Join me for a discussion as we mark four years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME’s insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them.
Every OpenBSD admin has booted bsd.rd at least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns out bsd.rd is a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything.
Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system
Expert birdwatchers have changes in their brain structure compared with novices, which probably help them better identify birds and may even protect against age-related cognitive decline
An examination of bones has revealed one of the largest prehistoric mass killings known in Europe, with women, adolescents and children making up most of the 77 victims
How we feel about a night’s sleep can have a bigger impact on mood and grogginess than actual hours of rest. Here’s how to change your mindset to feel more energised
Temnothorax kinomurai, a parasitic ant species found in Japan, reproduces asexually and all of its young develop into queens that try to take over other ants’ colonies
Horses use their larynx to make two sounds simultaneously, so they are effectively singing and whistling at the same time
I have posted a few times on the fiction of Gary Lovisi. He is an author, editor, publisher (Gryphon Books as well as Paperback Parade), and book dealer. While some of his work has come out from his own Gryphon Books, he has also put out works from Ramble House, Wildside Press, and now Stark […]
I have not been active in the John D. MacDonald world for awhile. Time is limited, and interests are many. I recently jumped down the Columbo rabbit hole (I wrote about him back in 2016, and I’ve got a big project in the works for 2027).
We often stop noticing things we’ve become too accustomed to, as a side effect of our brains protecting us from sensory overload. Columnist Helen Thomson shares the evidence-backed ways to learn how to notice again
Can you match the fantasy world on the left with its creator on the right? Kregen _________ 1. John Norman Magira _________ 2. Edmond Hamilton Newhon ________ 3. Gardner F. Fox Janus __________ 4. Charles Allen Gramlich Ur_____________ 5.
H.W. Sanden in Anti-intellectual tech:
Don’t throw out books willingly, as we did with films, music, instruments, software and self-made websites. Be independent, self-contented, revolutionary, intellectual, brave, strong and scholarly. Normalise stating that you are proficient in several skills. And normalise not knowing, and doing something about it.
Don't stop with not throwing out books. Take back everything we gave away, while we still can. Show the children the future they can still have.
The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release.
Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90.
So here we are, the final wild bunch of my favorite films; films that I have returned to time and time again purely for their entertainment value and healing properties. I’m sure most of the thirty films on my list are favorites for you too, but I hope there are at least one or two titles spread upon this charcuterie board of nostalgia and cheese that you haven’t seen, and might have piqued your interest enough to seek them out....
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I was trading New Year’s resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I’m a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything.
George R.R. Martin in The Mad King Is Coming:
You’ve been hearing about the great tourney at Harrenhal since A GAME OF THRONES came out in 1996. Now, at long last, we’re going to show it to you… live, on stage, at Stratford-upon-Avon, brought to you by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Never not surprised at the stuff George Martin will do to avoid doing the thing. As quality knows quality (or, so I've heard), procrastination knows procrastination, though, so I'm kinda not really surprised, actually. You know.
I've come to terms with the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire ended with the fifth novel, just as The Kingkiller Chronicle ended with the fifth and Gentlemen Bastard with the third. It's fine. We should just be happy that we got to read these stories at all!
And, in the case of Martin, I'm glad he continues pouring his energy into giving us more great stuff to enjoy. Been watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and I think it's absolutely brilliant.
A survey of 100 commercial foods for dogs and cats revealed that PFAS chemicals appear in numerous brands and types, with fish-based products among those with the highest levels
Colliding galaxies can create a beam of focused microwave radiation known as a maser, and astronomers have discovered the brightest one ever seen
New insights into the causes of migraine are prompting a fresh look at a drug target that was sidelined 25 years ago
These immigration proposals are obscene, but the government can be forced to think again.
These immigration proposals are obscene, but we can force the government to think again.
Rosel George was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 15, 1926. She attended Sophie Newcomb College and earned a Master of Arts degree in Greek at the University of Minnesota. In 1947, she married W.
Planet K2-18b, an apparent water world 124 light years away, has been seen as a promising location in the search for aliens, but telescopes on Earth failed to pick up any radio transmissions
We’ve been missing an important contributor to ageing, says columnist Graham Lawton. Ultra-processed foods are known to be associated with many chronic health problems, but studies have now shown they may also speed up ageing
Been keeping a list of albums I want to add to my music collection. Spent a small fortune (to me) today and splurged on all ten albums that were on the list! Downloading from Qobuz isn't the quickest, so I'm currently waiting for them all to finish downloading like it's 2002.
What a time to be alive!
Think I'll do a small note for each of these albums in the coming weeks. As good a thing to write about as anything else.
Stand on Zanzibar (Del Rey/Ballantine, June 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman Watching their sets in a kind of trance Were people in Mexico, people in France. They don’t chase Jones but their dreams are the same— Mr.
As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn’t complicated enough – don’t lie, you don’t know when that feature they announced is actually being released either – Microsoft is making everything even more complicated.
Spinosaurs have sometimes been portrayed as swimmers or divers, but a new species of these dinosaurs bolsters the idea that they were more like gigantic herons
After a Falcon 9 rocket stage burned up in the atmosphere, vaporised lithium and other metals drifted over Europe. This growing type of pollution could destroy ozone and form climate-warming clouds
And, as we approach the four-year anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion, have Putin’s war objectives changed?
An exotic type of dark matter could explain some of the characteristics of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, but many cosmologists are leery of the idea
Symbiotic bacteria living inside insect cells have lost much of their DNA over hundreds of millions of years, much like the ancient microbes that evolved into mitochondria
So vi only has one level of undo, which is simply no longer fit for the times we live in now, and also wholly unnecessary given even the least powerful devices that might need to run vi probably have more than enough resources to give at least a few more levels of undo.
F9 is an L4-inspired microkernel designed for ARM Cortex-M, targeting real-time embedded systems with hard determinism requirements. It implements the fundamental microkernel principles—address spaces, threads, and IPC, while adding advanced features from industrial RTOSes.
It’s been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it’s actually here available for everyone. We’ve been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing.
The Spell of Seven (Pyramid Books, June 1965). Cover by Virgil Finlay L. Sprague de Camp was a major player in the paperback Sword & Sorcery boom of the 1960s. I had the good fortune to meet him and his wife; both were urbane and erudite.
An assessment of nearly 900 dogs has identified 12 breeds prone to brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, which can affect dogs' ability to sleep and exercise
Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments
We have long drawn parallels between ants and humans. Now we are comparing the insects to computers. It is time to stop using ants as analogues for ourselves and our machines, says Annalee Newitz
Fungi have become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys. But as yet another story focuses on Cordyceps, Nick Crumpton says we are missing a chance to broaden our fictional horizons
Feedback enjoys the debunking of a study that suggested a 2022 solar eclipse had been "anticipated" by a bunch of trees
Mathematician Hannah Fry travels to the front lines of AI in her new BBC documentary AI Confidential with Hannah Fry. She talks to Bethan Ackerley about what the technology is doing to us – for better and for worse
In the ChatGPT era, a war over the nature of intelligence is playing out. Chris Stokel-Walker explores a Princeton professor's engaging take
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
A new show at the Royal West of England Academy brings together a series of works that interweave art and science
If you feel like the least popular person among your friends, then a handy piece of maths might improve your mood, says Peter Rowlett
Around 40 per cent of people are unaware that men can experience postpartum depression too — that has to change
Prolonged grief disorder affects around 1 in 20 people, and we're starting to understand the neuroscience behind it
Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that writes data into glass with lasers, raising the prospect of robotic libraries full of glass tablets packed with data
Fathers may get postpartum depression at a similar rate to mothers, but it’s often overlooked. At last, the way we diagnose and treat it is improving, for the good of the whole family
Babies in the West commonly lack a gut microbe that is found in infants in other parts of the world, which may be due to differences in their mothers' diets
Running 170 kilometres over mountainous terrain caused people's red blood cells to accumulate more age-related damage than those of less ambitious athletes
I recently discovered a new New Pulp hero, The Grey Phantom, created by Brian K. Lowe. At present there are two novels, The Invisible Crimes and The Mad Monk, with a third coming, The Perfect Murders. There are also two short stories available electronically, “The Silverback Murders” and “The Golden Rainbow Murders.” I hope they […]
KDE Plasma 6.6 has been released, and brings with a whole slew of new features. You can save any combination of themes as a global theme, and there’s a new feature allowing you to increase or decrease the contrast of frames and outlines.
SvarDOS is an open-source project that is meant to integrate the best out of the currently available DOS tools, drivers and games. DOS development has been abandoned by commercial players a long time ago, mostly during early nineties.
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about AsteroidOS, the Linux distribution designed specifically to run on smartwatches, providing a smartwatch interface and applications built with Qt and QML.
Every modern iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS application uses Asset Catalogs to manage images, colors, icons, and other resources. When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application.
Within the major operating system of its day, on popular hardware of its day, ran the utterly dominant relational database software of its day. PC Magazine, February 1984, said, “Independent industry watchers estimate that dBASE II enjoys 70 percent of the market for microcomputer database managers.” Similar to past subjects HyperCard and Scala Multimedia, Wayne Ratcliff’s dBASE II was an industry unto itself, not just for data-management, but for programmability, a legacy which lives on today as xBase.
A technology that uses a coiled wire to electrify aerosols has boosted snowfall amid a drought in the western US, according to the company developing it, but the results haven't convinced other scientists
Trip report from the 2026 Munich Security Conference
Dragonslayer (109 minutes; 1981) Written by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins. Directed by Matthew Robbins. What is it? A sorcerer’s apprentice travels across sixth-century England to battle a dragon terrorizing a small kingdom.
An ultrastable laser could enable extremely precise timing and navigation on the moon, and the cold, dark craters near the lunar poles would be the ideal location for it
The evolution of human hands is one of the most important – and overlooked – stories of our origin. Now, new fossil evidence is revealing their pivotal role
A giant virus encodes part of the protein-making toolkit of cells that gives it greater control over its amoeba host, raising questions about how it evolved and how such beings relate to living organisms
Hearing a sound while working on a complex puzzle, and then hearing it again during sleep, helped lucid dreamers better tackle the problem the next day
May his memory be a blessing.
A mathematical equivalent of a microscope with variable resolution has shed light on why some atoms are exceptionally stable, a riddle that has persisted in nuclear physics for decades
The psychedelic DMT has been linked to improved mental health outcomes before, but now, scientists have shown it reduces depression symptoms more than a placebo when given alongside therapeutic support
The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time
I have posted before on the Burroughs Bibliophiles, a literary society started by Vern Coriell with the permission of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In addition to publishing The Burroughs Bulletin, Coriell started a publication arm called the House of Greystoke, which published a variety of works from the late 1960s into the late ’70s.
Biologists have debated the reason why Homo sapiens evolved a prominent lower jaw, but this unique feature may actually be a by-product of other traits shaped by natural selection
We are used to heat flowing from hot objects to cool ones, and never the other way round, but now researchers have found it is possible to pull off this trick in the strange realm of quantum mechanics
I haven’t told you about What I’ve Been Watching since last year! Of course it’s only February 16, so I guess we can keep a sense of proportion. But I’ve been watching a lot of stuff this year. As always, many are re-watches.
The shape of the cosmos depends on a balance of two competing forces: the pull of gravity and the expansion driven by dark energy. Columnist Leah Crane explores what observations tell us about how much universe is out there and whether it’s shaped like a sheet, a saddle or something else entirely
Intermittent fasting appears to be no better than doing nothing when it comes to helping people who are overweight or have obesity lose weight
Ploum in Do not apologize for replying late to my email:
As soon as my email was sent, I probably forgot about it. I may have thought a lot before writing it. I may have drafted it multiple times. Or not. But as soon as it was in my outbox, it was also out of my mind.
I am wholeheartedly behind Ploum on this. Never apologise for replying late to my email.
In my fundraiser pitch published last Monday, one of the things I highlighted as a reason to contribute to OSNews and ensure its continued operation stated that “we do not use any ‘AI’; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing.” In the comments to that article, someone asked: Why do I care if you use AI? ↫ A comment posted on OSNews A few days ago, Scott Shambaugh rejected a code change request submitted to popular Python library matplotlib because it was obviously written by an “AI”, and such contributions are not allowed for the issue in question.
Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system? This binder contains the original design specifications for “NT OS/2,” an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT.
The three book Echoes of Valor anthology series from TOR was edited by Karl Edward Wagner, who wrote excellent Sword & Sorcery tales himself, and could recognize good ones when he saw them. These were not anthologies of new stories, but reprints.
There’s the two behemoth architectures, x86 and ARM, and we probably all own one or more devices using each. Then there’s the eternally up-and-coming RISC-V, which, so far, seems to be having a lot of trouble outgrowing its experimental, developmental stage.
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underlying infrastructure and then chronologically.
As I came by Pete's pet peeve that media don't know how to use quotes, I realised that I also don't know.
The first pain point is that I simply don't know how to write the correct symbols on my keyboard. In search of a quick answer, I turned to our Large Language Model overlords. Unfortunately, both ChatGPT and Claude proved entirely unable to provide assistance. They were completely confident in their entirely wrong answers, however. I guess that's something.
For the two languages in which I write, Norwegian and English, there are six relevant symbols. I use a Macbook with a Norwegian bokmål (ISO 639-1 code nb) keyboard layout. The six symbols can be written as follows with this keyboard setup:
« = ⌥ (option) + shift + V
» = ⌥ (option) + shift + B
‘ = ⌥ (option) + n
’ = ⌥ (option) + m
“ = ⌥ (option) + shift + n
” = ⌥ (option) + shift + m
Not exactly easily accessible, hence my writing them down here for future reference. The intricate key combinations also explain why many simply default to the straight quotes ". On my keyboard, I write them by pressing shift + 2.
Next up is knowing when to use which symbols. That varies from language to language. And, as we'll see, from region to region within the same language.
In Norwegian, we use « and » for first level quotes, while second level quotes (a quote in a quote) is indicated by ‘ and ’.
In American English, they use “ and ” for first level quotes, and ‘ and ’ for second level quotes.
In British English, they use ‘ and ’ for first level quotes, while “ and ” denote a second level quote.
No wonder I'm confused and find myself turning to " and ' for simplicity. But, as Pete pointed out, that is just plain wrong. As I aim to be as correct as I can with details like these when writing, I need to get my act together.
These days, I don't publish much in the way of Norwegian text on this blog. Or elsewhere, for that matter. But if I do, I will make a point to use the correct symbols for quotes. I do more than a bit of writing in my day job, and — although some text editors will replace " with « and » when your language is set to Norwegian — knowing this will make me a better and more consistent writer at work. That's a good thing.
As far as this blog goes, I generally try to adhere to British English spelling and grammar. Which means I will aim to be consistent in using single quotes (‘ and ’) for first level quotes from here on and out. Send me an email and let me know when I inevitably mess that up.
