State of the terminal
It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve begun to dig deep into the inner workings of how terminal emulators, and the applications that run inside of them, really work. I’ve learned that there is a lot of innovation and creative problem solving happening in this space, even though the underlying technology is over half a century old. I’ve also found that many people who use terminal based tools (including shells like Bash and editors like Vim) know very little about terminals … ⌘ Read more

Virtual Boy: the bizarre rise and quick fall of Nintendo’s enigmatic red console
Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo … ⌘ Read more

Winamp to “open up” its source code
Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application’s source code will be open to developers worldwide. Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve. ↫ Winamp press release Nice, I guess, but twenty years to late … ⌘ Read more

The X Window System and the curse of NumLock
Ordinary modifiers are normally straightforward, in that they are additional keys that are held down as you type the main key. Control, Shift, and Alt all work this way (by default). However, some modifiers are ‘sticky’, where you tap their key once to turn them on and then tap their key again to turn them off. The obvious example of this is Caps Lock (unless you turn its effects off, remapping its physical key to be, say, another Ctrl key). … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm details Linux on Snapdragon X Elite, and it’s looking surprisingly good
With Qualcomm and Microsoft about to flood the market with devices using the new Snapdragon X Elite, those of us who don’t want to use Windows felt a bit uneasy – what’s Linux support going to look like for this new generation of ARM devices? Well, it seems Qualcomm’s been busy, and they’ve published a blog post detailing their work on Linux support for the X Elite. It’s be … ⌘ Read more

Android 15 beta 2 released
Google released Android 15 beta 2 today, and with it, they unveiled some more of the new features coming to Android later this year when the final release lands. Android 15 comes with something called a private space, an area with an extra layer of authentication where you can keep applications and data hidden away, such as banking applications or health data. It’s effectively a separate user profile, and shows up as a separate area in the application drawer when unlocked. When … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi officially announces intent to IPO
As expected earlier this year, Raspberry Pi is going public on the stock exchange in London. Back then, CEO Eben Upton said he did not expect the IPO to change how Raspberry Pi did things, but history tells us that initial public offerings tend to, well, change how companies do things. In their official announcement that they intend to hold an IPO, there’s an incredibly interesting and telling contradiction, as noted by @yassie_j on Ma … ⌘ Read more

NetBSD bans use of Copilot-generated code
The NetBSD project seems to agree with me that code generated by “AI” like Copilot is tainted, and cannot be used safely. The project’s added a new guideline banning the use of code generated by such tools from being added to NetBSD unless explicitly permitted by “core“, NetBSD’s equivalent, roughly, of “technical management”. Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGP … ⌘ Read more

GNOME OS is switching from OSTree to systemd-sysupdate
I’m pretty sure most of you are familiar with KDE Neon, the distribution KDE maintains to provide easy access to the latest KDE technologies. However, did you know GNOME has something similar, called GNOME OS? It’s been around for a while, but has a far lower profile than KDE Neon does, and it seems they want to change that and put more of a spotlight on GNOME OS. GNOME OS is an immutable distribution using OSTree, the sam … ⌘ Read more

Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button
This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a “web” search. It’s rolling out “web” searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it’s looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google’s search engine. The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text — and Google confirms to The Verge that it will b … ⌘ Read more

The new APT 3.0 solver
A crucial but often entirely transparent feature of a modern package management system like Debian’s APT is its solver – basically the set of rules and instruction on how to handle dependencies when installing a package. APT is currently in the process of radically changing its solver, the first bits of which can be found in APT 2.9.3, referred to as solver3. Many of the changes and improvements get a little into the weeds and will mostly be transparent to users, but there is one featu … ⌘ Read more

Google details some of the “AI” features coming to Android
Google I/O, the company’s developer conference, started today, but for the first time since I can remember, Android and Chrome OS have been relegated to day two of the conference. The first day was all about “AI”, most of which I’m not even remotely interested in, except of course where it related to Google’s operating system offerings. And the company did have a few things to say about “AI” on Android, and the gener … ⌘ Read more

VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion pro go free for personal use
After Broadcom acquired VMware, there’s been a steady stream of worrying or outright bad news for people using VMware products at home, for personal use, as enthusiasts. The biggest blow to the enthusiast market was the end of perpetual licensing, forcing people into subscriptions instead. Finally, though it seems we’re getting some good news. The most exciting part is that Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro wi … ⌘ Read more

Google is experimenting with running Chrome OS on Android
Now that Android – since version 13 – ships with the Android Virtualisation Framework, Google can start doing interesting things with it. It turns out the first interesting thing Google wants do with it is run Chrome OS inside of it. Even though AVF was initially designed around running small workloads in a highly stripped-down build of Android loaded in an isolated virtual machine, there’s technically no reason it c … ⌘ Read more

Nintendo Switch hacked to run Windows 11 on Arm
As Nintendo Switch unlocks and homebrew software develops, people are inclined to explore the possibilities and whether or not they actually provide a good experience. Our new prime example seems to be a full install of Windows 11 Arm on the Switch. As noted by @PatRyk on Twitter, who actually set this up, the experience is pretty grueling! The initial installation took three hours, and even basic system tasks were unresponsive. ↫ Chris … ⌘ Read more

EA is prototyping in-game ads even as we speak
Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they’ve purchased a game — now, it appears, the company’s hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads. EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company’s Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games,” he said the company’s already working on it. “W … ⌘ Read more

Thanks to our outgoing sponsor: Snikket
Snikket is a FOSS project for creating private chat spaces for small groups, such as families, friends, or clubs. It doesn’t depend on a phone number, doesn’t upload address books anywhere, and doesn’t sell data to advertisers. It supports all the features you expect, including media and voice messages, audio and video calls, end-to-end encryption, group messaging, and more. Use it from multiple devices at once with the official apps, or even with unoff … ⌘ Read more

IBM introduces entry-level Power10 server and tower
Each S1012 node has a single Power10 processor, which can have 1, 4, or 8 cores activated, which suggests that it is the same single chip module (SCM) implementation of the Power10 processor that was used in the Power S1022s entry machine. The Power S1012 node has four ISDIMM memory slots (using the differential signaling created by Big Blue for its Power10 memory) with a maximum capacity of 256 GB. The node has four half-height … ⌘ Read more

iOS 17.5 and other Apple updates arrive with Bluetooth tracker notifications and more
Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices. The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 … ⌘ Read more

MacRelix: a Unix-like environment that runs in classic Mac OS
MacRelix is a Unix-like environment that runs in classic Mac OS. MacRelix natively supports classic 68K and PPC Mac OS, as well as Mac OS X on PPC via Carbon. ↫ MacRelix website The creator of MacRelix, Josh Juran, published an article in 2019 detailing the origins of the project. As a Mac OS developer, he was so unhappy with both CodeWarrior and Apple’s Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop (MPW), that he set out t … ⌘ Read more

Apple Vision Pro has the same effective resolution as Quest 3… Sometimes?
This article is a partial-rebuttal/partial-confirmation to KGOnTech’s Apple Vision Pro’s Optics Blurrier & Lower Contrast than Meta Quest 3, prompted by RoadToVR’s Quest 3 Has Higher Effective Resolution, So Why Does Everyone Think Vision Pro Looks Best? which cites KGOnTech. I suppose it’s a bit late, but it’s taken me a while to really get a good intuition for how visionOS renders fram … ⌘ Read more

The Emacs window management almanac
Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap. Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and affordances. As someone who’s spent an unnecessary amount of time trying different approaches to window management in Emacs over the decades, I decided to su … ⌘ Read more

Apple II DeskTop currently testing 1.4 alpha releases
Disassembly and enhancements for Apple II DeskTop (a.k.a. Mouse Desk), a “Finder”-like GUI application for 8-bit Apples and clones with 128k of memory, utilizing double hi-res monochrome graphics (560×192), an optional mouse, and the ProDOS 8 operating system. ↫ Apple II DeskTop GitHub page The goal of this project is to reverse-engineer Apple II DeskTop, and fix bugs and enhance it in the process. I didn’t actually know tha … ⌘ Read more

Obsolete, but not gone: the people who won’t give up floppy disks
If you remember a time when using floppy disks didn’t seem weird, you’re probably at least 30 years old. Floppy disks or diskettes emerged around 1970 and, for a good three decades or so, they were the main way many people stored and backed up their computer data. All the software and programmes they bought came loaded onto clusters of these disks. They are a technology from a different era of computing, … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA to install open Linux kernel modules by default
Starting in the release 560 series, it will be recommended to use the open flavor of NVIDIA Linux Kernel Modules 119 wherever possible (Turing or later GPUs, or Ada or later when using GPU virtualization). ↫ NVIDIA developer forums Slowly but surely, NVIDIA is taking a more favourable position towards open source. It still feels surreal. ⌘ Read more