Every Halloween we love to see the awesome costumes that people with limb difference wear. This year, we’ve decided to share some particularly epic ones with you!

Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources tell Axios.

President Donald Trump declined to endorse Vice President JD Vance for the 2028 presidential election during a press briefing in Ireland

Yesterday's show was nice. Too bad the moon is almost full at the moment, so the night sky is hardly dark.

In copyright lawsuits over AI training, Meta has spent weeks blaming staff for downloading torrents. The company has now been ordered to name executives who authorized decisions to pirate books from shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive and LibGen, TorrentFreak reported.

Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.

The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro.

OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others are positioning AI agents as personal assistants that can perform a range of tasks online. But the web is becoming increasingly unfriendly toward agents, undermining their usefulness.

MapQuest... welcome to the resistance.

I have very special bespoke boots. I care a lot about them - and for them too - because not only have I waited a long time to receive them and they help me walk, they're also very expensive and they were offered to me free of charge by the public healthcare system of the country I currently live in. Meaning the taxpayers of this country offered me the best fitting shoes I've ever owned since I dropped a few shoe sizes 8 years ago. So I feel very grateful.

In fact, they're the first delivery of a lifetime prescription for orthopedic footwear I was granted. Yes, you read that right: I needn't buy winter footwear ever again! When this pair is worn out, all I have to do is call the public hospital, and hey presto, 3 weeks later, a replacement pair will show up on my doorstep. So I'm even more grateful.

Those are 3,000€ boots and I don't want to abuse the system, so I take very good care of them so they last as long as possible. But as good as they are, they featured really annoying pull tabs at the back, like most boots:

The problem was, my pants would catch on them each time I'd get up from a seated position, and I'd have to bend down and pull my pant legs over the tabs each and every time.

I don't need the tabs to put my boots on, so I figured I'd remove them. But I wasn't about to take initiatives because I have never worked leather or stitched anything (well) and I did't want to ruin my precious boots.

So I brought them to my usual cobbler yesterday. He's done splendid leather work for me before, so I trust him. When I entered his shop, some older dude was there. After inquiring, I learned that he was his father - also a cobbler - and his son was on vacation.

Fine... I showed him my boots, pointed to the tabs, and asked him "Could you cut these off..." but before I could add "...as cleanly as you can, and ONLY if there's no risk of unraveling the stitch!", he grabbed a pair of scissors without saying anything, went snip-snip, then looked at me like I was a moron who couldn't work scissors and said "Like this?"

I was horrified! He did a completely sloppy job and didn't seem to care at all that those aren't ordinary boots from some discount store. I looked at what he'd done for several seconds, then eventually asked him:

"Like... really? Just like that?"
"Sure" he said. "Is it so hard?"

I wanted to tell him I wanted a cleaner job than that, that this was really crummy and, well, quite frankly, disrespectful. But I figured if he treated my boots like shit to begin with, he wasn't likely to do a better job if I asked him to explicitly.

So I just asked him if the stitch was in any danger of unraveling with what he'd done. "Naah..." he replied dismissively, like if it was obvious.

The father is a crummier cobbler than the son I guess. What a disappointment 🙁

Today a grabbed a pair of x-acto knives, mounted fresh blades on them, then carefully cut off the bits of leather the cobbler had left poking out with his half-assed scissor cuts, as straight and as evenly close to the stitch lines as I could.

I got lucky at one spot because the scissor cut almost made it all the way down to the stitch. But not quite, and luckily I had just enough material left to achieve a straight cut all the way across.

Then I chamfered the corners of the cuts, slathered some brown shoe polish a few times to darken the cross-section, and voila: the cuts look clean enough that you'd almost never know pulls tabs were there originally!

A Philadelphia woman was arrested after allegedly refusing to move out of the path of a delivery robot.

The night sky was very clear yesterday, with just enough auroral activity to make the scene more interesting, and I reworked the post-processing script to remove almost all the quantization noise and light pollution from the final mage.

The job of a defence analyst is getting harder; here is why. Unscripted and unedited, just a defence analyst sharing their knowledge.

Playing with video compilation options... I like this persistence effect that causes the stars spinning in the sky to leave long, slow-fading trails.

The night sky was very clear yesterday, with just enough auroral activity to make the scene more interesting, and I reworked the post-processing script to remove almost all the quantization noise and light pollution from the final mage.

I was trying to shoot a star trail last night with my new equatorial mount, since the sky was supposed to be crystal-clear. But instead it was partially overcast, and this decent-looking aurora rolled in too.

This is what the star trail looks like, if you're curious:

Too much green for a star trail 🙂

Success! - kind of...

I wanted a clear night without northern lights to get nice, circular star trails with the camera pointing towards the celestial north pole. So of course I got an overcast sky with lots of auroral activity...

But the camera could see enough stars enough time to confirm that this setup does indeed yield completely circular trails!

This is what last night looks like when combining all the images together. It's a busy image with the star trails, aircraft navigation light trails, and of course the northern lights.

I also got a nice-looking timelapse of the aurora while the sky was still mostly clear:

The mount at the nadir isn't too prominent. It almost blends into the dark background in the timelapse video. Still, I wish I could make it less obnoxious...

Meta says it fixed an issue with its smart glasses where it recorded users' audio without permission.

to hopefully capture star trails that look circular tonight.

If you view previous star trail photos I've done - such as this one, if you look up and sideways, you will notice that the circle of stars looks all crinkled and deformed.

That's because the camera's stitcher takes liberties with the edges of the fisheye images to stitch them together such that the features in the edges of both half-spheres match up. That's not great, and there isn't much I can do about it 🙁

To avoid this, I 3D-printed an equatorial mount for the camera: it positions the camera so the center of the image of the front lens points directly at the celestial north pole in my neck of the woods (the latitude where I live is baked into the print):

That way, almost all the stars that are visible here will be contained solely within the front image, will spin around the center of the image, and any deformation should occur pretty much only where the horizon meets the plane of the stitch line, as no stars are visible at the back of the camera where our trees and our house block the view.

Unfortunately, it also means that the nadir of the image is now situated just below the horizon instead of being hidden at the bottom of the sphere (because we live rather high up north), and it's quite visible. Here is a flat projection of a photo taken with the camera earlier:

I'm hoping it will disappear - or at least fade away enough to be inconspicuous - in the dark of the night.

The camera is shooting now. It'll take one image of the night sky every 15 seconds during the entire night. We should have totally clear nights tonight and tomorrow night.

Either we don't get any northern lights tonight and I'm hoping the camera will capture a nice, round-looking star trail, or I'm hoping we'll get strong auroral activity and we get spectacular northern lights overhead, where the image is clearest with the camera mounted in this position.

Stay tuned for the results tomorrow 🙂

This year's ever-present cloud cover broke for a few hours yesterday night and a lazy but nice-looking aurora appeared while the sky was clear.