News from the Planet

Back in February, I applied for NLnet's Next Generation Zero grant. They were looking for Fediverse projects to help rewild the social media landscape. Or, as they describe it: Reclaim the public nature of the internet Small and medium-sized R&D grants between 5.000 and 50.000 euro, with the…

And I think it’s pretty nice

Next to all the code samples on this blog is a little "copy" button. That makes it easier to grab any of the code I've shared. The HTML and JS is delightfully simple: <button onclick="navigator.clipboard.writeText( this.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('code')[0].textContent );" …

lambdock: quest for the eternal dock  # This is the story of lambdock: https://codeberg.org/jjba23/lambdock lambdock is a modern, hyper-hackable, Wayland-native desktop dock application (C and Guile Scheme + GTK4) w/ REPL. As a heavy computer user, spending most of my day enjoying…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week saw the first stirrings of support for QtWidgets-based apps in KDE’s new Union theming system, which is a very exciting milestone. But that’s not all! This week is also packed with UI improvements, performance improvements, bug…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project from August 14 to August 28. GNOME Core Apps and Libraries Sophie (she/her) announces The GNOME 51 Flathub SDK is now based on the Freedesktop SDK v26.08. The GNOME Beta SDK is available from Flathub Beta as org.gnome.Sdk/x86_64/51beta and GNOME…

It has begun. After couple months of work, I have now finally managed to cobble together the QtWidgets side of Union. This means that your QtWidgets apps, such as Dolphin, KMail, Kate etc. can now use the Union CSS files as the source of their styling. However, temper your expectations, as this is…

I'm traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I'll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s. So I built a little 'portable homelab' (pictured above) that…

The monkey-punchers at Google never quite seem to finish any of their apps. There's always some useful bit of work left undone, or showstopping bug which remains unfixed, a thousand jagged edges as yet unsolved by the greatest minds of their generation. I wanted to subscribe to an events calendar.…

Google Summer of Code 2026 has come to a close, so here’s where things stand with GPU reset recovery in Mutter. If you’re catching up, the short version is in my intro post: a GPU reset invalidates the EGL context and wipes all GPU memory, and until now Mutter had no way to come back from that. My…

Together with Modal, I’m happy to announce that the Sovereign Tech Agency is investing nearly €510k into Flatpak development. The focus is on closing gaps in Flatpak’s sandboxing story: new portals for audio, networking, VPNs, and spell checking, plus infrastructure work on entitlements and…

As you might already know, Transitous is a project that runs a public transport routing service that aims to work wold-wide. To make Transitous results more useful, there needs to be a simple way to book the individual sections of a multi-modal route. It is important to mention that Transitous can…

Bugs resolved in Moz-Phab 2.18.0: bug 1898339 moz-phab incorrectly uploads symlinks as text files when using Mercurial bug 2063674 Consider reminding people of their review queue when they push to try or moz-phab bug 2064223 Add pyrefly type checking to moz-phab test suite Discuss these changes in…

In Some Changes to GNOME Security Tracking, I reported: I will discontinue tracking newly-reported security issues on November 1, 2026. During November, I will focus only on tracking issues reported prior to November 1. By December 1, all disclosure deadlines for that set of issues will have been…

Introducing Apache Iggy™, a persistent message streaming platform written in Rust, and Apache Sourcelume, open source instrumentation for AI training-data provenance Wilmington, DE –&#160; August 27, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home of open source software the world…

This is a charming and zeitgeisty novel which has a strong start and fulfils the promise of its blurb. What if your autonomous vacuum cleaner was sentient and was very sad about your wife's death? It pays obvious homage to the Brave Little Toaster, 100 Acre Woods, Beauty and The Beast, and hundred…

Svenska språket uppfinns. “Hej! Här kommer en uppdatering av våra villkor! Du kan nu använda upp till två tusen ord i månaden med vår gratistjänst, sedan måste du uppgradera till Basic Plan för 129 kr/månaden. Ska du använda svenskan i jobbet kostar det som innan 1299 kr/månaden. Behöver du…

If your agentic workload involves the agent being able to run arbitrary code (like bash or equivalent), then you should not use a “LLM as part of your app” framework like LangChain, BeeAI, OGX etc. Instead, run OpenCode, goose, or another general coding agent inside a sandbox such as…

Hello! I'm Angelo Verlain, a Software Engineering student, and I've been working for the last 3 months easing the debugging process of GJS apps by adding Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) support to GJS as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2026). A debugger is software for executing a computer program…

Mergin Maps simplifies QGIS project sharing with automated webmaps. Recent updates include support for layer trees, map themes, custom JavaScript integrations, a redesigned full-screen interface, and the ability to embed interactive maps directly into websites.

Unified builds (also know as Jumbo Builds) is a build techniques that aims at improving build time through the concatenation of several sources as a single unified source before compilation. The goal is obtained through implicit caching of header instantiation, although it implies a trade-off with…

This might be a long post, it was a pretty challenging project. I wrote last week about my Amazing Animals in Crisis map of 50 endangered species, I got some bad news on Friday that my usage of the IUCN polygon data was in breach of their licencing conditions and a request that I take the map…

Following the symbolication work from Part 1, I undertook two more efforts to improve performance profiles for the Performance team. Native Profiling (Bugs 2030161, 2030166, 2047451, and 2030423) The first effort was to use platform-specific profilers to generate profiles in CI of browsers running…

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their latest camera to review - and it is a bit different to all the others I've tried. Whereas previous cameras are good for bird watching, or wildlife spotting, or finding leaks at home - the P3 has a manual macro lens and is specifically designed…

  Almost two months ago I went to my first GUADEC conference. While I’ve been busy since then, writing proper travel report has been something I’ve been putting off for a while. Without much further ado, here’s a report of my impressions Tower of Hercules in A Coruña First impressions It’s always a…