I was having an email conversation with Stoo Cambridge, and he mentioned that he was having trouble making his Linux machine display thumbnails of Amiga IFF/ILBM files. It turns out I have a solution for him, so I am sharing it here to help anyone else. The number of people to whom this is relevant must be minute, but that’s exactly what why it’s perfect OSNews material.
Currently, in Windows 11, links contained in Windows system components, like, say, in the Settings application, are always opened in Edge, completely disregarding your default browser setting. Well, thanks to the European Union’s new Digital Services Act, this is going to change – but only for users in the European Economic Area. The latest Insider Preview changelog states: In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. It’s remarkable how quickly things can change when the full might of the EU’s and member states’ legal systems can come bearing down on you if you don’t comply. We’re already seeing the first few signs of users in the EU getting a better experience than users elsewhere.
The Fairphone 5 is official and full of surprises. As you might expect, it’s the usual repairable phone from Fairphone, with parts available to order and easily installable with just a screwdriver. A new phone means faster components and a more modern design. What you might not expect is Fairphone opting entirely out of Qualcomm’s consumer upgrade cycle thanks to its choice of an “industrial IoT” SoC that promises longer support times. With a longer window from Qualcomm and a commitment from Fairphone to keep going even after Qualcomm’s industrial support cycle, Fairphone says this device will end up with a jaw-dropping 8–10 years of OS support. The Fairphone 5 is not for sale in the US. Europeans, though, can get the device for 699 euros (~$753), with preorders starting today and a ship date of September 14. For the basic specs, we have a mid-range loadout, starting with a 6.46-inch, 90 Hz, 2770×1224 OLED display. There’s 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a side fingerprint reader, and a microSD slot. For rear cameras, it offers a 50 MP Sony IMX800, an anonymous 50 MP wide-angle sensor, and a time-of-flight sensor. The front cam is a 50 MP Samsung JN1. Such a support cycle should be legally mandated for every OEM.
The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver. Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open-source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA’s default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author’s intent. Here’s a wild idea, NVIDIA: just release your driver code as open source.
By far, the most popular so-called DOS Extender in the early 1990’s was DOS/4GW. MS-DOS game compatibility occupied a very large portion of my time during Windows 95 development, so I saw a lot of DOS Extender banners, most frequently the DOS/4GW banner. Now, you might wonder, “How did these games even run in Windows 95 if they came with a DOS Extender? Wouldn’t the extender try to enter protected mode and fail, because Windows was already managing protected mode?” When Raymond Chen speaks, we listen. That’s the rules.
From Google’s Workspaces Blog: Today we’re making Duet AI for Google Workspace generally available, and you can get started now with a no-cost trial. With over 3 billion users and more than 10 million paying customers who rely on it every day to get things done, Google Workspace is the world’s most popular productivity tool. Our pioneering technology makes collaborating with people easy, fun, and ubiquitously available. With the introduction of Duet AI, we added AI as a real-time collaborator. Since its launch, thousands of companies and more than a million trusted testers have used Duet AI as a powerful collaboration partner that can act as a coach, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data. None of this stuff even remotely interests me, but to be fair – I don’t work in a large organisations with dozens of meetings to remember, endless emails to read, and countless shared documents to keep track of. I have no idea if these features make any of those tedious things any easier, or if it’s just something users who do live the office, collaborative life shove to the side as a nuisance.
ObjFW is a portable, lightweight framework for the Objective-C language. It enables you to write an application in Objective-C that will run on any platform supported by ObjFW without having to worry about differences between operating systems or various frameworks you would otherwise need if you want to be portable. It supports all modern Objective-C features when using Clang, but is also compatible with GCC ≥ 4.6 to allow maximum portability. ObjFW version 1.0 has just been released, which is, of course, a major milestone for any project. In this case, it also means ObjFW now has a stable API and ABI. ObjFW is available on a variety of platforms, from macOS and Windows to more exotic ones like the Amiga and Nintendo (3)DS.
In this article, I describe my journey creating a barely functional rust backend enabling compilation for the .NET runtime (Usually used to run C# and F#). It is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, but I believe it still may be of some interest. Rust is everywhere.
Turns out that installing the Steam client from the Ubuntu repos on a new Ubuntu 23.04 install doesn’t work – and barely anyone noticed. Which is kind of surprising given the popularity of Steam, but also kind of not — and I’ll get to why in a second. So what’s the rub? This whole saga seems to illustrate that most Steam users on Linux install Steam from Valve itself, instead of using the packaged version. Interesting.
Microsoft has just paused Bing ads targeting Chrome users who have set Google as the default search engine. Windows 11 (and 10) users are seeing more Bing and Edge of late, and the most recent ad appears on top of games as the tech giant trying to push folks to use Bing rather than Google search in Chrome. As I reported on Sunday, Microsoft aggressively pushed Bing to Chrome users with Google or other search engine as default. This campaign involved a pop-up on the desktop’s lower right side, hovering above all apps and games. The advert reminded users of the benefits of using Bing, such as AI chat and Microsoft Rewards. People will keep using this garbage, so why would Microsoft no spam Windows users with ads? It’s not like Windows users care.
I recently released a big update for my Mac ROM SIMM Programmer software which is written using Qt for cross-platform compatibility. As part of the update I wanted to release the Mac build as a universal x86_64/arm64 binary so that M1/M2 Mac users would be able to run it natively. It doesn’t currently compile for Qt 6, although I think I can fix that in the future without too much effort. However, Qt 5.15.9 and later do support creating universal binaries out of the box, so I decided to figure out how to set it all up. Even though I think I have pretty decent Google-fu, it was difficult to piece everything together to accomplish this goal. I’m hoping this post can serve as a reference for people in the future. These instructions are based on Qt 5.15.10 because that is the latest version that is currently open source. I did this on an M2 Mac Mini running macOS 13.5.1 Ventura. Useful information for those that need it. I’m not one of those, but I’m sure some of you are.
Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over. There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users. Google has consistently been getting worse in both user experience and search results for years now, but the frustrating thing is that Google has been – and still is – so incredibly dominant, that there really isn’t any viable competition. DuckDuckGo is nice, I guess, and I use it, but in the end it’s just Bing with extra steps, and it shows in its own rather dismal search results. Everything else barely deserves a mention. While I hear good things about Kagi, their business model just is not suited for someone like me who relies on searching the web more than most people do – I’m a translator, and we have to be effectively experts in so many fields that I almost spend more time searching and cross-referencing terminology in all kinds of fields than I do actually writing down the definitive translations. Add to that the various topics I need to cover for OSNews, and even their 1000 searches a month for $10 is not enough, and paying $25 per month for their unlimited tier – or $300 a year – is absolutely bonkers expensive. And we all know those prices are only going to go up. So, online search is in a bad spot right now, and I don’t think adding “AI” to it is going to make it any better – in fact, it’s probably only going to make it worse. There’s definitely a massive opportunity here for someone to make an actually good, no-nonsense search engine, but crawling and indexing the web is prohibitively expensive, so even the pricey stuff like Kagi relies on Google and others for its results. I wish Google would just focus their search efforts on making a good search engine, sprinkled with some ads in the sidebar or occasionally interspersed inside the results, clearly marked. They have the data, they have the index – why are they making search worse, instead of better? I hate this headline.
Magnetic tape drives have long occupied the role that hard drives have shifted toward since the emergence of SSDs – cost-effective cold storage. Although they’re too slow for most users, recent developments allow magnetic drives to carry hundreds of gigabytes per square inch of tape. This week, IBM’s offerings in the space took another step forward. The company’s new TS1170 drive can store 50TB of uncompressed data per tape cartridge using the new JF media type. Employing 3:1 compression expands the capacity to 150TB. The technology represents a 250 percent increase over the TS1160 drive and JE media, which reached 20TB uncompressed and 60TB compressed. Additionally, the TS1170 manages a native data rate of 400 MB/s, increasing to 900 MB/s when handling compressed data. I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a used tape drive so I can use it to back up data – but mostly just to play with the technology. They’re not that expensive on eBay, but there’s quite a few different types and offerings, and it’s difficult to get a grasp on what would be a good option for a tinkerer to go for.
In a first for any OS/2-based distribution, ArcaOS 5.1 supports installation on the latest generation of UEFI-based systems, and includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. This enables ArcaOS 5.1 to install on a wide array of modern hardware. ArcaOS 5.1.0 can be used for new installs or to upgrade any prior version of ArcaOS 5. If installing from USB stick, the USB install stick may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS). Once built, the USB stick can be inserted into any USB port in the target system to boot into the ArcaOS installer/updater in either UEFI or traditional BIOS mode (alternatively, the DVD image may be burned to physical media and also booted to either UEFI or traditional BIOS systems). This release, and the support for UEFI and GPT-based drives in particular, is a massive achievement by the ArcaOS team. They’re most likely a rather small team, serving a small market, and I’m not even sure how much access they really have to the source code of the various parts that make up OS/2 – is anything known about the license between Arca Noae and IBM? – and this release has taken them quite a few years. However long it took, and however much work was involved, ArcaOS can now be used on modern hardware for a long time to come.
We have been in charge of maintaining one legacy Android app for our customer. It is an app, which is used by end-customers in production, but it does not have any active development going on because it’s been ready for years now. If it would be up to us, then we would not touch that app and would let it live its life happily ever after. Of course, there is no happily ever after when closed application stores are involved, so everything went south from here. It amazes me that a lot people only seem to be waking up now to the realities so many of us warned about when closed application stores took over from freely distributable applications over a decade ago. What do you get for that 30% cut of your revenue? Delays, nonsense rejections, no people to contact, and so much corporate bureaucracy it would turn Ayn Rand socialist. This is the reality of doing business with monopolists.
The EU Digital Services Act went into effect last Friday, and since there’s an insane amount of misinformation from big tech astroturfers about what the DSA means, it’s time to list what the DSA really does for people in the EU. People in the 27-nation European Union can alter some of what shows up when they search, scroll and share on the biggest social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and other tech giants like Google and Amazon. That’s because Big Tech companies, most headquartered in the U.S., are now subject to a pioneering new set of EU digital regulations. The Digital Services Act aims to protect European users when it comes to privacy, transparency and removal of harmful or illegal content. Here are five things that will change when you sign on. All of these are excellent improvements and gives us as consumers more sticks to fight with. The EU is far from perfect – just like any other government – but as far as consumer protection goes, they’re leading the charge. Never forget who would not want consumers to have more protections.
The mess I’m describing — end-to-end encryption but with certain exceptions — may be a healthy balance of your privacy and our safety. The problem is it’s confusing to know what is encrypted and secret in communications apps, what is not and why it might matter to you. To illuminate the nuances, I broke down five questions about end-to-end encryption for five communications apps. This is straightforward and good overview of what, exactly, is end-to-end encrypted in the various chat and IM applications we use today. There’s a lot of ifs and buts here.
“But does it run Linux?” can now be finally and affirmatively answered for the Commodore C64! There is a catch (rather: a couple) of course: It runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit (REU), as there is no chance to fit it all into just 64KiB. It even emulates virtual memory with an MMU. Insanity. A real C64 would take about a week (!) to boot Linux.
Ichido is a set of experimental search engines and software projects created by Anthony Mancini. The flagship project is the Ichido general purpose search engine, a classic search engine with its own independent index. Now, indexing the web is hard and this is in beta so the search results aren’t exactly what you’d call competitive, but I have to say – the user interface for this search engine is downright fantastic. It emulates that late ’90s look, and does a very interesting thing where it adds buttons for things like RSS feeds and social accounts for the pages it links to in the results. On top of that, it will list less desirable features of websites – trackers, ads, etc., as red warnings. No, this can’t replace DDG or Google – but I love the thought put into the UI.
At some point last year (shortly before I began writing this blog post!) I found reference to a hanafuda video game created in 1998 for the Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator on a random old, Japanese website. It turns out this device is a long-forgotten handheld computer that was released in 1997, only in Japan. The device is what you might refer to as a PIM or PDA, roughly equivalent to Apple Newton or Palm Pilot, particularly as it featured handwriting recognition. Not what we would consider powerful in this day and age, but good at running database lookups and any undemanding software written specifically for it. The CPU was Intel 8086 compatible, like other period CASIO handheld personal computers, and an SDK was available. Cost of the device was 47800JPY, which was around 240GBP or 400USD at the time. The game file came with a reference bitmap showing hanafuda scoring, which was just the type of guarantee and encouragement I needed to start hunting. Nothing gets my blood flowing like a handheld device or PDA I’ve never heard of (my wife is okay with this).
