HTTP 418 · Oddities
Vala's core library ships make_directory_async but no async variant of create_directory_with_parents. A reader of The Daily WTF patched the gap with a loop that climbs parent directories on IOError.NOT_FOUND, then replay…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A hobbyist continues his series on playing audio through single-bit beepers, this time on the ZX Spectrum. Pulse code modulation works, pulse width modulation does not yet, and the machine's software-only buzzer is partl…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An anonymous contributor to The Daily WTF tells how a lucrative late-career contracting gig went sideways. His sponsor died suddenly right as he finished analyzing the legacy core application, leaving him ignored for 18 …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Declan Chidlow has catalogued the non-standard HTML snippets that once fought browser wars and third-party meddling: X-UA-Compatible, conditional comments, Smart Tags opt-outs, Baidu transcoding blocks, PICS labels, and …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Hacker Mike built an 8-bit von Neumann computer from former Eastern-bloc double-triode vacuum tubes, documented on hackaday.io and thetubecomputer.com. Its NOR-based logic recalls NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer, while m…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
NHTSA opened an audit query into Tesla's self-certification of the Cybercab robotaxi hours after its commercial launch in Austin, Texas. The probe examines how Tesla justified skipping standard controls such as steering …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF reruns a reader submission from Stella, who inherited an XML Schema meant to validate a custom query language for referencing travel booking data. Rather than model the grammar with proper XSD structures, t…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer k6lcm built NES Radar, an open-source Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge that shows live air traffic. A Python script on a nearby PC fetches aircraft positions and streams them through the console's second…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
GitHub user nampara-ai has packaged a vintage MS-DOS copy of WordStar with DOSBox and cross-platform launch scripts for Linux, Mac and Windows, plus a WebAssembly build that runs in any browser. Hackaday's Al Williams no…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The General Conference on Weights and Measures votes in October on a draft resolution making UTC continuous from May 20, 2027, letting it drift from Earth-rotation time by up to an hour instead of correcting every so oft…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A digital sign at London's O2 arena has been spotted displaying a Windows 10 update notification, an awkward backdrop for the indoor skydiving advertised behind it. Statcounter puts Windows 10 near 30 percent desktop sha…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Rabah Shihab had Claude Fable 5 port his 1993 Amiga game Babylonian Twins to Godot 4. The model rebuilt 72,758 lines of 68000 assembly byte-identically, reverse-engineered undocumented level formats, and shipped store as…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Uber pulled out of Nigeria and Uganda on September 2, 2026, notifying customers and drivers the same day service ended. Users reported rides stopping mid-trip, a phenomenon dubbed the 'Uber rapture'. The exits fit a wide…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A home automation project ships temperature conversion as a lookup table with wrong values, mapping roughly 0.5C steps to 1F steps. The twist: the table faithfully mirrors what mini-split IR remotes actually send. The re…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A video essay digs into the fate of Borland, the company behind Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Delphi. It traces how a firm that once defined the PC developer tools market faded from relevance. A nostalgia trip for anyone who…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Polish engineer ran 1,040 mushroom photos through 16 AI models to test foraging advice. The best model identified species correctly only 65 percent of the time, and some confused deadly fungi with edible ones. His advi…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF tale: a proudly metrics-driven manufacturing team tracks only widgets produced per unit time, pulls six databases into a Google Sheet, and blocks any change that does not improve the noisy top-level number. I…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF presents a code comment that truncates mid-sentence: 'Leave some room for'. The snippet subtracts 16 characters from a column size, and the trailing remark stops exactly where its explanation should begin, …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A digital bus departure board in Manchester showed passengers a Windows Defender Firewall alert instead of clean timetable data. The Vix Technology sign, part of the Bee Network rollout, had its destination text partly h…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A decompiled 2004 RuneScape client shows how Jagex ran a live multiplayer RPG over a 56k modem delivering roughly 5 KB/s. Tracing a single walk command from click to server and back, the analysis reveals delta-encoded co…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Computer History Museum has published part one of a 43-page oral history transcript in which Andy Hertzfeld, Apple's second Macintosh software engineer, describes porting QuickDraw from the Lisa, clashing with manage…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The ZCOM museum in Hoyerswerda, Germany, which houses original Zuse and Robotron computers, could close by the end of the year. The municipal housing company withdrew its annual 110,000-euro subsidy, and the city council…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In the latest episode of The Register's Kettle podcast, host Brandon Vigliarolo talks with reporters Liam Proven and Richard Speed about Windows XP's 25th anniversary, a Bluetooth-enabled Casio watch with two-year batter…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF reader recalls building a police tracking app for Brazil's 2014 World Cup with four engineers instead of the promised twenty, a photo-submission feature nicknamed the 'dick-pic encyclopedia,' and a debugging …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF's Error'd column for 2026-08-28 gathers reader-found software flops: a language picker with scrambled order, a Google screen where the math doesn't add up, an Outlook support form that fights back, a cheese…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Tarsnap creator Colin Percival has released Route 53 Files, a satirical but functional file system mounted on Amazon's DNS service. The project pokes fun at AWS S3 Files and its promise of buckets-as-filesystems, while e…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
tmp.0ut interviewed Unix pioneer Doug McIlroy at Dartmouth's Binary Fun Week. He recounts writing echo as his first C program, how Ken Thompson built Unix in three weeks and implemented pipes in a single night, Tom Duff'…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
University of Queensland researchers have outfitted giant burrowing cockroaches with electrodes and syringe-launching backpacks, achieving 95 percent injection accuracy at close range. The team says cyborg insect rescue …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A digital billboard in Greenock, Scotland, has displayed a Debian 11 login prompt for weeks after its operator, 75Media, went into liquidation at the end of 2025. The 1,200 x 320 pixel display runs Bullseye, which leaves…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Thoreau BASIC is a bootable, bare-metal BASIC interpreter for x86 machines with UEFI, built by developer Tarjan. It is largely GW-BASIC compatible, uses all system memory, and adds 24-bit high-resolution graphics, bitmap…