The Braindump Blog

Computing

2026-07-07: Converting between music file formats with ffmpeg

2026-07-05: Cryptomator is on a half price sale should anyone want a copy, or to support a worthy project on the …

2026-06-25

Meta pauses employee tracker for AI training amid privacy concerns: Funnily enough its employees were not fans of ‘a tool that tracked staff keystrokes, mouse clicks and content displayed on computer screens in order to collect data for training its AI models’.

Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows

2026-06-17

France to ditch Palantir’s AI data tools in favour of domestic provider: A wise move that needs to happen elsewhere too.

2026-06-14: Unsurprisingly the Online Safety Act hasn't stopped social media companies pushing dangerous content

2026-06-07: DocFetcher is a great multi-OS application for searching through vast tranches of your files

2026-06-06: On the grimmer side of Wikipedia entries I see there’s now an official page for ‘Deaths …

2026-06-03: The economic benefits of Open Source software

2026-05-30: Instagram quietly disables end-to-end encryption on your DMs

2026-05-27: Government department saves £ millions by replacing its Palantir IT system with an in-house one

2026-05-25: WhatsApp is being repeatedly sued alleging that it's lying about its end-to-end encryption

2026-05-17: The Open Rights Group's very comprehensive report on the importance of Digital Sovereignty

2026-05-16: Britain's dependence on US technology makes us vulnerable

2026-05-02: When my OneDrive sync started seemingly permanently destroying some of my files I was surprised to …

2026-04-22: Making an external monitor connected via a hub work in Linux Mint

2026-04-17: How to (re)move Windows 11's supposedly 'unmovable' files in order to shrink its disk partition

2026-04-09: Anthropic develops an AI model that is extremely good at finding and exploiting previously unknown security bugs in software

2026-03-22: The 'OSINT Techniques' book is surely the bible for all things Open Source Intelligence

2026-03-22: 📚 Finished reading Cult of the Dead Cow How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the …

2026-03-10: Noted 6 decades ago: '...extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people'

2026-03-08: One reason LLMs hallucinate is because we incentivise them to give any answer over saying they don't know

2026-03-04: A GUI for the Substack archiving process

2026-02-25: The inventor of the world wide web implores us to remember that 'This Is For Everyone'

2026-02-21: Companies are trying to force their employees to use generative AI