This beautiful purple slab is the Silicon Graphics Indigo² (though, unlike its earlier namesake, not actually indigo coloured) with the upper-tier MIPS R10000 CPU and IMPACT graphics. My recollection was that it worked at the time, but I couldn’t remember if it booted, and of course that was no guarantee that it could still power on. If this machine is to stay working and in the collection, we’re gonna need a Refurb Weekend.

↫ Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research

Out of all the retro UNIX workstations of old, the machines from SGI are both the most popular, the most well-known, and thus, also some of the most expensive. Yet, at the same time, everything up until the very last generation or two of MIPS IRIX workstations, generally do not seem to be particularly rare either. The community around SGI’s machines and IRIX is also quite thriving still, much more so than the communities of the other commercial UNIX variants. Still, the odds of me completing my collection of final-generation commercial UNIX workstations are low, exactly because of just how rare and stupidly expensive the SGI Tezro is.

As always, Cameron Kaiser goes into a level of detail few other people in the world do when it comes to rare or special computers, and this article about the Silicon Graphics Indigo² is no exception. Detailed photographs, an in-depth history of the machine, detailed descriptions of the hardware, the various fixes that needed to be performed, getting it back up and running, and everything else. There’s really nobody else writing these kinds of articles.

The weekend’s here, so sit back, relax, and have fun.

The NLnet foundation has sponsored a project to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, support which in turn can be used by other operating systems.

This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the diversity and resilience of the global IT ecosystem.

↫ NLnet foundation announcement

WPA3 support in Linux seems to be the only other open source implementation of WPA3, so this is great news not only for OpenBSD, but also for other operating systems who rely on BSD network drivers through compatibility layers, like Haiku. FreeBSD, meanwhile, is planning to build its own WPA3 implementation, so they, too, might benefit form the work that’s going to be done through OpenBSD.

October is listed as the start of this project, so work is probably already underway.

Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (or interest in) a Vision Pro, so I can’t comment on Liquid Glass in visionOS.

↫ Adam Engst at TidBITS

An incredibly detailed article showing exactly how to change the relevant settings, and exactly what they do, for each of Apple’s relevant platforms. I have a feeling quite a few of you will want to bookmark this one.

As someone who cut their teeth on Maemo (the N800/N900 still live in my basement) and carried the first Jolla dev device, I like to pull out my SailfishOS phones every few months to see how things are progressing. Here’s where I’m at in September 2025.

↫ Nick Schmidt

I was one of the very first people to review the original Jolla Phone way back in 2014, and I also happen to own the quite rare Jolla Tablet, so I was definitely a serious backer and believer in the platform back when it first entered the market. Sadly, the pace of improvements was slow, and failed adventures and mismanagement eventually led to the platform almost dying out. It’s only in recent years that they’ve been back on track and Sailfish OS is a more serious option again, but reading through Nick Schmidt’s findings, it seems the same problems still haunt the platform.

And we all know what the main problem will be: application availability. In your day-to-day use, you’re going to be spending a lot of time using the Android compatibility layer, because native Sailfish applications simply don’t pull their weight. This leads to the age-old problem of any operating system that loses focus on native applications and opts to go all-in on compatibility layers or ports instead, and int he case of Sailfish that means: why run Sailfish to run Android applications poorly, when you can also just run Android? And why develop native applications, when your Android build can run using the compatibility layer? OS/2 (with Windows applications) and Haiku (with Qt/GTK applications) suffer from the same problem.

Apparently, the Jolla C2 phone is not exactly great either, and doesn’t showcase Sailfish properly, and Sailfish’s keyboard is still unpleasant to use, a problem I also had in my original review so many years ago. There are some bright spots, too; the swipe-based navigation is still great, and apparently Wi-Fi connectivity is much more stable now. Still, it seems like Sailfish is suffering from more or less exactly the kind of problems you’d expect a small platform to suffer from, and whether or not you can deal with those problems is a more a question of dedication than just altering some use patterns.

Android and iOS, though illegal practices, have sucked all the air out of the room, and I doubt we’re ever going to get any of it back.

Another month, another activity report from the Haiku project. This past month, a lot of work went into the FreeBSD/OpenBSD network driver compatibility layer, opening the door to drivers using interfaces other than PCI or USB. Support for NFS4 took a bit of a hit with last month’s changes to VFS, and these have been addressed, and other aspects of NFS4 have been improved as well. On top of these two bigger items, there’s a list of smaller changes and fixes as well, but it’s been a calm month for Haiku so there’s less activity than normal.

I’m not sure what to add in a second paragraph here. I’m nearing act 3 in Silksong? Is that relevant here? I doubt it, but I still wanted to mention it. Only a few loose ends in act 2 and on Hornet goes!

Text ads on the search results page will now be grouped with a single “Sponsored results” label. This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored — upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence. We’re also adding a new “Hide sponsored results” control that allows you to collapse text ads with a single click if you want to focus only on organic results. In our testing, we found that the new design helps people navigate the top of the page more easily. The new design keeps the size of ads the same and you’ll still never see more than four text ads in a grouping.

↫ Omkar Muralidharan on Google’s Ads and Commerce Blog

I guess this is an improvement, but I doubt this will convince anyone to turn off their ad blocker or switch back to Google from another search engine. The option to collapse sponsored results is especially welcome, but I wish they’d gone a step further and added an option in settings to permanently collapse them – which, of course, is never going to happen. Removing any and all “AI” summaries would be nice, too, but with the entire technology industry pushing stringent “AI” KPIs on employees, that’s not going to happen, either.

Regardless, it’s still an improvement to Google’s results page, and while we may not realise it in our little bubble here, the number of people whose search experience this will improve is absolutely massive. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Google make a change to their search results page that doesn’t make it substantially worse, so I’ll take what I can get.

The world’s best operating system, 9front, has released a new release called Release. 9front is a maintained fork of Plan 9. The new release Release brings atomic(2) functions for arm, arm64, mips, 386 and amd64, improved stability when the kernel runs out of memory, memdraw and devdraw now support affine warp primitive, and more.

You can download Release from the usual mirrors.

The LineageOS project has released version 23 of their AOSP-based Android variant. LineageOS 23 is based on the initial release of Android 16 – so not the QPR1 release that came later – because Google has not made the source code for that release available yet. Like other, similar projects, LineageOS also suffers from Google’s recent further lockdown of Android; not only do they not have access to Android 16 QPR1’s source code, they also can’t follow along with the latest security patches for Android due to changes Google made to the patch release process, and without the device trees for Pixel devices, Pixels are now no longer supported any better than other Android devices.

LineageOS 23 brings many of the same features Android 16 brought, and comes with updated versions of LineageOS’ own camera application and music player, as well as a new TV launcher. They’ve also worked hard to make it much easier to run LineageOS in QEMU, they’ve improved support for running mainline kernels, they’ve made it easier to merge security fixes and updates for various kernel versions, and much more.

Update instructions can be found on the devices page, and specifically note that if you’re using an unofficial LineageOS build, you’ll need to perform the original installation again. With LineageOS being the Debian of the Android world, you can expect a ton of these unofficial versions to pop up over the coming months for devices LineageOS does not officially support.

Framework, the maker of repairable laptops, is embroiled in a controversy, as the company and its CEO are openly supporting people with, well, questionable views.

If you know a little bit about PR in social media space, you might note that, right out of the gate, a project by a vocal white nationalist known for splitting communities by their mere presence, is not a great highlight choice for an overtly non-left-right-political company like Framework. Does it get worse from here? Sadly, it does.

↫ Arya Bread Crumbs

The questionable views we’re talking about here are… Let’s just say we’re not talking about milquetoast stuff like “we should be a bit stricter with immigration” or “lower taxes on the rich”, but views that are far, far outside of the mainstream in most places in the world.

Let’s ditch the superlatives and review David’s post objectively:

• He thinks that even if you were born in the UK, you only count as British if you’re white.
• He wouldn’t consider living in London specifically because it has too many people of color.
• He uses racist tropes to accuse Asian men of being dangerous predators who attack white women.
• He pushes debunked conspiracy theories about immigrants replacing white people.
• He finds a march where speakers called for banning all non-Christian religions and ethnically cleansing immigrants “heartwarming”.
• Finally — and maybe most alarmingly — he argues that all of the above is normal and not extreme.

You can use whatever word you want to describe all that. But if you, like me, didn’t realize that this is who DHH is, we can probably agree that he’s way worse than we thought.

↫ Jake Lazaroff

Framework has stated in no uncertain terms that it is supporting and embracing people like this. That’s a choice they are entirely free to make, but I, and many with me, then, are entirely free to choose not to buy and/or promote products by Framework. I still sincerely hope that all of this is just a massive breakdown of PR and common sense at Framework and its CEO, but since they’ve already doubled-down, I’m not holding my breath. This whole thing is going to haunt them, especially since I’m fairly sure a huge chunk of their community and users – who are buying into hardware that is, in truth, overpriced – are not even remotely aligned with such extremist views.

I care deeply about Framework’s mission, but I don’t give a single rat’s ass about Framework itself. There are countless alternatives to Framework, some of which I’ve even reviewed here (like the MNT Reform or the NovaCustom V54), and if you, too, feel a deep sense of the ick when it comes to supporting extremist views like the above, I urge you to take them into consideration.

What if you are forced to use Windows, but want to use a real operating system instead? You could use WSL2 to use Linux inside Windows, but what if FreeBSD is more your thing? It turns out someone is working on making FreeBSD usable using WSL2.

This repository hosts work-in-progress efforts to run FreeBSD inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) with minimal to no changes to the FreeBSD base system. The project builds on the open-source components of WSL2 to enable FreeBSD to boot and run seamlessly in a Windows environment.

↫ WSL for FReeBSD GitHub page

The project is experimental, and definitely not ready for production use. It’s also important to note that this project is not part of Microsoft or FreeBSD. At this point in time, FreeBSD boots using WSL2 with basic functionality, and work is currently focused on networking, I/O, and process management.

It seems like Microsoft is continuing its quest to force Windows users to use Microsoft accounts instead of local accounts, despite the fact Microsoft accounts on Windows are half-baked and potentially incredibly dangerous. In the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build (26220.6772), the company has closed a few more loopholes people were using to trick the Windows installer into allowing local user accounts.

We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE). While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use. Users will need to complete OOBE with internet and a Microsoft account, to ensure device is setup correctly.

↫ Amanda Langowski at the Windows Blogs

It seems that the specific workaround removed with this change is executing the command “start ms-cxh:localonly” in the command prompt during the installation process (you can access cmd.exe by pressing shift+F10 during installation). Several other workarounds have also been removed in recent years, making it ever harder for people forced to use Windows 11 to use a local account, like the gods intended.

The only reason Microsoft is pushing online accounts this hard is that it makes it much, much easier for them to collect your data and wrestle control over your installation away from you. A regular, proper local account with additional online accounts for various services would work just as well for users, allowing them to mix and match exactly what kind of cloud services they want integrated into their operating system. However, leaving this choice to the user invariably means people aren’t going to be using whatever trash services Microsoft offers. And so, Microsoft will make that choice for you, whether you like it or not.

There are a million reasons to stay away from the Windows version that must be making Dave Cutler cry, and the insistence on online accounts is but one of them. It’s a perfect example of how Microsoft developers Windows not to make it better for its users, but to make it better for its bottom line. I wonder how much more Microsoft can squeeze its users before we see some sort of actual revolt.

Windows used to just lack taste. These days, it’s also actively hostile.

Servo, the Rust-based browsing engine spun off from Mozilla, keeps making progress every month, and this made Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wonder: what if we make a GTK widget so we can test Servo and compare it to WebKitGTK?

As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was at a good enough state to migrate from WebkitGTK to it. I have to admit that it is always a pleasure to work with Rust and the great gtk-rs bindings. Instead, Servo while it is not yet ready for production, or at least not for what we need in our product, it was simple to embed and to get something running in just a few days. The community is also amazing, I had some problems along the way and they were providing good suggestions to get me unblocked in no time.

↫ Ignacio Casal Quinteiro

The code is now out there, and while not yet ready for widespread use, this will make it easier for GTK developer to periodically assess the state of Servo, hopefully some day concluding it can serve as a replacement for WebKitGTK.

MicroPythonOS is a lightweight, fast, and versatile operating system designed to run on microcontrollers like the ESP32 and desktop systems. With a modern Android-like touch screen UI, App Store, and Over-The-Air updates, it’s the perfect OS for innovators and developers.

↫ MicroPytonOS’ website

It’s quite neat to see this running in such a constrained environment, especially considering it comes with a graphical user interface, some basic applications, and niceties like OTA updates and an application repository. As the name implies, MicroPythonOS uses native MicroPython for application and driver development, making cross-platform portability from microcontrollers to regular PCs a possibility. It’s built on the MicroPython runtime, with LVGL for graphics, packaged by the lvgl_micropython project.

It’s still relatively early in development, but it’s completely open source so anyone can help out and improve the project. I’m personally not too well-versed in the world of microcontrollers like the popular ESP32, so I’m not entirely sure just how capable other operating systems and platforms built on top if it are. This particular operating system seems to make it rather easy and straightforward for anyone to build and distribute an application for such microcontrollers, to a point where even an idiot like myself could relatively easily buy, say, an ESP32 kit with a display and assemble my own collection of small applications.

To repeat myself, it simply looks neat.

It was good while it lasted, I guess.

Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family. Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies’ powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.

↫ Qualcomm’s press release

Qualcomm’s track record when it comes to community engagement, open source, and long-term support are absolutely atrocious, and there’s no way Arduino will be able to withstand the pressures from management. We’ve seen this exact story play out a million times, and it always begins with lofty promises, and always ends with all of them being broken. I have absolutely zero faith Arduino will be able to continue to do its thing like it has.

Arduino devices are incredibly popular, and it makes sense for Qualcomm to acquire them. If I were using Arduino’s for my open source projects, I’d be a bit on edge right now.