News from the Planet

A tutorial on accessing, visualizing, and analyzing NASA Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) imagery in QGIS using the NASA Earthdata, GEE Data Catalogs, and OpenGeoAgent plugins, including RGB composites, NDVI, monthly time series, pixel extraction, and voice-driven workflows.

A while back, I came across the AI Fabric system created by Daniel Miessler. I liked its approach of providing command-line tools for filtering text using artificial idiocy services, allowing stepwise operations to be applied to a piece of text. The output of one operation can then serve as the…

In the recent weeks I've been engaging Prot as a coach to help review my new ffs package for GNU Emacs as I worked on preparing it for inclusion in GNU ELPA, as well as discussing other Emacs- and life-related topics. UPDATE 2026-05-23 22:39:15 -0400: Prot also published an article about our…

I am a teacher. Since January 2013, I have been teaching the “Operating Systems” course at the Engineering Faculty of UNAM. And yes, that means May and November are highly stressful months, where I have to review the work done by my students and… <egh… come to the difficult decisions leading to a…

I made another weird side project while unemployed. In fact I’ve wanted it for a while but once I learned that “Rebonjour” is the word for “hello again” I just had to finish the library. librebonjour is an asynchronous DNS-SD and mDNS client library for GLib applications. Or, more practically, it is…

In the UK, it is illegal to buy alcohol if you are under 18. Similarly, in most countries, you cannot vote until you have reached a specific age. These are age-gates. You do not need to prove your competence to drink, vote, smoke, or get married; you just need to be old enough. Some things have…

Nine years ago, I ran a 18 km race in the hills north of Montpellier, France, part of a big three-day festival of races called Festa Trail. I have good memories of the event. The weather was great, it was more runnable than Trail Quillan, and one of the race organizers emailed me the day after I…

On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit. Raspberry Pi 6 One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6. Looking back at previous launches: 2012: Raspberry Pi 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years) 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year) 2019:…

SRFI 263 is now in final status.This SRFI proposes a "Self"-inspired prototype object system. Such an object system works by having prototype objects that are derived repeatedly to modify, extend, and use them, and is interacted with by passing messages.

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 15 to May 22. Third Party Projects Alexander Vanhee reports Last Saturday, Bazaar was updated to 0.8.0 with the ability to install .flatpak bundles. We created a fancy new dialog so people can better understand what happens when…

I have a server at home. It runs a Kubernetes cluster and a few services. I want to expose them to the Internet, so I can e.g. share public links from my Nextcloud, or synchronize my Kobo reader with Grimmory. But I don't want to expose my home IP to the world, and I want to have some reasonable…

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Which version of QGIS should I use? With the release of QGIS 4, the question of the QGIS release cycle is arising again for many users. Among the most common: what is the roadmap? how long will this version be maintained? is it a stable version? The official QGIS roadmap page shows the current…

Background I'm a member of the EFI team in Debian, and I've done much of the work for Debian to support UEFI Secure Boot (SB) in recent years. We have included that support for a number of releases now, starting back with Debian 10 (aka Buster). I'm also a long-time accredited member of the…

ffs provides a minor mode for simple plain text presentations in Emacs, where the slides are separated using the page-delimiter, by default the form feed character (^L). I wrote ffs in early 2022 for my LibrePlanet 2022 presentation the Net beyond the Web, and earlier this year decided to polish…

CVE-2026-46529 is an argument injection vulnerability in Evince, Atril, and Xreader caused by missing shell quoting when composing a command line. The reporter, João Medeiros, has published a GitHub repo for the CVE and a blog post with the story of how he discovered the flaw and developed the…

SRFI 274 is now in draft status. A set of modest extensions to list conversion and list copying procedures is proposed that aligns them with other conversion and copying procedures and allows for some operations on improper and circular lists. Authors of further SRFIs that include list…

We try to be responsible with data. For example, we: - store as little sensitive data as possible - monitor changes in incoming data on which we've built models But what happens when those two approaches conflict? How do we monitor changes in incoming data that we don't want to store? This talk…

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Another very minor update, now at 0.3.15, for our nanotime package is now on CRAN, and has been built for r2u and Debian. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to…

It's probably not your fault. On a cache miss, there are two things a reverse proxy (which Fastly is to us) can do. It can make the client wait until the proxy itself fetches the requested content and then serve it, with subsequent requests being served from the cache. From a user's perspective, it…

Somewhere, in the endless blue ocean, a gigantic mammal shudders as it takes its last breath. Thanks to science, we know that all dogs go to heaven, but all whales descend through the murky depths until their carcasses litter the seabed. Imagine a giant dying. You can't. They are huge and endless.…

I often write about how when stuff works well, you take it for granted. It’s true for technology: when’s the last time you hit a compiler bug in GCC? Once upon a time these were a common thing and you had to choose your C compiler wisely. Yet I haven’t recently seen an article that says “GCC is…

Working Group 2 is pleased to announce the first draft of the second part of the R7RS-Large Foundations, the Procedural Fascicle". This draft encompasses the familiar block programming forms, such as lambda, let, if, or, and set!. The draft is…

I was getting “<XF86AudioPlay> is undefined” in the status bar of Emacs displayed every 2-3 seconds. Nowhere else I noticed any misbehavior or problems, and also couldn’t find any related log entries. It didn’t stop, though didn’t want to reboot my system to see whether that would fix the problem,…