Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Development Leftovers
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Thunderbird ☛ Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest - February 2025 - The Thunderbird Blog
The concept of a stable monthly release channel has been in discussion for many years and I’m happy to share that we recently changed the default download on Thunderbird.net to point at our most feature-rich and up-to-date stable version. A lot of work went into this release channel, but for good reason – it brings the very latest in performance and UX improvements to users with a frequent cadence of updates. Meaning that you don’t have to wait a year to benefit from features that have been tested and already spent time on our more experimental Daily and Beta release channels. Some examples of features that you’ll find on the monthly release channel (but not on ESR) are: [...]
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Linuxiac ☛ Kitty 0.40 Terminal Emulator Brings Variable Font Sizes
Kitty, one of the best GPU-accelerated and highly efficient cross-platform terminal emulators, has just unveiled its latest update—version 0.40. The main novelty is that Kitty now empowers terminal programs to specify and render text in different font sizes (more on that here).
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Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 9 March 2025
Feature film animation Flow got Academy Award. It’s the first Blender-made film to do so. It’s also the first Latvia’s Oscar ever.
Production took over five years. Animation director Silly-Pélissier Léo did a talk at Blender Conference last year about the project. If you haven’t watched it yet, there are a lot of production details there.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Migrating Databases
Last week I decided to clean up a bit of digital cruft. That is, I moved a few of my websites onto a single VPS, saving quite a bit of monthly server hosting costs.
What I did was that I moved VPSes from Linode (Akamai) to DigitalOcean, but also migrated a full web hotel from One to DigitalOcean (converting email accounts to email forwards).
As this is something that I do very rarely, I decided to document the process here so that I don’t have to look everything up again next time around.
The grunt work was about migrating a number of L*MP services to a LEMP server. There are a couple of tasks involved here, mainly migration of databases and getting WordPress running in a subdirectory using Nginx. The rest of the exercise had to do with the moving of nameservers and waiting for DNS propagation to get certbot to provide certificates for the new location.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Kiwi TCMS: Kiwi TCMS 14.1
We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 14.1!
This is a minor version release which includes security related updates, several improvements, API changes and new translations.
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Programming/Development
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Hackaday ☛ How To Use LLMs For Programming Tasks [Ed: Or how to commit GPL violations and have no idea what code you work with (it does not work well, either)]
[Simon Willison] has put together a list of how, exactly, one goes about using a large language models (LLM) to help write code. If you have wondered just what the workflow and techniques look like, give it a read. It’s full of examples, strategies, and useful tips for effectively using AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and others to do useful programming work.
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Rlang ☛ Underrated Gems in R: Must-Know Functions You’re Probably Missing Out On
R is packed with powerhouse tools—think dplyr for data wrangling, ggplot2 for stunning visuals, or tidyr for tidying up messes. But beyond the headliners, there’s a lineup of lesser-known functions that deserve a spot in your toolkit.
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Rlang ☛ Creating data-driven art
What is data-driven art?
At first I thought the answer to the question what is data art? would be relatively straightforward. I initially started with the definition that data art lies somewhere between data visualisation and generative art.
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