It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we were denied that, enter Hiroshi Oota with BSD on Windows.

↫ neozeed at Virtually Fun

This is absolutely wild.

According to my sources, the new Windows bosses are now returning to an annual release cycle for major versions of the Windows platform, meaning Windows is going back to having just one big feature update a year instead of multiple smaller ones throughout. Microsoft may still use Moment updates sparingly, but they will no longer be the primary delivery vehicle for new features going forward.

↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central

Raise your hand if you still have any idea how Windows updates, feature additions, and new versions even work at this point. The number of weird codenames and Microsoftisms in this article are through the roof.

According to my sources, Microsoft’s blockbuster new feature will be the introduction of an AI-powered Windows Shell, enhanced with an “advanced Copilot,” that’s able to constantly work in the background to enhance search, jumpstart projects or workflows, understand context, and much more. Sources say these AI features will be “groundbreaking.”

↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central

If you thought Windows 11 was bad now, it’s only going to get worse. Much, much worse.

This is a website dedicated to a project of mine, Sol-1. Sol-1 is a homebrew CPU and Minicomputer built from 74HC logic.

↫ Paulo Constantino

Sol-1 has user and kernel priviledge mode, a maximum of 256 processes in parallel, paged virtual memory, serial ports, parallel ports, IDE interface, realtime clock, a DMA channel, and much more. There’s also an accompanying operating system called Solarium.

FreeBSD UNIX system can be updated in many ways. You can use freebsd-update(8) command to fetch and install the official binary patches. You can download the FreeBSD sources and compile your new version. You can download and install base.txz and kernel.txz sets in a new ZFS Boot Environment along with copying over your config files there – Other FreeBSD Version in ZFS Boot Environment – as documented here.

While for most users these three options will be more then enough – there is a small group or people that need something else. Companies. People that like to use custom FreeBSD version or enterprise corporate world that needs to fulfill many compliance regulations. For their multiple reasons – including but not limited to – security – they want to have their own trusted FreeBSD update infra under their control.

↫ vermaden

It’s from vermaden, so if you’re a FreeBSD user, you know you’re getting good information. Their website is a treasure trove of incredibly detailed information about pretty much everything related to installing, running, and living with FreeBSD.

When I started taking apart the Fairphone 5, I didn’t really expect any surprises. 

Having dis- and reassembled the previous model several times, I had some experience with Fairphone’s approach to building a smartphone: Modularity paired with easy access to all major components. 

It’s a winning formula for a repairable smartphone they have iterated on several times now. So, what’s actually different this time around—apart from a new and shiny OLED screen and beefed up cameras?

↫ Manuel Haeussermann for iFixit

Spoiler: it’s still a 10/10 for repairability, but with new niceties to make the process even more pleasant.

Fvwm3, the successor to fvwm 2.6, has a new version, 1.0.9. This highly customisable and lightweight window manager for X has been around for a very long time, since 1993, and has been in development ever since. This new release, as the version number suggests, does not have the longest changelog. If you’re a user of fvwm, you already know exactly what 1.0.9 will mean for you.

The controller, which was created in collaboration with disabled gaming groups such as AbleGamers, Stack-Up, and SpecialEffect, has a unique circular design. The controller comes with a number of different button caps, along with three stick caps that can be changed out to suit the specific needs of the gamer. The controller itself is also designed to rest on a flat surface for players that would require that kind of feature.

↫ John Callaham at Neowin

Microsoft has a similar product as well, and it’s great that disabled people who want to play games are being taken so much more seriously these days. Excellent work from both console giants.

systemd 255 has been released, and it contains one particular new feature I want to highlight.

A new component “systemd-bsod” has been added to show logged error messages full-screen if they have a “LOG_EMERG” log level. This is intended as a tool for displaying emergency log messages full-screen on boot failures. Yes, BSOD in this case short for “Blue Screen of Death”. This was worked on as part of Outreachy 2023. The systemd-bsod will also display a QR code for getting more information on the error causing the boot failure.

↫ Michael Larabel at Phoronix

I like this. Operating systems usually have excellent logging capabilities, but getting to these logs and making sense of them isn’t always easy, especially if you’re not elbow-deep in the weeds of how your operating system of choice works. Giving a useful error screen when things really hit a brick wall at 200 km/h is a good thing, and will make at least some troubleshooting easier.

This promise of a world responsibly empowered by AI continues to drive our work at Google DeepMind. For a long time, we’ve wanted to build a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world. AI that feels less like a smart piece of software and more like something useful and intuitive — an expert helper or assistant.

Today, we’re a step closer to this vision as we introduce Gemini, the most capable and general model we’ve ever built.

Gemini is the result of large-scale collaborative efforts by teams across Google, including our colleagues at Google Research. It was built from the ground up to be multimodal, which means it can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information including text, code, audio, image and video.

↫ Demis Hassabis on Google’s official blog

It’s no secret I’m not particularly impressed by “AI”, not least because its ability to autocomplete complete nonsense based on copyrighted works it’s drawing from without permission and the dangers this might represent to our society. That being said, Google’s new “AI” thing, as demonstrated in this video, actually seems a tiny bit impressive. It still looks like to me like it’s just blurting out random information using fairly mundane things like object and speech recognition, but the fluidity of it all definitely feels a lot more natural than whatever OpenAI and Microsoft have shown so far.

I’m still not even remotely interested in any of this stuff, but this at least seems slightly more possibly useful than other examples I’ve seen so far.

Windows 10’s end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That’s the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure.

As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.

↫ Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica

Getting users to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 at that point isn’t going to be easy, because at this point Windows 10 users who can technically upgrade are clearly not doing so for a reason. I also wonder what this will mean for the large number of Windows 10 users who simply cannot upgrade because they have a processor that’s artificially restricted from running Windows 11.

According to our tests and reports seen by us, HP Smart is auto-installing on all versions of Windows that use Microsoft Store, including Windows 11 23H2 or 22H2. HP Smart is an app that allows you to manage HP printers, and it’s typically pre-installed on HP PCs. It’s not supposed to be installed when you’re not using an HP device like a PC or printer.

However, the Microsoft Store is auto-installing the “HP Smart” app on Windows installations.

↫ Mayank Parmar for Windows Latest

Microsoft is giving away free applications to Windows users the world over, and even installing it for them! What a nice, altruistic gesture. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Intel’s Optane memory modules launched with a lot of fanfare in 2015, and were recently discontinued, in 2022, with similar fanfare. It was a sad day for me, a lover of abstraction-breaking technologies, but it was forseeable and understandable.

At the time of Optane’s launch, a lot of us were excited about the idea of having a new storage tier, sitting between DRAM and flash. It was announced as having DRAM endurance and speed with the persistence and size of flash. It was a futuristic memory technology, but the technology of the future met the full force of Wright’s Law.

↫ Nima Badizadegan

I definitely remember Optane being presented as a huge deal, but it seems it fell between the cracks of other technologies developing around it and their prices dropping fast.

Even if you’ve used the Mac for decades, I suspect you have never fully understood the Fn key. Not helping is the fact that Apple sometimes calls it the Function key, but all Mac keyboards already have 12 or more numbered F-for-Function keys! The Fn key first appeared in 1998 in the PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet) and has become a fixture in the lower-left corner of laptop keyboards ever since. The Fn key migrated to standalone keyboards only in 2007 with the release of the Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, where it occupies a spot between the Delete key and the Home key. On Apple’s compact desktop keyboards, it reverts to the lower-left corner.

↫ Adam Engst at TibBITS

This article made me wonder when the Fn key first appeared, but searching for it leads to a lot of SEO spam that is clearly all wrong. As the article notes, Apple first introduced it in 1998, and IBM already it in on the monochrome ThinkPad 300 in 1992. It’s much older than that, though; the IBM PC Convertible from 1986 also had one, as did the IBM PCjr from 1984. At this point I’m starting to think it was actually a fairly common key, but with the explosion of IBM compatibles in the early ’80s it’s basically impossible to check them all, and, of course, there’s the possibility it may have existed on earlier systems, or third-party keyboards long lost to time.

This would be an interesting mystery to solve.

It was Big Sur that focussed attention on the size of macOS updates. In Mojave and earlier, updates had essentially been Installer packages that brought a minimum of overhead. By the time that many had installed Big Sur’s new Signed System Volume (SSV), we were starting to discover just how large its updates were. Those were early days with its completely new updating process that builds a new System volume, takes a snapshot of it, and constructs a tree of hashes that verify the integrity of every last bit within it.

↫ Howard Oakley

I had no idea macOS updates had become as big as they had, and good on Apple for trying to bring this back down again, and speed up installation of updates, too.