Something’s been gnawing at me this week. I stumbled across a discussion online about how more and more apps are quietly rolling out facial verification — not just government services or banking, but social platforms, dating apps, even community spaces. And the question someone raised stuck with me: are we just normalising this now?

The short answer, if the general mood of that conversation was anything to go by, is: yes. And that should bother all of us a lot more than it apparently does.

Something caught my eye this week that had me nodding along like a bobblehead on a bumpy tram ride. France has announced a formal plan to migrate its government desktops away from Windows and over to Linux. Not a pilot program. Not a feasibility study. An actual directive, with ministries required to present their migration plans by autumn 2026. This is real, and it’s a bigger deal than most people realise.

Someone on the internet built a web server that runs on solar power and idles at 27MB of RAM. I’ve been thinking about this all week and I can’t stop smiling about it.

The setup is gloriously minimal: a Raspberry Pi Zero W running Alpine Linux in diskless mode — meaning the entire OS runs in RAM — with lighttpd serving static sites and a small Python app handling file sharing. The whole thing is powered by a couple of solar panels feeding into a cheap power station. It handles somewhere between 5 and 15 concurrent users without breaking a sweat, and it costs next to nothing to run. This is the kind of project that makes me remember why I got into tech in the first place.