When I discover there’s been no backup since the project launched last year ⌘ Read more
The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter October 2025
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of October 2025.
The XMPP Newsletter is brought to you by the XSF Communication Team.
Just like any other product or project by the XSF, the Newsletter is the result of voluntary work … ⌘ Read more
When the project manager tells me “it’s just a quick little fix” ⌘ Read more
South Korea Launches Final Spy Satellite to Track North Korea 24/7, Completing “425 Project” ⌘ Read more
** …but I can do that with regex? **
The other day a co-worker showed me a project that seemed genuinely useful, but I didn’t love some bits of how complicated and resource intensive its architecture were, so, I made my own version of it! Check out diff heatmap.
Your browser does not support the video tag. You are rad as hell.
As an aside, I put this one on github which I don’t generally choose to use for personal projects, but I’d love to see folks contribute rules to this projec … ⌘ Read more
Show HN: Strange Attractors
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors( https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js.
Working on it reminded me of the little “maths for fun” exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but i … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)
Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.
The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.
A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.
I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.
Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.
It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.
Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.
Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: 
This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.
As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.
But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.
Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.
Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).
@bender@twtxt.net Kaboom! Hahaha, I did not think of that at all, thanks for pointing it out, mate! :‘-D
But let me clarify just in case: I honestly do not want to bash this project. In fact, it’s a great little invention. It’s just that I’m not conviced by the current user interface decisions. Anyway, web design isn’t right up my alley. I just wanted to add some fun. And luckily, at least someone liked it so far. :-)
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Don’t you worry, this was meant as a joke. :-D
There was a time when I thought that Swing was actually really good. But having done some Qt/KDE later, I realized how much better that was. That were the late KDE 3 and early KDE 4 days, though. Not sure how it is today. But back then it felt Trolltech and the KDE folks put a hell lot more thought into their stuff. I was pleasantly surprised how natural it appeared and all the bits played together. Sure, there were the odd ends, but the overall design was a lot better in my opinion.
To be fair, I never used it from C++, always the Python bindings, which were considerably more comfortable (just alone the possibility to specify most attributes right away as kwargs in the constructor instead of calling tons of setters). And QtJambi, the Java binding, was also relatively nice. I never did a real project though, just played around with the latter.
When I switch from a clean project to a messy one ⌘ Read more
OpenIndiana 2025.10 released
OpenIndiana, the Illumos distribution for general use, has released its latest snapshot release, and there’s some really interesting things in there. To refresh your memory: Illumos is a fork of the final OpenSolaris release, based on Solaris 11, before Oracle closed Solaris back up. It’s been in development ever since that fateful day back in 2010, and several Illumos distributions with unique identities have sprung up around the project. OpenIndiana is one of them, and fu … ⌘ Read more
Ignite Realtime Blog: Helping Dutch Healthcare Speak the Same Language with XMPP
Helping Dutch Healthcare Speak the Same Language with XMPPThe XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) has put out a call to action: it’s time for the community to help make secure, interoperable chat a reality - especially in healthcare. Here at Ignite Realtime, we’re excited to support this effort. Our projects, … ⌘ Read more
gleescript: Bundle your Gleam-on-Erlang project into an escript, a single executable file
Comments ⌘ Read more
Announcing the Certified Meshery Contributor (CMC)
A CNCF-first of its kind Open source projects thrive or die based in large part on their community of contributors. It behooves maintainers to make opportunities for recognition and support of their contributors abundant. As a… ⌘ Read more
man and it calls home to see if I'm allowed to do that.
Because OP twtxt seems to be a cross-post from the Fediverse, I am bringing some context here. It refers to this GitHub issue. This comment explains why the issue described is happening:
This is usually due to notarization checks. E.g. the binaries are checked by the notarization service (‘XProtect’) which phones home to Apple. Depending on your network environment, this can take a long time. Once the executable has been run the results are usually cached, so any subsequent startup should be fast.
OP network must be running on 1,200 Baud modem, or less. 🤭 I have never, ever, experienced any distinguishable delays.
Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies
Gavin Feek, Contributing Writer - The Intercept
_Stephan: In yet another demonstration of his utter uninterest in the wellbeing of Earth or Americans, particularly the indigenous tribes of Alaska, Trump is now allowing the devastation of the Arctic National Park. I have been there; it is an awe-inspiring, long-protected wilderness. The Biden administration denied this project for obvious environmental issues, b … ⌘ Read more
CNCF embraces LFX Self Service for calendar management
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has experienced remarkable growth since its inception, welcoming its first project, Kubernetes, on March 10, 2016. By 2025, the CNCF proudly supports over 200 active projects, generating thousands of meetings… ⌘ Read more
Tuckr - Stow alternative with symlink checking
I’ve been using Stow for a few years now. At the time (2020) Stow had a bug where it would just fail with a cryptic error and the maintainer didn’t have time to fix it, the bug was there for 2 years or so. So I got fed up and decided to try and fix it but I didn’t know perl nor did I want to learn it, so I decided to rewrite Stow and fix the issue. To fix it I decided that I track all symlinks and give users a nice way to see what was going on. So the entire project was based on having a n … ⌘ Read more
When I’m asked how my current project is going ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de My impression also is that good sysadmins are missing. No wonder if they all get laid off because they’re “not doing anything” and developers can just operate their shit themselves. Or so the bosses and plenty devs think. Sadly, that’s the general view.
Hell no, devops is bullshit in my opinion. Most developers (including myself) are rather bad at administrating. A good sysadmin offers other skills. Great admins appear to just sit around, but they’re much more proactively working than programmers who also operate the same stuff. The latter have a waaay more reactive work model in comparison. When things have already gone south. The sysadmin, on the other hand, would have noticed and thus prevented the vast majority very early on when it was far from becoming a problem in the future.
At least that’s my personal experience in all those years in different projects and what my mates tell me from their companies. Sure, skills can be learned, but it’s just not happening (enough). And obviously, there are people out there who excel in both disciplines, but they are rare. Most fall in one of the categories. Not to forget, plenty are just bad at everything. :-)
From karaoke terminals to AI résumés: The winners of GitHub’s For the Love of Code challenge
This summer, we invited devs to participate in our hackathon for joyful, ridiculous, and wildly creative projects. Here are the winners of For the Love of Code!
The post [From karaoke terminals to AI résumés: The winners of GitHub’s For the Love of Code challenge](https://github.blog/open-source/from-karaoke-terminals-to-ai-resumes-the-winners-of-github … ⌘ Read more
LFX Insights: A new way to understand open source projects
Open source forms the backbone of modern technology ecosystems. From orchestration and observability to frameworks and developer tools, today’s technology choices depend on projects we may not control but rely on every day. The challenge: not… ⌘ Read more
Simple, minimal SQL database migrations written in Go with generics. Std lib database/sql and SQLX supported OOTB
I built GoSMig for personal projects and open-sourced it. It’s a tiny library for writing migrations in Go (compile-time checks via generics). Supports both transactional and non-transactional steps, rollback, status/version commands, and a built-in CLI handler so you can ship your own tool.
- Zero dependencies (std lib; golang.org/x/term used for pager support)
- database/sql and sqlx supported out of the box, others w … ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.5 released
KDE is on a roll lately, and keeps on rolling with today’s release of KDE Plasma 6.5. As the project itself notes, this release focuses on relatively small improvements, refinements, and other niceties, without making any massive changes. With Linux desktops taking accessibility more seriously lately than ever before, I want to focus on the accessibility improvements first. The Orca screen reader now announces caps lock state changes, and screen readers will now describe the Shortcut … ⌘ Read more
Inside the breach that broke the internet: The untold story of Log4Shell
Log4Shell proved that open source security isn’t guaranteed and isn’t just a code problem. It’s about supporting, enabling, and empowering the people behind the projects that build our digital infrastructure.
The post [Inside the breach that broke the internet: The untold story of Log4Shell](https://github.blog/open-source/inside-the-breach-that-broke-the-internet-the-untold-story-of-log4she … ⌘ Read more
Create Your Own AI Voice Agent Using EchoKit, ESP32, and Rust
Step-by-step tutorial for EchoKit, a DIY AI voice agent (fully open source) I’ve been working on.
🔹 Hardware: An easy-to-assemble ESP32-S3 board (EchoKit). 🔹 Server: A high-performance server built entirely in Rust to manage the ASR -> LLM -> TTS pipeline. 🔹 AI Models: Fully customizable, using Groq’s APIs (Whisper, Llama 3, PlayAI-TTS) in the guide for near-instant responses.
This project is perfect for:
Developers wantin … ⌘ Read more
Using Vim with very big Java projects ⌘ Read more
Accelerate developer productivity with these 9 open source AI and MCP projects
GitHub Copilot and VS Code teams, along with the Microsoft Open Source Program Office (OSPO), sponsored these nine open source MCP projects that provide new frameworks, tools, and assistants to unlock AI-native workflows, agentic tooling, and innovation.
The post [Accelerate developer productivity with these 9 open source AI and MCP projects](https://github.blog/open-source/acce … ⌘ Read more
NLnet sponsors development of WPA3 support for OpenBSD
The NLnet foundation has sponsored a project to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, support which in turn can be used by other operating systems. This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the div … ⌘ Read more
The Brutality Is the Message: Why America’s Violence Against Immigrants Isn’t About Immigration
Thom Hartmann, Commentator - The Hartmann Report
_Stephan: I think Thom Hartmann has it exactly right. This whole immigrant business is about creating an “other” just as the Nazis made the Jews the “other” and using the “other” to create fear and intimidation. Project 2025 is just a restating of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the Republican … ⌘ Read more
When I have to install and configure 3 different SDKs to build a big project ⌘ Read more
An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS
One of the problems the ReactOS project continually has to deal with is that Windows is, of course, an evolving, moving target. Trying to be a Windows-compatible operating system means you’re going to have to tie that moving target down, and for ReactOS, the current focus is on being compatible with Windows Server 2003 “or later”. This “or later” part is getting a major boost in a very crucial area. The history of ReactOS spans a wider rang … ⌘ Read more
Efficient autoscaling: Keeping performance, reliability, and cost in mind with open source projects
During ContainerDays in Hamburg, Kelsey Hightower posed a simple but powerful question: “Why are we still talking about containers?” His point resonated with me deeply — even in the AI era, the cloud-native community is still… ⌘ Read more
After taking most of the year off from role-playing, I’ve got 3 one-shots coming up in the next month, all of which need some tweaking before I can run them (as do my homebrew rules).
Plus there’s a “build a game” code challenge at work, a pair of media boxes I need to rebuild, a pair of dead machines I need to diagnose, and I’d like to (eventually) get my twtxt apps to a “releasable” state.
So many projects, so little (free) time…
When I pull my Raspberry Pi out of the closet for a little side project ⌘ Read more
When we have to fix a bug in a hurry without being able to run the project locally ⌘ Read more
FSF announces Librephone project
Article URL: https://www.fsf.org/news/librephone-project
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45586339
Points: 501
# Comments: 206 ⌘ Read more
Haiku gets fixes for NFS4, improves its BSD driver compatibility layer
Another month, another activity report from the Haiku project. This past month, a lot of work went into the FreeBSD/OpenBSD network driver compatibility layer, opening the door to drivers using interfaces other than PCI or USB. Support for NFS4 took a bit of a hit with last month’s changes to VFS, and these have been addressed, and other aspects of NFS4 have been improved as well. On top of t … ⌘ Read more
LineageOS 23 released
The LineageOS project has released version 23 of their AOSP-based Android variant. LineageOS 23 is based on the initial release of Android 16 – so not the QPR1 release that came later – because Google has not made the source code for that release available yet. Like other, similar projects, LineageOS also suffers from Google’s recent further lockdown of Android; not only do they not have access to Android 16 QPR1’s source code, they also can’t follow along with the latest security patche … ⌘ Read more
10 Unexpected Things Scientists Made Using DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, holds the genetic information passed from parents to offspring. But researchers are driven by a bigger question—beyond inheritance, what more can you do with DNA? The results are mind-bending. From sperm plastic to woolly mammoth meatballs, here are ten projects that prove DNA is a freakishly malleable material. Related: 10 Awesome […]
The post [10 Unexpected Things Scientists Made Using DNA](https://listver … ⌘ Read more
In bizarre move, Framework embraces deeply extremist views
Framework, the maker of repairable laptops, is embroiled in a controversy, as the company and its CEO are openly supporting people with, well, questionable views. If you know a little bit about PR in social media space, you might note that, right out of the gate, a project by a vocal white nationalist known for splitting communities by their mere presence, is not a great highlight choice for an overtly non-left-righ … ⌘ Read more
DebDroid - Debian on Android (v1.1)
Hello guys! I’m happy to share DebDroid, a free and open-source project that aims to bring a real Debian environment to Android devices. It is not Termux-based, nor a simple proot-based wrapper, but a real, near-native chroot environment running on top of the Android kernel.
The project is built around a heavily modified version of the Kali Nethunter’s script I’ve developed 3 years ago. This new version (DebDroid) brings greatly improved security, isolation and additional compatibility patch … ⌘ Read more