simonw/pedalican Clearly I wasn't paying attention when these were first announced back in May, but today I accidentally activated a "pet" in Codex Desktop - a little animated robot, reminiscent of Clippy - and then learned you can create your own. So I did, and now I have a cute little pelican on a bicycle bouncing around my desktop giving me updates on my Codex tasks. Your browser does not support HTML5 video. The most interesting thing about this process was watching how the custom pet was created. I told it I wanted a custom pet that was a pelican riding a bicycle and GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh did the rest of the work, using several rounds with gpt-image-2 to generate the necessary sprite assets. I had it make extensive notes and record all of the intermediary steps . My GItHub repo includes every generated image and combined sprite sheet, plus GIFs for each of the animation loops such as this one, called waving.gif : That GIF was compiled from a single image generated by gpt-image-2 that looked like this: And that image was created by executing this prompt against the initial generated character reference image , which was created with this prompt , which has this structure: Create one clean full-body reference sprite for Codex pet Pedalican. Pet identity: A compact adorable baby pelican with a round cream-white body, soft coral-orange bill and feet, riding a tiny sky-blue bicycle [...] Place a single centered pose on a perfectly flat pure magenta #FF00FF chroma-key background. Keep the full pet visible, compact, readable at 192x208, and easy to animate. [...] I've been looking out for ways to use image generation to create simple game-ready sprites, so I spent some time digging into this mechanism to see how it works. The key implementation details are open source - these two skills in particular, both Apache 2.0 licensed: hatch-pet from openai/skills imagegen from openai/codex And yes, GPT-5.6 Sol did come up with the name "Pedalican". I like it! Tags: ai , prompt-engineering , generative-ai , llms , text-to-image , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , codex
While most fitness trackers are losing the screens to keep the price low, the CMF by Nothing Watch 3 Pro is a bit different. The budget-friendly smartwatch with a 1.43-inch OLED display is even cheaper than usual at Amazon, where it costs $69 in every color (the price fluctuates between $79 and $99). Some notable […]
The device is weirdly described as involving "mechanical elements that can move on their own" and the Bloomberg report includes the detail that the device is designed to "feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT."
We've been buying servers from Dell since the 2000s at 37signals , but I was never too impressed with their personal computers. They either felt cheap or enterprisey to me. Like they were made exclusively for people who are handed standard-issue laptops by corporate, and not something discerning techies would buy with their own money. But the new XPS line has completely changed my perception. I've now spent several months with the 2026 XPS 14 and 16, and last week I added the MacBook Neo-fighting XPS 13 , and all I can say is that these machines are fantastic! Great chips, great screens, great build quality. Superb packages. Which is very satisfying to see because there are few American business leaders I respect more than Michael Dell. He's been running his company for over forty years now, and he's still calling the shots! So to see the company pull a turnaround like this, so many years into its run, is very inspiring. I've written about the XPS 14 before , and as I noted back in April, a good portion of the credit for these new Dell machines being really good belongs to Intel. The 18A process is paying big dividends for both companies (and the rest of the PC makers). But Dell could still have stuck these chips into forgettable machines, and I wouldn't have had any interest. In fact, they did! Just last year, for the 2025 model year, they shipped new XPS machines with awful capacitive-touch function and esc keys. Two years after Apple had finally thrown in the towel on the ill-fated Touch Bar on their MacBooks! Dell also killed the XPS branding last year, and went with the truly uninspired Plus/Premium/Pro copycat branding. Like some cheap Chinese knockoff. It was embarrassing, to be honest. But unlike Apple, which introduced that cursed Touch Bar back in 2016, and then crammed it down everyone's throat for seven long years, Dell rebooted this nonsense almost immediately. Gave us back real function and esc keys, and revived the XPS branding. You could argue that they should have learned from Apple's mistakes to avoid their own, but the next best thing is surely a quick reversal. And what a reversal it's been. As I said, I've spent months using an XPS 14 as my main machine. It's been so good I even gave up on using a dedicated desktop machine. Now I just run everything off the XPS 14, connected to an Apple XDR 6K 32" (nobody has yet managed to beat this, and I've owned it for years). It's a great, simple setup. The XPS 14 is an expensive machine, though. Not more so than its direct competitors, but still, at $2,799 for the 358H/32GB/1TB/OLED unit, it's a lot. I'd spend that in a heartbeat, but not everyone is going to drop that kind of cash on a laptop. Especially if they already have a powerful desktop. That's where the new XPS 13 comes in. It's part of the PC industry's answer to Apple's new MacBook Neo, which analysts all thought would catch the other side flat-footed. Well, surprise, it didn't! Apple charges $699 for an 8GB RAM/256GB SSD Neo, whereas Dell wants $699 for 8GB RAM/512GB SSD, and even offers a 16GB RAM/512GB SSD version for $899 (there's no RAM upgrade possible for the Neo). But matching Apple on specs and price wasn't the surprise; it was besting them with a nicer screen and keyboard, and meeting them on build quality. The XPS 13 has a great 120Hz screen (something you don't even get on a MacBook Air at twice the money!), a superb keyboard w/ backlighting (also missing on the Neo!), and weighs 20% less at just 1 kg with every bit as nice an aluminum chassis. Now I'd forgive anyone their skepticism about 8GB RAM and Windows. Microsoft isn't exactly known for creating a responsive operating system on modest specs these days, but who cares, we have Linux! Of course, I've been running Omarchy on this thing for the past week, and it's frankly fantastic. As long as you understand the limitations! The Intel Wildcat CPU uses the same performance cores as the full Panther Lake chip, so single-threaded snappiness is all there, but it only has two of those, and then another four low-powered cores. So six total, but not a mix that's conducive to running big multi-core workloads, like local CI . This is where the XPS 13 meets the moment. As the agent craze has been taking over software development, you might have seen any of the many memes about half-cracked laptops, just so the agents won't halt with a closed lid. The obvious answer is of course to run these agents off a home server in the closet, connect them to something as slim and light as an XPS 13 over Tailscale, and then control it all over SSH. Used like this, you get a machine that runs a browser as fast as anything on the PC (thanks to those full-speed performance cores) while costing a fraction of a new top-spec machine, and having better close-the-lid ergonomics. Win-win-hurray. When I posted my enthusiasm on X about this new XPS 13, I got at least three replies with "Is this an ad???". No. This is not an ad. I bought the XPS 13 with my own money, and frankly, you couldn't pay me any sum to use a laptop I didn't like. I did try Dell's laptops a few years back, didn't like what I saw, and ended up spending a few years using Framework computers instead (they're still great too). I'm simply excited that the PC isn't giving up without a fight. That Linux has been on a run among early adopters. That companies like Intel and Dell are here to keep Apple honest. Competition is great. It was Apple's M chips that rejuvenated the laptop market, and they held a supreme lead for years. So it's lovely to see Intel, Dell, and others actually being ready to meet the challenge from the low-cost Neo right out of the gate. So I tip my hat, once again, to Michael Dell. Forty-plus years at the helm, not too proud to pivot quickly, and now the maker of my favorite Linux laptops. Well done, sir.
The countdown is officially on. In just a few weeks, the cloud-native ecosystem meets in Yokohama for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2026. Taking place on Tuesday, July 28 from 09:00 – 12:30, KeycloakCon Japan brings together...
Microsoft just released a long list of improvements for Windows 11 as part of its bigger patch Tuesdays, patching at least 570 security holes, almost triple the number fixed in last month's record-breaking release, according to Krebs on Security. It also includes the ability to pause updates indefinitely, as reported earlier by Windows Central. This […]
OpenAI's first device is set to be a smart speaker that lets you talk with ChatGPT, according to a report from Bloomberg. The device apparently won't have a screen, but will use a camera and additional sensors to "understand" your environment. The report comes just days after Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI that accused […]
Spain is back in the men's World Cup final for the first time since 2010. That's also when Spain won its only World Cup title. France had hoped to reach the final for the third straight tournament.