There’s about $400 of meat, milk, and miscellaneous condiments in my kitchen fridge at any given time. It runs 24/7, makes a quiet humming noise, and gives no indication when something’s wrong until you open the door three days later and recoil. The freezer compartment is worse: a slow failure can defrost everything before you notice the puddle. I already had a TP-Link P110 smart plug on the fridge — originally for energy monitoring, because I’m on a spot-priced electricity tariff and I like knowing what each appliance costs me. But the same wattage stream that tells you “the fridge used 1.4 kWh today” tells you almost everything you need to know about whether the fridge is healthy. ...

This is Part 2 of a series taking a GNOME app from an empty directory to GNOME Circle. Part 1 covered the why and the dev environment. The app we’re building Throughout this series, we’ll be building Gazette — an RSS reader. I picked it because it naturally exercises every pattern a non-trivial GNOME app needs: networking, data persistence, list/detail UI, adaptive layouts, settings, and state management. You don’t need to build an RSS reader to follow along — the patterns are universal. ...

This is Part 1 of a series that takes a GNOME application from an empty directory to acceptance into GNOME Circle. Each post is self-contained, but the series follows a single arc — and a real app — through every stage of the journey. Why GNOME If you’re building a desktop Linux application in 2026, you’ve got choices. KDE Plasma has Kirigami. Elementary has Granite. You can reach for Electron, Tauri, or a dozen other cross-platform toolkits and call it a day. ...

What Extreme Programming taught us about collaboration — and why it maps perfectly onto working with LLMs The current conversation is missing something If you spend any time in developer circles right now, the conversation about AI coding tools tends to collapse into one of two camps. The first camp believes we are months away from AI replacing software developers entirely — that the role of the human is already vestigial, a temporary inconvenience on the road to full automation. The second camp pushes back hard, arguing that AI is little more than a sophisticated autocomplete — useful for boilerplate, dangerous if trusted, and nowhere near capable of producing anything a senior engineer couldn’t do faster with a clear head and a good keyboard shortcut. ...