Latest posts
The ten most recent publications.
Linus Torvalds has published his first patch series created with the help of an AI coding assistant: ten patches meant to solve a scalability problem in reading from the page cache that has been known for years. In an artificial test with 64 threads, reads per second increase 23-fold, which according to Torvalds will be much less in real use. Just a few hours after publication, kernel developer Kiryl Shutsemau found a race condition in review and supplied the fix along with it.
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In October 2026 I wrote my own firmware for the GeekMagic SmallTV Ultra, a cube-shaped Wi-Fi display with an ESP8266: KAC, the KleinerAnzeigeComputer ("little display computer"). It shows the throughput of my two internet lines, the state of the firewall and the NAS disks in rotation, does not flicker and broadcasts no open Wi-Fi in normal operation. The firmware can be installed directly through the update page of the factory firmware, and this post shows how to build your own dashboard for it.
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The w1700k-sdr project turns the Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband SDR receiver that delivers up to 320 million complex samples per second from the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands over 10 GbE to a Linux host. To do this, the MediaTek MT7996 radio runs nothing but home-made firmware, rebuilt register by register from traces of the original firmware. The host shows spectrum and waterfall in the browser, and frequency, gain and filter can be changed while the stream is running.
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The article “Passkeys are a trap” on the Non-Functional blog warns non-technical readers about passkeys, because websites could use remote attestation to dictate which software and operating system you may use. On Hacker News it collected almost 900 points and more than 460 comments on 11 October 2026. Security researcher Scott Helme counters that attestation only reveals the model of the key and that synced passkeys provide none at all, while the article leaves out the biggest advantage of passkeys almost until the end: they cannot be phished.
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For my birthday I was given a book designed by an AI, with my photo on the cover and the title “Die Matrix ruft – Peter antwortet später” (“The Matrix is calling – Peter will answer later”). You might think an AI gift is impersonal, but the personal part lies in the idea, the photo and the punchline, not in setting the letters. This post explains why I see AI as a cordless drill and where the comparison still falls short.
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Live from Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, Mark Benecke summarises new environmental measurements from autumn 2026: WWF’s Living Planet Report, accelerated global warming, the super El Niño and record lows at Lake Constance and on the Rhine. The core message is that unlimited growth is physically impossible and that everyone can act immediately. Most of the measurements are well founded, but the talk overstates several figures considerably.
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In October 2026 I installed OpenWrt on my WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra, whose manufacturer support ends in December 2027, and first sent it into a boot loop. A Flipper Zero acting as a serial console saved it, loading the rescue system into RAM via YMODEM. Today it runs as an encrypted RAID1 NAS with its own fan and LED control, and this post contains all scripts and commands to rebuild it.
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In October 2026 the firewall log of my home network suddenly showed hundreds of connection attempts to my reverse proxy, all from two networks of a Polish provider. The analysis revealed crafted SYN packets whose replies nobody ever answered, so most likely not an attack on me but on the network of the supposed senders. This post shows how to recognise SYN-ACK reflection, why my country block did not apply and how I drop the packets in OPNsense for a limited time.
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On Hackaday, Maya Posch shows how LineageOS brings Android 15 to a 2016 Xiaomi Mi 5 and turns a Raspberry Pi 4 into a home-built smart TV replacement running Android TV. With the phone, the unlocked bootloader and a missing fastboot driver took most of the time; the actual installation via fastboot and adb sideload then went quickly. On the Raspberry Pi it was enough to write an image to the SD card, and hardware video decoding worked straight away.
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On 5 October 2026 Rui Ueyama released mold 3.0, the first version of the fast linker after its complete rewrite from C++ to Rust. The new version is meant to be a drop-in replacement for mold 2.42.1, with the same options, target architectures and speed. The goal of the 3.x series is to close the remaining gaps to GNU ld so that Linux distributions can use mold as their default linker.
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