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Why I "wrote" my own 8086 nostalgia emulator

Long-time readers (hi, both of you) might remember that I once spent a cross-Atlantic flight reverse-engineering a DOS poster viewer just so I could look at “pixel art” I had as a kid on my old ES-1841 – a Soviet clone of the IBM PC XT that was my entire...

TZDB 2.1.3.2026a — Bug fixes and IANA update

A new TZDB release is out — this one updates to IANA TZDB 2026a and ships a handful of bug fixes, some of which have been quietly causing performance problems on Windows for a while. Get the latest here. What changed IANA 2026a The usual timezone database update — picks...

They Can't Wait to Fire You

They are excited. Not quietly relieved, not pragmatically resigned — excited. The Klarna CEO said it out loud: “AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do.” The Shopify CEO sent a company-wide memo saying employees must now prove AI can’t do their job before anyone...

Hey .NET, where you at?

This article originally started as a “short delve” into the process of using Cursor editor to write .NET framework code. As I was writing it though, it quickly mutated into more of a commentary. Enjoy! It’s no surprise to anyone that knows me that I think .NET (Core) is a...

Neovim is fine ... I guess

There is praise galore on the interwebs for this thing called Neovim. If you are in software, you probably heard of it through a colleague, youtube or somewhere on Reddit. Well, that was my case as well… This is the story of my encounter with neovim, well, the first 5...

Why Prompt Engineering Is Nonsense

Like most people in tech, I have been bombarded lately with a ton of “AI stuff”. Articles upon articles of opinions and rants. Papers and videos on various subjects from technical architectures to societal impacts and beyond. While one must preserve a level-headed view on all these subjects and opinions,...

AI Takeover?

Preface I have been thinking for a while to write a post about the topic of AI and GPT and how that will influence or change the world we are living in. The reason I haven’t gotten into writing it before is that, like many other people, I have conflicting...

Decoding old-school PIC Images

And just when I thought I was done with converting old images into BMP format … another picture format attracted my curiosity. For fun, read my previous post about decoding old-school SCR Images Background Looks like I have found a program that was used to print posters (maybe?). This program...

Decoding old-school SCR Images

A bit of history Back in the 80s, 90s and the first years of 2000s, my primary computing environment was a 1980s-era IBM 8086 clone produced in the USSR. This machine was known as “ES-1841”. It had a whopping 640 Kb of memory, two 5 inch floppy drives and a...

Automating TZDB builds

Background Since the start of the TZDB project, I have been keeping it up to date by downloading the latest IANA database, and then, rebuilding the code and testing the changes manually. This has become somewhat of a chore and I have automated it by creating a custom shell script...

Some holiday dotfiles

It seems I can’t stop posting over the holiday season… It’s been more than a year since I have completely switched to GNU/Linux as my primary work environment. This has happened, in part, thanks to my new employer that promotes the use of UNIX-like tooling and stacks. Now, this is...

TZDB 2.1.2.2021e

Time for that end-of-the-year TZDB update again! This one updates TZDB to 2021e and fixes a reported small issue in ToISO8601Format. Get your latest version here. Happy Holidays!

Authentication for Azure AD B2C for Windows Desktop Apps

In an effort to alleviate the pain I went through a few weeks ago while trying to setup a Windows Desktop Application (WinForms!) for other brave souls, I decided to put together this blog post. I’ll start by saying kudos to all Microsoft teams that put together a ton of...

TZDB 2.1.2019c

The people at the IANA project have updated the database to the third installment this year, 2019c. As expected, I have updated TZDB accordingly. Get your latest version here. Enjoy!

TZDB 2.1.2019b Available on GetIt

Latest version of TZDB 2.1 (2019b) was released a few weeks ago. I strongly encourage everyone to update to this version as it contains a new core and multiple fixes based on those that core. On a related note, I have worked with Embarcadero to list it in the GetIt...

TZDB 2.0.2019b

After a few weeks of intense rewrites and tests I am finally proud to release TZDB 2.0 (2019b) released. :warning: This is a breaking release. You might need to fix your code after the update. TBudledTimeZone no longer derives from TTimeZone on Delphi. This has finally freed me from having...

The road to TZDB 2.0

With the release of TZDB 1.9 I have decided to give this project some more attention. I have started TZDB in 2012 and the source code shows it; and besides, version 1.9 still supports Delphi 6! This of course comes with a ton of support issues and subtle bugs (like...

TZDB 1.9.2019b

TZDB 1.9 (2019b) released. This release contains a number of fixes and updates to the source code to work on Free Pascal 3+. The latest source code is available here. Enjoy!

Ubuntu/Pop!_OS 19.04 Suspend then Hibernate

I have been using Pop!_OS 19.04 on my Dell XPS ‘13 recently and one of the missing features I wanted back was “suspend then hibernate”. systemd supports suspend-then-hibernate but as of now, it only supports native hibernation which is not working on my machine. After a lot of experimentation I...

New start

After many years of using WordPress to hold my blog and personal website, I have decided it was finally time to move onto something new - and most importantly - comfortable. The process will take some time, and there are quite a few things I need to figure about the...