⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

Update: The cities of Milton Keynes and Leighton Buzzard, UK, are now covered by #FediMeteo

@milton_keynes@uk.fedimeteo.com

@leighton_buzzard@uk.fedimeteo.com

https://uk.fedimeteo.com/milton_keynes

https://uk.fedimeteo.com/leighton_buzzard

#FediMeteoUpdates #FediMeteoAnnouncements #UK

I wrote up the saga of booting Debian from 2004 on an ARM based Acorn RiscPC from 1994. It was a wild ride.

https://www.thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2025-12-02/

Hello fellow #retrocomputing enthusiasts. Do I happen to be connected to anyone who knows about an #IBM #RS6k 43P-150?

Mine is dead as a door nail. When booting I get "Unexpected Firmware Error:
DEFAULT CATCH!, code=fff00200 at %SRR0: 00c194d8 %SRR1: 00083030"

And the debug LCD reads E1DC.

If I take out the PCI riser it boots to the RS/6000 boot menu and everything works. Got a replacement riser, but then the system doesn't even get to the 0> prompt, the debug LCD just reads 888

“Three years on, ChatGPT still isn't what it was cracked up to be – and it probably never will be”

Gary Marcus is in the field of AI, and has been pointing out the limitations of the LLM approach for quite some time.

I thought this was a good summary on where things are at three years after ChatGPT first made big waves.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/three-years-on-chatgpt-still-isnt

#AI #GaryMarcus

Special offer for AI companies: for a modest donation to #OpenStreetMap we'll give you a direct download link to our data in a machine-friendly format. Much quicker than juggling 100,000 IPs to scrape our website. Start here: https://supporting.openstreetmap.org/donate/ #ODbL #licensed #planet 😏🤖🌍💸

I'm looking for work!

I can do
- Product Management
- Full Stack Web
- Javascript all the things

I've done a lot of freelance so I'm great at talking to clients and have done all sorts of collaboration. I can be left alone to come up with solutions as well as I can in a team.

Available full-time, tax-friendly, in UK and Ireland. Remote essential.
Freelance wherever.

If you have any leads or tips, it would be greatly appreciated.

Details on request.

#fedihired #getFedihired

#Curiosity

#Android is dead and we’d better all leave the ship before it sinks entirely.

Earlier this year #Google already took bold steps in moving the development of several AOSP components behind closed doors, removing the open-source foundations of the project one component at the time.

Options to unlock bootloaders on Android devices are also narrowing down. Xiaomi removed the ability to unlock the bootloader entirely in MIUI in August (after months spent making it ridiculously difficult), same for OnePlus, Samsung did so in July, and probably Google devices will soon follow suit.

And let’s not mention the nightmare of the Play Integrity API that forces all Android developers to register through the Play Store and use Google’s signing keys, even if they don’t intend to distribute their apps through it.

Sure, officially Google has taken a step back and has pledged to provide a way for developers and power-users to bypass those restrictions. But we can all expect it to be a cumbersome and change-prone process filled with ridiculous amounts of frictions at every step - and I wouldn’t even expect such a morally bankrupt company to keep maintaining this “sideloading” option.

Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with. And the EU, the biggest opposer of its anti-competitive acts, is also becoming softer with Big Tech - both because Vestager has left the job, and because being soft with trillion-dollar monopolist tech titans is seen as a sign of being “technologically competitive”.

Your best bet is to purchase a Pixel 9a now, before more manufacturers decide to block bootloaders, and immediately flash it with #GrapheneOS.

The long term plan would instead be to throw all of our efforts and energies on Linux phones. The folks at GrapheneOS are doing an amazing job and fighting against all kind of pressures, but at some point we should probably all just acknowledge that anything that is tainted with Android, or runs on a device intended only to run Android, is a liability, and we should no longer build solutions on top of hardware and software that we can no longer trust.

Sailfish, PostmarketOS, UBPorts, MeeGo or whatever comes next must succeed. No matter the cost.

Fellow folks at the interest-intersection of "public transport" and "queer activism" (I know you're out there!): I had an idea for a t-shirt.

Do I print it? Or give up on graphic design and go back to backend programming where I belong?

#note #trans #trams #transport #publicTransport #picture #gender #identity

Via: 🔗 https://danq.me/2025/12/01/trams-rights/

Only 4 days left! Our new BBS music video drops this Friday at 10am. #indierock #cambridgeband #commodore64

Falcons reduce pre-harvest food safety risks and crop damage from wild birds
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.70209
Pre-harvest food safety and wildlife conservation are often thought to be in conflict, and produce growers have few tools to effectively manage birds. However, our findings suggest that the promotion of birds of prey using nest boxes may be one way for growers to conserve a declining species, reduce crop damage and reduce in-field faecal contamination that could cause foodborne illness.

The United Nations opts for @CryptPad, an open source alternative to #GoogleForms.

https://news.itsfoss.com/un-ditches-google-form/

#OpenSource #CryptPad #UN #UnitedNations #foss

@mcc I've seen something similar with the setting the addresses on old mainframe/mini drives in the 70s. There's a plug with the ID printed on the front, an encoded physically in plastic tabs on the back. If you swap those two "0" and "1" plugs, you will swap the addresses of the two drives.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
James Iry; Thursday, May 7, 2009

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.

1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.

1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.

1940s - Various "computers" are "programmed" using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.

1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There's nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.
1/6

I'm also happy to announce we've got a new sponsor for the LVFS: #Framework

Although there are about a half a dozen OEMs that have promised to sponsor LVFS, Framework is the first to have actually signed the paperwork. You can see the new logo on https://fwupd.org/ and also the new "sponsorship pill" on various vendor pages like https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/#framework

Alright, I’m gonna put out a call, since searches have come up blank: if anyone has a complete driver package for the MSI Mega 651 (or similar models), please, PLEASE archive it. Or send it to me and I’ll do it. If someone knows where one is, please let me know.

As of now I’m trying to get the FM radio talking to Win98 but I’m missing a couple drivers and I’m assuming that one of those is needed for it to work. MSI’s site has some drivers but they’re not complete.

#MSI #Windows98

I've been using this kind of AA and AAA battery for something like five years now. They will more than pay for themselves in the first year: I didn’t expect USB-C AA batteries to be this good, but here we are https://www.makeuseof.com/didnt-expect-usb-c-aa-batteries-to-be-this-good-but-here-we-are/

We're not shitting you 💩

ORG is giving away a copy of 'Enshittification' signed by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic!

Enter the competition by 5 January 2026 and be in with your chance to win.

Go on, try your luck ⬇️

https://action.openrightsgroup.org/win-copy-enshittification-signed-cory-doctorow

#competition #enshittification #corydoctorow

We've now added links to PDF scans of Apple's Develop magazine issues as archived on https://vintageapple.org/develop/:

http://newtonscript.org/#docs

https://github.com/NewtonScript/newtonscript.github.com/issues/48