News from the Planet

In Some Changes to GNOME Security Tracking, I reported: I will discontinue tracking newly-reported security issues on November 1, 2026. During November, I will focus only on tracking issues reported prior to November 1. By December 1, all disclosure deadlines for that set of issues will have been…

Introducing Apache Iggy™, a persistent message streaming platform written in Rust, and Apache Sourcelume, open source instrumentation for AI training-data provenance Wilmington, DE –  August 27, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home of open source software the world…

This is a charming and zeitgeisty novel which has a strong start and fulfils the promise of its blurb. What if your autonomous vacuum cleaner was sentient and was very sad about your wife's death? It pays obvious homage to the Brave Little Toaster, 100 Acre Woods, Beauty and The Beast, and hundred…

If your agentic workload involves the agent being able to run arbitrary code (like bash or equivalent), then you should not use a “LLM as part of your app” framework like LangChain, BeeAI, OGX etc. Instead, run OpenCode, goose, or another general coding agent inside a sandbox such as…

Hello! I'm Angelo Verlain, a Software Engineering student, and I've been working for the last 3 months easing the debugging process of GJS apps by adding Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) support to GJS as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2026). A debugger is software for executing a computer program…

Mergin Maps simplifies QGIS project sharing with automated webmaps. Recent updates include support for layer trees, map themes, custom JavaScript integrations, a redesigned full-screen interface, and the ability to embed interactive maps directly into websites.

Unified builds (also know as Jumbo Builds) is a build techniques that aims at improving build time through the concatenation of several sources as a single unified source before compilation. The goal is obtained through implicit caching of header instantiation, although it implies a trade-off with…

This might be a long post, it was a pretty challenging project. I wrote last week about my Amazing Animals in Crisis map of 50 endangered species, I got some bad news on Friday that my usage of the IUCN polygon data was in breach of their licencing conditions and a request that I take the map…

Following the symbolication work from Part 1, I undertook two more efforts to improve performance profiles for the Performance team. Native Profiling (Bugs 2030161, 2030166, 2047451, and 2030423) The first effort was to use platform-specific profilers to generate profiles in CI of browsers running…

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their latest camera to review - and it is a bit different to all the others I've tried. Whereas previous cameras are good for bird watching, or wildlife spotting, or finding leaks at home - the P3 has a manual macro lens and is specifically designed…

  Almost two months ago I went to my first GUADEC conference. While I’ve been busy since then, writing proper travel report has been something I’ve been putting off for a while. Without much further ado, here’s a report of my impressions Tower of Hercules in A Coruña First impressions It’s always a…

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…

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.