News from the Planet

I'm not sure what they're teaching at LAMDA, but it certainly isn't vocal projection. We were forewarned about the technical difficulties - but if a trained stage singer can't reach the 6th row of a tiny theatre, that can't be blamed on the backstage team. The show advertises itself as: What…

Last year, Plasma developers canceled the long-term support (LTS) version of Plasma. Why? We had a few reasons: Almost nobody was using it; really only Kubuntu. Other discrete-release operating systems like Debian and openSUSE Leap generally ignored it. It wasn’t a real LTS; we only…

Ohai, I have some pending, encrypted mails to answer. And some of my answers for the next few days (particularly to what pertains to the current in-discussion vote on LLM usage in Debian) will be unsigned, even though I’d like otherwise. My desktop system at work is showing some data corruption,…

It’s been about a month since I started my Sovereign Tech Fellowship in mid-July, and I want to give you some updates about what’s been going on before I go on summer holiday for the next two weeks. The idea behind these update posts is to highlight certain aspects of my activities and get people…

Are menopausal women hot? It is often said that pornographic actresses move straight from "barely legal" to "MILF" without so much as moment in between. Unlike the fringe's other burlesque shows - which seem to exclusively feature nymphettes and twinks with nary a grey hair between them - Hot Flush…

The undisputed queen of short-form viral video comedy snacks takes to the stage. Well, swims to the stage. The Mermaid is a delightful and gentle amble through the confusing world of a girl who just wants to become a mermaid. Less standup and more storytelling, nevertheless it packs in the laughs…

Version 3.5.0 of rsync has been released with a huge number of security fixes: This release fixes 33 security issues found during a focused audit of rsync's path handling and daemon protocol, a companion daemon-protocol fuzzing pass, and reports from external researchers -⁠-⁠ plus…

The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (abrt, dhcpcd, edk2, freerdp, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-good, iscsi-initiator-utils, isns-utils, kernel, kernel-rt, keylime, libarchive, libyang, nodejs-nodemon, opencryptoki, osbuild-composer, pacemaker, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql18,…

This is a disappointing and frustrating book - not least because it so nearly hits the mark. The subtitle is "How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing" - but it never gets close to discussing that topic, let alone deeply examining it. Instead, it is a book mostly focussed on the history of what…

posted by Stephen De Gabrielle and John Clements We are pleased to announce Racket v9.3 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/. As of this release: The raco setup command can generate markdown documentation, using the --doc-markdown option. The "#lang" teaching languages…

Since I wrote about my fly30 ice skates, I'd continued to battle pain around the navicular bone in my feet. The action that seems to have finally fixed it was to perform a "punch out": a very localized remoulding of the area of the boot that presses against the sore area. I basically followed the…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: BPF and binfmt_misc; CrossPoint ebook firmware; KVM planes; BPF formal verification; shadow-utils; new storage-code testing features. Briefs: Django releases; GNOME shell; LightDM 1.33.0; QEMU 11.1; uutils 0.10;…

In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching film with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see anything. This is regardless of the fact that the projector bulb…

There are at least four different Heated Rivalry shows at the Fringe this year. Earlier this week we saw Edinburgh Fringe - Heated Rivalry: The Musical Parody!. This is different because it is the unauthorized musical parody. Oh, and it is in the much larger Udderbelly venue. Some people spend the…

Up early, helped electrician get a Powerwall 3 installed - nice; amused to see us starting to run the house from electricity shipped from the USA(?) while it drained initially; hopefully charging cheaply at night, and draining all day gives savings, robustness, off-grid / UPS capability and…

This is a technically precise and emotionally complex show with energetic delivery from a talented performer. Sadly, it did nothing for me. I found it a little one note in terms of storytelling. The rhythm of the story followed all the predictable beats which I thought was a little repetitive. …

Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. The kernel provides several ways to inject block-layer I/O errors, but none of those can select the operation to fail,…

Easily the worst show we've seen at the fringe. Garrett Millerick has trained an AI on his stand up. Can it replace him? Yes, but only in the sense that the AI is obnoxiously dull and Millerick is simply obnoxious. He insulted a kid who he'd called on to stage to help him. Not even in a jokey way,…

I'm a sucker for anything Beatles related - and the fringe has no shortage of musicals, reinterpretations, and shameless cash-ins of the Fab Four. When Vincent Met John is an oddity in that it is a normal play, rather than a musical. It is also an oddity in being 90 minutes long rather than the…

Inspired by some recent reverse-engineering, here are some things I find wild by the original PlayStation GPU: VRAM is a flat 1024x512 16-bit image (555 + 1 bit alpha). You want more than just a framebuffer? Figure out yourself what goes where. Yes, that means you'll need to allocate two…

Over the last two weeks, I worked on adding multi-select support for deleting multiple entries at once. It sounded like a straightforward feature at first, but it ended up leading me down an interesting debugging involving an asynchronous race condition. Multi-Select with Ctrl+Click and Shift+Click…

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust…

Hi, I’m Peter, a software dev and currently a maintainer of nautilus, the GNOME project’s file manager. This blog will foremost contain monthly updates on what I did as a GNOME Fellow. The Fellowship The GNOME Fellowship program provides financial support for critical and under-resourced areas of…

This event is happening soon — see below for registration instructions!< We are extremely pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds summit, which will take place from September 22nd—24th 2026<in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. This year, we are thrilled to host the tenth edition of this…