FLOSS Project Planets

This week I’m attending two sprints: a KDE e.V. Board sprint which is already done, and a KDE Goals mega-sprint, which begins today! My “Automate and systematize internal processes” goal is represented there and I’m hoping we have a great time brainstorming and fixing stuff. And also that we eat lots of Döner kebabs. So many Döner kebabs. All the Döner kebabs.

New Features

Spectacle regains its “blur factor” feature, so now if you want your blurred areas to be even blurrier, you can do that without having to draw a blur over the same area multiple times (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

You can now copy the text of a column in System Monitor (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

The Plasma Digital Clock’s Islamic calendar feature now respects the locale-specific numbering system, which means for example that people living in Arabic-speaking countries that use western-style Arabic numerals will now see those rather than eastern-style Arabic numerals (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Removed the “Clear all” button on the fingerprint authorization enrollment UI, because it was a big obvious footgun you could use to destroy all your work to enroll fingerprints (Arthur Zamarin, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Normally I don’t mention changes to Welcome center, but this is a fairly large one: the “Simple by default” page is no longer a big dumb picture of System Settings, but rather shows you a nice mock desktop where you can hover or click on elements to learn what they are and what they do. System Settings is now mentioned on the “Powerful When Needed” page (me: Nate Graham and Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.1. Link):

On System Settings’ Night Light page, the time input fields for manual time mode are no longer a nightmare, because they’ve been replaced with a set of spinboxes (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Yes, ideally these would use a dedicated time picker UI component, but one thing at a time

Information about Night Light transition times is now shown in the tooltip for the Brightness and Color widget (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link):

System Settings’ Screen Locking page has also now adopted the “buttons in the header” paradigm, this time for its “Configure Appearance” button (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Bug Fixes

Fixed a number of issues in various pieces of KDE software caused by changes in Qt 6.7 (Felix Ernst, Noah Davis, and Fushan Wen, Dolphin & Spectacle 24.05 and Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Spectacle no longer badly misbehaves when asked to take a screenshot of a screen with a scale factor of less than 100% (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Fixed an issue whereby Spectacle’s feature to save screenshots with an increasing number sequence would number the screenshots incorrectly in certain circumstances (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Closing your laptop’s lid with the keyboard backlight illuminated now correctly restores its brightness level when you open the lid again (Anthony Vital, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed multiple issues whereby parts of Plasma would fail to save changed settings if Plasma quickly crashed, exited unexpectedly, or was terminated in an unclean way (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Plasma no longer crashes when removing standalone launcher widgets for apps with no “Open With” context menu action (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed multiple issues with keyboard focus and selection with search results in Plasma’s Application Dashboard widget—which you may notice is visibly on life support, but this constitutes some of that support (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Plasma’s screen chooser OSD once again works as expected on X11 (Fushan Wen and David Redondo, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)

The Grid layout for System Monitor sensors once again looks good in constrained spaces, such as a thick Plasma panel (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed a major regression that prevented LUKS-encrypted disks from being decrypted by KDE software using the Solid framework (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.2, but distros should be backporting it to their 6.1 packages too. Link)

Those increasingly ubiquitous contextual help buttons that open explanatory tooltips when clicked no longer have a weird empty space on the right side of their tooltips (Shubham Arora, Frameworks 6.2. Link):

Fixed a Breeze icon that was not changing its color properly when using non-default color schemes (Evgeniy Harchenko, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 38 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 36 last week). Current list of bugs
• 137 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Kolourpaint has been ported to Qt6 (Carl Schwan, Kolourpaint 24.05. Link)

On Wayland, implemented support for the remote desktop portal’s ConnectToEIS method. This enables applications like Synergy and Barrier that have Wayland support for sending emulated input events to do so in a more convenient way than using the existing methods. Full support for input-leap is pending, but in progress (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1. Link)

System Settings’ Keyboard page has been ported to QML, retaining most of its prior styling but with a modern and extensible codebase (Evgeny Chesnokov, Plasma 6.1. 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

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

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!

Discover the latest strategies for a seamless transition to Drupal 10 at the DrupalTO meetup, where experts and enthusiasts converge to share insights and foster community. Dive into discussions that bridge knowledge gaps and strengthen ties within the Drupal community. Explore more in the detailed event recap!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-16.

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

Tags: tech, internet, infrastructure

Very fascinating piece. This shows the underappreciated job of maintaining the subsea cables needed for the Internet to function and how extreme the conditions can be. Definitely a peculiar life for the folks in that trade… also shows the repairs are clearly underfunded and that not enough people are embracing this career. And now, add geopolitics to the mix, it should make you wonder how all of this work at all and for how long it’ll keep working.

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

Where The Wild Things Are: Brute-Force SSH Attacks In The Wild And How To Stop Them : Flux Research Group

Tags: tech, ssh, security

Interesting study on the brute force attacks against SSH. It gives plenty of insights and leads to a potential approach to detect most of them.

https://www.flux.utah.edu/paper/singh-nsdi24

Neverest CLI

Tags: tech, email, tools, command-line

Looks like a nice tool to backup and restore emails. Probably to check out next time you migrate your emails to another server.

https://pimalaya.org/neverest/cli/latest/

Mysterious Moving Pointers - blomqu.ist

Tags: tech, c++, memory

Interesting case… even though honestly we shouldn’t need to dig out this kind of details.

https://blomqu.ist/posts/2024/move/

Traces the shared-object dependencies of a binary, and graphs them

Tags: tech, library, dependencies

Neat little tool. Since I had to do this kind of work a few times, this is indeed a good idea to have a public and maintained script for it.

https://github.com/stolk/sotrace

Create graphs from your CommonJS, AMD or ES6 module dependencies

Tags: tech, dependencies, javascript, tools

Looks like a nice tool to explore dependencies in JS based projects.

https://github.com/pahen/madge

Setting up PostgreSQL for running integration tests

Tags: tech, tests, performance, databases, postgresql

Interesting use of database templates and memory disks to greatly speed up test executions.

https://gajus.com/blog/setting-up-postgre-sql-for-running-integration-tests

WebXR retro computer simulation | Dom Pajak

Tags: tech, web, 3d, xr

Funny side project. This shows well many of the challenges one should expect when working on mixed reality projects. It’s also nice to see how the ecosystem matured for such features in the browser.

https://www.dompajak.com/blog/webxr-beeb-virtual-beeb/index.html

Spectral Ray Tracing

Tags: tech, 3d, art, physics

Interesting approach to have a ray tracer which doesn’t quite follow physics for artistic purposes.

https://larswander.com/writing/spectral-ray-tracing/

What we talk about when we talk about ‘root cause’ · GitHub

Tags: tech, failure, project-management, product-management

This is definitely an ambiguous term. You need to know where stand the people employing it in order to figure out the exact meaning of “root cause”.

https://github.com/readme/guides/root-cause

Why you need a “WTF Notebook”

Tags: management, coaching, learning, organization

Definitely this. Listen and write down issues before you start to complain. There might be reasons why things are as they are. Take the time to understand them and refine to have a better feedback.

https://www.simplermachines.com/why-you-need-a-wtf-notebook/

Mental Health in Software Engineering

Tags: tech, work, life, management, burnout, health

A good reminder that mental health can be hard to keep in check in our profession. Pay attention to how you feel, anxiety is a sneaky foe. Lots can be done to improve if taken care of early enough.

https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/mental-health-in-software-engineering/

This is a teenager

Tags: sociology, politics, data-visualization

Excellent visualization which shows how adverse experiences during childhood shape our lives as adults.

https://pudding.cool/2024/03/teenagers/

Bye for now!

Boosting Productivity in Drupal with Composer 2 Editor Fri, 04/19/2024 - 16:10

Composer 2 is an effective solution for increasing productivity when working with Drupal. Everyone knows the situation when simple operations take a lot of time. Using Composer in Drupal makes developers' lives easier.
To speed up workflows, web developers often use the same code many times in many projects. This code can be written not only by other people; that's not the point. Regarding programming, rewriting code is a concern for many developers. Composer allows you to get rid of this problem. You can save parts of PHP code and use them for other projects.

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of testing your Python code with the unittest framework.

Testing in Python is a huge topic and can come with a lot of complexity, but it doesn’t need to be hard. You can create simple tests for your application in a few easy steps and then build on them from there.

With this quiz, you can check your understanding of testing with Python’s unittest framework. Good luck!

[ 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 ]

What are the benefits of using a decoupled data processing system? How do you write reusable queries for a variety of backend data platforms? This week on the show, Phillip Cloud, the lead maintainer of Ibis, will discuss this portable Python dataframe library.

[ 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 ]

When you're adding a new feature, like connecting your contact form to Mailchimp, on your Drupal website, you'll want to make sure it works the same way when you move it from one stage to another. Luckily, Drupal has a handy feature called Configuration Synchronization for this. 

This feature helps you easily export and import all the settings and setup between different copies of your Drupal website. In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at how Configuration Synchronization works and some tips for using it effectively. We will also understand the best ways to make sure your Drupal development stays consistent across different environments.

In this post, we will talk about how to run Visual ChatGPT in Python with Google Colab. ChatGPT has garnered huge popularity recently due to its capability of human style response. As of now, it only provides responses in text format, which means it cannot process, generate or edit images. Microsoft recently released a solution for the same to handle images. Now you can ask ChatGPT to generate or edit the image for you.

Demo of Visual ChatGPT

In the image below, you can see the final output of Visual ChatGPT - how it looks like.

To read this article in full, please click hereThis post appeared first on ListenData

In this post we have covered AutoGPT in detail. By end of this tutorial, you will not only understand how it works but also will be able to run it on your system. Auto-GPT has gained a significant amount of popularity in the media. It has become one of the most talked-about topics across various social media platforms after ChatGPT. It has not only captured the attention of people in Artifical Intelligence community but also people from other background. Media outlets across countries covered it and reported how it can automate everything ranging from simple to complex tasks.

Table of Contents What is AutoGPT?

AutoGPT is an experimental open-source project built on the latest ChatGPT model i.e GPT-4. It is not limited to ChatGPT as it can also do web search and try to find information from internet. When a client gives us a project with instructions on what to do. We, as analysts, perform tasks to fulfill the project requirements. In the same way, by assigning a project to AutoGPT, it will do on its own all the necessary tasks to meet the project's requirements.

Let's say you ask AutoGPT to do market research about different headphones in the market. It will do web search and try to find this information on internet and produce output for you in a cleaned and structured format. See the video below.

To read this article in full, please click hereThis post appeared first on ListenData

In this article we have covered everything about the latest multilingual speech model from the basics of how it works to the step-by-step implementation of the model in Python.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, released a new AI model called Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) that can convert text to speech and speech to text in over 1,100 languages. It is available for free. It will not only help academicians and researchers across the world but also language preservationists or activists to document and preserve endangered languages to prevent their extinction.

MMS is trained on a large dataset of text and audio in over 1,100 languages. Another best part about the model is that it generates audio which sounds very natural, like human speech. It is also able to identify more than 4,000 spoken languages.

To read this article in full, please click hereThis post appeared first on ListenData

We have a new AI tool in the market called Transformers Agent which is so powerful that it can automate just about any task you can think of. It can generate and edit images, video, audio, answer questions about documents, convert speech to text and do a lot of other things.

Hugging Face, a well-known name in the open-source AI world, released Transformers Agent that provides a natural language API on top of transformers. The API is designed to be easy to use. With a single line code, it provides a variety of tools for performing natural language tasks, such as question answering, image generation, video generation, text to speech, text classification, and summarization.

To read this article in full, please click hereThis post appeared first on ListenData

We've spoken previously about security and software supply chains and we are back at it this episode. We're diving in again with Charles Coggins. Charles works at a software supply chain company and is on to give us the insiders and defender's perspective on how to keep our Python apps and infrastructure safe.<br/> <br/> <strong>Episode sponsors</strong><br/> <br/> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/sentry'>Sentry Error Monitoring, Code TALKPYTHON</a><br> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/mailtrap'>Mailtrap</a><br> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/training'>Talk Python Courses</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Links from the show</strong><br/> <br/> <div><b>Pick a Python Lockfile and Improve Security</b>: <a href="https://blog.phylum.io/pick-a-python-lockfile-and-improve-security/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">blog.phylum.io</a><br/> <b>Bad Beat Poetry</b>: <a href="https://blog.phylum.io/bad-beat-poetry/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">blog.phylum.io</a><br/> <b>PEP 665 – A file format to list Python dependencies for reproducibility of an application</b>: <a href="https://peps.python.org/pep-0665/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">peps.python.org</a><br/> <b>PEP 517 – A build-system independent format for source trees</b>: <a href="https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">peps.python.org</a><br/> <b>PEP 518 – Specifying Minimum Build System Requirements for Python Projects</b>: <a href="https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">peps.python.org</a><br/> <b>Lockfiles should be committed on all projects</b>: <a href="https://classic.yarnpkg.com/blog/2016/11/24/lockfiles-for-all/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">classic.yarnpkg.com</a><br/> <b>An Overview of Software Supply Chain Security</b>: <a href="https://tldrsec.com/p/supply-chain-security-overview" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tldrsec.com</a><br/> <b>Typosquatting</b>: <a href="https://docs.phylum.io/analytics/typosquatting" target="_blank" rel="noopener">docs.phylum.io</a><br/> <b>Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification</b>: <a href="https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/693.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">capec.mitre.org</a><br/> <b>Dependency Confusion</b>: <a href="https://docs.phylum.io/analytics/dependency_confusion" target="_blank" rel="noopener">docs.phylum.io</a><br/> <b>Expired Author Domains</b>: <a href="https://docs.phylum.io/analytics/expired_author_domains" target="_blank" rel="noopener">docs.phylum.io</a><br/> <b>Unverifiable Dependency</b>: <a href="https://docs.phylum.io/analytics/odd_dependency" target="_blank" rel="noopener">docs.phylum.io</a><br/> <b>Repo Jacking: Hidden Danger in Broken Links</b>: <a href="https://blog.phylum.io/repojacking-software-supply-chain-vulnerability/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">blog.phylum.io</a><br/> <b>Software Libraries Are Terrifying</b>: <a href="https://medium.com/@dmrickert/software-libraries-are-terrifying-4875b6a74be6" target="_blank" rel="noopener">medium.com</a><br/> <b>phylum 0.43.0</b>: <a href="https://pypi.org/project/phylum/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pypi.org</a><br/> <b>linguist</b>: <a href="https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist" target="_blank" rel="noopener">github.com</a><br/> <b>rich-codex ⚡️📖⚡️</b>: <a href="https://ewels.github.io/rich-codex/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ewels.github.io</a><br/> <b>Phylum Community Discord</b>: <a href="https://discord.gg/Fe6pr5eW6p" target="_blank" rel="noopener">discord.gg</a><br/> <b>The dream is dead?</b>: <a href="https://mastodon.social/@tveskov/111289358585305218" target="_blank" rel="noopener">mastodon.social</a><br/> <b>When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024</b>: <a href="https://socket.dev/blog/when-everything-becomes-too-much?utm_source=tldrnewsletter" target="_blank" rel="noopener">socket.dev</a><br/> <b>pip-tools</b>: <a href="https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools" target="_blank" rel="noopener">github.com</a><br/> <b>Watch this episode on YouTube</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB-2nMphYBI" target="_blank" rel="noopener">youtube.com</a><br/> <b>Episode transcripts</b>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/457/software-supply-chain-security-with-phylum" target="_blank" rel="noopener">talkpython.fm</a><br/> <br/> <b>--- Stay in touch with us ---</b><br/> <b>Subscribe to us on YouTube</b>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/youtube" target="_blank" rel="noopener">youtube.com</a><br/> <b>Follow Talk Python on Mastodon</b>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@talkpython" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i>talkpython</a><br/> <b>Follow Michael on Mastodon</b>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@mkennedy" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i>mkennedy</a><br/></div>

This is how I update my Drupal modules to Drupal 11 with only GitLab and drupal.org in my browser!

Drupal's adoption of GitLab lead to five times faster test runtimes but for this post I will look at how it makes it much easier to update modules to a new major version. It is now possible to fully use the user interface of drupal.org and drupal.org's GitLab features to make modules compatible and even make new releases available. I'll use one of my modules as an example: Upgrade Rector. Let's walk through what I did.

Gábor Hojtsy Fri, 04/19/2024 - 10:35

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 265. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ] * Ensure that tests with ">=" version constraints actually print the corresponding tool name. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#370) * Prevent odt2txt tests from always being skipped due to an impossibly new version requirement. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#369) * Avoid nested parens-in-parens when printing "skipping…" messages in the testsuite.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Tuning Drupalize.Me Search Results with Solr Query Re-Ranking and Search API

During the Drupal 7 era, we created tutorials on a variety of topics such as Views, Drush, Form API, and theming. When Drupal 8 was released, we updated this content for Drupal 8, 9, and 10. The significant changes between Drupal 7 and modern versions necessitated maintaining two versions of each tutorial on our site: one for legacy Drupal and another for modern Drupal.

Today, we still maintain both versions. The use of our legacy Drupal content has steadily decreased, yet it still has a substantial presence in search results. This often leads to confusion, especially when members trying to learn about features in modern Drupal find themselves on a legacy Drupal tutorial.

In this article, Joe Shindelar writes about his coding experiments to tune search results on Drupalize.Me to favor Drupal 10 content, and demote Drupal 7 content.

joe Thu, 04/18/2024 - 15:44

I attended my first DrupalCon in 2010 in San Francisco, and since then have attended six more in the US and two in Europe.  Many elements stay the same, and are a welcome and treasured part of the DrupalCon experience: The DriesNote, the group picture, the keynotes, the BOFs, the sessions and trainings and parties and hallway conversation, on and on.  While you can look forward to more of those this year, here are a few additional features that have been added this year to Drupalcon Portland 2024:

Marketing Track

Recognizing the value that effective marketing brings to Drupal websites, DrupalCon 2024 will feature a substantial amount of content specifically targeted to marketers.  The Marketing Track features a dozen sessions of particular interest to CMOs and other marketing professionals, including presentations about AI, Personalization, Content Strategy, and multi-channel engagement.  Stay tuned for more information about content of particular interest to CMOs.  

Extended Welcoming Party

Everybody likes a party, and this year the opening reception is two full hours.  You can look forward to dancing to the robot DJ on a light-up dance floor, recording yourself in the 360 photobooth, playing with a giant Lite Brite, and enjoying free food and drink. 

Nonprofit Summit

It’s back!  After a short break, the Nonprofit Summit returns to DrupalCon, connecting Drupal users from the Nonprofit sector with each other.  Facilitated discussions, round table group sessions, and special pricing for the conference and summit are just a few of the features that will help deliver the power of Drupal to one of our most important communities. 

Enhanced focus on students

Drupal needs to continuously attract new people.  Recognizing this, DrupalCon 2024 is making extra efforts to reach out to students.  Targeted advertising to local student communities, focusing on the career-enhancing opportunities of the Drupalcon job fair, mentorship, resume help, and a special student discount price of only $50, job fair, mentorship, and resume help are a few of the enhancements that are specifically aimed at students. 

Community-designed DrupalCon T-shirt

New this year, the Drupal Association ran a design contest for the official DrupalCon Portland t-shirt.  Many great entries were received, and the winning design will be announced at DrupalCon, and available on the free attendee T-shirt.

As you can see, there are lots of new reasons to join the Drupal community in Portland this May.  We can’t wait to see you, so register here!

Having setup recursive DNS it was time to actually sort out a backup internet connection. I live in a Virgin Media area, but I still haven’t forgiven them for my terrible Virgin experiences when moving here. Plus it involves a bigger contractual commitment. There are no altnets locally (though I’m watching youfibre who have already rolled out in a few Belfast exchanges), so I decided to go for a 5G modem. That gives some flexibility, and is a bit easier to get up and running.

I started by purchasing a ZTE MC7010. This had the advantage of being reasonably cheap off eBay, not having any wifi functionality I would just have to disable (it’s going to plug it into the same router the FTTP connection terminates on), being outdoor mountable should I decide to go that way, and, finally, being powered via PoE.

For now this device sits on the window sill in my study, which is at the top of the house. I printed a table stand for it which mostly does the job (though not as well with a normal, rather than flat, network cable). The router lives downstairs, so I’ve extended a dedicated VLAN through the study switch, down to the core switch and out to the router. The PoE study switch can only do GigE, not 2.5Gb/s, but at present that’s far from the limiting factor on the speed of the connection.

The device is 3 branded, and, as it happens, I’ve ended up with a 3 SIM in it. Up until recently my personal phone was with them, but they’ve kicked me off Go Roam, so I’ve moved. Going with 3 for the backup connection provides some slight extra measure of resiliency; we now have devices on all 4 major UK networks in the house. The SIM is a preloaded data only SIM good for a year; I don’t expect to use all of the data allowance, but I didn’t want to have to worry about unexpected excess charges.

Performance turns out to be disappointing; I end up locking the device to 4G as the 5G signal is marginal - leaving it enabled results in constantly switching between 4G + 5G and a significant extra latency. The smokeping graph below shows a brief period where I removed the 4G lock and allowed 5G:

(There’s a handy zte.js script to allow doing this from the device web interface.)

I get about 10Mb/s sustained downloads out of it. EE/Vodafone did not lead to significantly better results, so for now I’m accepting it is what it is. I tried relocating the device to another part of the house (a little tricky while still providing switch-based PoE, but I have an injector), without much improvement. Equally pinning the 4G to certain bands provided a short term improvement (I got up to 40-50Mb/s sustained), but not reliably so.

This is disappointing, but if it turns out to be a problem I can look at mounting it externally. I also assume as 5G is gradually rolled out further things will naturally improve, but that might be wishful thinking on my part.

Rather than wait until my main link had a problem I decided to try a day working over the 5G connection. I spend a lot of my time either in browser based apps or accessing remote systems via SSH, so I’m reasonably sensitive to a jittery or otherwise flaky connection. I picked a day that I did not have any meetings planned, but as it happened I ended up with an adhoc video call arranged. I’m pleased to say that it all worked just fine; definitely noticeable as slower than the FTTP connection (to be expected), but all workable and even the video call was fine (at least from my end). Looking at the traffic graph shows the expected ~ 10Mb/s peak (actually a little higher, and looking at the FTTP stats for previous days not out of keeping with what we see there), and you can just about see the ~ 3Mb/s symmetric use by the video call at 2pm:

The test run also helped iron out the fact that the content filter was still enabled on the SIM, but that was easily resolved.

Up next, vaguely automatic failover.

New Upgrade Status 4.2.0 is beautiful in Gin, improves continuous integration compatibility and more

Thanks to 13 wonderful contributors, Upgrade Status 4.2.0 is out today! The new version is beautiful in Gin (light and dark mode), but even looks better than before in core's Claro. It improves continuous integration compatibility and has more graceful parsing of Twig templates. It has an updated list of rectorable fixes and is more compatible with Nikic PHP Parser. Thanks (in alphabetical order) to andypost, bbrala, estherp, joseph.olstad, lhridley, loze, mglaman, moshe weitzman, mpaulo, Pasqualle, ressa, risforrocket and saschaeggi for their contribution! Read on to see all the new things!

Gábor Hojtsy Thu, 04/18/2024 - 14:20

Discover the pinnacle of Drupal discourse at DrupalCamp Colorado 2024, where industry leaders and enthusiasts gather against the backdrop of Colorado's warmth to share expertise, forge connections, and shape the future of Drupal innovation.

Explore the Frontend Editing module, a new release from 1xINTERNET that transforms the Drupal editor experience. Industry leaders discuss its impact and compatibility with current web technologies.