News from the Planet

The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The…

This is a disappointing and frustrating book - not least because it so nearly hits the mark. The subtitle is "How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing" - but it never gets close to discussing that topic, let alone deeply examining it. Instead, it is a book mostly focussed on the history of what…

posted by Stephen De Gabrielle and John Clements We are pleased to announce Racket v9.3 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/. As of this release: The raco setup command can generate markdown documentation, using the --doc-markdown option. The "#lang" teaching languages…

Since I wrote about my fly30 ice skates, I'd continued to battle pain around the navicular bone in my feet. The action that seems to have finally fixed it was to perform a "punch out": a very localized remoulding of the area of the boot that presses against the sore area. I basically followed the…

In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching film with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see anything. This is regardless of the fact that the projector bulb…

There are at least four different Heated Rivalry shows at the Fringe this year. Earlier this week we saw Edinburgh Fringe - Heated Rivalry: The Musical Parody!. This is different because it is the unauthorized musical parody. Oh, and it is in the much larger Udderbelly venue. Some people spend the…

Up early, helped electrician get a Powerwall 3 installed - nice; amused to see us starting to run the house from electricity shipped from the USA(?) while it drained initially; hopefully charging cheaply at night, and draining all day gives savings, robustness, off-grid / UPS capability and…

This is a technically precise and emotionally complex show with energetic delivery from a talented performer. Sadly, it did nothing for me. I found it a little one note in terms of storytelling. The rhythm of the story followed all the predictable beats which I thought was a little repetitive. …

Easily the worst show we've seen at the fringe. Garrett Millerick has trained an AI on his stand up. Can it replace him? Yes, but only in the sense that the AI is obnoxiously dull and Millerick is simply obnoxious. He insulted a kid who he'd called on to stage to help him. Not even in a jokey way,…

I'm a sucker for anything Beatles related - and the fringe has no shortage of musicals, reinterpretations, and shameless cash-ins of the Fab Four. When Vincent Met John is an oddity in that it is a normal play, rather than a musical. It is also an oddity in being 90 minutes long rather than the…

Inspired by some recent reverse-engineering, here are some things I find wild by the original PlayStation GPU: VRAM is a flat 1024x512 16-bit image (555 + 1 bit alpha). You want more than just a framebuffer? Figure out yourself what goes where. Yes, that means you'll need to allocate two…

Over the last two weeks, I worked on adding multi-select support for deleting multiple entries at once. It sounded like a straightforward feature at first, but it ended up leading me down an interesting debugging involving an asynchronous race condition. Multi-Select with Ctrl+Click and Shift+Click…

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…

Hi, I’m Peter, a software dev and currently a maintainer of nautilus, the GNOME project’s file manager. This blog will foremost contain monthly updates on what I did as a GNOME Fellow. The Fellowship The GNOME Fellowship program provides financial support for critical and under-resourced areas of…

This event is happening soon — see below for registration instructions!< We are extremely pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds summit, which will take place from September 22nd—24th 2026<in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. This year, we are thrilled to host the tenth edition of this…

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…