News from the Planet

New release of Firefox DevTools MCP. Available on npm at https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp Added New --idle-timeout option (IDLE_TIMEOUT). It sets how many seconds a --connect-existing session waits without tool calls before it releases Firefox. The default stays 1800…

Insights from the DIRECTED Data Fabric The Challenge: Building Software That Users Actually Need and Use In geospatial research and software engineering, we frequently encounter a persistent paradox: sophisticated platforms, cutting-edge hazard models, and rich spatial data infrastructures are built…

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…

I’ve been wanting to get back into more frequent blogging instead of just posting half-thought-out toots to Mastodon, turning them into a rambling thread, and then losing the thought to the depths of social media… but every time I try to write something, there are a bunch of changes I want to make…

Build a tree inventory in QGIS: one point per tree from aerial imagery or LiDAR, with ID, crown size and height, then species and condition from the field.

AI GIS is software that does GIS work from imagery or a plain request. The five jobs it handles in 2026, the tools for each, and where it still fails.

Since this will be the only source of this process on the Internet1, I figured I'd document a quick fan swap I did on a piece of test/reference equipment I'm running in my Atomic Clock Tower. I took my Torx T10 screwdriver and popped off the top cover. The screws required some force to loosen, as…

Copernicus Sentinel-1D Data Unavailability on 26 October 2026

The days might be getting shorter, but your to-do list is only getting longer. Whether you’re getting a head start on holiday shopping or planning your next career move, Smart Window’s newest features will help you keep up.  Firefox’s opt-in AI browsing experience can now use information from…

Some of our latest Firefox updates have had big moments of their own, from the launch of our new design and built-in ad blocking on iOS to Firefox Enterprise and our partnership with NVIDIA GeForce NOW. You might’ve even spotted a few familiar internet OGs in our latest campaign. Other improvements…

It is hard to write a book in the second person. It is even harder to make it this good. It would have been easier to write a salacious cash-in with a dozen shocking revelations in each chapter. Instead, Andrew Hankinson attempts to use Raoul Moat's own words to build up a picture of the man. You…

I’ve been an unapologetic fan of the Lenovo “classic” 7 row keyboard in the ThinkPad X220 and have been using the external version of it ever since. This USB laptop keyboard chassis is called the SK-8855 which was manufactured in the late 2000s and early 2010s and is now essentially unobtainium from…

Walking up to the Fedora & CentOS booth on the first day of DevConf US in Boston, I was not quite sure what to expect. Although I have attended the Czech Republic variant of DevConf several times, this was my first time attending the US event. I was there as part of Red Hat’s joint Fedora and CentOS…

Mozilla has long called for US antitrust reform in digital markets. After several false starts, real change has yet to materialize. In the meantime, dominant tech players have further entrenched their hold, limiting choice and degrading people’s experiences. Integration of new AI services into…

One of the things you get to do after being laid off is a lot of reflection, but also to revisit all the old projects you used to contribute to. One of them was Pidgin: “the universal chat client”. The new Pidgin 3 app icon and a handful emoji I designed the original emoticon set for version 2…

If your online activities involve logging in and out of a lot of different accounts — often on the same website — Profile Manager Pro can be a time-saving game changer. The extension provides a one-click login process for multiple online accounts, so you can effortlessly jump between profiles. From…

SRFI 242 is now in withdrawn status. This SRFI defines a language to describe control-flow graphs (CFGs) suitable for formulating iterative and recursive algorithms. Using the notion of a CFG term, this language can be seamlessly embedded in the Scheme language. Complex CFG …

SRFI 265 is now in final status.This SRFI defines a language to describe control-flow graphs (CFGs) suitable for formulating iterative and recursive algorithms. Using the notion of a CFG term, this language can be seamlessly embedded in the Scheme language. Complex CFG terms can be…

Discontinuation of S-NPP VIIRS data availability - Impact on Sentinel-5P TROPOMI L2_NP* production

Why shouldn't an opera be set in an office? Not merely set there; performed there! On Saturday night, a couple of dozen audience members were ushered in to a genuine office in Tooting to watch a short comic opera by Opera UnTouched. It was a burst of sunshine in a rainy day. We're at Ben's leaving…

VHR Europe 2024 Mosaic now available for download

Copernicus DEM View Service - Dataset Update

TLDR: To fund general maintenance, donate to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund or sponsor the RustNL Maintainers Team To fund specific features and improvements, sponsor fundable Rust Project Goals To fund individual contributors, donate to their GitHub Sponsors accounts There is always so…

SRFI 288 is now in draft status. A condition object system is introduced that attempts to be implementable in and interoperable with many implementation’s condition systems, including the condition system of the R6RS. The condition system includes compound conditions, but does not include…

Hello, I started this blog 22 years ago now (I don’t recommend going back to the start), and for the last 5 years I wrote a monthly “status update” post, aiming to mainly write about interesting stuff I might have done in the world of open source software, which I hoped in turn would motivate me to…