News from the Planet

I’m on a VPN setup with several friends that, obviously, includes a VoIP network. I also have an old magicJack adapter and a deep and abiding need to use hardware in ways I should not. There was obvious synergy here. Plugging in the magicJack gives a USB vendor id of 0x06e6, which belonged to a…

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…

For a mobile 'mini homelab' project I'm working on, I wanted to use 5G Internet as a primary 'on-to-go' connection, but still have the ability to plug in another Internet connection when I put the mobile rack I'm building in a fixed location. I'll have more on that project soon, but I figured…

This project, its code and its substance, have been brought to you by a small but dedicated herd of passionate and possibly stubborn human beings often referred to as “hackers.” This is how it all started more than 20 years ago and it hasn’t changed! I mean, why hack an init system, with a…

Cats is so silly! In the olden days, after a wild animal was slaughtered, the tribe's shaman would wear the skin and re-enact the hunt. As he became one with the beast, the people slowly understood the ways of nature. Cats is a similarly spiritual experience wherein we watch androgynous sylphs…

In 2025 I was honored to be selected for the first cohort of Sovereign Tech Fellows, a program by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency to improve the resilience of the open source ecosystem by supporting maintainers directly (complementing their existing support for larger FOSS organizations). Back in…

On our recent trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, I was bemused by just how little effort performers put in to finding out why people had selected their show. Taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe is ridiculously expensive with some performers paying tens of thousands of pounds. The way performers recoup…

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.7.0rc1! Best Served with PostgreSQL 19 Beta 3 , GEOS 3.15.0rc1 , postgis_tiger_geocoder 2025.2 , and address_standardizer. This version requires PostgreSQL 14 - 19rc1, GEOS 3.10 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.15+…

Pixels are a lie. Even if you think you're drawing something with "pixel perfect" accuracy, your monitor is lying to you. There is no grid of platonically perfect squares. In CSS, pixels are a double lie: Note that 1px doesn't necessarily equal one physical device pixel. On HD displays, it may…

The PostGIS development team is pleased to provide postgis_tiger_geocoder extension. This is the very second release since the break from the PostGIS core. This version requires PostgreSQL 16 and above and should work with any supported PostGIS version. PostGIS 3.6 series is the last series to…

This is a detailed examination of the various senses possessed by animals. Some will be intimately familiar to you - like sight and sound - whereas some will seem strange and uncanny - like magnetic detection and electro-sensing. Some straddle an almost understandable space like echolocation or…

If you have ever spun up a PostGIS database or deployed GeoServer in a container, there is a good chance you pulled an image built by Kartoza. As of mid-2026, our geospatial Docker images have been pulled over 21 million times on Docker Hub. That number quietly astonishes even us. We are a small…

SRFI 274 is now in final status. A set of modest extensions to list conversion and list copying procedures is proposed that aligns them with other conversion and copying procedures and allows for some operations on dotted and circular lists (collectively called improper lists). Authors of…

The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi). The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display, which costs twice as much, with giant…

We are happy to announce that Guixotic has been awarded a grant by NLnet as part of the NGI TALER Fund! This grant will fund our work to bring the main components and extensions of GNU Taler, a privacy-friendly payment system, to GNU Guix.

One of the promises of the AI-filled future is that we'll all have highly capable autonomous servants "agents" to work for us. Even back in the 1990s, it was a common trope in future-gazing to insist that a person's personal slave agent would negotiate on their behalf. Ask your meek digital pal…

Oslandia will be attending the 2026 QGIS User Conference, which is taking place this year 5-6 October in Laax, Switzerland Workshop QGIS Expressions: From Labels to Geometry Generators (by Benoit de Mezzo | Monday, October 5, 11:30 AM) Deploying QGIS in large IT systems – best practices (by…

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 at callisto.liw.fi. Radicle CI use metrics I…

In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters (example), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis. One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+, the process of…

What Geode 2.0 taught us—and what comes next By Jinwoo HwangLead Developer, Project Lead, and Release Manager, Apache Geode 2.0https://JinwooHwang.com This post is divided into three parts. Part I explains why Apache Geode 2.0 matters. Part II walks through how it was modernized. Part III looks…

I was checking the new beta release of LIPS Scheme in GNU Emacs. I was searching for a way to execute an expression in Scheme mode when using the cmuscheme Scheme REPL in the other window. It turned out that it's standard C-x C-e (same as for elisp). The problem is that it displays the prompt…

Update I was requested to take down this map by the IUCN team (International Union for the Conserfvation of Nature) because my usage breached their license terms. “You have broken the Red List Terms of Use by reposting the range maps without prior written consent from IUCN … The Red List…

Rhombus version 1.1 is now available! We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org/. Rhombus is a general-purpose programming language that is easy to use and uniquely customizable. As of this release: Add annot and annot.def as ways to define an…

In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of…

I'm excited to introduce a new beta version of LIPS Scheme. The most important features of this version are full continuations and TCO (Tail Call Optimization). They were inspired by JS-Scheme by Alex Yakovlev. see the rest of the article