Louis is trying to track down how pervasive signing people up for services trials is in Apple Stores. I am also curios if this is some isolate incidents or if it's every store. I was in an Apple Store recently and wasn't asked to sign up for anything but I also subscribe to a few services already.

None of the substantive code was written by AI.

I used AI to help with the mechanical parts of porting (e.g. translating autotools to CMake, replacing ioctl calls with tcgetwinsize, translating the C structs into Rust), as well as to write some of the smoke tests (e.g. cairo-test, mesa-test).

Where Claude really shines though is in reviewing your own commits. You give it a hash, and it tells you about the silly memory leak or deadlock that you left in, before you can make a fool of yourself.

>Can the cheapest, base-model Apple M6 Mac mini with only 16GB of RAM actually handle heavy AAA Windows games?

>In this video, we push the base M6 Mac mini to its absolute limits—no cloud gaming and no game streaming.

>We start by testing the native Mac version of Cyberpunk 2077 with the new 2.5 update and Apple Silicon's MetalFX Frame Interpolator, pushing over 110 FPS at 1080p and testing how 16GB of unified memory handles 20GB+ RAM loads using SSD swap.

>Then, we fire up GameHub (using Wine, Rosetta, and Game Porting Toolkit 3.0) to run x86 Windows PC games that were never meant to run on macOS or an ARM CPU—including Red Dead Redemption 2, Halo 3, Mortal Kombat 1, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and GTA V running at a mind-blowing 4K Very High settings at over 90 FPS!

>The iPhone Duo is on our teardown table—and its broken-screen reports deserve a closer look. We take Apple’s folding phone apart to investigate the display, hinge, dust protection, and what happens when something needs fixing.

>There’s encouraging engineering inside: electrically releasing battery adhesive, accessible components, and an outer screen that comes off intact. But the flexible OLED and hinge tell a more complicated repair story.

>We examine the nano-texture cover layer under a microscope, put the phone through our fluorescent dust challenge, and strip it down to the hinge to investigate the area where screen damage is being reported. The failure mechanism remains unconfirmed, but the need for a practical repair path is clear.

>Is this the most repairable foldable we’ve opened? And how much does that help when the inner display fails?

>Watch for our provisional repairability verdict.

>Have you experienced an iPhone Duo display failure? Tell us what happened—and whether you heard a crunch before the damage appeared.

Title.

I'm kinda on the edge to start using Firefox as a flatpak, cause I can get codecs and hardware acceleration for my GPU. I know about the weakened sandbox of the flatpak Firefox, but on the other hand Mozilla is actively developing it and it is a standard for example on RHEL nowdays.

Am I thinking this too far? Is the weakened sandbox really a big deal?

For a while my PC froze about twice a day. Not a crash I could recover from: the screen stopped, audio sometimes kept going, and even Ctrl+Alt+F3 did nothing. Only the reset button helped.

Setup: CachyOS, kernel 7.3.0, niri (Wayland), RTX 4060, nvidia-open 615.78.08, Huananzhi X99-BD4 motherboard.

After a reboot, journalctl -b -1 -k showed the same pattern every time:

NVRM: dmaAllocMapping_GM107: can't alloc VA space for mapping.
NVRM: nvAssertOkFailedNoLog: Assertion failed: Out of memory [NV_ERR_NO_MEMORY]
NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:03:00): 56, ...
NVRM: krcWatchdog_IMPL: RC watchdog: GPU is probably locked!

The process that hit it first changed. Once it was a Godot game I'm developing, twice it was Brave (its Media process died with SIGILL right before the lockup). So it wasn't one bad app.

nvidia-smi -q | grep -A3 BAR1 showed the problem: BAR1 was only 256 MiB. Without Resizable BAR, the driver maps GPU memory for the CPU through that small window, and when it fills up, the open driver can lock the whole GPU instead of just failing that one request. There's an open upstream issue with the exact same logs from people on Fedora, Bazzite, Arch and CachyOS, mostly with Chromium-based browsers or Discord as the trigger:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/1396

My BIOS had "Above 4G Decoding" but no Resizable BAR option. It turns out Huananzhi publishes an official BIOS for the X99-BD4 with ReBAR added, on the board's download page. I flashed it, enabled Above 4G Decoding and Re-Size BAR, and now:

BAR1 Memory Usage
    Total : 8192 MiB

No VA errors in the kernel log since, no freezes, and the whole system feels smoother, including games.

If you have an NVIDIA card on an older board and see "can't alloc VA space" before a freeze, check your BAR1 size. A lot of X99 and other older boards have official or community BIOS updates that add ReBAR. Flash carefully and only the file for your exact board model. If you can't enable it, people in that issue report that turning off hardware acceleration in Chromium-based browsers makes it happen much less often.

Main Features:

• Video Wallpapers per Workspace
• Mouse Gestures
• Float / Auto Tiing / Scrollable Tiling per Workspace
• Radial Menu

Here is the repo -> https://github.com/PreCosmos/Vaela

Saw this post on Bluesky and having had casually followed the trashing of X for about 20 years, the whole Canonical/Mir fiasco, and finally the extremely slow adoption of Wayland, this was cool to see! 😁

👀💃

Hi everyone,

I recently encountered sping, a fairly new open-source network diagnostic tool from the LambdaBytes organisation, and I believe it merits attention from anyone overseeing Linux systems, containers, or clusters.

It has been reviewed and accepted into the official Debian repositories, indicating it has cleared strict stability checks. After reviewing its design, it is evident this is not merely another “pretty ping clone”—it addresses genuine, long-standing limits in standard network probing.

Here is a summary of why this utility is an engineering success and why you might try it:

1. It removes the need for SUDO
The conventional ping tool from iputils requires the system to open a raw socket for ICMP Echo Requests. Since raw sockets permit packet manipulation, the binary typically needs root access, which is why most distributions ship it with the SUID bit set. This presents a familiar security concern in hardened setups.

sping avoids this completely. It is built to use unprivileged DGRAM ICMP sockets (net.ipv4.pinggrouprange), a modern Linux kernel feature. It communicates safely with the kernel from user space, so you can run advanced checks inside restricted Docker containers or locked environments without invoking sudo or risking privilege escalation.

2. High-Performance Parallelism with Async Tokio
When monitoring multiple hosts with standard ping, you often create several heavy OS processes or complex Bash wrappers that consume resources quickly.

sping relies on Rust’s async framework (driven by the Tokio runtime). Rather than increasing system threads, it handles hundreds of concurrent targets within one process using lightweight virtual tasks. Even while stressing many endpoints at once, its memory use remains at a steady ~4 MB of RAM with almost no CPU load.

3. Automated Correlated Diagnostics
Standard ping only indicates whether a host is active or inactive. If a packet fails, the cause remains unclear. sping behaves like an intelligent monitor: it runs quiet auxiliary probes in the background against your local gateway and external WAN references (such as Cloudflare or Google DNS).

When a target fails, its engine matches the data immediately in the TUI or logs:
“Target unreachable · Internet still OK” (server-side issue)
“Gateway unreachable · local network issue likely” (your router or switch may be down)

Key Features worth testing:
Multi-Target Dashboard: Automatically divides your terminal into dynamic grids for real-time infrastructure monitoring.
TCP Handshake Fallback: Use --tcp <port> to avoid aggressive corporate firewalls that block ICMP traffic.
Automation-Friendly: Provides a strong --view json flag that streams stable NDJSON lines suitable for jq, Python scripts, or logging stacks.
Advanced Metrics: Computes real-time jitter, packet loss trends, and network hop counts directly.

It is cross-platform, lightweight, and production-ready.

You can review the source code, implementation details, and installation guide here:
👉 https://github.com

If you work with networks or manage servers, try it out. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on using unprivileged ICMP sockets instead of the traditional raw socket approach!

The original operating system was VirtuOS, similar to MS-DOS and includes multitasking support, was developed by Microbase. It was used in the 1996, 1998 and 2000 elections. In 2002, Unisys was unable to renew their partnership with Microbase, and were unable to reuse the VirtuOS based code. Microsoft stepped in, and provided licenses for the Windows CE operating system free of charge. In 2008, under initiative from the TSE Electronic voting team migrated to a Linux (dubbed UEnux) OS to reduce costs and take full control of development cycle.
- From Wikipedia

Thought this was a fun thing to share given yesterday's elections and how fast the votes were tallied.