US citizens: call on Congress to block the proposed autocratic grant rule, protect scientific independence, and stop political appointees from turning federal funding into an ideological loyalty test.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: call on Congress to end the corrupter's tax breaks for millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations.

Take action.

US citizens: call on Tell Congress: vote to keep DACA going so that people who grew up in the US can stay here.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: call on news media to cover the bully's Department of Injustice as a rule of law crisis.

US citizens: call on the Dept of Transportation to release the billions of dollars already appropriated by Congress for public transit projects.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Thank the New York Times for Fighting Back against the magats' subpoenas against journalism.

Global heating is making winters wetter and summers drier and hotter in Europe. In addition to wildfires, and early death of humans from their smoke, frequent severe droughts will cause agricultural failures.

The recent European heat wave is estimated to have killed 20,000 people. What should we call the people who want to kill tens of thousands for their profit?

The European heat wave and drought have dried up rivers, cutting off shipping of freight.

In addition, nuclear power plants are shutting down for lack of cooling water. They are too expensive to be economically feasible.

LLMs are just the thing to push certain people into delusions and psychosis.

I suspect that referring to them by the term "AI" facilitates this effect.

Inside the New York court where children face deportation without access to attorneys.

This implies an unfair trial. But then, it is not a real trial, and the judge is not a real judge.

Hvorfor it-afdelingens budget ofte rammes af valutakursudsving

Globale it-investeringer og driftsomkostninger er i vid udstrækning underlagt internationale markedskræfter, hvilket gør it-budgetter særligt sårbare over for fluktuationer på valutamarkedet. Ifølge en analyse fra analysehuset Gartner i 2026 udgør software- og cloud-tjenester nu over 35 % af de samlede globale it-omkostninger, og størstedelen af disse afregnes i amerikanske dollars (USD). Når den danske krone (DKK) svækkes over for dollaren, stiger de reelle driftsomkostninger for danske virksomheder øjeblikkeligt, selvom det faktiske forbrug af ressourcer forbliver uændret.

Mange virksomheder opererer med faste årlige budgetter, som lægges i fjerde kvartal af det foregående regnskabsår. Hvis en virksomhed har budgetteret med en USD/DKK-kurs på 6,80, og kursen i løbet af året stiger til 7,20, repræsenterer dette en stigning i omkostningerne på knap 6 %. For en mellemstor it-afdeling med et årligt cloud-budget på 500.000 USD svarer dette til en uforudset ekstraudgift på 200.000 DKK, hvilket kan tvinge ledelsen til at udskyde andre kritiske udviklingsprojekter.

Særligt hardwareindkøb påvirkes også af disse mekanismer, da mikrochips, servere og netværksudstyr produceres globalt med afregning i USD. Selvom udstyret købes gennem en dansk distributør, er priserne ofte indeksreguleret i forhold til dollarkursen på leveringstidspunktet. Dette skaber en uforudsigelighed i forsyningskæden, som kræver konstant overvågning og finansiel risikostyring.

“Valutarisiko i it-afdelingen er ikke længere et perifert problem for finansafdelingen. Det er en direkte operationel udfordring, som kræver præcise værktøjer og proaktiv risikostyring for at undgå budgetskred.”
– Finansiel analytiker i it-sektoren, 2026

SaaS-licenser og cloud-hosting: De skjulte valutaomkostninger i USD

Software as a Service (SaaS) og Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) har ændret it-afdelingens omkostningsstruktur fra kapitalomkostninger (CAPEX) til operationelle omkostninger (OPEX). Store udbydere som Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure og Google Cloud Platform afregner som standard deres ydelser i USD eller EUR. For europæiske virksomheder betyder det, at den månedlige hostingregning ændrer sig i takt med de globale valutakurser.

Mange af disse cloud-baserede services kører i øvrigt på open-source infrastruktur, hvilket du kan læse mere om i artiklen Hvad er Linux? – En komplet guide til det åbne styresystem. Selvom selve styresystemet ofte er licensfrit, betales der stadig store summer for den underliggende hardwarekapacitet og supportaftaler, som næsten altid afregnes i udenlandsk valuta.

For at styre disse fluktuerende omkostninger anvender mange finansansvarlige en digital valutaberegner, som henter realtidsdata direkte fra de globale finansmarkeder. Dette gør det muligt at estimere de præcise månedlige udgifter i danske kroner og foretage de nødvendige budgetjusteringer i tide. For præcise, bank-verificerede kurser kan man også anvende en ekstern Valutaberegner – omregn opdaterede valutakurser til at verificere de daglige transaktioner og sikre mod ubehagelige overraskelser på kreditkortudtogene.

Udover selve hostingafgifterne er mange enterprise-softwarelicenser (såsom Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud og Jira) bundet til dollarpriser. Selv når faktureringen sker via en europæisk enhed i euro, er prisen ofte fastsat ud fra en omregningskurs fra USD, hvilket betyder, at valutasvingninger indirekte overføres til den europæiske køber.

Styr på økonomien ved outsourcing af it-udvikling til udlandet

Outsourcing af softwareudvikling til lande i Østeuropa eller Asien er en udbredt strategi for at reducere lønomkostninger og imødekomme manglen på kvalificeret arbejdskraft i Danmark. Men når man samarbejder med eksterne udviklingshuse i eksempelvis Polen, Ukraine eller Indien, introduceres der komplekse valutarisici. Kontrakter indgås ofte i lokal valuta (såsom polske zloty (PLN) eller indiske rupees (INR)) eller i USD for at skabe en fælles standard.

Hvis den lokale valuta i modtagerlandet styrkes over for den danske krone, stiger timeprisen for udviklerne tilsvarende. En stigning på 10 % i den polske zloty kan hurtigt eliminere den økonomiske fordel, der oprindeligt var ved at outsource opgaven frem for at løse den internt eller med lokale konsulenter. Det er derfor afgørende at indbygge valutaklausuler i samarbejdsaftalerne eller foretage finansiel kurssikring (hedging).

Når der afregnes med udenlandske leverandører, skal moms- og skatteforhold indberettes korrekt til de danske myndigheder, hvor man med fordel kan konsultere SKATs officielle Valutaomregner – info.skat.dk. Korrekt omregning på faktureringstidspunktet er afgørende for at undgå efterreguleringer og sikre, at bogføringen overholder gældende dansk lovgivning.

Brug en præcis valutaberegner til at sikre dine it-budgetter

For at imødegå de risici, som valutafluktuationer medfører, bør it-afdelingen og økonomifunktionen samarbejde tæt om at overvåge markedet. En manuel omregning baseret på tilfældige søgninger på internettet er sjældent tilstrækkelig, da kurserne ændrer sig sekund for sekund. Anvendelsen af professionelle værktøjer sikrer, at man altid arbejder med de mest aktuelle og præcise tal.

Der findes forskellige finansielle strategier til at minimere valutarisikoen, og valget afhænger af virksomhedens risikoprofil og budgetstørrelse. Nedenstående tabel illustrerer de mest almindelige metoder til håndtering af valutarisiko i forbindelse med it-indkøb:

Ved systematisk at anvende en præcis beregner kan it-chefen hurtigt simulere forskellige scenarier. Hvis dollarkursen eksempelvis stiger med 5 %, 10 % eller 15 %, kan man øjeblikkeligt se konsekvenserne for det samlede årsbudget og træffe beslutning om, hvorvidt der skal foretages kurssikring via virksomhedens bankforbindelse.

Sådan integrerer du valutadata direkte i dine egne it-systemer

For større virksomheder er manuel indtastning af valutakurser i ERP-systemer (Enterprise Resource Planning) både tidskrævende og forbundet med risiko for menneskelige fejl. Den mest effektive løsning er at automatisere processen ved at integrere realtids-valutadata direkte i virksomhedens økonomisystemer via et API (Application Programming Interface).

Moderne ERP-systemer som Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP eller NetSuite tilbyder standardmoduler til automatisk valutaopdatering. Ved at forbinde systemet til en pålidelig datakilde via en REST-API kan systemet hente de officielle lukkekurser hver nat. Dette sikrer, at alle indgående fakturaer i fremmed valuta automatisk bogføres med den korrekte omregningskurs på transaktionsdatoen.

En typisk integration fungerer ved, at et script (eksempelvis skrevet i Python eller afviklet som en serverless funktion i cloud’en) kalder API’et, modtager data i JSON-format og opdaterer databasen. Dette reducerer tidsforbruget i finansafdelingen markant og minimerer risikoen for differencer i årsregnskabet, som skyldes forældede eller fejlagtige kursberegninger.

Ofte stillede spørgsmål

Hvorfor svinger it-budgetter på grund af valutakurser?

Mange it-ydelser, herunder cloud-hosting (AWS, Azure) og softwarelicenser (SaaS), afregnes i amerikanske dollars (USD). Når den danske krone svækkes over for dollaren, stiger de reelle udgifter i danske kroner, selvom det faktiske forbrug af it-ressourcer forbliver uændret.

Hvordan påvirker USD-kursen prisen på cloud-hosting?

Cloud-leverandører prissætter som regel deres globale infrastruktur i USD. Hvis dollarkursen stiger med f.eks. 8 % i løbet af et regnskabsår, vil den månedlige regning for cloud-hosting stige med nøjagtig samme procentsats for danske virksomheder, medmindre der er indgået en fast prisaftale.

Hvad er forskellen på en standard valutaberegner og en bank-kurs?

En standard valutaberegner viser typisk midterkursen (spotkursen) på det globale interbank-marked uden tillæg. Når man veksler penge eller betaler fakturaer gennem en erhvervsbank, pålægger banken normalt et vekselgebyr eller et kurstillæg, hvilket gør den reelle afregningskurs en smule dyrere.

Kan man automatisere valutaomregning i sit ERP-system?

Ja, de fleste moderne ERP- og økonomisystemer understøtter automatisk integration via API’er. Ved at opsætte en daglig synkronisering kan systemet automatisk hente og opdatere valutakurserne, hvilket eliminerer manuelt arbejde og sikrer præcis bogføring af udenlandske fakturaer.

While you (yes, you! no, not you, the one behind you) have been sweltering in the heatwaves of the northern hemispheres (Assisted-by: AI), I've been busy adding graphics tablet support to libei. This is scheduled for the soon to be released libei 1.7.0.

The initial work was done by Jason Gerecke and Josh Dickens from Wacom, I've been extending, polishing and testing it for the last few weeks.

Also, upfront: this only covers the stylus part of a tablet, we do not yet have an implementation for the "pad" part (the buttons, dials, rings, strips).

libei is, of course, the library for Emulated Input, a good-enough transport layer for sending logical input events between processes. We're already using libei as part of the XDG Portal Remote Desktop and Input Capture portals where we've been busy hurtling key and pointer events between the participating parties (and soon gesture events and text).

In the next release of libei, we will now also have "ei stylus" capabilities, i.e. the ability to send tablet stylus events. Getting pointer, keyboard and touch events supported was a long undertaking, everything was new and shiny and needed to be added everywhere in the stack. Now that all this is in place, scuffed and scratched, adding tablet events will be quite simple.

The ei stylus interface

Here's a short outline of how libei handles tablet events because it is, of course, different to how libinput handles them. Logical events are much nicer after all than physical hardware events.

First: we have a new interface: "ei_stylus". An EIS implementation (e.g. your compositor) may provide you, the libei client, with a device that supports this interface and one or more associated regions (typically representing the available screen areas). Typically this will be a separate device to the pointer devices or the keyboard devices but it's not a requirement. The ei_stylus interface comes with a bunch of capabilities you'd expect from a stylus (tilt, pressure, distance, ...) that you can selectively enable to emulate the stylus you want to. So basically, EIS will say "here's a stylus device, I support pressure, tilt, rotation, ..." and then the libei client says "This stylus should have pressure and tilt but nothing else". And then you do the normal thing: send proximity events, send tip down/up events, send data for the various capabilities you've enabled.

Happily for the EIS implementation, libei forces the client to take the guesswork out of everything: if you select the pressure capability, you must send a pressure value when coming into proximity. Where libei is used to forward data from a physical stylus (e.g. via some remoting protocol) it is up to the client to deal with firmware bugs that e.g. won't send data until a few frames in.

Note that there is no "tablet" anywhere. The tablet is represented by the region that the device may interact with. So in some ways every tablet is an on-screen tablet (which makes sense since we have logical events).

Multiple styli

The only quirky thing is how to request multiple styli[1]: libei 1.5.0 has added a "request device" request that allows a client to say "hey, EIS, I want a new device with capabilities pointer, keyboard, ...". And, if you've been a nice client, minding your own business, the EIS implementation may just create such a device for you.

So for the case of multiple styli: if the default stylus (if any) isn't good enough, you can now tell EIS that you want a(nother) device with stylus capability, configure the stylus capabilities once the device shows up and voila, you now have a normal pen, an art pen and maybe even an airbrush represented as logical device in libei. And since they're all separate devices in the protocol, they can be individually tracked and used, much like libinput tracks individual styli.

[1] For the "lots" of users that actually use multiple styli...

/me gestures vaguely at everything

Oh, hey, this works now? Great!

I'm not going to go too deeply into how pinch, swipe and hold gestures work, suffice to say we've had those in libinput (for touchpads) for years now so compositors and toolkits should already support those. And since libei and libinput have vaguely equivalent API layers integrating gestures for libei devices in compositors should be fairly straightforward.

The plumbing layers in the portals exist already too, so adding gestures to libei means that - once the compositors support it - we can have gestures support in remote desktop and input capture implementations without needing to update anything else. Hooray! Join in with me. Hooray! Louder! HOORAY!

For testing I had a (vibe-coded and thus immediately abandoned once testing was complete) gesturemouse utility which translates input events from a mouse into gesture events (depending which button is down). But don't let my lack of be a limit to your imagination, I'm sure you can come up with good use-cases for this.

If you've been paying attention (and I know you have, because it'd be embarrassing for you if you didn't) you'd have noticed that libei 1.6 (May 2026) added support for keysym and text events.

libei sends logical events between a libei client and an EIS implementation (typically: a Wayland compositor) but the keyboard interface it had was designed like real keyboards: key codes together with an (XKB) key map. You press one key, the keymap decides what that key means on the compositor side and off we go. This is easy but not always useful.

As of 1.6.0 libei now also supports an "ei_text" interface. A compositor may choose to provide you[0] with a device that supports this interface and that gives you two really nice opportunities.

First, you can now send a key sym. Instead of sending the KEY_Q key code and hoping it actually translates to 'q' (and if there's e.g. a frenchman^Wfrenchperson lurking behind the keyboard it may mean 'a'), you can now send 'q' as actual keysym. Or 'Q' instead of sending shift+q and hoping for no french influence in the process. It becomes the EIS implementation's job to handle that keysym - if it's a shortcut it may handle it directly, otherwise it may pass it on via Wayland to an application[1]. This centralises the keysym to keycode handling in the EIS implementation which is a pain for compositor authors (though they likely have that code already for e.g. RDP support) but reduces the variety of differently-wrong implementations in clients and of course makes it so much simpler to write clients.

Second, a client can send UTF-8 text to the compositor. So instead of emulating shift, keycodes, etc. you can literally send "Hello World" and expect the EIS implementation to pass that one. Again, makes a bunch of utilities a lot simpler to write and I mostly leave it up to your imagination to figure out what to do with that.

Notably for both cases: libei is about logical events that have a specific meaning that do not need further interpretation. If a client sends 'Q' that means it is supposed to be an uppercase Q. Sending keysym Shift_L and Q makes little sense. And for the utf8 text events: how the text comes to be matters doesn't matter for libei so you may use an IM to make up the text to begin with and send it, once committed, to EIS. It's not for sending partial strings.

As mentioned in the previous post: the plumbing for this is already in place so both clients and compositors can add support for this new interface without having to bother the rest of the stack (e.g. portals). So, hooray I guess.

The text/keysym support is relatively recent so expect this to hit the next compositor version (or the one after that).

[0]: the EIS implementation decides which devices are available and arguing about this is even less useful than arguing with a world cup ref
[1]: after converting it to a key code with possible keymap changes... but hey, such is life

Turns out it's been years since I've talked about eggs, so let's change this. libei is, of course, the library for Emulated Input[1].

This post is mostly a refresher because it's been so long and a short summary of some of the work we've done so far, in preparation for some more posts that come soon.

libei is a transport layer for logical input events, unlike libinput which is a hardware abstraction layer. In libinput's case the device's firmare/kernel pass events that are somewhere on the sanity spectrum, libinput tries to make sense of those and then we convert those to logical events to be consumed by the next layer (typically the Wayland compositor or Xorg). This is how e.g. "touch down at position x1/y1, touch up at position x1/y2" is converted into a button click event if touchpad tapping is enabled. Or maybe into nothing if we find it was an accidental palm touch.

libei works purely on the logical level - you as the libei client pass logical events to the EIS (Emulated Input Server) implementation (typically the compositor). No guesswork, you say button click, EIS gets a button click. libei supports a "sender" and "receiver" mode, depending on whether events are sent to the EIS implementation (input emulation) or receive from the EIS implementation (input capture). libei is designed for the Wayland stack but there are zero requirements for Wayland on either the client or the EIS implementation.

Core to libei's design is that the EIS implementation is in control of virtually everything, it decides which devices are available to the client, when those devices can send events, etc. Much like the compositor is in charge when it comes to physical devices - if a compositor decides a physical device doesn't exist, a Wayland client cannot get events from it.

Since the original proposal (again, [1]!) we've been busy bees and libei is now a part of the XDG Remote Desktop portal and the XDG Input Capture (both since version 1.17, mid 2023). In both cases the portal is for the negotiation and initial agreement of what should happen, libei is then used as the transport layer between the two processes [2].

More recently we also added session persistence support so you don't have to allow access on every connecton. Much of the work enabling this was done by Jonas Ådahl, it is now in the portals since version 1.21.0 and should be in the major compositors in the current or next versions.

Plumbing the Pipes

Getting all this into place was a huge amount of work across several pieces of the stack. This isn't exciting in the same way as laying plumbing pipes isn't particularly exciting but much like regular plumbing: once it's in place you can change your diet without severely impacting everyone again. Try get that analogy out of your head now. You're welcome.

In libei's case this means three things:

• if you have a client that uses the XDG portals to send/receive events they will now work with any compositor that implements the portal. No need for GNOME/KDE/... specific APIs.
• if you have a compositor that implements EIS you have all the infrastructure in place to talk to libei clients from somewhere else, if need be. The use-cases for this aren't fully scoped yet (assisitive technologies, virtual keyboards, touchpads, etc?) but the piping is there and ready to be (ab)used .
• since the actual events back and forth don't affect the layers in between, we can now add new events to libei without having to change everything else again.

The XWayland XTEST use-case

An example for such a case where we can now abuse the piping is Xwayland support for XTEST. XTEST is the protocol that everyone uses to emulate input under X but in Wayland it's not hooked up to anything so those APIs simply won't work.

But what we can do in Xwayland is translate XTEST to libei events and facilitate the portal interaction. This means our stack looks roughly like this:

    +--------------------+             +------------------+
    | Wayland compositor |---wayland---| Wayland client B |
    +--------------------+\            +------------------+
    | libinput |   EIS   | \_wayland______
    +----------+---------+                \
        |          |           +-------+------------------+
 /dev/input/       +-----------| libei |     XWayland     |
                               +-------+------------------+
                                                |
                                                | XTEST
                                                |
                                         +-----------+
                                         |  X client |
                                         +-----------+

What's next

So we have a lot of the plumbing in place, or in another anology: we have a hammer, let's go looking for nails. And right now the nails we can see are sending text, gestures, and tablet support. And those will be the subject of the next few posts.

[1]: 6 years ago?! whoah...
[2]: in Remote Desktop's case replacing the DBus emulation APIs which were a Newton's Cradle of wakeups for at least 4 processes per event

Happy July 4th! For those of us around the world contemplating independence, it's a good day to think about how we came to rely on expensive cloud infrastructure for our fundamental computing needs.

With that in mind, here is my latest toy project: an open source tool that makes replicating, forking, sharing, and running container snapshots fast and easy across cloud and personal devices.

It's fun to play with, especially on bare metal hardware you run at home, or rent from a provider like Hetzner or OVH. Or, because it uses Tailscale, why not all of them in a single mesh?

There's a lot more to say but I don't have time right now. Details are in the README.

I will say this: humans and AI agents both want the same things when they're trying to get work done. Ephemeral containers aren't really it. But how about unlimited disk space, fast CPUs, an undo button, and the ability to move to whatever provider offers the best hardware at the best price? That's more like it.

Go visit thundersnap on github and tell me what you think!