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Rairii Boots Classic Mac OS 7.6 on a Real Nintendo Wii by Forking OpenBIOS for the Console's ArtX Chipset
Developer Rairii booted classic Mac OS 7.6 on Nintendo Wii hardware from an SD card in about 40 seconds, after forking OpenBIOS for the ArtX-designed chipsets in Nintendo's consoles and running Mac OS 9.2.2 in a modified Dolphin emulator.
OnePlus Ace 7 Pro Puts a Cooling Fan's Vents in the Camera Island and Drops the Ultrawide
OnePlus launched the Ace 7 Pro in China with a built-in fan that breathes through a 'Storm Island' intake beside the cameras, a 200MP main camera and 3.5x periscope telephoto, and no ultrawide lens, while the cheaper Ace 7 keeps the ultrawide.
Adafruit's $34.95 Metro ESP32-P4 Hydra Puts Raspberry Pi Display and Camera Connectors on an Arduino Uno-Shaped Board
Adafruit's Metro ESP32-P4 Hydra routes the ESP32-P4's two-lane MIPI display and camera buses to 22-pin connectors that take Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 panels and Zero cameras, on a board laid out like an Arduino Uno.
Google Chrome's Enhanced Autofill Now Pulls Order Numbers and Flight Bookings From Your Gmail Into Web Forms
Google is rolling out a Chrome enhanced autofill that uses Gemini with Personal Intelligence to suggest order numbers, tracking information and flight bookings from Gmail while you fill out forms, in the US on desktop, Android and iOS.
NixThis Turns Off Windows Ads and Nags When You Point Your Cursor at Them
NixThis, a portable Windows 10 and 11 app from Builtbybel, reads the screen element under your pointer through UI Automation, matches it to a filter list, and flips the registry value behind it, with an undo that restores the old value.
Reddit Will Test a Logged-In-Only Site Outside the US as Search Referrals Drop by More Than 1 Million a Week
In its third-quarter 2026 shareholder letter, Reddit said it will begin testing a logged-in-only experience in select markets outside the US this quarter, after search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week in October, and CEO Steve Huffman said most scraping of the site happens through logged-out users.
Rubin Observatory's Linking Code Found Possible Dwarf Planet 2026 ED138, and Its Author First Checked for a Bug
Search code Matthew Holman wrote with Kevin Napier picked 2026 ED138 out of Rubin Observatory's detections on October 13, a trans-Neptunian object the team puts at 600 to 1,500 km across, pending infrared follow-up.
SpaceX Buys Grain's Nationwide 800 MHz Airwaves, Reportedly for $8 Billion, So Starlink Can Reach Phones Indoors
SpaceX agreed to buy Grain Management's entire nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, up to 14 MHz of paired low-band spectrum, a deal the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg put at $8 billion and that still needs FCC approval.
tinyworldformer Runs AI-Dreamed Pac-Man, Breakout and Doom-Lite on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, and Its Dream-Trained Player Scored 210 in a Game That Tops Out at 56
The open-source tinyworldformer runs two tiny neural networks on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, one generating each game frame and one playing it, and agents trained only inside that dream scored 210 where the real game tops out at 56.
Walmart Cancels Zelda 40th Anniversary Switch 2 Pre-Orders the Day Before Delivery, While Its Site Shows the Console at $700
Buyers who pre-ordered Nintendo's $519.99 Zelda 40th Anniversary Switch 2 from Walmart got cancellation emails a day before it was due, customer service told them Walmart had oversold, and the listing now shows the console at $700.
Windows Vista Dropped Space Cadet Pinball Because Its 64-Bit Port Let the Ball Fall Straight Through the Plunger
Microsoft's Raymond Chen says Pinball left Windows after XP because the 64-bit build's collision detection broke, the ball fell through the table, and nobody could find the collision code in the uncommented, licensed source.
Exin Therapeutics' CEO Says an AI Agent Picked the Gene Therapy and Brain Coordinates for a Mouse Surgery, Then Wouldn't Let Him Override It
Gabriel Ocana-Santero says his startup's agent chose an epilepsy treatment from 19 candidates, steered a motorized rig to inject it into a mouse's brain, and refused to retry a blocked move even when he pushed it to.
Core 4 Solutions Lists a $59.7 Million AI Cluster on eBay With 9,600 Nvidia A100s and $50 Overnight Shipping
A Minnesota hardware reseller put 300 racks of decommissioned hyperscaler servers on eBay for $59.7 million or best offer, with free FedEx Ground, $25 two-day and $50 overnight shipping, no returns and a 30-day warranty.
Arduboy Maker Kevin Bates' $149 Digital Candle Generates Its Flicker With a 3,545-Parameter Neural Network on 144 LEDs
The Digital Candle is a 10-inch circuit board with a 9 × 16 grid of amber LEDs driven by an ESP32-S3 running a tiny model trained on phone footage of one real candle, generated on the board with the radios off. It sells for $149 from Arduboy's shop.
Jon Postel Reserved All 16 Million 127 Addresses in 1981, Two Years Before Anyone Chose 127.0.0.1 for Loopback
RFC 790 marked network 127 reserved with no stated purpose; Berkeley Unix picked 127.0.0.1 in 1983, RFC 990 made 127 loopback in 1986, and a 2025 draft proposed giving most of it back.
LattePanda Sigma 2 Lets Its Intel Arc GPU Claim 59GB of 64GB Memory, on a $2,599 Board the Size of the Original Sigma
DFRobot's LattePanda Sigma 2 pairs an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H with 64GB of LPDDR5X, two 10Gb Ethernet ports and a 1TB SSD that boots Ubuntu with a local Qwen model already served over an OpenAI-compatible API. Pre-orders are $2,599 before the price rises to $2,799.
LILYGO's $150 T-Display K230 Runs Linux on RISC-V With LoRa Built In, and Its Snap-On Keyboard Adds LTE-M and GPS
LILYGO's T-Display K230 puts a Kendryte K230 RISC-V chip, 1GB of RAM, a 4.1-inch AMOLED, LoRa, Wi-Fi, Ethernet and HDMI in a pocket handheld, with an optional keyboard base that holds two 21700 batteries and an nRF9151 cellular and GNSS radio. The kit is about $150 on LILYGO's store.
nx2android Turns Nintendo Switch Games You Already Own Into Native Android Apps, With No Emulator Running
A free Windows tool takes your own Switch game dumps and your own console keys, rewrites the game's arm64 code to run directly on an Android phone, and hands back an APK; it needs an Adreno or Xclipse GPU.
OpenBot Turns an Android Phone Into the Brain of a $50 Robot Car
OpenBot, an MIT-licensed project that began at Intel Labs, pairs a roughly $50 wheeled body and an Arduino with an Android phone that does the seeing, thinking and driving.
Origami Robotics' S1 Glove Reads 20 Finger Joints So Its Matching Robot Hand Can Copy Each One Directly
Origami Robotics built its S1 data glove with the same joint layout as its robot hand, so every finger angle a person makes becomes a target for the matching robot joint, and it says mass production has started.
Sheet, a Free Design App That Runs on Your Own Computer, Lets Claude, Codex and Cursor Edit the Same Canvas at Once
Sheet 1.2.0, an open-source desktop design canvas, runs a local MCP server that Claude, Codex, Cursor and opencode connect to, and now shows each agent as a cursor on the element it is changing.
SidecarTridge Tested All 1,831 Atari ST Hard-Disk Game Adaptations and Patched 209 to Run From a microSD Card
SidecarTridge started every hard-disk adaptation listed on 8bitchip.info from a GEMDOS drive, found 1,608 run unchanged, and rebuilt launchers so 209 of the 212 that failed now run from its cartridge's microSD card.
The First Unix Pipes Used > Instead of |, and Dennis Ritchie Said a Missing > Created a File Instead of Running the Command
Doug McIlroy pushed for pipes for years before they went into Unix in 1972. Ritchie's own history says the first notation reused the redirection arrows, and it lasted only a couple of months.
vphone-cli Boots iOS in a Mac VM Using Apple's Private Cloud Compute Research Machines
The open-source vphone-cli runs a virtual iPhone on Apple Silicon Macs through Apple's Virtualization.framework and the research VMs Apple built for Private Cloud Compute, once the host's SIP debugging restrictions are relaxed.
A 1928 Punch-Card Patent Switched From Round Holes to Oblong Ones So Closely Spaced Columns Wouldn't Tear
Clair D. Lake's patent for the Tabulating Machine Co. stretched each hole along the direction the card feeds, giving the reading brush more contact time and fitting 80 columns where 45 had been.
Causal Security's AI agent Cipher found four serious bugs in EPICS, the control software behind particle accelerators and ITER's fusion project, in 3 hours 49 minutes
Cipher had never seen EPICS Base before, found one critical and three high-severity memory bugs on its own, and needed one human instruction to go on to exploit testing; version 7.0.11 fixes all four.
Apple's M6 iMac Moves to 2.5Gb Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7, and the Cheapest Model Now Starts at $1,499
Apple's 24-inch iMac jumps from M4 to M6 with up to 12 CPU cores, 170GB/s memory bandwidth, 2.5Gb Ethernet and a faster SSD, while the $1,299 eight-core model disappears from the lineup.
Apple Made Lisa Programmers Report Weekly Lines of Code, So Bill Atkinson Made QuickDraw Six Times Faster and Wrote -2000
In early 1982 Lisa managers added a Friday form counting each engineer's lines of code, and Bill Atkinson filled in -2000 after a rewrite that cut code and sped up QuickDraw's regions almost sixfold.
A Botched Server Patch Stopped a University's Email at About 500 Miles, and the Speed of Light Set the Limit
Trey Harris's account of the 500-mile email: a SunOS upgrade quietly downgraded Sendmail, zeroed its connect timeout, and turned three milliseconds of light travel into a map radius.
The Coding Placeholder 'Foo' Started in a 1930s Fireman Comic Before MIT's Model Railroad Club Adopted It
RFC 3092 traces foo from Bill Holman's Smokey Stover comic strip through WWII radar slang and MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club to about 212 internet standards.
Creeper, the 'First Computer Virus,' Was a Worm, and Reaper, the Program Built to Kill It, Was a Worm Too
Ray Tomlinson says Bob Thomas's 1971 Creeper program hopped between cooperating TENEX machines as a resource-sharing demo, and the word 'virus' didn't exist for it until 1983.
Filee Converts Files Offline When You Drop Them on a Donut Menu That Opens at Your Cursor
Hold a modifier key, drag a file, and Filee pops a ring of only the formats that fit it. The MIT-licensed app converts images, PDFs, Office files, e-books, CAD and 3D models locally on Windows, macOS and Linux, and passed 17,000 GitHub stars in its first month.
This Halloween Skull Uses 24 GHz Radar to Track Three People Through Its Plastic Head, With No Camera
UK maker Dr Jon EA built a Raspberry Pi-powered skull whose radar sees through plastic, lights one LED per person in its eyes, and switches between asleep, watching and hunting.
A Homemade RISC-V CPU Runs DOOM on an FPGA, Sent to the PC at 64x32 Because the Serial Cable Was Too Slow
A retro console built on a DE0-Nano FPGA and a self-designed dual-issue RV32IM core renders DOOM at 35+ FPS, but a 921,600-baud UART turned full frames into a 1.4 FPS slideshow, so the output dropped to Chip-8's 64x32 for a steady 45 FPS.
Honor X8e 4G phone reuses August's X7e Plus, 108MP camera and Snapdragon 685 included, with 400mAh less battery
Honor quietly listed the X8e 4G in Azerbaijan with a 108MP camera, a 7,700mAh battery and 1080p video, and its spec sheet matches the X7e Plus from August except for a smaller battery.
Amazon's $79.99 Kindle Page Turn Cover Brings Back Physical Buttons, but Only on the New Signature Editions
Amazon's magnetic Kindle Page Turn Cover adds two page-turn buttons with no pairing or charging, and it works only with the 2026 Paperwhite Signature Edition and Colorsoft Signature Edition.
A Last-Minute Fuel-Valve Change Nobody Told the Software Team About Made Apollo 5's Guidance Computer Shut Down Its Own Moon-Lander Engine
On January 22, 1968, the first Lunar Module's descent engine ran about 4 seconds of a planned 39. Software engineer Don Eyles traced it to a valve change made shortly before flight, which slowed the thrust past what the software's delta-V monitor would wait for.
Linux Was Almost Named Freax Until the FTP Admin Who Hosted It Named the Folder Linux
Linus Torvalds thought 'Linux' sounded too egotistical and planned to ship his kernel as Freax, but Ari Lemke, who set up its directory on Finland's nic.funet.fi server, hated that name and filed it under 'linux' instead.
IEEE Spectrum's Hidden Lockbox Opens Only When You Trace a Secret Gesture With a Magnet Over an 8-by-8 Hall-Sensor Grid
Stephen Cass hid SparkFun's $100 magnetic imaging tile behind a carved panel, recorded a gesture made with a magnet stylus, and had a Teensy 4.1 swing a servo-driven bolt when the same gesture comes back. Any plain magnet won't do it.
'No Space Left on Device' With 50GB Free Means You're Out of Inodes, and df -i Shows It
An on-call engineer traced a Linux server's 'No space left on device' errors to inode exhaustion from over a million empty log files, while df -h still showed 50GB free.
Christine Peterson Coined "Open Source" in 1998, Then Let Todd Anderson Drop It Into a Meeting
The Open Source Initiative credits Foresight Institute's Christine Peterson with the term. Her own account says she kept quiet at the February 1998 meeting while Todd Anderson used it in passing and the room picked it up.
Printable Commodore 64 Keycaps Put PETSCII Graphics on Modern MX Keyboards, With a Font Traced From a Real C64
GitHub user szabadkai's open keycap set prints dark brown SA-profile caps with cream C64 legends and the PETSCII symbols on each letter's front, using a CC0 font he traced from photos of his own Commodore 64.
Rob Pike Says Unix's Hidden Dot Files Came From an ls Shortcut That Skipped Every Name Starting With a Period
To hide the . and .. directory entries, early Unix's ls skipped any name whose first character was a dot. Rob Pike calls the hidden file it created an unintended consequence and a mistake, and blames it for the hundred-odd config files in his home directory.
RoboParty's RP1 humanoid robot publishes its CAD, 14 circuit boards and wiring under an open hardware license, minus the joint-motor firmware
Shanghai's RoboParty put the mechanical design, PCB production files, harnesses and bill of materials for its 1.35-meter RP1 humanoid on GitHub, with no price or ship date yet.
Sdrtop Is a Rust Terminal Monitor That Reads Software Radios, Maps Wi-Fi Airtime and Decodes Pagers With No Audio
sdrtop, by GitHub user MusiThang, puts SDR hardware in a terminal pane: a Wi-Fi channel survey, an airtime view, a noise figure model and, as of version 0.7.0, a POCSAG pager decoder written from the ITU spec.
Sony's $85 See-Through PS5 Controllers Show the Insides, While the Matching $75 Console Covers Hide Them
The PS5 Prism Collection brings back late-'90s clear plastic in Flare Orange, Emerald Green and Graphite Gray. The DualSense shell is clear front and back; the console covers sit over the console's own inner body. Pre-orders open November 10, and it ships starting February 4, 2027.
Sudo Began on a VAX at SUNY Buffalo Around 1980 and Passed Through Several Teams Before Todd Miller Took It Public in 1994
The sudo project's own history traces the command from Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer's first version at Buffalo through Usenet, CU-Boulder and The Root Group to Todd C. Miller, who still maintains it.
VoiceStudio Clones, Designs and Dubs Voices in 646 Languages on Your Own Computer as an Open-Source ElevenLabs Alternative
Palash Debnath's AGPL app runs voice cloning, voice-from-a-description, video dubbing, dictation, transcription and audiobook narration locally on macOS, Windows and Linux, with phone previews, a local API and MCP. It works without a GPU, just slower.
Wi-Fi Stands for Nothing: 'Wireless Fidelity' Was a Tagline Its Own Founder Calls a Mistake, and the Name Nearly Lost to Trapeze
Wi-Fi Alliance founding member Phil Belanger has said Wi-Fi is a made-up brand name from Interbrand with no meaning, and that 'The Standard for Wireless Fidelity' was a short-lived tagline added because board members wanted an explanation.
Windows Drops Bluetooth Headphones to Mono Phone-Call Audio Whenever Any App Opens Their Microphone
Microsoft's driver documentation says Windows switches a Bluetooth headset from stereo A2DP to the mono Hands-Free Profile the moment an app opens the headset mic, so the fix is to keep apps off that mic.