News from the Planet

Introducing Apache Auron™, Apache Reqsign™, and Apache ResilientDB™ Wilmington, DE – October 14, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home for open source software the world relies on, today announced that Apache Auron, Apache Reqsign, and Apache ResilientDB have become Top-Level…

New feature cuts local working-copy storage requirements by up to 50%, extending Subversion’s long-standing strength in version control for huge repositories and huge files Wilmington, DE –  October 14, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home of open source software the world…

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap, coming in at $699 (or $749…

On or before August 10th, a macOS system at Northwestern University which builds and hosts Racket snapshots was compromised. The attackers installed a crypto miner, which was detected by Northwestern network monitoring. By August 18th, the machine was fully deactivated, and was subsequently…

There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot. On paper, the Q8B beats…

Earlier this year, two years after AMD engineers contributed packages the HIP/ROCm stack to the Guix-HPC channels, Guix developers migrated the whole HIP/ROCm stack into Guix proper, starting with version 7.1.1. This was quite a milestone as it makes HIP/ROCm first-class citizens and gives them…

Emma does several jobs for me. It runs Cuirass for Guix builds and a Forgejo Actions runner, and I would like to add more services without discovering too late that CI ate the machine. My first instinct was to give each workload a quota: 11 GiB and four CPU cores for builds, 2 GiB and one core for…

Guix is all about empowering people, so it should come as no surprise that one can extend it with new guix commands . You can show the commands available in your current Guix through the help command: $ guix help If you are using a recent Guix, there are a number of extensions at…

We are pleased to share progress with the Responsible AI Initiative (RAI). Following its launch in April 2026, the RAI community developed its charter, which Vice President Jeff Genender presented in the August board report:  “The ASF Responsible AI Initiative is a program to support the open source…

Instead of simply updating my Guix home profile I ended up on a small scavenger hunt trying to fix a dependency of one of my audio packages.

For a while now I've wanted a tool to help in a number of areas:

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off…

Today, I find myself migrating from Digital Ocean to Linode (now Akamai Cloud but I’m never gonna really call it that) because, among other things, Digital Ocean recently donated $3 million USD to Omarchy, a slop distro for fascists. Raising money for free and open source software development is…

I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel. Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers,…

Three years after my last public appearance at a local FOSS event, my old friend Marco brought me on board again as a speaker for LinuxDay 2026 in October. While my latest speeches were mostly about the status and governance of the FOSS domain, this time I’ll present something more technical.

Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips, sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards. Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips,…

I'm back from VCF Midwest 21, arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet. After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5…

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…

UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly. To do both of those things well, you need a smart…

We are excited to announce the first release of Guix-Science channel: v20260907.

Guix system and Guix home introduce the concept of services. These provide users with a way to control background processes, commonly refereed as daemons , as well as ways of controlling the setup of files. For example, openssh-service-type is a service which controls a SSH daemon. In…

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server, so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the…

By ASF Tooling and ASF Security During a three-day window in August 2026, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) ran full security scans across 230 of the foundation’s repositories. The work was done by the ASF Security and ASF Tooling teams, within the Foundation’s Responsible AI Initiative (RAI),…

**To receive Plus One directly to your inbox, sign up via the subscribe box below.**  Community News The ASF has announced the keynote speakers for Community Over Code Glasgow, taking place October 11–14, 2026 in Glasgow, Scotland. The lineup features Adjunct Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University…

Open source leaders in software engineering education, sustainability, and the games industry to headline ASF’s flagship conference, October 11–14 in Glasgow, Scotland Wilmington, DE – September 1, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home of open source software the world relies…