Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-43. It’s published later than usual since I’m attending the Ubuntu Summit 2024 and had to travel because of it.

Microsoft maintains its own Windows debloat scripts on GitHub

Tags: tech, microsoft, criticism, funny

This is indeed telling unfortunately. It’s kind of ironic that they felt the need of having their own debloat scripts.

https://www.osnews.com/story/140955/microsoft-maintains-its-own-windows-debloat-scripts-on-github/

This Is Exactly How an Elon Musk-Funded PAC Is Microtargeting Muslims and Jews With Opposing Messages

Tags: tech, democracy, politics

This is just insane, claiming two opposite things to different demographic groups for political gains. And if you try to stop this kind of manipulative stunts they’d probably cry wolf about free speech…

https://www.404media.co/this-is-exactly-how-an-elon-musk-funded-pac-is-microtargeting-muslims-and-jews-with-opposing-messages/

Big Tech has given itself an AI deadline

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, economics, energy, criticism

More signs of the current bubble being about to burst?

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/10/big-tech-has-given-itself-an-ai-deadline/680301/

Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity promote scientific racism in AI search results

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism

This is what you get by making bots spewing text based on statistics without a proper knowledge base behind it.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/google-microsoft-and-perplexity-promote-scientific-racism-in-ai-search-results/

The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, copilot, language

Using the right metaphors will definitely help with the conversation in our industry around AI. This proposal is an interesting one.

https://www.dbreunig.com/2024/10/18/the-3-ai-use-cases-gods-interns-and-cogs.html

You Don’t Need Words to Think

Tags: cognition, neuroscience, language, logic, knowledge, research

Very interesting research. Looks like we’re slowly moving away from the “language and thinking are intertwined” hypothesis. This is probably the last straw for Chomsky’s theory of language. It served us well but neuroscience points that it’s time to leave it behind.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-words-to-think/

Reliable Reasoning Beyond Natural Language

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, logic, research

Now this is an interesting paper. Neurosymbolic approaches are starting to go somewhere now. This is definitely helped by the NLP abilities of LLMs (which should be used only for that). The natural language to Prolog idea makes sense, now it needs to be more reliable. I’d be curious to know how many times the multiple-try path is exercised (the paper doesn’t quite focus on that). More research is required obviously.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11373

Introducing quantized Llama models with increased speed and a reduced memory footprint

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, optimization

More marketing announcement than real research paper. Still it’s nice to see smaller models being optimized to run on mobile devices. This will get interesting when it’s all local first and coupled to symbolic approaches.

https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-quantized-lightweight-models/

You Should Probably Pay Attention to Tokenizers

Tags: tech, statistics, ai, machine-learning, gpt, language

This is still an important step with LLM. It’s not because the models are huge that tokenizers disappeared or that you don’t need to clean up your data.

https://cybernetist.com/2024/10/21/you-should-probably-pay-attention-to-tokenizers/

Developing a Beautiful and Performant Block Editor in Qt C++ and QML

Tags: tech, markdown, qt, note-taking, tools

Ah! I wish MarkNotes or KleverNotes would work like this. I wish we’d have a reusable component in KDE Frameworks too. This is quite some work of course, too bad this isn’t FOSS.

https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor

Bookmark Keywords

Tags: tech, browser, firefox, bookmarks

A very useful but indeed little known feature of Firefox bookmarks.

https://paper.wf/binarycat/bookmark-keywords

The IPv6 Transition

Tags: tech, internet, protocols, ip

Looks like we’re stuck in the middle of the bridge. Also looks like the motivation to finish the transition isn’t high.

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2024-10/ipv6-transition.html

against /tmp

Tags: tech, programming, unix, security

Good reminder that /tmp has many security flaws built in.

https://dotat.at/@/2024-10-22-tmp.html

The Part of PostgreSQL We Hate the Most

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, design

Since everything has design choices which imply trade offs. Here is the main issue with PostgreSQL right now. Hopefully it’ll get modernized at some point.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2023/04/the-part-of-postgresql-we-hate-the-most.html

Sensible SQLite defaults

Tags: tech, backend, databases, sqlite

Another nice list of defaults for SQLite. Some of them I didn’t have on my radar.

https://briandouglas.ie/sqlite-defaults/

Using uv to develop Python command-line applications

Tags: tech, python, developer-experience

uv keeps showing promise to make development easier. It makes everything very much self contained.

https://til.simonwillison.net/python/uv-cli-apps

Use data that looks like data

Tags: tech, programming, debugging

Definitely a sound advice. You don’t want to be confused when debugging something because it looks too much like a variable or a property name.

https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/use-data-that-looks-like-data

pytest selection arguments for failing tests

Tags: tech, tests, python

Another example of why pytest is really a nice test runner. I really miss it on projects which don’t have it.

https://mathspp.com/blog/til/pytest-selection-arguments-for-failing-tests

SMURF: Beyond the Test Pyramid

Tags: tech, tests

Indeed a good way to reason about tests and the value they bring.

https://testing.googleblog.com/2024/10/smurf-beyond-test-pyramid.html?m=1

I’ve been writing software for the last 25 years. Here some things I learned so far

Tags: tech, career, engineering, craftsmanship, complexity

Another good set of advices. They’re not all technical which is to be expected.

https://blog.rpanachi.com/after-25-years-writing-software-here-some-things-learned-so-far

Framework overload: when convenience dulls innovation in software development

Tags: tech, framework, complexity, knowledge, learning, debugging, craftsmanship

I very much agree with this. The relationship between developers and their frameworks is rarely healthy. I think the author misses an important advice though: read the code of your frameworks. When stuck invest sometime stepping into the frameworks with the debugger. Developers too often treat those as a black box.

https://prahladyeri.github.io/blog/2024/10/framework-overload.html

Learning to learn

Tags: tech, learning, career

Definitely the most important skill to develop. Especially in our profession.

https://kevin.the.li/posts/learning-to-learn/

How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership?

Tags: tech, management, career, hr

Lots of open questions which are left unanswered. That said it shows how difficult it is to evaluate knowledge workers in general and that we’re often grasping to the wrong metrics.

https://chelseatroy.com/2024/03/29/how-do-we-evaluate-people-for-their-technical-leadership/

Ground Rules of Fairness at Work

Tags: management, transparency, fair

Transparency and fairness are definitely important to keep people motivated across an organization. That doesn’t make it easy to deal with of course, but that’s where managers should focus.

https://read.perspectiveship.com/p/fairness-at-work

Bye for now!

This week, we realized that there are a few things we need to do to button-down our use of colors in a way that makes sense, not just for designers but also for developers.

As we find inspiration on what others are doing, we will make a couple of changes in the design system when it comes to colors.

1. Select UI colors using HCT color methodology.
2. Adopt a similar variable/token naming strategy as Material Design

HCT (hue, chroma, tone) Method

As suggested by team members, the HCT color selection methodology has a few advantages:

1. Accessibility
   • Standard calculation method for color selection rather than by doing manual contrast calculations. This allows for all selected colors to be separated and distinct-enough from each other that users can see color differences in their applications.
2. Perceptual accuracy
   • HCT allows for seeing colors more accurately at a perceptual level.
3. Consistent lightness and colorfulness
   • Consistent lightness and colorfulness across hues. 
4. Precise color and tonal accuracy
   • More precise color and tonal accuracy, especially in dark shadows and richly-saturated colors. 
5. Higher dynamic range and wider color gamut
   • Provides a wider color gamut and higher dynamic range than typical camera targets.

In our team, we have 3 people currently working on this. Not only are we selecting colors, but also creating a color-use system that all users can understand.

Building logic use into the colors allows for less dependence on people but something we can document and anyone looking at it would be able to understand regardless of their specialty.

Tokens

A few of the questions we had as a team while producing the design system were, how can we make it so that developers and designers understand all the pieces used in the design system, but at a development level?

One of the things that applications such as Figma and PenPot allow is for designers to define the names of each of the elements used in a design. We create variables names for stuff like fonts and colors. However, while that’s helpful, we also have to have logic behind the naming so that our developer friends are not confused by the use of variable names in the design system.

For this purpose, design system creators often use a token system that ensures naming between the design system and development is consistent, predictable, and useful.

Material design has a robust naming idea around tokens. It works a little like this:

The types of tokens are:

1. Reference tokens
   All available tokens with associated values
   
2. System tokens
   Decisions and roles that give the design system its character, from color and typography, to elevation and shape
   
3. Component tokens
   The design attributes assigned to elements in a component, such as the color of a button icon

We consulted with the team members and it seems like a good strategy. Right now, we don’t have any of the reference or system tokens but we use component tokens in some capacities. The idea is to create and organize the naming conventions around the token ideas from Material. We may still decide to change some of the naming conventions but keep the general idea.

Note that we don’t have the intention of replacing current tokens. The process would be to add new ones that developers would begin using over time while keeping the ones we already have.

What this means for us in the design system, is that we will change our design variables to reflect this organization and when communicating the changes to the dev team, we will provide tables showing all the variables/tokens used. It will also contain which elements of the design system are included in a reference, system, or component token.

If you would like to participate of this effort, you’re welcome to join us here:

Our channel is dedicated to working on the design system. For general Visual Design questions, you can access our team here:
https://matrix.to/#/#visualdesigngroup:kde.org

10 Tips to Make Your QML Code Faster and More Maintainable

add_executable(myapp main.cpp)

qt_add_qml_module(myapp
 URI "org.kde.myapp"
 QML_FILES Main.qml
)

qmlRegisterType("org.kde.myapp", 1, 0, "MyThing");

class MyThing : public QObject
{
    Q_OBJECT
    QML_ELEMENT
};

qt_add_qml_module(myapp
 URI "org.kde.myapp"
 QML_FILES Main.qml
 DEPENDENCIES QtCore
)

namespace MyApp {

class MyHelper : public QObject {
    Q_OBJECT
};

class MyThing : public QObject {
    Q_OBJECT
    QML_ELEMENT
    Q_PROPERTY(MyHelper *helper READ helper CONSTANT) // bad
    Q_PROPERTY(MyApp::MyHelper *helper READ helper CONSTANT) // good
    ...
};
}

property var size: 10 // bad
property int size: 10 // good

property var thing // bad
property MyThing thing // good

Item {
    id: thing

    property int size: 10

    Rectangle {
        width: parent.size // bad, Item has no 'size' property
        height: thing.height // good, lookup via id

        color: parent.enabled ? "red" : "black" // good, Item has 'enabled' property
    }
}

function calculateArea(width: double, height: double) : double {
    return width * height
}

MouseArea {
    onClicked: event => console.log("clicked at", event.x, event.y)
}

Item {
    id: root
    property int size: 10

    Rectangle {
        width: size // bad, unqualified lookup
        height: root.size // good, qualified lookup
    }
}

ListView {
    model: MyModel

    delegate: ItemDelegate {
        text: name // bad, lookup from context
        icon.name: model.iconName // more readable, but still bad

        required property bool active // good, using required property
        checked: active
    }
}

pragma ComponentBehavior: Bound

import QtQuick

Item {
    id: root

    property int delegateHeight: 10

    ListView {
        model: MyModel

        delegate: Rectangle {
            height: root.delegateHeight // good with ComponentBehavior: Bound, bad otherwise
        }
    }
}

The post 10 Tips to Make Your QML Code Faster and More Maintainable appeared first on KDAB.

If you want to contribute to KDE in a significant way (beyond coding), here is your opportunity — help us organize Akademy 2025!

We are seeking hosts for Akademy 2025, which will occur in June, July, August, or September. This is your chance to bring KDE’s biggest event to your city! Download the Call for Hosts guide and submit your proposal to akademy-proposals@kde.org by December 1, 2024.

Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns! We are here to help you organise a successful event and are here to offer you any advice, guidance, or help you need. Let’s work together to make Akademy 2025 an event to remember.

Kdenlive 24.08.2 is out with many fixes to a wide range of bugs and regressions.

Oxygen Icons 6.1.0 is a feature release of the Oxygen Icon set.

It features new SVG symbolic icons for use in Plasma Applets.

It also features improved icon theme compliance, fixed visability and added mimetype links.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/oxygen-icons/
Source: oxygen-icons-6.1.0.tar.xz
SHA256: 16ca971079c5067c4507cabf1b619dc87dd6b326fd5c2dd9f5d43810f2174d68
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/jriddell.pgp

Hey folks! Apologies for the long gap since my last post. A lot has happened both personally and professionally—I got a new job and relocated, which led to me extending my GSoC deadline to wrap up the remaining tasks. I’m happy to share that I’ve now completed everything, and all the pending MRs related to my GSoC work have been merged. Here’s a quick overview:

MRs merged:

• Reset form implementation in Okular : Okular now has form reset functionality, allowing you to clear fields or return them to their default values. !MR1007
• Support for MouseDown, MouseEnter and MouseExit events : The corresponding event object is now generated when these mouse events are triggered. !MR994
• Keystroke, Validate, Calculate and Format event support for Comboboxes : These essential events were previously not triggered for comboboxes. This MR adds support for them. !MR1027
• Fix order of execution of events for text form fields : Keystroke, Validate, Calculate, and Format actions weren’t always executed in the correct order, especially during undo/redo or when modified via JavaScript. This MR fixes that and ensures KVCF actions are only triggered when a field value is committed, improving keyboard usability. !MR1002
• Support for modifying the appearance stream text in form field choice (Poppler) : Added functionality to modify appearance stream text in form fields without altering their actual values. !MR1590
• SubmitForm functionality (Poppler) : Support for reading the SubmitForm action was added to Poppler. While Okular doesn’t yet implement the actual submission process, this lays the groundwork for future integration. !MR1579

Future Scope:

Although much progress has been made during GSoC’24, there are still many areas where Okular’s PDF form functionality could be expanded:

• The actual submission of forms in Okular can be built on top of the SubmitForm action now supported by Poppler.
• Adding support for the SelectionChange event in ListBoxes would enhance their interactivity.
• Additional functions could be implemented for CheckBoxes, ComboBoxes, and ListBoxes, such as programmatically checking items, clearing, deleting, inserting, and setting items. Some of these changes would also require updates to Poppler.
• Improving keyboard navigation for form fields could further boost accessibility and ease of use.

Conclusion:

Participating in GSoC with KDE and contributing to Okular has been an incredible learning experience, and I’m proud of the contributions made. Huge thanks to my mentor, Albert Astals Cid, for his constant support, guidance, and patience through all my mistakes. Special thanks to Sune Vuorela for his reviews and insights which helped me learn a lot, and to the KDE Mentorship and GSoC teams for their indirect but invaluable help. I’m looking forward to continuing my journey with KDE.

See you next time. Cheers!

Hello again, sorry it’s been a while since the last post. In this case, I’m doing a never-before-seen multi-month post!

This may be the last post in this series, as the KDE Promo team has launched “This Week in KDE Apps” which covers my work here (and I also have plans to contribute to… 😅) Nate Graham typically reports on my Plasma changes in his “This Week in Plasma” series. All that would be left is the uninteresting changes, so I was thinking it might be more sensible to do an emersion-style “Status update” that’s isn’t strictly KDE related. We’ll see!

Plasma

[Feature] You can now tweak the pen pressure. This is useful if you prefer a specific style to your strokes, and you can’t change this directly in your preferred application. We plan to have add “soft” and “hard” presets to make using the curve easier. This is one of the last items paid for by our NLnet grant, so it’s exciting to see it finally come to fruition! [6.3]

[Feature] The stylus cursor is now hidden on the Calibration page but this will only work once your distribution switches to Qt 6.8. The credit belongs to Nicolas Fella as he’s the one who put in the work upstream in Qt! [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] The calibration accuracy is now improved slightly and refining your existing calibration further should work closer to how you expect. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Added more safety rails in the Calibration code to prevent possible crashes. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Made sure the calibration matrix is reset when you hit the “Defaults” button. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Now the Calibration window opens on the correct screen. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Now the action dialog doesn’t show up in the wrong place when your KCM scrolls a lot, like mine. [6.2.1]

Tokodon

[Feature] The welcome page when you first open Tokodon now looks much nicer and friendly. Hopefully it makes it clearer what Tokodon is, and also includes an even clearer badge to indicate what service it connects to. [24.12]

[Feature] Display public servers to ease registration for first-time Mastodon users. Right now there’s not any filtering options, but this is a huge improvement over an empty textbox and expecting users to know where to find a server. [24.12]

[Feature] My post tag display improvement was merged, which limits tags to one line. Note that this isn’t the final design we’ll go with, but they will no longer spill onto multiple lines. [24.12]

[Feature] It seems people want Cohost’s “Following” feed for Mastodon, and of course Tokodon could do it! So that’s what I did, and implemented Cohost’s “Following” feed. Albiet it’s currently limited due to the Mastodon API we have available, so it comes with two big caveats currently: You only see when people were last active by the day, and the pagination kinda sucks. [24.12]

[Feature] Added support for managing your social graph within Tokodon. For example if you don’t want someone to follow you anymore, or to quickly unfollow someone from your “Following” list. [24.12]

[Feature] Self-identified bots are now correctly identified on the profile page. [24.12]

[Feature] Due to limitations in the Mastodon API, we now put a button on the account page to denote there are more settings available online. [24.12]

[Feature] Changed the media tab to a grid view, making it easy to see a user’s media all at once. This works different compared to Mastodon Web as you can even filter by featured tag in this mode - but it’s not shown in this screenshot. [24.12]

[Feature] Laid the initial groundwork unread notifications. You now have a number indicator in the sidebar for unread notifications, and mark them as read. [24.12]

[Feature] Added list user management, so now you can use lists to their full advantage within Tokodon itself. [24.12]

[Feature] The warning iconography for “Content Warnings” are now removed, and replaced with “Content Notice” to denote it’s true and more generic purpose. [24.12]

[Feature] Added support for read markers, allowing you to continue reading where you last left off. [24.12]

[Feature] Now the authorship of links are displayed in link preview cards including a Mastodon account, if available. See this official Mastodon blog post for more details. [24.12]

[Feature] Added a way to view poll results before voting, finally. [24.12]

[Feature] Now it’s possible to see which poll options you voted for. [24.12]

[Feature] When clicking the “ALT” button, the media description pops up. This could be useful if you want to quickly view what the media is, before unhiding it. [24.12]

[Feature] Tokodon now supports displaying admin report, severed relationship and moderation warning notifications. These notifications can then be configured in the notifications settings as per usual. The details shown in the notifications can still use a bit of work, though. [24.12]

[Feature] The Notifications page is redesigned, to better suit non-English languages. I also added a button to go straight to Notification settings from here. [24.12]

[Feature] When you’re using Tokodon on a newer and emptier Mastodon account, the application is much friendlier with more helpful explanatory text everywhere. [24.12]

[Feature] Tokodon’s UI is now more responsive. The sidebar will appear on mobile devices if their screen is wide enough, like the Android tablet I use Tokodon on. [24.12]

[Feature] Timeline streaming and read markers can be turned off, if you prefer. [24.12]

[Feature] When viewing someone’s profile, a list of people you follow that you have in common is now shown. Hopefully this will make it easier to find new friends on Mastodon! [24.12]

[Feature] You can now edit your profile fields within Tokodon, without having to do it through Mastodon Web. [24.12]

[Feature] You can now see trending links (or “news”) on the Explore page, and also suggested users. I’m intentionally not showing a screenshot since it doesn’t look very good yet. [24.12]

[Bugfix] The font size in the post composer now follows your preferred font setting. [24.12]

[Bugfix] Tapping a post only works by tapping on the content itself, not the margins. [24.12]

NeoChat

[Feature] You can open location links in your preferred map application. This is the same Map application under the Applications KCM, so you can choose something like OpenStreetMap or even Marble. [24.12]

[Feature] The location chooser is now better in general. There’s a toolbar button to re-center the map, and if your device supports positioning then it can use that to center itself. [24.12]

[Feature] The security page is overhauled and now contains more relevant settings from other pages. [24.12]

[Feature] NeoChat’s welcome page when you first open it now looks a bit nicer. [24.12]

[Bugfix] Now when you only have friend invites and no messages a better icon is displayed, instead of none at all. [24.12]

[Bugfix] The buggy look of the date section header is finally fixed. [24.08.1]

Itinerary

[Feature] I added support for United Airlines reservations, so they can be imported to Itinerary and show up in KMail. Paired with Kalendar, this makes it really easy to keep track of my travel plans! I hope to add support for more North American airlines as I fly them, it’s surprisingly easy to write extractors. [24.08.1]

Frameworks

[Feature] Added support for separator actions in ToolBarLayout in Kirigami. [6.7]

[Feature] Added command names for “Remove Spaces” and “Keep Extra Spaces” in KTextEditor, for a secret future project. [6.7]

[Feature] You can now disable the scrollbar interactivity on ScrollablePages in Kirigami. [6.8]

[Feature] Initial support for QML bindings to the KTextAddons emoticons API. This means that eventually our applications will no longer need to have their own special emoji picker, and our Unicode data will be unified! [1.6]

Libraries

[Bugfix] The caption text in applications that use the Kirigami add-ons fullscreen image viewer is now copyable. I usually write alternative text for my artwork in Tokodon first, and then copy it elsewhere. So it’s really cool to be able to do this within Tokodon itself and not have to go through Mastodon Web. [1.6]

KDE Goals

The goal I championed for, “We care about your Input” was selected! You can check it out on the goals page on the KDE website, which also includes links to our public workboard, chat and the original proposal. Let’s make KDE Plasma the perfect desktop environment for artists! (And everyone else too, I guess 😜)

Akademy

I also attended Akademy this year! You can read more about it in it’s dedicated blog post if you missed it.

It’s been almost a year since I started this series, and I can’t believe I’ve done almost a dozen of these. People seem to really like them, and I’m really appreciative of that! Like I said in the beginning, there will most likely not be a next part as it will be rolled into someone else’s blog posts now.

If you want a hint as to what I’ll be about blogging next, you might want to remember where this all began.

I’m pretty interested in tablet stuff . Not because I think it makes senseo type long chunks of text using an on-screen keyboard, but they should make for a good drawing and painting experience. I’ve already written about the largest tablet I ever had, a 24″ Cintiq Pro and the Remarkable 2.

Today I’m going to run the gamut of the other tablets I’ve used…

Let’s start at eleven o’clock. That’s an iPad pro, first generation. I got it to see whether painting applications would work on it, and maybe port Krita to it. In the end, I pretty much only used it to read comics on. It’s top-heavy, the pen is top-heavy and I just didn’t like the painting applications I could get for it, like Procreate. I did create a little mock-up Qt-based painting application for testing purposes. But… I really, really hated the Apple Pencil. Like, really.  I also dislike iPadOS quite a bit.

Then, at two o’clock, the latest addition to the stable. The Remarkable Paper Pro. It’s bigger than the Remarkable 2, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. It’s supposedly the most advanced color e-ink panel there is, and there’s a front light. That makes it better than my Remarkable 2, which I now handed over to Irina, because without the front light, it’s unusable in anything but the brightest sunlight. That might just be my eyes, of course. The color, though… It’s fine for reading comics or pdf’s, if you like that seventies cheaply printed comic book look. Since the Remarkable runs its own OS, you cannot install Android apps, and since the OS changes quite a bit from version to version, third party apps ten not to work, or even brink the device, despite the device being remarkably open. (Sorry, pun intended.) The device does ooze quality, though! And the pen is great, really great.

Then, at four o’clock, there’s an Onyx Boox. It does run Android, and I wanted to see how well it would run Krita. Well, Krita runs, but the device is a bit slow. The pen is pretty nice, too, even if the cap is dinky. The color is worse than the remarkable’s one, but, again, if you’re reading counterfeit seventies Uncle Scrooge PDF’s, it’s fine. I mostly use this device to learn Hangul and read right-to-left manga. It’s too slow, and the display is too slow, for vertical scrolling manhwa.

Next, at six o’clock, the Samsung Tab S4 Android tablet that we got when we first ported Krita to Android. Despite being really old and not getting any OS updates anymore, it’s still doing fine. I mostly use it to read manga and manhwa using Nihom, and still for testing Krita. The pen is too small to be comfortable, but I only use it for testing. What’s really annoying is that every Saturday morning, I get a notification that Samsung’s legal stuff has changed — even though I don’t get any security updates.

Finally, at eight o’clock, the Frunsi Rubenstab. It’s a bit heavy, a bit small, a bit slow, but on the whole, it’s amazing. It runs Android. It’s mostly designed to be used in landscape mode. The pen is great, the display is good, the large bezels make it easy to hold and it comes with just about too much extra stuff, ranging from ant-static gloves to a brush-like implement.

KUnifiedPush provides push notifications for KDE applications. Push notifications are a mechanism to support applications that occasionally need to receive some kind of information from their server-side part, and where receiving in a timely manner matters. Chat applications or weather and emergency alerts would be examples for that. More technical details about KUnifiedPush are available on Volker's introduction post about KUnifiedPush.

KUnifiedPush provides three possible provider backends for push notifications:

• Ntfy
• Nextpush
• Gotify

The default provider of KUnifiedPush is Ntfy with unifiedpush.kde.org but you can change it to your own server in the System Settings.

Currently both NeoChat and Tokodon integrates with KUnifiedPush as both Matrix and Mastodon support UnifiedPush. There is also ongoing work for weather and emergency alerts.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Carl Schwan's GPG key.