Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3 kernel, as expected. It's Sunday afternoon, and this week I somehow kept my wits together long enough to keep track of the day of the week, so the release isn't randomly delayed. Will wonders never cease? Anyway, nothing very special seems to have happened…
read more ➔Another new and exciting version of our still-new 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 one hundred eighty four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer…
read more ➔I have just released a new version of pcsc-lite 2.5.3. pcsc-lite is a Free Software implementation of the PC/SC (also known as WinSCard) API for Unix systems. It provides an API for using smart cards and smart card readers. Changes: 2.5.3: Ludovic Rousseau 18 October 2026 pcscd.service:…
read more ➔A few days ago systemd gained tools which allow you to monitor Varlink traffic. A new Varlink service (io.systemd.VarlinkMonitor) allows you to set up a ring buffer which will get filled with packets containing the traffic which matches the filters you provide. This provides the functionality that…
read more ➔Let's get this out of the way first - this is a terrible idea! I want my two-factor authentication codes to be easily accessible to me, so I've built a watch app which will display them. That's really convenient for me - but makes for a terrible security posture. Anyone who steals my watch will be…
read more ➔Yet another way of writing for loops: var_a2_4 = ... if (var_a2_4 < 0x78) { ... do { ... var_a2_4 += 1; } while (var_a2_4 < 0x78); } This extra if is merely there because the compiler wasn't able to prove that the variable didn't start…
read more ➔Bending is the hardest thing to learn on a harmonica, mostly because you can’t see it. You change the shape of your mouth and throat, and the only feedback is whether the note sounds right, which is exactly what a beginner can’t judge yet. The bending trainer is the screen in Harmonicon for…
read more ➔Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research…
read more ➔Let's look at the entire loop from yesterday: u16 spE10; u16 *var_v0_2; ... var_t1_2 = 0x7F; var_v0_2 = &spE10 + 0xFE; do { *var_v0_2 = 0; var_t1_2 -= 1; var_v0_2 -= 2; } while (var_t1_2 >= 0); What's going with the pointer arithmetic here?…
read more ➔SRFI 278 is now in final status. This SRFI defines procedures on Scheme numbers that aim to improve the portability and usefulness of Scheme arithmetic. These procedures include predicates with extended domains, hyperbolic and inverse hyperbolic functions, the R6RS numeric tower, and…
read more ➔Since Tellico is turning 25 years old, I decided to use the current generative AI tools to create several new entry templates. There may be some quirks I didn’t find, but they cover a variety of layouts and design themes. Install them from within Tellico via the Settings ➜ Templates dialog. They’re…
read more ➔Depending exactly on when I mark the date, Tellico is turning 25 years old this month. The ChangeLog tells me I released Bookcase 0.1 on November 4, 2001. Bookcase was the original name of the application. I renamed it to Tellico after I was contacted by another software developer. I thought it…
read more ➔Just a teaser of a small thing I’m working on. Our amazing meta-meta-builder tool kde-builder (just like its predecessor kdesrc-build) is indispensable if you’re building many KDE things from source. The only problem I have with it is that it is overly verbose. It generates ~10 lines of text for…
read more ➔Obnam is going to be an encrypting, de-duplicating, secure, and fast backup software implementation that's easy and convenient to use. I've been developing a new generation of Obnam for a couple of years now. So far I have mostly been exploring architectural and implementation design choices on my…
read more ➔A few months ago, I went to see Dr Hutchinson record his stand-up comedy special for the BBC - it's about his experiences working in the NHS as a Black doctor. As the title of the book implies, some of the public can be a mite suspicious that anyone with even a hint of melanin can rise beyond being…
read more ➔I spent last week in Bern, Switzerland, for the second edition of the Open Transport Community Conference, attending that but also being part of the organizer team. Open Transport Community Conference 2026 group photo Open Transport Community Conference Compared to last year the…
read more ➔Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week we released Plasma 6.8, but we didn’t stop there: work on Plasma 6.9 has been coming in hot and heavy, and there’s a lot to talk about! So let’s jump right in: Notable new features Plasma 6.9 The Weather Report widget has received massive…
read more ➔(Watch "Liberec Dam 2026" on YouTube) There's only a few places I get to take visiting friends to in Liberec. Sadly at the moment almost all of them are out of service. The city dam, Harcovská přehrada, is one of them. A fraction of the size of a neighboring Mšeno, it's set close to the middle of…
read more ➔This is the release schedule the release team agreed on https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_26.12_ScheduleDependency freeze is in less than 3 weeks (November 5) and feature freeze one week after that. Get your stuff ready!
read more ➔Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week October 9 to October 16. Miscellaneous balooii reports After the initial summer release of Contributor Atlas I can now announce the next version and additional dataset. This release now supports multi-project communities, a lot of polish…
read more ➔Anyone who's read “bro-coder” C from before that was a name will recognize this idiom: var_t1_2 = 0x7F; ... do { ... var_t1_2 -= 1; } while (var_t1_2 >= 0); Why does the loop count backwards? It's because comparison with zero is cheaper on some (many) platforms.…
read more ➔A brand new release 0.1.17 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe. RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free…
read more ➔The GNOME Project has provided GNOME OS for some time; until now, the project only provided a "Nightly" edition that was built from the latest commits and was aimed solely at GNOME developers. Adrian Vovk has now announced the release of GNOME OS Preview, which is intended for a non-developer…
read more ➔Self-referential structures that can be used without unsafe code have posed a problem for Rust for years. There are many cases where a self-referential data structure is the elegant algorithmic choice, but implementing it in accordance with Rust's lifetime rules is all but impossible. At Kangrejos…
read more ➔It’s been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We’re launching a new edition called “GNOME OS Preview”, which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that…
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