The next Kdenlive Café will be on the 3rd of December at 8 PM UTC.

Come chat with the team!

Join us at: https://meet.kde.org/b/far-twm-ebr

The post Kdenlive Café in December appeared first on Kdenlive.

Did you know about a small but very useful feature from KDE?

Open krunner via Alt+Space and type qw:KDE to search Qwant for KDE:

Pressing Enter will open up your browser with the specified KDE search on Qwant!

There are a lot of other Web Search Keywords like:

Wikipedia:

Invent:

Translate from English to German on dict.cc

You can find all of them by opening Web Search Keywords on krunner:

Extra: Create your own!

I use often a Fedora tool called COPR, so let’s use it as an example to create our own web search keyword.

Do your search in the webpage:

And now the important part you need:

Now back to the Web Search Keyword settings:

Fill in the data needed taking care of the placeholder for our input!:

Now we have our own Web Search Keyword:

NOTE: for some reason I had to click on Apply and OK until all the different setting windows were closed before the new custom Web Search Keyword worked

And the result:

I hope it’s useful to somebody!

In order to prepare for the Akademy I started some days before to give my Librem 5 ( an Open Hardware Phone) another try and ended up with a non starting Plasma 6. Actually this issue was known already, but hasn't been addressed. In the end I reached the Akademy with my Librem 5 having phosh installed (which is Gnome based), in order to have something working.

I met Bushan and Bart who took care and the issue was fixed two days later I could finally install Plasma 6 on it. The last time I tested my Librem 5 with Plasma 5 it felt sluggish and not well working. But this time I was impressed how well the system reacts. Sure there are some things here and there, but in the bigger picture it is quite useable. One annoying issue is that the camera is only working with one app and the other issue is the battery capacity, you have to charge it once a day. Because of missing a QR reader that can use the camera, getting data to the phone was quite challenging. Unfortunately the conference Wifi separated the devices and I couldn't use KDE Connect to transfer data. In the end the only way to import data was taking five photos from the QR Code to import my D-Ticket to Itinerary.

With a device with Plasma Mobile, it directly was used for a experiment: How well does Dolphin works on a Plasma Mobile device. Together with Felix Ernst we tried it out and were quite impressed, that Dolphin does work very well on Plasma Mobile, after some simple modifications on the UI. That resulted in a patch to add a mobile UI for Dolphin !826.

With more time to play with my Librem 5 I also found an bug in KWeather, that is missing a Refresh option, when used in a Plasma Mobile environment #493656.

Akademy is a good place to identify and solve some issues. It is always like that, you chat with someone and they can tell you who to ask to answer the concrete question and in the end you can solve things, that seems unsolvable in the beginning.

There was also time to look into the travelling app Itinerary. A lot people are faced with a lot of real world issues, when not in their home town. Itinerary is the best traveling apps I know about. It can import nearly every ticket you have and can get location information from restaurant websites and allow routing to that place. It does add many useful information, while traveling like current delays, platform changes, live updates for elevator, weather information at the destination, a station map and all those features with strong focus on privacy.

In detail I found some small things to improve:

• If you search for a bus ride and enter the correct name for the bus stop, it will still add some walk from and to the station. The issue here is that we use different backends and not all backends share the same geo coordinate. That's why Itinerary needs to add some heuristics to delete those paths.

• Instead of displaying just a small station map of one bus stop in the inner city, it showed complete Würzburg inner city, as there is one big park around the inner city (named "Ringpark").

• Würzburg has a quite big bus station but the platform information were missing in the map, so we tweaked the CSS to display the platform. To be sure, that we don't fix only Würzburg, we also looked at Greifswald and Aix-en-Provence if they are following the same name scheme.

I additionally learned that it has a lot of details that helps people who have special needs. That is the reason why Daniel Kraut wants to get Itinerary available for iOS. As spoken out, that Daniel wants to reach this goal, others already started to implement the first steps to build apps for iOS.

This year I was volunteering in helping out at Akademy. For me it was a lot of fun to meet everyone at the infodesk or help the speakers setup the beamer and microphone. It is also a good opportunity to meet many new faces and get in contact with them. I see also room for improvement. As we were quite busy at the Welcome Event to get out the badges to everyone, I couldn't answer the questions from newcomers, as the queue was too long. I propose that some people volunteer to be available for questions from newcomers. Often it is hard for newcomers to get their first contact(s) in a new community. There is a lot of space for improvement to make it easier for newcomers to join. Some ideas in my head are: Make an event for the newcomers to get them some links into the community and show that everyone is friendly. The tables at the BoFs should make a circle, so everyone can see each other. It was also hard for me to understand everyone as they mostly spoken towards the front. And then BoFs are sometimes full of very specific words and if you are not already deep in the topic you are lost. I can see the problem, on the one side BoFs are also the place where the person that knows the topic already wants to get things done. On the other side new comers join BoFs, are overwhelmed by to many new words get frustrated and think, that they are not welcome. Maybe at least everyone should present itself with name and ask new faces, why they joined the BoF to help them joining.

I'm happy, that the food provided for the attendees was very delicious and that I'm not the only one mostly vegetarian with a big amount to be vegan.

At the conference the KDE Eco initiation really caught me, as I see a lot of new possibilities in giving more reasons to switch to an Open Source system. The talk from Natalie was great to see how pupils get excited about Open Source and also help their grandparents to move to a Linux system. As I also will start to work as a teacher, I really got ideas what I can do at school. Together with Joseph and Nicole, we finally started to think about how to drive an exploration on what kind of old hardware is still KDE software running. The ones with the oldest hardware will get an old KDE shirt. For more information see #40.

The conference was very motivating for me, I also had still energy at the evening to do some Debian packaging and finally pushed kweathercore to Debian and started to work on KWeather. Now I'm even more interested in the KDE apps focusing the mobile world, as I now have some hardware that can actually use those apps.

I really enjoyed the workshop how to contribute to Qt by Volker Hilsheimer, especially the way how Volker explained things in a very friendly way, answered every question, sometime postponed some questions but came back to them later. All in all I now have a good overview how Qt is doing development and how I can fix bugs.

The daytrip to Rothenburg ob der Tauber was very interesting for me. It was the first time I visited the village. But in my memory it feels like I know the village already. I grew up with reading a lot of comic albums including the good SiFi comic album series "Yoku Tsuno" created by the Belgian writer Roger Leloup. Yoku Tsuno is an electronics engineer, raised in Japan but now living in Belgium. In "On the edge of life" she helps her friend Ingard, who actually lives in Rothenburg. Leloup invested a lot of time to travel to make the make his drawings as accurate as possible.

In order to not have a hard cut from Akademy to normal life, I had a lunch with Carlos, to discuss KDE Neon and how we can improve the interaction with Debian. In the future this should have less friction and make both communities work together more smoothly. Additionally as I used to develop on KDEPIM with the help of Docker images based on Neon I ask for a meta kf6 dev meta package. That should help to get rid of most hand written lists of dev packages in the Docker file in order to make it more simple for new contributors to start hacking on KDEPIM.

The rest of the day I finally found time to do the normal tourist stuff: Going to the Wine bridge and having a walk to the castle of Würzburg. Unfortunately you hear a lot of car noises up there, but I could finally relaxe in a Japanese designed garden.

Finally at Saturday I started my trip back. The trains towards Eberswalde are broken and I needed to find alternative routing. I got a little bit nervous, as it was the first time I travelled with my Librem 5 and Itinerary only and needed to reach the next train in less than two mins. With the indoor maps provided, I could prepare my run through the train station so I reached successfully my next train.

By the way, also if you only only use KDE software, I would recommend everyone to join Akademy ;)

Ruqola 2.3.2 is a feature and bugfix release of the Rocket.chat app.

It includes many fixes for RocketChat 7.0.

New features:

• Fix administrator refresh user list
• Fix menu when we select video conference message
• Fix RocketChat 7.0 server support
• Fix create video message
• Fix update cache when we change video/attachment description
• Fix export message job
• Fix show userOffline when we have a group
• Fix enable/disable ok button when search room in team dialog
• Fix crash when we remove room in team dialog
• Fix update channel selection when we reconnect server

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/ruqola/
Source: ruqola-2.3.2.tar.xz
SHA256: 57c8ff6fdeb4aba286425a1bc915db98ff786544a3ada9dec39056ca4b587837
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/jriddell.pgp

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 are continuing to prepare for the KDE Gear 24.12.0 release, with a focus on bugfixing now that we've entered the feature freeze period.

Meanwhile, and as part of the 2024 end-of-year fundraiser, you can "Adopt an App" in a symbolic effort to support your favorite KDE app. This week, we are particularly grateful to mdPlusPlus and txemaq for supporting Dolphin; mdPlusPlus, Greg Helding and Archie Lamb for Okular; Henning Lammert and Thibault Molleman for Filelight; Nithanim, Dominik Perfler, and Thibault Molleman for Spectacle; Vladimir Solomatin, Akseli Lahtinen, Haakon Johannes Tjelta Meihack, and Nithanim for Kate; Henning Lammert and Marco Ryll for Kasts; GhulDev, Anders Lund Tobias Junghans, and William Wojciechowski for Konsole; Piwix for KWrite; Gabriel Klavans for Tokodon; Matthew Lamont for Kontact; and Gabriel Karlsson for Itinerary.

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. So consider donating today!

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Global Changes

The KIO implementation for SFTP used by many KDE applications like Dolphin, Gwenview, and many others, now correctly closes the network connection when if a fatal error occurs, which means it is now possible to reconnect immediately without having to wait a few minutes. (Harald Sitter, 24.12.0. Link)

Many apps received some small bug fixes to ensure they work correctly on Haiku OS. (Luc Schrijvers, Link 1, link 2 and many more)

Dolphin Manage your files

Dolphin now sorts more naturally when comparing filenames by excluding extensions. So now "a.txt" appears before "a 2.txt". (Eren Karakas, 24.12.0. Link)

Haruna Media player

Left-clicking on a video now plays or pauses it by default. (Nate Graham, 25.04.0. Link)

Karp KDE arranger for PDFs

Karp is a new PDF arranger and editor by Tomasz Bojczuk which has just finished the incubation phase.

Tomasz was active this week and added an option to select the PDF version of the resulting PDF (Link) and made it possible to move multiple pages at the same time (Link).

Kate Advanced text editor

The build plugin — which allows you to trigger a rebuild from Kate's interface — now supports multiple projects being open at the same time without having to constantly reload the list of targets every time you switch projects. (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0. Link)

The ctag indexing doesn't happen anymore on the root and home folder as it makes no sense and just wastes CPU cycles. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link)

Fix getting a PATH when launching Kate outside of the console on macOS. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link)

KMyMoney Personal finance manager based on double-entry bookkeeping

It is no longer possible to apply category filters on the "Net Worth report" of KMyMoney as this was resulting in erroneous results. (Thomas Baumgart, 5.2, Link)

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

Fix loading the gateway server address in the settings. (Fabio Bas, 24.12.0. Link)

Fix a crash when scrolling; the app was previously sending empty scroll events which were rejected by the remote server. (Fabio Bas, 24.12.0. Link)

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

Stefano fixed various issues with the Plasma Activities integration inside Konqueror. We now, for example, wait for the Plasma Activity service to be ready, before restoring activities when starting Konqueror. (Stefano Crocco, 24.12.0. Link)

Konsole Use the command line interface

We added the Campbell color scheme from Microsoft. (Mingcong Bai, 25.04.0. Link)

We fixed a few font rendering issues in Konsole. (Matan Ziv-Av, 24.12.0. Link)

Okular View and annotate documents

Changed the default value of the "scroll overlap" feature from 0% to 10%, which means that when you scroll down in a document using Page Down or Space Bar, the bottom 10% of the previous page will remain visible at the top of the view. This helps you retain your spatial awareness when quickly navigating. (David Cerenius, 25.04.0. Link)

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Claudio fixed many issues with the day and month views. Now, clicking on a day in the month view will open the day view on the selected day and not just a random one, the current day will be correctly highlighted, some sizing issues are fixed, and the month view won't appear as disabled anymore in some situations. (Claudio Cambra, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3)

When double-clicking on an empty space in the month view, the incidence editor will use the selected date as its start date. (Claudio Cambra, 24.12.0. Link)

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

We fixed the sed-edit feature in NeoChat, which allows you to type a sed expression like s/foo/bar to edit your previous message. (James Graham, 24.12.0. Link)

On mobile devices, NeoChat won't open the space homepage when trying to just switch the selected space. (James Graham, 24.12.0. Link)

Implemented MSC4228: Search Redirection to harmlessly redirect searches for harmful and potentially illegal content.

OptiImage Image optimizer to reduce the size of images

It is now possible to remove an image from the list of images to optimize. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, Link)

Soumyadeep also fixed an issue where it was possible to add the same image multiple times (Soumyadeep Ghosh, Link)

Skanpage Scan multi-page documents and images

Ported the export dialog in Skanpage to use Kirigami.Dialog, giving it a nicer and more consistent appearance. (Thomas Duckworth, 25.04.0. Link)

Ported Skanpage to use KIO, which allows saving scanned documents to remote folders. (Alexander Stippich, 25.04.0. Link)

Telly Skout A convergent Kirigami TV guide

Fix the list of favorite TV channels being empty after opening a different page. (Plata Hill, 24.12.0. Link)

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Joshua added titles to the profile pages, so that it is not empty anymore. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Quote post are now better detected. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

It is now possible to start a new chat from the conversation page. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

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.

After the criticism in the last post about the limitations of KUserFeedback (KUF) for doing data-driven UX work — let’s get more detailed and constructive:

What insights do we as KDE UX people need to do even better than we are currently doing?

Let us start with what we already get from KUF. We get usage data, like how many people are using Wayland vs. X11. But we only get usage data according to our telemetry policy. So we do not get any deeper insight into how users configure their sessions when using Wayland compared to X11. But this is the kind of information we would need to do proper data-driven UX. What settings are users changing? How many users have icons on their desktop, and which ones? Are people manually mounting network drives? Which System Tray icons are interacted with the most? And so on.

But while this information is already impossible to gather with our current approach, we’re only scratching the surface. We need even deeper UX insights, like understanding where people click. And where they click next (in terms of Markov chains). That way we can understand if people are using Plasma the way we intended when we designed it. Or, how long does it take them to get from point A to point B? Are they taking detours because we’ve laid out paths that users don’t understand in the way we intended?

None of these questions can be answered with our current approach to telemetry.

The basic problem is that we currently send all the raw data to the KDE servers to get the answers we need. And the data we need to collect in order to get the above described desired user insights could of course be used to “identify a specific user” – which is not allowed by our telemetry policy for good reason.

And yet we need even more data. We want to target all users, or only users who exhibit certain behaviors. We want them to fill out questionnaires to better understand why they behave the way they do, to understand their goals and intentions. This would be extremely helpful in understanding bug reports. Or to support our design discussions with relevant data from real users.

All of this can only be achieved with a fundamental change in the way we do telemetry.

Existing alternatives, such as the opt-out Endless OS metrics system, also do not allow enough user insights and share the problem that the data leaves the property of the data owners, the users. That is why we have been working on the privact ecosystem, which allows all the insights described above, while fully preserving users’ privacy. And because of that, we can not only ask for more intimate data, but we can also make participation opt-out and so get data from substantially more people. And why is that? Because with the privact ecosystem, there is no technical possibility that any individual’s personal data can ever be shared remotely. Never. But it would finally enable good user-data-driven UX work. For the sake of KDE and our users.

Please also join the discussion about this issue on invent.kde.org.

Heyho together!

I am from now on writing my posts on GitHub pages. Apart from it being useful to keep my posts versioned using git, I had some issues with my previous blog. The idea was to simply use write.as and publish a post from time to time. This worked well except for more than a month ago me wanting to do a post about my KRunner plugins. It naturally contained a lot of links and thus the publishing was prevented and even the account blocked due to apparent spam. There was no response via mail for over a month.

So here we are not on another blog where I hopefully write more often and also be able to spent more time on KDE!

This week we of course continued the customary bug-fixing, but got some nice new features and UI improvements too!

Let me also remind folks about KDE's end-of-year fundraiser. We're 84% of the way to our goal, and it would be amazing to get all the way to 100% before December! Then we can focus on those stretch goals from December to January.

Anyway, enough of the sales pitch, back to the free stuff!

And isn't that amazing? Let's zoom out a bit here and remind ourselves just how incredible it is that this software is made available for free, with no contract or license agreement, to everyone. To you, to your school, to community organizations, businesses, governments, even our direct competitors to study and examine (which goes both ways, and helped me fix a bug in GTK this week; read on for details). It's kind of wild, if you think about it. But, here we are, and we want to keep on being a light in a tech world that sometimes seems to be darkening. Help us keep that light glowing!

Notable New Features

Info Center now shows your battery's cycle count. (Kai Uwe Broulik, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Added the ability to convert to and from the CFP franc currency in KRunner-powered searches. (someone going by the pseudonym "Mr. Athozus", Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Middle-clicking on the Brightness and Color widget no longer does anything when the Night Light hasn't been turned on. (Elias Probst, 6.2.4. Link)

Improved some sources of visual awkwardness in System Monitor: now the loading screen no longer sometimes has a scrollbar; and clicking something selected in a table view visibly de-selects it. (Akseli Lahtinen, 6.2.4. Link 1 and link 2)

Improved the way Discover presents external links to be less visually heavy. (Nate Graham, 6.3.0. Link)

Re-did the "Apply Plasma Settings" dialog on System Settings' Login Screen page to look better and more consistent with other dialogs in QML-based software these days. (Oliver Beard, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a regression in the Power and Battery widget that broke its ability to notice that power-profiles-daemon was installed instead of TLP after some porting work. (Méven Car, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused the Disks & Devices widget to not show the correct actions for non-mounted optical discs after some porting work. (Kai Uwe Broulik, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused screenshots and screen recordings to look too dim while using HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when logging in with an external screen connected to a laptop via HDMI. (Marco Martin, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed a rare case where Plasma could crash when copying data to the clipboard. (David Edmundson, 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a bug affecting people using panels in "Fit content" mode that could, under certain circumstances, cause them to be too small until you manually entered Edit Mode once. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0, Link)

KWin now behaves better when you plug in a weird defective TV that asks for an inappropriate resolution. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)

Discover once again shows update-able "Get New [Stuff]" content on the updates page. (Harald Sitter, 6.3.0. Link)

XWayland-using apps can no longer crash KWin with ludicrously large icon sizes. (David Redondo, Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Fixed a bizarre and annoying bug that caused text displayed at fractional scale factors in Plasma and QtQuick-based KDE apps and to look, for lack of a better term, wobbly. Wobbly windows good, wobbly text bad! Text has now been put on the straight and narrow. (David Edmundson, Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Fixed a strange Qt bug that manifested as Plasma notifications sometimes being vertically squished. (David Edmundson, Qt 6.8.1. Link)

GTK 3 apps once again have the correct icon for their spinboxes' "decrease the value" buttons when using the Breeze icon theme or any other icon theme whose list-remove icon isn't a minus sign. (Nate Graham, GTK 3.24.44. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 36 last week). Current list of bugs
• 94 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

The feature to let you record the screen without re-approval now also works for virtual outputs. Additionally, virtual outputs now have a better name that indicates which app records them. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a memory leak caused by having a lot of OverlayFS mounts, e.g. from Docker containers. (Joshua Goins, Frameworks 6.9. 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:

• Filter and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by donating to our yearly fundraiser! 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-47.

The Big Data Center Water Problem

Tags: tech, hardware, ecology, economics, energy, water

We always think about the energy consumption, but large data centers gobble billion liters of water too. This would need to be improved.

https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-big-data-center-water-problem

Relativty an Open-source VR headset for $200

Tags: tech, vr, hardware, foss

Nice to see open hardware for VR hitting such a price point.

https://www.relativty.com/

Bridgy Fed

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, tools

You’re on the fediverse and you want to reach out bluesky users? This might be the right tool for you (unclear if it’ll scale yet though). At least if and when Bluesky turns bad, people will know where to reach friends next.

https://fed.brid.gy/

Why Not Bluesky

Tags: tech, social-media, business, politics

Excellent post showing reasons to be skeptical about Bluesky’s future. Despite all their likely sincere claims I don’t see how they’ll escape enclosure and enshittification when their sketchy VCs will want to see money back.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/11/15/Not-Bluesky

Elon Musk’s X is hemorrhaging users to Threads and Bluesky

Tags: tech, social-media, politics, twitter

Sad to see people predominantly jumping from Twitter to other tech moguls walled gardens. This feels more and more like a missed opportunity for the fediverse. That said I’m amazed at how efficient Musk has been at killing the network effect of his platform. This proves it’s actually doable.

https://fortune.com/2024/11/14/x-elon-musk-leaving-election-trump-threads-bluesky-social-media-fragmentation/

A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election

Tags: tech, social-media, politics, twitter

This is what we get for refusing to regulate social media and for not auditing their algorithms. Their owners can game and bias the platforms as they see fit for their own gains. They became massive forces of manipulation in the process.

https://eprints.qut.edu.au/253211/

ChatGPT is Slipping

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, vendor-lockin

Good reminder that models shouldn’t be used as a service except maybe for prototyping. This has felt obvious to me since the beginning of this hype cycle… but here we are people are falling in the trap today.

https://adriano.fyi/posts/chatgpt-is-slipping/

FireDucks : Pandas but 100x faster

Tags: tech, python, performance, pandas, data, data-science

OK, the numbers are indeed impressive. And it’s API is fully compatible apparently, looks like a good replacement if you got Pandas code around.

https://hwisnu.bearblog.dev/fireducks-pandas-but-100x-faster/

Seer - a gui frontend to gdb

Tags: tech, tools, debugging

Looks like a nice tool. Maybe it’ll replace my trusty cgdb in some cases.

https://github.com/epasveer/seer

Retrofitting spatial safety to hundreds of millions of lines of C++

Tags: tech, c++, security

Will we see more deployments of C++ standard library with bound checking by default? It definitely looks tempting.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/11/retrofitting-spatial-safety-to-hundreds.html?m=1

Upcoming hardening in PHP

Tags: tech, php, security

Seeing the amount of PHP code open on the internet, it’s indeed important to harden the runtime (at long last).

https://dustri.org/b/upcoming-hardening-in-php.html

AAA - Analytical Anti-Aliasing

Tags: tech, graphics, gpu

Really nice in depth post. Everything you ever wanted to know about antialiasing but didn’t dare asking.

https://blog.frost.kiwi/analytical-anti-aliasing/

I don’t have time to learn React

Tags: tech, framework, career, learning

Good advice, no one should be a “React developer”. Make sure you learn more fundamental skills.

https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/i-dont-have-time-to-learn-react/

Going a Little Further

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, learning

If you’re just doing the minimum to deal with a task to “mark it done” you’re probably not doing enough and missing out on learning opportunities.

https://edanparker.hashnode.dev/going-a-little-further

What Is a Senior Engineer, Anyway?

Tags: tech, career, learning, engineering

This can change from organization to organization. This post proposes a career ladder which will work in some contexts. What’s clear is that it’s all about scope and impact.

https://matt.blwt.io/post/what-is-a-senior-engineer-anyway/

Real Ways To Maintain Your Technical Edge As An Engineering Manager

Tags: tech, engineering, management, learning

Interesting tips to keep learning on the technical side of the job as you get more managerial responsibilities.

https://medium.com/engineering-managers-journal/real-ways-to-maintain-your-technical-edge-as-an-engineering-manager-25652fa1495c

Bye for now!

We have updated Krita for Android and ChromeOS in the Google Play Store to 5.2.8, an Android/ChromeOS-only emergency release. This release fixes startup problems that happened on some devices with 5.2.6. Krita 5.2.8 for Android is now available both for beta-track users as well as in the "stable" release track. Note, however, that we still recommend treating Krita on Android as a beta release that might have bugs that impair your work, as well as a user interface that is not optimized for touch devices.