News from the Planet

Sometimes at the Edinburgh Fringe, you take a punt on a random show because it's close by and you can't be bothered walking any further. Justina Seselskaite's set was round the corner and started in 7 ½ minutes - so we scurried into one of the less glamorous rooms of The Hilton, sat at the front (as…

My favorite tabletop game of all time is Star Wars: Armada, a Star Wars themed ship combat wargame. Armada has many deep and tactically interesting features, but one of my favorites is the unique suite of defense tokens available to each spaceship to protect itself against attacks, from among…

Part of going to The Fringe is to expose yourself to new ideas, different art forms, and a range of artworks. Not everything needs to be a "zany" comedy about AI or a loving pastiche of that 1990s disaster movie you love. So I found myself sat in a Unitarian Church listening to a harpsichord and…

SRFI 279 is now in draft status. Interactive REPL-driven systems (that most Schemes are) need a way to get detailed information on a given piece of data. Inspectors, as these are conventionally called. This SRFI defines a basic protocol for inspectors, consisting of two procedures: …

I participated in the KEcoLab sprint held from May 27th to May 28th at the KDAB office in Berlin. It was my first time being at a KEcoLab sprint, I have mostly been an online participant before this so it was nice to meetup with both Karan and Joseph and work together in person. I also got to meet…

🎼"Hamlet's Mum Has Got It Going On"🎵 There you go, now you've seen the show. That's about the height it reaches. Distil the tortured Prince of Denmark down to an hour and sprinkle in parody pop songs. It so nearly works. There are a few good chuckles and a smattering of clever lyrics but, even for…

GeoCat Find 2026.1 is out! Find is built on GeoNetwork 4.4 and ships as two packages: The first covers the full set of metadata schemas available in GeoNetwork, with a clean, focused interface . The s...

GeoCat is pleased to announce the release of GeoNetwork Enterprise 2023.8. This version is a recommended upgrade to GeoNetwork Enterprise 2023.7 which includes several bug fixes, library upgrades, and...

Afrofuturism is a hot topic in the world of sci-fi. This is the circus version of "For All Mankind" where the Zambia Space Academy (a 100% real thing) attempt to land on the moon and win the space race. Told in an acrobatic style, naturally. It is delightful to see classic acrobatics find a whole…

The Apache Trusted Releases (ATR) platform, a new tool from the ASF Tooling Initiative, is making it easier for open source maintainers across hundreds of independently governed ASF projects to ship secure, compliant releases without adding to their workload. ATR automates the parts of the release…

Hi everyone! This week we added voice chat for Mankala.For Mankala, our goal was to elevate the player experience by adding real-time voice chat. We have already added text chat using XMPP, and to make this experience better, voice chat is a much better option to add. Mankala relies on the XMPP…

The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research…

About 95% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. OpenSSH Now that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released, I’ve been getting back to the GSS-API key exchange package split in our OpenSSH packaging. Once I…

My account on FLOSS.social, @strk, has been suspended. Not for writing toots with an LLM, but for writing toots about LLMs - mostly. One of the thirteen cited toots was not mine at all: it was my boost of a toot written by my AI minion. This is how it happened, and why I think the whole thing…

I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to make it to GUADEC. For months, the travel committee and I had been going back and forth trying to get all the documents needed for my visa application. The visa took longer than expected. I even lost hope at some point, and eventually got it just four days…

Debian Contributions: 2026-07 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services. DebConf 26…

The timeline for Google Summer of Code is coming to an end, and us interns are piecing together the final touches to our projects for submission. Thanks to the help of my mentors, and the duck sitting on my monitor, the algorithm that beats the heart of Vocab Crosswords in GNOME Crosswords has been…

On Saturday 25 July 2026, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. The Debian Press team would now like to share this personal and beautiful message from the Santa Fe Local Team. Words from DC26 Local Team DebConf26 is over, and those of us who were part of the…

Hello, Thunderbird community and followers of the blog! This is Jesse from the design team. Today’s post is about our recent journey in redesigning the calendar portion of Thunderbird, and what you can expect us to deliver in the near future. The calendar is a key part of any productivity…

Today, we moved to a new GPG signing subkey used to sign certain Firefox and Thunderbird artifacts (namely Linux tarballs, RPM packages, checksums files) after an unencrypted copy of the previous subkey was inadvertently committed to a private GitHub repository. Our review of available audit records…

The latest version of the Firefox Profiler is now live! Check out the full changelog below to see what’s changed: Highlights: [fatadel] Improve discoverability of downloading a local profile (#6216) [Nazım Can Altınova] Add the ability to apply source maps from the CLI (#6229) Other…

I enjoy reading The Guardian's monthly round-up of new SF novels, which can be found in their Science Fiction Books section, and can also be read via feed. Since the round-up is of new books, at the time the round-up is published they're usually only available in hardback. When it comes to choosing…

I'm going to this year's LPC and Open Source Summit Europe 🥳. I will organize sessions on two days after the conference program to exchange PGP fingerprints for keysigning to improve the kernel's web-of-trust (but of course everyone is welcome). For details see my announcement on LKML. Note the…

Lately I’ve been thinking about cyclic trait implementations. This is a problem that I’ve been trying to understand for years and years and I finally feel like I’m geting somewhere. I’m going to try to write out a series of blog posts documenting those explorations and, hopefully, culminating in a…

 I have been accessing, using the internet since probably around 1991, using my dad's academic account and then schools and then home. I've used the internet before the web existed, sending emails, downloading freeware and sharewares from "huge" ftp repository. Sharing ftp site, using Usenet to find…