Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 13, 2025

• Manton Reece ☛ Mastodon's incomplete migration

  The other side of Rob’s point about migration is not being able to recover if a Mastodon server suddenly goes down without warning. I’m not sure this is realistic to solve without major changes. My approach has mostly been to encourage users to preemptively think about backups, so at least they’re not left with nothing.

• Undeadly ☛ rpki-client 9.5 released

  The OpenBSD project has announced the release of version 9.5 of rpki-client: [...]

• Education

  • Kodi Foundation ☛ DevCon 2025 - Tirana - Part I

    This year we're coming to you from Tirana in Albania (or Tiranë in Shqipëri in the local language†). A country that, I suspect, most people know little about, Albania has a long and ... bumpy history, mostly involving other countries and some less-than-friendly regimes: Romans (both western Roman and eastern Byzantine), Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Italians, from imperial territory to independence, from international capitalism to isolationist communism and back. Sitting astride both the Aegean and Ionic seas, the country now embraces the promise of full modernity and EU membership as it strives to turn its back on the darker chapters of recent history and take its rightful place in Europe.

    As in previous years, we're going to aim to do a daily update (content-dependent), so let's see how it goes. Without further ado, then, let's get straight into it with Day One.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Exploring a 3-D Synthetic Dataset

      Inspired by this, I’ve also been doing the #30DayChartChallenge, where you make a chart a day on a theme that changes each day. I have taken this as an opportunity to explore Michael Friendly’s HistData package, which draws from his excellent book with Howard Wainer. I have done posts on John Snow, the Trial of the Pyx, Florence Nightingale, and others on my github. However, one dataset that a simple plot doesn’t do justice to is the Pollen dataset. This dataset, like mtcars and flights, are synthetic datasets that were used as data challenges (the other two are now basic datasets for reprexes as well).