Further Down Porter Street

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Further Down Porter Street

Porter Street, Parkside, South Australia

Porter Street

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Porter Street

Porter Street, Parkside, South Australia

Morning fog

jspeter9191 has added a photo to the pool:

Morning fog

In the morning at Tallawong, Sydney, Australia.
Peace be with you.

Spanje mocht Catalaanse separatisten amnestie verlenen, bepaalt EU-hof. Wat betekent dat voor de zaak-Puigdemont en andere verworpen verzoeken?

In ruil voor de steun van twee Catalaanse partijen introduceerde premier Sánchez in 2023 een omstreden amnestiewet. De straffen van ruim driehonderd separatisten werden kwijtgescholden. Het EU-Hof deed donderdag uitspraak over de vraag of de wet verenigbaar is met Europees recht. Vier vragen over de zaak.

Festivals organiseren wordt steeds riskanter nu extreem weer geen uitzondering meer is

Tijdens de recente hittegolven waren er grote regionale verschillen in de besluitvorming rond evenementen. De sector, die 12 miljard euro omzet per jaar maakt, vindt dat het ontbreekt aan uniforme landelijke besluitvorming, terwijl ingrijpende beslissingen als afgelasting en grote verzekeringsclaims steeds vaker voorkomen.

Een slimme meid kan beter TikTok-filmpjes kijken dan ‘Nieuwsuur’

Het was een tv-week vol zwangerschappen, miskramen en verminderde vruchtbaarheid. Bij ‘Nieuwsuur’ was het weer even 1950: als het over uitblijvend ouderschap gaat, ligt dat volgens het nieuwsprogramma vooral bij de vrouw.

Het eerste queerhuwelijk stamt uit 1632 en werd direct weer ontbonden – maar de kansel is nu wel tijdens Pride Amsterdam te zien

In Amsterdam bestaat Pride dertig jaar, en vindt later deze maand de WorldPride plaats. Daarom extra veel queerexposities in de hoofdstad. Juist in die veelheid zit waarde, zag NRC. Het is balanceren tussen geschiedschrijving en activisme.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Telegram shortlinks knocked offline over sanctioned VPN connection

The operator of the .ME domain registry has confirmed that Telegram's t.me shortlinks stopped working for around a day while the messaging platform verified that links associated with a sanctioned VPN service had been removed. The US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated First VPN Service (1VPNS) on July 13 for selling services to ransomware groups and other cybercriminals. Shortly after, users across the app reported problems with t.me links, which Telegram uses to share links to channels, groups, and profiles. Founder and CEO Pavel Durov publicly asked the .ME domain registry to look into it and Domain.Me confirmed the issues were related to OFAC sanctions. "The .ME Registry works closely with law enforcement to monitor and mitigate issues across the .ME domain in accordance with applicable laws, including sanctions requirements," Domain.Me stated via X. "On 13 July, 1VPNS was included as a sanctioned entity by the US Department of the Treasury. A Telegram channel using the t.me domain was among 1VPNS identified infrastructure. Accordingly, the t.me domain was suspended. "On 14 July, Telegram provided confirmation that it had removed its links and affiliations with 1VPNS. Once the confirmation was reviewed and verified, the suspension was removed from the t.me domain. "We appreciate Telegram's prompt cooperation in resolving this matter." The registrar did not specify which Telegram channel or group was identified as 1VPNS infrastructure. However, given that the service ran its own Telegram channel/account, and that group had its own t.me link that was also included verbatim in OFAC's sanction announcement, it seems likely that this was the reason for the domain-wide disruption. After European law enforcement agencies took 1VPNS's infrastructure offline in May, authorities said the service, whose administrator was based in Dnipro, Ukraine, had been used by at least 25 ransomware groups, including Avaddon, for network reconnaissance and intrusions. Edvardas Šileris, head of Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, said at the time: "For years, cybercriminals saw this VPN service as a gateway to anonymity. They believed it would keep them beyond the reach of law enforcement. This operation proves them wrong. "Taking it offline removes a critical layer of protection that criminals depended on to operate, communicate, and evade law enforcement." According to the FBI, which supported the France and Netherlands-led takedown, 1VPNS was advertised almost exclusively on criminal dark web forums and used for activity beyond ransomware. The service allegedly enabled scammers, botnet traffic, denial-of-service attacks, scanning operations, and more since it began operating around 2014. OFAC designated 1VPNS and its administrator, Dmytro Rashevskyi, on Monday. It also sanctioned Yevgeniy Vladimirovich Silayev for selling cryptors – tools designed to disguise ransomware and other malware so they evade detection by security software. The announcement of the sanctions stated that ransomware groups used both services, causing billions of dollars in losses to US businesses and critical infrastructure providers. Gene Lange, senior counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury, who is also performing the duties of the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said: "Under President Trump's leadership, Treasury is using every available tool to disrupt the cybercriminal ecosystem and protect the American people. "We will continue targeting the actors who enable ransomware attacks against Americans and our critical infrastructure." ®

How to teach an old Intel Mac new tricks with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

HANDS-ON Dortania's OpenCore Legacy Patcher lets you run newer versions of macOS on unsupported Intel Macs. It's handy, but there are a few things to beware of – including macOS Tahoe. OpenCore Legacy Patcher brings Hackintosh techniques to genuine Mac hardware. It's an inspired hack that helps you to install newer versions of Apple macOS on older Macs for which Apple has dropped support in recent versions of macOS. Its co-author, Mykola Grymalyuk, has a fascinating retrospective on its development. We introduced OCLP a few years ago when it was still quite new. Our screenshot then showed version 1.01, but as the project's GitHub page shows, it's now up to version 2.4.1. It does still have one big drawback, though. At present, the newest macOS it can help with is version 15 "Sequoia," whose release we covered back in 2024. In 2025, The Register warned that the forthcoming macOS 26 "Tahoe" would be the last version to have any support for x86 Macs. As we confirmed in September, it supports a mere four x86 Macs. This limited Intel support makes it a significant challenge for the OCLP development team, and nearly a year later, the latest OCLP still does not support Tahoe. As we've mentioned a few times, the main desktop computer at the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers is a 27-inch Retina 5K iMac (late 2015). A couple of years ago, we maxed out this machine with a quad-core i7, 32 GB of RAM, a 1 TB NVMe SSD, and an 8 TB hard disk. It also drives a 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display. It's a capable box, but the last supported OS was 2021's macOS 12 "Monterey." As we mentioned last month, this is now too old for the latest Raspberry Pi Imager. It was time. Getting started with OCLP Alongside OCLP's own documentation, there are several how-to guides out there, such as the iFixit Guide and Greg Gant's 10-step guide. We are not setting out to recreate them, just to point out the stumbling blocks we encountered. Ever since OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" in 2013, macOS has been a free download. You can get it from Apple's App Store, and the company even has a downloads page to help you find older versions. When you download a version of macOS, what you get is a macOS application, called "Install macOS [Codename]." Buried inside this is a little command-line app to create a bootable USB key to reinstall a completely blank machine – for instance, if you fit a new empty SSD. You'll need a fairly big, and ideally fast, key. The recommended minimum is 32 GB. Then you boot off the key and install or upgrade macOS. However, OCLP can also patch a system disk to make it bootable on an unsupported Mac. It will even download various releases of macOS and create the installation USB key for you. The basic way that OCLP works is by creating a standard macOS installer and adding a model-specific OpenCore configuration that bypasses Apple's firmware checks. It may also apply post-install root patches for unsupported hardware. Intel Macs use EFI firmware, which means a small hidden partition containing the EFI bootloader, called the EFI System Partition, or ESP for short. OCLP adds a new entry to this, which shows a special "EFI Boot" entry, as shown in the manual. You must use this to start your newly created key. OCLP does not build a generic modified macOS – it creates a model-specific OpenCore configuration for the Mac on which you run it. There is an option to bypass that and create a custom USB key for a different Mac, but watch out: by default, it creates one for the machine you run it on. For an easier life, you might want to keep a small partition with the last officially supported macOS for your machine – and if you're installing on a blank disk, do that first, before continuing with the process. Even after it's created a custom USB, you can't boot this the normal way. You must use the custom "EFI Boot" entry it creates. You will probably do a lot of rebooting. Don't do this process with a wireless keyboard or mouse, even if they're official Apple ones. Plug in plain old wired USB ones. If it's a PC keyboard, make sure that you know which keys are which in Mac terms. If the instructions say "hold down the Option key," that means Alt; if they say "press Cmd plus [some other key]," that means the Windows key. Our normal Das Keyboard is a USB 3 device, which might be why it doesn't always register when the machine boots, so we needed to use an additional USB 2 as well. To pick custom boot options, press the Option key (Alt) immediately after the power-on chime, and hold it down. Wait for all the options to appear, and pick EFI Boot, then in the following boot-device picker, choose the installer for your new version. Don't worry: after it's all installed, you don't need to do this every time – only if you change the Startup Disk to an unpatched, supported version, then need to switch back again. Once you've booted your new, customized macOS installer key, you can either do a clean install or upgrade an existing copy of macOS, just like normal. As a fallback measure, we used Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner to make a backup copy of our Monterey partition on another drive, just in case. This has been an essential Mac utility for decades, and it has a handy trick up its sleeve. Since 10.14 Mojave, macOS has defaulted to Apple's proprietary APFS, and since 10.15 Catalina, it uses a system of container volumes to keep the core OS semi-immutable and safe. For an example, the Eclectic Light Company explains the Sequoia config. This limits how much a macOS volume can be shrunk, but Carbon Copy Cloner can image a volume onto any destination big enough to hold the data, which is very handy. Post-install gotchas Of all our apps, only one didn't work. A couple of years ago, Broadcom made VMware Fusion freeware, but we couldn't update past Fusion 13. With Sequoia, we could update to Fusion 26 – but it didn't work. All VMs had a blank black display. No biggie: we have VirtualBox and the very capable UTM, and both work fine. Our iMac came with a "Fusion drive" – a tiered storage volume combining a tiny 24 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD. When we upgraded the drives, to keep life simple, we didn't recombine them: it boots from the SSD, and we have a big HFS+ data volume on the hard disk that holds our home directory. Sequoia seems not to expect home directories on HFS+, and various settings would not save. It asked some of the same first-run questions every boot. To get around this, we had to move it back. You can't move the home directory of a logged-in account, so we were glad of the standby "Administrator" user account we created years ago for emergencies. Logging in as "Administrator," we moved all the big data folders out of our home directory (Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos, and so on) elsewhere on the hard disk. Then we moved the home directory into its normal location in the boot volume on the SSD. Apple's Library folder is huge, and this process took a long time – about five hours. We didn't really expect it to work, but we created aliases to the data folders in our newly relocated home directory. (Aliases are the macOS equivalent of symbolic links, and to make them by drag-and-drop, hold down Cmd and Opt – the mouse pointer gains a curved arrow emblem, much like Windows shortcut icons.) This worked perfectly, and all of our apps find the folders in their new location. With the whole home directory on SSD, the Mac runs much faster and apps load much quicker too. (The folders don't have their usual icons, which is just cosmetic; also, Apple Music isn't very happy – but we never use it: Foobar 2000 does all we want.) Another snag is that once Sequoia was running smoothly, it started nagging us to upgrade to Tahoe. Don't do this: OCLP doesn't support macOS 26 yet, and while it might boot, USB doesn't work – and no Mac is very useful without a keyboard and mouse. If you do this, just say no to Tahoe. (If you only need some specific app then an older version of macOS may be all you need. Last year, we Hackintoshed a Dell Latitude to recover some data from a network Time Machine backup, and we found that macOS 11 Big Sur was much quicker than macOS 12 Monterey on that hardware. If an older version will do what you need, it may be easier or lighter-weight, but we decided to just go direct to the latest version on offer.) Back in March, we looked at "Stop Tahoe Upgrade," a tiny macOS policy file that you can install to make the nags go away. This worked perfectly on our M1 MacBook Air, but it didn't on our iMac. Doing some further investigation, we found some additional steps that got it working. You need to manually create two UUIDs and add them to the scripts, then the profile worked on our Intel box. The comments on that article offer an alternative method, by opting into beta updates, but that resulted in us being offered a beta of the update to 15.7.8, which isn't ideal. Why not Linux, or even Windows? We have considered using Boot Camp Assistant to see if we can crowbar Windows 10 LTSC onto this machine, but to be honest, we didn't buy a Mac to run Windows on it. This vulture adopted Windows with 2.01 in 1988. We've done our time, served our sentence, and we don't want to go back. So why not Linux? This is, after all, The Reg FOSS desk. Well, we tried it. The main problem is the iMac's dual displays. Its built-in screen is a massive 5,120 2,880, but the Thunderbolt display is a quarter of the resolution at just 2,560 x 1,440. Running two different dot-pitches currently means using Wayland, and that massively reduces the choice of desktops. First, we tried Pop!_OS 24.04 – we quite like its COSMIC desktop. This normally snappy distro took tens of minutes to boot and was almost totally unresponsive. After some research, we disconnected the Thunderbolt display, and then it ran fine, but we couldn't install it. As we reported back in 2021, the Pop!_OS installer expects an ESP of at least a gigabyte for its systemd-boot setup, while Apple, like Microsoft, typically creates one only a couple of hundred megabytes in size. Next, as a control, we tried Ubuntu 26.04. With the second screen disconnected, Ubuntu worked fine: HiDPI screen, Wi-Fi, power management, everything. We installed it and updated it, and it ran very quickly indeed… until we connected the Thunderbolt screen, when it instantly fell over. It seems that Linux's Thunderbolt support is distinctly lacking. Back in 2022, we reported on the difficulties connecting this display via a USB-C to Thunderbolt adapter. The adapter won't work at all on our company Dell Latitude 5420. Apparently, tenth-generation and later Intel processors can't talk to Thunderbolt 1 anymore. We had more luck on an older Dell, the 2025 FOSS desk testbed XPS 13. That can drive the display through an adapter, but only as a display. The 27-inch Thunderbolt display is also a docking station: it has Firewire, Ethernet, three USB-B 2 ports, a webcam, microphone, and stereo speakers, and can power an Apple laptop over MagSafe too. None of these ports work in Linux. It becomes just a big, hot, external screen. For now, Linux's hardware support just isn't up to making the most of some Apple hardware, even an 11-year-old iMac. After we moved the home directory onto the APFS boot drive, Sequoia runs very well on this machine. Thanks to having the home directory on SSD, it's faster than ever. For a couple of days, it ran hot and slow while Spotlight re-indexed some three terabytes of files, but once that was done, it happily purrs along at 63ºC, the same as before. If you have an older but well-specified Mac, OCLP can give it the gift of life. It doesn't support all models, but it supports most from the last decade and a half. So long as current browsers are available, running a dated version of macOS is no big problem. It's not trivial to install; you want as many backups as you can make, and once running, you must make very sure that it doesn't try to update itself to macOS 26. We hope that the OCLP developers add support for that final x86 release soon. ®

De Speld

Uw vaste prik voor betrouwbaar nieuws.

​FIFA kent Falklandeilanden toe aan Argentinië

Na het trekken van de lijnen heeft de FIFA besloten om de Falklandeilanden aan Argentinië toe te kennen. Volgens de voetbalbond laten de beelden duidelijk zien dat de eilandengroep niet aan Engeland toebehoort.

"Wij wisten in eerste instantie ook niet beter dan dat de Falklandeilanden bij Engeland hoorden", legt FIFA-praeses Gianni Infantino uit. "Maar toen we de Argentijnse voetballers na de halve finale zo gepassioneerd zagen protesteren, met spandoeken en al, zijn we toch nog eens beter naar de beelden gaan kijken. En verdomd, de lijnen zijn onverbiddelijk. Wat fijn dat we deze technologie tegenwoordig in huis hebben. Dat had in 1982 veel gedoe kunnen schelen."

De FIFA heeft beloofd zich in ieder geval tot en met de WK-finale weer vooral op voetbal te richten, maar zal later deze zomer nog lijnen trekken bij andere plekken waar over wordt getwist. "We hebben goede redenen om aan te nemen dat Venezuela, Cuba en Groenland onside liggen binnen Amerikaans grondgebied."

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​KNVB denkt aan Thomas Tuchel

In de zoektocht naar een nieuwe bondscoach is de KNVB uitgekomen bij Thomas Tuchel. De huidige bondscoach van Engeland staat met zijn voetbalfilosofie hoog op het lijstje van directeur topvoetbal Nigel de Jong.

"We willen bij het Nederlands elftal iemand die staat voor het voetbal dat de wereld inmiddels van Oranje kent", zegt De Jong. "Iemand die een wedstrijd met zijn wissels kan omdraaien. Tuchel heeft bewezen dat hij aan dat profiel voldoet."

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Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Physicists Create First Room-Temperature Quantum Material

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magana-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matsuyama, Japan 松山

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影) posted a photo:

Matsuyama, Japan 松山

Founds Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Founds Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

Found Photograph

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Photograph

handwritten on back of photograph, "4/19/87, Claremont Resort"

At the feet of the master

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

At the feet of the master

Kodoji, Nagano Japan

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Kodoji, Nagano Japan

MetaFilter

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Push to turn New South Wales south coast into national park

Push to turn New South Wales south coast into state's largest national park. The National Parks Association wants an ambitious 1.2-million-hectare national park spanning from the Illawarra to the Victorian border.

Echt zin in dat programma van Wilfred Genee over gezonde relaties

Toch best gek hoe dat gaat. Dat je gewoon 's avonds aan 's lands best bekeken talkshowtafel kan gaan zitten waar Johan Derksen dingen over neuken roept en Gijp zegt dat het met al onze problemen 'wel meevalt joh ouwe reus', dat daar alles en iedereen door de mangel gehaald mag worden maar dat er ondertussen ook één verboden onderwerp bestaat, namelijk met welke jonge griet je nu weer strontlazarus hebt staan vozen in een openbaar café. Niemand die ooit vraagt waarom dat toch week na week weer lijkt te gebeuren en wat je vrouw en kinderen van die hobby vinden. Ja oké, Marianne Zwagerman begon erover toen je haar openhartige uitspraken zat te ontlokken bij BNR, waarna je achter de schermen jankend en tierend zou hebben geroepen dat ze jou had genaaid. Verder blijft het stil, want je bent immers  de prijsstier uit de stal van John de Mol en de scoops komen steevast van Roddelpraat en dat zijn maar walgelijke rechtse rukkertjes. Enniewee, wij gaan 2 augustus met chips en nootjes zitten voor Mi Dushi: wat is dan liefde?, een nieuw SBS-programma waarin Wilfred Genee bekende koppels het hemd van het lijf vraagt over hoe je nu precies een gezonde liefdesrelatie onderhoudt. Misschien wel door en plein public afgelebberd te worden door je voormalige oppas!

O NEE!!!! Boa’s dreigen wapenstok en pepperspray te verliezen

Een voorbeeld van waar personeelstekort GOED voor kan zijn. De Politieacademie kampt met een tekort aan examinatoren, waardoor boa's niet jaarlijks getoetst kunnen worden, waardoor ze hun bevoegdheid voor een geweldsmiddel kwijt dreigen te raken. Boa's zijn een soort agenten die geen agent zijn, maar wel doen alsof ze agent zijn: als u tijdens carnaval starnakel op het Stratumseind staat lopen er heel veel van die lui, ze hebben 'FBI' op hun pak. Nu geef je een aap geen pistool en je geeft een boswachter ook geen Browning M2 .50 Cal maar blijkbaar geven we boa's wel wapenstokken en pepperspray. Dat is echt alleen maar nodig omdat politieagenten niet of nauwelijks (mogen) ingrijpen en het NS-alarmnummer 0613181318 eerst een halfuur gaat terugbomen of je het niet zelf kan oplossen - en dan lig je al aangerand op de treinplee. Nou en dáárom geven we boa's dus een wapenstok, een heel slecht idee, want het is gewoon je buurman die vroeger Aardrijkskunde gaf aan 1 mavo/havo, daar werd weggepest omdat hij de boel uit de klauwen liet gieren en nu denkt dat-ie het op straat allemaal kan uitmaken. Lang verhaal kort, de enige leuke boa is een dier.