News from the Planet

Many organizations require US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) certification of the crypto code they are running. The certification process is lengthy, but the bigger problem is that the way the crypto subsystem is built into the kernel makes the result unable to be reused across…

In September 2025, I attended the annual LibreOffice conference in Budapest, Hungary. This gave me an opportunity to explore the city, which I will cover in this post. Let’s start with the currency. Although Hungary is a part of the European Union (EU), it doesn’t use the euro as its currency.…

We want to share some updates and future plans from the GNOME Circle Committee with you. The Circle Committee is responsible for reviewing and accepting apps and other components into GNOME Circle as well as maintaining the review criteria. The biggest issue for us, and for maintainers who submitted…

My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option <nd the best value... but it…

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-22. What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat Tags: business, politics, culture, ethics Wondering how those very rich people think and perceive the world? Here is an explanation. I felt unease reading through…

Zswap vs Zram Last year I blogged about using Zram for VMs [1]. That setup is still working well for VMs and for phones and laptops with no swap device. I have just read Chris Down’s insightful blog post about Zswap vs Zram [2] which convinced me to setup Zswap on some systems. I have had some of…

It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things. Luckily, there's the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a…

Here are the new CMake changes in Qt Creator 20:

Here are the noteworthy news about the gedit and Enter TeX text editors. (Some sections are a bit technical). A single package for gedit and its core plugins Before, users needed to remember to install the gedit-plugins package in order to benefit from additional plugins such as Word…

Ongoing Work Back in March, I started to tackle this MR for GNOME Crosswords. It allowed me to learn a lot about navigating the codebase, adhere to naming conventions, and collaborating with others involved in Crosswords. Crosswords Editor features a section for users to input metadata, such as…

From the rise of Apache Iceberg and the modernization of Apache Geode, to a behind-the-scenes look at the rebuild of Apache STeVe v3, this month’s Plus One highlights how open collaboration continues driving innovation across the ASF ecosystem. We’re also gearing up for Community Over Code Glasgow…

En la nueva versión de gvSIG Desktop, la 2.7, se han incluido tres herramientas que permiten crear geometrías de líneas y polígonos mediante rumbo y distancia. Para ello se han incluido tres funciones nuevas en el gestor de expresiones: PointByAngle(): Permite insertar nuevos puntos de la geometría…

Pooch from Repkord dropped by my studio while he was in St. Louis, and asked a simple question: Can a 3D printer's heatbed act as an antenna? A fair question, as many an antenna is embedded in a PCB these days... and the traces on a PCB heatbed like the one used in Prusa's Core One look kinda like…

The SPDX Cryptographic Algorithm List keeps growing. New cryptoClass values, a structured docs folder, PQC as a new property, and SCANOSS as our first user-contributor. Here is what happened in the past months.

The community bonding period is over, and coding started, so this feels like the right moment for a first blog post. I'm contributing to KeepSecret this summer as part of GSoC 2026, working on single-wallet UX and page navigation architecture. What I did during community bonding: ->Close/dismiss…

In January 2025, as a pre-requisite for something else, I published a minimal neovim plugin called nvim-µwiki. It's essentially just the features from vimwiki that I regularly use, which is a small fraction them. I forgot to blog about it. I recently dusted it off and cleaned it up. You can find it…

Writing unit tests can be one of the most time-consuming and least creative phases of software development. For every QML component a developer writes, an equivalent volume of test code must follow - covering properties, signals, mouse and key interactions, state transitions, and edge cases.

posted by Stephen De Gabrielle and John Clements We are pleased to announce Racket v9.2 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/. As of this release: The match form checks that when non-linear patterns (patterns where the same variable is used multiple times) are used with ...,…

Full conda support for GRASS is finally here! You can now install GRASS 8.5.0 on conda on Windows, Linux, macOS on Intel, and macOS on Apple Silicon, simply by running: conda install -c conda-forge grass From soft launch to full rollout GRASS was soft-launched on conda with the 8.4.2 release, with…

Welcome to week one of my year's second eighteen week training program. I'm gearing up for a race that I've never run before, a long-standing one that is close to home: Steamboat Springs' Run Rabbit Run. The 50 mile course goes from the base of Steamboat Mountain, up Right-o-way, then up next to the…

With the release of 4.23.1, GTK’s renderer will come with a new feature that we’ve called snapping. How does it work? Snapping is enabled by calling gtk_snapshot_set_snap(). If enabled, it will slightly adjust the placement of rectangles when drawing so that they align with the pixel grid and don’t…

Here are the new modules available in the Plasma 6.7 beta: plasma-bigscreen union Some important features and changes included in 6.7 beta are highlighted on KDE community wiki page. Help stress-test the Union theming system This releases marks the first public tech preview of the new Union…

The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.96.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, you can get 1.96.0 with: $ rustup update stable If you don't have it already,…

The latest version of PerfCompare is now live! Check out the change-log below to see the updates: [kala-moz]: Bug 2036968: Replaced fast-kde with fftkde and used bootstrap-ci to get CI summary (#1034) Bug 1931291: Created expand all rows functionality (#1037) Bug 2032246: Add cles statement to…

Filling a 4-year gap here! Did not find time to post itemized yearly overviews, plus other updates. And that while even more has been happening compared to the past "COVID-years". Will stick to highlights with a promise to add regular updates. Below a brief overview of my professional life during…