The third International Calligraphy Festival of Kerala (ICFK) took place in October 2024, and I was invited to run a session. I had the fortune to see many exemplary calligraphers all over the world come together and demonstrate their work over three days of the festival.
Renowned Malayalam calligrapher Narayana Bhattathiri organizes the conference every year, and it was amazing to witness that many of the speakers and calligraphers were sharing the responsibilities and taking active role in the organization and execution of the sessions. The audience and speaker participation and interactions were warmly welcoming. The demographics was very distributed — students, professionals, calligraphers; and of all ages and genders.
An epiphany
During the session by Prof. G.V. Sreekumar when he asked the participants to write the word ‘സൂര്യൻ’ (the Sun); I took a survey of the writings. What I found was that the older generation all wrote the word in traditional Malayalam orthography; and a large number of younger generation also wrote it in traditional orthography. The latter group were not taught in schools to read or write in traditional script (the text books are all in broken/reformed script). Intrigued how they were familiarized with the traditional orthography, I had questioned how they knew to write in this fashion. The answers were categorized into:
They saw their parents write in traditional orthography.
They saw their grandparents write in traditional orthography (but their parents write in reformed script).
Most strikingly, some youngsters were sure this was the ‘correct’ way of writing and yet they could not explain how or from where they learnt it.
The response from the third category is very interesting: because they learnt the script ‘organically’ and it is imbibed in their identity — which is what the definition of ‘culture’ is. The revelation is that; the script belongs to its people and no matter what the government decrees about (ref: Kerala govt orders about script reform in 1971 and 2022).
The session
Together with type designer Athul Jayaraman, I had a joint session on typography. Athul focused more on the type design and I had elaborated more on Malayalam script (traditional orthography), and font engineering & techniques.
The Mathrubhumi news team also interviewed both of us and published a two-part series of the interview on their new site:
Of the many conferences I have been to, ICFK 2024 was one the best un-conferences in my experience. I met a lot of exemplary, yet humble & approachable, calligraphers (some of them gave me their autographed booklets, thank you!), learnt a lot and enjoyed enormously.
Here is another video recap of what happened in the last few weeks with the design system for Plasma. I review icon work and some considerations to take when designing icons.
There is a review of our current state or affairs, a proposal for a sprint and working with PenPot.
Some of you might have noticed. Updates to Manjaro ARM packages are far between these days. Actually it has been far between updates since I left the project in March 2023.
So this begs the question: Is Manjaro ARM dead?
Lets take a look at the current status.
No new images
The last round of release images for all the major platforms Manjaro ARM supports was done in February 2023, release version 23.02. And I have heard that most of them break the installation after the first update.
The only images I have seen that has had any kind of new release since I left, are the Pinephone based ones. But they are still considered Beta (after 4 years!).
ARM download are no longer prominent on the website
Manjaro.org got a new fancy website a little while ago. This website hides the ARM images, so you have to really look for them to find them. Here's how you find them on the new website:
manjaro.org -> Download button -> Go back a step in the submenu that says Products > Download > x86 by pressing the Download entry -> Press the Download button in the second section called For Phones And Embedded.
Now you can see and download the ARM images.
Very few package updates
The Raspberry Pi specific packages have been updates steadily by Ray Sherman, the maintainer. But all the other Manjaro specific packages are only updated rarely or not at all.
Even the package updates from Arch Linux ARM is not done very often anymore. So the package repository in general is in a very bad out-of-date state.
Is it maintained?
With all these points, I would conclude that it is not really maintained anymore. Ray asked the Manjaro project management about this and was told that the ARM branch no longer has a manager and therefore it was no longer a priority by the Manjaro team.
To me, that sounds like it has died a slow and quiet death.
I would not recommend Manjaro ARM to anyone anymore, because of the state it is in. It's a sad conclusion, as I started the project with Josh Crowder back in 2016 and we loved working on it.
One of my leisure time activities is to develop KMyMoney, a personal finance management application. Most of my time is spent on development, testing, bug reproduction and fixing, user support and sometimes I even write some documentation for this application. And of course, I use it myself on a more or less daily basis.
One of the nice KMyMoney features that helps me a lot is the online transaction download. It’s cool, if you simply fire up your computer in the morning, start KMyMoney, select the “Account/Update all” function, fill in the passwords to your bank and Paypal accounts when asked (though also that is mostly automated using a local GPG protected password store) and see the data coming in. After about a minute I have an overview what happened in the last 24 hours on my accounts. No paper statement needed, so one could say, heavily digitalized. At this point, many thanks go out to the author of AqBanking which does all the heavy work dealing with bank’s protocols under the hood. But a picture is worth a thousand words. See for yourself how this looks like:
A recording of my daily download procedure
The process is working for a long time and I have not touched any of the software parts lately. Today, I noticed a strange thing happening because one of my accounts showed me a difference between the account balance on file and the amount provided by the bank after a download. This may happen, if you enter transactions manually but since I only download them from the bank, there should not be any difference at all. Plus, today is Sunday while on the day before everything was just fine. First thought: which corner case did I hit that KMyMoney is behaving this way and where is the bug?
First thing I usually do in this case is to just close the application and start afresh. No way: same result. Then I remembered, that I added a feature the day before to the QIF importer which also included a small change in the general statement reader code. Of course, I tested things with the QIF importer but not with AqBanking. Maybe, some error creeped into the code and causes this problem. I double checked the code and since it dealt with tags – which are certainly not provided by my bank – it could not be the cause of it.
So I looked at the screen again:
The ledger on the left shows the state before and the one on the right after the download.
New data must have been received because the date in the left column changed and also the amount of the colored row changed but not the one in the row above which still shows the previous state. The color is determined by comparing the balance information with the one in the row above. So where is/where are the missing transaction(s)?
Long story short: looking at the logs I noticed, that the online balance was transmitted but there was no transaction at all submitted by the bank. And if I simply take the difference between the two balances it comes down to a reimbursement payment which I expect to receive.
Conclusion: no bug in KMyMoney, but the bank simply provided inconsistent data. Arrrrgh.
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
This week we also published a new web page in our "KDE For You" series, this time about "KDE For Digital Sovereignty". These pages give you tons of recommendations about KDE and other FOSS apps you can use in different situations, be it for education, creativity, travel and more.
When manually adding items to the Places panel, the current location's custom icon is pre-populated in the icon field, and the item will now be created globally by default, so it appears in other apps' Places panels as well (Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.11. Link and link 2).
We added an entry at the top of the grid/list to open a track view for the current artist or genre. Tracks from artists opened from genre view will be filtered by genre (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link).
We have solved the problem of creating infinitely nested views when browsing artist > album > artist (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link).
Haruna 1.3 is out with lots of code refactoring. Additionally, the default
actions for left and right mouse buttons have changed: left click is now
Play/Pause and right click opens the context menu. These actions can be changed in
Settings on the mouse page.
Volker restored public transport data access to Digitransit in Finland and to Rolph in Germany (Volker Krause, 24.12.2, also affects KTrip) and Joshua and Gregorz wrote and improved travel document extractors for American Airlines, Brightline and Southwest (Joshua Goins, 24.12.2, Link 1, link 2, and link 3) and Koleo (Grzegorz Mu, 24.12.2, Link).
Joshua fixed various issues with the markdown rendering in KMail, enabling markdown footnotes, highlighting and removing some dead code (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2); and, to facilitate the use of KMail's security features, KMail will now query a key server when clicking on an unknown OpenPGP certificate (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0 Link).
The audio waveform of Kdenlive was completely rewritten. It is now around twice as fast to generate and is more accurate (Étienne André and funded by the Kdenlive Fundraiser, 25.04.0 Link).
Before:
After:
KDevelop Featureful, plugin-extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages
We added and improved the debugger pretty printer for QJSon*, QCbor*, QDateTime, QTimeZone (David Faure, 25.04.0 Link 1 and link 2).
The latest Krita Monthly Update is out. If you want to learn what's going on in Krita as well as see some amazing artwork made with Krita, check it out.
Qrca now forces the rendering of QR code content to be plain text (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link) and only shows the flashlight button on devices with a flashlight (e.g. not on your laptop) (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link).
Tokodon will now remind you to add an alt text to your images (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
We also added an option for a confirmation dialog before boosting a post. This is particularly relevant for people managing multiple accounts to prevent them from boosting posts from the wrong account (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
In the department of trust and safety improvements, you can now filter some posts from your timeline (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
And show a banner when an account has moved to another server (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
You can now browse posts that are about a news link (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link) and see the post associated with an image in the media grid of a profile (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
We also fixed a bug where, when failing to authenticate one of your accounts, Tokodon would be stuck indefinitely on the loading screen (Carl Schwan, 24.12.2. Link).
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
Get Involved
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and
contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need
your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved.
Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog
in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things
you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them;
contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces;
translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your
local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary
contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries,
travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free
Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
This year there are 14 projects participating in Season of KDE.
The KDE Community warmly welcomes you, and looks forward to your contributions. We hope to have a mutually
rewarding experience, where you learn about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and we benefit from the projects
you will build and/or improve.
Animated Transition Preview for Kdenlive
Kdenlive, the popular KDE video editor, will receive a usability boost.
Swastik Patel will work on adding animated icon previews to the
transition widget. Jean-Baptiste Mardelle will guide Swastik on this
open source journey.
AudioTube: YouTube Music App
Chinmay Timwri will improve AudioTube,
in particular enhancing ability to create playlists and augmenting data
available for playlist creation. Chinmay will be guided by Jonah Brüchert.
Mankala Games
Add Kalah to Mankala Engine.
Kalah is a mancala game popular in North America which has benefitted from much
research in creating computerized opponents. Rishav Ray Chaudhury will work on adding
this to Mankala engine.
KEcoLab enables developers to measure the energy efficiency of their applications.
Shubhanshu Gupta, Roopa Dharshini and Utkarsh Umre
will work on improving the documentation and producing video tutorials so that the tool is easier to use and the
reports produced can be understood by a wider range of people.
PDF application comparison
Oreoluwa Oluwasina will compare the energy efficiency of Okular
and Adobe Acrobat on both Linux and Windows using KdeEcoTest, while fixing remaining open issues with KDE's user emulation tool.
Please follow their progress by reading their blog posts on KDE's planet, and by joining
the relevant project communication channels if you would like details more frequently.
Barely back from 38C3
preparations for another huge event started, FOSDEM 2025,
taking place in two weeks in Brussels, Belgium.
KDE
KDE will be there with a big team again, with the KDE stand being in building AW this year, on the ground floor.
There will also be talks by KDE people:
Albert will speak about Poppler,
the PDF library powering not only Okular but also the travel document extractor of Itinerary,
on Saturday at 11:50 in room H.2215.
Transitous has come a long way since then, meanwhile containing more than 1500 GTFS feeds from 54 countries,
which is beyond what we even deemed technically feasible a year ago. More than 50 people have contributed to this,
and five FOSS apps (that we know of) are using Transitous as (one of) their backends already.
We are just about to complete the migration to a new major version of MOTIS,
which brings a new much easier to use API, more routing options, and more powerful door-to-door
(instead of station-to-station) routing, to just name a few of the improvements.
At the same time Transitous is being moved to new and more powerful hardware, again kindly
provided by Spline.
A bunch of people working on Transitous will be at FOSDEM, and Felix and Marcus will cover
it in their talk
on Sunday at 16:30 in room K.4.601.
With people from so many different communities around, FOSDEM has resulted in great cross-project
collaborations in the past, excited to see what this one will bring and looking forward to many interesting discussions!
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
We're barely a week into the Plasma 6.3 beta period, and Plasma's contributors are already fixing record amounts of bugs! The number of 15-minute bugs has dropped to the low 20s, and there's only one VHI priority bug left. But that's not all; they hammered on a ton more bugs as well, and did quite a bit of UI polishing! Lots of great news this week!
I know I say this about every Plasma release, but 6.3 is gonna be gooooooood. Grab a beverage; there's a lot here!
Notable New Features
There are now several new search providers you can use from KRunner and KRunner-powered search fields, including Docker Hub, Mozilla Developer Network, and Nix Packages. (Aryan Tyagi, Frameworks 6.11. Link)
Notable UI Improvements
The Weather widget now fetches information immediately after the network re-connects following a period of lost connectivity, rather than waiting for the next scheduled refresh interval. (Ismael Asensio, 6.3.0. Link)
KWin is now smarter about choosing a default scale factor for devices with small screens; now it won't choose a scale factor too high to be practical. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.3.0. Link)
KWin's automatic scale factor chooser now chooses a scale factor that's rounded to the nearest 5%, no longer to the nearest 25%. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
Night Light is now colorimetrically correct when using an ICC profile. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
If your keyboard has a button to toggle the keyboard backlighting on and off, that button now works on the lock screen. (Yifan Zhu, 6.3.0. Link)
When a panel de-floats and causes its pinned-open widget popups to also de-float, the popups' de-floatiness animations are now beautifully synced up so everything just looks great. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)
When right-clicking on a Task Manager icon to show the files and URLs it's opened recently, icons and labels for URLs are now displayed more appropriately. (Nicolas Fella, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Switching virtual desktops using Meta+Alt+scroll now goes in the direction you expect when you're using reversed/natural scrolling. (Yifan Zhu, 6.3.0. Link)
Improved the descriptions of the accounts you can log into in System Settings, so it's a bit clearer what they can do for you. (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0 and kaccounts-providers 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
In Spectacle — which has moved to Plasma so I'll be mentioning it here — you can now hold down the Shift key while drawing with the freehand or highlighter tools to constrain them to perfectly straight lines. (Noah Davis, 6.4.0. Link)
Made a number of keyboard navigation and accessibility improvements to Discover and the Kirigami UI components it uses. (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.4.0 and Frameworks 6.11. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)
Discover no longer shows the "Plasma Addons" category when not being used in Plasma. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, 6.4.0. Link)
Notable Bug Fixes
It'll soon be once again possible to log into your Google account in System Settings — but unfortunately without Google Drive permission, since we have thus far been unable to demonstrate to Google's satisfaction that our software capable of interfacing with Google Drive is safe. This makes the account somewhat less useful to log into, but at least you can again. (Nate Graham, kaccounts-providers 24.12.2. Link)
Fixed a source of KWin crashes when the GPU drivers issue a reset, which they can do under various circumstances. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a source of KWin crashes caused by the kernel sending unexpected data on certain hardware. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a case where System Settings' Wallpapers page would crash the app due to stale screen arrangement configurations. (Méven Car, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while trying to generate window thumbnails or screen recordings. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash if you disabled the Clipboard widget while its configuration window was still open. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a case where Plasma could occasionally crash after you cleared the clipboard history, especially with a very large history size. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a random Plasma crash on Wayland. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)
Global shortcut keys no longer leak into applications under certain circumstances; this means for example that pressing Alt+Space to show and hide KRunner no longer also pauses and plays a video you happen to be watching. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a regression in the Folder View widget which prevented the functioning of inline folder pop-ups, choosing custom or Places panel-based locations, and also the widget's displayed title when showing the contents of the desktop folder. (Nate Graham, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a regression that caused the panel to resize in a slow and laggy way while customizing its maximum length. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a regression in the X11 session that caused auto-hide panels to lose the ability to display the "Alternatives" popup. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)
Switching desktop layouts from "Folder" to "Desktop" or vice versa no longer causes Sticky Notes on the desktop to lose their text, and also preserves desktop widgets' positions and sizes. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed two bugs that prevented desktop icons from being clickable while they were on a scrollable part of the desktop, or when using right-alignment and top-to-bottom ordering. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)
The "invert screen" accessibility setting now does what it says it will do on Wayland. (Nicolas Fella, 6.3.0. Link)
It's once again possible to authenticate in password dialogs using the credentials of an admin user other than yourself. (Harald Sitter, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that would cause the password dialog's password field to inappropriately become disabled after entering the wrong password when using systemd-homed. (Harald Sitter, 6.3.0. Link)
Worked around some issues with certain monitors and docks being dumb and buggy that could cause remaining monitors to get shut off after only one of them was unplugged or turned off. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
Remote input permission (e.g. for apps like Input Leap) no longer unexpectedly terminates when the display layout changes. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)
Plasma OSDs no longer sometimes teleport to the top-left corner of the screen, e.g. when switching devices with multiple monitors. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.3.0. Link)
Power settings that trigger on a state change (e.g. plugged in -> on battery) once again work as expected when that state change happened while the system was powered off. (Jakob Petsovits, 6.3.0. Link)
The feature to create a desktop widget from something in the System Monitor app now works more reliably, by always putting the new widget on the primary screen's desktop rather than on an unpredictable desktop that might even be invisible due to its screen not being connected at that moment! (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)
Improved the reliability of showing the right icon in the Task Manager for XWayland-using apps with broken or missing metadata. (Xaver Hugl and Nicolas Fella, 6.3.0. Link)
Apps that don't display correct metadata for the titles of their System Tray icons like Discord will now fall back to showing their tooltip text if that's set, so the tray icon doesn't end up with no label at all. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)
The Digital Clock widget's tooltip now shows seconds updating in real-time, as was always intended. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link)
The Calendar widget once again looks correct when using a non-default panel thickness and/or icon theme. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a source of Fitts' Law breakage for 24px thick attached full-width horizontal panels — yes, only with that exact combination of settings! (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)
The highlight effect in the Kate Sessions widget now works properly. (Paul Worral, 6.3.0. Link)
136 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the past week. Full list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
The list of recent emojis stored by the Emoji Selector app is now considered to be "state" and stored in the state config file, rather than the settings config file — which is helpful for people who version-control their config files. (Nicolas Fella, 6.3.0. Link)
Made KWin more robust against screens with horribly broken built-in color profiles. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
Fixed a variety of minor functional and display bugs relating to apps that export their shortcuts using the global shortcuts portal. (Tuxinal Tuxinal, 6.3.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Ported KRunner's Converter runner away from its nested event loop, which has been a source of crashes in the past. (Fushan Wen, 6.4.0. Link)
kscreen-doctor has gained the ability to report screens' DPMS states. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
How You Can Help
KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!
You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:
You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution — however small — will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
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.
The wonderful world of personalised pricing in the age of widespread surveillance… Also becoming personalised wage fixing in the case of gig workers. Shameful.
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).
You might have seen the awesome Klassy theme by Paul McAuley for Qt
applications and window decorations for KWin.
Klassy
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
rajeesh
@strit:matrix.org
