Ubuntu’s Desktop Icons NG (DING) extension has a little-known way to bring order to a chaotic desktop: stacks. Stacks groups multiple files of the same type in a collapsible icon, e.g. images in one stack, PDFs in another and so on. Folders don’t get grouped, and if there is only one of a type of file on the desktop, it is not stacked. Expanding a stack by clicking on it reveals all files in the stack (other file icons bump out of the way). Multiple stacks can be expanded or collapsed at the same time, and stacks can be left […]

You're reading A hidden Ubuntu feature I use to tidy up my desktop, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

A decades-old bug on Ubuntu’s Launchpad marked as invalid at the weekend lead to an impromptu reunion for many of Canonical’s former engineers. Bug #1589796 was filed in 2016 by a user who’d spent £700 on Ubuntu phone and tablet hardware but, on visiting the official website, found no documentation to tell him how to use them. Canonical axed the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving this bug unresolved. Until now. Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, on the Ubuntu bug triage team, marked #1599796 as invalid this weekend. In closing it, he added a comment to explain why, namely that “efforts were […]

You're reading Decade-old bug closure turns into an Ubuntu Phone engineer reunion, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Mathematician James Maynard has spent a lot of time this past year "soul searching." A professor at the University of Oxford and winner of the prestigious Fields Medal, Maynard told The Verge he's been grappling with the future of his field as the traditionally slow-moving discipline hurries to adapt to AI.

Days before we spoke, OpenAI revealed it had produced the solutions to 10 long-standing mathematics problems, some of which had confounded academics for decades. Like generative AI used to produce text and images or propose ideas in science and medicine, the technology learns patterns and connections from the vast amount of material it' …

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Every so often, I’ll be piloting some sensor-laden, software-defined press car down a dark stretch of highway when an oncoming driver’s high beams arrive like a targeted retinal strike, an involuntary reminder that modern automotive lighting has entered its own lumen arms race.

Anyone who has driven at night in the last few years knows what I'm talking about: A modern crossover crests a hill in the opposite lane, and the cabin briefly fills with enough cold-white light to suggest a police helicopter has joined traffic. The obvious assumption is that drivers are simply leaving their high beams on more often, but the reality is more complicated.

An old problem

Before cars became the modern mode of transportation, horse-drawn carriages used oil lanterns to light the way, as roads were largely unlit outside of towns and cities. These lanterns weren’t particularly bright, though, meaning that after-dark collisions and near-misses were common.

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I've liked the Framework Laptop 13 since the first time I used it, partly because I just think the idea of a repairable and upgradeable laptop is cool and partly because it's not Yet Another Ultraportable Trying To Be A MacBook Air Clone. But the design has always had real shortcomings—the most noticeable and serious being its mediocre battery life.

Enter the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. While all previous Laptop 13 refreshes have tinkered around the edges with the original design (a tweaked lid design here, new hinges or new speakers there), the Laptop 13 Pro is as close as we've gotten to a second-generation revision for the original design.

This means that it breaks backward compatibility for some (but not all) Laptop 13 components, most notably the bottom case, the keyboard and trackpad, and the original 55 WHr and 61 WHr battery designs. But by allowing itself to make larger changes to the design, Framework has made major strides in battery life and general fit and finish.

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