Ubuntu, Free Software, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 23, 2025

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Fridge ☛ The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 901

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 901 for the week of July 13 – 19, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.

  • Ubuntu News ☛ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 901

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ This Tool Upgrades Everything on Ubuntu Using One Command

    Skip running multiple commands to update packages on Ubuntu with TopGrade, a CLI tool which upgrades everything, from apt to pip, with a single command.

    You're reading This Tool Upgrades Everything on Ubuntu Using One Command, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Education

    • Evan Hahn ☛ Notes from "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet"

      Last month, I read Empire of AI, a scathing tale of the invention of ChatGPT. This month, I read Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, a much rosier story of the invention of a more important technology: the [Internet].

      Authors Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon cover the history starting in the 1960s all the way up to 1994, just two years before the book was published.1 Here are my notes.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Ruboss Technology Corp ☛ Architectural… by Denys Poltorak [Leanpub PDF/iPad/Kindle]

        A structured collection of architectural patterns with hundreds of NoUML diagrams.
        Technology-agnostic knowledge distilled from a multitude of sources.
        Deconstruction of software architecture into its basic principles.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Jono Alderson ☛ Why Semantic HTML Still Matters

      And that shift comes at a cost – in performance, accessibility, resilience, and how machines (and people) interpret your content.

      I’ve written elsewhere about how JavaScript is killing the web. But one of the most fixable, overlooked parts of that story is semantic HTML.

      This piece is about what we’ve lost – and why it still matters.

    • Artyom Bologov ☛ Plaintext Email Formatting

      Plaintext emails. This artifact of the times long gone, right? Not necessarily—plaintext emails are actively used in e.g. FOSS software mailing lists. And, if one’s into this type of communication, they’ll inevitably notice this: Plaintext email formatting. Asterisks, signatures, hyphenated lists.

      Being a standard freak that I am, I wondered: are these spec-ed anywhere? No, not really. The only reasonable resource on plaintext email formatting I was able to find was this Ed Mullen’s post regarding Thunderbird/Mozilla Structured Text. And even that lists mere four formatting directives.

      So I bit the bullet and decided I must list all the formatting conventions. With the support for these in all email clients I can get my hands on.

    • Arduino ☛ Dive into satellite IoT with the new Arduino-compatible Iridium Certus 9704 Development Kit

      IoT (Internet of Things) devices can be very useful, but they do, by definition, require internet access. That’s easy enough when Wi-Fi® is available, and it is even possible to rely on LoRa® and cellular data connections to transmit data outside of urban areas. However, deploying an IoT device to a truly remote location has been difficult and expensive in the past. Now, that’s changing thanks to the new 9704 Development Kit, created by Iridium to make satellite-based IoT accessible.