I wrote a popular post about serial ports once, and serial ports are something I think about, worry about, and dream about with some regularity. Yet I have never really devoted that much attention to the serial port’s awkward sibling, always assuming that it was a fundamentally similar design employing either 8 data pins each way or 8 bidirectional data pins. It turns out that the truth is a lot more complicated. And it all starts with printers. You see, I have written here before that parallel ... ⌘ Read more
I wrote a popular post about serial ports once, and serial ports are something I think about, worry about, and dream about with some regularity. Yet I have never really devoted that much attention to the serial port’s awkward sibling, always assuming that it was a fundamentally similar design employing either 8 data pins each way or 8 bidirectional data pins. It turns out that the truth is a lot more complicated. And it all starts with printers. You see, I have written here before that parallel ... ⌘ Read more
As a complete and utter juxtaposition to the usual tech stuff we quibble about here on OSNews, I stumbled upon this interesting video about Samuil, a man who, for the past 20 years, has been living in the middle of the Yakutia wilderness, the coldest place on earth with temperatures that go down to -71°. This is a story of Samuil. For the past 20 years, Samuil has chosen to live far away from civilization, together with bear ... ⌘ Read more
Budgie 10.7 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring major re-architectures, new APIs for extensibility, and polish to the user experience. For a point release, there’s a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in here, as the release notes detail. The changes are all over the place – from a brand new application indexer to replace libgnome-menus, to dual-GPU support, notification improvements, general UX improvements, and much more. ⌘ Read more
This is the bigger, more deluxe of the two Mattel dedicated D&D games (the Intellivision of course had its own set, and we had a Tandyvision ourselves), the other being the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS™ Computer Fantasy Game. That was a handheld unit with a surprisingly compelling implementation of Hunt the Wumpus, and something we might talk abou ... ⌘ Read more
As was revealed a handful of weeks ago, Microsoft is currently working on a significant update to File Explorer on Windows 11 that will update several core areas of the app with modern designs and new features that will better integrate the experience with OneDrive and Microsoft 365. The home page itself is being updated with more integration with Microsoft 365. Along the top will be a feed of “r ... ⌘ Read more
DiscoBSD is a 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like operating system for microcontrollers, with a focus on high portability to memory constrained devices without a memory management unit. This microcontroller-focused operating system is the continuation of RetroBSD, a 2.11BSD-based OS targeting only the MIPS-based PIC32MX7. DiscoBSD is multi-platform, as it also suppor ... ⌘ Read more
While developing mirrord, which heavily relies on injecting itself into other people’s binaries, we ran into some challenges posed by macOS’s SIP (System Integrity Protection). This post details how we ultimately overcame these challenges, and we hope it can be of help to other people hoping to learn about SIP, as we’ve learned the hard way that there’s very little written about this subject on the internet. Potentially useful information for macOS developers. ⌘ Read more
The Justice Department and a group of eight states sued Google on Tuesday, accusing it of illegally abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising, in the agency’s first antitrust lawsuit against a tech giant under President Biden and an escalation in legal pressure on one of the world’s biggest internet companies. The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry ... ⌘ Read more
Welcome to Magic Cap, the oddest yet somehow most endearing interface a PDA — and, briefly, Windows 95 — ever had. Unlike the Palm OS where I bought my first device brand new, I was a late convert to Magic Cap, picking up this wacky device called a DataRover in 2004 just to play with. It wasn’t exactly pocket-sized, but it was still quite portable, and the whimsical audio feedback and imm ... ⌘ Read more
But as you might think, nobody at AMD envisioned it that way in the planning or design stages. No engineer would ever start working with the idea to “build a shit product”; a recent chat with an engineer who was at AMD during Bulldozer’s development gave us additional insight on what the original goals for the architecture were. AMD originally wanted Bulldozer to be like K10, but with a shared fronte ... ⌘ Read more
While working on my Windows 3.x display driver, I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening properly. It was possible to recover by using Alt+Enter to switch the DOS window to full screen again and then returning to the desktop, but obviously that wasn’t going to cut it. ... ⌘ Read more
Recent Windows 11 Insider builds include support for ReFS, the Resilient File System. The file system is currently only available in Windows server operating systems, but not in client systems. Resilient File System is designed to “maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and provide data integrity with resiliency to corruption” according to Microsoft. I doubt ReFS will replace NTFS any time soon, but with Window ... ⌘ Read more
Ahead of these layoffs, Fuchsia appeared to be on an upward trajectory within Google. After years of being a skunkworks project, the company’s from-scratch operating system has grown to be used in the Nest Hub series and is poised to be used in an upcoming device. There are even indications of Google ramping up Fuchsia development internally in recent months. Considering Google’s overall workforce is set to be ... ⌘ Read more
Has anyone ever heard of the Apple YACC, or YACCintosh? it was a 68010 prototype mac intended to do colour in 1986. Weirdly enough someone managed to find the ROMs \\*and\\* the PALS for it, but no schematics have turned up yet. All of the stuff is on bitsavers. I do not know what to add here. This seems to be one of the most obscure – if not the most obscure – Apple efforts out there, as there are virtually zero references of it online. ⌘ Read more
Happy 40th Birthday to Lisa! The Apple Lisa computer, that is. In celebration of this milestone, CHM has received permission from Apple to release the source code to the Lisa software, including its system and applications software. Access the code here. More of this please. ⌘ Read more
This is the second installment of the Defender’s Guide series. In keeping with the theme, we are discussing Windows Services, the underlying technology, common attack vectors, and methods of securing/monitoring them. Services are an important part of the Windows operating system, allowing the control and configuration of long-running processes essential to keeping the OS functional. This also allows services to be a common vector of escalation and per ... ⌘ Read more
I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the
Here are some of the major cuts in the tech industry so far. All numbers are approximations based on filings, public statements and media reports. Many of the listed companies have experienced – and are experiencing – insane growth and financial success. ⌘ Read more
So we weren’t surprised to hear that Chrome users were concerned after learning that several of the internet’s most popular ad blockers, like uBlock Origin, would lose some of their privacy-preserving functionality on Google’s web browser, resulting from the changes Manifest V3 brings to Chrome’s extensions platform – changes that strengthen other facets of security, while unfortunately limiting the capabilities of cer ... ⌘ Read more
Here’s an in-depth look at a portable, ruggedized, third-party PA-RISC system running a pre-CDE version of HP-UX. The SAIC Galaxy family consisted of two systems, the 1000 and the 1100. Both the 1000 and 1100 were essentially recased 9000/712 workstations with minor hardware modifications and custom added electronics, but all of the systems I’ve seen including mine are Galaxy 1100s, based ... ⌘ Read more
Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment and a set of applications in Common Lisp. To get an overview, see The Power of Structure. Otherwise, the essays listed below may be read in any order. This goes far beyond my comfort level, but I’m pretty sure quite a few of you will find this project incredibly interesting. ⌘ Read more
In case you thought IBM AIX had a future, IBM’s legacy proprietary Unix, IBM apparently doesn’t. The Register reported Friday that IBM has moved the entire AIX development group to IBM India, apparently their Bangalore office, and placing 80 US-based developers into “redeployment.” That’s a fairly craven way of replacing layoffs with musical chairs, requiring the displaced developers to either find a new position within the company (possibly relocating as we ... ⌘ Read more
The Altair 8800 arguably launched Microsoft. Now Dave Glover from Microsoft offers an emulated and potentially cloud-based Altair emulation with CP/M and Microsoft Basic. You can see a video of the project below. One thing that makes it a bit odd compared to other Altair clones we’ve seen is that the emulator runs in a Docker environment and is fully cloud-enabled. You can interact with it via a PCB front panel, or a terminal running in a web browser. Neat. ⌘ Read more
Recently over the holiday break, I became interested in the 2600’s hardware architecture and started reading everything that I could find about it. I knew that it was some kind of 6502-based system, and I’d heard mentions of “racing the beam”, but that’s as far as my knowledge went. I was shocked to discover how primitive the 2600 hardware was, even compared to contemporary 6502 systems like the Ap ... ⌘ Read more
On Sunday, a Chuck E. Cheese employee named Stewart Coonrod posted a TikTok video that documents the process of installing a new song-and-dance show on an old Chuck E. Cheese animatronics system—a process that involves a 3.5-inch floppy disk and two DVDs. Coonrod says it is the last update before his store undergoes a remodel that will remove the animatronics altogether. I’ve never visited this restaura ... ⌘ Read more
Confession time: I don’t fully understand how terminals, shells and SSH really work (and my guess is you don’t either). And I don’t mean the cryptography behind SSH. I mean how SSH and the terminal — and the shell for that matter — interact with one another. I recently realized that even though I’ve been daily remotely logging into Linux systems for all of my adult life (and type in the shell and Vim) I didn’t really grasp how these things actu ... ⌘ Read more
NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it’s offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving — in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD’s HAMMER2 over to NetBSD. The GitHub repository has the code if you’re up for contributing. ⌘ Read more
One unfortunate fact of my life is that I have to deal with an obscure database whose macOS drivers require the addition of a directory to DYLD\\_LIBRARY\\_PATH for their Python driver to find them. To make matters worse, Apple’s CLI tools strip that variable away as part of macOS’s System Integrity Protection (SIP) before running a command. Given that DYLD\\_\\* environment variables are a known attac ... ⌘ Read more_*
Your T95 is infected with malware pre-installed, ready to do whatever the C2 servers decide. Yes, malware from Amazon straight to your door! If they insist on selling these devices they really should add an “Includes Malware” category in the Android TV section. I find it absolutely baffling that Amazon is full of sketchy garbage like this, and nobody really seems to care. Amazon itself, lawmakers, consumers – everybody just takes it for granted ... ⌘ Read more
Ars reports: It’s the end of the line for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. These older versions of Windows (plus Windows RT) stop receiving all security updates today, over a decade after their original releases. Microsoft will also stop providing Microsoft Edge browser updates for these operating systems in a few days, and the remaining third-party apps that still work will eventually follow suit (Google Chrome support, most notably, ... ⌘ Read more
So the Japanese market had very specific requirements, that PCs could not fulfill in the early DOS days. You couldn’t just replace the character ROM on your PC and make it display Japanese text (IBM did later develop the 5550 and the JX, a derivative of the PCjr, specifically for the Japanese market, and later, they developed the DOS/V variant, which added support for Japanese text to their PS/2 line, using standard VGA hardware, which by now had caught up in terms o ... ⌘ Read more
Several weeks ago, we published an article detailing five not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11. Recommended websites in the Start menu (introduced in build 25247) appear in the list as arguably one of Microsoft’s worst ideas. Luckily, the company has decided to backtrack that controversial change. Those unhappy with Windows 11 showing more ads on the Start menu will be glad to lea ... ⌘ Read more
Last year, Ubuntu developers pushed to remove Zsys from Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. This is an integral tool Ubuntu created to make it easier to manage and maintain ZFS-based installations. In a bug report they bluntly noted that ‘priority changes’ in the desktop team meant Zsys was no longer something they want to “advertise using”. As of writing, Zsys remains available in the Ubuntu archives but development of it isn’ ... ⌘ Read more
At CES today, Sony gave a look at its latest PlayStation 5 gaming controller, but this one is very different from its previous designs. Aimed at lowering the barrier of entry for players with disabilities, Project Leonardo for the PS5 is a highly customizable controller kit that has been developed with help from organizations such as AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up. The ... ⌘ Read more
DragonFly version 6.4 is the next step in the 6.x release series. This version has hardware support for type-2 hypervisors with NVMM, an amdgpu driver, the experimental ability to remote-mount HAMMER2 volumes, and many other changes. The details of all commits between the 6.2 and 6.4 releases are available in the associated commit messages for 6.4.0. The downloads are ready. ⌘ Read more
Google’s keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android’s director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a “tier-1 platform” in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That’s a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take “a lot of work” and outlined a roadmap that will take “a few years” to come to fru ... ⌘ Read more
It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use. Sun Valley has finally arrived, and it’s all about a long overdue reinvestment in design under Panos Panay’s leadership. But is it enough? Let’s take a look. For the purpose of this research, I used Windows 11 build 25267, which as of now is the latest Insider Dev build. Death, taxes, and new windows theme layers. ⌘ Read more
Vanilla OS has released its first version. Vanilla OS is an immutable desktop Linux distribution that brings some interesting new technologies to the table, such as the Apx package manager. By default, Apx provides a container based on your Linux distribution (Ubuntu 22.10 for Vanilla OS 22.10) and wraps all commands from the distribution’s package manager (apt for Ubuntu). Nevertheless, you can install packages from other package distributions. For example, using the --aur flag, ... ⌘ Read more
A rant about “year of Linux on the desktop” from a tired old man. I’ve been part of the Linux community since before Linux was called Linux. Over the years there’s been many people telling me directly that Linux is silly or wrong or imperfect, or that free and open source software is foolish or pointless. A lot more people have, of course, pontificated along those lines in public, and not directed it at me. I’m not claiming to be targeted at that, but I’ve been a ... ⌘ Read more
WuMgr (Update Manager for Windows) is a tool to manage updates of Microsoft products on the Windows operating system. It uses the “Windows Update Agent API” to identify as well as download and install missing updates. It allows the user fine control of updates on modern (Windows 10) operating system versions, comparable to what windows 7 and 8.1 offered. This functionality should be included in Windows by default, and the fact that ... ⌘ Read more
We are excited to announce the release of Formula Suggestions and Formula by Example for Excel web users – a couple exciting capabilities designed to help save you time and learn more about Excel formulas as you use them. Also for web users are suggested links, IMAGE function, and a new search bar in the queries pane. For Windows users, a new keyboard shortcut is available to open the Power Query editor, and Insiders users on Windows can now get data from dynamic arrays ... ⌘ Read more
Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development. There’s tons of lessons to re-learn when focusing on older platforms, whether as a mere user exploring or reminiscing, or as a developer trying to deal with all the constraints and limitations th ... ⌘ Read more
This week I received a new 12th Gen Intel laptop from Framework. And like with any new piece of hardware I get these days, my first instinct was to put NixOS on it 😄. But I wasn’t just content with firing up the NixOS installer and getting to work. Oh no no no. You see, I knew there was a better way. I didn’t now exactly what that better way looked like just yet, but I could feel in my bones that it existed. So I did what I usually do when I suspect there’s a b ... ⌘ Read more
The HP LaserJet III laser printer from 1990 used the “Printer Command Language” PCL 5 by default, but could be upgraded with the “HP PostScript Cartridge Plus” cartridge, which contained 2 MB of ROM with Adobe’s PostScript Level 2 rasterizer. Let’s look at the ROM contents and some of its hidden gems. With how printers have become the butt of jokes, it’s easy to forget they were sometimes kind of cool and had interesting technologies, featu ... ⌘ Read more
The fourth beta for Haiku R1 over a year and a half of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability, and to make lots more software ports available for use. Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release. There’s a lot here to talk about. The improved support for HiDPI looks amazing, and definitely a must-have in today’s world of 4K displays. There’s lots of new and improved drivers, including a new compatibility layer for OpenBSD ... ⌘ Read more
With that initial explanation out of the way, in 2022 I’ve been getting my Chumby working with the mainline Linux kernel and slowly trying to submit fixes upstream for issues as I find them. To be clear, I’m not trying to get the stock Chumby software working with the new kernel. That’s likely impossible. The stock software is heavily dependent on Flash which is a dead end. I’m just getting the new kernel running well enough ... ⌘ Read more
Around a year ago, I started working on emulating an iPod Touch 1G using the QEMU emulation software. After months of reverse engineering, figuring out the specifications of various hardware components, and countless debugging runs with GDB, I now have a functional emulation of an iPod Touch that includes display rendering and multitouch support. The emulated device runs the first firmware ever released by Apple for the iP ... ⌘ Read more
Reports have indicated that Microsoft is planning to release a new Windows version every three years like it was in the times of Windows Vista and Windows 7. However, Microsoft doesn’t want Windows 11 to become boring or unexciting. Microsoft wants to keep Windows 11 constantly updated with “Moment” and some “feature” updates. Microsoft has reportedly scrapped the original ... ⌘ Read more
Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place. Unified Kernel Images have been championed by the systemd folks for better securing and trusting Linux distributions. Unified kernel images are a combination of the kernel image, initrd, and UEFI stub program all distributed as one ... ⌘ Read more
The Mac Pro is one of the few remaining Intel Macs with no Apple Silicon replacement ready to go, even though we’re a little past the two-year deadline that CEO Tim Cook originally set for the transition in summer 2020 (and to be fair, it has been a hard-to-predict couple of years). Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple continues to work on a new version of the Mac Pro, alongside other as-yet-unrepla ... ⌘ Read more
As of year 2004, Dr. Gary Kildall’s operating system called CP/M was approaching 30 years old. I decided then to describe that history on my Web site, before it was lost. I worked on that through 2008; and updated my notes since. See my DRI home page for links to Web pages about that event, and about about persons, companies and developments related to Digital Research and/or CP/M in the S-100 and microcomputer world of the 1970’s. This Web page provides some ideas about how to get and ... ⌘ Read more
Tonight’s story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn’t make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound driver to fix it. OSNews bait, 100%. ⌘ Read more
This is a community-run resource to help you fix the Windows Update service on earlier versions of Windows. Since Windows XP was discontinued in 2014, followed by Windows 7 in 2020, Microsoft’s support for their earlier OSes has significantly dwindled. As XP and earlier don’t officially support modern security improvements, such as the SHA256 hash algorithm required ... ⌘ Read more
Nearly two years after the release of Xfce 4.16, here comes another major update to one of the oldest and lightest desktop environments for GNU/Linux distributions, Xfce 4.18. Xfce 4.18 is packed with lots of new features and improvements to the file manager, panel, plugins, and other core components. For example, the Thunar file manager now features not one but two image preview side panes, a new Split View, recursive search, and finally lets you undo or redo basic file operations. It also co ... ⌘ Read more
As part of a larger story about Apple’s plans to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone and iPad in EU countries, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman claimed that Apple is also considering removing its requirement for iPhone and iPad web browsers to use WebKit, the open source browser engine that powers Safari. Well, well, well. The EU might actually force Apple to turn iOS into a real o ... ⌘ Read more
The Verge, reporting on a paywalled story from Bloomberg: Apple is planning to let users install alternative app stores on iOS, according to a report from Bloomberg. The shift would be a remarkable change from the company, which has famously only allowed iPhone and iPad users to download apps from the App Store. The plans are reportedly being spurred on by the EU’s Digital Markets ... ⌘ Read more
Creating the PiRS232 and playing with the Pi over serial has been leading towards an idea – I wanted to create a small, battery powered device, a sidecar that I could carry with my Psion and use as portable Linux terminal. I also managed to turn it into an Internet gateway, leading to some interesting experiences. The idea was straightforward: take a Pi Zero, add an RS232 board that alread ... ⌘ Read more
Back in the ’90s and very early 2000s, a whole market segment of computers existed that we don’t really talk about anymore today: the UNIX workstation. They were non-x86 machines running one of the many commercial UNIX variants, and were used for the very high end of computing. They were expensive, unique, different, and quite often incredibly overengineered. Countless companies made and sold these UNIX workstation. SGI was a big player in this marke ... ⌘ Read more
Google is working on upgrading its Nest Audio smart speaker to run on the company’s own Fuchsia operating system. For the last few years, Google has been steadily working on switching its Nest Hub smart displays from running on “Cast OS” to the company’s in-house OS, Fuchsia. The original Nest Hub was the first to make the jump in 2021, and the Nest Hub Max made a similar move earlier this ... ⌘ Read more
Intel recently announced a big driver update for their Arc GPUs on Windows, because their DirectX 9 performance wasn’t as good as it could have been. Turns out, they’re using code from the open source DXVK which is part of Steam Play Proton. DXVK translates Direct3D 9, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 to Vulkan. Primarily written for Wine, the Windows compatibility layer, which is w ... ⌘ Read more
The story of PostScript has many different facets. It is a story about profound changes in human literacy as well as a story of trade secrets within source code. It is a story about the importance of teams, and of geometry. And it is a story of the motivations and educations of engineer-entrepreneurs. The Computer History Museum is excited to publicly release, for the first time, the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript. We than ... ⌘ Read more
End-to-end encryption is coming to most of iCloud with a new optional feature called Advanced Data Protection, according to Apple’s announcement on Wednesday. Previously, 14 data categories within iCloud were protected. This new feature brings that count to 23, including photos, notes, voice memos, reminders, Safari bookmarks, and iCloud backups of the contents of your devices. Not everything is enc ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 12.4 has been released. This is a maintenance release of the older stable branch, and contains the usual package updates, bug fixes, and other relatively minor changes. ⌘ Read more
This release features work-in-progress OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all current Apple M-series systems. That’s enough for hardware acceleration with desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE. It’s also enough for older 3D games, like Quake3 and Neverball. While there’s always room for improvement, the driver is fast enough to run all of the above at 60 frames per second at 4K. Please note: these drivers have not yet passed the OpenGL (ES) conforma ... ⌘ Read more
As you may already have noticed we have released new ISO and USB images for OpenIndiana Hipster some days ago. As usual we have received many updates via illumos-gate, eg. the latest Intel and AMD CPU microcode updates, the latest time zone changes and lots of enhancements for BHyVe and the internal SMB server. Does anybody still legitimately use any of the variants of Solaris? It certainly had a moment in the final days of Sun, but ever since Oracle got the ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica: Guess what has happened! Łukasz Siewierski, a member of Google’s Android Security Team, has a post on the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (AVPI) issue tracker detailing leaked platform certificate keys that are actively being used to sign malware. The post is just a list of the keys, but running each one through APKMirror or Google’s VirusTotal site will put na ... ⌘ Read more
Traditionally, updates on Linux systems are controlled by the user. You get an icon in the system tray that looks important; you click on it; it asks you if you want to install updates; you say “yes” or “no”; updates are applied, or not; when you next restart any applications that you have running that were updated, the new version is picked up. Data isn’t lost, because updates don’t restart the application. You can (and do) update the Linux kernel i ... ⌘ Read more
This is a problem for all of us. Most people who can afford one have bought their iPhone or iPad already. The programmers already have their MacBooks. And while everyone will need to buy replacements at some point, that’s a steady-state or at best low-growth business. When Apple says more, it means the Wall Street kind of “more”: a hockey stick of growth. Which means, Apple needs to find growth outside its usual business. And these days, that means: advertising. And online advertisi ... ⌘ Read more
In Android 13, about 21% of all new native code (C/C++/Rust) is in Rust. There are approximately 1.5 million total lines of Rust code in AOSP across new functionality and components such as Keystore2, the new Ultra-wideband (UWB) stack, DNS-over-HTTP3, Android’s Virtualization framework (AVF), and various other components and their open source dependencies. These are low-level components that require a systems language which otherwise would have been implement ... ⌘ Read more
So there you have it: recommending idly Secure Boot for all systems requiring intermediate security level accomplishes nothing, except maybe giving more work to system administrators that are recompiling their kernel, while offering exactly no measurable security against many threats if UEFI Administrative password and MOK Manager passwords are not set. This is especially true for laptop systems where physical acces ... ⌘ Read more
As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web. If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way. Consign that app to oblivion. Yep. ⌘ Read more
“Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get, probably also next year,” says Andreas Spiess, single-board enthusiast and YouTuber, in his distinctive Swiss accent. He’s not wrong. Spiess says he and his fellow Pi devotees need “a strategy to survive” without new boards, so he suggests looking in one of the least captivating, most overlooked areas of computing: used, corporate-minded t ... ⌘ Read more
There is still a long road ahead! The UAPI that we are using right now is still a prototype, and there are a lot of new features that need to be added or redesigned in order to support a full Vulkan driver in the future. Since Linux mandates that the UAPI needs to remain stable and backwards compatible across versions (unlike macOS), that means that the kernel driver will not be heading upstream for many months, until we have a more complete understanding of the GPU rendering parameters and ... ⌘ Read more
Highlights of this release include initial gesture support with double-tap to wake for selected devices, improvements to fingerprint unlock by allowing more backoff time between read retries, as well as support for media buttons on headsets for most Ubuntu Phone devices. In addition, the Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 update adds support for handling the sms:// URL scheme for properly opening the Messaging app, adds Full HD 1080p support t ... ⌘ Read more
Yes, I am playing Dope Wars on a Palm Pilot inside my iPhone. It’s thanks to The Internet Archive, which is once again launching a giant collection of software you can instantly play on any web browser, up to and including your touchscreen-equipped phone. There are currently 565 classic Palm apps in all, including games, widgets, and even free trials from both the greyscale and color eras. This is probably the easiest way to experience Palm OS application ... ⌘ Read more
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lost. But just try misplacing a Commodore SX-64. And any thief who tries to grab it and run gets a free hernia truss from the prison infirmary. I want to see someone carry an SX-64 into a coffee shop to authenticate something. Please. ⌘ Read more
I occasionally do talks about curl. In these talks I often include a few slides that say something about curl’s coverage and presence on different platforms. Mostly to boast of course, but also to help explain to the audience how curl has manged to reach its ten billion installations. Curl is literally everywhere – even on another planet. ⌘ Read more
Via Hackaday: We’re used to the so-called “Hackintoshes”, non-Apple hardware running MacOS. One we featured recently was even built into the case of a Nintendo Wii. But Dandu has gone one better than that, by running MacOS on an unmodified Wii, original Nintendo hardware (French, Google Translate link). How has this seemingly impossible task been achieved? Seasoned Mac enthusiasts will remember the days when Apple machines used PowerPC processors, and the Wii uses a Power ... ⌘ Read more
Apple currently brings in roughly $4 billion from advertising and is forecasted to bring in as much as $30 billion by 2026. While these amounts are an order of magnitude smaller than the $210 billion Google made from its ad services, they represent a change in philosophy for Apple, which only earned around $300 million for ads in 2017. This new emphasis on advertising also undermines Apple’s claims about privacy with its A ... ⌘ Read more
Music Studio is a Windows-based SID music creator software. For an accurate C64 sound, it utilises the newest RESID-FP emulation available, both old (6581) and new (8580) SID chips. MS2 is capable of creating 1x speed tunes and many SID chip parameters can be edited directly using the various commands. Classic and new C64 sounds can be created with envelope parameters that can be set up in few simple steps. While I’m sure purists will ... ⌘ Read more
Intel has officially revealed its Intel On Demand program (opens in new tab) that will activate select accelerators and features of the company’s upcoming Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processor. The new pay-as-you-go program will allow Intel to reduce the number of SKUs it ships while still capitalizing on the technologies it has to offer. Furthermore, its clients will be able to upgrade their machines without replaci ... ⌘ Read more
We have a lot to show since the 0.7.0 release! This release, care has been taken to ensure real hardware is working, i686 support has been added, features like audio and preliminary multi-display support have been enabled, and the boot and install infrastructure has been simplified and made more robust. I highly recommend skimming through the changes listed below before jumping into the images, if you want more details. It is also recommended to read through the Redox OS book if you ... ⌘ Read more
Atlas is a Windows version designed for gamers. Atlas users can enjoy higher framerate, lowered input delay & latency. Great for people on a low-end system, or high-end gaming machine. I had no idea people still did this – create custom versions of Windows ISOs and try to pawn them off as something special. The legality of this is more than dubious, of course, and you can probably achieve the same results with some of the countless scripts that are ... ⌘ Read more
Today the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in the Microsoft Store is dropping its “Preview” label and becomes generally available with our latest release! We are also making the Store version of WSL the default for new users who run wsl --install and easily upgradeable by running wsl --update for existing users. Using the Store ... ⌘ Read more
The first computer I owned shipped with 128 KiB of RAM and to this day I’m still jarred by the idea that applications can run out of memory given that even 15-year-old machines often shipped with 4 GiB of memory. And yet it’s one of the most common causes of instability experienced by users and in the case of Firefox the biggest source of crashes on Windows. A detailed technical explanation of why Windo ... ⌘ Read more
Time for another overdue progress report! This month’s update is packed with new hardware support, new features, and fixes for longstanding pain points, as well as a new bleeding-edge kernel branch with long-awaited support for suspend and the display controller! Asahi Linux is the project bringing Linux to Apple’s M1 and M2 platform, and they continue to make great strides. I’m still skeptical about how wise it is to buy expensive hardware you hav ... ⌘ Read more
Windows lets you know when your computer’s Internet connection is limited or absent entirely. What is this sorcery? Raymond Chen’s answer is simple. ⌘ Read more
We’ll start our conversation by saying that DOS/4GW is a DOS extender. That means DOS/4GW is a program responsible for adding some useful stuff on top of the vanilla DOS kernel you have installed on your system. And look, I know this does not really answer anything yet, but we’ll get there. Let’s begin our journey trying to understand why DOS needs extending in the first place. I definitely remember seeing DOS/4GW a lot when playing MS-DOS games back in the ’90s, but I had enti ... ⌘ Read more
This project is a Mastodon client written in Visual Basic 6. It works on Windows 95 and higher (Windows 10/11 untested). Yes. Belgian developer Maartje Eyskens made a Mastodon client for Windows 9x. Amazing. ⌘ Read more
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil, the Excalidraw font. That triggered me all sorts of emotions, ranging from laugh to total incredulity. I initially thought the root cause was a random derping from Valve but the Internet seemed quiet about it, so the unreasonable idea that it might have been my fault surfaced. Who doesn’t love a good technology mystery story? ⌘ Read more
The HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre was established in August 1992 in the Department of Computer Science at Liverpool University in the United Kingdom, but has been run by Liverpool-based Connect Internet Solutions Limited since 1995. Its primary aim is to make public domain, freeware and Open Source software more readily available to users of Hewlett-Packard UNIX systems. The archive began with an initial collection of 150 packages, all of which had been ... ⌘ Read more
Earlier in the week, some Windows 11 Dev Channel users spotted Start menu ads/promos encouraging them to back up their data to OneDrive, sign up for a Microsoft account, and complete their profile. This obviously opened the door to lots of conversations over on social media platforms such as Twitter as well as the comments section on our own coverage as the majority of ... ⌘ Read more
It’s undeniably good for the Arm Windows app ecosystem to have a viable, decently specced PC that is usable as an everyday computer. The Dev Kit 2023 is priced to move, so there may be some developers who buy one just for the hell of it, which might have some positive trickle-down effects for the rest of the ecosystem. Because eventually, the Windows-on-Arm project will need to develop s ... ⌘ Read more
Plan 9 is an operating system designed by Bell Labs. It’s the OS they wrote after Unix, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the most interesting operating system that you’ve never heard of, and, in my opinion, the best operating system design to date. Even if you haven’t heard of Plan 9, the designers of whatever OS you do use have heard of it, and have incorporated some of its ideas into your OS. Plan 9 is a research operating system, and exists to answer questions about ideas in OS design ... ⌘ Read more
The Zeal Operating System is a modernized, professional fork of the 64-bit Temple Operating System. Guiding principles of development include transparency, full user control, and adherence to public-domain/open-source implementations. ZealOS strives to be simple, documented, and require as little of a knowledge gap as possible. One person should be able to comprehend the entire system in at least a semi-detailed way within a few days of study. Simplify, don ... ⌘ Read more
The 8086 microprocessor is one of the most important chips ever created; it started the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and server computing today. I’ve been reverse-engineering its circuitry by studying its silicon die. One of the most unusual circuits I found is a “bootstrap driver”, a way to boost internal signals to improve performance. This circuit consists of just three NMOS transi ... ⌘ Read more
The AMD EPYC 9004 series, codenamed “Genoa” is nothing short of a game-changer. We use that often in the industry, but this is not a 15-25% generational improvement. The new AMD EPYC Genoa changes the very foundation of what it means to be a server. This is a 50-60% (or more) per-socket improvement, meaning we get a 3:2 or 2:1 consolidation just from a generation ago. If you are coming from 3-5 year-old Xeon Scalable (1st and 2nd ... ⌘ Read more
We are bringing process filtering to Task Manager. This is the top feature request from our users to filter/search for processes. You can filter either using the binary name, PID or publisher name. The filter algorithm matches the context keyword with all possible matches and displays them on the current page. The filter is also applied as you switch between pages. You can also use the keyboard shortcut ALT + F to focus on the filter box. This is a helpful fea ... ⌘ Read more
On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents’ basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by “Mel” in a famous piece of hacker lore. This is the vintage computing version o ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is now promoting some of its products in the sign-out flyout menu that shows up when clicking the user icon in the Windows 11 start menu. This new Windows 11 “feature” was discovered by Windows enthusiast Albacore, who shared several screenshots of advertisement notifications in the Accounts flyout. The screenshots show that Microsoft promotes the OneDrive file hosting service and prods users to create or com ... ⌘ Read more