News from the Planet

Week 23 This week's icon is for whitequark's project: ChiPass: "Store and autofill passwords" Check out all weekly app icons created so far over here and follow my icon creation adventures as they happen (including…

Table of Contents Basic points of style More points of style Ordering your text Code examples Metaphors English usage Based largely on comments by: Ron Hale-Evans, Robert J. Chassell, and Richard M. Stallman. Basic points of style  # Show, don’t just tell. Use plenty of…

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format is amazing. It allows you to precisely define how an image should look. Written in XML, it uses various mathematical operations to display an image which looks crisp and clear at any size. Here's a trivial example: <svg height="100" viewBox="0 0 100 100"…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 13 to June 20. Third Party Projects Sjoerd Stendahl says This week I released Lockpicker. Lockpicker is a tool to recover passwords from a hash. Essentially it functions as a front-end for hashcat, making it possible to do…

From 2021 to 2023, I was really motivated to write articles regularly, but that is no longer the case. Most of my energy goes into programming nowadays. Whenever I try to write about a complicated topic in a digestible manner, I quickly lose motivation and don’t publish it. For half a year, I’ve…

A brief summary of Lutra Consulting's key takeaways from State of the Map US 2026, featuring open-source market trends, community highlights, and Mergin Maps.

Discover the highlights from FOSS4G:HU 2026 in Budapest, featuring open source GIS insights, QGIS and Mergin Maps field data workflows, and community networking.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has yesterday published recommendations for using large language models / generative AI for free and open source contributions. It's better than I thought it was, based on initial reactions from my peers, but I am disappointed. They make 14 recommendations. I have…

This is the most overwritten book I've ever read. Unfortunately, Alan Moore knows exactly how much polysyllabic pressure it takes to transmogrify base coal into precious gems. With lines like "his shaved suede skull made him look like a wilted thistle" and "There was a rumour of pink lipstick…

Over the years, QField has gained a number of ways through which authors can share their mapping projects. This post looks at the multiple ways this can be achieved and what scenarios fit each method best. Leveraging QFieldCloud Sharing maps to the public QFieldCloud users all have the ability to…

This month in Radicle CI, June 2026 This is a monthly newsletter about the current state of Radicle CI, what has happened recently, and near future plans. Current status Radicle CI is in production use. There are several CI nodes, and Lars runs a public one for open source Rust projects…

Back in the late 1990s, I did a brief stint of work experience at the BBC. One of the most memorable moments was sitting in on a meeting about early forms of Interactive TV. I saw a demo of "Two Way TV". A flimsy grey box which (somehow) integrated with your OnDigital TV Box and connected to a…

SRFI 275 is now in draft status.This SRFI proposes a programming interface for working with RFC 3986 universal resource identifiers (URIs), as well as RFC 3987's generalisation to internationalised resource identifiers (IRIs). This document defines record types, normalisation procedures, and…

Welcome to RSS Club! These posts are only available to RSS and Atom subscribers. You can read more about the idea at Dave Rupert's site. I recently received an email from a distraught reader: I was going through my recent bookmarks and I found…

Read enough articles about The Beatles and you'll repeatedly hit the claim that Frank Sinatra frequently introduced his cover of George Harrison's "Something" as his "favourite Lennon & McCartney number." Much like the misquote about Ringo not being the best drummer in The Beatles, I think this…

There is a recent blog post about Nix Flakes vs Guix: https://coopi.neocities.org/posts/nix-flakes-vs-guix

Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely, without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints. While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two…

When I ran Ethernet around our house, I thought I was being clever. A CAT6 cable for every room - lush! Some of my rooms have lots of devices, so they get a nice big Ethernet switch with lots of ports and blinking lights. But most of my rooms don't have that many devices. Our gym had only an…

Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute. This isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of…

Introducing GeoLibre 1.0, a free and open-source, lightweight, cloud-native GIS platform that runs in your browser, as a desktop app, on your phone, and inside Jupyter notebooks.

By: Priya Sharma As a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) organization admin representing the Apache Software Foundation, I had the privilege of attending the GSoC Mentor Summit 2025, and it was an incredible experience! The Mentor Summit is a unique opportunity to connect with amazing mentors and discuss…

A seemingly simple question which sent me down into the murky depths of standards. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? It probably isn't sensible to name your online presence a----------hyphen.com - but is there anything technically stopping you? Table of ContentsHistoryTLD…

Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me…

Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one. But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC,…

Apache® Livy, a REST service for Apache Spark™, becomes a Top-Level Project Wilmington, DE –&#160; June 4, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home of open source software the world relies on, today announced that Apachy Livy has become a Top-Level Project (TLP).  Apache Livy is…