The Tao of Mac is the personal wiki of Rui Carmo, featuring a technology-oriented blog, links to articles, several compilations of resources around various key technology topics, and a collection of photos and videos.
This was a different week, partly because we decided to watch the eclipse from a Spanish beachfront and partly because I actually read three books. There is an entire sub-thread around my back and neck aching worse than ever and my sleep patterns looking like a game of Splatoon that I will spare my readership, though. I do think that this week’s Economist completely nailed the holiday feeling…
I literally chortled at this one. I had no idea Apple had done this bad an icon for what is likely the only game they ever shipped with early OS X.
I have a problem. Or, rather, I have two problems: I have been spending far too much time messing about with AI instead of reading. I end up zoning out in front of YouTube and, even with serious attempts at curating my feed, I spend far more time than I should there. I’ve griped about this before , but this week I decided to take some time to fine-tune the friction around those activities–removing…
EPUB is an open W3C format for distributing digital publications as a single file. It packages structured web content–primarily XHTML , CSS , SVG , images and fonts–with metadata, navigation and a defined reading order. Most EPUB publications are reflowable, allowing a reading system to adapt text to the screen and the reader’s font, spacing and colour preferences. The format also supports fixed…
Wow, 30 years. Part of that seems to have whizzed by, and it has been a long while since I last played Quake . I always hated the hellish look, but the technology was irresistible–and looking back, it is pretty amazing how much it shaped my career, or at least my pastimes. Running Quake servers at an ISP is quite literally how I initially ended up in marketing instead of engineering, and it got me…
Since I got a new printer last week and I’ve been documenting my endeavours in this realm in a rather haphazard way, I thought it would be useful to do a sort of catch-up/snapshot of where things are (and have been) for a while now. Right now I have three 3D printers (down from four): The KP3S Pro , which is my “tiny”, near-silent printer The Two Trees SK1 , my former workhorse A brand-new…
It’s about time. I’ve been running adapted versions of Proxmox on ARM for a few years now–first Pimox on a Raspberry Pi 4 , and later on RK3588 boards –and ARM servers have been around for at least as long, so the fact that official support is only arriving now makes me a bit worried about Proxmox ’s ability to do off-the-wall things like pve-microvm . But this is proper support, with feature…
Apple is removing AirPort Utility from iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate, eight years after discontinuing the hardware it manages. That is an unusually long run, but it still leaves working AirPort Express , AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule devices without Apple’s configuration software. airport-utility is an MIT-licensed reimplementation for macOS 27 and later, with a Swift interface and a Python…
I should probably start marketing piclaw as “Cloudflare OS on your own hardware”, given the amount of convergent evolution agentic workspaces seem to be enjoying these days–persistent chats, tools, generated apps, terminals and guarded access to external services all seem to be arriving independently at roughly the same shape. The repository is, unsurprisingly, built around Workers and the rest of…
A collection of tools, frameworks, and models built on or optimized for Apple’s MLX array framework and the Neural Engine (ANE) on Apple Silicon. MLX is Apple’s answer to PyTorch/JAX for the M-series chip, with lazy evaluation, unified memory, and first-class Python bindings. Resources Field Category Date Link Notes 3D Asset Models Runtimes 2026 Hunyuan3D-Swift MLX runtime for Hunyuan3D…
Notes and resources on building and operating agentic AI systems, covering orchestration frameworks, task routing, memory, and evaluation approaches that extend baseline LLM capabilities. Skills Reusable instruction packs, workflow recipes, and prompt modules live in Agentic Skills . OpenClaw OpenClaw-specific projects and lightweight variants live in OpenClaw Ecosystem . Pi.dev Pi.dev is the home…
This page is a collection of notes and links related to AI image generation technologies, including Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Midjourney, and other generative image models like Z-Image that have become prominent in the modern AI space. Resources Field Category Date Link Notes Diffusion Models 2026 GenCAD Image-conditioned CAD generation using transformer contrastive representations and diffusion…
Tailscale is a centrally-managed overlay network VPN service that provides seamless connectivity across your devices no matter where they reside, with a few interesting features: Support for direct access to other LANs (and outbound Internet connections) via “exit nodes” Support for every single operating system I use (including both major mobile platforms) Ability to run an exit node on the Apple…
Proxmox Virtual Environment is a Debian -based system that focuses on providing enterprise-grade LXC and KVM management capabilities, and that I have been using for my homelab. Resources Category Date Link Notes Add-ons 2023 kproximate A Kubernetes autoscaler for Proxmox Documentation 2023 cloud-init Support Scripts 2025 proxmox-cloud-init-scripts cloud-init scripts for Proxmox VE Templates 2023…
These little modules have taken hobby electronics by storm, so of course I grabbed a few of them and have been hacking away quietly on both the ESP8266 and the ESP32 . Resources Category date Link Notes Applications 2026 Win-95-Tracker-Cyd Small tracker music player with a Windows 95 aesthetic for the Cheap Yellow Display (ESP32 CYD board). MimiClaw Telegram-based AI assistant for ESP32-S3 using…
Clojure is a LISP dialect that targets the Java VM - but that also happens to have a number of other back-ends, including a JavaScript one. Category Date Link Notes Back-end 2021 babashka a standalone, fast-starting clojure interpreter 2019 calvin a built tool for ClojureScript 2018 clojerl Clojure atop the Erlang BEAM VM 2016 Ferret A Clojure to C++ compiler that can target Arduino-compatible…
Steam is Valve ’s game distribution platform, which became especially relevant to me when it started incorporating the Proton WINE -based compatibility layer for running DirectX Windows games on Linux . Tools Switch Users This is something I picked up on github but modified to use vdf : #!/bin/env python import os from pathlib import Path import vdf LOGIN_USERS = Path ( Path . home () /…
Scheme is a LISP dialect that has not just gone its own way (as is usual with LISPs) but also achieved IEEE standardization. With a focus on lexical scope and tail call optimization, it actually contributed many of its ideas back into Common LISP. Resources Category Date Link Notes Compilers 2026 jolt Clojure compiler implemented on top of Chez Scheme loko optimizing Scheme compiler for Linux,…
Emulation and hardware virtualization software of various descriptions, most of them obsolete by now: Category Date Link Notes 8-bit 2025 MCUME a multi-system emulator for microcontrollers chips-test a collection of Tiny Emus for 8-bit systems Amiga 2008 MaxUAE Somewhat dead, with only Power PC binaries available. UAE Cross-platform Amiga emulator 2021 amiberry optimized for ARM cpus Arcade 2010…
I spent far too much time doing 3d graphics to get me through college (it was tremendous fun but I fortunately had the good sense not to make a career out of it). These days I spend a lot of my free time in CAD software (including Blender and OpenSCAD ), so those years were a great learning experience that has really paid off. Resources Category Date Link Notes Gaussian Splats 2025-12 NullSplats…