News from the Planet

Emma does several jobs for me. It runs Cuirass for Guix builds and a Forgejo Actions runner, and I would like to add more services without discovering too late that CI ate the machine. My first instinct was to give each workload a quota: 11 GiB and four CPU cores for builds, 2 GiB and one core for…

Servo 0.6.0 contains all of the changes we landed in August, which came out to 417 commits! The big news is that we’ve turned on support for CSS Grid by default (@nicoburns, #45621). This has had a huge positive impact on the visual appearance of many websites! We’ve shipped several new web…

SRFI 286 is now in draft status. R7RS Scheme allows programs to query library presence at macro-expansion time using (cond-expand ((library ⟨library name ⟩) ...)). However, when an implementation ships a shared library tree across interpreters built with different feature…

I'm a theatrical cheapskate. I'm on all those last-minute seat-filler websites. I'll happily take a chance on an experimental play for a tenner a ticket or sit in an inexplicably unsold cheap seat at a major show. My philosophy is that the worst seat at the best show is preferable to the best seat…

Guix is all about empowering people, so it should come as no surprise that one can extend it with new guix commands . You can show the commands available in your current Guix through the help command: $ guix help If you are using a recent Guix, there are a number of extensions at…

Encryption is woven into everyday digital life. It protects our messages and passwords, but also banking and payments, health data, government services and the digital infrastructure societies rely on every day. Yet across jurisdictions, governments are increasingly considering laws that expand…

Firefox is teaming up with AEG and taking to the main stage at Berlin’s biggest and best indoor arenas. Starting this October, as the indoor music scene heats up and the basketball and ice hockey seasons are in full swing, fans flocking to the Uber Arena, Uber Eats Music Hall, and Uber Platz will…

Today, we are very pleased to announce two new additions to the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors: Jambu Palaniappan and David Parry-Jones. As we build the next chapter of Mozilla, we’ve been focused on bringing people onto our Board who combine deep operating experience with a real…

We see loads in the news about oil prices, the potential shortages caused by wars involving Iran and Russia and whether the UK should licence further oil extraction from existing oil fields in the North Sea. I wondered whether there was a mappy project opportunity around oil production and…

It has been another productive month working on GNOME Design and Community Management as part of my Sovereign Tech Fellowship, and I want to share some of the most interesting developments. Introduction I want to begin by highlighting how much the Sovereign Tech Fellowship has changed the conditions…

One hundred days ago, Mozilla released Over The Edge 2.0, the second independent report from leading experts on deceptive design Dr. Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, on how Windows, Edge, Bing, and Copilot are designed to steer people away from the browser they chose.  We published the report,…

Dear Reader, From November 2 to 4, 2026, GeoSolutions will be at FOSS4G North America 2026 in Sacramento, California, at the Sheraton Grand Sacramento. Simone Giannecchini and Andrea Aime will be there for the whole conference, from Monday to Wednesday. You will find them at our table in the exhibit…

We are pleased to share progress with the Responsible AI Initiative (RAI). Following its launch in April 2026, the RAI community developed its charter, which Vice President Jeff Genender presented in the August board report:  “The ASF Responsible AI Initiative is a program to support the open source…

The GNOME Foundation is supporting contributors with its fellowship program. You can help expand the fellowship program with a donation. September was the release month for GNOME 51. That doesn’t only mean a lot of releases but also the starting point for adding new features! My focus for this week…

I don't know why hardware manufacturers find it so hard to write decent documentation. As I've said before you need to actually test your readme. The Una Watch development instructions are scattered across a bunch of different files. So here's how to go from zero to your first "Hello, World!"…

Week 32 This week's icon is for Jan-Willem Harmannij's project: Haystack: "Edit OpenQA needles" Check out all weekly app icons created so far in the gallery and follow my icon creation adventures as they happen (including…

This content is exclusive to RSS and Atom subscribers. It is not on the web. Shhhhh! A few weeks ago I accidentally broke some of your feed readers. I was using <![CDATA[ … ]]> blocks in the feed. That allows me to put in raw HTML without the need for escaping. Unfortunately, some feed readers…

With the news that the BBC are tendering for a new series of Doctor Who, I thought I'd write down what I want from the show. This is, to be fair, pure fan-service wankery with zero chance of being made. I've based it on the oft-made observation that Hollywood is obsessed with remaking successful…

I've never been a huge fan of smart watches. My £16 smartwatch is basically fine, but the OS is closed source and there's no way to add new functionality. Previously I had the eInk Watchy which was a pain to use and really poorly designed. Even back in 2014 I was bemoaning the design compromises…

SRFI 269 is now in final status.This SRFI defines a portable API for test definitions that is decoupled from test execution and reporting. It provides four definition forms: the universal is macro for assertions, testing for giving groups of assertions human-readable context, test for grouping…

What do you use your smartwatch for? A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a…

Instead of simply updating my Guix home profile I ended up on a small scavenger hunt trying to fix a dependency of one of my audio packages.

Like sticky popcorn, this is a moreish but ultimately unsatisfying set of stories. After I flamed out of Dungeon Crawler Carl, someone suggested I try this series. I can see why! It's campy sci-fi fun, with enough tropes to keep you chuckling and enough tension to keep you turning the pages. …

For a while now I've wanted a tool to help in a number of areas:

Ahhh! PSB's RFS! A delightfully indulgent soundscape of melodic wonder, performed here on its 10th (ish) anniversary. Is it really nostalgia if an album is only a decade old? It feels like it has been in the air forever. For something which is seemingly made up of samples, it would have been easy…