Brian "bex" Exelbierd

I’ve been rebuilding my reading habit by logging books in public—on my own blog, not a new social network.

Jekyll + one YAML file powers a reading page and sidebar, with small tools to make updates boringly easy. Wrote up the approach here:

www.bexelbie.com/2026/03/03/j...

#reading #jekyll

A full-year compact calendar view with one row per week (Monday through Sunday), with committed events shown in green, possible events in yellow, public holidays in red, and overlaps highlighted with a yellow border.

Made a small web version of my year-at-a-glance compact calendar: it reads ICS feeds, highlights multi-day blocks, and shows overlaps. Helpful for “vacation vs travel vs school breaks” planning, not day-to-day scheduling.

www.bexelbie.com/2026/02/18/o...

#productivity #calendar

Has anyone used the mass download from iCloud (request or other) and then tried to use the app to keep current? Is the system able to determine that photos are already downloaded or does it start over? Not sure if a metadata change or access could create a problem.

The Pips puzzle for Jan. 17, 2026. Rows of dominos are lined up below a board of colorful squares. Text reads: "Place every domino in the right spot."

Pips is a logic puzzle where players must arrange a set of dominoes to meet the conditions of the board to win. There are three new puzzles each day — Easy, Medium and Hard — so you can solve at your own speed, in any order you want. trib.al/5M3ubE2

"The updated subscription pricing reflects the significant added Al value, as well as the many new features... To view the new pricing details and to review your renewal options, sign in to your Google Admin console."

Regardless of which side of the AI/LLM usefulness fight you’re on … both sides should agree that Google should say it with their chest. Hiding the price behind a link means you’re ashamed.

Integrating the NOUS E10 ZigBee Smart CO₂, Temperature & Humidity Detector with ZHA Integrating the NOUS E10 ZigBee CO₂ detector into ZHA with a custom quirk.

Writing custom ZHA quirks for Home Assistant: A journey through Tuya rebrands and Zigbee clusters. I got the NOUS E10 CO₂ detector working natively in ZHA and submitted my first PR to the zigpy project. Here is how to use it now.

www.bexelbie.com/2025/12/23/n...

#HomeAssistant #Zigbee #SmartHome

Fantastic write up. I got to relieve it in my head thanks to you.

Building Bridges: Microsoft’s Participation in the Fedora Linux Community | Microsoft Community Hub At Microsoft, we believe that meaningful open source participation is driven by people, not corporations. But companies can - and should - create the...

Last year, we quietly started a new Linux Community Engineering team within Azure to support the upstream teams doing the hard graft to maintain and enhance community distros. @bexelbie.com just published an update on the team's work with Fedora. Sweet :-)
techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/Linuxan...

I’m not saying you should change religions (or countries), but there are many options that don’t include these specific lights.

Did you chase it too?

If You’re Wearing More Than One Hat, Something’s Probably Wrong Navigating competing roles in open source - why clarity about which hat you’re wearing matters.

Do you ever feel like you're wearing too many hats? Juggling roles can create more confusion than clarity. It's often better to pick one hat and stick with it. It’s a tough choice, but it leads to clearer conversations.

bexelbie.com/2025/11/20/i...

#OpenSource #Community

Any updates?

Home Assistant entity details screen showing an IKEA smart plug named 'tree' with the Alexa label applied in the Labels section

Tired of hand-editing YAML files just to tell Alexa which Home Assistant devices to control? I built an automation to generate the list. It makes life simpler every time I add a new smart plug. Here's how I did it.

Read more at www.bexelbie.com/2025/11/12/a...

#HomeAssistant #Automation

Comic. PERSON 1 with white hat: How tall are you? PERSON 2: 5ft 24cm [caption] When switching to metric, make the process easier by doing it in steps.

Metric Tip

xkcd.com/3164/

Sort by name is a valid technical choice. Hide name in the display is a valid design choice. Placing these people this far apart in a company is a management decision.

European Sleeper introduces Comfort Standard from December - a couchette compartment ‘converted’ to a sleeper by getting mattresses & fully-made up beds, and sold as single double or triple. A good idea!
www.europeansleeper.eu/travel-class...

I’m not stating that non-LLM OCR doesn’t exist. I’m saying the opposite. I tried to OCR some documents without using an LLM and it failed and it wasn’t some obscure format. I haven’t tested to see if an LLM OCR would’ve passed.

I read that as “mollusk” and settled in to be schooled on a genetic tree I didn’t imagine was this small.

I needed to OCR bus schedules and all the PCR engines I could find couldn’t handle the columns and headers. I haven’t tested this, but there are real non-edge cases where column seeks fail.

you must appear to be bigger than your 10,562 unread emails

Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz (HD) YouTube video by trouchelle

The one I always feel compelled to post every time I see it is this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZ...

The Instagram account Saint featured me. The first slide says: "Derek Guy - Dieworkwear. Derek Guy is a menswear writer who has written for The New York Times, Esquire, and Mr. Porter. He also runs a menswear blog called Die, Workwear"

One of the slides showing my favorite products. It's it's a big bag of Hagen pigeon food. The food is fortified with the vitamins and nutrients pigeons need.

Instagram user writes: "Why tf do i need pigeon food for my outfit." I replied: "this is what i can afford to eat after spending all my money on clothes ::sad face::"

thinking about the time a cool Instagram fashion account asked me to name my favorite products and i didn't know i was supposed to name fashion products, so i said pigeon food because i like feeding pigeons and their followers were like "why the fuck do i need pigeon food for my outfit?"

Opinion: Why I'm handing in my Pentagon press pass Tom Bowman has held his Pentagon press pass for 28 years. He says the Pentagon's new media policy makes it impossible to be a journalist, which means finding out what's really going on behind the scen...

"Why I'm handing in my Pentagon press pass" by Tom Bowman of NPR. www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g... Recommended.

A thing frequently forgotten or ignored is that journalism is one of the few professions people will die for. [Via @brianstelter.bsky.social ]

Slide: WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOES NOT. Left Side • Password based authentication • Do I realy have to comment? • Any OS level administrative access control. • They have root lits as COTS. • Cloud bases authentication services. •You cant outsource your problems, only insource others. • Fine grained access control. •No way you can understand what you are doing. • Any closed source stuff. •They have been caught so many times to sel vulnerobilties. Complex stuff. • If you cant audit it its not safe. VDI. Free beer stuff. If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer, you are the product for sale. • Pain. • If its not convenient its not secure. • Access tokens Right Side • Hord information segregation. • At the miltory work with this. • Pubic, blockchoins. • Bilions of stake, work wel. • Correctly configured crypto. • We have seen them work very hard to disoble them. • Hierorchical Keystore. • All blockchoin wolets use them. • Type 1 hypervisor. • Requirement from NCSC (Uk). • Defence in debt. • Every miltory does this. • Correctly configured 2FA. • Surprisingly. • Rust. • Guardion protocol: • TLS, SSH, GPG, IPSEC.

Per Rene Malmgren at the #OpenSSL Conference, the left side is known as easily able to be bypassed by attackers, while the right side creates trouble for attackers and is the starting point for security.

Players at a long table playing a table top game in fours

Slide: Post-quantum trails: an educational board game about migration to post-quantum cryptography by Jelizaveta Vakarjuk and Pete Muzikant

To help people better understand the risk of ignoring post-quantum cryptography and the challenges involved in getting there we got to play Post-Quantum Trails at the #OpenSSL Conference

Instapaper is awesome. I’ve been a paying subscriber and strongly recommend it. Patrick has built RSS2Instapaper if you’re interested in having feeds flow straight in.

A polar bear on a poster advertising the OpenSSL and Brno Zoo cooperation

I love how being there for the world has been acted on through #OpenSSL sponsoring and supporting the Polar Bears at the Brno Zoo

+100

The theoretical ability to run an alternative set of relays is irrelevant, if there will never be a practical execution of it. Based on what I know about both at-proto and activitypub, one is technically interesting and the other one is more likely to achieve the stated goals.

Drew’s post is well worth reading as DSPy seems to be a missing link in thinking about LLM usage. Very readable and interesting. www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/10/l...

Thank you @simonwillison.net