Planet GNOME

A week ago we discussed free trade, and specifically took a look at the classical mechanism by which free trade is supposed to improve overall outcomes, as measured by GDP.

As I described it, the value proposition of free trade is ambiguous at best: there is an intangible sense that a country might have a higher GDP with lower trade barriers, but with a side serving of misery as international competition forces some local industries to close, and without any guarantee about how that trade advantage would be distributed among the population. Why bother? And why is my news feed full of EU commissioners signing new trade agreements? Where are these ideas coming from?

stave 2

I asked around, placed some orders, and a week later a copy of Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica came in the mail. I was hoping for a definitive, reasoned argument for or against free trade, from a leftist’s perspective (whatever that means). The book was both more and less than that. Less, in the sense that its narrative is most tightly woven in the century before the end of the second World War, becoming loose and frayed as it breezes through decolonization, the rise of neoliberalism, the end of history, and what it describes as our current neomercantilist moment. Less, also, in that Palen felt no need to summarize the classic economic arguments for free trade, leaving me to clumsily do so in the previous stave. And yet, the story it tells fills in gaps in my understanding that I didn’t even know I had.

To pick up one thread from the book, let’s go back to 1815. British parliament passes the Corn Laws, establishing a price floor for imported grain. This trade barrier essentially imposes a significant tax on all people who eat, to the profit of a small number of landowners. A movement to oppose these laws develops over the next 30 years, with Richard Cobden as its leading advocate. One of the arguments of the Anti-Corn Law League, which was actually a thing, is that cheaper food is good for workers; though wages might decline as bosses realize they don’t need to pay so much to keep their workers alive, relatively speaking workers will do better. More money left over at the end of the month also means more demand for other manufactured products, which is good for growing industry.

In the end, bad harvests in 1845 led to shortages and famine (yes, that one) and eventually a full repeal of the laws in 1846. Perhaps the Anti-Corn Law League’s success was inevitable: a bad harvest year is a stochastic certainty, and not having enough food is the kind of problem no government can ignore. In any case, the episode does prove the Corn Laws to be a front in a class war, and their repeal was a victory for the left, even if it occured under a Conservative government, and even if the campaign was essentially middle-class Liberal in character.

The repeal campaign was not just about domestic cost of living, however. Its exponents argued that free trade among nations was an essential step to a world of peaceful international cooperation. Palen’s book puts Cobden in context by comparison to Friedrich List, who, inspired by a stint in America in the 1820s, starts from the premise that for a nation to be great, it needs an empire of colonies to exploit, and to conquer and defend colonies, it needs a developed domestic industry and navy; and for a nation to develop its own industry, it needs protectionism. The natural state of empire is not exactly one of free trade with its neighbors.

The “commercial peace” movement that Palen describes cuts List’s argument short at “empire”: because there is no empire without war, a peace movement should scratch away at the causes of war, and the causes of the causes; a world living in pax economica would avoid imperial conflict by tying nations together through trade. It sounds idealistic, and it is, but it’s easy to forget that today we wage war through trade also: blockades and sanctions are often followed by bombs. Palen’s book draws clear lines from Cobdenism through such disparate groups as women’s peace societies, Christian internationalists, pre-war German socialists, and Lenin himself.

Marx understood history as a process of development, consisting of stages through which a society must necessarily pass on its way to socialism. This allies him with capitalism in many ways; he viewed free trade as a step towards a higher form of capitalism, which would necessarily lead to socialism. This, to me, is not a convincing argument in 2026: not only has the mechanistic vision of history failed to fruit, but its mechanism of plant closures and capital flight can be cruel and hard to campaign for politically. And yet, I think we do need a healthy dose of internationalism to remedy the ills of the present day: a jolt of ideals and even idealism to remind us that we are all travelling together on this spaceship Earth, and that those on the other side of a political line are just as much our brothers and sisters those on “our” side.

i went seeking clarity

When you tend Marxist, you know in your bones that although the road to socialism is rough and winding, the winds of history are always at your back; there is an in-baked inevitability of success that softens defeat. There is something similar in the Christian and feminist narrative strands that Palen weaves: a sense not that victory is inevitable, at least in this lifetime, but that fighting for it is a moral imperative, and that God is on your side. The campaign for free trade was a means to a moral end, one of international peace and shared prosperity. And this, in 2026, sounds... good, actually?

Again from our 2026 perspective, I cannot help but agree that a trade barrier is often an act of war; preliminary, yes, but on the spectrum. I have had enough freedom fries in my life to have developed an allergy to anything that tastes of my-side-of-the-line-is-better-than-yours. Though I have not yet read Klein and Pettis’s deliciously titled Trade Wars are Class Wars, I do know that among the 1.5 million people who died as a result of the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein was not on the list. Sometimes I feel like we learned the lessons of Cobdenism backwards: in order to keep the people starving, we must impose anew the Corn Laws.

Palen’s book leaves me with one doubt, and one big question. The doubt is, to what extent do the lessons of the early 1800s apply today? Ricardo’s contemporary comparative advantage theories presupposed that capital was relatively fixed in space; nowadays this is much less the case. The threat of moving the plant elsewhere is always present in all union drives everywhere. Though history rhymes, it does not repeat; it will take some creativity to transplant pax economica to the soils of the 21st century.

The bigger question, though, is as regards the morality of protectionism as practiced by more and less developed economies: when is it morally right for a country to erect trade barriers? Palen’s book does not pretend to answer this question. And yet, this issue was foremost in our minds, as we shut down Seattle in 1999, as we died in Genoa in 2001. (Forgive the collectivism, if you aren’t of this tribe (yet?), but it was a lived experience.) Free trade was a moral cause in 1835; how did it become immoral in 1995, at least to us?

world without end

Well. To answer that question, we need a history that picks up where Palen leaves off, and we have something like it in Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists, which we will look at next time. But before we go, two reflections.

One, in Europe we have kept the Corn Laws on the books, in a way, in the form of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In France the dominant discourse is very much in opposition to the free trade agreement with Mercosur, and the main reason is the threat to French farmers. The tradeoff to get the Mercosur agreement over the line were additional subsidies under the CAP, which are a form of trade barrier. And yet, the way the CAP is structured allocates most of the money in proportion to the surface area of a farm, which is to say, to the largest agribusinesses and to the largest landowners. Greenpeace just put out an excellent briefing arguing that the CAP is just a subsidy to the heirs of the Duchess of Alba and their ilk. Again, are we running the 19th century in reverse?

Secondly, and harder to explain... in the 2000s I listened a lot to an anarchist radio show hosted by Lyn Gerry, Unwelcome Guests. (Have you heard the eponymous tune? It makes me shiver every time.) Anyway I remember one episode which discussed the gift economy and hunter-gather economics, in which a researcher asked a member of that community what he would do if he came into a lot of food at one time: the response, as I recall, was that he would store it “in his brother”. He would give it to others. One day, if he needed it, they would give to him.

I know that our world does not work this way, but there is an element of truth here, in that it’s not reasonable for France to grow everything that it eats, to never trade what it grows, to make all its own solar panels, to write all software used within its borders. We live richer lives when we share and learn from each other, without regards to which side of the line our home is.

next

Still here? Gosh me too. Next time we will look at what the kids call the “1900s” and perhaps approach present day. Until then, commercial peace be with you!

For a few days leading up to FOSDEM 2026, the GNOME OS developers met for a GNOME OS hackfest. Here are some of the things we talked about!

Stable

The first big topic on our to-do list was GNOME OS stable. We started by defining the milestone: we can call GNOME OS “stable” when we settle on a configuration that we’re willing to support long-term. The most important blocker here is systemd-homed: we know that we want the stable release of GNOME OS to use systemd-homed, and we don’t want to have to support pre-homed GNOME OS installations forever. We discussed the possiblity of building a migration script to move people onto systemd-homed once it’s ready, but it’s simply too difficult and dangerous to deploy this in practice.

We did, however, agree that we can already start promoting GNOME OS a bit more heavily, provided that we make very clear that this is an unstsable product for very early adopters, who would be willing to occasionally reinstall their system (or manually migrate it).

We also discussed the importance of project documentation. GNOME OS’s documentation isn’t in a great state at the moment, and this makes it especially difficult to start contributing. BuildStream, which is GNOME OS’s build system, has a workflow that is unfamiliar to most people that may want to contribute. Despite its comprehensive documentation, there’s no easy “quick start” reference for the most common tasks and so it is ultimately a source of friction for potential contributors. This is especially unfourtunate given the current excitement around building next-gen “distroless” operating systems. Our user documentation is also pretty sparse. Finally, the little documentation we do have is spread across different places (markdown comitted to git, GitLab Wiki pages, the GNOME OS website, etc) and this makes it very difficult for people to find it.

Fixing /etc

Next we talked about the situation with /etc on GNOME OS. /etc has been a bit of an unsolved problem in the UAPI group’s model of immutability: ideally all default configuration can be loaded from /usr, and so /etc would remain entirely for overrides by the system administrator. Unfourtunately, this isn’t currently the case, so we must have some solution to keep track of both upstream defaults and local changes in /etc.

So far, GNOME OS had a complicated set-up where parts of /usr would be symlinked into /etc. To change any of these files, the user would have to break the symlinks and replace them with normal files, potentially requiring copies of entire directories. This would then cause loads of issues, where the broken symlinks cause /etc to slowly drift away from the changing defaults in /usr.

For years, we’ve known that the solution would be overlayfs. This kernel filesystem allows us to mount the OS’s defaults underneath a writable layer for administrator overrides. For various reasons, however, we’ve struggled to deploy this in practice.

Modern systemd has native support for this arrangement via systemd-confext, and we decided to just give it a try at the hackfest. A few hours later, Valentin had a merge request to transition us to the new scheme. We’ve now fully rolled this out, and so the issue is solved in the latest GNOME OS nightlies.

FEX and Flatpak

Next, we discussed integrating FEX with Flatpak so that we can run x86 apps on ARM64 devices.

Abderrahim kicked off the topic by telling us about fexwrap, a script that grafts two different Flatpak runtimes together to successfully run apps via FEX. After studying this implementation, we discussed what proper upstream support might look like.

Ultimately, we decided that the first step will be a new Flatpak runtime extension that bundles FEX, the required extra libraries, and the “thunks” (glue libraries that let x86 apps call into native ARM GPU drivers). From there, we’ll have to experiment and see what integrations Flatpak itself needs to make everything work seamlessly.

Abderrahim has already started hacking on this upstream.

Amutable

The Amutable crew were in Brussels for FOSDEM, and a few of them stopped in to attend our hackfest. We had some very interesting conversations! From a GNOME OS perspective, we’re quite excited about the potential overlap between our work and theirs.

We also used the opportunity to discuss GNOME OS, of course! For instance, we were able to resolve some kernel VFS blockers for GNOME OS delta updates and Flatpak v2.

mkosi

For a few years, we’ve been exploring ways to factor out GNOME OS’s image build scripts into a reusable component. This would make it trivial for other BuildStream-based projects to distribute themselves as UAPI.3 DDIs. It would also allow us to ship device-specific builds of GNOME OS, which are necessary to target mobile devices like the Fairphone 5.

At Boiling the Ocean 7, we decided to try an alternative approach. What if we could drop our bespoke image build steps, and just use mkosi? There, we threw together a prototype and successfully booted to login. With the concept proven, I put together a better prototype in the intervening months. This prompted a discussion with Daan, the maintainer of mkosi, and we ultimately decided that mkosi should just have native BuildStream support upstream.

At the hackfest, Daan put together a prototype for this native support. We were able to use his modified build of mkosi to build a freedesktop-sdk BuildStream image, package it up as a DDI, boot it in a virtual machine, set the machine up via systemd-firstboot, and log into a shell. Daan has since opened a pull request, and we’ll continue iterating on this approach in the coming months.

Overall, this hackfest was extremely productive! I think it’s pretty likely that we’ll organize something like this again next year!

Today, a very quick note on dynamic instance type checks in virtual machines with single inheritance.

The problem is that given an object o whose type is t, you want to check if o actually is of some more specific type u. To my knowledge, there are two sensible ways to implement these type checks.

if the set of types is fixed: dfs numbering

Consider a set of types T := {t, u, ...} and a set of edges S := {<t|ε, u>, ...} indicating that t is the direct supertype of u, or ε if u is a top type. S should not contain cycles and is thus a direct acyclic graph rooted at ε.

First, compute a pre-order and post-order numbering for each t in the graph by doing a depth-first search over S from ε. Something like this:

def visit(t, counter): t.pre_order = counter counter = counter + 1 for u in S[t]: counter = visit(u, counter) t.post_order = counter return counter

Then at run-time, when making an object of type t, you arrange to store the type’s pre-order number (its tag) in the object itself. To test if the object is of type u, you extract the tag from the object and check if tag–u.pre_order mod 2n < u.post_order–u.pre_order.

Two notes, probably obvious but anyway: one, you know the numbering for u at compile-time and so can embed those variables as immediates. Also, if the type has no subtypes, it can be a simple equality check.

Note that this approach applies only if the set of types T is fixed. This is the case when statically compiling a WebAssembly module in a system that doesn’t allow modules to be instantiated at run-time, like Wastrel. Interestingly, it can also be the case in JIT compilers, when modeling types inside the optimizer.

if the set of types is unbounded: the display hack

If types may be added to a system at run-time, maintaining a sorted set of type tags may be too much to ask. In that case, the standard solution is something I learned of as the display hack, but whose name is apparently ungooglable. It is described in a 4-page technical note by Norman H. Cohen, from 1991: Type-Extension Type Tests Can Be Performed In Constant Time.

The basic idea is that each type t should have an associated sorted array of supertypes, starting with its top type and ending with t itself. Each t also has a depth, indicating the number of edges between it and its top type. A type u is a subtype of t if u[t.depth]=t, if u.depth <= t.depth.

There are some tricks one can do to optimize out the depth check, but it’s probably a wash given the check performs a memory access or two on the way. But the essence of the whole thing is in Cohen’s paper; go take a look!

Jan Vitek notes in a followup paper (Efficient Type Inclusion Tests) that Christian Queinnec discovered the technique around the same time. Vitek also mentions the DFS technique, but as prior art, apparently already deployed in DEC Modula-3 systems. The term “display” was bouncing around in the 80s to describe some uses of arrays; I learned it from Dybvig’s implementation of flat closures, who learned it from Cardelli. I don’t know though where “display hack” comes from.

That’s it! If you know of any other standard techniques for type checks with single-inheritance subtyping, do let me know in the comments. Until next time, happy hacking!

It’s time for another Crosswords release. This is relatively soon after the last one, but I have an unofficial rule that Crosswords is released after three bloggable features. We’ve been productive and blown way past that bar in only a few months, so it’s time for an update.

This round, we redid the game interface (for GNOME Circle) and added content to the editor. The editor also gained printing support, and we expanded support for Adwaita accent colors. In details:

New Layout GNOME Crosswords’ new look — now using the accent color

I applied for GNOME Circle a couple years ago, but it wasn’t until this past GUADEC that I was able to sit down together with Tobias to take a closer look at the game. We sketched out a proposed redesign, and I’ve been implementing it for the last four months. The result: a much cleaner look and workflow. I really like the way it has grown.

Initial redesign

Overall, I’m really happy with the way it looks and feels so far. The process has been relatively smooth (details), though it’s clear that the design team has limited resources to spend on these efforts. They need more help, and I hope that team can grow. Here’s how the game looks now:

https://blogs.gnome.org/jrb/files/2026/02/main-1.webm

I really could use help with the artwork for this project! Jakub made some sketches and I tried to convert them to svg, but have reached the limits of my inkscape skills. If you’re interested in helping and want to get involved in GNOME Design artwork, this could be a great place to start. Let me know!

Indicator Hints

Time for some crossword nerdery:

Indicator Hints Dialog Main Screen

One thing that characterizes cryptic crosswords is that its clues feature wordplay. A key part of the wordplay is called an “indicator hint”. These hints are a word — or words — that tell you to transform neighboring words into parts of the solutions. These transformations could be things like rearranging the letters (anagrams) or reversing them. The example in the dialog screenshot below might give a better sense of how these work. There’s a whole universe built around this.

Indicator Hint Dialog with an example

Good clues always use evocative indicator hints to entertain or mislead the solver. To help authors, I install a database of common indicator hints compiled by George Ho and show a random subset. His list also includes how frequently they’re used, which can be used to make a clue harder or easier to solve.

Indicator Hints Dialog with full list of indicators Templates and Settability

I’ve always been a bit embarrassed about the New Puzzle dialog. The dialog should be simple enough: select a puzzle type, puzzle size, and maybe a preset grid template. Unfortunately, it historically had a few weird bugs and the template thumbnailing code was really slow.  It could only render twenty or so templates before the startup time became unbearable. As a result, I only had a pitiful four or five templates per type of puzzle.

When Toluwaleke rewrote the thumbnail rendering to be blazing fast over the summer, it became possible to give this section a closer look. The result:

https://blogs.gnome.org/jrb/files/2026/02/greeter.webm

Note: The rendering issues with the theme words dialog is GTK Bug #7400

The new dialog now has almost a thousand curated blank grids to pick from, sorted by how difficult they are to fill. In addition, I added initial support to add Theme Words to the puzzle. Setting theme words will also filter the templates to only show those that fit. Some cool technical details:

• The old dialog would load the ipuz files, convert them to svg, then render them to Pixbuf. That had both json + xml parse trees to navigate, plus a pixbuf transition. It was all inherently slow. I’ve thrown all that out.
• The new code takes advantage of the fact that crossword grids are effectively bitfields: at build time I convert each row in a grid template into a u32 with each bit representing a block. That means that each crossword grid can be stored as an array of these u32s. We use GResource and GVariant to load this file, so it’s mmapped and effectively instant to parse. At this point, the limiting factor in adding additional blank templates is curation/generation.
• As part of this, I developed a concept called “settability” (documentation) to capture how easy or hard it is to fill in a grid. We use this to sort the grids, and to warn the user should they choose a harder grid. It’s a heuristic, but it feels pretty good to me. You can see it in the video in the sort order of the grids.

User Testing

I had the good fortune to be able to sit with one of my coworkers and watch her use the editor. She’s a much more accomplished setter than I, and publishes her crosswords in newspapers. Watching her use the tool was really helpful as she highlighted a lot of issues with the application (list). It was also great to validate a few of my big design decisions, notably splitting grid creation from clue writing.

I’ve fixed most of the  easy issues she found, but she confirmed something I suspected: The big missing feature for the editor is an overlay indicating tricky cells and dead ends (bug). Victor proposed a solution (link) for this over the summer. This is now the top priority for the next release.

Thanks

• George for his fabulous database of indicator words
• Tobias for tremendous design work
• Jakub for artwork sketches and ideas
• Sophia for user feedback with the editor
• Federico for a lot of useful advice, CI fixes, and cleanups
• Vinson for build fixes and sanitation
• Nicole for some game papercut fixes
• Toluwaleke for printing advice and fixes
• Rosanna for text help and encouragement/advice
• Victor for cleaning up the docs

Until next time!

Pystd is an experiment on what a C++ standard library without any backwards compatibility requirements would look like. It's design goals are in order of decreasing priority:

• Fast build times
• Simplicity of implementation
• Good performance

 It also has some design-antigoals:

• Not compatible with the ISO C++ standard library
• No support for weird corner cases like linked lists or types that can't be noexcept-moved
• Do not reinvent things that are already in the C standard library (though you might provide a nicer UI to them)

Current status

There is a bunch of stuff implemented, like vector, several string types, hashmap, a B-tree based ordered map, regular expressions, unix path manipulation operations and so on. The latest addition has been sort algorithms, which include merge sort, heap sort and introsort.

None of these is "production quality". They will almost certainly have bugs. Don't rely on them for "real work". 

The actual library consists of approximately 4800 lines of headers and 4700 lines of source. Building the library and all test code on a Raspberry Pi using a single core takes 13 seconds. With 30 process invocations this means approximately 0.4 seconds per compilation.

For real world testing we have really only one data point, but in it build time was reduced by three quarters, the binary became smaller and the end result ran faster.

Portability

The code has been tested on Linux x86_64 and aarch64 as well as on macOS. It currently does not work with Visual Studio which has not implemented support for pack indexing yet.

Why should you consider using it?

Back in the 90s and 00s (I think) it was fashionable to write your own C++ standard library implementation. Eventually they all died and people moved to the one that comes with their compiler. Which is totally reasonable. So why would you now switch to something else?

For existing C++ applications you probably don't want to. The amount of work needed for a port is too much to be justified in most cases.

For green field projects things are more interesting. Maybe you just want to try something new just for the fun of it? That is the main reason why Pystd even exists, I wanted to try implementing the core building blocks of a standard library from scratch.

Maybe you want to provide "Go style" binaries that build fast and have no external deps? The size overhead of Pystd is only a few hundred k and the executables it yields only depend on libc (unless you use regexes, in which case they also depend on libpcre, but you can static link it if you prefer).

Resource constrained or embedded systems might also be an option. Libstdc++ takes a few megabytes. Pystd does require malloc, though (more specifically it requires aligned alloc) so for the smallest embedded targets you'd need to use something like the freestanding library. As an additional feature Pystd permits you to disable parts of the library that are not used (currently only regexes, but could be extended to things like threading and file system).

Compiler implementers might choose to test their performance with an unusual code base. For example GCC compiles most Pystd files in a flash but for some reason the B-tree implementation takes several seconds to build. I don't really know why because it does not do any heavy duty metaprogramming or such.

It might also be usable in teaching as a fairly small implementation of the core algorithms used today. Assuming anyone does education any more as opposed to relying on LLMs for everything.

Ever since my partner and I bought a house several years ago, I’ve wanted to throw a themed Star Wars party here. We’ve talked about doing a summer movie showing thing, we’ve talked about doing a Star Wars TV show marathon, and we’ve done a few birthday parties—but never the full-on themed party that I was dreaming up. Until this year!

For some reason, a combination of rearranging some of our furniture, the state of my smart home, my enjoyment of Star Wars: Outlaws, and my newfound work/life balance meant that this was the year I finally committed to doing the party.

Pitch

For the past few years I’ve thrown a two-part birthday party: we start out at a nearby bar or restaurant, and then head to the house for more drinks and games. I like this format as it gives folks a natural “out” if they don’t want to commit to the entire evening: they can just join the beginning and then head out, or they can just meet up at our house. I was planning to do the same this year, but decided: let’s go all-in at the house so we have more time for more fun. I knew I wanted:

1. Trivia! I organized a fun little Star Wars trivia game for my birthday last year and really enjoyed how nerdy my friends were with it, so this year I wanted to do something similar. My good friend Dagan volunteered to put together a fresh trivia game, which was incredible.

2. Sabacc. The Star Wars equivalent to poker, featured heavily in the Star Wars: Outlaws game as well as in Star Wars: Rebels, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the Disney Galactic Starcruiser (though it’s Kessel sabacc vs. traditional sabacc vs. Corellian spike vs. Coruscant shift respectively… but I digress). I got a Kessel sabacc set for Christmas and have wanted to play it with a group of friends ever since.

3. Themed drinks. Revnog is mentioned in Star Wars media including Andor as some sort of liquor, and spotchka is featured in the New Republic era shows like The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. There isn’t really any detail as to what each tastes like, but I knew I wanted to make some batch cocktails inspired by these in-universe drinks.

4. Immersive environment. This meant smart lights, music, and some other aesthetic touches. Luckily over the years I’ve upgraded my smart home to feature nearly all locally-controllable RGB smart bulbs and fixtures; while during the day they simply shift from warm white to daylight and back, it means I can do a lot with them for special occasions. I also have networked speakers throughout the house, and a 3D printer.

About a month before the party, I got to work.

Aesthetic

For the party to feel immersive, I knew getting the aesthetic right was paramount. I also knew I wanted to send out themed invites to set the tone, so I had to start thinking about the whole thing early.

Star Wars: Outlaws title screen

Star Wars: Outlaws journal UI

Since I’d been playing Star Wars: Outlaws, that was my immediate inspiration. I also follow the legendary Louie Mantia on Mastodon, and had bought some of his Star Wars fonts from The Crown Type Company, so I knew at least partially how I was going to get there.

Initial invite graphic (address censored)

For the invite, I went with a cyan-on-black color scheme. This is featured heavily in Star Wars: Outlaws but is also an iconic Star Wars look (“A long time ago…”, movie end credits, Clone Wars title cards, etc.). I chose the Spectre font as it’s very readable but also very Star Wars. To give it some more texture (and as an easter egg for the nerds), I used Womprat Aurebesh offset and dimmed behind the heading. The whole thing was a pretty quick design, but it did its job and set the tone.

Website

I spent a bit more time iterating on the website, and it’s a more familiar domain for me than more static designs like the invite was. I especially like how the offset Aurebesh turned out on the headings, as it feels very in-universe to me. I also played with a bit of texture on the website to give it that lo-fi/imperfect tech vibe that Star Wars so often embraces.

For the longer-form body text, I wanted something even more readable than the more display-oriented fonts I’d used, so I turned to a good friend: Inter (also used on this site!). It doesn’t really look like Inter though… because I used almost every stylistic alternate that the font offers—explicitly to make it feel legible but also… kinda funky. I think it worked out well. Specifically, notice the lower-case “a”, “f”, “L”, “t”, and “u” shapes, plus the more rounded punctuation.

Screenshot of my website

I think more people should use subdomains for things like this! It’s become a meme at this point that people buy domains for projects they never get around to, but I always have to remind people: subdomains are free. Focus on making the thing, put it up on a subdomain, and then if you ever spin it out into its own successful thing, then you can buy a flashy bare domain for it!

Since I already owned blaede.family where I host extended family wishlists, recipes, and a Mastodon server, I resisted the urge to purchase yet another domain and instead went with a subdomain. cantina.blaede.family doesn’t quite stay totally immersive, but it worked well enough—especially for a presumably short-lived project like this.

Environment

Once I had the invite nailed down, I started working on what the actual physical environment would look like. I watched the bar/cantina scenes from A New Hope and Attack of the Clones, scoured concept art, and of course played more Outlaws. The main thing I came away thinking about was lighting!

Lighting

The actual cantinas are often not all that otherworldly, but lighting plays a huge role; both in color and the overall dimness with a lot of (sometimes colorful) accent lighting.

So, I got to work on setting up a lighting scene in Home Assistant. At first I was using the same color scheme everywhere, but I quickly found that distinct color schemes for different areas would feel more fun and interesting.

Lounge area

For the main lounge-type area, I went with dim orange lighting and just a couple of green accent lamps. This reminds me of Jabba’s palace and Boba Fett, and just felt… right. It’s sort of organic but would be a somewhat strange color scheme outside of Star Wars. It’s also the first impression people will get when coming into the house, so I wanted it to feel the most recognizably Star Wars-y.

Kitchen area

Next, I focused on the kitchen, where people would gather for drinks and snacks. We have white under-cabinet lighting which I wanted to keep for function (it’s nice to see what color your food actually is…), but I went with a bluish-purple (almost ultaviolet) and pink.

Coruscant bar from Attack of the Clones

While this is very different from a cantina on Tatooine, it reminded me of the Coruscant bar we see in Attack of the Clones as well as some of the environments in The Clone Wars and Outlaws. At one point I was going to attempt to make a glowing cocktail that would luminesce under black light—I ditched that, but the lighting stayed.

Dining room sabacc table

One of the more important areas was, of course, the sabacc table (the dining room), which is adjacent to the kitchen. I had to balance ensuring the cards and chips are visible with that dim, dingy, underworld vibe. I settled on actually adding a couple of warm white accent lights (3D printed!) for visibility, then using the ceiling fan lights as a sabacc round counter (with a Zigbee button as the dealer token).

3D printed accent light

Lastly, I picked a few other colors for adjacent rooms: a more vivid purple for the bathroom, and red plus a rainbow LED strip for my office (where I set up split-screen Star Wars: Battlefront II on a PS2).

Office area

I was pretty happy with the lighting at this point, but then I re-watched the Mos Eisley scenes and noticed some fairly simple accent lights: plain warm white cylinders on the tables.

I threw together a simple print for my 3D printer and added some battery-powered puck lights underneath: perfection.

First test of my cylinder lights Music

With my networked speakers, I knew I wanted some in-universe cantina music—but I also knew the cantina song would get real old, real fast. Since I’d been playing Outlaws as well as a fan-made Holocard Cantina sabacc app, I knew there was a decent amount of in-universe music out there; luckily it’s actually all on YouTube Music.

I made a looooong playlist including a bunch of that music plus some from Pyloon’s Saloon in Jedi: Survivor, Oga’s Cantina at Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge, and a select few tracks from other Star Wars media (Niamos!).

Sabacc

A big part of the party was sabacc; we ended up playing several games and really getting into it. To complement the cards and dice (from Hyperspace Props), I 3D printed chips and tokens that we used for the games.

3D printed sabacc tokens and chips

We started out simple with just the basic rules and no tokens, but after a couple of games, we introduced some simple tokens to make the game more interesting.

Playing sabacc

I had a blast playing sabacc with my friends and by the end of the night we all agreed: we need to play this more frequently than just once a year for my birthday!

Drinks

I’m a fan of batch cocktails for parties, because it means less time tending a bar and more time enjoying company—plus it gives you a nice opportunity for a themed drink or two that you can prepare ahead of time. I decided to make two batch cocktails: green revnog and spotchka.

Bottles of spotchka and revnog

Revnog is shown a few times in Andor, but it’s hard to tell what it looks like—one time it appears to be blue, but it’s also lit by the bar itself. When it comes to taste, the StarWars.com Databank just says it “comes in a variety of flavors.” However, one character mentions “green revnog” as being her favorite, so I decided to run with that so I could make something featuring objectively the best fruit in the galaxy: pear (if you know, you know).

My take on green revnog

After a lot of experimenting, I settled on a spiced pear gin drink that I think is a nice balance between sweet, spiced, and boozy. The simple batch recipe came out to: 4 parts gin, 1 part St. George’s Spiced Pear Liqueur, 1 part pear juice, and 1 part lemon juice. It can be served directly on ice, or cut with sparkling water to tame it a bit.

Spotchka doesn’t get its own StarWars.com Databank entry, but is mentioned in a couple of entries about locations from an arc of The Mandalorian. All that can be gleaned is that it’s apparently glowing and blue (Star Wars sure loves its blue drinks!), and made from “krill” which in Star Wars is shrimp-like.

My take on spotchka

I knew blue curaçao would be critical for a blue cocktail, and after a bit of asking around for inspiration, I decided coconut cream would give it a nice opacity and lightness. The obvious other ingredients for me, then, were rum and pineapple juice. I wanted it to taste a little more complex than just a Malibu pineapple, so I raided my liquor supply until I found my “secret” ingredient: grapefruit vodka. Just a tiny bit of that made it taste really unique and way more interesting! The final ratios for the batch are: 4 parts coconut rum, 2 parts white rum, 2 parts blue curaçao, 1 part grapefruit vodka, 2 parts pineapple juice, 1 part coconut cream. Similar to the revnog, it can be served directly on ice or cut with sparkling water for a less boozy drink.

Summary

Over all I had a blast hanging out, drinking cocktails, playing sabacc, and nerding out with my friends. I feel like the immersive-but-not-overbearing environment felt right; just one friend (the trivia master!) dressed up, which was perfect as I explicitly told everyone that costumes were not expected but left it open in case anyone wanted to dress up. The trivia, drinks, and sabacc all went over well, and a handful of us hung around until after 2 AM enjoying each other’s company. That’s a win in my book. :)

Summary from 2022 Back then, I evaluated Google Cloud Platform for running Cockpit’s integration tests. Nested virtualization on GCE was way too slow, crashy, and unreliable for our workload. Tests that ran in 35-45 minutes on bare metal (my laptop) took over 2 hours with 15 failures, timeouts, and crashes. The nested KVM simply wasn’t performant enough. On today’s Day of Learning, I gave this another shot, and was pleasantly surprised.

One of the things that I appreciate in a GUADEC (if available) is a common accommodation. Loads of attendees appreciated the shared accommodation in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain (GUADEC 2006). For GUADEC 2026 Deepesha announced one recommended accommodation, a student’s residence. GUADEC 2026 is at the same place as GUADEC 2012, meaning: A Coruña, Spain. I didn’t go to the 2012 one though I heard it also had a shared accommodation. For those wondering where to stay, suggest the recommended one.