Monthly Archive:: September 2023
Last week, Microsoft started rolling out the modern Photos app on Windows. While the modern Photos app has several new editing tools, it removes the built-in “Video Editor” and replaces it with a web-based Clipchamp. If you’ve lost track of how many different photos applications Microsoft has shipped for Windows and what features they don’t and do have – the linked article has a good, if Microsoftian convoluted overview.
Servo, the Rust browser engine originally developed by Mozilla, has posted an update about the project’s progress over the past month, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there. While our WebGPU support is still very much experimental (--pref dom.webgpu.enabled), it now passes over 5000 more tests in the Conformance Test Suite, after an upgrade from wgpu 0.6 (2020) to 0.16 (2023) and the addition of GPUSupportedFeatures. A few WebGPU demos now run too, notably those that don’t require changing the width or height on the fly, such as the Conway’s Game of Life built in Your first WebGPU app. On the CSS front, floats and ‘white-space: nowrap’ were previously only supported in our legacy layout engine (--legacy-layout), but now they are supported again, and better than ever before! Floats in particular are one of the trickiest parts of CSS2, and our legacy version had many bugs that were essentially unfixable due to the legacy layout architecture. On top of this and other improvements, Servo’s reference browser now also comes with a new user interface, and it comes with a location bar! Keep in mind this is not supposed to be a full-fledged user interface comparable with Chrome or Firefox, so don’t expect the world as a user.
Earlier this month, we linked to a story about how Android 14 would make it impossible for users – even root users – to modify system certificates on Android. We’re ten days along now, and it seems two new methods have already been found to work around this issue, making it once again possible to edit system certificates. The original author, Tim Perry, found a way with the help of a few other people over on Mastodon, while g1a55er found a different way independently. I’m not smart enough to indicate if these methods are hacks or solid, durable, intended methods, but at least for now, this functionality remains available.
If you crack the screen on the Pixel Watch, getting it officially repaired by Google isn’t in the cards. Several Pixel Watch owners have vented their frustrations about the inability to replace cracked screens, both on Reddit and in Google support forums. The Verge has also reviewed an official Google support chat from a reader who broke their Pixel Watch display after dropping the wearable. In it, a support representative states that Google “doesn’t have any repair centers or service centers” for the device. “At this moment, we don’t have any repair option for the Google Pixel Watch. If your watch is damaged, you can contact the Google Pixel Watch Customer Support Team to check your replacement options,” Google spokesperson Bridget Starkey confirmed to The Verge. Google is exemplary at instilling confidence in buying their products.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 08 to September 15. It wasn’t a massive week for the GNOME project – at least when it comes to easily digestible improvements that fit neatly on a blog post – but there’s still a few notable points. First and foremost, the release of Libadwaita 1.4, which brings UI breakpoints, which allows developers to create arbitrary layouts for their applications at different sizes. It also comes with new adaptive widgets, which should fix a whole slew of problems that crop up when resizing an application. For the rest, a whole bunch of GNOME applications have been updated, as well as a number of extensions.
A lot is possible with a zipfile of data and just the programs that are either already installed or a quick brew install/apt install away. I remember how impressed I was when I was first shown this eurofxref-hist.zip by an old hand from foreign exchange when I worked in a bank. It was so simple: the simplest cross-organisation data interchange protocol I had then seen (and probably since). A mere zipfile with a csv in it seems so diminutive, but in fact an enormous mass of financial applications use this particular zipfile every day. I’m pretty sure that’s why they’ve left those commas in – if they removed them now they’d break a lot of code. When open data is made really easily available, it also functions double duty as an open API. After all, for the largeish fraction of APIs in which are less about calling remote functions than about exchanging data, what is the functional difference? I wonder how many of these types of simple, but extremely powerful open datasets that are so relatively easy to use exist.
Security is our number one priority. Chromebooks get automatic updates every four weeks that make your laptop more secure and help it last longer. And starting next year, we’re extending those automatic updates so your Chromebook gets enhanced security, stability and features for 10 years after the platform was released. A platform is a series of components that are designed to work together — something a manufacturer selects for any given Chromebook. To ensure compatibility with our updates, we work with all the component manufacturers within a platform (for things like the processor and Wi-Fi) to develop and test the software on every single Chromebook. Starting in 2024, if you have Chromebooks that were released from 2021 onwards, you’ll automatically get 10 years of updates. For Chromebooks released before 2021 and already in use, users and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the platform’s release (after they receive their last automatic update). A good thing… Without any additional strings other than are already attached to a Chromebook? This can’t be. In all seriousness, ten years of updates for laptops that are often quite cheap and disposable is simply good news, and ensures that Chromebooks can be passed on for longer than they could before.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is on trial in Washington DC over US allegations that it illegally maintained a monopoly in the online search business. Executives of the Mountain View, California-based behemoth have known for years that the company’s practices are under a microscope, and have encouraged its employees to avoid creating lasting records of potential problematic conduct, government lawyers allege. Googlers often communicate with one another internally using the company’s Google Chat product. Under a policy called “Communicate with Care,” the Justice Department asserts, Googlers receive training that instructs them to have sensitive conversations over chat with history off — meaning the conversation is auto-deleted after 24 hours. As far back as 2003, Google managers circulated unambiguous instructions on phrases to avoid to ensure they don’t come across like monopolists. It’s one thing that we all innately understand Google to be an abusive monopolist – it’s another thing to actually legally prove it. Antitrust hasn’t exactly been the strong suit of the US government as of late, so I’m hoping this one will turn out different than some of the other halfhearted attempts over the past few decades. We need some honest-to-god trust-busting or Bell cutters.
Back around the time I convinced my family to switch from a 56 kb/s dial-up modem to ADSL, the website milliondollarhomepage.com was launched, and quickly became an Internet phenomenon, selling pixels for advertising space on a 1000×1000 canvas. 18 years later, the homepage is still standing, proudly displaying the Internet billboard of 2005, frozen in time. Some time ago I bought one of the expired domain names the page points to, pixels4all.com. In this post I’m exploring this Internet garden. This whole thing was such a massive hype back then, but since it took place about a year before I became the news-post-person around here, I didn’t actually remember if OSNews covered it, and it seems we didn’t. It’s definitely a fun exercise to look back at these pixel links, and actually owning one of the original domains is amazing.
At this point I was getting annoyed that I had spent so long on these things, so I just imported megalodon-rs to download my mastodon timeline instead of writing the code myself. The conduit itself is exported as a 32-bit dll with a single entry point called OpenConduit, which HotSync calls after loading your dll. I think there are supposed to be more functions exported, but it works fine so far ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Internally, the conduit just takes an empty PalmDOC database (PDB) file, downloads the timeline data, then stuffs everything into the PDB and sends the entire thing to the handheld. I doubt any custom HotSync conduit has had an entire tokio runtime stuffed in it before, but it only took me an afternoon to write and it takes ~5s to run, so chalking this one up as a win. You can clone the repo here, and install the conduit yourself using the provided binary if you too would like to use the world’s most exclusive mastodon client. This project obviously make my heart flutter a little bit. As a longtime Palm OS user of yore, and huge fan of the platform to this day, I’ve been wondering when, in the flurry of interest in building Mastodon clients for weird and dead platforms, it would be Palm OS’ turn in the spotlight. Well, that spotlight is here now, and while it’s still relatively basic, this is excellent work. Targeting old-style Palm OS devices is an interesting choice, but without having tried it, it should work seamlessly through PACE on the later, ARM-based Palm OS devices. The whole blog post is a joy to read, and can serve as a blueprint for anyone interested in, for some reason, picking up Palm OS development in 2023.
California, the home to many of tech’s biggest companies and the nation’s most populous state, is pushing ahead with a right-to-repair bill for consumer electronics and appliances. After unanimous votes in the state Assembly and Senate, the bill passed yesterday is expected to move through a concurrence vote and be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. Excellent news from California, and I’d like to congratulate everyone involved in the effort getting this passed. Much like consumer protection laws from the EU, such laws from California also have a tendency to benefit consumers far beyond the borders of the original jurisdiction.
After several months of (public) work, ReactOS can now use UEFI boot. But that’s the major changes planned for this PR. As of the state of this PR UEFI boot will operate as long as you have a serial port you should be able to test it. Some more boot fixes will come down the road but this covers 85% of devices we’ve ran into. In fact, they’ve even made it possible for ReactOS to boot on the Steam Deck, which is surely a neat trick. I’m sure once this has been polished up a bit more – if that’s even necessary – it will make its way to the next ReactOS release.
KDE Gear 23.08.1 comes only three weeks after KDE Gear 23.08 and fixes various issues in several KDE apps, including the Dolphin file manager which now exports the copy location path with native separators on copy operations, and the Gwenview image viewer whose navigation works better with side mouse buttons. The Kdenlive video editor received quite some attention in this release with fixes for a possible crash in the audiolevel widget, broken audio channel setting when opening an existing project file, incorrect saving of default audio channels for a project, a crash on subclip transcoding, and extracting of audio multi-stream clips. There’s way more bug fixes and improvements than these. As always, KDE Gear 23.08.1 will make its way to your distribution soon enough, and of course, if you’re crazy, you can compile it yourself as well.
The latest Haiku activity report is here, covering the month of August, and it’s a massive laundry list of fixes and improvements, but I couldn’t find any major big ticket features or fixes. August also happens to bring the first two final Google Summer of Code reports – porting .NET to Haiku, and improving various parts of Icon-O-Matic, a vector drawing program designed specifically for working with Haiku’s vector icon format. Also of note is that the main Haiku CO is down at the moment, but should be back up soon.
This is the August 2023 update to 86Box, bringing many improvements, bugfixes (especially for non-Windows users) and some new hardware. Mouse and keyboard support has been completely reworked, and should perform much, much better on all platforms, while also fixing a slew of bugs. Support for the ATI Mach8/32 was added, which is a first for the world of emulation, and VDE networking has been implemented as well (but not on Windows yet).
There was a spike in Explorer crashes that resulted in the instruction pointer out in the middle of nowhere. The start of a Raymond Chen investigation.
The Xfce Wayland road-map on the project’s Wiki has been updated a few times over the past two weeks, namely around the desktop panel plug-ins and applications support for Wayland. There still isn’t a firm timeline or release where they expect to have a complete Xfce Wayland transition complete, but ultimately are aiming to have a native Wayland experience that doesn’t depend at all on XWayland and will be using wlroots as part of its compositor. Many Xfce panel plug-ins are working under Wayland as are a number of Xfce’s own applications. Do note, though, that there’s no certainty at all yet that Xfce will transition to Wayland completely. As the roadmap clearly states: It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all). So, the future of Xfce on Wayland is not yet set in stone – but with X.org having effectively been abandoned, I doubt Xfce will have much say in the matter.
I love these kinds of investigations.
I know I keep harping on the declining quality and enshittification of Windows, but Microsoft just makes it so easy. In the changelog for the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds is this gem: Beginning to roll out with this build, Chat is now Microsoft Teams – Free. Microsoft Teams – Free is pinned by default to the taskbar and can be unpinned like other apps on the taskbar. So you buy a new Windows machine or reinstall Windows, and the taskbar will have the beautiful and not at all thirsty name “Microsoft Teams – Free”. I know a good ad agency for Microsoft.
But now I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted. What has happened? Across the last few years, as John Riccitiello has taken over the company, the engine has made a steady decline into bizarre business models surrounding an engine with unmaintained features and erratic stability. Unity is imploding in on itself, and it’s very sad to see.
