We’ve talked about the various age verification laws in the United States, and there’s been a development recently that a lot of people seem to think is a good thing: both the age verification laws in California and Colorado have received exemptions for open source operating systems.
But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics. finger://, gopher://, and gemini://. Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet.
Now that my one-month sentence of using Windows 11 has begun (you can follow along!), I’m also a bit more perceptive of news and developments regardingMicrosoft’s latest and greatest operating system version.
The Eternal City, edited by David Drake, Martin Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh (Baen Books, January 1990). Cover by John Rheaume The main reason I bought this collection was for the Howard story, “Kings of the Night.” This was back when I was striving to be a Howard completist.
Embryo organoids made from stem cells are enabling scientists to recreate early pregnancy in the lab, unlocking treatments for infertility, miscarriage and pre-eclampsia
Among people of high socioeconomic status, love for nature corresponds with a bigger environmental footprint – and there's an obvious reason why
I have been posting on the fanzine bare*bones, which is devoted to “unearthing vintage, forgotten, and overlooked horror, mystery, sci-fi, western, and weird film, paperbacks, comics, pulp fiction, and video.” It is produced by Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri through Cimarron Street Books.
Three missions slated to launch this year will begin to search the lunar surface for a suitable base location
Researchers have designed a quantum version of a pendulum clock. It could shed light on timekeeping in the quantum realm
Gold is chemically inert and so doesn't tarnish, but exactly why had been a mystery
João Carrasqueira at XDA Developers has taken a look at the current state of Sailfish OS, and concludes: As an idea, I love Sailfish OS. Not only does it bring a wholly unique interface to mobile devices at a time when things seem more unified than ever, but it also has the potential to bring the full power of Linux to a smartphone you actually want to use.
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! Now that I’ve finished my play-thorugh of Far Cry 6, I have started playing a new game on my Friday night live streams. It is a survival exploration game that I am assured also has a story element (my livestreams are narrative games, largely).
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and
We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun
Critical safety equipment in many train systems is vulnerable to disruption by space weather, which could lead to fatal accidents
Residues on medical equipment reveal that physicians in China over 600 years ago used aconitine, a highly toxic plant chemical, to alleviate pain during surgical procedures
Men who do not produce sperm can’t be helped by existing fertility treatments, but a start-up is now claiming it can grow their sperm in the lab. Columnist Michael Le Page suspects this technique will have to be combined with gene editing if it is to help many men
Airstrikes on Tehran earlier this year emitted a plume containing almost 30,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide that reached Asian countries
Sometimes you come across a tune and you instantly know. It will be a combination of the melody, the instrumentation, the vocals and the lyrics. And everything else that makes music unique.
Came across Rattlesnake Milk today and it was love at first listen. Both their albums (from Bandcamp and Qobuz).
While listening I looked up their upcoming tour dates. Was mightily disappointed discovering that they're coming to Norway in the fall, but won't be playing in Oslo! Can we get someone on this asap?!
I have a Nokia N8, and it’s one of my favourite retro (?) devices I own. It was one of Nokia’s last efforts to make Symbian happen in the post-iPhone era, and while the hardware was quite nice, Symbian just wasn’t made for multitouch devices.
We’re a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I’d better take a peek at how things stand with Windows.
Anyone who’s written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn’t for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and libraries.
A rewrite of quantum mechanics that includes the force of gravity could finally achieve one of physicists’ biggest goals and reveal the ultimate fuzziness of time
I picked up the third volume in the Jimmy Wentworth series from Steeger Books. The Brothers of the Snake: The Complete Chinatown Cases of Jimmy Wentworth, Vol. 3, collects the next six stories in this series.
“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep Back in the Summer of 2020, A (Black) Gat in the Hand looked at some screen and radio productions for Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe.
There is currently no good way for astronauts in space to do laundry, but researchers may have finally come up with one: a bright purple jet of microbe-killing plasma
In the age of AI, instant answers to our questions are readily available. But columnist Helen Thomson finds that continuing to encourage those delicious flashes of insight that come from your own thoughts may be beneficial both for your everyday life and your long-term brain health
Since the publication of his first novel Ghost Road Blues, Jonathan Maberry has been a mainstay in genre fiction circles. Whether its for one of his multiple series, comic book writing, or the numerous anthologies he’s edited over the years, audiences have come to know and love his work.
If you visit the Flatpak website today, it lists, as the very first advantage of the project: “Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.” If you then move on to the list of supported distributions, you’ll see the usual suspects, but also distributions like Void Linux, Guix, and Alpine.
You may think you know what “long-term support” means when picking a Linux distribution and version, but judging by the multitude of utterly wrong takes and deeply confused users I come across online, I’m starting to get the feeling that in fact, no, you don’t know what it means.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Gnutella is a file sharing protocol that many have forgotten and it has the story of a decentralized technology adopted by millions of casual users who did not care to learn what a peer-to-peer system was.
A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again. Enjoy Parts One and Two here and here. A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990) – USA I can’t help thinking that this one must have disappointed many a randy teenager when they smuggled it out of the video store, only to learn that ‘nymphoid’ doesn’t mean the same as ‘nymphomaniac,’ and were instead subjected to a good hour of aimless...
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Signed up for updates about Open Printer. Hopefully this project sees the light of day, and soon! Right ready for a printer in the house, and this looks perfect.
Via.
Revisiting two appearances on The Late Show during pivotal moments in U.S.-Russia relations.
Bruno Croci’s blog had been running on Ubuntu 16.04 for a long time, well past the Linux distribution’s expiration date. As such, it was time to upgrade, but instead of opting for something standard like another Ubuntu release, he opted for FreeBSD instead.
Despite being the closest planet to the sun, Mercury has thick deposits of ice at its poles, and now we may understand the events that formed them over just one Mercurian day
We’ve already talked about the secure boot certificates from Microsoft that are about to become invalid, but Debian EFI team member and longtime Debian contributor Steve McIntyre published a blog post with more information for users and distribution developers alike.
Tests with rodents suggest an mRNA vaccine in development offers protection against three strains of Ebola virus, including the one behind the current crisis
Last week I ran the first part of my What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? Series, where I asked questions and posed scenarios as to the consequences of the many, many questions I’ve asked over the last few years.
Executive Summary:
- The Information reports that OpenAI generated $5.7bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2026 based on discussions with sources familiar with its financials.
- With adjusted negative margins of -122%, this means that for every dollar of revenue OpenAI made, it lost an additional $1.22, or
We all feel emotions like anger and disgust from time to time, but they seem to cause stronger bodily sensations when they're politically induced
Vaccine misinformation, nurse and doctor shortages and crowded living arrangements may be behind soaring rates of diphtheria in remote Indigenous communities in Australia
Pauline Whitby was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire on January 25, 1926 to the headmaster and headmistress of Merchant Taylors’ School in Ashwell, the village from which she would gain her pseudonym. Whitby had a younger sister named Marie.
We've fucked it up not once, not twice, but at least seven times in succession. Perhaps it's time to rethink how we do it.
We've fucked it up not once, not twice, but at least seven times in succession. Perhaps it's time to rethink how we do it.
Life on the International Space Station may feel distant, but columnist Graham Lawton finds that studying how astronauts experience accelerated ageing could help us fight similar effects on Earth related to sedentary lifestyles, disrupted circadian rhythms and social isolation
After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly.
Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why.
The stories of “AI” bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these “AI” bot and crawler assaults is insane.
Since X11 has moved to legacy status, it’s only a matter of time before the BSDs are going to have to make the move to being Wayland-first as well. This applies particularly to FreeBSD, which has been focusing on improving its suitability for desktop and laptops lately.
The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon) by Byron Leavitt (Brain Waves Press, 2026.) Cover created by Miblart with interior illustration by the author. A contemporary, cosmic-horror take on portal fantasy! The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon) is a young-adult, portal fantasy written by Byron Leavitt. It’s a contemporary, cosmic-horror take on the sub-genre that was a gateway for many of us.
Two popular web browser are overhauling their user interface, and the first to actually ship its new version is Vivaldi. Version 8.0 of this Chromium-based browser completely overhauls its UI, but retains its extensive customisation options, including the option to go back to the old look and feel if the new one doesn’t float your boat.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability:
Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of
Artificial intelligence built by OpenAI has cracked a decades-old conjecture by Paul Erdős, which mathematicians have hailed as a monumental moment for AI in mathematics
Some people experience vivid, incessant dreams that leave them feeling exhausted the next day, with researchers calling for this "epic dreaming" to be classed as a sleep disorder
Trumpets From Oblivion is a historical action/adventure series by H. Bedford-Jones that appeared in Blue Book Magazine. This thirteen-part series ran from November 1938 to November 1939 and was cover-featured four times.
Women appear cognitively normal for almost three years longer than men after their brains start to develop Alzheimer’s disease, making it harder to diagnose and preventing early treatment
I was a long-time Bitwarden user, until a year or so ago when I started migrating my passwords first to Firefox/LibreWolf, and recently from there to a KeePass database I can transfer and use with whatever password manager application is compatible with KeePass’ file format.
Printing on Linux, macOS, and even on Windows seems to be pretty much a solved problem, but what about printing on OpenBSD? Anyway, to do so I would need to set up my HP OfficeJet printer, connected wirelessly to the network, on OpenBSD.
⁂ A little progress bar to keep track of our fundraiser! ⁂ ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer ➡️ Why a fundraiser? Note that I have to update it manually, and that it includes both Ko-Fi donations, as well as direct bank transfers.
Women experience a steady rise in body temperature from their teens to midlife, which may be useful for monitoring ageing and overall health
Women experience a steady rise in body temperature from their teens to midlife, which may be useful for monitoring ageing and overall health
Previously classified photos and documents show the scientific work that went into the world's first atomic test in 1945 – a test that, just weeks later, would see nuclear bombs dropped in Japan
On a visit to the UK, Sydney-based reporter James Woodford visited an archaeological site that was on his bucket list – and experienced a very special moment as the sun set
Experiments hint that quantum mechanisms are vital to the machinery of life. Now researchers are exploring if these effects help to explain the success of an array of puzzling health treatments
Feedback goes down a "moon warfare" rabbit hole and discovers that some forward-thinkers are making plans to counteract as-yet-hypothetical pirates in space
Jennie Durant's Bitter Honey is a great exposé of the true cost of industrially farming US honeybees, finds Thomas Lewton. But the book's grim figures of bee death alone may not prompt deep change – how about seeing them as fellow creatures?
There’s unexpected news of a fifth movie for one of the most underrated sci-fi reboots. Hurray, says New Scientist film columnist Bethan Ackerley
Like covid-19 and mpox before it, the decision to relabel PCOS as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome is a welcome one – and reveals why a name is never just a name
Storing carbon dioxide in rocks while producing hydrogen from them - and perhaps even geothermal power too - could be a double win on the climate front, and several groups are trying to make it happen
Storing carbon dioxide in rocks while producing hydrogen from them - and perhaps even geothermal power too - could be a double win on the climate front, and several groups are trying to make it happen
I picked up a small book by L.S. Goozdich, Fire in the Tall Grass. Published by Veritas Entertainment, this is the first adventure with Noah Redford, set after World War I. Since the book is small, I think this one is most likely a novelette.
When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today’s genetic age
Fifty years ago, a draft of Richard Dawkins’s first book landed on book editor Michael Rodgers’s desk – and life was never the same
Last year, The New Yorker revealed the late Sacks's "guilt" about his “falsification” in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but is this story about more than just the facts?
While people disagree on the quality of Lin Carter’s writing, most people agree he was a fine editor and tireless supporter of the fantasy field. Volumes edited by Carter brought quite a few new authors to my attention, as well as feeding me a steady diet of works by writers I already loved.
Five different groups of predatory dinosaurs independently evolved disproportionately small arms, and it seems they did so because their heads became so large and powerful
Caffeine's negative effects on me are never clearer than when I'm under the influence of caffeine.
(I rewrote that sentence 13 times to get it ‘right’. It still doesn't feel right, but perfect is the enemy of good.)
I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it.
This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured.
We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them.
Thundarr the Barbarian (21 episodes; 1980-81) Created by Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck; The Defenders). The look of the main characters was designed by Alex Toth. After he was unavailable to continue working on the series, Jack “King” Kirby was brought in, at the recommendation of Gerber and Mark Evanier (who would later write a biography of Kirby).
The world’s best BSD (I’m kidding, I love them all equally) has released version 7.9, now available through your update tools and on mirrors the world over. OpenBSD 7.9 brings a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements, such as delayed hibernation support on amd64.
A decade ago, we discovered an exceptionally exciting exoplanet that could be the best candidate for hosting alien life. Now we’re about to find out if it really is
A solar farm in a tidal bay has generated more electricity and profits than a nearby coastal solar farm, but challenges could arise as floating solar moves further offshore
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and
If wind-assisted cargo ships chose routes based entirely on where the winds are better, their fuel use could be cut in half or even completely eliminated
Colossal Biosciences, the company that says it resurrected the dire wolf, now says it has developed artificial eggshells so it can replicate the huge eggs of the moa. Independent experts say this isn't nearly enough to bring back these giant birds
