• Apple's home hub with a touch-enabled display will be named HomeView, seemingly confirming a trademark filing discovered by MacRumors.


• HomeView is equipped with an A18 chip, which has 8GB of RAM in iPhones.


• HomeView will support Siri AI for voice control.


• HomeView will be available in a tabletop version with a speaker base made of metal, as well as a wall-mounted version with a flat, square wall plate.


• The tabletop HomeView will offer "better sound quality" than the HomePod mini.


• The tabletop HomeView will be available in four finishes: Gray, Silver, Starlight, and Rose. The wall-mounted version will be limited to Gray and Silver.


• HomeView will be unveiled this Tuesday, October 13, but the device is apparently not launching until "around mid-November."


• HomeView will have a selection of Apple apps, but no App Store for third-party apps.


• HomeView will be accompanied by an "Apple Home Collection" of accessories that brands such as LG and Schneider Electric developed in partnership with Apple. This will include a smart doorbell, deadbolt lock, thermostat, temperature sensor, indoor and outdoor security cameras, and a floodlight camera.


• LG's accessories for the HomeView will not ship "until later this year at the earliest."


• The new HomePod mini will be equipped with the Apple Watch Series 10's S10 chip, up from the S5 chip in the current model.


• The new HomePod mini will be available in green, pink, blue, white, and midnight.


• The new Apple TV 4K will be equipped with an A19 chip, which has 8GB of RAM.


• The new Apple TV 4K may have built-in microphones for Siri AI.


• The new Apple TV 4K may have an updated Siri Remote with a built-in speaker that makes it easier to find.


• The new HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K models will be unveiled on October 13 and launch on Friday, October 30.

Today, for a slightly more complicated snippet, but still in the same general area; say you have code like this:

x = (0x1000 - y) / 24;
z = var_s5 < 5;
if (x >= 0x81) {
    x = 0x80;
    z = var_s5 < 5;
}
var_s4 = 0;
if (z == 0) {

In particular, note the z = var_s5 < 5; repeated. Most likely, this is the compiler sticking stuff into branch delay slots, or else re-checking the condition if var_s5 changed in the branches (it does not here). You almost certainly want to undo this into:

x = (0x1000 - y) / 24;
if (x >= 0x81) {
    x = 0x80;
}
var_s4 = 0;
if ((var_s5 < 5) == 0) {

and the if, as we already know, should probably rather then be:

if (var_s5 >= 5) {

For a small bonus (since I'm not going to have a separate post about it), you can choose to change the upper if to:

if (x > 0x80) {
    x = 0x80;
}

which generates exactly the same code (on MIPS), but may in many cases be easier to understand.

Review: Daggerbound, by T. Kingfisher

Daggerbound is a secondary-world fantasy and a sequel to Swordheart, although it follows different protagonists for most of the book. It's also a sort of sequel to the Clocktaur War duology in that one of the protagonists was a protagonist of those books. T. Kingfisher is the pen name Ursula Vernon uses for her adult fiction.

Learned Edmond was once a devout acolyte of the Order of the Many-Armed God and a true believer in its teachings, including the ones about the evils of women. Then he went on an adventure with, among other people, a forger named Mistress Slate, during which he learned a great deal of things about the world that his order did not teach him. He has spent the subsequent years trying to bring this important new information to his order and encourage them to adjust their view of the world accordingly.

The order has not changed, and Edmond is very tired.

Someone needs to carry a number of books and a magical sword to the city of Archon's Glory. Edmond has volunteered and intends to perform the task exactly as expected, and then never return. He is unsure what he will do then, but at least it will be different.

Edmond did not expect to be waylaid by bandits or to accidentally draw the magical sword. He certainly did not expect the man who appeared in a flash of light and violently saved him from the bandits.

It would have been very convenient for the Dervish if Edmond died of his injuries after drawing the sword. That would leave the sword without a wielder and therefore the Dervish without someone he had to protect. All he would have to do was sit and watch while the fever and cold and lack of water did the work, and then he would be free. Given his past experience with wielders, no one could even blame him. Except maybe his own conscience.

I did not realize I wanted to read a novel about a traumatized Mercedes Lackey sword waking up in a T. Kingfisher universe, but apparently I did.

The Dervish is not a sword, precisely, at least not in the way that Need has become by the time we meet her in Lackey's novels. He's a man trapped in a sword, he doesn't like it, and he would very much like it to stop. But at the start of the book, he has the rest of the vibe of a Mercedes Lackey protagonist: vast past trauma, poor emotional regulation skills, and a prickly cynicism that only runs skin deep. Pairing him with an Edmund who is far more mature than in the earlier duology but still rather innocent and delightfully neurodivergent is a great touch.

The rest of the plot was fine but not that memorable. Like the Clocktaur series, there is a strong feeling of episodic D&D adventure as the characters stumble across disconnected problems and hostilities while collecting party members. Like Ursula Vernon's occasional D&D recaps, this party has a tendency to adopt everyone they come in contact with, which includes a gnole (as always one of the best parts of the book) and a sentient giant pill bug. The pill bug, who has a complex appendage-operated mechanical talk box and a banner that says "I DO NOT EAT HUMAN MEAT," is the most Ursula Vernon character that has ever existed in fiction.

There is a romance because there is always a romance in the novels set in this universe. I didn't mind this one. Like every Kingfisher romance, it involves a lot of irritating refusal to communicate and endless angst about how the other person couldn't possibly be in love with them, but the characters have rather more justification than usual and at least I didn't spend most of the book thinking one half of the romantic pairing was an idiot. Apparently it helps if no paladins are involved.

The strongest parts of this book are the beginning, before the Lackey vibes unfortunately drain out of the story, and the end, when all of the best characters from Swordheart show up again. The Temple of the White Rat continues to be the best feature of this fictional universe, and I could read endless books about how they solve problems.

The Dervish gazed at her with admiration. "And here I thought you'd be on the side of law and order..."

"No, young man," said Beartongue, despite being several centuries his junior. "I am on the side of justice. If we're lucky, the two run in parallel. If they don't, we bend the law to attain justice, not the other way around."

The ending also featured some exploration of the edge cases of the rules for the sentient swords that reminded me a bit of Fred Saberhagen with better characterization.

Daggerbound was not as charming as Swordheart, mostly because Halla appeared only at the end. I wish Kingfisher had leaned more into the Mercedes Lackey vibes rather than taking her normal D&D-flavored romance approach. But this was enjoyable, charming at times, had great supporting characters like all Kingfisher novels, and was a satisfying continuation of the series. I am looking forward to the third (and I believe final) book, which is supposed to be out next year.

Recommended if you liked Swordheart.

Followed by the not-yet-published Shieldborn.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Here’s my monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the FOSS world.

Debian

Whilst I didn’t have much time, here are still a few things that I worked on:

• Sponsored ubuntu-dev-tools/0.214 for Florent ‘Skia’ Jacquet, which updates seeded-in-ubuntu to use the new per-series indexer (LP: #2160240).
• Assisted a few folks in getting their patches submitted via Salsa.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu

I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time back in February 2021.

• With 26.10 in Feature Freeze, wore my Release team hat to:
  • Review and approve a bunch of Feature Freeze Exceptions, including the Go 1.27 transition, Qt 6.11.2, rust-coreutils 0.12.0, devscripts 2.6.12, kdump-tools moving to dracut, and a few GCE packages.
  • Point linux-entra-sso to the SRU team, as it didn’t need an FFe at all, and milestone a couple of bugs for 26.10.
• Continued to push for infrastructure improvements:
  • Made ubuntu-cdimage more resilient to Launchpad hiccups (MP).
  • Taught generate-freeze-block in ubuntu-archive-tools a couple of new options (--skip-update and --series) and better error handling (MP).
  • Bumped the arm64 generic non-cloud image to 4.5G in livecd-rootfs and uploaded it as 26.10.16; also sponsored the follow-up 26.10.17 for Chloé.
• Sponsored aevol/9.4.0-2ubuntu1 for Matthieu, fixing an FTBFS with GCC 15’s LTO (LP: #2167811).
• Reviewed quite a lot of MPs - britney hints, meta-release, ubuntu-release-tools, ubuntu-archive-tools, ubuntu-cdimage, livecd-rootfs, ubuntu-seeds, and so on.
• Enabled upgrades to 26.04 LTS.
• Released 26.10 Beta and announced it on Discourse.
• Did Archive Admin, DMB, and Release team duties as usual.

Debian (E)LTS

This month I have worked 33.5 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and on its sister Extended LTS project and did the following things:

(A quick note that I did quite a lot of the work during my work as Frontdesk that went on till 4th Oct, so 33.50 hours include the work I did till 4th October 2026.)

Released Security Updates

• node-lodash: Prototype pollution in _.unset and _.omit (plus a bypass of the initial fix for it), and code injection via the imports option of _.template.

  • [LTS]: Fixed CVE-2025-13465, CVE-2026-2950, and CVE-2026-4800 via 4.17.21+dfsg+~cs8.31.198.20210220-9+deb12u1 for bookworm. This has been released as DLA 4820-1.
  • This is the bookworm follow-up to DLA 4663-1 that I carried over from July. The update had been sitting prepared and tested on debusine, so once the upstream discussion wrapped up, it went straight out. It also carries an extra patch to the lodash-cli dependency map - without it, the regenerated lodash.template module throws “assignWith is not defined” at runtime, which node-gulp-util’s autopkgtest caught.

• libpng1.6: Use-after-free of zlib input in png_read_end() after incomplete zTXt, iTXt, or iCCP decompression, which could result in denial of service.

  • [LTS]: Fixed CVE-2026-46675 via 1.6.39-2+deb12u6 for bookworm. This has been released as DLA 4824-1.
  • I picked this one up whilst on front desk; the upstream fix that went into trixie via DSA 6537-1 applied to 1.6.39 as-is.

Work in Progress

• libpng1.6: The same CVE-2026-46675.
  • [ELTS]: Claimed in ela-needed; the same upstream fix applies to all three ELTS suites, so this should go out shortly.

Other Activities

• [E/LTS] Did my front-desk week from 28-09 to 04-10.

  • Over the week I did roughly:
    • Triage of 524 unique CVEs across 192 source packages and all four suites. And 1 automated ELTS end-of-life sweep.
    • Additional data is now part of the front-desk job too, so 75 commits record it for 179 CVEs across 71 packages.
  • Newly queued 22 source packages - 13 in dla-needed (apache2, chromium, firefox-esr, libnet-idn-encode-perl, libpng1.6, node-shell-quote, nvidia-graphics-drivers, openssl, pcre2, php-mongodb, php8.2, social-auth-core, and wpa) and 16 in ela-needed (apache2, firefox-esr, gegl, lemonldap-ng, libnet-idn-encode-perl, libpng1.6, libwebsockets, nsd, nvidia-graphics-drivers, pcre2, php7.0, php7.3, php7.4, rar, unrar-nonfree, and wpa), 7 of them in both. Also widened 3 ELTS entries to bullseye - antiword, ocaml, and openvswitch.
  • Most of the interesting work was again in the <not-affected> verdicts: 217 of 263 (83%, across 57 packages) rest on showing that the vulnerable code or feature isn’t in the source we ship. Another 17 cover incomplete upstream fixes that we either never shipped or shipped with the follow-up already in (expat, libxml2, node-tar, and pyjwt). 15 come from bundled components we don’t ship - node-ajv again, which uses uri-js and not fast-uri, and nvidia-open, which doesn’t ship the NGX updater. And 13 are vendor- or platform-specific - openssh’s CVE-2026-55654 lives only in a Red Hat GSSAPI patch, and the netdata and PHP ones only affect Windows.
  • Did 4 rounds of newly supported bullseye packages (33 packages overall), plus libmail-mboxparser-perl for buster - 34 in all. The existing CVE data mostly held up; the real finds were discovery gaps. One interesting gotcha: sid renamed stunnel4 to stunnel, and two new CVEs were associated only with the new name, so they never showed up for trixie, bookworm, or any ELTS suite. I also sorted the 180 “Triage needed” entries (57 packages) from elts-eol by where each was already handled, and triaged for ELTS the 100 that trixie or bookworm had already decided; the rest come next. And I imported 79 package-level lines for the older source names ELTS still ships (tomcat8, php7.0/7.3/7.4, netty-3.9, openssl1.0, python2.7/3.5/3.7, and pypy).
  • Caught some inconsistencies in released advisories: DLA 4801-1 (swift) was missing a CVE, ELA 1831-1 (redis) listed the wrong one, and DLA 4808-1 (network-manager-l2tp) listed CVE-2026-75883 - an ID that was renamed and then reassigned to an unrelated ppp issue. I fixed all three in the tracker’s advisory lists.
  • Made the Security team and the uploaders aware of regressions from our own updates:
    • libde265: the CVE-2026-49337 fix in DLA 4789-1/ELA 1828-1 (and DSA 6413-1) misses upstream’s follow-up commit.
    • libxml2 CVE-2026-76781 and policykit-1 CVE-2026-85498 were introduced by our own back-ports; the policykit-1 one is harmless.
    • expat: the CVE-2025-59375 backport in DLA 4807-1 is compiled out, because XML_GE is never defined.
    • xen: DLA 4818-1’s XSA-491 fix makes XSA-510 reachable.
    • gegl: the CVE-2026-2049/2050 back-port in ELA 1650-1 rejects valid RLE .hdr files.
    • log4cxx: DLA 4322-1 broke UTF-8 in JSONLayout output. That one is functional, not security.
  • Helped correct a set of triages and let the Debian Security team know:
    • ruby-json CVE-2026-71847: the vulnerable code was never in a released Debian version.
    • openssh CVE-2026-55654: only affects a Red Hat-specific GSSAPI patch.
    • three libxml2 issues that don’t affect trixie either.
    • the stunnel4 rename above.
    • trixie <no-dsa> lines on jsch, node-qs, and ruby-loofah, where trixie’s version doesn’t have the vulnerable feature at all.
  • Independently found a security issue in rclone and reported it privately upstream through a GitHub security advisory. Upstream already had a report for the same issue, so they folded mine into the existing advisory and credited me as a co-reporter.
    • https://github.com/rclone/rclone/security/advisories/GHSA-66qv-66mg-9h74
  • Also found some bugs in the additional-data tooling, e.g. cve-ad --package P --severity tbd wipes the CVE-level severity, and the schema doesn’t validate package-level entries at all.

• [E/LTS] Monitored discussions on mailing lists, IRC, and all the documentation updates.

• [E/LTS] Attended the monthly LTS meeting on IRC. Meeting notes here.

Until next time.
:wq for today.

A variation of the pattern from yesterday; say you have:

if (x == 3) {
    y = 0;
} else {
    y = 1;
}

When these are zero and one, sometimes this will give a better match, since booleans are evaluated as such:

y = (x != 3);

It's rare to have something else than zero or one work for this pattern (e.g. you would rarely write y = (x != 3) * 2 + 1).

For over ten years, the only way I have had of knowing what our solar panels are doing has been an impulse monitor on the generation meter, counting the flashes of its LED. It has always been a bit flaky due to battery changes or loose connections, and there has never been a way to see solar generation alongside the energy used by the rest of the house. This week I have fixed that, by building a small ESPHome sensor which talks directly to the inverter. I am still reeling slightly: with AI assistance, it took under a week from idea to working implementation, and it is a project I would certainly never have attempted otherwise. The result is zeversolar-esphome.

The inverter is a Zeversolar Zeverlution 3680, which has an RS485 port but no Wi-Fi or Ethernet module. It doesn’t speak Modbus; it uses Eversolar’s own master/slave protocol, which nobody has officially documented but which several people have reverse-engineered over the years (credit to eversolar-monitor, Heliograph and others). Manufacturer support for Eversolar/Zeversolar inverters apparently ended in December 2019 when the company went out of business.

The rating plate on my inverter.

A while ago I had looked into what ports were available on this inverter with a view to connecting some sort of monitoring, but I had abandoned it as “too hard”. While working on some Home Assistant configuration, Claude suggested the idea again, but similarly wrote it off initially. I encouraged it to explore a bit further, and supplied the model number of the inverter, at which point the picture got a lot more promising. After a bit of back-and-forth about hardware, we settled on an M5Stack Atom Lite on an Atomic RS485 Base. The main attraction was that it already comes in a case, so I didn’t need to design (or, more likely, bodge) an enclosure.

While I waited for the parts to arrive, Claude wrote the firmware: an ESPHome external component built around a small, dependency-free C++ driver, with host-side unit tests against byte captures that other people had published from other models. I found it slightly surreal to have a tested protocol driver before owning any hardware to run it on.

Cables

The parts came before the tools I needed to get into the inverter safely (a DC clamp meter and a T25 screwdriver bit), so in the meantime I made up an RS485 cable - this uses an RJ45 connection at one end, and some custom wiring at the other. My first attempt was with some CAT 6, but (as Claude had pointed out and I had ignored) its solid-core conductors are much harder to twist together. So I gave up and sacrificed an old CAT 5e patch lead instead, which went much better.

The custom end of the cable, before being taped up.

The risky bit

On a Zeverlution, the RJ45 sockets are inside the wiring compartment, which means taking the cover off to install the monitor. The manual addresses this part to qualified electricians. So the step I was most nervous about was not the software at all, but safely isolating the inverter.

Inside the inverter, with the cover off.

I did this with appropriate caution, following the instructions from the manual carefully, and also waiting until after dark just in case. Now that I understand how the DC clips from the panels work, I can see how to do this safely during daytime too – but hopefully this won’t be necessary.

Plugged in, and threaded through the cable gland.

Warning: if you’re not confident, I would always advise to get an electrician to do this bit. Do what I say, not what I do.

Debugging over Wi-Fi

Once the device was installed, the nice thing about ESPHome is that I never need to go back in the loft again to update it – it reflashes over Wi-Fi. I’ve taken full advantage of this for debugging, and for reading the wire protocol directly from the logs.

The finished device. Green means generating.

Separately, I’ve used Claude to integrate the new sensors into Home Assistant. Solar generation finally sits in the Energy dashboard next to the rest of the house’s usage, which was the whole point.

Reflections

This was a fun, quick project, and it solved a problem that has eluded me for a decade. I want to be honest about how much of that is down to the AI: I would not have attempted any of this on my own. I could not have told you the protocol existed, never mind implemented it. My contribution was everything involving a screwdriver, and ordering some hardware.

TVs and Monitors

• 34-inch Samsung ViewFinity Ultrawide Monitor - $329.99, down from $539.99


• 34-inch Samsung ViewFinity Curved Monitor - $449.99, down from $589.99


• 65-inch Roku Smart 4K TV - $429.99, down from $649.99


• 65-inch Samsung The Frame (2025) - $1,097.99, down from $1,497.99


• 65-inch Toshiba ArtVision 4K Fire TV - $999.99, down from $1,297.99


• 75-inch TCL QLED Smart TV - $1,197.99, down from $1,297.99


• 100-inch Toshiba mini-LED Fire TV - $1,897.99, down from $2,499.99

Chargers

• Anker Nano Smart Display Charger - $29.99, down from $39.99


• Mophie 3-in-1 Travel Wireless Charging Station - $57.59, down from $95.98


• Anker 3-Port 160W Prime Charger - $115.99, down from $149.99

Audio

• Dekoni Bulletz Memory Foam Ear Tips for AirPods Pro - $12.99, down from $14.99


• Soundcore Sleep A30 Earbuds - $168.99, down from $229.99


• Sonos Ace Headphones - $239.00, down from $349.00


• Sonos Beam Gen 2 - $359.00, down from $499.00


• Sonos Arc Ultra Soundbar - $899.00, down from $1,099.00

Cases

• iPhone Duo Case with Screen Protector - $17.99, down from $24.99

Home

• Apple: The First 50 years Hardcover - $26.00, down from $50.00


• Nanoleaf Essentials Smart Light Bulbs - $22.79, down from $29.99


• Aqara Zigbee Smart Plug - $29.99, down from $32.99


• Nanoleaf Smart Ceiling Light - $63.99, down from $79.99


• Nanoleaf LED Light Therapy Face Mask - $129.99, down from $249.99

Screen Protectors

• Rock Paper Pencil v3.0 Screen Protector for iPad mini + Apple Pencil Tips - $39.99, down from $44.99

Mac

• Bontec 2 Pack Adjustable Monitor Stand - $19.99, down from $22.99


• Elgato Stream Deck Neo - $78.99, down from $99.00


• Elgato Stream Deck MK.2 - $119.99, down from $149.99


• Elgato Stream Deck+ - $159.99, down from $179.99

Top Stories

Apple Product Launch Announced for October 13: 'Welcome Home'

Three Years of 80% Charge Limits on iPhone: The Results

Apple Says iPhone 18 Pro Max Users With AT&T Cellular Issue Need to Have Device Replaced

MacBook Pro With OLED Display Rumored to Be 'Significantly Lighter'

LG Making Doorbell, Lock, and Cameras for Apple's Home Hub

Apple Announces 'Full Disk Access' Changes on macOS Due to AI Agents

MacRumors Newsletter

Fun little touch for the iPhone Duo launch: Apple retail stores will have a system to customize the boot of the device with the buyer's name so it says "Hello, Mark" (for example) when it turns on for the first time. (US only, Duo only, English and Spanish).

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) October 9, 2026

A brand new release 0.1.16 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN, has been built for r2u, and is updated on r-universe.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

This version updates to the recent 5.0.2 upstream release with improved performance. Given the strong focus on performance, this release also alters some of the R and C++ interfaces to be more direct. Rcpp generally aims for a balance between readable / maintainable code and good performance; this moves the dial closer to strong performance gains. As Daniel noted in a table in the (main) PR for this release, this now consistently beats yyjsonr, and improves considerably over the previous release of this package. I had made some smaller interim upgrades earlier (without a CRAN releases), and made a number of minor standard packaging updates.

The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.16 (2026-10-09)

• simdjson was upgraded to versions 4.6.1 and 4.6.3 (Dirk in #100 and #102 fixing #99 and #101)

• simdjson was upgraded to version 5.0.2 (Daniel in #104)

• A number of small tweaks to the Rcpp interface were made too (Daniel in #104)

• Diagnostics for gcc and clang are not suppressed per CRAN Policy (Dirk in #106 closing #105)

• The continuous integration matrix was extended to g++ version 15 and 16 (Dirk in #108 closing #107)

• A few minor packaging nags were address (Dirk in #109)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

A few days ago, a colleague reached out to me, asking if I could help draft a resolution on digital autonomy and free software for the upcoming renewal of our collective bargaining agreement. Although she's very politicised and generally a great individual, she is not a techie and we never really talked about these issues before.

This took me by surprise. I should have been rejoicing; no, I should have been the one who brought up this topic in our union. Wasn't I the technical expert on these issues? But alas, my first reaction when she came to me was to snicker and tell myself: "That's cute, but nothing's ever gonna change, Big Tech is too strong and our governments don't give a damn."

How sad and cynical is that? That's not the person I want to be.

Something in the Quebecois political landscape has shifted in the last few years with regards to tech. More and more "regular" people seem to be talking about the importance of digital autonomy, how government services shouldn't rely on Big Tech and how we should be using FOSS on hardware we actually control.

A few years ago, I would have been at the vanguard of this change. I would have been part of the creation of Données souveraines Québec. Heck, they are organising a whole conference next week and I'm not even going. How did this happen to me?

I first fell for Free Software for its political ideals: Knowledge Should Be Free, Cooperation Is More Efficient Than Competition, Centralisation Should Be Avoided When Possible, etc. I still believe in all of this, but somehow, after years of fighting for change in the tech world, I have retreated into technical work. I maintain Debian packages as a hobby and to scratch my own itch. I run services for myself and a few friends. I organise Debian User Group meetings.

To be clear, I haven't generally given up. I'm very politically active in my union and at work, I'm a good member of my housing cooperative and I'm still fighting against the industrialisation of natural spaces in my neighborhood. But when it comes time to defend freedom in the tech world, lately, I've just been shrugging and accepting I should use Microsoft Teams like every one else does. I want this to change and to do so, I need to free some time.

Lintian

Two years ago, I added myself to Lintian's Uploaders list. Up until then¹, I enjoyed fixing little issues here and there and liked creating new tags to help out the Python Team, where most of my Debian time was spent.

Lintian was badly in need of a new maintainer and as I felt it was an important project, I decided to step in. 37 releases and about 160 closed bugs later², I'm done.

To be honest, I haven't had much fun maintaining Lintian lately. Bugs keep piling on the BTS, so much so I have mostly been ignoring them for the past few months. In fact, most of the actual work triaging, writing code and fixing bug has been done by Nilesh Patra for a while now.

All this to say, if you care about Lintian, you should consider adding yourself to the Uploaders list, as I'm out and Nilesh can't do all the work by himself.

He's a great person to work with and since I don't want to suddenly leave him all alone, I'll be sticking around for a few more weeks in the hope someone else will volunteer to help out. A smooth transition with a new co-maintainer would really be nice!

If you're interested, don't hesitate to reach out to me on IRC or by email.

• Monday, October 12: You can get ready for your iPhone Duo pre-order.


• Tuesday, October 13: Apple is holding a "Welcome home" experience to unveil an all-new smart home hub, a new HomePod mini, and a new Apple TV 4K.


• Friday, October 16: iPhone Duo pre-orders begin at 5 a.m. Pacific Time.


• Friday, October 23: iPhone Duo launches.


• Tuesday, October 27: While not yet officially announced, Apple reportedly plans to unveil even more new products on this day, including redesigned MacBook Pro models with OLED touchscreens, an iPad mini with an OLED display, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M6 chip, and an iMac with an M6 chip.


• Friday, October 30: iPhone Duo launches in 28 additional countries and regions.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 333. This version includes the following changes:

[ Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues ]
* Add support for showing differences in POSIX.1-2001 PAX headers within .tar
  files.

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Re-order various parts of the tar comparator to make it easier to
  progressively delve into its functionality.
* Reflect that the use of the "case-match" language feature requires at least
  Python 3.10+. This can be worked around if it causes problems - let us know.
* Update various copyright years.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.