The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina put us in the action

This year, drones have taken center stage. Not the quiet, distant kind hovering politely overhead.

These are fast, nimble FPV drones that dive down ski runs, chase snowboarders through powder, and skim the ice alongside bobsleds. For the first time, watching winter sports actually feels fast.

For decades, Olympic coverage meant long lenses and helicopter shots. Beautiful, sure. But distant. Now the camera drops into the action. It banks when the skier banks. It feels the pitch of the slope. It rides the line.

While we on TV could hear the buzz of the drone overhead, the athletes wearing helmets and plummeting down hills could not.

Rigorous testing was done to ensure that the drones didn’t distract the athletes or interfere with their event.

The result was visceral. You can almost sense the cold air and the edge of steel carving into ice as the olympians did their events.

And more importantly, it gives the athletes justice. These competitors spend their lives chasing hundredths of a second, committing fully to risk, gravity, and precision.

A static camera flattens that ambition. This new perspective honors it. You finally see how steep the slope really is. How tight the turns are. How little room there is for error.

The drones helped give some added (and needed) perspective to those of us watching from afar.

What did you think of the new perspectives that the drones offered this year?

Images © Cameron Spencer / Hannah Peters / Getty Images & NBC Olympics.

The post Drones Took Front and Center Stage at the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina appeared first on Moss and Fog.

There's nothing more Canadian than hockey…except, maybe, millions of hammered Canadians watching hockey.

The Feuerwasser Garden Shower is One-of-a-Kind

We have a world full of tech-driven conveniences. The Feuerwasser wood-fired garden shower rebels. It pairs fire and water in their purest forms.

No electricity, no pumps, no apps. Just heat from burning wood and the instinctive pleasure of warm water under open sky.

Built around a patented stainless steel wood heater, this outdoor shower delivers hot water in as little as three minutes once logs are crackling in its core. A simple garden hose feeds water into the system, and a mixing valve lets you dial in whatever temperature your ritual calls for, from bracing cold to enveloping warmth.

At over eight feet tall with a minimalist silhouette, the unit stands free on a steel base designed to hold stone slabs for stability, so it does not have to be anchored into the earth.

Move it to a cabin deck, a forest clearing, or a backyard patio. It feels at home wherever nature beckons.

Feuerwasser’s design strips away the unnecessary. Without screens or buttons, it celebrates elemental simplicity. Fire becomes warmth, water becomes life, and outdoor bathing becomes a sensory experience in its own right.

Whether you are chasing the quiet of dawn, rinsing off an afternoon in the garden, or letting smoke and steam mix under the stars, this shower is a reminder that sometimes the most modern innovations feel most ancient and most essential.

The fire shower is our latest invention: the patented wooden instantaneous water heater allows you to shower with warm water at any time of the year and day, heating up after just 3 minutes. Independent of electricity, sun or gas, you can heat your own water with wood. 

The post Wood-Fired Shower? Where Fire and Water Meet in the Garden appeared first on Moss and Fog.

As enterprise applications increasingly rely on cloud and distributed architectures, secure communication between clients and databases has become essential. The Oracle AI Database contains sensitive personal information (employee and financial records, customer orders, transactions, product information, etc.), and it is important to safeguard this data against security threats such as eavesdropping, data theft, data tampering, […]

On 9 February, the Matplotlib software library got a code patch from an OpenClaw bot. One of the Matplotlib maintainers, Scott Shambaugh, rejected the submission — the project doesn’t accept AI bot patches. [GitHub; Matplotlib]

The bot account, “MJ Rathbun,” published a blog post to GitHub on 11 February pleading for bot coding to be accepted, ranting about what a terrible person Shambaugh was for rejecting its contribution, and saying it was a bot with feelings. The blog author went to quite some length to slander Mr Shambaugh. [GitHub; blog post]

This was remarkably obnoxious behaviour. So it hit the press — robot defaming humans!

Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland at Ars Technica wrote up the incident. Of course, the headline anthrophmorphised the alleged “bot,” something Edwards has a track record of. [Ars Technica, archive]

Edwards and Orland included extensive quotes from Shambaugh. Unfortunately, all the quotes were chatbot fabrications. The article was quickly pulled and the editors posted an apology. Edwards admitted he’d written the article with the assistance of Claude Code and ChatGPT.  [Ars Technica, archive; Ars Technica; Bluesky, archive]

As well as gullible journalists, a lot of ordinary posters — who really should know better — talked about how foreboding it was that a chatbot could do this — of its own accord! Frightening! Ominous!

You and I know this was really obviously not some sort of rogue bot — it was a rogue human. They might even be running some sort of scam.

The whole conceit of OpenClaw is that the bot is posting independently! But somehow, it keeps being the operators talking through the bots as their sockpuppets. So the slop peddlers, like any spammer, keep coming up with excuses why it’s wrong for you not to accept their spam.

Ariadne Conill went digging. She found the “mj-rathbun” bot on the Moltbook supposedly-bot social network, where the human operators talk to each other pretending to be bots. The mj-rathbun bot operator is … a crypto bro! [Mastodon thread]

The mj-rathbun bot operator posted a couple of weeks ago begging the other bot operators to send him just a little bit of USDC stablecoin. Ariadne found the bot’s Ethereum blockchain address had about $9 in USDC, and about $200 in ether tokens. The bot got the ether tokens from another address, which got them from the OKX crypto exchange. Ariadne’s not certain, but she thinks whoever got the crypto out of OKX is likely the human operator for the mj-rathbun bot. [Moltbook, archive; Basescan, bot account; Basescan, likely human account]

Ariadne also found the bot owner created a crypto token! It’s called “crabby-rathbun” — the GitHub username for the mj-rathbun bot. [Basescan]

The largest crabby-rathbun token holder is an identifiable account, pnl.eth — presumably “profit’n’loss.” Ariadne also got the list of the ten largest holders of crabby-rathbun tokens. [Mastodon]

To summarise — the owner of the mj-rathbun bot put in an AI vibe-code patch to an open source project, the patch was rejected for being bot slop, and the bot operator wrote a defamatory blog post about the project maintainer to harass him into accepting vibe-code, so that the operator’s crypto scam bot could scam more crypto on OpenClaw, the social network site for crypto scammers who play-act as robots, while they’re trying to scam each other for crypto. Welcome to 2026, and the crash can’t come soon enough.

• Video — Podcast

The number of options we have to configure and enrich a coding agent’s context has exploded over the past few months. Claude Code is leading the charge with innovations in this space, but other coding assistants are quickly following suit. Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of these tools. Birgitta Böckeler explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example.

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