The village on Lunt near Liverpool considered changing its name to “Launt”, because vandals kept adding a top stroke to the L in signs.

Coulsdon is the new Scunthorpe, it seems

IIRC, the clock and calendar ones are a hack, with code in Springboard actually drawing the icons. Or at least that’s how it was at the start.

Maybe they’ve refactored it into a private API by now, though any such API would involve icon-drawing app extensions sort of like widgets, which seems a bit heavy if only a few system apps will have it as a gimmick.

Olympia at least had a good punk/indie/riot-grrrl scene in the 90s, and made its mark on music history that way

True, though BlueSky is a temporary redoubt at best, though one which, through switching costs, will trap people just as Xitter did. They accepted venture capital funds, and so when the time comes, will have to somehow recoup that from their users. At the moment, they’re in the glue-trap phase, attracting their users with promises to be open and not screw them over (see also: the early days of Facebook). Once enough are there, and have brought their friends and built personally meaningful networks dependent on BlueSky, the trap will close: third-party APIs will be restricted to the point of not providing an escape (as happened with Reddit and Xitter), the user-configurable algorithms will get unremovable additions that gradually increase the amount of ads, influencer content, AI pink-slime and whatever else they want in your feed, and then you’ll lose the ability to see all the content you selected, all the better to keep you refreshing and scrambling for anything you may have missed. And then, since all your friends and the cool people you follow are there, your choices will be to stay and suck it up, or effectively become a hermit.

and apparently Nazis are following suit.

Someone should perhaps spin up a Mastodon/Misskey/something instance named swifties.social and bring them into the fediverse.

How easy is it to strip DRM from Kobo ebooks?

Wireguard is more elegant and performant, and has a smaller attack surface. OpenVPN, meanwhile, is a legacy protocol, and retiring it should be a good thing.

In the long run, we will all be dead, and none of this will matter.

The economics of consoles made more sense when computer power was expensive, and the choice was an underpowered home computer with so-so graphics and sound or a dedicated game machine optimised for drawing sprites and scrolling the screen responsively, with the extra costs subsidised by the price of (uncopyable) software. When PCs caught up, the consoles started looking internally like x86 PCs with souped-up GPUs (and, of course, draconian amounts of DRM baked in). Now with devices like the Steam Deck (and similar form-factor devices running Windows in game-console mode), there’s no real reason to buy a dedicated game-playing machine.

Which territories will the hearing-aid functionality be enabled in? I understand it requires regulatory approval, which exists in the US. What the situation in, say, the EU, UK or Australia?

Murdering your wife is one of those things that, no matter what else you achieve in your life, people will say “there goes Hans the wife murderer”. Even if you only ever murdered one wife and have shown no signs of making a habit of it.

Presumably this will mean a high-performance ARM CPU (comparable to the Apple M series), along with the dynamic recompilation technology Steam have been experimenting with. (It’s unlikely that Intel or AMD will deliver the generational leap they’re talking about.)

So, a new computer that works like an old computer?

A miserable little pile of secrets, but only if it’s featherless and bipedal

Bjenny Montero rocks.

They made some shitty tap-the-screen game with collectibles for the iPhone maybe 10 years ago, though the less said about it the better. My guess is that it was a fuck-you to Takahashi-san.

You can have reenactment of actual historical events with your character inserted as the hero, or you can have a vivid open world, but not both. AC 3 goes for the former and has the vibe of being embarrassed of being a lowly entertainment product and aspiring to be one of the worthy but dry educational “games” you’d get to play on the school computers.

The original one and the two Ezio games which followed are both worth playing. The American Revolution one ran on rails a bit too much to be fun.

Gameplay can be patented. Namco patented the mechanics of Katamari Damacy, for example.