Praise for the FritzBox

The FritBox 7490 is amazing

I've had my FritzBox 7490 for ... 12 years now. It ran my 8MBit ADSL2 in 2013 or 2014. It's so old that when I bought it, I got DECT phone handsets, because I still had a (VoIP) landline service!

I still use it in 2026 for my 960MBit/500MBit fibre service and it's more than sufficient. My WiFi is by far and away the limiting factor on network performance now (for devices I don't have on wired Ethernet).

It still gets updates that add meaningful new functionality from AVM too. I just can't say enough good things about it.

Buying or renting a warm, dry house in Wellington: tips for avoiding mold and damp

My notes on buying or renting a warm dry house in Wellington, New Zealand. I haven't prettied this one up, it's a copy of notes I wrote to a friend. Be warned that I am not a professional or expert in this area, this is just my experience.

Lies, it's all lies. For properties for sale they like to wait put them up until summer especially for the dank dark ones. I've seen "sunny and light" places set deep into steep south east facing hills. Right, you can SEE the sunny places on the other side of the hill from your icy damp window maybe...

Nasal demons: LLM review by a virtual kernel hacker having a bad day is both effective and hilarious

Or, "how I learned about the phrase 'nasal demons' and its relevance to C code review¹.

I landed up asking an LLM tool to review complex, experimental work in progress "in the style of a very prominent Linux kernel developer having a very bad day".

So an out-of-tree extension author gets the rule wrong, the unwind callback dereferences a stack frame that has been unwound, you get nasal demons. And there is no diagnostic.

and

[...] logs the drop count once per minute and zeros it. No cumulative drop counter is exported as a metric — the extension cannot instrument itself. The on-call engineer has to scrape the postgres log to find out the OpenTelemetry pipeline is dropping data, which is a Heller-class irony.

The review was surprisingly good, especially from an statistics engine with delusions of grandeur. The results were hilarious ... but they were also the most useful LLM code review result I've ever managed to obtain.