Author: michiel

  • Will we get Mario Kart 8 online mode back on Wii U?

    The Wii U was one of the least popular platforms by Nintendo. It never saw much sales, probably partly due to its confusing name and its strange ‘not-a-tablet’ controller. I still own one. I have Mario Kart for it. When I got a Nintendo Switch some years later, it had the same Mario Kart game…

  • Fixing my Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones

    For years I worked in an open plan office, for five days a week, where my daily commute was more than an hour single journey by train. After much hesitation, I finally decided to treat myself to some nice noise canceling headphones. I settled for the Sony WH-1000XM3, very popular headphones at the time, and…

  • Pop!_OS development and no 22.10 release

    Pop!_OS development and no 22.10 release

    You probably know that Pop!_OS is the strangely named Ubuntu-based Linux distribution from System76, the company that sells mostly rebadged Clevo laptops tested & supported for Linux specifically. You might have read on your favorite Linux news site that there will be no Pop!_OS 22.10 because their team is ‘focusing their development time onto the…

  • Dark patterns in the Gmail web app

    Recently, my Google Pixel 3a phone started to have a faulty USB-C port. Luckily the device is also able to charge wirelessly (in fact, it’s the first Google phone that does that!) but it’s still rather inconvenient. My employer provided me with an iPhone SE which I think is a rather great little device. I’m…

  • Ali, what’s up

    Words on my favorite Chinese shopping site From time to time I buy stuff on AliExpress, mostly electronics. It has such a huge amount of items available which amazes me every time. Lots of quality stuff and lots of lesser quality stuff. Today, I found that it has rather strange text in the placeholder for…

  • Wayland and Microsoft Teams

    Or: Debian on the desktop, worse in 2021? I used Linux as my primary desktop until end of 2015, where I switched to a job where I also occasionally would do some work on an iOS app. And since the only way to compile an iOS app, or have useful stuff such as debuggers, is…

  • DBD::mysql – even more utf8-issues fixed, super CI

    In my previous post I explained how many utf-8 related issues are now fixed in the latest DBD::mysql development release, and I asked for feedback and testing from our users. Even better utf-8 handling I’m happy to inform you that, thanks to your feedback, we’ve now released yet another development version, with even more UTF8…

  • DBD::mysql – all your UTF-8 bugs are belong to us!!□□

    After a couple of years of more or less “maintenance mode” on DBD::mysql – we had a hand full of people contributing occasional fixes and a whole slew of drive-by contributors – we now have a prolific contributor again: Pali Rohár. It’s great to see some more long-standing issues taken care of! This time around,…

  • CPAN Pull Request Challenge for February: Archive::BagIt

    About the challenge See for more information my post about January. My assignment for February This month my assignment is Archive::BagIt. I never heard of BagIt before, but according to the Wikipedia page it is a format used by libraries to archive information and to be able to retrieve it later. I decided to check…

  • New tar, paxheaders and installing from CPAN

    I work most often with CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platforms, which are widely deployed in enterprise environments. Last year version 7 was released, and while it’s great it has some features like systemd that scares some sysadmins off. This means the version most widely used is version 6, which comes with perl…