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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

AmiMoJo quotes SlashGear: Remember the Pebble smartwatch? Despite being officially discontinued and several years old at this point, there are still some diehard fans out there keeping the hardware alive, and a team called Rebble Alliance plays an important part in this.

Whereas the web services for Pebble watches used to come from Pebble Technology Corp., they now come (unofficially) from Rebble, which has announced a new initiative called Rebble Grants... Rebble Alliance is, as explained by iFixit in an editorial last year, a group of former Pebble employees like Katharine Berry, as well as enthusiasts who are working hard to keep the defunct hardware operational. Key to this is the Rebble web services, which includes a replacement cloud infrastructure that was coded by Berry over the course of a couple of weeks...

The team says they've been saving some of the funds received from running the Rebble web services and that they plan to invest $25,000 into a variety of Pebble-centric projects.

Today, Mozilla launched the updated Firefox Android app with a version that many thought was a beta because it was full of bugs and UI issues. According to The Register, this was a deliberate software release and is the new version of Firefox for Android, which is set to hit the UK today, August 25, and the U.S. on the 27th. From the report: A Reg reader yesterday alerted us to an August 20 version bump that was causing so many problems, our tipster thought it was a beta that had gone seriously awry. "To sum it up, on 20th of August, Firefox 79 was unexpectedly forced on a large batch of Firefox 68 Android users without any warning, way to opt out or roll back," our reader reported. "A lot got broken in the process: the user interface, tabs, navigation, add-ons." Meanwhile, the Google Play store page for the completely free and open-source Firefox has a rash of one-star reviews echoing similar complaints: after the upgrade, little seemed to work as expected. "This is the worst 'upgrade' I've ever experienced," said netizen Martin Lindenmayer. "My main gripe is that there is no back button (to return to your previous page) anymore."

What's happened is this: the last stable version of Firefox for Android was version 68, released in 2019. For over a year, Mozilla has been working on an overhaul of its browser in a project code-named Fenix. Moz has slowly rolled out the result of its work to netizens in preview and beta form -- and since the end of July, as a proper release: version 79. This new stable version is what appeared on people's devices. As well as changes to the user interface and many new features that have thrown some users, it is also missing support for all extensions. In fact, by last count, only nine add-ons are supported so far, though this is expected to increase over time. The browser has also adopted Mozilla's GeckoView engine. If you accidentally updated the app and would like to roll back the update, you won't be able to. "[O]nce you've upgraded to the new browser, you won't be able to return to the old browser," says Mozilla.

For more information about the upgrade process, you can check out the browser's FAQ page.

At Build 2020 today, Microsoft gave developers a slew of new tools to coax them into using Windows over macOS or Linux. From a report: Windows Terminal is now out of preview for enterprises, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 is getting support for GPUs, Linux GUI apps, and a simplified install experience. Microsoft even released a Windows Package Manager in preview. Windows 10 runs on 1 billion monthly active devices (PCs, Xbox One consoles, and HoloLens devices), making it a massive platform for developers to target. [...] Microsoft today released Windows Terminal 1.0, which means it is stable for enterprise use. The open source application features multiple tabs, panes, tear-away windows, shortcuts, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, emojis, ligatures, extensions, GPU-accelerated text rendering engine, and custom themes, styles, and configurations. Windows Terminal is for users of PowerShell, Cmd, WSL, and other command-line tools. Microsoft also unveiled WSL improvements today, including support for GPUs, Linux GUI apps, and a simplified install experience. WSL is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows. Microsoft first shared it was working on WSL 2 a year ago at Build 2019. WSL 2 is slated to arrive in the next major Windows 10 update coming later this month (brilliantly called the Windows 10 May 2020 Update), but it won't have these new features. In the second half of the year, WSL 2 will get support for GPU compute workflows.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest contract manufacturer of silicon chips, is set to announce plans to build an advanced chip factory in Arizona (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) as U.S. concerns grow about dependence on Asia for the critical technology. The plans come as the Trump administration has sought to jump-start development of new chip factories in the U.S. due to rising fears about the U.S.'s heavy reliance on Taiwan, China and South Korea to produce microelectronics and other key technologies.

TSMC is expected to announce the plans as soon as Friday after making the decision at a board meeting on Tuesday in Taiwan, according to people familiar with the matter. The factory could be producing chips by the end of 2023 at the earliest, they said, adding that both the State and Commerce Departments are involved in the plans. TSMC's new plant would make chips branded as having 5-nanometer transistors, the tiniest, fastest and most power-efficient ones manufactured today, according to a person familiar with the plans. TSMC just started rolling out 5-nanometer chips for customers to test at a factory in Taiwan in recent months. It is unclear how much TSMC has budgeted or if it would get financial incentives from the U.S. to build. A factory capable of making the most advanced chips would almost certainly cost more than $10 billion, according to industry executives.

Microsoft is planning to fully integrate Linux file access into the built-in File Explorer. The Verge reports: A new Linux icon will be available in the left-hand navigation pane in File Explorer, providing access to the root file system for any distros that are installed in Windows 10. The icon that will appear in File Explorer is the famous Tux, the penguin mascot for the Linux kernel. Microsoft is testing the Linux File Explorer integration in a new build of Windows 10 that's available for testers today. Previously, Windows 10 users would have to manually navigate to a UNC path to get access to Linux files from the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). If you have WSL enabled, then the Tux will appear in File Explorer, and Microsoft is now seeking feedback on the integration before it's finalized as part of a future Windows 10 update. The software maker will ship this update to all Windows 10 users later this year.

schwit1 quotes CNN's report on a software engineer who really loves Star Wars costumes:
"I kind of incorporated all of the things that I've learned in 3-D printing and DIY into this project," said Nils Rasmusson. Over the course of nine months, he printed the suit and put it together. "I had to figure out — how do you put all of these pieces together? There's no tutorial or instructions on this," he said.

The helmet alone is made up of 19 different pieces fabricated on the printer. Rasmusson said he used five printers, humming for about 400 to 600 hours, to fabricate the suit out of plastic filament.

It's even bulletproof. His friend works for a company that bulletproofs cars...

Electronic component distributor Digi-Key will be producing a small manufacturing run of the "open hardware" ereader from the Open Book Project, reports Gizmodo: The raw hardware isn't as sleek or pretty as devices like the Kindle, but at the same time there's a certain appeal to the exposed circuit board which features brief descriptions of various components, ports, and connections etched right onto the board itself for those looking to tinker or upgrade the hardware. Users are encouraged to design their own enclosures for the Open Book if they prefer, either through 3D-printed cases made of plastic, or rustic wooden enclosures created using laser cutting machines. With a resolution of just 400x300 pixels on its monochromatic E Ink display, text on the Open Book won't look as pretty as it does on the Amazon Kindle Oasis which boasts a resolution of 1,680x1,264 pixels, but it should barely sip power from its built-in lithium-polymer rechargeable battery -- a key benefit of using electronic paper.

The open source ereader -- powered by an ARM Cortex M4 processor -- will also include a headphone jack for listening to audio books, a dedicated flash chip for storing language files with specific character sets, and even a microphone that leverages a TensorFlow-trained AI model to intelligently process voice commands so you can quietly mutter "next!" to turn the page instead of reaching for one of the ereader's physical buttons like a neanderthal. It can also be upgraded with additional functionality such as Bluetooth or wifi using Adafruit Feather expansion boards, but the most important feature is simply a microSD card slot allowing users to load whatever electronic text and ebook files they want. They won't have to be limited by what a giant corporation approves for its online book store, or be subject to price-fixing schemes which, for some reason, have still resulted in electronic files costing more than printed books.

McGruber writes: In a reply to a Twitter post, Raspberry Pi Foundation's CEO Eben Upton announced that they have sold their thirty-millionth Raspberry Pi.
"We don't get sales returns from our licensees until month end," Upton acknowledged in a later tweet, but "at the end of November, we were at 29.8Mu, with a monthly run rate of 500-600ku..."

PC Magazine's "tech nerd" Whitson Gordon writes that "Once you start using a smart speaker to set reminders, play the news, or turn the lights on, it's hard to go back."

But if you want the convenience of voice control without the data-collecting tech giant behind the scenes, an open-source project called Mycroft is a great alternative. And you can run it right on a Raspberry Pi.

Mycroft is a free, open-source voice assistant designed to run on Linux-based devices... Mycroft has been around for quite a few years, but it's recently gained a bit more notoriety thanks to privacy concerns surrounding data collection at Amazon and Google. Unlike those assistants, Mycroft only collects data if you opt in during setup. And for the users who do opt in, Mycroft promises never to sell your data to advertisers or third parties -- instead, it only uses it to help developers improve the product. Mycroft even uses the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo as its search engine instead of Google when you ask for information.

Mycroft makes its own smart speaker called the Mark I, though it's currently sold out with a new Mark II (video here) on the way. However, since the project is open-source, you can install Mycroft on just about any Linux machine, including the Raspberry Pi (thanks to a pre-made build called Picroft). Using Mycroft on the Pi is free, but you can also subscribe to a $1.99-per-month plan to help support its development -- you'll even get a few goodies, like other voices that sound more lifelike than the default robotic voice.

Long-time Slashdot reader ttsiod works for the European Space Agency as an embedded software engineer. He writes: After reading an interesting article from an NVIDIA engineer about how he used a dirt-cheap field-programmable gate array board to code a real-time ray-tracer, I got my hands on the same board -- and "compiled" a dual-core SPARC-compatible CPU inside it... Basically, the same kind of design we fly in the European Space Agency's satellites.

I decided to document the process, since there's not much material of that kind available. I hope it will be an interesting read for my fellow Slashdotters -- showcasing the trials and tribulations faced by those who prefer the Open-Source ways of doing things... Just read it and you'll see what I mean.
This is the same Slashdot reader who in 2016 reverse engineered his Android tablet so he could run a Debian chroot inside it. "Please remember that I am a software developer, not a HW one," his new essay warns.

"I simply enjoy fooling around with technology like this."