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.

James Silke (1931 – ) is something of a renaissance man in the arts. He’s a visual artist and prose writer, a set and costume designer, photographer, and comic book guy. Most people who I meet recognize him as a comic artist/writer, although I’ve never read any of his graphic stuff.

There have been valid questions about the Transatlantic Relationship for years.

Encrypting the data stored locally on your hard drives is generally a good idea, specifically if you have use a laptop and take it with you a lot and thieves might get a hold of it. This issue becomes even more pressing if you carry sensitive data as a dissident or whistleblower and have to deal with law enforcement.

Last year brought a wealth of new features and fixes to Firefox on Linux. Besides numerous improvements and bug fixes, I want to highlight some major achievements: HDR video playback support, reworked rendering for fractionally scaled displays, and asynchronous rendering implementation.

A drug that kills cancer cells by puncturing them comes with an additional benefit: tests in mice suggest it reduces the growth of pain-sensing nerves around tumours

An “epigenetic” adaptation could prevent large numbers of loggerhead turtles from hatching as female due to climate change – a threat that was feared to lead to population collapse

Developing for Windows seems to be a bit of a nightmare, at least according to Microsoft, so they’re trying to make the lives of developers easier with a new tool called winapp. The winapp CLI is specifically tailored for cross-platform frameworks and developers working outside of Visual Studio or MSBuild.

So Markdown is this Lightweight Markup Language. Everyone (relative; among programmers, writers, and other “power-users”) uses it. LLMs use it. So it’s destined to eat the world. But it doesn’t mean Markdown is good.

Whether it be singing, dancing or crafting, engaging in the arts is good for our health, and we're beginning to understand how this behaviour affects our biology

Two extremely damaging crop pests have interbred to create hybrids resistant to more than one pesticide that could cause serious problems in many countries

It was a week in which you could almost feel the world shudder. But Europe held firm.

It was a week in which you could almost feel the world shudder, but Europe held firm and Trump began to lose control.

Raymond F. Jones was born in Salt Lake City on November 15, 1915. He studied engineer and English at the University of Utah before working as a radio engineer. He later suggested that getting an English degree is one of the worst things a writer could do.

The company’s mega-constellation is having to perform a huge number of manoeuvres to prevent a collision in Earth orbit

Your chronological age can’t always tell you the state of your health, which is why biological clocks have been developed to show our risk of developing diseases or dying – but they’re not all they are cracked up to be, says columnist Graham Lawton

Many species of fungus across the world produce psilocybin, a chemical with psychedelic effects in humans, but its evolutionary purpose may be to deter mushroom-munching insects

About a year ago, I added Terraforming Mars to my collection of board games, fascinated by the premise. At the very end of the year, a local friend proposed to get together and try playing it. On 2 January, three of us sat down to a first game, using the beginner option of everyone playing a standard corporation and keeping all ten of their initial cards without having to pay for them.

Say one thing for Robin Hobb, say she knows how to write a trilogy.

The Tawny Man trilogy is the third three-book collection set in the "Realm of the Elderlings". After Liveship Traders took us south to the Satrap's lands of Bingtown, the Rain Wilds and Jamaillia, Tawny Man takes us back North to the Six Duchies. It was here the story kicked off with the Farseer Trilogy.

Tawny Man is a reunion. It centres around the same main cast of characters as the original trilogy, but not without adding new ones to the mix.

As with both previous trilogies, I found myself unconvinced at the outset. Hobb takes her time to set the scene. But, also as with both previous trilogies, this one grew. And grew. By the middle of the second book, I had a good idea of where the story was going. I was hooked. I didn't get many pages (or locs, to be more precise) into Fool's Fate before I was struggling to put the book down.

This is not unusual with Robin Hobb. All of the three trilogies I've read so far all have the feel of one big book split into three, rather than three distinct stories. The middle books in particular don't even pretend to be stand-alone stories. Instead, they build on the foundation of the first book and creates momentum in the story towards the eventual climax in the final third.

I think it's great.

Although Tawny Man doesn't reach the heights of Liveship Traders, it was a very enjoyable read. In terms of where it falls short, I think there's something about the first person storytelling that is limiting. You don't really get enough perspectives to make all the characters (bar one) feel as real and fully fleshed out. That said, I enjoyed getting closer to what is the most interesting character of all of them throughout these stories.

All in all, this felt like a worthy send off for both Fitz and the Fool. But I still wonder if we aren't going to get to hear more about the former's maternal origin. There's a story yet to be told there, I think, and there are some hints that we will learn more about "Keppet" in time.

I'll close with some of my highlighted quotes and passages from the books:

It could not compare to that moment of completion when minds joined and one sensed the wholeness of the world as a great entity in which one's own body was no more than a mote of dust.

Fool's Errand

Hobb has a way with framing that sense of belonging to something greater than just yourself that one can sometimes experience.

Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.

Fool's Errand

It is a magical place.

It was a boy's thing to do, this immediate offering to share a prized possession, and my heart answered it, knowing that no matter how long or how far apart we had been, nothing important had changed between us.

Fool's Errand

That's true friendship.

His air of petulant command mimed perfectly that of a foppish dandy of the noble class.

Fool's Errand

I just loved that sentence. Poetic.

… (I) knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

The Golden Fool

The more history I read, the more I come to agree with this world view.

How many words have I set down on paper or vellum, thinking to trap the truth thereby? And of those words, how many have I myself consigned to the flames as worthless and wrong? I do as I have done so many times. I write, I sand the wet ink, I consider my own words. Then I burn them. Perhaps when I do so, the truth goes up the chimney as smoke. Is it destroyed, or set free in the world?

Fool's Fate

More on the futility of capturing the moment, of defining it, and the truth. Doesn't mean we should stop trying. Just that we can never fully succeed.

Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.

Fool's Fate

It is. And it can.

Give him to me, she said with a woman's weariness at a man's incompetence.

Fool's Fate

Close to home!

No man, in the fullness of his years, should have to experience afresh all the passion that a youngster is capable of embracing. Our hearts grow brittle as we age.

Fool's Fate

I've been pondering this. Is it true? Is it self defence that our emotions dwindle as we age?

Home is people. Not a place. If you back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there anymore.

Fool's Fate

Home is people.

ReactOS is celebrating its 30th birthday. Happy Birthday ReactOS! Today marks 30 years since the first commit to the ReactOS source tree. It’s been such a long journey that many of our contributors today, including myself, were not alive during this event.

A 5500-year-old genome recovered from human skeletal remains in Colombia may give insights into the early evolution of syphilis and its relatives

Reflections on the future of US-European relations in the age of Trump

If you have any interest in SGI’s IRIX or used IRIX back when it was still current, you’re undoubtedly aware of Nekoware, a collection of freeware for IRIX, maintained and kept up-to-date as much as possible.

A distinct set of microbes has been identified in people with obesity, which might help spot and treat the condition early – but whether it is a cause or effect of the condition isn’t known

Long thought to have walked bipedally, like us, Australia’s extinct giant kangaroos have features that indicate they could also have bounced

In January 1976, MOS Technologies presented a demonstration computer for their recently developed 6502 processor. MOS, which was acquired by Commodore later that year, needed to show the public what their low-cost processor was able to.

A trial will finally reveal whether limiting the time teens spend on social media really does affect their mental health

Donated placentas can be processed into thin, sterilised sheets that are packed with natural healing substances and reduce scarring when applied to wounds

A striking shot of biting flies on the head of a crocodile is among the winning entries in the British Ecological Society’s annual Capturing Ecology photography competition

Wildwood is an upcoming stop-motion movie by the studio Laika. I cam across the trailer earlier today, and it looks awesome. The work and passion that goes into creating a good stop-motion movie is mind boggling.

What really caught my mind, however, was one the main characters, a golden eagle (emphasis mine):

The General, voiced by Honorary Academy Award recipient Angela Bassett, a fierce warrior and leader of the skies

My cousin used to call my grandmother "The General". When I watch this movie I'll undoubtedly imagine that character a representation of my grandmother.

Can't wait!

Women using frozen embryos as part of their IVF treatment can either choose to use a medicated cycle or their natural one to prepare their uterus for a pregnancy. Now, scientists have found that the latter option seems to carry fewer risks

Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken (Bantam Books, 1971) In my last post, I mentioned Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? to introduce a Ken Bulmer (as Manning Norvil) heroic fantasy trilogy.

Howard Oakley answers a very interesting question – is it possible to slim macOS down by turning off unneeded services and similar tricks? The answer is obviously no, you cannot. Classic Mac OS was more modular, with optional installs that the user could pick and choose, as shown above in Mac OS 9.1.

Photographer Frédéric Noy's shots give an insight into life around the rainforests of Udzungwa Mountains National Park – and efforts to protect it

Imposing order on the world is seductive, but it flattens out the diversity and rich messiness of human life. Oddly, playing by the rules may help us fight back, argues C. Thi Nguyen in The Score

Almost 80 years ago, sociologists identified a new personality type that is particularly sensitive to loneliness. It's even more relevant today, says Annalee Newitz

We thought we could address big social problems by steering individual behaviour. But "nudging" people doesn't work, say behavioural scientists Nick Chater and George Loewenstein

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

Feedback has seen all the fuss about the finale of Stranger Things, but would like to point out that if we're going to dissect the plot, we have bigger things to worry about

Peter F. Hamilton’s new book A Hole in the Sky is set on a troubled ark ship hundreds of years into its voyage, with fantastic plot twists and turns. I'm a big Hamilton fan, but one aspect of the novel proved alienating for me, says Emily H.

Time it right each month, and you can spot two fleeting tricks of light on the lunar surface. Abigail Beall is planning ahead

From smartphones to net zero, there has been no shortage of innovative ideas in the past 25 years, which is why we have taken a look back to choose the best

Extraordinary fossils of 518-million-year-old jawless fish, among the earliest known vertebrates, appear to show that these animals had two pairs of eyes

Newly discovered rock art sites in Sulawesi, Indonesia, that date to nearly 68,000 years ago are thought to be the oldest rock art in the world, pre-dating Neanderthal hand stencils in Spain by 1100 years

A fossil discovery in northern Ethiopia expands the known range of Paranthropus, a genus of strong-jawed hominins that lived around 2 million years ago, and suggests they lived in a range of habitats

The light-sensitive tissue of birds’ eyes is not supplied with oxygen by blood vessels – instead, it powers itself with a flood of sugar, and this may have evolutionary benefits

The 9020 is a fascinating system, exemplary of so many of the challenges and excitement of the birth of the modern computer. On the one hand, a 9020 is a sophisticated, fault-tolerant, high-performance computer system with impressive diagnostic capabilities and remarkably dynamic resource allocation.

A popular element in comics is the crossover of different characters and worlds. This idea has come over to the pulps, usually with crossovers involving different characters from different companies. But what about authors with different character series who never met in the original stories? Hence, the interest of having characters from Edgar Rice Burroughs‘s […]

This follow-up to the influential 28 Days Later continues to take the zombie movie franchise in a surprising and thought-provoking direction

A popular idea suggests a link between big brains and a rich social life, but octopuses don't fit the pattern, which suggests something else is going on

Humpback whales off the west coast of Canada have learned a cooperative hunting technique from whales migrating into the area, and this cultural knowledge may help the population cope as food becomes scarce

People who combine different types of exercise - such as running, cycling and swimming - seem to live longer than those with less varied workouts

I totally forgot you could do this, but back in the Windows 9x days, you could hold down shift while clicking restart, and it would perform a sort-of “soft” restart without going through a complete reboot cycle.

Xous is a microkernel operating system designed for medium embedded systems with clear separation of processes. Nearly everything is implemented in userspace, where message passing forms the basic communications primitive.

Startling findings in 2024 suggested that metallic nodules on the sea floor produce oxygen and might support life. Now researchers are planning an expedition to learn more and refute criticism from mining companies

Countries have spent beyond their sustainable water budgets for so long that critical assets are depleted and the world faces huge economic, social and environmental costs

An electrical outage at Chernobyl nuclear power plant risks dangerous fuel overheating, but experts say that the chances are extremely slim due to the age of the reactors, which were shut down over two decades ago

Have you noticed how it seems like how the “light mode” of your graphical user interface of choice is getting lighter over time? It turns out you’re not crazy, and at least for macOS, light mode has indeed been getting lighter.

Two or more satellites could communicate and manoeuvre around one another using magnetic fields, although getting the technique to work at scale in space might be tricky

If only it was that simple – cue the rollercoaster ride. What an absolutely garish state of affairs lies behind this simple radio button on a website. I’m also well aware OSNews has a certain amount of complexity it might not need, and while I can’t fix that, I am at least working on a potential solution.

I’m not particularly interested in photo editing or management, professional or not, but one thing I do know is that many people who are miss one application in particular: Aperture. Discontinued over a decade ago, people still lament its loss, and Daniel Kennett explains to us layman why that’s the case.

It is impossible to get rid of anxiety because it exists to help us, says cognitive psychotherapist Owen O'Kane. Instead, he suggests three ways to reframe your relationship with anxiety in order to take back control

Spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet have helped researchers map out an ancient coastline that surrounded a large ocean billions of years ago