Before the Romans captured Pompeii, the famous town was run by the Samnite people – and a dip in their public baths might have been an unpleasant experience
Combining two kinds of quantum computing devices could be just the trick for taking better images of faint, faraway exoplanets
For centuries, the principle of symmetry has guided physicists towards more fundamental truths, but now a slew of shocking findings suggest a far stranger idea from quantum theory could be a deeper driving force
Sexual behaviour among same-sex pairs is common in apes and monkeys, and a wide-ranging analysis suggests it does boost survival
The PDP-10 family of computers (under different names) was manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation between 1964 and 1983. Designed for time-sharing, batch and real-time systems, these computers were popular with universities, scientific companies and time-sharing bureaux.
Are you an author writing HTML? Just so we’re clear: Not XHTML. HTML. Without the X. If you are, repeat after me, because apparently this bears repeating (after the title): You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML.
I have posted several times on the various collections taken from the men’s adventure magazines (or MAMs), which succeeded the pulps. The folks who put out the excellent Men’s Adventure Quarterly, Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, have been putting out volumes in the Men’s Adventure Library, reprinting art and fiction (and nonfiction, some of which […]
The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work
Mathematicians rely on numbers, but finding words to explain different levels of certainty has stymied everyone from the ancient Greeks to the most famous modern philosophers. Maths columnist Jacob Aron tells the story of how a CIA analyst finally cracked it
(As long as Black Gate lets me post here, this will run every year the week of Howard’s passing (January 16), to help keep his flame alive) A LIFE IS NOT IMPORTANT EXCEPT IN THE IMPACT IT HAS ON OTHER LIVES – Jackie Robinson’s epitaph I did an interview last week with Jason Waltz for his ’24 in 42′ podcast (Yeah, I know: You just can’t wait to hear that one…).
As you may recall, circa 2022-2023 I was working on a
microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and
modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first
major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a
somewhat useful state of functionality, with drives for some real hardware,
filesystems, and an environment for running user programs of a reasonable level
of sophistication.
Helios development went strong for a while but eventually it slowed and
eventually halted in a state of design hell.
Came across Mole: 🐹 Deep clean and optimize your Mac. today. It is an open source, command line based utility for cleaning your Mac.
I generally don't install much, and try to be pretty diligent about keeping my Mac clean. Nevertheless, I was able to clear up a few gigabytes worth of junk that was lying around.
We all knew this was going to happen, so let’s just get it over with. Microsoft is testing a new feature that integrates Copilot into the File Explorer, but it’s not going to be another ‘Ask Copilot’ button in the right-click menu.
Posh, GNOME’s mobile shell, published a look back on the project’s 2025. The Phosh developers focus from day one was to make devices running Phosh daily drivable without having to resort to any proprietary OSes as a fallback.
From Sun King to Spray-Tan King
I discovered Adrian Cole (1949 – ) in the late 1970s through his Dream Lords trilogy. 1. Plague of Nightmares (1975) 2. Lord of Nightmares (1975) 3. Bane of Nightmares (1976) All were from Zebra books, with covers by Tom Barber, Jack Gaughan (maybe), and Tom Barber respectively.
Budgie has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent years, but it’s still in development and making steady progress. The project’s just released Budgie 10.10, the final release in the 10.x series which also marks the end of the transition to Wayland.
OpenBSD on a Sharp Zaurus Linux-based PDA from 2005? Of course, why not? Installing OpenBSD was easy. The instructions in INSTALL.zaurus are pretty straightforward. My 5.6 install was smooth. Installing sets took ~10-15 minutes.
Except me. I'll never leave. Not ever. I'm here until it's lights out.
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang (Harper Voyager, August 26, 2025) and We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, September 23, 2025). Covers: Patrick Arrasmith, uncredited The New York Times traces the inception of the “dark academia” genre to Donna Tart’s The Secret History, a Gothic murder mystery involving Classics students at a liberal arts college.
It’s time to end this discussion now.
Cutting down boreal forest and sinking the felled trees in the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year – but it could come at a cost to the Arctic ecosystem
One of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station is undergoing a “medical situation”, forcing NASA to bring the crew home early for the first time ever
Evidence is mounting that specific gut bacteria are linked to sleep conditions, which may open the doors to dietary recommendations aiming to boost the quality of our slumbers
A recording from a live video filmed on 5 January.
The ice-covered island may be strategically important, but it's unclear that it could be a commercially viable source of minerals and oil in the near future
Calculations show that injecting randomness into a quantum neural network could help it determine properties of quantum objects that are otherwise fundamentally hard to access
A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor
A standard industrial knitting machine has been modified to produce fabrics from tungsten wire coated in gold, which are used to form the dish on the CarbSAR satellite
A new survey hints at an alarming psychological distinction in political life
A new survey hints at a deep psychological distinction in political life
George Allan England was born in Fort McPherson, Nebraska on February 9, 1877. He attended Harvard University, where he earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees. In 1903, he published Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses.
Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers (Avon Books, 1948) Mysteries aren’t my first choice in genre fiction; science fiction and fantasy appeal to me more consistently. Even so, I’ve read a fair number of mysteries, by authors from Dashiell Hammett to P.D.
Rob Beschizza in Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud app that steals then deletes all your files for Boing Boing:
If you want control over your files (or simply like knowing where they are and be certain they still exist) use another operating system.
Sums up in a single sentence why I'll never again use Windows on a personal computer. The enshittification is unbelievably bad. Rob continues:
And it's such a mess: an operating system packed with ads, upsells and bloat. Something about Microsoft reminds me of oil companies in the southwest: risky environment, externalized costs, nauseating conditions, cunning alignments of liability and safety, no-one cares if it works so long as money is made.
Since we entered a new year, we also entered a new quarter, and that means a new quarterly report from the Hurd, the project that aims to, to this day, developer a kernel for the GNU operating system. Over the course of the fourth quarter of 2025, an important undertaking has been to port dhcpcd to Hurd, which will ultimately bring IPv6 support to Hurd.
MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, released version 1.58.00. Since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, the included X server has been improved, networking performance has been increased, there’s now native versions of classic X utilities like XEyes, XCalc, and others, and more.
Tree bark has a total surface area similar to all of the land area on Earth. It is home to a wide range of microbial species unknown to science, and they can either take up or emit gases that have a warming effect on the climate
A preliminary analysis suggests that industrially useful quantum computers designs come with a broad spectrum of energy footprints, including some larger than the most powerful existing supercomputers
There’s so much shit going on in the world right now, and we can all use a breather. So, let’s join Carl Svensson and look at some pretty Amiga Workbench screenshots. Combining my love for screenshots with the love for the Amiga line of computers, I’ve decided to present a small, curated selection of noteworthy Amiga Workbenches – Workbench being the name of the Amiga’s desktop environment.
The solution the Flatpak team is looking into is to use virtualisation for the graphics driver, as the absolute last-resort option to keep things working when nothing else will. It’s a complex and interesting solution to a complex and interesting problem.
Satellite photos show meltwater on the surface of iceberg A23a collecting in an unusual way, which may be a sign that the huge berg is about to break apart
A man’s severe reaction to a tattoo, which made all his hair fall out and destroyed his sweat glands, has reignited concerns about the immune effects of some tattoo inks
Jeffrey Lord was a house name used for a series of 37 fantasy/SF novels published between 1969 and 1984. They were billed as an “adult” fantasy series, meaning that they had sex in them. However the sex was pretty mild by today’s standards.
A comprehensive review confirms the benefits of exercise for treating depression, even if the exact reasons remain unclear
Winter finally started in earnest these last few days. Got out for my first cross country skiing session of the year today.
Crossing an ice covered lake in an otherwise quiet landscape is eerie. The ice is constantly shifting, cracking and resettling, resulting in intermittently ominous sounds.
Steph Ango in File over app:
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
This philosophy is what I hinted at in footnote 9 in my recent post about my current tech stack.
Storing data in open and accessible file formats is the way to go. It minimises lock-in and gives you great portability and freedom of choice.
Socks have always been a problem for me. I remember my mother, back when I was a kid, lamenting that I wrecked my socks too quickly. And this has remained a problem all through my life. I don't know the cause. Perhaps I drag my feet when I walk. Maybe I mess around and slide slide too much, even as a middle aged man. All I know is that when I buy two ten packs of regular cotton socks, holes start appearing a month or two later.
As a forty year old man of means I've decided that enough is enough. No longer will I suffer the discomfort of walking around with holes in my socks. Instead, I will approach this problem methodically, with a twofold aim:
- Figure out which socks on the market are the cheapest per wear.
- Pinpoint the correct replacement cycle and make sure that I order new socks before holes start appearing in my current batch.
In my advanced age, I've come to prefer wool over cotton in many cases. After embarking on an exhaustive study of sock durability, I seem to be in luck. Wool blend socks appear, in general, to be more durable than cotton socks. Further, my extensive research efforts led me towards two particular brands:
There seems to be a loose consensus in sock durability awareness communities that these two brands offer the most value of any socks on the market. Well, I'll find out.
My first experiment will be pitching Smartwool's Everyday Anchor Line Crew Socks against a Norwegian market generic brand wool-blend sock.
Now, I fully expect the Smartwool socks to outlast its opponent. But, the thing is, they also cost five times as much. For the price of three pairs of Smartwool socks, I bought fifteen pairs of the generic brand wool-blend socks. Fifteen!
I've therefore devised the following experiment:
- My sock rotation will be limited to six socks.
- When the generic brand socks start tearing, I'll replace them will three new pairs.
Will the three pairs of Smartwool socks outlast fifteen pairs of the generic brand wool socks? I have my doubts, but I will let you know. Naturally, I will also award extra points for comfort, if one or the other stands out in that regard. Like and subscribe to make sure you don't miss the results!
The second phase of this experiment will be pitching the winner against Darn Tough socks to determine the ultimate winner. Whoever it is, they will, in all likelihood, gain my patronage for the remainder of my life. Well, if I can find a way to purchase Darn Tough's more anonymous colourways here in Norway. I'm just a plain socks kinda guy.
Drugs like Ozempic have transformed how we treat obesity, but a review of almost 40 studies shows it doesn't take long for people to regain weight if they come off them
A collection of arrow points excavated in South Africa has provided the oldest direct evidence of hunters deploying plant-based poisons on their weapons, a practice that has continued into modern times in some traditional cultures
We are going to be getting a lot of exciting new information about galaxies in 2026, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who can't wait to see what it can tell us
There is a growing trend to see our relationship with nature as a spiritual thing. This is a mistake, argues Richard Smyth
From Fallout and Gen Z Star Trek to the classic Neuromancer, you will be glued to the TV this year, says TV columnist Bethan Ackerley
The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students
With a new 28 Days Later movie and a new Dune, not to mention films from Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott, this is shaping up to be a vintage year for sci-fi, says Simon Ings
After finding success with last year's New Year's resolution, health reporter Grace Wade has grand plans for 2026 – and the science to back them up
While US President Donald Trump and his administration are making false and debunked claims about the causes of autism, real research is improving our understanding of the condition
We need to call it out for what it is.
Four years ago, I reviewed a truly fully open source desktop computer, from operating system down to firmware: the Raptor Blackbird, built entirely around IBM’s POWER9 processor. The overall conclusion was that using was mostly an entirely boring experience, which was a very good thing – usually ideologically-fueled computers come with a ton of downsides and limitations for average users, but Raptor’s POWER9 machines bucked this trend by presenting a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill desktop Linux experience, almost indistinguishable from using an x86 machine.
The jawbones and vertebrae of a hominin that lived 773,000 years ago have been found in North Africa and could represent a common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans
Most planetary systems contain worlds larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, and the low-density planets around one young star should help us understand how such systems form
You might feel like the days and weeks are slipping by. Here is how one psychologist says you can shift your experience of time
Back in September, we got a new Lazarus Gray book: The Adventures of Lazarus Gray, Vol. 16, from Barry Reese. This one has a novel, Shadows Over Yalta. As with other recent Reese works, this is from his own imprint, Reese Unlimited.
AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini fail to give adequate advice for 60 per cent of queries relating to women’s health in a test created by medical professionals
Immune cells are most commonly engineered to kill cancers, but now, scientists have shown the technique makes the gut lining of older mice resemble that of younger mice, raising hopes that the same approach could work in people
About half a year ago, I wrote an article about persistent rumours I’d heard from Android ROM projects that Google was intending to discontinue the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP has been gutted by Google over the years, with the company moving more and more parts of the operating system into closed-source, non-AOSP components, like Google Play Services.
Since we moved to a new year, we also moved to a new month, and that means a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The report obviously touches on the news we covered a few weeks ago that Redox now has the first tidbits of a modesetting driver for Intel hardware, but in addition to that, the project has also taken the first steps towards basic read-only APIs from Linux DRM, in order to use Linux graphics drivers.
Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has happened in Gentoo over the past months. New developers, more binary packages, GnuPG alternatives support, Gentoo for WSL, improved Rust bootstrap, better NGINX packaging, … As always here we’re going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution.
The new version brings a ton of new enhancements and fixes to all 3 supported platforms, with Steam running not only on Arm64, but also on RiSC-V and on Loongarch! And this is the Linux version of Steam, not the Windows one (but the Windows one works too if you really prefer that one).
A 1.78-million-year-old partial elephant skeleton found in Tanzania associated with stone tools may represent the oldest known evidence of butchery of the giant herbivores
The earliest acoustic vibrations in the cosmos weren’t exactly sound – they travelled at half the speed of light and there was nobody around to hear them anyway. But Jim Baggott says from the first moments, the universe was singing
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! How was your winter holidays? I hope you found it gentle and restful and full of the things that make you happy. I spent some time with family, which is always lovely, and more time by myself recovering (the joys of being a massive introvert).
The curse of having to remember easily hackable passwords may soon be over, as a new alternative is set to take over in 2026
The benefits of sleep may be more universal than we thought. We know it helps clear waste from the brain in humans, and now it seems that even creatures without brains like ours get similar benefits
An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies. Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?
Ever noticed your computer acting sluggish or warning you about low storage? Temporary files could be the sneaky culprit. Windows creates these files while installing apps, loading web pages, or running updates.
For nearly three decades, the International Space Station has been the only destination in low Earth orbit, but that will change this year. Could it be the start of a thriving economy in space?
Modelling suggests both carbon taxes and green subsidies will be necessary to decarbonise the US economy, but the inconsistent policies of successive presidents are the "worst case" scenario
The way the histories of CP/M, DOS, Microsoft, and the 8086 intertwine would be worthy of an amazing film if it wasn’t for the fact it would be very hard to make it interesting screen material. Few OEMs were asking for an 8086 version of CP/M.
We’ve talked about just how bad Apple’s regular icons have become, but what about the various icons Apple now plasters all over its menus, buttons, and dialogs? They’ve gotten so, so much worse.
CheriBSD is a Capability Enabled, Unix-like Operating System that extends FreeBSD to take advantage of Capability Hardware on Arm’s Morello and CHERI-RISC-V platforms. CheriBSD implements memory protection and software compartmentalization features, and is developed by SRI International and the University of Cambridge.
The Prudhoe ice dome disappeared during a warm period 7000 years ago. Global warming could cause similar temperatures by 2100, showing the Greenland ice sheet’s vulnerability
Long-term evaluations of the success or failure of the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela will be determined by what happens next.
For years, we've thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests that it comes in several distinct types. The implications for how we support autistic people could be profound
A galaxy cluster in the early universe is 10 times hotter than it ought to be, which may reshape how we think these enormous structures formed
Over the past couple of years, S.T. Joshi’s Sarnath Press has been putting out weird-fiction collections from several lesser-known authors published in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines. At present, there are almost a dozen volumes, with more in the works.
A study of 160 European famines between 1500 and 1800 shows that El Niño weather events led to the onset of some famines and extended the duration of others
A host of new science books are due to hit shelves in January, by authors including Claudia Hammond, Deborah Cohen and Daisy Fancourt
The US government is approving the drug leucovorin to address rising rates of autism, despite limited evidence that it works. This year, results from the largest trial yet should give more insight into its potential
