If you’re an EndeavourOS user and were ever surprised why your system update is suddenly pulling in a ~126 MB webkit2gtk-4.1 package that nothing you consciously installed seems to use, then this is for you. I found myself annoyed by this particular dependency enough to rewrite reflector-simple, the GUI for reflector shipped with EndeavourOS. Even though I’m generally comfortable using reflector from the command line, it was interesting to see how much the Python implementation would differ from its Bash counterpart.

The result is ReflectorTK, a straightforward graphical interface for configuring and running reflector to update your Arch Linux mirrorlist. It’s designed as a Tkinter-based drop-in replacement for reflector-simple.

An attempt of a properly styled animated badge prompted by @jsiepkes’s comment on HN:

Full quote by George Santayana:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

This is yet another release post, this time for Catalay — a free software suite designed to automate the layout of image catalogues made with Adobe InDesign, using simple, declarative, human readable and editable configuration files in TOML or YAML formats as input. The main feature is not just automatically laying out the images in a grid, but adapting the grid layout itself. Catalay preserves the size relationship between different groups of items on each page, scaling them appropriately, while utilizing the page as efficiently as possible given the constraints.

When it comes to tech, I view myself a “generalist”: a person not excelling at anything specifically, but striving to grasp a wide spectrum of different things and looking at a general picture. Seeing the progress of the large language models, I believe people like me are going to be totally wiped out. Soon. Or, perhaps the 95% will, and the rest will be those lucky ones who managed to fight their way up to the not-exactly-cushy but better-than-totally-unskilled jobs of the AI-operators: be good enough to make a suitable prompt, check the results and stitch them together. It was “the glue” code, now it’s the glue humans.

This is a release post for Rearchiver — a little command line program for preparing your Reaper projects for archiving.

Rearchiver:

• Scans the project file for all used WAV files
• Finds them in the project directory and converts to FLAC
• Changes the links to the successfully converted source files in the RPP file accordingly
• Optionally deletes processed source files and their .reapeaks
• Outputs the corrected project file

It’s a Free Software (GPLv3) program written in Nim.