Saturday, 11 April 2026

Desktop Icons on GNOME

GNOME has traditionally always been one to prefer the benefits of a clean Desktop.

But I'm not one for traditions.

GNOME Extensions

There's an GNOME extention available called Desktop Icons NG (DIN)¹.

If you have installed it, you can see if you properly have it by "gnome-extensions show ding@rastersoft.com".

Once you install it, you can query to see if it is enabled using "gnome-extensions list --enabled", it should contain at least ding@rastersoft.com

Enabling it would probably help: "gnome-extensions enable ding@rastersoft.com" if it's not there.

You're likely to have to logout and log back in, to load extensions.

Extra steps

What I needed to do was:

copy the application file (thingy.desktop) from /usr/share/applications somewhere and then drag it onto my Desktop.
Make it Executable
Set it to "Allow launching"

References

[1] Desktop Icons NG (DING) by rastersoft: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2087/desktop-icons-ng-ding/

Wednesday, 8 April 2026

VoxxedDays 2026

So, I went to VoxxedDays on April 1st and 2nd.¹

Some of it was very interesting, and I've retained some notes and links written below.

Spec-driven development²

It seems to be a way to specify the wanted behaviour of your software in such a way that AI can successfully create your software based on your spec. Not entirely convinced of this.

Lion³

Lion is a set of highly performant, accessible and flexible Web Components.

PicNic⁴

PicNic is a online greengrocer/supermarket which is running a Blog on the challenges on scaling up. Quite interesting.

Some interesting things for example are providing fresh products (bread for instance) within a certain timeframe.

Programming Rules your IDE can tell you about.

https://github.com/jborgers/PMD-jPinpoint-rules

Compressed OOPs in the JVM