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 before - this person is a Palm OS wizard, and the progress he's making will prove invaluable once the remaining stock of Palm OS devices - half of which is in my office - starts breaking down.
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 Chat feature straight to the Windows 11 desktop. It appears as a sidebar in Windows 11, allowing you to control settings on a PC, launch apps, or simply answer queries. It's integrated all over the operating system, too: Microsoft executives demoed using Copilot to write text messages using data from your calendar, navigation options in Outlook, and more. Copilot feels like Clippy 3.0 - yes, 3.0, if you know your Microsoft history - and I have zero interest in any of it. I don't want to be second-guessed or receive helpful" advice from a glorified autocomplete that's hogging both bandwith and CPU cycles that I'd much rather put to use somewhere else. I'm absolutely baffled by this weird obsession Microsoft has to shove AI" into every nook and cranny of their products. Am I just out of touch? If this what Windows users want?
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 will recognize, including Windows, macOS, and Linux PCs, and possibly even other Android devices. Webcam support in Android 14 is not enabled out of the box, however. In order to enable it, four things are required: a Linux kernel config needs to be enabled, the UVC device needs to be configured, the USB HAL needs to be updated, and a new system app needs to be preloaded. iOS recently introduced this feature as well, and it makes a ton of sense for Android to go down the same path.
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 fascinating, especially when we pulled all of the DDR5 memory from a system and watched it boot. Let us get to it. Few of us will ever get to use one of these - especially since they're specifically designed for a supercomputer - but maybe we'll get lucky and they end up on eBay or AliExpress ten years from now.
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 much of their time. What's more, people have strong preferences: it turns out they want the ability to choose their default browser (rather than being assigned one by the operating system/device manufacturer); they also want to pick from a wider range of browsers. You can download the full report from Mozilla.
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 years ago. The Office key replaced the usual right-hand Windows key, offering up the ability to hold the key in combination with another one to quickly open Office apps. Absolutely bizarre. The funniest outcome of this is a joke feature request by KDE developers in the KDE bugzilla, demanding a shortcut key combination be added to KDE to open LinkedIn to achieve feature parity" with Windows, which sparked a flurry of proposed fixes" and additional feature requests - with this one definitely being my favourite.
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 packaging with EUV lithography for their upcoming client mobile platform. Meteor Lake uses a tiled, disaggregated chiplet architecture for its client-centric processors for the first time, changing the very nature of Intel's consumer chips going forward. And, according to Intel, all of these changes have allowed them to bring some significant advancements to the mobile market. Intel's first chiplet-based consumer CPU breaks up the common functions of a modern CPU into four individual tiles: compute, graphics, SoC, and an I/O tile. Within the makeup of the compute tile is a new pair of cores, a P-core named Redwood Cove and a new E-core called Crestmont. Both these cores promise IPC gains over their previous counterparts, but perhaps the most interesting inclusion is a new type of E-core embedded directly into the SoC tile, which Intel calls Low Power Island.' These new LP E-cores are designed with the idea that light workloads and processes can be taken off the more power-hungry compute tile and offloaded onto a more efficient and lower-powered tile altogether. Other major additions include a first-for-Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which sits within the SoC tile and is designed to bring on-chip AI capabilities for workloads and inferencing, paving the way for the future. With Meteor Lake, Intel is aiming to put themselves in a more competitive position within the mobile market, with notable improvements to compute core hierarchy, Intel's Xe-LPG Arc-based graphics tile looking to bolster integrated graphics capabilities, and an NPU that adds various AI advantages. Meteor Lake also sets the scene for Intel and modular disaggregation, with Foveros 3D packaging set to become a mainstay of Intel's processor roadmap for the future, with the Intel 4 process making its debut and acting as a stepping stone to what will become Intel's next mainstay node throughout its fabs, Intel 3. AnandTech takes its usual in-depth look at Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake platform, which seems like it will be a rather radical shift for the company. It's also the first generation whithout Intel's Core ix naming scheme, so things might be a bit confusing for a while post-launch.
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 them. Another reason, and a far bigger problem than simply maintaining LTS, according to Corbet, is that Linux code maintainers are burning out. It's not that developers are a problem. The last few Linux releases have involved an average of more than 2,000 programmers - including about 200 new developers coming on board - working on each release. However, the maintainers - the people who check the code to see if it fits and works properly - are another matter. The longer LTS support windows were put in place mostly for embedded devices, and as Ars Technica explains, it's Android in particular that is affected by this change.
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 which workspace you're on. A lot of work has gone into improving search performance, and they've added an indicator to let you know when your camera is in use. The image viewer has been replaced by an entirely new application, and there's a new camera application as well. Of course, this is just a small selection - there are countless improvements and fixes in all the core GNOME applications. GNOME 45 will find its way to a distribution near you.
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, and the current Start menu is an atrocious mess. Somehow I doubt adding folders to an already useless section of the Start menu is going to make it any less of a disaster.
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.
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 look at the main chip. I could design my own processor cores too if had the means of a genocidal, totalitarian superpower.
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 video into a handy Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode. This new feature is similar to the Automatically turn on picture in picture for video sites" option in Microsoft Edge Canary. This seems like another one of those helpful" browser features you need to turn off because at random moments it'll obscure part of the web page you're looking at. Who is asking for features like this?
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 Bezier curves. None of these can be used to express a circle accurately. You can only do an approximation of a circle but it is always slightly eccentric. The only way to create a proper circle is to have a raster image like the one above. Shouldn't be that big of a deal, right? I'm sure nobody is using PDF for anything that would require the kind of precision needed for a perfect circle, like CAD drawings for laser cutters and similar machinery. Right? Again one might ask whether this has any practical impact. For this case, again, probably not. But did you know that one of the cases PDF is being considered (and, based on Internet rumors, is already being used) is as an interchange format for CAD drawings? Now it suddenly starts mattering. If you have any component where getting a really accurate circle shape is vital (like pistons and their holes), suddenly all your components are slightly misshaped. Which would not be fun. This is why we can't have nice things.
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, and structured concurrency. You can find the GPL-licensed OpenJDK builds at the OpenJDK website, and the closed source builds from Oracle are also available.
WSL isn't exactly my cup of tea so I know relatively little about it, but I do know it's quite popular. This looks like a big update with a ton of new features to play around with.
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 games, which led to an even bigger lack of players, and so on. What surprises me most is not that this happened - but the fact they were surprised by this? I mean, getting a foothold in the gaming industry is incredibly hard, and requires you to be 110% in, and for the long haul at that. You have to be in all the way for the long term - anything less and you might as well not even try. I am baffled that nobody at Google was like - if we do this, we have to commit to at least ten years of perseverance, through lean times with few subscribers and massive investments and losses, only to recoup them later once the ball starts rolling. Consoles are sold at a loss for a reason.
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 offered, I instantly know the developers behind the project do not respect me as a user. They choose their own convenience over my experience as a user, and while that's a perfectly valid choice they can make, it does mean I'm not going to use your service.
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.
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 Surface event. Panay will no longer be presenting at Microsoft's showcase on Thursday but will remain at the company for another couple of weeks as part of a transition process. He's reportedly joining Amazon to replace Dave Limp and lead Amazon's Echo and Alexa push. Amazon is also holding its own hardware event on Wednesday. This sure is an odd and rather abrupt departure - only a few days before Panay was supposed to be present Microsoft's Surface event - and I wonder what the full story is, and if we'll ever get to hear it. I have mixed feelings about Panay's tenure at Microsoft. As far as hardware goes, Surface devices are quite nice and pleasant, albeit often a tad bit out of date for the prices Microsoft is asking. Worse yet, Microsoft and Panay, despite halfhearted attempts, completely missed the boat on ARM, and Windows is still floundering there due to both poor ARM hardware (compared to Apple's offerings) and Windows on ARM being an afterthought. As far as software goes - well, Windows is in a worse state than it's ever been in. It's the clown car of operating systems, and two decades of layering one user interface and API above another has turned the operating system into a layer cake that makes Hisarlik seem like a thin sheet of single-ply toilet paper. The ways in which Microsoft has jerked Windows from left to right are numerous, and Panay was at the head of it all for a long time. Maybe Microsoft's relentless push for shoving AI down Windows' users' throats as the straw that broke Panay's back?
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.
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 about it lately. So today, let's talk about it! Wayland is a needlessly divisive topic, mostly because the people who want to stick to X.org are not the same people with the skills required to actually maintain, let alone improve, X.org. Wayland should not be a divisive topic because there's really nowhere else to go - it's the current and future of the Linux desktop, and as time goes on, the cracks in X.org will start to grow wider and longer. In essence, Xorg became too large, too complicated, and too fragile to touch without risking breaking the entire Linux ecosystem. It's stable today because it's been essentially frozen for years. But that stability has come hand-in-hand with stagnation. As we all know in the tech world, projects that can't adapt die. Projects that depend on them then die as well. My biggest - and basically only - issue with Wayland is that it's very Linux-focused for now, leaving especially the various BSDs in a bit of a rough situation. There's work being done on Wayland for BSD, but I fear it's going to take them quite a bit of time to catch up, and in the meantime, they might suffer from a lack of development and big fixing in their graphics stack.
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.
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 you want to help out, I'm sure he'd be delighted. I love OS/2 - in the form of the modern ArcaOS - and a working Mastodon client is something that's quite high on my wish list. Who knows - maybe one of you nerds can help out with this project.
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 distributions on my main computers (NAS, Gaming, laptop, workstation) to be able to write this text. I haven't given any of these a try just yet, but I feel like this is where the Linux desktop is going. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing - I need both more experience as well as read more informed opinions about it - but I do like the concept.
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 can make the Fossil Wrist PDA into what may be the smallest (and first wrist-mounted) Gopher client. That also required an update to the Overbite Palm Gopher client (which you'll want for your 68K Palm anyway), and then there's the matter of the battery refusing to charge as well. And finally, we want to make all of this portable! This makes my heart flutter and my tummy somersault.
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 area of the chip. Zen 4 cores do an excellent job on the CPU side, while RDNA 3 provides strong graphics performance. Hardware offload helps power efficiency on specialized AI and audio processing workloads. To support all this, Infinity Fabric gets lower power states and very flexible clock behavior. Phoenix ends up being able to perform well across a wide range of form factors and power targets. These are the kinds of chips powering the current slew of mobile gaming devices like the Steam Deck and its various competitors. It's great to see this market segment take off, mostly thanks to AMD and Valve, but I'm going to hold off just one or two generations more before jumping in. If AMD's pace of improvement continues, these handheld devices are going to become even thinner and lighter. That being said, I'd still love to review a Steam Deck for OSNews, specifically because of its Linux base. Maybe I'll run into an acceptable deal at some point soon.
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 into than a lot of programmers tend to think. Learning how to program has big the rest of the fucking owl" energy in that the most basic of basic concepts are relatively easy to grasp, but the leap from those very basic concepts to actually using them for something useful is absolutely massive and fraught with endless pitfalls. Many, many have tried to bridge this massive canyon, and Apple sure has tried numerous times as this article illustrates, but other than just starting at a young age and never losing interest and never standing still for too long, it seems like nobody has found an actually good, reliable way of teaching latecomers how to program.
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 going all-in on large language models over the last couple years. I see this as a result of Apple generally priding themselves on polish and perfection, while language models are fairly unpolished and imperfect. As a result, this may be one of the first Transformer-based models that Apple will ship in one of its operating systems, or at least one of the first that they've acknowledged publicly. This left me with some questions about the feature. Jack Cook did some digging into this new feature and the language model it uses, and came up with some very interesting findings. He also details his process, and of course, the code he wrote to do all of this is available on Github.
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'll just quietly back away and let you all handle it.
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 designing a modern" CPU isn't that hard, so we have released our schematics and made it open source as well. You can check out our GitHub repository for more information. If there would be enough interest, maybe we could make a DIY kit, so anybody interested with soldering skills would be able to make their own Pineapple ONE! Don't think you can run Crysis on this though - it runs at 500 kHz, has a 512 kB program memory and 512 kB of RAM, and a black and white graphics card with 200*150 pixels. It's no speed demon, but who cares - this is quite the feat.
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 story.
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, if Microsoftian convoluted overview.
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 WebGPU demos now run too, notably those that don't require changing the width or height on the fly, such as the Conway's Game of Life built in Your first WebGPU app. On the CSS front, floats and white-space: nowrap' were previously only supported in our legacy layout engine (--legacy-layout), but now they are supported again, and better than ever before! Floats in particular are one of the trickiest parts of CSS2, and our legacy version had many bugs that were essentially unfixable due to the legacy layout architecture. On top of this and other improvements, Servo's reference browser now also comes with a new user interface, and it comes with a location bar! Keep in mind this is not supposed to be a full-fledged user interface comparable with Chrome or Firefox, so don't expect the world as a user.
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 Mastodon, while g1a55er found a different way independently. I'm not smart enough to indicate if these methods are hacks or solid, durable, intended methods, but at least for now, this functionality remains available.
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 Google doesn't have any repair centers or service centers" for the device. At this moment, we don't have any repair option for the Google Pixel Watch. If your watch is damaged, you can contact the Google Pixel Watch Customer Support Team to check your replacement options," Google spokesperson Bridget Starkey confirmed to The Verge. Google is exemplary at instilling confidence in buying their products.
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 also comes with new adaptive widgets, which should fix a whole slew of problems that crop up when resizing an application. For the rest, a whole bunch of GNOME applications have been updated, as well as a number of extensions.
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). A mere zipfile with a csv in it seems so diminutive, but in fact an enormous mass of financial applications use this particular zipfile every day. I'm pretty sure that's why they've left those commas in - if they removed them now they'd break a lot of code. When open data is made really easily available, it also functions double duty as an open API. After all, for the largeish fraction of APIs in which are less about calling remote functions than about exchanging data, what is the functional difference? I wonder how many of these types of simple, but extremely powerful open datasets that are so relatively easy to use exist.
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 any given Chromebook. To ensure compatibility with our updates, we work with all the component manufacturers within a platform (for things like the processor and Wi-Fi) to develop and test the software on every single Chromebook. Starting in 2024, if you have Chromebooks that were released from 2021 onwards, you'll automatically get 10 years of updates. For Chromebooks released before 2021 and already in use, users and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the platform's release (after they receive their last automatic update). A good thing... Without any additional strings other than are already attached to a Chromebook? This can't be. In all seriousness, ten years of updates for laptops that are often quite cheap and disposable is simply good news, and ensures that Chromebooks can be passed on for longer than they could before.
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 often communicate with one another internally using the company's Google Chat product. Under a policy called Communicate with Care," the Justice Department asserts, Googlers receive training that instructs them to have sensitive conversations over chat with history off - meaning the conversation is auto-deleted after 24 hours. As far back as 2003, Google managers circulated unambiguous instructions on phrases to avoid to ensure they don't come across like monopolists. It's one thing that we all innately understand Google to be an abusive monopolist - it's another thing to actually legally prove it. Antitrust hasn't exactly been the strong suit of the US government as of late, so I'm hoping this one will turn out different than some of the other halfhearted attempts over the past few decades. We need some honest-to-god trust-busting or Bell cutters.
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 this post I'm exploring this Internet garden. This whole thing was such a massive hype back then, but since it took place about a year before I became the news-post-person around here, I didn't actually remember if OSNews covered it, and it seems we didn't. It's definitely a fun exercise to look back at these pixel links, and actually owning one of the original domains is amazing.
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 \_()_/. Internally, the conduit just takes an empty PalmDOC database (PDB) file, downloads the timeline data, then stuffs everything into the PDB and sends the entire thing to the handheld. I doubt any custom HotSync conduit has had an entire tokio runtime stuffed in it before, but it only took me an afternoon to write and it takes ~5s to run, so chalking this one up as a win. You can clone the repo here, and install the conduit yourself using the provided binary if you too would like to use the world's most exclusive mastodon client. This project obviously make my heart flutter a little bit. As a longtime Palm OS user of yore, and huge fan of the platform to this day, I've been wondering when, in the flurry of interest in building Mastodon clients for weird and dead platforms, it would be Palm OS' turn in the spotlight. Well, that spotlight is here now, and while it's still relatively basic, this is excellent work. Targeting old-style Palm OS devices is an interesting choice, but without having tried it, it should work seamlessly through PACE on the later, ARM-based Palm OS devices. The whole blog post is a joy to read, and can serve as a blueprint for anyone interested in, for some reason, picking up Palm OS development in 2023.
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 California, and I'd like to congratulate everyone involved in the effort getting this passed. Much like consumer protection laws from the EU, such laws from California also have a tendency to benefit consumers far beyond the borders of the original jurisdiction.
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 been polished up a bit more - if that's even necessary - it will make its way to the next ReactOS release.
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 fixes for a possible crash in the audiolevel widget, broken audio channel setting when opening an existing project file, incorrect saving of default audio channels for a project, a crash on subclip transcoding, and extracting of audio multi-stream clips. There's way more bug fixes and improvements than these. As always, KDE Gear 23.08.1 will make its way to your distribution soon enough, and of course, if you're crazy, you can compile it yourself as well.
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 that the main Haiku CO is down at the moment, but should be back up soon.
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).
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.
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 are working under Wayland as are a number of Xfce's own applications. Do note, though, that there's no certainty at all yet that Xfce will transition to Wayland completely. As the roadmap clearly states: It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all). So, the future of Xfce on Wayland is not yet set in stone - but with X.org having effectively been abandoned, I doubt Xfce will have much say in the matter.
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