FLOSS Project Planets

55th issue of Andrei Neagoie's must-read monthly Python Newsletter

aider: Console-based LLM pair programming tool, to edit code in your local git repository.

Links:

• Repo
• Home

napar: A fast, interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for annotation and analysis of large images.

Links:

• Repo
• Home
• Fund

Plane: Modern, self-hostable issue and product roadmap tracker. An alternative to JIRA, Linear, and Asana.

Links:

• Repo
• Home

Codex: Self-hostable comic archive browser and reader.

Links:

• Repo
• Demo

One of the skills everyone needs to have is asking for help. Whether that’s in our work, our education, or our personal lives, we all need help from time to time. We are focused on work here, but this same basic rules apply in all aspects of our lives.

The right time to ask for help is, like so many things, a balancing act. Struggling through a complex issue can be a great way to learn something new. But often we can short cut that learning by simply asking the right questions at the right time.

On the flip side, if we ask too early not only do we risk missing a chance to build deep understanding, we also risk frustrating colleagues by asking them to do our job.

One short cut for when you need to ask for help is if another team member asks if you have already asked. Generally, I want to have called for support before my PM suggests it. By then they are frustrated that I haven’t already solved whatever the issue is solo.

Signs You Might Need Help

Given my current role and skill set, I’m often the person who gets called when a project goes sideways. That means I see a lot of places where someone didn’t call for help until they were in crisis. While that’s going to happen to us all from time to time, it’s better to call for help when the problem is small. If you want until the project starts burning down around you, it’s way too late.

You might need help if:

• You have absolutely no idea what to do next.
• You are about to re-design a large portion of your project to get around a challenge.
• You have spent more than a day pounding on a problem without success.
• You are avoiding working on a task, because you don’t know how to get started.
• You are about to use a mode/tool/technique that everyone says is a bad idea.
  • In Salesforce that can mean things like:
    • loading data in serial mode
    • setting batch size to 1
    • using view all data in your tests.
  • In Drupal that can mean things like:
    • hacking a module
    • loading data in the theme layer
    • writing raw SQL queries

What to do Before Asking for Help

As I said before, asking for help is a balance: you can wait too long, or you can ask too soon. The real trick is hitting the sweet spot.

There are several things you should always do before taking another person’s time.

• Google It! I kinda can’t believe I have to say that, but not everyone bothers.
• Make sure you can explain the question clearly. If you don’t know where you got stuck, how can I help you get unstuck? And thinking it through might make the answer obvious.
• Develop a theory. When asking for help, it can be useful to pose a theory about an approach. Even if you’re wrong it may help me understand your thinking.
• Try a few things. Experimenting with what’s going wrong can help you formulate your question, and may help me short cut my research if you have eliminated obvious issues.
• Explain the problem to your dog, cat, rabbit, stuff animal, etc. As someone who spends time being a human rubber duck, I can often tell when someone tried to explain it once already.

Where/Who to Ask for Help

For me, the hardest part is knowing who to ask.

As a consultant I try to avoid asking questions in places clients may see it. Our clients pay for us to be experts, they do not want to see us asking questions in public – particularly if the question has a simple answer.

As a Salesforce MVP, one of my favorite perks is the MVP Slack channel, where we ask each other questions that run the full range of complexity. While access to a community that hard to access, and that advanced, is a privilege there are other ways to find similar groups like your local user group.

I love having a good internal network of people to ask for help. Most of the places I have worked at as a consultant have had some kind of information place to ask questions and help each other out. If you work in a consultancy find or create such a back channel.

If concerns about being seen by clients isn’t relevant to you, check out this list of 7 Salesforce Communities to Join recommended by Salesforce Ben.

Help Build a Helpful Community

The final thing to know about asking for help, is that it’s important to offer help as well. A good question can be valuable to someone else who has the same issue in the future. A good answer is helpful to both the person who asked the question and the person who looks again in the future.

But offering answers, even if not perfect answers, is a great way to learn and encourage others to seek help. Any time I post a question on Stack Exchange, I try to hunt around for one or two to answer as well. That both allows me to pay it forward, it also helps encourage the tone that people can be experts in one thing while still needing help in another.

Smart people need help, and should be comfortable asking for it.

The post Knowing When to Ask for Help appeared first on Spinning Code.

We spent an enormous amount of time working on bug-fixing and polishing tasks for Plasma 6.1 this week. It was a big release, and there were some rough edges around the new edit mode. So we put quite a bit of time into making it integrate more seamlessly with the other existing modes, and generally polishing it up. Other areas of focus included panels and the system tray, especially when using non-default settings. We made a lot of big changes under the hood for Plasma 6.1 that had some negative consequences, so we’re working to fix things as quickly as we can.

As part of this initiative, we’ve driven the number of high priority Plasma bugs to a new record low: 29! This is the first time it’s ever dipped below 30, which I find very exciting! We’re really getting there.

After bug-fixing, we started working on user interface polish for Plasma 6.2. At this point new features are mostly still cooking, but a lot of subtle improvements have already started to land — complete with screenshots below!

New Features

Plasma now supports Enhanced Open (OWE) Wi-Fi security (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

In KWin’s new (off-by-default) “Hide Cursor” effect, you can now turn off hiding it after inactivity, and only hide it while typing (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

UI Improvements

Okular now provides you more information about the validity of a document’s cryptographic signatures (Sune Vuorela, Okular 24.08.0. Link)

When shaking the cursor to expand it, it’s now nice and crisp when using one of the default Breeze cursor themes. Note that It’ll still be pixelated when using a 3rd-party cursor theme until we can implement general support for SVG cursor theming and encourage 3rd-party theme artists to use it (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.1. Link):

In KWin’s Overview effect, the labels showing windows’ titles are now more legible (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.2. Link):

The Ocean and Oxygen sound themes now include bell sounds, so our automatic “make the system bell not not make you want to commit homicide” transformer can get its sound from those themes, and not just the fallback FreeDesktop sound theme (me: Nate Graham and Guilherme Marçal Silva, Plasma 6.1.2. Link 1 and link 2)

We’ve given another go at the idea of using the same “Open With” UI everywhere — this time including the terminal and script options that were missing last time and caused us to revert it (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2):

Discover now shows you a clear error message when the PackageKit daemon is broken or crashy instead of an ambiguous-to-misleading message, and also gives you a handy button you can use to submit a bug report for your distro to gently nudge them to actually care about PackageKit support (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Lock/Logout widget now has a “Show logout screen” option, bringing back the capability to see a screen with all the options. And now it replaces the previous “shut down” action, restoring the default user experience it had in Plasma 6.0 and earlier: a lock button and a button to show all the session-ending options, with “Shut Down” pre-selected. You can still customize the widget to show whatever you want, of course (Thomas Carmichael, and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Clarified the UI option to confirm shutdown, reboot, and logout, and also changed the old ambiguous “Leave…” text to “Show Logout Screen”, which is clearer (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2):

You can now set the key repeat rate to 200 characters per second, up from the old maximum value of 100 (Vladimir Brik, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

On System Settings’ Search page, indexing status is now shown in a footer, so it doesn’t cause UI elements to jump around while indexing (me: Nate Graham Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

On System Settings’ Touchpad page, the “Disable while typing” effect now warns you that it might break video games while in use (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Power and Battery widget now tells you when power profiles aren’t available because power saving is being handled by the alternative TLP utility (Bohdan Onofriichuk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

On System Settings’ Bluetooth page, blocked devices are now listed in their own section, and we also show a contextual help button to help you understand what “blocked” means in this context (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2):

The crash reporter dialog now has a “Finish” button in the corner that activates once it’s all done, so it’s more obvious when and how you can get rid of it (Engin Karakurt, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When using a custom accent color, Breeze folder icons no longer turn all white or all black when selected in various contexts; instead their background colors will just be tinted a little bit (Marco Martin and Carl Schwan, Frameworks 6.4. Link):

Bug Fixes

Fixed two regression in KCalc that would cause it to crash when hitting the backspace key and broke input chaining (Gabriel Barrantes, KCalc 24.05.2. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a regression that caused Plasma’s Icons-and-Text Task Manager widgets to not actually show text anymore on a thick vertical panel (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a regression that could cause Plasma’s System Tray to temporarily disappear when you quit an app playing media while the System Tray’s Media Player widget was active (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a visual regression in Plasma’s icons-and-text task manager’s multi-row mode (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused Plasma panels’ Adaptive opacity mode to not work properly with certain types of window resizing actions, panel orientations, and visibility states (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a KWin regression that broke multi-monitor support in the popular Polonium tiling script (Alik Aslanyan, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused newly-created blank System Monitor widgets to be broken until Plasma was restarted once (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed an odd interaction in Plasma’s new edit mode that could cause it to undesirably exit when the widget explorer was closed (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause the displayed brightness percentage to drift out of sync between the System tray widget and the OSD, and also make the slider kinda laggy (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1.1. Link 1 and link 2)

In case you’d noticed a tiny, barely detectable horizontal line in the top-left corner of Plasma widgets, it’s gone now (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a case where KWin would crash when run on a system with very old (like, 15 years old) graphics hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

Fixed a regression that broke the layout of Discover’s “Share” dialog (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

Fixed a regression that could cause individual widgets’ hover popups in edit mode to get covered up by the panel settings dialog under certain circumstances (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

Fixed a regression that could, under certain circumstances, cause Plasma’s “Show Alternatives” popup get stuck in the open state open and not close (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused the “Add Widgets…” button that appears on empty panels is to be aligned incorrectly and located in the wrong place (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused undoing the deletion of a panel outside of global edit mode to make it get stuck in its own panel edit mode (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause Plasma to freeze when a thick panel contained certain combinations of widgets with very specific popup sizes (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

When System Settings is already showing a page that lives in a sub-category, using another app to open open a different page that doesn’t live in a sub-category now correctly hides the sub-category column (Matthias Tillman, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

On System Settings’ Accessibility page, the sidebar listing sub-pages now has correct hover and highlight effects (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

When using Qt 6.8, Plasma no longer quits when you drag an app from Kickoff to the desktop (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Discover no longer crashes when you try to update a Flatpak app that has been declared end-of-life without any replacement provided. Instead you’ll be asked if you’d like to uninstall it (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Dragging a widget from one Plasma panel to another one or the desktop while in edit mode no longer causes it to get lost in a limbo state (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

If you set a global shortcut to activate a System Tray widget, it now always works, rather than only working after the first time the System Tray was opened (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The “Choose a device to send to:” text in share dialogs for KDE Connect is now always readable in every language (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 6.4. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
• 29 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 33 last week). Current list of bugs
• 137 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Fixed a case where KWin’s new triple buffering feature could actually make things worse with certain hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

KWin now falls back to software rendering automatically when used on systems with very old (like, 15 years old) graphics hardware that supports only a limited number of OpenGL operations (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma caused by receiving notifications (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)

Improved KWin’s robustness when using a very high refresh rate input device (like one of those blingy 127 billion hertz gamer mice), reducing the chance of apps freezing or quitting after the mouse is moved very very quickly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

In Plasma’s clipboard, the “Keep the selection and clipboard the same” setting now works independently of the “Text selection: Always save in history” setting (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Using a stylus on Wayland now allows you to drag windows around from empty areas, when so configured (Nicolas Fella, Qt 6.7.3. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added a test for adaptive panel opacity working properly (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

You probably noticed a lot of regressions got fixed! How did they sneak through? Frankly, because not enough people beta-tested Plasma 6.1. Plasma is enormous and can be used in wildly diverse ways, and there are only so many use cases that developers can notice. Automatic testing helps, and we’re getting better at this, but many features are difficult or impossible to test in an automatic fashion. Our faithful beta testers also find many regressions, but by far the majority go unnoticed until the final release. This is a problem!

If you use have multiple systems or an adventurous personality, you can really help us out by installing beta versions of Plasma using your distro’s available repos and reporting bugs. Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE Tumbleweed are examples of great distros for this purpose. So please please do try out Plasma beta versions. It really helps us! Heck, if you’re very adventurous, live on the nightly repos. I’ve been doing this full-time for 5 years with my sole computer and it’s surprisingly stable.

Does that sound too scary? Consider donating today instead! That helps too.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

Healthcare systems consistently rely on technology to provide accurate and timely care. Drupal, an integrated CMS, can help meet this goal.

Discover important security updates and changes happening in Drupal 7 and how you could benefit from upgrading to Drupal 10!

Discover how Drupal enables organizations to adapt to evolving business needs with agility and ease.

Organizations still using Drupal 7 are missing out on the flexibility, customization options, scalability, and marketing capabilities available in the newer versions. Drupal 10 allows for the management of consistent and engaging digital experiences across various channels, enhances search engine optimization, and enables web teams to deliver content more efficiently.

Authored by Nadiia Nykolaichuk.

It seems like yesterday that people started cautiously embracing artificial intelligence with admiration, surprise, or even fear. Technology rushes forward, multiplying the number of potential ways to use AI on your website to streamline your workflows.

I borrowed a 3D printer with Octoprint set up, and happened to access it from work, whereupon I was greeted with a big scary message and a link to this blog post. Even though it is from 2018, there seems to be no retraction, so I figured it's an interesting insight in how people seem to think about security:

• There is a “public internet” that is disjoint from your private network, and the only way something on the latter can be exposed to the former is if you “forward ports on your router”. (Hint: IPv6 prevalence is 45% and rising.)
• There are no dangerous actors on your private network (e.g., nobody sets up a printer on a company network with a couple thousand hosts). Software that is safe to use on your private network can cause “a catastrophe to happen” if exposed to the internet (note that OctoPrint has now, as far as I know, passwords on by default; the linked ISC advisory is about completely open public instances).
• There is no mention about TLS, or strong passwords. There is a mention about password rate limiting, but not that the service should be able to do that itself.
• HTTP forwarding is safe even if port forwarding is not. Cloud(TM) forwarding is even safer. In fact, exposing your printer to a Discord channel is also a much better idea.
• It is dangerous and difficult to have your reverse proxy on the same physical instance as the service it is proxying; it is “asking for trouble”.

I'm not against defense in depth. But I wonder if this is really what goes for best practice still, in 2024.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-26.

Chat Control and the New Panopticon - by Masayuki Hatta

Tags: tech, surveillance, privacy, cryptography, law

Very neat piece, shows quite well the problems with Chat Control like laws. It’s been postponed this time, but expect it to comeback somehow.

https://mhatta.substack.com/p/chat-control-and-the-new-panopticon

Cleantech has an enshittification problem

Tags: tech, politics, law

This is becoming an important industry. Regulation is needed to avoid consumers to be in a mouse trap. This is necessary to reap the benefits of those technologies.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/

Indirector

Tags: tech, cpu, security

A new type of attack targeting the CPU indirect branch predictor.

https://indirector.cpusec.org/

Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, web

This is bad for two reasons: 1) people clearly put too much trust in random CDNs to distribute their dependencies and 2) people don’t track depencendies obsolescence properly.

https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack

The People’s AI – Doc Searls Weblog

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss, self-hosting

This is ignoring the energy consumption aspect. That said, it is spot on regarding the social and economics aspects of those transformer models. They have to be open and self hostable.

https://doc.searls.com/2024/05/28/the-peoples-ai/

On the Paradox of Learning to Reason from Data

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

Further clues that transformer models can’t learn logic from data.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11502

Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling

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

Interesting paper showing a promising path to reduce the memory and workload of transformer models. This is much more interesting than the race to the gigantic size.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02528

Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

Tags: tech, nfc, hardware

Nice reverse engineering of a NFC chip used in a disposable transportation ticket.

https://www.righto.com/2024/06/montreal-mifare-ultralight-nfc.html

Local, first, forever

Tags: tech, crdt, self-hosting, privacy

Interesting approach for using CRDT through a file sync application. Probably something to see somehow generalized on traditional desktop applications.

https://tonsky.me/blog/crdt-filesync/

Reladiff

Tags: tech, databases, tools, tests

Interesting tool for diffing database tables. Should come in handy for tests.

https://reladiff.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Performance tip: avoid unnecessary copies – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, performance

Interesting case, when everything else gets faster, memory copies might start to become the bottleneck.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/06/22/performance-tip-avoid-unnecessary-copies/

How much memory does a call to ‘malloc’ allocates? – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, system, memory

If you needed to be reminded that allocating small blocks of memory is a bad idea… here is a paper explaining it.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/06/27/how-much-memory-does-a-call-to-malloc-allocates/

How the STL uses explicit

Tags: tech, c++

Definitely not the rules you want to apply on your projects. Still it’s interesting to know how the STL uses explicit.

https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2024/06/25/most-stl-ctors-arent-explicit-but-yours-still-should-be/

Breaking out of nested loops with generators | mathspp

Tags: tech, python

This is a useful construct in Python which is often forgotten.

https://mathspp.com/blog/breaking-out-of-nested-loops-with-generators

The plan-execute pattern

Tags: tech, algorithm, pattern, design, architecture

A nice pattern to separate decision from actions in complex algorithms.

https://mmapped.blog/posts/29-plan-execute

Fighting Faults in Distributed Systems

Tags: tech, safety, distributed, failure

A nice zine introducing the topic of faults and failures in distributed systems.

https://decomposition.al/CSE138-2024-01/zines/zine-ali.pdf

From ZeroVer to SemVer: A Comprehensive List of Versioning Schemes in Open Source | Andrew Nesbitt

Tags: tech, project-management, version-control

A nice collection of versioning schemes. I definitely didn’t know them all.

https://nesbitt.io/2024/06/24/from-zerover-to-semver-a-comprehensive-list-of-versioning-schemes-in-open-source.html

Of Psion and Symbian - by Bradford Morgan White

Tags: tech, history

Another story of precursors in the tech space. They basically invented the palmtop and spawned Symbian which was very much dominant on mobile for a while. The end of the Nokia story is a bit oversimplified for my taste just glancing over Maemo, but it is forgivable since it wasn’t the focus of this piece.

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/of-psion-and-symbian

Neko: History of a Software Pet

Tags: tech, history, funny

I remember playing with this a long time again… but it’s actually even older than I suspected.

https://eliotakira.com/neko/

Bye for now!

Here's what I've been working on for my Drupal contributions this week. Thanks to Code Enigma for sponsoring the time to work on these.

What techniques go into synthesizing a guitar sound in Python? What higher-level programming and Python concepts can you practice while building advanced projects? This week on the show, we talk with Real Python author and core team member Bartosz Zaczyński about his recent step-by-step project, Build a Guitar Synthesizer: Play Musical Tablature in Python.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

Takeaway: Government CMS preferences evolve with population size, shifting from specialized proprietary solutions for smaller entities to enterprise-level, often open-source platforms for larger ones. This shift reflects the need for greater scalability, flexibility, and advanced features as government entities grow and face more complex digital demands. NEED A CMS THAT CAN GROW WITH YOU? TALK TO OUR TEAM  

For months now I’ve been collecting a load of links saying that I’ll get round to blogging them "soon". Well, I’m currently babysitting for a friend’s daughter (who is sleeping peacefully upstairs), so I’ve finally found time to write them up.

So, here are a load of links – a lot of them are geospatial- or data-related, but I hope you might find something here you like even if those aren’t your specialisms:

• QGIS Visual Changelog for v3.36 – QGIS is great GIS software that I use a lot in my work. The reason this link is here though is because of their ‘visual changelog’ that they write for every new version – it is a really good way of showing what has changed in a GUI application, and does a great job of advertising the new features.
• List of unusual units of measurement – a fascinating list from Wikipedia. I think my favourite are the barn (and outhouse/shed) and the shake – you’ll have to read the article to see what these are!
• List of humourous units of measurement – linked from the above is this list of humourous units of measurement, including the ‘beard-second’, and the Smoot.
• lonboard – a relatively new package for very efficiently creating interactive webmaps of geospatial data from Python. It is so much faster than geopandas.explore(), and is developing at a rapid pace. I’m using it a lot these days.
  
• A new metric for measuring learning – an interesting post from Greg Wilson about the time it takes learners to realise that something was worth learning. I wonder what the values are for some things that I do a lot of – remote sensing, GIS, Python, cloud computing, cloud-native geospatial etc.
• The first global 30-m land-cover dynamic monitoring product with fine classification system from 1985 to 2022 – an interesting dataset that I haven’t had chance to investigate in detail yet, but purports to give 30m global land cover every 5 years from 1985 and every year from 2000.
• CyberChef – from GCHQ (yes, the UK signals intelligence agency) comes this very useful web-based tool for converting data formats, extracting data, doing basic image processing, extracting files and more. You can even build multiple tools into a ‘recipe’ or pipeline.
• envreport – a simple Python script to report lots of information about the Python environment in a diffable form – I can see this being very useful
• Antarctic glaciers named after satellites – seven Antarctic glaciers have been named after satellites, reflecting (ha!) the importance of satellites in monitoring Antarctica
• MoMAColors and MetBrewer – these are color palettes derived from artwork at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There are some beautiful sets of colours in here (see below) which I want to use in some future data visualisations.

• geospatial-cli – a list of geospatial command-line tools. Lots of them I knew, but there were some gems I hadn’t come across before here too.
• map-gl-tools – a nice Javascript package to add a load of syntactic sugar to the MapLibreJS library. I’ve recently started using this library and found things quite clunky (coming from a Leaflet background) so this really helped
• CoolWalks – a nice research paper looking at creating walking routes on the shaded side of the street for various cities
• Writing efficient code for GeoPandas and Shapely in 2023 – a very useful notebook showing how to do things efficiently in GeoPandas in 2023. There are a load of old ways of doing things which are no longer the most efficient!
• Inside PostGIS: Calculating Distance – a post explaining how PostGIS’s distance calculation algorithms work
• quackosm – a Python and CLI tool for reading OpenStreetMap data using DuckDB – either for future analysis in DuckDB or for export to GeoParquet
• Comparing odc.stac.load and stackstac for raster composite workflow – fairly self-explanatory, but it’s interesting to see the differences between two widely-used tools in the STAC ecosystem
• Towards Flexible Data Schemas – this article shows how the flexibility of data schemes in specifications like STAC really help their adoption and use for diverse purposes