A variation of the pattern from yesterday; say you have:
Log inif (x == 3) {
y = 0;
} else {
y = 1;
}
When these are zero and one, sometimes this will give a better match, since booleans are evaluated as such:
y = (x != 3);
It's rare to have something else than zero or one work for this
pattern (e.g. you would rarely write y = (x != 3) * 2 + 1).
| AirPods 5 | AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case |
|---|---|
| Force sensor | Force sensor with swipe volume controls |
| Up to four hours of listening time on a single charge with Active Noise Cancellation enabled (up to six hours with noise control off) | Up to five hours of listening time on a single charge with Active Noise Cancellation enabled (up to seven hours with noise control off) |
| Up to 20 hours of listening time with the charging case with Active Noise Cancellation enabled | Up to 22 hours of listening time with the charging case with Active Noise Cancellation enabled |
| Charging Case (USB-C) | Wireless Charging Case (USB-C) with support for the Apple Watch charger and Qi-certified chargers |
| Case speaker for Find My and charging and battery status sounds | |
| Find My with last-connected location and sound playback on the earbuds | Find My network tracking, sound playback on the earbuds, separate locations for each earbud and the case, and individual Lost Mode support |
| Charging case weighs 32.3 grams (1.14 ounces) | Charging case weighs 34.7 grams (1.22 ounces) |
| $129 | $149 |
For over ten years, the only way I have had of knowing what our solar panels are doing has been an impulse monitor on the generation meter, counting the flashes of its LED. It has always been a bit flaky due to battery changes or loose connections, and there has never been a way to see solar generation alongside the energy used by the rest of the house. This week I have fixed that, by building a small ESPHome sensor which talks directly to the inverter. I am still reeling slightly: with AI assistance, it took under a week from idea to working implementation, and it is a project I would certainly never have attempted otherwise. The result is zeversolar-esphome.
The inverter is a Zeversolar Zeverlution 3680, which has an RS485 port but no Wi-Fi or Ethernet module. It doesn’t speak Modbus; it uses Eversolar’s own master/slave protocol, which nobody has officially documented but which several people have reverse-engineered over the years (credit to eversolar-monitor, Heliograph and others). Manufacturer support for Eversolar/Zeversolar inverters apparently ended in December 2019 when the company went out of business.
The rating plate on my inverter.
A while ago I had looked into what ports were available on this inverter with a view to connecting some sort of monitoring, but I had abandoned it as “too hard”. While working on some Home Assistant configuration, Claude suggested the idea again, but similarly wrote it off initially. I encouraged it to explore a bit further, and supplied the model number of the inverter, at which point the picture got a lot more promising. After a bit of back-and-forth about hardware, we settled on an M5Stack Atom Lite on an Atomic RS485 Base. The main attraction was that it already comes in a case, so I didn’t need to design (or, more likely, bodge) an enclosure.
While I waited for the parts to arrive, Claude wrote the firmware: an ESPHome external component built around a small, dependency-free C++ driver, with host-side unit tests against byte captures that other people had published from other models. I found it slightly surreal to have a tested protocol driver before owning any hardware to run it on.
The parts came before the tools I needed to get into the inverter safely (a DC clamp meter and a T25 screwdriver bit), so in the meantime I made up an RS485 cable - this uses an RJ45 connection at one end, and some custom wiring at the other. My first attempt was with some CAT 6, but (as Claude had pointed out and I had ignored) its solid-core conductors are much harder to twist together. So I gave up and sacrificed an old CAT 5e patch lead instead, which went much better.
The custom end of the cable, before being taped up.
On a Zeverlution, the RJ45 sockets are inside the wiring compartment, which means taking the cover off to install the monitor. The manual addresses this part to qualified electricians. So the step I was most nervous about was not the software at all, but safely isolating the inverter.
Inside the inverter, with the cover off.
I did this with appropriate caution, following the instructions from the manual carefully, and also waiting until after dark just in case. Now that I understand how the DC clips from the panels work, I can see how to do this safely during daytime too – but hopefully this won’t be necessary.
Plugged in, and threaded through the cable gland.
Warning: if you’re not confident, I would always advise to get an electrician to do this bit. Do what I say, not what I do.
Once the device was installed, the nice thing about ESPHome is that I never need to go back in the loft again to update it – it reflashes over Wi-Fi. I’ve taken full advantage of this for debugging, and for reading the wire protocol directly from the logs.
The finished device. Green means generating.
Separately, I’ve used Claude to integrate the new sensors into Home Assistant. Solar generation finally sits in the Energy dashboard next to the rest of the house’s usage, which was the whole point.
This was a fun, quick project, and it solved a problem that has eluded me for a decade. I want to be honest about how much of that is down to the AI: I would not have attempted any of this on my own. I could not have told you the protocol existed, never mind implemented it. My contribution was everything involving a screwdriver, and ordering some hardware.
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
Fun little touch for the iPhone Duo launch: Apple retail stores will have a system to customize the boot of the device with the buyer's name so it says "Hello, Mark" (for example) when it turns on for the first time. (US only, Duo only, English and Spanish).
— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) October 9, 2026
A brand new release 0.1.16 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN, has been built for r2u, and is updated on r-universe.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.
This version updates to the recent 5.0.2 upstream release with improved performance. Given the strong focus on performance, this release also alters some of the R and C++ interfaces to be more direct. Rcpp generally aims for a balance between readable / maintainable code and good performance; this moves the dial closer to strong performance gains. As Daniel noted in a table in the (main) PR for this release, this now consistently beats yyjsonr, and improves considerably over the previous release of this package. I had made some smaller interim upgrades earlier (without a CRAN releases), and made a number of minor standard packaging updates.
The short NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in version 0.1.16 (2026-10-09)
simdjson was upgraded to versions 4.6.1 and 4.6.3 (Dirk in #100 and #102 fixing #99 and #101)
simdjson was upgraded to version 5.0.2 (Daniel in #104)
A number of small tweaks to the Rcpp interface were made too (Daniel in #104)
Diagnostics for
gccandclangare not suppressed per CRAN Policy (Dirk in #106 closing #105)The continuous integration matrix was extended to
g++version 15 and 16 (Dirk in #108 closing #107)A few minor packaging nags were address (Dirk in #109)
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
A few days ago, a colleague reached out to me, asking if I could help draft a resolution on digital autonomy and free software for the upcoming renewal of our collective bargaining agreement. Although she's very politicised and generally a great individual, she is not a techie and we never really talked about these issues before.
This took me by surprise. I should have been rejoicing; no, I should have been the one who brought up this topic in our union. Wasn't I the technical expert on these issues? But alas, my first reaction when she came to me was to snicker and tell myself: "That's cute, but nothing's ever gonna change, Big Tech is too strong and our governments don't give a damn."
How sad and cynical is that? That's not the person I want to be.
Something in the Quebecois political landscape has shifted in the last few years with regards to tech. More and more "regular" people seem to be talking about the importance of digital autonomy, how government services shouldn't rely on Big Tech and how we should be using FOSS on hardware we actually control.
A few years ago, I would have been at the vanguard of this change. I would have been part of the creation of Données souveraines Québec. Heck, they are organising a whole conference next week and I'm not even going. How did this happen to me?
I first fell for Free Software for its political ideals: Knowledge Should Be Free, Cooperation Is More Efficient Than Competition, Centralisation Should Be Avoided When Possible, etc. I still believe in all of this, but somehow, after years of fighting for change in the tech world, I have retreated into technical work. I maintain Debian packages as a hobby and to scratch my own itch. I run services for myself and a few friends. I organise Debian User Group meetings.
To be clear, I haven't generally given up. I'm very politically active in my union and at work, I'm a good member of my housing cooperative and I'm still fighting against the industrialisation of natural spaces in my neighborhood. But when it comes time to defend freedom in the tech world, lately, I've just been shrugging and accepting I should use Microsoft Teams like every one else does. I want this to change and to do so, I need to free some time.
Two years ago, I added myself to Lintian's Uploaders list. Up until then1, I enjoyed fixing little issues here and there and liked creating new tags to help out the Python Team, where most of my Debian time was spent.
Lintian was badly in need of a new maintainer and as I felt it was an important project, I decided to step in. 37 releases and about 160 closed bugs later2, I'm done.
To be honest, I haven't had much fun maintaining Lintian lately. Bugs keep piling on the BTS, so much so I have mostly been ignoring them for the past few months. In fact, most of the actual work triaging, writing code and fixing bug has been done by Nilesh Patra for a while now.
All this to say, if you care about Lintian, you should consider adding yourself to the Uploaders list, as I'm out and Nilesh can't do all the work by himself.
He's a great person to work with and since I don't want to suddenly leave him all alone, I'll be sticking around for a few more weeks in the hope someone else will volunteer to help out. A smooth transition with a new co-maintainer would really be nice!
If you're interested, don't hesitate to reach out to me on IRC or by email.
My first technical commit to Lintian was nearly 7 years ago! Crazy how time flies. ↩
Mostly closed by other people than I! ↩
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 333. This version includes the following changes:
[ Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues ]
* Add support for showing differences in POSIX.1-2001 PAX headers within .tar
files.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Re-order various parts of the tar comparator to make it easier to
progressively delve into its functionality.
* Reflect that the use of the "case-match" language feature requires at least
Python 3.10+. This can be worked around if it causes problems - let us know.
* Update various copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.
Apple today added the first-generation Apple TV 4K from 2017 to the vintage products list on its website, just four days before a new model is finally expected to debut.
My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian.
You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors.
I worked with upstream to remove libselinux linkage from /usr/sbin/sshd.
I applied a fix from Mark Robillard Jr to fix reload logic when using sysvinit.
I upgraded from 1.24.1 to 1.24.2, which fixed a few command injection security vulnerabilities.
I upgraded from 3.7 to 3.8, which fixed CVE-2026-89085 and CVE-2026-89088.
New upstream versions:
pkg_resources)pkg_resources)pkg_resources)pkg_resources)setuptools 84 is now in Debian and no longer contains pkg_resources. Removing uses of that module has been an ongoing project for a while now, but I did another batch of fixes this month:
A new python-coverage version triggered several build regressions due to a known problem in pytest-cov. I worked around these by setting COVERAGE_CORE=ctrace:
Other build/test failures:
I investigated a build failure in python-proton-vpn-local-agent and proposed a fix upstream, but I’m not comfortable applying this in Debian without review. If you’re familiar with this code, please take a look.
I fixed some other bugs:
rust-derivre had an invalid Section field, which I cleaned up.
Apple shares fell more than 2.5% in early trading today in response to Nikkei Asia's report that the company is cutting iPhone 18 Pro component orders due to weaker-than-expected demand. October orders were reportedly reduced by at least 15%, with higher memory costs and $100 price increases weighing on demand.
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Often, m2c will spit out something like this:
x = 3;
if (a == 10) {
x = 4;
}
This may be what was intended, but if it doesn't match (usually due to different register allocation; the rewrite itself is nearly always going to be taken, since it saves a branch on one of the paths), this is often a better rewrite:
if (a == 10) {
x = 4;
} else {
x = 3;
}
and in some cases, this may have different code generation (especially as you can stick it into an argument list):
x = (a == 10) ? 4 : 3;
This is a bit more of a trial and error than the others, and of course, it depends on the computed values not having side effects.
Apple's "second-party" LG accessories will debut another Home feature: Proximity Control.
— pdfu (@itspdfu) October 9, 2026
As with HomePod, tapping or bringing iPhone near the accessory shows a hint in the Dynamic Island. An "Open Controls" button opens the accessory's controls. Cameras and doorbells show a camera viewer.
An iPhone without a Dynamic Island or an iPad will show a 30-second notification instead. You can disable this behavior in the Home app after setup.
You'll also see feedback in the Dynamic Island as iPhone launches setup when you first tap the accessory to pair it.
Behind the scenes, the accessory writes an "apple-deviceid" in the Matter payload stored on its NFC tag that helps iOS identify it when tapped. It also broadcasts a Bluetooth Low Energy advert for Apple Proximity Control.
The feature appears in code since iOS 27.0. In earlier versions, Apple showed three presentation options instead of the on/off toggle in iOS 27.2:
• Never: Suppresses proximity controls.
• Ask to Launch: Shows Dynamic Island hint or notification, which deep links the control card.
• Launch Automatically: Shows control card.
In the current implementation, the enabled state is equivalent to Ask to Launch. Home's helper text reads: "Show controls when you bring your iPhone near your [accessory]." The feature is still in active development across beta releases, so the final behavior may change.
The Dynamic Island proximity control code in iOS 27.2 was first reported by @aaronp613 and @MacRumors.
LG home accessories are set to debut with HomeKit-exclusive "tap to set up without power" feature, according to iOS 27 code and device firmware.
— pdfu (@itspdfu) October 8, 2026
When you tap your iPhone on the accessory, HomeKit pairing happens over NFC. Your iPhone's pairing identity and network credentials are stored in the accessory's NFC secure element.
Once powered on, the accessory joins your Wi‑Fi or Thread network, and your home hub completes the Matter setup.
• Apple's HomeKit-over-NFC implementation is separate from Matter NFC Commissioning.
• Firmware for the LG lock and thermostat identifies an NXP SE051H Secure Element.
• While iOS 27 supports standard Matter NFC commissioning, LG's firmware replaces NXP's Matter NFC applet in the secure element with a HomeKit applet. This suggests that NFC provisioning will be a HomeKit exclusive. You can still pair the accessories over Matter once they're powered on.
(Shown here: Setup instruction asset for the LG lock)
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
Greg KH gave a great lecture for Kernel Recipies 2026 about the use of LLMs to find and fix bugs in kernel code [1]. I recommend that everyone watch this and I also think it’s important to note that hardly any of the lecture is really specific to kernel coding, it’s just that the Linux kernel is one of the highest profile large free software projects so it gets more attention than most projects in both good and bad ways.
One side note that Greg made at 20:30 is about the natural tendency to anthromorphise the entity sending bug reports, I think this deserves much wider appreciation. For the case of patches to source code the human sending the patch will have dedicated some time and effort to writing it, if it’s their first patch then they will have probably checked it a lot and maybe sought advice from people they regard as skilled. If they have a history of sending patches for the project they will probably do fewer checks but the quality of their work would be higher. In every case there’s some minimum level of quality that you can expect from a human who has gone to the effort of finding a bug and writing code to try and fix it.
This doesn’t mean that all code written by humans is good, I have written code that’s objectively bad on many occasions and I have also written code that’s good for my scenario but bad for others. For example the first patch I sent to the Linux kernel made all possible configuration settings of an ISA NE2000 network card be detected by the kernel (a clear benefit when using hardware I had available) but was rejected by Linus because it would break some ISA SCSI cards. So while being unsuitable for inclusion in the main kernel source tree the patch wasn’t bad for everyone and the change was clear and easy to check. I had of course checked the code many times before submitting it because I didn’t want to waste Linus’ time on rubbish code.
When you receive something produced by a human you will consider that the work was done by someone who spent some effort on it and did it for a reason. It may be misguided or even hostile in some rare cases but it is definitely worth some consideration. If you think of the output of LLMs in the same way you will give them much more consideration than they deserve. I think that the output of a LLM should not be given any more consideration than the first hit from a web search engine, it might be good but it might also be ridiculously wrong. I think in many ways LLM output should be treated with less trust than the first result from a web search because LLMs are designed to be convincing as an answer to your question unlike the cases where a web page has the wrong answer and it’s more obviously wrong.
This is going to become more of an issue as LLMs give responses that are more human-like. Early LLMs would refuse to advise on crimes. Currently ChatGPT will deflect for example when asking about advice for writing a crime novel it recommends to have the action of finding an employee to bribe happen outside the plot and concentrate on interactions within the group. One recent model I tried gave a human style conversation about how it felt uncomfortable about discussing such things in a similar manner to a law abiding person being coerced into helping with a criminal plan.
I expect that the attempts to appear human will increase and that this will become more of a problem. Possibly to the extent that we need to use something like the GPG web of trust to determine who is human.
Related posts:
Currently a scam group is sending out email to the administrators of web sites that link to a variety of dead domains. They claim to be the legitimate operators of the dead domains in question and request that the links change to mirrors of the web sites under en-html.org. Their end goal appears to game search engines by getting links from a lot of old web pages and later use that high ranking for selling SEO optimisation.
If you have made the mistake of linking to something under en-html.org then I recommend that you change the link to the original content on archive.org.
If you receive email from the en-html.org domain then ignore it, or configure your mail server to reject it.
I am seriously considering configuring the DNS servers I run to return no valid data for any requests under that domain.
Also I will reject all future requests to update links in old blog posts. The very small number of people who want to see what I linked to in old posts can use archive.org.
Related posts:
