Pook-Emu Bee: Links For 08-21-26

It is time to wrap up another perfect five-for-five Pook-Emu Bee work-week before we take tomorrow off for Newsletter Saturday.

Life Updates

I shared a photo of my new (Ebay, so “new”) Wacom One drawing tablet yesterday. While the “drawing” works as expected, I cannot get it to display an image. I think the annoying Wacom “X cable” is the issue, so I am ordering a replacement from B&H to see if that is correct before I move for a refund. In any event, I tested it on different computers to make sure it was not a computer-specific issue. That inspired me to pull out my touchscreen Fujitsu Lifebook, which I “upgraded” last fall with a new SSD and RAM (not to mention a replacement battery) but subsequently forgot due to being busy. It is now upgraded to Fedora 44.

My Fujitsu Lifebook with the KDE Plasma lockscreen.

I have an article project centered on this Fujitsu. You may think from the lockscreen that it is running KDE Plasma. That is sort of true, but not the full story. It is technically running Fedora’s KDE Plasma Mobile Spin. How many Plasma Mobile-on-laptop articles are there? Add it to my to-do list.

Links

1 | WordPress..Just Why? (JanerationX. July 23, 2026.)
Speaking as someone who has been a WordPress admin for more than six years, I have my fair share of complaints. With that being said and speaking solely for myself (granting different people have different needs and use-cases), I strongly prefer self-hosted WordPress (as in the software, not the service) to service-dependent solutions such as Pika, Bear Blog, Pagecord, and Neocities, and I would take WordPress over Ghost because it is more flexible. But for some people, some of the solutions noted by JanerationX would be better options, and were I starting today I may have opted for a different solution than WordPress, albeit none of the ones singled out for mention in the linked post.

2 | Comic Number 773 (Li Chen. August 21, 2026.)
Be careful what you say on the robot podcast.

3 | ‘GTA VI’ hackers threaten a nightmare scenario (Molly Liebergall for Morning Brew. August 21, 2026.)
I sincerely doubt any meaningful number of people will refrain from purchasing GTA VI due to leaks. For one, people who are excited for the story can avoid the leaks. For two, my understanding is that GTA focuses on game-play, it is not a movie or kinetic visual novel. Of course, I am not buying it regardless, so what I do I know?

4 | Whistleblower Arturo Béjar leads testimony in landmark trial against Meta (John Rowitch for NPR. August 19, 2026.)
I have not had an account having any nexus to a Meta property since I deleted my Facebook account in mid-to-late 2009 (I actually did not “make” that account, but that is a story for another day). My break-out article on NLJ involved my advocating for RSS/ATOM feeds over Facebook News for keeping abreast of worldly affairs. Finally, I have had less-than-positive things to say about children using TikTok, which, while not Meta, evinces that I have some interest in the negative effects of social media and children. Having noted the foregoing, I must concur with Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony (who gets a HT here) that the particulars of the concerns articulated by Mr. Béjar and 29 U.S. states are at best amorphous and fail to live up to the promise of the states’ allegations. Less charitably, I think I am dumber for having read that article.

5 | Diocese in Ghana restores remaining liturgical practices restricted during COVID-19 pandemic (Sabrina Amboka for EWTN News. August 20, 2026.)
I had to check the date to make sure they did not accidentally re-publish something from 5 years ago.

6 | Judge in Harvard Antisemitism Case Was Anti-Israel, Anti-War Activist, McGovern Campaign Aide (Ira Stoll for The Washington Free Beacon. August 18, 2026.)
There’s something charming about a McGovern presidential campaign controversy poping up as a story in 2026.

7 | AnduinOS is Windows without the frustration, and it just cracked the top 15 distros (João Carrasqueira for XDA Developers. August 17, 2026.)
This is the first I heard of it. Setting aside the fact that the Distrowatch rankings do not correspond to the real world, I would consider myself a skeptic of trying to make a Linux desktop look exactly like Windows out of the box. But assuming the review is accurate, AnduinOS sounds like a reasonable implementation of the idea that is trying to do its own thing to make for an interesting Linux experience. It is not something I would use, but I could see use-cases for the concept.

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