News from the Planet

I've released version 1.1.25 of plocate. This time around, there's two security issues of unknown severity; if you chain them with other bugs, they could lead to being able to list files (but of course not their contents) that you should not normally be able to see. So an update is probably in…

OSGeo pgRouting version 4.0.2 released - OSGeo The latest release is available at Github. For discussions on the release here. To see all issues & pull requests closed by this release see the Git closed milestone for 4.0.2 on GitHub. Summary of changes by function pgr_dijkstraVia…

This August, I accomplished what I wanted for many years: I deleted the last cgo dependency in Debian Code Search! This was made possible by Go’s recently introduced SIMD support, because now we can implement the TurboPFor integer compression format as efficiently — more efficiently, in fact, by…

Following the previous steps, we are now interested in getting a graphical environment with a VSCodium, the opensource rebuild of the VSCode IDE. Configuring the display and development environment From the previous steps we had a virtual machine where we can login with a debian user, and we can…

FOASS is back at a new site / url since late August! It restores original FOAAS functionality and full set of REST access points including the language filters. So this new rfoaas release restores all accessor functions re-enabling full R access, documents, and tests them. We re-enabled code…

This is a gorgeous set of short stories - and a good deal more accessible than some of the heavyweight prose Liu has previously been involved with. Some of the stories contain sentences which are complex jewels to be savoured. What I particularly like is the way he moves between almost-prosaic…

Summer Vacation for my kids is over. And Peace is back to my life. AI is transforming how I operate and view things. It was very different a few months back. AI (as a product) is useful in generating code, useful in analysing things. It seems to be able to retrieve and show me information…

Last week I attended this year’s State of the Map (SotM) in Paris, France, OpenStreetMap’s annual conference. This was actually my first time making it to SotM since I started working with OSM data for KDE Itinerary eight years or so ago. SotM 2026 group photo (source) All links to…

I’ve released a new version of virtnbdbackup. The new version adds a small plugin system layer that allows users to extend the backup targets by creating plugins. Past feature requests asked for backup to S3 or adding encryption features, which i dont need and do not want to maintain within the…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 28 to September 4. GNOME Foundation marimaj reports We’ve held an AUA on Reddit with GNOME’s new Board members last Saturday. Sri Ramkrishna — President, Jonathan Blandford — Vice-President, Maria Majadas — Chair, and Adrian…

We are in the process of introducing a new decision-making process into the GNOME project. The specification of the RFC process is available as a merge request on GitLab. The discussion is happening on the respective Discourse thread. I am now announcing the start of the final comment period for the…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! Some of the last Plasma 6.8 features landed this week, and there’s a whole bunch of great stuff! Let’s jump right in: Notable new features Plasma 6.8 Plasma now features a built-in “dwell clicker” feature! This is an accessibility tool that…

The GNOME Foundation is supporting contributors with its fellowship program. You can help expand the fellowship program with a donation. The previous month concluded with releasing the beta versions for GNOME 51. So this month, it was about time to get the bugs fixed in the beta releases. Tales of a…

The second month of the Fellowship is already over, let’s see what I got up to this month Nautilus I started implementing Tobias’ redesigned “Open With” mockup. The foundations to make the changes are done, as are most of the UI changes. Here is a preview: Due to technical limitations the design…

Python's support for multithreaded programs has improved considerably over the last few years with the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language. But testing multithreaded programs is notoriously difficult, because the underlying host system determines the thread-execution ordering,…

Welcome to post 59 in the R4 series. How did we get here: A initial words about GitHub. GitHub Actions provides (essentially unlimited) compute time. This further boosts a service already in a market-dominating position: GitHub1 as a code repository. Those of us old enough to remember the start of…

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server, so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the…

Firefox DevTools MCP (firefox-devtools-mcp) 0.10.2 is out on npm. New tools: press_key — sends a single key, optionally with modifiers, to a snapshot element or the focused element (Return, Escape, Tab, arrows, ctrl+shift+t, …).</li>type_text — types text key by key into the focused element, with…

Version 2026.09, code-named "Hättiwaritätti", of the Debian-based Grml live Linux distribution for system administrators has been released. It is based on packages from the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release. Notable changes include an update to the Linux 7.1.8 kernel, support for booting from…

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, and pcre2), Fedora (cockpit, expat, freeipa, kbd, kernel, mrtg, python-pip, and valkey), Mageia (libopenmpt and python-gitpython), Oracle (dbus-broker, freerdp, gegl, gegl04, gimp:2.8, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server,…

Today marks the day of soft-launching of my Debian derivative, which I’ve been using on several of my own machines for the past year or so. This is still work in progress, but I wanted to establish a launch date of the project so below is the DiffOS manifesto as motivation for continued…

Back from vacations and I did some catch up late at night… So expect a larger selection than usual. Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-36. WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone Tags: tech, web, internet, culture, history A very uplifting essay in my opinion. Starts with a historical…

Do come in and sit down. Pour yourself a cup of tea – I’ve just made a fresh pot. It’s been quite a ride since we last met to talk about these things. I became Scheme chair, but I’m not any more. Indeed, I’ve had to quit Scheme entirely. Let me tell you how this happened. Obviously, I’m a lot more…

For many years now, I and others have been working on getting plasmashell’s open bug reports as accurate and actionable as possible. We’ve made tremendous progress, driving down the number of unconfirmed bug reports to its lowest levels in over a decade, and mostly keeping it there: In case…

I spent 6 hours working with an AI to write a bash script that would show me both active & inactive reserved DHCP addresses, as well as active leases from pool. I am pretty sure that it would have taken me similar or even less time not to use the AI assistant, but that was not the purpose of this…