Updates 2026/Q1
This post includes personal updates and some open source project updates. 안녕하세요 and greetings from Asia! Right now I’m in Seoul, Korea. I’ll start this update with a few IRL experiences regarding my time here and some mechanical keyboard related things. If you’re primarily here for the technical stuff, you can skip forward or even skip all of the personal things and jump straight to the open source projects . With that said, let’s dive straight into it. Seoul has been one of the few places that I genuinely love coming back to. I cannot pinpoint why that is, but there’s a particular rhythm to the capital that’s hard to explain until you’ve lived in it for a while. Not the tourist rhythm, where you tick off palaces and night markets to “complete your bucket list” but the deeper, slower one that makes the city truly enjoyable. The rhythm of picking a neighborhood, learning its backstreets, finding your morning coffee spot, and then finding a different one the following week. I spent my time here doing exactly that, and what follows are some honest reflections on a city that continues to surprise me. As some of you might know by now, I’m basically the Mark Wiens of coffee, because I travel for coffee , except that I don’t film myself and put it online. But I’ve surely had a lot of coffee, in a lot of cities. However, Seoul’s coffee scene operates on a completely different level. The sheer density of independently run coffee shops is staggering. Within a fifteen-minute walk in neighborhoods like Mangwon , Hapjeong , or Sangsu , you can pass dozens of places where someone is carefully dialing in their espresso, roasting their own beans, and serving a beautifully made Americano for usually around three or four thousand KRW . That’s roughly two to three US dollars for a genuinely excellent cup of coffee, which is a pretty solid value proposition. I’ve been in Seoul before, multiple times actually, and I had the chance to find genuinely great cafes which I kept on my list of places to revisit whenever I would happen to come back. And so I did. But as life moves forward, places change or, in more unfortunate circumstances, even close down for good. das ist PROBAT is one of the places that sadly closed just a few days before I arrived. In its spot is now a new Ramen restaurant that seemed fairly popular. A few other places I’d loved on previous visits and that are still operating left me genuinely disappointed this time around. Compile Coffee was one of the sharper letdowns. Two years ago, it was a highlight. This time, however, the experience felt rushed and careless. The barista hurried through the ordering process, despite no one else waiting in line, and the cappuccino that followed was a spectacle for all the wrong reasons. The milk was frothed to an almost comical extreme, the liquid poured in first, then the foam scooped in one spoonful at a time, and finally a thick layer of chocolate powder on top that I hadn’t asked for. It felt like watching a car accident happening slowly enough for every detail to remain stuck in one’s head, yet too fast to articulate anything about it. I gave the place another try a few weeks after this incident only to experience a similarly rushed and somewhat unloving execution. Another change that I hadn’t seen coming was Bean Brothers in Hapjeong . The coffee house converted from their old industrial-style space to a noticeably more polished and… well, “posh” one. The new spot is nice enough, but the vibe has shifted towards a more upscale, less alternative one. In addition, they also opened up a new location in Sangsu , which leans further in that direction, with wait times for walk-ins that suggest a clientele they’re specifically courting. Bean Brothers seems to be evolving into a streamlined, upscale chain, and while that’s not inherently bad, it’s a different thing from what originally made it special. And last but not least, there’s Anthracite Coffee Roasters , specifically the Seogyo location , which had been one of my absolute favorite spots back in 2023. It pains me to say this, but the place has become a ripoff, with this specific location charging eight thousand KRW for a hot (drip coffee) Americano to go. For context, the healthy food chain Preppers serves a full meal consisting of a big portion of rice and a protein, as well as some greenery, for 8,900 KRW. The cup of drip coffee at Anthracite is only halfway full, and most of the time it arrives already lukewarm, which makes it essentially useless as a to-go option, unless all you want is to gulp down around 120ml of coffee. You’d think a place charging premium prices would at least discount a thousand Won for takeaways, as many Seoul cafes do. The Seogyo location’s commitment to drip coffee not only makes it feel somewhat pretentious considering the prices, but also adds a whole other layer of issues. During peak hours, the wait is considerable, and the coffee menu is limited to a small rotation of options that, more often than not, skew toward the acidic side of the spectrum. If that’s your preference, there’s nothing wrong with that. But when combined with the pricing, the lukewarm temperatures, and the half-filled cups, the experience increasingly feels like you’re paying for a brand name rather than a good cup of coffee. However, the beautiful thing about Seoul’s coffee culture is that for every established spot that drifts toward becoming another Starbucks experience, ten new places pop up that more than make up for it. The ecosystem is relentlessly self-renewing. In the same neighborhood as Anthracite ’s Seogyo location, I discovered a handful of places that are not only better in the cup, but dramatically more affordable: These are only a handful of places that I think of off the top of my head, but rest assured that there are plenty more. The quiet confidence of people who care about the craft without needing to perform it is what makes these places special. No gimmicks, no inflated prices justified by whatever interior design. Just friendly people and good coffee that’s made well and respects the customer. The time in Seoul reinforced what I already knew from past visits. This city is one of the best places in the world to simply be in. The neighborhoods are endlessly walkable, the infrastructure works beautifully (with the exception of traffic lights and escalators, but more on that in a bit), and the coffee culture, despite the occasional disappointment from places that have lost their way, remains one of the richest and most dynamic I’ve encountered anywhere. The disappointments, if anything, make the discoveries sweeter. The food also deserves a mention. Seoul is one of those cities where even a quick, unremarkable lunch tends to be delicious and more often than not at a sane price, judging from a global perspective. Compared to other capital cities like London or, worse, Madrid , in which food prices are frankly absurd, especially when taking the generally low quality into account, the cost of food in Seoul still strikes me as overall reasonable. Unlike for example Madrid , which is an almost homogenous food scene, Seoul offers incredibly diverse options, ranging from traditional Korean food, all the way to Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese and even European and Latin American food. And while the Italian pasta in many places in Seoul might not convince an actual Italian gourmet, it suddenly becomes a very high bar to complain about dishes that originate as far as twelve thousand kilometers/seven thousand miles away and that have almost no local cultural influence . Another beautiful thing about Seoul, at least for keyboard -enthusiasts like I am, is the availability of actual brick-and-mortar keyboard stores. Seoul is home to three enthusiast keyboard shops: Funkeys , SwagKeys , and NuPhy . The first two are local vendors that have physical locations across Seoul, the latter is a Hong Kong-based manufacturer of entry-level enthusiast boards that just opened a showroom in Mapo-gu . I took the time to try to visit each of them and I even scooped up some new hardware. The Funkeys store is located in the Tongsan district, on the second floor of a commercial space. The store is relatively big and stocks primarily FL-Esports , AULA , and 80Retros boards, keycaps and switches, but you can also find a few more exclusive items like the Angry Miao CyberBoard . I seized the opportunity to test (and snap up) some 80Retros switches, but more on that further down below. SwagKeys is probably a name that many people in the keyboard enthusiast community have stumbled upon at least once. They are located in the Bucheon area and they used to have a showroom, which I tried to visit. Sadly, it wasn’t clear to me that the showroom was temporarily (permanently?) closed, so I basically ended up standing in front of locked doors of an otherwise empty space. Luckily, however, SwagKeys have popup stores in different malls, which I have visited as well. Unfortunately in those popup stores they only seem to offer entry-level items; Enthusiast products are solely available through their web shop and cannot be ordered and picked-up at any of their pop-up locations. I was curious to test and maybe get the PBS Modern Abacus , which SwagKeys had in stock at that time, but none of the pop-ups had it available. Exclusive SwagKeys pop-up. This is a shared space with plenty of other brands to choose from. The NuPhy showroom in the Mapo-gu area is a small space packed with almost all the products the brand offers, from keyboards, over switches and keycaps all the way to accessories and folios /bags. However, the showroom is exactly that: A showroom. There’s no way to purchase any of the hardware. As with almost everything in Seoul, your best bet is to order it from NuPhy’s official Korean store, which accepts Naver Pay . Apart from Funkeys , SwagKeys and NuPhy , there are various brands (like Keychron , Razer and Logitech ) that can be found across in-store pop-ups in different malls. It’s interesting to see a society like the one in Seoul, that has largely moved away from offline-shopping for almost everything but fashion (more on this in a moment) having that many shops and pop-ups selling entry-level mechanical keyboards. I guess with keyboards being something in which haptics and personal preference play a big role, it makes sense to have places for people to test the various boards and switches, even if most of them will ultimately only sell the traditional Cherry profiles. Speaking of mechanical keyboards, I happened to be in the right place at the right time this year to visit the Seoul Mechanical Keyboard Expo 2026 at the Seoul Trade Exhibition Center ( SETEC ) in the Gangnam area. It was an interesting experience despite being less of a traditional enthusiast community event and more of a manufacturer trade fair targeting average users. Because yes, the average user in Korea does indeed seem to have a soft-spot for mechanical keyboards. This, however, meant that most vendors would primarily showcase the typical mainstream products, like Cherry profile keycaps and boards that are more affordable. For example while Angry Miao were around, their Hatsu board was nowhere to be seen. And it made sense: Every vendor had little signs with QR codes that would lead to their store’s product page for people to purchase it right away. Clearly, the event was geared more toward the average consumer than the curious enthusiast. It was nevertheless interesting to see an event like this happening in the wild . Getting around is different in Seoul than it is in other cities. If you’re navigating Seoul with Google Maps , you’re doing it wrong. Naver Map is simply superior in every way that matters for daily life here, although this might soon change . Not only does Naver show you where the crosswalks are, something you don’t realize you need until you’ve jaywalked across six lanes of traffic because Google told you the entrance was “right there” , but it also shows last order times for restaurants and cafes, saving you from going to places only to find out they’re not serving anymore. And public transit arrival times? Accurate to a degree that feels almost unsettling. You trust Naver , because it earns that trust. Clearly, however, me being me , I only used Naver without an account and on a separate profile on my GrapheneOS phone . Also, I mostly use it for finding places and public transit; For everything else CoMaps works perfectly fine, and I take care to contribute to OSM whenever I can. Note: The jaywalking example isn’t too far-fetched. You’re very tempted to cross at red lights simply because traffic light intervals in Seoul are frankly terrible. As a pedestrian you age significantly waiting for the stoplight to finally turn green. If you’re unlucky, you’re at a large crossing that is followed by smaller crossings, which for reasons I cannot comprehend turn green for pedestrians at the exact same time. Unless you are Usain Bolt there is no way to make it across multiple crossings in one go, leading you to have to stop at every crossing for around three minutes. That doesn’t sound like much, until you’re out at -15°C/5°F. Seoul has too many pedestrian crossings with traffic lights, and too few simple marked crosswalks. This is however probably due to drivers often not giving a damn about traffic rules and almost running over people trying to cross at regular marked crossings. My gut feeling tells me that, because of the indifference of drivers, the government decided to punish every traffic participant by building traffic lights at almost every corner. However, this didn’t have the (supposedly) intended effect, as especially scooters, but also regular cars often couldn’t care less about their bright red stop light. Considering the amount of CCTVs (more on this in just a second) one could assume that traffic violations are being enforced strictly. However, judging by the negligence of drivers towards traffic rules I would guess that this is probably not happening. Circling back to the painfully long waiting times at crossings, that are only outrivalled by painfully slow escalators literally everywhere, a route for which CoMaps estimates 10 minutes can hence easily become a 20 minute walk. Naver , however, appears to be making time estimations based on average waiting times at crossings, leading to it being more accurate than CoMaps in many cases. With Naver being independent of Google , it works without any of the Google Play Services bs that apps often require for anything related to location. And don’t get me wrong, Naver is just as much of an E Corp as Google , but there’s something worth appreciating on a broader level here. Korea built and maintains its own mapping platform rather than ceding that ground to US big tech, and it shows. Naver Map is designed by people who actually navigate Korean cities, and that local knowledge is baked into every interaction. I would love to see more countries doing the same, especially European ones. While there is Nokia HERE Maps HERE WeGo in Europe, it’s as bad for public transport as you might expect from a joint venture between Audi , BMW and Mercedes-Benz , and it is not at all comparable to Naver Maps , let alone Naver as a whole. One big caveat with Naver , however, is that it will drain your battery like a Mojito on a hot summer evening, so it’s essential to carry a power bank . Even on a Pixel 8 , the app feels terribly clunky and slow. In addition, the swiping recognition more often than not mistakes horizontal swipes (for scrolling through photos of a place) for vertical swiping, making it really cumbersome to use. I assume that on more modern Samsung and Apple devices the app probably works significantly better, as the Korean market appears to be absolutely dominated by these two brands. As a matter of fact, the Google Pixel is not even being sold in Korea, which brings me to one important aspect of life in Seoul that might be interesting for the average reader of this site. As much as I enjoy Seoul, it is an absolute privacy disaster. CCTV cameras in Seoul are everywhere and the city government actively expands and upgrades them as part of its public-safety and smart city initiatives. The systems are “AI” -enabled and can automatically detect unusual behavior or safety risks . It’s hard to find a definitive number, but it’s estimated that Seoul is covered with around 110,000 to 160,000 surveillance cameras, with an ongoing expansion of the network. This makes Seoul one of the most surveilled major cities in the world. In addition to CCTV surveillance, Seoul is also almost completely cashless. Most places only accept card/NFC payments with cash payments being a highly unusual thing to do. While there are still ATMs around, getting banknotes is almost pointless. You can top up your transit card using cash, and you might be thinking that at least this way nobody knows who owns the card and you cannot be tracked, but with the amount of “AI” cameras everywhere, there’s no need to track people using an identifier as primitive as a transit card. Speaking of which, mobile connectivity is another thing. In Korea SIM cards are registered using an ID/Passport. From what I have found, there’s no way to get even just a pre-paid SIM without handing over your ID. In addition, with everything being cashless, your payment details are also connected to the SIM card. You could of course try to only use the publicly available WiFi to get around and spare yourself the need for a SIM card. However, the moment you’d want to order something online, you will need a (preferably Korean) phone number that can retrieve verification SMS and you might even need to verify your account with an ID. You might think that this doesn’t really matter because online shopping isn’t something vital that you have to do. But with Seoul being almost completely online in terms of shopping you cannot find even the most basic things easily in brick-and-mortar stores. For example, I was looking to upgrade my power brick from the UGREEN X757 15202 Nexode Pro GaN 100W 3-Port charger that I’ve been using for the past year to the vastly more powerful UGREEN 55474 Nexode 300W GaN 5-Port charger. I bought the 3-Port Nexode last year during my time in Japan , in a Bic Camera . However, in Seoul it was impossible to find any UGREEN product. In fact, I could not find any household name products, like Anker or Belkin , regardless of where I looked. Everyone kept telling me to look online, on Naver or Coupang . Short story long, to be able to live a normal life in Seoul you will unfortunately have to hand over your details at every corner. Note : Only one day before publishing this update, the popular Canadian YouTuber Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video titled “Shopping in Korea’s Abandoned Tech Mall” , which perfectly captures the sad state of offline tech stores in Seoul. What I found more shocking than this, however, is that it doesn’t seem like privacy concerns are part of the public discourse. The dystopian picture that people in the Western hemisphere paint in literature and movies, in which conglomerates run large parts of society and the general population are merely an efficient workforce and consumers isn’t far off from how society here appears to be working. At the end of February I ran into an issue that I had seen before : Back then, I attributed it to either alpha particles or cosmic rays, as I was unable to reproduce the issue nor reliably find bad regions in the RAM. This time, however, my laptop was crashing periodically, for seemingly no reason at all. After running the whole playbook of and to verify the filesystem, as well as multiple rounds of the , I found several RAM addresses that were reported faulty. I decided to seize the opportunity and publish a post on BadRAM . At this point, I removed one of the two 32GB RAM sticks and it appears to have helped at least somewhat: The device now only crashes every few hours rather than every twenty or so minutes. But with RAM and SSD prices being what they are, I’m not even going to attempt to actually fix the issue. After all, it might well be that whatever is causing the buzzing sound I’ve been hearing on my Star Labs StarBook has also had an impact on the RAM modules or even the logic board. I’m going to hold on to this hardware for as long as possible, but I’ve also realized that the StarBook has aged quicker than I anticipated. I have therefore been glancing at alternatives for quite a while now. I love what Star Labs has done with the StarBook Mk VI AMD in terms of form factor and Linux support. Back when I bought it , the Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5800U had already been on the market for almost 4 years and wasn’t exactly modern anymore. However, its maturity gave me hope that Linux support would be flawless (which is the case) and that Star Labs would eventually be able to deliver on their promises. When I purchased the device, Star Labs had advertised an upcoming upgrade from its American Megatrends EFI (“BIOS”) to Coreboot , an open-source alternative. Years later, however, this upgrade is still nowhere to be seen . At this point it is highly unlikely, that Coreboot on the AMD StarBook will ever materialize. As already hinted exactly one year ago I’m done waiting for Star Labs and I am definitely not going to look into any of their other (largely obsolete) AMD offerings, especially considering the outrageous prices. I’m also not going to consider any of their StarBook iterations, whether it’s the regular version, or the Horizon , given that none of them come with AMD CPUs any longer, and, more importantly, that their Intel processors are far too outdated for their price tags. Let alone all the quirks the Star Labs hardware appears to be having, and the firmware features that sometimes make me wonder what the actual f… the Star Labs people are smoking. Note : The firmware update lists the following update: * Remove the power button debounce (double press is no longer required) “Power button debounce” is what Star Labs calls the requirement to double-press the power button in order to power on the laptop when it is not connected to power. It is mind-boggling that this feature made it into the firmware to begin with. Who in their right mind thought “Hey, how about we introduce a new feature with the coming firmware update which we won’t communicate anywhere, which requires the user to press the power button quickly twice in a row for their device to power on, but only when no power cable is connected? And how about if they only press it once when no power cord is attached the device simply won’t boot, but it will nevertheless produce a short audible sound to make it seem like it tried to boot, but in reality it won’t boot?” …? Because this is exactly what the “power button debounce” was about. I believe it got introduced sometime around , but I can’t really tell, because Star Labs didn’t mention it anywhere. Short story long, instead of spending more money on obsolete and quirky Star Labs hardware, I have identified the ASUS ExpertBook Ultra as a potential successor. The ExpertBook Ultra is supposed to be released in Q2 in its highest performance variant, featuring the Intel Core Ultra X9 Series 3 388H “Panther Lake” processor, running at 50W TDP and sporting up to 64 GB LPDDR5x memory, which is the model that I’m interested in. I will wait out the reviews, specifically for Linux, but unless major issues are to be expected I’ll likely upgrade to it. “Wait, aren’t you Team Red?” , you might be wondering. And, yes, for the past decade I’ve been solely purchasing AMD CPUs and GPUs, with one exception that was a MacBook with Intel CPU. However, at this point I’m giving up on ever finding an AMD-based laptop that fits my specs, because sadly with AMD laptops it’s always something : Either the port selection sucks, or there’s no USB4 port at all, or if there is it’s only on one specific side, or the display and/or display resolution sucks, or the battery life is bad, or you can only get some low-TDP U variant, or the device is an absolute chonker, or or or. It feels like with an AMD laptop I always have to make compromises at a price point at which I simply don’t want to have to make these compromises anymore. So unless AMD and the manufacturers – looking specifically at you, Lenovo! – finally get their sh#t together to build hardware that doesn’t feel like it’s artificially choked, I’m going back to Team Blue . “Panther Lake” seems to have made enough of a splash, TDP-performance-wise, that it is worth considering Intel again, despite the company’s history of monopolistic business tactics, its anti-consumer behavior, its major security flaws, its quality control issues, and its general douchebag attitude towards everything and everyone. The ASUS ExpertBook Ultra appears to feature the performance that I want, with all the connectivity that I need, packaged in a form factor that I find aesthetically pleasing and lightweight enough to travel with. If the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H notably exceeds the preliminary benchmarks and reviews of the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H version of the ExpertBook Ultra , then I’m “happy” to pay the current market premium for a device that will hopefully hold up for much longer and with fewer quirks than I’ve experienced with the StarBook . With a Speedometer 3.1 rating of around 30 and reporting 11:25:05 hours for on my current device, however, I’m fairly certain that even the X7 358H will be a significant improvement. “Did you hear about the latest XPS 14 & 16 from Dell? They also come with Panther Lake!” , I hear you say. See here and there on why those are seemingly disappointing options. The tl;dr is that Dell only feeds them 25W (14") / 35W (16"), instead of the 45W that ASUS runs the CPU at. I can’t tell for sure how long I’ll be able to continue working on the StarBook . While I can do the most critical things, the looming threat of data-corruption and -loss is frightening. The continuous crashes also introduce unnecessary overhead. I’m hoping for ASUS to make the ExpertBook Ultra available rather sooner than later, but if there’s no clarity on availability soon I might have to go with a different option. Ultrabook Review luckily has a full list of Panther Lake laptops to help with finding alternatives. What’s the second best thing that can happen when your computer starts failing? Exactly: Your phone (slowly) dying. It appears that the infamous Pixel 8 green-screen-of-death hit my GrapheneOS device, making it almost impossible to use it. Not only does the display glitch terribly, but it appears that the lower bottom part of the phone gets abnormally hot. When the glitching began, it would be sufficient to literally slap the bottom part of the phone and it would temporarily stop glitching. Sadly, the effectiveness of this workaround has decreased so much over time that now I basically need to squeeze the bottom part of the phone for the glitching to stop. The moment I decrease force, the screen starts glitching again. My plan was to keep the Google Pixel 8 for the next few years and eventually move to a postmarketOS /Linux phone as soon as there will be a viable option. Sadly it seems that I’m going to have to spend more money on Google’s bs hardware to get another GrapheneOS device for the time being. Unfortunately Google is not selling the Pixel devices across Asia, making it hard to find an adequate replacement for the phone right now. I might just have to suck it up and wait until I’ll pass by a region in which Pixel devices are more widely available. Of course, I luckily brought backups , although those run malware and are hence less than ideal options. My Anker Soundcore Space Q45 have died on me during a flight, for absolutely no reason at all. I purchased them back at the end of May 2024 and now, after not even 2 years it appears that the electronics inside of them broke in a way in which the headphones cannot be turned off or on again. They seem to be in a sort-of odd state in between, in which pressing e.g. the ANC button does something and makes the LED light up, but there’s no Bluetooth connectivity whatsoever. When connecting them via USB-C to power or to another device, the LED changes dozens of times per second between white and red. Holding the power button makes the LED turn on (white) but nothing else. The moment the power button is let go, the LED turns back off. This is yet another Anker product that broke only shortly after its warranty expired and I’m starting to see a common theme here. Hence, I will avoid Anker products going forward, especially given the tedious support that I had experienced in the past with one of their faulty power banks. I still use the Soundcore headphones via audio jack, as this luckily works independently of the other electronics. To avoid anything bad happening, especially during flights, I opened the left earcup and removed the integrated battery. The USI 2.0 stylus that I had bought back in mid September of 2024 from the brand Renaisser is another hardware item that has pretty much died. It seems like the integrated battery is done, hence the pen doesn’t turn on anymore unless a USB-C cable is connected to it to power it externally. While I’m still using it, it is slightly inconvenient to have a relatively stiff USB-C cable pull on the upper end of the pen while writing or editing photos, which is what I use the pen primarily for. As mentioned in the Seoul part, I picked up a handful of mechanical keyboard-related items, namely MX switches for my keyboard(s) . KTT x 80Retros GAME 1989 Orange , 40g (22mm KOS single-stage extended, bag lubed with Krytox 105 ), lubed with Krytox 205G0 . 80Retros x HMX Monochrome , 42g (48g bottom out), LY stem, PA12 top housing, HMX P2 bottom housing, 22mm spring, factory lubed, 2mm pre-travel, 3.5mm total. I invested quite some time in pursuing my open source projects in the past quarter, hence there are a few updates to share. This quarter I have finally found the time to also update my feature and make it work with the latest version of Ghostty , the cross-platform terminal emulator written in Zig. You can use this commit if you want to patch your version of Ghostty with this feature. It is unlikely that the Ghostty team is ever going to include this feature in their official release, yet I’m happy to keep maintaining it as it’s not a lot of code. I have updated and it now supports a new flag (that does not support), which makes it possible to build a complete power management policy directly through command-line arguments. I have documented it in detail in the repository , but the idea is that the flag allows executing arbitrary shell commands when the battery reaches a specific percentage, either by charging or discharging. The flag takes three arguments: For , the command fires when the battery percentage drops to or below the given value. For , it fires when the percentage reaches or exceeds it. The command fires once when the condition is met and will only fire again after the condition has cleared and been met again. Additionally, the flag can be specified multiple times to define different rules. This makes it possible to build a complete power management policy, from low-battery warnings to automatic shutdown, without any external scripts or configuration files. The benefit this has over, let’s say, rules, is that script execution as the current user is significantly easier, less hacky and poses fewer overall security risks, as does not need to (read: should not ) be run in privileged mode. Another one of my Zig tools that got a major update is , the command line tool for getting answers to everyday questions like or more importantly . The new version has received an update to work with Zig 0.15.0+ and its command line arguments parser logic was rewritten from scratch to be able to handle more complex cases. In addition, is now able to do a handful of velocity conversions, e.g. . As a quick side note, alongside the Breadth-first search implementation that it is using, , has also been updated to support Zig 0.15.0+. I had some fun a while ago building an XMPP bot that’s connected to any OpenAI API (e.g. ) and is able to respond when mentioned and respond to private messages. It preserves a single context across all messages, which might not be ideal in terms of privacy, but it is definitely fun in a multi-user chat – hey, btw, come join ours! The code is relatively crude and simple. Again, this was a just a two-evening fun thing, but you can easily run the bot yourself, check the README and the example configuration for more info. The work on my new project, ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓, which I had announced in my previous status update sadly didn’t progress as quickly as I was expecting it to, due to (amongst other things) the RAM issues that I’ve had to deal with. It also turns out that when writing software in 2026, everyone seems to expect instant results, given all the Codexes and Claudes that are usually being employed these days to allow even inexperienced developers to vibe code full-blown Discord alternatives within shorts periods of time. However, because I don’t intend to go down that path with ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓, it will sadly take some more time for me to have a first alpha ready. To everyone who reached out to offer their help with alpha testing: You will be the first ones to get access as soon as it’s ready. Kauf Roasters : A roastery with a clear focus on simplicity and quality without pretension. Identity Coffee Lab : This one stunned me. A hot Americano to go for 3,000 KRW. That’s almost a third of what Anthracite charges. And the coffee isn’t just cheaper, it is significantly better! It’s a bigger cup, it’s notably less acidic, and, here’s the part that really got me, it comes out steaming hot and stays that way for a good twenty minutes. You can actually walk around and sip it casually, even in freezing cold temperatures, just the way a to-go coffee is meant to be enjoyed, instead of gulping it down before it turns into cold brew. Oscar Coffee Booth : This became a personal favorite. Another spot where the coffee is serious, the price is fair, and nobody is trying to impress you with anything other than a well-made drink. On top of that the owner is a genuinely kind person. : Either (aliases: , ) or (aliases: , ) : The battery level (number from 0 to 100) : The shell command to execute
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