Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

Ollama buddy now supports cloud models! - Emacs@ Dyerdwelling

2026-01-28T08:29:00.000Z

Having another look at my AI assistant - ollama-buddy, its been a while and it seems ollama has moved on since I started creating this package last year, so I have developed a new roadmap and the first step is to add ollama cloud models!

Here are some references to the project, including a youtube channel where I upload ollama-buddy demonstrations:

https://melpa.org/#/ollama-buddy

https://github.com/captainflasmr/ollama-buddy

Here is the changelog for the cloud model implementation:

<2026-01-28 Wed> 1.1

Added Ollama Cloud Models support

Cloud models (running on ollama.com infrastructure) now work seamlessly
ollama-buddy-cloud-signin to automatically open browser for authentication
Cloud models are proxied through the local Ollama server which handles authentication
Use C-u C-c m or transient menu “Model > Cloud” to select cloud models
Status line shows ☁ indicator when using a cloud model
Available cloud models include: qwen3-coder:480b-cloud, deepseek-v3.1:671b-cloud, gpt-oss:120b-cloud, minimax-m2.1:cloud, and more

Highguard’s genre soup makes for reasonably entertaining shootouts, if not much else - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T17:50:49.000Z

It feels anticlimactic to say so, and I don’t know why Geoff likes it so much, but Highguard seems decent. Adequate. S'alright. It’s a fine competitive FPS that’s capable of producing spirited, back-and-forth gun battles between spec ops wizards on bearback, which can in turn tickle the itches of anyone burnt out on battle royales or exasperated with extraction shooters. That’s me. I’m talking about me.

"Enormously disappointing" - Darkest Dungeon's boardgame port is dead, but Red Hook are giving away game files to backers - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T17:39:20.000Z

Darkest Dungeon developers Red Hook have announced that game files for Mythic's troubled boardgame adaptation will be given away to project backers, after grimly concluding that Mythic are no longer able to manufacture or deliver the thing.

A critical GnuPG security update - LWN.net

2026-01-27T17:31:31.000Z

There is a new GnuPG update for a "critical security bug" in recent GnuPG releases.

A crafted CMS (S/MIME) EnvelopedData message carrying an oversized wrapped session key can cause a stack buffer overflow in gpg-agent during the PKDECRYPT--kem=CMS handling. This can easily be used for a DoS but, worse, the memory corruption can very likley also be used to mount a remote code execution attack. The bug was introduced while changing an internal API to the FIPS required KEM API.

Only versions 2.5.13 through 2.5.16 are affected.

Helldivers 2's next warbond has an exploding hammer, for all of your explosive hammering needs - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T17:05:04.000Z

Well, the last one might have only appealed to folks open to taking on a mission that demands a bunch of crouch-walking, but you can't say Helldivers 2's second warbond of 2026 isn't offering plenty of bang for your buck. It's got an exploding hammer. There's other stuff in this Siege Breakers warbond too, but I'll be honest, none of that can boast being a stick with a thing that goes boom taped to the end.

CD Projekt and Nerial reveal Reigns: The Witcher, a strategy game in which Geralt dies a million, delicious ways - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T17:00:00.000Z

Good news everybody! Geralt of Rivia is dead. He lies beneath a pile of naked, sculpted, drunken bodies in a castle ballroom. Actually, that’s not right - he’s been eaten by a dragon. Actually, that’s not right either - he drowned himself in a flagon of syrup. Fair audience, please consider which of these tragic eventualities is most befitting of your hand-claps and progression points. None of them meet your standards? Then I, Dandelion, must sing Geralt’s death anew.

Nerial and Devolver Digital have partnered with CD Projekt RED to make Reigns: The Witcher. I’m sure I don’t need to explain that this is a new version of Nerial’s cherished card-swiping narrative strategy game, which takes place in The Witcher’s grotty and magical medieval universe. The game casts you as temporarily embarrassed ‘master poet’ Dandelion, who is both Geralt’s best mate and very often, the biggest pain in his arse.

The GNU C Library is moving from Sourceware - LWN.net

2026-01-27T16:58:54.000Z

GNU C Library maintainer Carlos O'Donell has announced that the project will be moving its core services away from Sourceware in favor of services hosted at the Linux Foundation.

While it was clear to the GNU Toolchain leadership that requirements were coming to improve the toolchain cyber-security posture, these requirements were not clear to all project developers. As part of receiving this feedback we have worked to document and define a secure development policy for glibc and at a higher level the GNU Toolchain. While Sourceware has started making some critical technical changes, the GNU Toolchain still faces serious, systemic concerns about securing a global, highly available service and building a sustainable, diverse sponsorship model.

This has been a long-running discussion; see this 2022 article for some background.

Gruber On File Saving Ease - Irreal

2026-01-27T16:22:14.000Z

John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball has a post, Untitled Document Syndrome, that makes two points of interest to Irreal readers. The first involves the difficulty of initially saving what he calls “untitled documents”. He’s writing about macOS, of course, but even through I’ve used one Mac or another for almost two decades, I had a hard time figuring out what he was talking about. I guess it’s this: in some Apple text apps you can start typing without specifying a document name or a file path for where it should be saved. That means that when you first save the file you have to negotiate the file save dialog to supply this information.

Since I write everything in Emacs, this never happens to me. Part of starting a new file is executing a find-file which specifies its name and file system location. Even then, I just specify it in the minibuffer; there’s no annoying open dialog to deal with. The first time I save it is like any other time¹: a simple Ctrl+x Ctrl+s.

The point of all this is that the difficulty of the initial save means that people will put it off and therefore suffer disaster when the app or system crashes. They may even lose hours of work. Happily, that first save is easy in Emacs so there’s no reason—not even a weak one like the save dialog—for putting it off.

Even if you do put it off, Emacs, like Gruber’s editor BBEdit, has you covered. It does periodic automatic backups so you never lose more than a little work.

The second point is related and concerns note taking apps. Like most of us—at least us oldtimers—Gruber stated taking notes by creating a file for each one with his editor. As we’ve all discovered, that doesn’t work all that well so he moved to Yojimbo and discovered that he was taking many more notes. As you all know, I solved the same problem with Journelly. I use it as my memo book and typically make about 10 entries per day. People think of Journelly as integrated with Emacs but it can also save its data in Markdown so it’s perfectly usable on any system and editor as long as you’re using an iPhone.

It’s amusing how 40 year old technology is still more convenient and easier to use than “modern” systems with dialog boxes for everything.

Footnotes:

Yes, one can just open a buffer, set the appropriate mode and start writing. When it comes time to save it, you do have specify a name and location but, of course, no one works this way.

"It's just as if it never existed" Following Ubisoft's Prince of Persia remake cancellation, actor discusses losing three years worth of work - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T16:17:59.000Z

Last week, Ubisoft canned the long-in-development Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake amid a raft of cancellations and delays which have come to serve as the starting bell for a bunch of organisational changes that are currently crystalising into job cuts. Now, actor Eman Ayaz has released a video in which she discusses having learned last week that three years worth of her work on an unnamed project had been tipped down the drain.

Terraria 1.4.5 the absolutely huge Bigger and Boulder update is now live - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-27T15:53:17.000Z

With a huge bumper of additional content for the game, Terraria version 1.4.5 the "Bigger and Boulder" update is now officially live.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

[$] Implicit arguments for BPF kfuncs - LWN.net

2026-01-27T15:41:37.000Z

The kernel's "kfunc" mechanism is a way of exporting kernel functions so that they can be called directly from BPF programs. There are over 300 kfuncs in current kernels, ranging in functionality from string processing (bpf_strnlen()) to custom schedulers (scx_bpf_kick_cpu()) and beyond. Sometimes these kfuncs need access to context information that is not directly available to BPF programs, and which thus cannot be passed in as arguments. The implicit arguments patch set from Ihor Solodrai is the latest attempt to solve this problem.

Valve will face that £656m UK lawsuit accusing them of overcharging Steam customers, as tribunal rules it can go ahead - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T15:31:26.000Z

Valve's lawyers won't be able to file away one of the legal legalings they've been dealing with for a little while now, at least not yet. A tribunal have ruled that the £656m lawsuit brought against the company by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt and law firm Milberg London LLP last year - the one that could net UK dwellers who've bought stuff on Steam since early June 2018 up to £44 in compensation - can go ahead.

As a result, Valve's Lionel Hutzes will have to face the lawsuit's accusations that the company have used Steam's "dominant position" in the PC market to behave "anti-competitively", with the end result that regular folks are "paying too much for PC games and in-game content and have lesser PC Game platform alternatives".

The modular Linux handheld Mecha Comet is up on Kickstarter - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-27T14:32:02.000Z

The new Mecha Comet would have been a dream device to mess about with when I was younger, a fully modular Linux-powered handheld.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor - LWN.net

2026-01-27T14:20:10.000Z

The Xfce team has announced that it will be providing funding to Brian Tarricone to work on xfwl4, a Wayland compositor for Xfce:

Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks.

The first attempt at creating an Xfce Wayland compositor involved modifying the existing xfwm4 code to support both X11 and Wayland in parallel. However, this approach turned out to be the wrong path forward for several reasons:

Xfwm4 is architected in a way that makes it very difficult to put the window management behavior behind generic interfaces that don't include X11 specifics.

Refactoring Xfwm4 is risky, since it might introduce new bugs to X11. Having two parallel code bases will allow for rapid development and experimentation with the Wayland compositor, with zero risk to break xfwm4.

Some X11 window management concepts just aren't available or supported by Wayland protocols at this time, and dealing with those differences can be difficult in an X11-first code base.

Using the existing codebase would require us to use C and wlroots, even if a better alternative is available.

Work has already commenced on the project, and the project hopes to share a development release in mid-2026.

Back from a brink - BuzzMachine

2026-01-27T14:17:18.000Z

I’m back. Here’s where I’ve been. Most of you should not care, but for those wanting a medical update, here’s the tale.

Two weeks ago, on Sunday, Jan. 11, I lost a test of strength with bedding on laundry day. As I’ve already recounted, My feet flew out from under me; I flew up and fell hard on my back. That Thursday, I went to urgent care (yes, should have gone sooner), where a CT scan revealed a compression fracture to my L3 vertebrae.

I was in pain but felt it was in control, so I (stupidly) refused pain meds. After all, I”d driven myself to my teeth cleaning and to a board meeting; I got around.

But the next day, the pain got worse, drastically, unbearably worse. I started feeling crappy overall and lost my appetite. That Saturday, I simply could not get out of bed. I couldn’t even move myself away from its edge. In the dark, I fell out of bed with another thud.

Sunday morning, as snow fell, EMTs lugged me downstairs to the ambulance and Morristown Hospital. Because the drastic increase in back pain and the fever were coincident, the first hypothesis was that I had a spinal infection. The spinal specialist said he’d never seen such a thing. An MRI, a CT scan, and an X-ray backed him up.

Meanwhile, the infectious disease doctor ordered a huge battery of tests and a blood culture. He put me on aggressive, IV antibiotics, dripping from my personal Festivus pole. Two mornings later, the doctor came into my room, excitedly announcing, “It’s growing! It’s growing!” Staph bacteria were growing in the cultures. He knew what to treat.

Then, out of nowhere, my recurrent atrial fibrillation emerged with tachycardia — a very rapid heart beat at 133 — and low blood pressure (90/50 vs my usual 120/70). My oxygen was consequently low. After pumping me full of more fluids, that resolved.

An echo-cardiogram thankfully revealed no growth of the bacteria in my heart, but to be sure I’ll undergo another — a TEE or transesophageal echocardiogram, its wand stuck down my throat — for a closer examination later this week.

It’s likely, the doctors believe, that I got the blood infection from my dental cleaning. Happens. Years ago, folks like me with tricky heart valves had to take antibiotics before the procedure, but that standard was changed long ago. I’ll take them now.

It appears that the fall and the infection have nothing to do with each other, though we’re still baffled at how the latter coincided with much worse pain in the former. In any case, as serendipity, fate, or grace would have it, my fall — painful as it is — likely brought me to the hospital much sooner than my fever and appetite would have. I was a short walk away from sepsis: the infection spreading to organs, shutting them down in turn. The infection was treated sooner and more decisively because my back pain brought me in.

I’m trying to get back to work. The proofreading of my book is due now. I’m headquartered on a pile of pillows on the bed, forcing myself up with a cane, in a back brace. Every day, I now infuse IV antibiotics through a PICC-line, a 19-inch hose now installed from my right arm up to under my collar bone. I’ll do that for five weeks, with a kind nurse visiting to change the dressing and take blood draws once a week.

Before I left the hospital, a phlebotomist came to start another blood culture, pouring my precious humours into two little bottles that, to me, looked like hot sauce. He said most folks think they look like tiny booze bottles. Right. On second thought, this was a personal bloody Mary: Bloody Jeff.

Moments ago, my wife looked up the latest lab results and the great news is that now germs are *not* growing in my blood cocktail. Science and medicine are working.

I’m so grateful to the doctors, nurses, and staff at Morristown. To hell with you and the ignorance you stand for, RFK Jr.

And I could not be more grateful to my wife, who already does everything and now is caring for my every pathetic need, with our daughter’s help. (Our son is way up in New Hampshire.)

All this has meant canceling my scheduled cataract surgeries. Next I’ll have cardiac ablation to try to rid me of AFib. Age.

The post Back from a brink appeared first on BuzzMachine.

Security updates for Tuesday - LWN.net

2026-01-27T14:07:25.000Z

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, python-urllib3, python3.11-urllib3, and python3.12-urllib3), Debian (imagemagick, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and openjdk-21), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, ghostscript, glibc, mingw-glib2, mingw-harfbuzz, mingw-libsoup, mingw-openexr, and qownnotes), Mageia (kernel-linus), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), SUSE (go1.24-openssl, go1.25-openssl, govulncheck-vulndb, kernel, nodejs22, openCryptoki, openvswitch3, python-pyasn1, python311, and qemu), and Ubuntu (git-lfs, node-form-data, and screen).

Hell Express is Death Stranding meets Helldivers meets Pacific Drive - aka, deliver letters to the dead in a combat truck - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T13:42:32.000Z

Quick confession: every time I come up with an absolute Frankenstein’s cocktail of allusion-cobbling Google-bait like the headline for this article, a fairy dies. But that’s OK, because Hell Express is a top-down 3D extraction shooter about delivering letters to the dead. When I play it – there’s no release date yet – I will convey a note of apology to the soul of the fairy I’ve just slain with my appalling SEO practices. This may be difficult, however, because many of the underworld’s denizens are hostile. The only thing you’ll be delivering to them is bullets, fire and explosives.

A Glossary of Philadelphia Slang - McSweeney’s

2026-01-27T13:00:00.000Z

Jawn (/jôn/)

A term used by New York transplants to pander to locals and/or cynically promote their recently opened boutique, restaurant, or bakery.

“Come celebrate the grand opening of our new French-Belgian infusion cafe on Shunk. We’re calling it Merde Jawn.”

Parking Space (/ˈpärkiNG/ /spās/)

Any spot in a bike lane, sidewalk, or even a turning lane, apparently.

“Whaddaya mean I can’t stop my car in the middle of a one-way street? I got my hazards on, just go around.”

Philly Native (/ˈfilē/ /ˈnādiv/)

How people born and raised in South Jersey or Delaware County describe themselves.

“Well, I grew up about an hour outside of Philly. But my Mom-mom lived in Rhawnhurst once, so I’m pretty much a Philly native.”

Cheesesteak (/ˈCHēzˌstāk/)

An honestly pretty basic sandwich that locals insist is only worth getting from one particular, out-of-the-way restaurant that just so happens to be in the neighborhood where they grew up.

“Pat’s and Geno’s sucks. You need to go to this inconvenient cheesesteak place that is haunted by all the rats the line cook killed over the years.”

Rocky Steps (/ˈräkē/ /steps/)

Located in the Art Museum Area, these steps were made famous by Sylvester Stallone in the movie Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (CITATION NEEDED). Atop the steps is a bronze statue of Stallone, along with a large building that, as far as Philadelphians are concerned, is abandoned and contains nothing of value.

“Rumor has it that the building at the Rocky steps is a museum. But who cares? Museums are nerd shit.”

Irish Potatoes (/ˈīriSH/ /pəˈtādōs/)

A confectionery made from traditional Irish ingredients like… coconut.

“Your nephew Joey made some Irish potatoes in his kindee-garten class. Take some home with you. I don’t need all that friggin’ candy in the house.”

“Hello, how are you?” (/həˈlō,heˈlō/ /hou/ /är,ər/ /yoo,yə/)

A phrase that, when said to a stranger, may potentially result in you catching a beating.

“All I said was ‘Hello, how are you’ as I passed him in Suburban Station and when I came to I was covered in grease and dangling from a pole on Broad Street.”

Wooder Ice (/wooded/ /īs/)

Each spring, South Philadelphia residents gather to shear the Phillie Phanatic. His fur is then collected, frozen, and mixed with sugar to create this delectable, redundantly named treat.

“Hop on that footstool and start shaving the Phanatic’s back. We need to get this crap ready for opening day.”

Dickhead (/ˈdikˌ(h)ed/)

The thing that you see when you look at your own face in the mirror.

“Go Birds, dickhead!”

UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-01-27T12:58:32.000Z

Valve, creator of Steam, now face legal action in the UK as a lawsuit has been given the go-ahead that could result in up to £656 million in damages.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Fallout New Vegas now has sneaky dogs thanks to a mod, so you and your pooch can patiently pad past predators - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-01-27T12:09:13.000Z

You're shuffling through the desert scrub, wondering if the clawed beasts just a few yards away have spotted you yet. You've made sure to pop a Stealth Boy just to be extra safe, and told Raul that if his knees creak at an inopportune moment, he's on his own. Then, you realise you brought Rex along, and he's gotten stuck on a rock several meters behind you. Finally freeing himself, the good boy bounds towards you at full speed. This should be the point in some Fallout New Vegas stealthing that you realise it's brown trousers time.

It isn't, because Obsidian weren't total sadists when they designed the thing. It does take you out of your Mojave roleplay a bit, though. Thankfully, I can report that a modder has taken it upon themselves to ensure that New Vegas now benefits from the finest in sneaking dog technology.