When Nazi officials opened their infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition in 1937, they labeled modern art as culturally corrupt and ideologically impure. Now, nearly 90 years later, Donald Trump's latest executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution uses strikingly similar language about "improper ideology" and "divisive narratives." — Read the rest
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So your spacecraft breaks down and your 8-day space jaunt turns into a 9-month orbital sleepover. Surely NASA backs up a Brinks truck full of hazard pay, right? Sorry!
Turns out our intrepid space explorers Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who just splashed down after their involuntarily extended vacation on the International Space Station, got paid exactly what any random bureaucrat gets for a Hampton Inn stay in Toledo — a whopping $5 per day in "incidentals." — Read the rest
Germany has updated its travel advice for citizens heading to the United States after three Germans faced detention and deportation during attempted US entry, as reported by Euronews. The cases included allegations of mistreatment and unexpectedly long detention periods.
The German foreign ministry's revised guidance now explicitly warns that even minor visa infractions or criminal convictions can lead to arrest and detention. — Read the rest
Support your friendly neighborhood independent comic strip: SIGN UP FOR THE INNER HIVE and you'll get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic at least a day before publication. Plus other exclusive content like extra comics, commentary, juicy gossip, puzzles, jokes, and thrilling tales of pencil and ink drawing. — Read the rest
I've recently started using a full desktop PC with Linux loaded to do my streaming, with a wireless mouse and keyboard, it is a strict upgrade over the Roku,
Roku makes streaming media boxes and software for smart TVs, and I've stuck with it because I like how simple it is compared to the unusuable mess that Android TV amounts to or the smooth limits of Apple TV. But if I start seeing autoplaying video ads when I'm trying to use the home screen I'll be done. — Read the rest
Most hardware breaks down and gets worse as it ages. Some old Super Nintendo systems, however, are actually running faster. The changes aren’t noticeable to your average player, but dedicated fans have been measuring the differences and trying to uncover why the changes are occurring and what it could mean for the…
A French Member of the European Parliament demanded that the United States return the Statue of Liberty.
The United States no longer represents the values under which the famed Statue of Liberty was gifted to it, and French MEP Raphael Glucksmann has demanded its return:
"We're going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: 'Give us back the Statue of Liberty,'" he told cheering supporters.
Peat bogs are also one of Earth’s most effective contributing carbon sinks that help keep our air breathable!
Yes, bogs are absolutely filled to the brim with evil intent and malicious intentions to any human who comes across it, but I don’t need my super heroes to like me *personally*, y'know?
Thread from Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on her experience in a hospital in Cuba
okay total aside, but a lot of leftists get really, really mad at me when i say that a fundamental part of any communist movement must be the elimination of the division of labour. they mock me with “what, do you want us all taking turns being doctors?”
no, you fucking morons. i want us to live in a society where medical knowledge isn’t treated as secret unknowable lore that gatekeeps access to the care and resources we need to survive.
the reason we have so much bullshit medical psudeoscience is our society has a vested interest in making medical knowledge seem like impossible magic that only our greatest super-geniuses can hope to understand, but as both a trans person and a person who has helped a loved one with a chronic illness, getting care in these situations more often than not involved sitting down in front of a disinterested doctor and realizing with slow horror that we know more about our condition than they do, yet they decide what is best for us.
and if they notice you notice they’re out of their depths, there’s a good chance they will withhold care you need to punish you
the solution is the demystification and democratization of knowledge. yes, we have dedicated medical experts, because having specialists is important in realms of complex knowledge, but the death of the division of labour means the death of the idea that a field of human labour is the exclusive propertyof a caste of specialists.
it means exactly this; invite the community to be involved! teach those who are curious openly and eagerly so they don’t go looking for answers from grifters! get everyone involved! treat medicine as a journey a community takes together, not a missive from on high. and that goes for everything. treat science this way, treat education this way, treat life and all the work we do to sustain it as a beautiful shared journey instead of capitalism’s pay-as-you-go haunted house
Printer manufacturer Brother, once the last bastion of hope for people who don't have spare Krugerrands lying around to buy printer ink, has quietly joined the dark side of proprietary ink enforcement. Through forced firmware updates, the company is now blocking third-party cartridges and removing older firmware versions that allowed them to work. — Read the rest
Looks like it's a good time to shuffle passwords again.
Data breach news is reported with such regularity now that it's easy to feel jaded by each new leak of login details. The scale of this latest breach should give us all pause, however. Have I Been Pwned, the website where you check just how many password leaks your email address has been attached to, reports that 284,132,969 logins have been compromised in this latest data breach. Which is rather a lot.
"In February 2025," the site explains, "23 billion rows of stealer logs were obtained from a Telegram channel known as ALIEN TXTBASE." Troy Hunt, the founder of Have I Been Pwned, went into more detail on his blog, explaining that news of this breach came via a contact in a government agency, and consisted of "two files totalling just over 5GB" distributed via Telegram.
"Telegram makes it super easy to publish large volumes of data (such as we're talking about here) under the veil of anonymity and distribute it en mass", Hunt explained. This stolen data is basically monetized on a shareware model, like Wolfenstein 3D only instead of having you fight Hitler at the end you lose your Netflix. A smaller subset of the stolen data is provided for free—a mere "36 million rows" of email addresses and passwords—with the rest available after paying a subscription fee.
These passwords are normally obtained via malware. Users are tricked by a website that looks legit, download software with an "infostealer" attached, and then any credentials they subsequently input are stolen and logged to be sold as part of an archive like the one distributed via Telegram.
Instead of ending this news story in the traditional fashion, by berating you into using a password manager and improving your infosec, instead let me remind you that creating the ideal password can also be a super fun not-at-all-infuriating videogame.
When your data is just too precious for this world, look to the moon for a safe space to store it. Yep, that big rock with very little atmosphere, pock-holed by craters, and a perpetual 'bad side'. This is where Lonestar, a data center company, is eyeing up for hosting its next super-safe storage service. This isn't just another wild idea, either. The company just teamed up with Phison and SpaceX to launched a payload on a Falcon 9 rocket that's somewhere between Florida and the lunar surface as you read this.
The 'Freedom Mission' is intended to prove the technical know-how and capability to actually put some sort of storage on the moon. The reason? Well, there's a lot of business jargon involved, but Phison says it's something to do with providing an "additional layer of fortitude against natural disasters and unpredictable impacts to crucial data." Though, if you ask me, the idea of the Earth being wiped out and only a hard drive full of client shipping data being all that's left of humankind feels like proof enough that we 'had it coming'.
The SSD in question is one of Phison's Pascari enterprise-grade options, which has been tested to ensure it can withstand the slightly bumpy ride as it is launched faster than the speed of sound at the big rock in the sky. It's expected to reach the surface by March 4-6—in one piece, ideally.
"Phison worked closely beside Lonestar to provide a Pascari enterprise-grade storage solution pressure-tested to withstand cosmic radiation, harsh temperature variation, vibrations and disturbances from lunar launches and landings," the company says.
It's a great bit of advertisement for Phison. Its competitors can say 'Hey, we've built an SSD that can withstand a drop of 5 metres' and in response it can say, 'Our SSD has been to the bloody moon', or probably something a bit more professional than that.
The SSD contains a "number of storage and edge processing customers" but no one is mentioned by name. We know what was on the previous Lonestar mission to the moon, though, and it shouldn't be that surprising to you.
(Image credit: Lonestar)
This isn't the first mission to prove data centers on moon is a go-er. Lonestar has previously launched the Independence Mission, which blasted the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights to the moon for a bit of a laugh. They did manage to transmit and receive data from this mission though, which is a pretty big step in the right direction.
Lonestar's goal is to offer "space-based data services" and includes (more jargon incoming) Recovery and Resiliency as a Service (RaaS) premium data backup services on the moon, which I have to admit is the most boring sounding reason to go to space I've ever heard. This was not what I thought the age of commercial space transportation would entail, but I should've known better after they filled the Earth's orbit with what's basically a fancy Wi-Fi extender.
I jest, this is very cool and very impressive. What's even cooler is that the data center within the payload for the Freedom Mission is 3D-printed and designed to "reflect the silhouettes of NASA Astronauts Charlie Duke (Apollo Moonwalker) and Nicole Stott (Space Station Space Walker) in tribute to the Artemis campaign". This little flourish is great—it shows there's still plenty of romance and awe in corporate space missions, after all.
All of which attaches to Intuitive Machine's NOVA C Lunar Lander, which is what it's attached to in the image a bit further up.
Oh, and while the future of this mission hangs in the balance until March 4, the day when it's supposed lands on the moon, Lonestar says it's already sold all of the capacity for the next mission. No room for my Devil May Cry fanfiction then? Darn.
You can watch the rocket containing this mission blasting off from this SpaceX live stream below.
You know what else was on this rocket? A payload from Nokia set to demonstrate 4G connectivity on the moon.
Yeah, it sounds like that might be the most boring space mission yet, but as it turns out it's a pretty neat solution for the lunar surface. Altogether, pretty cool stuff.
Burn-in, it's the final frontier for OLED technology. Fix that, and we can all ditch our LCD panels, right? Well, according to one year-long test, we're tantalisingly close to that outcome, but not quite there.
Monitors Unboxed has posted its one-year follow up of the MSI MPG 321URX, the very same model we tested last summer. It's been intentionally using the display in the worst possible way for an OLED, namely as a desktop production screen for work and video editing and absolutely no gaming at all.
Roughly, that's about eight hours a day on the Windows desktop with worst case scenario settings including Windows Light mode, not auto-hiding the task bar and so on. In fact, Monitors Unboxed also only allowed the MSI MPG 321URX's pixel cleaning and compensation cycles to run every eight hours instead of the recommended every four.
All told, Monitor Unbox estimates something in the region of 2,700 to 3,000 hours racked up. The result? A very slight line down the middle of the display that's a consequence of routinely running two main application windows side-by-side, plus a touch of burn in where the taskbar resides.
It's really important to note that both of these "burn-in" remnants are just barely visible and even then only on certain shades of grey background. Monitors Unboxed says that the burned in areas are entirely invisible most of the time and barely a distraction when they are.
Still, there is some burn-in, it's not absolutely zero. Interestingly, Monitors Unboxed has found that the progression hasn't been entirely linear. At nine months the burn-in seemed to have regressed a little compared with six months. At one year, it's back to roughly where it was at six months. That probably reflects the impact of the compensation cycles.
Monitors Unboxed says that its usage has been particularly heavy and suboptimal for an OLED and that it equates to at least 18 months and more likely two years of normal "mixed" use of desktop work and gaming for most people. That means after two years, most users should expect to see very little burn in.
One other detail that's worth noting is that Monitors Unboxed has been running the MSI MPG 321URX at 200 nits. The panel can be set to up to 250 nits, and the brighter you run a monitor, the worse the burn-in would normally be.
My experience with the MSI MPG 321URX would certainly see me maxing the SDR brightness out to 250 nits, day to day. Even at that setting, it's only just bright enough for my preferences. Then again, I use dark mode for just about everything as a matter of course, so maybe that would make taskbar burn-in a non-issue.
Overall, it's hard to know exactly what to conclude from this test. On the one hand, the results are probably better than you might fear from this worst-case scenario. On the other, the fact that the panel showed any signs of burn-in at all remains a worry.
How you use an LCD monitor, in comparison, just isn't something you need to think about. Meanwhile, as Monitors Unboxed says, if you're spending $1,000 on a monitor, you should reasonably be able to expect it to last for about five years without major issues. And on the basis of this test, it's still not totally clear that would be the case.
Monitors Unboxed plans to keep going. So, if they clock up another year, that'll be around four years worth of up time for a "normal" PC enthusiast and pretty close to an idea of how things look after really long term use.
My sense is that the 3rd Gen QD-OLED panel used in the MSI MPG 321URX is already fairly resistant to burn-in. So, if Samsung really has made further progress with the latest panel tech announced in January, then burn-in should really have been relegated to a non-issue.
All the signs look good, but that will, of course, need to be proven in the field. The reality is it will take time. That new panel tech is only just now being put into displays, so that final reassurance is still a few years away. Watch this space.
That was a little disappointing, I've been reviving my interest in BattleBots since I can stream whole seasons now, and I kinda hoped there would be a good, easily available video game experience. I guess I'll have to find a few bucks and buy the toys.
Lately, I've started rewatching old terrestrial TV shows at times of particularly high stress or workload, when my brain is simply too frazzled to risk being disappointed by something new. Last year it was the archaeology show Time Team. This year it's Robot Wars, the competitive robot battling show that ran on the BBC and, later, Channel 5 from 1998 to 2004.
If you've not had the pleasure of watching Robot Wars, because you were too young or lived outside of the UK (you may be familiar with its American equivalent Battlebots) it's a tournament-based affair where amateur engineers build their own robots weaponised with axes, crushers, flywheels, and flipping mechanisms, then pitch them against each other in remote-controlled bouts of mechanical mayhem. Alongside the competing bots, the arena is patrolled by bigger 'House Robots' with names like Sir Killalot, Sergeant Bash, and my personal favourite, Dead Metal, a gunmetal lobster that clutches robots with hydraulic claws and then shreds them with a retracting circular sawblade.
Robot Wars brings together a lot of my favourite things, like nerdy chat about machines, wanton destruction, and Craig Charles—the relentlessly enthusiastic host for most of the original series' run. As a kid, I always wanted to give it a go myself, to build my own robot and enter the fray, and rewatching the series brought back those same desires. Unfortunately, now as then, I have all the engineering skill of a medieval peasant. But where reality denies, videogames can often provide, which is how I embarked upon a quest to find a great robot fighting game.
I figured the best place to start was the most obvious, the official tie-in Robot Wars:Arenas of Destruction released in 2001. This isn't readily available nowadays, but it wasn't difficult to acquire a copy from a certain purveyor of abandoned wares. It turns out Arena of Destruction is a surprisingly involved affair, letting you build your own robot from different chassis', batteries, drives, weapons etc, and compete in various kinds of tournaments and individual fights. It also has lots of official gubbins in it, including the TV show's CGI introduction, and some decent models of the house robots for a game made so close to the Millennium.
Unfortunately, it's also naff. The destruction isn't bad for the time with robots dynamically shredding their armour as they fight. But the physics are absolutely shocking, the weapons have no sense of impact, the menu for building robots is confusing to the point where I suspect it might be broken, and the game plays the same piercing audience-cheering sound effect every five seconds. It didn't help that the repository for forsaken entertainment products I used only had the US version of the game, which replaces the British version's exuberant commentator Jonathan Pearce with some identikit American pundit who could've come out of a can.
(Image credit: Vivendi Universal Games)
In all, Arenas of Destruction was a disappointment. Undeterred, however, I took a punt and searched for 'Robot Wars' on Steam. Immediately, a game came up named exactly that, despite having seemingly nothing whatsoever to do with the TV show. Nonetheless, it was released in 2024, and looked pretty shiny in the screenshots. Could I have struck gold?
For about five minutes, I thought I might have. Robot Wars only lets you select from a small number of robots and has just one fighting arena. But the moment my spinning sawblade monstrosity collided with the AI's flywheel contraption, the two bots sprang to either end of the arena in a shower of sparks. More than that, the impact triggered a delicious slow-motion camera depicting the collision in all its gnarly detail.
"Hahaha, yes, YES!" I squealed, my face pressed up against Robot Wars' window. Unfortunately, the moment I tried to move my robot again, it drove straight through the arena floor.
(Image credit: Inonia Games)
If Arenas of Destruction whiffed of being broken, Robot Wars is unambiguously busted. In another fight, my robot stopped working after the first impact. This is something that does happen in actual Robot Wars. But said robot remained nonfunctional after I had quit the match and restarted several times. Moreover, while the impacts between robots were decent, Robot Wars features little in the way of visible damage indicators. Besides, the whole package is far too barebones to recommend anyway.
Beaten by reality a second time, I returned to the pit for a rethink. I considered Besiege, an excellent game about building medieval siege contraptions that function similarly to robots. While it's probably the closest you can get to a Robot Wars experience while maintaining some level of quality, it just doesn't have the right tone. Another, longer search on Steam brought up a game called Robot Arena 3, released in 2016. Yet it has a 'Mostly Negative' rating, with many of the reviews stating it is unfinished, and not a patch on Robot Arena 2…
Hold on a minute.
Robot Arena 2, unfortunately, isn't on Steam. But as with the official Robot Wars game, it isn't hard to find elsewhere. Although visibly aged and structurally simple, it soon proved a superior experience to either Arenas of Destruction or Robot Wars. The robots have authentic weight and momentum as they move around, and the weapons have pleasing tangibility, even if the destruction is a little simplistic. Sadly, the robust robot simulation is spoiled by utterly dreadful camera control, which seems incapable of keeping your robots in view. Even if you control the camera manually with the mouse, the inertia is so great that you simply can't keep track of the action.
(Image credit: Infogrames)
At this point, I reckoned I'd done as well as I could. But there was one last ray of hope. Robot Arena 2 has a small but highly dedicated modding community, and like any modding community, it loves to recreate cultural touchstones. I'd already spotted individual Robot Wars bots built with the game's robot construction toolset knocking around the gametechmods forums, and I was sniffing around for more with the intent of assembling my own Robot Wars scenario, when I stumbled upon the Robot Wars 2004 mod.
For all intents and purposes, this is an unofficial Robot Wars game. Not only does it include a ton of recreated Robot Wars bots like Razer, Firestorm, Chaos 2, Behemoth and Pussycat, it also has recreations of different arenas from various eras of the show (including the 2016 reboot hosted by Dara O' Briain). It even features voice lines taken from the show, including some pre-match preamble by Jonathan Pearce, and the '3…2…1…ACTIVATE' countdown to a fight.
It's comfortably the most authentic Robot Wars experience of the bunch. The robot recreations are extremely well done. Behemoth feels exactly like the miniature bulldozer it is, Pussycat is a barely controllable threshing machine precisely as you'd expect. Chaos 2's flipper is as lethal as it is easy to underestimate. As for whether the mod is good, it's certainly better than the official Robot Wars game, but Robot Arena 2's wayward camera inevitably undermines the action. I did manage to eliminate Chaos 2 while controlling Razer, though, virtually realising a dream I've had since I was 12 years old.
(Image credit: Infogrames)
Ultimately though, none of these games include what I enjoy most about Robot Wars today—the people who partake in it. Behind the emphasis on destruction and the (very light) presentational posturing, there's a fundamental streak of decency among the Robot Wars community. No amount of provocation from presenters or producers can prevent the irrepressible sportsmanship among the roboteers from showing, and there's a real family atmosphere to the pit, not least because many of the competitors bring their actual families to the show.
Most of all, they're all proper, old-fashioned nerds. Shy, thoughtful, beardy types who are generally more interested in the craft of their robots than winning anything. They're graceful in defeat, awkward in victory, and always happy to lend a motor to a fellow roboteer in distress. I'm sure this kind of nerd, whose power and influence are limited entirely to their shed, still exists. But I miss the days when this was the defining image of geekery, rather than a multi-bulti billionaire whose overexposure to the Internet and unlimited access to venture capital led them to abandon their humanity.
I suppose what I'm truly yearning for is not a Robot Wars battle simulation, but a Robot Wars life simulation, a variant of the Sims where you manage the arena and the pit behind it, replacing the carpet swatches and nonsensical Simlish with circuit-boards and engineering jargon. And while it would naturally have a Craig Charles voiceover and a fully simulated robot destruction system, the ultimate goal of the game would be that everybody has a good time. I reckon the chances of my finding that on Steam are somewhere between zero and none. But it's a big old world, and maybe, just maybe, there's an indie game developer somewhere who is as obsessed with Robot Wars as I am.
Support your friendly neighborhood independent comic strip: SIGN UP FOR THE INNER HIVE and you'll get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic at least a day before publication. Plus other exclusive content like extra comics, commentary, juicy gossip, puzzles, recipes, and messages from celebrities. — Read the rest
The world's most popular beverage may do more than just warm you up or wake you up — it could help protect you from lead contamination. New research reveals that the simple act of steeping tea removes a meaningful portion of lead from drinking water, with the tea leaves acting as a natural filter. — Read the rest
I worked at a community museum run out of a historic freight house, next to the train tracks and historic station and engines and other cars. We hosted model train enthusiasts to set up a display every month. Pretty sure the only NT visitors were the confused people trying to buy train tickets.
Some lady brought her teen semi verbal son in all the time. He’d flap and vocalize and jump up and down. He’d run to the door and watch from the railing rocking back and forth so incredibly excited when we told him the train was on its way (you could hear the whistle as it passed the crossing before ours). He was in fucking love.
Some lady from out of town had the nerve to try and ask me to kick the kid and mom out bc he was disrupting her visit. The look on the mom’s face like “oh no, not from here, not from here too” made me so fucking mad. I agreed that someone was disrupting other visitors, and asked the karen to leave. She threw a fit. I was like “You’re harassing a regular visitor on the basis of disability. Please leave the premises.”
Karen left. I started writing an email explaining to my boss ahead of the inevitable complaint. The mom came up and was like “thank you for making this a place my kid can be happy and himself” and I’m like “ma'am this is a train musuem. If we didn’t have autistic visitors we wouldn’t have visitors.”
Same. The temptation to start replying to comments remarking upon the surprising number of neurodivergent people on tumblr with “ma'am, this is a map store” is remarkably strong
