Stephen Brennan

Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To my fellow Linux users who grew up using Windows XP: did you know, you can have Space Cadet Pinball on your Linux machine? This is not breaking news, but it’s exciting to me, and I’m the one who decides what I write about. So here’s your PSA!

A Silver Lining of Slop

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To state the obvious: when reading text on the Internet in 2026, there's really no guarantee that it was written by a human....

Why I Don't Have Fun With Claude Code

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLM-based coding agents like Claude Code & Codex are all the rage right now. Rightfully so, because these tools are actually getting good. They’re actually at the point where people, both programmers and less technical users, can use them to create features or even entire projects with decent results. I have a lot of feelings that I can’t cover in one blog post, but one thing feels like it’s becoming clear to me: I’ll likely never love a tool like Claude Code, even if I do use it, because I value the task it automates.

Break my System, Please!

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For what feels like a year at this point, I’ve been receiving this wonderful message from pip when I try running pip install --user SOME_PACKAGE:

What's Inside a Kernel Core Dump

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My article, again posted on the Oracle Linux Blog, goes into “excruciating detail” on the contents of kernel core dumps, or vmcores. It describes common data, metadata, and formats, as well as tools for introspecting, and of course debugging them.

My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since April of 2021, I’ve hosted a Mastodon server on the domain snake.club. It’s mostly for me and friends I know personally – nothing like the bigger, public ones. Until the last week or two, the server was mostly dead. Then Elon finally bought Twitter, triggering a mass exodus from Twitter, right into Mastodon. Conveniently, my server was already there, so it was a nice place for me and my friends to jump right in and grab some popcorn while we all watch Twitter implode.

Unwinding a Stack by Hand with Frame Pointers and ORC

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My article, posted on the Oracle Linux Blog, goes in depth on how the Linux kernel creates stack traces at runtime. It describes the common frame pointer approach, as well as the newer approach for x86_64 called ORC, which allows omitting the frame pointer.

Use deadsnakes PPA on Ubuntu hirsute

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today I upgraded a computer of mine from Ubuntu Groovy Gorilla (20.10) to Hirsute Hippo (21.04). The process was mostly painless, but I had to go through the standard process of evaluating each file in /etc/apt/sources.d/*.distUpgrade to determine how all of my PPAs or other software repositories needed to be updated. The one that took the most work was the Deadsnakes PPA.

When it comes to git history, less is more

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At a previous company, there was an “infamous” commit in our main repository. The commit was about 10 years old, and it replaced every tab with 4 spaces. When the commit was authored, the repository was likely in the hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions, of lines of code. For folks like me, who liked to go “spelunking” through git history, it was a frustrating barrier, but no more than a moderate frustration. It didn’t impact day-to-day work. After all, this repo was a regularly-deployed web application. Development happened on the master branch, deploys happened multiple times per business day, and old revisions were quickly forgotten.

Subscribe to Kernel Mailing Lists over NNTP on Thunderbird

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Linux kernel mailing lists are really important to watch and learn. They’re the best place to watch what’s happening upstream, you can see (almost) every change and the review process that goes into it. They can help you build an understanding for what sort of development is taking place on a particular subsystem, and how the maintainer and reviewers feel about certain types of changes.