It doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it’s developing a “RISC-V Snapdragon Wear” chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to “commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US.” For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone’s first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it’s the first announced mass-market RISC-V An ... ⌘ Read more
It doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it’s developing a “RISC-V Snapdragon Wear” chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to “commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US.” For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone’s first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it’s the first announced mass-market RISC-V An ... ⌘ Read more
Many developers believe creating apps for Windows on Arm is difficult, but developing for Arm is easier than you think, and Microsoft is here to help! It is my pleasure to announce a new App Assure Arm Advisory Service to help developers build Arm-optimized apps. This service is in addition to our existing promise: your apps will run on Windows on Arm, and if you encounter any issues, Microsoft will help you remediate them. ... ⌘ Read more
A new OpenBSD release means a ton of new features, and OpenBSD 7.4 is no different. It adds a VirtIO GPU driver, built-in leak detection for malloc, support for AMD processor microcode updates, and a whole lot more. If you want the really detailed list of changes, hop on over to the changelog, and OpenBSD users will already know how to update. ⌘ Read more
But thanks to all those other cyberdogs, Apple’s own Cyberdog — a seemingly ordinary web browser and Internet suite with some unusual capabilities — has since slid into search engine obscurity. Apple had some big plans for it, though, and even wanted to give developers a way to develop their own components they could run inside of it. Not just plugins, either: we’re talking viewers, UI elements and even entire protoc ... ⌘ Read more
The build has added a new separate “System Components” section in the Windows 11 Settings under the “System” menu. When one launches this System Components option, all the system applications appear under this section. This is a nice change, as it will make it easier to remove some of the garbage that comes with Windows. ⌘ Read more
In certain versions of Windows 10, you may receive a notification with a warning about Microsoft-verified apps when you run the Firefox installer. This is just so transparently anti-user. ⌘ Read more
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.” He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”. Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology. Anyone who has tried to find anything on Google ... ⌘ Read more
This is a big shift from the Google of old. People in this industry talk, even when they work for the companies that make these products. Previously, Google was very cautious about doing anything that would create a rift between itself and all the vendors that made Android what it is today. Very little was held back because Google needed to keep ... ⌘ Read more
Window Maker Live (wmlive) is an installable Linux live CD/ISO, and is based mostly on the recently released “Bookworm” branch of Debian Linux. It relies on the extensively preconfigured Window Maker window manager as its default graphical user interface. It can also be considered as an alternative installation medium for Debian/Bookworm. As such, wmlive is fully compatible with the official Debian/Bookworm repositories for security updates and bug fixes. We’r ... ⌘ Read more
In case you’re wondering why you can’t download the latest Ubuntu desktop version that was released earlier this week – it seems to have a bit of a rogue translation issue. A community contributor submitted offensive Ukrainian translations to a public, third party online service that we use to provide language support for the Ubuntu Desktop installer. Around three ... ⌘ Read more
Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86\\_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Waland on my desktop. So here we go, let’s write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland, without any libraries, this time in C. In case you’re bored this weekend. ⌘ Read more_
The primary new feature of this latest release is this one: Block cloning is a facility that allows a file (or parts of a file) to be “cloned”, that is, a shallow copy made where the existing data blocks are referenced rather than copied. Later modifications to the data will cause a copy of the data block to be taken and that copy modified. This facility is used to implement “reflinks” or “file-level copy-on-write”. Many common file copying programs, including newer versions of /bin/cp ... ⌘ Read more
Suppose, hypothetically, that you have some DNS servers that are exposed to the Internet behind an OpenBSD PF-based firewall. Since you’re a sensible person, you have various rate limits set in your DNS servers to prevent or at least mitigate various forms of denial of service attacks. One day, your DNS servers become extremely popular for whatever reason, your rate limits kick i ... ⌘ Read more
Several years ago, Google introduced Discover as a feature of Google Search on mobile devices. This feature populates content related to a user’s interests, based on their Web and App Activity. The Google Discover feed is displayed under the search box in Google’s mobile apps and on the left-most pane of the Home screens on some Android devices. However, Google has now begun testing the Discover feed on the deskt ... ⌘ Read more
Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like th ... ⌘ Read more
In the release notes for the latest Windows 11 Insider Build, there’s more notes about how Windows in the EU/EEA is diverging more and more from Windows for the rest of the world. In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows will now require consent to share data between Windows and other signed-in Microsoft serv ... ⌘ Read more
Patents are thought of by some as hardware focused and used by the big guys to intimidate with petty lawsuits. In reality, of course, patents are used for much more. They are used to help secure financing, attract M&A interest, create partnerships, and more. From 2007 to 2011, a particularly interesting patent lawsuit took place that showcases just how strategic patents can be. i4i Limited, a Canadian company, sued Microsoft over a patent it owned relating to custom X ... ⌘ Read more
This month, more than three dozen victims allegedly terrorized by stalkers using Apple AirTags have joined a class-action lawsuit filed in a California court last December against Apple. They alleged in an amended complaint that, partly due to Apple’s negligence, AirTags have become “one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers” because they can be easily, cheaply, and covertly use ... ⌘ Read more
Summarising Ubuntu 23.10 in just one word is tricky, but ‘refinement’ feels an apt choice. GNOME 45 brings a bevvy of buffs to the core desktop experience; improved window tiling; a sharper-looking web-browser; a pair of brand-new Flutter-based apps; and a colossal change to the amount of software preinstalled in new Ubuntu installations. Foundationally, Ubuntu 23.04 runs on Linux kernel 6.5, ships Mesa 23.2 graphics drivers (with in-distro access to proprietary NVIDIA drivers for those ... ⌘ Read more
Linux is an operating system, similar to Windows, but with many different versions due to the nature of being open source and fully customizable. To install Linux, you must choose an install method and choose a Linux distribution. So that’s a thing. ⌘ Read more
System76, the leading US-based Linux computer and keyboard manufacturer, made several new changes to their desktop line in order to optimize AI workloads and other fields reliant on heavy component use. The main focus: An airflow optimization that prevents throttling, putting their desktops at the top of performance charts. A new starter desktop, Thelio Spark, will also debut as a productiv ... ⌘ Read more
Cold War–era computing has a poor reputation. The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers. But then there was Yugoslavia’s Galaksija, a very inspired bid to put a computer into the hands of regular comrades. The Galaksija is a Z80-based, 8-bit DIY machine, cleverly designed so that its bill of materials meshed exactly w ... ⌘ Read more
‘Dread’ has been featured many times on Indie Retro News, as with every new update the Amiga 500 version looked better than ever with fabulous new textures and new zones to visit. Well if you’re looking for more gaming news on this upcoming first person shooter, we have not only been informed that a new demo has been made available, but the latest footage and detailed press release shows that John is true to his word in bringing a Doom-l ... ⌘ Read more
Jason Snell: It’s incredibly frustrating. This is my software, running on my computer, yet there are moments when it feels like Apple thinks it’s really in charge. It needs to back off. He’s so close. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has announced it’s removing VBScript from future Windows releases. VBScript is being deprecated. In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system. VBScript has been part of Windows for almost 30 years, first shipping in 1996. VBScript has a long history of serving as a vector for malware, which probably explains its removal from Windows. ⌘ Read more
Debian Bookworm itself is mostly made up of incremental updates of the software that was in the previous Debian Bullseye release. There are a few small changes — have a look here for the list — but they mostly won’t affect Raspberry Pi users. So Bookworm itself really hasn’t resulted in many changes. However, for the last year or so we have been working on some major architectural changes to the Raspberry Pi ... ⌘ Read more
Happy fifth birthday to SerenityOS! The alternative operating system project just posted its fifth birthday summary covering the preceding year, and it’s been yet another good one. The number of contributors keeps rising, and interest remains solid. The Serenity Browser, spun out as a cross-platform browser project, has picked up considerable funding and even a few employed developers. SerenityOS itself went 64-bit-only this year, and added support for V ... ⌘ Read more
This means the next time you sign in to your account, you’ll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins. It also means you’ll see the “Skip password when possible” option toggled on in your Google Account settings. To use passkeys, you just use a fingerprint, face scan or pin to unlock your device, and they are 40% faster than passwords — and rely on a type of cryptography that makes them more secure. But while they’re a big step forward, ... ⌘ Read more
That second agent proved quite capable, not only agreeing that the situation was strange, but also looking into issues on Apple’s side. Which led to the somewhat bizarre conclusion of this story: after perhaps 20 minutes on the phone, he seemed to hit on something. I heard him laugh and say something along the lines of “that explains it” and then, with my consent, put me on hold. When he came back, he said—and I’m not exactly quoting, but close enough: “I’m sorry, ... ⌘ Read more
Last year we wrote about how moving native code in Android from C++ to Rust has resulted in fewer security vulnerabilities. Most of the components we mentioned then were system services in userspace (running under Linux), but these are not the only components typically written in memory-unsafe languages. Many security-critical components of an Android system run in a “bare-metal” environment, outside of the Linux kernel, and these are historically written in C. As part of our e ... ⌘ Read more
Nightcap lets you run old Windows screensavers under XScreenSaver, using wine. That’s it. That’s the Github description. ⌘ Read more
Today marks the 6th time we are releasing new functionality in the Qt 6 series, with small and large additions that make both UI and backend development more productive and fun. Several of the new features come as technology previews, and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can get everything in tip-top shape for the next LTS release! Lots of new goodies for Qt developers. ⌘ Read more
This week, Windows 11 marked its second anniversary and the end of the initial release, version 21H2, which was infamous for its lack of polish and certain features. However, Windows 11 also introduced new things, such as a redesigned File Explorer, which later received tabs support and plenty of modernized UI elements and features. The Windows 11 Moment 4 update Microsoft released ... ⌘ Read more
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Apple’s macOS gaming policy of only offering a proprietary, Apple-only API isn’t exactly paying off. One of the most popular online games in history, CS:GO, is removing support for macOS, and it won’t be coming back. From here on out, the game will only be available on 64-bit Windows and Linux. That cycle played out again in Valve’s recent Count ... ⌘ Read more
ECC support has been standard on Ryzen processors, but with the recent introduction of the Ryzen 7000 series and the new AM5 socket, any mention of ECC was dropped from specification pages and similar documentation. It turns out, though, that there’s more to this story. A couple months ago I came across a topic on the ASRock forums talking about ECC support on AM5 motherboards, in which a user called ApplesOfEpicness said that they’d worked with an AMD e ... ⌘ Read more
A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment. Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 ... ⌘ Read more
As many of you will know from personal experience, there is a longstanding issue with VoiceOver on Mac where Safari will frequently become unresponsive with VoiceOver repeatedly announcing the message “Safari not responding.” When this issue occurs, the user’s Mac may become unusable for up to several minutes at a time. Sometimes it can be r ... ⌘ Read more
ZFS was promised, and didn’t arrive. In fact, there were about 4 of us on the beta program who saw the original zfs implementation, and it was quite different from what we have now. What eventually landed as zfs in Solaris was a complete rewrite. The beta itself was interesting – we were sent the driver, 3 binaries, and a 3-line cheatsheet, and that was it. There was a fundamental philosophy here that the whole thing was supposed to be so easy to use and sufficiently obvious that it didn’t nee ... ⌘ Read more
Running a 16K page size kernel implies some userspace applications that assume that the page size is 4K will break. While the Asahi Team did an amazing work fixing many of them, there’s little anyone can do (at least, at a scale) to fix applications that ship in binary form. And the prime example of this are x86\\_64 (a 4K page size platform) games. While it’s technically possible to run Apple Silicon devices with a 4K page size kernel, that would r ... ⌘ Read more_
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900, as well as the Type-R codec, which renders the R700 capable of performing real-time SP recordings with Sony’s last evolution of ATRAC1. I bet the market for hacking the best music format of all time is small t ... ⌘ Read more
In this guide, we’ll build a very tiny Linux kernel, weighing in at 789 K, and requiring no MMU support. We’ll write some userspace code and this will be deployed on a virtual RISC-V 64-bit machine, without MMU, and we’ll run some tiny programs of our own. As a reminder, please go through the guide for a micro Linux distro to understand the concepts behind what we’re doing today: building the kernel, initramfs, etc. This guide is basically a continuation of that ... ⌘ Read more
Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project. The fact that Debian is a relatively slow-acting, complex democracy is probably why it has survived for so long, and why it’s become the bedrock for ... ⌘ Read more
Little did we realise then that Sierra was going to change all that, and by Mojave we’d be enduring 4,000 and more log entries in a second, when our Macs were feeling loquacious. That was because Apple introduced the Unified log, with its entries written not in plain text but compressed binary format. This was the death-blow for the casual reader of logs: for a start, the replacement Console app was unable to access any log entries made in the ... ⌘ Read more
When it comes to famous operating systems for the Z80 and similar Zilog processors, the first and maybe only one to come to mind is CP/M, which was even made its presence known on the dual-CPU (8502 and Z80) Commodore 128. Yet Zilog also developed its own operating system, in the form of the comprehensively titled Z80 Operating System with Relocatable Modules and I/O Management (Z80-RIO for short). With limited documentation having survived, Ralf ... ⌘ Read more
In just a few days, Microsoft will end support for Windows Server 2012 after over 11 years on the market. Ironically, the launch of the server OS in 2012 was also the official end for another server product from Microsoft that had first gone on sale on October 10, 2007, nearly 16 years ago. It was called Windows Home Server, and it was an effort to expand Microsof ... ⌘ Read more
I don’t necessarily agree. These new editing tools in smartphones are nothing a semi-decent Photoshop user can’t do in an afternoon, and editing photos is as old as photography itself. All these tools do is further democratise photo editing, and this was always going to happen, smartphones or not. Adding watermarks or other markers is never going to work, since even if it’s entirely unfalsifiable – ... ⌘ Read more
The VAX served DEC well throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s, but as the latter decade went on, DEC began to face stiff competition from UNIX vendors, particularly Sun Microsystems. DEC struggled to change with the times, and the company ultimately failed. In 1998, DEC was acquired by Compaq, and in 2001, Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. The DEC line, including the VAX/VMS system, was discontinued and faded from t ... ⌘ Read more
In addition to several new full-screen utilities, like DEFRAG to defragment your hard disk (licensed from Symantec), MSBACKUP to efficiently backup your hard disk (also licensed from Symantec), and MSAV to check for viruses (licensed from Central Point Software), there were a number of new command-line programs, such as CHOICE, DELTREE, MOVE, MSCDEX, and SMARTDRV. But the biggest addition to MS-DOS 6.00 was a new fe ... ⌘ Read more
Writing a cycle-accurate emulator for a computer system is more than just understanding all the CPU instruction timings. A computer is a complete system with peripherals, interrupts, IO bus signals, and DMA. All this comes with an array of different timings and quirks. When software like Area 5150 is written that requires perfect cycle timing, it can be a challenge to provide the level of accuracy needed for the software to function. Area 5150 in particular requires precise coord ... ⌘ Read more
I want to address a controversy that has gripped the Rust community for the past year or so: the choice by the prominent async “runtimes” to default to multi-threaded executors that perform work-stealing to balance work dynamically among their many tasks. Some Rust users are unhappy with this decision, so unhappy that they use language I would characterize as melodramatic. What these people advocate instead is an alternative architecture that they call “thread-per-core.” They promise that this archi ... ⌘ Read more
Windows users who have installed the preview update may see advertisement when they interact with Copilot. Asking Copilot for the best gaming laptops returns five suggestions, similar to what Bing Chat would provide, and ads at the end of the output. Copilot for Windows has barely shipped and Microsoft is already using it to push ads into the operating system you paid for. “AI” is just a fancy autocomplete design ... ⌘ Read more
While this has been a hunch for a while among the Windows enthusiast community, a new leak seems to be further providing somewhat solidifying evidence that it could indeed be the case, that Microsoft’s next-gen OS, casually referred to as Windows 12, could be a subscription-based OS. I have no innate issue with the subscription model for software – especially in the mobile world ... ⌘ Read more
Get ready for the contents of your files in Microsoft OneDrive to be scanned and ingested by Microsoft’s “AI” efforts. As announced at Build in May and again in September we are bringing Copilot to your files in SharePoint and OneDrive so you can ask open-ended questions related to an individual file or get a summary of the content. And you can do this without opening the file and no matter where it lives, in OneDrive, Share ... ⌘ Read more
Lenovo is forecasting that the vast majority of its devices will be repairable by 2025 – as will the repair parts themselves – but it is not intending to specify where customers should have their kit fixed. “On repairability, we have a plan that by 2025 more than 80 percent of the repair parts will be repaired again so that they they enter into the circular economy to reduce the impact to the environment ... ⌘ Read more
Following preliminary objections over Google’s data terms, set out back in January by Germany’s antitrust watchdog, the tech giant has agreed to make changes that will give users a better choice over its use of their information, the country’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said today. The commitments cover situations where Google would like to combine personal data from one Google serv ... ⌘ Read more
DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has recently been working on further refinements to HAMMER2 for the next DragonFlyBSD operating system release. The latest HAMMER2 activity in the past few days has included improving its CPU performance and adding a new “hammer2 recover” directive. The HAMMER2 recover support allows for recovering/undoing single files as well as preliminary support to recover entire direct ... ⌘ Read more
Google unveiled the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones and the Pixel Watch 2 today, and while I no longer spend too many words on new phone releases on OSNews these days, this new phone does come with a rather major promise by Google. The Pixel 8 will get seven years of Android OS updates with security patches, as well as quarterly Feature Drops. Launching with Android 14, the Pixel 8 and ... ⌘ Read more
Google has released Android 14 – for Pixel devices, anyway. Android Police’s review summarises this rather small release: After months and months of beta testing, Android 14 has finally arrived in stable. There was a tremendous buildup of excitement around this release after the rather lackluster Android 13, which only introduced some small refinements following the big Android 12 design refresh on Pixel phones. Android 14 certainly stays true to the look ... ⌘ Read more
Redox OS, the Rust-based operating system aiming to be a general purpose operating system, has detailed its priorities for 2023 and 2024, and there’s ambitious stuff in there. First, the project wants to shoe up its support for server tooling so that Redox can host its own website. This will require porting a number of popular server tools, like Apache, Nginx, and so on. Second, they also want Redox to be self-hosting in the sense that i ... ⌘ Read more
When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That’s the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Y ... ⌘ Read more
The basic premise of Microsoft’s Arm64EC is that a single virtual address space can contain a mixture of ARM64 code and X64 code; the ARM64 code executes natively, whereas the X64 code is transparently converted to ARM64 code by a combination of JIT and AOT compilation, and ARM64 ⇄ X64 transitions can happen at any function call/return boundary. I wish Windows on ARM would get more traction, because I want more ARM laptops to run Linux on. It seems clear by now that Linux OEMs ar ... ⌘ Read more
As I was preparing the Windows NT RISC exhibit for VCF west, I realized that I’m missing a rather important piece of the history. While I will be showing the potentially last DEC Alpha Windows build ever – AXP64 2210, I don’t have anything earlier than NT 3.51. I would be nice to showcase the very first RTM version – NT 3.1. From time perspective, NT did not get popular until the version 3.5 and later. Windows NT 3.1 would be considered rare even on a 386, let alone o ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is making the Windows 11 setup process a little more entertaining, at least on some laptops. I unboxed the Surface Laptop Studio 2 yesterday (read Monica Chin’s review here) and noticed that Microsoft now prompts you to play the modern version of its SkiFree game while you wait for updates to be applied. A fun little touch. ⌘ Read more
Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads. The US tech giant will also charge $17 for Facebook and Instagram together for use on desktop, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans, which are likely to be rolled out in coming weeks. The move com ... ⌘ Read more
The full-featured, high-precision spreadsheet application for the Pico-8 that nobody asked for has finally arrived! PicoCalc is a feature-complete clone of the 1979 classic VisiCalc, which introduced the world to an entirely new category of business application. Steve Jobs said of VisiCalc, it’s “what really drove — propelled — the Apple ][. This is a few years old already, but still an amazing piece of work. ⌘ [Read more](https://www.osnews.com/story/137352/picocalc-a-fully-functional-clone-of-visicalc/)
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t search ... ⌘ Read more
The Verge has an excellent write-up of Satya Nadella’s day in court during the Google antitrust trial today. The power of defaults is one of the central questions of the entire US v. Google case and will continue to come up. (The witness after Nadella is former Neeva CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who has also said his search engine was crushed in part because overcoming Goog ... ⌘ Read more
One aspect of the jailbreak scene that always seemed like black magic to me, though, was the process of jailbreaking itself. The prospect is pretty remarkable: take any off-the-shelf iPhone, then enact obscene rituals and recite eldritch incantations until the shackles drop away. The OS will now allow you to run any code you point at it, irrespective of whether the code has gone through Apple’s blessed signing process, paving the way for industrious tweak developers like myself. A fe ... ⌘ Read more
All Chromebook Plus laptops offer faster processors and double the memory and storage, giving you the power to get more done, easily. All Chromebook Plus laptops also come with a Full HD IPS display — which means you get a full 1080p HD experience when watching streaming content, and crisp, clear viewing for reading, creating content or editing photos and videos. Finally, there’s a 1080p+ webcam with temporal noise reduction ... ⌘ Read more
A lot has changed in 20 years. In 2003, the main question was: what encoding is this? In 2023, it’s no longer a question: with a 98% probability, it’s UTF-8. Finally! We can stick our heads in the sand again! The question now becomes: how do we use UTF-8 correctly? Let’s see! Everything you ever wanted to know about how Unicode works, and what UTF-8 does. Plus some annoying web ... ⌘ Read more
Budgie 10.8.1 is the first minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release adds dark style preference support, squashes some bugs around our new StatusNotifierItem implementation, adds keyword support for search, and more! The Budgie Desktop renaissance continues. ⌘ Read more
The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of “design”. Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly “owing” their hardware. It’s ... ⌘ Read more
I picked pico-8 as the engine simply because I know I work better with constraints and the limited size and capabilities of it would ensure I would not attempt perfection since I know I do not have the skills to reach it anyway. I have been a professional developer for 10+ years so code syntax is not my biggest issue, but knowing how to architect things, deal with the art and sound. By sticking within what pico-8 provides I thought I could achieve this, wh ... ⌘ Read more
I often see a lot of confusion with regard to OpenBSD, either assimilate as a Linux distribution or mixed up with FreeBSD. Let’s be clear, OpenBSD is a stand alone operating system. It came as a fork of NetBSD in 1994, there isn’t much things in common between the two nowadays. While OpenBSD and the other BSDs are independant projects, they share some very old roots in their core, and regularly see source code changes in one being imported to ... ⌘ Read more
A circuit called the flip-flop is a fundamental building block for sequential logic. A flip-flop can hold one bit of state, a “0” or a “1”, changing its value when the clock changes. Flip-flops are a key part of processors, with multiple roles. Several flip-flops can be combined to form a register, holding a value. Flip-flops are also used to build “state machines”, circuits that move from step to step in a control ... ⌘ Read more
Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will end on October 10, 2023. After this date, these products will no longer receive security updates, non-security updates, bug fixes, technical support, or online technical content updates. If you cannot upgrade to the next version, you will need to use Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for up to three years. ESUs are available for free in Azure or need to be purchased for ... ⌘ Read more
It seems the new iPhone 15 Pro is having overheating issues, and while I normally don’t really care and don’t mention this sort of nonsense, I found Apple’s response to the issue… Peculiar. Furthermore, Apple tells 9to5Mac that recent updates to certain third-party apps are causing them to overload the system. The company says it’s working directly with those developers to fix the issu ... ⌘ Read more
Earlier this week, Microsoft started rolling out the Moment 4 update for Windows 11. The update also included Windows Copilot, a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) that replaces Cortana and offers to perform certain tasks for the users. However, if you are not interested in having additional bloatware on your system then there are ways to remove or disable Windows Copilot on Windows 11. The steps will depend on whether you have Windows ... ⌘ Read more
Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their “Fanimatrix” release is the oldest active torrent that’s still widely shared today. That’s amazing. When reading the headline, I assumed it’d be some copyrighted blo ... ⌘ Read more
Another week of KDE Plasma 6 big smashing and new features, and it’s a long list of good stuff. The biggest news this week: The Overview and Desktop Grid effects have been merged together into one, with fluid and natural-feeling touchpad gestures to transition between all states. It’s really awesome work, and also fixed a ton of open bug reports! There’s quite a few other things in here, such as indicators for when the camera is in use in the sy ... ⌘ Read more
A collection of modern/faster/saner alternatives to common UNIX commands. Quite a few of these are written in Rust – if you want more Rust alternatives to existing popular tools, there’s a list for that, too. ⌘ Read more
So, what’s in the document that Google didn’t want to get out? The document in question contains meeting notes that Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, “created for a course on communications,” Bloomberg reported. In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google’s search advertising “is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created” with economics that only certain “illicit b ... ⌘ Read more
With today’s release of kmod 31, Linux’s modprobe utility for loading kernel modules can finally allow arbitrary paths to allow loading new kernel modules from anywhere on the file-system. Surprisingly it took until 2023 for allowing Linux’s modprobe to accept loading kernel modules from any arbitrary path. Rather than just specifying the module name and then looking ... ⌘ Read more
I recently got my hands on an ordinary-looking iPhone-to-HDMI adapter that mimics Apple’s branding and, when plugged in, runs a program that implores you to “Scan QR code for use.” That QR code takes you to an ad-riddled website that asks you to download an app that asks for your location data, access to your photos and videos, runs a biza ... ⌘ Read more
We describe a model for multiple threads of control within a single UNIX process. The main goals are to provide extremely lightweight threads and to rationalize and extend the UNIX Application Programming Interface for a multi-threaded environment. The threads are intended to be sufficiently lightweight so that there can be thousands present and that synchronization and context switching can be accomplished rapidly without entering the kernel. These goals are achieved ... ⌘ Read more
In March, Microsoft began injecting ads into Bing Chat conversations to generate revenue from this new platform. However, incorporating ads into Bing Chat has opened the door to threat actors, who increasingly take out search advertisements to distribute malware. And in case you’re thinking, “whatever, I don’t use these online chatbots anyway”, just remember that all this stuff is now built right into Windows and Microsoft ... ⌘ Read more
But come 2020, a new round of talks opened between Apple and Microsoft. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft executives met with Apple’s Services VP Eddy Cue to “discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing.” These talks were reportedly “exploratory” and “never reached an advanced stage,” Bloomberg says. The revenue generated from its deal with Google was a “key reason” Apple’s talks to acquire Bing never advanced bey ... ⌘ Read more
Today, we’re delighted to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi 5, coming at the end of October. Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling (plus your local taxes), virtually every aspect of the platform has been upgraded, delivering a no-compromises user experience. Raspberry Pi 5 comes with new features, it’s over twice as fast as its predecessor, and it’s the first Raspberry Pi computer to feature silicon designed in‑house here in Cambridge, UK. While I personall ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft’s free upgrade offer for Windows 10/11 ended July 29, 2016. The installation path to obtain the Windows 7/8 free upgrade is now removed as well. Upgrades to Windows 11 from Windows 10 are still free. All good (?) things must come to an end. Maybe Windows 11 will end some day too. ⌘ Read more
COSMIC, the Rust-based desktop environment System76, makers of Pop!\\_OS are working on, has seen another month of work, and it turns out that it’s already being used daily by the COSMIC team, which is always an important milestone. For instance, COSMIC continues its focus on keyboard users: Pop!\\_OS and COSMIC DE are built to stay out of your way so you can focus on getting things done. With Auto-tiling, ne ... ⌘ Read more
I encountered yet another discussion about OpenBSD PF versus FreeBSD PF. For those who are new to the discussion: OpenBSD developers created PF in 2001, and it rapidly improved to become the most approachable open source packet filter. FreeBSD ported PF over to its kernel in 2004, with occasional updates since. Today a whole bunch of folks who don’t program echo cultish wisdom that one or the other version of PF has fallen behind, not kept up on improvements, or otherwise b ... ⌘ Read more
Caml Light is implemented as a bytecode compiler which made it highly portable. It is possible to create executables using the CAMLC.EXE command, but please be aware that the resulting binaries are not standalone when using the default linking mode, and the runtime system (CAMLRUN.EXE) is required to run them. The latest available release of Caml Light for DOS is version 0.7 released in 1995. Here’s a fun project for the weekend. ⌘ Read more
Google is rolling out ChromeOS 117, and it’s a very big update for Chromebooks that adds Material You, as well as other usability enhancements. A pretty big update to ChromeOS, and the Material You is definitely welcome – perhaps it fixes up some of the issues I had with ChromeOS when I reviewed it a few months ago. The quick settings panel has been completely redesigned, too, this update adds specific colour correction settings for people wi ... ⌘ Read more
Two unusual companies, Valve Software and Igalia, are working together to improve the Linux-based OS of the Steam Deck handheld games console. The device runs a Linux distro called Steam OS 3.0, but this is a totally different distro from the original Steam OS it announced a decade ago. Steam OS 1 and 2 were based on Debian, but Steam OS 3 is based on Arch Linux, as Igalia developer Alberto García described in a talk ... ⌘ Read more
Dotfiles are important. We use them every day for storing configuration for all kinds of applications, knowingly or otherwise. You know the ones, hidden in your $HOME directory, ~/.ssh/ for your ssh keys, or ~/.Xauthority (whatever the heck that does). Something you may not know is these are legacy locations for configuration. Please do not copy their behaviour. Your application’s configuratio ... ⌘ Read more
We’ve shipped an update for Windows Subsystem for Android on Windows 11 to the Windows Subsystem for Android Preview Program. This update (2309.40000.2.0) includes improvements to platform reliability and functionality improvements. It updates the Chromium WebView to version 117, allows .cer files to be shared to Android, contains various Android 13 platform updates, and more. The Windows Subsystem for Android is available in th ... ⌘ Read more
Philips Hue products are about to get a whole lot worse – even the ones you already own. Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can’t access your stuff. But that’s just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it’s getting worse. It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across ... ⌘ Read more
sysclean(8) is a system tool designed for help system administrator to keep their OpenBSD clean after upgrade. It walks the installed system and compare to a reference system, reporting to the user additional things in the installed system. The purpose is to point any elements that wouldn’t be present if a fresh install was done, instead of an upgrade. This seems like a useful tool. ⌘ Read more
Whenever Apple releases a major OS update, as it did last Monday with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and watchOS 10, developers – both large but especially indie – release a slew of day one updates to support the latest platform features. I understand how the Android update model is inherently different from Apple’s. Namely, updates start out only on Google’s Pixel phones, which have a relatively small market share, while ... ⌘ Read more
Apple released macOS 14.0 Sonoma today, and what’s the best way to celebrate the new release? Why, the Ars Technica review, of course. So macOS Sonoma is a perfectly typical macOS release, a sort of “Ventura-plus” that probably has one or two additions that any given person will find useful but which otherwise just keeps your Mac secure and avoids weird iCloud compatibility problems with whatever software is running on your phone. You probably don’t n ... ⌘ Read more