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The bill, which is from a shop on New Year's Eve 2001, cost just £34.57 and included staple items such as olive oil and cat food all of which have seen a marked increase in prices since then.

Drivers should avoid the area where possible

The new album, West End Girl, which title is inspired by her acting stints on the London stage, is a raw, confessional contents informed by the breakdown of her marriage from David Harbour.

OpenAI sweetens the deal with data residency

OpenAI has signed up the UK's Ministry of Justice as the latest public sector customer for ChatGPT Enterprise.…

Tory Robert Jenrick said an official report showed probation officers 'won't be able to cope' with huge numbers of criminals handed community punishments instead of jail.

An Icelandic programmer successfully ran Doom on the European Space Agency's OPS-SAT satellite, proving that the iconic 1993 shooter can now run not just everywhere on Earth -- but in orbit. ZDNet reports: Olafur Waage, a senior software developer from Iceland who now works in Norway, explained at Ubuntu Summit 25.10 how he, a self-described "professional keyboard typist" and maker of funny videos, ended up making what is perhaps the game's most outlandish port yet: Doom running on a real satellite in orbit, the European Space Agency (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite. OPS-SAT, a "flying laboratory" for testing novel onboard computing techniques, was equipped with an experimental computer approximately 10 times more powerful than the norm for spacecraft. Waag explained, "OPS-SAT was the first of its kind, devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities when satellites can fly more powerful onboard computers. The point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft." (The satellite was decommissioned in 2024.) [...] Running Doom in orbit was partly a challenge of portability and partly a challenge of the limitations of space hardware and mission control. The on-board ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while hot stuff for space computing hardware (which tends to be low-powered and radiation-hardened), was slow even by Earth-bound standards. Waage chose Chocolate Doom 2.3, a popular open-source version of Doom, for its compatibility with the Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distro, which was already running on OPS-SAT. Besides, Waage noted, "We picked Chocolate Doom 2.3 because of the libraries available for 18.04 -- that was the last one that would actually build. Updating software in orbit is extremely difficult, so relatively little code would have to be uploaded. As Waage said, "Doom is relatively straightforward C with a few external dependencies." In other words, it's easy to port. [...] The only sign that Doom was running in space at first was a lone log entry. So, the team used the satellite's camera to snap real-time images of the Earth, then swapped Doom's Mars skybox for actual satellite photos. "The idea was to take a screenshot from the satellite and use that as the sky, all rendered in software using the game's restricted 256-color palette," explained Waage. Even this posed unexpected difficulties: "Trying to draw all of these beautiful colors with those colors," said Waage, "it's probably not going to work right off. But we tried gradient tests, NASA demo photos. It took quite a bit of tweaking." Eventually, instead of a fantasy Mars as the sky background, they got a good-looking, real Earth in the game's sky. The game itself ran flawlessly. After all, Waage said, "It ran beautifully. It's on Ubuntu."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Official figures showed retail sales surging 0.5 per cent in September, while the August increase was revised up to 0.6 per cent.

In one of the most audacious robberies in history, the Louvre was victim to a brazen jewel theft in broad daylight.

A reliable umbrella is an essential addition to your new-season wardrobe.

Emily Robinson joined Harry and Meghan's team as director of communications in June, but she has already jumped ship.

Techie summoned at 02:00 AM to sort things out sent another 2 billion trying to fix it

On Call  Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly wander through your tales of tech support.…

It's been several years now that our reliable contributor Daniel D. has been sending us the same gripe time after time. We get it, really we do. It irks us too, but it is astounding just how many times he's been able to find this!
With no further ado, here is Daniel's pet peeve. See if you can figure out what it is.

640 kB 40 characters must be enough for anybody," right? Daniel bemoaned "US Banks, brokers, financial institutions. You would expect them to put heavy safeguards with stronger the password the better, right? But then you find out they require just 8 to 40 and not a bit more."

 

Gripe Numero Dos, Daniel wants to know "How much is more?" Grumbling on, "I tried to register an account with FT.com with a generated password of 62 character length of mixed alphanumerical and special symbols, as usual, when this happened... Based on my experience this issue usually pops up when the system does not allow longer passwords. So, decreasing to 52 didn't work, 42 did. Maybe the mice know why."

 

"50 characters should be enough for everybody", Daniel complained in March. "Bill Gates supposedly said ... (he didn't really). But New Relic is sure that 50 characters password are safe enough and you don't need 62 characters at all."

 

Still longer ago, Daniel identified another transgression with a limit of 32 this time. No idea who to blame and shame for this one:

 

Finally (or initially), Daniel uncovered foolish consistency among the publishing gnomes: "We all know password requirements are like a plague. Even security professionals do not recommend complex password creation rules. But The Atlantic begs to differ: "Why don't you add a special character to your securely generated 62 characters long password?" Yep, The Atlantic, that special symbol is going to make difference and my account won't get hacked." Alas, Daniel, I regret to inform you that some IT departments don't get a choice about what requirements to enforce, their security auditors or regulations make that decision for them.

 

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The former top advisor to Trump has spoken of the president getting past the 22nd amendment - which limits people from being elected president more than twice - before.

The crash reportedly involved a lorry. Drivers faced two-mile queues.

Britain's families face a split in the weather during the October half-term holidays next week - with the South seeing drier conditions and the North experiencing rain.

Alison Zupancic provided protection to former Vice President Kamala Harris's stepdaughter Ella Emhoff despite not achieving all the requirements of a Secret Service agent.

Murder, beheading, knock-knees, bribes, corruption and incompetence, stuttering, and weight problems are usually what comes with being Duke of York.

Federline, 47, alleged that their boys, Sean Preston, 20, Jayden James, 19, are 'terrified' and that one of them expressed fears that 'mom is going to die.'

Residents will have a slew of amenities to hand, including jacuzzis, swimming pools, a movie theatre, gym, golf simulator and an Aston Martin car simulator.

Earlier in the month, a reader got in contact to tell us, in rather modest fashion, that he had become an Isa millionaire at the ripe old age of 36.