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I perform Maurice Ravel's Boléro on a variety of homemade
8-bit instruments.
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Formula 1's 2026 technical regulations bring not only smaller and lighter cars but an entirely new vocabulary that fans and commentators will need to learn before the season opens in Australia in March. The drag reduction system that has been part of F1 racing since 2011 is gone, replaced by a suite of modes governing how the new active front and rear wings behave and how the hybrid powertrain delivers power. Straight Mode lowers both the front and rear wings to cut drag on designated straights, and unlike the outgoing DRS system any driver can activate it regardless of their proximity to other cars. The story adds: And there's corner mode, where the wings are in their raised position, generating downforce and making the cars corner faster. Those names are better than X-mode and Z-mode, which is what they were being called last year.
[...] Instead of using DRS as an overtaking aid, the hybrid power units will now fulfill that role. Overtake mode, which can be used if a driver is within a second of a car ahead, gives them an extra 0.5 MJ of energy and up to 350 kW from the electric motor up to 337 km/h -- without the Overtake mode, the MGU-K tapers off above 290 km/h. There's also a second Boost mode, which drivers can use to attack or defend a position, that gives a short burst of maximum power.
[...] Instead of using DRS as an overtaking aid, the hybrid power units will now fulfill that role. Overtake mode, which can be used if a driver is within a second of a car ahead, gives them an extra 0.5 MJ of energy and up to 350 kW from the electric motor up to 337 km/h -- without the Overtake mode, the MGU-K tapers off above 290 km/h. There's also a second Boost mode, which drivers can use to attack or defend a position, that gives a short burst of maximum power.
holographic "?" blocks on the course when
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Once upon a time, transmutation of the elements was a really big deal. Alchemists drove their patrons near to bankruptcy chasing the philosopher’s stone to no avail, but at least we got chemistry out of it. Nowadays, anyone with a neutron source can do some spicy transmutation. Or, if you happen to have a twelve meter sphere of liquid scintillator two kilometers underground, you can just wait a few years and let neutrinos do it for you. That’s what apparently happened at SNO+, the experiment formally known as Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, as announced recently.
The scinillator already lights up when struck by neutrinos, much as the heavy water in the original SNO experiment did. It will also light up, with a different energy peak, if a nitrogen-13 atom happens to decay. Except there’s no nitrogen-13 in that tank — it has a half life of about 10 minutes. So whenever a the characteristic scintillation of a neutrino event is followed shortly by a N-13 decay flash, the logical conclusion is that some of the carbon-13 in the liquid scintillator has been transmuted to that particular isotope of nitrogen.
That’s not unexpected; it’s an interaction that’s accounted for in the models. We’ve just never seen it before, because, well. Neutrinos. They’re called “ghost particles” for a reason. Their interaction cross-section is absurdly low, so they are able to pass through matter completely unimpeded most of the time. That’s why the SNO was built 2 KM underground in Sudbury’s Creighton Mine: the neutrinos could reach it, but very few cosmic rays and no surface-level radiation can. “Most of the time” is key here, though: with enough liquid scintillator — SNO+ has 780 tonnes of the stuff — eventually you’re bound to have some collisions.
Capturing this interaction was made even more difficult considering that it requires C-13, not the regular C-12 that the vast majority of the carbon in the scintillator fluid is made of. The abundance of carbon-13 is about 1%, which should hold for the stuff in SNO+ as well since no effort was made to enrich the detector. It’s no wonder that this discovery has taken a few years since SNO+ started in 2022 to gain statistical significance.
The full paper is on ArXiv, if you care to take a gander. We’ve reported on SNO+ before, like when they used pure water to detect reactor neutrinos while they were waiting for the scintillator to be ready. As impressive as it may be, it’s worth noting that SNO is no longer the largest neutrino detector of its kind.
The paper refers to "⁸B neutrinos". Based on the wikipedia article this seems to mean they are neutrinos that are given off as a side effect of a reaction chain that involves a short lived atom of beryllium (symbol B) with atomic weight of 8. These neutrinos "stand out because of their higher average energies", which is presumably part of why the experiment targets them specifically. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino#:~:text=decays%20into%20beryllium%2D8)
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We’re happy to announce that Debusine can now be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian. This facility is available in public beta to Debian developers and maintainers.
Why?
Debian developers typically put most of their effort towards maintaining the main Debian archive. However, it’s often useful to have other places to work, for various reasons:
- Developers working on a set of packages might need to check that changes to several of them all work properly together on a real system.
- Somebody fixing a bug might need to ask affected users to test the fix before uploading it to Debian.
- Some projects are difficult to package in a way that meets Debian policy, or are too niche to include in Debian, but it’s still useful to distribute them in a packaged form.
- For some packages, it’s useful to provide multiple upstream versions for multiple Debian releases, even though Debian itself would normally want to keep that to a minimum.
The Ubuntu ecosystem has had PPAs for a long time to meet these sorts of needs, but people working directly on Debian have had to make do with putting things together themselves using something like reprepro or aptly. Discussions about this have been happening for long enough that people started referring to PPAs for Debian as “bikesheds”, and users often find themselves trying to use Ubuntu PPAs on Debian systems and hoping that dependencies will be compatible enough for things to more or less work. This clearly isn’t ideal, and solving it is one of Freexian’s objectives for Debusine.
Developers publishing packages to Debusine repositories can take advantage of all Debusine’s existing facilities, including a battery of QA tests and regression tracking (coming soon). Repositories are signed using per-repository keys held in Debusine’s signing service, and uploads to repositories are built against the current contents of that repository as well as the corresponding base Debian release. All repositories include automatic built-in snapshot capabilities.
Who can use this service?
We’ve set up debusine.debian.net to allow using repositories. All Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers can log in there and publish packages to it. The resulting repositories are public by default.
debusine.debian.net only allows packages with licences that allow distribution by Debian, and it is intended primarily for work that could reasonably end up in Debian; Freexian reserves the right to remove repositories from it.
How can I use it?
If you are a Debian contributor, we’d be very excited to have you try this out, especially if you give us feedback. We have published instructions for developers on using this. Since this is a beta service, you can expect things to change, but we’ll maintain compatibility where we can.
If you’re interested in using this in a commercial setting, please contact Freexian to discuss what we can do for you.
is this finally PPAs for Debian ?!
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Rain sensing umbrella stands, Piranha Pi Cams, Fruit Jam (& more) were big in 2025.
Animating Animatronics by John Park
LED Matrix Wall Arcade for Pico-8 by John Park
Piranha Pi Camera by the Ruiz Brothers
No-Code, No-Solder Monitoring For Perfect Bread by Ben Everard
No-Code Rain Sensing Smart Desktop Umbrella Stand by Tyler Cooper
Mac Classic Fruit Jam by the Ruiz Brothers.
Measuring Parts from Product Photos in FreeCAD by Mikey Sklar
Magic Mirror with Glowing Secret Messages by Erin St. Blaine
50 Cent CPI Tracker for MagTag by Tim C
Ambient Video Lighting with HyperHDR by Liz Clark
ooh I had tangential involvement with one (Mac Classic Fruit Jam).
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After introducing an AI Mode shortcut earlier this year, Google has now added a new "plus" menu to its Search homepage, highlighting options for image and file uploads. 9to5Google reports: On google.com, the Search bar now has a plus icon at the far left that replaces the magnifying glass. Clicking lets you "Upload image" or "Upload file." It very much matches the AI Mode experience. Those two capabilities aren't new, but this plus menu does help emphasize that you can use Google to accomplish tasks, and not just find information. Additionally, it helps indicate that they can be used with AI Mode and AI Overviews. This is just available on desktop web (not mobile) and is live on all the devices we checked today, including across signed-out Incognito sessions.
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