news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Programming, and Standards
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Unicorn Media ☛ FOSS Force Mostly Open Tech News Quiz – May 9, 2025
Starting this week, after you finish taking our quiz you'll be presented with links to all of the news stories covered in the quiz! This week there are 10 questions, the same as last week. Good luck!
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Programming/Development
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Rlang ☛ Roaringly Acknowledge Organizations with ROR IDs in DESCRIPTION
A few years ago, the R community started using ORCID (“Open Researcher and Contributor ID”) to persistently and uniquely identify individual authors of packages in DESCRIPTION.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.22 on CRAN: New Upstream
Version 0.0.22 of RcppSpdlog arrived
This release updates the code to the version 1.15.3 of spdlog which was released this morning, and includes version 1.12.0 of fmt.
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Standards/Consortia
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Macworld ☛ Bluetooth 6.1 is here, before Bluetooth 6 devices hit the shelves
The Bluetooth 6.1 update is focused on a new feature called Randomized RPA (Resolvable Private Address). This feature allows for the timing of RPA address changes, which improves privacy. Your Bluetooth device and those it connects to can change address at times that can’t be predicted, which makes it harder for snooping devices to track your activity or location. To improve power efficiency, this address change operation can be offloaded to the Bluetooth controller instead of the device’s CPU, which will save battery life.
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Lee Yingtong Li ☛ Foreground segmentation with JBIG2 for improved PDF compression: pdf-segmented
JBIG2 is an efficient image compression format for bi-level (bi-tonal) images, which is supported by the PDF file format and common PDF viewers. To date, tooling for producing documents using JBIG2 (particularly open source tooling) has been limited; I have previously presented file-jbig2pdf, a GIMP plugin for generating PDF files using JBIG2. This suffices for simple black-and-white documents, but does not assist when documents contain both black-and-white text and colour graphics.
In the DjVu format designed specifically for archival, scanned documents can be separated into a black-and-white foreground layer which is losslessly compressed, and a colour background layer which is lossily compressed. This enables more efficient compression. PDF easily supports a similar structure (JBIG2 black-and-white foreground layer, on top of a colour background), and proprietary PDF software (particularly in scanners) can generate analogously structured PDF documents, but I am unaware of any open source software to do so.1
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