fidzu : computers

A 25-year-old German photographer won the 2026 Nikon Small World competition with a microscopic image freezing ink droplets in midair as an inkjet printer deposits them onto paper. Ars Technica reports that Ole Bielfeldt "beat out 1,802 other entries hailing from 69 different countries." From the report: Bielfeldt became interested in photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown after discovering an old microscope in his parents' attic. He figured out how to build an adaptor out of a tube and some wood to connect the microscope to his father's camera and taught himself the art through trial and error, building custom tools as needed. He documents how he captures transformative images of everyday objects with behind-the-scenes videos posted to macrofying, his photography and videography brand. It was Bielfeldt's curiosity about the inner workings of inkjet printers that inspired his winning entry, but capturing the action of ink drops being deposited on paper was a challenge, given that the process happens so quickly. The droplets, for instance, moved faster than the camera's shutter speed. Bielfeldt's solution was to deconstruct the printer so that the paper moved under a stationary (rather than moving) printhead, and then take the image in a dark room, using a flash to serve as the shutter, thereby freezing the ink drops mid-air. There was no need for pricey equipment. Bielfeldt does not use AI in his images, preferring to rely on traditional techniques. "Ole Bielfeldt's winning image embodies what makes Nikon Small World so powerful: the intersection of microscope imaging, ingenuity, and artistry," said Eric Flem, a spokesperson for Nikon Instruments. "By using a microscope objective in a different way, he transformed a familiar object into something altogether new and previously unseen. It is a reminder that the microscope is not only a scientific tool but also a creative one, capable of expanding how we see and imagine the world around us." The full list of winners can be found here.

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29 Oct 2026 7:00am GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from TechCrunch: In an email blast to customers titled "Protecting your finances in the Al World," Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, "including an Al-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf." [...] A spokesperson for Bank of America confirmed the authenticity of the bank's email that was posted to social media. But heed the bank's warning, for if things go wrong, it's on you. Account agreements at most banks hold customers responsible for anyone they give their log-in to. "If you do share your credentials," its email reads, "keep in mind that you're responsible for activity resulting from that access."

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29 Oct 2026 3:30am GMT

Flag LinuxNetBSD made a seemingly small, but very welcome announcement today: they're adding a more user-friendly, easier to use command-line text editor to the base install. To ease the transition for new users, NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system. ↫ NetBSD Foundation on Fedi Most guides and how-to article for operating systems like NetBSD assume the use of vi, and while I don't want to ignite a flamewar, vi isn't exactly the most approachable or friendly piece of software out there. My occassional text editing in the command line is all done through nano, but now I'm definitely curious to give atto a go. While other tech news websites are plastered with articles about a PC maker adding a touch screen to one of their laptops, we're talking about a new CLI text editor in NetBSD's base system. Priorities, folks.

29 Oct 2026 12:38am GMT

Windows 11 25H2, starting with build 26200.9550, now comes with something called CLAT. As organizations move toward IPv6-only and IPv6-mostly networks, some applications still depend on IPv4-only applications or services. Windows CLAT helps those applications continue to work when a network does not provide native IPv4 connectivity. CLAT is the client-side component of 464XLAT. It statelessly translates IPv4 traffic from the Windows client into IPv6 for transport across the network to a provider-side translator (PLAT), which provides stateful NAT64 translation to IPv4. ↫ Jim Alumbaugh at Microsoft's Networking Blog Yet another important component of the long, neverending transition to IPv6. Like endlessly cutting a cucumber in half, you'll never quite run out of cucumber to cut.

29 Oct 2026 12:28am GMT

Do you want a hobby operating system with a desktop for a microcontroller-based computer? Sylphide OS is a new project aiming to build just that. For the last few weeks, I've worked on a new pet project: an operating system for computers based on microcontrollers. There aren't many yet, but I expect them to be more and more common. Why MCU computers ? You get a relatively very simple platform, booting straight to your code (or almost), and you can understand the whole architecture. Exactly as it was with home computers long ago. And not at all what you get with modern computers. Even booting involves lot of very different systems, black magic, and even blog/proprietary software. ↫ Thomas Capricelli It's very early in development, but by building it atop FreeRTOS, Capricelli had a head-start. It's got a basic desktop, one that might need some changes to avoid the lawyers. The code's open source, of course.

29 Oct 2026 12:09am GMT

An Anthropic engineering manager says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews because AI can now outperform candidates on the kinds of programming challenges they typically contain. "There's no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," said Felix Rieseberg in a blog post. "Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests." The Register reports: "I don't think the coding interview is going to come back," said Rieseberg. "It's easy to get sentimental given how many copies of 'Algorithms and Data Structures' were bought in hopes of unlocking good jobs and a better future -- or how the death of the coding interview is another milestone in software engineering reaching a new level of abstraction." At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it. "I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said: "I'm not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I'd be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills." "We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry -- at least not yet," added Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications." "The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills." She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.

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28 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT

This Vulcan launch will be the first to utilize a full complement of six solid rocket boosters.

28 Oct 2026 10:51pm GMT

Europe's Pan-Arctic Cable will bypass US to link Canada, Japan, and South Korea.

28 Oct 2026 10:35pm GMT

Six unproven peptides popular with MAHA now under "enforcement discretion policy."

28 Oct 2026 10:17pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT