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Review: The Wings Upon Her Back, by Samantha Mills

Publisher: Tachyon Copyright: 2024 ISBN: 1-61696-415-4 Format: Kindle Pages: 394

The Wings Upon Her Back is a political steampunk science fantasy novel. If the author's name sounds familiar, it may be because Samantha Mills's short story "Rabbit Test" won Nebula, Locus, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards. This is her first novel.

Winged Zemolai is a soldier of the mecha god and the protege of Mecha Vodaya, the Voice. She has served the city-state of Radezhda by defending it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, for twenty-six years. Despite that, it takes only a moment of errant mercy for her entire life to come crashing down. On a whim, she spares a kitchen worker who was concealing a statue of the scholar god, meaning that he was only pretending to worship the worker god like all workers should. Vodaya is unforgiving and uncompromising, as is the sleeping mecha god. Zemolai's wings are ripped from her back and crushed in the hand of the god, and she's left on the ground to die of mechalin withdrawal.

The Wings Upon Her Back is told in two alternating timelines. The main one follows Zemolai after her exile as she is rescued by a young group of revolutionaries who think she may be useful in their plans. The other thread starts with Zemolai's childhood and shows the reader how she became Winged Zemolai: her scholar family, her obsession with flying, her true devotion to the mecha god, and the critical early years when she became Vodaya's protege. Mills maintains the separate timelines through the book and wraps them up in a rather neat piece of symbolic parallelism in the epilogue.

I picked up this book on a recommendation from C.L. Clark, and yes, indeed, I can see why she liked this book. It's a story about a political awakening, in which Zemolai slowly realizes that she has been manipulated and lied to and that she may, in fact, be one of the baddies. The Wings Upon Her Back is more personal than some other books with that theme, since Zemolai was specifically (and abusively) groomed for her role by Vodaya. Much of the book is Zemolai trying to pull out the hooks that Vodaya put in her or, in the flashback timeline, the reader watching Vodaya install those hooks.

The flashback timeline is difficult reading. I don't think Mills could have left it out, but she says in the afterword that it was the hardest part of the book to write and it was also the hardest part of the book to read. It fills in some interesting bits of world-building and backstory, and Mills does a great job pacing the story revelations so that both threads contribute equally, but mostly it's a story of manipulative abuse. We know from the main storyline that Vodaya's tactics work, which gives those scenes the feel of a slow-motion train wreck. You know what's going to happen, you know it will be bad, and yet you can't look away.

It occurred to me while reading this that Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory told a similar type of story without the flashback structure, which eliminates the stifling feeling of inevitability. I don't think that would not have worked for this story. If you simply rearranged the chapters of The Wings Upon Her Back into a linear narrative, I would have bailed on the book. Watching Zemolai being manipulated would have been too depressing and awful for me to make it to the payoff without the forward-looking hope of the main timeline. It gave me new appreciation for the difficulty of what Tesh pulled off.

Mills uses this interwoven structure well, though. At about 90% through this book I had no idea how it could end in the space remaining, but it reaches a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Mills uses a type of ending that normally bothers me, but she does it by handling the psychological impact so well that I couldn't help but admire it. I'm avoiding specifics because I think it worked better when I wasn't expecting it, but it ties beautifully into the thematic point of the book.

I do have one structural objection, though. It's one of those problems I didn't notice while reading, but that started bothering me when I thought back through the story from a political lens. The Wings Upon Her Back is Zemolai's story, her redemption arc, and that means she drives the plot. The band of revolutionaries are great characters (particularly Galiana), but they're supporting characters. Zemolai is older, more experienced, and knows critical information they don't have, and she uses it to effectively take over. As setup for her character arc, I see why Mills did this. As political praxis, I have issues.

There is a tendency in politics to believe that political skill is portable and repurposable. Converting opposing operatives to the cause is welcomed not only because they indicate added support, but also because they can use their political skill to help you win instead. To an extent this is not wrong, and is probably the most true of combat skills (which Zemolai has in abundance). But there's an underlying assumption that politics is symmetric, and a critical reason why I hold many of the political positions that I do hold is that I don't think politics is symmetric.

If someone has been successfully stoking resentment and xenophobia in support of authoritarians, converts to an anti-authoritarian cause, and then produces propaganda stoking resentment and xenophobia against authoritarians, this is in some sense an improvement. But if one believes that resentment and xenophobia are inherently wrong, if one's politics are aimed at reducing the resentment and xenophobia in the world, then in a way this person has not truly converted. Worse, because this is an effective manipulation tactic, there is a strong tendency to put this type of political convert into a leadership position, where they will, intentionally or not, start turning the anti-authoritarian movement into a copy of the authoritarian movement they left. They haven't actually changed their politics because they haven't understood (or simply don't believe in) the fundamental asymmetry in the positions. It's the same criticism that I have of realpolitik: the ends do not justify the means because the means corrupt the ends.

Nothing that happens in this book is as egregious as my example, but the more I thought about the plot structure, the more it bothered me that Zemolai never listens to the revolutionaries she joins long enough to wrestle with why she became an agent of an authoritarian state and they didn't. They got something fundamentally right that she got wrong, and perhaps that should have been reflected in who got to make future decisions. Zemolai made very poor choices and yet continues to be the sole main character of the story, the one whose decisions and actions truly matter. Maybe being wrong about everything should be disqualifying for being the main character, at least for a while, even if you think you've understood why you were wrong.

That problem aside, I enjoyed this. Both timelines were compelling and quite difficult to put down, even when they got rather dark. I could have done with less body horror and a few fewer fight scenes, but I'm glad I read it.

Science fiction readers should be warned that the world-building, despite having an intricate and fascinating surface, is mostly vibes. I started the book wondering how people with giant metal wings on their back can literally fly, and thought the mentions of neural ports, high-tech materials, and immune-suppressing drugs might mean that we'd get some sort of explanation. We do not: heavier-than-air flight works because it looks really cool and serves some thematic purposes. There are enough hints of technology indistinguishable from magic that you could make up your own explanations if you wanted to, but that's not something this book is interested in. There's not a thing wrong with that, but don't get caught by surprise if you were in the mood for a neat scientific explanation of apparent magic.

Recommended if you like somewhat-harrowing character development with a heavy political lens and steampunk vibes, although it's not the sort of book that I'd press into the hands of everyone I know. The Wings Upon Her Back is a complete story in a single novel.

Content warning: the main character is a victim of physical and emotional abuse, so some of that is a lot. Also surgical gore, some torture, and genocide.

Rating: 7 out of 10

I recently sent a database to a client whose new Drupal website I'm building.

I'd populated it with some default users, nodes and menu links that they'd be able to review after they import the database into their hosting.

That worked well, but I've also recently been using the Default Content module which exports entities into YAML and saves them as code alongside the configuration.

Now I can install the website from scratch using the exported configuration to re-add the content types, block types, etc, and by enabling a custom module, all the default content will also be recreated.

I can tear the site down now and rebuild it as often as I like and avoid contaminating my environment with any rogue configuration or content changes.

Everything is reproducible.

I also wouldn't have needed to send the database to the client. They could have installed Drupal and followed the same steps I would do locally and got exactly the same result.

I like this approach and can see me using it more on future projects.

If your Python code isn’t fast enough, you have many options for compiled languages to write a faster extension. In this article we’ll focus on Rust, which benefits from:

• Modern tooling, including a package repository called crates.io, and built-in build tool (cargo).
• Excellent Python integration and tooling. The Rust package (they’re known as “crates”) for Python support is PyO3. For packaging you can use setuptools-rust, for integration with existing setuptools projects, or for standalone extensions you can use Maturin.
• Memory- and thread-safe, so it’s much less prone to crashes or memory corruption compared to C and C++.

In particular, we’ll:

• Implement a small algorithm in Python.
• Re-implement it as a Rust extension.
• Optimize the Rust version so it runs faster.

Read more...

Back from Akademy

Welcome to the first post in our "This Week in KDE Apps" series! You may have noticed that Nate's "This Week in KDE" blog posts no longer cover updates about KDE applications. KDE has grown significantly over the years, making it increasingly difficult for just one person to keep track of all the changes that happen each week in Plasma, and to cover the rest of KDE as well.

After discussing this at Akademy, we decided to create a parallel blog series specifically focused on KDE applications, supported by a small team of editors. This team is initially constituted by Tobias Fella, Joshua Goins and Carl Schwan.

Our goal is to cover as much as possible of what's happening in the KDE world, but we also encourage KDE app developers to collaborate with us to ensure we don't miss anything important. This collaboration will take place on Invent and on Matrix #this-week-kde-apps:kde.org.

We plan to publish a new blog post every Sunday, bringing you a summary of the previous week's developments.

This week we look at news regarding NeoChat, KDE's Matrix chat client; Itinerary, the travel assistant that lets you plan all your trips; the Gwenview image viewer; our sleek music player Elisa; KleverNotes, KDE's new note-taking application; the KStars astronomy software; and Konsole, the classic KDE terminal emulator loaded with features and utilities.

We also look at how Android support has been subtly improved, and the effort to clean up our software catalogue, retiring unmaintained programs and getting rid of cruft.

Let's get started!

NeoChat

Emojis in NeoChat are now all correctly detected by using ICU instead of a simple regex. (Claire, NeoChat 24.08.2, Link)

On mobile, NeoChat doesn't open any room by default any more, offering instead a list rooms and users. (Bart Ribbers, NeoChat 24.08.02, Link)

Filtering the list of users is back! (Tobias Fella, NeoChat 24.08.02, Link)

Itinerary

The seat information on public transport is now displayed in a more compact layout. (Carl Schwan, Itinerary 24.12.0, Link)

Gwenview

Rendering previews for RAW images is now much faster as long as KDcraw is installed and available (Fabian Vogt, Gwenview 24.12.0, Link)

Elisa

We fixed playing tracks without metadata (Pedro Nishiyama, Elisa 24.08.2, Link)

KleverNotes

The KleverNotes editor now comes with a powerful highlighter. (Louis Schul, KleverNotes 1.1.0, Link)

KStars

The scheduler will now show a small window popup graphing the altitude of the target for that night. (Hy Murveit, KStars 3.7.0, Link)

Konsole

You can set the cursor's color in Konsole using the OSC 12 escape sequence (e.g., printf '\e]12;red\a'). (Matan Ziv-Av, Konsole 24.12.0, Link)

Android Support

The status bars on Android apps now follow the colors of the Kirigami applications (Volker Krause, Craft backports, Link)

Cleaning Up

We have archived multiple old applications with no dedicated maintainers and no activity. This applies to Kuickshow, Kopete and Trojita, among others. Link

...And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog and KDE's Planet, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped achieve that status. As we grow, it’s going to be equally important that your support become sustainable.

We need you for this to happen. 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 help KDE continue bringing Free Software to the world.

A new release 0.0.3 of the RcppFastAD package by James Yang and myself is now on CRAN.

RcppFastAD wraps the FastAD header-only C++ library by James which provides a C++ implementation of both forward and reverse mode of automatic differentiation. It offers an easy-to-use header library (which we wrapped here) that is both lightweight and performant. With a little of bit of Rcpp glue, it is also easy to use from R in simple C++ applications. This release turns compilation to the C++20 standard as newer clang++ versions complained about a particular statement (it took to be C++20) when compiled under C++17. So we obliged.

The NEWS file for these two initial releases follows.

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2024-09-15)

• The package now compiles under the C++20 standard to avoid a warning under clang++-18 (Dirk addressing #9)

• Minor updates to continuous integration and badges have been made as well

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

This is the third article in a series of articles about the Batch API in Drupal. The Batch API is a system in Drupal that allows data to be processed in small chunks in order to prevent timeout errors or memory problems.

So far in this series we have looked at creating a batch process using a form and then creating a batch class so that batches can be run through Drush. Both of these examples used the Batch API to run a set number of items through a set number of process function callbacks. When setting up the batch run we created a list of items that we wanted to process and then split this list up into chunks, each chunk being sent to a batch process callback.

There is another way to set up the Batch API that will run the same number of operations without defining how many times we want to run them first. This is possible by using the "finished" setting in the batch context.

Let's create a batch process that we can run and control using the finished setting.

Setting Up

First we need to create a batch process that will accept the array we want to process. This is the same array as we have processed in the last two articles, but in this case we are passing the entire array to a single callback via the addOperation() method of the BatchBuilder class.

Read more

~$ mkdir moin-test ~$ cd moin-test ~/d/moin-test►python3 -m venv . 00:04 ~/d/moin-test►ls 2.119s 00:04 bin/ include/ lib/ lib64@ pyvenv.cfg ~/d/moin-test►source bin/activate.fish 00:04 ~/d/moin-test►pip install --pre moin moin-test 00:04 Collecting moin Using cached moin-2.0.0b1-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (4.7 kB) Collecting Babel>=2.10.0 (from moin) Using cached babel-2.16.0-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (1.5 kB) Collecting blinker>=1.6.2 (from moin) Using cached blinker-1.8.2-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (1.6 kB) Collecting docutils>=0.18.1 (from moin) Using cached docutils-0.21.2-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (2.8 kB) Collecting Markdown>=3.4.1 (from moin) Using cached Markdown-3.7-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (7.0 kB) Collecting mdx-wikilink-plus>=1.4.1 (from moin) Using cached mdx_wikilink_plus-1.4.1-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (6.6 kB) Collecting Flask>=3.0.0 (from moin) Using cached flask-3.0.3-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (3.2 kB) Collecting Flask-Babel>=3.0.0 (from moin) Using cached 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greenlet-3.1.0-cp312-cp312-manylinux_2_24_x86_64.manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl (626 kB) Using cached itsdangerous-2.2.0-py3-none-any.whl (16 kB) Using cached pytz-2024.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (508 kB) Using cached typing_extensions-4.12.2-py3-none-any.whl (37 kB) Using cached lxml-5.3.0-cp312-cp312-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl (4.9 MB) Using cached python_dateutil-2.9.0.post0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (229 kB) Using cached cffi-1.17.1-cp312-cp312-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (479 kB) Using cached six-1.16.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (11 kB) Using cached pycparser-2.22-py3-none-any.whl (117 kB) Installing collected packages: XStatic-svg-edit-moin, XStatic-Pygments, XStatic-JQuery.TableSorter, XStatic-jQuery-File-Upload, XStatic-jQuery, XStatic-Font-Awesome, XStatic-CKEditor, XStatic-Bootstrap, XStatic-autosize, XStatic, whoosh, pytz, passlib, typing-extensions, six, pygments, pycparser, markupsafe, Markdown, lxml, itsdangerous, greenlet, emeraldtree, docutils, click, charset-normalizer, cachelib, blinker, Babel, Werkzeug, sqlalchemy, python-dateutil, mdx-wikilink-plus, Jinja2, flatland, cffi, Flask, feedgen, cryptography, pdfminer.six, Flask-Theme, Flask-Caching, Flask-Babel, moin Successfully installed Babel-2.16.0 Flask-3.0.3 Flask-Babel-4.0.0 Flask-Caching-2.3.0 Flask-Theme-0.3.6 Jinja2-3.1.4 Markdown-3.7 Werkzeug-3.0.4 XStatic-1.0.3 XStatic-Bootstrap-3.1.1.2 XStatic-CKEditor-3.6.4.0 XStatic-Font-Awesome-6.2.1.1 XStatic-JQuery.TableSorter-2.14.5.2 XStatic-Pygments-2.9.0.1 XStatic-autosize-1.17.2.1 XStatic-jQuery-3.5.1.1 XStatic-jQuery-File-Upload-10.31.0.1 XStatic-svg-edit-moin-2012.11.27.1 blinker-1.8.2 cachelib-0.9.0 cffi-1.17.1 charset-normalizer-3.3.2 click-8.1.7 cryptography-43.0.1 docutils-0.21.2 emeraldtree-0.11.0 feedgen-1.0.0 flatland-0.9.1 greenlet-3.1.0 itsdangerous-2.2.0 lxml-5.3.0 markupsafe-2.1.5 mdx-wikilink-plus-1.4.1 moin-2.0.0b1 passlib-1.7.4 pdfminer.six-20240706 pycparser-2.22 pygments-2.18.0 python-dateutil-2.9.0.post0 pytz-2024.2 six-1.16.0 sqlalchemy-2.0.34 typing-extensions-4.12.2 whoosh-2.7.4 ~/d/moin-test[1]►pip install setuptools moin-test 0.241s 00:06 Collecting setuptools Using cached setuptools-75.0.0-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (6.9 kB) Using cached setuptools-75.0.0-py3-none-any.whl (1.2 MB) Installing collected packages: setuptools Successfully installed setuptools-75.0.0 ~/d/moin-test►moin create-instance --full moin-test 1.457s 00:06 2024-09-16 00:06:36,812 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:76 Directory /home/raj/dev/moin-test already exists, using as wikiconfig dir. 2024-09-16 00:06:36,813 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:93 Instance creation finished. 2024-09-16 00:06:37,303 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:107 Build Instance started. 2024-09-16 00:06:37,304 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:51 Index creation started 2024-09-16 00:06:37,308 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:55 Index creation finished 2024-09-16 00:06:37,308 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:166 Load help started Item loaded: Home Item loaded: docbook Item loaded: mediawiki Item loaded: OtherTextItems/Diff Item loaded: WikiDict Item loaded: moin Item loaded: moin/subitem Item loaded: html/SubItem Item loaded: moin/HighlighterList Item loaded: MoinWikiMacros/Icons Item loaded: InclusionForMoinWikiMacros Item loaded: TemplateSample Item loaded: MoinWikiMacros Item loaded: rst/subitem Item loaded: OtherTextItems/IRC Item loaded: rst Item loaded: creole/subitem Item loaded: Home/subitem Item loaded: OtherTextItems/CSV Item loaded: images Item loaded: Sibling Item loaded: html Item loaded: markdown Item loaded: creole Item loaded: OtherTextItems Item loaded: OtherTextItems/Python Item loaded: docbook/SubItem Item loaded: OtherTextItems/PlainText Item loaded: MoinWikiMacros/MonthCalendar Item loaded: markdown/Subitem Success: help namespace help-en loaded successfully with 30 items 2024-09-16 00:06:46,258 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:166 Load help started Item loaded: video.mp4 Item loaded: archive.tar.gz Item loaded: audio.mp3 Item loaded: archive.zip Item loaded: logo.png Item loaded: cat.jpg Item loaded: logo.svg Success: help namespace help-common loaded successfully with 7 items 2024-09-16 00:06:49,685 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:338 Load welcome page started 2024-09-16 00:06:49,801 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:347 Load welcome finished 2024-09-16 00:06:49,801 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:124 Index optimization started 2024-09-16 00:06:51,383 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:126 Index optimization finished 2024-09-16 00:06:51,383 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:114 Full instance setup finished. 2024-09-16 00:06:51,383 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:115 You can now use "moin run" to start the builtin server. ~/d/moin-test►ls moin-test 15.295s 00:06 bin/ intermap.txt lib64@ wiki/ wikiconfig.py include/ lib/ pyvenv.cfg wiki_local/ ~/d/moin-test►MOINCFG=wikiconfig.py moin-test 00:07 fish: Unsupported use of &apos=&apos. In fish, please use &aposset MOINCFG wikiconfig.py&apos. ~/d/moin-test[123]►set MOINCFG wikiconfig.py moin-test 00:07 ~/d/moin-test[123]►moin account-create --name test --email test@test.tld --password test123 Password not acceptable: For a password a minimum length of 8 characters is required. 2024-09-16 00:08:19,106 WARNING moin.utils.clock:53 These timers have not been stopped: total ~/d/moin-test►moin account-create --name test --email test@test.tld --password this-is-a-password 2024-09-16 00:08:43,798 INFO moin.cli.account.create:49 User c3608cafec184bd6a7a1d69d83109ad0 [&apostest&apos] test@test.tld - created. 2024-09-16 00:08:43,798 WARNING moin.utils.clock:53 These timers have not been stopped: total ~/d/moin-test►moin run --host 0.0.0.0 --port 5000 --no-debugger --no-reload * Debug mode: off 2024-09-16 00:09:26,146 INFO werkzeug:97 WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment. Use a production WSGI server instead. * Running on all addresses (0.0.0.0) * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000 * Running on http://192.168.1.2:5000 2024-09-16 00:09:26,146 INFO werkzeug:97 Press CTRL+C to quit

Kdenlive 24.08.1 is out and we urge all to upgrade. This version fixes recent playback and render regressions while fixing a wide range of bugs.

Full changelog:

• Fix reassigning timecode to project clip. Commit. Fixes bug #492697.
• Fix possible crash on undo/redo single selection move. Commit.
• Fix dragging transitions to a clip cut to create a mix. Commit.
• Fix multiple selection broken. Commit.
• Fix clip offset not appearing on selection in timeline. Commit.
• Ensure bin clips with effects disabled keep their effects disabled when added to a new sequence. Commit.
• Fix keyframe at last frame prevents resizing clip on high zoom. Commit.
• Fix effects/compositions list size. Commit. Fixes bug #492586.
• Fix compositions cannot be easily selected in timeline. Commit.
• Replace : and ? chars in guides names for rendering. Commit. See bug #492595.
• Don’t trigger timeline scroll when mouse exits timeline on a clip drag, it caused incorrect droppings and ghost clips. Commit. See bug #492720.
• Fix scolling timeline with rubberband or when dragging from file manager can move last selected clip in timeline. Commit. Fixes bug #492635.
• Fix adding marker from project notes always adds it at 00:00. Commit. Fixes bug #492697.
• Fix blurry widgets on high DPI displays. Commit.
• Fix keyframe param not correctly enabled on first keyframe click. Commit.
• Fix curveeditor crash on empty track. Commit.
• Ensure rendering with separate file for each audio track keeps the correct audio tag in the file name. Commit.
• Fix render project folder sometimes lost, add proper enums instead of unreadable ints. Commit. See bug #492476.
• Fix MLT lumas not correctly recognized by archive feature. Commit. Fixes bug #492435.
• Fix configure toolbars messing UI layout. Commit.
• Effects List: ensure deprecated category is always listed last. Commit.
• Fix tabulations in Titler (requires latest MLT git). Commit.
• Titler: ensure only plain text can be pasted, prepare support for tabulations (needs MLT patch). Commit.
• Don’t accept empty whisper device. Commit.
• Fix ffmpeg path for Whisper on Mac. Commit.
• Fix archive doesn’t save the video assets when run multiple times. Commit.
• Fix document notes timecode links may be broken after project reload. Commit. See bug #443597.
• Fix broken qml font on AppImage. Commit.
• Remove incorrect taskmanager unlock. Commit.

The post Kdenlive 24.08.1 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

I previously blogged about the difficulties in getting a good Wifi mesh network setup [1].

I bought the Kogan AX1800 Wifi6 Mesh with 3 nodes for $140, the price has now dropped to $130. It’s only Wifi 6 (not 6E which has the extra 6GHz frequency) because all the 6E ones were more expensive than I felt like paying.

I’ve got it running and it’s working really well. One of my laptops has a damaged wire connecting to it’s Wifi device which decreased the signal to a degree that I could usually only connect to wifi when in the computer room (and then walk with it to another room once connected). Now I can connect that laptop to wifi in any part of my home. I can now get decent wifi access in my car in front of my home which covers the important corner case of walking to my car and then immediately asking Google maps for directions. Previously my phone would be deciding whether to switch away from wifi due to poor signal and that would delay getting directions, now I get directions quickly on Google Maps.

I’ve done tests with the Speedtest.net Android app and now get speeds of about 52Mbit/17Mbit in all parts of my home which is limited only by the speed of my NBN connection (one of the many reasons for hating conservatives is giving us expensive slow Internet). As my main reason for buying the devices is for Internet access they have clearly met my reason for purchase and probably meet the requirements for most people as well. Getting that speed is not trivial, my neighbours have lots of Wifi APs and bandwidth is congested. My Kogan 4K Android TV now plays 4K Netflix without pausing even though it only supports 2.4GHz wifi, so having a wifi mesh node next to the TV seems to help it.

I did some tests with the Olive Tree FTP server on a Galaxy Note 9 phone running the stock Samsung Android and got over 10MByte (80Mbit) upload and 8Mbyte (64Mbit) download speeds. This might be limited by the Android app or might be limited by the older version of Android. But it still gives higher speeds than my home Internet connection and much higher speeds than I need from an Android device.

Running iperf on Linux laptops talking to a Linux workstation that’s wired to the main mesh node I get speeds of 27.5Mbit from an old laptop on 2.4GHz wifi, 398Mbit from a new Wifi5 laptop when near the main mesh node, and 91Mbit from the same laptop when at the far end of my home. So not as fast as I’d like but still acceptable speeds.

The claims about Wifi 6 vs Wifi 5 speeds are that 6 will be about 3* faster. That would be 20% faster than the Gigabit ethernet ports on the wifi nodes. So while 2.5Gbit ethernet on Wifi 6 APs would be a good feature to have it seems that it might provide a 20% benefit at some future time when I have laptops with Wifi 6. At this time all the devices with 2.5Gbit ethernet cost more than I wanted to pay so I’m happy with this. It will probably be quite a while before laptops with Wifi 6 are in the price range I feel like paying.

For Wifi 6E it seems that anything less than 2.5Gbit ethernet will be a significant bottleneck. But I expect that by the time I buy a Wifi 6E mesh they will all have 2.5Gbit ethernet as standard.

The configuration of this device was quite easy via the built in web pages, everything worked pretty much as I expected and I hardly had to look at the manual. The mesh nodes are supposed to connect to each other when you press hardware buttons but that didn’t work for me so I used the web admin page to tell them to connect which worked perfectly. The admin of this seemed to be about as good as it gets.

Conclusion

The performance of this mesh hardware is quite decent. I can’t know for sure if it’s good or bad because performance really depends on what interference there is. But using this means that for me the Internet connection is now the main bottleneck for all parts of my home and I think it’s quite likely that most people in Australia who buy it will find the same result.

So for everyone in Australia who doesn’t have fiber to their home this seems like an ideal set of mesh hardware. It’s cheap, easy to setup, has no cloud stuff to break your configuration, gives quite adequate speed, and generally just does the job.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/08/24/wifi-6e-mesh/

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Introduction to Diffy for Visual Regression Testing

As someone who works on multiple Drupal applications, I know it can be tricky to keep on top of all the available updates.

So, I'm building a SaaS project to display all your available updates in one place.

If you're a freelancer or work for an agency or any team that works on multiple Drupal applications, this could be useful for you.

If this is you, I'm looking for alpha testers to help me test it.

If you're interested, reply and let me know.

Python's Boolean operators are used for combining Boolean expressions and negating Boolean expressions.

Table of contents

1. Combining two if statements using and
2. Combining expressions with Boolean operators
3. Using or instead of and
4. Negating expressions
5. Embrace and, or, and not in your Boolean expressions

Combining two if statements using and

Here we have a program called word_count.py:

words_written_today = int(input("How many words did you write today? ")) if words_written_today < 50_000/30: print("Yay! But you need to write more still.") else: print("Congratulations!")

This program has an if statement that checks whether we've written enough words each day, with the assumption that we need to write 50,000 words every 30 days.

If our word count is under 1,666 words (50,000 / 30) it will say we need to write more:

$ python3 word_count.py How many words did you write today? 500 Yay! But you need to write more still.

We'd like to modify our if condition to also make sure that we only require this if today's date is in the month of November.

We could do that using Python's datetime module:

>>> from datetime import date >>> is_november = date.today().month == 11

That is_november variable will be True if it's November and False otherwise:

>>> is_november False

If we combine this with the code we had before, we could use two if statements:

from datetime import date words_written_today = int(input("How many words did you write today? ")) is_november = date.today().month == 11 if words_written_today < 50_000/30: if is_november: print("Yay! But you need to write more still.") else: print("Congratulations!") else: print("Congratulations!")

One of our if statements checks whether we're under our word limit. The other if statement checks whether it's the month of November. If both are true then we end up printing out that we still need to write more words. Otherwise we print a success message:

$ python3 word_count.py How many words did you write today? 500 Congratulations!

This works, but there is a better way to write this code.

We could instead use Python's and operator to combine these two conditions into one:

from datetime import date words_written_today = int(input("How many words did you write today? ")) is_november = date.today().month == 11 if is_november and words_written_today < 50_000/30: print("Yay! But you need to write more still.") else: print("Congratulations!")

We're using a single if statement to asking whether it's November and whether our word count is less than we expect.

Combining expressions with Boolean operators

Python's and operator is a …

Read the full article: https://www.pythonmorsels.com/boolean-operators/

I've a set of Alesis M1Active 330 USB on my desk to listen to music. They were relatively inexpensive (~100€), have USB and sound pretty good for their size/price.

They were also sitting on my desk unused for a while, because the left speaker didn't produce any sound. Well, almost any. If you'd move the volume knob long enough you might have found a position where the left speaker would work a bit, but it'd be quieter than the right one and stop working again after some time. Pretty unacceptable when you want to listen to music.

Given the right speaker was working just fine and the left would work a bit when the volume knob is moved, I was quite certain which part was to blame: the potentiometer.

So just open the right speaker (it contains all the logic boards, power supply, etc), take out the broken potentiometer, buy a new one, replace, done. Sounds easy?

Well, to open the speaker you gotta loosen 8 (!) screws on the back. At least it's not glued, right? Once the screws are removed you can pull out the back plate, which will bring the power supply, USB controller, sound amplifier and cables, lots of cables: two pairs of thick cables, one to each driver, one thin pair for the power switch and two sets of "WTF is this, I am not going to trace pinouts today", one with a 6 pin plug, one with a 5 pin one.

Unplug all of these! Yes, they are plugged, nice. Nope, still no friggin' idea how to get to the potentiometer. If you trace the "thin pair" and "WTF1" cables, you see they go inside a small wooden box structure. So we have to pull the thing from the front?

Okay, let's remove the plastic part of the knob Right, this looks like a potentiometer. Unscrew it. No, no need for a Makita wrench, I just didn't have anything else in the right size (10mm).

Still, no movement. Let's look again from the inside! Oh ffs, there are six more screws inside, holding the front. Away with them! Just need a very long PH1 screwdriver.

Now you can slowly remove the part of the front where the potentiometer is. Be careful, the top tweeter is mounted to the front, not the main case and so is the headphone jack, without an obvious way to detach it. But you can move away the front far enough to remove the small PCB with the potentiometer and the LED.

Great, this was the easy part!

The only thing printed on the potentiometer is "A10K". 10K is easy -- 10kOhm. A?! Wikipedia says "A" means "logarithmic", but only if made in the US or Asia. In Europe that'd be "linear". "B" in US/Asia means "linear", in Europe "logarithmic". Do I need to tap the sign again? (The sign is a print of XKCD#927.) My multimeter says in this case it's something like logarithmic. On the right channel anyway, the left one is more like a chopping board. And what's this green box at the end? Oh right, this thing also turns the power on and off. So it's a power switch.

Where the fuck do I get a logarithmic 10kOhm stereo potentiometer with a power switch? And then in the exact right size too?!

Of course not at any of the big German electronics pharmacies. But AliExpress saves the day, again. It's even the same color!

Soldering without pulling out the cable out of the case was a bit challenging, but I've managed it and now have stereo sound again. Yay!

PS: Don't operate this thing open to try it out. 230V are dangerous!

Cog is my tool for using bits of Python to generate content inside an otherwise static file. I used it in extreme ways to generate my GitHub profile page.

If you haven’t seen it before, you can customize your GitHub profile by creating a README.md in a repo named the same as your username. So my profile is rendered from nedbat/nedbat/README.md.

My profile has a bit of static text, but much of it is badges, blog posts, links to PyPI projects, and so on. The README.md is literally a Markdown file that can be displayed by GitHub, but it’s full HTML comments containing Python code that generates the content. The generation happens once a day in a GitHub action.

There are three kinds of lines in a file run through cog: static content, code that will generate content, and generated content. My README.md is lop-sided: it has 225 lines of code, 38 of static content, and 43 of generated content.

The badges are made with shields.io image URLs. To make this easier, there are Python functions for Markdown image syntax, for building shields.io badge URLs, and so on.

I can’t walk through all of the code, but I can show a few simplified versions to convey the idea. Read the file itself if you are interested in the full details.

This makes a shields.io URL:

def shields_url(
    label=None,
    message=None,
    color=None,
    label_color=None,
    logo=None,
):
    params = {"style": "flat"}
    url = "".join([
        "/badge/",
        quote(label or ""),
        "-",
        quote(message),
        "-",
        color,
        ])
    url = "https://img.shields.io" + url
    if label_color:
        params["labelColor"] = label_color
    if logo:
        params["logo"] = logo
    return url + "?" + urlencode(params)

This makes a Markdown image:

def md_image(image_url, text, link):
    return f'[]({link})'

Now we can make a Markdown badge:

def badge(text=None, link=None, **kwargs):
    return md_image(image_url=shields_url(**kwargs), text=text, link=link)

Anything print’ed will become part of the generated portions of the file. We can add a badge to the page with:

print(badge(
    logo="discord", logo_color="white", label_color="7289da",
    message="Discord", color="ffe97c",
    text="Python Discord", link="https://discord.gg/python",
))

There are other functions built on top of these to make Mastodon badges, Stack Overflow badges, a row of badges for a PyPI project, and so on.

Building the page ends up pulling data from 10 URLs, including a JSON summary of my blog for including blog posts. It’s satisfying to be able to have this update automatically instead of having to copy data around.

The result is a convenient mix of static and generated, and it was a fun exercise in light-touch automation.

This year’s Akademy was a special one for me in many ways.

First of all, instead of me travelling to Akademy it took place in my hometown of Würzburg, Germany. While I did have a hand in organizing it, most of the credit for it goes to Tobias and David. I had a lot of fun introducing people to my area and the concept of drinking wine on a bridge.

Qt Contributor Summit

Right before Akademy there was the Qt Contributor Summit, also in Würzburg (what a coincidence!). It was great to meet old and new Qt faces and talk about topics that are relevant to KDE, like the upcoming migration of KDE API documentation to qdoc.

Akademy Talks

This Akademy I gave two talks: One long one where I looked back at the Qt6/KF6 transition, what went well, what didn’t, and looked towards the future of what’s next for our software platform. Then I also had a lightning talk where I talked about the role of maintainers in open-source projects, why KDE doesn’t have traditional maintainers, and why that’s a good thing.

Besides that there were also a lot of interesting talks from other people, too many to mention right now. Speaking as a member of the program committee we had some tough decisions to make about what to include.

Goals

During the conference we announced the new set of Goals that were recently elected. I’m excited that my own proposal “Streamlined Application Development Experience” got selected and I’m looking forward to working on it with you. Besides that I also want to see how I can help out with the other elected goals: “We care about your input” and “KDE needs you 🫵”.

Akademy Awards

Another way this Akademy was special for me is that I was awarded with an Akademy award for my work on KDE Frameworks and Plasma. It feels great to get recognition for all the work I’ve been doing for the last seven years.

BOFs

During the week we had lots of smaller meetings and workshops (a.k.a BOFs, world’s most terrible acronym). I was leading two of them, one about my newly-elected goal where I was presenting my proposal in more detail, and one about the ongoing work of mine to migrate our API documentation to qdoc. Thanks to our sysadmin Ben we now have a website where the current (still very much WIP) state of the new API documentation page can be seen.

Other Things

What’s great about Akademy isn’t just talks and BOFs, it’s meeting people you only see online all year, talking to them in person, getting your code reviewed while staring on a screen together, chatting over random visions, complaining about things, laughing and enjoying things together, and wrapping up the day with a nice beer in your hand.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s Akademy, wherever that will be. Maybe it will be your place, organizing it is a lot less scary than you’d think ;).

Alright… this is published a bit later than usual due to travels and lack of energy. Anyway, let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-37.

Fediverse Discovery Providers

Tags: tech, fediverse, search

Nice to see such a project be funded. Let’s see how far this will go.

https://www.fediscovery.org/

2024: 0.5% of the Global Top 200 Websites Use Valid HTML

Tags: tech, html, quality

This is clearly not a great outcome. The browser monoculture probably doesn’t help.

https://meiert.com/en/blog/html-conformance-2024/

Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

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

This is bad. There was no way to know the book was AI generated and clearly it contained errors and lies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1etko9h/family_poisoned_after_using_aigenerated_mushroom/

Baiting the bot

Tags: tech, gpt, security

Looks like an interesting venue to attack systems which use LLMs.

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/baiting-the-bot

Building a browser using Servo as a web engine!

Tags: tech, web, browser, servo

It’s good to see servo getting closer to being usable in a browser. Makes me dream of Falkon or Konqueror being resurrected with Servo as the engine.

https://servo.org/blog/2024/09/11/building-browser/

Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison

Tags: tech, windows, unix, design, system, architecture

Interesting exploration of the NT design compared to Unix. There was less legacy to carry around which explains some of the choices which could be made. In practice similarities abound.

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design

The Insecurity of Debian

Tags: tech, debian, redhat, security

Interesting comparison of the difference in approaches between RedHat and Debian about default system hardening.

https://unix.foo/posts/insecurity-of-debian/

Linux’s Bedtime Routine

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, power

Ever wondered what happens when you suspend or hibernate on Linux? Here is a very deep exploration of the process from the kernel perspective.

https://tookmund.com/2024/09/hibernation-preparation

Operating system threads are always going to be (more) expensive

Tags: tech, multithreading, system, kernel

Good reminder of what OS threads entails and why they can’t be optimized much further. There’s so much you can do properly in userland.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/OSThreadsAlwaysExpensive

QUIC is not Quick Enough over Fast Internet

Tags: tech, networking, performance, quic

Looks like there is still some work required on QUIC. There is a path forward though.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145⁄3589334.3645323

JSON diff and patch

Tags: tech, json, tools

Looks like a very nice tool to deal with JSON files.

https://github.com/josephburnett/jd

proctrace - a high level profiler for process lifecycle events · Tinkering

Tags: tech, linux, profiling, tools, processes

Looks like an interesting little profiling tool. The article explains quite well how it’s been done. Can be a nice blueprint to make other such tools.

https://tinkering.xyz/proctrace/

Docker images using uv’s python

Tags: tech, python, packaging

It feels more and more that uv might turn out to be a game changer for the Python ecosystem.

https://mkennedy.codes/posts/python-docker-images-using-uv-s-new-python-features/

uv under discussion on Mastodon

Tags: tech, python, foss, community, business

There is a sane conversation going on around uv in the Python community. Here is a good summary.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/uv-under-discussion-on-mastodon/

What’s new in C++26 (part 1)

Tags: tech, c++

Clearly nice examples of better quality of life adjustments coming with C++26.

https://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2024/09/06/whats-new-in-c26-part-1/

Replace strings by views when you can

Tags: tech, c++, performance, memory

Good reminder that packing your data is generally the right move when squeezing for performances.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/09/09/replace-stdstring-by-stdstring_view-when-you-can/

Why I Prefer Exceptions to Error Values

Tags: tech, failure, exceptions

A couple of flaws in this article I think. For instance, the benchmark part looks fishy to me. Also it’s a bit opinionated and goes too far in advocating exceptions at the expense of error values. Still, I think it shows quite well that we can’t do without exceptions at all, even in the case of error values being available. In my opinion, we’re still learning how both can be cleverly used in code base.

https://cedardb.com/blog/exceptions_vs_errors/

Why some of us like “interdiff” code review systems (not GitHub) · GitHub

Tags: tech, version-control, git

A bit too much of a rant for my taste (even though I agree with the GitHub flaws). That said it illustrates nicely a use of git range-diff which is often overlooked.

https://gist.github.com/thoughtpolice/9c45287550a56b2047c6311fbadebed2

Scope Management 101 - by Kent Beck

Tags: tech, quality, agile, project-management, product-management

He is spot on again. The scope is what will allow to create flexibility in a fixed price project. This is what leads to the necessity to work incrementally.

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/scope-management-101

The Impossibility of Making an Elite Engineer

Tags: tech, engineering, career, learning

Interesting musing about what it takes for engineers to grow. Clearly there are a few paradoxes in there… that gives ideas to manage your career though.

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-impossibility-of-making-an-elite

Bye for now!

This week I attended the 2024 edition of KDE Akademy in Würzburg, Germany.

Akademy CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Andy Betts

Akademy is the people. Just a bit over 100km away from Würzburg I attended my very first Akademy in 2004. Twenty years later I still meet some of the same people, as well as some I had never met in person before. Some people I had met in several countries this year alone already, some I hadn’t seen again since before the pandemic. It’s a week of hanging out with friends.

I got back physically exhausted but refreshed with many ideas and a huge motivational boost, and I can’t wait to see what will come out of all the things discussed and started there.

A big thank you to everyone who helped to make Akademy happen, and to those of you who enabled people to attend with your donations!

Topics

I’ll try to list some of the topics I ended up involved in discussing, in talks, BoFs or elsewhere, but that’s bound to only scratch the surface. Also check out Planet KDE for more reports.

CI/CD and Craft

• If/how could we give tooling the ability to create MRs (e.g. for release automation)?
• How can we get CI coverage for Craft and Craft Blueprint changes? At least for the latter there are some ideas.
• Possible branching strategies for Craft Blueprints, to address the problem of all changes hitting the stable package builds immediately.
• Ways to work around or remove assumptions in our CI/CD infrastructure about the amount of parallel branches. Usually we have a development and a release branch, but there are cases of multiple still active release branches (e.g. Plasma LTS, or overlaps during the Gear release cycle).
• Removing the strong version locking between the Android CI image and the target Qt version.
• Using Qt’s upcoming SBOM tooling to generate package manifests, to automate collecting and maintaining information about 3rd party dependencies we ship in application packages (for FOSS license compliance).

See also the CI/CD BoF notes and Ben’s, Hannah’s, Julius’ and my talk.

KWallet successor

How to evolve our password and credential store was also a topic, following previous discussions at GPN22 and FrOSCon.

There generally seem to be two different types of data that need their own handling and consumer-facing APIs:

• Usernames and passwords, passkeys or 2FA secrets that you might want to sync between different devices.
• Device-bound secrets that are not shareable, like OAuth tokens or XDG portal secrets.

Building blocks for parts of this exist, but even when putting everything together there’s still gaps.

Migration from the status quo will also be challenging, as many different things need to happen in the right order, not all of which are under our control.

Localization

• Qt 6.6 added QQmlEngine::markCurrentFunctionAsTranslationBinding() which should allow us to make our i18n QML functions automatically reevaluate on language changes. That would be an enormous step forward for making runtime language changes work in QML applications, but it still requires a creative solution for dependency issues its use would cause in KF::I18n.
• Debugged various cases of our Android apps mixing up translations from different languages. All of that seems to trace back to a wrong fallback handling of non-US English-language locales (we should prefer en_US as a fallback in that case, but end up using secondary languages first instead). And newer Android versions seem to have a separated region from the language settings, making it easier to hit this issue.

Static builds

Being able to build our libraries and applications statically has been on the wishlist since a long time. Work has happened into that direction, but we haven’t gotten to the point to put all this together yet.

There’s now a stronger need for this though, with the first bits of iOS support landing in Craft, and Qt on iOS can only be linked statically.

Emergency alerts

Thursday morning the Plasma Mobile BoF coincided with the yearly test of Germany’s emergency alert systems. And while we didn’t manage to capture the cell broadcast with ModemManager, the push notification based system worked.

Public emergency alert notification.

I also got a data feed for New Zealand earthquake warnings and we discussed ways to make push notifications work on Linux mobile devices even in power save mode, something that will benefit not just the emergency alerts.

Android

• There’s a new Qt JNI array API coming, similar to something we already have in the KAndroidExtras code. More of that in Qt should help reducing the dependencies on the Android platform calendar integration, making it easier to move that to KF::CalendarCore.
• All pieces of the window insets color API have been merged, so the Android status and navigation bars now follow the Breeze style color for KDE apps.

Android status bar matching application colors.

• There’s agreement on retiring the KDE Frameworks 5 Android CI coverage, which would remove quite some maintenance burden. We don’t use this anywhere anymore, and external users of KF5 on Android are exceedingly unlikely as Qt5 will likely not produce APKs anymore which are in line with Google Play store guidelines.
• We discussed ideas for a cross-platform alarm/wakeup API, to be added to KIdleTime. That is, timers that also work while the application isn’t running, or even when the device is in sleep mode.

Kongress

Kongress generally worked, and given the incoming wishes for additional features it seems it was actually used.

We did learn though that rolling out updates to event specific content for the map needs to be possible fairly quickly, this tended to need manual CDN flushes too often.

I also got a chance to try the indoor localization solution from the team we met at 37C3 in the Akademy venue. It’s unfortunately not Free Software, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see what performance/precision can be achieved without special infrastructure in the building, with just the existing radio beacons, inertial sensors and a building map. Still a bit out of reach for us, but if the past is any indication we’ll eventually get there as well I guess.

See also my talk on OSM indoor venue maps in Kongress.

Itinerary

Conference travel of course also results in work around KDE Itinerary:

• Nobody got lost on the way to Akademy due to Itinerary issues it seems. That’s a big relief.
• As this was my first chance of field testing the new two-level timeline view, a bunch of fixes and improvements followed from that.
• Identified why opening the bus stop map showed the full city map instead in Würzburg (it’s the fault of the “Ringpark”…).
• Improved stop point/quay display for large bus stations on the map.
• Andy Betts designed new public transport icons, replacing the current incoherent mix of different styles.
• As one attendee got Frankfurt Hahn’ed we are now looking into having Itinerary warn about airports with SEO names.

See you next time!

Looking forward to the next opportunity to meet all of you again! At least for some I don’t have to wait very long, considering the Nextcloud Community Conference 2024 today and the Matrix conference next week in Berlin.

Technically Akademy isn’t part of Plasma, but most of KDE’s movers and shakers were here in Würzburg for Akademy 2024 this week, so the list of technical work merged was understandably light; we were all busy with conference things! I’ve already blogged about my Akademy experience separately; check it out here if you’re interested.

Despite the pressures of Akademy, quite a few things happened anyway, including Plasma’s release manager Jonathan Riddell releasing a beta version of Plasma 6.2 while at the conference. I’m very happy with Plasma 6.2. It feels great already to me. I had no hesitation pulling down git master and compiling everything while at the airport waiting for my return flight, and indeed everything was fine. But please do test the beta and report bugs!

In addition some code work also got merged; check it out below! Expect the pace of work to pick up next week and beyond as we start implementing all the cool stuff we talked about during the conference.

Notable UI Improvements

Immutable tool view tabs (as opposed to tabs for documents) now have a fancy new style! We’ll be opting into it over the course of Plasma 6.3 and other following gear and Frameworks releases, and replacing other tab-like-but-not-actually-a-tab UI elements with the real one (Carl Schwan, Plasma 6.3.0. Link):

Pressing the Meta+B shortcut to switch power profiles now cycles through them as you continue to press the key, rather than showing an overlay from which you would choose an exact profile (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

System Settings’ Login Screen (SDDM) page no longer shows blurry preview images, and the dialogs that contain them have been updated to use the new modern dialog style (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

The alternative actions in the context menus of Plasma’s “Peek at Desktop” and “Minimize All” widgets are now expressed comprehensibly rather than being static and showing a checkbox, which made them look like persistent settings (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Pressing Shift+delete to force-quit a process using SIGKILL in System Monitor now tells you that this is what will happen, rather than leaving it a secret (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Throughout System System Settings’ grid views, all elided text labels now appear in a tooltip on hover, rather than only some of them (Han Young, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a high-priority Plasma crash that could happen when certain apps did certain weird things with their windows in a way that the Task Manager didn’t approve of. This also fixed a similar bug whereby certain apps might be missing from the Task Manager (Demetrius Belai, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an issue that could cause certain added keyboard layouts to not appear in all of Plasma’s various lists of keyboard layouts you can switch between (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Custom shortcuts with commands that result in their .desktop files having the same file name as an app’s own .desktop file are no longer capable of shadowing the app in software that fails to respect the NoDisplay=True key in apps’ .desktop files (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

In Plasma’s wallpaper chooser view, image previews no longer sometimes have single-pixel lines gaps around some of the edges when using certain fractional scale factors (Méven Car, Frameworks 6.6. Link)

Special KDE-specific keywords of apps and System Settings pages are now translatable into German (Alexander Lohnau, right now! Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 1 Very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 32 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 73 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Fixed a performance bottleneck in KWin that caused it to sometimes unnecessarily copy textures across GPU devices on multi-GPU systems. This fix also happens to make Plasma Mobile work on the Librem 5 phone (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

How You Can Help

Plasma 6.2 just branched for the beta release, so please test it! We have focused a lot on stability for this release and want to make sure we haven’t missed anything big before the final release in about a month. Your bug reports do not go into a black hole; we triage every one! So enthusiastic testing and bug reporting is encouraged.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover additional ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.

I attended KDE’s Akademy and the Qt Contributor Summit that happened this year. I also completed my personal goal of giving a talk at a conference! These conferences were back-to-back and were located in Würzburg, Germany during the 5th-8th of September.

Somewhere inside Würzburg. Travel #

I stopped in IAD before flying into FRA, and the journey was fortunately uneventful compared to last year. My IAD->FRA flight was delayed by an hour due to (another plane’s) mechanical issues and the ATC was backed up. When they announced that they were “sequencing” departures, I was surprised to find them actually putting all of the departing planes in a physical line on the runway.

On the IAD->FRA flight, they were having some troubles with the satellite connection and tried restarting the in-flight entertainment. While that probably did not please many of the people enjoying their movies and shows, it did reveal the in-flight entertainment system for United flights were running Android. Boo, that’s no surprise.

The trains I were on weren’t too late and I quickly arrived in Würzburg after a transfer to Frankfurt Central Station. To save some money, I purchased a Deutschland-Ticket which covered most local transportation, including the buses in Würzburg proper. The ticket was only 50€, which if I had paid for the trains separately would mean at least 65€! I didn’t bother calculating how much bus fares would’ve cost. So the D-Ticket was definitely worth it during my stay.

At one of the stations outside the airport. Yes, I did take the S-Bahn in the wrong direction…

On my returning overseas flight, the plane was half-empty. So I had a row with window seat all to myself, it was pretty sweet! Is this how flying first-class feels?

A full row to myself! Hotel #

I stayed in Hotel Amberger, close to the central station. It’s a cute little hotel, housed in a building that was clearly repurposed (my guess is some kind of hospital.) The hotel rooms are dead simple, but I didn’t really care. The first few days were really hot and the lack of a central air conditioning was really noticeable. Once the weather cooled off, the room was much more hospitable.

My hotel room.

The hotel room had a TV, but mine did not work. No German TV for me this time! There was multiple bus stops near the hotel, so it was very easy to get to the Akademy venue. The QtCS venue was within walkable distance, so I walked there each day.

Qt Contributor Summit #

This being my first Qt event, I didn’t really know what to expect. The venue is hosted in this expensive-looking conference center ( Congress Centrum Würzburg) near the river. There was catered food, which included lunch and coffee breaks. Dinner was served on the first day. I noticed the wait staff and looked young so I wonder if they were local culinary students.

The talks were a mixed bag of topics, but I still found value going there. Most of the non-Qt people there were either KDE or KDE adjacent, of course. One of the cooler things for me was meeting a bunch of Qt people in person. Of whom I only knew by name, mentioned in e-mails and Gerrit, so on. Lots of people recognized me by my work on qmlformat, so that was neat.

The talk that interested me the most was Vladimir Minenko discussing “QML Next”, plans to use languages other than C++ with QML. Some languages discussed were Swift, and C#. Curiously Rust was absent, which he did duly note. They did mentioned they were hiring a developer to work on Rust support later this year. The talk itself the concept was a bit vague, but that’s because they’re still in the exploratory stage.

If you’re interested in the other talks in this conference, there are notes and slides available from the Qt Wiki.

An unrelated picture of a tram, because I didn’t have any pictures of QtCS. Akademy #

Akademy was hosted in Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, which was much farther than the venue for QtCS. That necessitated travel by bus, but that was also covered by the D-Ticket. The talks were hosted in two identical-looking lecture halls. On a bus heading towards Akademy one day, I noticed one of the screens didn’t work. Of course, I had to take a picture…

The bus screen in some sort of debug mode.

My talk was about integrating C++, Qt, Rust (and KDE Frameworks.) For proper disclosure, this talk is on behalf of my company for spreading the word of our cxx-qt library which eases integration of all of these technologies. I think was a bit too rough structurally but lots of people seem to enjoy it. One of my goals was to raise awareness of the usage of Rust you can find in KDE today, and that seemed to be successful! I want to express my gratitude to my fellow colleague Leon Matthes for helping review my slides. Also thanks to Darshan Phaldesai for his KDE work featured in the presentation.

A picture of me hastily giving my presentation.

The results of my talk I think were really cool! Within the KDE community, there seems to be some interest in picking up Rust. Lots of KDE developers were in varying stages of Rust interest. No one told me how stupid it was to glue the two together, so the general vibe I think is “it’s pretty neat, let’s see how well this works.” Unfortunately due to technical issues my talk was not recorded properly. A colleague recorded my talk on his phone, and will hand that over to the Akademy organizers soon. So please be patient, but the slides are available online while you wait.

Oh yeah, and the KDE goal I’m championing “We care about your Input” was selected! I’m pretty excited to keep hacking away on graphics tablets in KDE Plasma. Thanks to NLnet for sponsoring us to work on that, along with Wayland accessibility improvements.

One of my favorite talks was Xaver Hugl’s “What even is color?”. The work he’s doing in KWin is excellent, and I think he did a really great breakdown to understand what color management is.

Day Trip #

In the day trip we went to Rothenburg. It was rainy, cold and miserable most of the day but we still had fun. One of my favorite parts was climbing up the tower to get an excellent view of the town.

A picture of the tower. A view from the top of the tower.

That’s all I have to say about Akademy + QtCS, I had lots of fun this year! I’m happy that I was able to attend the talks this year, and meet a lot of people I missed last year. I hope everyone else were able to return home, and I’m excited to see what event I’ll attend next. See you!

Akademy is this yearly thing where bunch of KDE people go to talk about and work on KDE software. I had never been in one before, but this year I managed to make it there! This year Akademy was held at the city of Würzburg. This was also my first time in Germany, which is the furthest I've ever been from home.

I also had my wife Jenny with me, since if I had gone alone I would have gotten lost in some random mountain somewhere, or started a new life at the dark corners of Frankfurt airport, completely confused.

Friday, the day of flying (or so I thought)

On Friday the 6th, we left from Oulu to Helsinki first. Hop on plane at 14.30 and- Oh, a small delay.

Eh, it's fine, we hopped on the plane at 16.00 and-...

The flight was canceled.

So, we wait til like 19.30 or something to get to Helsinki. But of course, our flight from Helsinki to Germany had already left! No worries though, the next flight to Germany would leave soon.

Wait, what do you mean it leaves at 7.00?

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhggggggggggg....

Well, we got paid airport hotel room with paid dinner and breakfast. So we slept at Helsinki the first night. We were supposed to be at Würzburg at 23.55 or something, but of course not. Oh well, with some effort I might be able to make to the event, although I would miss the first few talks.

I had the most saddest (but still good) slab of lasagne at very sad and empty airport hotel restaurant. Very frustrated by everything. Sure it'll get better, right?

Saturday, the day of sleep deprivation

This time the airplane actually started to fly, instead of getting canceled for scandalous airplane activities, and we were on route to Frankfurt pretty soon. I spent some time in the airplane just working on my never-ending game project.

At Frankfurt, we got our luggage and went to the funny ICE train, which was a bit late. Apparently being late is some German train thing, I don't really understand it, but we have similar thing at Finland so it wasn't that shocking.

At the train, we were exhausted with our 4h of sleep due to stress not allowing us to sleep, so we just find some seats and sit down. Five minutes later some chap tells us to go away, so we stay up standing for the next 1h 30min next to the exit doors in some midcabin thing.

I wanted to watch some of the Akademy streams at this point, but I was mostly focusing on staying up.

Eventually, we finally reach the Burg of Würz. First impressions were that it looks really nice and.. What the hell is that? A.. mountain? Wow, they can be THAT tall??? (Authors note: Finland is very, VERY flat).

Also it was hellishly hot. The most I saw was 32 celsius. It was painful, I was sweating all the time and it was not fun.

We walk to our hotel room at Mercure hotel, which was really nice by the way. At this time, Akademy was having an incredible luncheon together, so me and Jenny decided to find something to eat. We found this place that was all about avocados, and I had something called powerbowl, which was brilliant.

After that, we began to study the incredibly complex thing that is the German bus system and started our trip towards the Akademy venue.

Aktually at Akademy

Me and my blurry sleep deprived brain walk to the venue and first off I meet familiar people. A lot of familiar people. Many hugs and "Oh you finally made it!"-s were shared. Jenny was with me there as well and it was fun to introduce her to my friends.

I honestly don't remember much about the day. It was quite a blur. But it was cool and I talked a lot.

I stole a lot of stickers and listened some talks, which I can barely remember... But I do remember which ones:

• Arjen's talk about Union KDE styling theme thing, that is super cool.
• Harald talked about of our own new possible shiny OS called KDE OS. Or 🍌 OS. I found this really exciting.
• A lot of lighting talks, where Nicole's talk about teaching lil kiddos how to install Linux with KDE software on old PC's to bring them back alive.
  • I think this talk was my favorite. It was very wholesome, motivating and I'd like to have similar kind of teaching event at home. No promises, but.. Maybe!

During this day I also began to give out salmiakki to people, since I had been well prepared. It was kinda fun to see peoples reactions, especially if they had never heard of it before.

Then it was back to sleep at the hotel.

Sunday, I managed to do things

On sunday I was at Akademy pretty much the whole day. Again, I listened bunch of talks, met more people and we had many good chats about LTS distros, KDE PIM, Kwin, Flatpak... And many other things I can't remember.

I listened Carl's KDE Apps Initiative talk which was very motivating for me, since I've wanted to make a KDE app for a while. A gaming related lil thing.

After the fun group photo and delicious lunch, I chatted more and wandered about the venue.

There was a talk about daily driving Plasma Mobile and I found it very cool, and we had a chat about the Plasma Mobile afterwards. Apparently my Fairphone 5 could run PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile pretty well already, but I am not yet ready to commit to such a change with my mobile device.

Last I listened Xaver's talk about what color is in computers. I learned that sRGB is a lie and gasped audibly, then heard a lot of words related to color systems I didn't really always understand.. But I found the talk still quite interesting and informative.

The evening was then again a bit of a blur, with sponsors lightning talks and Akademy Awards (congrats to winners btw).

Very interesting day, but I've always been bad when it comes to learning from listening. I learn by doing.

Of course the day wasn't complete without me going to wait bus with my t-shirt and shorts (since it was hot again), and it started pouring like heck. I was soaked when I got to the bus, then at the last stop I had to walk 1km to the hotel in the rain. Ah well, it was warm so I didn't mind too much.

Monday, I skipped the class

On monday I was so exhausted by Everything:tm: I decided to just chill with my wife and we went around Würzburg, buying food and chocolate.

I spent that day just recharging my social batteries. And I ate some Flammenkuchen, which was delicious!

At some point when Jenny is done editing and uploading her video, I will make separate post for it. Then you can see what Würzburg is like, and hear what she did during the trip.

Tuesday, I flocked together with the birds

Like on monday, on tuesday as well Akademy had these events called "BoFs" which is abbreviation of Birds of a Feather. Because "Birds of a Feather Flock Together". I don't know why it's called that, but anyhow, I participated a few of them:

• New design system bof
  • Very interesting discussions and ideas even I know nothing about design
  • I was mostly hoping to help people there with my programmer side of knowhow, as someone who has touched the Breeze styles codebases
• Tiling in kwin bof
  • We mulled over what we could do to make tiling in kwin even better
  • I have this mini task for myself where I try to make tiles split automatically when a window is dragged on top of the other
• Fedora KDE bof
  • I was just mostly curious whats up with Fedora KDE at the moment
  • I also wanted to give my praise for Fedora KDE, it's been my daily driver for many months now and it's been really good
  • Couple of my friends use it too due to my recommendation and they're having good time gaming on it! :)

To wrap up the evening, I had a fancy dinner with my friends. What was quite a culture shock to me was that after 22.00 the streets were practically completely empty. It was eerily quiet. At home we would have had few drunks about making noise, but at Germany there was just.. Silence.

Wednesday, to home again

Due to having two lizards and them needing a petsitter, and said petsitter not being able to be there the whole week, we left a bit early so we missed the daytrip and the last bof day.

Bit early being our flight from Frankfurt was leaving around 7.00. So we woke up at 5.00.

And when I wake up I saw a message in my phone saying: "Hi your flight is canceled"

Ah. Fun. If all had gone to plan, we would've been at home around 17.00. But instead, we were home at ~2.00.

We had to live at Frankfurt airport for ~7 hours, saw a lot of police with weapons (it was really scary to me, I've never seen weaponry like.. that openly), there was some suspicious luggage that got a whole McDonalds covered in "dont go here" tape and more police.

Urghgfhklfg. Scary.

Eventually we luckily made it to Helsinki and then back to Oulu and I didn't need to type out this blogpost from some corner of the airport.

Conclusions

Akademy was really fun event. I can hardly describe how fun it was. It's been quite a blur due to traveling issues and thus me being completely stressed and exhausted, but I still had many fun chats with everyone.

It was really nice to finally see who the people behind the internet names are and have talks with them, be it just random topics or KDE topics. I met people who I had never met before and shared many chats, laughs and information with them.

I learned quite a lot about what's going on in our KDE ecosystem and even outside of it, how we all interact. But I think the biggest thing I learned was that events like Akademy are crucial for the motivation and wellbeing of the KDE community. It helps us stay together, keep our bonds strong, be it KDE folk itself or people working with us, and keep us being awesome at what we do: Making computers do cool things, for free, for productivity and for fun.

Sorry about no photos, I have basically nothing: I am very bad at taking photos because I simply don't remember.

I love KDE and if you love KDE too, and if it's at all possible, visiting Akademy is well worth it!

See you at the next one, and apologies for the all-over-the-place-rambly-travel-post. Hope you find it a good read anyway.

Thanks for reading!