Categories
Artificial Intelligence

Form or URL? The two elicitation modes in MCP

MCP servers can ask the user for input in the middle of a tool call. Form mode has the client draw a dialog; URL mode sends the user to a web page. How both work on 2025-11-25 and 2026-07-28, why secrets belong in URL mode, and what Open WebUI 0.13.2 does.

Categories
Artificial Intelligence

MCP Apps vs. regular MCP servers: what you gain and what you pay

MCP Apps let a server ship its own interactive UI into the chat. With a colour picker and a 3D viewer as examples: how it works, what you gain over plain tools and elicitation, and what it costs in confirmations, sandbox limits and host support.

Categories
Artificial Intelligence

From stdio to stateless: a short history of the Model Context Protocol

Five specification revisions and one official extension in under two years: how MCP grew from a local tool protocol into a stateless, extensible standard under the Linux Foundation.

Categories
3D Printing Artificial Intelligence

From one sentence to a printable case: an ESP32 + CC1101 enclosure designed with Claude Code

One sentence went in, a parametric 3D-printable enclosure for an ESP32 and a CC1101 radio came out: M2 heat-set inserts, a wiring-friendly layout, pegs that fit the boards’ real mounting holes, and a configuration table that adapts the whole box to a 30-pin or 38-pin ESP32. The final design, and a short summary of the fourteen versions it took to get there.

Categories
Linux Samba Windows

Samba AD, chrony and Windows 11: why signed NTP silently fails, and how to fix it

A Windows 11 domain member refuses to take its time from a Samba AD DC running chrony. Plain NTP works, the configuration is fine, yet the DC never answers. The cause: above functional level 2012, Windows uses the MS-SNTP extended authenticator, which neither chrony nor Samba support. I patched both, and after one more trap in the byte order, Windows now accepts the signed replies.

Categories
Linux Network Windows

Fixing time synchronisation on Windows (with chrony as the time source)

Windows clocks drift, jump or silently stop syncing more often than they should. How the Windows Time service actually works, how to find out what it is doing with w32tm and the event log, how to fix standalone machines, domain members and the PDC emulator, and how to use a Linux box running chrony (or ntpd/NTPsec) as a reliable time source for Windows.

Categories
Debian Linux Ubuntu

APT repositories on GitHub Pages: branch or GitHub Actions?

GitHub Pages can publish a site in two ways: from a branch, or from a GitHub Actions workflow. For an APT repository the difference matters more than for a website: where the .deb files live, where the signing key lives, and how the repository grows over time. Both approaches, their trade-offs, and when to pick which.

Categories
Debian Linux Ubuntu

An APT repository for Zoom without hosting a single .deb

Zoom ships .deb files but no APT repository. zoom-ubuntu-repo fills the gap in two ways: a self-hosted repository built by a cron job, and a GitHub-hosted one where the index lives on GitHub Pages while apt downloads the packages straight from Zoom’s CDN. How it works, where the files live, and how to set it up on Debian/Ubuntu.

Categories
Artificial Intelligence

WordPress and MCP: which plugin does what?

MCP Adapter, Enable Abilities for MCP and the official AI plugin all sound like they do the same thing. They don’t. A look at the two directions of AI in WordPress, how the plugins fit together, and what you actually need.

Categories
RFID Security

Anatomy of a Transit Card: Reading a Real Mifare Classic Dump

A full dump is just 1024 bytes of hex — until you know how to read it. Using a real public-transport card, here’s how to go from raw sectors to the MAD, an NDEF message, a digital signature, and the access bits that decide what you can touch.