When
Making things more complicated than they need to be: it’s human nature. Or at least my human nature. “You’re barely human.” Or natural. This is a video of Joseph of Joseph’s Machines building and demonstrating (in front of a live audience!) a Rube Goldberg machine that (with minimal effort on his part, but still more effort than should be required from a Rube Goldberg machine) gets him out of bed, washes his face, dresses him, then feeds him a banana, a breakfast sandwich, and a bowl of cereal. Or, rather, dunks his face into a bowl of cereal. Now I’ll be the first to admit I’m terrible at building Rube Goldberg machines (I’ve never made one that didn’t end waiting for first responders), but the face washing step probably should have come after that one. That’s like washing your hands before going to the bathroom, but not after. Most men don’t do either though, which is why I don’t shake hands or fist bump anymore, only wink.
Sent out on Thursday was the last round of planned Intel Xe kernel driver improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. There is one big improvement that is set to benefit Intel discrete GPUs with at least Battlemage benefiting nicely…
Ubuntu developer Gianpiero Carpinelli at Canonical has been working on introducing SHA3-256 and SHA3-384 support for Debian’s APT packaging tool in preparing for if/when that SHA2 is broken…
Compare the best rolling release Linux distributions, including Arch Linux alternatives like Tumbleweed, Void, and CachyOS, with honest pros and cons.
Cloudflare is building a free, public Certificate Authority with ACME support to add more choice and resilience to the TLS ecosystem.
Published in The Astrophysical Journal, research led by Dr. Kate Su of the Space Science Institute
Rust has a number of kinds of smart pointers, both in the standard
library and defined by users. Still, some operations that are possible with
built-in references are not possible to perform with user-defined smart
pointers. Tyler Mandry, lead of the Rust project’s
language team, spoke at
RustConf 2026 about the lengthy effort to change that, and make smart pointers
just as flexible as built-in references.
Outside of what fitness trackers and smartwatches are able to reliably monitor (e.g. step counts,
With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC that launched this summer that focused on local AI, one of the biggest surprises for me when reviewing the unit was finding that the Linux preload wasn’t just a stock Ubuntu/Debian OS but rather a customized AMD Linux distribution known as AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform. Yesterday the newest version of AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform was released with some nice software updates…
Linux users have long had a pragmatic relationship with text-to-speech. The classic open-source engines have been available for years, wired into accessibility tools and the occasional script, dependable but unmistakably robotic. They do the job where the job is simply to convert text to some kind of speech, but the mechanical output has kept them out of anything where the voice actually matters. The arrival of high-quality speech synthesis delivered over an API changes what is possible, letting Linux users add genuinely natural voices to scripts, services, and applications without hosting a heavyweight model themselves.
The Linux Test
Project has announced its
latest stable release for September 2026. There have been 382 patches
from 41 authors since the May 2026
release. See the announcement for a list of new tests, changes, and
more.
The newest systemd component being worked on and drafted for an initial pull request is systemd-appd as a new mechanism to centralizing the tracking of user’s apps…
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dogtag-pki, expat, freerdp, gawk, gdb, ghostscript, gvfs, kernel, kernel-rt, libpcap, openssh, pki-core, rsync, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, libio-compress-perl, libpng1.6, nodejs, open-iscsi, redis, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (sos), Mageia (libgcrypt, python-tornado, python-urwid, python-wcwidth, and wireshark), Oracle (corosync, dogtag-pki, expat, firefox, freerdp, gawk, glib2, ipa, kernel, libXfont2, nodejs:24, openssh, osbuild-composer, perl-DBI, pki-core, postgresql:12, python-cryptography, resteasy, ruby, ruby4.0, ruby:3.3, ruby:4.0, thunderbird, and xmlrpc-c), Red Hat (skopeo), SUSE (chromium, emacs, glib2, glibc, gnome-shell, helm3, ImageMagick, imagemagick, kernel-devel, libtcnative-1-0, libtcnative-1-0, libtcnative-2-0, tomcat, tomcat10,, libtcnative-2-0, libX11, libX11-6, libXi-devel, libXpm-devel, libXtst-devel, mistral-vibe, openssl-3, perl-DBI, perl-Protocol-HTTP2, php-composer2, php8, python, rpcbind, sccache, and valkey), and Ubuntu (kf6-kcoreaddons, libxpm, linux, linux-aws, linux-fips, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-fips, linux-gke, linux-raspi-5.4, and openssl).