Love them or hate them, inkjets are still a very popular technology for putting text and images on paper, and with good reason. They work and are inexpensive, or would be, if not for the cartridge racket. There’s a bit of mystery about exactly what’s going on inside the humble inkjet that can be difficult to describe in words, though, which is why [Dennis Kuppens] recently released his Interactive Printing Simulator.

[Dennis] would likely object to that introduction, however, as the simulator targets functional inkjet printing, not graphical. Think traces of conductive ink, or light masks where even a single droplet out-of-place can lead to a non-functional result. If you’re just playing with this simulator to get an idea of what the different parameters are, and the effects of changing them, you might not care. There are some things you can get away with in graphics printing you really cannot with functional printing, however, so this simulator may seem a bit limited in its options to those coming from the artistic side of things.

You can edit parameters of the nozzle head manually, or select a number of industrial printers that come pre-configured. Likewise there are pre-prepared patterns, or you can try and draw the Jolly Wrencher as the author clearly failed to do. Then hit ‘start printing’ and watch the dots get laid down.

[Dennis] has released it under an AGPL-3.0 license, but notes that he doesn’t plan on developing the project further. If anyone else wants to run with this, they are apparently more than welcome to, and the license enables that.

Did you know that there’s an inkjet in space? Hopefully NASA got a deal on cartridges. If not, maybe they could try hacking the printer for continuous ink flow. Of course that’s all graphics stuff; functional printing is more like this inkjet 3D printer.

Mastodon is making changes in the hopes of making its social networking service more appealing and easier to use, especially for more mainstream users looking for an alternative to X or Threads.

On Thursday, the decentralized social networking software maker said it’s redesigning a key part of its platform by giving people’s user profiles a new look, which it hopes will appeal to organizations, as well as individuals.

Built on the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon became better known after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now called X, which led some to seek alternatives. The platform’s appeal is its decentralized nature, meaning a single company doesn’t have control of the algorithm, and users can move their accounts if they don’t like how a particular server operates or moderates its community.

However, this system is also more complicated compared with signing up for a traditional social network like X. On Mastodon, users have to pick a server to join and have different timelines (local and federated), which can be confusing to newcomers. The process for following others on the service can be cumbersome, too.

That’s left Mastodon struggling to pick up more users, numbers that now hover at around 800,000 monthly actives, down from a million at the height of the Twitter drama.

Mastodon has been working in more recent months to address various pain points that could alienate users. In February, it simplified the onboarding process and added other features users expect, like Quote Posts or “starter packs” called Collections.

Now it’s tackling user profiles. The revamped version makes several changes, many of which are visual in nature.

What’s changing

Instead of offering two views of a person’s posts (“posts” or “posts and replies”), similar to X, profiles feature just one “Activity” tab with a dropdown menu. This lets users configure other combinations of posts, by toggling on or off replies and boosts — the latter being Mastodon’s version of the repost.

Hashtags also now appear at the top of this Activity tab, allowing users to filter the posts on that account by the tag they click on.

Mastodon also ditched the pinned posts carousel, which many users didn’t like. The feature was meant to balance the needs of those who wanted to pin several posts, with the needs of those visiting a profile to quickly get to the user’s recent posts. Now Mastodon users with multiple pinned posts will have one featured, while the rest can be revealed by clicking on a new “View all pinned posts” button.

Another change is designed to explain Mastodon handles to newcomers. Unlike on X or Threads, where users are just @username, Mastodon handles have two @’s in them — one referencing their account name and the other their server’s name. A new informational pop-up explains this.

Users have more control over how their profile appears, too, with options to hide the “Media” or “Featured” tabs, if desired, or hide replies from their “Media” tab if they want to showcase their work.

Custom fields on the profile, where users add things like links, pronouns, and other information, are displayed side by side, which means there’s more vertical space available on the screen. These fields can now be modified on iOS and Android, too, not just the web.

Other tweaks to the design make profiles seem less cluttered — like the removal of a “following you” badge and moving the optional “personal note” users add to their profiles to an overflow menu.

Profile edits can now all be done from one place in the account settings, allowing users to manage tasks like their featured hashtags (which Mastodon helpfully now suggests), links, and other profile information.

Link verification — which is Mastodon’s tool to establish someone’s credibility without becoming a centralized authority (or requiring payment, as on X) — is no longer buried in settings. Users can crop and add alt text to their profile images and cover photos.

The changes will initially be available to the mastodon.social server and other servers that opt to run the nightly build. More servers will get the update when the Mastodon 4.6 software update arrives in a few weeks.

The European Commission, the European Union’s main executive body, is investigating a security breach after a threat actor gained access to its Amazon cloud infrastructure.

Although the EU’s executive cabinet has yet to disclose the incident publicly, BleepingComputer has learned that the breach affected at least one account used to manage the compromised cloud infrastructure.

Sources familiar with the incident have told BleepingComputer that the attack was quickly detected and that the Commission’s cybersecurity incident response team is now investigating.

While the Commission has yet to share any details about this breach, the threat actor who claimed responsibility for the attack reached out to BleepingComputer earlier this week, stating that they had stolen over 350 GB of data (including multiple databases).

They didn’t disclose how they breached the affected accounts, but they provided BleepingComputer with several screenshots as proof that they had access to information belonging to European Commission employees and to an email server used by Commission employees.

The threat actor also told BleepingComputer that they will not attempt to extort the Commission using the allegedly stolen data as leverage, but intend to leak the data online at a later date.

The Commission disclosed another data breach in February after discovering on January 30 that the mobile device management platform used to manage its staff’s devices had been hacked.

The January incident appears to be linked to similar attacks targeting other European institutions (including the Dutch Data Protection Authority and Valtori, a government agency of Finland’s Ministry of Finance) that exploit code-injection vulnerabilities in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) software.

These recent security breaches come on the heels of the Commission’s January 20 proposal for new cybersecurity legislation to strengthen defenses against state-backed actors and cybercrime groups targeting Europe’s critical infrastructure.

Last week, the Council of the European Union also sanctioned three Chinese and Iranian companies for orchestrating cyberattacks targeting the critical infrastructure of member states.

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When it comes to AI chatbots, there’s currently a war on for consumer attention. All the big chatbot providers are looking to increase their user count and, in a minor coup for itself, Google just made it significantly easier for users of those other chatbots to defect to Gemini.

On Thursday, the company announced what it calls “switching tools,” new widgets that are designed to allow users to transfer “memories” (basically chunks of personal information) and even entire chat histories from other chatbots directly into Gemini. Users can easily share “key preferences, relationships, and personal context” in this way, the company says.

The idea is to make it significantly easier to adopt Google’s AI assistant, as users won’t have to spend large amounts of time re-training Gemini on who they are and what they want.

The memory feature works like this: Gemini will suggest a prompt that the user can enter into their current chatbot, which will then generate a response that can be copied and pasted back into Gemini. In this fashion, Gemini coaches the user on what kinds of information it would be helpful to know about them, while also helping facilitate the transmission of that information back into its own archive.

“Once you import these memories, Gemini will understand the same key facts you’ve shared with other apps, like your interests, your sibling’s name, or where you grew up,” the company says. “Instead of starting over from scratch, you can quickly get Gemini up to speed on what matters most to you.”

When it comes to importing chat histories, Google says that all you need is to upload them in a zip file. It’s relatively easy to export chat logs via zips from most chatbots — including from ChatGPT and Claude. This allows users to “seamlessly pick up right where you left off,” the company says. Google says users also have the ability to search through those old chats.

ChatGPT remains the big kahuna in the consumer chatbot market, with OpenAI announcing last month that it has reached 900 million weekly active users. Gemini — despite Google’s vast distribution advantages, including its default placement across Android devices and the Chrome browser — has lagged in consumer mindshare. Last month, it shared its own numbers during Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings call, saying Gemini had surpassed 750 million monthly active users. This move is clearly aimed at helping Google catch up.

There were two questions I was looking to answer as I fired up MLB The Show 26. First, how much does the game cater to a baseball newbie like me? Second, will it keep me hooked enough to keep playing after my first few games?

I think it’s important to share some personal context. I have very limited experience with baseball. I have been to one MLB game, which was on my first visit to Canada as a teen. The lead-off Toronto Blue Jays hitter scored a home run on his first at-bat. Fireworks went off and everyone was going wild. Fun!

But that was the only score of the whole game. My dad and I (both lifelong soccer fans, for what it’s worth) were bored lifeless for the rest of the three hours.

An incredible run of a dog playing a baseball game at Games Done Quick aside, I had no real interest in the sport for the next couple of decades until the Blue Jays made a deep run into the 2025 playoffs. This time, now as a Canadian citizen, I bought into the excitement and watched all of the World Series last year. I was enthralled.

I slowly started to appreciate the nuances of pitching, the skill of trying to make every pitch look identical at the time the ball is thrown to hopefully hoodwink the batter. Friends who are in-the-know tolerated my most basic of questions about how everything works as the postseason wore on. Now, I’m planning to watch a lot more games this year and MLB The Show 26 arrived at just the right time to get me ready for the new season.

Sony’s San Diego Studio seemed to be speaking to me, personally, when the first thing the game asked me to do was select my preferred playstyle. The Competitive track was definitely out for now. The Simulation option offers an “authentic MLB experience that plays true to player and team ratings.” I wasn’t quite feeling that either. As a newcomer to all of this, I had to select the Casual style. That’s billed as “an easier, fun, pick up and play experience with an emphasis on learning the game.” Exactly what I needed.

I was immediately impressed with how deeply you can customize the gameplay, even if the vast array of batting and pitching options in particular felt a little overwhelming. Using both a thumbstick to aim and button to swing at the ball seemed too much for someone who has no idea as yet how to read pitches.

Dipping my toes in slowly was surely going to help me avoid getting too frustrated too quickly and uninstalling the game, so I chose to keep everything as simple as possible. I’m not switching off options like automated bullpen warm ups for a long time, if ever.

Finally, after about 20 minutes of fine-tuning some settings in the tutorial, it was game time.

The Dodgers didn’t know what hit ’em as I won my first game 38-0. I thought this Shohei guy was supposed to be good? Pffft, he didn’t even register a hit. His team only got a measly two players on base, while I had 46 hits. That blowout was a fun intro to MLB The Show 26, but I had to bump up the difficulty and make it a little more challenging if there was any chance of me sticking with it.

Instead of jumping into the Road to the Show career mode, an online match or another exhibition game to get my feet a tad wetter, I next tried the Storylines feature. This is what really drew me into MLB The Show 26.

San Diego Studio has been sharing the stories of several notable players from the Negro Leagues in the last few editions of the series. I know very little about baseball history outside of household names. So I was fascinated to learn about the likes of Roy Campanella, who debuted in the league as a 15-year-old catcher, and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, the league’s first female pitcher.

The developers did a fantastic job of connecting these athletes’ stories to playable moments from their playing careers. Cutscene insights from Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, tied everything together quite beautifully. Great stories are such an effective way to pull you into a sport and to start learning about it. Stories connect us more than just about anything else.

The default difficulty in the Storylines mode was much higher than I dealt with in my first washout game. Still, that gave me a chance to practice the Competitive playstyle without having to play a full game or the stop-start nature of the tutorial.

My pitching was less accurate, so figuring out how to compensate for that made for an interesting challenge. Batting was a lot tougher too, with balls travelling faster and pitchers trying to trick me. At first, I was swinging at every ball, but that clearly was the wrong idea. I tried to be more judicious and wait to see if a ball was breaking, but that meant I was swinging too late and fouling or giving the fielders an easy catch. That’s a tricky conundrum to solve, and I’ll need a lot more practice before I dream of playing online. I’m not even going to get started on how woeful I am at catching.

And yet all of this deepened my appreciation for baseball. There’s so much more nuance and complexity to the sport than I realized until a few months ago. And even as someone who doesn’t typically enjoy turn-based games, I found myself getting into the swing of it… so to speak.

I’m never going to care about Diamond Dynasty, MLB The Show’s take on Ultimate Team modes in EA Sports games. I can’t see myself diving into the team management-focused Franchise mode, in large part because I don’t yet have a strong enough understanding of stats to have a decent handle on what makes a specific player great in their role. And as much as I like the idea of the Road to the Show career mode — in which you can stick with a player from their high school days all the way to a Hall of Fame induction — I don’t think I can invest enough time into that to make it worth the effort.

I did find the answers to the two main questions I had about MLB The Show 26. It does a bang-up job of easing a baseball newbie like me into the fray. I’m eager to keep playing as well. I don’t think MLB The Show has quite enough pull to keep me away from my actual forever game, Overwatch, for too long. But I can absolutely see myself playing it on a second screen while streaming some MLB games this season. After all, I’m always on the lookout for a great story.

MLB The Show 26 is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

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