Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Chiark ☛ Iconography of the PuTTY tools
Sometimes I receive an email asking a question, and by the time I’ve finished answering it, I realise it’s worth turning into a blog post. This time I knew it was going to be one of those before I even started typing, because there’s a graphic design angle to the question and a technical angle. So I had a lot to say.
PuTTY’s icon designs date from the late 1990s and early 2000s. They’ve never had a major stylistic redesign, but over the years, the icons have had to be re-rendered under various constraints, which made for a technical challenge as well.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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James G ☛ Tales of Debugging: The missing character
Artemis has an algorithm that looks for a common suffix among post titles. If a suffix is found across multiple titles, it is removed. This has been useful in reducing repetition in titles, especially among posts in series. With that said, there was a bug: my code used replace() to remove the suffix, not, as I should have used, string indexing.
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Hackaday ☛ BritCSS: Write CSS With British English Spellings
Everyone knows that there is only one proper English, with the rest being mere derivatives that bastardize the spelling and grammar. Despite this, the hoodlums who staged a violent uprising against British rule in the American colonies have somehow made their uncouth dialect dominant in the information technologies that have taken the world by storm these past decades. In this urgent mission to restore the King’s English to its rightful place, we fortunately have patriotic British citizens who have taken it upon themselves to correct this grave injustice. Brave citizens such as [Declan Chidlow], whose BritCSS project is a bright beacon in these harrowing times.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ Updates on Schleswig-Holstein moving to LibreOffice
Nearly a year ago, we posted about the German state of Schleswig-Holstein’s plan to move 30,000 PCs from Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice. Now, Stephane Fermigier from EuroStack – which promotes European technological sovereignty and open source – has posted an update, citing an article in the German c’t Magazin.
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Education
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Reuven Lerner ☛ My newest course: HOPPy (Hands-on Projects in Python) — Reuven Lerner
I constantly encounter people who know the basics of the language, but are frustrated when it comes time to create, manage, and distribute their own project. This has become especially acute over the last few years, as the set of Python tools has become more modern and robust — but also more complex.
How can you improve your skills, and get over these feelings of frustration and doubt?
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APNIC ☛ Event Wrap: APAN 59
APNIC supported and participated in 59th Meeting of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN 59), held in Yokohama, Japan from 3 to 7 March 2025.
The five-day event comprised working groups, workshops, panel discussions, and conference sessions on topics including IPv6, AI, disaster mitigation and security. View the agenda for more information.
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Licensing / Legal
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University of Pittsburgh ☛ BSD Licenses - Using Creative Commons and Open Software Licenses
Balancing the rights of creators and users, open licenses grant users some permissions to use and distribute a copyrighted work.
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