Flying Into Burlington, VT

Oct. 17th, 2025 10:18 pm
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Posted by John Scalzi

The foliage looks impressive even from far away.

Reminder that tomorrow I will be at the Green Mountain Book Festival, talking about, and then signing, books! Come see me and other very fabulous writers talk about books and writing and stuff. It’ll be fun, promise.

— JS

The pivot

Oct. 17th, 2025 03:50 pm
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It's my 61st birthday this weekend and I have to say, I never expected to get to be this old—or this weirded-out by the world I'm living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in which two-fisted billionaires colonize space in order to get away from the degenerate second-hander rabble downstairs who want to survive their John W. Campbell-allocated banquet of natural disasters. (Here's looking at you, Ben Bova.)

Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that's going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup ...

I'm calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

It's pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we're seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point.

Until approximately 1750, humanity's energy budget was constrained by the available sources: muscle power, wind power (via sails and windmills), some water power (via water wheels), and only heat from burning wood and coal (and a little whale oil for lighting).

During the 19th century we learned to use combustion engines to provide motive power for both stationary machines and propulsion. This included powering forced ventilation for blast furnaces and other industrial processes, and pumps for water and other working fluids. We learned to reform gas from coal for municipal lighting ("town gas") and, later, to power dynamos for municipal electricity generation. Late in the 19th century we began to switch from coal (cumbersome, bulky, contained non-combustible inclusions) to burning fractionated oil for processes that demanded higher energy densities. And that's where we stuck for most of the long 20th century.

During the 20th century, the difficulty of supporting long-range military operations led to a switch from coal to oil—the pivotal event was the ultimately-disastrous voyage of the Russian Baltic fleet to the Sea of Japan in 1906, during the Russo-Japanese war. From the 1890s onwards Russia had been expanding into Siberia and then encroaching on the edges of the rapidly-weakening Chinese empire. This brought Russia into direct conflict with Japan over Korea (Japan, too, had imperial ambitions), leading to the outbreak of war in 1905—when Japan wiped out the Russian far-eastern fleet in a surprise attack. (Pearl Harbor in 1941 was not that surprising to anyone familiar with Japanese military history!) So the Russian navy sent Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, commander of the Baltic Fleet, to the far east with the hastily-renamed Second Pacific Squadron, whereupon they were sunk at the Battle of Tsushima.

Rozhestvensky had sailed his fleet over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) from the Baltic Sea, taking seven months and refueling numerous times at sea with coal (around a quarter of a million tons of it!) because he'd ticked off the British and most ports were closed to him. To the admiralties watching from around the world, the message was glaringly obvious—coal was a logistical pain in the arse—and oil far preferable for refueling battleships, submarines, and land vehicles far from home. (HMS Dreadnought, the first turbine-powered all-big-gun battleship, launched in 1905, was a transitional stage that still relied on coal but carried a large quantity of fuel oil to spray on the coal to increase its burn rate: later in the decade, the RN moved to oil-only fueled warships.)

Spot the reason why the British Empire got heavily involved in Iran, with geopolitical consequences that are still playing out to this day! (The USA inherited large chunks of the British empire in the wake of the second world war: the dysfunctional politics of oil are in large part the legacy of applying an imperial resource extraction model to an energy source.)

Anyway. The 20th century left us with three obvious problems: automobile driven suburban sprawl and transport infrastructure, violent dissatisfaction among the people of colonized oil-producing nations, and a massive burp of carbon dioxide emissions that is destabilizing our climate.

Photovoltaic cells go back to 1839, but until the 21st century they remained a solution in search of very specific problems: they were heavy, produced relatively little power, and degraded over time if left exposed to the sun. Early PV cells were mainly used to provide power to expensive devices in inaccessible locations, such as aboard satellites and space probes: it cost $96 per watt for a solar module in the mid-1970s. But we've been on an exponential decreasing cost curve since then, reaching $0.62/watt by the end of 2012, and it's still on-going.

China is currently embarked on a dash for solar power which really demands the adjective "science-fictional", having installed 198GW of cells between January and May, with 93GW coming online in May alone: China set goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 in 2019 and met their 2030 goal in 2024, so fast is their transition going. They've also acquired a near-monopoly on the export of PV panels because this roll-out is happening on the back of massive thin-film manufacturing capacity.

The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it's cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.

This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground. (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.

China is also banking on the global shift to transport using EVs. High speed rail is almost always electrified (not having to ship an enormous mass of heavy fuel around helps), electric cars are now more convenient than internal combustion ones to people who live in dense population areas, and e-bikes don't need advocacy any more (although roads and infrastructure friendly to non-motorists—pedestrians and public transport as well as cyclists—is another matter).

Some forms of transport can't obviously be electrified. High capacity/long range aviation is one—airliners get lighter as they fly because they're burning off fuel. A hypothetical battery powered airliner can't get lighter in flight: it's stuck with the dead weight of depleted cells. (There are some niches for battery powered aircraft, including short range/low payload stuff, air taxis, and STOVL, but they're not going to replace the big Airbus and Boeing fleets any time soon.)

Some forms of transport will become obsolescent in the wake of a switch to EVs. About half the fossil fuel powered commercial shipping in use today is used to move fossil fuels around. We're going to be using crude oil for the foreseeable future, as feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries, but they account for a tiny fraction of the oil we burn for transport, including shipping. (Plastic recycling is over-hyped but might eventually get us out of this dependency—if we ever get it to work efficiently.)

So we're going through an energy transition period unlike anything since the 1830s or 1920s and it's having some non-obvious but very important political consequences, from bribery and corruption all the way up to open warfare.

The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.

I was wrong repeatedly in the past decade when I speculated that you can't ship renewable electricity around like gasoline, and that it would mostly be tropical/equatorial nations who benefited from it. When Germany is installing rooftop solar effectively enough to displace coal generation, that's a sign that PV panels have become implausibly cheap. We have cars and trucks with reasonably long ranges, and fast-charger systems that can take a car from 20% to 80% battery capacity in a quarter of an hour. If you can do that to a car or a truck you can probably do it to a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle, insofar as they remain relevant. We can do battery-to-battery recharging (anyone with a USB power bank for their mobile phone already knows this) and in any case the whole future of warfare (or geopolitics by other means) is up in the air right now—quite literally, with the lightning-fast evolution of drone warfare over the past three years.

The real difference is likely to be that energy production is widely distributed rather than concentrated in resource extraction economies and power stations. It turns out that PV panels are a great way of making use of agriculturally useless land, and also coexist well with some agricultural practices. Livestock likes shade and shelter (especially in hot weather) so PV panels on raised stands or fences can work well with sheep or cattle, and mixed-crop agriculture where low-growing plants are sheltered from direct sunlight by taller crops can also work with PV panels instead of the higher-growing plants. You can even in principle use the power from the farm PV panels to drive equipment in greenhouses: carbon dioxide concentrators, humidifiers, heat pumps to prevent overheating/freezing, drainage pumps, and grow lamps to drive the light-dependent reactions in photosynthesis.

All of which we're really going to need because we've passed the threshold for +1.5 °C climate change, which means an increasing number of days per year when things get too hot for photosynthesis under regular conditions. There are three main pathways for photosynthesis, but none of them deal really well with high temperatures, although some adaptation is possible. Active cooling is probably impractical in open field agriculture, but in intensive indoor farming it might be an option. And then there's the parallel work on improving how photosynthesis works: an alternative pathway to the Calvin cycle is possible and the enzymes to make it work have been engineered into Arabidopsis, with promising results.

In addition to the too-many-hot-days problem, climate change means fluctuations in weather: too much wind, too much rain—or too little of both—at short notice, which can be physically devastating for crops. Our existing staple crops require a stable, predictable climate. If we lose that, we're going to have crop failures and famines by and by, where it's not already happening. The UK has experienced three of its worst harvests in the past century in this decade (and this decade is only half over). As long as we have global supply chains and bulk shipping we can shuffle food around the globe to cover localized shortfalls, but if we lose stable agriculture globally for any length of time then we are all going to die: our economic system has shifted to just-in-time over the past fifty years, and while it's great for efficiency, efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience. We don't have the reserves we would need to survive the coming turbulence by traditional means.

This, in part, explains the polycrisis: nobody can fix what's wrong using existing tools. Consequently many people think that what's going wrong can't be fixed. The existing wealthy elites (who have only grown increasingly wealthy over the past half century) derive their status and lifestyle from the perpetuation of the pre-existing system. But as economist Herbert Stein observed (of an economic process) in 1985, "if it can't go on forever it will stop". The fossil fuel energy economy is stopping right now—we've probably already passed peak oil and probably peak carbon: the trend is now inexorably downwards, either voluntarily into a net-zero/renewables future, or involuntarily into catastrophe. And the involuntary option is easier for the incumbents to deal with, both in terms of workload (do nothing, right up until we hit the buffers) and emotionally (it requires no sacrifice of comfort, of status, or of relative position). Clever oligarchs would have gotten ahead of the curve and invested heavily in renewables but the evidence of our eyes (and the supremacy of Chinese PV manufacturers in the global market) says that they're not that smart.

The traditional ruling hierarchy in the west had a major shake-up in 1914-19 (understatement: most of the monarchies collapsed) in the wake of the convulsion of the first world war. The elites tried to regain a degree of control, but largely failed due to the unstable conditions produced by the great depression and then the second world war (itself an emergent side-effect of fascist regimes' attempts to impose imperial colonial policies on their immediate neighbours, rather than keeping the jackboots and whips at a comfortable remove). Reconstruction after WW2 and a general post-depression consensus that emerged around accepting the lesser evil of social democracy as a viable prophylactic to the devil of communism kept the oligarchs down for another couple of decades, but actually-existing capitalism in the west stopped being about wealth creation (if it ever had been) some time in the 1960s, and switched gear to wealth concentration (the "he who dies with the most toys, wins" model of life). By the end of the 1970s, with the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the traditional wealthy elites began to reassert control, citing the spurious intellectual masturbation of neoliberal economics as justification for greed and repression.

But neoliberalism was repurposed within a couple of decades as a stalking-horse for asset-stripping, in which the state was hollowed out and its functions outsourced to the private sector—to organizations owned by the existing elites, which turned the public purse into a source of private profit. And we're now a couple of generations into this process, and our current rulers don't remember a time when things were different. So they have no idea how to adapt to a changing world.

Cory Doctorow has named the prevailing model of capitalist exploitation enshittification. We no longer buy goods, we buy services (streaming video instead of owning DVDs or tapes, web services instead of owning software, renting instead of buying), and having been captured by the platforms we rent from, we are then subject to rent extraction: the service quality is degraded, the price is jacked up, and there's nowhere to go because the big platforms have driven their rivals into bankruptcy or irrelevance:

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

This model of doing business (badly) is a natural consequence of the bigger framework of neoliberalism, under which a corporation's directors overriding duty is to maximize shareholder value in the current quarter, with no heed to the second and subsequent quarters hence: the future is irrelevant, feed me shouts the Audrey II of shareholder activism. Business logic has no room for the broader goals of maintaining a sustainable biosphere, or even a sustainable economy. And so the agents of business-as-usual, or Crapitalism as I call it, are at best trapped in an Abilene paradox in which they assume everyone else around them wants to keep the current system going, or they actually are as disconnected from reality as Peter Thiel (who apparently believes Greta Thunberg is the AntiChrist.)

if it can't go on forever it will stop

What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so. It's already leading to resource wars, famines, political upheaval, and insecurity (and when people feel insecure, they rally to demagogues who promise them easy fixes: hence the outbreaks of fascism). The ultra-rich don't want it to stop because they can't conceive of a future in which it stops and they retain their supremacy. (Also, they're children of privilege and most of them are not terribly bright, much less imaginative—as witness how easily they're robbed blind by grifters like Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman Fried, and arguably Sam Altman). Those of them whose wealth is based in ownership of fossil fuel assets still in the ground have good reason to be scared: these are very nearly stranded assets already, and we're heading for a future in which electricity is almost too cheap to meter.

All of this is without tackling the other elephant in the room, which is the end of Moore's Law. Moore's Law has been on its death bed for over a decade now. We're seeing only limited improvements in computing and storage performance, mainly from parallelism. Aside from a very few tech bubbles which soak up all available processing power, belch, and ask for more, the all you can eat buffet for tech investors is over. (And those bubbles are only continuing as long as scientifically naive investors keep throwing more money at them.)

The engine that powered the tech venture capital culture (and the private equity system battening on it) is sputtering and dying. Massive AI data centres won't keep the coal mines running or the nuclear reactors building out (it's one of those goddamn bubbles: to the limited extent that LLMs are useful, we'll inevitably see a shift towards using pre-trained models running on local hardware). They're the 2025 equivalent of 2020's Bored Ape NFTs (remember those?). The forecast boom in small modular nuclear reactors is going to fizzle in the face of massive build-out of distributed, wildly cheap photovoltaic power plus battery backup. Quantum computing isn't going to save the tech sector, and that's the "next big thing" the bubble-hypemongers have been saving for later for the past two decades. (Get back to me when you've got hardware that can factor an integer greater than 31.)

If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s.

But this year, 2025, is the pivot. This can't go on. So it's going to stop. And then—

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Posted by Linode

Oct 17, 14:00 UTC
Completed - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.

Oct 17, 10:00 UTC
In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Sep 10, 22:00 UTC
Scheduled - We will be performing network maintenance at US-SEA (Seattle) on October 17th from 10:00 UTC to 14:00 UTC. During this window, changes will be made to enhance routing stability, improve convergence performance, and enable additional support for advanced routing features. Individuals may experience short-lived packet loss or latency spikes while maintenance occurs.

The Big Idea: Jennifer Estep

Oct. 16th, 2025 07:54 pm
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

Much like an oak tree from an acorn, author Jennifer Estep had one small scene that ended up turning into the fifth book in her Galactic Bonds series. Come along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Only Rogue Actions, and let her set the scene that started the whole book.

JENNIFER ESTEP:

Sometimes in writing, a random image, thought, or phrase can spark a story, a book, or even an entire world.

I’ve had this happen a couple of times in my writing career, most recently with Only Rogue Actions, book #5 in my Galactic Bonds science-fiction fantasy series. 

As I was writing Only Cold Depths, the previous book in the series, one image kept popping into my mind over and over again—a woman in a long, flowing white gown running through cold, thick white fog, desperately searching for something (or someone). 

Why this particular image? I have no idea. It just appeared to me one day and then kept coming back. Maybe it was my writerly subconscious at work, already thinking ahead to the next book. Maybe I drove through the fog one morning, and the trip got warped and stuck in my mind. Maybe I just thought it was a cool image. Or maybe I had just eaten too much sugar that day. 

But somewhere along the way, I started really thinking about the image and asking myself all the usual writing/story questions:

  • Who is this woman?
  • Why is she stuck in the fog?
  • What obstacles are in her way?
  • Who is she trying to find?
  • Is she running toward something/someone?
  • Is she running away from something/someone?
  • Or what if she is doing both?

This one image kept playing on a loop in my mind like a ghost wavering in and out of view, but I couldn’t figure out a way to incorporate it into my current book. When I started writing Only Rogue Actions, I thought why not take this one striking image and build my whole book around it? It seemed like the only way to banish this potential story ghost once and for all. 

I ditched the long, flowing gown, stuck my heroine Vesper Quill in the middle of a dangerous training course, and made the thick white fog a literal obstacle that she must navigate through. And just like that, the fog cleared (so to speak), and the rest of the story came into focus. Soon, I was writing scenes of Vesper running through the fog and doing all sorts of things (which I won’t spoil here). 

Not only did I use the fog as an obstacle for Vesper to overcome, but it also gave the story a dim, murky, menacing atmosphere that was oddly similar to a horror movie. So I decided to really embrace the fog and add a few jumpscares into the story. Bonus!

And perhaps best of all, I finally banished this image from my mind . . . although I’m sure a new ghost will arise to take its place and (hopefully) spark another story. 

Authors—Have you ever had an image, thought, or phrase spark a story?

Readers—What are some images that have stayed with you from books, movies, and TV shows?


Only Rogue Actions: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author’s socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Facebook

[syndicated profile] tacit_feed

Image: Aleutie

A while back, I wrote about a kink website called “Know Your Sins” using a fake DMCA scam to get backlinks and boost their search results. The site’s owners would send out phony copyright claims, saying they owned images they neither owned nor had nothing to do with, and demanding backlinks to their site or they’d sue for copyright infringement. The site’s owners, Samuel Davis (@Samueld_KYS on Twitter) and Olivia Moore (whose Twitter profile has been deleted), engage in copyright fraud to try to boost their Google search results.

It seems fraudulent copyright scams are something of a growth industry.

About a week ago, I received this email from an outfit calling itself CopyTrack, headquartered in Germany (click to embiggen):

CopyTrack claimed I was using images belonging to their “client,” a Norwegian company owned by a Chinese conglomerate called Yay Images that appears only to license images from other stock companies, and demanding €2,168.76 (about $2,500) in “compensation.”

The images in question on my site are licensed from stock agencies (Shutterstock and Deposit Photos, the latter of which I’ve been using for many years).

A quick Google search shows that Copytrack is a scam, and the owner has been running this scam under a variety of names for years.

BlueMedia has an article about these guys, Copyright Infringement Notice Email from Copytrack: What Kind of Company Is Copytrack?

The company is organized and registered in Germany, where it has changed names multiple times. A German lawyer, Kanzlei Franz, has a lengthy article about this company’s sordid history (with a German-language version here).

I am, of course, far from the only person to be hit with this extortion scheme. You’ll find similar tales from the Brutally Honest Blog, Yvan’s Substack, Ben Tasker, molif, and tons of others; a Google search for copytrack scam produces hundreds of similar hits.

The general consensus on Copytrack is neatly summed up by this quote from Content Powered:

I think Copytrack provides a service that could, potentially, be legitimate. However, they don't put any effort at all into verifying copyright ownership; they're a more-or-less entirely automated platform anyone can just upload some pictures to and then send threatening letters to other people, hoping for a payout. They may not, themselves, be copyright trolls, but they facilitate copyright trolls with no mechanism to stop them.

I am fortunate in that I am represented by an outstanding intellectual property attorney, Leonard Duboff in Portland. I simply informed Copytrack that I am represented by counsel and would no longer respond directly to them, and needless to say my attorney hasn’t heard a peep from them.

When I wrote about the Know Your Sins scam, a ton of people emailed me to say they'd received similar fraudulent copyright-scam emails. I got so many that I wasn’t able to respond to all of them (but thank you, everyone who messaged me!).

That suggests the scale of copyright fraud is enormous.

If you’ve received a fraudulent email from Copytrack, I’d love to hear about it! Post a comment here, or email me

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Posted by Linode

THIS IS A SCHEDULED EVENT Nov 4, 07:00 - 11:00 UTC

Oct 16, 16:26 UTC
Scheduled - We will be performing a scheduled network maintenance in our US-East (Newark) data center from 07:00 (UTC) until 11:00 (UTC) on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. While we do not expect any downtime, a brief period of increased latency or packet loss may occur.

Service Issue - Cloud Manager and API

Oct. 16th, 2025 04:06 pm
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Posted by Linode

Oct 16, 16:06 UTC
Resolved - We haven't observed any additional issues with the Cloud Manager or API, and will now consider this incident resolved. If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 855-454-6633 (+1-609-380-7100 Intl.), or send an email to support@linode.com for assistance.

Oct 15, 17:12 UTC
Update - We have implemented a fix for this issue as of October 7, 2025. Based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. Customers and partners can find more details on the Akamai Community: https://community.akamai.com/customers/s/feed/0D5a700000cRKGoCAO

We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated.

Oct 15, 09:23 UTC
Update - We have not seen issues since 7 October 2025 and are continuing to monitor further. If you are still experiencing issues, please open a Support ticket for assistance.

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Monitoring - A database maintenance was performed and we are currently monitoring the results. If you are still experiencing issues, please open a Support ticket for assistance.

Oct 2, 00:05 UTC
Update - We are continuing to investigate this issue.

Oct 1, 22:05 UTC
Investigating - Our team is investigating a service issue that intermittently triggers 5XX responses in the Cloud Manager (https://cloud.linode.com/) and API request failures for brief periods. We will share additional updates as we have more information.

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Posted by Linode

THIS IS A SCHEDULED EVENT Nov 12, 03:00 - 05:00 UTC

Sep 11, 19:18 UTC
Scheduled - The Linode Cloud Manager, API, and CLI will be offline for scheduled maintenance between 03:00 UTC and 05:00 UTC on November 12, 2025. During this window, running Linodes and related services will not be disrupted, but account management access and Support tickets will be unavailable.

Please ensure that you complete critical or important jobs in the Cloud Manager or API before the maintenance window. We will update this status page once this event is complete and Linode customers have full access to all Linode services.

Customers who need assistance from Linode Support during this time will need to call 855-454-6633 (+1-609-380-7100 outside of the United States) to contact our Support team. Please note that our Support team will not be able to assist with issues related to the Cloud Manager or API, authenticate users to their accounts, or respond to Support tickets for the duration of the maintenance window. As soon as our Support team regains access, we will answer tickets in the order they are received.

Impacts on Current Linode Customers:
Current Linode customers will not be able to log in to the Cloud Manager, interact with the API, or perform any administrative or management functions. This includes Create, Remove, Boot, Migrate, Back Up, Shut Down, etc.

The scheduled maintenance will impact the Kubernetes API. Dynamic aspects of LKE that rely on the Linode API will also be impacted, to include items such as autoscaling, recycling, rebooting, attaching/detaching PVCs, Node Balancer provisioning, as well as the ability to create new clusters. Cluster nodes and running workloads will not be affected.

Impacts on Users Trying to Create Linode Accounts / Awaiting Account Authentication:
While the Linode Cloud Manager is offline during the maintenance period, we are unable to accept requests for new accounts or authenticate accounts for users awaiting full account access.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

A Year Of Blogging

Oct. 16th, 2025 01:40 pm
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

October 1st of 2024 was my official start date to my oh-so-exciting career as a writer, and I thought we could take this opportunity to revisit some of my favorite pieces over this past year.

I have carefully curated a list of ten pieces for you to examine, if you so choose. In no particular order, these are just ten posts that I think showcase my year of writing the best.

  1. Celebrating Maialata With Plates & Pages
  2. A Night & Day Of Eatin’ Good In San Francisco
  3. Scalzi Reads Scalzi: Lock In
  4. From Straight Edge to Sloshed
  5. A Birthday Bonanza In Columbus
  6. Why Licensed Music Works So Well In “Megamind”
  7. Close To Home: Grist
  8. Throwing A Dinner Party Using “Third Culture Cooking” By Zaynab Issa
  9. Brunching It Up At Alcove by MadTree Brewing
  10. Unwinding At Panacea Luxury Spa In Columbus

It’s probably pretty obvious based on my selection, but my favorite type of writing to do is food writing, whether it’s restaurant reviews or writing about my experiences with cooking for friends. And spa experiences, apparently.

Let me know if you have any favorites out of this list, or if another piece from this year is one I should’ve put on this list.

Moving forward, what would y’all like to see more of? Movie reviews? Cat pictures? Monday Music recommendations? Let me know, and have a great day!

-AMS

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Posted by Linode

Oct 16, 00:00 UTC
Completed - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.

Oct 15, 20:00 UTC
In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Sep 10, 21:58 UTC
Scheduled - We will be performing network maintenance at SG-SIN-2 (Singapore 2) on October 15th from 20:00 UTC to 00:00 UTC (October 16th). During this window, changes will be made to enhance routing stability, improve convergence performance, and enable additional support for advanced routing features. Individuals may experience short-lived packet loss or latency spikes while maintenance occurs.

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Posted by Home Assistant

Ending production of Home Assistant Yellow

Today, we’re announcing that we will no longer be producing Home Assistant Yellow. Rest assured, it will continue to receive software support far into the future.

I’m Carl, Vice President of Commercial at Nabu Casa, the organization that builds and sells official hardware for the Open Home Foundation. I couldn’t be more proud of our hardware achievements over the past 12 months, including Voice Preview Edition and Connect ZWA-2 (including its cool new Wi-Fi and PoE experimental firmware).

Home Assistant Yellow was similarly groundbreaking at launch and helped fund Home Assistant’s development. However, for reasons I’ll explain below, the time has come to end production. This means that if you were considering buying a Home Assistant Yellow, you’ll need to act fast, as stock will not be replenished (check the Order Now button on the Home Assistant Yellow page to see if your local retailer still has stock).

Nabu Casa is now exploring what hardware could replace Home Assistant Yellow, so if you have any suggestions on what we should do next, please tell us in the comments! In the meantime, the good news is that there are already plenty of other great ways to run Home Assistant. For example, if you’re looking for hardware that’s both easy to start with and supports the Open Home Foundation, we’d recommend the Home Assistant Green.

A golden era

There is a long yellow brick road that brought us to today. All the way back in 2021, we announced Home Assistant Yellow (originally called Amber). It included some pretty unique features, including its built-in Zigbee or Thread adapter, optional PoE, and overall expandable approach. As it used the Raspberry Pi Compute Module platform, included GPIO, and had an NVMe slot, there were a lot of different ways you could upgrade it over time (including people being able to upgrade from CM4 to CM5, which was quite the speed bump 🏎️).

It wasn’t all smooth sailing with Home Assistant Yellow. We essentially launched the device in the middle of the great Pi shortage. It definitely complicated things for a time, but it all eventually stabilized. In late 2023, we launched Home Assistant Green, which became the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant. This new product led us to end the sale of Home Assistant Yellow devices that shipped with a CM4 already installed (called the Home Assistant Yellow Standard), which allowed us to focus the product line on the kit versions.

Exploded view of the Home Assistant Yellow Small, but so much room for activities

Home Assistant Green continues to have strong sales, but Home Assistant Yellow sales have been naturally slowing down, as happens a couple of years into any product’s life. This month, it finally reached the point where it no longer made sense to have another production run, which ultimately pushed us to discontinue Home Assistant Yellow.

Technology changes, and small-form-factor computing has always moved fast. For instance, in the early days of Home Assistant, the community’s de facto recommendation was always the most recent Raspberry Pi device, but we’re seeing more people gravitate towards Mini PCs. We’re now exploring what we could build next for our power users, but we’re still some way off, so don’t wait if you need something today.

Software support continues

As long as it’s possible to run Home Assistant on Yellow, we will continue to provide builds. If you want living proof of this commitment, take our first hardware device: Home Assistant Blue. It ended production in 2022, but still receives new builds of Home Assistant, something that shows no signs of changing for a long time. We continue to streamline and make Home Assistant more efficient, as it’s our goal for you to run it on the hardware you have.

Say ‘ellow to the future

I’d just like to take a moment to thank everyone who bought a Home Assistant Yellow over the years, and for all the great feedback you shared with us. We’re sad to say goodbye to our trusty little expandable powerhouse, but it’s had a good run and we’re super proud of how far we’ve come. Also, we’ll soon be announcing the date of our next hardware product (not a computing device… but something very cool nonetheless), so stay tuned!

Service Issue - Object Storage

Oct. 15th, 2025 11:03 pm
[syndicated profile] linode_status_new_feed

Posted by Linode

Oct 15, 23:03 UTC
Resolved - We haven’t observed any additional issues with the Object Storage service in any of the impacted regions, and will now consider this incident resolved. If you continue to experience problems, please open a Support ticket for assistance.

Oct 15, 19:42 UTC
Monitoring - At this time we have been able to correct the issues affecting the Object Storage service. The impacted regions and their impact windows are listed below. We will be monitoring this to ensure that it remains stable. If you continue to experience problems, please open a Support ticket for assistance.

Location and time, in UTC, all dated 2025-10-15:
Chicago (US-ORD): 10:46-10:52
London (GB-LON): 10:52-10:59
Washington, DC (US-IAD): 12:26-13:54
Seattle (US-SEA): 13:14-13:23
Singapore 2 (SG-SIN-2): 14:00-14:09
Melbourne (AU-MEL): 14:57-15:04
Tokyo 3 (JP-TYO-3): 12:34-12:42

Oct 15, 18:20 UTC
Update - We have narrowed down the impacted regions to be E2 and E3 endpoint regions. Our list below has been updated to reflect this.

Oct 15, 18:10 UTC
Update - We are continuing to investigate this issue.

Oct 15, 18:00 UTC
Investigating - Our team is investigating an emerging service issue affecting Object Storage in multiple locations. We will share additional updates as we have more information.

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