today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 29, 2026

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Plasma Bigscreen (or something else) for a lounge TV computer

      Our AppleTV has proved perfectly serviceable for the decade we’ve had it, but… actually, scratch that, besides its mediocre remote, it’s been excellent. Fashion Company Apple could have abandoned it years ago and forced us to upgrade, but it’s still been getting patches and new features this whole time. That feels unusual in our current world of planned obsolescence, enshittification, and everyone’s favourite two letters of the Latin alphabet, so it’s worth calling out. Good job, Cupertino.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Cassidy James Blaede: Updates to the Blog

      I’ve been wanting to get back into more frequent blogging instead of just posting half-thought-out toots to Mastodon, turning them into a rambling thread, and then losing the thought to the depths of social control media… but every time I try to write something, there are a bunch of changes I want to make to my website so I get overwhelmed and do something else. 😅

      Between the recent Matrix Conference (another blog post I need to write…), travel, and taking a couple of days off of work to recover, I decided to tackle some of those changes to hopefully reduce the mental block for the future: I finally added pagination and tags, plus imported a bunch of my writing from other sites! As long as I’m here, I figured I should document the changes as a blog post, too.

  • Events

    • FOSS Force ☛ DrupalCon Rotterdam Focuses on Digital Sovereignty and Abusive Monopolist Microsoft 365

      Summit contributors weigh in on which would be better: Quitting Abusive Monopolist Microsoft 365 cold turkey or a gradual withdrawal.

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Caching, bot defense and a CDN

      When I deploy, visitors will briefly see 502s. A new copy of the Go binaries gets copied to the origin server, the app restarts, and Caddy hasn't reloaded its config yet (said config gets copied over as part of the deploy). There's now a short retry for Caddy to help mitigate this.

    • Search Engine Roundtable ☛ Google Updates Favicon Documentation To Specify Googlebot Must Follow Redirects From Homepage To Favicon

      Google Search has just updated its favicon documentation to now specify that Googlebot must be able to follow redirects from the homepage to the page where the favicon is specified. The document also explicitly says that these URLs must not be blocked by robots.txt or other means.

  • Education

    • Fernando Borretti ☛ We Won’t “Just Hang Out”

      The social processes by which people come together and build relationships will disappear. Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence. University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.

      I met a lot of my friends by writing open-source code, and participating in the community of software engineers. AI is dissolving that community by making human contributions superfluous. If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects or my technical blog posts.

    • APNIC ☛ APRICOT 2027 Call for Presentations is open now

      The APRICOT 2027 Program Committee (PC) is seeking proposals for presentations and tutorials for APRICOT 2027, taking place in Hong Kong SAR, China, from 24 February to 4 March 2027.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Hackaday ☛ How Bad Is That Bridge: A Government Database

        Bridges! We kind of expect them to just be there and do their job, ad infinitum. They are built into the landscape, and we often take them and the routes they open up for granted.

        The reality, as any civil engineer will tell you, is that bridges are living, breathing things that require endless maintenance and monitoring to keep them safe, standing, and functional. A great example of this is found in the US Department of Transportation, and its publicly accessible register of bridge health reports.

    • Open Access/Content

      • James G ☛ Trade zines with me!

        Over the last few weeks I have been experimenting with making more zines. I have been having so much fun!

      • Darren Goossens ☛ Dr Trevor Hicks symposium, 2009

        Back in 2009, I coordinated a symposium on neutron scattering and magnetism: on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Dr Trevor Hicks, my PhD supervisor. And now, only 17 years later, the conference handbook is available electronically! Wow!

      • Creative Commons ☛ Commons Stories: Part 1

        For Creative Commons’ 25th anniversary, we asked some of the people behind CC: What does the commons mean to you? Their answers became this four-part series of personal reflections. We’re kicking things off with four perspectives.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Hackaday ☛ JPEG-XL Is Back On The Menu

      Many of the image formats we’re familiar with have been around for decades. We all know JPEG and PNG like the back of our hands, and GIF even had a bit of a resurgence when tiny annoying looping animations became cool again on social media. There has been a growth in newer formats, though, like WEBP, and AVIF, with various platforms and software companies adopting them for greater efficiency, performance, and image quality.

      Amongst the new crop of formats vying for relevance is JPEG XL. It was touted as a format that improved on what JPEG could do in the lossy compression space, while also adding on a lossless mode. There were grand hopes that it would become a universal replacement for all existing raster formats on the Web. A major problem was that Google was seemingly against it, only to backflip—with the format now slated to hit the big time with renewed backing from the search giant. So what’s going on?