Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-28.

Chat Control 1.0: EU Council forces messenger scans via fast-track

Tags: tech, europe, surveillance

This is a shady move once more… They really want to extend this security apparatus. We could hope there were enough MEPs to vote against this… but it’s not been the case.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Chat-Control-1-0-EU-Council-forces-messenger-scans-via-fast-track-11353659.html

You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month: here’s how it went

Tags: tech, windows, funny

Funny experiment. If you’re a Linux user pondering going back to Windows it’ll likely cure you. Goodness the install experience is abysmal and that’s just the beginning of the troubles. Of course it has a good side as well but it feels fairly limited.

https://www.osnews.com/story/145459/you-paid-me-a-long-time-linux-user-to-use-windows-11-exclusively-for-a-month-heres-how-it-went/

Democratizing Abandonware

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, slop, flatpak, codereview

The data set is rather small but the trend is really bad. So much reviewer time wasted due to AI slop… this time on the Flathub side.

https://geopjr.dev/blog/democratizing-abandonware

I am not a tool

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, ethics, foss

Really this kind of AI push is a bad move from employers, especially when interacting with FOSS communities so much. This forces people to pass the ethical issues onto volunteers…

https://eng.hroncok.cz/2026/07/07/ai-tool

Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, productivity, education

How is going this social experiment at scale? Not well I’d say… And some in those cohorts will end up in positions of power, that’s when it’ll become really “interesting” I guess.

https://futurism.com/future-society/college-critical-thinking-ai

Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS with Kokoro

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, speech

This keeps being a very interesting TTS model. Looks like it’s getting simpler to deploy too.

https://ariya.io/2026/03/local-cpu-friendly-high-quality-tts-text-to-speech-with-kokoro/

Cpp2Rust: Automatic Translation of C++ to Safe Rust

Tags: tech, c++, rust, compiler

Still need some work I’d say but this is interesting research. Transpiling C++ to Rust is getting more accessible. It need some improvements on the optimisation side to be more generally usable.

https://web.ist.utl.pt/nuno.lopes/pubs/cpp2rust-pldi26.pdf

Physically Based - The PBR values database

Tags: tech, shader, pbr, physics

Cool resource to have the right values for various PBR materials.

https://physicallybased.info/

How I’m using CSS View Transitions on this blog

Tags: tech, html, css, animation

A good reminder that you can go a long way to specify transitions with just CSS nowadays.

https://blog.omgmog.net/post/how-im-using-css-view-transitions-on-this-blog/

Size does matter, actually

Tags: tech, web, performance, complexity

There are ways to have a lighter web. It leads to interesting techniques too.

https://nh3.dev/blog/05-bloat

98% isn’t very much

Tags: tech, reliability, statistics

Can you rely on something? Indeed, if it fails “only” 2% of the time it can mean a lot of failures… you better handle the edge cases and degrade gracefully.

https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2026/07/03/98-isnt-very-much/

a software engineering interview question I like: computing the median

Tags: tech, hr, interviews, complexity

I like this kind of questions as well. It’s more interesting to aim for something simple to start with than a puzzle. Even topics considered simple have several layers of complexity.

https://krisshamloo.com/blog/007

The Lion, The Witch, and the audacity of recruiters

Tags: tech, hr, interviews

Whatever the hiring process, show some respect to the candidate. It’s the least you can do for them.

https://hauleth.dev/post/the-lion-the-witch-and-the-aduacity-of-recruiter/

The myth of mind uploading

Tags: tech, scifi, science, philosophy

A long piece, but digs in details on why “mind uploading” really can’t be a thing.

https://plus.flux.community/p/the-myth-of-mind-uploading

Bye for now!

Qt for MCUs 2.12.2 LTS has been released and is available for download. This patch release provides several bug fixes and other improvements while maintaining source compatibility with Qt for MCUs 2.12 (see Qt for MCUs 2.12 LTS released). This release does not add any new functionality however as part of a continuous effort to scale Qt for MCUs to more platforms new Tier-2 board Nuvoton Gerda-4L is now available. 

Hi everyone!! So we are halfway through our journey of GSOC 2026. It's time for the midterm and new status updates we have accomplished over the past 6 weeks.

• During my first and second weeks, I familiarized myself more with the XMPP protocols and clients like Kaidan, etc., which can be used for XMPP server interactions and also created a page for the Mankala Engine using Hugo. I have successfully added the option to register XMPP accounts from within the Mankala Engine and also added an XMPP compliance check in the 2nd week, which makes sure that the selected XMPP server has all the protocols that are needed to play the game.

• For the next tasks in week 3, I worked on extracting usernames and profile player icons from within the XMPP servers and directly display it as part of the user account in the game. I also fixed the sizes for the different components in the profile page and gave it a proper redesign.

• For weeks 4 and 5, I spent time creating the tournaments. I experimented a bit with the connectivity to connect more than 2 players to an XMPP server, and then created a detailed tournament page for the number of wins, losses, and player match details, and thus implemented the round-robin tournament style. Some more features, like setting up the time limits for each move and accepting game invites, were also added.

• In the 6th week, I gave a talk at the ILUGC (Indian Linux Users Group Chennai) virtual meet and got feedback from the players, and implemented better sounds and a sound button for the game. I also added animations for the shells so they get smoothly displaced to their destined pits after each move.

Challenges I faced

The most difficult part while implementing tournaments can be said to connect multiple players and track their moves in real time across the games. The best possible way to fix this was to create a XMPP MUC and then join the player using that and track the moves being sent across the channel. So, for example a move played by Player 1 will be sent to Player 2, to do this we send the request from Player 1's account track the request through the MUC and display it on the Players 2's board and same goes for multiple players present in the game.

Goals for upcoming weeks

A couple of changes were added based on our GSOC proposal, and a lot of new things and features were implemented. In the next half of GSOC, I plan to work on text- and voice-based chat options within the Mankala so that players can communicate with others during their matches. I also plan to add another variant of tournaments, which gives the players a broader number of options to choose from, and add the feature to create a user-defined AI to play against another person or an AI over the network.

Thanks for reading 🚀

This week I implemented clipboard auto-clear for KeepSecret (!36).

When a user copies a password, it shouldn't stay in the clipboard indefinitely — that's a real security risk if the clipboard gets inspected, synced, or accessed by another application.

What was implemented:

After copying a password, the clipboard is automatically cleared after 30 seconds. A Kirigami.InlineMessage countdown notification appears in the entry page showing "Password copied. Clipboard will be cleared in X seconds", updating every second. The clipboard is also cleared when the app quits via QCoreApplication::aboutToQuit. Instead of QClipboard::clear() (which on X11 reverts to the previous clipboard entry), the clipboard is overwritten with an empty string. A single repeating QTimer of 1 second handles both the countdown and the clear — subtracting 1 second each tick, stopping and clearing when it reaches 0. The timeout uses std::chrono::seconds as suggested by Marco Martin during review.

Klipper history protection:

One tricky KDE-specific problem: even if you clear the clipboard after the timeout, the password could still be sitting in Klipper's clipboard history. The fix is to add the x-kde-passwordManagerHint MIME type (set to "secret") alongside the password data when copying. Klipper specifically checks for this hint and skips adding that entry to its history entirely — so the password never gets recorded there in the first place. This approach was pioneered by KeePassXC.

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.6.6.

Plasma 6.6 was released in February 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds two months’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

Ok, the title is slightly click-baity but hear me out.

So nearly 2 weeks ago, after writing a lot of code for making the font subsetting work for annotations, I found a flaw in my approach.

I was never deleting the old original font after embedding it's subset version.

So what happened is that:

• Suppose a user creates a new annotation in an empty PDF.
• The subsetted font gets embedded and used in the PDF.
• But the original font stays there, taking space.

This is actually slightly worse than when we had no subsetting at all.

So the solution should just be to delete the original font right? Nope

If we simply delete the original font, it would create the following problem:

• Suppose a PDF with two annotations pointing / using the same font.
• User edits the 1st annotation.
• 1st annotation uses the subset font, and the old font gets deleted from the PDF.
• The 2nd annotation is rendered useless.

When I realized this, I thought I would need to completely change how I do subsetting, and almost all the code I had written will go to waste.

My new idea was to never let the full version of a font to exist inside the PDF. What I mean is subsetting immediately when the font is loaded from the disk and is about to be embedded as a Font object.

But I had a meeting with my mentor Albert Astals Cid yesterday, and we decided to settle on a simpler approach. We can simply detect if the font we want to delete is:- a font we added ourselves or a pre-existing font inside the PDF.

If we added it ourselves, we can safely remove it. Otherwise, let it stay there as it might be in use by other annotations.

I implemented it today, and we have working font subsetting for freetext annotations right now (not merged).
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/2220

A simple size experiment

Here's a simple experiment which demonstrates the impact of font subsetting on PDF file size:

Original file size: 105820 bytes = 105.82 KB

After adding an annotation with content "hello world":

Poppler without font subsetting: 504699 bytes = 504.699 KB

Poppler with font subsetting: 145806 bytes = 145.806 KB

That's like a 500% improvement...

What's next

• Right now, I only do the subsetting for ttf/otf fonts and not for ttc fonts. I need to do that.
• I need to make the subsetting work for forms as well.

Thank You

Good Night!

The last maintenance release of the 26.04 series is out, bringing the usual batch of bug fixes and workflow and stability improvements. Highlights include fixes for crashes when undoing sequence creation and recording audio without an audio device, as well as improvements to Rectangular Alpha Mask and Rotoscoping effects. This release also continues the security hardening efforts of this cycle by preventing unwanted command execution on MLT versions below 7.40.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

This is a weekly update from my Google Summer of Code 2026 project with KDE, improving effect widgets in Kdenlive, a free and open source video editor.

Gradient widget: switched to Qt-Color-Widgets

Julius Künzel suggested last week that the Gradient widget be built with an eye toward upstreaming to KDE Frameworks, pointing to Qt-Color-Widgets's GradientEditor class as a reference. It's already vendored inside MLT's Glaxnimate module, so this week I wired it in directly instead of maintaining a fully custom-painted widget.

The vendored color_widgets::GradientEditor gives a native-styled gradient bar with checkerboard alpha preview, drag-and-drop stop reordering, and its own color dialog, all for free.

Fixing undo-stack behavior

The library only emits stopsChanged on completed actions (mouse release, menu add/remove, dialog accept), not per-pixel during drags. That meant two bugs: every plain click created a junk undo-stack entry, and drags had no live preview on the monitor at all.

Fixed with three pieces:

• commitStops() emits valueChanged(..., true) only when the serialized value actually changed
• An eventFilter emits valueChanged(..., false) during drag moves, for live monitor preview
• An echo-guard in slotRefresh() ignores the model value coming back from our own emit; without it, the synchronous refresh resets the editor's selection and kills the drag mid-motion

32-stop cap

MLT's gradientmap filter supports stop.1 through stop.32. The library has no pre-add hook to reject a 33rd stop, so commitStops() rejects after the fact: the just-added stop gets removed and the editor reset under a signal blocker, with no undo entry created. gradientStopsFromString() also truncates at 32 on load, so an over-long saved value can't smuggle in extra stops. Exposed as GradientEditWidget::MaxStops.

Build: configurable vendor path

The path to Qt-Color-Widgets was previously hardcoded assuming a sibling MLT checkout. Replaced with a KDENLIVE_QTCOLORWIDGETS_PATH CMake cache variable; same default, overridable with -D, and a missing path is now a fatal configure error instead of a silent skip that only surfaced at compile time.

Tests

gradienteditwidgettest.cpp now covers a full widget-interaction path with a real timeline document and synthesized mouse events: a plain click produces zero undo entries, a drag produces two preview emissions plus exactly one committed undo entry, and adding a 33rd stop is rejected with the editor staying at 32. All 5 test cases pass, 62 assertions.

What's next

Four commits are done locally (gradient widget + CMake + tests, plus two unrelated Qt 6.10 compat fixes found along the way), but nothing's pushed yet. Waiting on Jean-Baptiste to confirm this is the direction to commit to before opening an MR.