/root

Anki flashcards using AI

March 9th, 2026
Using AI to generate Anki flashcards has evolved rapidly over the past couple of years. Here’s a look at how it started and where we are in 2026.

The Beginning: ChatGPT Prompts (2023)

The first to provide an Anki flashcard-generating ChatGPT prompt was Jarret Lee in this Anki forums post: Casting a Spell on ChatGPT: Let it Write Anki Cards for You. The idea was simple — give ChatGPT a structured prompt and it returns properly formatted flashcards you can import.

AnkiBrain Add-on

Shortly after, the AnkiBrain add-on was developed, integrating AI directly into Anki’s interface. This made it possible to generate cards without leaving the application.

Current Landscape (2026)

The ecosystem has exploded. Here are the main tools available today:
- AnkiDecks AI — upload PDFs, PowerPoints, Word docs, or even YouTube links and get flashcards generated instantly
- Ankify — turns notes, PDFs, and slides into export-ready Anki decks with card preview and editing before export
- NovaCards — uses LLMs to generate cards from class notes, with a companion Anki plugin for in-app generation
- AnkiAIUtils — AI-powered tools to enhance existing cards with explanations, mnemonics, and illustrations
- Agentic AI approaches — tools like Claude Code can now generate batches of contextualised cards by describing the pattern you want
- MCP interfaces — AI models can now interact directly with your Anki collection through MCP connectors
My Approach

I still prefer writing my own cards for deep learning, but AI-generated cards are great for:
- Quickly converting lecture notes or documentation into reviewable material
- Generating vocabulary cards in bulk
- Creating first-pass cards that you then refine manually
The key is to always review AI-generated cards before adding them to your collection. Bad cards lead to bad learning.
TrueNAS 2026

March 8th, 2026
The latest episode of TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) — Episode 56 — dropped on March 6, 2026, and it’s packed with news that every TrueNAS homelab enthusiast and sysadmin will want to hear. Hosts Kris Moore and Chris Peredun (the TrueNAS HoneyBadger) cover the upcoming TrueNAS 26 release schedule, a deep dive into the new dataset tiering feature, and tackle eight viewer questions.

TrueNAS 26: A (Tentative!) Release Timeline

The big headline this week is that Kris and Chris finally lay out the tentative roadmap from the first TrueNAS 26 BETA release all the way through to the .0 general availability. If you’ve been waiting to know when you can get your hands on the next generation of TrueNAS software, this episode gives you the clearest picture yet. No more codenames, no more decimal versioning — as the team confirmed back in Ep. 52, TrueNAS is moving to a clean annual release cycle, and 26 is the first major fruit of that shift.

Dataset Tiering: Hybrid Storage Gets Smarter

One of the standout features coming to TrueNAS 26 is dataset tiering — the ability to mix fast flash and spinning-disk pools and automatically tier datasets (or shares) between them. This is an Enterprise-tier feature, meaning it won’t land in the Community Edition, but the architecture is fascinating for anyone interested in how ZFS and TrueNAS manage data placement at scale. Since this is implemented at the TrueNAS layer rather than directly in OpenZFS, pools remain compatible with standard OpenZFS if you ever need to migrate away, though some caveats may apply.

For those of us running pure Community Edition homelabs — Docker stacks, S3-compatible storage, and all — it’s still a great signal of the direction TrueNAS engineering is heading.

Eight Viewer Questions

As always, Kris and Chris close out the episode with a batch of community questions — likely touching on storage configuration, upgrade paths, and follow-up on ZFS AnyRaid and Spotlight search (truesearch) from recent episodes.

Why This Episode Matters for Homelab Users

If you’re self-hosting on TrueNAS Scale — running Docker containers, managing snapshots over Tailscale, or experimenting with S3-compatible backends like RustFS or Garage — TrueNAS 26 is a significant milestone. The annual cadence promises more predictable upgrade windows, and features like dataset tiering give a window into where the platform’s storage smarts are heading.

Watch the full episode on the TrueNAS blog or on YouTube.

T3 Tech Talk is a weekly podcast from the TrueNAS team. New episodes drop every Thursday.

So …
1. Beta 1 at the end of March
2. Beta 2 at the end of May
3. RC in July
4. Official release in September
VirtualBox: AMD-V VERR_SVM_IN_USE Fix on Linux

March 7th, 2026
If you’re trying to run VirtualBox on a Linux host with an AMD CPU and you get this error:
```
VirtualBox can't enable the AMD-V extension. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_SVM_IN_USE).
```
The problem is that KVM has claimed the AMD-V virtualization extension, and VirtualBox can’t use it at the same time.

Worse on Newer Kernels (6.12+)

This issue has become more common with Linux kernel 6.12 and later. The KVM modules are now loaded more aggressively at boot, even if you’re not using KVM. If you recently updated your kernel (e.g., to 6.14+ on Arch Linux) and VirtualBox stopped working, this is likely the cause.

Solution

You don’t need to recompile anything. Just unload the KVM modules:
```
sudo modprobe -r kvm_amd
sudo modprobe -r kvm
```
Then start your VirtualBox VM — it should work.

Making It Persistent

If you want KVM to never load automatically (so VirtualBox always works), blacklist the modules:
```
echo "blacklist kvm_amd" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-kvm.conf
echo "blacklist kvm" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-kvm.conf
```
Going Back to KVM

If you need KVM again (e.g., for QEMU), simply reload the modules:
```
sudo modprobe kvm
sudo modprobe kvm_amd
```
You can only use one hypervisor at a time — VirtualBox or KVM, not both simultaneously. That’s a hardware limitation of AMD-V/SVM.
Power optimizations in a Laptop running FreeBSD

March 5th, 2026
An annoying problem that I always had while running FreeBSD on my Dell Inspiron 15 5510 is the high temperature and fan speed. Doesn’t matter if it’s a live medium or post-installation — the average CPU temp is over 60 degrees Celsius.

With FreeBSD 15.0 (released December 2025) and the FreeBSD Foundation’s laptop project, things have improved significantly. Here’s what works.

Checking CPU Temperature

First, load the Intel Core temperature sensor driver:
```
kldload -v coretemp
```
Then check the temperature with:
```
sysctl dev.cpu | grep temperature
```
To load this automatically at boot, add to /boot/loader.conf:
```
coretemp_load="YES"
```
Power Management with powerd

FreeBSD ships with powerd, a daemon that dynamically adjusts CPU frequency based on load. Enable it in /etc/rc.conf:
```
powerd_enable="YES"
powerd_flags="-a hiadaptive -b adaptive"
```
This sets the CPU to hiadaptive mode on AC power (favors performance but still scales) and adaptive on battery (favors power saving).

C-States and Power Saving

Enable deeper CPU sleep states by adding to /etc/sysctl.conf:
```
hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=Cmax
```
New in FreeBSD 15: Modern Sleep States

FreeBSD 15 brings new power management features from the Foundation’s laptop initiative:
- s2idle (suspend-to-idle) support for modern standby
- New SPMC (System Power Management Controller) driver for s0ix sleep states
- Work-in-progress CPPC (Collaborative Processor Performance Control) for AMD processors — enabling finer-grained performance/efficiency control
Suspend and Resume

For laptops, suspend/resume support can be tested with:
```
acpiconf -s 3
```
If it works, you can bind it to your laptop lid by adding to /etc/sysctl.conf:
```
hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3
```
Results

After applying these changes, my Dell Inspiron dropped from a constant 60+ degrees down to around 40-45 degrees at idle, and the fan became much quieter. The combination of powerd with proper C-state configuration makes a noticeable difference on FreeBSD laptops.

More details: coretemp(4), powerd(8), FreeBSD Wiki: Tuning Power Consumption
ankiR mirrored by Washington State University!!

March 5th, 2026
Tip of the day – ntp – big offset mitigation

March 3rd, 2026
If you’ve ever rebooted a machine and NTP refused to sync because the clock drifted too far, you’ve hit the panic threshold. By default, ntpd will exit if the offset exceeds 1000 seconds.

The Fix

Add this to /etc/ntp.conf:
```
tinker panic 0
```
Setting panic 0 disables the panic threshold entirely, allowing ntpd to correct any offset regardless of size.

When Is This Useful?
- Machines that have been powered off for a long time (e.g., home servers, lab equipment)
- VMs that resume from a suspended state with a stale clock
- Systems without a working RTC battery
- FreeBSD jails or containers that inherit a drifted host clock
Alternative: One-Time Force Sync

If you don’t want to permanently disable the panic threshold, you can do a one-time force sync with:
```
ntpd -gq
```
The -g flag allows the first adjustment to be any size, and -q makes ntpd set the time and exit.
Proxmox Backup Server

March 2nd, 2026
Proxmox Backup Server for Near ZERO Downtime

March 1st, 2026
PostgreSQL 18: What’s New and Where It Stands in 2026

March 1st, 2026
PostgreSQL 18 was released in September 2025, and it’s packed with major improvements across the board. As of February 2026, the latest point release is PostgreSQL 18.3 — an out-of-cycle release on February 26th that fixes several regressions from the last update. Here are the highlights of the 18.x series.

Performance
- New asynchronous I/O subsystem (AIO) delivers up to 3x faster data reads
- Better index usage and parallel GIN index builds
- Skip scans on multicolumn indexes
- Improved OR condition optimization
- Faster hash/merge joins
Upgrades
- Planner statistics preserved across major upgrades — faster recovery of query performance
- pg_upgrade improvements: parallel checks, --swap option
Developer Features
- Virtual generated columns (now the default)
- UUIDv7 function — timestamp-ordered UUIDs
- Access to OLD/NEW values in RETURNING
- Temporal constraints (WITHOUT OVERLAPS, PERIOD)
Text Processing
- Faster Unicode collation (PG_UNICODE_FAST)
- Nondeterministic LIKE support
- Improved full text search behavior
Security & Authentication
- OAuth 2.0 authentication support
- FIPS mode validation
- TLS v1.3 ciphers now configurable
- MD5 auth deprecated — SCRAM recommended
Replication
- Default parallel streaming for subscriptions
- Conflict reporting
- Auto-drop idle replication slots
Maintenance & Observability
- Smarter vacuum freezing
- EXPLAIN now shows buffer, index, CPU, and WAL stats
- Expanded monitoring views
Other Notable Changes
- Page checksums enabled by default in new clusters
- New wire protocol version 3.2 — the first update since 2003!
Point Releases
- 18.1 (Nov 2025) — first maintenance release
- 18.2 (Feb 2026) — regular update cycle
- 18.3 (Feb 26, 2026) — out-of-cycle fix for regressions in 18.2
The AIO subsystem alone makes the upgrade worthwhile for anyone running read-heavy workloads. If you’re still on 17.x, now is a great time to plan the migration — 18.3 is stable and battle-tested. More details at postgresql.org.
Claude’s Connector for WordPress

February 28th, 2026

“The WordPress.com MCP server allows AI assistants to securely interact with your WordPress.com sites. It exposes tools for listing, searching, and viewing posts, pages, and comments, managing users and site settings, and retrieving statistics. By leveraging OAuth 2.1, it ensures that agents only access resources you’ve approved, making it easy to integrate AI-driven workflows into your publishing experience.”

You can use WordPress.com to:

Manage Content:
“Show me my latest blog posts” or “Search for posts about technology”

View Analytics:
“What are my site statistics for this month?”

Manage Users:
“List all users on my WordPress site”

Site Administration:
“Check my site settings and installed plugins”

https://claude.com/connectors/wordpress-com
FreeBSD 14.4 RC1

February 28th, 2026
Claude Code Security Vulnerabilities !!

February 27th, 2026

And I wondered why so many AUR package updates for the claude-code …

“Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple security vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s Claude Code, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant, that could result in remote code execution and theft of API credentials.”

“The vulnerabilities exploit various configuration mechanisms, including Hooks, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and environment variables – executing arbitrary shell commands and exfiltrating Anthropic API keys when users clone and open untrusted repositories”

https://thehackernews.com/2026/02/claude-code-flaws-allow-remote-code.html
February 27th, 2026
iXsystems brings back SMART to TrueNAS

February 26th, 2026

https://forums.truenas.com/t/we-re-bringing-some-smart-options-back/64029
Officially member of BioArchLinux

February 25th, 2026

I recently added my AUR package ankiR to the BioArchLinux repository, a repo that contains the majority of R Language related packages such as r-tidyverse etc.

https://github.com/BioArchLinux/Packages/pull/305