Category	Date	Link	Notes
8-bit	2025	MCUME	a multi-system emulator for microcontrollers
		chips-test	a collection of Tiny Emus for 8-bit systems
Amiga	2008	MaxUAE	Somewhat dead, with only Power PC binaries available.
		UAE	Cross-platform Amiga emulator
	2021	amiberry	optimized for ARM cpus
Arcade	2010	Open Emu	A modular emulator that can be used as a Quartz Composer plug-in
	2011	Emulaunch	A multi-emulator front-end suitable for use on a TV
	2022	Provenance	an iOS and tvOS multi-emulator frontend
C64	2019	bmc64	a “bare metal” C64 emulator for the Raspberry Pi
	2025	TeensyROM	a ROM emulator, fast loader, MIDI and internet cartridge for Commodore 64/128
DEC	2024	DECstation2040	A RP2040 based DECstation emulator (the workstations I used in college)
Emulation		86Box	a low level x86 emulator for running older operating systems and software.
	2026	M5Tab-Macintosh	68040 emulator on an ESP32-P4 with video rendering and input handling capabilities.
		Musashi	A portable Motorola 68000 CPU emulator core used in many classic system emulators
		Anemoia NES Emulator fixes	fixes for the ESP32 port of the Anemoia NES emulator
Gameboy	2008	Boycott Advance	GBA emulator. Universal binary.
Gaming		KiGB	Gameboy/Gameboy colour emulator.
Generic x86		QEMU	Q
		Virtual PC	Used to be the best option for running Windows on Power PC
	2010	DOSBox	Boxer
Graphics	2025	retroarch-shaders	a collection of finetuned shaders to replicate CRT looks on Retroarch
IBM PC	2023	martypc	a cycle-accurate IBM PC/XT emulator written in Rust
	2025	Dosbian	a lightweight distribution for Raspberry Pi that boots directly into DOSBox
		felix86	a low-level x86 emulator for RISC-V platforms
		Evertop	an ultra low power, ultra long battery solar PC
		Faux86	designed to be run ‘bare metal’ on a Raspberry Pi
Mac	2011	Basilisk II and SheepShaver	the most stable emulators for Motorola-based Macs, but maintained and released via an obscure forum, so quite annoying to keep up to date
	2023	µvMac	An attempt to modernize the vMac source code
		Macintosh ROMs	quite amazed to see these in the wild
		Mini vMac	The most straightforward Mac emulator out there
	2024	MinivMacArduino	Port of Mini vMac to the Arduino framework (Kind of)
		nacemu	for of Basilisk and SheepShaver with networking support
		pico-umac	embeds the umac emulator into a Rasbperry Pi Pico, complete with VGA mono output
		umac	a minimalist Apple Macintosh 128K/512K emulator
		Ultibo-Mini_vMac	A minivmac fork to be built against Ultibo instead of out-of-date SDL2
		MacRelix	a Unix-like environment that runs in classic Mac OS
	2025	pico-mac-nano	a minimal Mac emulator using an RP2040 and a tiny LCD
		rpi-basilisk2-sdl2-nox	a script to build Basilisk II on a Raspberry Pi with no X11 dependencies
		snow	a new classic 68K Mac emulator that emphasises accurate emulation and debugging features
		MR Browser	a package manager for emulated classic Macs
	2026	Retro68	A GCC-based cross-compilation environment for building 68K and PowerPC Macintosh software, including modern hobby projects and tiny utilities for classic Mac emulators.
		Cydintosh	A Macintosh Plus emulator port for the Cheap Yellow Display ESP32 board, bundled with a few tiny 68k Mac applications and repurposed as a smart-home status display.
		MacSurf	a modern web browser for Classic Mac OS 9 PowerPC with CSS3, ES5 JavaScript, and native HTTPS
		pico-mac	Runs the umac emulator on a Raspberry Pi Pico, with VGA output.
		Macframe	An IBM mainframe emulator for macOS distributed as release downloads
		speedmtr	A classic Mac benchmarking utility distributed via Gryphel (archive of classic Mac software)
		Advanced Mac Substitute	An API-level reimplementation of classic 68K Mac OS that runs old Mac applications without an Apple ROM or original system software.
Multi-system	2025	retrom	a centralized management service that serves up web-based emulated games
N64	2010	mupen64plus	a less polished but cross-platform alternative
		Sixtyforce	A N64 emulator with the ability to render games in high resolution.
Newton	2025	Einstein	Newton MessagePad emulator for multiple platforms
Nintendo 3DS	2020	Citra	formerly available for Android with motion controls
Other	2024	libmui	a brilliant Classic MacOS & GS/OS widget library for linux used in the Apple IIe emulator
		mii_emu	an Apple IIe Emulator for Linux
		oberon-risc-emu	Emulator for the Oberon RISC machine
		Twister OS	a set of UI themes and prebuilt ARM images to turn XFCE into faithful reproductions of older OSes
	2026	rocket68	C11 Motorola 68000 CPU emulator library focused on correctness, precise cycle counting, and easy embedding into retro projects.
		Pocket8 / pico-ios	Native PICO-8 companion for iOS that embeds the official engine via WASM, adding instant save/load states, adaptive controls, and a smart library for cartridges.
		OberonSystem3Native	Native port of Oberon System 3 for modern Windows units, complete with build scripts, packaging artifacts, and usage notes.
		Oberon System (ETH)	Official ETH Zurich archive for the Oberon language and operating system, including System 3 downloads, documentation, and research notes.
		Project Oberon	Niklaus Wirth’s Project Oberon site: the book, FPGA schematics, and step- by-step guides to recreate Oberon hardware.
PalmOS	2024	cloudpilot-emu	a cloud-based emulator for running PalmOS applications that works on the iPhone
		Mu	PalmOS Emulator
Psion		WindEmu	emulator for Psion Series 5mx (Windermere)
RISC-V	2025	uvm32	a minimalist, dependency-free virtual machine sandbox that emulates a 32-bit RISC-V CPU that can run DooM
	2026	Emuko	Fast RISC-V emulator written in Rust that can boot Linux and targets modern systems.
Retrocomputing	2023	Clock Signal	a multi-system emulator that works beautifully on a Mac
	2025	Bedrock	8-bit virtual computer system specification with assembler/emulators for PC, web, and Nintendo DS
	2026	RomM	A beautiful self-hosted ROM manager and player with metadata scraping, browser-based UI, and built-in EmulatorJS/RuffleRS players for hosting and sharing emulation collections.
Sinclair	2010	Fuse	A recent port of the cross-platform ZX Spectrum emulator
		zxsp	Emulates a range of Z80-based devices, including the ZX81 I started out with.
	2023	pico-zxspectrum	a ZX Spectrum emulator for for the Raspberry Pico RP2040 MCU
	2024	zx2040	a ZX Spectrum emulator for the Raspberry Pi Pico
	2025	ZXBaremulator	a complete ZX Spectrum 48K/128K/+2A bare-metal emulator
Switch	2023	Ryujinx	Very good performance on Apple Silicon
	2024	sudachi	Another yuzu fork
Terminals	2026	Blaze	a VT420 terminal emulator written in Rust
Tools	2024	retronas	network storage for different retro computers and consoles
	2026	Memo-1	simple 6502-based computer project
Wii U	2022	Cemu	Very good performance on Apple Silicon
Wii/GameCube	2011	Dolphin	An amazing Wii and GameCube emulator
Windows	2024	hangover	enables running Win32 applications on aarch64 Linux using various DLLs for improved performance.
	2025	vbesvga.drv
		winboat	a Windows VM wrapper that uses RDP and RemoteApp to render apps on Linux

]]> https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/07/30/0703?utm_content=atom 2026-07-30T07:03:00+00:00 2026-07-30T07:11:30+00:00 Rui Carmo https://taoofmac.com

I find it highly amusing that it has taken this long for people to realise that the passport form factor is actually more usable–if only because you can reach across the entire screen with your thumb–and that a 4:3 foldable makes far more sense both ergonomically and content-wise than the tall, narrow monstrosities we have had to put up with.

I was actually a big fan of the Microsoft Surface Duo during the pandemic years, and look forward to seeing what Apple comes up with in October. But my real interest is the opportunity for someone to make a smaller, more compact single-screen device with exactly these dimensions and ergonomics.

I have never been a fan of the huge bricks we have had to carry around since the iPhone X, and am not likely to get a foldable until hinge and screen reliability are truly solved (not to mention affordability). But I would buy a single-screen iPhone shaped like this now. Well, maybe not in mauve.

Year	Item	Notes
2016	Sushy	my current wiki engine
2015	rss2imap	The way I used read my news a while back
2009	PNG Canvas	a native Python PNG creation module, suitable for use in Google App Engine
2007	Yaki	my previous wiki engine
2006	MailArchive	a quick hack to file web pages as MIME compliant e-mail messages.
2005	PicoStats	a minimalist Apache log parser.
	IMAP Backup	another quick hack that apparently filled a long-standing need.
	The Python Grimoire	which I converted into TiddlyWiki format
2004	newspipe	which I used daily for a couple of years and occasionally contributed to
	PicoRendezvous.py	a minimalist (and dumb) Bonjour / Rendezvous client
	Growl native protocol implementation	this spawned numerous variants, including a proxy.

Resources

Category	Date	Link	Notes
Astronomy	2021	Skyfield	An astronomical library for Python
Audio	2024	pedalboard	a library for audio processing
Authentication	2023	authlib	OAuth, OpenID Connect and other niceties
	2021	aioauth	Oauth 2.0 framework and provider for asyncio
Automation	2024	helium	a library for automating browsers such as Chrome and Firefox
CAD	2025	sdfCAD	Simple 3D mesh generation with Python based on SDFs
	2024	build123d	a parametric BREP modeling framework for 2D and 3D CAD built on OpenCascade
	2023	sdf	Generate 3D meshes based on SDFs (signed distance functions)
		sdf (Gitlab)	Another version of the sdf library with additional functionality
CLI	2021	pqdm	parallel tqdm
	2020	pyp	a clever shell tool to do inline Python
		typer	A click-like library for building CLI applications
	2019	tqdm	a configurable progress bar
	2018	python-fire	a CLI wrapper for any Python object
		click	A very nice way to do composable CLI tools (see also argh, defopt, docopt, python-fire, etc.)
		Clint	A great module for developing CLI apps
		pbs	A nice, simple and consistent generic command wrapper.
		ptpython	The Python Prompt Toolkit
		plumbum	Another command wrapper, with SSH support.
Cloud	2026	Stelvio	a pure-Python framework for building and deploying AWS apps with the stlv CLI
	2020	pyinfra	a fabric-like agentless automation tool
Coding	2025	pyscn	an intelligent python code quality analyzer
Compilers	2022	codon	an LLVM compiler for a Python subset
	2021	mypyc	a compiler for a subset of type-annotated Python
		Transcrypt	Another JavaScript transpiler
Compression	2021	zipfly	a library for doing on-the-fly zip compression with low memory footprint
Concurrency	2024	dramatiq	background queueing/task processing library
		protean	framework for building event-driven applications using the CQRS pattern
		asyncpal	a unified approach at providing elastic task pools
	2023	mpire	a multiprocessing replacement with a number of additional features
	2020	aiomultiprocess	an asyncio Pool implementation to manage multiple processes with independent event loops
		Trio	a friendlier wrapper around asyncio for concurrent tasks
		OpenReplica	A coordination service that provides replication and synchronization support for large-scale distributed systems
		python-rq	A simpler queueing library
		Pulsar	Another actor-based multiprocessing library with asyncio support and a fair degree of network transparency
		Celery	My current go-to library for task queueing
		Pykka	An implementation of the Actor model, with gevent support
		offset	ports of the Go concurrency model
		aioprocessing	A set of asyncio equivalents of the multiprocessing library
		ray	A distributed execution engine that implements a pandas clone
		goless	ports of the Go concurrency model
		Littleworkers	Parallel job management without the hassles.
Console	2020	rich	a console library with various layout options
		bpython	My favorite REPL
		Colorama	Making ANSI color sequences work cross-platform (see also this gist)
		fabulous	Prints images to console
		urwid	A curses based library for building console UIs
Data Engineering	2024	polars-h3	a Polars extension that adds support for the H3 discrete global grid system
	2020	Little Ball of Fur	a graph sampling library that works with NetworkX
		riptable	a multithreaded array processing library
		Happy	A Hadoop library to run map-reduce jobs via Jython
		biplist	A library that can manage Mac binary .plist files
		pyparsing	a handy, flexible parser library that does away with lex/yacc.
		snakebite	A native HDFS client to access the Hadoop datastore.
		xlwings	An Excel plugin
		Bounter	A fast probabilistic counter
		voluptuous	A data schema validation library.
		fuzzywuzzy	A fuzzy string matching library
		PyCascading	A better way to write Hadoop jobs.
		xlwt	a library to parse Excel documents (cheatsheet.
Data Science	2025	DataSynthesizer	a library for generating synthetic data
		kreuzberg	a text extraction library supporting PDFs, images, office documents and more
		mimesis	a library for generating fake data
		Merlion	A time series forecasting library
		pydbgen	another library for generating synthetic data
	2024	sail	unifies stream and batch processing with a drop-in replacement for Spark SQL
		cuDF	a GPU DataFrame library leveraging CUDA
	2023	pygwalker	a Tableau-like dataframe exploration tool for Jupyter
		datapane	a data and reporting and analisys framework
		fugue	a unified interface for executing SQL, Python and Pandas code on Spark, Dask and Ray
	2021	Kats	a time series analysis library
		euporie	a text-based interface for Jupyter notebooks
		xeus-sql	a Jupyter kernel for SQL databases
		eztable	a simple table library
		pyxelate	a pixelation/dithering algorithm that uses a mix of algorithmic and ML approaches
	2020	papermill	a way to parameterize and automate Jupyter notebooks
		SciPy	scientific (including plotting) libraries for Python
Data Validation	2021	schema	another data validation library
		pydantic	Data validation using type hinting
		Schematics	A validation/schema handling library.
Database	2025	mssql-python	a Microsoft SQL Server driver for Python
		aiosqlitepool	a connection pool for aiosqlite
	2023	mongolite	another MongoDB-like database
	2021	pottery	a Redis library with Pythonic syntactic sugar
		dataset	trivial abstraction layer over SQLAlchemy
		Mongita	a MongoDB-like database library for in-process use
	2020	DuckDB	an embeddable SQL database with OLAP features
		montydb	a tiny MongoDB implementation in pure Python
		simple-graph	A simple graph database in SQLite
		pymssql	SQL Server and Sybase driver
		FreeTDS
		SQLAlchemy	tutorial
		Peewee	A small, very flexible ORM
		tinydb	A (very) lightweight document oriented database
		Goatfish	An even smaller schemaless ORM
Debugging	2020	Scalene	A high-performance CPU and memory profiler
		PrettyErrors	an error handler that prettifies output
		Eww	Insert a REPL into a running application
		Pycallgraph	Generate a program flow graph Graphviz
		Hypothesis	A very nice testing framework
		pudb	A console debugger
		lptrace	A pretty amazing single-file strace-like tool for Python
		assertEquals	a testing framework with a great screncast
Django	2025	django-qrauth	a Django library for QR code-based authentication
		django-tastypie	a Django library for building RESTful APIs
		plain	an opinionated fork of Django
		django-rest-framework	another Django library for building RESTful APIs
		django-admin-sortable	a library for adding drag-and-drop sorting to Django admin
	2024	django-organizations	a Django library for managing organization accounts
	2023	django-unicorn	a Reactive framework for Django that uses minimal JavaScript
	2022	django-ninja	for building APIs with Django and Python 3.6+ type hints
	2021	diskcache	a Django-compatible caching library
		wid.gy	A Django-based CMS framework
		Django	Probably the best app framework I’ve every used.
		Wagtail	Another Django-based CMS framework
		django-micro	A lightweight wrapper to use Django as you would Bottle
Electronics	2024	micropython-fusion	a sensor fusion library for MicroPython
		Kalman-Filter-Python-for-mpu6050	a Kalman filter for the MPU6050 IMU
	2023	belay	a library and helper for developing MicroPython projects, including an on-device REPL
	2021	pinout	Helps create SVG pin-out diagrams for electronic hardware
Embedded	2025	MicroPythonOS	a MicroPython-based operating system for embedded devices that can run on ESP32 (and likely the CYD)
		archimedes	a Python framework that lets you develop and analyze algorithms in NumPy and automatically generate optimized C code for embedded systems
Enterprise		toil	A cross-platform pipeline management system with Common Workflow Language support
Environments	2020	snakeware	a Python userspace for Linux
Frameworks	2024	Platypush	a modular platform for home automation with easy MQTT event handling and a graphical editor
Functional Programming		Hy	An awesome LISP dialect that sits atop the runtime.
		funcy	A nice, fairly complete functional library
		Toolz	A functional complement to the standard library.
		pyrsistent	A persistent data structure library
GIS	2021	prettymaps	A minimal Python library to draw customized maps from OpenStreetMap data
		geopy	an amazingly flexible geocoding library.
		reverse-geocoder	A fast offline reverse geocoder
GUI	2025	pytauri	a Tauri binding for Python
	2024	CustomTkinter	offers customizable widgets and supports system appearance modes across platforms
		mesop	a rapid web development framework for Python
		micropython-nano-gui	A lightweight MicroPython GUI library
		nicegui	a library for creating Web UIs
	2022	flet	creates realtime web, mobile and desktop apps using Flutter
	2021	encodermenu	a MicroPython library for GUI creation, using uasyncio
	2020	Gooey	a wxWidgets wrapper for quickly building GUI versions of CLI tools
		DearPyGui	a Linux/Windows GUI library atop ImGUI (C++)
	2019	fman build system	a complete build system for Qt applications
	2018	Toga	a cross-platform GUI that works on the Mac
		kivy	A sophisticated UI/UX library with Android support
		PythonCard	A bit basic, but interesting.
		VPython	3D OpenGL libraries for quick visualization
		winGuiAuto.py	for Windows automation
		pyglet	a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library with OpenGL support
		PySide	A recent Qt binding (up to and including 4.7) with QML support
		PySimpleGUI	a simple tkinter-based GUI wrapper
Graphics	2026	slamd	a lightweight Python 3D visualization library with a GPU-accelerated viewer for point clouds, meshes, camera frustums, and scene-graph style transforms
		splathash	Encodes any image into 16 bytes (22-char base64url) and decodes to a 32×32 preview orders of magnitude faster than BlurHash, with Go/TS/Python reference libs and identical hashes across languages.
	2025	piligraphs	a library for creating charts using PIL
		html2pic	a library for rendering HTML/CSS to images using pictex
		pictex	a layout library for creating component-based graphics in Python, using skia
	2024	renderer	rendering and rasterizing library for STL
		pyrender	glTF 2.0-compliant OpenGL renderer for visualization of 3D scenes
		pygfx	render engine targeting Vulkan/Metal/DX12
	2023	pyxel	A retro game engine for Python
	2022	taichi	a high-performance graphics library
	2021	image-blender	a Cython implementation of Adobe Photoshop blend modes
	2020	blurhash	A way to encode image placeholders as strings
		hiplot	high dimensional interactive plotting
		diagrams	a library for drawing cloud architecture diagrams (Azure, AWS, k8s, etc.)
	2019	douglas-quaid	a library for image matching and correlation
		imagededup	uses several different algorithms (including NNs) to detect duplicate images
		plottyprint	printable formatting for matplotlib
		smc.freeimage	A wrapper for the freeimage library that can handle various TIFF and fax formats as well as ICC color profiles
		Graphite	a real-time graphing system similar to RRDTool
		Skip's Python Bits	lots of useful snippets
		Pygal	An SVG charting library with a variety of built-in formats.
		Pyx	Oldie, but goodie.
		pygame	a game-oriented library with SDL support
		pyprocessing	A Processing clone in Python.
		Vapory	A library to generate photorealistic renderings using POV-Ray
		drawille	Uses Braille characters for TTY charting
		Cropmap	Face-aware image cropping.
HTML		lxml	a different libxml binding, with excellent HTML parsing performance
		cssutils	a CSS parser
		Gnosis Utilities	all sorts of XML goodies
		pygments	syntax highlighter able to handle multiple nested languages
		pyquery	A jQuery-like library for manipulating documents.
		BeautifulSoup	The most powerful HTML parser out there.
		squeezeit	A CSS and JavaScript bundler/minifier
Interpreters	2026	monty	a minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for running AI-generated code
	2024	RustPython	A Python Interpreter written in Rust
	2023	pocketpy	an embeddable C-based interpreter in 5000 LOC
		PyScript	a WASM runtime using Pyodide for web embedding
Languages	2025	SPy	a variant of Python designed to be statically compilable with an interpreter and compiler
Libraries	2026	fast-ebook	A Rust-powered Python EPUB2/EPUB3 library for reading, writing, validation and Markdown conversion
		shreg	a Python library for regularizing line segments and closed contours using various algorithms.
	2025	readability-python	an implementation of Mozilla’s readability algorithm for extracting the main content from HTML documents
		trafilatura	another readability variant for extracting text from HTML documents
		automerge-py	a Python library for building collaborative applications with CRDTs
		pythonista-stubs	a collection of type stubs for the Pythonista app, useful for writing scripts that run on iOS devices
		smartfunc	a library for using LLMs via docscrings and introspection and introspection
		aiopandas	a library for using Pandas with asyncio
	2024	unsafe-python	A library to assist writing memory-unsafe code, without any imports
		domscribe	converts HTML to semantic Markdown while preserving structure and meaning
		foc	an intriguing collection of higher-level functions using operators for composability
		BM25S	an ultrafast implementation of BM25 in pure Python
	2023	fastkafka	A Kafka library inspired by fastapi
		reader	A modern RSS/Atom/JSON feed reader library.
	2022	slack-machine	A Slack bot library that uses socket mode and asyncio
		mintotp	a tiny TOTP library
	2021	Sorted Containers	a fast C-backed collections library
		seedir	A utility library to render filesystem tree diagrams
	2020	minotaur	an asynchronous inotify interface
		minibatch	a simple stream processing library
Machine Learning		Tensorflow	Usual staple, largely superseded by PyTorch
Mail	2021	imapautofiler	an IMAP mailbox sorter that I unwittingly replicated (with less features)
	2018	aiosmtpd	an asyncio version of smtpd.py
		Salmon	an SMTP mail server
		slimta	a mail app framework for building MTAs
Messaging	2023	Propan	a declarative Python MQ framework inspired by fastapi
Music	2025	music21	a library for computer-aided musicology
	2023	musicpy	A domain-specific language for writing music
	2020	pippi	an audio processing/music library
		pymidi	a library for building MIDI over IP/RTP applications (compatible with Apple specs)
Networking	2023	p2pd	an async networking library with P2P and UDP support
	2019	opendrop	a partial implementation of AirDrop
	2018	asphalt	An asyncio framework for network oriented applications, with a considerable number of modules
		PyRendezvous	neat little Bonjour module I use a lot
		telnetscript	a simple module to do scripted telnet sessions.
		IPy	an IP address manipulation library.
		pyvnc	A ctypes interface to the VNC libraries
		ircutils	A relatively modern async IRC framework
		Eventlet	Amazing event-oriented framework
		ftputil	a high-level interface to the ftplib module
		Python smtplib progress indication	Might come in useful some day.
		gunicorn	A WSGI server that supports a number of different worker daemons and is highly customizable.
		dpkt	packet creation and parsers
		Pcapy	a packet manipulation library
		uwsgi	A C application container that speaks WSGI and is seriously good.
		PuSSH	SSH wrapper
		RPyC	an awesome RPC library
		SleekXMPP	A more modern XMPP library
		Tftpy	a pure Python TFTP library, useful for implementing UDP file transfer testbeds.
		ThriftPy	A pure Python implementation of Apache Thrift
		pyxmpp2	another one, probably more interesting.
		pyrobuf	a Cython implementation of Google’s protobuf library
		pyapns	An Apple Push Notification Service provider based on Twisted.
OCR	2025	olmocr	A toolkit for training language models to work with PDF documents in the wild.
	2024	surya	OCR library supporting 90+ languages
PDF	2025	plutoprint	another PDF generation library
	2024	marker	a PDF to markdown converter optimized for books and scientific papers, using surya
	2023	peepdf	a Python tool to explore PDF files in order to find out if the file can be harmful or not.
	2021	borb	a library for creating and manipulating PDF files
	2020	camelot	a library to extract tabular data from PDFs
		Kiva	a Display PDF library
		PyPdf	a PDF toolkit
		WeasyPrint	Alternatives to PrinceXML for generating formated PDF documentation.
		xhtml2pdf
Packaging	2026	go-to-wheel	build Python wheels that bundle cross-compiled Go CLI binaries
	2021	PyOxidizer	a better way to distribute Python bundled apps than pyinstaller
		shiv	builds self-contained applications for easy deployment
	2019	Poetry	a dependency management and packaging tool
Presentations		pydown	An HTML presentation generator
Reference	2023	python-cheatsheet	a modern reference, useful for kids
Reporting		Relatorio	A very neat reporting library with multiple output formats
		ReportLab Toolkit	a pure Python PDF library that includes a presentation tool.
Resources	2024	awesome-micropython	another curated list of MicroPython resources
		awesome-micropython	a curated list of MicroPython resources
	2023	python-package-template	a template project for building packages
Robotics	2026	Cozmo Direct Control	PyCozmo-powered GUI with AI chat, keyboard/mouse driving, visual node lab, MediaPipe face tracking, and procedural speech/animation pipelines for commanding Cozmo over WiFi without the official app.
		Cozmo Explorer Tool	Flask-powered GUI that combines Cozmo’s camera feed, keyboard remote controls, event monitor, and animation explorer for prototyping behaviors without the stock app.
		Cozmo Python SDK	Official Anki SDK for the Cozmo robot, with the cozmo module, sample scripts, an event monitor, simulation support, and documentation at cozmosdk.anki.com/docs for wiring your own behaviors over Wi‑Fi.
		PyCozmo	Pure-Python alternative SDK and app that speaks Cozmo’s UDP protocol directly, bundles tools for dumps/replay/animation updates, and exposes docs/examples for firmware, OTA, and Wi-Fi based control.
		kabuki	A declarative control library for MicroPython
Runtimes	2026	pon	Python 3.14 native compiler/runtime in Rust with JIT and AoT support
	2022	pikascript	an embedded Python runtime for the STM32 and other tiny MCUs
	2021	Pyjion	Pyjion, a JIT extension for CPython that compiles your Python code into native CIL and executes it using the .NET 5 CLR.
	2020	Pycopy	a fork of MicroPython
		Nuitka	An interesting batch compiler.
		Pyjamas	Some interesting twists on using Python on the way to JavaScript.
		Brython	a fairly complete in-browser runtime
		Skulpt	Some interesting twists on using Python on the way to JavaScript.
		tinypy	Python in 64K of code.
		Js2Py	A JavaScript interpreter written in pure Python
		Hope	A specialized JIT compiler
Scraping	2020	InvoiceNet	a neural network for extracting invoice information from PDFs
		Mechanize	a programmatic web browser for screen scraping.
		subliminal	A library for looking up movie subtitles in various languages.
		pholcidae	A web crawler library.
		urlwatch	A flexible page modification monitor
Site Generators	2023	django-distill	Minimal configuration static site generator for Django
	2020	MiniConf	a lovely site generator for managing conferences
	2019	portray	a static site generator for Python project documenntation
TUI	2026	rovr	a post-modern terminal file manager built in Python with Textual, offering themed navigation, configurable layouts, and modern packaging via uv/pipx.
	2023	trogon	a genius way to automatically generate a TUI for click-based applications
		pyTermTk	an impressive text UI toolkit
	2021	textual	Text user interface widgets and fields
Task management		doit	a task runner that can replace make for many use cases
Tools	2026	HeloWrite	a distraction-free terminal writing environment built with Python
	2025	posting	an amazing terminal-based Postman replacement
	2024	hancho	a simple, pleasant build system
		berylliumOS	a Python-based shell for CircuitPython devices
	2023	ssh-crypt	a clever way to manage secrets on remote servers
		frogmouth	a TUI Markdown browser
		pypipe	a Python command-line tool for pipeline processing that can export pipelines as standalone scripts
		marcel	a shell that can pipe structured data (like PowerShell, but done right)
		flameshow	a terminal flamegraph viewer
		termgraph	simple terminal charting
		reloadium	advanced hot reloading and profiling
	2022	reloading	a decorator for hot reloading code
		Doctool	a tool to manipulate .docx files
		honcho	a process supervisor that uses Procfiles and can be used for multi-process Docker containers
Tutorials	2021	ugit	a step-by-step git implementation
Unicode		Unidecode	Does character transliterations.
Video	2021	webcam-filters	a set of GStream filters for doing live webcam background segmentation and blurring
Visual Programming	2024	nodezator	a graphical node workflow editor based on PyGame
	2022	PyFlow	a another (confusingly, identically named) visual programming environment
		Ryven	a flow-based programming environment with a Qt front-end
		PyFlow	a desktop-based visual programming environment
WASM	2026	wasmtime-py	Python bindings for the Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime.
Web	2025	justhtml	a pure Python HTML5 parser
	2022	newscatcher	a cute scraper database/fetcher combo
Web Frameworks	2026	micropidash	An asynchronous MicroPython web dashboard library for Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W and ESP32, built around non-blocking updates, dark mode, and simple hardware integration via uasyncio.
		Reflex	Python web app framework for building UIs with pure Python
	2025	fastapi-voyager	a FastAPI extension for visualizing endpoints
		air	a FastAPI-backed HTML framework
	2023	socketify.py	another libuv wrapper
		litestar	another high-performance ASGI API framework with rigorous typing
		robyn	an async Python framework with a Rust connection handler
		sse-starlette	Server-Sent Events for Starlette and FastAPI
		ucall	a JSON-RPC library that claims to be 100x faster than FastAPI
	2022	pynecone	a full-stack Python web framework that automatically renders Next.js components
	2021	FastAPI	decorator-based, runs under uvicorn
	2020	blacksheep	an ASGI web framework that uses decorators
		starlette	an ASGI web framework that runs under uvicorn
	2019	appkernel	a microservices framework
	2018	zatt	An asyncio implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm (some of the forks add significant enhancements)
		Bottle	Tiny, flexible, awesome. My favorite since 2011.
		Draco	Old and busted, to various extents.
		Falcon	A Cythonizable framework with little magic and good performance
		Karrigell	Old and busted, to various extents.
		pecan	Based on object dispatching
		eve	Another RESTful foundation framework
		wheezy.web	A high-performance framework that seems to get along well with PyPy
		Snakelets	A minimalistic app server, my old web platform of choice.
		Twisted	Old and busted, to various extents.
		medusa
		CherryPy
		Tornado	non-blocking, which is pretty interesting.
		Zope	Old and busted, to various extents.
		sandman	A simple RESTful wrapper
		Vibora	An asyncio framework that seems to beat Sanic in static performance
		Moya	a new(ish), template-centric web framework with some interesting twists
Wikis	2024	silicon	another Markdown-focused wiki
		otterwiki	a nice git-backed wiki
Writing	2023	proselint	a linter for prose

Techniques

• daemon.py, an example daemon script.
• Pydoc built-in Web help, anytime, anywhere
• How to Write a Spelling Corrector - an interesting technique that can come in handy to fix/suggest search terms, etc.
• Python Webcam Color Track
• Python webcam fun - motion detection

Create a file named .pydistutils.cfg in your home directory with the following contents and set $PATH accordingly:

[install]
install_lib = ~/Library/Python/$py_version_short/site-packages
install_scripts = ~/Library/Python/$py_version_short/bin
install_data = ~/Library/Python/$py_version/share

This will install packages to your Library folder rather than to the system directory, saving you the trouble to use sudo or risking messing with the system installation. Of course virtualenv does a better job for keeping track of project-specific dependencies, but this is great for common/complex dependencies and is sure to survive operating system upgrades.

And then you can use easy_install or pip install --user with impunity, although you might need to do something like:

ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future easy_install pandas

…for getting around some clang oddities.

#!/bin/sh
python -c '__import__("SimpleHTTPServer").test()'

• Estimating the Airspeed of an Unladen Swallow

I don’t usually link to The Verge twice over breakfast, but I do want to go on record as saying that I am still pretty happy with my G Cloud.

Yes, it is slower than most modern gaming handhelds, but it has a glorious 7-inch 1080p screen, great ergonomics and enough power to run PS1 games locally (I am finally blundering my way through Metal Gear Solid, albeit slowly). Since we mostly stream games over the LAN here at home–our gaming setup is an Xbox and a dedicated Steam Link/retro emulation server–I have got plenty of use out of it.

But my particular circumstances and spotty gaming habits very likely do not make me a profitable enough niche. There are a gazillion cheaper Chinese handhelds that can do much the same with less polish–or, rather, there were before hardware prices ballooned–so I can hardly blame Logitech for not building another one…

This is one of those exceedingly rare cases where EU legislation has produced an unambiguously good outcome: from February 2027, Logitech’s European wireless devices will ship with hard-pack, user-replaceable batteries, and Logitech will sell certified replacements.

Of course, Logitech plans to keep shipping sealed versions everywhere else. Its gaming chief cites cost and extra weight, adding that few people will bother replacing the batteries in $50-100 mice–which is wonderfully circular reasoning when the current products do not give them the option. The inexorable drive towards profit keeps manufacturers from doing the right thing until legislation forces them to, and apparently only in the countries where it applies.

I do worry that enough regional splits like this will eventually balkanise hardware, spares and support, although I would find it highly amusing if Americans started “smuggling” European Logitech mice after realising they no longer had to throw them away when the battery died. Apple will certainly not bring back the AA-powered Magic Mouse or its earlier keyboard designs, even though they had already solved this problem…

Since then, it has spent enough time in bags, on desks and hooked up to odd displays to make the honeymoon period irrelevant–and in the process it has become one of those machines I reach for without thinking too much about it.

Disclaimer: Even though this is a long-term review, the machine was originally sent by Chuwi, and the usual review policy still applies.

I have very few complaints–in fact, practically none. The keyboard is still perfectly usable, if a little stiffer than some of my other mobile devices, and the screen’s higher pixel density remains one of the main reasons I enjoy using it. The machine’s responsiveness, even in power-saving mode, has made it a great writing and coding device.

Over time, and after a few software upgrades, minor niggles like trackpad smoothness and the slight excess sensitivity I occasionally noticed also faded away. Mostly.

When my hands feel slightly dry I still notice some “noise” and pointer tremors, but other than when using an external display (where a mouse is slightly handier for flicking the pointer across a lot more pixels), I have had no need to use anything to compensate for the trackpad size–partly because the touch screen works fine for quick focus changes and tablet-like text selections, and partly because my workflow on it has become very keyboard-centric.

I’ve since plugged it into various USB-C displays, and it can drive a 5K panel with ease. That also makes it a useful thin client when I want to sit somewhere else and remote into bigger machines. The battery does not last me as long as an ARM machine, but I haven’t noticed any degradation yet.

Quality-wise, the only issue I have had so far is that most of the rubber feet came off, which led me down a small AliExpress rabbit hole to find suitable replacements. The ones I bought are even a little better for airflow, since they are slightly taller.

There are also minor scuffs in the metal cover, but that’s hardly surprising given how much I use it, and I’d rather have a metal cover with a few scuffs than a plastic one that would have cracked or marred by now:

I’m now running Fedora Silverblue 44, after upgrading from 43 with no real drama other than the LUKS decryption screen still having the same text-rendering bug. Since GNOME was not making good use of the screen real estate and could be a bit heavy in power-saving mode, I switched to Niri and Noctalia Shell as my primary desktop environment–which then cascaded “up” into my other Linux machines.

Obsidian, Zen Browser to access a local piclaw instance, and Ghostty now cover 99% of what I need from it. Anything else I need tends to become a small Noctalia Shell extension, which sometimes makes the whole setup feel like a tailored appliance.

I have felt little need to install much else–Blender, OpenSCAD and the rest of my CAD tools are there when I need them, and although the hardware imposes obvious limits, they are quite usable for minor edits.

I still get occasional Wi-Fi fluttering in one spot of the house due to the Linux driver bugs I discovered when setting up guided handover on the Cudy APs. Fine-tuning roaming settings on the Wi-Fi side mostly fixed that, so I do not really consider it a MiniBook problem anymore.

The main change since the original review is that the MiniBook X stopped being a cute novelty and faded into the background as a reliable everyday tool.

It is still small enough to feel slightly improbable, but at least to me it never feels compromised in the “netbooks are too small to be useful” sense–the display is excellent, the keyboard is good enough, and the N150 is more than adequate for the mix of writing, coding, browsing and remote access I use it for. It is also very quiet in power-saving mode.

I would still like better Linux polish around the first-boot and decryption-screen oddities (both Fedora issues), and the rubber feet should have lasted longer–the only wear issue I can ascribe to Chuwi, and that is also very much on me given how much I use it.

But it has aged very well for a machine this size, especially one that can run a modern Linux desktop without making me think about performance all the time–although it certainly helps that it shipped with 12GB of RAM…

For those tuning in today, almost two decades after that happened, going through my notes from 2009 brought home how tired I was of Vodafone at that time, and how my career change the year after was essentially driven by a period of exhaustion that is not that different from what is going on right now, and that I tried to “fix” by running into the fire and taking on Vodafone 360.

Well, that was a mistake I’ve definitely learned from. Mostly.

The good news is that unlike my near-burnouts in recent years, I am now both mentally and physically tired but with very clear ideas of what I want to do next, so I’m taking advantage of summertime and preparing to batten down the hatches and finish/pause some of my ongoing projects to focus on more hardware stuff, which takes longer and is less glamorous but has two primary advantages: it gets me off the AI treadmill a bit in my personal space and should hopefully be healthier overall.

Oh, and I have loads of gadgets to write about. I’m making a conscious effort to finish all of my pending reviews and long-term follow-ups even as I endeavor, once again, to clean up my office.

All times are GMT/Lisbon, but you can adjust them to your favorite time zone of quiet despair.

4:30 - Either due to insomnia, back pain, or both, I decide that rolling over and lying in various positions that would best befit a contortionist is not a strategy conducive to sleep, so I leave the bedroom and sit in the living room. During the heat wave I also make it a point to check whether my office window is open to make sure it cools down overnight, and then settle on the couch. Trying to read with a light on doesn’t work well (this is when I really regret that the Nomad has no backlight), so my life hack is to don my Oculus Quest and, depending on my mood, either use the browser to check on my agents and RSS feeds or watch stuff that might help me go back to sleep. James Bond movies, which I have been slowly watching in chronological order, are kitsch and distracting enough that I sometimes actually doze off wearing the headset and bear a red imprint on my forehead until mid-morning.

6:30-7:30 - All attempts at staying asleep usually end either around this time or an hour later (on weekdays), depending on what I have scheduled or whose alarm goes off loudest. I imbibe some form of hard caffeine, vaguely edible toast and optional painkillers (for my migraines or back), and shutter my office before the sun starts warming it up.

8:00-8:30 - (optional) shower, make myself vaguely presentable to humans, check my schedule. Depending on how messed up it is, I pick out outdoor or indoor clothing and tally any required shopping, then keep my office shuttered before the morning sunlight pours in and brings it to 28 °C. I track down the Roomba and make sure it can earn its keep now that it can roam the house and noisily bump into everything without legal harassment from the neighbors.

8:30-9:00 - What the holy f*** happened overnight in my inbox? Formulate a strategy, often completely different from what I expected the night before due to the latest corporate reorg, which is still casting interference patterns and minor uncertainties that are reminiscent of quantum physics. This is also the time Teams notifications are automatically turned on, and when Copilot starts accepting meeting requests again.

9:00-10:30 - This is the only slot in the day where the Venn diagram of wakefulness and outdoor temperature makes it viable for me to exit the house, trudge 2 km uphill to a rather nice garden I have no real time to sit in and enjoy, pick up some groceries on the way back, and have a (non-optional) shower upon my return. The window is always too short (I make it a point of doing at least 45 minutes of continuous walking), but it is impossible to predict due to the barrage of project stand-ups, check-ins, team meetings, and whatnot, so I might take the calls at my standing desk, as I leave or return, during my hike, etc. Fortunately, these days most of them are check-ins where my direct reports are leading, or where the discussion does not require me to present anything. The trick for this part of the day is to grab two six-liter milk cartons on the way back downhill, which forces me to walk straight, brings my shoulders down and is much better for my back and neck pain than painkillers. And yes, work-life balance is a fallacy.

10:30-12:30 - Even if I have too many early calls, delay my outing and only return home on the late side of this slot, my office is still taking the full brunt of sunlight and heat, so I will show up on video calls as if I am living in an air-conditioned underground bunker with LED lighting, standing awkwardly in front of a makeshift standing desk and propped up by sheer willpower while I work my way through a tumbler of iced decaf. I will also be sniffing as loudly as Darth Vader breathes because I have to have the AC on, but liberal use of the mute button makes me seem human. The Roomba usually runs out of battery sometime before DHL and the Post Office start their deliveries to my zone, so I can reliably expect to answer the door, receive a package and then spend a few minutes figuring out where it is sulking, which is hardly exercise but can get somewhat involved for my neck and back if it’s stuck under furniture.

12:30-14:00 - Another floating slot. The first thing I do is to set an alarm for 13:45, which serves three purposes: reminding me to wind down family matters and get back to the office, making sure I take any painkillers on schedule, and making sure I wake up in case I doze off on the couch after lunch. The second thing I do is to panic about whether or not I have food, need to attend to family stuff or have a deadline looming. Ordering, fetching and consuming food happen at random during this time, as do any necessary outings (and further non-optional showers due to the heat). On a good day, only one person will ignore the very prominent block on my calendar and book a call in this slot (even if Copilot automatically declines it); I will have some leftover food and still be able to sit on the couch for 15 minutes and take my mind off things. On an excellent day it will be cool enough for me to have a decent lunch, eat fresh vegetables and get back home to do some actual productive work. That’s two working days out of 30 this summer, and the average is going down quickly.

14:00-18:30 - Actual work might happen here if I am lucky. By this time my office is in shade; I can shift from my standing desk to my “real” desk and continue to worsen my back and neck, but my feet appreciate that I am now only metaphorically racing against the clock. Fortunately, I become more productive as Europe slows down and the Americas come online, but there are, invariably, meetings to attend to. There is also usually a second pitcher of iced decaf and some loud music to keep me going.

18:30-21:30 - Second round of family/personal time, roughly aligned with meal times in the Americas. In summertime, the lovely light of the golden hour makes my living room irresistible, so I end up collapsing on the couch in a heap and earning myself another crick in my neck or back to compound the long hours of sitting. If I retain enough presence of mind, I will add a couple of intelligible paragraphs to one of my various ongoing drafts and sic my agents onto some code. Unless I go out with family, I skip dinner more often than not these days.

21:30-23:00 - Occasional late calls, reading, choice TV to justify my Apple TV subscription (usually the cultural highlight of my evenings when I am fresh enough). If I am completely fed up with work, I either resort to hacking at some obscure coding problem or to self-hypnosis by doomscrolling, followed by a descent into increasingly futile attempts at sleeping. Sometimes I just go out like a light while trying to read.

02:30 - Oh bugger, not again.

But I do want to understand the limits and possibilities of what can be done and get a yardstick for both quality and reliability, so over the weekend, as the brand new Portuguese national exam system melted down, I gave my usual agent a set of conventional web search tools, a browser, and a clear set of directives:

• You are an investigative reporter.
• Research Portuguese news and government sites and prepare a dossier on the procurement, implementation and roll-out of the new national exam grading system.
• Gather interviews and press statements from government officials, teachers’ unions, schools, and political commentary.
• Verify those statements and gather substantive facts to build a comprehensive research dossier towards an Economist-style news article.
• Give me that article in Markdown and PDF format, written according to the Economist’s published writing and editorial style guide.

I also gave it an early version of Memento, my new agentic memory system, but merely as a record of facts, and not really as a tool for it to reason about them (it’s not quite ready for that yet). But as you’d expect, the AI took to it swimmingly:

Absolutely. I’ll apply the anti-trope and drafting-restraint rules as a hard line-edit layer—especially removing inflated stakes, empty pivots, canned contrasts, false certainty, needless jargon and cadence-by-repetition—without a specific personal style. The result will retain an Economist-like register: dry, compressed, analytical and occasionally wry, with conclusions proportionate to the evidence.

I ran this on Friday, over the weekend and, again, today (essentially asking it to update the dossier) using my Codex subscription and gpt-5.6-sol, and it was fascinating to see it double-checking and auditing its own research, even if its thinking still had the characteristic Californian enthusiasm that I find so grating:

I realized that I made a mistake: it’s about exam copies, not grades. Now, I need to browse for relevant links related to this topic. My goal is to extract links that contain titles associated with exam copies. I want to make sure I’m focusing my search appropriately so I can gather the right information for what I need. Let’s get started on finding those links!

It was also very precise about the interpretation of facts, and attribution of statements:

The reconciliation has already corrected the most consequential headline: 63,000 refers to digitised exam copies not yet distributed, not 60,000 pupils without grades. The ministry says 227,000 of 290,000 scripts had reached more than 100,000 pupils. Some grades were still missing, but the public material I have found does not attach the 63,000 figure to them.

And it delegated to sub-agents with amazing prompts like:

Act as a ruthless copy editor. Review the attached drafts for accuracy, contradictory references, manufactured contrast … against the dossier and transcripts in ....

All in all, it was a fascinating thing to do (and watch being done), and the results, I think, speak for themselves. And yes, it picked the title by itself…

Late results, wrong grades and an emergency sitting have turned a technical reform into a test of administrative competence.

LISBON – At 10.19am on July 17th Portugal’s education minister brought good news to parliament. Every national examination had been marked, he said, and the National Examinations Jury held all the grades. More than 166,000 secondary-school pupils had already waited three days beyond the original publication date. University applications opened the following Monday.

Teachers were reportedly marking papers that morning. Schools received result files at around 7.30pm, after their offices normally closed. Some kept staff late; others reopened over the weekend. EduQA, the public institute running the operation, later said that about 1,400 of 290,351 examinations were undergoing additional checks when it authorised release. Pupils awaiting grades found -3 in the ENES admissions system. The code meant “suspended”; some school software displayed it without explanation.

On July 20th officials found that an automatic answer key for Physics and Chemistry A had been configured wrongly. Rerunning that question’s marking changed 12,613 grades: 11,496 rose and 1,117 fell. Later that day the jury reported faulty settings for two Geografia A questions. Schools received new lists and registration for that subject’s second phase was extended. A separate export error had already required another set of replacements.

By July 21st some pupils were sitting second-phase examinations while first-phase grades were being settled. Fernando Alexandre, the education minister, expected everyone to have a final grade by the end of the week. He conceded that pupils awaiting grades or corrections had already been disadvantaged. An extra sitting in September was announced for them; its rules and dates were being prepared.

The reform promised faster, auditable marking. A misconfigured answer key changed grades across the country.

The examinations were taken on paper. The innovation began afterwards. Scripts were transported, scanned and divided into individual answers. Software distributed them to teachers, who marked through an online interface. Grades passed through quality checks, the examinations jury and school systems before reaching pupils.

Trouble began with the paper itself: staples hid QR codes, folded pages produced cropped images, continuation sheets disappeared and some scripts missed secure transport. Teachers waited for credentials, received incomplete answers and repeated work when corrected images arrived. On July 13th one mathematics teacher received 160 new items less than a day before the deadline. Further batches arrived after extensions had expired. Marking continued on results day.

The allocation of markers was equally muddled. On July 16th Mr Alexandre attributed the remaining work to a shortage of available teachers. The following evening he said willing teachers awaiting assignments had contacted him, even as the jury reported a shortage. More than 100 people registered for Portuguese had recorded zero scripts, he said. Their eligibility and assignment status remained unclear. On July 21st he described the organisation of 11,000 markers as deficient and proposed formal contracts. In five days the diagnosis had advanced from too few teachers to too little organisation.

The official timetable shifted too. On June 29th marking was on schedule and every pupil would be protected. Two days later Mr Alexandre dismissed most reports of failure as false. Publication then slipped from July 14th to the 17th, and the second examination period was postponed. By July 16th even the revised date was in doubt. The following evening he acknowledged that “the process did not go well”.

Schools inherited the final rush. Directors received incomplete files around closing time and were told to publish that day. Mr Alexandre threatened to seek explanations from directors who missed publication. Pupils could consult grades in “their applications”, he said, leaving each school to choose the application, login arrangements and publication time. Some pupils saw results that night; others waited through the weekend. Publication depended on each school’s staff and local software.

EduQA completed central validation on Saturday and made replacement files available from Sunday. The subject-level corrections and export repair followed. By Monday a grade could be present, corrected or suspended, depending on which file a school had received and when it had published it.

Early accounts referred to “the platform”. The name covered a chain of systems and operators.

One component prepared scanned files and distributed answers. Published accounts place it within EduQA’s operation. PCS/SCOI presented items to teachers for marking. Versions of that interface were developed by Blat, a small Portuguese design and software firm. Its remit covered the classification screen. Scanning, image quality, users, assignments and upstream processing were handled elsewhere.

Public contracts illuminate one corner of the operation. In 2017 IAVE, a predecessor of EduQA, paid Blatstudio-MAF-Serviços €30,375 plus tax for a practical-test module and SCOI upgrades. In 2023 a legally distinct company, Blat-Creative Powerhouse, received €19,080 plus tax for another update. The published total is €49,455 before tax, with long gaps in the record. The scanning, allocation and export faults arose beyond the work described in those agreements.

Blat’s ownership opened a political subplot. One shareholder, with a 5% stake, had worked on campaigns for the centre-right Social Democrats and advised Carlos Moedas, Lisbon’s mayor. The records describe two small software contracts, awarded six years apart, and contain no sign that politics influenced either award. Many operational failures arose outside Blat’s remit.

A much dearer replacement is under construction. In July 2025 IAVE signed a €1.5m contract with Axianseu II Digital Consulting for GAEBS, a future examination-management system. Delivery is expected later. Deloitte reportedly provided emergency technical help after a security weakness caused an outage. A search of the contract register by July 21st yielded no entry setting out its fee or remit. Mr Alexandre also authorised EduQA to buy up to €500,000 of emergency support; expenditure under that authority awaited publication.

“The platform” was a useful singular noun while digitisation was a reform to defend. During parliamentary scrutiny it separated into preparation, classification, export, the jury and school systems. The machinery divided the work and, conveniently, the blame.

Luís Pereira dos Santos, EduQA’s president, told parliament on July 21st that the technology had been tested several times and introduced gradually. He cited ninth-year mathematics, which uses a similar paper-and-scan process. In the same hearing he acknowledged unexpected computer faults and problems moving information between the preparation and classification systems.

EduQA has yet to publish the scope and results of testing for the full secondary-school operation. That operation turned 290,351 scripts into more than 2m items, handled by thousands of teachers and several databases against a fixed admissions calendar. Many failures occurred as work moved between organisations or systems.

A 2025 pilot with the Philosophy examination added a dispute over institutional memory. Luís Duque de Almeida, then president of the examinations jury, says it exposed serious problems. Mr Alexandre told parliament that his predecessor had left office without a report. Mr Duque de Almeida replied that the ministry had requested none. Later in the hearing a secretary of state said officials had received information about the pilot in another form.

Parliament debated whether the missing document qualified as a report. Officials have yet to publish the faults recorded, who received the findings and what changed before national adoption. The hearing established that information existed in some form, without establishing what officials did with it.

Quality control fared worst on the answer keys. The Physics and Chemistry item was worth ten points out of 200. Its key awarded incorrect marks across the country until complaints prompted another run. Geografia followed. Reprocessing took minutes. Both settings had passed the checks before publication.

A formal reappraisal usually requires a €25 deposit for each examination, refundable when the grade improves. Directors, opposition parties and pupil representatives asked for the charge to be suspended after the failures. Mr Alexandre kept it. Central digitisation faults would be corrected free of charge; ordinary disputes over marking would follow the usual procedure.

This is tidy from the ministry’s side of the counter. A pupil staring at an implausible grade has little means of choosing among a cropped scan, a wrong answer key, an export fault, a manual entry or an examiner’s judgment. A family challenging several papers must pay before learning which part of the state needs correcting.

The first university-application period runs from July 20th to August 6th. Reappraisal results are scheduled for August 7th, although regulations provide a short later window for updated grades and choices. Pupils must meanwhile seek advice, consider appeals and decide whether to sit another examination.

The September sitting is intended for pupils who lacked enough information for the ordinary second phase. It will count as that phase, and Mr Alexandre said the September 14th admissions deadline would move. At 5.50pm on July 21st the eligibility rules, registration dates and examination timetable awaited publication.

A government notice issued that afternoon repeated the pledge that every pupil would be protected. Hours earlier the minister had described some as already disadvantaged. The notice praised the rapid correction of 11,496 Physics and Chemistry grades that rose, omitting the 1,117 decreases and the Geografia error.

Mr Alexandre has promised an external audit covering ownership of each step, checks on automatic keys, the Philosophy pilot, marker allocation, emergency contracts and the shifting totals for examinations, pupils and schools. Portugal preserved the original scripts throughout. Paper, having survived its digital upgrade, may now be the most reliable witness.

Information checked through 5.50pm WEST on July 21st 2026. Subtracting the rounded ministry figure of 227,000 distributed copies from roughly 290,000 scripts gives an estimated 63,000 awaiting distribution. Reports counted copies and left the corresponding number of pupils unspecified. Figures for Physics and Chemistry A use the internally consistent JNE/ministry totals reported by TEK: 12,613 changed grades, comprising 11,496 increases and 1,117 decreases. A late RTP report carried variants that do not add up. The number affected by the Geografia A error awaited publication.

• EduQA’s account of release and additional validation
• Official higher-education admissions calendar
• Emergency procurement authority, Despacho 8649-A/2026
• Physics and Chemistry A error and export fault
• Geografia A parametrisation error
• Minister’s July 17th SIC interview
• July 17th parliamentary chronology
• July 21st parliamentary hearing and live record
• Official July 21st Government notice
• Minister’s admission that some pupils were already disadvantaged
• EduQA’s testing claim
• EduQA’s account of unexpected IT and information-flow problems
• The 2025 pilot dispute
• Digital-copy distribution figures
• September rules absent as phase two began
• ECO investigation of suppliers and contracts
• 2017 Blatstudio contract
• 2023 Blat contract
• TSF on the digital-copy platform

Although there are still some stilted, noticeably AI twists in the prose and the “facts” it investigated were already tinged by some journalistic interpretations (except for interview transcripts–I gave it access to Whisper APIs, so it just went and downloaded videos to transcribe and translate), this is pretty amazing, and whatever people think, I rate it as another milestone in real LLM usage.

If I can do it on a lark, imagine what news corporations will be able to do in the future–for fact checking, hopefully, at the very least.

I’m linking the PDF version, which is just lovely, and the research brief, because, well, reporting has to be transparent, right?

Ishmael caught my attention because it takes one of iA Writer’s best qualities–an editor that disappears while I am writing–and applies it to an entire manuscript, with chapters, outlines, bookmarks, notes and export to Word, EPUB, HTML and Markdown. I usually begin long pieces in iA Writer and finish them in VS Code, with folders, filenames and scripts holding everything together, so I am curious to see how much of that clutter Ishmael can replace.

It was created by the genius Will McGugan, who also created Rich, Textual and PyFilesystem. I don’t write novels, but I have demonstrably spent over two decades writing fairly long pieces here, and Ishmael focuses on things I care about: organising a messy draft, reading it without editing clutter and leaving the sentences to me. I can’t wait to see if there is going to be an iPad version.

Open Minis is a brilliant app, and is based on roughly the same iSH-derived ARM64 core I used for ios-linuxkit (which I wrote about when I released it).

I went all-out on generic Linux runtime support–Alpine, language runtimes, compilers and all the CLI tools I could get working–whereas Minis made the much sharper product choice of using CLI tools as the internals of an iOS agent. That is a brilliant inversion, and much closer to what Siri AI ought to be.

Seriously now, it was pretty OK even if my back has been troubling me again, which I tried to counter with daily outings to run errands and “run” about. Carrying loads is not a problem, so even relatively prosaic affairs like leaving the house right after stand-ups (while it’s still cool), trotting over to the market and carrying back a dozen milk cartons are quite welcome.

Sitting around in lengthy meetings, however, is not, nor is doing slow, gratingly ineffective agile rituals to appease the backlog gods as a group… But I digress.

As far as my personal endeavours go, this was another oddly fragmented week, but somewhat productive: I bounced between embedded hardware, classic Mac emulation, agent infrastructure and an unexpectedly deep investigation into the ongoing mess with Portugal’s national-exam platform.

I am still poking at the AArch64 JIT in my Mac emulation fork, which has now moved well past merely getting it to run fast and into the much less glamorous business of making it actually behave.

I’ve had an agent slowly wading through various 68k instruction families–arithmetic, shifts, branches, effective-address handling and exception semantics–and, just like the PowerPC version, things began erroring out when FPU tests were involved because the criteria for “proper” floating-point precision have evolved over the years.

Classic Mac software has had decades to develop opinions about obscure 68k behaviour, and an emulator can appear perfectly healthy until this kind of thing crops up–not that I expect to run anything taxing on my emulators, but I would very much like to avoid surprises, and I haven’t yet gone back to live graphics hardware tests…

piclaw took up entirely too much of my time this week (again), for two reasons:

• I spent the first half of the week poking at context compaction (including filing #6676 upstream, because Codex native compaction is very “cheap” code-wise)
• pi had another core update that forced me to refactor most of the core agentic runtime, just hours after I finished the above.

None of this was glamorous, fun or even that useful except that it removed special cases that had accumulated as new providers and dynamic model catalogues were added, but… Yeah, I just want to use the thing now.

Anyway, halfway through that second pass I realized that my current instances had no recollection of some of the design choices I’d made in the past, so I went down another rabbit-hole: I took some of the concepts I have been using in enterprise agent designs and started Memento, a small cross-agent memory system.

The immediate goal is to keep durable facts and operational knowledge I keep having to repeat like “no, Portainer’s endpoint is not that” separate from chat transcripts, but with proposal and review workflows rather than letting every agent write directly into shared memory and cram it with useless factoids.

It’s a tad overkill in that regard, though, so I’m also considering it an experiment on whether I can get useful embedding, vector search and intent-driven queries running on tiny hardware (it’s going to be running on an Atom CPU, so of course I rolled my own inference…)

Since Google updated Gemma 4 (but did not actually change the version number and effectively only tweaked some of the templating), I set it up again on the Milk-V, and compared it to a couple of new models–including the 35B Ornith mixture-of-experts model.

In short, the results were mostly the same as during the review: You can run Ornith with a 256K context at roughly 7.5 tokens per second, but it’s too slow for any practical use, and Gemma is definitely still not a useful coding model in anything but Go, so I still need better hardware.

Since my eldest is about to enter college, the ongoing failure of Portugal’s new national-exam platform has been… interesting. And what better way to test Memento than by assembling a source-led dossier covering the Ministry, IAVE, JNE, schools, unions, procurement records and shifting grade publication deadlines?

I asked piclaw to build a timeline, and… it did, maybe even going a bit overboard, as I now have:

• a 50-page PDF with a detailed timeline of events
• a claim-to-source ledger
• procurement material for all contracts apparently pertaining to the new platform
• transcripts of the Minister’s main television, radio and parliamentary appearances for the past few months
• matching testimony from the teacher unions and the main opposition party

And having it check for inconsistencies was fascinating. For instance:

In a 7 July RTP interview, Fernando Alexandre said that exams were digitised by teachers on Ministry equipment and then “treated and placed on the platform by Ministry of Education staff”. That supports internal handling, but it does not establish that the software itself was Ministry-owned–a distinction that does not agree with government procurement records and coverage in (references elided).

gpt-5.6-sol was pretty tenacious: it tracked down and downloaded original video clips, recorded their URLs, durations and hashes, generated timestamped transcripts and cross-referenced them into a dense PDF that I might use as a basis for a little rant on the topic.

Fortunately, my kid’s grades were posted in the late evening, but there are “hundreds” or “thousands” of students (depending on whom you interview) who were not so lucky.

Although I have always had very little (OK, zero) faith in the Portuguese government’s ability to cultivate, manage, or even use technology effectively, this might be an interesting thing for me to write about.

We are, after all, in the silly season, as my journalist friends usually referred to it until the US, well… never mind.

I used to run a games portal called accao.net a long, long while ago, and still rate running through q3dm6 with rockets exploding all around me as one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had in gaming.

Back in 2001, I created a skin pack for the Visor model with two extra colors (green and yellow) and some level texture changes that we used for a Yorn co-branded tournament at the Internet World 2001 event in Lisbon.

I even did banner ads:

…and the year before, we gave away a scooter:

Date	Link	Notes
Ages ago	Source Code
	Xbox port	a port for the Xbox
	Wolfenstein Enemy Territory	a free game with a Mac client available here
	QQQ	the Arena as performance art
	cake	a map viewer
Jul 2026	Q3Edit	a browser-based Quake III Arena map editor with WebGL2 and client-side BSP compilation
Nov 2025	Open Arena for Apple Silicon	an installer for the OpenArena fork
Sometime ago	OpenArena	a derived open source effort
	ioquake3	arguably the best (cross-platform) enhanced runtime engine, with an amazing amount of improvements

]]> https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/swift?utm_content=atom 2016-12-07T19:38:00+00:00 2026-07-19T13:09:00+00:00 Rui Carmo https://taoofmac.com This is a stub to start gathering some resources on Swift, which won several of my personal awards for “most breakages between major releases” and has therefore not been something I’ve invested a lot of time on.

In fact, I’ve yet to have a reason for building something with it (other than the occasional test), but it pays to keep an eye on things.

Category	Date	Link	Notes
Apps	2026	Holo	an experimental native macOS utility that turns the desk around a MacBook into four assignable tap zones by listening through the selected microphone and extracting acoustic features
		phosphene	Video wallpaper engine for macOS Tahoe
		nyxian	an on-device iOS IDE for developing native apps on unjailbroken iOS using a certificate
Database	2024	Blackbird	a zero dependency SQLite database wrapper and model layer
Libraries	2026	FluidAudio	a Swift package for on-device audio AI using CoreML models: speech transcription, text-to-speech, voice activity detection, and speaker diarization on macOS and iOS
		bonsplit	A native macOS tab bar library with split pane support
	2025	WorkKit	an amazing Swift package to parse documents from Apple’s iWork suite
		Noise	a Swift wrapper around Racket CS.
		SwiftAI	a Swift library for building AI applications
	2024	SyndiKit	A Swift library for RSS and Atom feeds
		Async-Channels	Performant channels for Swift concurrency
	2016	Markingbird	A Markdown libary
Other		Building on ARMv7	A concise walkthrough
Runtimes	2024	LuaJIT-spm	A LuaJIT package
		swift-rp-pico-bare	Embedded Swift on the Raspberry Pi Pico
Samples	2025	winamp	A Winamp clone written in SwiftUI
	2024	Swift-D3-Charts	Replicating D3 Charts with Swift Charts
Tools	2026	apfel	a macOS CLI for on-device Apple Intelligence via FoundationModels
		MXMaster	A lightweight macOS utility for Logitech MX Master mice, replacing the bloated Logitech Options
		agentswift	A native macOS agent app for Apple-platform development, with Claude-based multi-step coding workflows.
		AnsiSaver	An ANSI art screensaver for macOS that streams 16colo.rs packs via libansilove rendering
		swifdroid	Swift toolchain and frameworks for Android development
		xtool	a cross-platform Xcode replacement for building and deploying iOS apps with SwiftPM
	2024	skip	a framework for creating dual-platform mobile apps in Swift and Kotlin
		bclm	a command line tool for limiting the battery’s max charge on macOS
	2022	textra	a nice CLI tool that uses VisionKit and speech recognition APIs to OCR documents and audio into text.
Tutorials		Stanford University CS193p (Developing Applications for iOS using SwiftUI)	a pretty decent set of learning materials

]]> https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2026/07/18/1920?utm_content=atom 2026-07-18T19:20:00+00:00 2026-07-20T07:38:18+00:00 Rui Carmo https://taoofmac.com Hot on the heels of my ESP32 display detour–which went from Cydintosh to Flying Toasters on an ESP32-S3 and then, inevitably, R-Type–I ended up with an M5Stack Tab5 on my desk as a very indirect consequence of chasing e-paper displays.

I have followed M5Stack for years and have a couple of their ESP cameras running, plus one of the original stackable Core modules (complete with battery) somewhere in a drawer, but I had not written code for any of them in quite a while (the cameras are running ten-year-old code at this point, I think, and have been rock solid).

Getting my hands on a Tab5 was completely random, but I spent the next couple of weeks trying it as a Home Assistant terminal, a firmware playground and, unexpectedly, a tiny HDMI monitor.

Disclaimer: M5Stack sent me a review unit of the Tab5, for which I thank them. And, as usual, this article follows my review policy.

I have a weakness for portable gadgetry, and the Tab5 is very much to my tastes–it looks like a chunky little Android tablet and boots into something closer to an industrial HMI, with a polished demo app that lets you test all the sensors and hardware, but underneath it is “just” an ESP32.

Except this is the ESP32-P4, rather than the somewhat vanilla chips you get with cheap yellow displays, and it can plausibly drive a 720p MIPI display and a camera while handling audio. The CYD boards are pretty good bang for the buck, but even before I started abusing them for emulation I spent most of my time fighting their constraints–a slow parallel or SPI panel, single-digit megabytes of PSRAM and a UI that visibly lurches whenever Wi-Fi wakes up.

I did not run into those problems with the P4. The Tab5 adds a MIPI-DSI panel, 32MB of PSRAM and a dedicated ESP32-C6 radio co-processor, and feels much closer to a small Raspberry Pi than to a vanilla ESP8266.

There is, of course, a catch–the slot-in battery makes the Tab5 grow from 128x80x12mm bare to 128x80x31mm, and mine went from 118g to 230g with the third-party battery I used.

The Tab5 is a little constellation of chips:

• ESP32-P4NRW32 with two 360MHz high-performance RISC-V cores and a separate 40MHz low-power core
• ESP32-C6-MINI-1U radio co-processor over SDIO, providing 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 6, Thread and Zigbee
• 16MB flash and 32MB octal PSRAM
• 5-inch 720x1280 portrait-native IPS panel over MIPI-DSI, with capacitive touch
• SC2356 2MP camera
• ES8388 audio codec, ES7210 ADC, dual microphones and a 1W speaker
• BMI270 six-axis IMU and RX8130CE RTC
• IP2326 charge management and INA226 current/voltage monitoring for an NP-F550 7.4V 2000mAh (14.8Wh) battery

Besides a 3.5mm audio jack (a thing that Apple still seems unable to include in its devices), it has a pretty impressive array of connectors:

• microSD slot
• USB-C with USB 2.0 OTG
• USB-A host port, which is unusual enough on an ESP32 device
• RS-485 via a SIT3088, with a switchable 120-ohm terminator and 6-24V input
• 30-pin M-BUS connector that harks back to M5Stack’s stackable module line
• a small menagerie of Grove-style connectors for specific applications, including access to the USB bus
• two software-selectable MMCX ports complementing the internal antenna

Besides the (always awesome) way in which M5 tends to label their devices, there are two things about the form factor that deserve to be called out.

The first is the NP-F550 slot–yes, the classic Sony camcorder pack people my age typically have three of in a drawer. The batteries are cheap, hot-swappable and available everywhere, which is a smart bit of BOM design even if they do make the assembled setup chunky.

I did not have any, so I got two USB-C rechargeable packs that were already on my “someday” list for powering a camera light, and they fit perfectly:

M5Stack quotes the Tab5 at 118.4g bare and 217.3g with their standard battery kit; my third-party USB-C battery brings it to 230g.

The second thing is the 1/4-inch tripod mount next to the microSD slot. Together, the battery and tripod mount make the Tab5 feel like a field device, while the sheer number of connectors still makes it useful on the bench. There are also six threaded inserts around the edge and four around the M-BUS connector, giving you plenty of options beyond the tripod mount.

I didn’t open mine, but according to CNX Software’s teardown, there is a flexible PCB carrying the GT911 touch controller, the SC2356 on an FPC cable and the C6 module wired to both the internal 3D antenna and external MMCX connectors–so tearing it down seems like a lesson in patience that I decided to forego.

This is probably the first ESP device where this kind of testing is warranted, since the P4 is passively cooled inside a sealed handheld with a 0-40°C rated operating range. In casual use–UVC viewer running, screen at full brightness–the bottom gets noticeably warm, but not alarmingly so–I measured 39°C after half an hour of continuous use, though.

As I pointed out above, out of the box the Tab5 runs M5Stack’s demo firmware with a launcher-style UI, and as usual with their products, you are probably best served by using ESP-IDF–the P4 needs a recent release, and the C6 relies on esp_hosted plumbing. Arduino support is always a little iffy on fresh SoCs, but the option is there already.

But M5Stack also provides an entry-level UI for education and entry-level coding called UiFlow2, which lets you use blocks or MicroPython instead of C.

Yet, before you write any of that, you have to flash it, and this is where M5Stack lost me a little, because M5Burner for the Mac is still an Intel-only binary in 2026. It runs on Apple Silicon under Rosetta, but I had to run:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/M5Burner.app

…just to get past Gatekeeper, and I got this semi-persistent reminder:

Additionally, it insists on living in /Applications rather than running from wherever you unpack it like a well-behaved modern Mac app, and has that unmistakable Electron heaviness–slow to launch, sluggish to draw and memory-hungry for what is fundamentally a catalogue-based serial flashing tool–but I will grant that it is a nice and practical one:

None of the above stops you from using it, but it is a bit of a disappointment from a company whose hardware is very polished.

I did most of my actual development in Linux, though, where I could hack into the ESP toolchain’s internals at leisure and play around with a few projects I found interesting.

The ESP-IDF SDK runs just fine on ARM, and it took no time at all for me to get my Orange Pi 6 to figure out how to get some test patterns on the screen (as usual, I just pointed a camera at the display, told my AI agents what I wanted, and they set up the basic LVGL scaffolding in no time):

Besides all the other stuff that I was already doing with cheap yellow displays (including my R-Type port, which runs on this at around 33fps without any real optimisation), I went down a few interesting rabbit holes:

Even though I don’t use Home Assistant myself, I am very much interested in ESPHome these days because of voice agents, and ESPHome supports the original Tab5 revision, including the C6 radio, MIPI-DSI display, GT911 touchscreen, ES8388/ES7210 audio path, RTC, IO expanders and battery monitor.

And the microphones run at 16kHz through its AEC front-end, which makes the board a very nice local voice terminal that is directly supported in Home Assistant.

There is a little caveat here, since as it turns out there are two display revisions: My unit uses the ILI9881C display driver and GT911 touchscreen, detected when the GT911 answers at I2C address 0x14. Later units use ST7123/ST7121 parts, detected through the display controller at 0x55, and ESPHome does not support those yet. If ESPHome is the reason you are buying one, check the display revision first.

Besides my own Mac Plus core, I also tried the Basilisk II port, which can run classic 68k Mac OS on the P4 in living colour. It is slow, but a US$60 RISC-V terminal pretending to be a Macintosh at all is pleasantly absurd–and after the contortions involved in getting Mac emulation and arcade games to behave on CYD-class hardware, having enough memory and display bandwidth to make it viable (even if slow) felt like quite a leap.

During my exploration of M5Burner, I found a little gem: a UVC host viewer that turns the USB-A port into a video input. Plugging in a cheap UVC/HDMI capture dongle turns the Tab5 into a tiny standalone HDMI monitor, which I found delightful since it is a great use of the tripod mount: screw it onto an arm or mini tripod, connect the capture dongle, and you have a self-contained, battery-powered 5-inch 720p monitor for a camera, a headless server console, a Raspberry Pi or a retro machine.

Latency is fine for a console or a slow-moving camera feed, and the screen is sharp enough at 720p. For the price of the Tab5 plus a cheap capture dongle, it is a useful field monitor that doubles as a hackable computer the rest of the time, and I make it a point of reflashing the UVC firmware between experiments–the USB-C rechargeable NP-F550 pack makes it perfect for emergencies like figuring out why your headless box won’t boot.

But the thing I am really keen to get working on this is an M8 Tracker display–I have a TrackerKB built around a “headless” M8 that needs a computer to both render the display (via its own protocol, implemented in m8c and other clients) and provide audio out, and I have been trying to get the Tab5 to do that:

Right now the biggest problem I have is the ESP-IDF USB stack, which is very confused by the fact that the Tab5 not only has to decipher the TrackerKB’s little USB hub on its host USB-A port, but that the device itself also has a particularly challenging combination of a data port, an audio and MIDI device and a keyboard–three things the stack struggles to manage and initialise consistently.

This is not a Tab5 hardware problem, but the Espressif SDK was clearly never designed to cope with this kind of situation, so even though I can get the display protocol going and (apparently) the audio, the highly custom keyboard doesn’t seem to be recognised and I can’t get the Tab5 to send control events back into the Teensy inside the keyboard…

I’m probably 95% there, but right now I do have to patch the SDK itself to even get all the devices to be detected. Once I figure things out to my satisfaction I’ll put it up on GitHub and try to upstream a fix.

I have not run formal benchmarks, but all the data I have points to the P4 being 2-4 times faster than the CYD devices I had, although that will depend a lot on what you get each core to do and the use you make of PSRAM.

In lieu of more scientific numbers, here’s a chip-level comparison for the three SoCs in the Tab5 and the CYD boards I have been playing with, and what little I was able to glean from the research I did on the YOLO/vision ports I’ve yet to play around with:

Poking around with the R-Type hacks, I’d put the very rough relative performance estimates like so, taking into account the optimisations I tried to do:

The bottleneck for all of this is memory bandwidth, not clock speed, CPU architecture or even display rendering. All of the stuff I tried (Cydintosh/R-Type/M8) tried to push a full framebuffer through PSRAM every frame, with different optimisation techniques like using SIMD for blitting, and I don’t think you can do a lot of data transfer on the smaller displays at anything resembling decent speed, so the Tab5 wins out on that alone even considering its display is comparatively huge…

The P4’s 360 MHz cores and cache should give it a substantial scalar speed-up, but its nicest trick is the PPA 2D accelerator (hardware blit/scale/rotate) offloading the exact framebuffer work the others do in software–that’s why the Tab5 was able to render at 33 fps on a 720×1280 panel while also running an HS-USB host for the M8.

The Tab5 is a very nice device for prototyping just about anything you’d like to do with an ESP32, as long as you don’t need 5GHz networking.

Having a camera and decent microphones is already enough of a distinction, but the plethora of connectivity options that M5Stack provides will enable you to do away with dozens of wires and additional glue chips on the first iterations of any hardware project, and for that alone I’d say it’s worth the asking price.

However, and since I came from lower-performing devices to it and had to slog my way through a lot of slow, painful debugging before switching to the Tab5, do keep in mind that you’ll be spoiled by its performance and smoothness if you intend to develop something that will run on a cheaper display. The touch screen is buttery smooth, the LVGL rendering performance is great, and, of course, iterating on anything is always faster when you have fast hardware, but take the time to optimise your code heavily if you need to target something smaller.

But hey, it’s still a remarkable achievement. A fast MIPI-DSI display, a camera, a proper audio path and enough PSRAM to run a full 68k Mac emulator now fit into a sub-US$70 ESP32 device instead of a Raspberry Pi, and that is an excellent thing.

The hardware is unusually practical, and, again, I am loving having that ingenious UVC viewer hack around to test other stuff when I’m not doing ESP development–that alone might be more than enough reason to get one if, like me, you keep having to test random SBCs.

The only downside for Mac users is that M5Burner feels like it escaped from a much less polished product, but to be honest I suspect that won’t be a problem for long, and that most people using it are probably on Windows. But I couldn’t let that go unmentioned.

So I thought it would be a good idea to have a policy in place to make sure everyone is on the same page:

1. I don’t do paid reviews. I realize there is a fine line between getting “free” stuff to review and being paid to review it, but I’m not interested in crossing it–this site does not generate any form of income for me, and I’d like to keep it that way.
2. I only review things I have a personal interest in (i.e., things that I would ordinarily have an actual use for, learn from or would otherwise consider buying) or that would be interesting for the people I occasionally provide consulting services to.
3. I don’t do scripted reviews (i.e., there is no content placement, I write about the features I find important, etc.)
4. There are no editorial tweaks–vendors get to read my reviews at the same time as the general public.
5. I don’t participate in vendor affiliate programs–I’m OK with handing out discount codes or linking to the vendor’s site with a utm referral tag (so they can check attribution), but other than my usual (automatic) Amazon/AliExpress linking (which I started using for books decades ago and now do for electronics components), there are no other affiliate links on this site to ensure I don’t get any direct revenue from the reviews.
6. When applicable, scripts used for performance measurements and benchmarks will be published here or on GitHub.
7. Benchmarking will be focused on the aspects I value (although I will try to use standard tooling where appropriate).
8. I review what’s “in the box”, not what’s promised for future releases or what might be available in a future version.

I’m also open to reviewing books–I’ve done pre-publishing reviews in the past, and I’m always happy to read and review books on topics I’m interested in.

I have also recently started a YouTube channel called @TheTaoOfTech that I am slowly populating with videos that complement the content on this site. I will try to keep the same review policy there, although I might do some sponsored videos in the future (but I will always disclose that).

So if you have something you’d like me to review, please get in touch and we’ll take it from there.

Many people ask me about page views, statistics, Google rankings, etc. This is what I have to say about it:

• This site does not use Google Analytics for privacy reasons, nor any other mainstream analytics or tracking platform. The flip side of that is that it is (incorrectly) down-ranked in just about every single public site ranking.
• It does, however, use Cloudflare Analytics, which is privacy-preserving and a more accurate than most other tracking sites because it automatically filters out bots, referrer spam and other things that contribute to site traffic inflation. However, it can provide some interesting figures (updated for August 2024):
  • Over 2M monthly pageviews (and steadily rising).
  • Over 110K unique human visitors per month, mostly from the US, UK, Germany, and Singapore (if I add in figures from Japan and Australia, I get almost as much traffic from APAC than from the UK, which has always been interesting to me).

You can check this PDF for a sample Cloudflare traffic report.

This audience reach comes down to four main factors:

• My emphasis on consistently solid technical content–which ensures continued reader interest.
• No fake audience engagement on site (I interact with readers directly via e-mail correspondence)
• Posts are automatically broadcast to X/Twitter, Mastodon and a few sites that consume my RSS feed directly.
• I get a lot of traffic from places like Reddit, Hacker News, etc. (especially when I post something with an unusual technical angle).

All of my posts are automatically broadcast to my X/Twitter and Mastodon accounts, and I also post occasional links to my LinkedIn profile.

I am also (slowly) starting to produce YouTube videos. This will be a slow process, as I am not a professional video editor and I have no intention of becoming one. I will, however, try to produce some videos that complement the content on this site, and am curious to explore the medium a bit more (and not just in Youtube).

Links to all my social and video accounts can be found on the site footer.

This is a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve reviewed in the past:

Date	Category	Link	Notes
2026	Accessories	Logitech Combo Touch (long-term)	Purchased by me (discount from Logitech)
	E-ink Readers	The Xteink X4	Purchased by me
	Laptops	MiniBook X N150 (long-term)	Supplied by Chuwi
	NAS	YouYeeToo NestDisk	Supplied by YouYeeToo
	SBCs	Orange Pi 6 Plus	Supplied by Orange Pi
		MilkV Jupiter 2 / SpacemiT K3	Supplied by Radxa
		M5Stack Tab5	Supplied by M5Stack
2025	3D Printing	Polyphemus Filament Dryer	Supplied by EIBOS
	Accessories	The Maclock	Purchased by me (AliExpress)
	Apple	HomePod Mini
	E-Ink Tablets	SuperNote A6X2 Nomad	Supplied by Supernote, six month review
	E-ink Displays	The TRMNL (DIY Everything Edition)	Purchased by me from Seeed Studio
	Homelab	Sipeed NanoKVM Cube
		JetKVM	Supplied by JetKVM
	Laptops	MiniBook X N150	Supplied by Chuwi
	Mini-PCs	iKOOLCore R2Max	Supplied by iKOOLCore
		Chuwi LarkBox S	Supplied by Chuwi
		Chuwi AuBox 8745HS	Supplied by Chuwi
	Music	ESI Xsynth	Supplied by ESI
	Networking	Sodola SL902-SWTGW218AS	Purchased by me
		Cudy AX3000 Wi-Fi 6 System	Purchased by me (multiple units)
	SBCs	ArmSoM AI Module 7	Supplied by ArmSoM
		Orange Pi RV2	Supplied by OrangePi
		ArmSom Forge1	Supplied by ArmSom
		LattePanda Mu	Supplied by DFRobot
		LattePanda IOTA	Supplied by DFRobot (expansion boards included)
2024	3D Printers	Two Trees SK1	Supplied by Two Trees
		Two Trees SK1 Enclosure Kit
	Accessories	3DConnexion SpaceMouse Wireless
	Gaming	Logitech G Cloud
		BSP D8 Bluetooth Controller
	Homelab	AURGA Viewer	Supplied by AURGA
	Keyboards	Logitech K380
		Keychron K7 Max	Supplied by Keychron
		Keychron K11 Max	Supplied by Keychron
		Keychron K2 HE
		Hexgears Immersion A3	Supplied by Hexgears
	Mini-PCs	AceMagic AM18	Supplied by AceMagic
		GMKtec G2
	NAS	CM3588 NVMe NAS Kit	Supplied by FriendlyELEC
		TerraMaster F4-424 MAX	Donation
	Networking	TP-Link L-SG108E
		wisdPi WP-UT5 5GbE USB adapter	Supplied by wisdpi
		SL-SWTG124AS	Supplied by Sodola
		SL-SWTGW218AS
	SBCs	Orange Pi 5+	Supplied by Orange Pi
		YouYeeToo R1	Supplied by YouYeeToo
		Orange Pi Zero 3	Supplied by Orange Pi
		Banana Pi M7	Supplied by Banana Pi
		Luckfox Pico Mini B	Supplied by Luckfox
		Radxa X4	Supplied by Radxa
		XPI-3566-Zero	Supplied by Geniatech
		Banana Pi M5 Pro	Supplied by Banana Pi
		Debix Model A	Supplied by Debix
2023	3D Printers	Kingroon KP3S Pro V1	two year review
	Accessories	OBSbot Tiny 4K, RODE NTG1
	Android	Lenovo ThinkSmart View
	Apple	Mac Mini M2 Pro
		iPhone 15 Pro, Watch Series 9
	Keyboards	Bluehand
	Mini-PCs	Beelink U59 Pro
	Monitors	LG 28MQ780-B
	PC Builds	ASRock DeskMeet B660
	SBCs	Radxa Zero
2022	Android	Xiaomi Mi Stick 4K
	Apple	iPad Pro M1
	Gaming	Xbox Series X
		Retroid Pocket 3
	Keyboards	Avatto Folding Keyboard
		Dierya 63, Adafruit Macropad
		Logitech Combo Touch
	Laptops	Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga	Work issued
	Music	Novation Circuit Tracks
		Monome Norns Shield	Built from kit
	SBCs	Banana Pi M2 Zero
2021	Laptops	Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5
		MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)
	Monitors	LG 34WK95U-W
	Music	Teenage Engineering OP-1
		Arturia KeyLab Essential 61
2020	Laptops	Surface Book 3	Work issued
	Music	Yamaha Reface DX, AG06
	NAS	Synology DS1019+
2019	Apple	iPad Mini 5
		Watch Series 5
	Laptops	Surface Laptop	Purchased by me
	Music	Roli Songmaker Kit, Korg Nanokey Studio
2018	Apple	iPhone XS
2017	3D Printers	BQ Prusa i3 Hephestos	Built from kit
	Laptops	Surface Pro 4	Work issued
	Mini-PCs	Z83ii
2016	Apple	Apple Watch (Sport)	Purchased by me
	Keyboards	Logitech Keys-To-Go
	Mice	Citrix X1 Mouse
	PC Builds	Streacom ST-F1CB WS Black Aluminum Case
2014	Laptops	Acer C720	Surprisingly still working in 2024
2013	Phones	HTC One	Test sample
2010		Samsung Wave 8500	Purchased by me
2009	E-ink Readers	The Sony Reader
2008	Accessories	DisplayLink DVI	Supplied by DisplayLink
	Cameras	Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX33	Purchased by me
	Laptops	Asus Eee PC 901

]]> https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/07/17/1601?utm_content=atom 2026-07-17T16:01:00+00:00 2026-07-17T16:08:57+00:00 Rui Carmo https://taoofmac.com I’m going to get on my soapbox again and call out Apple once more on the extremely limited HomeKit automation experience–and how they can fix 80% of the gripes I have with it by just cloning a small subset of the Shortcuts user experience.

The most infuriating, they-are-so-close annoyance I have with it is that automations can only have one trigger, and extremely basic conditions, to the point where they are effectively useless in real life.

Right now, HomeKit automation is effectively as simple as this pseudo-code:

if office.presence = true
then scenes.office_ambient.light = on

One trigger, one outcome. There are some conditionals, but they are extremely limited:

if office.presence = true
   and schedule = "daytime"
then scenes.office_ambient.light = on

Conditionals are just a schedule and somebody (optionally me) being home, which is not enough for the way people actually live in a house. For instance, I can’t set up logic like this:

if office.temperature.celsius > 27
   and office.presence = true
   and office_window.closed = true
then
   office.heatpump.target = 25
   office.heatpump.mode = cool
   office.heatpump.fan = 50%

This is the sane way to automate a heatpump (obviously), but there is zero way for this to be configured in HomeKit in any way whatsoever. I can, of course, do it “out of band” in Node-RED, but the moment I do that it becomes unfathomable to anyone else in the house.

And yet, it would be pretty much trivial to add both to the Home app (by just stealing the visual if construct from Shortcuts) and to any home hub.

You also can’t have alternate triggers without duplicating the entire thing (or creating scenes for the common outcome, which clutters your scene list):

if office.presence == true
   "I have two presence sensors that actually don't overlap"
   or office.desk.presence == true
then
   office_desk.light = on

And, finally, there is no way to chain automations after a period of time:

if office.presence == true
   and schedule = 'nighttime'
then
   for 3m
      "Turn on the light so I can search for stuff on my desk"
      office_ceiling.light = on
      office_ceiling.light.intensity = 0.5
   then
      "Make it dim enough so I can still find things if I linger"
      office_ceiling.light.intensity = 0.25
   until office.presence == false
      then office_ceiling.light = off

I don’t have any garage doors (so this is a bit of a contrived example), but I can’t tell you how many times I had to step into the office in the late evening for a little while and needed to adjust the lights.

The basic principle would translate to much better and more useful automation overall–if you replace lights with space heaters and times with temperature thresholds, you can cut your power bill by up to 50% (which is what I did last winter with Node-RED).

Complex triggers alone would make HomeKit tremendously more useful:

if tv.power = on
   and input = "apple tv"
   and schedule = "night time"
   and sofa.presence = on
then
   tv.soundbar.volume = 6
   sofa_lamp.intensity = 0.7

And, of course, something like this:

if office.presence = on
   and schedule == "nighttime"
then office_homepod.Siri("Will you be staying long?")
   if answer == true
      ...

…etc. Again, this is not rocket science, and I think the real cause is that nobody at Apple who works on HomeKit actually uses it beyond the basics. I’m willing to bet they use Home Assistant instead…

Google is playing the EU game much better than Apple, but the EU still doesn’t seem to understand how privacy and security work in modern platforms. Letting people swap the onboard agent is being treated much like the ancient argument over shipping/default browsers–politically correct, bureaucratically led and technically much harder than changing a default handler.

An agent may need access to personal data and privileged APIs, and keeping a third-party agent away from things it should not access is difficult–or impossible for some features. The EU’s framing is therefore somewhat stupid, but Apple will have to deal with the same demands (and has already held features back), so Google is setting a lot of useful precedents here. Apple certainly won’t like this.