After almost a year, I finally found some time to dive back into Krita. I stumbled upon the Memileo Impasto Brushes bundle, which mimics the texture and thickness of real paint—perfect for adding depth and dimension. Inspired to try them out, I created this quick one-hour painting.
I started this blog back in 2010. Back then I used Wordpress and it worked reasonably well. In 2018 I decided to switch to a static generated site, mostly because the Wordpress blog felt slow to load and it was hassle to maintain. Back then the go-to static site generator was Jekyll, so I went with that. Lately I’ve been struggling with it though, because in order to keep all the plugins working, I needed to use older versions or Ruby, which meant I had to use Docker to build the blog locally. Overall, it felt like too much work and for the past few years I’ve been eyeing Hugo - more so since Carl and others migrated most of KDE websites to it. I mean, if it’s good enough for KDE, it’s good enough for me, right?
So this year I finally got around to do the switch. I migrated all the content from Jekyll. This time I actually went through every single post, converted it to proper Markdown, fixed formatting, images etc. It was a nice trip down the memory lane, reading all the old posts, remembering all the sprints and Akademies… I also took the opportunity to clean up the tags and categories, so that they are more consistent and useful.
Finally, I have rewritten the theme - I originally ported the template from Wordpress to Jekyll, but it was a bit of a mess, responsivity was “hacked” in via JavaScript. Web development (and my skills) has come a long way since then, so I was able to leverage more modern CSS and HTML features to make the site look the same, but be more responsive and accessible.
When I switched from Wordpress to Jekyll, I was looking for a way to preserve comments. I found Isso, which is basically a small CGI server backed with SQLite that you can run on the server and embed it into your static website through JavaScript. It could also natively import comments from Wordpress, so that’s the main reason why I went with it, I think. Isso was not perfect (although the development has picked up again in the past few years) and it kept breaking for me. I think it haven’t worked for the past few years on my blog and I just couldn’t be bothered to fix it. So, I decided to ditch it in favor of another solution…
I wanted to keep the comments for old posts by generating them as static HTML from the Isso’s SQLite database, alas the database file was empty. Looks like I lost all comments at some point in 2022. It sucks, but I guess it’s not the end of the world. Due to the nature of how Isso worked, not even the Wayback Machine was able to archive the comments, so I guess they are lost forever…
For this new blog, I decided to use Carl’s approach with embedding replies to a Mastodon. I think it’s a neat idea and it’s probably the most reliable solution for comments on a static blog (that I don’t have to pay for, host myself or deal with privacy concerns or advertising).
I have some more ideas regarding the comments system, but that’s for another post ;-) Hopefully I’ll get to blog more often now that I have a shiny new blog!
Enjoy the holidays and see you in 2025 ü•≥!
In recent weeks we have been working on transferring LabPlot’s documentation to a new format.
We decided to move the documentation from the DocBook and MediaWiki format to the Sphinx/reStrcutredText framework. In our perception Sphinx offers a user-friendly and flexible way to create and manage documentation. Easy math typing and code formatting also come along. Additionally, Sphinx supports basic syntax checks, and modern documentation practices, such as versioning and integration with various output formats like HTML, PDF and ePub.
The new user’s manual is available on a dedicated page: https://docs.labplot.org. Please check it out and let us know what you think.
The manual still needs to be supplemented with new content, so we encourage you to contribute to the documentation, e.g. by fixing and adding new sections, updating images, as collaborative efforts can lead to a more comprehensive resource for everyone. Please check the Git repository dedicated to the documentation to find more details on how to help make it better.
We are happy to announce Kdenlive 24.12. This release focuses on bug fixes, improved stability, and usability enhancements across the board. Numerous crashes and glitches have been addressed, including issues with audio capture, effect zones, high DPI display rendering, and subtitle editing. Proxies, rotoscoping, and project management workflows have been significantly refined, resolving lags, incorrect EXIF orientation handling, and archiving problems. We’ve managed to sneak in some little nifty features as well like the ability to resize multiple timeline items, Shift + Del shortcut to extract clips from the timeline, added actions to quickly add Marker/Guides in a specific category and mixes (same track transitions) can be 1 frame long.
Under the hood, we’ve dropped support for Qt5 and now require Qt6, alongside updated dependencies (MLT 7.28 and KF 6.3). This release comes with a lot of code cleanups and refactored Whisper settings. Optimized threading and memory management. Additionally, fail-safe measures have been taken to prevent invalid project profiles and script names. Subtitles
We’ve added support for Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles, a widely used text-based format renowned for its flexibility in creating highly styled and customizable subtitles. ASS subtitles support advanced features such as font family, size, and color; text outlines and shadows; alignment and positioning; scaling and rotation; margins and spacing; and effects, including masking and other enhancements. This feature was developed by Chengkun Chen as part of Google Summer of Code (GSOC).
The new subtitle manager is now integrated with style management and has been divided into four sections: Files, Layers and Content, Style, and Info, which correspond to the four main components of ASS subtitles.
The new and powerful Subtitle Style Editor allows you to control all the styling capabilities of the ASS format.
The ASS format supports three types of effects: Banner, where the text scrolls sideways across the screen; Scroll, where the text moves vertically; and Karaoke, where each word is highlighted in sync with the audio.
Currently, only the Banner and Scroll effects are accessible through the user interface, but additional styling, including Karaoke effects, can be applied using ASS tags.
We’ve polished the Speech to Text features ensuring a smoother and more reliable experience. Seamless installation, GPU translation and threading issues have fixed. We’ve also resolved issues with the display of Vosk, Whisper and Seamless model folder sizes on Windows. Added the ability to update all virtual environment packages have updated to the latest version of Whisper. Lastly, the Whisper settings interface has been refactored.
With this version, we complete the final task of our fundraiser: builtin effects and a redesigned effects interface. Rendering of keyframe types like Bounce, Circular, and Exponential has been improved, alongside fixes for zone-based effects, rotoscoping lag, shape filter rendering, improved precision for time remapping, motion tracker models and prev/next seeking in monitor. It is also now possible to have single-frame mixes (same track transitions).
The new Effect Stack redesign enhances usability with clearer organization of keyframeable and non-keyframeable parameters, improved layout consistency, more compact and clean. We’ve also added info buttons in effect headers for quick access to documentation.
To make your workflow much more fluid, the new effects panel gives direct access to effect parameters, allowing to quickly and easily adjust them. Currently built-in effects are Transform and Flip for video clips and Volume for audio clips. Built-in effects can be enabled/disabled in the settings.
As usual there is always room for some eye candy, so we’ve added two color correction effects, HSL Primaries and HSL Range as well as GPS Effects (Images below displaying Distance, Altitude and Speed among many other values).
Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community. Donate now!
As usual, you will find very useful tips in our documentation website. You can also get help and exchange your ideas in our Kdenlive users Matrix chat room.
Kdenlive relies on its community, your help is always welcome. You can contribute by :
For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.
Today, we bring you a report on the brand-new release of the Maui Project.
To follow the Maui Project’s development or to just say hi, you can join us on our Telegram group @mauiproject
We are present on X and Mastodon:
Thanks to the KDE contributors who have helped to translate the Maui Apps and Frameworks!
You can get the stable release packages [APKs, AppImage, TARs] directly from the KDE downloads server at https://download.kde.org/stable/maui/
All of the Maui repositories have the newly released branches and tags. You can get the sources right from the Maui group: https://invent.kde.org/maui
With the previous version released, MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps were ported over to Qt6, however, some regressions were introduced and those bugs have now been fixed with this new revision version.
Currently, there are over 10 frameworks, with two new ones recently introduced. They all, for the most part, have been fully documented, and although, the KDE doxygen agent has some minor issues when publishing some parts, you can find the documentation online at https://api.kde.org/mauikit/ (and if you find missing parts, confusing bits, or overall sections to improve – you can open a ticket at any of the framework repos and it shall be fixed shortly after)
A brief list of changes and fixes introduced to the frameworks are the following:
For MauiKit Controls
For the MauiKit Frameworks
All of the frameworks are now at version 4.0.1
All of the apps have been reviewed for the regressions previously introduced in the porting to Qt6; those issues have been solved and a few new features have been added, such as:
** Index, Vvave, Pix, Nota, Buho, Station, Shelf, Clip, and Communicator versions have been bumped to 4.0.1
*** Strike and Fiery browser versions have been bumped to 2.0.1
**** Agenda and Arca versions have been bumped to 1.0.1
And as for Bonsai, Era, and other applications still under development, there is still not a ported version to Qt6 as of now
Although Maui Shell has been ported over to Qt6 and is working with the latest MauiKit4, a lot of pending issues are still present and being worked on. The next release will be dedicated fully on Maui Shell and all of its subprojects, such as Maui Settings, Maui Core, CaskServer, etc.
That’s it for now. Until the next blog post, that will be a bit closer to the 4.0.1 stable release.
The post Maui Release Briefing #7 appeared first on MauiKit — #UIFramework.
Ruqola 2.4.0 is a feature and bugfix release of the Rocket.chat messenger app.
Some of the new features in this release of Ruqola include:
Some bug fixing:
URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/ruqola/
Source: ruqola-2.4.0.tar.xz
SHA256: f532e421ae731dfc2e88b78ab61de01e0e367a31a4fe34497664a66fc737225c
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/jriddell.pgp
I recently saw one of my old branded “stripes” wallpapers in a screenshot of FreeBSD by someone on X, and that triggered me to make a new wallpaper in a similar style.
There was a call for artwork for the next Debian release – Trixie, and I made a modified version of one of my old wallpapers for it. As it was not chosen to be the default in Trixie, I decided to post it here for people who might like it.
It is, like all my wallpapers, a calm non-distracting one. (it is much prettier full-4k-size than in the thumbnail below)
If you like it, you can download it from Debian’s Wiki – in 1920x1080 and 4k versions. There is also a version with the Debian logo there for inspiration if you want to create a custom distribution-branded one.
The open source project I work on for the longest time is KDE and there more specific Kate.
This means I look at user bug reports for over 20 years now.
The statistics tell me our team got more than 9000 bugs since around 2001 (just for Kate, this excludes the libraries like KTextEditor that we maintain, too).
That is a bit more than one bug per day for over two decades.
And as the statistics show, especially in the last years we were able to keep the open bug count down, that means we fixed a lot of them.
Given we are a small team, I think that is a nice achievement.
We not just survived over 20 years, we are still alive and kicking and not just a still compiling zombie project.
Thanks a lot to all people that are contributing to this success!
Let’s keep this up in the next year and the ones following.
This release includes fixes for GreaseMonkey, VerticalTabs, Navigation bar (security icon), stability fixes, does not advertise the FTP support, fixes printing and more small fixes.
@sriru:matrix.org
GSoC
dvratil
*.user.js name.
(BUG: 467459)
Falkon now display more proper security icon in the url bar based on the state if the SSL certificate exceptions. (BUG: 420902)
The FTP support in Chomium and QtWebEngine which is based on it was removed a while ago. So with this update Falkon will not advertise to the system that it support FTP protocol and it will instead try to open other program to handle it. (BUG: 494222)
And more:
This release fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details.
Bugfixes:
Or install Kaidan for your distribution:
