Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-06.

The Retro Web

Tags: tech, hardware, history

This is a nice resource trying to document the history of computer hardware. Really cool stuff.

https://theretroweb.com/

IndieWebify.Me? Yes please!

Tags: tech, web, blog, self-hosting, indie

Looks like an interesting tool to check you’re doing “everything right” on your blog. That said, it looks like quite a few hoops to jump through. I wish there’d be a way to make all this a bit easier.

https://blog.rickardlindberg.me/2026/02/04/indie-webify-me-yes-please.html

“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

Tags: tech, social-media, attention-economy, law

Clearly a trial to keep an eye on. Some of those internal memos might prove decisive.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-hours-before-landmark-social-media-addiction-trial-starts/

Backseat Software

Tags: tech, product-management, metrics, ux, attention-economy, surveillance, history

Excellent historical perspective on how we ended up with applications filled with annoying interruptions and notifications. It’s been done indeed one step at a time and lead to poor UX really.

https://blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-software/

AdNauseam

Tags: tech, web, browser, advertisement, attention-economy, privacy

I’m not sure I’m quite ready to use this… Still I like the idea, make some noise and have companies turning to those invasive ads to just pay for nothing. The more users the better I guess.

https://adnauseam.io/

Europe’s tech sovereignty watch

Tags: tech, europe, business, politics, vendor-lockin

Despite clearly being an advertisement for Proton’s offering, this shows how reliant European companies are on vendors showing strategic problems. We can cheer at the EU policies when they go in the right direction. It’s probably not enough already, but the European companies are clearly asleep at the wheel.

https://proton.me/business/europe-tech-watch

GDPR is a failure

Tags: tech, law, gdpr

The ideas behind GDPR are sound. The enforcement is severely lacking though. Thus its effects are too limited.

https://nikolak.com/gdpr-failure/

Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

Tags: tech, mobile, gps, privacy, surveillance, protocols

Yep, it’s worse than the usual triangulation everyone thinks about. It’s right there in the protocol, or why you’d better not let the GPS on all the time.

https://an.dywa.ng/carrier-gnss.html

Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying

Tags: tech, spy, surveillance, mobile, hardware

Time to spy on the spies. Or at least know when they’re around.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying

What If? AI in 2026 and Beyond

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, business, economics

Interesting analysis. It gives a balanced view on the possible scenarios around the AI hype.

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/what-if-ai-in-2026-and-beyond/

Selfish AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, copyright, ecology, economics, ethics

Let’s not forget the ethical implications of those tools indeed. Too often people put them aside simply on the “oooh shiny toys” or the “I don’t want to be left behind” reactions. Both lead to a very unethical situation.

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/selfish-ai

The API Tooling Crisis: Why developers are abandoning Postman and its clones?

Tags: tech, web, api, tests

Another space with rampant enshittification… No wonder users are jumping between alternatives.

https://efp.asia/blog/2025/12/24/api-tooling-crisis/

What’s up with all those equals signs anyway?

Tags: tech, email, encodings

If you didn’t know about quoted printable encoding. This is a way to understand it.

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/02/02/whats-up-with-all-those-equals-signs-anyway/

The Disconnected Git Workflow

Tags: tech, git, email

A good reminder that Git doesn’t force you to use a web application to collaborate on code.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-31-offline-git-send-email.html

4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync)

Tags: tech, networking, syncing

Need to move many files around? Rsync might not be the best option anymore.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/4x-faster-network-file-sync-rclone-vs-rsync/

From Python 3.3 to today: ending 15 years of subprocess polling

Tags: tech, python, processes, system

Nice improvement in Python for waiting the end of a subprocess. Explains nicely the underlying options and available syscall if you need to do the same in your code.

https://gmpy.dev/blog/2026/event-driven-process-waiting

Django: profile memory usage with Memray

Tags: tech, python, memory, profiling, django

Looks surprisingly easy to profile the Django startup. Probably makes sense to profile other parts of your application but this is likely a bit more involved.

https://adamj.eu/tech/2026/01/29/django-profile-memray/

Flavours of Reflection

Tags: tech, reflection, type-systems, c++, java, python, dotnet, rust

Looking at several languages and their reflection features. What’s coming with C++26 is really something of another class than anything else. I just have concerned about its readability though.

https://semantics.bernardteo.me/2026/01/30/flavours-of-reflection.html

In Praise of –dry-run

Tags: tech, tools, tests, command-line

This is indeed a very good option to have when you make a command line tool.

https://henrikwarne.com/2026/01/31/in-praise-of-dry-run/

Some Data Should Be Code

Tags: tech, data, programming, buildsystems, infrastructure, automation

There is some truth to this. Moving some things to data brings interesting properties but it’s a two edged sword. Things are simpler to use when kept as code. Maybe code emitting structured data.

https://borretti.me/article/some-data-should-be-code

Plasma Effect

Tags: tech, graphics, shader

Neat little shader for a retro demo effect.

https://www.4rknova.com/blog/2016/11/01/plasma

Forget technical debt

Tags: tech, technical-debt, engineering, organisation

Interesting insight. Gives a lot to ponder indeed. Focusing on technical debt alone probably won’t improve a project much. It’s thus important to take a broader view for long lasting improvements.

https://www.ufried.com/blog/forget_technical_debt/

Bye for now!

In the last month, I have mostly been working on refactoring the Kdenlive keyframes system to make it more powerful. This is part of a NGI Zero Commons grant via NLnet.

Improving existing parameters handling

A first step in preparation for this work was to improve the usability of some effects. In Kdenlive, we support several effect libraries, like MLT, Frei0r and FFmpeg's avfilters. Not all effects expose their parameters in the same way. For example in MLT, we have a rectangle parameter allowing to define a zone in a video frame. Other effects expose several independent parameters for a rectangle, namely x, y, width and height.

Currently, these effects are displayed with a list of sliders for each value:

With my latest changes, these will be handled like a rectangle, which means it can directly be manipulated in the monitor overlay.

Another improvement is the addition of Point parameters which will allow selecting a point in the monitor.

These changes are planned to be in the 26.04 release.

Boosting keyframes

The next improvement being worked on is support of keyframes per parameter. Currently, once you add a keyframe to an effect, it is applied to all parameters, which is sometimes not wanted. This will also allow animating only one parameter while leaving the others parameters fixed. Below is a screenshot of a basic UI created to test the feature.

Kdenlive needs your support

Our small team has been working for years to build an intuitive open source video editor that does not track you, does not use your data, and respects your privacy. However, to ensure a proper development requires resources, so please consider a donation if you enjoy using Kdenlive - even small amounts can make a big difference.

We have started the release process for the next feature release of Krita today! This release is the culmination of years of hard work. From the same codebase, we're building both Krita 5.3, based on Qt5, and Krita 6.0.0. based on Qt6. Krita 6 is not yet available for Android or ChromeOS because Qt6 is unstable on those platforms.

Highlights

To learn about everything that has changed, check the release notes!

Text Object

The text object has been completely rewritten, as have all the tools to handle text. You can now edit text on the canvas, make text wrap inside vector shapes and put text on a vector path. We support most if not all scripts fully as well.

A variety of technical blog posts were written on the topic: Fonts, Open Type, Font Metrics, various other properties, Text in Shape and Type Setting Mode.

Wayland Color Management Support

A Krita 6-only feature, on Linux, we now support Wayland color management support when Krita runs in native Wayland mode. Note that the only officially supported wayland compositor is KWin. If you use another compositor and find an issue, test with kwin first whether that issue reproducible.

Tools

There is a completely new tool: a knife tool for vector objects, for merging and splitting vector objects. This is extremely handle when creating comic page layouts. Other tools have been extended or have improved performance. For instance, the freehand drawing tool has a pixel-art stabilizer and the liquify transform tool is much faster.

Assistants

Configuring assistants has become easier and there's a new curve-linear perspective assistant.

Filters

There are new filters: propagate colors and color overlay mask. All blending modes have been checked for correctness when working in HDR.

Dockers

The recorder docker now can capture in real time. Dockers can be added to the popup palette.

Brush Engines

Among other improvements, the pattern option has been extended with a soft texturing mode.

File Formats

There is support for a new file format, Radiance RGB. Additionally, JPEG-XL support has been improved a lot, just in time for Googles volte-face on JPEG-XL support. And... Text objects in PhotoShop files now be loaded as text! You can save text to PSD as well, but only in a limited way.

Python Plugin API

The Python plugin API has been extended with an API for generating brush strokes, new user interface objects and new methods for existing classes. There are also new python plugins.

Krita 5.3 Downloads

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-5.3.0-beta1-setup.exe
• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-5.3.0-beta1.zip
• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with 5.2.11, the minimum supported version of Ubuntu is 22.04.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.0-beta1-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.3.0-beta1.dmg

Android

We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK
• 64 bits Arm CPU APK
• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

You can build Krita 5.3 using the Krita 6.0.0.source archives. The difference is which version of Krita you build against.

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/unstable/krita/5.3.0-beta1/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

Krita 6.0. Download

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-6.0.0-setup.exe
• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-6.0.0.zip
• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

• 64 bits Linux: krita-6.0.0-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

• MacOS disk image: krita-6.0.0-signed.dmg

Source code

• krita-6.0.0.tar.gz
• krita-6.0.0.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/unstable/krita/6.0.0-beta1/. and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

Over 180 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

• kalk: Map Delete key to clear input (Commit, fixes bug #487585)
• kdeconnect: Fix sharing files from kdeconnect-app (Commit, fixes bug #504982)
• kpmcore: Fix division by zero crash in PartitionAlignment::sectorAlignment (Commit)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

• 25.12 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
• Package download wiki page
• 25.12.2 source info page
• 25.12.2 full changelog

This year was my first year attending FOSDEM. I was encouraged to submit a talk and it got accepted. My talk was on Design Systems applied to Open Source projects.

In our case, I related the story and learnings from using a design system for the Plasma desktop. I outlined things that are pending or missing in this process.

I did my best to convince the audience to switch to Plasma and it seems a few of them changed their mind by the end of the talk.

This talk is a variation on my previous talk at Akademy 2025. Without further delay, here is the video recording of my talk. Note that the audio is not the best.

A recent toot of mine got the response “friends don’t let friends use GPG” which, I suppose, is true enough. It certainly isn’t the attestation-friendly thing to use, and the opsec failures that are so easy with GPG-encrypted mail make it a hazard there. But for some things it’s all we’ve got, and I do like to sign Calamares releases and incidental FreeBSD things. And I am nominally the maintainer of the security/gnupg port on FreeBSD. So gpg.fail notwithstanding, here’s notes on my 2026 GPG key update.

Previously in 2024 and 2025 I wrote down basically the same things:

• Things expire in about 13 months and I’ll have to remember then again,
• You can find my pubkey published on my personal and business sites,
• FreeBSD signature information is used rarely, but is available in the FreeBSD developers OpenPGP keys list,
• Codeberg will have signed commits in the Calamares repository with these keys.

sec   rsa4096/0x7FEA3DA6169C77D6 2016-06-11 [SC] [expires: 2027-02-03]
      Key fingerprint = 00AC D15E 25A7 9FEE 028B  0EE5 7FEA 3DA6 169C 77D6
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <groot@kde.org>
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <adriaan@bionicmutton.org>
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <adridg@freebsd.org>
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <adriaan@commonscaretakers.com>
ssb   ed25519/0x55734316C0AE465B 2025-03-04 [S] [expires: 2026-08-26]
ssb   cv25519/0x064A54E8D698F287 2025-03-04 [E] [expires: 2026-08-26]
ssb   ed25519/0x14B6CC381BC256D6 2026-02-03 [S] [expires: 2027-02-28]
ssb   cv25519/0xD716006BBA771051 2026-02-03 [E] [expires: 2027-02-28]

Hello everyone!🎉

Welcome to my first blog!

I am Sayandeep Dutta, an undergraduate at SRM University. I learned about the awesome mentorship program, Season of KDE.

Getting Started

I started contributing to Mankala in December 2025. Got to know more about the project, interacted with mentors, and started with some small merge requests. I really like contributing to Mankala. Mankala has been a very interesting game, and the guidance from the community is really good.

Week 1: Development & Design

In my first week, I had set up Mankala on my Ubuntu machine and started with the development. I created mockups for the proposed UI changes in MankalaNextGen. The mockups mainly included the main game page, a login page, a home page, and some other pages in the game, which were created and worked upon by me on Figma.

Progress So Far

I had created a merge request updating the MainMenu. Well, there are a couple of pages and components we need to work on, and the Main Menu is the most essential one to start with.

What's next?

In the upcoming week, I plan to:

• Complete the rest of the UI updates.
• Start implementing the new theme of MankalaNextGen.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more updates. 👀

Building Volumetric Light Shafts with Real IES Profiles

You know that feeling when the street lamps on a hazy evening cast these particular patterns of light? I've always been fascinated by those effects, so I decided to build a real-time volumetric lighting system using Qt 6.11's graphics capabilities, leveraging its QML shader integration and 3D rendering pipeline to recreate them with actual IES profiles.

Streetlight patterns in the evening haze