Firefox Settings features a brand-new look with streamlined organization, clearer groupings, and improved navigation for easier customization.
Video controls like play, pause, fullscreen, mute, and loop are now available in the context menu, even on sites like Instagram and TikTok where custom video players previously blocked access to them.
In Private Browsing windows, you can now temporarily disable tracker blocking for a tab if it's causing a site to break. When you reload a page where trackers were blocked, Firefox shows a message offering to reload without the stricter protections. All other tracking protections stay active.
You can now mute your browser from the address bar: type "mute" (or "shush" or "sssh") and use the address bar quick action to silence every tab currently playing sound across all Firefox windows.
Improved support for more advanced cursor movement commands, including those relating to paragraph boundaries, on macOS.
On Windows and Linux, you can now copy links via the tab context menu by right-clicking a tab and selecting Share > Copy Link, making it easy to copy a link without switching to the tab first. When multiple tabs are selected, you can copy all selected links at once. Windows users still retain access to Microsoft sharing options from the Share menu.
A "Send tab" toolbar button is now available which can be added via More Tools > Customize Toolbar.
The following languages are now available for Translations:
Firefox builds in Croatian, English (UK), Georgian, Persian, Slovenian, Tajik, Tamil, Tibetan, Turkish, Welsh, and Xhosa now come with a built-in dictionary for the Firefox spellchecker.
Firefox now offers experimental support for the new JPEG XL image format, which generally provides better compression than WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF and is designed to supersede them. You can enable it from the Firefox Labs panel in Settings.
Fixed an issue where the Paste option could be missing from context menus when editing content on sites such as Squarespace, LinkedIn, and eBay.
Improved dragging images from Firefox to the desktop or Finder on macOS β images now save reliably and land where you drop them.
In multiple monitor situations, the About Firefox window now more reliably opens on the display with the most recently used Firefox window.
Fixed arrow-key text navigation and word selection commands that moved in the wrong direction in right-to-left text on macOS and Linux.
Various security fixes.
Site zooming via keyboard or mouse now offers more zoom levels in smaller increments than before.
When a PDF or other file that Firefox opens directly finishes downloading, it now opens in a background tab if you've switched tabs or closed the original page.
The Tabs from Other Devices panel in the sidebar now lets you open tabs in a new tab or a new container tab from the context menu.
Developer Tools now have an option in the Settings panel to toggle the display of comment nodes in the Inspector.
Web Notifications can now have action buttons via the actions option. They appear as buttons below the notification text or in the Options list on macOS.
The field-sizing property is now available, allowing form controls to adjust in size to fit their contents.
Firefox now supports the WebAuthn Related Origin Request feature, which simplifies login flows by making Passkeys usable from multiple domains.
The Pointer Lock API now supports the unadjustedMovement option, allowing sites to receive raw mouse-movement data unaffected by OS-level acceleration.
With the release of Firefox 152, we are pleased to welcome the developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 25 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:
The next Ubuntu Touch major release is approaching rapidly, yesterday we reached a major step in the preparation of the upcoming Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 release: The branching-off (see below on what that is).
Part of this development release step is the publication of the 24.04-2.0 Beta release images, for more details and information see:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/ubuntu-touch-24-04-2-0-beta-is-n...
And additionally, find below some background information on how we maintain various Ubuntu Touch releases in parallel via Git(Lab). In fact, the release model of Ubuntu Touch has partially been adopted from how we in Debian maintains our various Debian versions in parallel, only that in Ubuntu Touch we use Git(Lab) for maintaining the different package versions and not, like in Debian, the APT archive itself.
Last Saturday, in the UBports Q&A, I explained Ubuntu Touch's "branching-off", an aspect of the Ubuntu Touch release workflow based on Git(Lab). To make this accessible to even more people, here it comes as a write-up:
We host many Git repositories on GitLab, and our primary work is done on the main branches, which contain the bleeding-edge code. When a merge request is deemed critical for stable versions of Ubuntu Touch, we cherry-pick it into a release series branch.
Currently, we land our changes in the main branches and then cherry-pick them to the ubports/24.04.1.x branches. The 'branching off' process for the upcoming 24.04-2.x release means that our current main branches will be copied over to create new branches for this release cycle, namely ubports/24.04-2.x.
This has two major implications. First, any item that hasn't been translated by the time of the branch-off will not receive any more translation updates during the 24.04-2.x cycle. This is why it is crucial that translation work is completed before the branching-off.
Second, looking ahead to the release after 24.04-2.x, we will be approaching 26.04-1.x. The OS base will change to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, hopefully being ready for release to Ubuntu Touch users before the end of the year. We already have a list of features we want to land there. Because we plan to include various major changes, such as the switch from Mir 1 to Mir 2, new calendar and contacts backends, Qt6-based core apps and service components, etc., the likelihood of breaking changes at the beginning of the 26.04-1.x release cycle (which will become the next main branches' target) is very high.
The current release schedule is estimated to be:
25 May 2026 [done]
Platform stability freeze 24.04-2.x
25 May 2026 [done]
String freeze 24.04-2.x
15 June 2026 [done]
Branching-off (and unfreeze 26.04-1.x development), UT image release: 24.04-2.0 Beta
22 or 29 June 2026 [coming]
Final freeze for 24.04-2.x, UT image release: 24.04-2.0 RC
6 or 13 July 2026 [coming]
Release version 24.04-2.0
Inβ―2008, I landed my second job, in the network team at Orange Portails, the division behind the websites and search engine of the French telecom operator Orange. The place ran like clockwork: a comprehensive technical setup, a dedicated team for every part of the business, and room to focus on what I do best. A few years later, none of that mattered: thanks to an obsession with the numbers, we could no longer deliver new services on time.
Disclaimer
This is a story I like to tell to warn people about Goodhartβs law.1 As these events happened almost 15 years ago, my recollection is a bit fuzzy. I left in 2012.
During my first years, the department operated like a startup. Its cradle was the French company Echo. They built a search engine. France TΓ©lΓ©com bought it and renamed it Voila. It was the most visited search engine in France in the early 2000s. France TΓ©lΓ©com consolidated the portal activities into the Wanadoo Portails division, later renamed Orange Portails.
The technical environment was excellent. We had many internal tools:2 a ticket system, an RRD-based graphing tool, an IPAM, a reporting tool, and an SNMP-based alerting tool.3 We deployed our Linux servers with CFEngine. We installed systems and applications from internal Debian repositories. We documented everything in a private MediaWiki instance. Supervision was performed with an ancestor of Xymon. The network architecture was clean and scalable with little legacy. We onboarded new people in a day.
It was a nurturing environment for me. I developed several tools: lldpd, an 802.1AB implementation, Snimpy, a pythonic binding for Net-SNMP, Wiremaps, a layer-2 discovery tool with a time machine to know which device is connected where, KitΓ©rΕ, a tool to simulate network conditions, QCSS-3, a controller for load-balancers, and ipoo, a service available through a Jabber chatbot and a Greasemonkey script to expose IP-related information. I added SNMP support for Keepalived and Quagga. I also started this blog, with articles like βAnycast DNS,β TLS-related articles like βTLS computational DoS mitigation,β SNMP-related articles like βIntegration of Net-SNMP into an event loop,β Linux-related articles like βTuning Linux IPv4 route cache,β and an article about VXLAN long before it was cool.
When we needed new servers, the on-site team would take a set from the inventory, install our base Linux distribution on them, put them in the datacenter, and cable them to the top-of-the-rack switches. We opened a ticket describing the servers we needed, and one week later, our servers were available. π«
Orange wanted to know if this team was performing well, so they asked for KPIs. They decided to use the number of tickets completed in a year. They asked to double this number. So instead of one ticket for a new service, we would open six ticketsβone per server. By the end of the year, the KPIs had more than doubled.
Everybody saw it as a success for performance management. So, they asked to do the same for the next year. Now, we needed to open a ticket per server and per step. Again, the KPIs doubled. Behind the scenes, the tickets went to different people and were no longer handled in order. So, for the next year, it was decided to have meta-tickets and meetings to follow the progress of these tickets. Of course, all these extra steps pushed the KPI even higher.
This performance management method spread to the other teams.4 Everything became slower. Instead of a couple of weeks, a new service now took six months. We built a Soviet nail factory. But the KPIs were good, and we stopped caring.
Let me give you another example. We had to estimate the impact of each night operation. We werenβt half bad: we declared most operations βwithout any expected impact.β Most of the time, there was no impact. One time out of five, there was a 5-second impact. We were told to try harder to meet our expected impact. What did we do? We started declaring a 5-second expected impact. One day, we got a 30-second impact and were told we failed to match the expected impact. In the end, we declared most operations with a 10-minute expected impact, and we stopped caring: instead of carefully shifting traffic around, we allowed ourselves a 5-minute impact. And our KPIs were never better.
KPIs are not bad, but they are easy to break. Use them carefully: let the people doing the work help choose the metrics, and tie those metrics to the quality of the serviceβfor example, with service level objectives. Otherwise, even dedicated people stop caring, game the system, and eventually quit. π
Goodhartβs law often gets the credit, but Campbellβs law describes my experience even better: the more you lean on a number to make decisions, the faster people corrupt it.Β β©
At the time, SaaS was not really a thing. I remember we considered, with a couple of colleagues, selling Wiremaps as a SaaS, with homomorphic encryption for the database. But who would outsource their observability stack?Β β©
Snalert was a metacircular alerting tool in Perl. It was able to poll a very large number of SNMP targets in a short timespan. All our monitoring was SNMP-based, including system monitoring.Β β©
My team also managed the rules of many Linux-based firewalls. To increase our KPIs, we used the same method: rather than accepting one ticket with a flow matrix, we requested one ticket per flow.Β β©
We're excited to announce that the 1.60 update for American Truck Simulator has officially been released and is now available on Steam!
Before we head to the news, we would like to thank everyone who took part in the Open Beta and reported any issues or provided general feedback on our forum. This makes it much easier for our team to fine-tune everything and helps ensure a smooth transition to the full update release.
Game Radio
With the 1.60 update, we are introducing Game Radio, a brand-new in-game radio system designed to make every drive feel more immersive and authentic. Rather than just playing music, Game Radio gives you five stations with their own distinct sounds, identities, and moods, each one built to shape the atmosphere of your journey in a different way.
Players can tune into Rust FM, Escape, PUMP IT!, Pop Gear, and Roadio, spanning guitar-driven rock and American roots music to electronic, pop, and lo-fi. Each station features carefully curated tracks, handpicked to hold up across many hours on the road. Escape is also a radio station designed to help content creators, and we are committed to doing our best to keep it stream-safe.
Game Radio also introduces a new in-game widget displaying station info, track titles, and artist names while driving. Players can customize widget behavior through the Widget Options menu (F6). This update also brings a range of improvements to the existing radio and music player systems.
Game Radio arrives with its musical foundation in place, with more planned for future updates. You can find out more information about Game Radio in our dedicated blog post.
Improved Material System
The Improved Material System significantly improves the lighting and visual quality of vehicle interiors in selected trucks. Its main focus is to enhance how interior materials react to light, which will result in a more readable, detailed, and visually pleasing cabin environment.
During the development of Project Road Trip, we implemented a wide range of visual and technical improvements. One of the most significant changes was a redesign of the materials used in vehicle interiors. As a result, it makes differences between materials such as leather, fabric, plastic, and metal far more apparent, even in low-light conditions. The new solution uses multiple variants of dynamic cubemaps, allowing all materials to reflect their surroundings more naturally and respond to ambient light in a more realistic way.
The entire system was designed from the start with the interiors of trucks in both games in mind, so the base games and their existing fleets will gradually benefit from these improvements as well. The first trucks to benefit from the Improved Material System in ATS are the Mack Anthem and the Western Star 49X. With future updates, we will gradually add this technology for other trucks across both games. You can read more about this feature here.
Light Tweaks
We have carried out minor adjustments to the global lighting, primarily focused on exposure and contrast balancing, along with subtle visual refinements for bad weather conditions. The work mainly consisted of smoothing out and polishing the overall visuals to achieve a more consistent and refined look.
Players' Company Paint Jobs
Players are now able to customize their trucks and trailers with a brand-new collection of company-themed paint jobs inspired by the selectable company identities available when creating a driver profile. These designs bring a more cohesive and professional visual style to your fleet while fitting naturally into the world of ATS.
One of the biggest focuses during development was ensuring that every paint job feels unique, depending on the type of trailer it is applied to. Rather than simply using one design across all trailer models, our teams carefully adapted each company's paint scheme to match the shapes and details of different trailer types. Whether youβre hauling cargo with a tanker, transporting materials in a dumper, or pulling a traditional box trailer, each variant features its own tailored details and layout. You can find out more in our blog here.
Kenworth TourAmerica Paint Jobs
We're also pleased to introduce the TourAmerica paint jobs for the Kenworth W900 and Kenworth T680 2022 as free content for all players. Inspired by the iconic TourAmerica T600 livery from the 1990s, this special design was recently reimagined by Kenworth as part of the Freedom 250 initiative, a nationwide celebration marking the 250th anniversary of the United States and honoring the legacy of American trucking. You can see more in our blog here.
Job Details Widget
Based on feedback from our #BestCommunityEver and upcoming widget designs, the Job Details Widget is introduced with the 1.60 update. Its primary purpose is to enable a new, more immediate, and concise way of displaying the relevant job info. Also, in response to community feedback, the GPS now displays the estimated arrival day and time, along with the remaining travel time and distance.
You can enable the Job Details Widget through the Widget Options menu (F6). The widget displays key job information, including cargo type and weight, delivery location, job income (colour-highlighted), and the remaining time to complete the job, so players will have this info available immediately without the necessity to pause the game. You can read more about the feature here.
Expanded Rest Mechanic
This new feature gives players greater control over their rest periods by allowing them to choose how long they want to sleep and exactly when they want to wake up, instead of being limited to a predefined rest duration.
Alongside this change, the Fatigue system is now split into two separate values: Rest State and Mandatory Break, each represented by its own icon in the UI.
The Rest State, symbolised by a bed icon, now gradually depletes rather than recovers over time. Extended periods of driving will steadily reduce the Rest State, while resting will restore it at a faster rate.
The Mandatory Break system, indicated by a "P" icon along with the remaining hours before a required stop, functions more strictly. In American Truck Simulator, drivers can stay on the road for up to 14 hours before they must take a mandatory break, requiring 10 consecutive hours of rest afterward. You can read more about this feature here.
Changelog:
Vehicles
Visual
Sound
UI/UX
We hope you are also excited to try out all the new features! Make sure to keep up to date with the future updates by following us on X/Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, YouTube, and Instagram, and by subscribing to our newsletter! Until next time, happy haulin'!
I have proposed the deletion of an obsolete script, but it makes me feel complicated feelings so Iβm going to try and express those. This particular script was written in 2014, but the concept goes back much further β before git was invented.
When I started university in 2003, I seem to remember the computing society used to run tutorials for first-year students on how to use Apache Subversion for your group project β a vast upgrade on CVS (or worse, no version control at all). Back then, the idea of viewing your changesets in a web browser was relatively new β while it was possible to look at an SVN repository through a web UI, features were limited unless you installed something compicated like Trac.
Figure 1: Data flow when distributing commits via a mailing list
Perhaps because reading email on your desktop computer (I donβt think I could afford an IBM ThinkPad?) was the only vaguely real-time notification system available at the time (except I guess SMS, which cost 10p per text), a common pattern seemed to be to use a post-commit hook to send every single commit to a mailing list, named something like βfoo-commitsβ. Indeed, for a long time Fedora had an scm-commits list which appears to be a topic of recent discussion.
I canβt really explain why people wanted to have every commit sent to a mailing list except as a way of getting notified of activity β I canβt believe people would import raw patches from those lists, ala LKML, rather than run actual version control commands to fetch the new source directly. Maybe youβd have to go back to NNTP for this.
I do like the vendor-neutrality of the βeverything-as-textβ approach, building on the open ecosystem of SMTP. But I doubt weβd see a widespread resurgence of commit lists now β most code hosting must allow anyone to subscribe to email notifications, I assume, and I donβt see a huge benefit in a mailing list archive of commit messages.
In the case of seL4, Iβm even more confused about why this script was committed in 2014, shortly after the kernel was put on GitHub. I can only assume it was imported from previous infrastructure. I do know that the implementation is quite Python 2 heavy, with the conversion between unicode and bytes featuring heavily. So rather than risk breaking its logic with patching, I think itβs time to βthank it for its serviceβ and let go.
Thank you for your donations:
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Log intext/plain alternative (#421)accountId when sharing files (#408)basePath from router.push redirects after login (#390)/ instead of 404ing on /mailsidebarAppsEnabled is false
If you are upgrading from v0.16.x, replace the binary (or run docker pull). If you are upgrading from v0.15.x and below, please read the upgrading documentation for more information on how to upgrade from previous versions.
*/changes methods leak ids of non-shared objects (reported by @5ud0er).http_header function.default virtual queue.address-data are ignored.keep is not specified.
A new SCS On The Road episode has just arrived! Buckle up and join us as we take you along for the amazing Volvo Days: Influencer Day event, where we were invited by Volvo Construction Equipment.
After the last one two years ago, Volvo CE once again hosted its well-known Volvo Days event at their Customer Center in Eskilstuna, Sweden, showcasing its latest products to customers and the public.
This year, Volvo invited us to attend the event and also approached us to help connect them with content creators from our community to take part in the Influencer Day, held on May 28. Together, we joined fellow influencers such asΒ Gamekeepers_cz, TheNorthernAlex, Polmanzan, Iwona Blecharczyk,Β and others for a day that began with an amazing machine show and continued with hands-on experience operating Volvo CE equipment and Volvo trucks. Now, let's watch the episode!
We would like to extend a huge thank you to Volvo Construction Equipment and their staff for inviting us to this incredible event, providing great hospitality, and giving us the opportunity to experience their vast product line hands-on! You can find more information about the Volvo Days event here.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to show your appreciation by following Volvo CE onΒ Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.
And if you would like to transport some Volvo CE machines in our games, you can check out the Volvo Construction Equipment DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 here, and for American Truck Simulator here.
Also, don't forget to stay connected with all the latest news and upcoming episodes by following us on X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, and YouTube, or by subscribing to our newsletter. Until next time, happy haulin'!
Contributing to Debian is part of Freexianβs mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.
At the MiniDebConf Hamburg, Andrew Lee
had prepared a talk on how Debian accidentally chooses Go compatibility.
Helmut joined Tobias Quathammer and Andrew Lee in looking into the problem.
Go has a compatibility system where modules declare a desired Go version to be
compatible with. This influences various features such as whether RSA keys
smaller than 1024 bits are accepted. Unfortunately, Debianβs way of building Go
packages is unique in setting GO111MODULE=off, which practically implies a
very old compatibility version that enables a number of insecure settings. Most
Linux distributions use the default GO111MODULE=on and therefore consult a
go.mod file that often declares a sensible version. While doing so is the way
for Debian longer term, getting there involves major changes so we also sought
a more short term workaround. We developed a
patch to the Go compiler
that would enable it to pick up a compatibility version from the environment.
Tobias uploaded it to unstable. The next step is
communicating the declared compatibility version
from go.mod to the compiler via the new variable. Then, rebuilding the archive
resolves the immediate symptoms. This does not save us from having to perform
the larger transition to GO111MODULE=on, but this shortcut can be backported
to trixie.
One of the harder problems of the architecture cross bootstrap is correctly
expressing the Build-Depends of glib during the toolchain bootstrap. It
implicitly depends on build-essential, which happens to depend on libc6-dev.
This poses a cycle. It applies even for cross building, because it is
interpreted for the host architecture and that there is no way of satisfying
this dependency during the toolchain bootstrap.
Given discussions at MiniDebConf Hamburg
with Jochen Sprickerhof and others, a seemingly stupid idea evolved: Letβs
delete build-essential. What looks insane on the surface might deserve a
second look. Given how we moved away from C, C++ and autotools, what is in
build-essential no longer is required by much of the archive. With the rise of
debputy, debian/rules no longer has to be a makefile. While the task would
be huge, those packages relevant to architecture bootstrap could explicitly
support building without the implied dependency making their dependencies
explicit. In a number of cases, this amounts to issuing a dependency on
g++-for-host. This dependency requires the use of architecture-prefixed tools.
Therefore, Helmut wrote a debhelper change
that makes it always pass build tools to various build systems. This also
enables more packages to honour environment variables such as CC and CXX.
Stefano attended PyCon US (at personal expense)
to improve upstream relations and ensure Debianβs voice is heard where it needs
to be. On Friday there was a packaging summit
(notes) with good
discussion on the future of the wheel format, and some discussion of the new
abi3t shared library format for free-threaded python.
In preparation for the event, Stefano did a complete review of the current patch stack.
Stefanoβs primary goal was to get some of Debianβs patches merged during the sprints, and results were mixed. Some trivial patches (e.g. GH-150098, made progress and merged, but the most consequential patch Debian is carrying is still blocked. Stefano will continue to try to drive progress on this.
debvm and guess_concurrency both featuring improved
reproducibility and documentation.gcc-defaults. Additionally, he poked at existing gcc patches giving answers,
rebasing or closing them.debci to configure a global
notice (which is being used in Debian CI to point to the system status pages).gem2deb (Ruby packaging helper) and in ruby-byebug, both
already fixed in unstable.python-pip, pystemmer, snowball-data,
snowball (making up a mini, uncoordinated snowball transition),
python-authlib, python-discovery, python-installer, python-mitogen,
python-pipx, python-cachecontrol, platformdirs, and python-virtualenv.dh-python, culminating in the
7.20260524 upload.hplip. He also
uploaded a new upstream version of epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. Last but not
least with the help of other contributors he could fix bugs in lprng.clang-extract package for debian. clang-extract is one of the
building blocks that will help to extract specific functions from large C code,
so only relevant code can be patched, without recompiling the whole original
basecode. Quick note to share that rbenchmark is back on CRAN! The rbenchmark package makes it easy to benchmark (and compare) simple R expressions.
This package has been on CRAN for many years. At one point fourteen years ago it appeared to be rudderless so I offered help but things realigned. Now it was just tossed off CRAN, taking a number of packages depending on it with it (as shown in this CRANberries skeet listing a set of removed packages) so I offered again to help, and CRAN agreed. So here we are.
So far I just made a number of small βeditingβ changes, added CI support, and enable dbsr-universe coverage . I do not expect to change the package materially. So far the package has no NEWS file either so maybe glance at the ChangeLog at the git 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 sponsor me at GitHub. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.
Important
This version contains security fixes, it is recommended to update to this version immediately.
Important
If you are using Part-DB it would be helpful if you fill out this short survey on your usage of Part-DB (Google Forms): https://forms.gle/Q15twx3YYq3qCNfe8
Full Changelog: v2.12.1...v2.12.2
Today we went to see a theater play in UNAMβs Cultural Center, very near our home. No, not inside any of the theaters β in the square just between Sala NezahualcΓ³yotl, Foro Sor Juana and Sala Carlos ChΓ‘vez.. So, yes, not only we had fun, but we had fun for free!
UNAMβs 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 eventsβ¦
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:
Two weeks ago, we had the pleasure of opening our doors to the public as part of the Open House Praha Festival, welcoming visitors to our headquarters in Prague. As a festival dedicated to architecture, urbanism, and exceptional spaces that are not normally accessible to the public, Open House Praha offers a unique opportunity to explore some of the city's most interesting buildings and interiors.
As the first tenant of the Roztyly Plaza office building in Chodov, awarded Building of the Year 2024, we were proud to take part in this event and share our workplace with visitors. Throughout the weekend, guests joined guided tours across our offices, discovering not only where we create our games but also the architectural and technological solutions that make this space unique.
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Designed by Studio Perspektiv, our offices span several floors and are built around the concept of an adventurous journey through a microworld where nature and technology intertwine. During the tours, visitors learnt more about the architectural vision behind the interior design, as well as the technical aspects of the workspace, including its acoustic design, ventilation systems, and the solutions implemented to create a comfortable and inspiring environment for our teams.
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Guests were also able to explore many of the facilities available to employees, including the fitness center, rooms dedicated to massages and meditation, spaces for board games, and even our own movie theater. One of the most striking features of the interior is the monumental red staircase known as Diamant, which connects all three floors of the company and serves as a central architectural element of the space.
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Alongside the architectural and technical aspects of the offices, we were happy to share more about SCS Software, our projects, and the work that takes place within these spaces every day. It was a pleasure to meet so many visitors, answer their questions, and showcase the environment where our teams collaborate and create.
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A big thank you goes out to everyone who stopped by, as well as to the organizers of Open House Praha for making this event possible. We truly enjoyed welcoming you to our offices and sharing this experience with you.
If you weren't able to visit us during Open House Praha, or would simply like to take another look around, you can explore our offices virtually through Google Street View.
Make sure to follow us on our social media channels X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, YouTube, or subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss any news or behind-the-scenes.
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 βtestingβ 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.
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:
show, search, list-updates, what-provides, instead of get-details and friends.NO_COLOR and degrading gracefully).--json flag emits JSONL instead of fully human-readable output when possible, to make it easier to use the tool for scripting purposes.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.
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 βeditorβ in name or description, then look at the details of one result:
$ pkgcli search editor
Querying [ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ] 100%
β£ ace-of-penguins 1.5~rc2-7.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β£ acorn-fdisk 3.0.6-14.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β£ ardour 1:9.2.0+ds-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β audacity 3.7.7+dfsg-1.amd64 [manual:debian-testing-main]
β audacity-data 3.7.7+dfsg-1.all [auto:debian-testing-main]
β£ augeas-tools 1.14.1-1.1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β£ emacs 1:30.2+1-3.all [debian-testing-main]
β£ gedit 48.1-9+b1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β£ gedit-common 48.1-9.all [debian-testing-main]
β£ 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 KBSearch only within package names rather than descriptions:
$ pkgcli search name python3Check for updates. refresh updates the metadata, then list-updates reports whatβs available:
$ pkgcli refresh && pkgcli list-updates
Loading cache [ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ] 100%
β² cme 1.048-1.all [debian-testing-main]
β² gir1.2-gdm-1.0 50.1-2.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β² imagemagick 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β² imagemagick-7-common 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.all [debian-testing-main]
β² imagemagick-7.q16 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β² libdlrestrictions1 0.22.0.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β² libfftw3-bin 3.3.11-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
β² 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 libappstream5Find the package that provides a capability, here the AV1 GStreamer decoder:
$ pkgcli what-provides "gstreamer1(decoder-video/x-av1)"
β 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-double3pkgcli 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.
Expanding American Truck Simulator into Canada is much more than just adding new roads and cities. As our teams work on bringing British Columbia, our first Canadian province to ATS, a lot of work is taking place behind the scenes to ensure it feels authentic and recognizable.
Docker images have been built and pushed:
Docker Hub:
alexta69/metube:latestalexta69/metube:2026.06.13GitHub Container Registry:
ghcr.io/alexta69/metube:latestghcr.io/alexta69/metube:2026.06.13
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
@directus/app@16.1.1@directus/api@36.0.2create-directus-extension@12.1.0
