Good afterevenmorn, Readers! I took myself on a date Thursday night. It was very romantic. I first went to a bookshop to pick up a new book for myself (this was because I had forgotten to take my book with me, and could not spend the evening passing time without a book.

We recently talked about Apple’s pre-Mac OS X dabblings in UNIX, but Apple wasn’t the only computer and operating system company exploring UNIX alternatives. Microsoft had the rather successful Xenix, Atari had ASV, Sony had NEWS, to name just a very small few.

After a seemingly endless stream of tone deaf news from Mozilla, we’ve finally got some good news for Firefox users. As the company’s been hinting at for a while on social media now, they’ve added an “AI” kill switch to the latest Firefox nightly release, as well as a set of toggles to disable specific “AI” features.

In the late 1980s, with the expansion of the Internet (even though it was not open to commercial activities yet) and the slowly increasing capabilities of workstations, some people started to imagine the unthinkable: that, some day, you may use your computer to record voice messages, send them over the Internet, and the recipient could listen to these messages on his own computer.

Ants rely on scent to recognise their comrades, and when they are exposed to common air pollutants, other members of their colony react as if they are enemies

Reviewing January’s projects and publications

For the first time, researchers have found what seems to be a cloud of dark matter about 60 million times the mass of the sun in our galactic neighbourhood

The most robust evidence to date shows that people with a type of lung cancer lived longer if they received immunotherapy before 3pm

Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Tapping into these communication networks is opening up radical new ways to boost health

Steeger Books in the summer of 2025 came out with a new expanded edition of Don Hutchison’s The Great Pulp Heroes (1996, 2007, 2025). This work has long been an excellent introduction and overview of the world of pulp heroes.

We are getting a clearer sense of where and how often Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and it turns out the behaviour was much more common than we first thought

I’m working on a Douglas Adams post as part of an upcoming recurring feature on his non-fiction quotes. But I got sidetracked reading Calvin and Hobbes this past weekend. Much of America is in a war against brutal weather.

To eliminate bedtime struggles, a growing number of parents have turned to melatonin gummies, but these hormone supplements are largely unregulated. Columnist Alice Klein digs into the evidence on the risks of regularly using melatonin as a sleep aid for children

Gene-editing citrus fruits to make them less bitter could not only encourage more people to eat them, it might also help save the industry from a devastating plague  

A series that I wanted but had a difficult time getting was the Berserker series by Chris Carlsen. There are three books, all from Sphere Books, published in 1977, 1977, & 1979 respectively. I finally got the last one and just finished reading it.

Readers are spoiled for choice when it comes to popular science reading this month, with new titles by major names including Maggie Aderin and Michael Pollan

I previously covered x64 OpenVMS release on VMware. This was insanely cool achievement for the operating system. While it had no practical ramification there was one small annoyance. The OS console was on a serial port.

But NixOS isn’t the only declarative distro out there. In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme.

Josh Tumath in Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary:

Tip 1: Don't override the initial font size

The default font size comes from the initial value of the CSS font-size property. If an author doesn't specify a size, the initial font-size is medium. But what is medium? Typically it's 16px. But on desktop browsers, users can change it to whatever they want.

Came across this about text scaling, which is definitely a much needed feature, via Luke Harris. Josh's post is clear with good advice on how to support text scaling on your website. I have a ways to go, and need to dive into my CSS to fix it.

Ironically, I've only overridden the initial font size on my site here because I find initial font size to be too small!

Following the excellent Starship Troopers feedback last week, here’s a selection that might be a little less controversial. Kidding. The Party (1968) Who’s in it? Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Steve Franken, Denny Miller What’s it about? Hrundi V.

It’s no secret that Windows 11 isn’t exactly well-liked by even most of its users, and I’m fairly sure that perception has permeated into the general public as well. It seems Microsoft is finally getting the message, and they’re clearly spooked: the company has told The Verge that they have heard the complaints, and intend to start fixing many of the issues people are having.

But it’s on a lifeline, becoming less liberal, and will only survive if we work hard to reform and renew it

Columnist Michael Le Page delves into a catalogue of hundreds of potentially beneficial gene mutations and variants that is popular with transhumanists

You can’t avoid Oracle.

No, really, you can’t. Oracle is everywhere. It sells ERP software – enterprise resource planning, which is a rat king of different services for giant companies for financial services, procurement (IE: sourcing and organizing the goods your company needs to run), compliance,

Some people don’t develop dementia despite showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brain, and we're starting to understand why

Reports suggest that Elon Musk is eyeing up a merger involving SpaceX, Tesla and xAI, but what does he hope to achieve by consolidating his business empire?

Operating systems written in Rust – especially for embedded use – are quite common these days, and today’s example fits right into that trend. Ariel OS is an operating system for secure, memory-safe, low-power Internet of Things (IoT).

Yawning and deep breathing each have different effects on the movement of fluids in the brain, and each of us may have a distinct yawning "signature"

We pick the sci-fi novels we’re most looking forward to reading this month, from a new Brandon Sanderson to the latest from Makana Yamamoto

How one man's career explains our public life.

How one man's career explains British public life.

In the early 1800s, Denmark’s government, medical community, church leaders and school teachers all united to promote the new smallpox vaccine, which led to a remarkably quick elimination of the disease in the capital

Robert Moore Williams was born in Farmington, Missouri on June 19, 1907 and attended the Missouri School of Journalism, from which he graduated in 1931 with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism. He married Margaret Jelley in 1938 and they had one daughter.

Members of the New Scientist Book Club give their take on Sierra Greer's award-winning science-fiction novel Annie Bot, our read for February – and the needle swings wildly from positive to negative

In this extract from the February read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet the protagonist of Tim Winton’s Juice, driving across a scorched landscape in a future version of Australia

The New Scientist Book Club's February read is Tim Winton's novel Juice, set in a future Australia that is so hot it is almost unliveable. Here, the author lays out his reasons for writing it – and why he doesn't see it as dystopian

Elizabeth Hohmann is very interested in faeces, and spends her days sifting through stools to find those that could make the biggest difference to other people's health

Welcome to more Dark Muse News. This post reviews Anna Smith Spark’s A Sword of Bronze and Ashes. It was released in September 2023 (Flame Tree Press, cover illustration by Broci) and is the first book of the series The Making of This World: Ruined.

Borys Kit for the Hollywood Reporter in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, Stormlight Archive to Get Movie, TV Show:

Could the next great fantasy screen franchise be here? Apple TV believes so. The streaming giant has closed what has been described as an unprecedented deal to land the rights to the Cosmere books, the fictional literary universe by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.

Cannot wait!

Every year I make a family highlights movie. Throughout the calendar year, I try to whip out my camera or, if it is all I have at hand, my phone, to capture a glimpse of something that might be worthy of including.

None of it is anything special. And that is kind of the point. I can't dictate the memories my children retain from the childhood. But, my goal with these videos is to shape them. To reinforce the happy moments we shared as a family. Remind them of how their grandparents — even though they might not see them too often in their day to day lives — were there for every special occasion. Show them that they were happy and active and healthy and loved.

Not rarely I need that reminder myself. In the hubbub of daily life it easy to feel doubt that you're doing enough. Going through a plethora of recorded evidence to the contrary reminds me otherwise.

Making these annual movies is quite an endeavour. Capturing the source material is one thing. Sorting it, deciding what to keep and what to discard as I try to weave a story of the year that passed, is no small task. I am no videographer, no movie director, much as I think myself Wes Anderson's slightly less talented, albeit unappreciated cousin as I'm battling iMovie for the seventh year in a row, trying to remember the key combination for cutting a clip before eventually giving in and looking up the answer. When I'm finally done, I feel relieved.

In this day and age, there are tools out there that could do the job for me. I could just dump the raw footage in a chat and something akin to my yearly movie would pop out after a short while. In all likelihood, the movie it produced would be objectively better than anything I can finagle out of iMovie. Smoother, more polished, with a tailor made soundtrack and so on. Far more impressive.

Sometimes I'm tempted to give it a go. Then I take a step back and ask myself "what would be the point?" and I go back to wrestling with iMovie.

Because I know that the end product, the movie itself, is not the point. Making it is. The magic is in hand-picking the moments that make up our family's highlight reel of the year that came and went. My idiosyncratic use of transitions. The way I abuse iMovie's various title effects to superimpose dry-wit commentary atop most clips. An eclectic soundtrack from my own music library to give my kids little hints of who their father was and what he enjoyed listening to.

All these little things inject a little bit of my humanity into the end product. And that is the point. Not just of these movies, but of anything that you and I and everyone else make. To inject as much humanity as possible into the things we make.

Don't fall for the temptation of using technology to produce something polished, soulless and void of humanity when all that matters is to imprint as much humanity as possible.

As most of you will know, Mac OS X (or Rhapsody if you count the developer releases) wasn’t Apple’s first foray into the world of UNIX. The company sold its own UNIX variant, A/UX, from 1988 to 1995, which combined a System V-based UNIX with a System 7.0.1 desktop environment and application compatibility, before it acquired NeXT and started working on Rhapsody/Mac OS X.

Interval cancers are aggressive tumours that grow during the interval after someone has been screened for cancer and before they are screened again, and AI seems to be able to identify them at an early stage

A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we inherit, and on where we live and what we do

Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to be thriving

Adults with kidney cancer who received faecal microbiota transplants on top of their existing drugs did better than those who had placebo transplants as their add-on intervention

Even given a set of possible quantum states for our cosmos, it's impossible for us to determine which one of them is correct

While the two major open source desktop environments get most of the airtime – and for good reason, since they’re both exceptionally good – there’s a long tail of other desktop environments out there catering to all kinds of special workflows and weird niches.

The name John Maddox Roberts (1947 – ) first came to my attention as a writer of Conan sword & sorcery pastiches from Tor. He wrote eight, and when I talk to other REH fans Roberts’ name is almost always listed near the top of the Conan pastiche writers.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And, I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with the implied threat of appealing to my boss if appealing to me didn’t work.

The basic premise of TDD, for those unaware, is that one first writes a unit test that verifies the expected behavior for some function they want to write, observes the new test fail, and then one writes the implementation, iterating on it until the test passes.

Since I have no qualms about kicking a proprietary software product while it’s down, let’s now switch to NTDEV‘s thoughts on the state of Windows 11. Unfortunately, the issue that plagued Windows since the dawn of time has only aggravated recently.

I’ve been terribly sick for a few days so we’ve got some catching up to. Let’s first take a look at how Windows is doing. People often say Linux is “too much work.” And I agree.

From health tech developers to influencers, our health is being monetised – and we need to be aware of what's going on, says Deborah Cohen

How much do you know about friction? Jennifer R. Vail's charming, if sometimes technical, "biography" of the force showcases its amazing and largely overlooked role in everything from climate change to dark matter, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Feedback has been informed about a "global telepathy study" which is currently taking place, but isn't entirely convinced about its merits

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Susan Wise Bauer's The Great Shadow investigates the effects of illness on individual lives and collective beliefs. It's a mixed bag, says Peter Hoskin

Where is physics headed? No one knows for sure, but Beyond the Quantum by Antony Valentini is a striking new book that reminds us what a big idea really looks like, finds Jon Cartwright

While snakes and ladders is purely a game of chance, there is a way to add some strategy, says mathematician Peter Rowlett

Many countries are debating whether to follow Australia and ban social media for younger teenagers. But with more robust evidence on its harms coming, we shouldn't be too hasty

Discussing the fallout from the U.S. president's reckless Greenland gambit

The ubiquitous Epstein-Barr virus is increasingly being linked to conditions like multiple sclerosis and lupus. But why do only some people who catch it develop these complications? The answer may lie in our genetics

Thousands of years before the invention of compasses or sails, prehistoric peoples crossed oceans to reach remote lands like Malta and Australia. Doing so meant striking out in unknowable conditions. What do such crossings tell us about ancient minds?

A treasure trove of Cambrian fossils has been discovered in southern China, providing a window on marine life shortly after Earth’s first mass extinction event

Right on schedule in September, the fourth Thomas Adam Grey thriller by Duane Laflin, The Deadly Skulls, came out. As I’ve been enjoying this series, I quickly got and read it. This series continues to be great, and I look forward to the next ones.

Clumps of cells known as organoids are helping us to understand the brain, and the latest version comes equipped with realistic blood vessels to help the organoids live longer

Using a superconducting quantum computer, physicists created a large and complex version of an odd quantum material that has a repeating structure in time

Hidde de Vries in I'm back to building my own digital music collection:

Over the past months, I realised it was about time I moved away from music streaming, to keeping a personal music collection that I control.

Great post from Hidde on why he's now back to building his own digital music library. His reasoning is very much in line with why I embarked on the same journey last year.

Related post: Building a digital music library in 2025.

It’s still January, which means I haven’t yet abandoned my ambitious New Year’s Resolution to get caught up on my favorite blogs. I started with Rich Horton’s excellent Strange at Ecbatan, and this week I’ve been spending time at Dave Hook’s book blog A Deep Look by Dave Hook.

The amount of rainfall in the southern Amazon basin has declined by 8 to 11 per cent since 1980, largely due to the impact of deforestation

The measles vaccine has prevented 60 million deaths since 2000. So why are so many children around the world missing out on it?

A newly discovered collection of neurons suggests the brain and heart communicate to trigger a neuroimmune response after a heart attack, which may pave the way for new therapies

Chemist Omar Yaghi invented materials called MOFs, a few grams of which have the surface area of a football field. He explains why he thinks these super-sponges will define the next century

An evolution-inspired framework for how quantum fuzziness gives rise to our classical world shows that even imperfect observers can eventually agree on an objective reality

A couple of years back, I began experimenting with self-hosting. I dug out an old laptop and set it up as an always on home server. It did many jobs. Stuff like acting as a file server with access to external storage and backups, automating tasks with scripts, music server, running a torrent client for my legally acquired content and more.

It worked fine. But, the added complexity of another machine bugged me slightly. Most of the tasks could be solved on my daily driver laptop. There was also the fact that it didn't run the latest software from Apple. This caused a lot of friction. I couldn't run Homebrew. It caused a lot of issues when trying to install or update packages. Most current programs would not run on my ancient version of MacOS.

These issues made me want to shut down this "server" and simplify my setup. To do so, I had to solve two problems:

• Storage space: My original motivation for setting up the home server was convenient access to more storage space. My laptop only has a 256GB drive. A 1TB external SSD solved the issue, but I move around the house a bit with my laptop, so it was rarely connected. Which meant the data on the external drive was rarely available.
• Remote access: After moving away from Spotify, being able to access my music collection from my phone on the go was convenient. My home server also ran my static site generator, meaning I could update this website on the go with my phone, if I wanted. (Happened like two times, one of which was me testing that it worked. Still, just in case, you know.)

I've solved both problems and decommissioned my old home server. The light bulb moment? Realising that my "home server" doesn't need to be a separate machine. My regular, daily driver laptop can do the job! A server is, after all, just a computer that's always on. My regular laptop can do that, too.

Let's dive into each of the specific problems mentioned above.

Storage space

As mentioned, my laptop doesn't have enough space for all my data. Using cloud storage and an external drive for local backups, I've been able to work around this limitation.

The past year I've been using a remote installation of Nextcloud for cloud storage, and much more. With the aim of simplifying my setup, I wanted a solution that required less maintenance. After considering multiple solutions, I landed on going back to Apple's iCloud.

Both my laptop and phone are Apple devices. iCloud services are neatly integrated. And, having migrated away from iCloud recently, I feel like I have a solid grasp of what my setup should look like to minimise dependency and vendor lock-in.¹ After shopping around, I also realise that the 2TB storage tier is actually reasonably priced. Lastly, it let me go back to using iCloud Photos to browse my photos and videos. It works well and I like it.

I don't want to rely solely on a third party and "the cloud" to preserve all of my data. Especially precious photos and videos. To solve this, I've landed on the following routine:

At the beginning of each month, I export all of my photos and videos from the previous month from Photos to my external drive.² I then export every other file and document stored on my cloud drive to the drive.

Is it bullet proof? No. I'm susceptible to losing as much as a month's worth of data with this approach. In contrast to a total wipe out, something I can live with.³

Remote access

Above I mentioned two specific cases of remote access that I had come to rely on:

1. Music collection.
2. Updating my website.

By setting up my laptop as a de facto server, I've solved both.

Accessing my music collection on the go

I iterated through several approaches for making my music collection available remotely. I first tried Doppler and their sync to iOS feature. While I think Doppler is hands down the best app for playing music on both Mac and iPhone,⁴ I found the sync cumbersome.

Next, I thought of using iCloud Drive as a "music server". Surely some app could watch a folder in my iCloud Drive and automatically add new files to my music library? Well, you'd think so. But no. I couldn't find any decent app(s) that solved this to my expectations. Plus, my phone doesn't really have enough storage to save my full music library locally. Which really only left me with one option: Setting a full-fledged music server.

This was the solution I had been using for the last few months, running Nextcloud Music on my Nextcloud instance. I resigned myself to the fact that I needed a remote virtual server to solve this. As I'd been wanting to test out Pikapods, I decided to try out Airsonic Advanced. It was too advanced (I have no right to be surprised) and I couldn't get it set up exactly to my liking. Instead, I switched to Navidrome and I found it an absolute delight. I couldn't believe how fast and lightweight it was!

It worked well and, as a bonus, I could continue using Amperfy which I had become comfortable with these last few months. One thing was still bothering me: Streaming and caching my music collection from a remote server, when it was already stored in full on my Mac, was incredibly wasteful. Realising I was (again) on the lookout for a music player to play music on my Mac left me feeling like I was back to square one. Eventually, though, the penny finally dropped:

"Navidrome is so lightweight, I could probably run it on my laptop without any issues!"

Using Homebrew, setting up Navidrome on my laptop was a five minute job. Configuring my laptop to automatically launch Navidrome on startup took me another five minutes. Now we're (rocking and) rolling! The native Navidrome web interface is perfect for playing music on my laptop. And all I had to do to access my music collection from Amperfy on my phone was change the server URL and authentication details.

I didn't really mind only being able to access my full library while on my home network. Amperfy has great caching and downloading the albums I want is no hassle. The only inconvenience was keeping my laptop open and awake to access my music.

Luckily, the other penny dropped at this point. This is a solved problem! I already set up a Macbook as a "home server" and there's no reason I can't do it with this particular Macbook. So, I ran the terminal command⁵ and I was off to the races. Despite decommissioning my home server, I once more had a "server" running at home. Just one that doubles as my daily driver laptop.

Remotely updating my website

With my laptop running as a server, this problem was solved as well. It was simply a matter of updating my old workflows to rely on iCloud Drive instead of my old Nextcloud instance.

Because I'm not the smartest guy around, my site generator is quite simple: A script monitors a "content" directory. When a new file appears, the site generator runs to process this file and upload all the new and modified files to the server that hosts my website. This lets me update my website from anywhere without having to worry about remote access to my home server. All I have to do is save a text file to the content directory. Whichever cloud service I'm using then does the sync magic, and my home server a.k.a. my laptop, updates my website.

Even images exist only as a file in my content directory. If I reference them in a text document, the site generator picks them up and uploads the file(s).

And that's it. I can now create posts and notes from my phone while I'm on the go. I don't know that I ever will, but at least I can rest comfortably knowing that I can. And that's the most important thing.

TL;DR

I tweaked a setting on my laptop to make sure it doesn't go to sleep when power is connected. I connect to it with my phone to listen to my music and update my website when I'm on the go.

Postscript

You didn't think I'd actually settle on not being able to access my full music collection while on the go, did you? About five minutes after thinking I could live with that, I remembered Tailscale. With my "server" running a current version of MacOS, I could actually install it and rely on it for proper remote access.

Excavations at an opencast mine in Greece have uncovered two wooden objects more than 400,000 years old that appear to have been fashioned as tools by an unknown species of ancient human

A lasting peace will require Europe and America to work together to raise the cost of war for Russia

A woman's fertility can be partly gauged by levels of a hormone that reflects how many eggs she has. Now, scientists have built a strip that changes colour according to levels of this hormone, which is present in period blood, into a menstrual pad

JWST has created a map of dark matter that is twice as good as anything we have had before, and it may help unravel some of the deepest mysteries of the universe

The way time ticks forward in our universe has long stumped physicists. Now, a new set of tools from entangled atoms to black holes promises to reveal time’s true nature

Savageology is a new collection of works on Doc Savage by Philip José Farmer and others from Meteor House Press. It’s a sort of follow-on to The Man Who Met Tarzan, which collected Farmer’s work on Tarzan.

Solar geoengineering could halve the economic cost of climate change, but stopping it would cause temperatures to rebound sharply, leading to greater damage than unabated global warming

It’s been quite a while since I’ve shared some Things I Think. Since I just jumped back down the Castle rabbit hole, and finished off the associated Nikki Heat books, I had the basis for this column.

Columnist Helen Thomson investigates the neurological benefits of saunas, and how heat therapy can have anti-inflammatory effects throughout the body

Despite its small size, Mars seems to have a huge impact on the orbital cycles that govern Earth’s climate, especially those that cause ice ages

I’ve had a little think about my favorite films, and what makes them my favorites. As you will see, my choices are on the whole rather fluffy, but these are the films that I return to time and time again for comfort, or as a way to reset my brain.

9front, by far the best operating system in the whole world, pushed out a new release, titled “GEFS SERVICE PACK 1“. Even with only a few changes, this is still, as always, a more monumental, important, and groundbreaking release than any other operating system release in history.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sneak into the earliest parts of the boot process, swap the startup config without breaking anything, and leave without a trace. Are you ready? Let’s begin.

The front of the American grocery store contains a strange, liminal space: the transitional area between parking lot and checkstand, along the front exterior and interior of the building, that fills with oddball commodities.