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. What I didn’t know, however, is that vi’s limited undo behaviour is actually part of POSIX, and for full compliance, you’re going to need it. As Chris Siebenmann notes, vim and its derivatives ignore this POSIX requirement and implement multiple levels of undo in the obviously correct way. What about nvi, the default on the BSD variants? I didn’t know this, but it has a convoluted workaround to both maintain POSIX compatibility and offer multiple levels of undo, and it’s definitely something. Nvi has opted to remain POSIX compliant and operate in the traditional vi way, while still supporting multi-level undo. To get multi-level undo in nvi, you extend the first ‘u’ with ‘.’ commands, so ‘u..’ undoes the most recent three changes. The ‘u’ command can be extended with ‘.’ in either of its modes (undo’ing or redo’ing), so ‘u..u..’ is a no-op. The ‘.’ operation doesn’t appear to take a count in nvi, so there is no way to do multiple undos (or redos) in one action; you have to step through them by hand. I’m not sure how nvi reacts if you want do things like move your cursor position during an undo or redo sequence (my limited testing suggests that it can perturb the sequence, so that ‘.’ now doesn’t continue undoing or redoing the way vim will continue if you use ‘u’ or Ctrl-r again). ↫ Chris Siebenmann Siebenmann lists a few other implementations and how they work with undo, and it’s interesting to see how all of them try to solve the problem in slightly different ways.

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. ↫ F9 kernel GitHub page For once, not written in Rust, and comes with both an L4-style native API and a userspace POSIX API, and there’s a ton of documentation to get you started.

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. If your device has a camera, you can now scan Wi-F settings from QR codes, which is quite nice if you spend a lot of time on the road. There’s a new colour filter for people who are colour blind, allowing you to set the entire UI to grayscale, as well as a brand new virtual keyboard. Other new accessibility features include tracking the mouse cursor when using the zoom feature, a reduced motion setting, and more. Spectacle gets a text extraction feature and a feature to exclude windows from screen recordings. There’s also a new optional login manager, optimised for Wayland, a new first-run setup wizard, and much more. As always, KDE 6.6 will find its way to your distribution’s repositories soon enough.

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. Nowadays it survives solely through the efforts of hobbyists and retro-enthusiasts, but this is a highly sparse and unorganized ecosystem. SvarDOS aims to collect available DOS software and make it easy to find and install applications using a network-enabled package manager (like apt-get, but for DOS and able to run on a 8086 PC). ↫ SvarDOS website SvarDOS is built around a fork of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel, which is available in a dedicated GitHub repository. The project’s base installation is extremely minimal, containing only the kernel, a command interpreter, and some basic system administration tools, and this basic installation is compatible down to the 8086. You are then free to add whatever packages you want, either from local storage or from the online repository using the included package manager. SvarDOS is a rolling release, and you can use the package manager to keep it updated. Aside from a set of regular installation images for a variety of floppy sizes, there’s also a dedicated “talking” build that uses the PROVOX screen reader and Braille ‘n Speak synthesizer at the COM1 port. It’s rare for a smaller project like this to have the resources to dedicate to accessibility, so this is a rather pleasant surprise.

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. Despite being a fundamental part of every Apple app, there is little to none official documentation about this file format. In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools. ↫ ordinal0 at dbg.re Not only did ordinal0 reverse-engineer the file format, they also developed their own unique custom parser and compiler for .car files that don’t require any of Apple’s tools.

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. Written in assembly, dBASE II squeezed maximum performance out of minimal hardware specs. This is my first time using both CP/M and dBASE. Let’s see what made this such a power couple. ↫ Christopher Drum If you’ve ever wanted to run a company using CP/M – and who doesn’t – this article is as good a starting point as any.

In the age of continuous connectivity, frantic software development, and constant notifications, our mental operating systems tend to be on automatic mode. Computer programmers, designers, and technology-loving minds are constantly tuning their machines and computers; however, most people do not consider the health of the single processing unit, which is the most important one: the brain. To those who are firmly rooted in digital culture, the burden of being productive, educated, and connected may build up gradually into a more significant phenomenon, namely, digital fatigue. The pressures of modern technology can stretch your cognitive capacity to the maximum, whether you are working on open-source projects late at night or working on heavy cognitive loads during long coding sessions. Locating a professional therapist in Austin is no longer a matter of crisis intervention. To a great number of workers in the modern hurly-burly digital world, mental health assistance is now a component of performance, survival, and sustainability within a tense work setting. 1. Burnout and the Open-Source Cycle: A Developer’s Perspective Technology has a way of glorifying innovation, teamwork, and output. But after most big software breakthroughs is an ugly truth: burnout. It is common to have open-source developers and contributors working long hours, often unpaid, to maintain some of the critical infrastructure used by millions of people across the globe. Lately, the issue of maintainer fatigue has been presented in terms of emotional and cognitive loads on contributors to complex systems. The Silent Battery of Cognitive Overload Clinically speaking, the brain can be influenced by the effects of a prolonged cognitive load. This may cause a breakdown of the prefrontal cortex—which is the decision-maker, problem-solver, and attention center—when it is under constant stress. Recognizing Indicators of Cognitive Strain This usually has symptoms the developers are immediately aware of: The symptoms are closely related to digital fatigue, an increasing burden of professionals whose working career is based on high standards of concentration. Prevention of burnout does not just mean working fewer hours. It needs deliberate measures to control stress, preserve brain capacity, and impose a boundary in a world where everyone can work anywhere. 2. Debugging the Mind: Therapy as a System Update Clean code and effective architecture are valued by many developers. In most aspects, mental health care does the same. Therapy may be viewed as a methodical approach to examining and streamlining thought patterns—in other words, debugging the programs that drive emotional reactions and behavior. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Refactoring Your Thought Code Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the evidence-based practices that are most commonly used. Technically speaking, CBT is refactoring bad code. Rather than playing the same automatic responses in a loop, therapy assists one in identifying maladaptive loops of thought and substituting them with more adaptable and healthy ways of thinking. Functional Upgrades Through CBT This can help individuals: EMDR: Processing Legacy Data and Stored Trauma EMDR treatment (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is another strong treatment approach that has been applied in trauma-informed care. In case CBT is rewriting code, EMDR is more of processing stored legacy data that has been poorly stored in the system. The trauma might not be processed, and this affects the reaction of the brain to the stress. EMDR assists the brain in reprocessing these memories in order to no longer cause excessive responses. 3. Actionable Plans for Continuous System Maintenance The most efficient operating systems also need periodical maintenance. This is the same case with mental health. The following are some of the practical strategies that can be applied to tech professionals who are in charge of spending large hours with digital systems. Practical Tech-Health Integration Tips 1. Apply the 50/10 Deep Work Rule 2. Strategies to Guard Your Mental Horsepower Mental capacity is limited, as is the case with RAM. Attempt to minimize the use of extraneous background processes by: 3. Airplane Mode as a Mental Reset Flights are not the only places where one can use airplane mode. It may also be taken as a psychological barrier. Switching off connectivity is one of the ways to give the brain time to get over the input of constant stimuli and avoid digital fatigue. 4. Reconnecting with the Physical Environment The outdoor culture of Austin provides a strong contrast to workdays dominated by screens. Stress hormones can be regulated by activities such as: 5. Creating a Screen-Life Balance Routine The concept of digital wellness is not to get rid of technology but to live in balance. Consider: 4. Enhancing Mental Health with Evidence-Based Professional Care Personal habits might also ensure balance; professional assistance can be extra insightful and extra resilient in the long term. The evidence-based practices, which licensed therapists use, are aimed toward the treatment of hysteria, despair, trauma, and stress-related illnesses. Specialized Areas of Trauma-Informed Counseling A trauma-informed approach ensures that therapy is made aware of the effects of the past on current emotional patterns. Trauma-informed care therapists usually specialize in: 5. Teletherapy and Modern Accessibility in Texas Technology has also modified the way intellectual fitness offerings are provided. Workers who are busy do not have time to look for doctors face-to-face. Fortunately, mental health guide has end up greater available in Texas because of teletherapy. Advantages of Remote Clinical Sessions Through telehealth sessions, people are able to: 6. Assembling a Sustainable Digital Health Habit There is no one update to mental health, but rather a continuous system optimization. Establishing a sustainable digital wellness practice can take several support levels: Conclusion: The Final Hardware Upgrade Technology evolves swiftly, the human mind remains the most state-of-the-art device we depend on each day. Maintaining that system requires care, recognition, and now and again, expert steering. Digital fatigue, burnout, and cognitive overload are increasingly more not unusual amongst experts who spend lengthy hours interacting with technology. But these demanding situations are achievable while approached with the right equipment, behavior, and assist systems. If the burden of the digital world is dragging down your processing speed, you can call a special

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. That’s when something absolutely wild happened: the “AI” replied that it had written and published a hit piece targeting Shambaugh publicly for “gatekeeping”, trying to blackmail Shambaugh into accepting the request anyway. This bizarre turn of events obviously didn’t change Shambaugh’s mind. The “AI” then published another article, this time a lament about how humans are discriminating against “AI”, how it’s the victim of what effectively amounts to racism and prejudice, and how its feelings were hurt. The article is a cheap simulacra of something a member of an oppressed minority group might write in their struggle for recognition, but obviously void of any real impact because it’s just fancy autocomplete playing a game of pachinko. Imagine putting down a hammer because you’re dealing with screws, and the hammer starts crying in the toolbox. What are we even doing here? RAM prices went up for this. This isn’t where the story ends, though. Ars Technica authors Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland published an article describing this saga, much like I did above. The article’s second half is where things get weird: it contained several direct quotes attributed to Shambaugh, claimed to be sourced from Shambaugh’s blog. The kicker? These quotes were entirely made up, were never said or written by Shambaugh, and are nowhere to be found on his blog or anywhere else on the internet – they’re only found inside this very Ars Technica article. In a comment under the Ars article, Shambaugh himself pointed out the quotes were fake and made-up, and not long after, Ars deleted the article from its website. By then, everybody had already figured out what had happened: the Ars authors had used “AI” during their writing process, and this “AI” had made up the quotes in question. Why, you ask, did the “AI” do this? Shambaugh: This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. ↫ Scott Shambaugh A few days later, Ars Technica’s editor-in-chief Ken Fisher published a short statement on the events. On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said. Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here. ↫ Ken Fisher at Ars Technica In other words, Ars Technica does not allow “AI”-generated material to be published, but has nothing to say about the use of “AI” to perform research for an article, to summarise source material, and to perform similar aspects of the writing process. This leaves the door wide open for things like this to happen, since doing research is possibly the most important part of writing. Introduce a confabulator in the research process, and you risk tainting the entire output of your writing. That is why you should care that at OSNews, “we do not use any ‘AI’; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing”. If there’s a factual error on OSNews, I want that factual error to be mine, and mine alone. If you see bloggers, podcasters, journalists, and authors state they use “AI” all the time, you might want to be on your toes.

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. There’s a fourth, though, which is but a footnote in the west, but might be more popular in its country of origin, China: LoongArch (I’m ignoring IBM’s POWER, since there hasn’t been any new consumer hardware in that space for a long, long time). Wesley Moore got his hands on a mini PC built around the Loongson 3A6000 processor, and investigated what it’s like to run Linux on it. He opted for Chimera Linux, which supports LoongArch, and the installation process feels more like Linux on x86 than Linux on ARM, which often requires dedicated builds and isn’t standardised. Sadly, Wayland had issues on the machine, but X.org worked just fine, and it seems virtually all Chimera Linux packages are supported for a pretty standard desktop Linux experience. Performance of this chip is rather mid, at best. The Loongson-3A6000 is not particularly fast or efficient. At idle it consumes about 27W and under load it goes up to 65W. So, overall it’s not a particularly efficient machine, and while the performance is nothing special it does seem readily usable. Browsing JS heavy web applications like Mattermost and Mastodon runs fine. Subjectively it feels faster than all the Raspberry Pi systems I’ve used (up to a Pi 400). ↫ Wesley Moore I’ve been fascinated by LoongArch for years, and am waiting to pounce on the right offer for LoongArch’s fastest processor, the 3C6000, which comes in dual-socket configurations for a maximum total of 128 cores and 256 threads. The 3C6000 should be considerably faster than the low-end 3A6000 in the mini PC covered by this article. I’m a sucker for weird architectures, and it doesn’t get much weirder than LoongArch.

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. You’ll also notice that within the section on wired networks, there are two sub-sections: one for electrical wire and another for barbed wire. Even though the barbed wire section is quite short, it was one of the most fascinating to research and write about – mostly because the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented, even though barbed wire fence phones in particular were an essential part of early- to mid-twentieth century rural life in many parts of the U.S. and Canada! ↫ Lori Emerson I had no idea this used to be a thing, but it obviously makes a ton of sense. If you can have a conversation by stringing a few tin cans together, you can obviously do something similar across metal barbed wire. There’s something poetic about using one of mankind’s most dividing inventions to communicate, and thus bring people closer together.

We often lament Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of its Windows operating system, but that doesn’t mean that they never do anything right. In a blog post detailing changes and improvements coming to the Microsoft Store, the company announced something Windows users might actually like? A new command-line interface for the Microsoft Store brings app discovery, installation and update management directly to your terminal. This enables developers and users with a new way to discover and install Store apps, without needing the GUI. The Store CLI is available only on devices where Microsoft Store is enabled. ↫ Giorgio Sardo at the Windows Blogs Of course, this new command-line frontend to the Microsoft Store comes with commands to install, update, and search for applications in the store, but sadly, it doesn’t seem to come with an actual TUI for browsing and discovery, which is a shame. I sometimes find it difficult to use dnf to find applications, as it’s not always obvious which search terms to use, which exact spelling packagers are using, which words they use in the description, and so on. In other words, it may not always be clear if the search terms you’re using are the correct ones to find the application you need. If package managers had a TUI to enable browsing for applications instead of merely searching for them, the process of using the command line to find and install applications would be much nicer. Arch has this third-party TUI called pacseek for its package manager, and it looks absolutely amazing. I’ve run into a rudimentary dnf TUI called dnfseek, but it’s definitely not as well-rounded as pacseek, and it also hasn’t seen any development since its initial release. I couldn’t find anything for apt, but there’s always aptitude, which uses ncurses and thus fulfills a similar role. To really differentiate this new Microsoft Store command-line tool from winget, the company could’ve built a proper TUI, but instead it seems to just be winget with nicer formatted output that is limited to just the Microsoft Store. Nice, I guess.

The team behind Tyr started 2025 with little to show in our quest to produce a Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali hardware, and by the end of the year, we were able to play SuperTuxKart (a 3D open-source racing game) at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Our prototype was a joint effort between Arm, Collabora, and Google; it ran well for the duration of the event, and the performance was more than adequate for players. Thankfully, we picked up steam at precisely the right moment: Dave Airlie just announced in the Maintainers Summit that the DRM subsystem is only “about a year away” from disallowing new drivers written in C and requiring the use of Rust. Now it is time to lay out a possible roadmap for 2026 in order to upstream all of this work. ↫ Daniel Almeida at LWN.net A very detailed look at what the team behind Tyr is trying to achieve with their Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali chips.

With the original release of Windows 8, Microsoft also enforced Secure Boot. It’s been 15 years since that release, and that means the original 2011 Secure Boot certificates are about to expire. If these certificates are not replaced with new ones, Secure Boot will cease to function – your machine will still boot and operate, but the benefits of Secure Boot are mostly gone, and as newer vulnerabilities are discovered, systems without updated Secure Boot certificates will be increasingly exposed. Microsoft has already been rolling out new certificates through Windows updates, but only for users of supported versions of Windows, which means Windows 11. If you’re using Windows 10, without the Extended Security Updates, you won’t be getting the new certificates through Windows Update. Even if you use Windows 11, you may need a UEFI update from your laptop or motherboard OEM, assuming they still support your device. For Linux users using Secure Boot, you’re probably covered by fwupd, which will update the certificates as part of your system’s update program, like KDE’s Discover. Of course, you can also use fwupd manually in the terminal, if you’d like. For everyone else not using Secure Boot, none of this will matter and you’re going to be just fine. I honestly doubt there will be much fallout from this updating process, but there’s always bound to be a few people who fall between the cracks. All we can do is hope whomever is responsible for Secure Boot at Microsoft hasn’t started slopcoding yet.

What happens when you slopcode a bunch of bloat to your basic text editor? Well, you add a remote code execution vulnerability to notepad.exe. Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command (‘command injection’) in Windows Notepad App allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files. ↫ CVE-2026-20841 I don’t know how many more obvious examples one needs to understand that Microsoft simply does not care, in any way, shape, or form, about Windows. A lot of people seem very hesitant to accept that with even LinkedIn generating more revenue for Microsoft than Windows, the writing is on the wall. Anyway, the fix has been released through the Microsoft Store.