planet.linuxaudio.org

Both small children and cats have a certain tendency to make loud noises at inopportune times, but what if there were a way to combine these auditory effects? This seems to have been the reasoning behind the creation of the Meowsic keyboard, a children’s keyboard that renders notes as cats’ meows. [Steve Gilissen], an appreciator of unusual electronic instruments, discovered that while there had been projects that turned the Meowsic keyboard into a MIDI output device, no one had yet added MIDI input to it, which of course spurred the creation of his Meowsic MIDI adapter.

The switches in the keys of the original keyboard form a matrix of rows and columns, so that creating a connection between a particular row and column plays a certain note. [Steve]’s plan was to have a microcontroller read MIDI input, then connect the appropriate row and column to play the desired note. The first step was to use a small length of wire to connect rows and columns, thus manually mapping connections to notes. After this tedious step, he designed a PCB that hosts an Arduino Nano to accept input, two MCP23017 GPIO expanders to give it enough outputs, and CD4066BE CMOS switches to trigger the connections.

[Steve] was farsighted enough to expect some mistakes in the PCB, so he checked the connections before powering the board. This revealed a few problems, which some bodge wires corrected. It still didn’t play during testing, and after a long debugging session, he realized that two pins on an optoisolator were reversed. After fixing this, it finally worked, and he was able to create the following video.

Most of the MIDI hacks we’ve seen involved creating MIDI outputs, including one based on a Sega Genesis. We have seen MIDI input added to a Game Boy, though.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new old stable 1.24 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes as well as a number of security fixes and important playback fixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.24.x.

Please note that the 1.24 old-stable series is no longer actively maintained and has been superseded by the GStreamer 1.26 stable series now.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Various security fixes and playback fixes
• MP4 demuxer atom parsing improvements and security fixes
• H.265 decoder base class and caption inserter SPS/PPS handling fixes
• Subtitle parser security fixes
• Subtitle rendering and seeking fixes
• Closed caption fixes
• Matroska rotation tag support and v4 muxing support
• Ogg seeking improvements in streaming mode
• Windows plugin loading fixes
• MIDI parser improvements for tempo changes
• Video time code support for 119.88 fps and drop-frames-related conversion fixes
• GStreamer editing services fixes for sources with non-1:1 aspect ratios
• RTP session handling and RTSP server fixes
• Thread-safety improvements for the Media Source Extension (MSE) library
• macOS video capture improvements for external devices
• Python bindings: Fix compatibility with PyGObject >= 3.52.0
• cerbero: bootstrapping fixes on Windows, improved support for RHEL, and openh264 recipe update
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.24.13 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

The Functionalist design philosophy that Dieter Rams brought to Braun from the 50s to the 90s still inspires the look of a few devices, including Apple’s iPod, Teenage Engineer’s synthesizers and recorders – and [2dom]’s IR7 streaming radio.

The streaming radio was inspired by Braun’s portable radios, particularly the SK2, TP1, and the T3 pocket radio. [2dom] started with the T3’s circular pattern of holes and experimented with several variations, finally settling on a cylindrical shape with a central display; a prototype with a low-power monochrome rectangular display was eventually rejected in favor of a circular LCD. The housing consists of four 3D-printed components: an upper and lower shell, a resonator for the speaker, and a knob for a rotary encoder.

Electronics-wise, an ESP32 handles the computing requirements, while the LCD and rotary encoder provide a user interface. For audio, it uses a VS1053 MP3 decoder, PAM8403 amplifier, and a wideband speaker, with an audio isolation transformer to clean up the audio. To reduce power consumption, a MOSFET cuts power to the peripheral components whenever the device is in sleep mode. The full design is available on GitHub.

The end result of this effort is a quite authentic-looking 21st-century adaptation of Rams’s original designs. If you’re interested in more Braun designs, check out this replica of one of their desk fans. We’ve also seen a restoration of one of Braun’s larger radios, the TS2.

Mutable Instruments' Frames had one of Émilie's best and most underrated ideas: apply keyframing, as in animation and motion, to modular control. Now, Grayscale Modular is developing that concept with 12 channels and more control. It's available for $399 as hardware, or you can try it right now in VCV Rack for free.

The post Grayscale Nexus expands on Mutable’s keyframing – free now in VCV Rack appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Week highlights: new release of RawTherapee, new features in GIMP, and new apps for screenshot annotation and film photography.

The X11Libre drama

It’s hard to avoid this topic. In a nutshell:

• Enrico Weigelt started contributing to xserver (X11/X.org) around January 2024. He has over 800 commits to his name to date.
• He didn’t test at least some of his patches, which broke things on multiple occasions.
• At least one maintainer (employed by Red Hat) complained that his patches added little value, yet the sheer number of them blocked the review of patches by other contributors.
• Some contributors, such as Jasper St. Pierre of Valve, complained that Enrico’s patches broke ABI compatibility way too often.
• Many of Enrico’s patches stayed unapplied, which he complained about, too.
• Enrico also complained that his fixes are not being released (there were actually five xserver releases in 2024 and one in 2025).
• Enrico spent some time publicly badmouthing Red Hat / IBM online (in this comments section, for instance), claiming that the company was sabotaging X11 development.
• He ended up forking X11, renaming it to X11Libre, and hosting his fork on freedesktop’s infrastructure (now on GitHub).
• The FreeDesktop CoC committee reportedly discussed this and—which is an established fact—banned Enrico from the platform and deleted the fork repository, which automatically deleted all unapplied merge requests (because Gitlab).
• The person (employed by Red Hat) who pushed the red button posted on Mastodon what some people think was schadenfreude (unlikely).

If all this complaining is not quite sufficient, the story was reported by Bryan Landuke in his usual narrative-twisting style to add extra drama and skip some important details.

I have little interest in discussing the whole X11 vs Wayland topic. I’m neither against nor in favor of either. Overall, I’d happily switch to Wayland since that’s where GNOME is heading. The only reason I’m still an X11 user is that Ardour works less reliably on XWayland for me, and chances of Paul and Robin porting YTK (their vendored version of GTK2) to Wayland any time soon seem extremely slim, same as a port of Ardour to GTK3/GTK4 (however little of that they would use).

I also don’t buy the entire “passionate developer vs big evil dishonest corporation” narrative. I’ve read enough discussions in the issue tracker and merge requests to form my own opinion. Everybody had a problem with his changes: both Red Hat, Oracle, Valve, and NVIDIA peeps. His contribution style and approach to testing his patches didn’t change at all despte multiple confrontations.

What I find more interesting to discuss is that the decision-making is not transparent in many FOSS organizations. It’s hard for me to name a project that has a code of conduct and a public record on any voting to apply its policy.

In this particular instance, we don’t know who posted a complaint to the CoC, who actually participated in the conversation, what CoC rule was deemed broken, and why the committee decided to ban instead of issuing an official warning. As a matter of fact, it’s possible that they did issue a warning, but there’s just no way to tell.

This is not a unique issue. But it’s the kind of growing pains in the community that are educational to watch.

All in all, I think there’s a multitude of lessons to learn from this controversy. For example, if you have a difficult contributor who disrupts the project’s operation and you know he won’t shut up about the ban, maybe try being extra open about the process of ejecting him. Or if a big bad corpo is out to get ya, maybe don’t try to host your fork on the infrastructure they can kick you out of.

GIMP

Okay, this was an eventful week for the project:

• Advance Software implemented JPEG2000 exporting.
• The Lock Content command is now undoable (CmykStudent).
• GIMP can now optionally follow the light/dark theme system switch on systems where thi is supported (Niels De Graef, Hari Rana, Jehan Pages, Isopod).
• Some transformations can once again add the alpha channel automatically (CmykStudent).
• GIMP can now load JIF (Jeff’s Image Format) images which are a variation of the GIF format that compresses indexed images using zlib rather than LZW (CmykStudent).
• When reading and writing OpenRaster files, GIMP now supports two official specification extensions: storing if layers are pixel-locked and if they are selected (CmykSudent). Both extensions are supported by Krita and MyPaint.
• The CMYK color selector now displays total ink coverage (CmykStudent, unsurprisingly).

Gradia 1.4

This is a brand-new application to annotate screenshots. Functionally, it’s a lot like Annotator, but with a slightly different approach to UI.

The application lacks some important features, such as cropping and a delay for screenshots, but the developer is quite responsive in the issue tracker, in my experience. Definitely check it out. Officially, it’s only distributed as a flatpak build, but I just built it from git (it’s all in Python, anyway).

RawTherapee 5.12

This is a major update bringing some neat changes, including these:

• Dehaze option added to The Raw Black Points.
• De-fish option in Distortion Correction to convert fisheye images into rectilinear images.
• New Gamut Compression tool to apply ACES Reference Gamut Compression operator.
• The Resize tool can now add a single-color border around the image.
• New global tone mapper in Shadows/Highlights & Tone Equalizer tools.

See here for the full list of changes.

Filmbook

This is a brand-new application to help film camera users keep track of their rolls. The interface seems to be heavily geared towards phones despite being written in GTK4 (there isn’t an abundance of platforms you can run this on at the moment, it’s pretty much just Phosh).

Björn Adelberg was kind enough to provide some background about this project.

At the moment, the application is still very much geared to my needs. I have several cameras and not all of them have the option of inserting part of the film carton at the back. That’s why I wanted to remember which film is in which camera. It is also sometimes good to remember which films have not yet been developed. I would then take a film of the same type and load it again.

Once this is exposed, I have two films of the same type and can develop them in one developer box. It should also be possible to remember which films you have in the fridge and which cameras are in the cupboard. How much you expand this is another question.

One feature that is not yet integrated is the ability to create image entries for an inserted film. There you could enter the exposure time and which lens you used. Perhaps also a quick little sketch of the image. However, I think that having to document every image there is too time-consuming and not relevant in practice. But maybe I’m wrong.

The source code is over at Codeberg. There haven’t been any releases of this application yet. However, the developer publicly asked film photography aficionados for feedback. So there, consider this a broadcast of that request.

Flowblade 2.22

There are a few interesting changes in this new release of Flowblade, an MLT-based video editor:

• 32 new options for easing in keyframes.
• GUI editors for Alpha Shape, Crop, and Gradient Tint effects.
• Text labels for tracks displayed in track headers.
• Various minor UI improvements.

See here for the full changelog.

Artworks

Power Beacon by Marat Zakirov, made with Blender:

Amsterdamsche Munt by Laura Kempff, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Ah, shiny, new, free modules for the free VCV Rack. They're a perfect solution to starting new tracks and playing with new toys. Of course, that's not a problem most of us have. Starting is easy; finishing is hard. Enter JW Arrange. Let's have a look.

The post New VCV Rack modules – including JW Arrange so you can finish tracks appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Week highlights: new features in GIMP, new versions of PDF Arranger, Odin 2, and Tumult; new VAMP plugins.

GIMP

Two interesting patches merged to GIMP this week:

• Importing legacy drop shadows in PSD (MR #2297).
• Loading layered EXR files (MR #2301).

Other interesting changes in review:

• JPEG 2000 exporting, with options for quality, CMYK exporting, and Digital Cinema Specification compliance profile (MR #2291).
• Loading Photoshop patterns (MR #2285).

Because it’s LGM week, the team attended the conference, and this seems to have brought back Michael Natterer, who hasn’t been active in the project in the past two years.

PDF Arranger 1.12

This is a convenient little application by Konstantinos Poulios for performing various operations on PDF files. Here is what’s new in this release:

• You can now export pages to PNG, JPEG, and rasterized PDF.
• There’s a new option to drop document-level information like outline, passwords, and tags when exporting.
• You can now do reverse imposition (booklet to pages).
• It’s possible to do range selection for pages now.
• You can now choose standard paper sizes when inserting a blank page or changing the page size.

There are builds for Windows on GitHub and a Linux build on Flathub.

Odin2 v2.4.0

TheWaveWarden released a new version of this free/libre virtual synth with a complete UI revamp. Already covered this in a few more details on a dedicated post earlier this week, have a read.

Tumult 1.1.0

Consint released a new version of Tumult, a plugin that adds noise to your audio for aesthetic reasons. You can now import custom samples and use 50 more noises added from the “Noise Plethora” sample pack.

Here is an earlier video demonstration of the plugin:

New VAMP plugins

Chris Cannam released two new VAMP plugins:

• MERT Vamp plugin extracts feature vectors ( you could call them patterns) that can be used in machine learning for music interpretation.
• Lossy Encoding Detector attempts to determine if the audio was ever subjected to a lossy compression algorithm.

Technically, you can use both of them with Sonic Visualiser, but only the lossy encoding detector renders an immediately useful plot.

Ardour and the Linux kernel

Linux 6.x broke support for Launchkey MK4 users in Ardour. This is because the system builds the names of ports from USB iProduct and USB iJack names, and some manufacturers put the product name into both. So instead of a telling port name Ardour sees something like “Launchkey MK4 61 Launchkey MK4” for all available ports and doesn’t know which one to pick.

Paul Davis ended up rolling up his sleeves and submitting a patch to introduce some basic heuristics and make the naming of MIDI ports smarter. Now, instead of non-descript “Launchkey MK4 61 Launchkey MK4”, you get regular port names like “Launchkey MK4 61 DAW In”. The patch has already landed in the kernel v6.14.8.x, and users report that it resolves the issue.

Artworks

Flooded Temple by OOFBurrito, made with Blender and GIMP:

They Will Kneel Soon by Arshad T P, made with Blender, After Effects, and Photoshop:

Entrance to the Research Facility for The Dark Eye by Illarstration, made with Krita:

Disney SpeedStorm: The Castle by Pedro Pitéu, made with Blender, Krita, and Photoshop (all artwork in the series made in pre-production and during development of the game):

Ruins of the Frozen Viking Ancients by YKK, made with Blender, 3DCoat, and Photoshop:

Fantastica Kowloon - Mufant Contest Entry by Alessandro Rocco, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new stable 1.26 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes as well as a number of security fixes and important playback fixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Various security fixes and playback fixes
• aggregator base class fixes to not produce buffers too early in live mode
• AWS translate element improvements
• D3D12 video decoder workarounds for crashes on NVIDIA cards on resolution changes
• dav1d AV1-decoder performance improvements
• fmp4mux: tfdt and composition time offset fixes, plus AC-3 / EAC-3 audio support
• GStreamer editing services fixes for sources with non-1:1 aspect ratios
• MIDI parser improvements for tempo changes
• MP4 demuxer atom parsing improvements and security fixes
• New skia-based video compositor element
• Subtitle parser security fixes
• Subtitle rendering and seeking fixes
• Playbin3 and uridecodebin3 stability fixes
• GstPlay stream selection improvements
• WAV playback regression fix
• GTK4 paintable sink colorimetry support and other improvements
• WebRTC: allow webrtcsrc to wait for a webrtcsink producer to initiate the connection
• WebRTC: new Janus Video Room WebRTC source element
• vah264enc profile decision making logic fixes
• Python bindings gained support for handling mini object writability (buffers, caps, etc.)
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.2 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS has reached the end of its three years of supported life provided by the Ubuntu Studio team. All users are urged to upgrade to 24.04 LTS at this time.

This means that the KDE Plasma, audio, video, graphics, photography, and publishing components of your system will no longer receive updates, plus we at Ubuntu Studio won’t support it after 29-May-2025, though your base packages from Ubuntu will continue to receive security updates from Ubuntu until 2027 since Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Core continue to receive updates.

See the Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS Release Notes for upgrade instructions.

No single release of any operating system can be supported indefinitely, and Ubuntu Studio has no exception to this rule.

Long-Term Support releases are identified by an even numbered year-of-release and a month-of-release of April (04). Hence, the most recent Long-Term Support release is 24.04 (YY.MM = 2024.April), and the next Long-Term Support release will be 26.04 (2026.April). LTS releases for official Ubuntu flavors (not Desktop or Server which are supported for five years) are three years, meaning LTS users are expected to upgrade after every LTS release with a one-year buffer.

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 25.04 code-named “Plucky Puffin”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 36th release. This release is a Regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months, until January 2026.

Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a more complete list of changes and known issues. Listed here are some of the major highlights.

This release is dedicated to the memory of Steve Langasek. Without Steve, Ubuntu Studio would not be where it is today. He provided invaluable guidance, insight, and instruction to our leader, Erich Eickmeyer, who not only learned how to package applications but learned how to do it properly. We owe him an eternal debt of gratitude.

You can download Ubuntu Studio 25.04 from our download page.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.04 disk 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 standard 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.

Minimum installation media requirements: Dual-Layer DVD or 8GB USB drive.

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

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

Upgrades from 24.10 should be enabled within a month after release, so we appreciate your patience. Upgrades from 25.04 LTS will be enabled after 24.10 reaches End-Of-Life in July 2025.

New This Release

GIMP 3.0!

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 is included by default. GIMP is now capable of non-destructive editing with filters, better Photoshop PSD export, and so very much more! Check out the GIMP 3.0 release announcement for more information.

Pencil2D

Ubuntu Studio now includes Pencil2D! This is a 2D animation and drawing application that is sure to be helpful to animators. You can use basic clipart to make animations!

The basic features of Pencil2D are:

• layers support (separated layer for bitmap, vector and soud part)
• bitmap drawing
• vector drawing
• sound support

LibreOffice No Longer in Minimal Install

The LibreOffice suite is now part of the full desktop install. This will save space for those wishing for a minimalistic setup for their needs.

Invada Studio Plugins

Beginning this release we are including the Invada Studio Plugins first created by Invada Records Australia. This includes distortion, delay, dynamics, filter, phaser, reverb, and utility audio plugins.

PipeWire 1.2.7

This release contains PipeWire 1.2.7. One major feature this has over 1.2.4 is that v4l2loopback support is available via the pipewire-v4l2 package which is not installed by default.

PipeWire’s JACK compatibility is configured to use out-of-the-box and is zero-latency internally. System latency is configurable via Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration.

However, if you would rather use straight JACK 2 instead, that’s also possible. Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration can disable and enable PipeWire’s JACK compatibility on-the-fly. From there, you can simply use JACK via QJackCtl.

Ardour 8.12

This is, as of this writing, the latest release of Ardour, packed with the latest bugfixes.

To help support Ardour’s funding, you may obtain later versions directly from ardour.org. To do so, please one-time purchase or subscribe to Ardour from their website. If you wish to get later versions of Ardour from us, you will have to wait until the next regular release of Ubuntu Studio, due in October 2025.

Deprecation of Mailing Lists

Our mailing lists are getting inundated with spam and there is no proper way to fix the filtering. It uses an outdated version of MailMan, so this release announcement will be the last release announcement we send out via email. To get support, we encourage using Ubuntu Discourse for support, and for community clicking the notification bell in the Ubuntu Studio category there.

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 also became a snap so that the maintainers can 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.

We have additional snaps that are Ubuntu-specific, such as the Firmware Updater and the Security Center. Contrary to popular myth, Ubuntu does not have any plans to switch all packages to snaps, nor do we.

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: Simply use the Ubuntu Studio Installer to remove the features of Ubuntu Studio you don’t want or need!

Get Involved!

A wonderful way to contribute is to get involved with the project directly! We’re always looking for new volunteers to help with packaging, documentation, tutorials, user support, and MORE! Check out all the ways you can contribute!

Our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, is now working on Ubuntu Studio at least part-time, and is hoping that the users of Ubuntu Studio can give enough to generate a monthly part-time income. We’re not there, but if every Ubuntu Studio user donated monthly, we’d be there! Your donations are appreciated! If other distributions can do it, surely we can! See the sidebar for ways to give!

Special Thanks

Huge special thanks for this release go to:

• Eylul Dogruel: Artwork, Graphics Design
• Ross Gammon: Upstream Debian Developer, Testing, Email Support
• Sebastien Ramacher: Upstream Debian Developer
• Dennis Braun: Upstream Debian Developer
• Rik Mills: Kubuntu Council Member, help with Plasma desktop
• Scarlett Moore: Kubuntu Project Lead, help with Plasma desktop
• Len Ovens: Testing, insight
• Mauro Gaspari: Tutorials, Promotion, and Documentation, Testing, keeping Erich sane
• Simon Quigley: Qt6 Megastuff
• Erich Eickmeyer: Project Leader, Packaging, Development, Direction, Treasurer
• Steve Langasek: You are missed.

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]