or not it’s worth witnessing in spite of how you can’t control it is an exercise that needs to be left to you, because at the end of the day, we each only have our own perspective to work from, however hard we try to incorporate the perspectives of others. Though on that, I will add this: when the cabin is compromised and the air pressure is gone, you have to put your own breathing mask on first before you can help anyone else. The Bodhisattva who is staying behind in Samsara until all sentient beings are liberated needs their own liberation before they can do their work.

This blog, along with most Arcana Labs projects, are offered up as a free-as-in-beer activity on the internet; something for you to peruse at your leisure and enjoy. If you’d like to contribute to the development activities at Arcana Labs or show appreciation for our free offerings, consider lending us your support or perusing our Writing section for links to our published works.

Signifying Nothing - US Operation Epic Fury

2026-02-28T00:00:00-06:00

It’s 9 AM on a Saturday morning and somehow I am already an hour into having learned that the looming US strike on Iran has finally happened, and that they’ve only gone ahead and gotten Israel involved too. The US has named this operation “Epic Fury”, which always brings to mind the old Shakespeare saw “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It’s easy to get pulled into asides about the name of the operation and wrack up a few quick morale-boosting rhetorical kills against the men in the US who made this decision, but that would be missing the broader point here.

Being the aggressor in a war almost never actually benefits the aggressor and almost never turns out to be morally justifiable. This only gets worse when you’re squaring up against a near-parity force. Not that anyone is near-parity to the US but for a country that outspends any given 20 or so collectively on their military they do have a shocking habit of losing almost any time they’re the ones in charge, which is interesting in a case like this.

If POTUS was undeniably mentally competent, it’d be pretty easy to make the argument that the sole responsibility for his actions lay with him. But to be honest, even in cases where the position is being held by a mentally competent individual, one man can never be solely responsible for war. Thousands of people between his whims and the blood on the pavement have to accept the necessity of the war and engage in the business of bringing the war about. It’s a bit like the problem where a toddler gets control of a motor vehicle and kills the old lady across the street when they back into the rosebushes; you don’t arrest the toddler, but the parent.

The citizens of the US and Israel, and their partner nations in the conflict, have a responsibility to immediately down tools, especially if they’re actually in these nations’ respective Military-Industrial complexes. “Not in my name” has to be more than your muttered Nuremberg defense. It is your rallying cry, the first line of your protest songs and if need be the last line of your epitaphs. Get yourselves familiar with the CIA simple sabotage field manual. Lose work orders that would facilitate the war. Struggle to process tax filings. Continue to clog the toilets on the USS Ford.

Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of people on all the sides of the conflict are about to die so that a few mostly old mostly white mostly men are going to be able to feel like they created a place in history for themselves. And to be entirely too fair to them, they have.

But that place has to be in Den Hague, and if you in any way are helping to hand them the keys, you need to be right there with them.

We’ve Been Doing Business Wrong

2026-02-18T00:00:00-06:00

For some reason, after spending the best part of a decade in the tech industry, I’ve begun to feel a certain kind of way about the state of enterprise in the highly industrialized parts of the world. I can’t begin to imagine why. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”, the kids say. (I’ve looked. The quote’s hard to source, but it appears in a 1969 article by Edward Abbey, though he was chiefly concerned with urban sprawl.) Like most ideas a person can hold, the way I’ve viewed enterprise and corporation over the last thirty years or so of my life has gone through some changes. Now, with nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon but finally put some of those thoughts to pen, I am going to inflict them upon you.

Scarcity is a Dead God, and We Have Killed Him.

There’s this concept in science fiction, that at least makes a nod toward economics as a science, of ‘post-scarcity’. It’s most strongly featured in Star Trek, and the progenitor-idea behind the leftist’s favourite meme of “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism”. The short version, again without reference to actual economics (at best a minor in my management-oriented post-secondary education) is that it’s possible for a society to hit a level of industrialization and economic productivity where resources are effectively unlimited - e.g. the Star Trek “replicator” or the fact that humanity collectively grows more food than it can consume, logistically.

There’s sort of two problems with post-scarcity thinking:

It creates a general idea that anything post-scarcity is effectively worthless because there’s effectively infinitely many of it;
As a result of one, which is caused by the supply/demand idea in your first-pass macro-econ course, the presumption that Infinitely Many of something is “worthless” incentivizes the manufacturing of scarcity.

Basically, if you make Software TM, you want to be able to generate the greatest profit making that software possible. This means being able to somehow drive up the price you can extract (amazingly, this is possible even though software is an effectively post-scarcity resource right from the outset!) while driving down your cost to manufacture. Most recently we see this in terms of replacing human employees with unfit-for-purpose toolboxes instead in the form of LLM slopcode-agents, but it’s a problem as old as double-entry accounting.

“Software” here can be considered a meta-syntactic variable: my complaints apply to basically any product you can think of.

And here’s the thing. Let’s suppose you’re me: writing blogposts, creating small gizmos and bits of software, writing books, and throwing livestreams onto the internet every few days. If you want to earn a living doing that, meaning you want to financially justify this use of your time by ensuring that, as a result of these activities you are able to cover the costs of your necessities of daily life and bonus luxuries as are afforded to you, you too need to have a corporation’s eye for the profit margin - that difference between what you can get other people to pay you for your activity and what it costs you to pursue that activity and deliver those things to the people who are paying you. For the vast majority of people in “developed” countries, this problem is most easily solved by agreeing to work for a corporate entity or some other enterprise in exchange for a wage or a salary.

There is nothing wrong with earning a wage, or a salary, or using your skills for profit in any other way. The problem is when concern for profit becomes an all-consuming need to grow the profits. The problem, in short, is Fiduciary Responsibility, not merely a profit-motive.

Fiduciary Responsibility is the Worst Period Idea Period Ever Period

Fiduciary Responsibility is, in essence, the idea that if you are an agent of an enterprise, you owe a responsibility to everyone with a stake in that enterprise to make the enterprise as profitable as possible. Where this differs from a profit motive on its own is that key phrase, stakeholders.

If I wanted to make Arcana Labs and all it’s various strange activities, or my fiction writing, or my twitch streaming a full-time career, we could think of that in a way as a form of sole proprietorship. I am effectively an enterprise of one, and everyone in the enterprise is a stakeholder, obviously.

If you had a partnership structure, all the partners would be stakeholders, which is also appropriate.

A major problem with the current mainstream model of incorporation, where ownership of the corporation is staked to effectively tradable tokens-of-ownership (shares, whether or not the company is publicly traded), a problematic situation can develop where most of the stake held is by a comparatively small number of people within the enterprise, or, worse, a significant portion of stake is held outside the enterprise entirely. When this happens, the Fiduciary Responsibility principle makes your decision-making beholden to either a minority of your fellow members of the enterprise or to individuals outside the enterprise entirely. The concern is now “what will make the shareholders the most money?”, and this increasingly reduces the amount of concern that goes into the enterprise itself. If it’s most profitable when the time to compute profit comes around to reduce headcount, you’ll shed hundreds of employees to meet those growth targets the stakeholders expect.

You’re holding my Bag.

We accept this behaviour because we accept a collection of social constructs that have become truths of the world, but they’re less true in the “water is wet” sense than they are in the broader sense of “vanilla smells pleasant”. Of course the profit should go to the stakeholders. They’re stakeholders. They have the risk and should get the reward.

These truths are numerous: money has a value, rent-seeking is acceptable behaviour, investors hold all the risk. They are, however, Lies to Children. Useful fictions. Money services as a medium of exchange only because we’ve all agreed that it should. We allow for landlordism and other rent-seeking behaviours because we’ve got a situation where housing and other needful goods are not in surplus and also unevenly-distributed. “Landlords give access to housing” is a true statement that is also true in the sense that “cars are a more free method of transport than busses”.

But that’s a discussion for another time. For the present, our real bone to pick is this idea that stake-holders, especially shareholders, are “holding the bag” of risk and reward. That statement is arguably still sometimes true, to be fair; when an enterprise is in its infancy, not yet stabilized and established. It becomes less true as business models solidify, and I would argue, absolutely fallacious by the time a business is stable enough to consider “going public”. The risk assumed by the NASDAQ or NYSE investor can be better compared to the risk assumed by the gambler than the baker, though the stock game is arguably safer to the initiated than buying a lottery ticket is. (“Lotteries are a tax on the poor” is another idea that might bear some examination at another time.)

Indeed, any time a situation has emerged where a legal move for a business is to shed employees - contributors to the enterprise - in order to maximize the profit opportunities for the “legal” stakeholders, the real risk is on the shoulders of these ‘unstaked’ employees.

In fact, I’m comfortable to say that this situation is a form of legalized theft. If the worker performs their job poorly, they realize the risk of the failures of the enterprise. If they perform their job well, but Infinite Growth isn’t on the cards for the company they work for, they still bear the risk of the insufficient success of the enterprise.

The Game is not Zero-Sum, Even When It Is

Let’s digress for a moment to discuss the infinite growth meme, because I think it’s important for people to understand what I see as the true punchline of a “number go up” mentality: absolutely nothing works that way in reality. All products, scarce or post-scarce or never-scarce-in-the-first-place, have a saturation point where everyone who could possibly be convinced to purchase that product or patronize that service have done so. It’s not a question of expanding your offering or getting into new markets: if there’s only eight billion or so living and financially liquid souls on the planet, it is improbable you are going to sell many more than eight billion licenses for Software TM.

That doesn’t mean everything, or even anything, will only ever be purchased by one person one time, of course. As we figured out with the frankly rather infuriating move from perpetual licensing to personal-use subscription SaaS, almost anything can be turned into a forever revenue stream. At that point, your concern turns a little bit toward client retention, sure, but there’s still a greatest possible extent to which you’re ever going to spread your market cap.

And that is absolutely okay. If the business is profitable, if the enterprise is able to sustain the livelihoods of all engaged in the enterprise, it is doing its job even if it’s not setting new records every year.

The Guilds and the Trade Unions had a Point

The thing is, I just don’t think that limited liability corporations with transferrable shares are a responsible or ethical way to organize an enterprise, for much the same reason I don’t think it’s a good idea to let someone else own all my data storage or to let a child have unrestricted access to a firearm. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in stakeholders. I’m not an idiot; there is risk in enterprise. My education was to support a career in an industry where the average life expectancy of a fresh enterprise was 3 years and you shouldn’t expect to turn a profit on the original investment in the first five years. Obviously that’s not the kind of thing that just anyone should do or the kind of risk that just anyone should take.

There’s a reason the majority of people are employees of an enterprise with an agreed wage or salary rather than taking the full risks of ownership of an enterprise, after all.

I was asked a few months ago what my ideal enterprise looks like, and I can articulate it in the silliest way possible: it looks a lot like what a pirate crew on the web game Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates looks like: everyone staked to varying degrees to the success of the enterprise. You had tiers that were something like “double share”, “full share”, and “half share”, and at the end of a session once the booty were liquidated into currency, that pool of currency was split according to those shares (2, 1, and 0.5). As long as everyone knew what they’d signed up for, things were fine.

(Occasionally, someone would misunderstand, and war were declared)

Now, it’s a risky proposition for the average person stuck on a salary - I know I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around deciding to give up a salaried position where I know that on certain days every month I have a certain amount of money coming to me and can budget accordingly. I don’t think “fixed rate” employment is ever going away completely.

But I do think it’s a good model. I think it actually creates a sense of being a stakeholder in an enterprise, of having a vested interest in doing whatever you can to ensure the success of that enterprise, in order to maximize the pie for everyone else aboard (beg pardon) and make sure those two slices, that slice, or half-slice you’re taking home was worth your time and effort. And here’s the thing: nowhere in there did I suggest you should be able to buy your way to a slice of the pie, let alone a bigger one. If you have too much money lying around, and you wanted to use it to speculate on the success or failure of an enterprise, we have a tool for that already - it’s called usury.

I don’t think that you should really be taking the stake with you when you leave, either. You should obviously get the share that’s coming to you on the way out the door, but if you’re gone you’re gone.

So how do you move up this ladder of stakes? The hopeless optimist in me thinks merit might suffice, but that’s an awfully broad term. The part of me that tends to view all labour as a trade wonders if it shouldn’t be something a bit like seniority. When you’re junior and fresh in your role, maybe you are a rate employee, and become a half-share when you’ve got the basic ropes. Then, as you move up that ladder of instrumentality, demonstrate a greater mastery of your profession and eventually even start mentoring others, you’re granted more share as you go up. I know. Imagine working hard and improving your skills being a rewarded behaviour.

That was really the other half of my ideal model: the enterprise, as a by product, should be creating masters of the trade the enterprise plies. Anything worth doing is worth doing well. None of this “let’s automate away all the work we normally give junior engineers” as if you have no idea where senior engineers come from. (If you really don’t, ask your father.)

Bus Factors of 100% are Perfectly Reasonable

Anticipating reactions, the next objection is probably “well, that’s all well and good for an enterprise where one accident wipes out all thirty employees, but what happens when you want to scale”, at which point I politely remind you that “scale” is a four-letter word in this laboratory and shake the swear jar under your nose like the mother of an unruly teen.

I don’t know that I believe a business should scale infinitely. In software it’s certainly easy to grow, but I’ve worked in plenty of other industries where it wouldn’t make sense. What would a restaurant even do with 500 employees?

It’s like the old joke about the more popular furry conventions: the wrong plane crash on the way to or leaving Midwest Fur Fest is going to kill the entire staff-engineer-and-higher generation of the US IT industry. Obviously that sort of thing would be a disaster, but I sort of think that all of your employees probably should be able to fit on the same airplane (even if it’s a really big one). It keeps the heirarchy reasonably flat and facilitates an environment where a share of ownership is actually worth something.

Remember, you want a flat heriarchy because why be a half share when there’s a 100-share member of the c-suite (which would actually be less skewed than the minimum/maximum compensation disparities at most tech firms), and you don’t always want a situation where the total number of shares in the entire enterprise is so high where your share can’t support your livelihood anymore!

XKCD 2347 is an Ideal, Actually

Obviously, there comes an objection to this: in order to grow the enterprise, more people are needed. The counter-argument to this, is, of course, to point at recent layoff figures, but let’s address the problem more specifically:

I don’t think that anybody needs to be the “world’s standard producer of X, Y, or Z” anyway.

This might be the FOSS/OSHW brainworms, or my recent increasing radicalization toward being a proponent of federated technologies and platforms, but you can just be curl. There’s no reason we need to be creating these huge software monocultures to let one womable vulnerability rip through everything. There’s no need to be the global leader in social media platforms for pictures of cats messing up calligraphy projects.

From an economic perspective, there’s an important difference between a company selling paperclips in 450 countries and a company selling paperclips in one logistical region of one administrative division of every country: a whole lot more job opportunities for would-be sellers of paperclips, makers of paperclips, and designers of new and exotic paperclip technologies.

XKCD 927 doesn’t Matter

From here, the obvious objection becomes that sounds like an interoperability nightmare, but it’s really only as big of a problem as market forces would allow.

It’s a comparison that annoys a lot of people, but of the things Discord replaced, one of the core examples is IRC. But IRC wasn’t one piece of software the way that Discord is. It was a standard, a protocol for a way to use the internet to reliably move text messages between individuals on different computers. It had as many clients - produced by as many different enterprises - as there are fish in the sea. People are still producing new software that uses the standard.

A standards-based approach to manufacturing is literally all it takes to have global interoperability of “stuff”, and we had that (or were on the way to that) for the better part of a century. It wasn’t even “the internet” or “big tech” that ruined that for us per se, it was the late-internet-2.0 “FAAANG” era of “one stop shop” apps where something that used to be a distributed standard and the people who used it were increasingly replaced with one product owned and maintained by one company whose profit motives (and fiduciary responsibility) might not best align with the interests or tastes of their users.

And every time you try to suggest that sort of approach again, people bring up XKCD 927, as if somehow the integer count of standards available is actually a problem. Even if you have fifteen competing standards for (e.g.) smartphone OS image baselines, it doesn’t really cause a problem as long as products that have to interact with that list what standards they conform to and are compatible with.

You know, like how we have a dozen competing net-friendly (and sometimes not net-friendly) formats for storing digital images.

The Arcana Corollary to Vimes’ Law

I mentioned early the idea that an enterprise can reach a sort of break-even where they’ve reached everyone they can, and at a certain point, their only hope is essentially repeat business. This phenomenon is responsible for most of the stuff you don’t currently like about any industry you could probably mention, and to rattle them off is a risk of projecting that “old man yells at cloud” image. Nothing has a decent amount of on-board storage anymore. Cars aren’t built to last anymore. “Device Hording”. Fast Fashion.

In one of his Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett expounded an idea that has since become known as Vimes Law or “The Boot Rule”. To not crib him directly, the idea was that an expensive boot probably lasts a good long time, but a cheap boot almost certainly won’t. By the time you’ve worn out the expensive boot, you’d almost certainly have spent more money replacing the cheap boots. He likens the idea to a tax on poverty (if you’re too broke to afford the expensive boots once, you have no choice but to repeatedly by the cheap ones), and I in no way disagree.

This is a problem for me personally. I have strange cares. I am not interested in participating in a system where you’re deliberately making an inferior thing so that you can sell more of the thing. This phenomenon is in no way limited to physical goods.

There was a time, in my lifetime, when software was actually really expensive. (Quiet down, FOSS). If you wanted that year’s edition of Microsoft Office, or one of the Adobe suite programs, or something from Autodesk like AutoCAD or Maya (I think they made Maya, anyway), you needed some appreciable spare dosh. This was a real problem for people just starting out, like students in a field that used the specialized software. FOSS really didn’t have the broad format compliance it has now, and even if it did, a bunch of students in a classroom are going to be much harder to teach if they’re using half a dozen different programs in the same general category, by comparison to teaching all of them Excel specifically. But, there was a beautiful compensation: most of the time these licenses were perpetual. If you bought, say, Microsoft Office 2006, you had it until the wheels fell off.

This was true of operating systems, software suites, etc. You actually owned things.

Now, of course, with the subscription model, that barrier to entry is lower. A self-employed artist can almost justify the expense of Adobe (but obviously, profit motive being what it is, should be exploring other alternatives!) on a month to month basis but over the run of years pay enormous sums of their profits. Perpetual licenses for a lot of software isn’t even always available. (For a while, gaming was a sacred island in a sea of this nonsense, but the proliferation of mobile games and MMOs has made that significantly murkier over the years.)

There’s a million justifications. Oh, you get updates more often, and that can be important for security. Oh, we’re constantly adding new features.

But you don’t own anything. If you stop paying, you don’t even retain access to the software in the state it was in when you stopped paying for these new updates and features.

And if you’re not careful about that, especially with the increasing reliance on paid cloud storage - you can lose your livelihood this way.

It’s a tax on individual enterprise, it’s the Vimes Law tax on being too poor to afford licenses that they won’t even sell you in the first place, and it’s just wrong. It’s not how an ethical enterprise should operate.

But how do we get around market saturation if we can’t double dip? The same way we did before: the upgrades need to be genuine upgrades. The next widget in the product line needs to be an actual improvement. You sell service and repairs. It’s not rocket appliances, it’s just slightly more effort than rent-seeking. But the choice between the two is straightforward, if you have a conscience.

The Ethics of Vast Wealth

I’ve had to tack this bit down at the end, as a sort of final thought, because there’s no straight flow into it from any one other topic we touched on: while a reasonable appreciation of profit motive is a necessity in a monetary economy, and the fiduciary responsibility is reasonable when it’s not being abused (it is still, after all, present in a system where the stakeholders are the main agents of the enterprise rather than external actors), I’m still not wholly convinced there is an ethical version of being a billionaire, or millionaire.

Not in the sense of those specific numbers - inflation is hitting a point where you almost have to be a millionaire to be comfortably middle-class, in some senses - but this idea that somehow anyone’s contributions to society as a whole or the enterprises they’re active in to the extent that they’re worth hundreds of their comrades.

I believe this is where the kids would say “Eat the Rich”. Horded money serves no ends. Get it out there, get it flowing, get it doing stuff. It’s good for you, good for enterprise, and good for your community.

The ironclad way to not get torches-and-pitchforksed by the peasantry is not to be the lord in the first place. Or, to put it another way: Corona onus grave est; noli eam gerere.

PETI Single-Board Dev Kit, Consumerism, and Unusual Delays

2026-01-21T04:00:00-06:00

Last October, I took the time to share some updates about PETI, which at that point was more a project-in-concept than something I was hands-on-keyboard “working on”. That’s not really true anymore; over the last couple weeks, I’ve been actually working on our favourite virtual pet again. Specifically, on the new Single Board Development Kit (SBDK).

Gordian-Knotting the Battery Capacity Problem

One of my big concerns last October was whether or not I could reassemble the development kit in a way that all the various daughter cards currently part of the development kit could fit on one board with roughly the same footprint as the TI Launchpad that would form its brain. A big part of that concern came from the battery that drives the development kit.

The current Development Kit, with Revision C of the “backplane” board, uses a 2x AA cells-in-series battery to drive the toy. Since these are NiMH batteries, they provide about 2.4v DC for about 1200 mAh, and even with some care and attention paid to cutting certain circuits out of the flow when running on battery power, that wasn’t really enough to play “more than a day or so” of PETI. This made the obvious size solution - replace the AAs with button cells - undesirable, because any version of that I could pursue would (a) replace secondary recharagable cells with primary single-use cells and (b) lower the overall power capacity even further.

I spent multiple hours chasing possible efficiencies around the circuit in terms of the amperage only to come up with something that made me feel kind of unhappy: the only time the power draw is even remotely high anywhere on the toy is when an LED is flashing or for the brief moment that a button was being pressed.

Brief Sidebar: in the video linked above, I conclude without ever resolving something that was left as an open mystery: why disconnecting the LCD board lowers power consumption device-wide by 6 mA, even though I don’t actually measure that amount of current on any signal or power pin. During a later session, which is linked below, I make the discovery that one of the pins on the LCD panel happens to be tied directly to ground in the stock configuration of the toy. That pin is also a GPIO pin. I suspect the current fall is coming from the LCD no longer pulling a GPIO pin to ground, since the way I have that GPIO pin configured makes it a pull-up-resistor pin. 6 mA happens to be the rough maximum rating that the GPIO pins can provide for this microcontroller.

By the end of all my investigating I ultimately realized that there wasn’t going to be a change in firmware that would meaningfully lower power use, beyond possibly changing the timing and duty cycle of the LED flashes for the alert and low battery LEDs (which should probably also have their resistances increased). That meant I had a real problem: the AAs are too big for a single board design but no button cell existed that could even come close in capacity, even with many wired in parallel, without losing their advantage in compactness.

Enter, please, Lithium battery chemistry. Many lithium battery configurations exist with some real advantages here. For one, both Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries are rechargable, meaning that we don’t have to lose the advantage in waste management we had from working with NiMH. Second, most LiIon and LiPo cells that I can find output a voltage of 3.7v nominal. This means that even a battery with slightly less nominal capacity (in mAh) will last longer than the NiMH battery, because there’s a loss in capacity caused by stepping the 2.4v NiMH up to the 3v3 rail, whereas the lithium chemistry is actually stepping down. (Ohm’s law. It’s not just there to give your high school physics teacher something to make you memorize.)

Originally, PETI was going to explicitly have an integrated Lithium battery pack. It was 2019! Who ever heard of a toy that needed batteries? No no, you just plug that thing into the wall overnight while you weren’t using it anyway! As a beginner at this sort of thing, I had a healthy appreciation for Risk, so when I started to realize I was having difficulty fully understanding the circuitry needed to safely charge an on-board battery and regulate its voltage (all while managing the way voltage is being supplied to the toy, on top of which!), I balked. Let’s take the rechargable battery off the board, said I.

Well, I’ve talked myself back into it. This way, we can achieve parity or possibly even surpass the AA battery pack, if not in terms of actual electrical capacity, then in wall-clock uptime. And, if nothing else, we can just plug the darn thing in to charge it.

Restarting Schematics from Scratch

With that decision ‘made’ (for values of made), we could then set about the work of pulling the existing circuits knowledge from the RevA/C Development Kit and creating schematics for the new SBDK. This is the humbling exercise of going over all the pre-existing (and frankly horrendously drawn) schematics for the PETI Rear Expansion Board, the BOOSTXL-SHARP128 LCD module from TI, and the “control daughterboard”, breaking them all apart into their relevant circuits and schematics, and then recording those into a fresh KiCAD project. Most of that is incredibly straightforward, actually. I would argue that there are no complex circuits in PETI, which is where the humbling part comes in - this is 5+ years of my hard-won hobbyist EE experience and the most complicated circuits on the whole board are the pinout for the LCD header (which is just a bit of power, a bit of decoupling, and some SPI signal lines), or the pinout for the power converter (which we aren’t even keeping for the current redesign!).

Fully redrawing all the circuits we’re actually keeping from previous hardware revisions took about an hour and a half, and a goodly part of that hour and a half was the distraction of chat banter, or the occasional hiccup with KiCAD. From there though, the supposedly fun part - settling on a specific battery to use in the design so that we can pick an appropriate charging IC and an appropriate power management IC and start wiring together all the power circuitry, from the two battery terminals to the 3v3 and ground rails.

Sidebar again: I had a thought to possibly not bother designing the USB connection for the charging circuit at all on the SBDK but instead to use the 5v rail to supply the “charging” voltage to the battery charging portion of the circuit. This 5v rail comes from the 5v of the Ez-FET subsection of the launchpad board, which itself is supplied via USB. Why spec in a connector we don’t need?

The problem I ran into there is that for reasons currently passing my understanding, neither of the suppliers I normally turn to for components on these projects - DigiKey and Mouser - were willing to sell lithium batteries in Canada. Mouser explicitly says this when you look up the parts; in DigiKey’s case, they just appear as “unavailable in your currency”.

So now I’m kind of hung up on the problem of choosing the battery, which brings everything else to a crashing halt.

Where to Go from Here

While it’s unquestionable that Lithium chemistry batteries are hazardous to ship (as are, if we’re being honest, almost all batteries), I am not ecstatic about the leading solution to the problem of sourcing the battery - that is, ordering one (1) battery for myself at retail prices from somewhere, and building the spec around it. These are sort of a specialty good (not that the development kit isn’t), so there’s that problem. But also, the SBDK’s design considerations are all around “easy adoption” of the development kit by someone who wants to use this project as a launchpad to get into this kind of development. Eliminating the LCD module by moving the display onto the SBDK is explicitly about shortening the overall BOM for the new user. Making them responsible for buying a slightly exotic battery is not really progress.

The other problem is that it’s also just annoying. It’s patently absurd that almost any J Random Toy Manufacturer on Wish can ship you something with a battery in it, but for some reason I can’t.

Finding a supply of these batteries - possibly now from a vendor overseas (which, let’s face it, is where they were being manufactured anyway) is obviously the next step for hardware development on PETI, but hardware development on PETI isn’t only part of this project. The revision C development kit still exists, and I still own one.

So while I ruminate on battery choice, I’m going to keep working on firmware version 0.6.0, which is an update comprising of a more advanced evolution system that ties in with an all-new pet health system. I rather frustratingly stopped development in the middle of that update so I’m not entirely sure where the state of it stands, but that’s what git and notes are for.

And, in keeping with the new stream schedule, I will at the minimum be working on the pet in public on Tuesdays at 7 PM Atlantic/Halifax time on my Twitch livestreams.

Internet Highlights - 2025-12-31

2025-12-31T00:00:00-06:00

As is increasingly our tradition around here, I wanted to take one final opportunity this year to round up the fun and interesting things I found this month and share them with you! But first, a more important message: If you’re on the Gregorian Calendar, let me extend to you my warmest wishes for the upcoming year. I don’t think there are many adults whose impression of 2025 was overwhelmingly positive, so, quite seriously, All the Best.

The first highlight of the month was finding a new mastodon/fediverse hashtag game, #MakersHour. It’s a one-hour run every Thursday, a set of five questions with 10 minutes for everyone to respond to them. Big hoot, and I’m finding some cool new people that way too.

NASA has open-libraried a large number of e-pub and PDF books on astronomy and aeronautical science. On a similar vein, I also learned about DokuWiki, a database-free wiki software package which might allow for an even simpler setup and management workflow than MediaWiki, which is our current standard. Sticking with books, I’ve also learned of an upcoming new book on the internet of my childhood, meaning I’m now “sing you the song of my people” years old, I suppose. On the topic of the Oldternet, Neocities is a whole thing. To my immediate pleasure, there’s been no end of progress made in terms of advancing the return to tradition of our internet prime - including this special backend for having a static, but periodically updating, site.

As the oldheads around the lab know, I’m something of an information security and privacy nerd. Some folks have expressed some concern that I primarily use the fediverse for online social media, because the fediverse, broadly speaking, cannot handle end-to-end encryption. That may soon change. Frequent flyer on these aggregation posts, Soatok Dreamseaker, has introduced a prospective implementation of a standard for key transparency. This is a major step toward solving that problem, which of course makes it a major step toward a freer, more equitable, and abuse-resistant internet. To the immediate contrary, Quebec is doing Quebec Shit, proving once again that the Notwithstanding Clause was a mistake and that we really need to amend some basic law around here.

In “Lies to Children” news, your brain is less of a computer than you think it is. I gotta be honest, if I could just learn for a living instead of having to farm computers, I’d probably dive a lot deeper into that strange edge of science between neurology, psychology, and Theory of Mind, because this is definitely a field where the more you know, the less you understand.

I like to play a little game, and this month’s big hits have been Space Haven and (since I’m such a sucker for Zachtronics games)TIS-100.

And, because I just can’t ween myself off the platform (in fact, I’ve been thinking about creating some videos for it directly), a brief roundup of youtube videos worth watching.

SAD: Frontier, a channel where someone has created their own hard sci-fi setting that I’m absolutely fascinated by.
MsMadLemon mods an Amiga to take USB-C Power
My Favourite Book Binder, Four Keys Bindery, has a special project for Andy Weir

Finally, since it’s the year end and there’s no point in doing a separate announcement for it, I’m excited to say that I will be returning to Twitch starting next year. The times included below are Atlantic Time, which is currently UTC -4.

Tuesdays at 7PM - Lab Nights with much tinkering and poking. Effectively, anything to do with creating or modifying software and hardware. Think PETI, but also think perhaps kit assembly projects, creating household helper software or libraries for the same, etc etc.
Thursdays at 7PM - Office Hours, which’ll be writing and journalling streams or things that are close cousins. RPG session prep, planning and curruculae, maybe even literary analysis stuff.
Saturdays at 3 PM - Free Play. I’ve always got some game or other under my skin worth showing to people. Possibly also RPG Liveplays, but I think those will be fewer and further between. Either way, we’ll crack some beverages and play in some sandboxes.

Passkeys: Ruining a Great Idea

2025-12-16T04:00:00-06:00

Passkeys are undergoing a major adoption push at the moment, as a replacement for the more traditional username/password authentication model. And while they do carry significant benefits, the way they’re being adopted makes me a bit nervous, to say the least.

It’s been a while since I wrote on a security-related topic, and there’s a good reason for that: I’m now qualified enough in this area to understand how big the gaps in my understanding can be. It’s a bit like accounting. I know enough about accounting to be dangerous. That’s why you shouldn’t ask me for accounting device, but work with an actual accountant who carries liability insurance. That said, I think I know enough in this one particular area to at least raise some concerns.

For the uninitiated, a passkey authentication model involves a cryptographic challenge to test whether you and a thing-to-authenticate-to (usually, this being the 2020s, a website) agree on the value of a shared secret. There’s a thousand standard and non-standard versions of this arrangement, and my critique isn’t for the cryptography itself. It’s the way those secrets/keys are being handled.

You see, I’m a big believer in additional factors of authentication, and asymmetric encryption makes me very happy. I’ve been using a Yubikey Hardware Token for years, and if I had my way, they’d be as ubiquitous as house-keys. Many passkey schemes allow a compatible controller (like the Yubikey) to hold the keys for a passkey challenge. I have zero problem with this model. I own the physical hardware key, that key is robust, and, (to within a reasonable limit), backup authentication workflows exist in case I somehow manage to destroy the damn thing.

The problem I’m seeing now, though, is how often the passkey storage method is being pressured toward unsuitable models. All too often, the key is being stored in a browser or attached to an account from a service provider: your password manager, gmail account, or similar. This becomes a real problem, not because the backup access methods aren’t viable (I have no comment on that),but because of the further consolidation of “authority” as to whether or not you have access to your various accounts in the hands of a small number of vendors. Vendors who usually have terms of service that allow them to boot you off their service, with limited appeal and little recourse.

Now, if you’re a professional paranoid like me and you keep all your backup passcodes printed or written out in a safe somewhere, that might not be a huge problem. But for a large number of users, that’s probably not happening. I’m not going to pretend this is truly novel threat service - the average person with one master email account is pretty well hosed if that account ever gets taken over by a malicious user already anyway. The bigger problem is the cascading effect caused by the loss of access if you are ejected, at a time when the big vendors are becoming more and more overtly conservative and willing to terminate accounts for absolute nonsense reasons.

Let’s suppose a prototypical user, Able Baker, has a gmail account that he’s used to sign in to chrome, and that chrome is acting as a passkey store for all of Able Baker’s pass keys. Mx Baker is using passkeys to authenticate to most important things in their life: bank, github, entertainment, and so on. Unfortunately for Mx. Baker, an erroneous report reaches Google that Baker is involved in sending Spam emails, and with minimal investigation of the matter, Google terminates their business relationship with Baker. Unless they have already pre-saved backup keys in a convenient location, Baker is now effectively hard locked out of all their web identities, and has to more or less start over from scratch, or at least deal with a long and arduous process of working with dozens of vendors’ customer support; and let’s face it, that’s a lost cause.

This risk does not occur if you have a hardware store for your authentication keys. Especially with the newer Yubikey models (which can store hundreds of such keys), the only real risk is a loss of the device. Usually, when setting up passkeys that run through the Yubikey, most vendors explicitly prompt you to save backup keys immediately. Even if they don’t, I believe there is a utility that allows you to sync two yubikeys together. Stash one in the firebox and keep the other on you, and the problem goes away.

There are good reasons to adopt passkeys over username/password combinations. There’s also good reasons not to, since multifactor authentication involving a username and password is reasonably secure. I think we have to be careful about how this technology is rolled out, in case we wind up in another “SMS Second Factor” situation, where trying to add a security control actually exposes an entirely new threat surface.

Internet Highlights - 2025-11-30

2025-11-30T06:00:00-06:00

It’s not the most pressing thing in the backlog, but it’s time again for the monthly post of what has struck me as interesting from around the internet. Since we’re not starting off in the middle of the month like last time, this month is a bit more robust:

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to burn even more hours in Vintage Story in an effort to stay halfway sane after a particularly maddening week, because nothing makes your Reliability Engineering woes go away like fighting for your simple survival when a bear has decided your dooryard makes as good a winter haunt as any.