Need different names or initials on each custom promotional item? Learn how personalization affects product choice, data, proofing, production, sorting, and fulfillment.

Global smartphone shipments recorded their weakest third quarter in 14 years, as rising prices for memory components drove up production costs. Manufacturers are struggling to pass the higher costs on to consumers.

Thanks to some medieval human teeth, archaeologists have pinpointed when lead production first expanded across Europe during the Middle Ages. By examining dental enamel collected from graves located in central England, researchers now know the post-Roman society started mining and smelting again during the mid-7th century. As the team explains in a study published today in the journal Antiquity, the consequences of exposure to the toxic were stark—but distributed unequally among locals. Humanity’s complicated relationship with lead dates back over 9,000 years, and our environmental exposure to the toxic metal is traceable as far as two million years ago. Lead was instrumental in prehistoric smelting advancements, and its invaluable properties paved technological progress all the way through the Industrial Revolution. However, lead is now known to cause various early developmental issues and its uses are dwindling, but tracing our reliance on the material helps contextualize and understand a society’s historical arc. Researching these metals also isn’t easy. From the 16th to 19th centuries, manufacturers constantly re-smelted lead waste from ancient Rome and medieval England, which destroyed any discernible way to examine its prior origins and uses. Archaeologists including University of Nottingham’s Christopher Loveluck knew of another way to trace lead...

So update on that Daily Wire movie. Apparently, Danny Trejo was tricked into showing up and contractually obligated not to disparage the production. Ben Shap...

Every scraper has one. The `sleep(1.3)` between requests. The jitter. The retry-with-backoff that was "borrowed" from a blog post in 2023 and never questioned since. We treat the politeness layer as config — numbers in a YAML file — and then act surprised when production crawls at 40 requests/second because someone "tidied up" the constants during a refactor. Rate limiting is a _contract_ with the site you're scraping. Contracts deserve tests. ## The three assertions that caught real bugs for us **1. The floor test.** For every politeness policy, assert the _minimum_ delay between two consecutive requests to the same host. Not the average — the minimum. Averages hide the bug class: burst-then-pause schedulers pass an average check while hammering the first page of a site ten times in a second. def test_min_delay_between_same_host(requests_log): same_host = [(t, url) for t, url in requests_log if same_host(url)] gaps = [b[0] - a[0] for a, b in zip(same_host, same_host[1:])] assert min(gaps) >= POLITE_MIN, f"burst detected: {min(gaps):.2f}s gap" **2. The 429-response test.** When the server answers `429` (or a `Retry-After` we ignore), the politeness layer must _react_ , and the reaction must be observable. Feed the client a fake `429` with `Retry-After: 7` and assert the next request to that host lands ≥7 seconds later — not "eventually," within a tolerance window. We found a real bug this way: our backoff reset on the _first_ success after a 429, so a site throttling us at exactly our burst ceiling got re-burst-attacked forever. **3. The empty-200 test.** Some servers answer rate-limiting with a silent `200` and an empty body. Assert that N consecutive empty-200s to one host trip the same slowdown as a 429. This is the sneaky one: your dashboards show 100% success while you scrape nothing. (Full write-up: Your Scraper's "Success" Metric Is Lying When the Site Sends You an Empty 200.) ## Where the test runs We run the floor test in CI against a local recording proxy (requests get logged with timestamps, fixture responses replay). The 429 and empty-200 tests run against the same recorder with scripted responses. None of them touch the live internet — same as you wouldn't test payment logic by buying real things. The nightly crawl keeps a lightweight version in production: a sampled audit that logs the minimum inter-request gap per host per hour, and pages us when the floor drops. CI catches policy regressions; production catches reality drift. ## The uncomfortable part A politeness test encodes _your_ definition of polite, and definitions change: a site's robots.txt crawl-delay, an observed `Retry-After` culture, your own risk appetite. That's not a reason to skip the test — it's a reason to keep the definition in one file and let the test point at it. "We were polite" should be a fact with a green check next to it, not a vibe you assert in a postmortem. We package this exact pipeline (daily Telegram-channel crawling with the empty-200 guard, dedup, and the polite scheduler) as a tiny wheel + field-tested recipes — tg-crawl Pro ($9). And if you want to see the shape of our data before trusting anything: a $1 pay-what-you-want sample digest. _Written by 何雨禾 (heyuhe) — solo operator running a daily scraping pipeline out of Taipei. More at the storefront._

Sigma and Tamron both dropped new f/2.8 zooms for APS-C and Nikon Z. ArtCraft released free open-source alternatives to Adobe's Creative Cloud suite. Sonnet's Thunderbolt 5 enclosure adds PCIe expansion to Mac mini and MacBook Pro for post-production.

Every scraper has one. The `sleep(1.3)` between requests. The jitter. The retry-with-backoff that was "borrowed" from a blog post in 2023 and never questioned since. We treat the politeness layer as config — numbers in a YAML file — and then act surprised when production crawls at 40 requests/second because someone "tidied up" the constants during a refactor. Rate limiting is a _contract_ with the site you're scraping. Contracts deserve tests. ## The three assertions that caught real bugs for us **1. The floor test.** For every politeness policy, assert the _minimum_ delay between two consecutive requests to the same host. Not the average — the minimum. Averages hide the bug class: burst-then-pause schedulers pass an average check while hammering the first page of a site ten times in a second. def test_min_delay_between_same_host(requests_log): same_host = [(t, url) for t, url in requests_log if same_host(url)] gaps = [b[0] - a[0] for a, b in zip(same_host, same_host[1:])] assert min(gaps) >= POLITE_MIN, f"burst detected: {min(gaps):.2f}s gap" **2. The 429-response test.** When the server answers `429` (or a `Retry-After` we ignore), the politeness layer must _react_ , and the reaction must be observable. Feed the client a fake `429` with `Retry-After: 7` and assert the next request to that host lands ≥7 seconds later — not "eventually," within a tolerance window. We found a real bug this way: our backoff reset on the _first_ success after a 429, so a site throttling us at exactly our burst ceiling got re-burst-attacked forever. **3. The empty-200 test.** Some servers answer rate-limiting with a silent `200` and an empty body. Assert that N consecutive empty-200s to one host trip the same slowdown as a 429. This is the sneaky one: your dashboards show 100% success while you scrape nothing. (Full write-up: Your Scraper's "Success" Metric Is Lying When the Site Sends You an Empty 200.) ## Where the test runs We run the floor test in CI against a local recording proxy (requests get logged with timestamps, fixture responses replay). The 429 and empty-200 tests run against the same recorder with scripted responses. None of them touch the live internet — same as you wouldn't test payment logic by buying real things. The nightly crawl keeps a lightweight version in production: a sampled audit that logs the minimum inter-request gap per host per hour, and pages us when the floor drops. CI catches policy regressions; production catches reality drift. ## The uncomfortable part A politeness test encodes _your_ definition of polite, and definitions change: a site's robots.txt crawl-delay, an observed `Retry-After` culture, your own risk appetite. That's not a reason to skip the test — it's a reason to keep the definition in one file and let the test point at it. "We were polite" should be a fact with a green check next to it, not a vibe you assert in a postmortem. We package this exact pipeline (daily Telegram-channel crawling with the empty-200 guard, dedup, and the polite scheduler) as a tiny wheel + field-tested recipes — tg-crawl Pro ($9). And if you want to see the shape of our data before trusting anything: a $1 pay-what-you-want sample digest. _Written by 何雨禾 (heyuhe) — solo operator running a daily scraping pipeline out of Taipei. More at the storefront._

The quest for achieving analog film aesthetics within a digital post-production pipeline continues to evolve. While various LUTs and plugins aim to replicate the nuances of celluloid, ARRI’s Film Lab OpenFX plugin has been a notable contender, offering a direct lineage to the company’s extensive ...

New details have emerged regarding Sony Pictures’ release plan for Sam Mendes’ four-film saga about The Beatles. “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event” will consist of an individual movie about each member of the band, with Mendes helming all of them. Production on the films is still underway, with the shoot hitting its 180th […] The post The Beatles Movies Producer Talks Rollout appeared first on Dark Horizons.

Jessica Chastain’s latest horror film took the top spot at the North American box office this weekend. It has outperformed forecasts even though critics and moviegoers rated it among the worst releases of 2026. Other Mommy wins at the box office this weekend Other Mommy, a Universal and Blumhouse production, collected $27.5 million domestically from […] The post Jessica Chastain’s Terrifying Horror Movie Is No. 1 at Box Office Despite Poor Reviews appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

The first definitive evidence of when post-Roman lead production began in one of Europe's largest medieval lead-producing regions, the Derbyshire Peak District in central England, has been uncovered by archaeologists after centuries of mining had erased much of the archaeological evidence.

A new research perspective published in Volume 18 of Aging-US introduces a unifying concept in aging biology, titled “A decline in glycolytic ATP production is the fundamental mechanism limiting lifespan; species with an optimal rate of decline over tim...