Science and Technology (old posts, page 201)

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Is this the antidote to the housing crisis? The YouTube series showcasing chic – and tiny – abodes

On Never Too Small, there are cabins that split in two and apartments straight out of Wes Anderson. It feels like we’re all one reclaimed wood table away from complete bliss

I’ve been invited into the homes of architects in Buenos Aires, voguish designers in Hong Kong, community organisers in Sydney and writers in Paris – except that I haven’t, not really.

Really what I’m doing is watching episodes of Never Too Small on YouTube. Never Too Small is a media company that makes a magazine and an online documentary series dedicated “to small footprint design
and living”. To me, Never Too Small is “the company that makes my favourite television show, which I watch while eating toast”.

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Marginalia mania: how ‘annotating’ books went from big no-no to BookTok’s next trend

Readers are sharing how they write their predictions into novels, colour-code their emotional responses and even gift annotated books to friends. Is it actually fun, or just a bit like homework?

There are two kinds of readers: those who would choose death before dog-ears, keeping their beloved volumes as pristine as possible, and those whose books bear the marks of a life well read, corners folded in on favourite pages and with snarky or swoony commentary scrawled in the margins. The two rarely combine in one person, and they definitely don’t lend each other books. But a new generation of readers are finding a way to combine both approaches: reviving the art and romance of marginalia, by transforming their books and reading experiences into #aesthetic artifacts.

“I keep seeing people who have books like this,” says one TikToker, their head floating over a greenscreened video of fat novels bristling with coloured sticky tabs. “What are you doing? Explain yourselves! Because this looks like homework. But also … I do like office supplies.”

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‘It’s thieving’: impersonators steal elderly people’s TikToks to hawk mass-produced goods

Fraudsters are manipulating content of older adults as ‘sadness bait’ to push sales. The videos are going viral

In April of this year, Daisy Yelichek was scrolling TikTok when something unusual appeared in her feed: a video of her 84-year-old father, George Tsaftarides, who runs an account sharing sewing videos from his small tailoring business in Ohio. But the video Yelichek was seeing was not from Tsaftarides’ actual page, which has nearly 41,000 followers – but instead originated from a profile of someone claiming to be a “sad old man” whose cat sanctuary was at risk of shutting down.

“Please stay 8 seconds so I don’t have to shut down my cat shelter I poured my love into,” the text on the video said, adding that the sanctuary would be selling slippers to raise additional funds. The bid for sympathy worked on many viewers, garnering millions of views and tens of thousands of users leaving concerned comments. “Just ordered two! Sending love to these kittens,” wrote one. Another commenter said: “thank you for all you do for these babies.” Others even asked if there was a GoFundMe link to donate directly to the cat shelter.

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‘You don’t brag about wiping out 60‑70,000 people’: the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This summer will mark 80 years since the attacks stunned the world. Today, every one of the crew members who carried out the bombings is dead. Here, one of the last writers to interview them reopens his files

‘It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.”

I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I’m writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.

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316: KDE Plasma 6.4, Arch Linux Wine, Kali Linux, Valve flips the Proton switch, & more Linux news

video: https://youtu.be/XZXpfvmlo9g

Comment on the TWIL Forum

This week in Linux, we have a jam packed episode for you. The KDE team have released a brand new version of the Plasma desktop. We're also going to talk about some big changes coming to Arch Linux and the pentesting distro, Kali Linux. Plus we got a trifecta of great news from Valve this week related to Steam & Proton that is bound to be exciting for Linux gamers. Then we're going to check out a major update to the OpenMoonRay renderer from DreamWorks Animation... yea that DreamWorks. All of this and more on This Week in Linux, the weekly news show that keeps you up to date with what’s going on in the Linux and Open Source world. Now let's jump right into Your Source for Linux GNews!

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:50 KDE Plasma 6.4 Desktop Released
07:56 Arch Linux switches to WoW64 Wine
10:51 Kali Linux 2025.2 Released
14:40 Sandfly Security, agentless Linux security [ad]
16:37 Valve hits 20,000 playable Steam Deck games and flips Proton on by default
19:36 DreamWorks Animation's OpenMoonRay adds NUMA Support
22:26 20 Years of the Open Invention Network
24:19 SDL Implements the Pointer Warp Protocol
29:31 Outro

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Do electric vehicles make people more carsick?

An increasing number of people are experiencing motion sickness in EVs, and there is a scientific explanation as to why

With electric cars skyrocketing in popularity around the world – in 2024, 22% of new car sales worldwide were electric vehicles, compared with 18% in 2023 – a growing body of studies and an increasing number of people have found that they feel more motion sick riding in EVs than in traditional petrol or diesel cars. Anecdotes of feeling sick in the passenger or back seat of electric cars litter social media, as do questions from wary prospective buyers.

There is a scientific explanation behind why a person might feel more sick in an EV, though, according to multiple academic studies.

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