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I recently added a UPS to my server rack to keep my internet and home network running during a power outage. After unpacking it, I investigated its USB port and discovered it wasn’t for powering other devices. Instead, it connects to a host computer to provide information like battery charge status, remaining runtime, and current load.

I wanted to access this data without relying on third-party software, so I decided to see if I could reverse-engineer the protocol using Linux.

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For those dealing with SquashFS compressed, read-only file-systems, a new version of the user-space tools were released this week.

SquashFS remains a popular choice for embedded systems for read-only file-system needs as well as the likes of Linux live images. The new 4.7.3 release while a point release does bring a few notable changes.

A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years. The question is whether researchers will be able to take this piece of middle-aged media and rewind it back to the 1970s to get the data off.

The news was posted to Mastodon by Professor Robert Ricci of the University of Utah's Kahlert School of Computing.

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973

Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition

We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum

It feels like it's been a while since I fixed an Apple II. Let's get this one running again!

A YouTuber has managed to bring a cut-down version of the PlayStation 5’s hardware to life on a custom AMD BC250 board bought from China. Running Linux, the unit surprisingly booted and delivered playable performance across several modern games, effectively turning PS5 silicon into a working gaming PC.

A modder has managed to get their hands on what is being sold as the PlayStation 5’s graphics card, or more precisely, the AMD BC250 APU, a cut-down version of the PS5’s custom chip, from a Chinese seller for just £96, or roughly $120. Against all odds, the unit not only powered up but successfully ran multiple PC games on Linux, including GTA V, Cyberpunk 2077, and Counter-Strike 2.

MKVToolNix, a set of tools for creating, altering, and inspecting Matroska (MKV) files under Linux systems, has been updated today to version 96.0, a release that brings a couple of new features and several bug fixes.

MKVToolNix 96.0 comes almost a month after MKVToolNix 95.0 to introduce the --no-bom command-line parameter for disabling the writing of byte order marks to text files encoded with one of the UTF variants. This change fixes an unexpected UTF-8 BOM in mkvextract that occurred when extracting subtitles.

This release also improves the multiplexer feature in the MKVToolNix GUI by adding the <MTX_CHAPTERS_FILE_NAME> variable to the “run program after job completion” mechanism, which contains the absolute path to the chapters file name.

Several bugs were addressed in MKVToolNix 96.0, which improves the OBU reader feature in mkvmerge by fixing probing of files where the first frame ends after the 1MB mark, which is how big the memory buffer used for probing content is, as well as the VobSub reader feature in mkvmerge by correctly reading VobSub .idx files that start with a byte-order mark (BOM).