News from the Planet

The thing about Romeo and Juliet is that it is a true story. It isn't literally true, but it is literary true. We see the same motif repeated throughout all cultures and all times. Caroline Lea (writing as Caroline Finch) asks an important question - what if every pair of star-cross'd lovers were…

Laax, Switzerland, 10 October 2026. More than 420 people from over 30 countries and five continents gathered in Laax from 4 to 9 October for the QGIS User Conference 2026, the largest event ever held on Crap Sogn Gion at 2222 metres above sea level. Two conference days at the Galaaxy venue…

LinuxDays 2026, the largest open-source event in Czechia, took place on the first weekend of October, and we had a Fedora & CentOS booth there again. This time, we got a smaller table and our booth equipment was more modest because no one traveled from Brno by car—we only had what we could carry on…

No single person can know everything happening in Fedora at any given time. I say this often in our community, half as a warning and half for comfort. For a while, I did not really believe it applied to me. I wanted to know everything. I joined new teams, participated in tickets, and either…

Institutions are recalculating who controls the technology they rely on. Mozilla has an independent option to offer. For years, organizations consolidated technology around a small number of providers to make things simpler. Fewer systems. Tighter integrations. More economies of scale. But that…

I remember back in 2020, people were complaining that we didn’t have enough documentation for creating GNOME Shell extensions. They said it was almost impossible to figure out where to start. They were right, learning all of it without proper documentation was a huge challenge for me too. So, I…

This is more of a note to myself since I keep forgetting and "rediscovering" this technique every time I need it, but if it helps you, great!The JavaScript way is to toggle displaying the menu based on a button click. For instance, here's an example in Svelte:[This interactive/preview is only…

Ports and adapters, also called hexagonal architecture, is the pattern I reach for when a system has rules worth protecting, and the pattern I refuse when it has none. This article is the map between those two cases. If you have read Hexagon of Doom, you know the other half of the argument: on…

Discover Lutra Consulting's highlights from the QGIS User Conference 2026 in Laax, Switzerland. Explore our talks on QGIS 3D, point clouds, Mergin Maps, and more!

I read Ruben Schade's notes on underlining and wanted to add more, as adding a border-bottom and leaving at that seemed incomplete to me.ModernOf course, you could just use the modern choice. Here, I've shortened what Schade uses into one line of CSS (because I can). As noted, this is a fairly new…

This year’s edition of International Calligraphy Festival Keralam was yet another great experience, consisting of workshops, demonstrations and talks surrounding calligraphy & typography, much like the last time. Eminent calligraphers of about a dozen scripts shared their expertise and…

Week 33 This week's icon is for Tau Gärtli's project: Ripples: "Rip CDs" Check out all weekly app icons created so far in the gallery and follow my icon creation adventures as they happen (including sketches) on the…

Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely…

Review: Daggerbound, by T. Kingfisher Series: Swordheart #2 Publisher: Bramble Copyright: 2026 ISBN: 1-250-40009-0 Format: Kindle Pages: 436 Daggerbound is a secondary-world fantasy and a sequel to Swordheart,…

Welcome to the latest edition of This Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty! This blog series covers the work done throughout KDE’s software stack that’s funded by the investment KDE received earlier this year from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency. Commissioned work on a variety of projects has been…

KML is map data written as XML; a KMZ is the zipped form. Open it in Google Earth or QGIS, find attributes hidden in HTML, convert to Shapefile, CSV or GeoJSON.

6,041 bike crashes in Paris mapped three ways in QGIS: Heatmap renderer, kernel density raster and hexagons, then one sentence to an AI agent: 2 min 34 s.

Over one Pyrenean valley, four free 30 m DEMs sat 12 to 18 m above the LiDAR ground under forest. Where to get each DEM free, and how to load it in QGIS.

Microsoft matched 25% of a French town's cadastre buildings, OpenStreetMap 83%. Then Nairobi: five free sources, timed downloads, checked on drone imagery.

One story is 3.07 m (10.1 ft) floor to floor at the median. Heights for 1 to 12 stories: a 5-story building stands 16.2 m (53 ft), a 10-story one 27 m (89 ft).

For this post, I wanted to talk about two different approaches to handling supertraits. I’m calling them modular proofs vs external proofs. The key idea of this post is that, if we want to have cyclic trait impls, we really need to use a modular proof strategy, where the impl establishes all…

Great news for the community! The integration of QML Quick Editor into Qt Creator is now 100% complete. The plugin is officially available, bringing native workflow integration directly to your development environment. Give it a try, and let us know what you think! Features: Designed as an…

I'll be radically honest here - I never really got the idea of "Test Driven Development". I'm much more of a "telnet into production and damn the consequences" kind of guy. Look, it's much more fun and my cardiologist recommends severe shocks every now and again. The essence of unit testing is…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 2 to October 9. GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries Brage Fuglseth reports This week Concessio was accepted into GNOME Circle. Concessio helps you understand and convert between unix permissions representations.…

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…