fidzu : geek

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a machine-washable electronic fabric that can turn clothing into an interactive graphical user interface. The prototype reportedly survived 50 gentle machine washes and 1,000 bending cycles, though it still relies on external batteries and controllers. The Register reports: The development could lead - at some point - to a "future in which clothing functions as a pervasive, multimodal human-computer interface," according to the study published in peer-reviewed science journal Nature this week. The paper shows someone interacting with computing devices using the sleeve of a wool sweater (no jokes about the Windows ugly sweater please, this is serious). The researchers, led by Singapore National University research engineer Fu Heng, claim this is a big leap forward. "This fiber-centric approach shifts wearable electronics from flexible panels toward truly textile-native architectures, laying the groundwork for fabrics that visualize, sense, communicate and compute as naturally as the garments they inhabit," the paper says. The researchers claim to have developed a scalable process to make millimeter-thick fibers. Using lasers to strip the insulation from specific spots on the thin copper wires, they attached light-emitting chips to the exposed sections, creating electrical connections to the chips. Thousands of chips were connected to the wires with extreme precision using this process. The fibers were then fed into a transparent plastic tube, and made pressure-sensitive by adding two strips of a compressible, conductive polymer into a second longitudinal channel in the tube. The paper says they could make fibers 10 meters long using this method, and that they are thin and flexible enough to be woven into or attached to fabrics. The researchers were also able to add "peripherals" such as a microphone, a speaker, a temperature sensor and a light sensor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT

"We have the mandate, we have the resources, and the support from our stakeholders."

23 Oct 2026 10:48pm GMT

Frustrated by intrusive ads, sluggish interfaces, and data tracking, smart TV owners are using AI coding tools and open-source projects to strip unwanted software from their televisions and build customized home screens. The Verge reports: Several vibe-coded TV-debloating projects exploded in popularity over the weekend. Cleanyourtv (known as tv-vibehack until the 19th), tv-detox, and dumbtv all claim to accomplish similar things -- remove sponsored ads, debloat the TV so it runs faster, and block unwanted data collection that tracks what you're watching -- without hacking, or rooting, the TV. By default, they all also replace the TV's built-in app launcher with simpler ones. Many users are going a step further and vibe-coding their own replacement launchers, like the Pokemon one below. Most of the projects we've seen so far focus on TVs that run on Android and Google TV operating systems (such as TCL, Hisense, Sony, and older Amazon Fire products), using existing developer modes and the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to tweak settings and apply (and remove) packages. According to the GitHub pages, they can also work with some Fire TV products that use a custom fork of Android (although likely not on the new Vega-based Fire TV Sticks). Because they use built-in developer tools, they don't require root access or firmware hacking, and they're reversible. Even projects that totally change the look of the interface just use Android's ability to install custom launchers -- in many cases with an assist from Claude Code or a similar tool to create the new launcher, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Oct 2026 10:00pm GMT

Greece has passed a law banning children under 15 from social media platforms beginning January 1, 2027. The legislation requires platforms to implement reliable age verification and parents to use government-backed apps to restrict access, with penalties for noncompliance under the EU's Digital Services Act. Engadget reports: "It would have been very easy to do absolutely nothing today and wait for the perfect European law. But the challenge is here. Children are sinking into the internet every day, and I believe a responsible government must do what it is obliged to do," said Greece's digital governance and AI minister, Dimitris Papastergiou. The legislation was opposed by Greece's minority parties, so Mitsotakis used his majority government to pass the bill. The nation previously barred mobile phones in schools in 2024, and opinion polls show that the new social media ban for children is widely supported by Greece's adult population. Mitsotakis previously said that his government's "goal is to push the European Union in this direction as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Oct 2026 9:00pm GMT

Pentagon memo: Insider trading gives US enemies key intel on military operations.

23 Oct 2026 8:28pm GMT

Turning on Personal Intelligence gives the company more data for ad targeting.

23 Oct 2026 8:19pm GMT

Earlier this year, I needed to learn PowerShell scripting for one Windows-related project, and I have tried it out a few more times on Mac. It has quickly become one of my favorite tools for automation and scripting-taking on jobs that I would have otherwise tried to do with Node.js, Shortcuts, macOS Automator, or heaven forbid, Bash scripts. I get it now. PowerShell is great, even if you don't use it as your shell, and even if you're on Mac or Linux. ↫ Corbin Davenport I don't use the shell often enough on any of my main machines to have much of an idea about the strenghths and weaknesses of PowerShell compared to more traditional shells, but this is definitely not the first time I've heard a lot of praise for it from people otherwise knee-deep in the UNIX and traditional shell world. There really must be something to this, and since PowerShell is also available on Linux and macOS, it's pretty straightforward to give it a go without having to deal with Windows.

22 Oct 2026 11:19pm GMT

Earlier this year, Garmin closed its Connect API developer program because it was being flooded with "AI"-generated applications to the point it couldn't handle them anymore. What made it worse was that half of the applications were never actually used, not even once. It also didn't help that Garmin treated every single application to the program the same way, whether it was from a hobbyist just wanting access to their own data, to a massive corporation developing a popular service used by god knows how many people. Today, the company has relaunched the program, and it's been considerably overhauled. While hobbyist use of the API is going to be free - which is way better than it was before - once you hit a thousand users, you're going to have to start paying. Still, Garmin's shift here towards charging for API access will set a dangerous precedent for the industry. Especially for a company that bills itself as a (or the?) premium sports hardware provider. On the flip side, there's simply no ignoring the flood of mostly AI apps that take up resources at Garmin and elsewhere to support. Heck, my inbox is flooded with these apps daily requesting reviews. It sounds like when Garmin shut off access to the API last spring, they were seeing inbound API requests at a daily scale that they'd previously only seen over a period of weeks. Simply put, there's no good answer. ↫ Ray Maker at DC Rainmaker The excesses of the easy availability of "AI" code generation impacts the entire industry. At least one good thing has come out of this: hobbyists can now access the Connect API developer program much easier than before.

22 Oct 2026 10:16pm GMT

If you've ever written C (or c++) on a mac, you'll know that the so-called gcc is just clang in disguise. Most people (fairly) assume that this is just an alias, but this is not true! It's a binary! Now, what is this binary? I naively assumed that it would just be shelling out to clang but it turns out the answer is more interesting than that. ↫ juliethefoxcoon It's all smoke and mirrors.

22 Oct 2026 9:58pm 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