Today we went to see a theater play in UNAM’s Cultural Center, very near our home. No, not inside any of the theaters — in the square just between Sala Nezahualcóyotl, Foro Sor Juana and Sala Carlos Chávez.. So, yes, not only we had fun, but we had fun for free!

UNAM’s El Carro de Comedias is an itinerant theater company that often presents in this same spot (but you can see the stage is foldable, and they do have presentations elsewhere, of this same play even). I went with my family, and we enjoyed a very fun adaptation of this great play (written by teenager Alfred Jarry in 1894). One of those plays that could be inspired any day by current geopolitical events…

I know most of the people that happen to stumble upon my blog are not in Mexico City. But if you happen to be here, do consider going to their function. Check their schedule; being it an itinerating show, they can also be found at other places, but they are scheduled at the same place we saw them, every Saturday and Sunday until June 28, 11:00AM. They mentioned they will likely continue during August, but AFAICT it is not confirmed (or, at least, announced) yet.

Some pics, shot randomly by me throughout the play:

First Light box

My youngest daughter and I recently started playing the tabletop game HeroQuest. Specifically, the recently-issued, cut-down variant HeroQuest: First Light. This is quite advanced for her age, and I'm a little surprised she's taken to it, but she's really loving it, It's pushed her to read bits of lore on cards and quest books that is way above her expected reading level, and we've been exercising her maths by adding up the gold we find on our quests and calculating what the heroes can buy with it in the store afterwards.

Originally from 1989, Hasbro re-issued HeroQuest in 2020. I read about it at the time but didn't buy it. I wasn't sure who I would play it with. It also seemed expensive to me. It probably wasn't unusually expensive in 2020, nor now, for the sheer volume of finely-sculpted miniatures included. I also knew I had the original game in the loft, and I wasn't that keen on buying something I already had, although untangling the contents from several similar boxed games would take me many hours, and I wasn't sure how much of the game I would find.

mix of old and new

First Light was compelling because it is much, much cheaper than the full remake, so I was happy to take a punt. It's cheaper because it doesn't have any plastic monsters or furniture: instead cardboard cut-outs that stand up on plastic stands. For us, that is a significant drawback: 3D miniatures are much more immersive, But I can re-use the plastic miniatures I can find from the original game. First Light has a newly written adventure, better suited to beginners than the original game.

The re-issue(s) have new art and new model sculpts that look fantastic. They've changed anything which tied into Games Workshop's IP and I'm really happy about that. They've made an effort to add women, almost entirely absent from the original. I'm certain my daughter wouldn't have tried it otherwise.

For almost two decades, the PackageKit package management abstraction layer has shipped with pkcon as its command-line client. pkcon does its job, but it was always kind of a “testing” front-end for the PackageKit daemon rather than a tool designed for everyday use. The focus has instead been on the GUI tools, automatic system updates, GUI application managers and other front-ends. Its command names mirror the D-Bus API almost one-to-one (get-details, get-updates, get-depends), output is very plain, and there is no machine-readable mode for scripting. Most importantly though, there has been no development on it at all for almost a decade, so pkcon was stuck in its rudimentary state from that era.

Since a lot of changes will be coming to PackageKit, and testing the daemon and working with it from the command-line was not very pleasant anymore in 2025/2026, I decided to modernize the tool as part of my work as fellow for the Sovereign Tech Agency last year. pkgcli is the new command-line client for PackageKit. It is built from the ground up to be pleasant to use interactively and easy to drive from scripts.

Why a new tool?

Of course, instead of introducing a new tool, I could have just expanded pkcon instead. The problem with that approach is that the pkcon utility has been around for so long and its command-line API had ossified so much, that rather than changing it and potentially breaking a lot of scripts relying on its quirks, I decided to introduce a new tool instead. pkcon can still be optionally compiled for people who need it in their scripts and workflows.

The goals for pkgcli, and the features it now has are:

• Human-friendly command names. Verbs that read the way you’d describe the task, instead of mirroring the D-Bus API 1:1: show, search, list-updates, what-provides, instead of get-details and friends.
• Readable, colored output by default (still respecting NO_COLOR and degrading gracefully).
• A real scripting mode. A global --json flag emits JSONL instead of fully human-readable output when possible, to make it easier to use the tool for scripting purposes.
• Sensible defaults. A few defaults have been changed, such as the metadata cache-age, or automatic cleanup of unused dependencies being enabled by default. This is more in line with current defaults by other tools and frontends. We also print package information in a slightly different, more readable way.
• Better handling of internationalized text. Text should now align properly in the terminal window, and we should no longer have completely chaotic text output on non-English locales (especially Chinese/Japanese).

Why not pkgctl?

Originally, this tool was called pkgctl, to match other common cross-distro tool names. However, that name was already taken by an Arch-specific distro development tool. When this issue was raised, we decided to just rename our tool to pkgcli with the next release, to avoid the name clash on Arch Linux.

Examples!

Here are some examples on how to use the new tool (some of which include the abridged output pkgcli prints).

Search for anything containing the string “editor” in name or description, then look at the details of one result:

$ pkgcli search editor
Querying                  [████████████████████████████████████████] 100%
▣ ace-of-penguins 1.5~rc2-7.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ acorn-fdisk 3.0.6-14.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ ardour 1:9.2.0+ds-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
✔ audacity 3.7.7+dfsg-1.amd64 [manual:debian-testing-main]
✔ audacity-data 3.7.7+dfsg-1.all [auto:debian-testing-main]
▣ augeas-tools 1.14.1-1.1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ emacs 1:30.2+1-3.all [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit 48.1-9+b1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit-common 48.1-9.all [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit-dev 48.1-9+b1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
[...]

$ pkgcli show nano
Package: nano
Version: 9.0-1
Summary: small, friendly text editor inspired by Pico
Description: GNU nano is an easy-to-use text editor originally designed as
 a replacement for Pico, the ncurses-based editor from the non-free mailer
 package Pine.
[...]
URL: https://www.nano-editor.org/
Group: publishing
Installed Size: 2.9 MB
Download Size: 646.0 KB

Search only within package names rather than descriptions:

$ pkgcli search name python3

Check for updates. refresh updates the metadata, then list-updates reports what’s available:

$ pkgcli refresh && pkgcli list-updates
Loading cache            [████████████████████████████████████████] 100%
▲ cme 1.048-1.all [debian-testing-main]
▲ gir1.2-gdm-1.0 50.1-2.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick-7-common 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.all [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick-7.q16 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libdlrestrictions1 0.22.0.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libfftw3-bin 3.3.11-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libfftw3-dev 3.3.11-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]

Explore relationships between packages:

$ pkgcli list-depends inkscape  # list what inkscape depends on
$ pkgcli list-requiring libappstream5  # list what requires libappstream5

Find the package that provides a capability, here the AV1 GStreamer decoder:

$ pkgcli what-provides "gstreamer1(decoder-video/x-av1)"
✔ gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad 1.28.3-1.amd64 [auto:debian-testing-main]

You can also have JSON output for most commands! Attach --json to any query and pipe the result straight into jq. Each line is a self-contained JSON object:

$ pkgcli --json list-updates | jq -r '.name'
cme
gir1.2-gdm-1.0
imagemagick
imagemagick-7-common
imagemagick-7.q16
libdlrestrictions1
libfftw3-bin
libfftw3-dev
libfftw3-double3

Try it

pkgcli is built by default alongside the rest of PackageKit since PackageKit 1.3.4. If your distribution ships a recent enough PackageKit, it should already be on your PATH. You can read its man page man pkgcli for more information. Feedback, bug reports, and patches are very welcome.

‌watchOS 27‌

• Apple Watch Series 6 (2020)


• Apple Watch Series 7 (2021)


• Apple Watch Series 8 (2022)


• Apple Watch Ultra (1st generation, 2022)


• Apple Watch SE (2nd generation, 2022)

‌iPadOS 27‌

• ‌iPad Air‌ (3rd generation, 2019)


• ‌iPad Pro‌ 12.9-inch (3rd generation, 2018)


• ‌iPad Pro‌ 11-inch (1st generation, 2018)


• ‌iPad‌ (8th generation, 2020)


• ‌iPad mini‌ (5th generation, 2019)

macOS 27 Golden Gate

• ‌MacBook Pro‌ (16-inch, 2019)


• ‌MacBook Pro‌ (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)


• ‌iMac‌ (2020)


• Mac Pro (2019)

tvOS 27

• ‌Apple TV‌ HD (2015)


• ‌Apple TV‌ 4K (1st generation, 2017)

Nintendo Switch 2

• What's the deal? Take $15 off Switch 2 with code NEW15


• Where can I get it? Woot

AirPods Pro 3

• What's the deal? Take $70 off AirPods Pro 3


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

AirPods Max 2

• What's the deal? Take $40 off AirPods Max 2


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

Sonos

• What's the deal? Take up to 25% off Sonos devices


• Where can I get it? Sonos


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

Top Stories

Everything Apple Announced at WWDC 2026 in 10 Minutes

Hands-On With iOS 27's Siri AI

Apple Announces macOS 27 Golden Gate With New Siri and 'Tons' of Refinements

Apple Says iOS 27 Adds These 12 New Features to Your iPhone

iPadOS 27 Drops Support for a Wave of iPads

iPhone 17's 8GB Limit Costs It These Two Siri AI Features in iOS 27

MacRumors Newsletter

Automatic Tab Organization

Custom Extensions

• Create a citation for the current webpage and copy it to my clipboard


• Create a 3-minute focus timer for the page


• Set the minimum font size to 14pt


• Turn the page into pirate speak


• Style websites like 90s websites with bold colors and type


• Every time I open a new tab, draw me a different flower


• Highlight and show the dimensions of webpage elements when I tap on them


• Enter the design mode for a website so that I can edit the contents

Notify Me

Passwords

Ask to Browse

Performance Improvements

Compatibility

Availability

In the process of preparing a major Ubuntu Touch release (v24.04-2.0, coming soon...) we will also update Ayatana Indicators in Ubuntu Touch.

Last week various new features have been added to some of the indicators (toggle switch to keep the display switched on permanently, blue tooth pairing agent, redesign of the keyboard indicator, etc.) and those changes require translation updates.

If you can, please visit [1] this weekend and help translating Ayatana Indicators into your native language. Thanks so much!!!

light+love
Mike

[1] https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/ayatana-indicators/

• Beta: Build 26220.8680
• Experimental: Build 26300.8687

• Beta (26H1): Build 28020.2298
• Experimental (26H1): Build 28120.2302
• Experimental (Future Platforms) – Including Canary 29600 series: Build 29610.1000
  • Note: The issue affecting AMD machines supporting System Guard has been resolved meaning these devices will be offered the Experimental (Future Platforms) build as usual

• Release Preview 24H2/25H2: Build 26100.8728/26200.8728
• Release Preview 26H1: Build 28000.2333

Notable new features

[Windows Update]

• As announced in the Windows Update announce blog, we are rolling out a new unified update experience to reduce the number of reboots you see per month. We are starting by coordinating driver, .NET, and firmware updates to align with the monthly quality update, reducing the update experience to a single monthly restart. See the blog for more information.

• Finding apps is more forgiving. Search is better at handling typos, dropped letters, extra letters, and partial words for apps. Queries like “utlook” can still find Outlook.
• Settings results are improving. We’ve made ranking improvements to help more relevant settings appear higher in results.

I have been looking at seL4 some more recently, and had a small patch merged today to remove a legacy Python module from a helper script. (I was trying to run the script on a system without that module installed, and it was almost easier to patch it out.)

However, the more I think about this code and how it’s used, the more it seems wrong on at least five other levels.

The patch itself is quite uninteresting; this script was importing the past module (part of future?) to use the xrange function. Python 2 used to have separate xrange and range functions, where range returned a list in memory while xrange generated an iterator. Because this seL4 script is iterating over a large range of values, it’s important the list is not generated in-memory. But Python 3 removed the xrange function and just has range return an object, so it’s trivial to avoid the module import.

Having thought carefully some more about the specific line, there’s surely an off-by-one error in it - range iterates over 0 to n-1, so this line shouldn’t be subtracting one if it’s looking to test all 32-bit values:

    for i in range(2**32-1):

But then again, this is being used for a ‘sanity check’ of a magic bit shift algorithm that speeds up division operations to convert CPU ticks to microseconds on 32-bit arm platforms. Surely if the algorithm’s good, it shouldn’t be necessary to validate it exhaustively against every possible 32-bit value?

Also, 32 bits isn’t enough, because this is 64-bit division. include/api/types.h shows that ticks_t is always a uint64_t, so if this were a proof by exhaustion it should run to 2**64 (though that would take infeasibly long).

As discussed in issue #1352, lots of people have been running this code with the wrong divisor anyway. But because the bit shift path is only used on 32-bit platforms, it’s not clear to me that there’s even any point in specifying CLK_SHIFT/MAGIC on platforms which are 64-bit only (e.g. the tx2 port).

And to follow this rabbit hole to the very end, in comments on PR #1435 and issue #1509 it’s clear that the future of this code is to remove it, as it’s 1. unnecessarily clever (on 64-bit platforms the equivalent code just uses a division, so performance can’t be that important), and 2. the entire concept of converting to microseconds breaks the seL4 principle of not abstracting away details of the hardware.

So this has left me unclear on whether my small patch was a good thing or not, but I certainly learnt something about this corner of seL4 timer handling. And I’ve ordered a copy of “Hacker’s Delight” on the recommendation of a code comment.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 319. This version includes the following changes:

[ Jochen Sprickerhof ]
* Improve header detection for Sphinx documentation projects.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

iPhones

• iPhone 18 Pro: A20 Pro chip, a smaller Dynamic Island, a simplified Camera Control button, a Dark Cherry color option, variable aperture for at least one rear camera, Apple's C2 modem with support for 5G web browsing via satellite, and more.


• iPhone 18 Pro Max: The same features rumored for the iPhone 18 Pro, but the Pro Max model may or may not be slightly thicker.


• iPhone Ultra: A foldable iPhone Ultra with a 7.7-inch inner display and 5.3-inch outer display, two rear cameras, one front camera, a Touch ID power button instead of Face ID, and more. iOS 27 is expected to be tailored for the foldable iPhone, allowing for side-by-side apps and other iPad-like multitasking functionality.

Apple Watches

• Apple Watch Series 12: A faster S11 chip or newer, plus design changes such as Touch ID and/or more health sensors (disputed).


• Apple Watch Ultra 4: A faster S11 chip or newer, plus design changes such as Touch ID and/or more health sensors (disputed). There may also be additional satellite features for the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and newer, such as Apple Maps via satellite and the ability to send and receive photos with Messages via satellite.

iPads

• iPad 12: A16 chip → A18 chip or A19 chip with Apple Intelligence support.


• iPad mini: A17 Pro chip → A19 Pro or A20 Pro chip, an OLED display, a vibration-based speaker system, and a water-resistant design.

Macs

• Mac Studio: M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips → M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips.


• Mac mini: M4 and M4 Pro chips → M5 and M5 Pro chips.


• iMac: M4 chip → M5 chip, plus new color options.


• MacBook Ultra: A major MacBook Pro redesign in late 2026 or early 2027, with M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, an OLED display, a touch screen, a Dynamic Island, and a thinner design. On this laptop, which will reportedly be named MacBook Ultra, macOS 27 is expected to offer a touch-friendly interface.

Home

• Apple TV: A17 Pro chip with support for the more personalized Siri, and Apple's N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7 support. A built-in FaceTime camera has been rumored for a future Apple TV, but it is unclear if that will arrive with the next model.


• HomePod mini: S9 chip or newer with support for the more personalized Siri, Apple's N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7 support, improved sound quality, a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, and potentially new color options like red.


• HomePod: A new full-sized HomePod that supports the revamped Siri.


• Home Hub: An all-new smart home hub featuring the more personalized version of Siri, a 6-inch to 7-inch square display, an A18 chip for Apple Intelligence, FaceTime, and more. Place it on a table or mount it on a wall.

Notes

• Apple's smart home hub may be accompanied by accessories such as a security camera/sensor and a Face ID doorbell.


• AirPods Ultra with cameras for Visual Intelligence are also rumored, but it is unclear if they are launching this year or later.


• The next Mac Studio and Mac mini models as well as the MacBook Ultra could be delayed until 2027 due to the RAM chip shortage.

Nintendo Switch 2

• What's the deal? Take $15 off Switch 2 with code NEW15


• Where can I get it? Woot

AirPods Pro 3

• What's the deal? Take $70 off AirPods Pro 3


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

AirPods Max 2

• What's the deal? Take $40 off AirPods Max 2


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

Sonos

• What's the deal? Take up to 25% off Sonos devices


• Where can I get it? Sonos


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

AI is incredibly powerful technology. Still, some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard to the people, all of us, that it's ultimately meant to serve.

• Better battery efficiency


• Improved Wi-Fi connectivity


• More efficient water detection


• More accurate step tracking


• Faster media playback


• Faster app extension launches

By bringing Audible's distinctive catalog to Apple Podcasts, we're allowing members to find their favorite Originals where many of them already listen to their podcasts. And by making select shows and episodes available widely, we have the opportunity to introduce new listeners to the extraordinary audio storytelling Audible offers right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Design

Visual Intelligence

Cycle Tracking

Faster Data Updates

Child Safety

Route and Distance Accuracy

Step Count

GymKit

Launch Date

Quite the opposite, because as you may know, if you use many of the existing chatbots, they're really focused on engagement to a large degree. And sycophancy, right? They kind of want to pull you in. They might encourage you to reveal things about yourself, and then use that as a basis to establish a connection.

We view it quite the opposite. I mean, the way that we have designed Siri, Siri really wants to say 'Listen, that's not what I'm here for, right? I'm here to help you. I can help you get things done. I can help you learn about the world.' But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri's not up for that. Siri's 100 percent not into that.

We like when technology disappears, right? You just focus on what you want to do, or you focus on the content. And it's the same thing with AI. [...] We don't do AI for AI's sake. 'Hey, look at us, we're doing AI.' It's how does AI make everything better? And that makes our products better, our features better.

I think it's a challenging thing for a lot of people to understand the distinction between what your iPhone knows and what, say, Apple as a company knows. Your iPhone is yours, right? Your data is yours and it stays on your phone and your control and Siri is using it for you. Apple doesn't get to know any of this stuff, and that is very different than I think most players in the space, and I think super important.