Windows

First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel 42

According to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview build is the first to include the memory-safe programming language Rust. Thurrott reports: "If you're on the Win11 Insider ring, you're getting the first taste of Rust in the Windows kernel," Russinovich tweeted last night. It's not clear which Insider channel he is referring to, however.

Regardless, that that was quick: Microsoft only went public with its plans to replace parts of the Windows kernel with Rust code in mid-April at its BlueHat IL 2023 security conference in Israel. At that event, Microsoft vice president David Weston said that "we're using Rust on the operating system along with other constructs" as part of an "aggressive and meaningful pursuit of memory safety," a key source of exploits. And it's not just the Windows kernel. Microsoft is bringing Rust to its Pluton security processor as well.
Programming

Raspberry Pi Launches Online Code Editor to Help Kids Learn (tomshardware.com) 28

An anonymous reader shares this report from Tom's Hardware: When we think about Raspberry Pi, we normally picture single-board computers, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation was started to help kids learn about computers and it wants to help whether or not you own its hardware. The non-profit arm of Raspberry Pi this week released its new, browser-based code editor that's designed for young people (or any people) who are learning.

The Raspberry Pi Code Editor, which is considered to be in beta, is available to everyone for free right now at editor.raspberrypi.org. The editor is currently designed to work with Python only, but the organization says that support for other languages such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS is coming....

The Raspberry Pi Foundation already had a nice set of Python tutorials on its site, but it has adapted some of them to open sample code directly in the online editor....The Pi Foundation says that it plans to add a number of features to the Code Editor, including sharing and collaboration. The organization also plans to release the editor as an open-source project so anyone can modify it.

There's a pane showing your code's output when you click the "Run" button (plus a smaller pane for adding additional files to a project).

Tom's Hardware notes that "Since the entire programming experience takes place online, there's no way (at least right now) to use Python to control local hardware on your PC or your Raspberry Pi." But on the plus side, "If you create a free account on raspberrypi.org, which I did, the system will save all of your projects in the cloud and you can reload them any time you want. You can also download all the files in a project as a .zip file."
Build

Star64 RISC-V Single-Board PC Launches April 4 for $70 and Up (pine64.org) 26

PINE64 has an update about their Star64 single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor: it will be available on April 4th in two configurations: 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99: Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features:


- Quad core 64bit RISC-V
- HDMI video output
- 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates
- i2c touch panel connector
- dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
- dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth
- 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports
- PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART).
- The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots.


The board will be available in two different RAM configurations — with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. The Star64 store page ought to already be live when you read this, but will be listed as out of stock until the 4th.

Liliputing offers this summary: The Star64 is a single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor, support for up to 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage (as well as a microSD card reader). Developed by the folks at Pine64, it's designed to be an affordable platform for developers and hobbyists looking to get started with RISC-V architecture. Pine64 first announced it was working on the Star64 last summer...
Meanwhile, PINE64's Linux tablets, the PineTab2 and PineTab-V, will launch one week later on Tuesday, April 11th.

Other highlights from this month's community update: there's now a dedicated Debian with GNOME image with tailored settings for grayscale for their Linux-based "PineNote" e-ink tablets. ("Other OSes and desktop environments are being worked on too.")

And the update also includes photos of one user's cool 3D-printed replacement cases for their PinePhone featuring Tux the penguin.
Build

The Orange Pi 5: a Fast Alternative To The Raspberry Pi 4 (phoronix.com) 81

"With an 8-core Rockchip RK3588S SoC, the Orange Pi 5 is leaps and bounds faster than the aging Raspberry Pi 4," writes Phoronix: With up to 32GB of RAM, the Orange Pi 5 is also capable of serving for a more diverse user-base and even has enough potential for assembling a budget Arm Linux developer desktop. I've been testing out the Orange Pi 5 the past few weeks and it's quite fast and nice for its low price point.

The Orange Pi 5 single board computer was announced last year and went up for pre-ordering at the end of 2022.... When it comes to the software support, among the officially available options for the Orange Pi 5 are Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, Android, and Armbian. Other ARM Linux distributions will surely see varying levels of support while even the readily available ISO selection offered by Orange Pi is off to a great start....

Granted, the Orange Pi developer community isn't as large as that of the Raspberry Pi community or the current range of accessories and documentation, but for those more concerned about features and performance, the Orange Pi 5 is extremely interesting.

The article includes Orange Pi 5 specs:
  • A 26-pin header
  • HDMI 2.1, Gigabit LAN, M.2 PCIe 2.0, and USB3 connectivity
  • A Mali G510 MP4 graphics processor, "which has open-source driver hope via the Panfrost driver stack."
  • Four different versions with 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of RAM using LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X. "The Orange Pi 4GB retails for ~$88, the Orange Pi 5 8GB version retails for $108, and the Orange Pi 5 16GB version retails for $138, while as of writing the 32GB version wasn't in stock."

In 169 performance benchmarks (compared to Raspberry Pi 4 boards), "this single board computer came out to delivering 2.85x the performance of the Raspberry Pi 400 overall." And through all this the average SoC temperature was 71 degrees with a peak of 85 degrees — without any extra heatsink or cooling.


Chrome

ChromeOS Will Finally, Mercifully, Let You Change Its Keyboard Shortcuts (arstechnica.com) 18

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As spotted in Kevin Tofel's About Chromebooks blog, an updated version of the shortcut viewer in the Settings app -- first seen in October 2022 -- has the early makings of a shortcut changing and adding mechanism.

Clicking on a shortcut brings up a dialogue that allows you to, at the moment, add alternative shortcuts to common shortcuts for manipulating tabs, windows and desktops, system settings, accessibility, and other utilities. A small "lock" icon next to each suggests that you might also be able to unlock these shortcuts to remove or alter their defaults. A "Reset all shortcuts" button offers another hint. Sadly, none of the shortcuts you add seem to work for the moment, though the promise is there.

Open Source

Hobbyist's Experiment Creates a Self-Soldering Circuit Board (hackaday.com) 114

Long-time Slashdot reader wonkavader found a video on YouTube where, at the 2:50 mark, there's time-lapse footage of soldering paste magically melting into place. The secret? Many circuit boards include a grounded plane as a layer. This doesn't have to be a big unbroken expanse of copper — it can be a long snake to reduce the copper used. Well, if you run 9 volts through that long snake, it acts as a resistor and heats up the board enough to melt solder paste. Electronics engineer Carl Bugeja has made a board which controls the 9 volt input to keep the temperature on the desired curve for the solder.

This is an interesting home-brew project which seems like it might someday make a pleasant, expected feature in kits.

Hackaday is impressed by the possibilities too: Surface mount components have been a game changer for the electronics hobbyist, but doing reflow soldering right requires some way to evenly heat the board. You might need to buy a commercial reflow oven — you can cobble one together from an old toaster oven, after all — but you still need something, because it's not like a PCB is going to solder itself. Right?

Wrong. At least if you're Carl Bugeja, who came up with a clever way to make his PCBs self-soldering.... The quality of the soldering seems very similar to what you'd see from a reflow oven.... After soldering, the now-useless heating element is converted into a ground plane for the circuit by breaking off the terminals and soldering on a couple of zero ohm resistors to short the coil to ground.

It's an open source project, with all files available on GitHub. "This is really clever," tweeted Adrian Bowyer, inventor of the open source 3D printer the RepRap Project.

In the video Bugeja compares reflow soldering to pizza-making. (If the circuit board is the underlying dough, then the electronics on top are the toppings, with the solder paste representing the sauce that keeps them in place. "The oven's heat is what bonds these individual items together.")

But by that logic making a self-soldering circuit is "like putting the oven in the dough and making it edible."
Sony

Telnet Gets Stubborn Sony Camera Under Control (hackaday.com) 45

Hackaday writes According to [Venn Stone], technical producer over at Linux GameCast, the Sony a5000 is still a solid option for those looking to shoot 1080p video despite being released back in 2014. But while the camera is lightweight and affordable, it does have some annoying quirks — namely an overlay on the HDMI output (as seen in the image above) that can't be turned off using the camera's normal configuration menu. But as it so happens, using some open source tools and the venerable telnet, you can actually log into the camera's operating system and fiddle with its settings directly.
A grassroots tool for unlocking Sony cameras apparently also unlocks developer options — including a telnet server on its WiFi interface. (There's a video of the whole procedure on Linux Gamecast Weekly's web site.)

Venn Stone (the podcast's technical producer/engineer) is apparently also a long-time Slashdot reader — and also describes himself on the podcast as "not a fan of articial software limitations."

And he calls this telnet-enabled tweak "the most hack-y thing I've done in recent memory" — even creating a playlist of 1990s hacker music to more fully enjoy the moment.
Microsoft

New Windows 11 Insider Build Supports Third-Party Widgets, Slick New Teams Video Feature (theverge.com) 33

Microsoft is rolling out support for third-party widget development and new video calling functions for Chat from Microsoft Teams in its latest developer build of Windows 11. The new features in Preview Build 25217 are available for folks enrolled in the Windows Insider program. The Verge reports: Now, developers can create and test widgets that can be added to the Windows 11 widgets panel. New third-party widgets can only be tested locally on the latest Insider Preview build for now, but can later appear in the Microsoft Store for the shipping version of their apps once the build is formally released to the public. Microsoft says that Widgets can only be created for packaged Win32 apps at this time, but support for Progressive Web App (PWA) Widgets is planned as part of Microsoft Edge 108.

The Insider preview also includes a sneak peek (for a limited group of Insiders) at a new video calling experience for Chat from Microsoft Teams on Windows 11. When you open Chat from the taskbar, you'll soon be able to see a preview of your own video feed, allowing you to fix your appearance or spot any background issues before starting a call. Microsoft hopes to make this experience more broadly available in the coming months, but a 'small subset of users' will already have access to the feature as part of a sneak preview release. You can launch Chat from your Windows 11 taskbar yourself to check if you're one of the lucky few selected.

The Insider Preview Build 25217 also contains a few other feature updates, including improved cloud suggestions and integrated search suggestions for Simplified Chinese, and some design changes to the Microsoft Store. Now, the store makes it clearer if a game is included as part of Game Pass to spare you from accidentally purchasing a game you may have free access to. The Game Pass library is also getting a performance boost and some more simplified options.

Hardware

Pine64 Touts Its RISC-V-Based Single-Board Computer and Soldering Irons (pine64.org) 42

PINE64's August update included photos of their first prototype for its upcoming Star64 single-board computer, "the first true RISC-V single-board computer from us...but as I wrote last month it certainly isn't the last RISC-V piece of hardware you'll be seeing from us." Just as a short recap: Star64 comes with a StarFive JH7110 64bit CPU sporting quad SiFive FU740 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. The SOC is equipped with BXE-2-32 from Imagination Technologies, which is said to be a solid mid-range GPU. Star64 will be available in two configurations — with 4Gb and 8GB of RAM, similarly to the Quartz64. Both hardware versions include USB 3.0 and a PCIe slot as well as two native Gigabit Ethernet NICs.... Along the long leading edges you'll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you'll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you'll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas — one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi....

The Star64 also has an MiPi display output complete with a touch panel (TP) input, a 12V power port, a CSI camera port and an eMMC slot. A micro SD card slot can be found at the bottom of the PCB. Similarly to the RockPro64 and Quartz64, the 12V port on the Star64 can be used for powering other hardware directly from the board — a popular example is powering one or multiple SSDs connected to a PCIe SATA adapter. I'll add that, at least in theory, the Star64 would make a great network-attached storage device because of its SoCs low thermals and idle power. I am looking forward to seeing NAS-focused Linux or BSD* OSes available for the board.

Speaking of software, efforts to support the SoC in Linux have already begun. I've been told that both Debian and Fedora are already being ported to the StarFive JH7110, which is great news. We are certain that many other OSes will follow swiftly — especially once we start delivering the Star64 to interested developers. On the subject of availability: the Star64 will be available in a few weeks time, and will initially be available to developers. Given the interest in the Star64's and the SoC powering I hope to see functional distributions available for the board soon after launch.

The announcement also included an update on their PinecilV2 smart mini portable soldering iron (built with a 32-bit RISC-V SoC). "The Pinecil V2 landed earlier this month and sold out almost instantly. The next production run of the ought to be available soon however..."
Open Source

(Mostly) Open Source SteamOS Forked into Homegrown ISO For Other Machines (neowin.net) 22

"While Valve has yet to actually release a proper ISO for SteamOS 3 used on the Steam Deck, others have been taking it into their own hands to provide," reports GamingOnLinux, "like with the new HoloISO.

"This is possible, since 99% of what SteamOS uses is open source (not the Steam client though)..." So people can easily hack away at it to do whatever they want. [HoloISO] is not exactly the same as SteamOS 3 but it's probably the closest I've seen yet, with the main packages coming direct from Valve with "zero possible edits" the developer says.
It's described as a "first beta release."

Neowin supplies some context: Back in early March, Valve released the Steam Deck recovery image for Deck users who need to get back to a factory state. When it was released, many of us over at the Steam OS subreddit did the first thing any reasonable enthusiast would do and tried installing it on a standard PC. The results of this approach were mixed, and only partial successes were achieved. Then HoloISO happened....

The first release, called 'Ground Zero', was released today and allows users to install Steam OS on any machine. But there are some things you need to know before installing this for yourself....

There's a bunch of caveats, but the article still concludes that "If you're team red and you want to give this a shot, head over to the project's Github page to read more and download."

Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the story!
Windows

New Windows 11 Test Build Wants Your Credit Card Info (pcworld.com) 148

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 test build is another substantial one, adding two important features: payment information, and a new security feature called Smart App Control that will watch over new apps and games that you add to your PC. PCWorld reports: Microsoft released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22567 for the Dev Channel on Wednesday with other changes, tooâ"including a tweak to Windows Update, so that now you can configure your PC to turn on an update when renewable energy is at its most plentiful. (Remember, code that Microsoft tests within the Dev Channel may make its way to your PC eventually -- or not.)

Asking for credit-card information within Windows isn't that startling, as you've probably already entered payment information into the Microsoft ecosystem either for buying apps or movies on the Microsoft Store app or for making similar purchases via your Xbox. Still, those transactions are normally performed via your Microsoft Account web page, which manages all of that online and behind the scenes. (You can reach them via the Windows 11 Settings > Accounts > Your Microsoft account.) Microsoft considers the additional credit-card info as part of the subscription option it added last month. Now, if your subscription risks falling through because of an expired credit card, Microsoft will alert you. Conceptually, however, it implies that your PC is as much a tool to make purchases as it is to simply work and game.

Another interesting addition is what Microsoft calls Smart App Control, or SAC. Microsoft describes it as a "new security feature for Windows 11 that blocks untrusted or potentially dangerous applications." What those applications are, apparently, is up to Microsoft. And yes, there's always a concern that SAC would flag otherwise innocuous applications that it simply hasn't seen before. But Microsoft is gently easing SAC onto your PC. For one thing, you'll need to perform a clean install to enable it. For another, SAC won't immediately insert itself.
Other tweaks and changes include the ability to have Windows update your PC when clean energy is more commonly available (via Microsoft's partners electricityMap or WattTime) and better integration between your Android phone and PC via Windows 11 OOBE (Out of the Box Experience).

Additionally, "Microsoft now offers wider availability of speech packs to improve transcription, the ability to choose a mic for dictation/ transcription, and the ability to mute your speakers by simply clicking the volume icon in the hardware indicator for volume," reports PCWorld.
Hardware

This 22-Year-Old Builds Semiconductors in His Parents' Garage (arstechnica.com) 84

Wired reports on 22-year-old Sam Zeloof, who builds semiconductors in his family's New Jersey garage, "about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947." With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. "Maybe it's overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer," he says... His chips lag Intel's by technological eons, but Zeloof argues only half-jokingly that he's making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore's law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel's breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition....

Garage-built chips aren't about to power your PlayStation, but Zeloof says his unusual hobby has convinced him that society would benefit from chipmaking being more accessible to inventors without multimillion-dollar budgets. "That really high barrier to entry will make you super risk-averse, and that's bad for innovation," Zeloof says.

Privacy

'Worst of CES' Awards Announced by Right-to-Repair/Privacy Advocates (theregister.com) 66

The Register reports on a unique response to CES: Six right-to-repair advocates assembled on Friday morning to present Repair.org's second annual Worst in Show Awards, a selection of the "the least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable gadgets at CES."

In a presentation streamed on YouTube, author and activist Cory Doctorow presided over the condemnation session. He said that he has been attending the Consumer Electronics Show for decades and vendors will gladly enumerate the supposed benefits of their products. "But what none of those people will ever do is tell you how it will fail," said Doctorow. "And that's kind of our job here today, to talk about the hidden or maybe not so hidden and completely foreseeable failure modes of these gadgets."

Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, gave the new Mercedes EQS EV the award for the worst product in terms of repairability. Showing a slide of the warning screen the car presents to its driver, he said, "You cannot open the hood of the car. It is locked, warning of accident, warning of injury if you open the hood. Mercedes' perspective is, 'Hey, this is an electric car. There's nothing the owner needs to do under the hood of this car."

Wiens said this is not the first time Mercedes has gone down this road, noting that a few years ago the company removed the dipstick from its C-class vehicles, arguing that only an authorized technician should change the oil.

"So this is everything that is wrong with the future," he said.

Some other higlights (via the Register)... Nathan Proctor, national campaign director for public interest non-profit USPIRG, gave the "worst in class for the environment" award to Samsung's new NFT Aggregation Platform, which he described as "a way to buy, sell and display your NFT artwork from your huge ginormous OLED Samsung TV."

Proctor added "If you don't know what an NFT is, I am honestly jealous of your life," calling it "sort of like a Beanie Baby craze for crypto tech bros — if Beanie Babies required massive continual energy consumption on a warming planet to remain corporeal."

And the Community Choice poll for Worst in Show went to John Deere — presumably for fighting right-to-repair laws in every single state legislature — while the tractor companywas also recognized by Paul Roberts, founder of securerepairs.org, for its industry-lagging bad outreach to the security community.
United States

US Advocacy Group Launches Online Petition Demanding Protections for 'Right to Repair' (repair.org) 27

A U.S. advocacy group called The Repair Association is urging Americans to demand protections for their right to repair from the country's consumer protection agency.

"Tell the FTC: People just want to fix their stuff!" argues a page urging concerned U.S. citizens to sign an online petition (shared by long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K).

The petition asks the FTC to...
  • Enforce the law against companies who use illegal tying arrangements to force consumers to purchase connected repair services.
  • Enforce the law against companies who violate the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act by voiding warranties when a consumer fixes something themselves or uses third-party parts or repair services.
  • Enforce the law against companies who refuse to sell replacement parts, diagnostic and repair tools, or service information to independent repair providers.
  • Publish new guidance on unfair, deceptive, and abusive terms in end user license agreements (EULAs) that: restrict independent or self repair; restrict access to parts and software; prohibit the transfer of user licenses; that and that purport to void warranties for independent or self repair.
  • Issue new rules prohibiting exclusivity arrangements with suppliers, customers, and repair providers that exclude independent repair providers and suppress competition in the market for repair services.
  • Issue new rules prohibiting companies from deceiving customers by selling products which cannot be repaired without destroying the device or cannot be repaired outside of the company's own service network, without disclosing that fact at the point of sale.

Toys

Model Trains Make a Pandemic Comeback - With Electronic Enhancements and Engineer Software (nytimes.com) 38

The New York Times reports: Along with baking and jigsaw puzzles earlier in the pandemic, model trains are among the passions being rediscovered while people are cooped up indoors. Several companies that make trains are reporting jumps in sales. For many people, the chance to create a separate, better world in the living room — with stunning mountains, tiny chugging locomotives and communities of inch-high people where no one needs a mask — is hard to resist.

"Outside, there is total chaos, but inside, around my little train set, it is quiet, it is picturesque," said Magnus Hellstrom, 48, a high school teacher in Sweden, who has indulged in his hobby while working from home during lockdowns.

"It's a little piece of a perfect world," he said.

The Times visits Märklin, the 162-year-old German maker of model trains, whose engines now include "tiny speakers that reproduce scores of digital chugging noises and whistles (recorded, if possible, from the original), and interior and exterior lights that can be controlled separately... Real steam coming out of the steam locomotives has been a feature for years." The company's owner tells the newspaper "What's really changed during the last 20 years is the focus on truly replicating the original." The trains can be controlled by computer console or by a phone app, with different trains on the same track going different speeds or traveling different circuits. Märklin even added the option of controlling the trains via train engineer simulator software, allowing devotees to control their little model train as though they were sitting in the engineer's chair.

"It is a traditional toy that through digital functions, like sound and light, has become more and more like a real train," said Uwe Müller, who was a product manager at Märklin for 15 years and now runs the Märklineum, the company's museum.

Just 12 years ago the company had declared bankruptcy. But now one 64-year-old employee (who's assembled models trains for the company for over 38 years) tells the Times "We're booming so much it's hard to keep up."
AI

Will The Next Raspberry Pi CPU Have Built-in Machine Learning? (tomshardware.com) 49

"At the recent tinyML Summit 2021, Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton teased the future of 'Pi Silicon'," writes Tom's Hardware, adding "It looks like machine learning could see a massive improvement thanks to Raspberry Pi's news in-house chip development team..." Raspberry Pi's in-house application specific integrated circuit team are working on the next iteration, and seems to be focused on lightweight accelerators for ultra low power machine learning applications. During Upton's talk at 40 minutes the slide changes and we see "Future Directions," a slide that shows three current generation 'Pi Silicon' boards, two of which are from board partners, SparkFun's MicroMod RP2040 and Arduino's Nano RP2040 Connect. The third is from ArduCam and they are working on the ArduCam Pico4ML which incorporates machine learning, camera, microphone and screen into a the Pico package.

The last bullet point hints at what the future silicon could be. It may come in the form of lightweight accelerators possibly 4-8 multiply-accumulates (MACs) per clock cycle.

Build

Can 'Ready' Crowdfund a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Enclosure for Cyberpunk Enthusiasts? (kickstarter.com) 61

There's 29 hours left in a Kickstarter campaign to fund "an open source, Linux-based, highly modular, customizable portable computer kit that accommodates anything from a Raspberry Pi to a Ryzen x86 4x4 single-board computer and more," writes READY!100: Reminiscent of 1980s executive portable computers, the READY! 100 is fully modern with 12 input output ports and 4 antenna ports. Perfect for hackers, ham radio operators, and audio/video folks, it can even be used with external graphics cards.
Engadget hailed it as "a Raspberry Pi enclosure for cyberpunk enthusiasts." Thanks to their diminutive size and low-power consumption, single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi can come in all shapes and sizes. We've seen DIY enthusiasts like Guy Dupont put a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W into the shell of a 2004 iPod Classic to create a device that can access Spotify. But few are as cool as this recent Kickstarter project we spotted from a Toronto-based company called Ready! Computer Corporation.

The company's Ready! Model 100 is essentially a case for your single-board computer that includes a mechanical keyboard, stereo speakers, a touchscreen display and enough I/O ports to connect almost anything you need. The enclosure allows you to fit an SBC that's about the size of a 4x4 Intel NUC board. Oh, and you can carry it around with a guitar strap.

Basically, it allows you to build the cyberdeck of your dreams.

Android

The Nintendo Switch Can Now Run Android 10, Unofficially 20

Thanks to the hard work of the SwitchRoot team, it's now possible to enjoy an Android 10-based LineageOS 17.1 port on your Nintendo Switch console. XDA Developers reports: The Android 10 release is based on the LineageOS 17.1 build for the NVIDIA SHIELD TV and brings many improvements over the previous release, including a much-needed deep sleep mode so the OS doesn't murder your console's battery life. It's also generally faster and more responsive than the previous Android 8.1 Oreo version, according to the SwitchRoot team.

The ROM comes in two flavors: a Tablet build that offers a standard Android UI with support for all apps and an Android TV build that supports both docked and undocked use cases but has more limited app support. The former is recommended if you primarily use your Nintendo Switch while undocked, while the latter will offer a much-better docked experience. As for bugs and broken things, the developer says games built for the SHIELD (Half-Life 2, Tomb Raider, etc.) aren't supported, and you might notice some stuttering with Bluetooth audio. Some apps also may not support the Joy-Con D-Pad.

In order to install this build, you'll need an RCM-exploitable Nintendo Switch, a USB-C cable, a high-speed microSD card (formatted to FAT32), and a PC. If you already have the Android 8.1 Oreo build installed on your SD card, just make sure to back up your data before installing the Android 10 build, as flashing this new ROM will wipe all data. After installing the ROM itself, be sure to flash the Google Apps package, Alarm Disable ZIP, and Xbox Joycon Layout ZIP if you use an Xbox controller.
You can download LineageOS 17.1 for Nintendo Switch here.
Printer

First 3D-Printed House Goes On Sale, Foreshadowing Faster, Cheaper Homebuilding (cnn.com) 134

"A company says it has listed the first 3D printed house in the United States for sale," reports CNN. "This is the future, there is no doubt about it," says Kirk Andersen, the director of operations at SQ4D Inc.

SQ4D uses automated building methods, or 3D printing, to build structures and homes... The company can set up its Autonomous Robotic Construction System at a build site in six to eight hours. It then lays concrete layer by layer, creating footing, the foundation of a house and the interior and exterior walls of the structure... "The cost of construction is 50% cheaper than the cost of comparable newly-constructed homes in Riverhead, New York, and 10 times faster," said Stephen King, the Zillow Premier agent who has the 3D house listing...

"I want people to not be afraid of automation...it is just a different tool and different method. But it's still the same product; we are still building a house at the end of the day," says Kirk Andersen, the director of operations at SQ4D...

"We can make things more affordable and safer. We can use the technology to tackle homelessness, and aid in disaster relief in an eco-friendly way," Andersen said.

Emulation (Games)

Microsoft's Latest Windows 10 Test Builds Includes Promised x64 Arm Emulation (zdnet.com) 30

Microsoft has made available two different Windows 10 test builds today, one of which includes the promised x64 app emulation for Arm, among other features. ZDNet reports: The RS_Prerelease build 21277 -- which ultimately is expected to be designated as the "Cobalt" branch -- includes the features Microsoft had previously been testing but removed at the end of October. This includes the updated emoji picker, redesigned touch keyboard, voice typing, theme-aware splash screens and more. It also provides the aforementioned Arm emulation support. Currently, Windows on Arm natively supports Arm apps, including ARM64 versions. But so far, only 32-bit Intel (x86) apps are supported in emulation. This lack of x64 emulation has limited the number of apps that can run on Windows on Arm devices, since apps that are 64-bit only have only been available on Windows on Arm (WoA) devices if and when developers created native versions of them. As of now, these x64 Arm apps also can run in emulation. More details on the x64 Arm emulation preview functionality are in this Microsoft post.

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