farre

@__farre__
52 Followers
50 Following
68 Posts
Programmer, Mozillian, ex-protohipster, gorehound. Breaking the web since 2006. 🇸🇪 🇩🇰

♻️ legendofmi.com: Nice easter egg on https://DuckDuckGo.com. If you search for “Guybrush Threepwood”, the logo transforms into Guybrush.

Spotted by Technical_Pass7714 on Reddit.

Why is suddenly Chromium my default image viewer? I never agreed to that!
If you've ever done HTML spec work you know about The Great Rewrapper. I stuck it in a VSCodium extension: https://open-vsx.org/extension/farrese/the-great-rewrapper. Coming to VSCode as soon as GitHub get their act together.
Open VSX Registry

TACO time.
I'm currently appalled by parts of the fediverse. The US is threatening to invade the Kingdom of Denmark and the takeaway is that we should hope that the EU repeals anticircumvention laws? That's a whole new Black Mirror episode.

Firefox 147 just landed & it's pretty huge in terms of web features:

🎉 CSS anchor positioning
🎉 The navigation API
🎉 View transition types
🎉 Brotli support in Compression/DecompressionStream
🎉 CSS module imports

And more!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/147

Firefox 147 release notes for developers (Stable) - Mozilla | MDN

This article provides information about the changes in Firefox 147 that affect developers. Firefox 147 was released on January 13, 2026.

MDN Web Docs
I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry. At least I know this came into my life both at the right time as well as ~40 years too late.
When Twitter collapsed, it was great to see the flood of friends, game devs and other come to Mastodon. Over the next 9 months a lot of them vanished to Threads, BlueSky or just left. I want to thank all people who are still on Mastodon and make it a wonderful place. You know who you are.

the UNIX v4 tape reminded me of this story by Ali Akurgal about Turkish bureaucracy:

Do you know what the unit of software is? A meter! Do you know why? In 1992, we did our first software export at Netaş. We wrote the software, pressed a button, and via the satellite dish on the roof, at the incredible speed of 128 kb/s, we sent it to England. We sent the invoice by postal mail. $2M arrived at the bank. 3-4 months passed, and tax inspectors came. They said, “You sent an invoice for $2M?” “Yes,” we said. “This money has been paid?” they asked. “Yes,” we said. “But there is no goods export; this is fictitious export,” they said! So we took the tax inspectors to R&D and sat them in front of a computer. “Would you press this ‘Enter’ key?” we asked. One of them pressed it, then asked, “What happened?” “You just made a $300k export, and we’ll send its invoice too, and that will be paid as well,” we said. The man felt terrible because he had become an accomplice! Then we explained how software is written, what a satellite connection is, and how much this is worth. They said, “We understand, but there has to be a physical goods export; that’s what the regulations require.” So we said: “Let’s record this software onto tape (there were no CDs back then—nor cassettes; we used ½-inch tapes) and send that.” Happy to have found a solution, they said, “Okay, record it and send it.” The software filled two reels, which were handed to a customs broker, who took them to customs and started the export procedure. The customs officer processed things and at one point asked, “Where are the trucks?” The broker said, “There are no trucks—this is all there is,” and pointed to the tape reels on the desk. The customs officer said, “These two envelopes can’t be worth $2M; I can’t process this.” We went to court, an expert committee examined whether the two reels were worth $2M. Fortunately, they ruled that they were, and we were saved from the charge of fictitious export. The same broker took the same two reels to the same customs officer, with the court ruling, and restarted the procedure. However, during the process, the unit price, quantity, and total price of the exported goods had to be entered—as per the regulations. To avoid dragging things out further, they looked at the envelope, saw that it contained tape, estimated how many meters of tape there are on one reel, and concluded that we had exported 1k to 2k meters of software. So the unit of software became the meter.