fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK's first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend -- operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the West Ealing to Greenford branch line, four stops and 12 minutes each way, and now carrying up to 273 passengers, should its celebrity stoke up the demand. The battery will recharge in just three and a half minutes back at West Ealing station between trips, using a 2,000kW charger connected to a few meters of rail that only becomes live when the train stops directly overhead. There are hopes within government and industry that this technology could one day replace diesel trains on routes that have proved difficult or expensive to electrify with overhead wires, as the decarbonization of rail continues. The train has proved itself capable of going more than 200 miles on a single charge -- last year setting a world record for the farthest travelled by a battery-electric train, smashing a German record set in 2021. The GWR train and the fast-charge technology has been trialled on the 2.5-mile line since early 2024, but has not yet carried paying passengers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jan 2026 3:30am GMT

Apple posted its biggest quarter ever, with iPhone revenue hitting a record ~$85.3 billion and Services climbing 14% to ~$30 billion. Total revenue reached nearly $143.76 billion. "The demand for iPhone was simply staggering," CEO Tim Cook said on a conference call discussing the results. "This is the strongest iPhone lineup we've ever had and by far the most popular."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jan 2026 1:25am GMT

Belkin is shutting down cloud support for most Wemo smart home devices on January 31, leaving only Thread-based models and devices already set up in Apple HomeKit functional. Everything else will lose remote access, voice assistant integrations, and future app updates. The Verge reports: The shut down was first announced in July and impacts most Wemo devices, ranging from smart plugs to a coffee maker, with the exception of a handful of Thread-based devices: the 3-way smart light switch (WLS0503), stage smart scene controller (WSC010), smart plug with Thread (WSP100), and smart video doorbell camera (WDC010). Wemo devices configured through Apple's HomeKit will also continue to work, but you have to set them up in HomeKit before January 31st if you want to use that option. Other affected devices will only work manually after Saturday. If your Wemo device is still under warranty, you may be able to get a partial refund for it after cloud services shut down.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jan 2026 12:45am GMT

You won't be going on road trips, but a very cheap electric runabout is possible.

30 Jan 2026 3:55pm GMT

"We think that's a really important mission, and something that we can do."

30 Jan 2026 3:31pm GMT

Operating systems written in Rust - especially for embedded use - are quite common these days, and today's example fits right into that trend. Ariel OS is an operating system for secure, memory-safe, low-power Internet of Things (IoT). It is based on Rust from the ground up and supports hardware based on 32-bit microcontroller architectures (Cortex-M, RISC-V, and Xtensa). For a quick overview of our motivations and what we plan next, check our roadmap. Ariel OS builds on top of existing projects from the Embedded Rust ecosystem, including Embassy, esp-hal, defmt, probe-rs, sequential-storage, and embedded-test. While those provide high-quality building blocks for a wide range of embedded applications, such projects do not provide the high level of integration that developers know from contemporary C-based operating systems for microcontrollers, such as RIOT or Zephyr for instance. ↫ Ariel OS GitHub page There's bound to be a microcontroller you can get your hands on that Ariel OS supports, and since it's licensed under either a MIT or Apache 2.0 license, you can get going right away.

30 Jan 2026 1:52pm GMT

"We're seeing remarkable growth year after year."

30 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

As most of you will know, Mac OS X (or Rhapsody if you count the developer releases) wasn't Apple's first foray into the world of UNIX. The company sold its own UNIX variant, A/UX, from 1988 to 1995, which combined a System V-based UNIX with a System 7.0.1 desktop environment and application compatibility, before it acquired NeXT and started working on Rhapsody/Mac OS X. As a sidenote, I don't know if the application compatibility layer was related to the Macintosh Application Environment for UNIX, which I have running on my HP-UX machines. That's not the only time Apple dabbled with UNIX, though - Apple's unique Apple Network Server product from 1996 also came with UNIX, but time it wasn't one from Apple itself, but rather from its enemy-turned-friend IBM: AIX. The Network Server shipped with a slightly customised version of IBM's AIX operating system; regular AIX straight from IBM wouldn't work. The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess. Since the Apple Network Server was built around a modified Power Macintosh 9500 - there's much more to the hardware, but that's the short of it - so you would expect the Network Server to also be able to run regular Mac OS for PowerPC, right? Apple even sold server products running plain Mac OS at the time, so it'd make sense, but nothing about Apple in the '90s made any sense whatsoever, so no, use of plain Mac OS was locked out through the ROM. And let's not even get started about other PowerPC operating systems of the time, like, of all things, Windows NT - something Apple supposedly demonstrated at some point. But was that always the case? Well, we've got new ROMs straight from a former Apple employee, and after flashing them to a supported ROM chip, the Apple Network Sever can now run classic Mac OS. On top of that, and even more miraculous, the Windows NT-capable ROMs have also been discovered. I'll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn't enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let's get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process. ↫ Cameron Kaiser While it's great news to see that Mac OS can now be run on the Network Server, I'm personally much more interested in the story behind the Windows NT ROMs. The idea that Apple would sell a computer running Windows NT out of the box is wild to think about now, but considering the desperate state the company was in at the time, all options must've been on the table. Sadly, as Kaiser discovered, the Windows NT ROMs in and of themselves are not enough to run Windows NT. However, they appear to be much farther along in the development process than even the Mac OS-capable ROMs, which is fascinating. When Jobs talked Gil Amelio into canning the ANS as well, the ROM initiative naturally went out the window with it. However, while the existing 2.0 Mac OS ROMs are only known on an unmarked development flash stick similar to mine, these final 2.26NT ROMs appear almost production-ready with fully printed labels, suggesting they had reached a very late stage of development. ↫ Cameron Kaiser Despite not being able to boot Windows NT for PowerPC as-is, most likely because there's no compatible ARC or HAL, Kaiser did discover a ton of interesting details, like how this ROM configures the Network Server to run in little endian mode, which is all Windows NT for PowerPC ever supported, making this the very first time a PowerPC machine did so. I'm hoping Kaiser manages to track down the necessary components to make Windows NT bootable on the ANS, as one of the most unique curiosities in Apple history. There's a ton more details in the article, as per usual Kaiser standards, and it's an absolute joy to read.

29 Jan 2026 11:50pm GMT

While the two major open source desktop environments get most of the airtime - and for good reason, since they're both exceptionally good - there's a long tail of other desktop environments out there catering to all kinds of special workflows and weird niches. I think we can all agree that Xfce leads this long tail of more niche desktop environments, without really being niche itself. Xfce may not be as popular as KDE or GNOME, but it's an amazing full-featured desktop environment that offers a slightly more traditional, less fast-paced desktop for those that desire so. Xfce, too, is moving to Wayland, which can mean significant efforts in certain places, not the least of which is the window manager. Xfce originally planned to adapt its venerable xfwm4 to support both X11 and Wayland at the same time, but this turned out to be too complex for a variety of reasons, all more or less caused by differences between X11 and Wayland. On top of that, this approach would risk introducing new bugs to the X11 side of things, and the Xfce project does not want to subject its X11 users to that. As such, they've decided to develop a Wayland compositor from scratch: xfwl4. The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does, or as much as possible considering the differences between X11 and Wayland. Using xfwl4 should feel just like using xfwm4 on X11. We even plan to reuse the existing xfwm4 configuration dialogs and xfconf settings to ensure a seamless transition. Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks. ↫ The Xfce development team This project also includes related tasks like rearchitecting session-startup to support Wayland, implementing support for the xdg-session-management protocol, and adding support for XWayland. This is obviously anything but a small effort, but it seems like a practical solution. Xfce users generally seem to choose Xfce exactly because it's a stable environment that does not move fast(er) and break (some) things. As such, keeping the X11 window manager separate and stable, without Wayland work possibly breaking it, seems like the kind of thing the average Xfce user can get behind. Personally, I can't wait for Xfce to become a full Wayland desktop, as dealing with X11's nonsense feels decidedly retro to me now, and I don't see Xfce as a retro environment at all. It's going to take some time, of course, but thanks to countless generous donations to Xfce, longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone will be paid to work on this project. Excellent news for everyone involved.

29 Jan 2026 10:17am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT