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• Post #4217482

  The open source UnaWatch can be disassembled with one screwdriver, with user-replacable parts. https://unawatch.com/ - Ultra low power cortex M-33 CPU - 2.5MB RAM - 4.3GB storage - Bluetooth LE 5.2 - Haptic vibration - Piezo alert - Altimeter - Temperature sensor - 280mAh hard shell battery - 1.2" 240x240px LCD with backlight - Dual frequency GPS - Heart rate monitoring - Peripheral oxygen saturation

• Post #4018949

  In three announcements last Thursday, the Trump admministration signalled the end of democracy in the USA. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/22/stephen-miller-marco-rubio-trump-speeches 'The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington. It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely to...

• Post #3996008

  The hidden partition is invisible when the drive is inspected. https://rootkitlabs.com/2026/06/22/I%27m-Building-a-Secure-USB-Drive/ 'Phantomdrive is a completely open source USB drive that appears as an 8 GB drive when first plugged in. There’s no way for the OS to detect the remainder of the disk. If the user edits a plaintext file on the disk with the contents password:PUTYOURPASSWORDHERE, it unmounts itself and remounts the second hidden section and AES-256 encrypts/decrypts in place.&...

• Post #3994653

  A completely open source eBook reader. https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/open-book-touch There are a lot of good things about this project. For me, the limited number of supported book formats and the thickness of the case are the only two negatives.

• Post #3927135

  Because large language models do not scale, generative artificial intelligence is an expensive dead end. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/generative-ai-engineering-disaster/687901/ 'The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even...

• Post #3800310

  The blue lines are every year from 1982 to 2025. The red line is 2026. The consequences will not be trivial. https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/the-graph-that-should-be-front-page-news 'Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate. The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes...

• Post #3779447

  The current government of Aotearoa New Zealand has ended all research that doesn't promise monetisable deliverables. Oana Olteanu argues that this is exactly the wrong approach. https://www.motivenotes.ai/p/against-usefulness 'I am looking for the person who - has been obsessed with one unfashionable question for years, and can tell you why the obvious approach is wrong - builds in the open, or wants to, because they would rather the idea live than own it - measures progress in deca...

• Post #3542683

  An independent app store's take on Google's Developer Verification. https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html '... beware the dangers of allowing the terminology of debate to be defined by those who don’t have your best interests at heart. Malware being synonymous with “software we don’t like” means that they can unilaterally dictate — driven either by business incentives or by being compelled by a sufficiently powerful government — what the malware-du-jour definition is to b...

• Post #3540953

  Sometimes events overtake journalism. In this case, Der Spiegel's investigation into the real state of affairs in Venezuela was overtaken by severe earthquakes. Now published, it also illuminates why the response to the earthquakes has been so inadequate. https://archive.ph/BgCtA 'No one knows what Trump's plans are, but in Caracas hardly anyone believes Machado has a role in them. It may be about oil, about business opportunities for his campaign donors, or about pushing the Chine...

• Post #3525709

  Google's new reCAPTCHA wants you to turn on your camera and show it your hand, so it can identify you more definitively. https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand 'This is a company whose business runs on gathering and monetizing personal data, now asking to switch on your camera and read your hand.'

• Post #3437779

  For anything more recent than an i386 processor, there's a Linux solution that'll deliver a useable computer. A guide. https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm 'Reviving old hardware with Linux is not just possible. It is practical, sustainable, and often results in a machine that feels faster than it did when it was new. The key is matching the distro to your hardware tier, optimizing RAM usage with zram and service trimming, and being honest abou...

• Post #3435695

  This directory of open webcams on the public internet world-wide is interesting, but raises one question for me. https://ipcrawl.com/ How many of the people who installed these cameras realise they're publicly accessible?

• Post #2537773

  A developer discusses his reasons for moving. https://jorijn.com/en/blog/leaving-github-for-forgejo/ 'GitHub is no longer an independent company with its own CEO. Since August 2025 it is a unit of Microsoft's CoreAI division. The April 2026 outages and the Copilot training-data default flip are downstream of the same shift. Both are predictable from the structure. US-jurisdictional risk under FISA 702 and the CLOUD Act is real and unresolvable from the customer side. EU data...

• Post #2479599

  Reviewing the protections put in place as Nixon's term in office ended, and comparing that period to the current president's decline. https://thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/36-doctors-just-staged-the-quietest 'On April 30, 2026, thirty-six American physicians slipped a document into the Congressional Record that every future historian will be forced to reckon with. As of this writing, not a single mainstream reporter has touched it. The Times has not. The Post has not...

• Post #2331121

  An analysis of works from individual artists and schools of painting provides inspirational colour palettes. https://paletteinspiration.com/ ' PaletteInspiration.com is a curated color intelligence platform dedicated to the study and exploration of color as used by the world's greatest painters. We extract, analyze, and present the dominant color palettes from thousands of artworks spanning the Renaissance through the Modern era. Our mission is to make the color wisdom of mast...

• Post #2242072

  Google's new reCAPTCHA only works if your phone runs Google Play Services. This means that a de-Googled phone will fail all (new) reCAPTCHAs all the time. https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-android-users 'People running de-Googled phones chose those setups because they read the data practices, understood what Play Services phones home about, and decided they didn’t consent. Google’s new system punishes that decision by treating the absence of its proprietar...

• Post #2175684

  Brazil's government-run Pix payment system is trouncing Visa and Mastercard by offering instant payments that are mostly free. But Visa and Mastercard have the ear of Donald Trump ... https://www.elciudadano.com/en/brazils-pix-payment-system-faces-pressure-from-visa-and-mastercard/04/04/ In essence, the case being made by Visa and Mastercard is that socialism should be illegal. 'In September 2025, the Trump administration openly supported Visa and Mastercard, with the U.S. Trade Repre...

• Post #2119060

  My take on government calls for further amalgamation of local bodies is that larger regional organisations are less accountable to the local community and more readily manipulated by central government. I also have not seen a shred of evidence that larger councils result in any of the vaunted cost savings, either immediately or forty years out. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/594354/mayors-consider-government-s-amalgamation-ultimatum 'The biggest problem councils faced was financi...

• Post #2054464

  Cory Doctorow on the loose but growing international coalitions opposing Trump and, of necessity, US Big Tech monopolies. https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/05/three-is-a-magic-number/#coalitions 'I have been an activist all my life, and a digital rights activist for the majority of my adult life. I'm sure there are members of this post-American coalition who want things that are absolutely antithetical to my agenda. That's what makes us a coalition – we disagree about so...

• Post #2016952

  Swedish tests show touchscreens can take four times longer than physical controls to complete common tasks. https://etsc.eu/physical-buttons-outperform-touchscreens-in-new-cars/ 'According to the magazine’s conclusions, the easiest car to understand and operate, by a large margin, was the 2005 Volvo V70. The four tasks were handled within ten seconds during which the car drove 306 meters at 110 km/h. At the other end of the scale, was the Chinese electric car, the MG Marvel R. The dr...

• Post #2013095

  From September, phones running Google's implementation of Android will no longer be able to side-load applications. I'm one of those who believe this is Not A Good Thing. https://keepandroidopen.org/en/ I've written Android apps in the past, both professionally and for my personal use. I currently use a third party build of Android (LineageOS) without Google Play Services and believe the proposed changes will not directly affect me ... but they will certainly affect me...

• Post #1846515

  When potato salad goes bad. https://www.thefarside.com/2026/04/29/4

• Post #1846514

  I'm running Thunderbird as my email client. It has four email accounts, three of which I host myself. This morning the inboxes for two of the self-hosted accounts on the same domain contain items which are not fully compliant email messages. Between the dash separators is one full message including all headers. -------- X-Account-Key: account18 X-UIDL: UID481-1708895215 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 X-Mozilla-Keys:...

• Post #1792029

  The average American generates more than USD1600 a year for Google. https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google 'Every cross-product integration, every friction point on data export, every feature built to increase daily engagement is backed by this math. Google’s advertising mechanics have always been deliberately opaque. The data shows why: users are considered money-generating assets, assigned a value and targeted accordingly. Every feature built to increase engagement...

• Post #1758667

  Greece wants to remove anonymity from social media. Is this a better strategy than kicking teens off internet platforms? https://www.euractiv.com/news/greece-to-ban-anonymity-on-social-media/ '“In ancient Greece, everyone could express their opinion openly and by name – they would raise their hand and share their view. This should inspire us as we shape a new digital democracy,” the minister told Euractiv on the sidelines of the Delphi Economic Forum.'

• Post #1275977

  Cory Doctorow presents a simple equation: responding to economic crises with austerity results in fascism. What will the current Aotearoa New Zealand government do when the Strait of Hormuz strangles our economy? https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs 'Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called 'organized loneliness' – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.'

• Post #1215788

  European governments are moving employees off WhatsApp and Signal. https://www.politico.eu/article/european-civil-servants-new-messaging-services/ 'The move toward government-controlled messaging apps is part of Europe's search for alternatives to American technology, sparked by fears of being strategically dependent on Washington. WhatsApp is owned by U.S. tech giant Meta, while Signal is run by a U.S.-based non-profit and managed by a large community of open-source software...

• Post #1215784

  I've finished digitising all our aged uncle's photographs. Most are quite faded, and I've done what colour correction I can. I've bought him two 128GB USB keys - Fortnite branded, on a ridiculously cheap special at Noel Leeming - and we'll rotate these each time we visit. As well as his own photographs each new USB key will have fresh videos and photos of suitably classic vehicles downloaded from the internet. I suspect this entire exercise may be a was...

• Post #1171427

  This Atlantic article about the power of the aged in the USA prompted me to consider how we might make democracy work better for the future. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/gerontocracy-wealth-power/686585/ The young will inherit the world we leave them so, in my opinion, they should have the largest voice in shaping that world. Would some form of weighted voting be workable? Could people under 40 get two additional votes, and those under 65 one additional vote? Or is there some...

• Post #1111687

  No, not RAM or SDD upgrades ... taking a file to the body of your Macbook. Yup. https://kentwalters.com/posts/corners/ 'The bottom edge of the MacBook is very sharp. Indeed, the industrial designers at Apple chose an aluminum unibody partly for the fact that it can handle such a geometry. But, it is uncomfortable on my wrists, and I believe strongly in customizing one's tools, so I filed it off.'