Stem

The 8 best video doorbells tried and tested – and Ring isn’t top

Whether you want to bolster your home’s security or simply make sure you know when someone is at the door, the latest generation of smart doorbells will help put your mind at ease

The best robot vacuums to keep your home clean and dust free

Doorbells have evolved. Today, they watch us as we approach, let the people inside the home know we’re coming sooner than our finger can hit the button, and give them a good look at our faces before they open the door. They’re essentially security cameras with a chime function.

Fittl: Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O

LWN
Lukas Fittl writes in detail on the pganalyze blog about the asynchronous I/O capability coming with the PostgreSQL 18 release.

Asynchronous I/O delivers the most noticeable gains in cloud environments where storage is network-attached, such as Amazon EBS volumes. In these setups, individual disk reads often take multiple milliseconds, introducing substantial latency compared to local SSDs.

With traditional synchronous I/O, each of these reads blocks query execution until the data arrives, leading to idle CPU time and degraded throughput. By contrast, asynchronous I/O allows Postgres to issue multiple read requests in parallel and continue processing while waiting for results. This reduces query latency and enables much more efficient use of available I/O bandwidth and CPU cycles.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 8, 2025

LWN
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

  • Front: Debian and essential packages; Custom BPF OOM killers; Speculation barriers for BPF programs; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
  • Briefs: Deepin on openSUSE; AUTOSEL; Mission Center 1.0.0; OASIS ODF; Redis license; USENIX ATC; Quotes; ...
  • Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Surviving 200 snake bites, decoding ancient scrolls and the countries ‘flourishing’ – podcast

Science correspondent Hannah Devlin joins Ian Sample to discuss three intriguing science stories from the week, from a global study that puts the UK third from bottom when it comes to flourishing, to a man who intentionally suffered more than 200 snake bites in the quest to find a universal antivenom and a breakthrough in the quest to understand the contents of the charred Herculaneum scrolls buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted