News from the Planet

Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! As a little thank-you for being a member of RSS Club I thought I'd show you some trailers for upcoming blog posts. I use the brilliant Editorial Calendar Plugin to organise all my scheduled blog posts. Here's what you can expect…

A tutorial on using OpenGeoAgent with the QGIS Timelapse plugin to generate Landsat, MODIS, GOES, and Esri Wayback timelapse animations from natural language and voice prompts.

This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it. The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence. A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent…

Here’s a comparison between the three pixel/​sprite/​tile making apps I could find on F-Droid. I know there’s stuff in that vein on Varvara, but I haven’t figured out a good way to run Varvara apps on Android yet, especially in a way where I could get files in and out. (Definitively still interested…

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago, in 2020. I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection. I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my…

The schedule for Community Over Code Glasgow 2026 is live, with an expansive program: 168 sessions across 18 tracks, spanning four days in October. Whether you’re running infrastructure at hyperscale, modernizing a fintech stack, or trying to figure out what responsible AI governance actually looks…

A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show. During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper: Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". But judging from all the other shots,…

While Guile Scheme has a lot of hidden gems, like (ice-9 peg), parsing command line arguments is not one of its strengths in my opinion. Even if there are many powerful approaches to structured argument parsing, there is no API simple enough for me to know it by heart (as opposed for example to…

Catching air in the middle of the deep-dive on Scheme bytecode interpreters.

Java 17, Jakarta EE 10, Spring 6—and a thousand dominoes By: Jinwoo HwangLead Developer, Project Lead, and Release Manager, Apache Geode 2.0https://JinwooHwang.com This post is divided into three parts. Part I explains why Apache Geode 2.0 matters. Part II walks through how it was modernized. Stay…

Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I…

A step-by-step tutorial on installing the NASA OPERA QGIS plugin, searching and visualizing DSWx surface water products, and using an integrated AI agent to analyze flood events with natural language and voice commands.

Guix will be featured at the annual conference of the French Reproducible Research Network, 19–21 May 2026, Bordeaux, France.

Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! A little while ago I added some locally hosted, privacy first stats to my blog. Using an offline GeoIP service I can get a very rough idea of where visitors are from. It doesn't deal with people using a VPN, or their mobile roaming…

A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write vanilla CSS instead. But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette (here as CSS). If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like it maybe try blue-200 or blue-50. I’m not very…

SRFI 271 is now in draft status.This SRFI proposes a pattern of libraries for binary input ports that produce random bytes. Libraries are divided into “randomized” and “determinized” categories to address different uses of random data. The design leaves the details of random number…

I have a PHP function which uses Roman Numerals. It looks like this: $romanNumerals = [ "Ⅿ" => 1000, "ⅭⅯ" => 900, "Ⅾ" => 500, "ⅭⅮ" => 400, "Ⅽ" => 100, "ⅩC" => 90, "Ⅼ" => 50, "ⅩⅬ" => 40, "Ⅹ" => 10, "Ⅸ" => 9, "Ⅷ" => 8, "Ⅶ" => 7,…

Introducing OpenGeoAgent, an open-source multimodal AI agent that automates geospatial analysis and visualization in QGIS through natural language and voice commands.

Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it…

SRFI 270 is now in draft status. Floating-point numbers are usually stored in radix 2, but are written by users in radix 10. This SRFI introduces Scheme syntax for hexadecimal floating point constants based on C99's syntax, that use radix 16 for writing the integer and fractional part, and a…

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C. I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026, the Single Board Cluster Competition…

The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Ministers on why it was…

Support for remote controlling Windows PCs may be added to Raspberry Pi Connect, Raspberry Pi's free remote access service. When they announced Pi Connect in 2024, I speculated the service was launched in response to RealVNC's sluggish adoption of Wayland, leading to Pi users lacking a solid…

Dipankar Mazumdar is the Director of Developer Relations at Cloudera, leading global developer initiatives across lakehouse architecture and AI. He previously held advocacy and engineering roles at Dremio, Onehouse, and Qlik, contributing to open source projects including Apache Iceberg, Apache…

There is a persistent tension in software engineering between the beautiful, mathematically pure ideal of a program, and the messy, pragmatic reality of just getting things done. Over my career, I’ve explored the depths of both extremes in an attempt to find my personal sweet spot for hacking. …