Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-03.

How This “Basic” Robot Solves REAL Life Problems (without AI) - YouTube

Tags: tech, robots, disability, empathy

This is definitely an excellent use of robotics. Probably one of the best I’ve seen. The things we can do when we’re not just focusing on increasing productivity. These people get a shared sense of belonging they’d have a hard time to have without those robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iLcOLvNfz0

Common misconceptions about the complexity in robotics vs AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, robots

Nice reminder that the tasks necessary to robotics are clearly much harder to develop through machine learning than language.

https://harimus.github.io//2024/05/31/motortask.html

The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

Tags: tech, surveillance, politics, economics, privacy

The wonderful world of personalised pricing in the age of widespread surveillance… Also becoming personalised wage fixing in the case of gig workers. Shameful.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

I was just censored by Meta

Tags: tech, social-media, facebook, politics, censorship

I think the trend is clear: don’t criticise the powerful or else…

https://boehs.org/node/meta-censorship

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, foss, politics

Definitely a good move, especially when we see the behavior of the tech moguls…

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

WordPress is in trouble

Tags: tech, foss, community, wordpress

The WordPress is still unfolding… I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends with a fork.

https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble

Speech and Language Processing

Tags: tech, language, nlp

Looks like a good resource if you’re interested in natural language processing.

https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/

an autoflusher

Tags: tech, system, programming

This is definitely a neat trick. This way you can flush stdout regularly without modifying the code of a command.

https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/an-autoflusher

Rewrite it in Rust: A Computational Physics Case Study

Tags: tech, rust, computation, performance

More studies needed to confirm this, it is a single data point. Still it looks like Rust could take the HPC world by storm once it gets a better GPGPU story (still early days there).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19146

Django vs. FastAPI, An Honest Comparison

Tags: tech, python, backend, django, fastapi

Nice comparison of both approaches. Some of the criteria used I would have left out but otherwise it seems fair.

https://www.david-dahan.com/blog/comparing-fastapi-and-django

Open source and its power demonstrated in PostgreSQL

Tags: tech, foss

Very good demonstration of why you want open source code on your projects. I often end up doing this kind of forensics myself, this is truly powerful.

https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/the-power-of-open-source-in-postgresql/

Thinking About Risk - Sidebar #1: “Exposure” - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, project-management, risk

Interesting extra dimension to think about risks. I don’t think I ever encountered it in the wild but that can make sense to use it.

https://jacobian.org/2025/jan/15/risk-exposure/

Thinking About Risk - Sidebar #2: The Swiss Cheese Model - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, project-management, risk

Or why you can’t consider risks in isolation. It’s too often forgotten.

https://jacobian.org/2025/jan/16/swiss-cheese-model/

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Tags: science, research

Wondering what a Ph.D. is about? This is a good illustrated summary.

https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Bye for now!

You might have seen the awesome Klassy theme by Paul McAuley for Qt applications and window decorations for KWin.

It has some issues compiling against the latest Plasma since the KDecoration API break.

Until it is fixed in the main repository, I’ve created a temporary fork that includes the port to KDecoration3 done by Eliza Mason, with a tiny additional fix I added on top of it. The fork is available at github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy

The kdesrc-build recipe for it is:

module klassy
    repository https://github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy
    cmake-options \
        -DBUILD_QT5=OFF \
        -DBUILD_QT6=ON
    branch plasma6.3
end module

Kirigami Addons is a collection of additional components for Kirigami applications. 1.7.0 is a relatively big release bringing a new convergent component for context menus as well as various quality of life APIs to existing components.

ConvergentContextMenu

This release bring a new component which wraps the tradional context menu Controls.Menu provided by Qt and on mobile will instead displays a BottomDrawer with the list of actions.

Using it, is really easy:

import QtQuick.Controls as Controls
import org.kde.kirigami as Kirigami
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.components as Components
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.formcard as FormCard

Components.ConvergentContextMenu {
 id: root

 // Only visible on mobile to show a bit of information about the selected element
 headerContentItem: RowLayout {
 spacing: Kirigami.Units.smallSpacing

 Kirigami.Avatar { ... }

 Kirigami.Heading {
 level: 2
 text: "Room Name"
 }
 }

 Controls.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Simple Action")
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Nested Action")

 Controls.Action { ... }

 Controls.Action { ... }

 Controls.Action { ... }
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Nested Action with Multiple Choices")

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Follow Global Settings")
 checkable: true
 autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Enabled")
 checkable: true
 autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Disabled")
 checkable: true
 autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
 }
 }

 // custom FormCard delegate only supported on mobile
 Kirigami.Action {
 visible: Kirigami.Settings.isMobile
 displayComponent: FormCard.FormButtonDelegate { ... }
 }
}

Icons on Android

Kirigami Addons components are using some breeze icons which needs to be packaged manually on android by calling kirigami_package_breeze_icons with the icons used. Now Kirigami Addons, provides a Cmake variable KIRIGAMI_ADDONS_ICONS listing all the icons used by Kirigami Addons, simplifying the maintainance work of applications to keep the list of icons used up-to-date.

kirigami_package_breeze_icons(ICONS
 ${KIRIGAMI_ADDONS_ICONS}

 // own icons
 ...
)

Shortcut Editor

Kirigami Addons’ shortcut editor can now be embedded in normal ConfigurationView via a new ConfigurationModule: ShortcutsConfigurationModule.

import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.settings as KirigamiSettings

KirigamiSettings.ConfigurationView {
 id: root

 required property TokodonApplication application

 modules: [
 ...
 KirigamiSettings.ShortcutsConfigurationModule {
 application: root.application
 },
 ]
}

FormCard

The FormCardPage now uses a slighly less grey to get more contrasts with the sidebar.

We cleaned up FormComboBoxDelegate to not relly on the applicationWindow() hack from Kirigami anymore. This fixes using FormComboBoxDelegate in Plasma Settings. Unfortunately some areas of Kirigami Addons still implicitely rely on applicationWindow() to set the parent of popups (Kirigami has a similar issue). If you are using dialogs or popup in your code, make sure to explicitely pass a valid Controls.Overlay.overlay as parent to them instead of rellying on applicationWindow() being valid all the time.

The FormCard.AboutPage now show the KDE Frameworks version in use rather than the one we built against. We are also using in the AboutKDEPage component, the same bug address as in the AboutPage component. And we fixed various other small issues with the about pages. Thanks Volker and Joshua!

Other

We now use clang-format automatically and various clang-tidy warnings were fixed. Thanks Alex!

Avatar are now loaded asynchronously which should make NeoChat, Tokodon and Merkuro list views smoother. Thank Kai! Addionally the text fallback is now only rendered as plain text, which should also be sligly faster.

The RadioSelector now uses the style from Marknote.

We updated the templates provided by Kirigami Addons to the latest version of the flatpak runtimes and some other minor improvements like using the new KLocalizedQmlContext.

AlbumMaximizeComponent now expose not only the currentItem from the internal view, but also the currentIndex.

The IndicatorItemDelegate and RoundedItemDelegate components are now easier to use with drag and drop interaction. You can see that in effect in last week update of Merkuro Mail.

MessageDialog now behaves better on mobile.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Haruna version 1.3.0 is out. There have been lots of code refactoring, so make sure to report any bugs you encounter. There's a "Report bug" menu entry under the "Help" menu or in settings in the about page.

The default actions for left and right mouse buttons have changed: left click is now play/pause and right click opens the context menu. Actions can be changed in settings in the Mouse page.

Another setting whose default changed is the Start playing setting which is now on by default.

Start playing controls the playback state, playing or paused, when restoring the position of the file.

Windows version:

• haruna-1.3.0-windows-gcc-x86_64.exe
• haruna-1.3.0-windows-gcc-x86_64.7z
• haruna-1.3.0-windows-gcc-x86_64-dbg.7z

Availability of other package formats depends on your distro and the people who package Haruna.

If you like Haruna then support its development: GitHub Sponsors | Liberapay | PayPal

Feature requests and bugs should be posted on bugs.kde.org, ignoring the bug report template can result in your report being ignored.

Changelog

1.3.0

Features

• Changed the settings related to restoring the playback position, if you changed the defaults you might have to redo them
• Playlist: added context menu entries for non local urls to be opened in the browser and to be removed (from the playlist)
• Added setting (in General) to start app in fullscreen
• Added setting (in Subtitles) to control subtitle auto selection
• Changed left and right mouse button default actions: left click is now play/pause and right click opens the context menu. Actions can be changed in settings Mouse page
• Dragging the seek/progress bar will update the main view as well as the seekbar preview
• Decreased the minimum window size
• Replaced hardware decoding checkbox with an option in the hardware decoding combobox/drop-down

Bugfixes

• Improved scrolling performance of playlist, shortcuts and seekbar's chapters menu
• Fixed issue with setting shortcuts with modifier keys (ctrl, alt etc.)
• Fixed active audio and subtitle tracks not being correctly checked
• Removed empty header toolbar from settings window
• Fixed a bug where the app would freeze when loading a file with lots of tracks
• Improved menubar animation
• The floating footer now hides when the mouse leaves the app

Welcome to the @Krita-promo team's December 2024 development and community update.

Development Report

Krita 5.2.9 Coming Soon

After taking some time off for the holidays, the team is getting ready to start the year with a new bugfix release. This will contain all the stable fixes from the community bug hunt and more, so stay tuned!

Community Report

December 2024 Monthly Art Challenge Results

For the "Tropical" theme, 16 members submitted 23 original artworks. And the winner is… Tropical vibes by @steve.improvthis, with three entries.

The January Art Challenge is Open Now

For the January Art Challenge, @steve.improvthis has chosen "Magical Adventure" as the theme, with the optional challenge of choosing a point of visual focus. See the full brief for more details, and embark on a fantastical new journey.

Featured Artwork

Best of Krita-Artists - November/December 2024

Six images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread, which was open from November 14th to December 11th. When the poll closed on December 14th, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:

Kurzschwardzenbuglen Nature Sanctuary by @Yaroslavus_Artem

Speedpainting 01122024 by @SylviaRitter

Magicians Room by @Ape

Princess Mipha by @ynr_nohara and @zeki

[otsoa] Finished illustrations by @onde_hurlante

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors.

Visit Krita's funding page to see how user donations keep development going, and explore a one-time or monthly contribution. Or check out more ways to Get Involved, from testing, coding, translating, and documentation writing, to just sharing your artwork made with Krita.

The Krita-promo team has put out a call for volunteers, come join us and help keep these monthly updates going.

Notable Changes

Notable changes in Krita's development builds from Dec. 12, 2024 - Jan. 16, 2025.

Stable branch (5.2.9-prealpha):

• Filters: Fix compatibility of Per-Channel filter with files from before Krita 5.1. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
• General: Improve pattern icon rendering. Fix pattern preview scale. Fix aspect ratio of resource tooltips. (Change, by Freya Lupen)
• File Formats: JPEG XL: Fix unable to set EPF value to -1 (encoder chooses) on export. (Change, by Rasyuqa A H)
• G'MIC Filters: Update to latest version of G'MIC, 3.5.0.1. (Change)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):

Bug fixes:

• Brush Engines: Fix a regression causing opacity to be multiplied twice in some brush engines (Curve, Clone, Deform, Hairy, Hatching, Sketch, and Spray) since 5.2.0. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
• Color Management: When Softproofing, use Blackpoint Compensation if enabled. (Change, Wolthera van Hövell)
• Edit Shapes Tool: Fix first click on node being ignored. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
• Edit Shapes Tool: Change "break path" shortcut in Shape Edit Tool to Ctrl+B to avoid conflict with the default Brush Tool shortcut B.(bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)

Features:

• General: Fix regressions in Bundle Creator. Fix regressions of resource icons. (Change, by Freya Lupen)
• General: Add setting in General->Miscellaneous to make 'Copy of' on duplicated layer name optional. (Change, by Freya Lupen)

Nightly Builds

Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.9-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

I run Home Assistant Core on a Raspberry Pi. I installed it in a Python venv and now and then I feel a need to upgrade. Today was such a day.

So, having backed everything up, I went for the plunge. Let’s install version 2025.1.2.

The usual dance goes a bit like this:

sudo systemctl stop homeassistant
sudo su homeassistant
cd /opt/homeassistant
source bin/activate
pip install --upgrade homeassistant
exit
sudo systemctl start homeassistant

Then all the dependencies are installed, so I usually go for a coffee, and once things have settled down (I use top to check that the system is idle), I usually restart homeassistance, just to make sure that it stops and starts nicely.

This time, I had no such luck. Lots of little issues. The major one seemed to be that import av in one of the core modules suffered from some sort of ValueError exception.

Having duckducked the issue for a while, I realized this meant that I had to do the upgrade from Python 3.12 to 3.13. Upgrading va to version 14.x using pip does not help. Since I always forget how to do this, I’m now writing this blog post.

Recollecting the steps, the moves are, more or less these:

sudo apt-get install python3.13 python3.13-venv python3.13-dev
sudo systemctl stop homeassistant
sudo su homeassistant
cd /opt/homeassistant
mkdir old
mv bin/ cache/ include/ lib/ lib64 LICENSE pyvenv.cfg share/ old
python3.13 -m venv .
source bin/activate
pip install homeassistant
exit
sudo systemctl start homeassistant

Again, restarting Home Assistant takes a while and a bit more since all the dependencies are built. Go grab a snack or just a quiet coffee and, viola, you will end up with a fresh install of Home Assistant version 2025.1.2

Qt Network Authorization module was released 8 years ago in Qt 5.8. Since those days, the role and use of OAuth2 has grown significantly.  Today, many people use OAuth2 in one form or another; be it by clicking a “Sign-in with ...” button or allowing your favorite online drawing application to store the results on your cloud drive. 

Tellico 4.1 is available, with some improvements and bug fixes. This release and any subsequent bugfix dot releases (such as 4.1.1) will be the last ones that build with Qt5.

Improvements

• Improved image loading to be on-demand only, improving load time for local and remote images (Bug 490922).
• Redesigned the welcome screen.
• Added option to disable the welcome screen.
• Added property to disable line feed replacement in Paragraph fields.
• Added tooltips in the Settings for configured image location.
• Added a tooltip to show the internal field name for custom fields.
• Tweaked the report templates to follow color settings.
• Added option to disable building of documentation.
• Improved logging for data searches.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed print preview (Bug 496816).
• Fixed a crashing bug when printing (Bug 496648).
• FIxed theme handling when using qt6ct (Bug 496074).
• Updated the data sources for Dark Horse comics (Debian bug 1087109), iTunes search, and Kino.de.
• Fixed compilation on FreeBSD with libcdio.

The post Kdenlive 24.12.1 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

If you’re old enough, you probably remember that there was a meme from the 4.x days is that Plasma is all about clocks.

I’ve started working on some new artwork, and ended up sidetracked spending more time designing fun clocks for Plasma than on what I planned to work on, proving there’s some truth to the meme.

These are based on one of the coolest watch designs I’ve seen in recent years – a Raketa Avant Garde: