News from the Planet

Tested QGIS raster calculator formulas for NDVI, masks, reclass and slope, plus four traps that silently write wrong numbers without raising an error.

How to use the QGIS Field Calculator for area, length, CASE WHEN classes, text cleanup and spatial counts, tested on 8,709 buildings with the silent traps.

Batch processing, the Graphical Modeler, a PyQGIS script, and an AI agent: we ran the same multi-step QGIS workflow on two German cities and timed the re-run.

There is no official Claude plugin for QGIS. Here are the three ways to use Claude with QGIS, tested on the same mapping task, and which one to pick.

Most AI map generators draw pictures, not maps. I tested two image models and a QGIS agent on one prompt in Recife, Brazil, and checked every name against OSM.

Recently, I’ve been noticing something on packaging around my house that I used to glance right past: raised Braille dots on a carton of medicine, and embossed markings on a container of body cream. I’ve always known what Braille looked like, but I never paid close attention to it. Now that I’m…

Videos from the 2026 X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) are now available on YouTube. XDC was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 28-30.

Here's the data! A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post. Thank you all for filling the survey I mentioned in my other post here. We got 1518 full responses total, which is a lot! Without further ado, here's the data in charts. FYI: I…

When a computer hibernates, the kernel writes the contents of memory to disk and then shuts the system down. Resuming from hibernation involves reading that data back into memory, and then having the kernel pick up where it left off. Unfortunately, the kernel does not have any way to know that the…

Hot on the heels of the previous two stable kernels, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.3.3, 6.18.62, 6.12.116, 6.6.162, 6.1.192, 5.15.225, and 5.10.274 stable kernels. Each one only contains fixes for three use-after-free vulnerabilities announced today by the Xen security…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.3.2 and 6.18.61 stable kernels. Each contains quite a few changes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

I’ve been working again on faster integer factoring in my Perl module Math::Prime::Util::GMP. My latest work grew into msiqs, a standalone factoring program that is competitive with specialized software I've been recommending for years, such as YAFU. But first, what does this mean for Perl…

It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post about my work on GNOME Design and Community Management as part of my Sovereign Tech Fellowship. As usual, I want to share some of the most interesting developments. Passkey Portal Passkeys are an easy and safe way to sign in, and can replace passwords.…

We're at the Arm office in Cambridge for fun conversations and Debian hacking, as part of this year's mini-DebConf. Here's some geek pron... :-) Massive thanks to the Arm folks for making us welcome: Steve Capper and especially Charlie Dixon for going above and beyond to set things up for…

It is election week in the US, and the result is an unexpectedly huge mandate for reigning in corruption. Breathing a sigh of relief, I can amuse myself with Weekly Challenge 398. As a hopeful sun rises over the lake on this frosty November morning, the music in the backround is the Spotify…

I didn’t post last week, but I did read a bit. Between this and some catching up this week… Behold the web review double issue for the week 2026-45! Reading in decline? Barnes & Noble is un-Daunt-ed Tags: tech, book Bookshops still have a future and it can be bright. It looks like ebooks can’t…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cockpit-files, container-tools:rhel8, delve, gcc-toolset-12-binutils, gimp:2.8, glibc, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, libfastjson, mariadb:10.3, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, mysql:8.0, php:8.0, pki-core:10.6 and pki-deps:10.6, squid:4, tang, tesseract,…

To optimize the performance metrics of this blog, I relied on Amazon CloudFront to serve the assets,1 and Route 53 for the geo-aware DNS2 to direct readers to the closest host serving the content. But Route 53 is expensive: US$0.50 per zone per month, US$0.70 per million geolocation queries, and…

Kirigami Addons 1.16.1 is out! Kirigami Addons is a growing collection of nice components you can use in your Kirigami and QML applications. This release mainly includes small bugfixes and two visual chances. AboutPage The about page provided by Kirigami Addons now display the release…

There has been a dramatic fall in the amount of interpersonal violence in most countries. I don't want to go too Freakanomics and, obviously, correlation is not causation but perhaps video games have a role to play in this? A teenager being cooped up in their room means less exposure to situations…

 At Arm in Cambridge for two hackathon-type days before the main mini-Debconf on Saturday and Sunday. A roomful of people, mostly very quiet this morning but with people gradually arriving and greeting each other.Just had an excellent lunch. Arm are excelling themselves, as ever. With particular…

Another interesting morning so far. Lots of interesting side conversations (and, of course, people using IRC to talk to the person next to them as is traditional).It's nice to hear somebody ask a question and be told, effectively  "Oh, you need to talk to XX - they're sitting over there" or " I need…

Debian packages: firmware-nonfree: Bugs: replied to #1150535: firmware-amd-graphics: Raphael iGPU SMU fails on resume from s2idle with 20260810 blobs, works with 20240318 Uploads: …

Renovate is a helpful tool that updates your dependencies automatically. This is cool, because it means you don’t have to track updates to your dependencies manually, which let’s be honest never really work. Renovate will just create a new merge request as soon as it detects an update. This is…

Has it really been just one week? The public announcement of Kwi last weekend has resulted in a flurry of activity both inside and outside the project! First of all, thank you all very much! There's been a lot of positive and kind feedback, a lot of excitement, and very useful bug reports from so…