(Credit for cover image: CC-BY-SA ZarlokX)

On August 12th of this year, the first of a set of three consecutive solar eclipses visible from Spain occurred, and was the first total eclipse visible from mainland Spain since 1912.

Although rare, these events can be predicted decades ahead of time where and when they will happen. Having limited mobility, I was looking forward to this astronomic spectacle for more than 10 years.

It felt like forever, but The Yonic Corner is officially back! There have been a lot of set backs that prevented me from continuing working on the blog. But after a series of big and important changes, it’s so satisfying to go back to writing content for my blog.

So, here is a list of the big changes that have been going on as of recent, and what it means for me and this blog.

A few weeks ago, Uber announced they signed a deal with Chinese startup Momenta, as well as Pony.ai and WeRide to bring self-driving cars into Europe next year. Similarly, Baidu has also been making moves to test their own in Turkey and Switzerland later this year.

It all seems like by 2026–2027, Europeans will be having self-driving cars on the streets. However, much like Uber’s cab service itself, it’s highly likely this will not last long.

And you might not believe it if you’re keen to making a startup, but that’s actually a good thing for everyone for several reasons.

Normally I wouldn’t care much about Apple’s announcements at their keynotes and other events, but this one has brought me many concerns about what they were thinking when they came up with this.

On April 28th, 2025, the Iberian Peninsula power grid malfunctioned, causing a nation-wide blackout on Spain, Andorra and Portugal. Some towns in the Spain-France border also got affected.

For most of these areas, power went back on within the following 6 to 10 hours. But the region where I live was among the ones that took the longest for lights to return.

This gave me an opportunity that I sort of hoped would happen, but never thought there would ever be a realistic chance of happening within my lifetime: Taking photos of the night sky while in the downtown of a city. This was an occasion that was so rare that I had to take the chances at whatever the cost to not miss out.

Throughout the 2010s, we’ve seen the surge of apps that run on your browser. You simply log into a web page and you’d be able to make things do with your life. With that sparked the beginning of a dream: What if you could have your app running literally anywhere? With the web, that dream was made true.

However, it came at a bunch of hidden costs that even Big Tech is fully aware of, but the general public isn’t. And I don’t think it’d be too farfetched to say that there is a collective of app developers —particularly the most junior— who have yet to realize this trap that is affecting both users, maintainers and developers of these apps alike.

This is a cautionary tale for everyone about the upcoming future of apps that you can use on any of your devices.

It’s no question that optimizing images is one of the best practices web developers must take into account for a fast loading page. Not doing so can lead to a surge of bounce rates, resulting in an unfavorable SEO score.

When optimizing images, it’s common to set a custom width and height. But I found a more elegant way to resize them that doesn’t involve manually setting a width and height: Using aspect ratios.

Unlike the previous year, 2024 has been a fairly slow one in terms of game releases as a result of the fallout of layoffs that affected many studios and developers during these past 2 years.

However, new developments are bringing a new wave of change that’s bringing new players in the market, but also hanging its future in the balance.

If you’ve been recently playing online games, you may have noticed that a bunch of games have switched to what’s called “kernel mode anti-cheat software” for catching cheaters: League of Legends switched to Riot’s Vanguard AntiCheat, and most notoriously, GTA Online also switched to BattlEye.

These updates, while they do bring a lot of major improvements to anti-cheating, they also bring with them a lot of controversy: From tech experts showing a lot of concern over them, to people DDoS’ing GTA V Online services in protest for this change. But why make such a fuss about something that should, in theory, make things fair for all players? Or is there a danger lurking around?

As it turns out, kernel mode anti-cheat is a powerful tool, but it may be too powerful. In this post I want to give a layman explanation without the technical mumbo jumbo.

Sometimes, my blog will have some texts displayed in east Asian languages (mostly Japanese).

In the Legacy version, said posts will display an alert box, warning that if you’re browsing the site with an old operating system, strange text may appear. But if you can browse this version without any issue, you have nothing to worry about, since your browser has full support for East Asian languages already.

This post will continue assuming you’re running an old operating system (e.g. Windows 9x, Windows XP, or Mac OS Classic).

Once you’ve installed support for these languages, check the About ruby text section of this post to check if the text is displayed correctly.

Throughout October, archive.org has been the target of numerous DoS attacks, and the data of roughly 31 million users has been exposed.

At the time of writing this post, even though the Archive has been reportedly restored in a read-only manner, some of its main features still have connection timeouts, meaning they are still having some unresolved outages.

Worse still, it’s been reported that some of its content has been erased, although we still don’t know the scope of the damages.

Being one of the largest digital libraries in existence, its recent history has been a close parallel to the Great Library of Alexandria, with this event being probably the counterpart of the fire that burnt a large part of the library, although not completely.

Hopefully, it will soon be restored and remain relevant for years to come. Still, this should serve as a lesson for the future to prevent history from repeating.

Whoa, it’s been nearly a year since I promised part two of how I made the Legacy version of The Yonic Corner! The thing is, I wanted to complete the majority of the features of the version in order to fully cover the whole story.

And now that it’s finally feature complete, here’s the long awaited second part!

In part 1, I discussed about what visual style I wanted to use for the Legacy version of this blog. This part goes through the technicalities of making the design a reality.

What if the famous Windows XP wallpaper was made in the 1990s?

Lately I’ve been getting myself into making retro-styled renders from the 1980s to the early 2000s. This is a recreation of the famous wallpaper for Windows XP made with Blender 4.3 with the Cycles renderer.

I also have a 1024x768 standard wallpaper for old computers to use.

On last year’s retrospective on game development, I predicted that the gaming industry layoffs wouldn’t stop this year. Sadly, I was right on the money: We’ve surpassed the amount of layoffs from 2023 back in June.

And it’s not just the big studios that are suffering. The indie industry is struggling with a completely different kind of situation.

If you were to browse the Internet in its early days, you will encounter it very different from what it is today. Several websites would offer the possibility to customize parts of your own profile, allowing you to express yourself in the way you wanted and be creative in your personal web space.

But that is now a shadow of the past: Standardization and a “more corporate look” are seemingly now the norm. But why is this? I will explain it in depth in this post.

The performance of the blog might not be on par with when it was on the cloud, but I’ll be working on optimizing it little by little.

If you’ve seen books about astronomy, you may have come with a passage similar to this: The Moon looks upside down in the southern hemisphere compared to the northern one. But what about the equator? Clearly there must be something in between if it’s in the middle of the two hemispheres, right?