Wed 04 February 2026

❤️‍🩹 Content Note: The following text mentions transmisia, J. K. Rowling, and the Epstein Files.

Today: genuine SD cards — guitar strings attached to a magnet — what if Signal goes away — Hans Zimmer's transmisia — Bash in the Epstein Files — MicroPythonOS — university exams in the age of chatbots — Chrome to ship cache sharing — parsing Link: headers — analyzing Midnight City and You Spin Me Round — documenting samples in MusicBrainz

f3 – Fight Flash Fraud is a CLI tool to check capacity and write performance of SD cards to determine whether they're genuine or not.
Mattias Krantz was curious whether you can build an electric guitar where the strings are connected to the body not via the usual bridge, but free-floating using a magnet with 250 kg of pull force (15 min). tl;dw: Yes you can, but aside from some fancy bends it doesn't sound all that different, and it's highly dangerous and a nightmare to tune.
What if Signal (the messenger) suddenly became censored or unavailable? How would you be able to still talk to your friends? Signal Contingency Plan has some thoughts about that.
Apparently, world-famous composer Hans Zimmer is going to collaborate with world-famous TERF J. K. Rowling and compose the score for the upcoming Harry Potter HBO series scheduled for 2027. And if you're thinking that he maybe just missed the controversy: I'm afraid not; for example, trans musician Lauren Bousfield has said that Zimmer is using transphobic language and fired her when she transitioned. (via Tilly Bridges)
The Bash 3.1-beta1 Reference Manual is in the Epstein Files.
MicroPythonOS is an ESP32 microcontroller operating system built with MicroPython and comes with a GUI, touchscreen support, and OTA updates.
Ploum has written a blog post about how he is allowing students to use genAI chatbots (and dress however they want) in exams: Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots.
Chrome will soon use single-keyed HTTP caching "[f]or a small number (hundreds) of hand-curated static third-party script, stylesheet and compression-dictionary resources that are used on a large portion of the web". Dan Fabulich has written an excellent deep-dive post about what this means and why it's "a tradeoff between performance vs. privacy + fairness": Chrome will make popular scripts load faster (by picking winners).
To access the Mastodon API, I had to parse the HTTP Link: response header, and it wasn't fun. There can be multiple links, separated by a comma, and each link can have a key-value mapping associated to it, separated with equals signs and semicolons. The values can include any of these special characters, unescaped, which means you can't really use regular expressions to split the header into its components. The Requests library comes with a links property, but its parsing code would likely fail for more exotic values. HTTPX doesn't parse Link: headers. linkparse does character-by-character parsing and has a weird output format. linkheader-parser also has a weird output format. links-from-link-header is using regexes. httplink seems to have a somewhat complicated implementation, but comes with a test suite—which unfortunately doesn't test for exotic values. I ended up writing my own implementation using regexes and trusting that I won't see any weird characters in the responses I'm dealing with. 🤷‍♂️
Captain Pikant made a great video about the drum patterns and samples used in Dead or Alive's 1984 hit You Spin Me Round (13 min). I really enjoyed them playing the whole song at the end.
Also, Ego Dip recreated M83's Midnight City from scratch (22 min).
Recently, I was wondering how to add the fact that Sabrina Setlur's Freisein samples Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech to MusicBrainz. Because while there is a "samples material" relationship, you can only have that between recordings, but there are several I Have a Dream recordings, and it's unclear (and also not really important) which one has been used. aerozol pointed me to the forum thread How to handle samples of speeches and other non-music?, but I found it kind of inconclusive nevertheless.