h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Yesterday the government announced that it 'will repeal in full the power for Government to impose a strategy and policy statement on the Electoral Commission.'

This will meaningfully increase the independence of the UK's elections watchdog. The Commission itself has been calling for repeal since it was introduced in 2022.

This change of policy was announced during the second reading of the Representation of the People Bill: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-03-02/debates/702183A9-7B57-487C-9634-BF459DB65DB2/RepresentationOfThePeopleBill#main-content

LINUX IN SPACE
Linux has become the most popular operating system in the known universe. It may be ready to take off — again. In a big way.

(This is a really cool article that IMO deserves attention. Boosts welcome.)
https://www.windriver.com/blog/Linux-Flies-into-Space

Specially calibrated for visitors to the planet Earth in the vexed year 2026: The special STRESS issue of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research https://payhip.com/b/R2xJD

Oh fucking great idea. I forgot about this.
Yep it did the trick!

https://bsky.app/profile/jayforeman.bsky.social/post/3mfyvn67fy22y

Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.

#HitchhikersGuide #DouglasAdams #quotes #quote #bot

Tinkering with the Commodore Reair Toolbox https://github.com/HovKlan-DH/Commodore-Repair-Toolbox which is a Windows app to interactively explore and learn about the Commodore Vic 20, C64 and C128. Here I am looking at the pinout for the 6510 CPU.
It works with Wine, so here I am running it on Ubuntu 24.04.3.
This could be very useful!

Approximately 15 months after submittng FoI requests for the UK Railway's Barcoded Ticketing specifications, I've just managed to settle the appeal on the cases (on a Saturday of all days).

So, presenting for your reading enjoyment, some PDFs that the Government really didn't want me to get until the last minute: https://magicalcodewit.ch/rsp-specs/

I swear this is the most I've laughed out loud at a youtube chemistry video, those two have perfect comic timing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98qiQJ8maCU

Happy First Radian Day, to those who celebrate it!

https://milk.com/first-radian-day/

First Radian Day celebrates the 58th day of the year. 58 ≅ 365.256/2π. That is, it is the day during which the path traced by the Earth around the Sun, starting from the beginning of the year, is momentarily the same length as the distance between the Earth and Sun, to a first approximation. This is of course way more mathematically and geometrically interesting than Decimal Approximation Pi Day on 3/14.

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online

I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players

ssh snakes.run to join!

I wrote about the late Jesse Jackson, spending his time with me, when I was a child. It's personal, adorable, and most of all, humane. emptywheel.net/morality-is-...

Morality is a Long Game - empt...

Prime time: now with annoying notifications! https://aperiodical.com/2026/02/prime-time-now-with-annoying-notifications/

*** New blog post ***

It has been a while, but now it's time for another slice of traffic signal pie where I delve into the double standards of design.

https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2026/02/traffic-signal-pie-double-standards.html

Amazon may be in fairly big legal trouble here: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/amazon-busted-for-widespread-price?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=11524&post_id=189053872&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=wabr&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Today we join various other FOSS advocacy groups like @fsfe @fdroidorg @eff in addressing an open letter to Google about #keepandroidopen We need open ecosystems and the move to "sideload" software has set a bad paradigm for having control over our devices. You can read more about it here:

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/feb/24/keep-android-open/

I hacked car charging to work with my electric bike!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6IyukCIia8

Big news that OpenSAFELY is now available for non-COVID researchers:

https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02/opensafely-news-you-can-apply-to-do-non-covid-research-from-today/

OpenSAFELY allows researchers to run analysis against NHS healthcare records *without* shipping highly sensitive, barely-anonymised data around the place. Their documentation is public and very good:

https://docs.opensafely.org/

Museum of Plugs and Sockets

Some days, I am reminded that the internet is a wonderful place.
https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/index.html

on my blog!

one page of async Rust

https://dotat.at/@/2026-02-16-async.html

what is the least boilerplate needed to make a minimal async runtime?