Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Target The Best AA, And Take No Flak

  In this era of cheap lithium pouch cells, it might seem mildly anachronistic to build AA batteries into a project. There are enough valid reasons to do so, however, and enough legacy hardware that still takes AAs, that it’s worth spending some time deciding which batteries to use. Luckily for us, [Lumencraft] over on YouTube has done the legwork in the video embedded below, and even produced a handy-dandy spreadsheet.

• Science

  • New York Times ☛ Blue Origin Scrubs Launch of NASA’s ESCAPADE Mission to Mars

    The second flight of the orbital rocket from Jeff Bezos’s space company was halted by weather. The company may try again on Wednesday.

  • Science Alert ☛ James Watson, Central But Controversial DNA Pioneer, Dies at 97

    "Extraordinary contributions."

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Reveal a Chilling Glimpse of The Sun's Future Death

    Thirteen elements exposed in a cosmic crime scene.

  • Science Alert ☛ We May Finally Know The Purpose of 5,200 Mystery Holes in Peru

    The architects are not who we thought.

  • Science Alert ☛ We May Finally Understand Why Birds Burst Into Song at Dawn

    They've been waiting all night.

  • Science Alert ☛ Can Narcissism Be Treated? Here's What The Science Says

    It takes great care and patience.

  • Science Alert ☛ Dolphins Spotted Wearing Sea Sponge Hats to Try Woo The Ladies

    They think they're so handsome.

  • Science Alert ☛ FDA Recalls Common Blood Pressure Drug For Cancer-Causing Chemicals

    Here's what we know.

  • Science Alert ☛ Listening to Music Has a Surprising Impact on Dementia Risk, Study Shows

    Keep those tunes coming.

• Career/Education

  • The Straits Times ☛ Two teachers, one classroom: Malaysia’s plan to roll out ‘co-teaching’ sparks concern

    The will also be a new subject, Alam dan Manusia (Nature and Humanity), covering areas like science and music.

• Hardware

  • The Straits Times ☛ China grants exemptions to export curbs on Nexperia chips for civilian use

    The company makes basic chips used in automotive electrical systems.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ EU says China confirms Nexperia chip export resumptions

    The European Commission said Saturday that Chinese authorities had confirmed a partial resumption of Nexperia chips, easing a blockage that has alarmed carmakers. The dispute erupted in September when the Dutch government effectively took control of Nexperia, which is based in the Netherlands but whose parent company is China’s Wingtech.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Laid-off defective chip maker Intel employee allegedly steals 'Top Secret' files, then disappears — ex-engineer downloaded 18,000 files before vanishing

    A former defective chip maker Intel software engineer who spent over a decade with the company allegedly stole several thousand documents, including confidential ones, after he was laid off.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Hard drives on backorder for two years as Hey Hi (AI) data centers trigger HDD shortage — delays forcing rapid transition to QLC SSDs

    Artificial intelligence has taken yet another victim. After GPUs and memory, storage is now facing a shortage as well, at least in the enterprise space. Production capacity for nearline storage, fueled by high-capacity server HDDs, is booked for the next two years. Cloud providers are switching to QLC NAND to avoid the lead times.

  • Hackaday ☛ Mesmerizing Marble Runs From Procedural Generation

    There are few things that can keep a certain kind of mechanically-inclined mind entranced as well as a marble run, and few structures that look as interestingly organic as procedurally-generated designs – combine the two and you get [Will Morrison]’s Marble Fountain.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ This week in 1982, Compaq announced the first true I.C.B.M. PC clone — it was portable, too, as long as you were comfortable lugging 28 pounds

    Compaq took the wraps off its first product in November 1982, revealing the computing world's first true I.C.B.M. PC clone, and an all-in-one portable model at that. It would take a year for I.C.B.M. to respond.

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: AMD Video Driver Issues

    I have had some graphics hangs on my HP z640 workstation which seem to always be after about 4 days of uptime, in one instance running Debian kernel 6.16.12+deb14+1 I got the following kernel error:

    kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* [CRTC:58:crtc-0] flip_done timed out

    Then I got the following errors from kwin_wayland:

    kwin_wayland_wrapper[19598]: kwin_wayland_drm: Pageflip timed out! This is a bug in the amdgpu kernel driver
    kwin_wayland_wrapper[19598]: kwin_wayland_drm: Please report this at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues
    kwin_wayland_wrapper[19598]: kwin_wayland_drm: With the output of 'sudo dmesg' and 'journalctl --user-unit plasma-kwin_wayland --boot 0'

    In another instance running Debian kernel 6.12.48+deb13 I got the kernel errors at the bottom of the post (not in the RSS feed).

  • Hackaday ☛ Concrete Lathe Turns Metal

    Full disclosure. If you want a lathe capable of turning metal stock, you probably should just buy one. But what fun is that? You can do like [kachurovskiy] and build one with your 3D printer. If you are chuckling, thinking you can’t make 3D printed parts sturdy enough, you aren’t exactly wrong. [Kachurovskiy’s] trick is to 3D print forms and then cast the solid parts in concrete. The result looks great, and we don’t doubt his claim that it “can surpass many comparable lathes in rigidity and features.”

  • Hackaday ☛ 2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Dawg Gone LED Tester

    The Hackaday 2025 Component Abuse Challenge is all about abusing electronic components in the service of making them do things they were never intended to. It’s not the 2025 Food Abuse Challenge, so in the case of [Ian Dunn]’s hot dog pressed into service as an LED tester, we’ll take the ‘dawg to be a component in its own right. And by any measure, it’s being abused!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Say They’ve Figured Out a Way to Reprogram the Pancreas to Produce GLP-1s Without Ozempic

    "It outperformed semaglutide."

  • France24 ☛ Gaza's streets overwhelmed by waste causing a growing public heath crisis

    The October Peace Plan allowed those who had survived displacement from cities in Gaza to return home. In the heavily bombarded areas of Khan Younis and Gaza City, however, they now face a new challenge: a growing public health crisis caused by the collapse of waste disposal infrastructure. As garbage accumulates, so too do communicable diseases. Simon Moritz reports.

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Just Found Something Fascinating About How Women Dirty Talk

    Positive affirmations are good for more than your self-confidence.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Jail for South Korea cabby who extorted drunk passengers with fake vomit scam

    He extorted 150 million won (S$135,000) from 160 intoxicated passengers after they had fallen asleep.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia group wants durian, the king of fruits, to get rightful crown

    Any decision to name it the national fruit will require thorough consideration by various government agencies.

  • Lee Yingtong Li ☛ Ultrasound-guided peripheral IV cannulation in paediatrics

    This post discusses practices and evidence regarding a number of aspects beyond the basics of ultrasound-guided peripheral intravenous cannulation. Most principles are applicable to adults as well, but some discussion will be directed towards paediatric-specific issues.

    Preliminaries

    In regards to theoretics, review the physics of medical ultrasound, the sonographic characteristics of veins, arteries, nerves and thrombus, and common ultrasound artifacts. To familiarise yourself with practical aspects of point-of-care ultrasound, review the ‘knobology’ of your ultrasound machine (presets, gain, depth, middle marker and colour Doppler), and terminology of ultrasound transducer movements (sweeping, sliding, fanning, rocking, rotation, compression).

    There are many high-quality resources discussing these fundamentals. The following is a selection of additional hidden gems: [,..]

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Judge Blasts Lawyer Caught Using Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Chaffbot in Divorce Court, Orders Him to Take Remedial Law Classes

      "In our view, this does not satisfy the requirement of competent representation."

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ TikTok’s ‘Millennial Baroness’ Starts to Branch Out

      Leonie von Ungern-Sternberg built a social control media following by talking about her family’s history — both good and bad. Now she’s ready to talk about the rest of her life.

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ Iraq: Early parliament polls begin with security forces and displaced people able to vote today

    Members of Iraq’s security forces, along with internally displaced citizens, began voting in the parliamentary elections on Sunday - the sixth since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Polls opened at 7 am for 1.3 million security personnel across 809 polling centers and will close at 6 pm before they are deployed to provide security on the main election day on Tuesday. France24 correspondent Lina Malers reports the latest from Baghdad, Iraq.

  • JURIST ☛ UN experts warn of growing use of ‘proxy actors’ in both war and peacetime

    The UN Working Group on the use of mercenaries warned Friday of the increasing use of mercenaries and private military and security companies (PMSCs) as “proxy actors” in both conflict and peacetime settings. These private actors reportedly facilitate violence and human rights violations worldwide.

  • JURIST ☛ Amnesty International warns of EU complicity with Tunisia’s abuses against migrants

    Amnesty International has accused Tunisian authorities of intensifying abuses against sub-Saharan migrants through violent policing, expulsions, and discriminatory laws that violate fundamental human rights. The organization said Tuesday that European governments risk complicity in these violations by continuing to fund Tunisia’s border operations.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea special prosecutor indicts ex-President Yoon on more charges

    The prosecutor said Yoon attempted to provoke military conflict between South and North Korea.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea rescuers recover 3rd body after collapse in power plant: Media reports

    Rescue efforts have been affected by the risk of a further collapse of the structure.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Influencer Iris Hsieh’s death: Malaysia police seek to extend Namewee’s remand in murder probe

    Wee Meng Chee, better known as Namewee, had earlier been remanded until Nov 10 after surrendering to the police on Nov 5.

  • The Straits Times ☛ 11 found dead in Thai-Malaysia search after Rohingya migrant boat sinks

    The status of another boat with about 230 passengers remains unclear, the authorities say.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Boat with Rohingya migrants sinks off Malaysia, hundreds missing

    About 300 began the journey, but only 10 survivors and one body have been recovered so far.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Influencer Iris Hsieh death: Malaysia police seek to extend Namewee’s remand in murder probe

    Wee Meng Chee, better known as Namewee, had earlier been remanded until Nov 10 after surrendering to the police on Nov 5.

  • The Strategist ☛ How to achieve real national resilience with industry policy

    Australia stands at a crossroads where ambition, fiscal restraint and strategic necessity intersect.

  • France24 ☛ UK to send defence equipment to help Belgium combat drone disruptions

    The UK will send defence experts and equipment to Belgium to help it respond to drone sightings over military bases and airports, the head of the armed fores said on Sunday. Moscow has denied any connection to the incidents as European defence leaders have said the drones could be a form of Russian "hybrid warfare".

  • NYPost ☛ Brooklyn dad says goodbye to hero son Itay Chen — the final slain Israeli-American hostage whose body was released by Hamas

    "Itay, I prayed for a different ending, but of all the possibilities that could have happened, of all the scenarios that raced through my mind, this was still the least terrible outcome of them all," dad Ruby Chen said in a statement.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • RFERL ☛ Wide Ukraine Electricity Outages As Crews Struggle To Repair Damage From Russian Attacks

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy kept up his call for additional Western pressure on the Kremlin as the death toll rose from the latest Russian attacks and as authorities struggled to restore power following the latest strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure

    • RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Prosecutors Arrest Battalion Officer After Russian Strike Killed 19 During Ceremony

      Ukrainian prosecutors ordered the arrest of a battalion commander after a Russian air strike hit troops at a ceremonial gathering, killing at least 19 people.

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine: Women are taking on roles that were done by men before the war

      As Ukraine is forced to send more and more soldiers to the frontline, women are taking on roles that were traditionally done by men. Daniel Quinlan reports.

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine scrambles for energy as Russian attacks put power generation at 'zero'

      Ukraine faced power cuts of up to 16 hours across most regions on Sunday operators said, as the country scrambles to make repairs after massive Russian attacks targeted its energy infrastructure. The national energy provider said the attacks had put its generating capacity down to "zero", adding to the risk of heating outages in the coming months. France24 correspondent Emmanuelle Chaze reports from Kharkiv.

    • New York Times ☛ Argentina Has Become an Escape for L.G.B.T.Q. Russians Escaping Putin’s Anti-Gay Crackdown

      Argentina has emerged as a surprisingly prominent destination for L.G.B.T.Q. Russians escaping President Vladimir V. Putin’s escalating anti-gay repression.

• Environment

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea to see cold snap before warm temperatures return Wednesday

    In Seoul, morning lows on Nov 10 could reach as low as 2 deg C, and as low as 3 deg C on Nov 11.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Straits Times ☛ China halts ban on export to US of dual-use metals, further easing tensions

      Imposed in December 2024, the ban will now be suspended until Nov 27, 2026.

    • Low Tech Mag ☛ How to Brew Solar Powered Coffee

      Image: The solar powered coffee maker that we build in this manual. Photo by Marie Verdeil.

      There are many different methods for making coffee, some more energy-efficient than others. However, there are no coffee makers that you can power with a small solar PV panel. For example, a commercially available 12V DC drip coffee maker requires a solar panel of 300 watts to brew coffee and keep it warm.

      The key to making a more energy-efficient coffee maker is insulation. Regardless of which conventional coffee maker you purchase, it will typically have little to no heat insulation, and most of the heat generated by the energy source will be wasted into the environment. Therefore, we made an insulated solar electric coffee maker ourselves.

      Our coffee maker operates on the same principles as our solar-powered oven and runs on a 100W solar panel. We embedded an Italian coffee maker—a moka pot—in a mortar slab, surrounded by cork insulation and a layer of ceramic tiles.

      We embedded an Italian coffee maker—a moka pot—in a mortar slab, surrounded by cork insulation and a layer of ceramic tiles.

    • The Straits Times ☛ As US allows South Korea to join nuclear sub club, how will this impact Japan and the region?

      It would enable the US and its allies to maintain their edge in the regional undersea balance of power, said an analyst.

    • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea launches search after reports 9 missing on capsized Chinese fishing boat

      The vessel was reported to have capsized about 150km off South Korea’s west coast.

    • Hackaday ☛ The Cardboard Airplane Saga Continues

      History is full of engineers making (or attempting to make) things out of the wrong stuff, from massive wooden aircraft to boats made of ice and sawdust. [PeterSripol] is attempting to make an ultralight aircraft out of a rather wrong material: cardboard. In the previous installment of the project, a pair of wings was fabricated. In this installment, the wings find their home on an equally mostly cardboard fuselage, complete with rudder and elevator. 

    • dwaves.de ☛ hardware how to: can USV protect PC workstation server computer NAS or router from power surge lightning (direct and indirect) strikes?

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Futurism ☛ Officials Outraged by Coral Reef Vandalized With Underwater Graffiti

      Shameful.

  • Overpopulation

    • RFERL ☛ Iranian Officials Plan Major Water Cuts For Tehran Amid Drought Crisis

      Iranian officials warned of cuts to drinking supplies for parts of Tehran, as the country grapples with a deepening water crisis caused by a yearslong drought.

    • France24 ☛ Iran: Dams almost empty in Mashhad, home to 4 million people

      Water levels at the dam reservoirs supplying Iran’s north-eastern city of Mashhad have plunged below 3%, according to reports, as the country suffers from severe water shortages. Director of the United Nations University for Water, Environment and Health, Kaveh Madani, gives his insights on this critical drought in Iran.

• Finance

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Bank of America sued over not paying workers for PC boot up time in proposed class action lawsuit

    Bank of America is facing a proposed class and collective action lawsuit that accuses the company of failing to pay hundreds of hourly workers for time spent booting their computers.

  • Futurism ☛ Genius Exec Says There Are Only Two Possibilities for AI: It’ll Collapse the Economy, or Make Everyone’s Job Obsolete

    More and more are saying it.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • France24 ☛ US shutdown hits 40th day, senators seeking breakthrough work through weekend

    The US government shutdown entered its 40th day Sunday with senators still deadlocked over a plan to reopen federal agencies. Disputes over health care subsidies stalled efforts to end a standoff that has halted paychecks, snarled air travel, and threatened food aid for millions.

  • The Strategist ☛ China’s reactive diplomacy shows maintenance beats momentum

    China’s sudden scramble to court Honduras before the country’s 30 November election shows how quickly China reacts when its influence is under threat.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • France24 ☛ BBC director resigns after row over Convicted Felon documentary edit

    The director general of Britain's BBC, Tim Davie, and the chief executive of news, Deborah Turness, have stepped down following criticism over bias at the corporation, including in the way it edited a speech by US President The Insurrectionist.

  • New York Times ☛ BBC Director Tim Davie and CEO Deborah Turness Quit Following Convicted Felon Documentary Turmoil

    The abrupt moves followed furor over claims that a documentary had misleadingly edited footage of Hell Toupée’s speech before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

  • JURIST ☛ Kenya cybercrime law sparks freedom of expression concerns

    Human Rights Watch warned on Thursday that Kenya’s cybercrime law amendments risk criminalizing legitimate online speech.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ TLNOG 2: Building network security skills in Timor-Leste

    TLNOG 2 will run from 19 to 21 November 2025 in Dili. The three-day event will feature hands-on workshops and conference sessions aimed at strengthening network security and operational skills across Timor-Leste’s growing Internet community.