A lot has al­ready been said about the ab­surdly large cor­ner ra­dius of win­dows on ma­cOS Tahoe. People are call­ing the way it looks com­i­cal, like a child’s toy, or down­right in­sane.

Setting all the aes­thetic is­sues aside — which are to some ex­tent a mat­ter of taste — it also comes at a cost in terms of us­abil­ity.

Since up­grad­ing to ma­cOS Tahoe, I’ve no­ticed that quite of­ten my at­tempts to re­size a win­dow are fail­ing.

This never hap­pened to me be­fore in al­most 40 years of us­ing com­put­ers. So why all of a sud­den?

It turns out that my ini­tial click in the win­dow cor­ner in­stinc­tively hap­pens in an area where the win­dow does­n’t re­spond to it. The win­dow ex­pects this click to hap­pen in an area of 19 × 19 pix­els, lo­cated near the win­dow cor­ner.

If the win­dow had no rounded cor­ners at all, 62% of that area would lie in­side the win­dow:

But due to the huge cor­ner ra­dius in Tahoe, most of it — about 75% — now lies out­side the win­dow:

Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t ac­tu­ally touch them:

So I in­stinc­tively try to grab the win­dow cor­ner in­side the win­dow, typ­i­cally some­where in that green area, near the blue dot:

And I as­sume that most peo­ple would also in­tu­itively ex­pect to be able to grab the cor­ner there. But no, that’s al­ready out­side the ac­cepted tar­get area:

So, for ex­am­ple, grab­bing it here does not work:

But guess what — grab­bing it here does:

So in the end, the most re­li­able way to re­size a win­dow in Tahoe is to grab it out­side the cor­ner — a ges­ture that feels un­nat­ural and un­in­tu­itive, and is there­fore in­evitably er­ror-prone.

I love writ­ing soft­ware, line by line. It could be said that my ca­reer was a con­tin­u­ous ef­fort to cre­ate soft­ware well writ­ten, min­i­mal, where the hu­man touch was the fun­da­men­tal fea­ture. I also hope for a so­ci­ety where the last are not for­got­ten. Moreover, I don’t want AI to eco­nom­i­cally suc­ceed, I don’t care if the cur­rent eco­nomic sys­tem is sub­verted (I could be very happy, hon­estly, if it goes in the di­rec­tion of a mas­sive re­dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth). But, I would not re­spect my­self and my in­tel­li­gence if my idea of soft­ware and so­ci­ety would im­pair my vi­sion: facts are facts, and AI is go­ing to change pro­gram­ming for­ever.

In 2020 I left my job in or­der to write a novel about AI, uni­ver­sal ba­sic in­come, a so­ci­ety that adapted to the au­toma­tion of work fac­ing many chal­lenges. At the very end of 2024 I opened a YouTube chan­nel fo­cused on AI, its use in cod­ing tasks, its po­ten­tial so­cial and eco­nom­i­cal ef­fects. But while I rec­og­nized what was go­ing to hap­pen very early, I thought that we had more time be­fore pro­gram­ming would be com­pletely re­shaped, at least a few years. I no longer be­lieve this is the case. Recently, state of the art LLMs are able to com­plete large sub­tasks or medium size pro­jects alone, al­most unas­sisted, given a good set of hints about what the end re­sult should be. The de­gree of suc­cess you’ll get is re­lated to the kind of pro­gram­ming you do (the more iso­lated, and the more tex­tu­ally rep­re­sentable, the bet­ter: sys­tem pro­gram­ming is par­tic­u­larly apt), and to your abil­ity to cre­ate a men­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the prob­lem to com­mu­ni­cate to the LLM. But, in gen­eral, it is now clear that for most pro­jects, writ­ing the code your­self is no longer sen­si­ble, if not to have fun.

In the past week, just prompt­ing, and in­spect­ing the code to pro­vide guid­ance from time to time, in a few hours I did the fol­low­ing four tasks, in hours in­stead of weeks:

1. I mod­i­fied my linenoise li­brary to sup­port UTF-8, and cre­ated a frame­work for line edit­ing test­ing that uses an em­u­lated ter­mi­nal that is able to re­port what is get­ting dis­played in each char­ac­ter cell. Something that I al­ways wanted to do, but it was hard to jus­tify the work needed just to test a side pro­ject of mine. But if you can just de­scribe your idea, and it ma­te­ri­al­izes in the code, things are very dif­fer­ent.

2. I fixed tran­sient fail­ures in the Redis test. This is very an­noy­ing work, tim­ing re­lated is­sues, TCP dead­lock con­di­tions, and so forth. Claude Code it­er­ated for all the time needed to re­pro­duce it, in­spected the state of the processes to un­der­stand what was hap­pen­ing, and fixed the bugs.

3. Yesterday I wanted a pure C li­brary that would be able to do the in­fer­ence of BERT like em­bed­ding mod­els. Claude Code cre­ated it in 5 min­utes. Same out­put and same speed (15% slower) than PyTorch. 700 lines of code. A Python tool to con­vert the GTE-small model.

4. In the past weeks I op­er­ated changes to Redis Streams in­ter­nals. I had a de­sign doc­u­ment for the work I did. I tried to give it to Claude Code and it re­pro­duced my work in, like, 20 min­utes or less (mostly be­cause I’m slow at check­ing and au­tho­riz­ing to run the com­mands needed).

It is sim­ply im­pos­si­ble not to see the re­al­ity of what is hap­pen­ing. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more in­ter­est­ing to un­der­stand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this sec­ond part, LLMs are great part­ners, too). It does not mat­ter if AI com­pa­nies will not be able to get their money back and the stock mar­ket will crash. All that is ir­rel­e­vant, in the long run. It does not mat­ter if this or the other CEO of some uni­corn is telling you some­thing that is off putting, or ab­surd. Programming changed for­ever, any­way.

How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was in­gested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, be­cause I see this as a con­tin­u­a­tion of what I tried to do all my life: de­moc­ra­tiz­ing code, sys­tems, knowl­edge. LLMs are go­ing to help us to write bet­ter soft­ware, faster, and will al­low small teams to have a chance to com­pete with big­ger com­pa­nies. The same thing open source soft­ware did in the 90s.

However, this tech­nol­ogy is far too im­por­tant to be in the hands of a few com­pa­nies. For now, you can do the pre-train­ing bet­ter or not, you can do re­in­force­ment learn­ing in a much more ef­fec­tive way than oth­ers, but the open mod­els, es­pe­cially the ones pro­duced in China, con­tinue to com­pete (even if they are be­hind) with fron­tier mod­els of closed labs. There is a suf­fi­cient de­moc­ra­ti­za­tion of AI, so far, even if im­per­fect. But: it is ab­solutely not ob­vi­ous that it will be like that for­ever. I’m scared about the cen­tral­iza­tion. At the same time, I be­lieve neural net­works, at scale, are sim­ply able to do in­cred­i­ble things, and that there is not enough “magic” in­side cur­rent fron­tier AI for the other labs and teams not to catch up (otherwise it would be very hard to ex­plain, for in­stance, why OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are so near in their re­sults, for years now).

As a pro­gram­mer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to im­prove cer­tain repos­i­to­ries of mine aban­doned for time con­cerns. I want to ap­ply AI to my Redis work­flow. Improve the Vector Sets im­ple­men­ta­tion and then other data struc­tures, like I’m do­ing with Streams now.

But I’m wor­ried for the folks that will get fired. It is not clear what the dy­namic at play will be: will com­pa­nies try to have more peo­ple, and to build more? Or will they try to cut salary costs, hav­ing fewer pro­gram­mers that are bet­ter at prompt­ing? And, there are other sec­tors where hu­mans will be­come com­pletely re­place­able, I fear.

What is the so­cial so­lu­tion, then? Innovation can’t be taken back af­ter all. I be­lieve we should vote for gov­ern­ments that rec­og­nize what is hap­pen­ing, and are will­ing to sup­port those who will re­main job­less. And, the more peo­ple get fired, the more po­lit­i­cal pres­sure there will be to vote for those who will guar­an­tee a cer­tain de­gree of pro­tec­tion. But I also look for­ward to the good AI could bring: new progress in sci­ence, that could help lower the suf­fer­ing of the hu­man con­di­tion, which is not al­ways happy.

Anyway, back to pro­gram­ming. I have a sin­gle sug­ges­tion for you, my friend. Whatever you be­lieve about what the Right Thing should be, you can’t con­trol it by re­fus­ing what is hap­pen­ing right now. Skipping AI is not go­ing to help you or your ca­reer. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five min­utes test where you can just re­in­force your own be­liefs. Find a way to mul­ti­ply your­self, and if it does not work for you, try again every few months.

Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn cod­ing, and now ma­chines are do­ing it for you. But what was the fire in­side you, when you coded till night to see your pro­ject work­ing? It was build­ing. And now you can build more and bet­ter, if you find your way to use AI ef­fec­tively. The fun is still there, un­touched.

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There. That’s out of the way. I re­cently in­stalled Linux on my main desk­top com­puter and work lap­top, over­writ­ing the Windows par­ti­tion com­pletely. Essentially, I deleted the pri­mary op­er­at­ing sys­tem from the two com­put­ers I use the most, day in and day out, in­stead trust­ing all of my per­sonal and work com­put­ing needs to the Open Source com­mu­nity. This has been a grow­ing trend, and I hopped on the band­wagon, but for good rea­sons. Some of those rea­sons might per­tain to you and con­vince you to fi­nally make the jump as well. Here’s my ex­pe­ri­ence.

It’s no se­cret that Windows 11 har­vests data like a pump­kin farmer in October, and there is no easy way (and some­times no way at all) to stop it. The op­er­at­ing sys­tem it­self acts ex­actly like what was called “spyware” a decade or so ago, pulling every piece of data it can about its cur­rent user. This data in­cludes (but is far from lim­ited to) hard­ware in­for­ma­tion, spe­cific apps and soft­ware used, us­age trends, and more. With the ad­vent of AI, Microsoft made head­lines with Copilot, an ar­ti­fi­cial as­sis­tant de­signed to help users by cap­tur­ing their data with tools like Recall. It turns out that Copilot has largely been a flop and helps Microsoft (and data thieves) more than its users.

Why are so many ar­ti­cles and YouTube videos lately re­gal­ing read­ers and watch­ers with the har­row­ing tales of techies switch­ing from Windows to Linux? Anyone who has read one of those ar­ti­cles or watched one of those videos will know it boils down to two main is­sues: teleme­try and poor soft­ware sta­bil­ity.

After deal­ing with these is­sues and try­ing to solve them with workarounds, I dual-booted a Linux par­ti­tion for a few weeks. After a Windows up­date (that I did­n’t choose to do) wiped that par­ti­tion and, con­se­quently, the Linux in­stal­la­tion, I de­cided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the en­tire drive for Linux.

The other main rea­son folks unin­stall Windows is due to the over­all poor soft­ware ex­pe­ri­ence. Windows 11 has mul­ti­ple set­tings mod­ules to han­dle the same task (such as set­ting up net­work­ing or adding de­vices), and none of them seem to talk to each other. Additionally, each new up­date (which will even­tu­ally be forced upon you) seems to bring more bugs than fixes. Personally, I en­coun­tered 2-3 full sys­tem crashes a week when I ran Windows 11, and my hard­ware is fairly de­cent: AMD Ryzen 7 6800H, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB PCIe NVMe drive. Still, a few times a week, my com­puter would freeze for a few sec­onds, the dis­plays would go dark, and the PC would ei­ther restart or hang in­def­i­nitely.

There. That’s out of the way. I re­cently in­stalled Linux on my main desk­top com­puter and work lap­top, over­writ­ing the Windows par­ti­tion com­pletely. Essentially, I deleted the pri­mary op­er­at­ing sys­tem from the two com­put­ers I use the most, day in and day out, in­stead trust­ing all of my per­sonal and work com­put­ing needs to the Open Source com­mu­nity. This has been a grow­ing trend, and I hopped on the band­wagon, but for good rea­sons. Some of those rea­sons might per­tain to you and con­vince you to fi­nally make the jump as well. Here’s my ex­pe­ri­ence.

It’s no se­cret that Windows 11 har­vests data like a pump­kin farmer in October, and there is no easy way (and some­times no way at all) to stop it. The op­er­at­ing sys­tem it­self acts ex­actly like what was called “spyware” a decade or so ago, pulling every piece of data it can about its cur­rent user. This data in­cludes (but is far from lim­ited to) hard­ware in­for­ma­tion, spe­cific apps and soft­ware used, us­age trends, and more. With the ad­vent of AI, Microsoft made head­lines with Copilot, an ar­ti­fi­cial as­sis­tant de­signed to help users by cap­tur­ing their data with tools like Recall. It turns out that Copilot has largely been a flop and helps Microsoft (and data thieves) more than its users.

Why are so many ar­ti­cles and YouTube videos lately re­gal­ing read­ers and watch­ers with the har­row­ing tales of techies switch­ing from Windows to Linux? Anyone who has read one of those ar­ti­cles or watched one of those videos will know it boils down to two main is­sues: teleme­try and poor soft­ware sta­bil­ity.

After deal­ing with these is­sues and try­ing to solve them with workarounds, I dual-booted a Linux par­ti­tion for a few weeks. After a Windows up­date (that I did­n’t choose to do) wiped that par­ti­tion and, con­se­quently, the Linux in­stal­la­tion, I de­cided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the en­tire drive for Linux.

The other main rea­son folks unin­stall Windows is due to the over­all poor soft­ware ex­pe­ri­ence. Windows 11 has mul­ti­ple set­tings mod­ules to han­dle the same task (such as set­ting up net­work­ing or adding de­vices), and none of them seem to talk to each other. Additionally, each new up­date (which will even­tu­ally be forced upon you) seems to bring more bugs than fixes. Personally, I en­coun­tered 2-3 full sys­tem crashes a week when I ran Windows 11, and my hard­ware is fairly de­cent: AMD Ryzen 7 6800H, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB PCIe NVMe drive. Still, a few times a week, my com­puter would freeze for a few sec­onds, the dis­plays would go dark, and the PC would ei­ther restart or hang in­def­i­nitely.

The first ques­tion of­ten asked of Windows refugees mi­grat­ing to Linux is, “Why Linux?” It’s a good ques­tion, and one that needs to be asked be­fore dump­ing Windows for any­thing else. Personally, I tried ma­cOS first. The ex­pe­ri­ence was smooth and easy but ul­ti­mately felt re­stric­tive (installing from third-party de­vel­op­ers, any­one?). Additionally, the only Apple com­puter I have is a 2014 MacBook Air. As such, the lat­est ver­sion of ma­cOS I could ac­tu­ally run is 11 (Big Sur), which was re­leased in 2020. Overall sys­tem op­er­a­tion was quite slug­gish on the older hard­ware, and I knew that time would in­evitably take its toll on the soft­ware ex­pe­ri­ence — apps would soon be out of date and I would­n’t be able to up­date them. I also tried the OpenCore Legacy Patcher to push the lap­top to ma­cOS 13. While per­for­mance im­proved, key fea­tures like iMes­sage and Continuity Camera were ei­ther buggy or flat out re­fused to work. It felt like my lap­top was run­ning in mud with its hands tied be­hind its back. Plus, I needed some­thing for my desk­top. Not want­ing to drop a mort­gage pay­ment or two on new hard­ware, I opted for Linux.

Linux promised me the po­ten­tial of what I wanted - high hard­ware com­pat­i­bil­ity with full soft­ware free­dom. The op­er­at­ing sys­tem can run on pretty much any­thing, and it grants users a huge amount of con­trol over their sys­tem. I tried out a few ditri­bu­tions, or dis­tros, of Linux. A dis­tro is like a “flavor” of Linux, and each one has unique fac­tors (e.g., app/​pack­age man­age­ment, bun­dled user in­ter­face). With most dis­tros, these dif­fer­ences are largely ir­rel­e­vant; most dis­tros of­fer the same main pack­ages as oth­ers.

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On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury sub­poe­nas, threat­en­ing a crim­i­nal in­dict­ment re­lated to my tes­ti­mony be­fore the Senate Banking Committee last June. That tes­ti­mony con­cerned in part a multi-year pro­ject to ren­o­vate his­toric Federal Reserve of­fice build­ings.

I have deep re­spect for the rule of law and for ac­count­abil­ity in our democ­racy. No one—cer­tainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law. But this un­prece­dented ac­tion should be seen in the broader con­text of the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s threats and on­go­ing pres­sure.

This new threat is not about my tes­ti­mony last June or about the ren­o­va­tion of the Federal Reserve build­ings. It is not about Congress’s over­sight role; the Fed through tes­ti­mony and other pub­lic dis­clo­sures made every ef­fort to keep Congress in­formed about the ren­o­va­tion pro­ject. Those are pre­texts. The threat of crim­i­nal charges is a con­se­quence of the Federal Reserve set­ting in­ter­est rates based on our best as­sess­ment of what will serve the pub­lic, rather than fol­low­ing the pref­er­ences of the President.

This is about whether the Fed will be able to con­tinue to set in­ter­est rates based on ev­i­dence and eco­nomic con­di­tions—or whether in­stead mon­e­tary pol­icy will be di­rected by po­lit­i­cal pres­sure or in­tim­i­da­tion.

I have served at the Federal Reserve un­der four ad­min­is­tra­tions, Republicans and Democrats alike. In every case, I have car­ried out my du­ties with­out po­lit­i­cal fear or fa­vor, fo­cused solely on our man­date of price sta­bil­ity and max­i­mum em­ploy­ment. Public ser­vice some­times re­quires stand­ing firm in the face of threats. I will con­tinue to do the job the Senate con­firmed me to do, with in­tegrity and a com­mit­ment to serv­ing the American peo­ple.

I have flirted with self-host­ing at home for years. I al­ways bounced off it - too much time spent con­fig­ur­ing in­stead of us­ing. It just was­n’t fun.

That changed re­cently. The rea­son is sim­ple: CLI agents like Claude Code make self-host­ing on a cheapo home server dra­mat­i­cally eas­ier and ac­tu­ally fun.

This is the first time I would rec­om­mend it to normie/​soft­ware-lit­er­ate peo­ple who never re­ally wanted to sign up to be­come a sysad­min and stress about up­time of core per­sonal ser­vices.

The last one is the real un­lock.

Instead of Googling “docker com­pose vault­war­den caddy re­verse proxy” and stitch­ing to­gether five blog posts from 2021, I just let Claude fig­ure out (up to you how much you care to re­ally un­der­stand the tech­ni­cal de­tails!).

Fits in one hand. Check that cen­tral cool­ing unit!

I pre­vi­ously ran my Plex server on an M1 Mac mini, which was great, but as I wanted to add more ser­vices I found my­self run­ning a lot of re­source-hun­gry VMs (via UTM) and it was get­ting com­pli­cated any­time the Mac re­booted. So, I picked up a Beelink Mini N150. It is small, quiet, and just barely sips power. I paid around $379 for the de­vice and an­other few hun­dred USD for 8TB in NVMe SSD. It’s pretty wild how ac­ces­si­ble these mini PCs have be­come in re­cent years!

This is the en­tire work­flow:

This is the part that sur­prised me. I’ve been us­ing Claude Code and other agen­tic CLIs for my day-to-day de­vel­op­ment, but as oth­ers are re­al­iz­ing, they are gen­er­al­ized com­puter agents and na­tive to the ter­mi­nal.

I in­stalled Claude Code di­rectly on the Linux box. Then I asked it things like:

* Keep my Docker im­ages up to date

* Restart on boot so I never have to futz with it af­ter an out­age

Claude Code run­ning di­rectly on the server. Just de­scribe what you want.

I did­n’t copy-paste YAML from the in­ter­net or have to do deep googling. I just asked.

I fo­cused on things I al­ready used, but wanted more con­trol over - ef­fec­tively start­ing to knock down the walled gar­den around my core ser­vices like pass­words, pho­tos, me­dia.

Each one lives in its own con­tainer.

I can ac­cess every­thing from my phone, lap­top, and tablet like it is lo­cal.

Uptime Kuma keep­ing an eye on every­thing.

Automatic alerts via email give me peace of mind.

When some­thing goes down, I get an email. When it comes back up, an­other email. No pager duty, no com­plex alert­ing rules. Just a sim­ple ping that tells me if I need to care.

Vaultwarden was kinda the “okay, this can work” mo­ment.

It is a Bitwarden-compatible server writ­ten in Rust. Lightweight, re­li­able, and you can use the ex­ist­ing Bitwarden clients (like na­tive apps and browser ex­ten­sions). You can even set it as the de­fault pass­word man­ager on iOS, at the OS level!

Once that was run­ning, I ex­ported my pass­words from iCloud/​Key­chain, im­ported them eas­ily into Vaultwarden, and haven’t looked back since.

That alone jus­ti­fied the box.

Immich is a se­ri­ous Google Photos re­place­ment. I thought I’d have to com­pro­mise and flinched a bit when I in­stalled it. But nope, it’s good. Mobile apps. Face recog­ni­tion via a lo­cal (but slow) ma­chine learn­ing thread. Timeline and map view. Automatic up­loads from your photo roll.

Immich. This is not a com­pro­mise. This is bet­ter.

This is the kind of thing that used to feel frag­ile and half-baked when self-hosted. It does not any­more.

I took a bet on ReadDeck. The UI is gen­uinely good. Clean ty­pog­ra­phy, nice read­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, good mo­bile sup­port. It al­ways re­mem­bers where I stopped read­ing and takes me right there. I even set up a short­cut that al­lows me to save an ar­ti­cle for later right from mo­bile Firefox. Awesome.

This is ex­actly the kind of thing self-host­ing is per­fect for. A small, per­sonal tool that you ac­tu­ally use every day.

Lazydocker is a ter­mi­nal UI for Docker. It shows you all your con­tain­ers, logs, stats, and lets you restart or shell into any­thing with a few key­strokes.

I have been a huge fan of Lazygit for some time. I think it’s one of the best UIs I’ve ever used. So I was ex­cited to learn that Lazydocker is ba­si­cally that, but for mon­i­tor­ing Docker con­tain­ers. No mem­o­riz­ing docker ps flags or grep­ping through logs. Just SSH in, type lazy­docker, and every­thing is right there.

You feel like a su­per­hero af­ter you ssh in and see this

For a fuller pic­ture, Glances shows every­thing at once: CPU, mem­ory, disk, net­work, and all run­ning con­tain­ers.

Glances show­ing the whole pic­ture. 13 con­tain­ers, 6% CPU, 32% mem­ory. This lit­tle box barely breaks a sweat.

That is 13 ser­vices run­ning on a $379 mini PC, us­ing about 4 GB of RAM and al­most no CPU. The N150 is not a pow­er­house, but it does not need to be.

This does not feel like “running a server.”

The feel­ing of own­er­ship is pow­er­ful, but a bit hard to de­scribe. I think you just have to try it, and I hope you get a strong feel­ing of in­de­pen­dence like I have.

When some­thing breaks, I SSH in, ask the agent what is wrong, and fix it. When I want to add some­thing new, I de­scribe it in plain English.

I am spend­ing time us­ing soft­ware, learn­ing, and hav­ing fun - in­stead of main­tain­ing it and stress­ing out about it.

This is for peo­ple who:

* Do not want to be­come in­fra ex­perts

If that is you, I re­ally think this is the year to try self-host­ing.

For the first time, I would say this is not just vi­able. It is fun.

Follow me on Twitter for more.

* A com­mand-line tool to down­load all your iCloud pho­tos.

* Works on Linux, Windows, and ma­cOS; lap­top, desk­top, and NAS

* Available as an ex­e­cutable for di­rect down­load­ing and through pack­age man­agers/​ecosys­tems (Docker, PyPI, AUR, npm)

* Developed and main­tained by vol­un­teers (we are al­ways look­ing for help).

See Documentation for more de­tails. Also, check Issues

We aim to re­lease new ver­sions once a week (Friday), if there is some­thing worth de­liv­er­ing.

To make iCloud Photo Downloader work, en­sure the iCloud ac­count is con­fig­ured with the fol­low­ing set­tings, oth­er­wise Apple Servers will re­turn an ACCESS_DENIED er­ror:

* Enable Access iCloud Data on the Web: On your iPhone / iPad, en­able Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > Access iCloud Data on the Web

There are three ways to run icloudpd:

Download ex­e­cutable for your plat­form from the GitHub Release and run it

Use pack­age man­ager to in­stall, up­date, and, in some cases, run (Docker, PyPI, AUR, npm)

Build and run from the source

See Documentation for more de­tails

* Three modes of op­er­a­tion:

Sync - down­load new pho­tos from iCloud and delete lo­cal files that were re­moved in iCloud (–auto-delete op­tion)

Move - down­load new pho­tos from iCloud and delete pho­tos in iCloud (–keep-icloud-recent-days op­tion)

* Sync - down­load new pho­tos from iCloud and delete lo­cal files that were re­moved in iCloud (–auto-delete op­tion)

* Move - down­load new pho­tos from iCloud and delete pho­tos in iCloud (–keep-icloud-recent-days op­tion)

* Support for Live Photos (image and video as sep­a­rate files) and RAW im­ages (including RAW+JPEG)

* Automatic de-du­pli­ca­tion of pho­tos with the same name

* One time down­load and an op­tion to mon­i­tor for iCloud changes con­tin­u­ously (–watch-with-interval op­tion)

* … and many more (use –help op­tion to get full list)

Some changes are added to the ex­per­i­men­tal mode be­fore they grad­u­ate into the main pack­age. Details

To keep your iCloud photo col­lec­tion syn­chro­nized to your lo­cal sys­tem:

To in­de­pen­dently cre­ate and au­tho­rize a ses­sion (and com­plete 2SA/2FA val­i­da­tion if needed) on your lo­cal sys­tem:

Want to con­tribute to iCloud Photos Downloader? Awesome! Check out the con­tribut­ing guide­lines to get in­volved.

Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has hap­pened in Gentoo over the past months. New de­vel­op­ers, more bi­nary pack­ages, GnuPG al­ter­na­tives sup­port, Gentoo for WSL, im­proved Rust boot­strap, bet­ter NGINX pack­ag­ing, … As al­ways here

we’re go­ing to re­visit all the ex­cit­ing news from our favourite Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Gentoo cur­rently con­sists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 dif­fer­ent pack­ages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of bi­nary pack­ages avail­able on the mir­rors. Gentoo each week builds 154

dis­tinct in­stal­la­tion stages for dif­fer­ent proces­sor ar­chi­tec­tures and sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tions, with an over­whelm­ing part of these fully up-to-date.

The num­ber of com­mits to the main ::gentoo repos­i­tory

has re­mained at an over­all high level in 2025, with a slight de­crease from 123942 to 112927. The num­ber of com­mits by ex­ter­nal con­trib­u­tors was 9396, now across 377 unique ex­ter­nal au­thors.

GURU, our user-cu­rated repos­i­tory with a trusted user model, as en­try point for po­ten­tial de­vel­op­ers, has shown a de­crease in ac­tiv­ity. We have had 5813 com­mits in 2025, com­pared to 7517 in 2024. The num­ber of con­trib­u­tors to GURU has in­creased, from 241 in 2024 to 264 in 2025. Please join us there and help pack­ag­ing the lat­est and great­est soft­ware. That’s the ideal prepa­ra­tion for be­com­ing a Gentoo de­vel­oper!

Activity has slowed down some­what on the Gentoo bug­tracker bugs.gen­too.org, where we’ve had 20763 bug re­ports cre­ated in 2025, com­pared to 26123 in 2024. The num­ber of re­solved bugs shows the same trend, with 22395 in 2025 com­pared to 25946 in 2024. The cur­rent val­ues are closer to those of 2023 - but clearly this year we fixed more than we broke!

In 2025 we have gained four new Gentoo de­vel­op­ers. They are in chrono­log­i­cal or­der:

Let’s now look at the ma­jor im­prove­ments and news of 2025 in Gentoo.

RISC-V bootable QCOW2: Same as for amd64 and ar­m64, also for RISC-V we now have ready-made bootable disk im­ages in QCOW2 for­mat

avail­able for down­load on our mir­rors in a con­sole and a cloud-init vari­ant. The disk im­ages use the rv64gc in­struc­tion set and the lp64d ABI, and can be booted via the stan­dard RISC-V UEFI sup­port.

Gentoo for WSL: We now pub­lish weekly Gentoo im­ages for Windows

Subsystem for Linux (WSL), based on the amd64 stages,

see our mir­rors. While these im­ages are not pre­sent in the Microsoft store yet, that’s some­thing we in­tend to fix soon.

hppa and sparc desta­bi­lized: Since we do not have hard­ware read­ily avail­able any­more and these ar­chi­tec­tures mostly fill a retro­com­put­ing niche, sta­ble key­words have been dropped for both hppa (PA-RISC) and sparc. The ar­chi­tec­tures will re­main sup­ported with test­ing key­words.

musl with lo­cales: Localization sup­port via the pack­age

sys-apps/​musl-lo­cales has been added by de­fault to the Gentoo stages based on the light­weight musl C li­brary.

GPG al­ter­na­tives: Given the un­for­tu­nate frac­tur­ing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosys­tem due to com­pet­ing stan­dards, we now pro­vide an al­ter­na­tives mech­a­nism to choose the sys­tem gpg provider and ease com­pat­i­bil­ity test­ing. At the mo­ment,

the orig­i­nal, un­mod­i­fied GnuPG, the FreePG fork/​patch­set as also used in many other Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions (Fedora, Debian, Arch, …), and the re-im­ple­men­ta­tion

Sequoia-PGP with

Chameleon

are avail­able. In prac­tice, im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails vary be­tween the providers, and while GnuPG and FreePG are fully sup­ported, you may still en­counter dif­fi­cul­ties when se­lect­ing Sequoia-PGP/Chameleon.

zlib-ng sup­port: We have in­tro­duced ini­tial sup­port for us­ing zlib-ng and

minizip-ng in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode in place of the ref­er­ence zlib li­braries.

System-wide job­server: We have cre­ated steve, an im­ple­men­ta­tion of a to­ken-ac­count­ing sys­tem-wide job­server, and in­tro­duced ex­per­i­men­tal global job­server sup­port in Portage. Thanks to that, it is now pos­si­ble to glob­ally con­trol the con­cur­rently run­ning build job count, cor­rectly ac­count­ing for par­al­lel emerge jobs, make and ninja jobs, and other clients sup­port­ing the job­server pro­to­col.

NGINX re­work: The pack­ag­ing of the NGINX web server and re­verse proxy in Gentoo has un­der­gone a ma­jor im­prove­ment, in­clud­ing also the split­ting off of sev­eral third-party mod­ules into sep­a­rate pack­ages.

C++ based Rust boot­strap: We have added a boot­strap path for Rust from C++ us­ing

Mutabah’s Rust com­piler mrustc, which al­le­vi­ates the need for pre-built bi­na­ries and makes it sig­nif­i­cantly eas­ier to sup­port more con­fig­u­ra­tions.

Ada and D boot­strap: Similarly, Ada and D sup­port in gcc now have clean boot­strap paths, which makes en­abling these in the com­piler as easy as switch­ing the use­flags on gcc and run­ning emerge.

FlexiBLAS: Gentoo has adopted the new FlexiBLAS wrap­per

li­brary as the pri­mary way of switch­ing im­ple­men­ta­tions of the BLAS nu­mer­i­cal al­go­rithm li­brary at run­time. This au­to­mat­i­cally also pro­vides ABI sta­bil­ity for link­ing pro­grams and bun­dles the spe­cific treat­ment of dif­fer­ent BLAS vari­ants in one place.

Python: In the mean­time the de­fault Python ver­sion in Gentoo has reached Python 3.13. Additionally we have also Python 3.14 avail­able sta­ble - fully up to date with up­stream.

KDE up­grades: As of end of 2025, in Gentoo sta­ble we have KDE Gear 25.08.3, KDE Frameworks 6.20.0, and KDE Plasma 6.5.4. As al­ways, Gentoo test­ing fol­lows the newest up­stream re­leases (and us­ing the KDE over­lay you can even in­stall from git sources).

Additional build server: A sec­ond ded­i­cated build server, hosted at Hetzner Germany, has been added to speed up the gen­er­a­tion of in­stal­la­tion stages, iso and qcow2 im­ages, and bi­nary pack­ages.

Documentation: Documentation work has made con­stant progress on wiki.gen­too.org. The Gentoo Handbook had some par­tic­u­larly use­ful up­dates, and the doc­u­men­ta­tion re­ceived lots of im­prove­ments and ad­di­tions from the many ac­tive vol­un­teers. There are cur­rently 9,647 pages on the wiki, and there have been 766,731 ed­its since the pro­ject started. Please help

Gentoo by con­tribut­ing to doc­u­men­ta­tion!

Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fis­cal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dom­i­nant part

(over 80%) con­sists of in­di­vid­ual cash do­na­tions from the com­mu­nity. On the SPI side, we re­ceived $8,471

in the same pe­riod as fis­cal year 2025; also here, this is all from small in­di­vid­ual cash do­na­tions.

* Expenses: Our ex­penses in 2025 were, pro­gram ser­vices (e.g. host­ing costs) $8,332, man­age­ment & gen­eral (accounting)

$1,724, fundrais­ing $905, and non-op­er­at­ing (depreciation ex­penses) $10,075.

* Balance: We have $104,831 in the bank as of July 1, 2025 (which is when our fis­cal year 2026 starts for ac­count­ing

pur­poses). The Gentoo Foundation FY2025 fi­nan­cial state­ment

is avail­able on the Gentoo Wiki.

* Transition to SPI: The Foundation en­cour­ages donors to en­sure their on­go­ing con­tri­bu­tions are go­ing to

SPI - more than 40 donors had not re­sponded to re­quests to move the re­cur­ring do­na­tions

by the end of the year. Expenses will be moved to the SPI struc­ture as on­go­ing in­come per­mits.

As every year, we would like to thank all Gentoo de­vel­op­ers and all who have sub­mit­ted con­tri­bu­tions

for their re­lent­less every­day Gentoo work. If you are in­ter­ested and would like to help, please join us to make Gentoo even bet­ter! As a vol­un­teer pro­ject, Gentoo could not ex­ist with­out its com­mu­nity.

Have you ever no­ticed that the food graph­ics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders is flat “billboarded” stock im­ages of food?

This artis­tic de­ci­sion from di­rec­tor Masahiro Sakurai has per­sisted through 8 games over nearly 25 years. I’ve seen a few folks on­line re­mark­ing about the “JPEG” or “PNG”-like qual­ity of the im­ages in the most re­cent re­lease: .

While re­search­ing every game with this art style and all 150+ unique food im­ages I ended up fix­ing wikis, re­view­ing a sea­sonal KitKat fla­vor, and pre­serv­ing an un­cat­a­logued im­age of tem­pura soba.

Masahiro Sakurai is the di­rec­tor for every game on this list, so clearly this is his artis­tic de­ci­sion.

Super Smash Bros. Melee was the first game to con­tain this food art style, pub­lished in 2001. This style was then re­peated in Kirby Air Ride (2003), Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008),

Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U (2014), Super Smash Bros.

Ultimate (2018), and most re­cently in Kirby Air Riders (2025).

Credit to Nintendo, HAL Laboratories, SORA Ltd., and Bandai Namco Studios as de­vel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers of these games. Artwork was sourced from the Spriters Resource.

Where it all be­gan! Super Smash Bros. Melee for the GameCube started off with 28 dis­tinct food items, of­ten found in “Party Balls”. Each type of food had a dif­fer­ent “nutritional value” and “yumminess quo­tient” ac­cord­ing to the in-game tro­phy ded­i­cated to the food items.

Melee in­cluded many foods spe­cific to Japanese cui­sine, such as un­agi (eel), omurice, soba, dango, and gyū­don. I do dis­tinctly re­mem­ber grow­ing up as a “culinarily shel­tered” kid in the mid­west United States and not un­der­stand­ing what many of these food items were.

The orig­i­nal stock im­ages of Super Smash Bros. Melee and the next game, Kirby Air Ride, have been par­tially dis­cov­ered and doc­u­mented by a group called “Render96”. The stock im­ages are from a com­pany called “Sozaijiten”. Many of the food im­ages come from Material Dictionary CDs (Vegetables & Fruits),

(Food & Dishes), and (Cooking Japanese, Western, & Chinese). The ap­ple stock im­age in par­tic­u­lar was re-used all the way through Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018). The burger, milk, dango, and donut are still miss­ing their pri­mary source.

Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube had sig­nif­i­cantly fewer dis­tinct food items (12) com­pared to Melee and main­tained many of the same food stock im­ages from Melee, in­clud­ing the ap­ple, burger, chicken, curry, omurice, oni­giri, and ra­men. Nigiri was in­cluded, but the im­age was changed from a sushi board to a plate.

The stock im­ages had their sat­u­ra­tion in­creased and the black bor­ders around the im­ages are thicker, some­times 2-3 pix­els in­stead of only 1 pixel for Melee.

I paid $50 plus ship­ping on eBay for this PNG. This is the clos­est I’ll get to NFTs.

While re­search­ing the foods in Kirby Air Ride I dis­cov­ered a wiki de­scrip­tion of a “tempura soba” item that I’d never heard of and was­n’t in­cluded in the Spriters Resource spritesheets

for Kirby Air Ride. Turns out that this item was changed to a “hotdog” in the NSTC-M and PAL re­leases of Kirby Air Ride.

I was un­able to find a non-blurry im­age of the tem­pura soba sprite on­line, so of course I had to pre­serve this sprite my­self. I pur­chased

a Japanese copy of Kirby Air Ride, dumped the ROM us­ing the FlippyDrive Disc Backup Utility, and ran the ROM us­ing Dolphin with “Dump Textures” mode en­abled to archive the sprite di­rectly from the game.

Kirby Air Ride cover art­work (left: JP, right: US, PAL). Images from the GameTDB.

In the process I also learned that the cover of Kirby Air Ride changed be­tween the Japanese and in­ter­na­tional re­leases. The Japanese cover art fea­tures a smil­ing happy Kirby where the in­ter­na­tional cover has Kirby with a fur­rowed brow and se­ri­ous look.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii has only one more food item com­pared to Melee (29) and in­tro­duces 11 new food items in­clud­ing bread, cake, candy, choco­late, cookie, melon soda, par­fait, peaches, pie, pineap­ple, and steak.

About half of the Japanese-specific foods from both Melee and Kirby Air Ride were re­placed: curry, omurice, oni­giri, and ra­men.

The art is less sat­u­rated and more “realistic” which is in-line with the rest of the game’s art di­rec­tion. The im­ages lost their black out­line, likely to draw less at­ten­tion to the “arcade-y” feel that the pre­vi­ous ti­tles had with food items.

Super Smash Bros. Wii U and 3DS have the same to­tal num­ber of food items as Brawl (29). These games change the food art style com­pletely, again! It’s brighter, sat­u­rated, and looks de­li­cious.

The soda item was changed from a melon cream soda to a dark cola with lemon. The omurice was changed to a pair of fried eggs with ba­con. These games are also the only ones with­out the “burger” food item.

Super Smash Bros. for 3DS uses the same food art­work used in Super Smash Bros. for down­scaled to 64x64 pix­els from 256x256 pix­els with some mi­nor edit­ing.

Super Smash Bros. Wii U and 3DS added the “Mont Blanc” food item, which is a French dessert that is pop­u­lar in Japan. I’ve seen mul­ti­ple guides and wikis mis­tak­enly la­bel this food item as “noodles” due to the “vermicelli” shape of the puréed chest­nuts. Yummy!

While re­search­ing and writ­ing this blog post I hap­pened across “Mont Blanc”-flavored KitKats. These are ap­par­ently a lim­ited-time fla­vor for au­tumn. The KitKats are creamy and have plenty of chest­nut fla­vor, but they are very sweet (apparently Mont Blanc is quite sweet, too, so this is to be ex­pected).

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate uses the same 29 foods from the Wii U and 3DS and adds 9 more foods for a to­tal of 38. Many of the newly added foods are call-backs to food items in pre­vi­ous ti­tles, be­low high­lighted in pink.

The 9 new foods in Ultimate are burg­ers, cheese, corn­dogs, donuts, dumplings, daisies, pizza, pineap­ple, and steak.

It’s clear that the “Sozaijiten” stock im­ages were still in use even in 2018: 17 years later! The ap­ple, cheese, and chicken stock im­ages for Super Smash Bros. Melee match the stock im­ages used in Ultimate.

Kirby Air Riders re­leased for the Switch 2 has the most foods of any game with this art style with 45 dis­tinct food items.

Massive thank-you to Charles Bernardo for send­ing me care­fully cropped im­ages of the food in Kirby Air Riders.

Kirby Air Riders is the first game in this se­ries to use com­pletely new mod­els for all food items: not even the ap­ple or cheese are the same from any pre­vi­ous game. Kirby Air Riders is also the first game in this se­ries not to have a “roast chicken” item, break­ing from an es­tab­lished video-game food trope.

Kirby Air Riders adds a new food-cen­tric mode called “” where rid­ers earn points by con­sum­ing food as quickly as pos­si­ble in a small arena. Gourmet Race in­tro­duces a new food con­cept: “Large Foods”. Large food items are worth 15 points in­stead of 1 point per food item. There are 14 large food items, some pre­sent­ing as “upgraded” ver­sions of reg­u­lar-sized foods.

The large food items are: a bunch of 12 ba­nanas in­stead of 3, a bread-bas­ket, a dou­ble cheese­burger, a whole cake in­stead of a slice, donuts, a fruit bas­ket, a board of ni­giri in­stead of a plate, fruit par­fait, pizza, pop­corn, salad, rain­bow shave ice in­stead of blue only, a tem­pura bowl, and a whole wa­ter­melon in­stead of a slice.

Prior to this ar­ti­cle there was not yet a com­plete list of foods in Kirby Air Riders doc­u­mented on a wiki or spritesheet. I added this list to the Kirby wiki, but I’ve also in­cluded the list be­low:

There are 16 to­tal food items that only ap­pear in a sin­gle ti­tle across the 25-year span of games. Kirby Air Riders and Super Smash Bros. Melee have by far the most unique food items with 8 and 5 re­spec­tively.

Finally, here is a table with every im­age so you can com­pare how each changed across dif­fer­ent ti­tles:

Wow, you made it to the end!

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