Saturday, November 07
Daily News Stuff 7 November 2026
Time Is A Flat Rat Edition
Time Is A Flat Rat Edition
Tech News
- With the end of support of Intel Macinti, the number of MacOS-like varieties of Linux is rapidly increasing. (The Register)
Because it coincided with the rise of AI development tools and independent creators working on the "they can't sue all of us" philosophy quickly reskinning Linux to look and feel like MacOS but without the flaws. (Replacing them with different flaws, I'm sure.)
- And while the Hackintosh - running MacOS on regular PC hardware - died with Apple's move to its own Arm-based architecture that too is making a return now that regular PCs are available running Arm chips. (Yoon's Blog)
Less appealing now though with the memory plague making comparable hardware just as expensive as an actual Macintosh.
- Though if you're more of a classicist you can run something that looks and feels like the original MacOS on a Raspberry Pi Pico. (Free Hackers)
Not the now expensive Raspberry Pi 5, but the tiny $5 microcontroller.
And on the "they can't sue all of us" it includes the classic Apple menu icon. That's just asking for trouble.
Tech News
- Speaking of Apple Applebees left its database password in its Android app, installed by over a million people. (Tech Crunch)
I am sometimes amazed that our species has survived this long.
- Nagare labs is making progress on the impossible: DRAM that runs more like SRAM. (Tom's Hardware)
The commodity dynamic memory (DRAM) found in every computer - except for example the Raspberry Pi Pico - is a tradeoff: It's much cheaper than static memory and much smaller, but it's slow and it leaks - it needs to be constantly refreshed where the contents are read and written back. That's invisible these days but if you look at older systems it was very obvious; the Zilog Z80 CPU had a and integrated refresh counter and the Commodore Amiga had refresh slots baked in to the DMA allocation.
It looks like this still needs to be refreshed, but it solves a different leak: With conventional DRAM every read erases the data and the memory chip also has to write it back afterwards.
Long story short, the new memory uses two transistors per bit instead of one for DRAM or two for SRAM, is five times denser than SRAM, and fourteen times faster than DRAM. Only problem remaining is that it doesn't exist outside of lab samples yet.
- Six more Nvidia GPUs with a total value of $11 million have been stolen in transit from a third-world country, this time California. (WCCFTech)
The cards left Oakland bound for Texas but only made it as far as San Bernardino County before the entire truck was abducted by aliens.
- Some less bleak political news closer to home: The ruling Labor (Maoist) government at the heart of the rot down under, my birth state of Victoria, is now polling third ahead of state elections on the 28th.
The Greens (Khmer Vert) are polling fourth.
First are the Liberals (Conservative Squish), with second place going to One Nation (Conservative Non-Squish).
To give you an idea of how unpopular Labor has made themselves, they are polling at 22% in their own stronghold. And thanks to preferential voting (used by Victorian state and Australian federal elections) a situation where Labor loses numerically but wins a majority of seats as happened in the UK is all but impossible.
I hope this trend spreads.
- Repotted all 29 seedlings in coconut fiber propagation pots so I can just pop them in the ground.
Now in the process of digging out the ground to plant them in. It's hard clay riddled with rocks and roots and builder's debris, so this is a lot of work. I planted one boronia this morning to replace the one that didn't make it through the winter, leaving 42 plants in various sizes of pot sitting by the walkway to my front door.
This is what the half-ton of gardeny stuff is for - soil improvement so I can grow something other than tussock grass and weeds, and mulch so that the tussock grass and weeds don't grow back.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: The children yearn for the mines.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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