Month: December 2024

On April 15, 2019, the world watched in transfixed horror as a fire ravaged the famed Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, collapsing the spire and melting the lead roof. After years of painstaking restoration costing around $740 million, the cathedral reopens to the public this weekend. The December issue of National Geographic features an exclusive look inside the restored cathedral, accompanied by striking photographs by Paris-based photographer and visual artist Tomas van Houtryve.

For several hours, it seemed as if the flames would utterly destroy the 800-year-old cathedral. But after a long night of work by more than 400 Paris firefighters, the fire finally began to cool and attention began to shift to what could be salvaged and rebuilt. French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to restore Notre Dame to its former glory and set a five-year deadline. The COVID-19 pandemic caused some delays, but France nearly met that deadline regardless.

Those reconstruction efforts were helped by the fact that, a few years before the fire, scientist Andrew Tallon had used laser scanning to create precisely detailed maps of the interior and exterior of the cathedral—an invaluable aid as Paris rebuilds this landmark structure. French acousticians had also made detailed measurements of Notre Dame's "soundscape" that were instrumental in helping architects factor acoustics into their reconstruction plans. The resulting model even enabled Brian FG Katz, research director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Sorbonne University, to create a virtual reality version of Notre Dame with all the acoustical parameters in place.

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Offenbar ist die Nachfrage nach Teslas Cybertruck eingebrochen. Die Beschäftigten sollen mehrere Tage lang zu Hause bleiben. (Tesla Cybertruck, Elektroauto)

One of the key differences between Apple's Macs and the iPhone and iPad is that the Mac can still boot and run non-Apple operating systems. This is a feature that Apple specifically built for the Mac, one of many features meant to ease the transition from Intel's chips to Apple's own silicon.

The problem, at least at first, was that alternate operating systems like Windows and Linux didn't work natively with Apple's hardware, not least because of missing drivers for basic things like USB ports, GPUs, and power management. Enter the Asahi Linux project, a community-driven effort to make open-source software run on Apple's hardware.

In just a few years, the team has taken Linux on Apple Silicon from "basically bootable" to "plays native Windows games and sounds great doing it." And the team's ultimate goal is to contribute enough code upstream that you no longer need a Linux distribution just for Apple Silicon Macs.

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Auf Parkplätzen in Bayern entfällt ab April 2025 für E-Autos drei Stunden lang die Parkgebühr - zunächst für anderthalb Jahre. (Elektroauto, Auto)

The Steam Link was a little box ahead of its time. It streamed games from a PC to a TV, ran 1,500 0f them natively, offered a strange (if somewhat lovable) little controller, and essentially required a great network, Ethernet cables, and a good deal of fiddling.

Valve quietly discontinued the Steam Link gear in November 2018, but it didn't give up. These days, a Steam Link app can be found on most platforms, and Valve's sustained effort to move Linux-based (i.e., non-Windows-controlled) gaming forward has paid real dividends. If you still want a dedicated device to stream Steam games, however? A Raspberry Pi 5 (with some help from Valve) can be a Substitute Steam Link.

As detailed in the Raspberry Pi blog, there were previously means of getting Steam Link working on Raspberry Pi devices, but the platform's move away from proprietary Broadcom libraries—and from X to Wayland display systems—required "a different approach." Sam Lantinga from Valve worked with the Raspberry Pi team on optimizing for the Raspberry Pi 5 hardware. As of Steam Link 1.3.13 for the little board, Raspberry Pi 5 units could support up to 1080p at 144 frames per second (FPS) on the H.264 protocol and 4k at 60 FPS or 1080p at 240 FPS, presuming your primary gaming computer and network can support that.

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The Orange Pi 5 Ultra is a new single-board computer that’s nearly identical to the Orange Pi 5 Max that launched this summer. Both are credit card-sized devices that look like a Raspberry Pi with a few extra connectors including an M.2 slot for an SSD. And both are powered by Rockchip RK3588 octa-core processors. But […]

The post Orange Pi 5 Ultra is an RK3588 single-board PC with HDMI input appeared first on Liliputing.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is trying to rein in data brokers that sell Americans' personal and financial information with a new rule that would classify the brokers as consumer reporting agencies. But the proposal has a dim future in the Trump administration, and the CFPB itself could face new limits planned by Republican politicians.

Currently, "the data broker industry collects and sells detailed information about Americans' personal lives and financial circumstances to anyone willing to pay," the CFPB announcement today said. The agency said it wants to "limit the sale of personal identifiers like Social Security Numbers and phone numbers collected by certain companies and make sure that people's financial data such as income is only shared for legitimate purposes, like facilitating a mortgage approval, and not sold to scammers targeting those in financial distress."

The proposed rule would "treat data brokers just like credit bureaus and background check companies," requiring them to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act regardless of how the information is used. "Companies that sell data about income or financial tier, credit history, credit score, or debt payments would be considered consumer reporting agencies," the CFPB said.

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Auch nach dem Black Friday gibt es bei Amazon gute Deals. So ist etwa ein Top-Gaming-Monitor zum neuen Bestpreis erhältlich. (Amazon, Technik/Hardware)

Mit einer solchen Software sollen ganze Levels für Spiele oder Szenen für Filme erstellt werden können. Das kann schon ausprobiert werden. (Spiele, KI)

Die USA gehen weiter gegen Chinas Halbleiterbranche vor. Die Regeln werden deutlich weitreichender. China antwortet mit eigenen Verboten. (Politik, TSMC)