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QmidiCtl 1.0.2 - An Early Spring'25 Release rncbc Mon, 31 Mar 2025 - 19:00

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QmidiNet 1.0.1 - An Early Spring'25 Release rncbc Mon, 31 Mar 2025 - 18:00

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Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear.

Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher [nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn the device is running some kind of stripped down Linux, and [nuit] spends the first part of the write-up going over the partitions and peeking around inside the filesystem. From there the post briefly covers how over-the-air (OTA) updates were supposed to work when everything was still online, which may become useful in the future when the community has a new firmware to flash these things with.

Where things really start getting interesting is when the Jooki starts up and exposes its HTTP API to other devices on the local network. There are some promising endpoints such as /flags which let’s you control various aspects of the device, but the real prize is /ll, which is a built-in backdoor that runs whatever command you pass it with root-level permissions! It’s such a ridiculous thing to include in a commercial product that we’d like to think they originally meant to call it /lol, but in any event, it’s a huge boon to anyone looking to dig deeper in to the device.

But wait, there’s more! The Jooki runs a heartbeat script that regularly attempts to check in with the mothership. The expected response when the box pings the server is your standard HTTP 200 OK, but in what appears to be some kind of hacky attempt at implementing a secondary OTA mechanism, any commands sent back in place of the HTTP status code will be executed as root.

Now as any accomplished penguin wrangler will know, if you can run commands as root, it doesn’t take long to fire up an SSH server and get yourself an interactive login. Either of these methods can be used to get into the speaker’s OS, and as [nuit] points out, the second method means that whoever can buy up the Jooki domain name would have remote root access to every speaker out there.

Long story short, it’s horrifyingly easy to get root access on a Jooki speaker. The trick now is figuring out how this access can be used to restore these devices to full functionality. We just recently covered a project which offered a new firmware and self-hosted backend for an abandoned smart display, hopefully something similar for the Jooki isn’t far off.

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, PhotoGIMP, Shotcut, Flowblade, and Calf.

Spectral JPEG XL

Alban Fichet and Christoph Peters from Intel presented Spectral JPEG XL, an extension of JPEG XL that supports storing data at wavelengths invisible to humans (but useful for scientific data). The new file format does pretty much the same as the spectral version of OpenEXR, except it reportedly compresses the original zipped data x10 to x60 without losing spectral characteristics.

There’s a quite decent coverage of this project over at Ars Technica, check it out.

GIMP 3.0.2

This is a bugfix release that also has the patch for improved graphic tablets support reverted. Apparently, the patch needs redoing. You can download the new version here.

With this release, the team is going back to their old release policy: major (v3.0) and minor (v3.2, v3.4, etc.) releases can have new features, micro releases (3.0.2, 3.0.4, etc.) can only have bug fixes. The rationale for that is that the team wants to make more frequent minor releases. For example, they want to release v3.2 within one year of 3.0.

If they can pull it off (which I hope they can), then this policy makes perfect sense. If they can’t, we’ll end up with another pre-2.10 multi-year development effort where the team has nothing to show for itself, and GIMP will begin to feel like a dead project again. Let’s hope it won’t come to that.

PhotoGIMP 3.0

Gabriel Almir released a new version of PhotoGIMP targeting recently released GIMP 3.0. It’s a pack of presets and graphics to make GIMP look more like Photoshop.

The project achieved seemingly impossible: the PhotoGIMP defaults make the GIMP3 window not fit a HiDPI 2560x1440 screen. I had to tweak the icon size and font scaling in the Welcome dialog to fix that.

LibrePCB 1.3.0

The new version arrives with an interactive HTML BOM export based on the existing code by Open Scope Project, compatibility for KiCad v9 library file format, and initial use of Rust instead of C++. You can read the release notes for more details.

Personally, I find the idea of a Rust port somewhat puzzling. Some developers are very excited about the language, but there aren’t many complex applications written in it. The few ones that I know of are nowhere near completion.

Moreover, there are virtually no complex applications that use Slint—the Rust UI toolkit that LibrePCB is supposed to be ported to eventually. It looks like LibrePCB will be a pilot project of sorts, and in that sense, I don’t really envy Urban.

Shotcut 25.03

Dan Dennedy released a new version of Shotcut with various quality-of-life improvements. Here are some of the release highlights:

• It’s now possible to copy just the currently selected filter or all filters in the stack for pasting into another clip.
• New switch: Toggle Filter Overlay in the Player menu.
• New video filters: 360: Cap Top & Bottom and 360: Equirectangular Wrap.
• Timeline clips with filters now have a funnel icon on them.
• ITU-R BT.2020 is now available in output properties.

The full list of changes is in the release announcement. You can grab the downloads for your operating system here.

Flowblade 2.20

Janne Liljeblad released a new version of Flowblade, a non-linear video editor based on MLT (same as Kdenlive and Shotcut).

Release highlights:

• Numerous sync editing improvements.
• Sequence Link Container Clips to easily replace clips in sequences.
• Position Scale and Position Scale Rotate filters can now have presets to apply pans and zooms with a single click.
• Generators can now have templates.

For the full list of changes, please see the release notes. Only the source code is available officially.

Calf 0.90.6

This once-popular pack of LV2 plugins is slowly getting back to life. There was little development between 2016 and 2020 and virtually no development between 2020 and 2024. Since 2024, new maintainer Johannes Lorenz has been patching things and making new releases.

The only new feature in recent releases is a psychoacoustic clipper plugin:

The rest is pretty much bugfixing and the switch to CMake for the build system. Only source code is available officially, but some Linux repositories track Calf releases closely.

Artworks

Mountain by Philipp Urlich, made with Krita:

Castle on the Highlands by Yuta Shimpo, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Pharaoh of the Desert by Stefan Thadeus Radenkovic, made with Blender:

MTG : Draconic Wastelands by Max Roche, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Ocult by Johannes Winkler, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Music consumption has followed a trend over the last decade or more of abandoning physical media for online or streaming alternatives. This can present a problem for young children however, for whom a simpler physical interface may be an easier way to play those tunes. Maintaining a library of CDs is not entirely convenient either, so [JakesMD] has created the Yaydio. It’s a music player for kids, that plays music when a card is inserted in its slot.

As you might expect, the cards themselves do not contain the music. Instead they are NFC cards, and the player starts the corresponding album from its SD card when one is detected. The hardware is simple enough, an Arduino Nano with modules for MP3 playback, NFC reading, seven segment display, and rotary encoder. The whole thing lives in a kid-friendly 3D printed case.

Some thought has been given to easily adding albums and assigning cards to them, making it easy to keep up with the youngster’s tastes. This isn’t the first such kid-friendly music player we’ve seen, but it’s certainly pretty neat.

Both VCV Rack Free and VCV Rack Pro 2.6 are out, including the ability to Zoom to fit / Zoom to fit modules and drag multiple cables stacked on a port. It's a nice upgrade for this free and open source modular tool (and its partly-proprietary Pro package, too) - while we wait on upcoming v3.

The post VCV Rack 2.6: multilingual, drag multiple cables, fit in view – all for free appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 25.04, codenamed “Plucky Puffin”.

While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper installer bugs, you will find some bugs within. This image is, however, mostly representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 25.04 is released on April 17, 2025.

We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.04 image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32 and may not be readable when burned to a DVD. For this reason, we recommend downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.

Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/25.04/beta/

Full updated information, including Upgrade Instructions, are available in the Release Notes.

New Features This Release

This release is more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. While we work hard to bring new features, this one was not one where we had anything major to report. Here are a few highlights:

• Plasma 6.3 is now the default desktop environment, an upgrade from Plasma 6.1.
• PipeWire continues to improve with every release.. Version 1.2.7
• The Default Panel Icons are now back. The default panel now populates depending on which applications are available, so that there are never empty icons if you choose the minimal install, and then install one or more of our featured applications. This refresh to the default is done every reboot, so it’s not a live update. Additionally, it must be refreshed manually from the User side either by selecting the Global Theme or removing the panel and adding “Ubuntu Studio Default Panel”.
• While not included in this Beta, Darktable will be upgraded to 5.0.0 before final release.

Major Package Upgrades

• Ardour version 8.12.0
• Qtractor version 1.5.3
• Audacity version 3.7.3
• digiKam version 8.5.0
• Kdenlive version 24.12.3
• Krita version 5.2.9
• GIMP version 3.0.0

There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to look around the freely-downloadable ISO image.

Known Issues

• The installer was supposed to be able to keep the screen from locking, but this will still happen after 15 minutes. Please keep the screen active during installation. As a workaround if you know you will be keeping your machine unattended during installation, press Alt-Space to invoke Krunner (this even works from the Install Ubuntu Studio versus the Try Ubuntu Studio live environment) and type “System Settings”. From there, search for “Screen Locking” and deactivate “Lock automatically after…”.
  
  Another possible workaround is to click on “Switch User” and then re-login as “Live User” without a password if this happens.
  
• You will be prompted, upon first login of any new user, to reboot to apply proper audio configurations for audio production. This is intentional and is a workaround for the installer’s inability to configure the first user as part of the “audio” group or for new users to be added to the audio group automatically.
  
• The Installer background and slideshow still show the Oracular Oriole mascot. This is work in progress, to be fixed in a daily release sometime between now and final release.

Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-studio-25-04-release-notes/

Further known issues, mostly pertaining to the desktop environment, can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PluckyPuffin/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu

Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/plucky-puffin-release-notes/

How You Can Help

Please test using the test cases on https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com. All you need is a Launchpad account to get started.

Additionally, we need financial contributions. Our project lead, Erich Eickmeyer, is working long hours on this project and trying to generate a part-time income. Go here to see how you can contribute financially (options are also in the sidebar).

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Ubuntu Studio contain snaps?
A: Yes. Mozilla’s distribution agreement with Canonical changed, and Ubuntu was forced to no longer distribute Firefox in a native .deb package. We have found that, after numerous improvements, Firefox now performs just as well as the native .deb package did.

Thunderbird is also a snap this cycle in order for the maintainers to get security patches delivered faster.

Additionally, Freeshow is an Electron-based application. Electron-based applications cannot be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories in that they cannot be packaged in a traditional Debian source package. While such apps do have a build system to create a .deb binary package, it circumvents the source package build system in Launchpad, which is required when packaging for Ubuntu. However, Electron apps also have a facility for creating snaps, which can be uploaded and included. Therefore, for Freeshow to be included in Ubuntu Studio, it had to be packaged as a snap.

Also, to keep theming consistent, all included themes are snapped in addition to the included .deb versions so that snaps stay consistent with out themes.

We are working with Canonical to make sure that the quality of snaps goes up with each release, so we please ask that you give snaps a chance instead of writing them off completely.

Q: If I install this Beta release, will I have to reinstall when the final release comes out?
A: No. If you keep it updated, your installation will automatically become the final release. However, if Audacity returns to the Ubuntu repositories before final release, then you might end-up with a double-installation of Audacity. Removal instructions of one or the other will be made available in a future post.

Q: Will you make an ISO with {my favorite desktop environment}?
A: To do so would require creating an entirely new flavor of Ubuntu, which would require going through the Official Ubuntu Flavor application process. Since we’re completely volunteer-run, we don’t have the time or resources to do this. Instead, we recommend you download the official flavor for the desktop environment of your choice and use Ubuntu Studio Installer to get Ubuntu Studio – which does *not* convert that flavor to Ubuntu Studio but adds its benefits.

Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine?
A: We now include a minimal install option. Install using the minimal install option, then use Ubuntu Studio Installer to install what you need for your very own content creation studio.

The next live concerts of Malte Steiner's soloprojects:

Elektronengehirn will play 19. April at Noiseberg Berlin, Germany

Notstandskomitee will play 17. May Object Permanence Festival at Caisa Culture Centre Helsinki, Finland

The GStreamer project is thrilled to announce that there will be a spring hackfest on Friday-Sunday 16-18 May 2025 in Nice, France.

For more details and latest updates check out the announcement on Discourse.

We will announce any further updates on Discourse, but you can also follow us on Bluesky and on on Mastodon.

We hope to see you in Nice!

Please spread the word!

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, Blender, PDF4QT, libwacom, and LosslessCut.

GIMP 3.0

This release was nearly seven years in the making and delivers some long-overdue features:

• Layer filters
• Multiple layers selection
• Layer locks
• CMYK exporting / late binding
• Color management updates
• Text outlines
• Better file formats support

I already covered those in a dedicated post, check it out.

The roadmap will likely be revisited sometime after the v3.0 release.

Piranesi

Bruno Postle published his Python script called piranesi which implements the perspective transformation technique by the Italian archaeologist, architect, and artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (18th century). You probably have seen some of the etchings by Piranesi before:

Source: The Metropolitan Art Museum

As an architect, Bruno has a lifelong interest in veduta (which used to be a thing for people in the Hugin community, check out e.g. the Panini projection). If you want to know more about this particular project, Bruno posted a detailed write-up on his Piranesi perspective research several years ago.

libwacom 2.15

The new version adds data for built-in Wacom units in various Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu laptops, but beyond that it ships with support for:

• XP Pen Innovator 16, Deco 01 V3, and Deco Pro S tablets;
• Wacom Intuos 3rd gen S, M, and L tablets.

Once the new release finds its way to distributions, the GNOME configuration panel will pick the new data to expose the right controls (and so should the KDE configuration panel, but I’m not sure).

PDF4QT 1.5

Completely missed this update of PDF4QT, a PDF editor by Jakub Melka, a couple of weeks ago.

This is mainly a bugfix release with some quality-of-life additions:

• Zooming in now anchors to the cursor position.
• When you enable the highlighting tool, you now select the highlighter color first (the color was hardcoded before that).
• The page order can now be reversed in the PageMaster mode (useful when you scan pages back to front).

For a full list of changes, please see here.

Blender 4.4

The new version arrives with fixes for over 700 reported issues, which alone is very impressive, but also with various new features and improvements:

• Newly introduced action slots to easily animate multiple elements together.
• VSE now has text editing right in the preview, as well as H.265 and 10/12-bit video support. It has also switched to BT.709 for rendering video.
• Various modeling improvements.
• The sculpting toolbox got a brand-new Plane brush.
• The CPU compositor has been rewritten, several filter nodes are now much (up to x10) faster.
• Blender 4.4 is built with libraries that are in the VFX Reference Platform 2025.

See here for the full release notes. There’s a video recap as well:

LosslessCut 3.65.0

This is a convenient video editor designed for one job, which is cutting bits out of videos without re-encoding.

Lots of changes in this new version, here are some of the most interesting ones:

• Markers are now available to mark locations (not used for exporting).
• You can now play multiple audio tracks simultaneously.
• Faster waveform rendering.
• Shortcuts for jump & seeking to previous/next segments.

See here for the full list of changes.

Tantacrul on UX

Martin Keary aka Tantacrul gave a talk about UX design at FOSS Backstage Design 2025 in Berlin recently, showcasing his team’s work on Audacity and MuseScore, but also showing some user testing he did for Inkscape (and the devs are listening).

Artworks

The Legend of Ramayana with Amish by Sachin Chauhan, made with Krita:

Winter by Philipp A. Urlich, made with Krita:

Iron Trials - Village by Asher Sobek Israel, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Runic - Aden by KyzosArt, made with Krita:

The culmination of seven years of open-source development, GIMP has reached its milestone 3.0 release. GIMP was always powerful, but this feels more like the mature, usable release to take on the proprietary heavyweights.

The post GIMP 3.0, free and open source image app, looks brilliant appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The GStreamer team is excited to announce a new major feature release of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

As always, this release is again packed with new features, bug fixes and many other improvements.

The 1.26 release series adds new features on top of the previous 1.24 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.

Highlights:

• H.266 Versatile Video Coding (VVC) codec support
• Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) support
• Closed captions: H.264/H.265 extractor/inserter, cea708overlay, cea708mux, tttocea708 and more
• New hlscmafsink, hlssink3, and hlsmultivariantsink; HLS/DASH client and dashsink improvements
• New AWS and Speechmatics transcription, translation and TTS services elements, plus translationbin
• Splitmux lazy loading and dynamic fragment addition support
• Matroska: H.266 video and rotation tag support, defined latency muxing
• MPEG-TS: support for H.266, JPEG XS, AV1, VP9 codecs and SMPTE ST-2038 and ID3 meta; mpegtslivesrc
• ISO MP4: support for H.266, Hap, Lagarith lossless codecs; raw video support; rotation tags
• SMPTE 2038 ancillary data streams support
• JPEG XS image codec support
• Analytics: New TensorMeta; N-to-N relationships; Mtd to carry segmentation masks
• ONVIF metadata extractor and conversion to/from relation metas
• New originalbuffer element that can restore buffers again after transformation steps for analytics
• Improved Python bindings for analytics API
• Lots of Vulkan integration and Vulkan Video decoder/encoder improvements
• OpenGL integration improvements, esp. in glcolorconvert, gldownload, glupload
• Qt5/Qt6 QML GL sinks now support direct DMABuf import from hardware decoders
• CUDA: New compositor, Jetson NVMM memory support, stream-ordered allocator
• NVCODEC AV1 video encoder element, and nvdsdewarp
• New Direct3D12 integration support library
• New d3d12swapchainsink and d3d12deinterlace elements and D3D12 sink/source for zero-copy IPC
• Decklink HDR support (PQ + HLG) and frame scheduling enhancements
• AJA capture source clock handling and signal loss recovery improvements
• RTP and RTSP: New rtpbin sync modes, client-side MIKEY support in rtspsrc
• New Rust rtpbin2, rtprecv, rtpsend, and many new Rust RTP payloaders and depayloaders
• webrtcbin support for basic rollbacks and other improvements
• webrtcsink: support for more encoders, SDP munging, and a built-in web/signalling server
• webrtcsrc/sink: support for uncompressed audio/video and NTP & PTP clock signalling and synchronization
• rtmp2: server authentication improvements incl. Limelight CDN (llnw) authentication
• New Microsoft WebView2 based web browser source element
• The GTK3 plugin has gained support for OpenGL/WGL on Windows
• Many GTK4 paintable sink improvements
• GstPlay: id-based stream selection and message API improvements
• Real-time pipeline visualization in a browser using a new dots tracer and viewer
• New tracers for tracking memory usage, pad push timings, and buffer flow as pcap files
• VA hardware-acclerated H.266/VVC decoder, VP8 and JPEG encoders, VP9/VP8 alpha decodebins
• Video4Linux2 elements support DMA_DRM caps negotiation now
• V4L2 stateless decoders implement inter-frame resolution changes for AV1 and VP9
• Editing services: support for reverse playback and audio channel reordering
• New QUIC-based elements for working with raw QUIC streams, RTP-over-QUIC (RoQ) and WebTransport
• Apple AAC audio encoder and multi-channel support for the Apple audio decoders
• cerbero: Python bindings and introspection support; improved Windows installer based on WiX5
• Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements and bug fixes

For more details check out the GStreamer 1.26 release notes.

Binaries for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows will be provided in due course.

You can download release tarballs directly here: gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, gst-libav, gst-rtsp-server, gst-python, gst-editing-services, gst-devtools, gstreamer-vaapi, gstreamer-sharp, gstreamer-docs.

Ardour 8.12 is now available.

This is a hot-fix release, intended to fix two issues.

1. the bug fix introduced in 8.11 turned out to be incorrect, and broke several other things in subtle ways. 8.12 is a completely new approach to fixing the problem with region lengths after certain operations could cause sessions to be unloadable.

2. for several previous versions, the packaging of translation files on macOS was broken. This has been corrected, and translations should work again on that platform.

Note that 8.12 will also correctly load sessions suffering from the problem referred to in #1 above.

All users of earlier 8.x versions should plan to upgrade as soon as possible. Apologies for the problems the bug in #1 has caused people - we hope this is a permanent, correct fix this time.

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Last year Malte Steiner learned that there is an antifeminist movement. Female antifeminists. Further research lead to the art installation The Tradwives: Three color e-paper screens generate and show unsupervised and uncensored collages of material which was data-scraped from Tradwife influencer profiles on Instagram. The material was first decomposed with Machine Learning into smaller bits which within the installation are rearranged to ever changing collages.
First shown at Oksasenkatu 11 Helsinki (FI) last September. Part of Steiner's art project Absolute Power.

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 24.04.2 LTS. This is a minor release which wraps-up the security and bug fixes into one .iso image, available for download now.

Among the changes, we have updated the support and help links in the menu, fixed bugs in Ubuntu Studio Installer, and more. As always, check the Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS Release Notes release notes for more information.

Please give financially to Ubuntu Studio!

Giving is down. We understand that some people may no longer be able to give financially to this project, and that’s OK. However, if you have never given to Ubuntu Studio for the hard work and dedication we put into this project, please consider a monetary contribution.

Additionally, we would love to see more monthly contributions to this project. You can do so via PayPal, Liberapay, or Patreon. We would love to see more contributions!

So don’t wait, and don’t wait for someone else to do it! Thank you in advance!

Donate using PayPal Donations are Monthly or One-Time

Donate using Liberapay Donations are Weekly, Monthly, or Annually

Donate using Patreon Become a Patron!Donations are Monthly

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I haven't been sure what to do about the software pages here for quite a while. Most of them were essentially just stale versions of the README files from their projects, and for better and worse, most of the projects I maintain are libraries that don't have as much of a need for a homepage as user-facing software. It's easy to just ignore things that don't really matter in day-to-day work, but the embarrassingly bad state of things became really clear when I sat down to actually poke through this site.

Since it's much more important for me right now to streamline maintenance duties and eliminate as much overhead as possible, I've simply removed all of the software pages, and redirected those addresses to the corresponding Gitlab projects where possible. I might bring them back at some point, but for now, no pages are better than stale pages that really only serve to make things look bad. I don't have traffic metrics here, but I seriously doubt anyone will either notice or care.

I'm not sure about the utility of the software release posts or tarballs either. Ideally, the effort required to make a release could be reduced to simply pushing a git tag, and cross-domain posting hugely complicates that. Besides, the tarballs are made manually on my personal machine, so they're absolutely less trustworthy than the signed tags in git anyway, and, I assume, not reproducible. At the same time, for many reasons I'm wary of fully investing in some git forge or another, the automatic tarballs provided by all of them leave much to be desired (the silly "v" names for example), and I don't want to disrupt things for packagers. We'll see, but for now I'll leave the mechanics of actual releases as they are.

Ultimately, pages and posts are largely a waste of time for libraries and similar things that only support other projects anyway. So, a more radical simplification of the release process would be a good idea, but for now I'll just take out the trash and reduce the amount of things I need to consider in that process.

I don't suppose inactivity from me will be terribly surprising to anyone after the past several years. Still, since I was working on emptying my bug-fix and maintenance queue, making releases, and finally getting to some significant forward progress again, an update:

Unfortunately I got violently ill last week with some horrible flu-like thing, the worst I've ever had (and I'm a COVID casualty, so that's saying quite a lot). Somehow, it's still going strong. So, aside from maybe a few minutes a day of idle tinkering, everything I was doing is on pause for a while. Hopefully a short while, but so far so not good, so we'll see.

As an added bonus, Google just bricked my phone with a botched forced update, so I'm locked out of 2FA and many other things besides (I suppose I had to learn the hard way that I've gotten lazy and too dependent on that horrible device). So, yeah, things aren't going great, to put it lightly.

On the bright side, I do have some exciting things in the queue, but since I don't do vapourware or hype (to a fault, really), and have a huge amount of "infrastructure" work to do first anyway, you'll have to stay tuned for that. Assuming I don't die first, anyway.

... if I do, it would be pretty funny that this was my last post though, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

[Edited on 2025-02-16 to remove broken link]