Category Archives: News

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John C. Dvorak has died

Source: Hacker News

Article note: He was the absolute prototype of the curmudgeon technologist.
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Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yeah. I'm pretty technical along both the "academic CS" and "practical IT" axes, and I have discomfort reasoning about passkeys. For most users, it just sounds like "I lost my phone or got my Microsoft/Google/Apple account banned, and now I'm locked out of everything" in waiting. Like many folks, I suspect it's primarily a "Get users locked in to vendor ecosystems" thing.
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Automated Pressure Advance Using a Bed-Leveling Sensor

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: This is super compelling shit that I'm excited to see appear in klipper (even though I'm not running a hotend with an FSR). The direct-probing with an FSR in the heat break thing is already good (Hank's Kobra X punches way above it's price and bedslinger-ness), and clearly you should/can be able to infer quite a bit about flow dynamics from one.

One of the most crucial aspects of FDM 3D printing is ensuring sufficient material is extruded. Determining the right flow rate can be done manually, but some printers these days automatically perform this adjustment, which is very convenient. [Stefan] of CNC Kitchen investigates how to add similar functionality using existing bed-leveling sensors.

A major complication with extrusion in FDM printers is that the flow rate has to fit the printing speed. However, you can’t just immediately speed up or reduce the flow rate, as the melting filament is flexible and thus acts like a spring, especially as the extruder is exerting significant force on the filament, which adds compression.

The moment you reduce or increase the speed of the nozzle, you can get over- or under-extrusion, but the delayed response by the extruded filament means that you have to adjust for this change in advance. Ergo, the name ‘pressure advance’, also known as the K-value. Obviously, this is a parameter that differs with each material, printer, and other factors, so a direct measurement is always the best.

In the Bambu Lab X1 FDM printer, a Lidar scanner was used to scan various test patterns to automatically determine the optimal setting. This was later moved to the purge section of the extruder in newer Bambu Lab printers. On other FDM printers, the only available sensor in that area is typically the pressure sensor for bed leveling. Could this sensor make a similar measurement?

This wasn’t just an idle thought, but was inspired by the Snapmaker U1, which runs open-source Klipper, with tantalizing glimpses of how it does pressure-advance sensing in its extruder. This extruder also only contains a load cell, as do some Prusa printers. These much more open printers thus provided a test bed for some experimentation.

With load cell data available, [Stefan] measured how various extrusion rates affect the load cell, which can then theoretically be correlated with the appropriate K-values for specific transitions. He created a calibration tool for a range of Prusa printers that works with stock firmware, though this is definitely still a work in progress. There are also a couple of similar open-source projects, such as this Auto PA Calibration project by [Mark].

Overall, K-value presets tend to work pretty well, but adding a pressure-advance calibration feature to existing FDM printers is definitely an interesting idea. There’s also the prospect of lateral sensing using this same bed-leveling sensor, which could allow the printer to sense much more than just the bed.

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Building an Arch Linux Aarch64 Port for Holo Core

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Nifty. I played with rolling my own i586 Arch builds (off of someone elses' bootstrap) back in ~2004, and with archlinuxarm, and the issues all sound familiar but like they've extended and multipled. It's fussy, but ...frankly I'd almost rather port normal distro tooling than spend time trying to get Yocto set up for a even slightly peculiar target.
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Plasma 6.7.3 Complete Changelog

Source: Published articles

Bug 522075 has been causing JUST enough load and thus heat on my i7-1365U to be annoying (warm back, spinning fans). That machine runs Neon so it got 6.7.3 this morning, it looks like the two relevant patches sufficently solved/mitigated it. Many thanks to Xaver and Vlad.

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Google and Epic give up fighting — third-party Android app stores are coming next week

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Now that they've arranged the "Developer Verification" scheme to give them control of distribution on the platform regardless of where files are distributed through, capitulation on the last fight that no longer matters.
Photo illustration of the Sundar Pichai and Tim Sweeney Epic Games logo and Google logo inside of a Google Play logo.

Epic Games and Google have just jointly withdrawn their attempt to retroactively settle the lawsuit that's changing how Android app stores work in the United States - and that means Google will be forced to carry rival app stores inside of its own. In fact, Google tells the court, it's ready to begin carrying third-party app stores on Wednesday, July 22nd. Does that mean it's time for Microsoft to launch an Xbox game store on Android?

In October 2024, Judge James Donato originally agreed that forcing Google to carry rival Android app stores within its own Google Play store for several years, and forcing it to share its own entire catalog of …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Microsoft’s Secure Boot has been broken for a decade and no one noticed until now

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: It has always been bullshit to technologically and FUD harass things-not-Microsoft on PC-like platforms, not an actual security feature. If they ever actually revoke issued keys, they brick deployed systems and get blowback.

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device's motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

Threat extends to Windows and Linux users

The threat extends to Windows and Linux users alike, since the shim can be installed on devices running both operating systems. From there, an attacker can subvert the mandated chain of digitally signed firmware to install malicious firmware that loads early in the boot process and persists after either the OS is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.

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Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I hate to "please do extra work I'm not volunteering to do" this, but I'm curious how compositors other than kwin_wayland (tested here, also my usual environment lately for this and other reasons) do. The compositor to compositor platform inconsistency in wayland is still a nuisance.
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Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh boy, fingerprinting that will get human Linux users treated like scrapers, being called out by a scraper vendor. AI fuckers continuing to ruin everything.
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Distributed System Is Slower Than a Laptop

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I love how people periodically figure this out. In the "Big Data" boom era it was usually "Laptop with basic unix utility pipeline beats hadoop cluster" but the principle is the same: Distributed systems are fucking expensive, deeply fiddly methods of last resort when you can't do what you need any other way, and are willing to pay for massive amounts of hardware and engineering. Getting local parallelism right is hard enough. I've spent plenty of time helping wrangle problems on to clusters, and increasingly my impulse is "probably don't" for any problem that isn't inherently embarrassingly parallel (island GA, mote carlo trials, etc.)
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