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I typically hesitate to suggest making peanut butter in blenders, but the Vitamix Ascent X5 is the exception. It’s the best blender I’ve ever tried, and you should definitely make nut butters with it. Not only is it the absolute fastest nut processor I’ve ever tested (under a minute in some cases), but the resulting peanut butter is incredibly smooth. Here’s how to make any nut butter in the Vitamix Ascent X5.
I like to roast the nuts in the oven first, because I love the sweet, toasty flavor. To do it, spread out your nut of choice (I used walnut pieces today) on a baking sheet in a single layer, and put the sheet pan in a 350°F oven for five to 12 minutes. This time will vary depending on the nut, the size of the pieces, and thickness of the sheet pan, so use your nose as your guide. As soon as you start to smell toasted nuts, give them a stir with a wooden spatula and assess if you need a few more minutes. They should be golden with no burnt areas. Allow the nuts to cool on the sheet pan for at least 10 minutes. If you prefer raw nut butters, though, skip this step and start at step two.
Pour the nuts into the container and snap the lid on, but keep the middle plug lined up with the notches (see picture) so it’s easy to un-stopper. You’ll need to use the tamper to assist the nuts (the tamper is that black plastic baseball bat-looking thing that came with the Vitamix Ascent X5), smashing them down toward the blade during the one minute blend time. It’s best to have it right next to the blender—the preset timer goes by before you know it.
Press the button on the left above the knob that has three horizontal lines. The screen will display several cute little cartoons of food. Rotate the knob until you see a jar with a peanut inside. Press the play button directly to the right of the knob.
Once the engine kicks on, the initial kick-up of nut particles will pass after a second or two. Then you can unstopper the center plug and use the plastic tamper to jam the nuts down into the blades. The engine will kick up another speed level and you’ll hear it, but don’t let it stop your tampering. If you’re ever in doubt of when to start pressing, you can look at the screen. There’s a little tamper icon with a downward arrow signaling that tampering is necessary.
For a chunky butter, stop the machine after 30 or 40 seconds by pressing the same start/stop button to the right of the dial. Unplug the machine and stir the mixture to see if it’s the consistency you like. If you like a smoother nut butter, let it run for the full minute. To get an even silkier nut butter, you may want to add another 15 seconds by pressing the “+:15” button, which is on the right side above the rotating dial. But generally, once the initial minute is up, you have nut butter. That’s all it takes.
If you want to get a little creative, you can add a few fun ingredients. I decided to make Rum Raisin Walnut Butter today, so after the first nut butter blend finished, I added some dark rum, raisins, a touch of honey, and a bit of salt. I selected the nut butter preset again, did some tamping, and stopped the blend after about 20 seconds to incorporate the new ingredients and smooth out my walnut butter. Of course, you could keep yours low key with just a pinch of salt and some cinnamon, for example.
Once I emptied my walnut butter into a glass container, I added warm water and a drop of soap to the container. (Don’t go higher than half full, the blender will swish the water aggressively.) Click the little button in the center with the image of bubbles and let the blender clean itself. This setting is mostly meant to get the blades clean, so don’t get frustrated if some peanut butter smears are still hanging out on the sides of the container. Just bring it over to the sink and carefully wash the sides.
If you’ve never made walnut butter before, I highly suggest it. This spread turned out buttery-smooth with a salty and bitter edge, and it makes an excellent partner for jam. You can also increase the honey or raisins if you want it to be sweeter.
Ingredients:
350 grams (3 cups) walnut pieces
35 grams (1/4 cup) raisins
1 tablespoon dark rum
1 teaspoon honey
¼ teaspoon salt
1. Roast the walnut pieces in a 350°F oven for five to 12 minutes, or until lightly browned and fragrant. Allow to cool to room temperature for at least 10 minutes.
2. Pour the walnut pieces into the Vitamix Ascent X5, add the lid, and select the nut butter setting.
3. Press start, remove the central stopper on the lid and use the tamper to press the nuts down into the blades.
4. With the machine off, add the raisins, rum, honey, and salt. Put the lid back on and start the nut butter setting again. Tamper the mixture as it blends for another 20 seconds. Stop the machine. Scoop the nut butter into a container with a tight-fitting lid. Enjoy your new nutty spread on toast, with cake, with yogurt, or over granola.
tap is a terminal-based music player that lets you jump to any album with fuzzy-finder shortcuts. It’s got one of the lightest memory footprints of any audio player. There’s a new release out!
A new report from Seagate reveals that hard drives significantly outperform solid-state drives in environmental impact metrics, challenging common industry assumptions about storage sustainability. According to Seagate’s “Decarbonizing Data” report released this month [PDF], standard hard drives produce just 29.7 kg of embodied carbon dioxide compared to a staggering 4,915 kg for equivalently sized data center SSDs.
On a per-terabyte basis, hard drives generate less than 1 kg of CO2/TB versus 160 kg for SSDs. The power consumption difference is equally notable. Hard drives operate at 9.6 watts with 0.32 watts per terabyte efficiency, while SSDs consume 20 watts with 0.5 watts per terabyte. “Hard drives exhibit the least carbon footprint, both in total and on a per-TB basis, offering the most carbon-efficient sustainable storage solution,” the report states.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Is the treadmill harder or easier than running outdoors? Survey runners, and you’ll get plenty of different opinions on which feels harder or easier, but the basic physics of running are the same on both. (I promise.) So why do people who are used to treadmills find that they’re slower when they run outdoors? I’m going to run through the factors that are at play here, and talk about how to adapt if you want to be able to enjoy both.
If you find treadmill running harder, you probably already know the reason: it’s boring. You have nothing to distract you from your own effort and the glowing numbers telling you how little progress you’ve made. This is a problem that we can train our brains to solve for us over time, whether with distractions, mindfulness, or simply being grateful that we’re not outdoors in the bad weather.
For those who find treadmill running easier, the biggest reasons have to do with the environment (heat, hills, etc.) and with your mindset (especially your ability to pace yourself). Training both indoors and outdoors will help you to make the transition a little easier. Let’s dig into the reasons.
Before we get into the relevant factors, I want to dispel a few myths. Physics-wise, running on a treadmill is pretty much identical to running outdoors in the same conditions.
The first myth we need to bust is the idea that the treadmill “moves your feet” and thus makes running easier. That’s not true. You have to spend just as much effort to stay in place on a treadmill going (say) say 6.0 miles per hour, as you do to move forward at 6.0 miles per hour on flat, steady ground. Running is the action of pushing off the ground to move yourself forward. In both scenarios, you are asking your muscles to push off with a force that will keep you moving 6 mph faster than the ground.
(If the “treadmill moves your feet” theory were correct, would we not have to consider the rotating Earth its own sort of treadmill? And thus it would be 2,000 times harder to run west than to run east? Come on.)
Then there’s the issue of wind resistance. Some runners will say you need to set the treadmill’s incline to 0.5% or 1% to mimic outdoor air resistance. Even on a calm day, your body has to push into the air to keep moving. Adding a small incline to the treadmill is supposed to mimic that extra effort.
But that is only true if you run at a pace of 7:30 per mile (8.0 mph) or faster. Below that, “the difference is so small as to be meaningless,” a scientist who studied the question told Runner’s World. So if you’re jogging at 6 mph, you don’t have to worry about accounting for wind resistance.
Now that we understand the physics, let’s talk about why treadmill runs often feel easier than outdoor runs.
This is probably the biggest factor (aside from weather) in why outdoor running feels harder for a person who is used to treadmill running. On the treadmill, you decide on a pace—say 6 mph, as in our example above—and then your body knows what to do.
But outdoors, you just have to run, and then figure out later what pace you’re going. Even if you have a watch that tells you your pace, it takes a few seconds to minutes to work out what that number is. (You also may not be used to reading minutes-per-mile pace if you’re used to seeing mph on the treadmill, which makes it even harder to know how fast you’re going.)
So you, the treadmill runner, head off on an outdoor run without a good sense of how fast you’re going. Perhaps you end up going a little too fast, but you don’t realize it until it’s too late and you’re pooped.
Meanwhile, outdoor runners will develop a sense of pace out of necessity. You have to listen to your body, not just look at a number, to know how hard you’re pushing.
The good news is that it’s easy for treadmill runners to learn a sense of pace—all you have to do is run outside from time to time. You’ll learn what your body feels like when you’re going at an easy pace versus a harder pace versus an unsustainable one. It just takes a little practice.
If all your treadmill runs are inside of a 68-degree gym, they’ll all feel pretty similar. But the great outdoors is fond of blessing us with heat, wind, humidity, rain, snow, ice, and similar complications.
Heat slows us down a lot, especially if we aren’t used to it. (You do build up some heat adaptation throughout the summer.) Humidity, in combination with heat, makes this even worse. Your body can’t cool itself as well through sweating, so you get hot and stay hot. It’s normal for your pace on a hot day to be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes slower each mile.
Heavy winds can also slow you down (when you’re running into the wind) or speed you up (when you’re running with the wind at your back). Ice can make you slow down to watch your footing. Snow can make you work harder as your feet sink into the ground and you have to fight to pull them back up again.
On the other hand, a cool, dry day is better for your performance than the conditions inside a sweaty gym. Perfect running weather is (in my opinion) around 50 degrees, calm, and overcast. Most people will run a lot faster and feel better in those conditions than on a treadmill at room temperature.
If you live in a pancake-flat part of the country, you can skip this section. But many of us live where there are hills. Big ones, little ones, maybe some mountains. On the treadmill, you get to choose what incline to run with. Outdoors, your choices may be limited.
I live in a hilly place, so even my “flat” outdoor routes aren’t entirely flat. A regulation running track is my only truly flat option. Even gently rolling hills can add up over the course of a long run, making you work harder on the uphills without ever fully giving you that speed back on the downhills.
A treadmill only has one surface. Every step meets flat ground. Every step is the same softness or hardness. Outdoors, there’s so much more variation.
Even on a simple city run, you’ll find yourself traversing curbs, slightly tilted sidewalk slabs, cambered edges of roads, pebbles, stray garbage, and occasional patches of grass or dirt. Take your run to the trails and you’ll also hit packed dirt, mud, soft grass, leaf litter, rocks, sticks, logs, little streams you have to hop over, ruts carved by mountain bike wheels—you get the idea. Your feet have to land and push off just a little differently for each of these.
The variety in outdoor running is good for your feet, but it can be fatiguing on the small muscles of your feet and lower legs if you’re not used to it.
It’s OK to do plenty of your training on a treadmill, and in some situations it may be necessary. The treadmill can let you get your training in when the weather is bad, when you can’t line up child care at your running times, or any of a number of other reasons.
The important thing is to still run outdoors at least sometimes. If you’re training for a marathon, try to do your long runs outdoors, even if some of your shorter runs and speedwork have to be on the treadmill. Get outside when you can. That way you’re adapting to the weather, training your feet on different surfaces, and building the muscles and mindset necessary to tackle hills.
In the latest evidence that indie games are often where you find the boldest creative choices, look no further than Unbeatable. The hand‑drawn rhythm adventure title — announced in 2020 and crowdfunded the following year — oozes style and attitude. For example, look no further than its tagline: “a game where music is illegal and you do crimes.” (Nice.) Developer D‑Cell Games launched a new trailer and a much more robust demo on Thursday, letting you sample a slice of the full game.
One part of the “anime‑juiced” Unbeatable follows the protagonist, Beat, and her “band on the run.” (Nice to see that a Wings reference can still fly in 2025.) The game’s narrative‑driven segment includes dialogue around town with various people, baseball (played “the wrong way” with sledgehammers and katanas), graffiti tagging and bare‑knuckle brawls with the cops who enforce the draconian anti‑music laws. (Dicks!) And don’t forget some alone time to “think and write new songs.”
Another part of Unbeatable‘s gameplay involves rhythm mini‑games that only require two buttons: up and down. Although that mode is woven into the story, old‑school rhythm game fans can enjoy a separate arcade mode that stands as a “complete game experience,” including challenges and modifiers. (PaRappa the Rapper fans, rejoice.)
There’s no release date yet, but the trailer below shows that D‑Cell has put those five years of development time to good use. If it looks like your jam, you can take the demo for a spin on Steam and PS5. (The final version will also be available on Xbox.)
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-rhythm-infused-adventure-unbeatable-has-a-new-demo-for-pc-and-ps5-185618354.html?src=rss
Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its “Plus” tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.
“Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems,” a Synology representative told Ars by email. “Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues.”
Without a Synology-branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology’s German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though work-arounds exist.
As part of their ongoing celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 35th anniversary, NASA and ESA have shared a new image of the Eagle Nebula, specifically a “spire of cosmic gas and dust” that’s in a region last captured by the telescope two decades ago.
The tower in the image is 9.5 light years tall, according to NASA and ESA, and only a portion of the larger Eagle Nebula, which is considered a “nursery” for young stars. The tower’s unique mix of oranges and dark blues is thanks to a combination of swirling hydrogen gas and space dust. The nebula’s “Eagle” name comes from how it looks when you pan across it, where edge clouds like the one in the image look like the wings of a giant bird of prey.
As of late, the James Webb Telescope has become the designated source for spectacular images of space, but clearly Hubble still has some juice in it, too. Some of that is thanks to “new data processing techniques” that are being applied to the images captured by the telescope.
The Eagle Nebula is just one of several celestial targets Hubble is revisiting for its 35th anniversary. By capturing different angles and using data differently, the telescope is able to produce more spectacularly colored images. There’s no major discoveries made with these “reruns,” but they are, without a doubt, even cooler than before.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/celebrate-the-35th-anniversary-of-the-hubble-space-telescope-with-a-gigantic-tower-of-gas-and-dust-184340147.html?src=rss
The Apple Sports app just introduced a new feature called Game Card Sharing. This lets users generate digital game cards that carry information about a specific match. The cards can be generated for upcoming, live and completed games. In the latter two cases, the score will be displayed.
The cool part about these cards is that they are shareable across iMessage or via social media platforms. I could see this being useful in a group chat with friends, as a handy way to keep track of an ongoing match. Just look for the share button on the upper-right side of each card.
There is one caveat. It requires the latest version of iOS, so it might be time to finally strap in for an update. These cards work with a whole bunch of sports leagues, including the NBA, MLB, NHL and even stuff like the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
For the uninitiated, Apple Sports is a free iPhone app that delivers real-time scores and various stats. It also displays useful stuff like broadcast information. It even lets users pin real-time scores to the lock screen.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/the-apple-sports-app-now-lets-users-create-and-share-game-cards-184235076.html?src=rss
For those of us whose memory of high school biology hasn’t faded entirely, planarians will probably sound very familiar. They’re generally used as an example of one of the extreme ends of regenerative capacity. While some animals like mammals have a limited ability to regenerate lost tissues, planarians can be cut roughly in half and regenerate either an entire head or entire tail, depending on which part of the body you choose to keep track of.
In doing so, they have to re-establish something that is typically only needed early in an animal’s development: a signaling system that helps tell cells where the animal’s head and tail are. Now, a US-based team asked a question that I’d never have thought of: What happens if you cut the animal in half early in development, while the developmental head-to-tail signaling system is still active? The answer turned out to be surprisingly complex.
Planarians are small flatworms that would probably be living quiet lives somewhere if biologists hadn’t discovered their ability to regenerate lots of adult tissues when damaged. The process has been well-studied by this point and involves the formation of a cluster of stem cells, called a blastema, at the site of damage. From there, many of the signals that control the formation of specialized tissues in the embryo get re-activated, directing the stem cells down the developmental pathways needed to reproduce any lost organs.
Bruce66423 shares a report: Toothpaste can be widely contaminated with lead and other dangerous heavy metals, new research shows.
Most of 51 brands of toothpaste tested for lead contained the dangerous heavy metal, including those for children or those marketed as green. The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.
About 90% of toothpastes contained lead, 65% contained arsenic, just under half contained mercury, and one-third had cadmium. Many brands contain a number of the toxins. The highest levels detected violated the state of Washington’s limits, but not federal limits. The thresholds have been roundly criticized by public health advocates for not being protective — no level of exposure to lead is safe, the federal government has found. Bruce66423 asks: “As ever the question that should be asked is: ‘What level is worth worrying about and why?'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In a Black Mirror-esque turn, some cash-strapped actors who didn’t fully understand the consequences are regretting selling their likenesses to be used in AI videos that they consider embarrassing, damaging, or harmful, AFP reported.
Among them is a 29-year-old New York-based actor, Adam Coy, who licensed rights to his face and voice to a company called MCM for one year for $1,000 without thinking, “am I crossing a line by doing this?” His partner’s mother later found videos where he appeared as a doomsayer predicting disasters, he told the AFP.
South Korean actor Simon Lee’s AI likeness was similarly used to spook naïve Internet users but in a potentially more harmful way. He told the AFP that he was “stunned” to find his AI avatar promoting “questionable health cures on TikTok and Instagram,” feeling ashamed to have his face linked to obvious scams.
TrueNAS 25.04 open-source NAS launches with ZFS fast deduplication, new API features, experimental Incus-based virtualization, and more.
Name: Mel Scrivin
Hometown: Dunoon, Scotland
How did you get into cycling? As an asthmatic kid I did very little sport – cardio was just not accessible for me. I met my partner in 2013 and she was a serious cyclist – one of the first ‘dates’ we had was me supporting her at Ride London (which she completed in 6 hours – so far ahead of schedule that I nearly missed cheering her on at all!) She bought me a bike as a housewarming present when we moved in together, but our first (tiny) ride nearly killed me. Due to work travel and because of me not riding, she had practically stopped cycling and was getting quite seriously depressed. In July 2016 I said “‘”Right, you need to start riding again, we’re cycling. Together!” I told her if after a mile she hated it she could go home, but that I was riding the 7-mile loop from our home. Of course by 1 mile, where there’s a little hill (to me at the time!) she was out of sight and I was puffing up it like a snail. Miraculously I discovered I COULD cycle, and in July 2017 we did Ride London, and in 2018 London to Paris.
When Covid hit, and cycling was one of the few things you could still do, we decided to join a local cycling club to discover new routes (and cafes once they were open again). It became apparent that there was very little provision for women who couldn’t ride far and fast, and, shockingly, unexpected resistance to such provision from those women who *could* ‘hang with the boys’. I’m a fairly strong personality (as you’ll come to see 
) so if I felt utterly rejected, how on earth did less forceful women feel?
This lead to me training as a British Cycling Breeze Champion (women’s ride leader), and I quickly gathered a group of regular riders. Soon, though, they reached beyond the limitations of Breeze (especially living near the Cotswolds, where a limitation of 12% gradients was near impossible to stick to!) and I ended up forming a women’s cycling club called the Severn Belles. Many of the riders had no cycling wardrobe and once they got beyond short flat rides they were in need of more technical kit. I designed a striking kit for us which always gets lots of looks and comments when we’re out and about.
The progress by some of them was incredible – from shy ladies simply wanting to improve confidence on their tri cycling leg, to confident women tackling some pretty long and spicy sportives.
How many years have you been racing on Zwift? I started riding on Zwift in Oct 2023, because even if it’s not cold or wet where I live it’s windy, so I was never going out. I decided to have a go at racing in about April 2024 because the barriers are so much less than outdoors – no entry fees, no slogging back to your car if you have a mechanical or get terminally dropped, no bad weather, no potholes, and no chance of falling off (unless you sprint REALLY hard and topple the turbo 
) I really enjoyed it and was soon jealous of the folk in teams getting to ride WTRL TTT and ZRL, then in July 2024 there just happened to be a call for C and D cat riders, and I’ve never looked back.
Are you part of a Virtual team? Yes! eSRT were looking for riders last summer and I was so lucky to join them. We have some of the best racers on Zwift (check out the ZwiftPower rankings of some of our guys!) and women who’ve raced for Sweden in the eSports World Champs, but they’re SO encouraging and supportive of all the lower cat riders. We joke that there’s no ReST in eSRT, but we just like to go hard when we race. I just love them and have really found my home 
I’ve even started learning Swedish on Duolingo for the odd occasion when someone posts in Swedish or links to a Swedish event or website, and so that when we have IRL meetups (yep this really happens, despite the geographical spread, and yes, ABBA is a universal theme 
) I can try to repay some of the riders’ brilliance in conducting everything in a foreign language. Ja är hemma med eSRT
What do you love most about racing? I love that I just can’t let someone get away from me. Racing makes me push myself far harder than I would on my own, even in a workout. I may not have the power or endurance to catch the girl in front, but I’ll push myself to and beyond my limits trying!
What is your favourite style of race (e.g. points, scratch, iTT, TTT, Chase, duathlon)? TTT. There’s nothing like racing with a bunch of friends to share the pain.
What is your favourite Zwift women’s race series? Iceni, probably cos I won it
What is your most memorable racing experience, inside or outside or BOTH Flamme Rouge Racing Tour France Queen Stage on Quatch Quest. Honestly that was the hardest 10 days of my life! We even had ZRL on the rest day. 9 stages, 221 miles. I may not be the lightest or the strongest or the fastest rider on Zwift, but I’m probably the most bloody-minded – when I decide to do something I’m committed to seeing it through. I must admit, though, I questioned this several times during the event, and swore never to ride the France map again 
By the final stage I was resigned to just dragging myself round (and to facing divorce if I ever tried anything this stupid again) and I just watched the other riders streaming away. I wasn’t going to be beaten though and on I plodded (climbing is DEFINITELY not my strength, and we’d done an iTT up La Reine the day before…) but as I crept up the Alpe my nemesis popped up on my rider list. I assumed it was a glitch of the hairpins, but then the time gap was suddenly only two minutes. That really fired my motivation so I kept slogging away, watching the gap inching down, until suddenly there she was, stopped on the side! A real tortoise and hare moment. I gave it another burst to try and get as big a gap as I could while she recovered but once she started moving again she was soon eating into it. I was SO determined not to be caught though, and I guess having gone into the red she was the one at a disadvantage. Somehow I held her off – she was right on my heels – and I won the Queen Stage for my category. I was completely astonished and so proud of myself (and nearly in tears because my good racing pal Manon Holtman totally unexpectedly teleported to the end of the race to cheer me on)
(Also fairly fond memories of eSRT Flashcore winning round 1 of ZRL this season – my first outings with the team.)
What is your favourite food to eat post race? I like a good soak in an Epsom salts bath after a hard race. I haven’t really got a sweet tooth so my usual in-bath protein hit is nachos and houmous. If I’m not in the bath it’s a blueberry smoothie (milk, frozen banana, frozen blueberries… freezing the banana gives you the ice cream creaminess without the excess sugar, and blueberries are full of inflammation-zapping antioxidants and immunity-boosting vitamin C
)
I also have a weakness for Powerbar 30% Protein+ Chocolate. I’m not great racing in the evenings, but after ZRL I have tortellini with cherry tomatoes and feta. It means I can cook for my wife before the race, and then cook mine in about 5 minutes post-race.
What advice would you give to a woman entering her first Zwift race? JUST DO IT! Warm up first because Zwift race starts are HARD (my go-to here is the INEOS Pre Race Warmup workout on whatever course you’re racing. The routine of completing the same warmup each time relaxes you and prepares you for the race). But get in there, be prepared to be pushed harder than you’ve ever been pushed before, and be prepared to have FUN. Prepare seems to be my mantra here
Any upcoming race you are looking forward to? Always ZRL racing with my Flashcore teamies, but also looking forward to Iceni coming back round to see if I still have what it takes. And of course the unique ‘All cats in one pen’ eSRT Tiny Races, which are brutal but if you’re a powerpack who is good at drafting you can get the A cat girls to drag you along until you die I’m usually totally out of watts by race 3 though.
Where can people follow your racing adventures? If you want to follow me you’d better get yourself in the D Pen for a race, hadn’t you? 
An anonymous reader shares a report: Members of the European Parliament were offered special pouches to protect digital devices from espionage and tampering for a visit to Hungary this week, a sign of rising spying fears within Europe.
Five lawmakers from the Parliament’s civil liberties committee traveled to Hungary on Monday for a three-day visit to inspect the EU member country’s progress on democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights.
One lawmaker on the trip confirmed to POLITICO that the Parliament officials joining the delegation were offered Faraday bags — special metal-lined pouches that block electromagnetic signals — by the Parliament’s services and were also advised to be cautious about using public Wi-Fi networks or charging facilities.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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We like to think that our home is also our fortress of privacy: Once you walk through your front door, you’re free from prying eyes (or lenses) and can relax. There are a ton of ways to ensure your privacy inside, starting with items like window films, shades, and curtains. And if you want to protect your outdoor space from neighbors peering over the fence, you have several easy options.
Most of those options, however, assume your neighbors are on the same level as you. If the neighboring homes are located above yours, you’ll need to re-think your privacy plan. This is especially true if your neighbors have outdoor areas that offer a perfect view of your backyard. If you get the sense you’re being watched every time you step outside your house, here are a few ways you can regain some privacy.
The simplest long-term option is to plant trees—specifically canopy trees, whose branches stretch out and form a living roof over the area below. You’ll want to consult with an arborist or other landscaping professional to identify canopy trees that will thrive in your region and climate. You’ll also want to get some advice on spacing out the trees so you eventually get the lush, thick “roof” effect that will offer the privacy you’re looking for (not to mention cool down the space and block out the sun’s damaging rays).
Note the word “eventually,” however: Trees don’t just pop up in a matter of days. Maple trees, for example, are excellent canopy trees, but can take several decades to reach their full height and size. But if you’re going to be in the house (and using the yard) for a long time to come, investing in canopy trees will solve your problem and beautify the space.
A shade sail is typically a large triangular or rectangular sheet of fabric that you attach to posts or existing structures in your yard (such as a fence). They let air and rain through, but block out the sun, creating shade wherever you want it. That means they can be used for vertical privacy, too—one or more shade sails installed in your yard will block someone’s view of your yard from above.
Shade sails are relatively affordable and easily installed. You can buy a shade sail kit that comes with everything you need, but it’s easy to DIY by sinking a few posts or attaching some hooks to your fence or exterior walls. They can also be quickly removed if your circumstances change.
If you have a defined patio or deck space where you spend most of your time being observed by your neighbors (or imagining you are), you can cover it pretty easily using several options:
A freestanding pergola or a pergola attached to the house, combined with some outdoor curtains
A gazebo with a canopy is a less-permanent choice that can also afford you a ton of privacy, at least in that specific area of your yard.
A pop-up canopy tent is a quick, cheap, and temporary solution.
Speaking of pergolas, if your neighbor’s house looms over your yard, you can enhance your privacy by building a pergola near your fence line where their house is located. The angle will work in your favor; even a modest pergola can block much of your neighbor’s view if they’re not looking straight down into your yard. And if you have multiple neighbors up there, you can add a strong of pergolas along the fence line to block the angle everywhere.
You’ll have to check local regulations (or your homeowners association) before building. Some areas will require a pergola to be a set distance from a boundary fence (e.g., 16 feet), while others might have a calculation based on the size of the property and the height of your fence.
Finally, privacy fencing isn’t your best option for elevated neighbors, but if it is your only option for some reason, go big and install an extremely tall privacy fence. You’ll need to check local regulations to see if there are legal limits to how tall your fencing can be and then build or buy a fence at the maximum height (you can buy pre-made 12-foot and even 16-foot tall privacy fencing, though you’ll likely pay a steep price). As with pergolas near the perimeter, a tall enough fence can block your neighbors’ viewing angle. Another option is to grow a “living fence” using hedges or other plants (such as nigra arborvitae, which can reach 30 feet in height). You’ll have to wait for your plants to mature, but this can be a prettier option than a looming fence.
In recent kernel releases there have been performance enhancements to the AES implementations and other cryptographic subsystem code for speeding up the performance on modern Intel and AMD processors. With Linux 6.16 there will be at least some additional small gains to find with Intel and AMD processors bearing AVX-512 when employing AES-XTS…
After obliterating the federal office on long COVID and clawing back billions in COVID funding from state health departments, the Trump administration has now entirely erased the online hub for federal COVID-19 resources. In its place now stands a site promoting the unproven idea that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 was generated in and leaked from a lab in China, sparking the global health crisis.
Navigating to COVID.gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats.
Previously, the site provided unembellished quick references to COVID-19 resources, including links to information on vaccines, testing, treatments, and long COVID. It also provided a link to resources for addressing COVID-19 vaccine misconceptions and confronting misinformation. That all appears to be gone now, though some of the same information still remains on a separate COVID-19 page hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mars has not always been a seemingly lifeless red desert. We have evidence that billions of years ago it had a warm, habitable climate with liquid water in lakes and flowing rivers, which is somewhat confusing, given that Mars is much farther from the Sun than the Earth and that the Sun was much less bright back then. “In order for Mars to be warm enough to host liquid water, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” says Benjamin Tutolo, a researcher at the University of Calgary. “The question we’ve been asking for at least 30 years was where the record of all this carbon is.”
Tutolo led a new study of rock samples collected by the Curiosity rover that might have answered this question.
The mystery of Mars’ missing carbon stems from two seemingly conflicting results. On the one hand, we have already found dried riverbeds and lakes on the surface of Mars, so we know there must have been liquid water on its surface at some point. To account for the presence of this water, every Martian climate model we have run indicates that huge amounts of atmospheric carbon were needed to provide a sufficient greenhouse effect to keep the surface temperature above freezing. But the data we were getting from satellite observations of Mars found much less carbon in the Martian soil than those climate models would suggest. “So, either the models were incorrect—and there’s no good reason to believe that—or there really was lots of carbon in the Martian atmosphere,” Tutolo says.