A lot of hardware runs non-free software. Sometimes that non-free software is in ROM. Sometimes it's in flash. Sometimes it's not stored on the device at all, it's pushed into it at runtime by another piece of hardware or by the operating system. We typically refer to this software as "firmware" to differentiate it from the software run on the CPU after the OS has started¹, but a lot of it (and, these days, probably most of it) is software written in C or some other systems programming language and targeting Arm or RISC-V or maybe MIPS and even sometimes x86². There's no real distinction between it and any other bit of software you run, except it's generally not run within the context of the OS³. Anyway. It's code. I'm going to simplify things here and stop using the words "software" or "firmware" and just say "code" instead, because that way we don't need to worry about semantics.

A fundamental problem for free software enthusiasts is that almost all of the code we're talking about here is non-free. In some cases, it's cryptographically signed in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to replace it with free code. In some cases it's even encrypted, such that even examining the code is impossible. But because it's code, sometimes the vendor responsible for it will provide updates, and now you get to choose whether or not to apply those updates.

I'm now going to present some things to consider. These are not in any particular order and are not intended to form any sort of argument in themselves, but are representative of the opinions you will get from various people and I would like you to read these, think about them, and come to your own set of opinions before I tell you what my opinion is.

THINGS TO CONSIDER

• Does this blob do what it claims to do? Does it suddenly introduce functionality you don't want? Does it introduce security flaws? Does it introduce deliberate backdoors? Does it make your life better or worse?

• You're almost certainly being provided with a blob of compiled code, with no source code available. You can't just diff the source files, satisfy yourself that they're fine, and then install them. To be fair, even though you (as someone reading this) are probably more capable of doing that than the average human, you're likely not doing that even if you are capable because you're also likely installing kernel upgrades that contain vast quantities of code beyond your ability to understand⁴. We don't rely on our personal ability, we rely on the ability of those around us to do that validation, and we rely on an existing (possibly transitive) trust relationship with those involved. You don't know the people who created this blob, you likely don't know people who do know the people who created this blob, these people probably don't have an online presence that gives you more insight. Why should you trust them?

• If it's in ROM and it turns out to be hostile then nobody can fix it ever

• The people creating these blobs largely work for the same company that built the hardware in the first place. When they built that hardware they could have backdoored it in any number of ways. And if the hardware has a built-in copy of the code it runs, why do you trust that that copy isn't backdoored? Maybe it isn't and updates would introduce a backdoor, but in that case if you buy new hardware that runs new code aren't you putting yourself at the same risk?

• Designing hardware where you're able to provide updated code and nobody else can is just a dick move⁵. We shouldn't encourage vendors who do that.

• Humans are bad at writing code, and code running on ancilliary hardware is no exception. It contains bugs. These bugs are sometimes very bad. This paper describes a set of vulnerabilities identified in code running on SSDs that made it possible to bypass encryption secrets. The SSD vendors released updates that fixed these issues. If the code couldn't be replaced then anyone relying on those security features would need to replace the hardware.

• Even if blobs are signed and can't easily be replaced, the ones that aren't encrypted can still be examined. The SSD vulnerabilities above were identifiable because researchers were able to reverse engineer the updates. It can be more annoying to audit binary code than source code, but it's still possible.

• Vulnerabilities in code running on other hardware can still compromise the OS. If someone can compromise the code running on your wifi card then if you don't have a strong IOMMU setup they're going to be able to overwrite your running OS.

• Replacing one non-free blob with another non-free blob increases the total number of non-free blobs involved in the whole system, but doesn't increase the number that are actually executing at any point in time.

Ok we're done with the things to consider. Please spend a few seconds thinking about what the tradeoffs are here and what your feelings are. Proceed when ready.

I trust my CPU vendor. I don't trust my CPU vendor because I want to, I trust my CPU vendor because I have no choice. I don't think it's likely that my CPU vendor has designed a CPU that identifies when I'm generating cryptographic keys and biases the RNG output so my keys are significantly weaker than they look, but it's not literally impossible. I generate keys on it anyway, because what choice do I have? At some point I will buy a new laptop because Electron will no longer fit in 32GB of RAM and I will have to make the same affirmation of trust, because the alternative is that I just don't have a computer. And in any case, I will be communicating with other people who generated their keys on CPUs I have no control over, and I will also be relying on them to be trustworthy. If I refuse to trust my CPU then I don't get to computer, and if I don't get to computer then I will be sad. I suspect I'm not alone here.

Why would I install a code update on my CPU when my CPU's job is to run my code in the first place? Because it turns out that CPUs are complicated and messy and they have their own bugs, and those bugs may be functional (for example, some performance counter functionality was broken on Sandybridge at release, and was then fixed with a microcode blob update) and if you update it your hardware works better. Or it might be that you're running a CPU with speculative execution bugs and there's a microcode update that provides a mitigation for that even if your CPU is slower when you enable it, but at least now you can run virtual machines without code in those virtual machines being able to reach outside the hypervisor boundary and extract secrets from other contexts. When it's put that way, why would I not install the update?

And the straightforward answer is that theoretically it could include new code that doesn't act in my interests, either deliberately or not. And, yes, this is theoretically possible. Of course, if you don't trust your CPU vendor, why are you buying CPUs from them, but well maybe they've been corrupted (in which case don't buy any new CPUs from them either) or maybe they've just introduced a new vulnerability by accident, and also you're in a position to determine whether the alleged security improvements matter to you at all. Do you care about speculative execution attacks if all software running on your system is trustworthy? Probably not! Do you need to update a blob that fixes something you don't care about and which might introduce some sort of vulnerability? Seems like no!

But there's a difference between a recommendation for a fully informed device owner who has a full understanding of threats, and a recommendation for an average user who just wants their computer to work and to not be ransomwared. A code update on a wifi card may introduce a backdoor, or it may fix the ability for someone to compromise your machine with a hostile access point. Most people are just not going to be in a position to figure out which is more likely, and there's no single answer that's correct for everyone. What we do know is that where vulnerabilities in this sort of code have been discovered, updates have tended to fix them - but nobody has flagged such an update as a real-world vector for system compromise.

My personal opinion? You should make your own mind up, but also you shouldn't impose that choice on others, because your threat model is not necessarily their threat model. Code updates are a reasonable default, but they shouldn't be unilaterally imposed, and nor should they be blocked outright. And the best way to shift the balance of power away from vendors who insist on distributing non-free blobs is to demonstrate the benefits gained from them being free - a vendor who ships free code on their system enables their customers to improve their code and enable new functionality and make their hardware more attractive.

It's impossible to say with absolute certainty that your security will be improved by installing code blobs. It's also impossible to say with absolute certainty that it won't. So far evidence tends to support the idea that most updates that claim to fix security issues do, and there's not a lot of evidence to support the idea that updates add new backdoors. Overall I'd say that providing the updates is likely the right default for most users - and that that should never be strongly enforced, because people should be allowed to define their own security model, and whatever set of threats I'm worried about, someone else may have a good reason to focus on different ones.

03 Mar 2026 3:09am GMT

Another year of work on Mahjongg is over. This was a pretty good year, with smaller improvements from several contributors. Let's take a look at what's new in Mahjongg 49.x.

Game Session Restoration

Thanks to contributions by François Godin, Mahjongg now remembers the previous game in progress before quitting. On startup, you have the option to resume the game or restart it.

New Pause Screen

Pausing a game used to only blank out the tiles and dim them. Since games restored on startup are paused, the lack of information was confusing. A new pause screen has since been added, with prominent buttons to resume/restart or quit. Thanks to Jeff Fortin for raising this issue!

A new Escape keyboard shortcut for pausing the game has also been added, and the game now pauses automatically when opening menus and dialogs.

New Game Rules Dialog

Help documentation for Mahjongg has existed for a long time, but it always seemed less than ideal to open and read through when you just want to get started. Keeping the documentation up-to-date and translated was also difficult. A new Game Rules dialog has replaced it, giving a quick overview of what the game is about.

Accessibility Improvements

Tiles without a free long edge now shake when clicked, to indicate that they are not selectable. Tiles are also slightly dimmer in dark mode now, and follow the high contrast setting of the operating system.

When attempting to change the layout while a game is in progress, a confirmation dialog about ending the current game is shown.

Fixes and Modernizations

Various improvements to the codebase have been made, and tests were added for the game algorithm and layout loading. Performance issues with larger numbers of entries in the Scores dialog were fixed, as well as an issue focusing the username entry at times when saving a score. Some small rendering issues related to fractional scaling were also addressed.

Mahjongg used to load its tile assets using GdkPixbuf, but since that's being phased out, it's now using Rsvg directly instead. The upcoming GTK 4.22 release is introducing a new internal SVG renderer, GtkSvg, which we will hopefully start using in the near future.

GNOME Circle Membership

After a few rounds of reviews from Gregor Niehl and Tobias Bernard, Mahjongg was accepted into GNOME Circle. Mahjongg now has a page on apps.gnome.org, instructions for contributing and testing on welcome.gnome.org, as well as a new app icon by Tobias.

Future Improvements

The following items are next on the roadmap:

• Port the Scores dialog to the one provided by libgnome-games-support
• Use GtkSvg instead of Rsvg for rendering tile assets
• Look into adding support for keyboard navigation (and possibly gamepad support)

Download Mahjongg

The latest version of Mahjongg is available on Flathub.

That's all for now!

02 Mar 2026 7:41pm GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 20 to February 27.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ announces

Georges livestreamed himself reviewing and merging parts of merge request !598, making the month view easier than ever to navigate with a keyboard!

This merge request introduces a coordinate-aware navigation system in the month view, which computes the coordinates of relevant event widgets and finds the nearest widget relative to the one in focus when using arrow keys. When tabbing, focus moves chronologically, meaning focus moves down until there are no event widgets overlaying that specific cell, which then moves focus to the topmost event widget found in the next cells or rows; tabbing backwards goes in the opposite direction.

To illustrate the sheer complexity of navigation in a calendaring app, here is Georges's live reaction:

"Wow, congratulations, this is looking INSANE, Hari… The hell is going on here"

- Georges, maintainer of GNOME Calendar - https://youtu.be/smofXzVwNwQ?t=1h24m6s

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

James Westman says

Blueprint 0.20.0 is here! This update includes a ton of features from many contributors. Most significantly, this release includes a linter thanks to Neighborhoodie and the STA grant. The linter catches common mistakes that go beyond simple syntax and type checking. Due to the nature of these checks, it may still have some rough edges, so please file an issue if you see room for improvement.

Also of note are a number of new completion suggestions while editing, improved type checking in expressions, and support for newer GTK features like Gtk.TryExpression.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Tobias Bernard says

Sudoku by Sepehr Rasouli was accepted into Circle! It's what it says on the tin: A dead-simple, polished GNOME app for playing Sudoku. Congratulations 🥳

Tobias Bernard reports

Gradia by Alexander Vanhee was accepted into Circle ✨️

Edit and annotate screenshots, draw on them, add a background, and share them with the world.

https://apps.gnome.org/Gradia

Third Party Projects

Anton Isaiev says

RustConn 0.9.3 is out!

This release cycle was all about closing the gap between "it works" and "it works exactly how you'd expect." I successfully closed every single open issue and feature request from this period, delivering major quality-of-life and security upgrades for anyone who lives in a terminal.

Highlights from this release:

Agentless Remote Monitoring: A MobaXterm-style bar now sits below your SSH, Telnet, and Kubernetes terminals, parsing /proc/* over the existing session to show live CPU, memory, disk, and network stats.

Lightning-Fast Navigation: A new Command Palette (Ctrl+P) brings VS Code-style fuzzy searching for connections, tags, and commands. I also added full support for Custom Keybindings, letting you remap 30+ actions.

Visual Organization: Tame massive connection lists with pinned Favorites, custom GTK icons or emojis, and protocol-colored tabs with group indicators (e.g., "Production" or "Staging").

Modernized UI: Eight dialogs were migrated to modern adw::Dialog with adaptive sizing, and I've added screen reader support to password and connection dialogs.

Rock-Solid Security: A massive backend overhaul! Stored credentials now use AES-256-GCM with Argon2id, and the entire codebase was migrated to SecretString to prevent memory leaks. I also added full support for SSH port forwarding (-L, -R, -D).

pass Backend: A huge shoutout to community member @h3nnes for contributing a pass (passwordstore.org) backend with full GUI and CLI support!

Under the Hood: Migrated to the Rust 2024 edition, added smart protocol fallbacks for RDP/VNC to gracefully handle negotiation failures, and reached 100% translation coverage across 15 languages.

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Haydn Trowell says

Typesetter, the minimalist, local-first Typst editor, gets some quality of life updates with version 0.11.0:

• New app icon
• The preview now automatically sizes itself to fit the window and your display without needing a manual PPI setting
• Invert lightness option for the preview when using dark mode
• The ability to simulate different forms of color blindness in the preview to test document accessibility
• Performance improvements, including reduced memory usage

Install via Flathub (https://flathub.org/apps/net.trowell.typesetter)

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

oo7-daemon, the server side of the Secret Service provider, has received a new release featuring KDE support. Making it compatible with both GNOME and KDE.

GNOME Websites

federico announces

The Code of Conduct page is now generated from the original sources with a beautiful stylesheet. Thanks for Bart for the web app and the design team for the updated look!

Shell Extensions

storageb reports

Build your own custom menu for the GNOME top bar!

Custom Command Menu is a GNOME extension that lets you build a custom menu to run commands directly from the top bar. Launch apps, run scripts, execute shell commands, and more through a simple, intuitive interface.

Version 13 introduces support for submenu creation, increases the maximum number of entries allowed, and adds compatibility with GNOME 50. This release also includes additional translations for Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Polish.

More information can be found on the project's GitHub page.

Miscellaneous

Sophie (she/her) reports

As a cost-saving measure, git traffic like git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/<repo> is now redirected to our mirror under https://github.com/GNOME/<repo>.

Peter Eisenmann says

Last week the long unmaintained support for Google Drive in gvfs was dropped. If you ever needed motivation to switch to a more privacy-respecting cloud provider, now is as good a time as any.

That's all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

27 Feb 2026 12:00am GMT

There are a lot of prime classes, such as left truncating primes, twin primes, mersenne primes, palindromic primes, emirp primes and so on. The Wikipedia page on primes lists many more. Recently I got to thinking (as one is wont to do) how difficult would it be to come up with a brand new one. The only reliable way to know is to try it yourself.

The basic loop

The method I used was fairly straightforward:

1. Download a list of the first one million primes
2. Look at it
3. Try to come up with a pattern
4. Check if numbers from your pattern show up on OEIS
5. Find out they are not
6. Rejoice
7. Check again more rigorously
8. Realize they are in fact there in a slightly different form
9. Go to 2

Eventually I managed to come up with a prime category that is not in OEIS. Python code that generates them can be found in this repo. It may have bugs (I discovered several in the course of writing this post). The data below has not been independently validated.

Faro primes

In magic terminology, a Faro shuffle is one that cuts a deck of cards in half and then interleaves the results. It is also known as a perfect shuffle. There are two different types of Faro shuffle, an in shuffle and an out shuffle. They have the peculiar property that if you keep repeating the same operation, eventually the deck returns to the original order.

A prime p is a Faro prime if all numbers obtained by applying Faro shuffles (either in or out shuffles, but only one type) to its decimal representation are also prime. A Faro prime can be an Faro in prime, a Faro out prime or both. As an example, 19 is a Faro in prime, because a single in shuffle returns it to its original form. It is not an Faro out prime, because out shuffling it produces 91, which is not a prime (91 = 7*13).

The testing for this was not rigorous, but at least OEIS does not recognize it.

Statistics

I only used primes with an even number of digits. For odd number of digits you'd first need to decide how in and out shuffles should work. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Within the first one milllion primes, there are 7492 in primes, 775 out primes and 38 that are both in and out primes.

The numbers with one or two digits are not particularly interesting. The first "actual" Faro in prime is 1103. It can be in shuffled once yielding 1013.

For the first out shuffle you need to go to 111533, which shuffles to 513131 and 153113.

The first prime longer than 2 digits that qualifies for both a Faro in and out prime is 151673. Its in shuffle primes are 165713, 176153 and 117563. The corresponding out shuffle primes are 151673, 617531 and 563117.

Within the first one million primes the largest in shuffle prime is 15484627, the largest out shuffle prime is 11911111 and the largest in and out prime is 987793.

Further questions

As is typical in maths, finding out something immediately raises more questions. For example:

Why are there so many fewer out primes than in primes?

How would this look for primes with odd number of digits in them?

Is it possible to build primes by a mixture of in and out shuffles?

Most of the primes do not complete a "full shuffle", that is, they repeat faster than a deck of fully unique playing cards would. For any number n can you find a Faro prime that requires that many shuffles or is there an upper limit for the number of shuffles?

26 Feb 2026 10:31pm GMT

In my last post on this topic, I explained the history of SVG in GTK, and how I tricked myself into working on an SVG renderer in 2025.

Now we are in 2026, and on the verge of the GTK 4.22 release. A good time to review how far we've come.

Testsuites

While working on this over the last year, I was constantly looking for good tests to check my renderer against.

Eventually, I found the resvg testsuite, which has broad coverage and is refreshingly easy to work with. In my unscientific self-evaluation, GtkSvg passes 1250 of the 1616 tests in this testsuite now, which puts GTK one tier below where the web browsers are. It would be nice to catch up with them, but that will require closing some gaps in our rendering infrastructure to support more complex filters.

The resvg testsuite only covers static SVG.

Another testsuite that I've used a lot is the much older SVG 1.1 testsuite, which covers SVG animation. GtkSvg passes most of these tests as well, which I am happy about - animation was one of my motivations when going into this work.

Benchmarks

But doing a perfect job of rendering complex SVG doesn't do us much good if it slows GTK applications down too much. Recently, we've started to look at the performance implications of SVG rendering.

We have a 'scrolling wall of icons' benchmark in our gtk4-demo app, which naturally is good place to test the performance impact of icon rendering changes. When switching it over to GtkSvg, it initially dropped from 60fps to around 40 on my laptop. We've since done some optimizations and regained most of the lost fps.

The performance impact on typical applications will be much smaller, since they don't usually present walls of icons in their UI.

Stressing our rendering infrastructure with some more demanding content was another motivation when I started to work on SVG, so I think I can declare success here.

Content Creators

The new SVG renderer needs new SVGs to take advantage of the new capabilities. Thankfully, Jakub Steiner has been hard at work to update many of the symbolic icons in GNOME.

Others are exploring what we can do with the animation capabilities of the new renderer. Expect these things to start showing up in apps over the next cycle.

Future work

Feature-wise, GtkSvg is more than good enough for all our icon rendering needs, so making it cover more obscure SVG features may not be big priority in the short term.

GtkSvg will be available in GTK 4.22, but we will not use it for every SVG icon yet - we still have a much simpler symbolic icon parser which is used for icons that are looked up by icon name from an icontheme. Switching over to using GtkSvg for everything is on the agenda for the next development cycle, after we've convinced ourselves that we can do this without adverse effects on performance or resource consumption of apps.

Ongoing improvements of our rendering infrastructure will help ensure that that is the case.

Where you can help

One of the most useful contributions is feedback on what does or doesn't work, so please: try out GtkSvg, and tell us if you find SVGs that are rendered badly or with poor performance!

Update: GtkSvg is an unsandboxed, in-process SVG parser written in C, so we don't recommend using it for untrusted content - it is meant for trusted content such as icons, logos and other application resources. If you want to load a random SVG of unknown providence, please use a proper image loading framework like glycin (but still, tell us if you find SVGs that crash GtkSvg).

Of course, contributions to GtkSvg itself are more than welcome too. Here is a list of possible things to work on.

If you are interested in working on an application, the simple icon editor that ships with GTK really needs to be moved to its own project and under separate maintainership. If that sounds appealing to you, please get in touch.

If you would like to support the GNOME foundation, who's infrastructure and hosting GTK relies on, please donate.

25 Feb 2026 12:07pm GMT

Its moments of change that remain striking in your memory when you look back. I feel like i'm in a long period of change, and if like me you participate in the tech industry and open source then you probably feel the same. It's going to be a wild time to look back on.

As humans we're naturally drawn to exciting new changes. Its not just the tech industry. The Spanish transport minister recently announced ambicious plans to run trains at record speeds of 350km/h. Then two tragic accidents happened, apparently due to careless infrastructure maintenance. Its easy (and valid) to criticise the situation. But I can sympathise too. You don't see many news reports saying "Infrastructure is being maintained really well at the moment and there haven't been any accidents for years". We all just take that shit for granted.

This is a "middle aged man states obvious truths" post, so here's another one we forget in the software world: Automating work doesn't make it go away. Lets say you automate a 10 step release process which takes an hour to do manually. That's pretty great, now at release time you just push a button and wait. Maybe you can get on with some other work meanwhile - except you still need to check the automation finished and the release published correctly. What if step 5 fails? Now you have drop your other work again, push that out of your brain and try to remember how the release process worked, which will be hazy enough if you've stopped ever doing release manually.

Sometimes I'll take an hour of manual work each month in preference to maintaining a complex, bespoke automation system.

Over time we do build great tools and successfully automate bits of our jobs. Forty or fifty years ago, most computer programmers could write assembly code and do register allocation in their heads. I can't remember the last time I needed that skill. The C compiler does it for me.

The work of CPU register allocation hasn't gone away, though. I've outsourced the cognitive load to researchers and compiler teams working at places like IBM / Red Hat, embecosm and Apple who maintain GCC and LLM.

When I first got into computer programming, at the tail end of the "MOV AX, 10h; INT 13h" era, part of the fun was this idea you could have wild ideas and simply create yourself piece by piece, making your own tools, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Look at this teenager who created his own 3D game engine! Look at this crazy dude who made an entire operating system! Now I'm gonna do something cool that will change the world, and then ideally retire.

It took me the longest time to see that this "rock star" development model is all mythology. Just like actual rock stars, in fact. When a musician appears with stylish clothes and a bunch of great songs, the "origin story" is a carefully curated myth. The music world is a diverse community of artists, stylists, mentors, coaches, co-writers, producers, technicians, drivers, promotors, photographers, session musicians and social media experts, constantly trading our skills and ideas and collaborating to make them a reality. Nobody just walks out of their bedroom onto a stage and changes the world. But that doesn't make for a good press release does it ?

The AI bubble is built on this same myth of the individual creator. I think LLMs are a transformative tool, and computer programming will never be the same; the first time you input some vaguely worded English prompt and get back a working unit test, you see a shining road ahead paved with automation, where you can finally turn ideas into products within days or weeks instead of having to chisel away at them painfully for years.

But here's the reality: our monkey brains are still the same size, and you can't If your new automation is flaky, then you're going to spend as much time debugging and fixing things as you always did. Doing things the old way may take longer, but the limiting factor was never our typing speed, but our capacity to understand and communicate new ideas.
"The future belongs to idea guys who can just do things". No it doesnt mate, the past, present and future belongs to diverse groups of people whose skills and abilities complement each other and who have collectively agreed on some sort of common goal. But that idea doesn't sell very well.

If and when we do land on genuinely transformative new tool - something like a C compiler, or hypertext - then I promise you, everyone's going to be on it in no time. How long did it take for ChatGPT to go from 0 to 1 billlion users wordwide?

In all of this, I've had an intense few months in a new role at Codethink. It's been an intense winter too - by some measures Galicia is literally the wettest place on earth right now - so I guess it was a good time to learn new things. Since I rejoined back in 2021 I've nearly always been outsourced on different client projects. What I'm learning now is how the company's R&D division works.

23 Feb 2026 9:14am GMT

You all know that librsvg is developed in gitlab.gnome.org, not in GitHub. The README prominently says, "PLEASE DO NOT SEND PULL REQUESTS TO GITHUB".

So, of course, today librsvg got its first AI slop pull request and later a second one, both in GitHub. Fortunately (?) they were closed by the same account that opened them, four minutes and one minute after opening them, respectively.

I looked.

There is compiled Python code (nope, that's how you get another xz attack).

There are uncomfortably large Python scripts with jewels like subprocess.run("a single formatted string") (nope, learn to call commands correctly).

There are two vast JSON files with "suggestions" for branches to make changes to the code, with jewels like:

• Suggestions to call standard library functions that do not even exist. The proposed code does not even use the nonexistent standard library function.

• Adding enum variants to SVG-specific constructs for things that are not in the SVG spec.

• Adding incorrect "safety checks". assert!(!c_string.is_null()) to be replaced by if c_string.is_null() { return ""; }.

• Fix a "floating-point overflow"... which is already handled correctly, and with a suggestion to use a function that does not exist.

• Adding a cache for something that does not need caching (without an eviction policy (so it is a memory leak)).

• Parallelizing the entire rendering process through a 4-line function. Of course this does not work.

• Adding two "missing" filters from the SVG spec (they are already implemented), and the implementation is todo!().

It's all like that. I stopped looking, and reported both PRs for spam.

21 Feb 2026 1:13am GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 13 to February 20.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas announces

I released Newsflash 5.0-beta1 to the beta channel of flathub. The headlining feature is a new native article view rendering everything with the help of Gtk. This also made it possible to overhaul everything media related (images, videos and audio). It should now closer resemble what can be found in fractal or tuba.

Jan Lukas reports

In related news: Newsflash now has a brother. The core newsflash library was used to create a TUI application by Christopher Auer. So if you like what Newsflash has to offer but prefer to stay in the terminal, check out eilmeldung: https://github.com/christo-auer/eilmeldung

Third Party Projects

Diego Povliuk announces

Cine, the video player, got some quality of life updates on version 1.0.9:

• The volume is now always restored on startup
• Icon indicators for mute and subtitles on/off
• Toggle elapsed/remaining time
• Option to add folder to playlist
• Unmute when changing volume
• Hold click to double playback speed

Install via Flathub

ranfdev announces

Lobjur has just received a big update!

• It now works as a client for multiple link aggregators: Lobsters and Hacker News.
• An integrated WebView has been added
• The UI has been improved, with a new split layout
• The comments are now displayed with complex formatting, converting HTML tags to GTK widgets

Check it out on Flathub

Anton Isaiev announces

I've released RustConn 0.8.9, a major update driven largely by user feedback and feature requests. This version expands protocol support, security and refines the user experience.

Key highlights:

• New Protocols: Added full Kubernetes support (shell access/exec), Serial Console (via picocom), and SFTP integration (via URI or Midnight Commander).
• Virtualization: Added support for importing Virt-Viewer (.vv) files (Proxmox/oVirt) and SPICE proxy tunneling.
• Connectivity & Security: Added FIDO2/Security Key support for SSH, Wake on LAN (WoL) GUI, and improved RDP rendering on HiDPI displays.
• UX & i18n: Added Regex-capable terminal search and translations for 14 languages (including UK, DE, FR, IT, PL).

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.53 is out:

Phosh's overview now shows a splash for launching apps and the Polkit dialog has more user details. The on-screen keyboard scales better in landscape and adds new completion dictionaries. The Wayland compositor phoc got initial support for the xx-cutout-v1 Wayland protocol to inform clients about notches and display cutouts.

There's more - see the full details here.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic is at V2026.2.4 this week with new features and many bug fixes!

Here's the full changelog:

• Added a search bar for subtitles in the add download dialog
• Added the ability to specify extra yt-dlp arguments for the discovery process
• Added the ability to specify extra yt-dlp arguments for the download process
• Fixed an issue where pausing and resuming downloads did not work correctly
• Fixed an issue where video passwords were not working when specified
• Fixed an issue where yt-dlp progress was not always displayed correctly
• Fixed an issue where instagram stories did not download correctly
• Fixed an issue where the encoder field was not properly cleared on FLAC files when remove source data was enabled
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic would not detect translation languages correctly
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic would use a previous save folder even if it no longer existed
• Fixed an issue where downloaded yt-dlp version were not getting executable permissions on Linux
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic wouldn't open on Linux
• Fixed an issue where playlist video downloads may not have had sound on Windows

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb says

I've released GNOME Crosswords 0.3.17. This is a strong release, featuring both a new interface for the game and multiple features for the editor. Read the announcement here.

Crosswords

The game got a full UI refresh in preparation for GNOME Circle.

• The game sports a new layout and design, including a sidebar for easier navigation
• The welcome screen was cleaned up
• A hints dialog was added to help players learn game controls
• Fullscreen support was redone
• Sorting and filtering was added to puzzle pickers
• We improved the adaptive functionality and accent color support
• Many polishing touches and bug fixes

Crosswords Editor

The editor also got some quality of life improvements as a result of user testing.

• The new puzzle dialog got a complete overhaul, including the addition of almost a thousand additional templates
  • This dialog also gained a theme word editor to preset crossword themes before grid creation.
• A new wordplay indicator dialog was added to help write cryptic clues
• Printing support was added, so the final product can be printed.
• Many polishing touches and bug fixes

Finally, a request for TWIG readers. GNOME Crosswords could really benefit from improved artwork, and we've reached the limits of my Inkscape skills. If you'd like to get involved with artwork for GNOME, this could be a great place to begin. Drop me a line if you're interested!

Shell Extensions

Miklós Zsitva says

Matrix Status Monitor v5

Matrix Status Monitor v5 has been released, focusing on deeper desktop integration and security awareness.

New features include:

• End-to-End Encryption Indicators: Encrypted rooms now feature a lock icon in the room list for immediate security verification.
• Selectable Matrix Clients: Users can now toggle between Element and Fractal in the preferences. The extension handles URI dispatching to ensure the correct application is launched.
• Settings UI Update: A refined preference window for easier API configuration and client selection.
• Performance: Optimized asynchronous /sync calls using Libsoup3 to minimize impact on Shell performance.

Extension Link: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/9328/matrix-status-monitor/ Source Code: https://github.com/nurefexc/matrix-status

Just Perfection says

The extensions porting guide for GNOME Shell 50 has been released and we are now accepting version 50 packages on EGO.

Miscellaneous

GNOME OS ↗

The GNOME operating system, development and testing platform

Ada Magicat ❤️🧡🤍🩷💜 reports

For a few months now, the gnome-build-meta repository - home of GNOME OS and the GNOME flatpak runtime - has been generating and publishing debug tarballs to our new debuginfod server. This week, Jordan added the final bits of configuration needed to use this infrastructure.

As a result, debugging tools (like gdb) running in GNOME OS and the upcoming version 50 release of the GNOME flatpak SDK can dynamically fetch the debug symbols they need at that moment, no longer requiring developers to download and update large debug extensions on their system for debugging.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

A new GNOME Foundation update post is available this week, covering highlights from the past two weeks. Notable items include the LAS 2026 announcement and a report from the latest Board of Directors meeting.

That's all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

20 Feb 2026 12:00am GMT

Welcome to another GNOME Foundation update post, covering highlights from the past two weeks (this week and last week). It's been a busy time, particularly due to conference planning and our upcoming audit - read on to find out more!

Linux App Summit 2026

We were thrilled to be able to announce the location and dates of this year's Linux App Summit this week. The conference will happen in Berlin on the 16th and 17th of May, at Betahaus Berlin. More information is available on the LAS website.

As usual, we are very pleased to be collaborating with KDE on this year's LAS. Our partnership on LAS has been a real success that we hope to continue.

Travel sponsorship for LAS 2026 is available for Foundation members through the Travel Committee, so head over to the travel page if you would like to attend and need financial support.

February's Board meeting

The Board of Directors it's regular monthly meeting last week, on 9th February. Highlights from the meeting included:

• We finally caught up on our minutes, approving the minutes from a total of nine meetings. This was a big relief, and hopefully we will be able to stay on top of the minutes now that we're caught up.
• The Board was thrilled to formally add Nirbheek Chauhan as a member of the Travel Committee. Many contributors will know Nirbheek as a longstanding GStreamer hacker, and he's already been doing some great work to help with travel. Thanks Nirbheek!
• The Board approved a new document retention and destruction policy, which is something that we are encouraged to have by regulators.
• I gave an update on the operational highlights from the last month, including fundraising, conference planning, and audit preparation.
• The Board considered a proposal for an exciting new program that we're hoping to launch very soon. More details to follow soon.

The next Board meeting is scheduled for March 9th.

Audit submissions

As I've mentioned in previous updates, the GNOME Foundation is due to be audited very soon. This is a routine occurrence for non-profits like us, but this is our first formal audit, so there's a good deal of learning and setup to be done.

Last week was the deadline to submit all the documentation for the audit, which meant that many of us were extremely busy finalising numbers, filling in spreadsheets, and tidying up other documentation ready to send it all to the auditors.

Our finance team *really* went the extra mile for us to get everything ready on time, so I'd like to give them a huge thank you for helping us out.

The audit inspection itself will happen in the first week of March, so preparations continue, as we assemble and organise our records, update our policies, and so on.

GUADEC 2026

Planning for this summer's conference has continued over the past two weeks. In case you missed it, the location and dates have been announced, and accommodation bookings are open at a reduced rate. In the background we are gearing up to open the call for papers, and the sponsorship effort is on its way. Now is a good time to start thinking about any talk proposals that you'd like to submit.

Membership certificates

A cool community effort is currently underway to provide certificates for GNOME Foundation members. This is a great idea in my opinion, as it will allow contributors to get official recognition which can be used for job applications and so on. More volunteers to help out would definitely be welcome.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading, and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

19 Feb 2026 3:01pm GMT

A week ago we discussed free trade, and specifically took a look at the classical mechanism by which free trade is supposed to improve overall outcomes, as measured by GDP.

As I described it, the value proposition of free trade is ambiguous at best: there is an intangible sense that a country might have a higher GDP with lower trade barriers, but with a side serving of misery as international competition forces some local industries to close, and without any guarantee about how that trade advantage would be distributed among the population. Why bother? And why is my news feed full of EU commissioners signing new trade agreements? Where are these ideas coming from?

stave 2

I asked around, placed some orders, and a week later a copy of Marc-William Palen's Pax Economica came in the mail. I was hoping for a definitive, reasoned argument for or against free trade, from a leftist's perspective (whatever that means). The book was both more and less than that. Less, in the sense that its narrative is most tightly woven in the century before the end of the second World War, becoming loose and frayed as it breezes through decolonization, the rise of neoliberalism, the end of history, and what it describes as our current neomercantilist moment. Less, also, in that Palen felt no need to summarize the classic economic arguments for free trade, leaving me to clumsily do so in the previous stave. And yet, the story it tells fills in gaps in my understanding that I didn't even know I had.

To pick up one thread from the book, let's go back to 1815. British parliament passes the Corn Laws, establishing a price floor for imported grain. This trade barrier essentially imposes a significant tax on all people who eat, to the profit of a small number of landowners. A movement to oppose these laws develops over the next 30 years, with Richard Cobden as its leading advocate. One of the arguments of the Anti-Corn Law League, which was actually a thing, is that cheaper food is good for workers; though wages might decline as bosses realize they don't need to pay so much to keep their workers alive, relatively speaking workers will do better. More money left over at the end of the month also means more demand for other manufactured products, which is good for growing industry.

In the end, bad harvests in 1845 led to shortages and famine (yes, that one) and eventually a full repeal of the laws in 1846. Perhaps the Anti-Corn Law League's success was inevitable: a bad harvest year is a stochastic certainty, and not having enough food is the kind of problem no government can ignore. In any case, the episode does prove the Corn Laws to be a front in a class war, and their repeal was a victory for the left, even if it occured under a Conservative government, and even if the campaign was essentially middle-class Liberal in character.

The repeal campaign was not just about domestic cost of living, however. Its exponents argued that free trade among nations was an essential step to a world of peaceful international cooperation. Palen's book puts Cobden in context by comparison to Friedrich List, who, inspired by a stint in America in the 1820s, starts from the premise that for a nation to be great, it needs an empire of colonies to exploit, and to conquer and defend colonies, it needs a developed domestic industry and navy; and for a nation to develop its own industry, it needs protectionism. The natural state of empire is not exactly one of free trade with its neighbors.

The "commercial peace" movement that Palen describes cuts List's argument short at "empire": because there is no empire without war, a peace movement should scratch away at the causes of war, and the causes of the causes; a world living in pax economica would avoid imperial conflict by tying nations together through trade. It sounds idealistic, and it is, but it's easy to forget that today we wage war through trade also: blockades and sanctions are often followed by bombs. Palen's book draws clear lines from Cobdenism through such disparate groups as women's peace societies, Christian internationalists, pre-war German socialists, and Lenin himself.

Marx understood history as a process of development, consisting of stages through which a society must necessarily pass on its way to socialism. This allies him with capitalism in many ways; he viewed free trade as a step towards a higher form of capitalism, which would necessarily lead to socialism. This, to me, is not a convincing argument in 2026: not only has the mechanistic vision of history failed to fruit, but its mechanism of plant closures and capital flight can be cruel and hard to campaign for politically. And yet, I think we do need a healthy dose of internationalism to remedy the ills of the present day: a jolt of ideals and even idealism to remind us that we are all travelling together on this spaceship Earth, and that those on the other side of a political line are just as much our brothers and sisters those on "our" side.

i went seeking clarity

When you tend Marxist, you know in your bones that although the road to socialism is rough and winding, the winds of history are always at your back; there is an in-baked inevitability of success that softens defeat. There is something similar in the Christian and feminist narrative strands that Palen weaves: a sense not that victory is inevitable, at least in this lifetime, but that fighting for it is a moral imperative, and that God is on your side. The campaign for free trade was a means to a moral end, one of international peace and shared prosperity. And this, in 2026, sounds... good, actually?

Again from our 2026 perspective, I cannot help but agree that a trade barrier is often an act of war; preliminary, yes, but on the spectrum. I have had enough freedom fries in my life to have developed an allergy to anything that tastes of my-side-of-the-line-is-better-than-yours. Though I have not yet read Klein and Pettis's deliciously titled Trade Wars are Class Wars, I do know that among the 1.5 million people who died as a result of the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein was not on the list. Sometimes I feel like we learned the lessons of Cobdenism backwards: in order to keep the people starving, we must impose anew the Corn Laws.

Palen's book leaves me with one doubt, and one big question. The doubt is, to what extent do the lessons of the early 1800s apply today? Ricardo's contemporary comparative advantage theories presupposed that capital was relatively fixed in space; nowadays this is much less the case. The threat of moving the plant elsewhere is always present in all union drives everywhere. Though history rhymes, it does not repeat; it will take some creativity to transplant pax economica to the soils of the 21st century.

The bigger question, though, is as regards the morality of protectionism as practiced by more and less developed economies: when is it morally right for a country to erect trade barriers? Palen's book does not pretend to answer this question. And yet, this issue was foremost in our minds, as we shut down Seattle in 1999, as we died in Genoa in 2001. (Forgive the collectivism, if you aren't of this tribe (yet?), but it was a lived experience.) Free trade was a moral cause in 1835; how did it become immoral in 1995, at least to us?

world without end

Well. To answer that question, we need a history that picks up where Palen leaves off, and we have something like it in Quinn Slobodian's Globalists, which we will look at next time. But before we go, two reflections.

One, in Europe we have kept the Corn Laws on the books, in a way, in the form of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In France the dominant discourse is very much in opposition to the free trade agreement with Mercosur, and the main reason is the threat to French farmers. The tradeoff to get the Mercosur agreement over the line were additional subsidies under the CAP, which are a form of trade barrier. And yet, the way the CAP is structured allocates most of the money in proportion to the surface area of a farm, which is to say, to the largest agribusinesses and to the largest landowners. Greenpeace just put out an excellent briefing arguing that the CAP is just a subsidy to the heirs of the Duchess of Alba and their ilk. Again, are we running the 19th century in reverse?

Secondly, and harder to explain... in the 2000s I listened a lot to an anarchist radio show hosted by Lyn Gerry, Unwelcome Guests. (Have you heard the eponymous tune? It makes me shiver every time.) Anyway I remember one episode which discussed the gift economy and hunter-gather economics, in which a researcher asked a member of that community what he would do if he came into a lot of food at one time: the response, as I recall, was that he would store it "in his brother". He would give it to others. One day, if he needed it, they would give to him.

I know that our world does not work this way, but there is an element of truth here, in that it's not reasonable for France to grow everything that it eats, to never trade what it grows, to make all its own solar panels, to write all software used within its borders. We live richer lives when we share and learn from each other, without regards to which side of the line our home is.

next

Still here? Gosh me too. Next time we will look at what the kids call the "1900s" and perhaps approach present day. Until then, commercial peace be with you!

18 Feb 2026 10:25pm GMT

For a few days leading up to FOSDEM 2026, the GNOME OS developers met for a GNOME OS hackfest. Here are some of the things we talked about!

Stable

The first big topic on our to-do list was GNOME OS stable. We started by defining the milestone: we can call GNOME OS "stable" when we settle on a configuration that we're willing to support long-term. The most important blocker here is systemd-homed: we know that we want the stable release of GNOME OS to use systemd-homed, and we don't want to have to support pre-homed GNOME OS installations forever. We discussed the possiblity of building a migration script to move people onto systemd-homed once it's ready, but it's simply too difficult and dangerous to deploy this in practice.

We did, however, agree that we can already start promoting GNOME OS a bit more heavily, provided that we make very clear that this is an unstsable product for very early adopters, who would be willing to occasionally reinstall their system (or manually migrate it).

We also discussed the importance of project documentation. GNOME OS's documentation isn't in a great state at the moment, and this makes it especially difficult to start contributing. BuildStream, which is GNOME OS's build system, has a workflow that is unfamiliar to most people that may want to contribute. Despite its comprehensive documentation, there's no easy "quick start" reference for the most common tasks and so it is ultimately a source of friction for potential contributors. This is especially unfourtunate given the current excitement around building next-gen "distroless" operating systems. Our user documentation is also pretty sparse. Finally, the little documentation we do have is spread across different places (markdown comitted to git, GitLab Wiki pages, the GNOME OS website, etc) and this makes it very difficult for people to find it.

Fixing /etc

Next we talked about the situation with /etc on GNOME OS. /etc has been a bit of an unsolved problem in the UAPI group's model of immutability: ideally all default configuration can be loaded from /usr, and so /etc would remain entirely for overrides by the system administrator. Unfourtunately, this isn't currently the case, so we must have some solution to keep track of both upstream defaults and local changes in /etc.

So far, GNOME OS had a complicated set-up where parts of /usr would be symlinked into /etc. To change any of these files, the user would have to break the symlinks and replace them with normal files, potentially requiring copies of entire directories. This would then cause loads of issues, where the broken symlinks cause /etc to slowly drift away from the changing defaults in /usr.

For years, we've known that the solution would be overlayfs. This kernel filesystem allows us to mount the OS's defaults underneath a writable layer for administrator overrides. For various reasons, however, we've struggled to deploy this in practice.

Modern systemd has native support for this arrangement via systemd-confext, and we decided to just give it a try at the hackfest. A few hours later, Valentin had a merge request to transition us to the new scheme. We've now fully rolled this out, and so the issue is solved in the latest GNOME OS nightlies.

FEX and Flatpak

Next, we discussed integrating FEX with Flatpak so that we can run x86 apps on ARM64 devices.

Abderrahim kicked off the topic by telling us about fexwrap, a script that grafts two different Flatpak runtimes together to successfully run apps via FEX. After studying this implementation, we discussed what proper upstream support might look like.

Ultimately, we decided that the first step will be a new Flatpak runtime extension that bundles FEX, the required extra libraries, and the "thunks" (glue libraries that let x86 apps call into native ARM GPU drivers). From there, we'll have to experiment and see what integrations Flatpak itself needs to make everything work seamlessly.

Abderrahim has already started hacking on this upstream.

Amutable

The Amutable crew were in Brussels for FOSDEM, and a few of them stopped in to attend our hackfest. We had some very interesting conversations! From a GNOME OS perspective, we're quite excited about the potential overlap between our work and theirs.

We also used the opportunity to discuss GNOME OS, of course! For instance, we were able to resolve some kernel VFS blockers for GNOME OS delta updates and Flatpak v2.

mkosi

For a few years, we've been exploring ways to factor out GNOME OS's image build scripts into a reusable component. This would make it trivial for other BuildStream-based projects to distribute themselves as UAPI.3 DDIs. It would also allow us to ship device-specific builds of GNOME OS, which are necessary to target mobile devices like the Fairphone 5.

At Boiling the Ocean 7, we decided to try an alternative approach. What if we could drop our bespoke image build steps, and just use mkosi? There, we threw together a prototype and successfully booted to login. With the concept proven, I put together a better prototype in the intervening months. This prompted a discussion with Daan, the maintainer of mkosi, and we ultimately decided that mkosi should just have native BuildStream support upstream.

At the hackfest, Daan put together a prototype for this native support. We were able to use his modified build of mkosi to build a freedesktop-sdk BuildStream image, package it up as a DDI, boot it in a virtual machine, set the machine up via systemd-firstboot, and log into a shell. Daan has since opened a pull request, and we'll continue iterating on this approach in the coming months.

Overall, this hackfest was extremely productive! I think it's pretty likely that we'll organize something like this again next year!

18 Feb 2026 4:57pm GMT

def visit(t, counter):
    t.pre_order = counter
    counter = counter + 1
    for u in S[t]:
        counter = visit(u, counter)
    t.post_order = counter
    return counter

18 Feb 2026 4:21pm GMT

It's time for another Crosswords release. This is relatively soon after the last one, but I have an unofficial rule that Crosswords is released after three bloggable features. We've been productive and blown way past that bar in only a few months, so it's time for an update.

This round, we redid the game interface (for GNOME Circle) and added content to the editor. The editor also gained printing support, and we expanded support for Adwaita accent colors. In details:

New Layout

I applied for GNOME Circle a couple years ago, but it wasn't until this past GUADEC that I was able to sit down together with Tobias to take a closer look at the game. We sketched out a proposed redesign, and I've been implementing it for the last four months. The result: a much cleaner look and workflow. I really like the way it has grown.

Overall, I'm really happy with the way it looks and feels so far. The process has been relatively smooth (details), though it's clear that the design team has limited resources to spend on these efforts. They need more help, and I hope that team can grow. Here's how the game looks now:

I really could use help with the artwork for this project! Jakub made some sketches and I tried to convert them to svg, but have reached the limits of my inkscape skills. If you're interested in helping and want to get involved in GNOME Design artwork, this could be a great place to start. Let me know!

Indicator Hints

Time for some crossword nerdery:

One thing that characterizes cryptic crosswords is that its clues feature wordplay. A key part of the wordplay is called an "indicator hint". These hints are a word - or words - that tell you to transform neighboring words into parts of the solutions. These transformations could be things like rearranging the letters (anagrams) or reversing them. The example in the dialog screenshot below might give a better sense of how these work. There's a whole universe built around this.

Good clues always use evocative indicator hints to entertain or mislead the solver. To help authors, I install a database of common indicator hints compiled by George Ho and show a random subset. His list also includes how frequently they're used, which can be used to make a clue harder or easier to solve.

Templates and Settability

I've always been a bit embarrassed about the New Puzzle dialog. The dialog should be simple enough: select a puzzle type, puzzle size, and maybe a preset grid template. Unfortunately, it historically had a few weird bugs and the template thumbnailing code was really slow. It could only render twenty or so templates before the startup time became unbearable. As a result, I only had a pitiful four or five templates per type of puzzle.

When Toluwaleke rewrote the thumbnail rendering to be blazing fast over the summer, it became possible to give this section a closer look. The result:

Note: The rendering issues with the theme words dialog is GTK Bug #7400

The new dialog now has almost a thousand curated blank grids to pick from, sorted by how difficult they are to fill. In addition, I added initial support to add Theme Words to the puzzle. Setting theme words will also filter the templates to only show those that fit. Some cool technical details:

• The old dialog would load the ipuz files, convert them to svg, then render them to Pixbuf. That had both json + xml parse trees to navigate, plus a pixbuf transition. It was all inherently slow. I've thrown all that out.
• The new code takes advantage of the fact that crossword grids are effectively bitfields: at build time I convert each row in a grid template into a u32 with each bit representing a block. That means that each crossword grid can be stored as an array of these u32s. We use GResource and GVariant to load this file, so it's mmapped and effectively instant to parse. At this point, the limiting factor in adding additional blank templates is curation/generation.
• As part of this, I developed a concept called "settability" (documentation) to capture how easy or hard it is to fill in a grid. We use this to sort the grids, and to warn the user should they choose a harder grid. It's a heuristic, but it feels pretty good to me. You can see it in the video in the sort order of the grids.

User Testing

I had the good fortune to be able to sit with one of my coworkers and watch her use the editor. She's a much more accomplished setter than I, and publishes her crosswords in newspapers. Watching her use the tool was really helpful as she highlighted a lot of issues with the application (list). It was also great to validate a few of my big design decisions, notably splitting grid creation from clue writing.

I've fixed most of the easy issues she found, but she confirmed something I suspected: The big missing feature for the editor is an overlay indicating tricky cells and dead ends (bug). Victor proposed a solution (link) for this over the summer. This is now the top priority for the next release.

Thanks

• George for his fabulous database of indicator words
• Tobias for tremendous design work
• Jakub for artwork sketches and ideas
• Sophia for user feedback with the editor
• Federico for a lot of useful advice, CI fixes, and cleanups
• Vinson for build fixes and sanitation
• Nicole for some game papercut fixes
• Toluwaleke for printing advice and fixes
• Rosanna for text help and encouragement/advice
• Victor for cleaning up the docs

Until next time!

16 Feb 2026 7:30am GMT

Pystd is an experiment on what a C++ standard library without any backwards compatibility requirements would look like. Its design goals are in order of decreasing priority:

• Fast build times
• Simplicity of implementation
• Good performance

It also has some design-antigoals:

• Not compatible with the ISO C++ standard library
• No support for weird corner cases like linked lists or types that can't be noexcept-moved
• Do not reinvent things that are already in the C standard library (though you might provide a nicer UI to them)

Current status

There is a bunch of stuff implemented, like vector, several string types, hashmap, a B-tree based ordered map, regular expressions, unix path manipulation operations and so on. The latest addition has been sort algorithms, which include merge sort, heap sort and introsort.

None of these is "production quality". They will almost certainly have bugs. Don't rely on them for "real work".

The actual library consists of approximately 4800 lines of headers and 4700 lines of source. Building the library and all test code on a Raspberry Pi using a single core takes 13 seconds. With 30 process invocations this means approximately 0.4 seconds per compilation.

For real world testing we have really only one data point, but in it build time was reduced by three quarters, the binary became smaller and the end result ran faster.

Portability

The code has been tested on Linux x86_64 and aarch64 as well as on macOS. It currently does not work with Visual Studio which has not implemented support for pack indexing yet.

Why should you consider using it?

Back in the 90s and 00s (I think) it was fashionable to write your own C++ standard library implementation. Eventually they all died and people moved to the one that comes with their compiler. Which is totally reasonable. So why would you now switch to something else?

For existing C++ applications you probably don't want to. The amount of work needed for a port is too much to be justified in most cases.

For green field projects things are more interesting. Maybe you just want to try something new just for the fun of it? That is the main reason why Pystd even exists, I wanted to try implementing the core building blocks of a standard library from scratch.

Maybe you want to provide "Go style" binaries that build fast and have no external deps? The size overhead of Pystd is only a few hundred k and the executables it yields only depend on libc (unless you use regexes, in which case they also depend on libpcre, but you can static link it if you prefer).

Resource constrained or embedded systems might also be an option. Libstdc++ takes a few megabytes. Pystd does require malloc, though (more specifically it requires aligned alloc) so for the smallest embedded targets you'd need to use something like the freestanding library. As an additional feature Pystd permits you to disable parts of the library that are not used (currently only regexes, but could be extended to things like threading and file system).

Compiler implementers might choose to test their performance with an unusual code base. For example GCC compiles most Pystd files in a flash but for some reason the B-tree implementation takes several seconds to build. I don't really know why because it does not do any heavy duty metaprogramming or such.

It might also be usable in teaching as a fairly small implementation of the core algorithms used today. Assuming anyone does education any more as opposed to relying on LLMs for everything.

14 Feb 2026 5:54pm GMT

Ever since my partner and I bought a house several years ago, I've wanted to throw a themed Star Wars party here. We've talked about doing a summer movie showing thing, we've talked about doing a Star Wars TV show marathon, and we've done a few birthday parties-but never the full-on themed party that I was dreaming up. Until this year!

For some reason, a combination of rearranging some of our furniture, the state of my smart home, my enjoyment of Star Wars: Outlaws, and my newfound work/life balance meant that this was the year I finally committed to doing the party.

Pitch

For the past few years I've thrown a two-part birthday party: we start out at a nearby bar or restaurant, and then head to the house for more drinks and games. I like this format as it gives folks a natural "out" if they don't want to commit to the entire evening: they can just join the beginning and then head out, or they can just meet up at our house. I was planning to do the same this year, but decided: let's go all-in at the house so we have more time for more fun. I knew I wanted:

1. Trivia! I organized a fun little Star Wars trivia game for my birthday last year and really enjoyed how nerdy my friends were with it, so this year I wanted to do something similar. My good friend Dagan volunteered to put together a fresh trivia game, which was incredible.

2. Sabacc. The Star Wars equivalent to poker, featured heavily in the Star Wars: Outlaws game as well as in Star Wars: Rebels, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the Disney Galactic Starcruiser (though it's Kessel sabacc vs. traditional sabacc vs. Corellian spike vs. Coruscant shift respectively… but I digress). I got a Kessel sabacc set for Christmas and have wanted to play it with a group of friends ever since.

3. Themed drinks. Revnog is mentioned in Star Wars media including Andor as some sort of liquor, and spotchka is featured in the New Republic era shows like The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. There isn't really any detail as to what each tastes like, but I knew I wanted to make some batch cocktails inspired by these in-universe drinks.

4. Immersive environment. This meant smart lights, music, and some other aesthetic touches. Luckily over the years I've upgraded my smart home to feature nearly all locally-controllable RGB smart bulbs and fixtures; while during the day they simply shift from warm white to daylight and back, it means I can do a lot with them for special occasions. I also have networked speakers throughout the house, and a 3D printer.

About a month before the party, I got to work.

Aesthetic

For the party to feel immersive, I knew getting the aesthetic right was paramount. I also knew I wanted to send out themed invites to set the tone, so I had to start thinking about the whole thing early.

Since I'd been playing Star Wars: Outlaws, that was my immediate inspiration. I also follow the legendary Louie Mantia on Mastodon, and had bought some of his Star Wars fonts from The Crown Type Company, so I knew at least partially how I was going to get there.

For the invite, I went with a cyan-on-black color scheme. This is featured heavily in Star Wars: Outlaws but is also an iconic Star Wars look ("A long time ago…", movie end credits, Clone Wars title cards, etc.). I chose the Spectre font as it's very readable but also very Star Wars. To give it some more texture (and as an easter egg for the nerds), I used Womprat Aurebesh offset and dimmed behind the heading. The whole thing was a pretty quick design, but it did its job and set the tone.

Website

I spent a bit more time iterating on the website, and it's a more familiar domain for me than more static designs like the invite was. I especially like how the offset Aurebesh turned out on the headings, as it feels very in-universe to me. I also played with a bit of texture on the website to give it that lo-fi/imperfect tech vibe that Star Wars so often embraces.

For the longer-form body text, I wanted something even more readable than the more display-oriented fonts I'd used, so I turned to a good friend: Inter (also used on this site!). It doesn't really look like Inter though… because I used almost every stylistic alternate that the font offers-explicitly to make it feel legible but also… kinda funky. I think it worked out well. Specifically, notice the lower-case "a", "f", "L", "t", and "u" shapes, plus the more rounded punctuation.

Since I already owned blaede.family where I host extended family wishlists, recipes, and a Mastodon server, I resisted the urge to purchase yet another domain and instead went with a subdomain. cantina.blaede.family doesn't quite stay totally immersive, but it worked well enough-especially for a presumably short-lived project like this.

Environment

Once I had the invite nailed down, I started working on what the actual physical environment would look like. I watched the bar/cantina scenes from A New Hope and Attack of the Clones, scoured concept art, and of course played more Outlaws. The main thing I came away thinking about was lighting!

Lighting

The actual cantinas are often not all that otherworldly, but lighting plays a huge role; both in color and the overall dimness with a lot of (sometimes colorful) accent lighting.

So, I got to work on setting up a lighting scene in Home Assistant. At first I was using the same color scheme everywhere, but I quickly found that distinct color schemes for different areas would feel more fun and interesting.

For the main lounge-type area, I went with dim orange lighting and just a couple of green accent lamps. This reminds me of Jabba's palace and Boba Fett, and just felt… right. It's sort of organic but would be a somewhat strange color scheme outside of Star Wars. It's also the first impression people will get when coming into the house, so I wanted it to feel the most recognizably Star Wars-y.

Next, I focused on the kitchen, where people would gather for drinks and snacks. We have white under-cabinet lighting which I wanted to keep for function (it's nice to see what color your food actually is…), but I went with a bluish-purple (almost ultaviolet) and pink.

While this is very different from a cantina on Tatooine, it reminded me of the Coruscant bar we see in Attack of the Clones as well as some of the environments in The Clone Wars and Outlaws. At one point I was going to attempt to make a glowing cocktail that would luminesce under black light-I ditched that, but the lighting stayed.

One of the more important areas was, of course, the sabacc table (the dining room), which is adjacent to the kitchen. I had to balance ensuring the cards and chips are visible with that dim, dingy, underworld vibe. I settled on actually adding a couple of warm white accent lights (3D printed!) for visibility, then using the ceiling fan lights as a sabacc round counter (with a Zigbee button as the dealer token).

Lastly, I picked a few other colors for adjacent rooms: a more vivid purple for the bathroom, and red plus a rainbow LED strip for my office (where I set up split-screen Star Wars: Battlefront II on a PS2).

I was pretty happy with the lighting at this point, but then I re-watched the Mos Eisley scenes and noticed some fairly simple accent lights: plain warm white cylinders on the tables.

I threw together a simple print for my 3D printer and added some battery-powered puck lights underneath: perfection.

Music

With my networked speakers, I knew I wanted some in-universe cantina music-but I also knew the cantina song would get real old, real fast. Since I'd been playing Outlaws as well as a fan-made Holocard Cantina sabacc app, I knew there was a decent amount of in-universe music out there; luckily it's actually all on YouTube Music.

I made a looooong playlist including a bunch of that music plus some from Pyloon's Saloon in Jedi: Survivor, Oga's Cantina at Disney's Galaxy's Edge, and a select few tracks from other Star Wars media (Niamos!).

Sabacc

A big part of the party was sabacc; we ended up playing several games and really getting into it. To complement the cards and dice (from Hyperspace Props), I 3D printed chips and tokens that we used for the games.

We started out simple with just the basic rules and no tokens, but after a couple of games, we introduced some simple tokens to make the game more interesting.

I had a blast playing sabacc with my friends and by the end of the night we all agreed: we need to play this more frequently than just once a year for my birthday!

Drinks

I'm a fan of batch cocktails for parties, because it means less time tending a bar and more time enjoying company-plus it gives you a nice opportunity for a themed drink or two that you can prepare ahead of time. I decided to make two batch cocktails: green revnog and spotchka.

Revnog is shown a few times in Andor, but it's hard to tell what it looks like-one time it appears to be blue, but it's also lit by the bar itself. When it comes to taste, the StarWars.com Databank just says it "comes in a variety of flavors." However, one character mentions "green revnog" as being her favorite, so I decided to run with that so I could make something featuring objectively the best fruit in the galaxy: pear (if you know, you know).

After a lot of experimenting, I settled on a spiced pear gin drink that I think is a nice balance between sweet, spiced, and boozy. The simple batch recipe came out to: 4 parts gin, 1 part St. George's Spiced Pear Liqueur, 1 part pear juice, and 1 part lemon juice. It can be served directly on ice, or cut with sparkling water to tame it a bit.

Spotchka doesn't get its own StarWars.com Databank entry, but is mentioned in a couple of entries about locations from an arc of The Mandalorian. All that can be gleaned is that it's apparently glowing and blue (Star Wars sure loves its blue drinks!), and made from "krill" which in Star Wars is shrimp-like.

I knew blue curaçao would be critical for a blue cocktail, and after a bit of asking around for inspiration, I decided coconut cream would give it a nice opacity and lightness. The obvious other ingredients for me, then, were rum and pineapple juice. I wanted it to taste a little more complex than just a Malibu pineapple, so I raided my liquor supply until I found my "secret" ingredient: grapefruit vodka. Just a tiny bit of that made it taste really unique and way more interesting! The final ratios for the batch are: 4 parts coconut rum, 2 parts white rum, 2 parts blue curaçao, 1 part grapefruit vodka, 2 parts pineapple juice, 1 part coconut cream. Similar to the revnog, it can be served directly on ice or cut with sparkling water for a less boozy drink.

Summary

Over all I had a blast hanging out, drinking cocktails, playing sabacc, and nerding out with my friends. I feel like the immersive-but-not-overbearing environment felt right; just one friend (the trivia master!) dressed up, which was perfect as I explicitly told everyone that costumes were not expected but left it open in case anyone wanted to dress up. The trivia, drinks, and sabacc all went over well, and a handful of us hung around until after 2 AM enjoying each other's company. That's a win in my book. :)

14 Feb 2026 12:00am GMT

Summary from 2022 Back then, I evaluated Google Cloud Platform for running Cockpit's integration tests. Nested virtualization on GCE was way too slow, crashy, and unreliable for our workload. Tests that ran in 35-45 minutes on bare metal (my laptop) took over 2 hours with 15 failures, timeouts, and crashes. The nested KVM simply wasn't performant enough. On today's Day of Learning, I gave this another shot, and was pleasantly surprised.

13 Feb 2026 12:00am GMT