rePalm – Dmitry.GR
Pixter was quite popular, as far as kids' toys go, in USA in the early 2000s. A friend brought it to my attention a year ago as a potential rePalm target. The screen resolution was right and looking inside a "Pixter Color" showed an ARM SoC – a Sharp LH75411. The device had sound (games made noises), and touch panel was resistive. In theory – a viable rePalm target indeed.
Colors of Growth by Lars Boerner, Tim Reinicke, Samad Sarferaz, Battista Severgnini :: SSRN
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higherfrequency fluctuations-such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks-that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
Toasts | Primer
GitHub no longer uses toasts because of their accessibility and usability issues. Toasts pose significant accessibility concerns and are not recommended for use.
Google Confirms Android Attacks—No Fix For Most Samsung Users
Android is under attack. Google issued a warning on Dec.1 along with what is essentially an emergency update. This was rushed out to all Pixel users. But for most Samsung users, these fixes are not yet available, despite attacks now underway.
Is This The GREATEST In-Camera Effect of ALL TIME?
Een bijzonder zeer fijne aflevering van Corridor Crew, over Foreced Perspective. Emotioneel ook, zowaar.
December 2025 – News archive – Jorvik Systems
It has now been 30 years since WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness was released. After the great response to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, released in November 1994, Blizzard began working on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North America and Australia on December 9, 1995. While WarCraft: Orcs and Humans had laid the foundations of the series — arguably even for the RTS genre at a whole — it was really WarCraft II that took things to new heights. More units could be selected at once, the player could right-click to issue commands, naval and aerial combat was introduced, and buildings and units could be upgraded. The graphics were more vivid and visually appealing, and features like the Fog of War was introduced, where you could only see in the vicinity of your own units — unlike in the first game, where you could indefinitely see any area you had previously visited, you now had to continuously scout the map.
Jack The Ripper: History's Darkest Mystery
Tom en Dominic tonen nog maar eens waarom ze met recht en rede beste podcast van 2025 werden. "Was Jack the Ripper the first serial killer of all time? Who was his first victim, and why was the murder so shocking? And, what did the Ripper phenomenon reveal about the anxieties of Victorian London?"
The Last Lecture: Bart Ehrman's Retirement Lecture from UNC
In cauda venenum, wat deze lezing betreft. <em>After more than 40 years in the classroom, including 37 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Bart Ehrman is retiring from UNC. To mark this milestone, Bart delivered his final public lecture at UNC on December 7th, 2025, sharing his most cherished memories and profound lessons from his life as a scholar and teacher.</em>
Size of Life
Explore the scale of living things, from an amoeba to a blue whale.
Decoding Armenia's 6,000-Year-Old Dragon Stones: An Ancient Water Cult
Archeologists say they have finally cracked the 6,000-year-old mystery of Armenia’s “dragon stones" – massive carved monoliths scattered across high-altitude volcanic slopes and pastures where no ancient settlements ever existed. New research from Yerevan State University (YSU) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography is the first large-scale statistical and spatial analysis of 115 known dragon stones – or vishaps – to argue that these monuments were not markers of territory or myth, but deliberately placed totems of an early “water cult” whose rituals were tied to melting snow streams, springs and the seasonal movement of herding groups through the mountains.
Patterns.dev
Patterns.dev is a free online resource on design, rendering, and performance patterns for building powerful web apps with vanilla JavaScript or modern frameworks.
Israeli Ban on Media Entering Gaza Remains, as Legal Challenge Is Delayed – The New York Times
Nearly two months into the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel continues to bar journalists from freely entering the Gaza Strip to report, despite a longstanding petition brought by journalists seeking access to the territory. On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court gave the government an extension in responding to the petition, the ninth such delay since the case was filed in September 2024.
String Theory Inspires a Brilliant, Baffling New Math Proof | Quanta Magazine
Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major problem in algebraic geometry. Other mathematicians had their doubts. Now he says he has a proof.
Revisiting the Ediacaran Enigma
The radiation of animals across the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition is one of the most transformational events in Earth history, radically changing Earth’s surface environments. However, while fossils from the Cambrian are readily recognised as belonging to extant groups, those from the late Ediacaran Period show distinctive forms with no counterparts among living species. Although these Ediacaran fossils are often held to represent the antecedents to modern animal groups, their strange anatomies have meant that, for the most part, they have been eschewed from the debate and their unique insight left unrealised. My work combines novel morphogenetic data and phylogenetic systematic studies to show that these unique fossils are animals to the exclusion of alternatives and likely occupy a critical position in the tree of animal life. This conclusion enables me to integrate Ediacaran macrofossils into debates concerning the ancestors of major animal lineages and the mode of early animal evolution.
Goodbye Microservices | Twilio
Microservices is a service-oriented software architecture in which server-side applications are constructed by combining many single-purpose, low-footprint network services. The touted benefits are improved modularity, reduced testing burden, better functional composition, environmental isolation, and development team autonomy. The opposite is a Monolithic architecture, where a large amount of functionality lives in a single service which is tested, deployed, and scaled as a single unit. This post is the story of how we took a step back and embraced an approach that aligned well with our product requirements and needs of the team.
Recovering Anthony Bourdain’s (really) lost Li.st’s
Loved reading through GReg TeChnoLogY Anthony Bourdain’s Lost Li.st’s and seeing the list of lost Anthony Bourdain li.st’s made me think on whether at least some of them we can recover. Having worked in security and crawling space for majority of my career—I don’t have the access nor permission to use the proprietary storages—I thought we might be able to find something from publicly available crawl archives. All of the code and examples lead to the source git repository.
Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10
This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing. In this talk, Scott Jenson gives examples of how focusing on UX — instead of UI — frees us to think bigger. This is especially true for the desktop, where the user experience has so much potential to grow well beyond its current interaction models. The desktop UX is certainly not dead, and this talk suggests some future directions we could take.