For those with an eternal love of city builder simulation games, Cities Skylines II is for you. It comes just over eight years since the first game released, and promises to deliver all the realism that mod’s covered since.

Ask any IT engineer about their home lab and you’ll probably get into a conversation that rivals Cat lovers uniting or new parents talking about their babies. It can be long, passionate and you may end up never speaking to the person ever again. Well, ok maybe not that extreme.

It’s been a week since Debian released the latest iteration of their rock solid, super free Operating System - Debian 12. Codenamed “Bookworm”, it’s now on digital shelves all across the world for you to enjoy.

Every now and then, a game comes along that can teach you more about the world than your average school classroom ever could.

Microsoft have done a pretty good job with WSL, and while it still has a lot to do - for the basics, it’s pretty reliable and sure as hell beats spinning up VM’s every time you need to run a quick command.

The good folk over at Offensive Security had a surprise for us over the weekend. As part of the latest 2023.1 release of Kali Linux, they’ve added additional tools aimed at the purple\blue teams - defensive tools!

It’s been eight years since Cities Skylines blessed our PC’s with a fantastic city building simulator and helped us forget about the troubles Sim City provided in 2013. The good folk at Paradox Interactive have released this teaser:

The Internet is still similar to the wild west in many ways. There’s a lot more law enforcement than there used to be, but it’s still mostly about prevention, rather than justice.

One thing I’ve always liked about Android is the freedom to choose the default SMS app. Not that I’ve used SMS in a while, but when various services still rely on it - it’s nice to have the SMS messages combined with an existing messaging app, rather than something entirely different.

Congratulations on making it yet another year around the sun and keeping all your faculties and sanity intact (even if it’s just a bit!)

Rufus, the long-time application of choice for building ISO files on Windows, has added some great new features to their latest 3.19 release. Ever since Windows 11 was released, it imposed some rather questionable decisions upon the community, such as requiring a TPM chip, and forcing the use of a Microsoft account. But no more! These things can now be removed at the source thanks to their trusty ISO burner.

Exciting news in the world of micro-controllers for under £6! Raspberry Pi have released a WiFi enabled version of their successful (and tiny!) Pi Pico.

So long Microsoft Internet Explorer - you gave us hell for 25+ years, but yet somehow will still be missed*… a little.

Considering how long The Serpent has been online, we’ve not done a great job of making some of our older content available. It seems to get lost with every re-write, database change or new hosting provider. Well that changes now! Starting today, you can read some of the crap we’ve written as far back as 2002, and plenty of other articles since then. The database is a little worse for wear, so there are many years missing, but we’ve made available what we can.

I remember back in 2016 when Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux, I was super-excited to try this new feature. At the time I was working on Linux daily but only for pretty basic stuff, yet it was still stuff that Windows made difficult. Tools like grep, wget, ssh and nc required a whole VM to be running elsewhere on my machine.