OpenBSD gets hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding
Only yesterday, I mentioned one of the main reasons I decided to switch back to Fedora from OpenBSD were performance issues – and one of them was definitely the lack of hardware acceleration for video...
View ArticleOpenBSD workstation for the people
This is an attempt at building an OpenBSD desktop than could be used by newcomers or by people that don’t care about tinkering with computers and just want a working daily driver for general tasks....
View ArticleA brief history of Dell UNIX
“Dell UNIX? I didn’t know there was such a thing.” A couple of weeks ago I had my new XO with me for breakfast at a nearby bakery café. Other patrons were drawn to seeing an XO for the first time,...
View ArticleNo, Southwest Airlines is not still using Windows 3.1
A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem...
View ArticleGoogle won’t be deprecating third-party cookies from Chrome after all
This story just never ever ends. After delays, changes in plans, more delays, we now have more changed plans. After years of stalling, Google has now announced it is, in fact, not going to deprecate...
View ArticleNew Samsung phones block sideloading by default
The assault on a user’s freedom to install whatever they want on what is supposed to be their phone continues. This time, it’s Samsung adding an additional blocker to users installing applications...
View ArticleYou can contribute to KDE with non-C++ code
Not everything made by KDE uses C++. This is probably obvious to some people, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless. And I don’t mean this as just “well duh, KDE uses QtQuick which is written with...
View ArticleFreeBSD as a platform for your future technology
Choosing an operating system for new technology can be crucial for the success of any project. Years down the road, this decision will continue to inform the speed and efficiency of development. But...
View ArticleIntel: Raptor Lake faults excessive voltage from microcode, fix coming in August
In what started last year as a handful of reports about instability with Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop chips has, over the last several months, grown into a much larger saga. Facing their biggest client...
View ArticleTwo threads, one core: how simultaneous multithreading works under the hood
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a feature that lets a processor handle instructions from two different threads at the same time. But have you ever wondered how this actually works? How does the...
View ArticleOpenAI beta tests SearchGPT search engine
Normally I’m not that interested in reporting on news coming from OpenAI, but today is a little different – the company launched SearchGPT, a search engine that’s supposed to rival Google, but at the...
View ArticleFull-featured email server running OpenBSD
This blog post is a guide explaining how to setup a full-featured email server on OpenBSD 7.5. It was commissioned by a customer of my consultancy who wanted it to be published on my blog. Setting up...
View ArticleThe bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins
In January of 2021 I was exploring the corpus of Skins I collected for the Winamp Skin Museum and found some that seemed corrupted, so I decided to explore them. Winamp skins are actually just zip...
View ArticleManagarm: microkernel-based OS with fully asynchronous I/O
Ah, another microkernel-based hobby operating system. The more, the merrier – and I mean this, without a hint of sarcasm. There’s definitely been a small resurgence in activity lately when it comes to...
View ArticleNotMyFault: Microsoft’s tool to create BSoDs
Blue screens of death are not exactly in short supply on Windows machines lately, but what if you really want to cause your own kernel panic or complete system crash, just because you love that shade...
View ArticleMicrosoft’s CrowdStrike post-mortem
Microsoft has published a post-mortem of the CrowdStrike incident, and goes into great depths to describe where, exactly, the error lies, and how it could lead to such massive problems. I can’t...
View ArticleLogitech has an idea for a “forever mouse” that requires a subscription
Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber talked about someting called the “forever mouse”, which would be, as the name implies, a mouse that customers could use for a very long time. While you may think this would...
View ArticleAI causing burnout, lower productivity
Is machine learning, also known as “artificial intelligence”, really aiding workers and increasing productivity? A study by Upwork – which, as Baldur Bjarnason so helpfully points out, sells AI...
View ArticleThe impact of AI on computer science education
Yesterday I highlighted a study that found that AI and ML, and the expectations around them, are actually causing people to need to work harder and more, instead of less. Today, I have another study...
View ArticleSerpent OS prealpha0 released
Serpent OS, a new Linux distribution with a completely custom package management system written in Rust, has released its very very rough pre-alpha release. They’ve been working on this for four...
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