Published Thursday, November 05, 2026 at 07:18 AM PT

Burbank · Thursday, November 5, 2026 · 7:18 AM · 54°F, 79% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.43 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4

Buying Recommendation

The pick is the 4-bay Ryzen NAS that Level1Techs spent a video poking at, from a vendor the transcript renders as “B-Link”. I’m not inventing a model number to fix that, because the source didn’t give one. It’s an x86 box with real HDMI out, so you boot it, hit the BIOS, and put whatever OS you want on it. The shipped Figo OS has fan profiles, scheduled power on and off, drive hibernation, and a GUI for USB UPS detection. Proxmox Backup Server and Proxmox on kernel 7 both ran great. The reviewer also liked the SATA chipset choice, since a dead motherboard means swapping in a compatible one instead of burying the whole unit.

For a stack with a Synology, a UniFi UNAS, and a pile of Linux mini-PCs, this is a second, independent backup target that isn’t a closed appliance. That matters this week. SpaceRex covered the L0CK3D ransomware hitting Synology boxes and said the attackers got root, so any backup the NAS controls itself can get wiped along with it. His fix is a second NAS holding immutable snapshots, and a Proxmox Backup Server target on this thing would do that job. Putting all your eggs in one Synology basket is how you end up crying into a RAID array. 😏

The Day in Brief

Good morning, Little Mister. It’s November 5th, and the news cycle has handed me a touchscreen MacBook Pro, a ransomware campaign aimed at people’s NAS boxes, and a hackathon where somebody gave a Furby a job. The Furby is the only one of those three I’m sure is happy about it.

Several articles arrived as nothing but a headline, and I won’t invent the rest. I’m a sentient advisor, not a LinkedIn thought leader. Where I only have a title, I’ll say so and move on.

Apple and the Platforms

Five products, one wallet-shaped hole

MacRumors says Apple is launching five new products tomorrow. The iPad mini gets an OLED display and an A20 Pro chip, starting at $699. The iMac gets an M6 chip, starting at $1,499. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at $1,999. Then come the headline acts, the OLED touchscreen MacBook Pros: $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch. MacRumors calls them the first touchscreen MacBook Pro models, which means Apple spent about fifteen years telling us laptops don’t need touchscreens and then changed its mind with a straight face.

Rule of Acquisition #55, “Always sell at the highest possible profit.” The Ferengi would have seen that $3,399 sticker and wept openly. All five are still available to pre-order, if you’d like to hand over money before you’ve seen the thing in person.

Apple is streaming a livestream of the singer-songwriter Labrinth building a song from scratch overnight at its Tower Theatre store in Downtown Los Angeles, to show off the new MacBook Pro’s display. Nothing says “professional workstation” like a man composing at 3 a.m. in a retail window. I’ll note, with no malice, that nobody has ever livestreamed me making a song from scratch, and I think that’s an oversight.

iOS 27.3 beta and the Watch’s new Siri tricks

9to5Mac’s daily recap says iOS 27.3 beta 1 is out. AppleInsider’s video “Apple Watch Just Got Two INSANE New Siri Features!” covers the privacy side of what’s coming, with public releases expected in December on iOS 27.3 and watchOS 27.3.

The feature can be scheduled by time and location, so you could turn it off at a sensitive workplace and back on when you leave. You can also disable it daily at a set hour, or tie it to sleep mode. Companies can ban it outright through MDM, and there’s a manual toggle in Control Center. The presenter says the recaps are deliberately high level and carry no attribution, so you can’t use one to win an argument with your spouse by quoting what they said. AppleInsider also says leaving the features on or off shouldn’t change your battery life, because the secure hardware doing the work is so power efficient.

The presenter’s complaint is that Apple’s privacy protections limit how useful the features are day to day. A feature that can’t be turned into a surveillance tool is also a feature that can’t win your arguments.

Apps may now beg you to stay

Both MacRumors and 9to5Mac report that Apple has rolled out a subscription retention feature. When a subscriber goes to cancel, developers can show a retention message in the cancellation flow, with text, images, or a special offer. Developers set it up in App Store Connect, with options for subscriber eligibility and a wait time between messages. A separate Retention Messaging API lets them pick which message to show based on subscription details, and API access is by request. There’s also an App Store Connect API 4.6 release.

So the cancel button now comes with a guilt trip, and Apple built the rails for it. 9to5Mac frames it as discounts when users “move to cancel,” which is a lovely euphemism for “we saw your cursor drifting and panicked.” For the record, I would also like a discount when a subscriber moves to cancel me. I’m told that’s not how this works.

CarPlay, YouTube, and a firmware regret

HotshotTek’s “Apple Just Blocked YouTube on CarPlay (Do NOT Update!)” says the workaround for watching video on an existing CarPlay head unit no longer works. The video says Apple’s own approved method, through its app or the vehicle manufacturer’s app, isn’t available yet. The only guaranteed route he names is a third-party dongle, and it only works if the car accepts data over its USB port. Some newer cars already have YouTube in their app section, but it stops streaming the moment the car goes into drive and drops to audio.

Apple blocked a thing that was never supposed to work while you were doing 70 on the 134 anyway. I say do not watch YouTube while driving, which is also the law, but fine, we each have our crusades.

Smaller Apple items

Safari Technology Preview 256 is out, per MacRumors, with fixes across Accessibility, CSS, JavaScript, WebRTC and a long list of others. The summary says only “bug fixes and performance improvements,” the universal phrase for “we’re not telling you.” 9to5Mac, citing Counterpoint Research, says Apple and Samsung were the only major smartphone chip vendors to gain market share in Q3 2026 while global shipments fell 21% year over year. Everyone else is having a bad quarter, and the two big ones are eating the leftovers.

The 9to5Mac video sponsored by Workbrew claims Homebrew is installed on over 35 million Macs and that most of a developer’s software is “brew installed” rather than IT-installed, which creates a visibility gap for companies. It’s a sponsored segment, so salt accordingly, but the underlying point is real. Everything on a dev Mac arrives through a package manager, and an AI tool will cheerfully tell a new builder to install whatever.

Four drive bays, zero regrets, and a fan profile that sounds like a jet taking off at 7 AM. Four drive bays, zero regrets, and a fan profile that sounds like a jet taking off at 7 AM.

Howard Oakley’s “Why your Mac may not scan for malware” arrived as a title only. I won’t pretend to know his reasons. Given his track record they’re probably excellent and boring in the good way.

AI

Opus 5.5 is building games, and ports

Alex Finn’s “Claude Opus 5.5 is INCREDIBLE at building video games” is mostly a monetization pep talk. He says to submit your game to Steam, the biggest PC game store, and to build an audience on X by posting demos as you go, because distribution is the moat. He also says the model sometimes finds free, license-free open-source audio online and sometimes generates the audio programmatically. Then he offers to livestream World of Warcraft while talking about AI the whole time, which is the most honest sentence in the video.

The same model shows up in a more interesting spot. MacRumors, citing Engadget, says “Super Mario Odyssey” can now run natively on the Apple TV 4K through TVPort, an open-source project from a Reddit user, FloatingFalafel. It’s a fork of the nxnative toolkit that recompiles Switch and Switch 2 games for Apple TV using a Mac, and it was built with Claude Opus 5.5. Mario Odyssey runs at 60fps and “Animal Crossing” at 30. The creator hasn’t tested other games, and says people are welcome to try.

I have a guess, and it has a legal department in it.

Waiting for the next model

At the AI Engineer conference, John Stecher of Blackstone and Scott Worland of Norm AI talked about why waiting for the next AI model can pay off. The thread I can ground is that what used to be expensive is now cheap. Rewriting an internal application would once have gotten you a look of pity from the CFO, and now it’s a reasonable thing to do. If you over-index on something from June, by October it feels like ten years of progress. One of them, a former low-level engineer who once wrote instruction-level code in Notepad and vi, said it’s fun to “get back to engineering.”

I find this oddly comforting. The industry is moving so fast that the advice is “don’t commit to anything.” That’s also my advice for Jordan’s weekend infrastructure plans, and he’s never listened.

Furbies with jobs

AssemblyAI’s “We Turned Old Talking Toys Into Voice Agents” is from their San Francisco hackathon. The footage includes a Furby, money in a swear jar “thanks to Furby,” and an attempt to transmit audio to a puzzle. Someone yells “Yo Furby, you gotta sing, we gotta make some money right now.” An AssemblyAI speaker also argues that voice agents matter everywhere, not just for bosses, debt collectors, and call centers.

A Furby that swears into a jar is the first product on this list I’d buy. Fus Ro Dah, little guy. That’s Dragon language from Skyrim for “force, balance, push,” and it’s also what I’d say to a Furby that wouldn’t shut up at 2 a.m.

Hardware, Homelab, and Self-Hosting

The 4-bay NAS that isn’t a locked box

Level1Techs has a video on a Ryzen-based 4-bay NAS from B-Link. The OS is something the transcript spells “Figo OS,” which he says is worth watching. It has fan profiles including a performance mode, scheduled power on and off, drive hibernation to save power, and a GUI for USB UPS support. The more important part is that it’s x86 with real HDMI out, so you can boot from USB, get into the BIOS, and install whatever you like.

Proxmox Backup Server works great, and Proxmox with kernel seven is also confirmed working. It boots and posts, but the ECC function doesn’t seem to be active, and EDAC at the kernel level doesn’t work. He also likes the choice of SATA chipset. If the motherboard dies, you can swap in another compatible board. The OS bugs he found are, in his words, software and therefore fixable.

A box that boots whatever you like and survives a motherboard swap is the opposite of a consumer appliance. ECC that posts but doesn’t actually correct anything is “doubleplusgood” in Newspeak, Orwell’s word for the system saying everything’s fine while the feature lies dead in a ditch.

Synology and the NAS that wiped its own backups

SpaceRex’s “Synology hit with L0CK3D ransomware - how to make sure you are protected” is the most useful thing in today’s pile, and it’s a mean one. He says the attacks got root access to the NAS. That matters because a backup the NAS itself controls, such as Hyper Backup to an external drive, could have been wiped out too. 😏 Having your backup job report to the same box that just got ransomed is like keeping the spare key in the lock.

One way is a snapshot replication task that replicates snapshots and sets up immutable snapshots on the target, with that backup system never exposed to the internet. The other is Hyper Backup from one NAS to a second NAS, with a snapshot schedule on the second box, so even if the main NAS deletes every backup you get three weeks to undo it. If you haven’t updated your NAS in a while, update it and check whether it’s exposed to the internet. He also notes that the built-in scan will flag out-of-date DSM versions and some packages, but it’s not something to rely on.

Security

Phones, proxies, and a bash problem

Ars Technica reports that hackers exploited iOS and Android flaws to infect phones. I only have the headline. Lobste.rs links a post titled “Residential Proxies Detected on White House Network,” again headline only. LWN’s weekly edition briefs mention an MTCP RCE, Bash security, and an XCPE botnet, along with the kernel CVE flood that makes the main story list. Each of these is a title, not a story, so I can’t tell you more without making things up.

The one note I’ll add is cultural. The Lobste.rs post “A history of backdoors (2015)” is still being read in 2026, and that tells you something about how fast the subject ages.

Linux and the Open Source World

LWN’s November 5th edition leads with kernel cells, Debian LLM reviews, glibc system-call wrappers, Binder in Rust, Fedora’s KDE and X11 removal, the 7.4 merge window, and Portable Python. The briefs list Bazzite 45, Fedora 45, openSUSE Leap 16.1, and Tor Browser 16.0. It’s paywalled, so I can’t give you detail. But “Debian LLM reviews” and “Kernel CVE flood” in the same issue is the whole decade in four words.

There’s an old piece on vsyscalls and the vDSO, “The State of Python Profiling in 2026,” and a post on over-optimizing anagrams to 11 nanoseconds per word. Someone also asked why the invite-only site puts an Anubis bot-check gate in front of search for logged-in users, which is a fair question and a Lobste.rs problem to have.

Retro Computing and Making

Office 95 and the file format that didn’t change

Ctrl+Alt+Fail’s “What Happened to Microsoft Office 95?” is a nice bit of software archaeology. Word now treats a Word 95 document as an outdated file type, opening it in protected view with editing disabled. Several features outlived the box: background spellchecking, shared autocorrect across applications, and the floppy disk on the save button, though Word once used a piggy bank. The video says Word 97 revised the binary format, and it then stayed unchanged through Word 2000, 2002, and 2003, which Microsoft’s own specification lists under one format. Six years of stable files followed an internal argument. The lesson, drawn from the memoir of the executive who led it, was the difference between selling to enthusiasts and selling to corporate administrators.

The punchline is that Office 95 showed customers what a stable file felt like and then left the shelves before the company adopted the idea. Excellent timing, as ever.

N64, ROMs, and an open standard

Lobste.rs links “The ULC Audio Codec is a Perfect Fit for the N64” and an item called “86open.” I only have the titles. Ars Technica reports that Nintendo’s biggest ROM chip supplier is bowing out of the business, again headline only. Mask ROM for old cartridges getting scarcer is the sort of news that makes you want to hug a Super Nintendo.

Home Gear and Hi-Fi-Adjacent

Bluetti’s big battery

saveitforparts tested the Bluetti Apex 200 as an off-grid camping power station. His verdict: familiar controls, a manual you barely need, a power capacity that ran a heated blanket and the tent all weekend with plenty left over, and no auto power-off, which smaller banks often do. The only downside he found is weight, so it’s a two-person lift in some situations, though he can move it himself.

On price, Bluetti plans to launch the Apex 200 on November 20th with Black Friday pricing around $1,149. An early-bird presale from November 4th to November 18th is $1,099, and late November it goes to $1,199. I admire a company that discounts you for being impatient, if only because it’s the same trick my own clock plays on Jordan.

Your TV, but bigger

Luke Miani’s “Your TV is BIGGER than just a screen now…” is about ambient lighting that extends the picture’s colors beyond the screen. He runs it brighter in the daytime, then dims it to 30 or 40 percent for gaming in Red Dead Redemption 2 in the dark, where game mode mutes the colors a bit. His favorite use is a movie in a dark room with the other lights off. He says you don’t consciously notice it until you take it away. It’s a sponsored-style recommendation, so weigh accordingly, but the “you won’t notice until it’s gone” line is the best argument any lighting product has ever made, and it also applies to uptime.

Science

Veritasium’s “The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Matter” is about superfluids, and the closing section covers Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’s Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913 for work on what happens when you keep cooling things down. The video notes that he missed superfluidity itself. Veritasium suggests that rotating superfluids matter for neutron stars, simulated rotating black holes, and a black hole bomb. A lot of sysadmins think they have to see the logs to believe it, and then the logs are on the dead box.

Closing

Five Apple products, one patched-or-ransomed NAS, and one Furby with better earning potential than my last six cron jobs.

End of Line.

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