schestowitz.com

RMS Asks About Problems With systemd

HE good news of the day is, RMS is open to feedback – including to criticism – on systemd.

Wedding Anniversary in 3 Weeks

ime flies.

Patent Troll InterDigital Proves UPC is a Sham, Needs to be Scuttled ASAP

welve years ago we travelled around the same time SCOTUS delivered Alice and with 35 U.S.C. § 101 it became easier to squash software patents in the US. Now in Europe we see the opposite trend. This means I’d need to get back to writing a lot more about patents.

You Know You Secretly Hate Women When…

he thing you want to do to women is put them in cages (even your own wife!) You insist women are not women and then argue about nature, replacing science with ideology You naturally come to realise women keep a distance from you (they probably explain to one another why) You cheat on women casually You assume what’s theirs is actually men’s (like you) You antagonise women except those who flatter you

I Try My Best to Boycott YouTube and You Should Too

he ‘video sharing’ [sic] site YouTube is getting more aggressive over time and it tries to block people from accessing videos in a way that suits them.

The Crocodile is Shedding Off Tears Again

HIS year I heard the term “emotional vulture” many times and wrongly assumed it might be similar to “crocodile tears” (a fake emotion(al) crocodile that cries for the people or animals it devours). As it turns out, emotional vulture is one who preys on the emotionally vulnerable – i.e. it is something different altogether. It’s said to refer to a manipulative dating trend that targets people going through a breakup (or similar ordeal). I remember a Norwegian girl showing interest in me when her Danish boyfriend was not treating her well; I wasn’t preying on her, it felt like she was using me to try to get him (the boyfriend) jealous or not to take her for granted.

Last Year’s Decision

he decision made a year ago to curb binges of salty and sweet foods ended our weekly ‘ritual’, but we have since then found alternatives, which are healthier and more productive use of time. Improving diet is a desirable thing and governments should recommend healthy diets.

MediaCityUK Development Seems to Have Stalled

Facing Old Trafford (MUFC)

Explaining AlternativeApproaches.com

HE other day I was contacted by Christine from FOSS Force. I thought the matter was worth documenting in public and I carefully checked that no personal information would be divulged in the process, not something embarrassing anyway (if told otherwise, I’d modify accordingly). Regarding FOSS Force ownership, she told me, “I notice that you identify articles on FOSS Force as being on Unicorn Media, which is an identity that hasn’t existed in about 10 years down.”

Playing CDs With VLC and KDE’s Dragon Player

hese days I use two media players to play my CDs (mostly 1990s albums and collections). One is KDE’s Dragon Player (because it’s based on Qt), the other is VLC. The latter has a lot more functionality but higher RAM footprint. In the past I used even leaner applications to achieve the same functionality. Those are no longer compatible with this setup (a lot changes in 20+ years in this sector).

9to5Linux

Darktable 5.6.1 RAW Image Editor Improves UI Performance and Fixes More Bugs

Darktable 5.6.1 comes two months after Darktable 5.6 with a small UI performance boost by reverting the increased preview pipe dimension, as well as support for copying color labels, ratings, and manually applied geotags to images created by AI denoise and upscale, in addition to EXIF data and tags.

LibreOffice 26.8 Open-Source Office Suite Officially Released, This Is What’s New

Highlights of LibreOffice 26.8 include the Paragraph Composer in Writer as a text layout algorithm that balances word spacing across consecutive lines, along with support for OpenType font variations, and the ability to detect paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted.

Armbian 26.8 Released with Linux 7.1, Revamped Installer, and UEFI ISO Images

Coming almost three months after Armbian 26.5, the Armbian 26.8 release adds support for new ARM boards and chips, including Anbernic RG DS and RG Vita Pro, Radxa Cubie A7Z and Dragon Q6A/Q8B, Seeed reComputer RK3576 and RK3588 DevKits, as well as TI BeagleBadge and TMDS64EVM.

COSMIC 1.7 Desktop Environment Improves COSMIC Files, COSMIC Edit, and More

Coming only a week after COSMIC 1.6, the COSMIC 1.7 release is a small update that updates the COSMIC Compositor with improved support for scalable cursors so that they won’t be blurry when their size is increased, the ability to increase the zoom with each keypress, and support for magnifying the cursor when it’s shaken.

Ardour 9.8 Open-Source DAW Is Now Available with Initial Scales Support

Coming two and a half months after Ardour 9.7, the Ardour 9.8 release introduces initial scales support to let you visualize out-of-scale notes and choose if you want to avoid creating them entirely when composing and improvising in a specific musical key, as well as support for the Novation Launchkey 88 Mk4 and Arturia Drumbrute controllers.

OpenSSL 4.0.2 Released with Important Security and Bug Fixes

Coming two and a half months after OpenSSL 4.0.1, the OpenSSL 4.0.2 release is here to address several important security vulnerabilities, including a heap buffer overflow in CMS key unwrapping (CVE-2026-63072), excessive memory use buffering DTLS records (CVE-2026-54874), and a client-side memory leak in OCSP response checking (CVE-2026-54876).

Happy 35th Birthday, Linux!

It was on August 25th, 1991, that the 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Benedict Torvalds made his now-famous announcement on the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he was working on a free operating system for 386 (486) AT clones, just as a “hobby”.

Shelly 3.1 Package Manager Is Out with Support for Building Arch Linux Packages

Shelly 3.1 is here to introduce support for building Arch Linux packages through a new shelly build command that’s part of the native package-management library, not a wrapper around makepkg. It writes makepkg-compatible entries and produces archives that pacman and other Arch Linux tools understand.

LinuxGizmos.com

FireWire HAT with PCIe 2.0 for Tapeless DV and HDV Capture

A recent Crowd Supply campaign features the Firehat, an open-source FireWire HAT designed for PCIe-capable single-board computers including the Raspberry Pi 5 and Radxa ROCK 2F. The board uses a VIA VT6315N IEEE 1394 controller and targets direct DV and HDV capture from older digital camcorders and tape decks using Linux.

Upcoming Jetson Orin Nano 2 boosts edge AI performance to 78 TOPS

NVIDIA has announced the Jetson Orin Nano 2, an updated edge AI platform aimed at robotics, drones, machine vision, and other embedded AI applications. The new module provides up to 78 TOPS of AI performance, 8GB of memory, and an 8-core Arm CPU while retaining the compact form factor of the previous Jetson Orin Nano generation.

Fanless Edge box runs Linux on Rockchip RV1126B with 3-TOPS NPU

The Forlinx FCU3101 is a fanless edge AI computing system based on Rockchip’s RV1126B/RV1126BJ processor, providing local AI inference, Ethernet, serial, and digital I/O connectivity for industrial vision, security monitoring, and data acquisition applications.

IAR webinar to examine static and runtime analysis for AI-assisted embedded development

IAR will host a September 15 webinar focused on the use of AI-generated code in regulated embedded development, with discussion covering static analysis, runtime checking, and CI/CD workflows used to support software verification and compliance activities.