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Ever since selling Handspring to Palm in the early 2000s, Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot and founder of Palm, has been working on his true passion: neuroscience and trying to understand how the brain works. Teaming up with several neuroscientists and some former Palm people, his company Numenta, entirely funded by Hawkins himself, is now ready to show its research to the world.

KDE has released Plasma 5.14 desktop.

So I learned something new today. Back in the early and mid-90s, IBM tried to build a PC-like platform and ecosystem around its PowerPC processor. They called it the PowerPC Reference Platform, or PReP, and with it, you could build what were effectively PC clones with PowerPC processors, ready to run a number of operating systems, including AIX, Windows NT, OS/2, and Apple's failed Taligent project. None of this is news to me.What is news to me, however, is that aside from a number of desktop PReP machines, IBM also developed and sold a number of PReP laptops under the ThinkPad brand.

Google unveiled its new Pixel phones today, as well as the Pixel Slate, a ChromeOS tablet/laptop device that's basically a cross between an iPad Pro and a Surface Pro. Virtually everything from the event was leaked over the past few weeks, so there were few - if any - surprises. The new devices are certainly interesting, but Google continues its policy of not making these products available in most of the world, so there's little for me to say about them - I have never seen them, let alone used them.One thing that stood out to me about the Pixel Slate are its specifications - it runs on Intel processors, and in order to get a processor that isn't a slow Celeron or m3, you need to shell out some big bucks. I don't have particularly good experiences with Celeron or m3 processors, and even Intel's mobile i5 chips have never really managed to impress me - hence why I opted for the i7 version of the latest Dell XPS 13 when I bought a new laptop a few weeks ago. In The Verge's video, you can clearly see the user interface lagging all over the place, which seems like a terrible user experience to me, especially considering the price of $599 for the base Celeron model without a keyboard.Time will tell if this machine is any good, but I am quite skeptical.

AnandTech's iPhone XS review and benchmarks have been published, and it looks like Apple is leaping even further ahead in performance compared to Qualcomm's offerings.

So this is an interesting underreported story from February 2018 - as it turns out, iPhones sold in China will soon use specific NAND chips made by a specific Chinese company that won't be used in iPhones sold outside of China.

It's been a long time since we last covered Visopys - one of the few remaining hobby operating systems still in development - so how about an update? The last version we covered was 0.8 way back in September 2016, but the most recent release is 0.8.3 from August of this year.

More than three quarters of a year has gone by since last time, but the Arcan project has squeezed out a new release of the 'multimedia server' or 'desktop engine' Arcan and its related subproject, the Durden desktop environment.For those unaware of the project as such, it might be worthwhile to skim through a recent summary that can be found in the article "Revisiting the Arcan Project" - but suffice to say that it is an ambitious attempt at replacing large swaths (terminal emulators, display server, audio server, and so on) of the normal user-facing parts of the BSD and Linux userspace, with a single compact and coherently scriptable component.

I've been away for a few days, so there's some backlog for me to chew through.