Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 23, 2025

• Linuxiac ☛ PipeWire 1.4.3 Brings Netjack2 Fixes and MIDI Improvements

  MIDI data writing is also improved, with errors being handled more gracefully—a welcome change for users relying on complex MIDI setups. Additionally, the update refines UMP (Universal MIDI Packet) sysex handling.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google, Volvo deepen partnership on car software

    Volvo vehicles currently operate using Android 13, but at Google’s I/O annual developer conference underway in Mountain View, California, the two companies are demonstrating Volvo’s flagship EX90 electric SUV running on Android 15 — the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system — which will roll out in production models later this year.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • James G ☛ Building an edit button browser extension

    I would like a system that lets me look for edit links and markup on the page, and also define custom rules for pages I know are editable but may only be editable by me (i.e. my website pages, documentation sites I maintain).

  • University of Toronto ☛ Thinking about what you'd want in a modern simple web server

    This goal of simplicity of operation is why I put "process supervision" into the list of features. In a traditional reverse proxy situation (whether this is FastCGI or HTTP), you manage the reverse proxy process separately from the main webserver, but that requires more work from you. Putting process supervision into the web server has the goal of making all of that more transparent to you. Ideally, in common configurations you wouldn't even really care that there was a separate process handling FastCGI, PHP, or whatever; you could just put things into a directory or add some simple configuration to the web server and restart it, and everything would work. Ideally this would extend to automatically supporting PHP by just putting PHP files somewhere in the directory tree, just like CGI; internally the web server would start a FastCGI process to handle them or something.

  • Chromium

    • Raymond Camden ☛ Multimodal Support in Chrome's Built-in AI

      It's been a few weeks since I blogged about Chrome's built-in AI efforts, but with Google IO going this week there's been a lot of announcements and updates. You can find a great writeup of recent changes on the Chrome blog: "AI APIs are in stable and origin trials, with new Early Preview Program APIs".

      One feature that I've been excited the most about has finally been made available, multimodal prompting. This lets you use both image and audio data for prompts. Now, remember, this is all still early preview and will likely change before release, but it's pretty promising.

  • Mozilla

    • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Mozilla Refuses to Speak to Lunduke (Except About Helping Mozilla Identify Whistleblowers)

      The Lunduke Journal regularly offers Mozilla a chance to comment on stories.

• Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Latest Video Release: CNI Spring 2025 Membership Meeting

    The next collection of project briefing videos from the CNI Spring 2025 Membership Meeting is now live: [...]

  • Allen Downey ☛ My very busy week

    I’m not sure who scheduled ODSC and PyConUS during the same week, but I am unhappy with their decisions. Last Tuesday I presented a talk and co-presented a workshop at ODSC, and on Thursday I presented a tutorial at PyCon.

    If you would like to follow along with my very busy week, here are the resources: [...]

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: FSD meeting recap 2025-05-16