fidzu : geek

2025'S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books: Anyone who has read Tolkien's letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien's fury - specifically, ire over mankind's obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien's anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien's fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity. It is Tolkien at his angriest and funniest, making The Bovadium Fragments a minor treasure in his ever-growing catalog... As Tolkien put it in one of his private letters, "the spirit of 'Isengard,' if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case." Readers of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) will recognize the allusion. In the author's magnum opus, Isengard is a kind of industrial hell, endlessly feeding its furnaces with felled trees... The Bovadium Fragments brings Tolkien's visceral hatred of such machines to the fore for the first time - on the same level as Isengard or the scoured Shire. In Tolkien's story, the words "Motores" and "monsters" are interchangeable. And with his grand, mythic register, Tolkien defamiliarizes the car enough for modern readers to see it as he does - as truly monstrous. "[T]he Motores continued to bring forth an ever larger progeny," Tolkien writes. "[M]any of the citizens harboured the monsters, feeding them with the costly oils and essences which they required, and building houses for them in their gardens...." One suspects that Tolkien would have preferred to see Oxford return to the era of the donkey cart. That kind of nostalgia is familiar in Tolkien's work - the idea that we developed just a little too far, skipping past an Eden we failed to recognize a generation or two ago. (For Tolkien, the paragon of paradise seems to have been a rural village around the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.) But he also knows that mankind's impulse to develop is something we cannot help. And the inevitable blowback we get from our hubris is something we cannot avoid. That defeatist attitude is suggested in the frame narrative to The Bovadium Fragments, in which the archaeologists smugly declare their superiority to the extinct citizens of old Oxford. "We at any rate are not likely to fall into such folly," one of them says. In their more enlightened future, we are told, they only pursue the more benign science of longevity. Their wish is that one day they shall "at last conquer mortality, and not 'die like animals.'" But humans are animals, Tolkien argues. And in stretching beyond that, we may find progress and modern conveniences like motorcars. But perhaps we also pave a road to Isengard. And we may not recognize that destination until it is too late - until we are trapped within its walls, suffocating on our own exhaust fumes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Jan 2026 8:34am GMT

Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews. They call it "the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux." I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract)... Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. As the clocks chimed midnight on New Year's Eve, he advised everyone to "spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Jan 2026 5:35am GMT

While California's residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company," reports TechCrunch. But now Californians can make "a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information" - using the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (or DROP): Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state... Brokers are supposed to start processing requests in August 2026, then they have 90 days to actually process requests and report back. If they don't delete your data, you'll have the option to submit additional information that may help them locate your records. Companies will also be able to keep first-party data that they've collected from users. It's only brokers who seek to buy or sell that data - which can include your social security number, browsing history, email address, phone number, and more - who will be required to delete it... The California Privacy Protection Agency says that in addition to giving residents more control over their data, the tool could result in fewer "unwanted texts, calls, or emails" and also decrease the "risk of identity theft, fraud, AI impersonations, or that your data is leaked or hacked."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Jan 2026 2:34am GMT

Desktop Classic System is an operating system based on Debian and a customized version of the MATE Desktop Environment that hearkens back to, but is not a direct copy of, the classic Mac OS. DCS seeks to provide and sometimes even improve upon the conceptual simplicity offered by the old Macintosh. ↫ Desktop Classic System website I'm usually not particularly interested in reporting on random Linux distributions, but any one of them that defaults to a proper spatial file manager is one that I will highlight. I'm not entirely sure if this is just a supported feature of MATE's file manager, or something more custom - there are some patches to Caja here, as mentioned - but spatial file managers are a dying breed and that's a shame. They're hard to implement and even harder to get right, which is probably why few people take on the challenge. Other than that, DCS isn't particularly revolutionary or special, but I'd love for more Linux distributions to look back at what we've lost, and see if we can bring those things back.

04 Jan 2026 11:12am GMT

KDE developer Herz published a detailed look at the immense amount of work they've done cleaning up the developer onboarding documentation for KDE. All that just to say that I'm finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. That is to say, all the beginner docs fixes I wanted to add to Develop are either already there or have merge requests ready or almost ready. ↫ Herz at rabbitictranslator.com Judging by the article, KDE's developer documentation really were in need of major work, and it's great to see that thankless task being done. One of the areas where KDE lags behind GNOME is that the latter has a more vibrant application ecosystem, with tons of great GNOME applications under active development. Now, I'm not saying it's the state of KDE's documentation is the sole reason for this, but I'm sure it wasn't helping either. Improving documentation is not a particularly glamorous task, but it's vitally important nonetheless.

04 Jan 2026 10:47am GMT

It shouldn't be surprising that the HP-UX FAQ eventually grew an entry for "how can I make a 712 run headless". It was possible, and to do it you had to change the firmware "console" path. The 712 firmware would not allow you to do this, to keep you locked to a keyboard and frame buffer console, but some of the HP-UX standalone tools could be used to change this without the firmware getting in the way, so the FAQ recipe was roughly "abort the boot sequence, at the BOOT_ADMIN> prompt, do not start the HP-UX kernel but some diagnostic tool, and then at the tools prompt, type a magic sequence without any mistake or you'll be very, very, very sorry". There was no exaggeration in these words: the magic sequence is conspath 2/0/4.0x283, which is everything but intuitive and easy to remember. ↫ Miod Vallat What a great story.

04 Jan 2026 12:57am GMT

Letting the unreliable Grok be its own "spokesperson" lets xAI off the hook.

02 Jan 2026 11:08pm GMT

"Welder's Anthrax" was first coined in 2022, when seven cases had been identified.

02 Jan 2026 10:36pm GMT

Voice has lagged in adoption behind screens. OpenAI wants to change that.

02 Jan 2026 9:27pm GMT

2025 was a crazy simulation. A lot of glitches, plot twists and fun stuff™.

31 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Same as last year, this is a summary of what I've been up to throughout the year. See also the recap/retrospection published by my friends (antiz, jvoisin, orhun).

• Uploaded 467 packages to Arch Linux
  • Most of them being reproducible, meaning I provably didn't abuse my position of compiling the binaries
  • 35 of them are signal-desktop
  • 29 of them are metasploit
• Made 53 uploads to Debian
  • All of them being related to my work in the debian-rust team, that I've been a part of since 2018
  • …

31 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.
• Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT