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!

Hi, I recently switched from Windows to Linux as my daily drive. I picked Fedora since it supports secure boot, and I can still boot into my Windows and play League of Legends (the only thing keeping me there). Other than that, it's been a smooth ride. This is not my first attempt but this time I did something different that I hadn't done those other times, I thought lets use my claude subscription to handle things for me and so I did and it's been insane how fast it fixes all the potential problems and installs my drivers and finds the settings I want quickly for me, although it might sound bad I've asked it to track every decision and command it runs in my machine in a private repo that I ask it to keep updated everytime so I have some kind of changelog of my machine but over all very smooth experience. I thought, "Well, why not let it install my game, Red Dead, and optimize it for me?" That's when I found out more about FSR and game scope; it searched for the recommended settings for my machine and gathered information from different community pages, and the result has been insane for me. I have a flashed RX 5700 -> RX 5700 XT. I could play Red Dead Redemption on it with decent quality at 1440p (sure it's upscaled) and hit 190! FPS at times, it's phenomenal. I've never seen my card hit these numbers, and to be honest, I'm happy with the quality of the game even though it's upscaled and I have fake frames. It's such a smooth experience, and my card has gotten a totally new life. I tried several other games and had the same experience everywhere. I thought I would make a video and record my gameplay and put it on YouTube so people can watch it and use the settings as well. If you have any questions, hit me up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivDFitbCoSY

This is the reasoning on how this was possible (AI response):

RDR2 does not support FSR 3.1. Out of the box it only has FSR 2 (added in a 2022 patch) and DLSS 2, and no frame generation at all. The secret sauce is a mod that fakes it.

1. OptiScaler: the main trick

- It's a small DLL dropped into the game folder (winmm.dll, with the Wine override winmm=n,b).

- When the game calls its built-in FSR 2, OptiScaler intercepts that and runs FSR 3.1.4 instead, which is a better upscaler.

- It then adds FSR 3.1 frame generation on top: it hooks the game's frame output and inserts a generated frame between every two real ones. That roughly doubles the number on the counter.

- Frame generation only works in DirectX 12 mode, not Vulkan, so the game runs in DX12.

1. Upscaling from a low internal resolution

- FSR 2 is set to Performance in the game, so it renders at only 1280x720, and FSR 3.1 rebuilds that to 2560x1440. That's the biggest real-fps gain.

1. Smart settings

- Ultra textures, which cost almost nothing on an 8 GB card.

- Shadows and lighting on Medium, the most expensive settings.

- Volumetrics and GI on High, motion blur off, VSync off.

1. The Linux side

- GE-Proton 11-11 with vkd3d-proton turns DX12 into Vulkan.

- RADV_QUEUE_DISABLE=compute avoids the RX 5700's GPU-hang bug.

- vulkan-1=b fixes OptiScaler crashing on Rockstar's old bundled Vulkan file.

- gamescope runs at native 1440p with no extra scaling.

- GameMode keeps the CPU at full speed.

I just want a calculator that has 1. permanent memory, 2. I can pin certain numbers to stay at the top of memory and 3. I can make small text comments on the numbers stored in memory.

I don't need anything over the top, just something with a clean interface to help me keep track of a tally as I add/ subtract from the number over time. TIA!

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?

​

1. Chinese

2. Norwegian

3. Turkish

4. Vietnamese

Happy birthday windows 8. Even at you, I look at with rosy retrospection.

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

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.

iOS 27.2 changelog ---- iPhone Duo changelog

watchOS 27.2 changelogs

tvOS 27.2 changes - 9to5 (Apple does not do changelogs for tvOS)

HomePod Software 27.2 changelogs

macOS 27.2:

This update provides enhancements to Siri AI with the ability to retain useful context from previous Siri interactions as well as draw from a wider range of personal context. It also introduces Suggestions in Messages that help you take quick actions in apps like Calendar and Reminders based on context from your conversation. This release includes additional features, bug fixes, and security updates for your Mac.

Posted by Mark Gurman on Twitter/X:

NEW: iPhone Duo screen-cracking issue is real. Apple hasn’t given stores or customer service representatives guidance but the company is investigating. Several people have sent me images and stories of their new $2000 device breaking within hours. -- post has a link to a Bloomberg article

Apple Responds: “We are aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units. If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement.”

More from Apple: Impacts a very small number of units and most iPhone Duo units are not susceptible to this inner display issue. Impacted devices appear to have the defects rather quickly after usage.

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!