Notes from February 2026

Things I did and saw this February.

Things I made

• I shipped my first feature at Ghost: Inbox Links. When a member enters their email to log in or sign up, we now show a button that takes them straight to their inbox. In addition to shipping a neat feature, I also enjoyed learning about MX records and RFC-compliant email address parsing. The source code for the main logic is here.

• I was surprised to learn that gzip streams encode which operating system did the compression. I built a little tool, “gzpeek”, to inspect this metadata (and more).

• The 40th anniversary of the original Legend of Zelda was this month, and I wanted a calendar feed for other game anniversaries, so I made one. Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons just turned 25 yesterday! Speaking of, I wrote a few articles for Zelda Dungeon as usual.

Cool links from online

• An incredible stunt: a game written in HTML and CSS. “No JavaScript or server-side code is used.”

• Best description of LLMs I’ve seen so far: “When you enter text into [ChatGPT], you’re asking ‘What would a response to this sound like?’”

• Seems like it’s better for your programming career to be bullish on AI, according to “AI skepticism is a quiet career killer”.

• “Countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on US technology firms”, which the US is trying to stop. We deserve to lose this battle.

• “The lack of European billion-dollar technology companies leads people to forget the technology invented here that instead embraced openness: the web, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Open StreetMap, the Fediverse.”

• Someone has decided to pick up a retro video game instead of doom scrolling.

• “This isn’t about paranoia. It’s about understanding the trade-offs we make when we leave wireless radios enabled on our devices. For some use cases, Bluetooth is essential. For others, it’s just convenience. Being aware of what you’re exposing is the first step to making informed decisions about which category your devices fall into.” From “What Your Bluetooth Devices Reveal About You”.

• “I want to break down how [Content Security Policy] actually works and, more importantly, where people screw it up.”

• “The research […] did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot were leading to a ‘material, verifiable, and substantial’ reduction in planet-heating emissions.”

• First read the term “openwashing”, which describes the process of using the word “open” as marketing. OpenAI and Android are examples of this. See “Acting ethically in an imperfect world”.

Hope you had a good February.