Dark Prague here I come. But it's very sunny at the moment.

If you put your website behind Cloudflare with that traffic verification setting enabled you've made accessing your site more annoying than even the worst cookie banner. If you need some bot protection (and you probably don't) just use Anubis because as annoying as it can be it's thousands of times better.

Fancy a bit of bitcoin in a seaside town in mid-September? Check out

Entropical

Entropical · Entropy on the Tropical Coast, Sept 18–20, 2026

Entropical was born to turn the abstraction of bitcoin into something you can touch with your own hands. Talks, workshops, and community in La Herr...

Time to spin up a Knots node to see how it will perform tomorrow.

Surprised no one has already made this meme.

I have made three purchases from Coinkite (between 2022 and 2024). The first by a credit card with my own name (yes, dumb to do this and I can't remember why I did) and the two others paid for with bitcoin. For each one, I used a masked email address only used for Coinkite stuff. So I'm quite surprised that today I received an email from Coinkite to my primary email address, not the masked one. How has this happened? Is Coinkite using some databroker data that matched my credit card to my primary email address? Or is this a phishing attempt that has managed to get some control over Coinkite's domain?

Running self-hosted services is initially more work to setup but I like it so much more. Not only because of the ops and data sovereignty, but the software experience is just faster and better. This is particularly true of Forgejo over Github; it makes one realize how slow and shit Github is now. Also, if I want to make a personalized change (which I've done for my time tracker), I just can. Plus, software quality is good enough these days so sysadmin time ends up being virtually nil.

So I don't get the desire to merge chat and payment apps. Maybe because I'm a Unix graybeard but I want each app to do basically one thing and do it well. We've had URI schemes (e.g. mailto) for ages and they work fine. Just make your app aware of bitcoin payment schemes (see BIP 321).

Could have written this article myself:

Quillette

Why Soccer Feels Boring: The Science of Luck and Skill

How the beautiful game convinced the world that boredom is sophistication.

Color me surprised that Dan Boneh doesn't hate bitcoin.

Not a very original take but quite remarkable how OpenSSL managed to create such poor APIs that the blast zone spread so wide.

Has anyone gotten WhiteNoise chat to actually work?