MapQuest becomes the top free iPhone app on the App Store in Canada and fourth on the US App Store after refusing to change Lake Ontario to Lake America (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/31/mapquest-tops-app-store-charts/

MapQuest Tops App Store Charts After Refusing 'Lake America' Change
MapQuest is in the spotlight this week after refusing to change "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" on its map following an executive...

Degrees of Maps and Cohomological Rigidity of Partial Flag Manifolds
Manas Mandal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09183 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.09183 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.09183
arXiv:2608.09183v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the existence of continuous maps with nonzero Brouwer degree between partial flag manifolds. We prove that every continuous map between two distinct complex (or, quaternionic) partial flag manifolds, whose codomain is not a Grassmannian, has Brouwer degree zero. This establishes, for such partial flag manifolds, the analogue of the results of Ramani-Sankaran and Sankaran-Sarkar for complex and quaternionic Grassmannians, as well as an algebraic-geometric result of Paranjape and Srinivas for complex Grassmannians. As a consequence, we prove that complex and quaternionic partial flag manifolds are cohomologically rigid; that is, their rational cohomology rings determine their homeomorphism types. We conjecture that complex and quaternionic partial flag manifolds are homologically rigid.
toXiv_bot_toot

Meet #comet P/2026 R2 (Leonard) - discovered and tracked by many amateurs since mid-September but only officially named today: https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K26/K26TC6.html (see https://groups.io/g/comets-ml/topic/121311524 and https://groups.io/g/comets-ml/topic/121629614 for an old and a new thread; here it is two days ago, details in ALT text).

The Senate's Clarity Act, a crypto industry-backed bill set for a vote this summer, is mired in debate over rules to stop Trump from selling digital currencies (David Yaffe-Bellany/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/t…

Clarity Act Mired In Debate Over Whether to Bar President From Selling Crypto
Democrats and Republicans are haggling about the Clarity Act, a major bill pushed by the crypto industry, as it moves closer to a Senate vote.

A recurring topic of Wild West movies is some poor lonesome cowboys experiencing the arrival of “civilization“ with all his rules and regulations and retreating further to the “free west” to keep their perceived independence.¹
And with the “civilization” came the oil, casinos, mafia, cars, and insurance companies. And some of the former farmers managed to become fat, rich, old white men.
Then the Internet was invented, and nerds started to explore this new world – until compani…

Since we're on the topic of “disk almost full":
tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done
Deletes lokal time machine snapshots
Another good candidate may be iChat History at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat
All messages including pictures and movies of the last like 10 years are stored there. So if you use iChat (aka Messages) a lot this is BIG.

Have finished 'Balcony Over Jerusalem' by John Lyons. It's showing its age (published 2017), but was on this list: #AmReading #Bookstodon

An Iranian-linked cyberattack knocked a small British power generator offline for four days last month, putting a spotlight on the security of smaller energy facilities.
Check out today's Metacurity for more on what happened in the UK and other top infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--GTA VI hacker leaks gameplay and map,
--Hackers claim 6.1 TB theft from Italian schools,
--CISA warns of exploited MLflow flaw,
--OpenAI warns of persistent AI cyberattacks,
--Anthropic puts Mythos 5 to work on cyber defense,
--Anthropic customers balk at pricey Fable 5,
--Black Hat and DEF CON attendee phishing campaign weaponizes Google Docs,
--OpenAI calls for stronger California AI law,
--Apollo confirms breach after social engineering attack,
--Irregular postmortem leaves key questions unanswered,
--Latvia road agency faulted for late breach reporting,
--Medusa ransomware victim count tops 500,
--Thousands of leaked AWS keys remain active,
--Malware targets Android car head units,
--ToxicPanda expands Android attack arsenal,
--New Zealand moves to ban social media for under-16s,
--Prevalent AI raises $22 million,
--Munich Re buys At-Bay for $575m
--Lawmakers seek probe of CISA staffing cuts,
--TikTok settles children’s privacy case for $400m,
--Google launches tool to expose image context,
--Flock builds AI to identify and track drivers,
--Flock CEO calls for privacy-safety “compromise”
https://www.metacurity.com/iran-linked-uk-power-generator-attack-exposes-a-cybersecurity-blind-spot/

Distance Matrices of Ordered Point Clouds and Their Persistent Homology
David Hien
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12620 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12620 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12620
arXiv:2608.12620v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The distance matrix of a finite point cloud can be visualized as a heatmap. When the data arise from a time series, the sublevel sets of this image are known as recurrence plots and are widely used in time series analysis. Motivated by this perspective, we establish a relationship between the distance-matrix filtration of the time series and the \v{C}ech (or Vietoris--Rips) filtration of its state-space embedding in the form of a degree-one chain map. We study the induced maps in homology, showing that the map from $H_0$ into $H_1$ is essentially surjective and providing an example where the map from $H_1$ into $H_2$ is nontrivial. These chain maps can be applied to simplify image persistence computations arising in the computation of cycling signatures, a topological tool for time series analysis. Moreover, these computations yield finer information that allows the analysis of transitions between different types of cycling motion.
toXiv_bot_toot

📝 Droning on about drones

September 29, 2026
Three years ago I got a DJI Mini 3 Pro for my birthday. Flying it around and getting aerial pictures is great fun. Lately, though, it mostly stays in its bag. This is about why.
It's tiny. The camera is decent: a 1/1.3-inch sensor behind an f/1.7 lens, which is a big sensor for something this size. It has 48 megapixels through the magic of marketing, which means it's 12 megapixels that get upscaled. It does RAW, and 4K video. It has a fancy gimbal head that is surprisingly competent at keeping the camera stable. The drone can autonomously follow a subject, circle a point, or fly preset moves. Handy if you're a narcissist or just not as comfortable with the controls yet.
DJI promises 34 minutes in the air, probably in a vacuum. Real flights, with actual air and wind resistance are around 20 minutes. Range is 8 kilometres, which sounds unrealistic, but probably refers to the antenna. Anyway in the Netherlands you are obliged to keep the drone in your line of sight. Obstacle sensors look forward, back and down, and freak out whenever I get close to Big Hard Things.
And it weighs under 249 grams, which is the whole point of the Mini line. Under 250 grams it flies in the A1 subcategory, the most relaxed one in the EU. You can fly near and even over people, as long as it isn't a crowd. No exam either, just an operator number from the RDW, the Dutch vehicle authority, stuck on the drone. On paper, it's about as free as flying gets. Except all the restrictions that apply anyway because it has a camera. 
It looks easy. It isn't. The Mini holds its position on GPS, so hovering takes no effort at all. Everything else takes practice. Two sticks: the left one handles height and turning, the right one moves you forward, back and sideways. A wheel tilts the camera. A smooth shot usually means using three of those at once, gently, while the drone drifts in the wind. At 249 grams it doesn't take much wind to destabilize it.
Then there's orientation. When the drone faces you, everything is mirrored: left is right, forward is back. At a hundred metres it's a dot, and you can't tell whether it's clearing that tree or about to hit it. The obstacle sensors don't look sideways, so sideways is your problem. And you're supposed to keep your eyes on the drone, while the shot you're making is on the screen in your hands.
Practice is exactly what I'm not getting, and the reason starts at my own front door. 
My home is squeezed in between three no-fly zones. De Horsten, the royal estate, lies in prohibited area EHP-26, the same rectangle of closed airspace that covers Huis ten Bosch, Noordeinde and the Binnenhof. It runs from the ground to about 600 metres, and no drone gets an exemption, whatever it weighs. The King moved out in 2019; the no-fly zone didn't. The other one is Valkenburg, the old naval air base. It closed back in 2006, and the province turned part of it into a test airport for professional drones, called Unmanned Valley. Whether there's still a restricted circle around it depends on which map you ask. Since at least 2022, the official aviation chart has shown one and the official drone map hasn't.
The drone map around Wassenaar. The pink rectangle is EHP-26, with De Horsten at the bottom. The dunes are on the left, and the dots mark the old airfield at Valkenburg.
That's the real problem: nobody can tell you exactly where the lines are. The government points you to two maps, and both say you can't derive any rights from them. The borders don't follow a street or a fence, either. It's a line on a map, and you're standing in a field trying to work out which side of it you're on. And where the air is free, the ground may not be: Dunea, the water company that runs the water extraction in the dunes, simply bans drones in Meijendel.
Then there's the mood. Last year drones turned up over airports and air bases across Europe. Russia is the usual suspect, though whose they are hardly matters. Do you really want to have your drone shot out of the sky and have an inspiring conversation with an arrest team?
Probably not. The police don't publish how many drone fines they hand out, and an investigation counted thousands of illegal flights over The Hague every year. Nobody patrols the Wassenaar wastelands looking for a 249-gram drone.
Then again, nobody has to. Drones under 250 grams are exempt from the EU's Remote ID. But on my generation of drones, DJI's own signal broadcasts the drone's position and the pilot's, unencrypted.
The fines themselves aren't dramatic: €250 for flying in a no-fly zone, €300 over a crowd, €350 near vital infrastructure and €500 for getting in the way of emergency services. They stack, though, and the drone usually gets seized as well.
In a village like Wassenaar, the likeliest detection system is the neighbour. Most people are uneasy about drones, mainly because of privacy. One of my colleagues, who lives in a big city, proudly claims to shoot illegal drones out of the sky with a slingshot.
Even a perfectly legal flight comes with a fair chance that someone walks over to argue about it. That's an argument I'd rather not have. It's supposed to be fun.
The obvious way out is to take it on holiday. I mostly go to Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and surely somewhere out there is a field with room for 249 grams of drone. My Dutch registration is valid everywhere in the EU, so how hard can it be?
Quite hard, it turns out. The EU only sets the basics, and every country adds its own layer on top. Zones, its own map app, its own list of special permissions. Nature parks, castles and towns add theirs. And the rules move: the Czech Republic introduced a whole new zone system only last year. 
Germany wants proof of insurance in your pocket, which I don't need in the Netherlands. The Czech Republic wants a flight plan in its app before almost any flight near a town, road or railway. Slovakia doesn't ask for insurance, but most of its mountain areas are off limits on principle, so that actually limits what there is to take pictures of in the first place.
Read all that back and you'd think I should sell it. I won't. Because when it does go up, it's still awesome. A few seconds after take-off the ground turns into a map, and places you walk past every day look like somewhere you've never been. None of my other cameras can do that. So hopefully I will be more successful at motivating myself to keep trying in the near future. 
Please feel free to add any tips for drone photography you might have, and I may use them to rekindle my interest in the hobby.
#Blog #Article #Drones #Gear #Photography #Travel #Wassenaar