fidzu : geek

The United Nations has an announcement. "The UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to encourage governments, schools and tech companies worldwide to stop using maps that make Africa look far smaller than it really is." By 164 votes to one, Member States on Friday endorsed a resolution promoting map projections that more accurately reflect the true size of continents - the culmination of an African-led campaign against the 16th-century Mercator projection, still the most widely used map in the world. The United States cast the sole vote against, dismissing the initiative as part of a "radical ideological project." Six countries - Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine - abstained. The resolution does not ban the Mercator projection or impose a replacement. Instead, it encourages governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters, and to teach the limitations of any flat map in representing a spherical planet. Behind that seemingly technical debate lies a larger argument about history and power: whether a map designed for European sailors in the 16th century has, over generations, distorted not only geography but perceptions of a whole, vast and complex continent... [With Mercator maps] landmasses appear increasingly enlarged the farther they are from the Equator. Greenland, for instance, can look roughly comparable in size to Africa, even though Africa is about 14 times larger. Northern Europe and North America are similarly magnified, relative to equatorial regions. Despite its original navigational purpose, Mercator remains common in educational, media, digital and official materials. The resolution says those distortions have contributed to the "symbolic minimization" of Africa and perpetuated an unbalanced view of the world... Equal-area maps do not make Africa larger; they remove the exaggeration Mercator gives landmasses closer to the poles. The UN notes that hours before the vote, France's foreign minister announced the country was planning to abandon Mercator for its maps of the world.

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06 Sep 2026 2:34pm GMT

"We achieved within a few years what had taken the European space industry decades before."

06 Sep 2026 11:55am GMT

"No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil - until today," reports Space.com. DW.com reports that a Spectrum space rocket from German company Isar Aerospace launched today from the Arctic Norwegian spaceport at Andoya: "Germany has spaceflight capabilities," said the country's Ministry for Research, Technology and Space on X, praising a "milestone that impressively demonstrates our country's innovative strength and technical expertise". This was the German company's second attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into space. The first attempt, which took place 18 months ago, was unsuccessful. The Spectrum rocket is designed for small and medium-sized payloads. It carried five smal satellites and an in-flight technological experiment, the company said. According to Isar Aerospace, the launch was for "both the vehicle's qualification mission and its first flight carrying payload." The move is believed to bring Europe closer to being able to offer satellite flights from its own territory. Several countries voiced interest in the growing market of commercial space missions, including Britain and Sweden... Isar is also working on the development of a second launch site, located in Canada. The company said that while the US launched 198 rockets last year, Europe's tally was just eight. Isar's goal is to produce some 40 rockets a year. Although the rocket is not yet ready for mass production, Isar has already received orders through 2028. Today's launch webcast was produced in collaboration with NASASpaceflight, notes Space.com. And they note that Spectrum chief engineer Nikolaos Perakis says"This is just the beginning... I'm really looking forward to the next steps." Reuters quotes this statemnt from Norway's minister of industry and commerce, Cecilie Myrseth. "The fact that we can now launch satellites from Andoeya strengthens Norwegian and European security in the turbulent times we live in."

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06 Sep 2026 11:34am GMT

The shift in the fish's diet is having significant downstream impacts on the environment and climate.

06 Sep 2026 10:00am GMT

This year's Hugo Award winners were announced last weekend at Worldcon - the world's longest-running science fiction/fantasy convention. The Orange County Register reports there were fans "clad in capes, gowns and elaborate character costumes," with famous attendees including Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, who held a book signing: Martin attended his first Worldcon in 1971 in Boston, before he published his first novel. Fresh out of his graduate studies, Martin, then 22 years old, found a community of fellow comic book fans and genre enthusiasts... "It was a transformative experience," Martin said. "Worldcon is the heart of the science fiction fandom." Four years later, Martin won his first Hugo Award for his novella, "A Song for Lya," which made him the award's youngest winner - a record he held until Sunday night, when 25-year-old Los Angeles writer H. H. Pak took home the award for Best Novelette. [Read that novelette here...] Notable writers and artists, such as "Star Trek: The Next Generation" screenwriter Ronald D. Moore and graphic artist Stan Sakai, announced the [Hugo award] categories. In their acceptance speeches, winners acknowledged the enduring strength of their community amidst rapidly evolving physical and social environments. They also praised the power of speculative fiction in facilitating dialogue on real-world issues and the importance of human-made art. Among the winners were C. B. Lee, whose novel "Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe" won the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book; the team behind Apple TV's "Murderbot: 'All Systems Red," which won for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form; and John Scalzi, who took home the trophy for Best Series [for Old Man's War]. The night concluded with its most anticipated award - Best Novel - which went to " The Everlasting" by Alix. E. Harrow, a fantasy time-loop novel about a scholar forced to rewrite his nation's history. AppleTV's Murderbot episode beat nominated episodes from other several popular streaming series: Doctor Who (âoeThe Story & the Engineâ) Pluribus (âoeWe Is Usâ) Severance (âoeCold Harborâ) The Wheel of Time (âoeThe Road to the Spear) Overall the awards committee had received 23,543 nominations this year for 4,299 works and individuals, according to the official Hugo Awards site. Other interesting winners: Best Graphic Story or Comic: A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel, written by Ursula K. Le Guin, adapted and art by Fred Fordham Best Short Story: "In My Country" by Thomas Ha Best Novella: The River Has Roots Best Related Work: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Sinners Best Game or Interactive Work: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

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06 Sep 2026 7:34am GMT

The US government is investigating whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards.

05 Sep 2026 3:17pm GMT

Zenith is a variant of Windows for "developer-class devices". Project Zenith comes with a set of pre-installed tools spanning languages and runtimes, source control, and productivity tools. Windows Terminal and Visual Studio Code are pinned to the Taskbar by default, putting your favorite tools within immediate reach. We've also pre-configured Windows Settings for coding across File Explorer, Search, Start, and the Taskbar. File Explorer shows file extensions, hidden files, the full path in the title bar, and the details pane, with long-path support enabled. Recently used files and folders and sync provider tips are turned off for a cleaner workspace. In Search and Start, Command Palette is enabled, while Start menu tips and account notifications are turned off to reduce distractions. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has become foundational for running Linux workloads on Windows. Last year we open-sourced WSL. Building on that momentum at Build 2026, we integrated WSL more deeply into Windows with WSL containers to provide a built-in way to create, run, and interact with Linux containers directly on Windows. ↫ Logan Iyer at the Windows Blogs It's highly unlikely you'll be using this Zenith Windows flavour any time soon, as it requires 64GB of unified RAM with 250 GB/s memory bandwidth. In 2026, that's a serious ask. On top of that, it's not entirely clear to me if Zenith will be available as a separate Windows variant, without having to buy a complete device. Of course, it would be trivial to set all of this up on any fresh Windows installation.

04 Sep 2026 9:19pm GMT

We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.16! After a year and a half of development, we're excited to showcase the improvements we've made between a new graphical installer; a unified bootcd and livecd image; video, audio, networking, and storage stack improvements; a new installation type; and third-party code syncs. ↫ The ReactOS Team on the ReactOS website The amount of changes and improvements is quite staggering, honestly. They'll always be chasing a moving target, sure, but if they manage to keep this rate up ReactOS might actually grow into something usable in its own right, full compatibility with Windows or not. Excellent progress.

03 Sep 2026 6:24pm GMT

Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It's the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can't exactly overcome physics - laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers - there's a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you're a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it's just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux' advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop's speakers. EasyEffects' own description on its GitHub page doesn't really explain what it does or what it's capable of, so here's the description from Wikipedia instead. EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line. Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer. ↫ EasEffects' Wikipedia page None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs. What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio - MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more - aren't magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery. If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better. In an ideal world, you'd pick a preset created specifically for your laptop make and model, but odds are you won't find one, so for most laptops you'll have to settle for a generic preset that tries to do its best. I've long settled on the Advanced Auto Gain.json preset from JackHack96, which greatly improves the audio performance on any laptops I've tried it on, but of course, there's countless other presets for you to try to see if there's anything that suits your particular laptop and ears better. Getting all of this up and running is really easy. EasyEffects is most likely packaged by your Linux distribution, and the latest version is always available as a Flatpak from Flathub. Download the preset(s) you want to try, copy them either to ~/.config/easyeffects (if you use your distribution's package) or to ~/.var/app/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects/data/easyeffects/output/ (if you use the Flatpak version). They'll show up right away in the Presets tab in EasyEffects, ready to be turned on and off whenever you want, making it very easy to compare and contrast to find the one you like best. EasyEffects can live in your system tray giving you easy access to your presets without having to open the main window, and it can be set to start automatically at boot. EasyEffects can also be turned on and off on the fly. There's obvious downsides to all of this, too, of course. First, since you're most likely going to be using a generic preset not specifically crafted for your laptop, there's no guarantee the results will be positive for you. Second, not every preset is ideal for every type of audio. Most of my audio consists of YouTube videos with mostly speech; if you listen mostly to music, different presets may yield better results. Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours. Fourth, EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I'm talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE's System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything. Even the generic preset I use makes such a massive difference for me on every laptop I've ever tried it on, that I've become convinced EasyEffects and a few of the generic presets should be installed by default by any desktop-oriented Linux distribution. On top of that, Linux laptops OEMs like System76, Nova Custom, Star Labs, and so on, should really take the time to create proper presets for their laptops to improve their sound quality out of the box. I feel like if you're already designing and selling laptops, you probably also have the skills and means to create a decent preset. In fact, I'd take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings. They shouldn't include the entire application and its user interface, but should make it so that you can configure and manage presets right from the sound settings panels, and switch between presets from their volume applets (as well as turn it off entirely, of course). This would leave the full EasyEffects application for people who need more control, manual tuning, and more advanced features. There's absolutely no reason why speakers on Linux laptops should sound tinny, harsh, and hollow. The Linux desktop has all the technologies and features built right in to make speakers sound much better than they do without any tuning,

27 Aug 2026 8:18pm 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

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT