News from the Planet

Ahhh! PSB's RFS! A delightfully indulgent soundscape of melodic wonder, performed here on its 10th (ish) anniversary. Is it really nostalgia if an album is only a decade old? It feels like it has been in the air forever. For something which is seemingly made up of samples, it would have been easy…

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…

"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle…

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,…

Hi everyone. In this blog post I want to take you in an adventure of parsing Org mode with Parsing Expression Grammars (PEG) in Guile Scheme (ice-9 peg) and converting to HTML (via SXML): OrgWebAlchemy. I wanted to share something with you all that I’ve been working on for a while. It all…

One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard <video> element. An…

Last year I ran an experiment to test the ability of modern LLMs to correctly answer a relatively straightforward question. Every single one of them got it wrong. Some missed information, some made up false statements, none were right. Of course the fanbois variously claimed that I was holding it…

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,…

SRFI 285 is now in draft status. This SRFI details an API for storing and manipluating dates and times. This SRFI decomposes dates and times into dates (a count of days in the proleptic Gregorian calendar), clock times (time of day, independent of time zone), moments (instants in TAI),…

This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction. How to…

SRFI 284 is now in draft status.This SRFI defines the forms define-typed and define-typed* for creating procedures with checked type boundaries. It allows checking the arguments and/or the return value or values with simple predicate procedures and raises exceptions on usage when they don’t match.…

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…

I remember the moment when I learned about immutability. It changed everything. — Denis Defreyne Periodically, in various programming language forums, the discussion comes up of why a certain language doesn’t provide the immutable and mutable variants of some data structure as subtypes or…

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…

Of what use is software freedom to someone who doesn't know how to program a computer? If I have the right to change the software that controls my devices, but lack the skill, knowledge, time, or money to do so, do I really have software freedom? This dilemma has worried me for a long time. I think…