News from the Planet

I love testing in production. The thrill of accidentally publishing some dummy data - or taking down an entire website - is similar to skydiving without a parachute. Exquisite excitement followed by heart-stopping terror. Before going live with a new website or service, it's sensible to test how…

Another new version of our still-new-ish package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe. The matching Python package has also been updated. The package offers twenty two hundred eighty four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer of…

As part of our Security project for QGIS initiative, we identified a work package titled “Improve Memory Safety.” Having worked on this topic over the last few months, here is a summary of the issues involved and what has been accomplished so far. It’s not an easy thing to present this topic. I’ll…

We’re glad to announce the release of GIMP 3.2.8! This new stable release contains a number of bugfixes and security updates from new and long-time contributors. General Updates and UX Improvements Highlighting New Contributor’s Work System-specific Updates Security Updates Around…

SRFI 272 is now in final status. This SRFI follows the traditional Scheme model of pretty printing, which treats it as a process distinct from general controlled formatting. While general-purpose formatters often prioritize specialized presentation at the expense of machine-readability,…

As of today, I've been on the Mastodon social network for 10 years. I think that deserves a little reflection and celebration. Post by @Edent View on Mastodon Social networks often launch in a blaze of glory but limp out of existence within a year or so. How many services have you signed up…

After quite some time, I picked up debvulns again to implement what I mentioned in my previous post: exporting reboot required status and identifying services that need a restart. Additionally, I wanted to ensure kernel vulnerabilities are not marked as fixed unless the running kernel matches or…

To experiment with network stuff, I was using UML-based network labs. Many alternatives exist, like GNS3, Netkit, Marionnet or Cloonix. All of them are great viable solutions but I still prefer to stick to my minimal home-made solution with UML virtual machines. Here is why: I didn’t want to use…

Debian Related Work Uploaded fuzzel 1.15.0+ds-1 to unstable Uploaded foot 1.28.0-1 to unstable Uploaded swayimg 5.6-1 and 5.7-1 to unstable Uploaded wdisplays 1.3.0-1 to unstable Orphaned usbguard with version 1.1.4+ds-5 and usbguard-notifier with version 0.1.0-4 The orphaning of usbguard and…

Welcome to a new edition of This Month in KDE Linux, dedicated to KDE’s next-generation operating system. October was another infrastructure-heavy month for the project. A major initiative involved migrating the OS image storage and updating system to work with KDE’s new S3-based file storage…

I've started work on a new KDE application. It's called Kwi (pronounced kwee). Kwi is designed to provide users of KDE Plasma and other free desktops with a modern and fast terminal, built on a robust tech stack and following the latest KDE HIG and UI conventions. Here's a screenshot: In some…

Soon after I posted my One Hundred Famous Views of Edo Map, Keir Clarke posted about another map of Japanese woodblock prints on his Maps Mania blog, well worth a read if you want to learn a bit about Japanese landscape art in the 19th C. It turns out that there are a lot more than Hiroshige’s One…

The most common way people experience classical style music these days is via movies and video-games. After seeing The Force Awakens - live in concert, I've become rather a fan of watching movies performed with a live soundtrack. But what about watching a video game with orchestral accompaniment?…

From raster to histogram Visualisation is a key part of any analysis. It is useful not only at the end, when presenting the results, but also throughout the analysis itself. A quick plot can help you interpret intermediate results and decide what to do next. R and Python offer excellent tools for…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 23 to October 30. GNOME Fellowship Sophie (she/her) says GNOME RFC Process, many fixes in glycin, CMYK images in Loupe, and more: Learn about my work in October as part of the GNOME Fellowship. GNOME Core Apps and…

In the previous post we looked at a simple multithreaded task executor that behaves roughly like its Python standard library counterpart. The biggest missing feature was being able to return values from run tasks via future objects. In a fully dynamic language like Python this is fairly…

I have a Samsung Q800A soundbar. It ships with built-in support for the Apple Airplay protocol, but I’m not really an Apple kind of guy so that’s never been particularly helpful for me. So, instead, I have a Chromecast Audio plugged into it via TOSLINK, and that works fine - except for the fact that…

The GNOME Foundation is supporting contributors with its fellowship program. You can help expand the fellowship program with a donation. After the release of GNOME 51 in the previous month, this month was the time were people noticed the first regressions and bugs. Hence, a lot of work went into bug…

There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM, they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016. Of course they made that decision while I was out on vacation, so I'm just getting this video up…

I did not care for this one bit. I found it cloying, infantilising, and far too circuitous. It starts off as a bit of an overwritten melodrama, where every phrase is a delicious flower waiting to bloom, but ends up being a over-sugared mess with a rotten heart. Parts are just exhausting to read,…

What's new in openEO: real zeros, cleaner masks and better merges

Copernicus Sentinel-3B unavailability notice for OOP manoeuvre planned on 29/10/2026 [DOY 302]

Copernicus Sentinel-1D Data Unavailability on 28 October 2026

Temporary rollback of the Sentinel-1 processor

The name of the game in agentic development is figuring out how to clearly tell agents what you want– and then how to be sure they follow through. Lately I’ve been tinkering with an interesting technique around this that I’d like to share.1 I call it “trust but verify”2. The basic idea is that…