A few weeks ago I shipped NewsBlur v14 for iOS and Mac, a major redesign of the Apple apps. Today, Android gets the same treatment. Every screen has been reworked: the feed list, the story list, the reading view, preferences, and menus. Along with the visual overhaul, several features that were previously web-only are now on Android: Ask AI, Discover Related Sites, and the Daily Briefing.

Here’s what’s new.

Ask AI

Ask AI brings the same AI-powered Q&A from the web and iOS to Android. Open any story, tap Ask AI, and ask questions about it. Summarize a long article, get background on a developing situation, or fact-check a claim. Pick your preferred AI model and keep the conversation going with follow-ups. The Ask AI sheet matches your current theme and slides up as a bottom sheet, consistent with the share and trainer dialogs.

Discover related sites

Discover Related Sites lets you find new feeds related to any feed you’re already subscribed to. Tap the Discover button in the story list header bar, browse what’s available, and preview a feed before subscribing. Duplicate feeds are filtered out so you only see new options.

Daily Briefing

The Daily Briefing generates a personalized summary of your news, organized into sections like Top Stories, Based on Your Interests, and Long Reads. It uses native Android story rows, so it feels like a regular feed rather than a bolted-on feature. Configure your briefing frequency, writing style, and sections from the briefing view in your sidebar.

Sepia theme and refined dark themes

A new Sepia theme brings warmer tones for comfortable long reading sessions. The Dark theme has been lightened to match the iOS gray/medium palette, and the Black theme now uses true absolute black backgrounds for feed and story cells, making it ideal for OLED screens.

Story list header bar

The top of the story list now has a header bar with quick access to Discover, search, display options, and settings. The display and settings controls are split into separate menus so you can change the view without wading through unrelated options.

Redesigned reading experience

The reading view has been rethought from top to bottom. Story traversal buttons are lifted above the bottom edge for easier thumb access. A new traverse bar with refined icons shows your position and unread count. Story actions are hidden until the story finishes rendering, so you never tap a button before the content is ready. Opening a story from the list now animates smoothly into the reader, and swiping back uses an interactive gesture that tracks your finger.

Redesigned preferences and menus

Preferences have been rebuilt as a modern settings screen with inline segments instead of separate dialog pickers. The feed list menu, reading menu, and folder menus have all been redesigned with cleaner styling and better organization. Menus now scale with your device font size, so they stay readable at any accessibility setting.

Premium Archive and Pro subscriptions

You can now subscribe to Premium Archive and Premium Pro directly from the Android app. An upgrade banner appears in the story list when you’re on a lower tier, showing what you’d unlock by upgrading.

Everything else

Beyond the headline features, this release includes a long list of improvements and fixes.

Improvements

• Interactive swipe-back gesture in both the story list and reading view with predictive back support on Android 14+.
• Feed list aligned with iOS styling, with new collapse-all and expand-all toggles.
• Story header pills with compact layout and title case formatting.
• Active reading time tracking per story, synced to your account.
• Full text and regex classifiers for the Intelligence Trainer.
• Feed search field themed to match your current theme with autofill disabled.
• Sync done pill delayed until feeds actually render, so you see the update happen.
• Story thumbnails enlarged for small sizes and cropping fixed.
• Status banners at the top of the story list for loading and error states.
• Mute Sites redesigned with upgrade card and progress bar.
• Custom folder and feed icon support.

Fixes

• Fixed TransactionTooLargeException crash in the reading pager.
• Fixed database version mismatch crash on launch.
• Fixed ItemListMenuPopup crash on small and split-screen displays.
• Fixed login autofill and app switching losing input.
• Fixed story row thumbnail cropping.
• Fixed search pill text vanishing.
• Fixed story list edge back gesture interference.
• Brightened story feed titles for better readability.

Coming up next: v14.2 will bring story clustering to Android, so duplicate stories across your feeds get grouped together automatically, just like on the web.

NewsBlur v14 for Android is available now on the Google Play Store. If you have feedback or run into issues, I’d love to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.

The AP:

Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese’s products starting next year, a change that comes after the grandson of Reese’s founder criticized the company for shifting to cheaper ingredients.

Running to the press never works.

(Stick to Trader Joe’s, I say.)

Link: apnews.com/article/hershey-reeses-chocolate-peanut-butter…

Why do so many people keep falling for the same trick over and over again?

With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising.

Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR’s description to include this message: “⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast.”

↫ David Uzondu at Neowin

It turns out that Microsoft has added ads to over 1.5 million Copilot pull requests on GitHub, and they’re even appearing on GitLab, one of the GitHub alternatives. The reasoning is clear, too, of course: “AI” companies and investors have poured ungodly amounts of money in “AI” that is impossible to recover, even with paying customers. As such, the logical next step is ads, and many “AI” companies are already starting to add advertising to their pachinko machines. It was only a matter of time before Copilot would start inserting ads into the pull requests it ejaculates over all kinds of projects.

This isn’t the first time a once-free service turns on its users, but it’s definitely one of the quickest turnarounds I’ve ever seen. Usually it takes much longer before companies reach the stage of putting ads in their products to plug any financial bleeding, but with the amount of money poured into this useless black hole, it really shouldn’t be surprising we’re already there. I’m sure Copilot’s competitors, like Claude, will soon follow suit.

They’re enshittifying Git, and developers are just letting it happen. No wonder worker exploitation is so rampant in Silicon Valley.

Speaking of power adapters, this information guide from Rands in Repose is both useful and enlightening.

Link: randsinrepose.com/guides/apple-charging-guide.html

The SGI O2 was SGI’s last-ditch attempt at a low-end MIPS-based workstation back in 1996, and correspondingly didn’t use the hottest parts of the time, nor did it offer much of an upgrade path. None of which is a concern to hobbyists who are more than happy to work around any hardware- and software limitations to e.g. install much faster CPUs. While quite a few CPU upgrades were possible with just some BGA chip reworking skills, installing the 900 MHz RM7900 would require some PROM hacking, which [mattst88] recently took a shake at.

The initial work on upgrading SGI O2 systems was done in the early 2000s, with [Joe Page] and [Ian Mapleson] running into the issue that these higher frequency MIPS CPUs required a custom IP32 PROM image, for which they figured that they’d need either SGI’s help or do some tricky reverse-engineering. Since SGI is no longer around, [mattst88] decided to take up the torch.

After downloading a 512 kB binary dump of the last version of the O2’s PROM, he set to work reverse-engineering it, starting by dissembling the file. A big part of understanding MIPS PROM code is understanding how the MIPS architecture works, including its boot process, so much of what followed was a crash-course on the subject.

With that knowledge it was much easier to properly direct the Capstone disassembler and begin the arduous process of making sense of the blob of data and code. The resulting source files now reassemble into bit-identical ROM files, which makes it likely that modifying it to support different CPUs is now possible with just a bit more work.

For those who want to play along, [mattst88] has made his ip32prom-decompiler project available on GitHub.

Thanks to [adistuder] for the tip.

Top image: Silicon Graphics 1600SW LCD display and O2 workstation. (Source: Wikimedia)

Phased-array radars are great for all sorts of things, whether you’re doing advanced radio research or piloting a fifth-generation combat aircraft. They’re also typically very expensive. [Nawfal] hopes to make the technology more affordable with an open-source radar design of their own.

The design is called the AERIS-10, and is available in two versions. Operating at 10.5 GHz, it can be built to operate at ranges between 3 or 20 kilometers depending on the desired spec. The former uses an 8 x 16 patch antenna array, while the latter extends this to a 32 x 16 array. Either way, each design is capable of fully-electronic beam steering in azimuth and can be hacked to enable elevation too—one of the most attractive features of phased array radars. The hardware is based around an STM32 microcontroller, an FPGA, and a bunch of specialist clock generators, frequency synthesizers, phase shifters, and ADCs to do all the heavy lifting involved in radar.

Radar is something you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about unless you’re involved in maritime, air defence, or weather fields. All of which seem to be very much in the news lately! Still, we feature a good few projects on the topic around these parts. If you’ve got your own radar hacks brewing up in the lab, don’t hesitate to let us know.