The great game of chicken is afoot. Fable 5 trial period is extended, yet again, to July 19th. Albeit anecdotal, there are numerous developers sharing similar stories about the cost performance of the new ChatGPT model, GPT-5.6 Sol. The community consensus agrees Fable 5 and Sol are both frontier models delivering similar results. What’s staggering in these accounts of ChatGPT comparison is not its mere performance. The current consensus seems to be running around a third or a quarter of the cost of running Fable 5.
From Op-ed
macOS to Drop Encrypted HFS+ Support by 2027
Apple announced that macOS 28, which will be released in 2027, will not support encrypted HFS+. The support document simply calls it “Mac OS Extended file system”. You may want to double-check old archival HDDs if they’re still formatted to encrypted HFS+. I’d recommend simply reformatting the drive to encrypted APFS, though decrypting the volume is an option too.
Fable 5 Trial Extended
Fable 5’s trial period got an extension. If you had a chance to try it on an existing subscription, you already know whether it worked out for your actual project. There’s no stronger evidence than that. For me, Fable 5’s capability was amazing in its own right — but not at usage-based pricing.
Fable 5 Is Back, Also Sonnet 5 Is Out
Anthropic announced Sonnet 5 this week, described to be as capable as Opus 4.8 but cheaper. Rough timing — Fable 5’s return ate all the attention. I haven’t had the chance to do any coding with it in-depth yet. But from the limited exchange I had over chat, Sonnet 5 still struggled with technical specs. For any technical discussion, I had better luck with Gemini Flash 3.5. In terms of output, Sonnet became incredibly verbose. There is no trace of the laconicism I had noticed in Sonnet 4.
The Murky Rabbit Hole of DIY NAS
My NAS is reaching the end of its design. Twenty terabytes usable across five bays, a few hundred gigabytes left, and it’s warned me twice now that I’m nearly out. I’ve bought time where I could, moving what I can to the pool meant for cold archive. But the design is aging out on more than one front. Swapping the drives to bigger ones won’t fix the root of the problem. With the new home lab feeding the queue, the need only grows until the backlog clears. The clock is ticking.
What Remains of Fable 5 Ban
Apple said Apple Intelligence would bring AI to its brand. It was a broken promise, unless Genmoji is to be considered a success. Apple is now saying the new Siri AI will deliver the promises they made back in 2024. Neither iOS 27 nor macOS Golden Gate has been officially released (available only in beta), but this definitely marks the beginning of the full transition toward AI-centrism in consumer OS. The dependency is real now — local or cloud, there’s no opting out.
Steam Machine Out to Have Pie and Eat It Too
Valve announced yesterday the specs and price point of the new Steam Machine. It has been speculated Valve is coming after the console market, specifically, the “couch” market. The first Steam Machine from 2015 was a commercial failure, in large part because the pricing wasn’t agreeable to either console or PC gamers. After the successful run with Steam Deck, Valve is giving Steam Machine yet another go, seemingly for the same reason.
Quest to Find Ergonomic Keyboard of Today
Remember Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard? It was legendary in retrospect. It was a tenkeyless design with a detached numpad, yet fully functional as a full-sized keyboard. It didn’t need additional software to set up — it was pure plug and play. I had written simple configurations for Sculpt Keyboards before; it was a testament of what the ergonomic keyboard was capable of.
“Ethical Concern” is AI Dunce Cap
Storage is at an all-time premium nowadays, with even the price of SSDs and HDDs being affected by AI craze. As much as I would love to say ‘rip the discs raw’, there is bound to be a real world limit on how much storage I can secure for a self-hosted media server. My search for encoding these raws led me to looking for configurations used by others, and for what it’s worth, their activity could easily translate into online piracy. Claude shut down the conversation immediately, citing my query as equivalent to looking for a black-market arms dealer.
Google Announced “Honey” Dipped in AI
Just last year, browser extension Honey suffered an infamous scandal. Now owned by PayPal, the extension promised to find the best deal, including finding the best coupon codes. The exposé revealed Honey’s business model focused more on being a man in the middle in both security and transaction. And it also reveals a gap, a bias between what buyers think they do and what they actually do.
The Case of the ‘Indulgent’ Subscription
Bit of context before I get into the whole fiasco. The choke point of physical ownership is real estate. Everyone who has ever tried owning every contents would know this. At some point, medium takes up more space than the media: books, movies, musics, video games, just about all of them. Movies, especially, would hit close at home for most of us. VHS, Betamax, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, the list of mediums are keep growing for the same movie. And some of the mediums haven’t even survived its own era. Streaming has solved this, albeit at a price.
Raspberry Pi, RAM, and Home Labs
Most of my Raspberry Pis have been decommissioned. I had used Docker and Docker only on Pis, so much of the effort was on focused compatibility and reliability of single machine (Synology NAS) doing all the work. For the record, Synology couldn’t do everything off the shelves. I had to upgrade the RAM from default 4 GB to 20 GB. And I am running most of the DBs on m.2 drives to ensure faster read and write. The question I have now is simple. What will I do with Pi boards?
Closed Captioning is a Must
For the life of me, I do not know why YouTube still doesn’t officially support closed captioning on PiP. As much as I appreciate overall better audio qualities even from a beginner YouTuber, the problem stands. Unless I am watching a podcast video uploaded onto YouTube, a video of people talking in perfectly sterilized studio, there is bound to be some background noises, some other audios mixing in. It’s only natural, even big time Hollywood movies and TV shows suffer from it. The difference I am pointing out is how these platforms handle the problem. Of which, YouTube is slowly…
Olympus Air, Caira, and Photography
Before some may assume I must be talking of photography in commercial or professional sense, I am not. Just recently, I was searching for a better way to scan my old books, only to find the “real” solution used in archiving was DSLR or Mirrorless cameras on tripods with professional softwares. It is a solution, but it is not the solution for home or for the hobbyists. Though it is far from photography, my interest in telescopes almost always comes back to bite in a same way — the most pro models and pro conventions are not always the answer.
Resurrecting Abandoned Projects with Vibe Coding
Open source projects always had a huge caveat in its system. If it’s too rigid and far too common, it is less likely to be given enough attention for maintenance until it breaks. If it’s too early in the development and quite niche, it is also less likely to be given enough attention. The projects I usually encounter and enjoy reading are usually in the later category. Coming from that very same niche, — that’s how I ended up googling for it — I understand the desire to come up with an algorithm. These abandoned projects never come to fruition,…