Leftovers

• Rob Knight ☛ Zines Resources • Robb Knight

  When I posted about my zine I mentioned being surprised that there wasn't any tools for showing zines online like a web component or similar. Turns out there is, web search is just shit now.

• Rowan Merewood ☛ Zine machine!

  Zines are little, self-produced publications with a history going back to the 1920s. People used zines to share the content they were passionate about with others and over the years that's been everything from sci-fi, feminism, and rock music. As access to photocopiers and later printers became more widespread, creating a zine was an easy option for almost anyone.

• Jim Grey ☛ Not everything I've ever published online needs to last

  I’ve been thinking lately about what happens to my online writing and photographs after I die. To be clear, at my current age I expect to last at least another 20 years. But I’ve entered the time of life where my death isn’t an abstract someday — I can see it from here.

  I’m not kidding myself that my work is so important that it must go into the National Archives or the Library of Congress. But my children and grandchildren might enjoy a connection to me through my work. And I have done some original research into, and exploration of, historic roads that someone is likely to find valuable after I’m gone.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] How animals prepare for war

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] What it’s like to discover an ancient Egyptian tomb – and the race against time to preserve it

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] Why do some people feel life is so unfair? Understanding this may help explain conspiracy beliefs

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] Can DNA from cave paintings tell us who the artists were?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] How a cosmic coincidence gives Earth its ‘perfect’ solar eclipses

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-07 [Older] Part of a rocket crashed into the Moon – why this could threaten future lunar bases

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-07 [Older] The psychology of overconfidence: why excessive self-belief is often a successful strategy in life

  • Hackaday ☛ Radio Shack Toy Returns To Life

    If you missed these, they were a host of real electronic components with springs connected to the leads. To make a circuit, you bend the spring over, insert a wire, and let go of the spring. By changing the wiring, you could make radios, alarms, computer circuits, and more

  • Hackaday ☛ Turning Energy Drinks Into Rocket Fuel

    Removing the moisture from the energy drink was the obvious first step, as water and rocket fuel aren’t a great mix. Adding and mixing potassium nitrate to the resulting thick syrup created the fuel-oxidizer mixture, also known as rocket fuel. This did take a detour involving removing the carbonation using a vacuum chamber, as CO2 and fire do not really like each other either.

  • John D Cook ☛ Probability of correcting errors

    Error correcting codes are most simply described in terms of the errors they can certainly correct. For example, the Hadamard code used for the Mariner 9 probe to Mars encoded each 6-bit pixel to a 32-bit codeword in such a way that the original pixel could be recovered if no more than 7 bits were corrupted in transit.

    What is the probability that a pixel could be repaired if corrupted? That depends on your probability model. We will assume that the probability of each bit being flipped is p and that errors are independent.

  • John D Cook ☛ Compressing a Hadamard matrix

    A Hadamard matrix is an orthogonal matrix with all entries equal to ±1. Jacques Hadamard conjectured that there exist Hadamard matrices of order 4n for all positive integers n. It’s necessary that the order be divisible by 4, and Hadamard conjectured that this is sufficient [1].

• Career/Education

  • Robert Birming ☛ What's stopping you?

    One of the guys on the staff told me that it's his last full-time shift today. When I asked him why, he told me he wants to commit full-time to making music. Even if it's not enough to make a living off yet, and maybe never will be, he wants to give it a shot.

    I love hearing stories like that. People following their heart, even if there's no guarantee that they will succeed. And when you think about it, what guarantees do we really have in life?

  • Lalit Maganti ☛ Responsibility Is Taken Before It Is Given

    The problem is that they are treating responsibility as a complete, self-contained opportunity that someone must give them first. In my experience, they’ve got it the wrong way round: responsibility is demonstrated before it is formally given.

• Hardware

  • [Old] Hackaday ☛ Choosing the Right Sensors

    We need to make the right choices by considering the global availability and cost of each sensor to make sure that others will be able to get them to replicate/modify the device. These are what I've been able to come up with. Datasheets of all these sensors will be available at the file section of this project.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Hackaday ☛ Peeling Fruit With The Power Of Steam

    This particular example of steam-powered culinary happenings is inspired by industrial potato-peeling machines. By adding high-pressure, high-temperature steam to a pressure vessel with potatoes inside, heat can transfer more easily to the inside of the potatoes. Because the pressure is so high, however, the water in the skin won’t boil. This is fundamentally the same concept as a pressure cooker. However, what’s different is that instead of a pressure cooker’s slow release, these industrial peeling machines rely on explosive decompression, flash boiling the water underneath the potato’s skin. This rapidly expanding steam rips away the skin in a nice clean sheet.

    But, to [Stuff Made Here’s] disappointment, there were no videos of the process on the internet. But, fortunately for us, being an engineer of complicated machines means that there is one now that you can watch below.

  • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ On the boredom of going to the gym

    There. The dilemma. Give me one reason to go to the gym despite being certain I’ll be bored to death at every single session. Please, convince me that it’s great to go and that it’s enormously worth it.

  • Carlos Becker ☛ Old man goes to a Jiu Jitsu tournament

    Then, I decided: I’ll sign her up to learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. After all, it is the soft art, and it is supposed to work against people bigger than you. And then it hit me: how can I expect her to go and train every other day, and learn it, if I’m not walking the walk myself?

    So I, a 35-year-old man, with 2 bad knees, 2 bad elbows, and not a lot of free time, went into a school and signed up.

    The next Monday, 6AM, I was there.

  • NPR ☛ Is there a summer COVID-19 surge this year? Yep, it's ramping up again

    But remember COVID-19? It may not be surprising that many people may have almost forgotten about COVID. Unfortunately, COVID hasn't forgotten about us.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • CEO who fired 900 workers on Zoom is fighting to take his job back

    Vishal Garg, the founder and former chief executive of Better Home & Finance who drew widespread attention after dismissing roughly 900 employees during a Zoom call just before Christmas in 2021, is now attempting to regain control of the mortgage company he established.

    Garg was removed as CEO on August 3, only days after Daniel Lewis joined Better’s board and subsequently replaced him. Now Garg says he believes the board made a mistake and that Lewis was not transparent about his intentions when the two worked together.

  • Macworld ☛ Apple just declared the one-time 'future of the smartphone' obsolete

    On the eve of its 9th anniversary, the iPhone X is now officially relegated to the junk drawer.

  • Paul ☛ Link penalties on social media platforms

    Although I’ve known for a while that social platforms make posts with links in them less visible, I didn’t know until recently just how much they did it. So, here’s a run down of how much different platforms penalise links and how you can work with it.

    Aside from link penalties, a good general rule of thumb is to prioritise useful content that works on the platform itself first. Links perform best when used with genuinely useful posts that otherwise keep the users on the platform.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Stopping a systemd service when a filesystem is unmounted

    Suppose, hypothetically, that you have a service that works on stuff in a mounted filesystem and will malfunction if that filesystem goes away (for example, a media server that's working from a NAS-mounted drive). You'd like to immediately stop the service if the (remote) filesystem goes away for any reason so the service won't freak out (or has minimal chances of doing so). It's possible to do this in systemd but it's not quite obvious what you need to do and what the drawbacks are.

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Warner Bros Quickly Deletes Behind-the-Scenes Video That Seems to Show Use of AI Slop During "Supergirl" Production

      “Supergirl” just can’t flop in peace.

      The 2026 film is one of the biggest box office failures of the year and is the DC franchise’s lowest grossing film since Catwoman (2004).

      And now it’s the subject of yet another controversy: the apparent use of AI slop during its production.

    • Futurism ☛ Influencer Melts Down That People Didn't Like Her Being a Paid Shill for OpenAI

      Considering how radioactive the subject of AI and the tech companies leading the construction of extremely environmentally damaging data centers has become lately, the backlash to the thinly-veiled attempt to greenwash the tech was unsurprisingly fierce.

    • Wired ☛ Tech Visionary Says the Big AI Labs Don’t Get What People Want

      Tim O’Reilly’s yardstick for measuring the worth of a company, person, or society has long been create more value than you capture. It’s no surprise that O’Reilly—publisher, internet pioneer, VC, conference organizer, and dispenser of tech wisdom—is applying that metric to the way people design and use AI. Specifically, he’s pushing for a future where open-source AI is an elixir for the masses. He worries that, like Microsoft in the 1990s, today’s hyperscalers are trying to lock users into their products. So he is promoting efforts to open-source AI technology—not only making critical technical details such as neural-net weights accessible, but unlocking the whole stack of an AI system, giving control to designers and users.

  • Social Control Media

    • Owl Owl OÜ ☛ ActivityPub Won by Being Boring

      At FediForum 2026, Evan Prodromou gave a talk with the kind of title only a protocol co-author can get away with: “How To Bullshit Your Way Through a Conversation about ActivityPub.”

      The joke worked because the speaker had no need to bluff. Prodromou is one of the five authors listed on the W3C ActivityPub Recommendation and the author of O’Reilly’s ActivityPub book. The self-deprecating frame covered an honest architecture talk about why the Fediverse works at all.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CBC ☛ A Canadian payment giant is being sold to U.S. private equity. Is your digital privacy at risk?

      However, some industry analysts are raising concerns the move could have negative repercussions for Canada's digital sovereignty amid the country's ongoing trade war with the U.S.

    • Futurism ☛ McDonald's Has Hundreds of Pages of Intel on Its Repeat Customers, and You Can Get a Copy of Yours

      For most people, the mental calculation to grab a meal from McDonald’s is pretty simple: it’s relatively cheap, fast, and goes down easy, even if it doesn’t always feel so good afterward. For McDonald’s, however, the question of how to keep a customer coming back is far more complicated — apparently requiring an expansive web of corporate surveillance.

    • Futurism ☛ Man Wearing Pervert Glasses Films Himself Harassing Famous Female Comedian in the Middle of TV Shoot

      It’s become such a contentious issue that a German nonprofit filed a criminal complaint over privacy concerns. Just this week, England and Wales banned the glasses from courts.

      In a particularly egregious example of the kind of harassment the glasses are enabling, a user who goes by Mark filmed himself accosting British comedian Diane Morgan, widely known as the fictional documentarian Philomena Cunk, during a TV shoot on Hollywood’s iconic Walk of Fame.

    • Engadget ☛ Surprise, Surprise: CBP Officers Are Misusing Surveillance Tech

      The FOIA files, ranging from 2009 to 20222, show a number of troubling incidents. A CBP officer is alleged to have used a government database to contact a flight attendant, and another was accused of using data from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. One employee provided border-crossing data to someone involved in a divorce, and another abused internal policies by tracking coworkers cellphones with ad-tech-derived location data.

      Of 300 incidents tracked by Wired, 138 were referred to CBP management and 78 assigned to criminal investigators, while 43 others weren't investigated. Many of the claims were handled internally or put under the category of minor misconduct, but 21 were withheld due to potential law-enforcement proceedings that suggest criminal misconduct were involved.

  • Confidentiality

    • [Old] Citizen Lab ☛ Move Fast and Roll Your Own Crypto: A Quick Look at the Confidentiality of Zoom Meetings

      This report examines the encryption that protects meetings in the popular Zoom teleconference app. We find that Zoom has “rolled their own” encryption scheme, which has significant weaknesses. In addition, we identify potential areas of concern in Zoom’s infrastructure, including observing the transmission of meeting encryption keys to China.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Burkina Faso Orders Mandatory “Patriotic” Military Training for Journalists

    Burkina Faso has introduced mandatory military-style “patriotic” training for journalists working in both public and private media, as the government seeks to mobilize society against the country’s jihadist insurgency.

  • Votebeat ☛ Hamtramck, Michigan, will count 37 ballots from 2025 mayoral election after new state Supreme Court decision

    The state Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal, meaning a Court of Appeals ruling to count the ballots stands.

  • New York Times ☛ Google Turns On Gemini A.I. for Students Using Its Classroom App

    Google turned on its Gemini chatbot this week for some elementary through high school students using its popular Classroom app for schools, escalating a race among U.S. tech giants to train students on their artificial intelligence tools.

• Environment

  • Atlantic Council ☛ The Danube is running dry, and taking Central Europe’s power supply with it

    The region built its energy security around interconnection, but drought is exposing the flaw: neighbors can’t rescue each other when the same river is straining everyone at once.

  • CBC ☛ U.S. company's 'sunlight on demand' project worries N.B. astronomers

    “It would basically kill ground-based astronomy and backyard stargazing, which is already in trouble from the huge number of satellites that have been launched — and they're not nearly as bright as these.”

  • Omicron Limited ☛ 'Starwashing': How space companies use the greenwashing playbook while causing environmental damage

    From launchpads to low Earth orbit and beyond, space companies and their affiliates are deploying a familiar marketing tactic—with a new twist. In a space economy projected to reach US$1.8 trillion by 2035, they sell space exploration narratives by appealing to a desire to expand humankind beyond Earth—while downplaying or omitting the negative repercussions for Earth and the space environment. Welcome to the age of starwashing.

  • Wired ☛ The Real Reason Data Center Gas Power Plants Are So Dirty

    Amazon’s Texas power plant is permitted to emit up to 33 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. The project will rely solely on simple cycle turbines, which mix fuel and air in a combustion chamber to create energy, letting off a significant amount of waste heat in the process. Combined cycle units, which are generally used at on-grid power plants, add an additional steam turbine component to capture the waste heat and turn it into more energy. That means they release fewer emissions for the same amount of energy.

  • Wired ☛ Puerto Rico Is Rationing Water. It Could’ve Avoided It by Harvesting Rainwater

    Abruña, who is also a fellow with the American Institute of Architects, estimates the island could gather 30 billion gallons of water a year if just 1 million households used rainwater collection technology. The average resident uses 62 gallons a day, amounting to just over 72 billion gallons of residential water use a year.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Why canned sardines vanished from store shelves

    Warm ocean water has disrupted the sardines' plankton food supply, making them harder to come by. Morocco supplies a large share of the canned sardines sold in North America and Europe, and some regional catches there are down by more than half.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Robert Birming ☛ Hedgehog Week

      In short: we humans are to blame. Our never-ending hunt for speed and simplicity, money and comfort. Making lives easier for ourselves, and a lot harder for others.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Protests May No Longer Be a Good Test of Public Opinion

    Public polls show Americans broadly disapprove of President Donald Trump’s war against Iran.

    Yet, six months into a war the Trump administration initially said would last only a matter of weeks, there have been few national protests of the scale seen for other major conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, the Iraq War and the war in Gaza.

  • Rob Knight ☛ Severe Alert Issued By Me: This Blog Post

    I posted about it then did some follow up posts but I don’t think I was able to capture what annoyed me so much about this properly so I’m trying again.

    If you go to the alerts website linked it says "You may get alerts about any type of life threatening emergency". "Don't light fires please" is not a life threatening emergency.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ How cooked is Gemini?

    I think this is being a bit overdramatic. It is true that there's been a good amount of executive shakeup and that the company has failed to release any semblance of a frontier model in all of 2026. That's an eon in this industry right now, but Google could come out with something extremely impressive any day now and change the narrative. How often has the narrative shifted over the past couple years of who was winning, who was losing, who was dead?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Mike Brock ☛ How to Publish a $1.43 Billion Bribe and Survive it

      All four pillars aim at the same thing, and Americans keep missing what it is. Post-truth propaganda persuades you “not into opinion but into inaction” — an extreme project of depoliticization. It asks only that you hold two minimal opinions about politics: that participating is for fools — “private freedom is good but public freedom is for idiots” — and that, on the back-of-the-napkin theory of truth, “who knows what, if anything, is true.” A citizenry holding those two opinions does not need to be convinced of anything else. It has already stood down.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • LRT ☛ Ministry moves to save Cold War-era underground printing press near Kaunas

    The underground printing press is located beneath a private property in the village of Saliai, in Kaunas district. A concealed entrance beneath a greenhouse leads to the underground facility.

  • Variety ☛ Would 'Trainspotting' Get Made Today? Film Execs Weigh In

    That was the conceit of a lively session hosted by Wendy Mitchell, with Picturehouse’s creative director Clare Binns, Killer Films’ Christine Vachon, Film4’s head of distribution and sales Stefanie Fahrion, BBC Film’s commissioning executive Alice Ojha and Casarotto’s Simon Renshaw asked to assess British classics as if they had just landed on their desks in 2026.

  • American Library Association ☛ ALA UN Delegation elevates libraries at the United Nations High-Level Political Forum 2026

    ALA presented the public program Libraries as Catalysts: Driving Equitable and Innovative Action, hosted in partnership with The New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. The program brought together international library leaders to explore how libraries advance the Sustainable Development Goals through equitable access to information, digital inclusion, innovation, education and community partnerships while strengthening collaboration among libraries, governments and civil society.

  • Index On Censorship ☛ Book bans: How can we prepare for the next 5 years? - Index on Censorship

    As book bans continue to escalate across the United States and signs of similar pressures emerge in the UK, what can librarians, publishers and free expression advocates do now to prepare for the years ahead? Ahead of Banned Books Week UK (4-10 October 2026), Index on Censorship and Pan Macmillan bring together leading voices from publishing and free expression for a timely transatlantic conversation on the future of the freedom to read.

    Rather than looking back, this conversation asks a more urgent question: what will the next five years demand of us, and how can we prepare?

  • Massachusetts ☛ Governor Healey Signs Freedom to Read Law Keeping Book Bans out of Massachusetts Schools and Libraries

    Governor Maura Healey today signed a new law protecting students' freedom to read and keeping book bans out of Massachusetts schools and public libraries. Signed at the Franklin Public Library, the oldest public library in the United States, the law establishes a fair, transparent process for reviewing library materials while strengthening protections for teachers and librarians.

  • 404 Media ☛ Man Arrested in Texas For Cussing at a County Meeting

    According to an arrest report obtained by 404 Media, Carrion is charged with two counts of disrupting a meeting or procession, a misdemeanor in the state of Texas. “On or about the 4th day of August 2026, in the county of Tarrant, state of Texas, [Carrion] did intentionally hinder an official proceeding [...] by noise or violent or tumultuous behavior,” the record said.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Journalism coalition calls on Brazilian Supreme Court to reaffirm source confidentiality protection

    “Like any other citizen, journalists are subject to the law and may be investigated for any crimes they have committed. However, it is unacceptable to reverse the investigative process and violate the constitutional right to source confidentiality in order to gather information and find evidence of illegal activities,” the statement notes.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • [Old] HyperAllergic ☛ The Gestural Feminism of Iranian Women

    In a recent act of defiance, Ahoo (Mahla) Daryaei, a doctoral student in French Literature at Azad University’s Science and Research branch in Tehran, protested the oppressive enforcement of mandatory hijab in Iran by stripping down to her underwear on campus. She had reportedly been harassed by members of the university's Basij paramilitary group — a faction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard — who allegedly tore her clothing for not fully complying with the Islamic dress code. In response, Daryaei removed her remaining clothes, sat on campus grounds, and walked around in her underwear, leaving passersby stunned. She was soon arrested and reportedly taken to a psychiatric hospital, a frequent strategy used by the regime against protesters. Footage of Daryaei’s bold gesture quickly spread across social media under the hashtag #GirlofScienceAndResearch (دختر_علوم_و_تحقیقات#), sparking both national and international dialogue about women’s rights in Iran.

  • New Republic ☛ ICE Agents Mock Army Wife They Tried to Deport

    Maisa Lopes Eliaser was mid-flight Wednesday with several other immigrants when agents received a call about her. She told the Associated Press that an ICE agent then asked her if she wanted to continue to Brazil or return to the U.S. Eliaser’s husband, Army Staff Sgt. Alexis Jaramillo, told the AP that they didn’t know who made the call, “but someone made the phone call, and then she came back.”

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • GoonHost ☛ We implemented the IPv8 Internet-Draft in the Linux Kernel, Musl Libc, and BGP

    Most network engineers would laugh this off as an April Fools RFC written by an enterprise architect on buzzword overdrive. But instead of just arguing on mailing lists, the team at goonhost.rocks decided to actually build the entire specification from scratch and test what happens when you deploy it across a distributed multi-AS network.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Michael Tsai ☛ TabControl Scam and the App Review Queue

    Arment ended up waiting on hold—listening to an odd choice of music—to talk to App Review, which I didn’t realize was an option. His Unforgetful app is now approved.

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • 404 Media ☛ Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party

        A new Meta patent published Thursday says a system, like its AI glasses, would use facial recognition to identify people, current a series of video clips, then provide you with a highlight reel of your night.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Our Culture Is Filled With Music With No Place for Musicians…

      Music is everywhere. It plays in stores, restaurants, gyms, offices, films, television shows, video games, podcasts, social posts, waiting rooms and elevators. It wakes us up, helps us work, sells us products, regulates our moods and fills every uncomfortable silence. We consume more music in more places, for more hours of the day, than any previous generation could have imagined.

      Yet the people making that music are increasingly treated as though they are incidental to the process.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Court Rejects Fair Use Claim, Orders YouTube to Unmask Anime Recap Channels

      A California federal court has ordered YouTube to unmask three popular South Korean creators of anime recap channels. The creators filed a motion to quash the DMCA subpoena, requested by Japanese publisher KADOKAWA, but the court rejected the fair use claim, which is now under appeal.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Bad Bunny Reggaeton Copyright Case Ruling Gets Second Look From Judge

      In the July ruling, the judge found that a jury must decide whether an estimated 1,800 reggaeton songs by more than 100 artists infringed the composition copyright held by Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson for the 1989 song “Fish Market.” The plaintiffs claim the song was the original source of reggaeton’s so-called dembow rhythm, the signature percussion pattern that helped define the genre.