Microsoft Defender broke VLC’s MP3 loading, not the other way
A recent thread on X blamed VLC for slow MP3 playback, then turned out to be a Microsoft Defender bug. The whole argument is more useful as a debugging case study than…
#ai assistant
142 articles
Android finally has Flighty alternatives and Aviate wins most
Two flight-tracking apps on Android are worth a serious look right now, and the source material on the better one is unusual. Most Android flight apps still feel like ports of an…
Kernel cleanup in Mint and 16,000 desks off Microsoft Office
The FOSS Weekly #26.33 roundup from It’s FOSS collects a week of Linux news, and two items in it are worth more attention than a newsletter bullet gives them. Linux Mint is…
Opencode is an open source ai coding agent for your terminal
Real Python (a long-running Python tutorial publisher) added a ten-lesson video course on OpenCode on August 11, 2026. OpenCode (an open-source AI coding agent that runs in your terminal and answers conversational…
The $99 Nest Hub is the smart home gadget worth buying in 2026
Google’s new Home Speaker costs $99 and replaces the discontinued Nest Mini. It also has the misfortune of sitting on the shelf next to a five-year-old Nest Hub that costs the same…
Where the $400 Pixel 11 premium actually goes on a spec sheet
Android Authority published a case for spending $400 more on a Pixel 11 instead of settling for the Pixel 10a, written by Dhruv Bhutani, who says A-series phones have been his default…
Comparing seven AI writing tools in 2026 without buying hype
The most common pattern in this category is paying for four AI writing subscriptions at once, running each of them through the same brief, and only realizing partway through month two that…
AI helps legacy migrations when analysis comes before transformation
Six months after a team I worked with rewrote their legacy application, the codebase looked nothing like the old one. The deployment pain was the same. The unclear business rules were the…
5 free VPNs worth your time and which one I’d actually keep
I paid for a VPN for three years before I realized I was using the free version of the same product 80% of the time. That confession is the most useful thing…
AI observability has its own stack and open source finally delivers
Most AI applications ship without real observability. They have logs, request counts, maybe a Grafana dashboard with token usage over time. What they lack is the layer that lets an engineer answer…