Microsoft is releasing one of its biggest updates to Windows 11 today. It includes access to the new Windows Copilot, AI-powered updates to Paint, Snipping Tool, and Photos, RGB lighting support, a modernized File Explorer, and much more. Windows® 11 with Clippy™ 3.0 is yours for the taking. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is releasing one of its biggest updates to Windows 11 today. It includes access to the new Windows Copilot, AI-powered updates to Paint, Snipping Tool, and Photos, RGB lighting support, a modernized File Explorer, and much more. Windows® 11 with Clippy™ 3.0 is yours for the taking. ⌘ Read more
The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge ... ⌘ Read more
Cory Doctorow: Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through. Why does Apple hate repair so much? It’s not that they want to poison our ... ⌘ Read more
Google will send Gmail’s basic HTML view sailing into the great beyond starting in January 2024, after which time everyone who uses it will be switched to the service’s far more modern “Standard” view. The change appears to have been announced around September 19th in a Google support article. Though the vast majority of people use the Standard view on their PCs without question, the HTML version of Gmail ... ⌘ Read more
Projects become unmaintained every day. This is a fact of life, and is not the issue I am taking with The Apache Software Foundation. It is the way the foundation, and its contributors, do not disclose information relating to the lack of substantial updates or changes for nearly a decade, and seems to intentionally mask the lack of development. I sometimes forget Open Office still exists. I have no idea why The Apache Software Foundation ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve always been fascinated by remote island communities, and few places are more remote and more island than St. Helena. They have a wonderful page about communications to, on, and from the island, and it’s delightful. However you connect, the Internet on St Helena is slow and expensive! For technical details and pricing information please contact Sure. Assuming you are a visitor you are best to access the Internet via your mobile (cell) Device. Otherwise you wi ... ⌘ Read more
Intel is a newcomer to the world of discrete graphics cards, and the company’s Xe architecture is driving its effort to establish itself alongside AMD and Nvidia. We’ve seen Xe variants serve in integrated GPUs and midrange discrete cards, but Intel’s not stopping there. Their GPU ambitions extend to the datacenter and supercomputing markets. That’s where Ponte Vecchio (PVC) comes in. Like other compute-oriented GPUs, PVC goes wide and slow. High m ... ⌘ Read more
Years later, Todd Mortimer and I developed RETGUARD. At the start of that initiative he proposed we protect all functions, to try to guard all the RET instructions, and therefore achieve a state we call “ROP-free”. I felt this was impossible, but after a couple hurdles the RETGUARD performance was vastly better than the stack protector and we were able to protect all functions and get to ROP-fr ... ⌘ Read more
On github, there has been an increasing trend of using “Staleness detector bots” that will auto-close issues that have had no activity for X amount of time. In concept, this may sound fine, but the effects this has, and how it poisons the core principles of Open Source, have been damaging and eroding projects for a long time, often unknowingly. I’m not a developer and even I can instantly see such bots would create countless problems. I had no idea such bots were being used. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has opened a GitHub repository for a set of tools to create Windows drivers in Rust. This repo is a collection of Rust crates that enable developers to develop Windows Drivers in Rust. It is the intention to support both WDM and WDF driver development models. Note: This project is still in early stages of development and is not yet recommended for commercial use. We encourage community experimentati ... ⌘ Read more
The European Commission has fined Intel $400 million (€376 million) for hindering competitors’ access to the market through naked restrictions between 2002 and 2007. The fine comes after a long-running antitrust court battle dating back to 2009 when the Commission initially fined Intel a record $1.13 billion for abuse of dominance. While some of Intel’s ... ⌘ Read more
I had to do some digging into our archives to see if we ever covered GeckOS before, but apparently we haven’t – and that’s a shame. GeckOS is a pre-emptive multitasking operating system for the Commodore 64 and the PET, and should be easily portable to other 6502-based machines, and offers multithreading, TCP/IP networking, and more. Version 2.1 has just been released, and it adds a ton of new features and bugfixes. ⌘ Read more
In this article, we’ll talk about building up a tiny (micro) Linux “distribution” from scratch. This distribution really won’t do much, but it will be built from scratch. We will build the Linux kernel on our own, and write some software to package our micro-distro. Lastly, we are doing this example on the RISC-V architecture, specifically QEMU’s riscv64 virt machine. There’s very little in this article that is specific to this architecture, so you might as well do an almost ... ⌘ Read more
Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME’s GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo. Cairo is something most end users don’t really have to think about or worry too much about, but ... ⌘ Read more
The Wayland Color Management protocol has been years in the making and is needed for a client to specify the color space and HDR metadata of a surface. This color management protocol is ultimately needed for getting high dynamic range (HDR) support working out well within Wayland environments. This week an initial merge request was opened for implementing the draft color management protocol with the Weston reference compositor. ... ⌘ Read more
Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors. It’s less of a problem if you only do short ... ⌘ Read more
At its peak in 2017, the global smartphone market saw more than 700 brands fiercely competing. Fast forward to 2023 and the number of active brands (that have recorded sell-through volumes) is down by two-thirds to almost 250, according to Counterpoint’s Global Handset Model Sales Tracker, which has been tracking sales of these brands across more than 70 key countries. So many good brands and good ideas kicked to ... ⌘ Read more
Every six months, there is a new Java release. Ever so often (currently, every two years), Oracle labels a release as “long term support”, and Java users wonder whether they should upgrade. In theory, other JDK distributors could offer “long term support” for other releases, but it seems everyone is following Oracle’s lead. Should you upgrade? Here are the major features of Java 21. I omit preview and incubator features (which you are surely ... ⌘ Read more
GNOME 45 may have just been released, but that doesn’t mean GNOME 44 will be buried right away. GNOME 44.5 has just been released, packed with bugfixes and small tweaks – nothing groundbreaking. Reading through the changelog, it’s a long list of squashed bugs, so it should be an uneventful upgrade for most GNOME users who aren’t upgrading to 45 quite yet. ⌘ Read more
iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 offer several welcome improvements, tweaks, and new features. They also continue two trends that have dominated recent updates for both platforms: the expansion of widgets giving modular access to functions from a variety of apps, and on-device intelligence that improves search, recommendations, and more. This year’s update pushes both platforms forward just a bit—but not enough that too many people will notice. A more complete fe ... ⌘ Read more
It’s been a while, but Visopsys has had a new release, 0.92, with all the details in the changelog. There is a longer-term project to bring the operating system into the modern era, with things like 64-bit support, UEFI booting, and so on. In the meantime, this maintenance release features stability and usability improvements, bug fixes, and multitasker portability changes designed to further unshackle it from the x86 processor architecture. Visopsys has been in development since 1997, ... ⌘ Read more
This repository is part of the GoSub browser project. Currently there is only a single component/repository (this one), but the idea will be that there are many other components that as a whole make up a full-fledged browser. Each of the components can probably function as something standalone (ie: html5 parser, css parser, etc). In the future, this component (html5 parser) will receive through a ... ⌘ Read more
Installing Windows strictly through the Command Line is an important tool to have. If Windows changes the installer or out of box experience, you can bypass any changes with this guide! I had no idea this was possible. I knew you could open up cmd.exe during installation and do certain things there, but I didn’t know you could perform the entire Windows installation this way. I’m not entirely sure what the use cases are, but it’s definitely a neat trick. ⌘ Read more
The Raspberry Pi is known for its versatility and ability to run different operating systems but it seems that the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico can also run an OS. This impressive foray into the world of Palm PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) emulation on our favorite microcontroller comes from Dmitry Grinberg. They have shared an early demo of his platform known as rePalm in which he manages to run PalmOS on a Raspberry Pi Pico. We mentioned Grinberg’s work be ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft will release its next big Windows 11 update on September 26th. The update will include the new AI-powered Windows Copilot feature, a redesigned File Explorer, a new Ink Anywhere feature for pen users, big improvements to the Paint app, and much more. Windows Copilot is the headline feature for the Windows 11 23H2 update, bringing the same Bing ... ⌘ Read more
When you plug an Android phone into a PC, you have the option to change the USB mode between file transfer/Android Auto (MTP), USB tethering (NCM), MIDI, or PTP. In Android 14, however, a new option can appear in USB Preferences: USB webcam. Selecting this option switches the USB mode to UVC (USB Video Class), provided the device supports it, turning your Android device into a standard USB webcam that other devices ... ⌘ Read more
Today we have something that has taken months to write, and we feel that the best we have done is to give a sense of what Intel’s coolest CPU is capable of. The Intel Xeon MAX 9480 combines 56 cores with memory on the package. The memory is not standard DDR5. Instead, it is 64GB of HBM2e, the same kind of memory found on many GPUs and AI accelerators today. What seemed like a straightforward review at the outset became absolutely f ... ⌘ Read more
Mozilla has conducted one of the first – maybe even the first – studies into the effectiveness of browser choice screens, and they conclude: This research showed that browser choice screens have the potential to be effective. Well designed browser choice screens can improve competition, giving people meaningful choice and improving people’s satisfaction and feelings of control. And they can do all of this without overburdening people or taking too muc ... ⌘ Read more
If you’re running Windows try holding down CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + L. Then watch in bemusement as LinkedIn opens in your default browser. Windows watcher Paul Thurrott posted this bizarre keyboard shortcut on X (Twitter), noting that it’s an operating system hotkey. So why does Windows even have this? It’s all part of the Office key that Microsoft introduced on some of its own keyboards a few y ... ⌘ Read more
During the opening keynote at Intel’s Innovation event in San Jose, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger unveiled a score of details about the upcoming Meteor Lake client platform. Intel’s Meteor Lake marks the beginning of a new era for the chipmaker, as they move away from the chaotic Intel 7 node and go into a rollout of their Foveros 3D p ... ⌘ Read more
Here’s one major change coming down the road: long-term support (LTS) for Linux kernels is being reduced from six to two years. Why? Simple, Corbet explained: “There’s really no point to maintaining it for that long because people are not using them.” I agree. While I’m sure someone out there is still running 4.14 in a production Linux system, there can’t be many of the ... ⌘ Read more
The GNOME project is excited to present the latest GNOME release, version 45. For the new version we’ve focused on refining your daily interactions, enhancing performance, and making the overall experience smoother and more efficient. From subtle design tweaks to functional upgrades, GNOME 45 is all about refining the core desktop environment you rely on. GNOME 45 comes with a new Activities indicator, which replaces the “Activities” button with workspaces indicator, letting you know at a glance ... ⌘ Read more
As it turned out, Microsoft is testing the idea of adding folders to the Recommended section in Windows 11’s Start menu, giving users access to more recently added applications and suggested files. The release notes do not mention the change, and enabling it requires a third-party app called ViVeTool. I was forced to use Windows for a little while on a new laptop, an ... ⌘ Read more
Hetzner introduced its Ampere Altra powered arm64-based cloud servers earlier this year, making it possible to easily run OpenBSD/arm64 on their platform. The only caveat for now is that the viogpu(4) driver is required, which was committed by jcs@ in April 2023 and thus only available in snapshots. It will first appear in OpenBSD 7.4. Excellent news. ⌘ Read more
Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro’s “system on a chip” (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones. The other four CPUs are Arm-based but feature Huawei’s own designs and adaptations, according to three people familiar with the Mate’s development and Geekerwan, a Chinese technology testing company that took a closer loo ... ⌘ Read more
Google Chrome is getting a new feature that automatically plays YouTube and other videos in picture-in-picture mode (PiP) when you switch tabs or windows. Chrome’s new PiP feature is coming to desktops, including Windows 11, Windows 10, macOS and ChromeOS. If you’re watching a video on Chrome and decide to hop over to another tab, the browser will automatically place your vid ... ⌘ Read more
However almost every “circle” you can see in printed media (and most purely digital ones) are not, in fact, circles. Why is this? Since roughly the mid 80s all “high quality” print jobs have been done either in PostScript or, nowadays almost exclusively, in PDF. They use the same basic drawing model, which does not have a primitive for circles (or circle arcs). The only primitives they have are straight line segments, rectangles and Bézier curves. None of these can be used to express a cir ... ⌘ Read more
Java 21 introduces the notion of sequenced collections, the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) has been extended to maintain separate generations for young and old objects for improving Java app performance, virtual threads are now out of preview form, and the Windows 32-bit x86 port has been deprecated for removal. Java 21 also brings some new preview features including string templates, the latest iteration on the foreign function and memory API, unnamed classes and instance main methods, scoped values, ... ⌘ Read more
In court documents from the FTC vs Microsoft case, Google Stadia’s former product lead Dov Zimring was called to discuss the cloud gaming platform and competition in the gaming space. This led to several comments on why Stadia couldn’t compete in the industry from Google’s own point-of-view. Exactly what you expected: lack of players led to a lack of gam ... ⌘ Read more
There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this idea too religiously. Unfortunately, the actual choice is about having an app or not, and I’d rather take something over nothing. I mean, sure, but that doesn’t negate the fact that web applications – or, more specifically, Electron and Electron-like applications – are just bad. Any time I see an Electron application ... ⌘ Read more
Today we are beginning to roll out an update for the Paint app to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels (version 11.2308.18.0 or higher). With this update, we are introducing support for layers and transparency! Paint.NET is still better. ⌘ Read more
The Verge: Panos Panay has always been the force behind Microsoft’s Surface line. He helped bring Surface to life as a secret project more than 10 years ago. He’s presented the new devices onstage at events, showed up at malls to promote Surface hardware, and has steered Microsoft’s Surface tablets to success in the years since. Now, he’s leaving in a surprise departure announced just days before Microsoft’s next big Sur ... ⌘ Read more
iOS 17 expands on last year’s Lock Screen updates with the addition of interactive widgets and StandBy, a new feature that turns the iPhone into a mini home hub when it is charging. You can now see voicemail transcriptions in real time, and leave video messages in FaceTime. FaceTime also now works on the Apple TV with tvOS 17. Apple also released watchOS 10, tvOS 17, and HomePod 17 Software. Take a guess which one is the unwanted child. ⌘ Read more
KDE’s Nate Graham talks about Wayland, and sums up both its history, current status, and the future. Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite a bit lately with the announcement that Fedora KDE is proposing to drop the Plasma X11 session for version 40 and only ship the Plasma Wayland session. I’ve read a lot of nervousness and fear ... ⌘ Read more
Before the ubiquity of the Internet, before WiFi, even before Ethernet was affordable, there was the LocalTalk physical layer and cabling system and its companion suite of protocols called AppleTalk. A network ahead of its time in terms of plug-and-play, but not quite as fast as 10mbit/s Ethernet at 230.4 kbit/s. This article goes into great detail about setting up an AppleTalk network today. ⌘ Read more
The spread of Mastodon clients to alternative platforms is continuing, and today, it’s OS/2’s – the one that got away – time in the spotlight. Robert Roland is working on a Mastodon client targeting OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS, but it’s all still early in development. The first bits of code were only uploaded yesterday, so there’s a long way yet to go – but if you want to follow along, you can go to Roland’s Mastodon account, and of course, if ... ⌘ Read more
If you reach this page, you may be interested into this new category of Linux distributions labeled “immutable”. In this category, one can find by age (oldest → youngest) NixOS, Guix, Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, Vanilla OS and many new to come. I will give examples of immutability implementation, then detail my thoughts about immutability, and why I think this naming can be misleading. I spent a few months running all of those dist ... ⌘ Read more
But little was said at the time about connectivity and networking. It could IR-beam (consuming the battery) and sync, but other than muted complaints about missing Bluetooth (which would have consumed even more battery), no one said anything one way or the other about getting it on the Internet. And I’m all about Palm devices on the Internet. It turns out there’s a reason for that, and we’re going to patch the operating system so we ... ⌘ Read more
Phoenix is the latest addition to AMD’s long line of APUs (chips with integrated graphics). Ever since Picasso launched with Zen cores and Vega graphics, AMD’s APUs saw massive improvements from generation to generations. That’s largely because AMD started from so far behind. But Zen 2 and Zen 3 APUs were already very solid products, so Phoenix’s improvements make it a very dangerous competitor. AMD has put a lot of focus into reducing power consumption across every ... ⌘ Read more
Macs have brought a great deal to us over the years: desktop publishing, design, image editing and processing, multimedia, and more. One of the few fields where they have failed is programming, despite many attempts. Here I look back at some of those opportunities we missed. It’s a bit of an only mildly related aside, but even though I personally would love to get into programming in some form, it’s actually a lot harder to get int ... ⌘ Read more
I had no idea that Vim started on the Amiga, and I doubt many people do. ⌘ Read more
At WWDC earlier this year, Apple announced that upcoming versions of iOS and macOS would ship with a new feature powered by “a Transformer language model” that will give users “predictive text recommendations inline as they type.” Upon hearing this announcement, I was pretty curious about how this feature works. Apple hasn’t deployed many language models of their own, despite most of their competitors goin ... ⌘ Read more
Java 21 will be released on September 19, 2023, supporting record patterns in switch blocks and expressions. Such syntax is monumental (At least, in Java land). It marks the point where Java could be considered to properly support functional programming patterns in ways similar to Kotlin, Rust, or C#. And it marks the first point where I can say, as a Kotlin developer, that I feel jealous. I’ve got nothing to say about matters such as these, so I’l ... ⌘ Read more
Pineapple ONE is a functioning (macro) processor, that is based on an open-source architecture RISC-V. This architecture is becoming very popular these days, and it is well, open-source, so we chose to build a cpu only out of discrete, off-the-shelf components. You heard it right, there is no FPGA nor any microcontroller, there are just logic gates and memories. Our goal is to prove that desi ... ⌘ Read more
In short, no, I’m not making it up, I did make a virus back in 1990. I don’t have the source code, unfortunately, for two reasons. It was over thirty years ago. I’m a chronic hoarder, but seemingly not that chronic. The floppy discs containing the code were confiscated. No, my mum wasn’t proud, indeed she didn’t even know about this episode at the time, and still doesn’t. Not that she’d understand what a computer virus is, even if I attempted to explain it to her. What a great st ... ⌘ Read more
Last week, Microsoft started rolling out the modern Photos app on Windows. While the modern Photos app has several new editing tools, it removes the built-in “Video Editor” and replaces it with a web-based Clipchamp. If you’ve lost track of how many different photos applications Microsoft has shipped for Windows and what features they don’t and do have – the linked article has a good, i ... ⌘ Read more
Servo, the Rust browser engine originally developed by Mozilla, has posted an update about the project’s progress over the past month, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there. While our WebGPU support is still very much experimental (--pref dom.webgpu.enabled), it now passes over 5000 more tests in the Conformance Test Suite, after an upgrade from wgpu 0.6 (2020) to 0.16 (2023) and the addition of GPUSupportedFeatures. A few WebGP ... ⌘ Read more
Earlier this month, we linked to a story about how Android 14 would make it impossible for users – even root users – to modify system certificates on Android. We’re ten days along now, and it seems two new methods have already been found to work around this issue, making it once again possible to edit system certificates. The original author, Tim Perry, found a way with the help of a few other people over on Mast ... ⌘ Read more
If you crack the screen on the Pixel Watch, getting it officially repaired by Google isn’t in the cards. Several Pixel Watch owners have vented their frustrations about the inability to replace cracked screens, both on Reddit and in Google support forums. The Verge has also reviewed an official Google support chat from a reader who broke their Pixel Watch display after dropping the wearable. In it, a support representative states that Go ... ⌘ Read more
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 08 to September 15. It wasn’t a massive week for the GNOME project – at least when it comes to easily digestible improvements that fit neatly on a blog post – but there’s still a few notable points. First and foremost, the release of Libadwaita 1.4, which brings UI breakpoints, which allows developers to create arbitrary layouts for their applications at different sizes. It al ... ⌘ Read more
A lot is possible with a zipfile of data and just the programs that are either already installed or a quick brew install/apt install away. I remember how impressed I was when I was first shown this eurofxref-hist.zip by an old hand from foreign exchange when I worked in a bank. It was so simple: the simplest cross-organisation data interchange protocol I had then seen (and probably since) ... ⌘ Read more
Security is our number one priority. Chromebooks get automatic updates every four weeks that make your laptop more secure and help it last longer. And starting next year, we’re extending those automatic updates so your Chromebook gets enhanced security, stability and features for 10 years after the platform was released. A platform is a series of components that are designed to work together — something a manufacturer selects for ... ⌘ Read more
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is on trial in Washington DC over US allegations that it illegally maintained a monopoly in the online search business. Executives of the Mountain View, California-based behemoth have known for years that the company’s practices are under a microscope, and have encouraged its employees to avoid creating lasting records of potential problematic conduct, government lawyers allege. Googlers ... ⌘ Read more
Back around the time I convinced my family to switch from a 56 kb/s dial-up modem to ADSL, the website milliondollarhomepage.com was launched, and quickly became an Internet phenomenon, selling pixels for advertising space on a 1000×1000 canvas. 18 years later, the homepage is still standing, proudly displaying the Internet billboard of 2005, frozen in time. Some time ago I bought one of the expired domain names the page points to, pixels4all.com. In thi ... ⌘ Read more
At this point I was getting annoyed that I had spent so long on these things, so I just imported megalodon-rs to download my mastodon timeline instead of writing the code myself. The conduit itself is exported as a 32-bit dll with a single entry point called OpenConduit, which HotSync calls after loading your dll. I think there are supposed to be more functions exported, but it works fine so far ¯\\\\\\_(ツ)\\_/¯. Internally, the conduit just takes an empty PalmDOC database (PD ... ⌘ Read more_
California, the home to many of tech’s biggest companies and the nation’s most populous state, is pushing ahead with a right-to-repair bill for consumer electronics and appliances. After unanimous votes in the state Assembly and Senate, the bill passed yesterday is expected to move through a concurrence vote and be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. Excellent news from Calif ... ⌘ Read more
After several months of (public) work, ReactOS can now use UEFI boot. But that’s the major changes planned for this PR. As of the state of this PR UEFI boot will operate as long as you have a serial port you should be able to test it. Some more boot fixes will come down the road but this covers 85% of devices we’ve ran into. In fact, they’ve even made it possible for ReactOS to boot on the Steam Deck, which is surely a neat trick. I’m sure once this has be ... ⌘ Read more
KDE Gear 23.08.1 comes only three weeks after KDE Gear 23.08 and fixes various issues in several KDE apps, including the Dolphin file manager which now exports the copy location path with native separators on copy operations, and the Gwenview image viewer whose navigation works better with side mouse buttons. The Kdenlive video editor received quite some attention in this release with fix ... ⌘ Read more
The latest Haiku activity report is here, covering the month of August, and it’s a massive laundry list of fixes and improvements, but I couldn’t find any major big ticket features or fixes. August also happens to bring the first two final Google Summer of Code reports – porting .NET to Haiku, and improving various parts of Icon-O-Matic, a vector drawing program designed specifically for working with Haiku’s vector icon format. Also of note is tha ... ⌘ Read more
This is the August 2023 update to 86Box, bringing many improvements, bugfixes (especially for non-Windows users) and some new hardware. Mouse and keyboard support has been completely reworked, and should perform much, much better on all platforms, while also fixing a slew of bugs. Support for the ATI Mach8/32 was added, which is a first for the world of emulation, and VDE networking has been implemented as well (but not on Windows yet). ⌘ Read more
There was a spike in Explorer crashes that resulted in the instruction pointer out in the middle of nowhere. The start of a Raymond Chen investigation. ⌘ Read more
The Xfce Wayland road-map on the project’s Wiki has been updated a few times over the past two weeks, namely around the desktop panel plug-ins and applications support for Wayland. There still isn’t a firm timeline or release where they expect to have a complete Xfce Wayland transition complete, but ultimately are aiming to have a native Wayland experience that doesn’t depend at all on XWayland and will be using wlroots as part of its compositor. Many Xfce panel plug-ins ... ⌘ Read more
I love these kinds of investigations. ⌘ Read more
I know I keep harping on the declining quality and enshittification of Windows, but Microsoft just makes it so easy. In the changelog for the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds is this gem: Beginning to roll out with this build, Chat is now Microsoft Teams – Free. Microsoft Teams – Free is pinned by default to the taskbar and can be unpinned like other apps on the taskbar. So you buy a new Windows machine or reinstall Wind ... ⌘ Read more
But now I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted. What has happened? Across the last few years, as John Riccitiello has taken over the company, the engine has made a steady decline into bizarre business models surrounding an engine with unmaintained features and erratic stability. Unity is imploding in on itself, and it’s ver ... ⌘ Read more
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things). This was a great opportunity for me to learn more about ZFS (because I new ‘nada’ to start with). And I’m happy to share some of the knowledge that I gathered with you on this post. Please keep in mind ... ⌘ Read more
Thunderbolt 5 will deliver 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, and with Bandwidth Boost it will provide up to 120 Gbps for the best display experience. These improvements will provide up to three times more bandwidth than the best existing connectivity solution, providing outstanding display and data connections. Thunderbolt 5 will meet the high bandwidth needs of content creators and gamers. Built on industry standards – including USB4 V2 – Thund ... ⌘ Read more
Every release has a killer feature. Qt 6.6 features the opposite – staying alive. This blog post describes work to make Qt clients more robust and seemlessly migrate between compositors, providing resistance against compositor crashes and more. Qt 6.6 is bringing something to the Linux desktop we haven’t had yet: transparent recovery from display server crashes. The solution for this? Instead of exiting when the ... ⌘ Read more
With the release of Windows 10 21H2, Windows offers inbox support for Mopria compliant printer devices over network and USB interfaces via the Microsoft IPP Class Driver. This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on. Device experience customization is now available via the Print Support Apps that are distributed and automatically in ... ⌘ Read more
In the last few years, several other vendors have begun selling Mac ROM SIMMs too. Friendly competition is great, but it creates a potential dilemma for me if someone buys another vendor’s ROM SIMM and reprograms it with BMOW’s base ROM in order to get the on-the-fly ROM disk decompression and other features. It could turn into a situation where my base ROM software is subsidizing another competing product. To compound the problem, I didn’t have ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft published a blog post on the Windows Insider Blog in late August with a vague statement saying that “Windows system components“ were to begin respecting the default web browser setting. Windows 10 and 11 regularly bypass this setting and force-open links in Microsoft Edge instead. In my extensive testing, I haven’t found any changes in the new Windows Insider version. The issue here, I think, is in the wo ... ⌘ Read more
2 years ago, I learned of an open-source project called Graphics Gremlin (GG) by Eric Schlaepfer who runs the website Tubetime.us. It is an 8-bit ISA graphics card that supports display standards like Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). CGA and MDA are display standards used by older IBM(-compatible) PCs in the 1980s. The frequencies and connectors used by ... ⌘ Read more
Regular readers will know that I have a lot of love for the French Minitel system and own a couple. In the past I’ve written about using a Minitel 1B as a terminal and replacing the EPROM in a Minitel 2 to run custom firmware. Today I’m going to blog about a project called Minimit. The Minimit is a small, Minitel-shaped box that attaches to the Minitel’s DIN port and brings the Minitel experience back to life. The box cont ... ⌘ Read more
Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its “experimental” marking. The KSMBD in-kernel SMB3 server is now formally declared stable with Linux 6.6 in removing its experimental tag. Neat. ⌘ Read more
A major change introduced by iPadOS 17 that is going to make video creators and gamers happy is support for UVC (USB Video Class) devices, which means an iPad can now recognize external webcams, cameras, video acquisition cards, and other devices connected over USB-C. I started testing iPadOS 17 thinking this would be a boring addition I’d never use; as it turns out, ... ⌘ Read more
The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He’s not as well known as Fez’s developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he’s been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenan ... ⌘ Read more
Enter the trustbusters, led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law. In arguing for his bill, Sherman said to the Senate: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” ... ⌘ Read more
We’ve got new merch! The first round of merch turned out to be more popular than I thought, so it’s time to shake things up a bit and get some fresh new stuff in the official OSNews merch store. Before we start, if you want the limited edition quote T-shirt or quote mug, you have to be quick – I’ll be removing them from the store somewhere in the coming days, and they’ll never come back. This is your last chance to ... ⌘ Read more
SoftBank has been gearing up anchor investments in Arm Holdings among its clients and partners for months now (ahead of the upcoming IPO) and apparently Intel is among them. In a call for the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference, the head of the company’s foundry business unit confirmed that the chip giant has made an investment in Arm because its technology is strategically important for both Intel Foundry Services and Alt ... ⌘ Read more
Do you need software and hardware accelerated graphics drivers for Windows 9x running inside a virtual machine? Well, here’s SoftGPU, which will give you just that in Bochs, VirtualBox, Qemu, or VMware, for Windows 95, 98, or ME. The Github page provides detailed instructions on setting up the optimal virtual machines, and information about what, exactly, each virtual machine and diver supports ... ⌘ Read more
What, you thought we were done with the operating systems written in Rust? Oh sweet summer child. rxv64 is a pedagogical operating system written in Rust that targets multiprocessor x86\\_64 machines. It is a reimplementation of the xv6 operating system from MIT. As a pedagogical system, it supports very little hardware other than the text-mode CGA device, serial port, PS/2 keyboard controller, and PCIe AHCI SATA storage devices. xv6, in turn, is a reimplementation of Sixth Edit ... ⌘ Read more_
In the recent past I have discussed the Book 8088 and the Hand 386, which are newly made vintage computing systems. I concluded that those products, although not uninteresting were rather flawed. The Book 8088 was by far the more disappointing of the two devices. I have also been made aware of a project which tries to fulfill a similar niche, the NuXT motherboard. The NuXT is an 8088-based motherboar ... ⌘ Read more
As best I can tell, there is no broad consensus on how large a kilobyte is. Some say that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes while others say it’s 1024 bytes. Others are ambiguous. This also means that the industry does not agree on the size of megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and so on. Not entirely new information to most of us, I would presume, but in my head canon a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, even though that technically doesn’t make any sense from a metric perspective. To make matters worse, as ... ⌘ Read more
Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s ... ⌘ Read more
Created by Mozilla Research in 2012, the Servo project was the first major Rust codebase other than the compiler itself, and has since been a hallmark for experimental web engine design. Major components of Servo have been incorporated into the Firefox web browser, and several of its parsers and other lower-level libraries have become foundational to the Rust ecosystem. As a promising, modern, and open web engine for building ... ⌘ Read more
A month has passed since the last Plasma 6 status update, so it’s time for another one! First, what you’ve all been waiting for: a release date! We’ve decided that Plasma 6 will be released in early February of 2024. We don’t have a specific day targeted yet, but it’ll be in that timeframe. I’m feeling quite confident that the release will be in excellent shape by then! It’s already in good shape right now. 5 months should provide enough of a runway ... ⌘ Read more
Over the past few days, there have been a lot of reports in the media that the UK government was backing down from its requirement that every end-to-end encrypted messenger application inside the country had to give the government backdoor access to these messenger applications. However, after reading the actual words from the UK’s junior minister Stephen Parkinson, it seemed like all she did was give a “pinky p ... ⌘ Read more
To address this customer concern, Microsoft is announcing our new Copilot Copyright Commitment. As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we are providing a straightforward answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks invo ... ⌘ Read more
ELKS is a project providing a Linux-like OS for systems based on the Intel IA16 architecture (16-bit processors: 8086, 8088, 80188, 80186, 80286, NEC V20, V30 and compatibles). Such systems are ancient computers (IBM-PC XT / AT and clones) as well as more recent SBCs, SoCs, and FPGAs. ELKS supports networking and installation to HDD using both MINIX and FAT file systems. Version 0.7.0 was recently released, and it includes support for several new systems, among which is the Book 8088, a rece ... ⌘ Read more
Xcom is a crossplatform GUI system: a multi-windowed, multi-tasking environment. Xcom allows you to browse, copy, view and manage your files, start and stop programs, watch and listen basic media content and music. Unlike other windowing systems and protocols, it integrates the basic functionality as a monolithic, cohesive program. Xcom can run on top of various kernel, currently the DOS version is available publicly. Xcom is tiny in size, ... ⌘ Read more