iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I bet this feels so good for the clothes

Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

$/* * We do not wish to experience the ills of cancellation(7). */ unsafe { sys::pthread_setcancelstate( sys::PTHREAD_CANCEL_DISABLE, std::ptr::null_mut(), ) };$

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Second routing protocols are for suckers

#
# Literature suggests that a separate routing protocol (e.g.,
# OSPF or IS-IS) should be, or at least often is, used inside
# an AS to distribute routes. I would rather not do that, and
# I would rather not pretend that every router or VPN server
# is in a separate AS.
#
# Instead, we twist IBGP into doing what we want by:
#
# * prepending an additional hop with our internal AS when we
# send routes to IBGP peers, turning hop count into a cheap
# cost metric
#
# * always tell our IBGP peers that the routes we are announcing
# are contactable directly through us
#
# * reflect all internally announced routes, so that we pass
# on interior routes even though that usually does not happen
# with IBGP
#
set prepend-self 1
set nexthop self
route-reflector

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Well this is 20 minutes and several increasingly horrified web searches I'll never get back! www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07...

Locked-in culture is a term coined online to describe doing one thing at a time.

When the norm has become to watch a movie while scrolling your phone, locking in refers to a new counter act.

"[Locked-in culture is like] going for a 'naked walk', which is a walk without headphones, or getting in the car and trying to find your way without using maps," Mr Stuart said.

He said the raw dogging movement was led by a centre-right demographic online, with young white men chasing a traditional hardened version of masculinity.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Was reminded of tweeting this in the before times by a colleague, who pointed out that Smalltalk also contains delightful Alice's Restaurant references: news.squeak.org/2014/04/29/i...

Screenshot of tweet from Joshua M. Clulow (@jmclulow):

The Alice's Restaurant Garbage Pile Principle, as often applies to software engineering: At the bottom of the cliff was another pile of garbage, and we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down.

4:36 AM · Jan 24, 2021

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Anything that requires you to type a password or other details should have one of these. So much better than on-screen keyboards. I wish I could jam this thing into my Android phone.

Photograph of an Xbox 360 Chatpad peripheral held in one hand. Behind is an Xbox 360 controller, and on the floor (out of focus) is a copy of You Don't Know Jack for Xbox 360.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

I was looking for the full text and

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

tbh we should all go back to HyperCard style filters, everything is better with Atkinson dithering

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Vaguely threatening energy in the Wired paywall:

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Wild to think this used to trundle across the Pyrmont Bridge. Truly the future we didn't get.

A photograph of the Sydney Monorail crossing Pyrmont Bridge

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Douglas Adams had a prescient level of contempt for modern technology companies. You can't upload an audio file here, but I often think about this "Share and Enjoy" bit from the 1980 Hitchhiker's radio drama.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

This is apparently a real product I just saw on AliExpress, but because of @nanoraptor.danamania.com my brain refuses to accept it isn't photoshopped

A "USB charger station", with 15 USB A ports on the front. It looks like a photoshopped image.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Apropos of nothing in particular, I think about this conversation and the conclusion a lot lately.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

This is the Pike subtweet of which I am most proud:

Screenshot of a tweet that says: "He believed strongly that it was important for the author of a system to get details like this right instead of defaulting on that responsibility by making every user make the choice instead... that if the users revolted he'd find a new set of colors, but options wouldn't happen."

The tweet also contains a picture of a bathroom in a garish yellow and green as was presumably popular for five minutes in the 1960s.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

The video podcast nonsense reminds me of this bit of an episode of The Goon Show (comedic radio on the BBC) from 1957:

Eccles: I can see a manhole cover right above us.

Neddy Seagoon: Shine the beam of this candle on it. I'll push it off. Eccles! Stand on my shoulders and pull me up!

Eccles: Ok... [strained] I'd like to see them do this on television.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

I love VFDs! When I used to catch the Emery-go-round shuttle I had a bus departure board on my desk:

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Reflecting on my application materials after six years at Oxide, and I feel that I continue to stand by all of this.

Why do you want to work for Oxide?

I have spent nearly two decades dealing with servers in different personal and professional settings. I
have been a customer of Dell and of HP. I have watched for a long time an industry that has seen no
lasting, ground-breaking improvement in commodity server technology (especially for scale) since the
advent of rack mountable servers with Intel x86 processors. We stand in the long shadow cast by
deeply proprietary, but historic and visionary technologies from large companies like DEC, and IBM,
and Tandem. Technologies that were defined at least in part by the joint engineering and deployment
of hardware and software to provide ground-breaking reliability and features mostly unmatched in
more open, commodity systems today.
We have an opportunity to build on decades of isolated advancements in commodity software and
hardware. To bring together open and commodity components, both new and existing, into one
engineered computing system that scales from a single rack up to a warehouse. We can build, as a
product and an ecosystem, the kinds of computing platforms that are today bespoke within the walls of
the hyperscalers like Google and Facebook and Microsoft.
Most importantly, though, we can do it all while building a fantastic team, united in a shared mission, a
shared set of values, and a shared trust!

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

Microsoft's latest office assistant abomination, Mico, had the best lines in that movie about the plumber family.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

There really should be a better way to put audio here without turning it into a video

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

The Clock application on the new Pixel 10 is absolutely rubbish. Witness the way it lurches around the display because apparently absolutely nobody at all actually looked at the font with their eyeballs and realised that the numbers are different widths. Just absolutely stellar work.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Like Sisyphus, I roll the e-mails up the mailing list, for all time.

It's also easy to see everybody agrees that having more drivers would
be good! The thing is, the only way we will get drivers is if you
pick a piece of hardware you'd like to use, and _write a driver_. If
you have hardware for which a driver is not currently available, the
best thing to do is to start working on that driver right now. The
kernel is not magic; it's just a big C program. Anybody who can
compile random bits of software on a UNIX system can surely learn how
to do it, especially with help from other resources in the community.
The most important question to ask is: if not you, then who?

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Move over ponycorns, it's time for a new mascot

Text says "D. Tracey" with a silhouette of a familiar yellow-suited detective.

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

NYT Games acknowledges that sex work is work, I guess?!

A screenshot of the "Connections" game on NYT Games, where the group "polite terms for sex" includes the word "commerce".

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Joshua M. Clulow @jclulow.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Sometimes when you open the Kaiser Permanente phone application it does this for ages. What does this even mean? It seems like bullshit to cover for the application being truly atrocious?

Screenshot of Kaiser Permanente android application that says "please wait while we secure your account", with a straight face, as if that means anything at all.

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