Month: February 2024

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."

The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don't see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work. All of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down.

Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google's page. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources.

Enlarge / The Golgi apparatus, shown here in light green, may have been involved in building internal structures in cells. (credit: ARTUR PLAWGO / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Before Neanderthals and Denisovans, before vaguely humanoid primates, proto-mammals, or fish that crawled out of the ocean to become the first terrestrial animals, our earliest ancestors were microbes.

More complex organisms like ourselves descend from eukaryotes, which have a nuclear membrane around their DNA (as opposed to prokaryotes, which don’t). Eukaryotes were thought to have evolved a few billion years ago, during the late Palaeoproterozoic period, and started diversifying by around 800 million years ago. Their diversification was not well understood. Now, a team of researchers led by UC Santa Barbara paleontologist Leigh Ann Riedman discovered eukaryote microfossils that are 1.64 billion years old, yet had already diversified and had surprisingly sophisticated features.

“High levels of eukaryotic species richness and morphological disparity suggest that although late Palaeoproterozoic [fossils] preserve our oldest record of eukaryotes, the eukaryotic clade has a much deeper history,” Riedman and her team said in a study recently published in Papers in Paleontology.

Enlarge / Penk Chen's Rasti Computer, built with 3D printing, Framework laptop internals, and a deep love for the first laptop that went to space. (credit: Penk Chen)

If I had to figure out what to do with the insides of a Framework 13 laptop I had lying around after today, I might not turn it into a strange but compelling "Slabtop" this time.

No, I think that, having seen Penk Chen's remarkable project to fit Framework parts into a kind of modern restyling of the Grid Compass laptop, I would have to wait until Chen posts detailed build instructions for this project... and until I had a 3D printer... and could gather the custom mechanical keyboard parts. Sure, that's a lot harder, but it's hard to put a price on drawing unnecessary attention to yourself while you chonk away on your faux-used future laptop.

The Rasti Computer, which Chen writes is "derived from the German compound word 'Rasterrahmen' (grid + framework)," has at its core the mainboard, battery, and antennae from the highly modular and repairable first-generation Framework laptop. It takes input from the custom keyboard Chen designed for the chassis, with custom PCB and 3D-printed keycaps and case. It sends images to a 10.4-inch QLED 1600×720 display, and it all fits inside a bevy of 3D-printed pieces with some fairly standard hex-head bolts. Oh, and the hinges from a 2012 13-inch MacBook pro, though that's possibly negotiable.

Enlarge / Penk Chen's Rasti Computer, built with 3D printing, Framework laptop internals, and a deep love for the first laptop that went to space. (credit: Penk Chen)

If I had to figure out what to do with the insides of a Framework 13 laptop I had lying around after today, I might not turn it into a strange but compelling "Slabtop" this time.

No, I think that, having seen Penk Chen's remarkable project to fit Framework parts into a kind of modern restyling of the Grid Compass laptop, I would have to wait until Chen posts detailed build instructions for this project... and until I had a 3D printer... and could gather the custom mechanical keyboard parts. Sure, that's a lot harder, but it's hard to put a price on drawing unnecessary attention to yourself while you chonk away on your faux-used future laptop.

The Rasti Computer, which Chen writes is "derived from the German compound word 'Rasterrahmen' (grid + framework)," has at its core the mainboard, battery, and antennae from the highly modular and repairable first-generation Framework laptop. It takes input from the custom keyboard Chen designed for the chassis, with custom PCB and 3D-printed keycaps and case. It sends images to a 10.4-inch QLED 1600×720 display, and it all fits inside a bevy of 3D-printed pieces with some fairly standard hex-head bolts. Oh, and the hinges from a 2012 13-inch MacBook pro, though that's possibly negotiable.