Internet Highlights - April 2026 Edition
Last Updated: 2026-05-04 00:00:00 -0500
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.