You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be. Perhaps I can explain.
This post aims to be a high level introduction to using USB for people who may not have worked with Hardware too much yet and just want to use the technology. There are amazing resources out there such as USB in a NutShell that go into a lot of detail about how USB precisely works (check them out if you want more information), they are however not really approachable for somebody who has never worked with USB before and doesn’t have a certain background in Hardware.
The months keep coming, and thus, the monthly progress reports keep coming, too, for Redox, the new general purpose operating system written in Rust. This past month, there’s been considerable graphics improvements, better deadlock detection in the kernel, improved Unicode support thanks to switching over to ncurses library variant with Unicode support, and much more.
Arcane Arts and Cold Steel (Pulp Hero Press, December 24, 2025) From History to Writing Sword and Sorcery, Pulp Hero Press has us covered In 2019, Pulp Hero Press published Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, which was notably covered by David C.
Researchers who observed a murderous conflict unfolding in a once-unified group of wild chimpanzees say there are parallels with civil wars in human societies
A woman with three different autoimmune conditions had all of them treated simultaneously by genetically modifying her immune cells to kill off the rogue ones causing problems
Strange Escapes is another of H. Bedford-Jones’s short story series from Blue Book magazine. It is an eight-story series that appeared under his Gordon Keyne pseudonym and ran from February 1938 through September 1938.
Elizabeth Banks stars as an author shrunk by her scientist husband Matthew Macfadyen in this major new series – but it fails to live up to its promise, finds Josh Bell
A drug known only as compound X helped to remove the problematic proteins associated with Parkinson's disease from the brains of mice, and improved their balance and mobility
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has updated the Red List status for three of Antarctica’s most famous species after a dire assessment of their prospects under climate change
Swords and Sorcery: Stories of Heroic Fantasy, edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, December 1963). Cover by Virgil Finlay Here are two more Sword & Sorcery anthologies edited by L. Sprague de Camp.
Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list. In this post, I’ll share how I ported the first version of Mac OS X, 10.0 Cheetah, to the Nintendo Wii.
Join me live at 11 a.m. PDT / 2 p.m. EDT for a discussion on Nato, Iran and more.
Measurements by buoys at four latitudes in the western Atlantic provide the strongest evidence yet that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is weakening
A new book from photographer Jon McCormack collects his shots of patterns in nature from around the world, from flamingoes to icebergs
A fresh and important book reveals the messy reality of our ever-mutating cells – and why the quest to defeat ageing is futile, says Michael Le Page
Feedback is delighted by the discovery of a very specific scientific sculpture park in China – and wonders if readers can top it
A method that relies on hitting materials with neutrons can measure how much quantum entanglement hides within them, which could enable new kinds of quantum technology
Massive herbivores became scarce in the Middle East about 200,000 years ago, and this coincided with a shift towards smaller, lighter toolkits in the archaeological record
A decline in ancient megafauna in the Middle East coincided with a shift towards smaller, lighter toolkits in the archaeological record – though scientists are still in debate about why
John Pendry is known for creating an invisibility cloak. Twenty years on, he has used the same principles to fashion an even more powerful kind of metamaterial that can teach us about the wild frontiers of physics
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I previously read and reviewed Terrance Layhew’s first novel, One Man’s Treasure, which I enjoyed. Now he has a new series with pilot Mitch Mayhew coming from Veritas Entertainment, which is putting out works by several authors under the heading of “men’s adventure fiction.” I’ve seen several of these on Amazon, but have yet to […]
By tracing the origins of an unusual, short-lived particle, researchers have gathered some of the strongest evidence yet that mass can emerge from fluctuations in the vacuum
James Watson’s The Double Helix is probably one of the greatest science books of all time – but Michael Le Page finds he can’t recommend that anyone actually reads it
Reform it, don’t destroy it.
Conan the Barbarian (129 minutes; 1982) Written by John Milius and Oliver Stone. Directed by John Milius. Based on the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. What is it? The first film adaptation of Robert E Howard’s greatest creation: the Cimmerian warrior who was a thief, soldier, pirate, mercenary and king.
Two of the forefathers of quantum theory, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, had a famous argument over whether light is a wave or a particle. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan finds that the matter has been settled once and for all
The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission have captured extraordinary views of the moon, including close-ups of the far side and a breathtaking solar eclipse
Training programmes for people with aphantasia – the inability to create mental images – are challenging neuroscientists' understanding of how we create thoughts
Amplifying the brain's waste disposal system seems to clear a substance that drives migraines, relieving some of the pain associated with the condition
Anaerobic digesters converting manure to biogas reduce methane emissions from livestock, but incentives for them have encouraged factory farms to get bigger
From 2024, but still accurate and interesting: Plan 9 is unique in this sense that everything the system needs is covered by the base install. This includes the compilers, graphical environment, window manager, text editors, ssh client, torrent client, web server, and the list goes on.
Anos is a modern, opinionated, non-POSIX operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU-Linux) for x86_64 PCs and RISC-V machines. Anos currently comprises the STAGE3 microkernel, SYSTEM user-mode supervisor, and a base set of servers implementing the base of the operating system.
This year sees 35 years since 2.11BSD was announced on March 14, 1991 – itself a slightly late celebration of 20 years of the PDP-11 – and January 2026 brought what looks to be the venerable 16-bit OS’s biggest ever patch! Much of the 1.3 MB size is due to Anders Magnusson, well-known for his work on NetBSD and the Portable C Compiler.
Four NASA astronauts have now travelled further from Earth than any humans before them, as they flew around the moon during the Artemis II mission on 6 April
Anyone remember the KDE 4.0 themes Oxygen and Air? Well, several KDE developers have been working tirelessly to bring them back, which means they’re patching it up, fixing bugs, and generally making these classic themes work well in the current releases of KDE Plasma 6.
This is a great post, but obviously it hasn’t convinced me: The folks waving their arms and yelling about recent models’ capabilities have a point: the thing works. This project finished in three weeks.
Iodine deficiency is on the rise among people in the UK, the US and Australia. A century ago this led to drops in IQ, height and thyroid health – and the modern fancy salt fad may be leading to a resurgence, says columnist Alice Klein
For decades, scientists have tried and failed to explain how the force that binds the heart of atoms together really works. But new mathematical tools are finally prising the problem open
Executive Summary
- OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has, per The Information, said that OpenAI is not ready to go public in 2026, in part because of the "risks from its spending commitments" and not being sure whether the company's revenue growth would support its spending commitments.
- Friar
Somehow I missed doing a review of The Pontine Dossier, Millennium Edition, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Autumn/Winter 2023), the scholarly journal of Solar Pons, edited by Derrick Belanger. So I rectify that here. There are six issues out, all available from Amazon.
Boosting the brain's waste-disposal system is increasingly showing promise for Alzheimer's disease, with a study now suggesting that a novel approach eases brain deficits and symptoms associated with the condition
Mark Frost co-created, co-wrote, and co-produced, Twin Peaks. That includes the 2017 reboot (which I abandoned early on. I’m a huge fan of the original series, but the restart did nothing for me. He also wrote the two Fantastic Four films with Jessica Alba (which I said here, are better than people give it credit), as well as 42 episodes of Hill Street Blues, which was an extremely influential cop show in the eighties.
The January-February issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by Tithi Luadthong and Dominic Harman We’ve settled into a new reality with Analog and Asimov’s SF.
If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason.
So… if you are an enthusiast of single player RPGs and have not spent any time thoroughly engrossed in this modern masterpiece, you’re either buried under a pile of rubble or not allowing yourself enough time for brilliant escapism.
An ultra-lightweight real-time operating system for resource-constrained IoT and embedded devices. Kernel footprint under 10 KB, 2 KB minimum RAM, preemptive priority-based scheduling. ↫ TinyOS GitHub page Written in C, open source, and supports ARM and RISC-V.
Another major improvement in Redox: a brand new scheduler which improves performance under load considerably. We have replaced the legacy Round Robin scheduler with a Deficit Weighted Round Robin scheduler.
You’d think if there was one corner of the open source world where you wouldn’t find drama it’d be open source office suites, but it turns out we could not have been more wrong. First, there’s The Document Foundation, stewards of LibreOffice, ejecting a ton of LibreOffice contributors.
This is the first of a series of articles in which you will learn about what may be one of the silliest, most preventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st century, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest customer, and the trust of the US government.
Alex Chan in Creating a personalised bin calendar:
I start by generating an HTML calendar using Python. There’s a built-in calendar module, which lets you output calendars in different formats. It doesn’t embed individual date information in the <td> cells, so I customise the HTMLCalendar class to write the date as an id attribute.
Neat post from Alex. Can immediately think of a few places where this approach might be useful. Also wish I'd known that Python calendar module fifteen years ago when I spent a not insignificant amount of hours setting up a calendar grid in Photoshop by hand ^_^
If you've peeked at my reading log the last year or so, you'd be excused for thinking I'd abandoned Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. It has featured under my reading section for more than a year!
Finishing a book has never taken me this long before. But finish it I did, and I did it just the other day.
Stoic philosophy has interested me for many years. Even before it was co-opted by the ‘manosphere’ and quotes from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and their fellow stoics became endemic to various platforms. I just never really got around to following up on my curiosity. Not until I began listening to the History of Rome podcast a couple of years back. It renewed my interest in the philosophical teachings of the age, and — having both Seneca's Letters and Aurelius' Meditations on my shelf — I decided that I needed to read these two cornerstones of stoicism.
Seneca's letters are written as musings and advice for his friend Lucilius. The 65 letters have become somewhat of a bible or, the original teachings, for stoics. They cover a wide array of subjects. Everything from the folly of the crowds to how to meet death to the point of philosophy.
Part of the reason finishing the book took me so long is because I decided to read at most one letter per day. Given the subject matter, plowing through felt insufficient. Better to let each letter sink in and process it properly before moving on to the next. I also took a fair bit of notes.
Much of what Seneca teaches resonates with me. The stoic views on death, in particular, align with my personal beliefs. Seneca closes his 65th and final letter to Lucilius:
And what is death? It is either the end, or a process of change. I have no fear of ceasing to exist; it is the same as not having begun. Nor do I shrink from changing into another state, because I shall, under no conditions, be as cramped as I am now. Farewell.
Mic drop!
Death is a recurring subject throughout the letters. The view is consistent in that death is nothing to be feared. All of our lives we are dying. (‘For death itself is always the same distance from us.’) Not a single one of us has any guarantees for when that final moment will come. We should lead our lives as if death is constantly around the corner. ‘Let us postpone nothing’, he writes.
His first letter deals with just that. Seneca opens it thus:
Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.
Seneca preaches that ‘life is long, if only you know how to use it’. Most of us, unfortunately, do not. We are not set free. We do not gather and save our time. Instead, our precious time is squandered to ‘the most disgraceful kind of loss’ which ‘is due to carelessness’.
His strong and adamant preaching that ‘nothing is ours, except time’ was a timely (hur-hur) reminder. I'm at a part of my life where the days seemingly fly by. Each day is filled to the brim. Reading Seneca's letter compelled me to take stock of how I'm spending my time. To make adjustments, sure. But, more importantly, to reach the conclusion that much of what I fill my days with is genuinely what I want to be doing.
What a gift.
Another gift was his thoughts on crowds. In the physical sense, in the sense of ‘everyone is doing it’ that is so easy to use as justification for our actions and in the sense that we need to strive for the approval of the many. This particular anecdote hit home:
The following was also nobly spoken by someone or other for it is doubtful who the author was; they asked him what was the object of all this study applied to an art that would reach but very few. He replied: ‘I am content with few, content with one, content with none at all.’
And, on the subject of attracting praise, Seneca wrote (emphasis mine):
Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself if you are a person whom the many can understand? Your good quality should face inwards.
These are thoughts I've sort of held or vaguely surmised, but never truly expressed. But I could not agree more. Your compass should point towards something other than praise and adulation. Your good quality should face inwards. Seneca also talks about going against the crowds in how you act:
It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting, but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way — thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd. For one may keep holiday without extravaganza.
In opposing the crowd, it is easy to default to reclusive behaviour. As Seneca points out here, however, this is not necessarily the stoic way. Instead, to be among the crowds, and to do what they do, but in a different way, is both more challenging and more instructive.
Another cornerstone of stoic philosophy are the views on material wealth. It is not that they abhor richness. In fact, they actively encourage anyone to pursue it. It, however, being something quite different than what we normally consider wealth. Nothing illustrates this more than when Seneca quotes Epicurus in a story about Pythocles:
‘If you wish to make Pyhocles rich, but not rich in the vulgar and equivocal way, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.’
Seneca believes that it is equally true that:
If you wish to make Pythocles honourable, do not add to his honours, but subtract from his desires.
And:
If you wish Pythocles to have pleasure forever, do not add to his pleasures, but subtract from his desires.
Not as eloquent as his ‘Epicurean enemy’, perhaps, but it certainly gets the point across. This view that wealth and honour and true pleasure is not defined by what you own and acquire, but rather what you desire, is something I believe deeply. Seeing it written in such plain words helped me cement that belief. Every day I now try to remind myself of this. That I can become richer, more virtuous and make life more pleasurable simply be subtracting from my desires.
To that end, I will end this post with perhaps my favourite quote from all of Seneca's letters, concerning what constitutes happiness:
…teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with which he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, who is unerring in judgement, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.
I assume I don’t have to explain the difference between big-endian and little-endian systems to the average OSNews reader, and while most systems are either dual-endian or (most likely) little-endian, it’s still good practice to make sure your code works on both.
An incredibly powerful flash of X-rays spotted by the Einstein Probe telescope appears to be a kind of explosion first theorised more than 30 years ago
Hello, yes, I have fucked it once again
This week offered two different futures for humanity. The first was based on self-pity and ignorance, the second on reason and common humanity.
This week offered two different futures for humanity. The first was based on self-pity and ignorance, the second on reason and common humanity.
Fears that artificial intelligence could rise up to wipe out humanity are understandable given our steady diet of sci-fi stories depicting just that, but what is the real risk? Matthew Sparkes looks at what the experts say
Peter Schuyler Miller was born on February 21, 1912 in Troy, New York. He earned a Master of Science from Union College and worked as a technical writer for General Electric and the Fisher Scientific Company.
AI predicted that a forgotten breast cancer drug could be repurposed to treat many respiratory and gastrointestinal viruses, and subsequent animal tests suggests it may be right
For those who want a little help composting, take a cue from James Woodford’s experience raising worms – both the small colony of wrigglers he keeps in a sensible bin in his city garden and the dumpster-sized worm farm he has that can turn even animal carcasses into nutrient-dense soil
Science fiction fans naturally know H.G. Wells best for his scientific romances. But after 1905, he wrote relatively little in that genre. Instead, he turned his efforts variously to the Fabian Society, Britain’s indigenous socialist movement; to surveys of human knowledge for general audiences, in the style later followed by Isaac Asimov (I read my grandmother’s copy of The Outline of History, and I still have the four volumes of The Science of Life); and to realistic novels, starting with...
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A fossil bed in China containing animals up to 554 million years old suggests that we may have to reconsider the idea that life suddenly diversified during the Cambrian explosion
Recognising rhythmic patterns was thought to require a big brain, but a series of experiments has shown that buff-tailed bumblebees have this ability, too
If you would like to hear me speak about Elemental check the dates below
A recording from Arthur Snell and The New World's live video
The fallout of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and its implications for global geopolitics
Nelson Dellis credits techniques like the method of loci for his extraordinary memory. Now, brain scans have revealed the parts of his brain that this approach taps into, and how we can use it to improve our own recall
Perhaps the countries whose economies are most directly linked to the Straits of Hormuz should take care of the Straits of Hormuz
A galaxy spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope, known as Hebe, that existed just 400 million years after the big bang appears to contain extremely pure and young stars
If you are unlucky enough to have been bitten by a snake, you are unlikely to want to repeat the experience. Not so for Tim Friede, who intentionally exposes himself to deadly bites in the hope of developing a treatment for the 5 million people who are bitten each year
April 1st is now globally over - relax!
AI won't decide about what's in your backups.
Charles Saunders (1946 – 2020) was one of two men who established a sub-genre of Sword & Sorcery that has come to be called Sword & Soul. The other was Samuel Delany (1942 – ). Saunders was born in the USA but moved to Canada as a conscientious objector after being drafted for Vietnam.
I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router.
Four astronauts have begun a 10-day journey around the moon and back again, the first crewed flight to the moon since 1972
Genetically engineering tobacco plants could enable a more sustainable production method for psychedelic drugs, which are increasingly in demand for research and medical uses
Photographer Lalo de Almeida has been documenting the industrialisation taking place in the Amazon rainforest after the Brazilian government relaxed environmental controls
Ducks with corkscrew penises, fish changing sex – what do we really know about sex and reproduction on Earth? Less than we think, reveals a mind-boggling new book. Elle Hunt explores
A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. He tells Olivia Goldhill what he learned – and how it changed him
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
But a few similarities cannot be ignored.
Traditional encryption methods have long been vulnerable to quantum computers, but two new analyses suggest a capable enough machine may be built much sooner than previously thought
In a shift that is reshaping entire ecosystems, the open oceans are letting less light in. We don't fully understand the consequences yet, but there is still hope, says oceanographer Tim Smyth
The third right arm of male octopuses has a specialised role in mating, and the creatures take extra care to avoid damaging it or losing it to a predator
