OSnews

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.

I had no idea that Vim started on the Amiga, and I doubt many people do.

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.

I love these kinds of investigations.

I know I keep harping on the declining quality and enshittification of Windows, but Microsoft just makes it so easy. In the changelog for the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds is this gem: Beginning to roll out with this build, Chat is nowMicrosoft Teams - Free. Microsoft Teams - Free is pinned by default to the taskbar and can be unpinned like other apps on the taskbar. So you buy a new Windows machine or reinstall Windows, and the taskbar will have the beautiful and not at all thirsty name Microsoft Teams - Free". I know a good ad agency for Microsoft.

But now I can say, unequivocally, if you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it's worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted. What has happened? Across the last few years, as John Riccitiello has taken over the company, the engine has made a steady decline into bizarre business models surrounding an engine with unmaintained features and erratic stability. Unity is imploding in on itself, and it's very sad to see.

As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things). This was a great opportunity for me to learn more about ZFS (because I new nada' to start with). And I'm happy to share some of the knowledge that I gathered with you on this post. Please keep in mind that I don't consider myself an expert on ZFS (not even close), but I will try to make things simple and easy to understand for someone, who like me, is just getting started with ZFS. An excellent starting point for diving into ZFS.

Thunderbolt 5 will deliver 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, and with Bandwidth Boost it will provide up to 120 Gbps for the best display experience. These improvements will provide up to three times more bandwidth than the best existing connectivity solution, providing outstanding display and data connections. Thunderbolt 5 will meet the high bandwidth needs of content creators and gamers. Built on industry standards - including USB4 V2 - Thunderbolt 5 will be broadly compatible with previous versions of Thunderbolt and USB. That's some serious speed for a cable.

Every release has a killer feature. Qt 6.6 features the opposite - staying alive. This blog post describes work to make Qt clients more robust and seemlessly migrate between compositors, providing resistance against compositor crashes and more. Qt 6.6 is bringing something to the Linux desktop we haven't had yet: transparent recovery from display server crashes. The solution for this? Instead of exiting when the compositor closes, simply...don't! If we could connect to a new compositor we just need to send the right amount of information to bring it in sync and notify the application code of any changes to bring this in sync. For Qt applications all this information is handled in the backend, in the Wayland Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA). Qt already has to handle screens and input devices being removed, clipboards being revoked and drag and drops cancelled. Supporting a whole reset isn't introducing any new work, we just have to trigger all of these actions at once, then reconnect to the newly restored compositor and restore our contents. Applications already have to support all of these events too as well as handle callbacks to redraw buffers. There's no changes needed at an application code level, it's all done as transparently as possible. The benefits here are legion: you can run two different compositors on two different monitors. You can switch compositors at runtime. You can add new features without logging out and back in. Checkpoint restore in userspace, and more. All this made possible by Wayland - X.org cannot do any of these things.

With the release of Windows 10 21H2, Windows offers inbox support for Mopria compliant printer devices over network and USB interfaces via the Microsoft IPP Class Driver. This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on. Device experience customization is now available via the Print Support Apps that are distributed and automatically installed via the Windows Store. This framework improves reliability and performance by moving customization from the Win32 framework to the UWP software development framework. Finally, print device manufacturers no longer have to rebuild their software since this solution is supported across all Windows versions and editions. With these advancements in the Windows print platform, we are announcing the end of servicing of the legacy v3 and v4 Windows printer drivers. As this is an impactful change, end of servicing will be staged over multiple years. Printer drivers used to be an absolute hell on Windows. Whereas on Linux you just plug the printer in and Linux will find and use the printer without much issue, on Windows, you had to trawl vendor websites using obscure device names and minor version variations just to get the right driver installed - usually accompanied by a whole boatload or crapware. Things got better as Windows eventually started downloading printer drivers and accompanying OEM management software by itself, and it seems this is the next step in the process by moving the functionality from these often crappy printer management applications into Print Support Apps.

In the last few years, several other vendors have begun selling Mac ROM SIMMs too. Friendly competition is great, but it creates a potential dilemma for me if someone buys another vendor's ROM SIMM and reprograms it with BMOW's base ROM in order to get the on-the-fly ROM disk decompression and other features. It could turn into a situation where my base ROM software is subsidizing another competing product. To compound the problem, I didn't have any clear usage policy or license" for the base ROM to say whether this type of use was OK. Furthermore my FC8 compression algorithm is free open-source, but the BMOW base ROM which incorporates it is not. This all created a large gray area. I hope to clarify this now by making the BMOW base ROM image explicitly free for personal use with anybody's own Mac ROM SIMM, no matter what vendor they purchased it from. This is the simplest and best way of resolving the ambiguity for the benefit of the classic Mac community. I only ask that you don't resdistribute the base ROM image elsewhere - come back to the BMOW Mac ROM-inator II details page if you need to download the image. Excellent move.

Microsoft published a blog post on the Windows Insider Blog in late August with a vague statement saying that Windows system components were to begin respecting the default web browser setting. Windows 10 and 11 regularly bypass this setting and force-open links in Microsoft Edge instead. In my extensive testing, I haven't found any changes in the new Windows Insider version. The issue here, I think, is in the wording Microsoft used. Here's the announcement: In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. I think the issue lies in the term Windows system components". The author of the post, Vivaldi employee Daniel Aleksandersen, states he tested links inside the new Copilot, Start menu, Search on the taskbar and desktop, Windows Spotlight, first-party apps (Outlook, Teams, News, Weather, and more), and Widgets on the taskbar (formerly called News and Weather)." However, I don't think Microsoft was talking about any of those things. When I read that original announcements from Microsoft, I assumed Windows system components" referred to links inside things like the Settings application, or various control panels. I have a feeling system components" does not include applications, search, or things like the search functionality. Idiotic and unclear, I know, but Microsoft is known for arcane language and terminology that doesn't make any sense to normal people outside the company. Of course, this is just my guess, so we'll see how this plays out.

2 years ago, I learned of an open-source project called Graphics Gremlin (GG) by Eric Schlaepfer who runs the website Tubetime.us. It is an 8-bit ISA graphics card that supports display standards like Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). CGA and MDA are display standards used by older IBM(-compatible) PCs in the 1980s. The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. GG addresses this problem by using techniques like scan doubling (for CGA) and increasing the vertical refresh rate (for MDA) then outputing to a relatively newer but still old VGA port. As neat as this project is, it does have a few limitations that the author tried to address: it doesn't have modern outputs, which is becoming problematic with monitor makers no longer adding VGA ports, and it can't display on two outputs at once. This article details his solutions.

Regular readers will know that I have a lot of love for the French Minitel system and own a couple. In the past I've written about using a Minitel 1B as a terminal and replacing the EPROM in a Minitel 2 to run custom firmware. Today I'm going to blog about a project called Minimit. The Minimit is a small, Minitel-shaped box that attaches to the Minitel's DIN port and brings the Minitel experience back to life. The box contains an ESP32 which talks to the DIN port outputting Minitel-compatible text and graphics. And the graphics and letters appear slowly just as they would have in the 1980s. Minitel is such a fascinating topic and technology - Teletext, but more versatile. I'm so glad people are keeping it alive like this.

Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its experimental" marking. The KSMBD in-kernel SMB3 server is now formally declared stable with Linux 6.6 in removing its experimental tag. Neat.