Goodafterevenmorn, Readers! I’m still in the world of video games. I’d rather not be. I’m gearing up for a book release right now. I’d much rather be talking about that. But the gaming news is slamming itself into my algorithm at the moment, and I need to talk about it.
In today’s climate, I needed this: GentleOS, an operating system targeting both 386 (GentleOS/32) and even processors as old as the 80186 (GentleOS/16), with a lovely retro graphical user interface, usable on bare metal, and, of course, open source.
Apple’s developer conference started today, and as is tradition, this means it also announced coming updates to its operating systems lineup. macOS is probably one of the two major ones OSNews readers are interested in, so let’s start there: Much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple said it focused on improving macOS’s performance and dozens of underlying technologies this year.
Anthropic has warned that recursive-self-improving AI could be on the horizon, but the truth is the company is more immediately concerned with marketing itself for a blockbuster initial public offering on the stock market, says Matthew Sparkes
The out-of-Africa migration, in which ancient humans went on to inhabit every other continent except Antarctica, may not have been one moment in time, but a long and slow process. Columnist Michael Marshall examines how archaeologists are rethinking this critical part of our history
Lapses in memory are a normal part of ageing but can also be signs of dementia. Here’s how to distinguish between typical brain ageing and cognitive decline
A diverse range of bird species has been recorded at a solar park on rewetted peatland in Germany, suggesting that combining energy generation with habitat restoration could benefit biodiversity, the climate and the economy
Redox progressed another month, and that means a ton of improvements and new features to talk about. The biggest news this past month is that Xfce has been ported to Redox, which offers a better X11 experience than MATE currently does.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned tech firms, including Apple and Google, that they must voluntarily implement tools to stop children sharing explicit images, but experts warn this is easier said than done
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
Each decade the world is losing over 7 per cent of its freshwater storage capacity to sediment build-up, according to an analysis of over half a million reservoirs
Norman Feske, one of the main developers behind Genode and Sculpt OS, has published a blog post detailing how he developed a two-factor authentication application for Sculpt OS. With this little tool, which I have turned into an deploy option on Sculpt OS to swiftly bring it up whenever I need it, TOTP-based two-factor authentication has become part of my daily routine.
One-third of people with anorexia nervosa don’t recover and treatment has remained stagnant for years. Now we’re beginning to understand how the condition takes over the mind
At the end of 2025, we got the second collection of the Lady From Hell series: The Adventure of the Voodoo Moon: The Complete Cases of the Lady From Hell, Vol. 2. This series ran 25 stories, all in Detective Fiction Weekly from 1935 to 1936.
Endometriosis is usually thought of as a gynaecological condition, but a huge study shows it has links with cholesterol levels, inflammation and an altered microbiome
Mice seemed to reap some of the benefits of sleep by having their brain activity stimulated while they were awake, and the researchers plan to test the approach on people
“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 I just finished the intro for Volume 4 of Steeger Books’ The Continental Op series.
I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue on my desktop and laptop for the past, what, five years? Silverblue is Fedora’s main atomic variant, a spiritual counterpart to Fedora Workstation. I also make niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.
I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year old. The center of my books is always the childhood of which I seem to have a nearly total recall. John Bellairs It’s perhaps fitting I follow up a years worth of writing about JRR Tolkien with something about John Bellairs‘ young adult stories.
Sue Granquist, Black Gate’s own incomparable Goth Chick, died not quite seven months ago, and the hole she left here is impossible to fill. I don’t know about you, but my Thursdays just haven’t been the same.
I had a lot of trouble on my Mac with Time Machine telling me the disk was full and yet I could not find huge wins just by inspection and deleting things that looked too big.
Scientists warn that the Trump administration's push to dismantle a vital network of ocean-sensing instruments will stymie crucial weather and climate monitoring in the Pacific and Atlantic
RISC-V has been in the “promising” phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile.
The modern world depends on open-source software maintained by volunteers, but the added demands of checking and fixing AI-written submissions are causing some to burn out and quit
Mice that contain cells with an added rat chromosome have been created by scientists. The next step is to try this with frozen elephant tissue – and if that works, the team will try it with frozen mammoths
I’ve mentioned it before, but Chris Siebenmann is basically the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world, and today he’s filling that role perfectly once again. I recently read Simon Tatham’s Nitpicking the shell history scene in Tron: Legacy, where one thing that surprised Tatham was the film using ‘login -n root‘ to become root instead of ‘su‘.
Philip Francis Nowlan’s name may not be remembered by many, but he may be the most influential science author I’ll discuss in this series. Born on November 13, 1888 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nowlan earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1910.
A seemingly simple set of rules kicks off a kind of mathematical magic trick, which has kept great minds busy since the 1930s. Columnist Jacob Aron explores the origins of the Collatz conjecture, why it is so addictive to mathematicians and whether AI could help us solve it once and for all
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others.
Black Gate has covered the inception of Battleborn magazine as it spawned from an August 2025 crowdfunding on Indiegogo. Columnist and author Mark Rigney interviewed the champion and chief editor Sean CW Korsgaard over three segments: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source – and by remote control I don’t mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch.
Raymond Chen shares some history regarding Windows 8’s development: During the development of Windows 8, we needed a name for “that thing we’re creating.” Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it “the modern experience,” to distinguish it from what we had in Windows 7, which was called “the classic experience.” And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad.
A patch of ocean south-east of Greenland is the only place on Earth that is cooling, and it could be a sign that the warm water "conveyor belt" in the Atlantic is slowing down
For the past few years, Microsoft has been phasing out NTLM in Windows in favor of Kerberos-based alternatives. Starting with the next versions of client and server editions of Windows, Microsoft will also be disabling the legacy authentication protocol by default.
Rachel Carson’s look at the dire effects of industrial and agricultural pollution birthed the modern environmental movement when it was first published – and remains as crucial a read today, finds Rowan Hooper
Read Part One of this interview here. Our wide-ranging interview with the legend Jonathan Maberry continues as the award-winning author discusses how Black Panther not only changed his life, but led to one of the most rewarding opportunities any writer could ask for.
May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg.
A farm in Bodenseeufer, Germany
We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits.
The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees.
At its Build conference, Microsoft announced coreutils for Windows. Coreutils for Windows is a Microsoft-maintained set of UNIX-style command-line utilities that run natively on Windows — the same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL.
On the Vogon forums, user MarkDastedt posted an interesting bit of source code he discovered on an old company DVD: a very basic, very rudimentary implementation of multicore support for DOS. Another user, dartfrog, took a closer look and had this to say: Interesting stuff nonetheless.
A hobby operating system, not written in Rust, not targeting Qemu, not targeting a Raspberry Pi. Yes, it still happens. Serena OS is what you get when modern operating system design and implementation meets vintage hardware like the Amiga computers.
Andrew Tridgell, developer of rsync, has published a blog post addressing the massive surge in “AI” code submissions and the string of regressions supposedly caused by them. He explains rsync was flooded with “AI”-generated security reports, and he couldn’t handle the volumes anymore.
Actor Ben McKenzie explores the world of crypto in an entertaining documentary that doesn't shy away from calling out those who have promoted the currency
Giulia Enders made her name with Gut, an exploration of our intestines. Now, in the compelling follow-up Organ Speak, she’s listening to what our other organs are telling us
Feedback discovers Halupedia, an online encyclopedia that is 100 per cent generated by AI, offering such delights as the 19nd century and The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays
Why do we have big brains? Or walk on two legs? Biological anthropologist and broadcaster Alice Roberts talks human exceptionalism, evolution and her new book Humans with Michael Marshall
Mark Thomson has taken the reins at CERN just as particle physics confronts some of its deepest unknowns – and faces hard choices about what comes next
A circle running along the 27° east and 153° west meridians divides the globe into two halves with equal reflectivity – and this may have implications for solar geoengineering schemes
A quantum computer made from extremely cold atoms can correct its own errors during long computations, an important prerequisite for becoming truly useful
WinUtils started in 1996-1997 as a way to build my programming chops. I was poking around the Windows 95 shell APIs, found the file operation functions, and thought it would be cool to have CLI tools that called them instead of doing raw file I/O.
Google is adding a switch to allow website owners to opt out of being featured in their “AI” overviews and related slopsearch results. With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover).
In early 2026, we got a double issue of The Bronze Gazette: No. 98/99. Or maybe I should call it a flip issue. The same was done with No. 96/97, which I missed posting on. The Bronze Gazette is the premier Doc Savage fanzine, which was offered as a subscription for these “two” issues.
Restricting carbohydrates may sound like an unlikely approach to treating anorexia, but following a ketogenic diet was linked to recovery in 3 in 4 people with the eating disorder in a small trial
There’s this idea in IndieWeb circles of the admin tax. That’s the work you have to do in order to be somewhat independent of the big silo platforms, the price you pay instead of paying with your attention.
Jack of Shadows (Signet, August 1972). Cover by Bob Pepper A decade ago this summer, Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny was reissued in print, after many years languishing in obscurity even among the author’s most devoted fans.
Researchers studying a 5300-year-old mummified man have identified bacteria that lived in his gut when he was alive, as well as cold-tolerant fungi that colonised his body after death
With KDE Plasma 6.7 almost ready for release, developers have moved on to working on 6.8, and with that release comes probably one of the biggest deprecations in KDE’s history: as of today, the X11 session is gone from KDE.
Ages 40 to 65 see a period of turmoil in the brain that has previously been overlooked. But identifying problems during this time can protect your cognitive health for decades to come
Our understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum goes back to Isaac Newton, but astronomers are still finding new ways to employ it. Astrophysicist Emma Chapman explores how much these invisible waves can reveal to us about the cosmos – and whether they might show us that we’re not alone
The most exciting popular science reads this month explore everything from symbiosis to hormones, while Alice Roberts takes on an editor-in-chief role in her latest book
From dementia to heart attacks, hearing loss has been linked to a wide range of effects across the body, and the condition is on the rise. Fortunately, we're learning how best to safeguard this crucial sense and how we might be able to reverse the damage
Computer simulations have uncovered a new manganese compound that could exist deep in Earth’s mantle and may be connected to the process that gave our atmosphere oxygen
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked. Look, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve spent almost a decade and a half identifying vulnerabilities and exploits at unicorn scale, but this is hands down the most unserious, “almost too stupid to be true” of them all.
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
An interesting art volume I received is Gil Cohen: Inside/Out (Archive Collection), edited by Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle and published by New Texture as part of the Men’s Adventure Library series of books.
An exploration of how biological cooperation underpins all life - and why we’ve overlooked its power until now - makes thrilling reading, finds Penny Sarchet
In the face of frenzied right-wing attacks, this government has successfully executed one of the most ambitious climate change projects in the world. It's time to give credit where it's due.
You’re a smart cookie, so you opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to.
Turmeric is heralded for its anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties, but columnist Alice Klein finds that the evidence for this is shaky. Taking high doses of its curcumin extract in supplement form can be risky
Mathematicians are stunned at the progress AI is making in solving advanced problems, leaving some questioning whether there will still be room for humans
Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: could a computer convince a human it was human? We have begun conducting the same test on ourselves, writes Max Moser
Here we have the second volume of Lester Dent’s “gadget hero,” Clickell “Click” Rush: The Devils Smelled Nice: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man, Vol. 2. This one has the next six stories. This series was published in Street & Smith’s Crime Busters pulp in 1937-39, which was intended to be a sort of […]
It was an open secret that NVIDIA was working on an ARM-based system-on-a-chip for laptops and desktops, and today at Computex 2026 the company unveiled what it’s been working on. It’s surely a beast, and unsurprisingly, it’s lathered in “AI” buzzwords.
My favorite metonymic technology term is “cron job”: even though cron may not literally be the daemon that executes actions on a schedule, we apply the term to anything that walks like a cron and quacks like a cron.
Almost 50 more genes have been flagged as being linked to Alzheimer’s, along with changes in activity in crucial cells that disappear as dementia progresses
“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.” – Raymond Chandler Spider-Noir is the best thing to happen to Marvel streaming since…well, Daredevil: Born Again.
