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The Martian Chronicles is a roughly connected collection of short stories written at various times by Ray Bradbury that were about humans going to Mars. They don't really have a coherent story but some of the characters and events cross over and it beats having to read 50 stories separately but is it worth reading them at all?

Where Fahrenheit 451 showed the sci-fi side of Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles shows his poetic side.

In many ways it is more ambitious than 451, indeed many of the themes that Ray had to connect with the thread of storytelling show themselves off beautifully here with short stories exploring colonialism, religion, need of belonging, blowing ourselves to bits (something that doesn't sound as far-fetched considering the events we are all going through) and he creates a wonderful mythology about Mars one that isn't more fantastical than realistic for sure but feels lived in.

Although even when talking about hardcore science-fiction books this little collection of stories manages to achieve something that I have seen very few stories do right, namely that it shows how weird and magical and utterly incomprehensible that other lifeform (be it Martians or otherwise) can be.

Ultimately this is a book about people and their stories, experiencing it brought out a lot of emotions and I was ultimately left amazed by how well the whole was written.

Highly highly recommended if you're into short stories

Review by @Legendsofanus@lemmy.world

1st, USB emulation, since it's more interesting of a use case, IMO.

A while back you may've stumbled upon the article Unlocking secret ThinkPad functionality for emulating USB devices where a dude patches nvram to enable xdci. I've been reminded of that recently and decided to find a way to achieve that with coreboot. After some time looking here and there, here's the solution: just add device ref south_xdci on end after device domain 0 on in coreboot's src/mainboard/lenovo/sklkbl_thinkpad/variants/t480/overridetree.cb. Yap, that simple; have fun!

Now on edk2: as one dude on reddit suggested, libreboot can be used to get the proprietary binaries and patched ME semi-automatically (although I've experienced some instability here and ended up feeding it blobs from an earlier build). As for the .config, I ended up following MrChromebox' advice and leaving most of the default choices be. Here's a minimal defconfig that generates working builds (fully flashable, not just the bios region):

# board choice
CONFIG_VENDOR_LENOVO=y
CONFIG_BOARD_LENOVO_T480=y
CONFIG_PAYLOAD_EDK2=y

# proprietary blobs
CONFIG_HAVE_IFD_BIN=y
CONFIG_IFD_BIN_PATH="../../../config/ifd/t480/ifd_16"
CONFIG_HAVE_ME_BIN=y
CONFIG_ME_BIN_PATH="../../../vendorfiles/t480/me.bin"
CONFIG_HAVE_GBE_BIN=y
CONFIG_GBE_BIN_PATH="../../../config/ifd/t480/gbe"
CONFIG_ADD_FSP_BINARIES=y
CONFIG_FSP_USE_REPO=n
CONFIG_FSP_M_FILE="../../../vendorfiles/kabylake/Fsp_M.fd"
CONFIG_FSP_S_FILE="../../../vendorfiles/kabylake/Fsp_S.fd"

# nice-to-haves
CONFIG_EDK2_FULL_SCREEN_SETUP=y
CONFIG_MEC1653_ENABLE_UART=y

You can walk around the menuconfig after making olddefconfig and see what other options you may like. However DO NOT TOGGLE the "allow pcie resource allocation over 4g" or whatever it was called (it's in the bottom of the device section), as on my machine that resulted in coreboot and systemd-boot displaying nothing, though there finally was image after Linux started booting. So, not fatal, but may end up requiring reflashing externally, depending on your setup.

The most useful thing in edk2 for me with that was the working platform setup menu, where one can disable the annoying fnlock on boot/wake and increase the memory limits for igpu. Although, nvramtool should work for that now, too.

OC by @HyperfocusSurfer@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Wine 11.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release in the road toward the Wine 12.0 stable release next January.

Wine 11.1 kicked off the new development cycle in late January following the Wine 11.0 stable debut. With Wine 11.2 there is more early feature work plus 32 bug fixes, which is on the heavier side for the past two weeks.

Another day, another load of bug fixes coming from Valve for all Steam users and an especially nice one for Linux / SteamOS if you have a lot of games.

Something that does come up now and then is that the Steam client on Linux systems (like Steam Deck) can seemingly forget it's able to run Windows games via Proton. There's a few different ways it can happen, with previous bugs already solved by Valve and now they've found another related bug to squash.

Well, here's an unexpected combination... Toyota's Toyota Connected North America unit is developing a console-grade open-source game engine. Making it even more unusual is their engineering choices of building around the Flutter toolkit and in turn the Dart programming language. This new game engine creation is called Fluorite.

Toyota Connected North America is Toyota Motor Corporation's subsidiary founded in collaboration with Microsoft for working on in-vehicle software, AI, and related tech initiatives. Toyota Connected developers announced at FOSDEM 2026 their Fluorite game engine as a "console grade" engine built around Flutter and Dart. They were going with Flutter to leverage its rich UI toolkit and for "building stunning interactive experiences." Fluorite also makes use of Google's Filament 3D rendering engine.