Thursday, 26 January 2023
It has been a while since the last blog post covering Qt OPC UA news. This short update will outline what we have primarily worked on in 2022.
Wednesday, 25 January 2023
New year, new digiKam Recipes book release. The new version features the completely rewritten Tag faces with the Face Recognition feature chapter and an all-new example workflow section in the Batch process photos and RAW files chapter. Several chapters have been revised and improved, including Edit tags with Tag Manager, Color management in digiKam, and Move digiKam library and databases. All screenshots have been refreshed, too. As always, the new revision includes plenty of tweaks and fixes.
Tuesday, 24 January 2023
@marcdeop:matrix.orgWe at the @kde-sig are happy to announce we have created a COPR repository which currently contains the KDE Plasma 5.27.0 Beta (aka: 5.26.90).
We intend to use this COPR repository in the future for KDE beta releases so that those Fedora users who want to help the KDE Community can test and report bugs to the KDE developers.
Enabling this COPR repository is very simple:
sudo dnf copr enable @kdesig/kde-beta
sudo dnf updateYour system should now have the Plasma Beta:
For our users using Kinoite, you should check out this blog post by @siosm
That’s all for now.
Feel free to join us at our Matrix room!.
Friday, 20 January 2023
Today we are releasing GCompris version 3.1.
As we noticed that version 3.0 contained a critical bug in the new "Comparator" activity, we decided to quickly ship this 3.1 maintenance release to fix the issue.
It also contains some little translation update.
You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.
Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny
A pesar de un protocolo abierto y libre, y una red pública y federada, el correo electrónico se ha convertido en un oligopolio. ¿Correrán la misma suerte Mastodon y el resto del Fediverso?
ervinLet’s go for my web review for the week 2023-03.
AI’s Jurassic Park moment - by Gary Marcus
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, ethics
Very good piece about that dangerous moment in the creation of the latest large language models. We’re about to drown in misinformation, can we get out of it?
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/ais-jurassic-park-moment
OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour: Exclusive | Time
Tags: tech, ethics, ai, machine-learning, gpt
The human labor behind AI training is still on going. This is clearly gruesome and sent over to other countries… ignoring the price for a minute this is also a good way to hide its consequences I guess.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
U.S. No Fly List Left on Unprotected Airline Server
Tags: tech, airline, security
That’s an “interesting” leak, both for how it happens and what it contains. I shows serious biases in the “no fly list” used by airlines.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/no-fly-list-us-tsa-unprotected-server-commuteair/
New T-Mobile Breach Affects 37 Million Accounts – Krebs on Security
Tags: tech, security
That’s really a massive leak again! The amount of personal data in the wild… will likely help with identity theft too.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/01/new-t-mobile-breach-affects-37-million-accounts/
Jack’s Blog - Revisiting KDE
Tags: tech, kde
Nice to see kind words out there. A couple of issues are pointed out of course but nothing which seems critical I think.
https://jackevansevo.github.io/revisiting-kde.html
How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many | Chris Warrick
Tags: tech, python
Yes… python packaging is a mess. I wonder when it’ll get properly unified and get a proper single tool and workflow.
https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2023/01/15/how-to-improve-python-packaging/#summary
The Elusive Frame Timing | by Alen Ladavac | Medium
Tags: tech, 3d, performance
Excellent analysis and explanation of the stutter problem people experience with game engines. It’s an artifact of the graphics pipeline becoming more asynchronous with no way to know when something is really displayed. Extra graphics APIs will be needed to solve this for real.
https://medium.com/@alen.ladavac/the-elusive-frame-timing-168f899aec92
Use.GPU Goes Trad — Acko.net
Tags: tech, web, webgpu, 3d, frontend
This WebGPU framework is getting interesting. Definitely something to keep an eye on and evaluate for productive uses. Obviously requires WebGPU to be widely available before banking on it.
https://acko.net/blog/use-gpu-goes-trad/
Examples of floating point problems
Tags: tech, programming, mathematics
Nice set of problems encountered when using floating point numbers. Definitely to keep in mind.
https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/01/13/examples-of-floating-point-problems/
Examples of problems with integers
Tags: tech, programming, mathematics
Problems with integers now. Kind of better known usually, still to keep in mind as well.
https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/01/18/examples-of-problems-with-integers/
We invested 10% to pay back tech debt; Here’s what happened
Tags: tech, programming, technical-debt
Excellent piece about technical debt. The approach proposed is definitely the good one, it’s the only thing which I know to work to keep technical debt at bay.
https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/tech-debt-day
From Story Points to Slam Dunks — Planning for Success
Tags: tech, project-management, estimates, kanban
Interesting approach regarding estimates. Might especially make sense combined with kanban like project management.
https://medium.com/agileinsider/from-story-points-to-slam-dunks-planning-for-success-c3e067354d9b
The CARL framework of reflection | The University of Edinburgh
Tags: tech, project-management, hr, management, interviews
It’s coming from the job interview domain… but I wonder if it could be more largely useful due to how simple it is (but not easy mind you). I guess I’ll experiment with it for my next project postmortem.
https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/reflecting-on-experience/carl
Writing Is Magic - Marc’s Blog
Tags: tech, communication, writing
A reminder for me, I write quite a bit, but I feel that I don’t write nearly enough. It’s very important for plenty of cases though.
https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/11/08/writing.html
These Gorgeous Photos Capture Life Inside a Drop of Seawater | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
Tags: photography, science, biology
Really amazing pictures! All this life we usually can’t see with our own eye.
Bye for now!
Tuesday, 17 January 2023
We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 3.0.
It contains 182 activities, including 8 new ones:
- "Mouse click training" is an exercise to practice using a mouse with left and right clicks.
- In "Create the fractions", represent decimal quantities with some pie or rectangle charts.
- In "Find the fractions", it's the other way: write the fraction represented by the pie or rectangle chart.
- With "Discover the International Morse code", learn how to communicate with the International Morse code.
- In "Compare numbers", learn how to compare number values using comparison symbols.
- "Find ten's complement" is a simple exercise to learn the concept of ten's complement.
- In "Swap ten's complement", swap numbers of an addition to optimize it using ten's complement.
- In "Use ten's complement", decompose an addition to optimize it using ten's complement.
We've added 2 new command line options:
- List all the available activities (-l or --list-activities)
- Directly start a specific activity (--launch activityName)
This version also contains several improvements and bug fixes.
On the translation side, GCompris 3.0 contains 36 languages. 25 are fully translated: (Azerbaijani, Basque, Breton, British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian). 11 are partially translated: (Albanian (99%), Belarusian (83%), Brazilian Portuguese (94%), Czech (82%), Finnish (94%), German (91%), Indonesian (99%), Macedonian (94%), Slovak (77%), Swedish (94%) and Turkish (71%)).
A special note about Ukrainian voices which have been added thanks to the organization "Save the Children" who funded the recording. They installed GCompris on 8000 tablets and 1000 laptops, and sent them to Digital learning Centers and other safe spaces for children in Ukraine.
Croatian voices have also been recorded by a contributor.
As usual you can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.
For packagers of GNU/Linux distributions, note that we have a new dependency on QtCharts QML plugin, and the minimum required version of Qt5 is now 5.12. We also moved from using QtQuick.Controls 1 to QtQuick.Controls 2.
Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny
Monday, 16 January 2023
Carl Schwan already announced it on discuss.kde.org and at @neochat@fosstodon.org.
In this blog we’ll see how it was done and how you can publish your KDE app in the Microsoft Store.
Reserving a Name and Age Rating Your App
The first step requires some manual work. In Microsoft Partner Center you need to create a new app by reserving a name and complete a first submission. How to do this has been described by Christoph Cullmann in the Windows Store Submission Guide. Don’t hesitate to reserve the name of your app even if you are not yet ready for the first submission to the Microsoft Store. Once a name is reserved nobody else can publish an app with this name.
The first submission needs to be done manually because you will have to answer the age ratings questionnaire. NeoChat was rated 18+ because it allows you to publish all kinds of offensive content on public Matrix rooms. Filling out the questionnaire was quite amusing because I did it together with the NeoChat crowd at #neochat:kde.org.
On the first submission of NeoChat I chose to restrict the visibility to Private audience until it was ready for public consumption. I created a new customer group NeoChat Beta Testers with the email address of my regular Microsoft Store account in Microsoft Partner Center and then selected this group under Private audience. This way I could test installing NeoChat with the Microsoft Store app before anybody else could see it.
Don’t spend too much time filling out things like Description, Screenshots, etc. under Store Listings because some of this information will be added automatically from the AppStream data of your app for all available translations.
Semi-automatic App Submissions
The next submissions of NeoChat were done semi-automatically via the Microsoft Submission API with the submit-to-microsoft-store.py script while writing this Python script and the underlying general Microsoft Store API Python module microstore. The script is based on a Ruby prototype (windows.rb) written by Harald Sitter.
The idea is that the script is run by a (manual) CI job that the app’s release manager can trigger if they want to publish a new version on the Microsoft Store.
To run the script locally you need the credentials for an Azure AD application associated with KDE’s Partner Center account. Anything else you need to know is documented in the script’s README.md.
Making NeoChat Publically Available
The last step of the process to get NeoChat published in the Microsoft Store was another manual submission which just changed the visibility to Private audience. This could also have been done via the Microsoft Submission API (but not with the current version of the script), but I think it’s good to have a last look at the information about the app before it is published. In particular, you may have to fill out the Notes for certification, e.g. if your app cannot be tested without a service or social media account. For NeoChat we had to provide a test account for Matrix.
Moreover, you may want to fill out some details that are currently not available in the AppStream data, e.g. a list of Product features, the Copyright and trademark info, or special screenshots of the Windows version of your app.
What’s Next
On our GitLab instance, we want to provide a full CI/CD pipeline for building and publishing our KDE apps on the Microsoft Store (and many other app stores). A few important things that require special credentials or signing certificates are still missing to complete this pipeline.
And we want to get more KDE apps into the Microsoft Store.
If you need help with getting your KDE app into the Microsoft Store, then come find me in the #kde-windows room.
Updates after publication:
- 2023-01-31: Updated link to script after merge of the MR
Saturday, 14 January 2023
New year, new RISC-V Yocto blog post \o/ When I wrote my last post, I did really not expect my brand new VisionFive-2 board to find its way to me so soon… But well, a week ago it was suddenly there. While unpacking I shortly pondered over my made plans to prepare a Plasma Bigscreen RaspberryPi 4 demo board for this year’s FOSDEM.
Obvious conclusion: “Screw it! Let’s do the demo on the VisionFive-2!” — And there we are:
After some initial bumpy steps to boot up a first self-compiled U-boot and Kernel (If you unbox a new board, you need to do a bootloader and firmware update first! Otherwise it will not boot the latest VisionFive Kernel) it was surprisingly easy to prepare Yocto to build a core-image-minimal that really boots the whole way up.
Unfortunately after these first happy hours, the last week was full of handling the horrors of closed-source binary drivers for the GPU. Even though Imagination promised to provide an open source driver at some time, right now there is only the solution to use the closed source PVR driver. After quite a lot of trying, guessing and and comparing the boot and init sequences of the reference image to the dark screen in front of me, I came up with:
- a new visionfive2-graphics Yocto package for the closed source driver blobs
- a fork of Mesa that uses a very heavy patch set for the PVR driver adaptions; all patches are taken from the VisionFive 2 buildroot configurations
- and a couple of configs for making the system start with doing an initial modeset
The result right now:
VisionFive-2 device with Plasma-Bigscreen (KWin running via Wayland), SD card image built via Yocto, KDE software via KDE’s Yocto layers, Kernel and U-Boot being the latest fork versions from StarFive
Actually, the full UI even feels much smoother than on my RPi4, which is quite cool. I am not sure where I will end in about 3 weeks with some more debugging and patching. But I am very confident that you can see a working RISC-V board with onboard GPU and running Plasma Shell, when you visit the KDE stall at FOSDEM in February 
For people who are interested in Yocto, here is the WIP patch set: https://github.com/riscv/meta-riscv/pull/382
Friday, 13 January 2023
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-02.
A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.
Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, culture
A very interesting metaphor. Indeed on social media we’re not dealing with gardens.
https://powazek.com/posts/3571
Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens
Tags: tech, automotive, ux
Not very scientific, but indeed thought provoking and taps into safety considerations.
I scanned every package on PyPi and found 57 live AWS keys
Tags: tech, security, secrets, python
This is apparently a somewhat common mistake. Something is apparently not easy enough to handle and error prone.
https://tomforb.es/i-scanned-every-package-on-pypi-and-found-57-live-aws-keys/
The yaml document from hell
Tags: tech, yaml
A few examples of why yaml is getting out of control. It is very very error prone at this point.
https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
How to store your app’s entire state in the url
Tags: tech, web, browser
Interesting approach although you probably don’t want to do this systematically. For some applications it is a good idea.
https://www.scottantipa.com/store-app-state-in-urls
Introduction - Just Programmer’s Manual
Tags: tech, tools, command-line
Interesting little tool. I usually use make for this kind of things, but it seems to bring some benefits for non build tasks.
Makefiles for Web Work – Ross Zurowski
Tags: tech, command-line, tools, unix
A love letter to Makefiles. A couple of interesting tricks in there.
https://rosszurowski.com/log/2022/makefiles
What Happens When A CPU Starts
Tags: tech, cpu
Nice nugget reminding us the early steps and basic mechanisms of the CPU life at boot.
https://lateblt.tripod.com/bit68.txt
The Power of Prolog
Tags: tech, programming, logic, prolog
Nice resource to get started with Prolog.
https://www.metalevel.at/prolog
Architecture diagrams should be code - BAM Weblog
Tags: tech, architecture, diagrams
I’m more and more tempted by this kind of approach. Managing architecture models using code seems fairly neat. That said I wish we’d have better free software tooling for that, I find it still fairly limited. Maybe I should check out the Haskell library which is mentioned.
https://brianmckenna.org/blog/architecture_code
Shopify: Say no to meetings | UNLEASH
Tags: tech, management, meetings
Always a good idea to seek reduction in time spent in meetings. I’ve seen this being too often a drain. Can get quickly out of control.
https://www.unleash.ai/hr-technology/shopify-encourages-employees-to-say-no-to-meetings/
Epochalypse
Tags: tech, unix, date, funny
It’s comiiing! OK… not quite yet. But if that prevents your sleep here is an easy way to check.
https://www.epochalypse.today/
The science of why you have great ideas in the shower
Tags: science
Finally, we have an idea of why we get ideas in “strange” moments. Fascinating stuff.
Bye for now!