News from the Planet

I have just released a new version of pcsc-lite 2.5.2. pcsc-lite is a Free Software implementation of the PC/SC (also known as WinSCard) API for Unix systems. It provides an API for using smart cards and smart card readers. Changes: 2.5.2: Ludovic Rousseau 19 September 2026 hotplug_libudev: rescan…

Introduction After bazel-bootstrap 7.7.1 was landed into Debian unstable, I'm working on packaging newer Mozc (Most famous Japanese input method editor) with Bazel. Here is the blog entry initial efforts to build Mozc with Bazel at that time. kenhys.hatenablog.jp Then, I've shared implementing…

SRFI 284 is now in draft status.This SRFI defines the forms define-typed and define-typed* for creating procedures with checked type boundaries. It allows checking the arguments and/or the return value or values with simple predicate procedures and raises exceptions on usage when they don’t match.…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 11 to September 18. This week we released GNOME 51! This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, including visual signatures in Papers, Maps offline usage, Files refinements, Calendar usability improvements,…

For a while now, my preferred way of installing QGIS has been from conda-forge. However, while we’re waiting for QGIS 4 to become available on conda-forge, there are alternatives: Option 1: Flatpak In the Software Manager, you can find QGIS from Flathub in two different versions: stable and…

On the Mappery site we have almost 2,400 posts on WordPress and we had never used the Category feature to sort them when we were adding posts. When we built the new Mappery Map Plugin for WordPress we included the option to only map posts in a specific category which we thought would be useful to…

As a graduate of a liberal arts university, I wound up, unsurprisingly, taking a lot of classes in every possible academic discipline. Thinking back to the person that I was going into university, I don’t think I would have chosen to take them – after all, my degree was in the sciences; I’d have…

The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Molière's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial…

Firefox DevTools MCP (firefox-devtools-mcp) 0.10.3 is out on npm. New features: New tool: close_firefox_session — ends the browser session: it releases the connection when the server is attached to an existing Firefox, and closes the browser when the server started it.<New parameter: fullPage for…

It is said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a quote often attributed to the American philosopher George Santayana. And to remember the past, records must be maintained and kept accessible to learn from. With this in mind, it is no wonder that archivists worldwide…

I like to run my Linux as an operating system, so I usually resort to toolbox for packages and development. However flatpak-builder is distributed as a flatpak itself, so here's how you can go about building flatpaks yourself for when GNOME Nighlies are not enough. On GNOME OS, some developer tools…

Biodiversity data is most valuable when it is shared. A river survey stored in a single database helps one team, but the same records, shared openly, can inform researchers, conservationists, and policymakers around the globe. That is exactly what the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)…

This is a new series1 I'm starting on the tools I have been crafting and buying to play pedagogical games in my Economics classes. These games, aside from being just plain fun for the students, often aim to teach them a lesson via interactive play. Unsurprisingly, it is much easier for them to grok…

Today at ALL IN, Canada’s largest AI and technology event, Mozilla and Mila announced a new initiative and fresh investment to build an open source AI foundation layer that enables organizations and institutions to own and operate advanced AI systems locally, ensuring full control over their…

Highlights Firefox 155 just released! That’s the first release that went through the full 2-week release cycle process. The WebExtensions team added a new backgrounds_area theme property so themes can explicitly control whether background images apply to the whole window or only the top…

[Originally written in Czech] At the very beginning of the last year, Jiří Eischmann wrote a post on his blog about the status of the Czech translation at GNOME, tl;dr: the translation was slowly dying. I would really love to say that it is resolved, but that would be oversimplified. What…

Yesterday I gave a talk at Geomob London on my adventures in vibe coding. The slides are pretty but probably don’t tell the whole story unless you have been reading my regular posts on my projects. The images in the slides are all cartoons of an old dog learning new tricks and got some praise,…

I remember the moment when I learned about immutability. It changed everything. — <enis Defreyne Periodically, in various programming language forums, the discussion comes up of why a certain language doesn’t provide the immutable and mutable variants of some data structure as subtypes or…

It’s been about 4 months since my last GNOME Foundation update. Time flies. I’m sorry that it’s been so long. I will try to do more regular posts again in the future, but perhaps not at the same tempo as before. While I would love to post every other week, it’s hard to sustain. With that said, let’s…

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. CI node leaderboard This…

Back in April I wrote an informal history of the BuildStream project: Status update: 23rd April 2026. Things escalated and somehow I ended doing a podcast interview with Rich Bowen of the Apache Software Foundation recently, on the Apache PlusOne podcast:Apache BuildStream — with Sam Thursfield –…

This is the second part of a two-part series in which we explore approaches to protecting children online while safeguarding privacy, security and the open web. Part one covers our concerns regarding age gates, and suggests alternative policy proposals that address the root causes of online harms.…

Not a lot of things have landed this cycle, but there's still a bit to list, so let's do that. Android support As part of his effort to port GTK to Android, Florian also ported libadwaita demo. The builds are available from CI and the GTK 4 Android page. He also implemented a settings backend,…

We believe that there is an ongoing campaign targeting rust-lang members and owners of popular crates that is attempting to compromise devices and accounts in order to use them to publish malware. What we've seen A video call is set up for something positive — maybe for a job, maybe for a project,…

I’ve been working for a while as a contractor as part of the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) initiative for Flatpak, organized by Modal and Para-Real Ltd. There is a nice write up about the project, giving an overview of the investment and the collaborative effort. Intents My involvement has been focused…