Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftover

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 27, 2025

• University of Toronto ☛ Mostly stopping GNU Emacs from de-iconifying itself when it feels like it

  For those of you who use GNU Emacs and have never been unlucky enough to experience this, if you start some long operation in GNU Emacs and then decide to iconify it to get it out of your face, a lot of the time GNU Emacs will abruptly pop itself back open when it finishes, generally with completely unpredictable timing so that it disrupts whatever else you switched to in the mean time.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Luke Harris ☛ Ghost.

    Couldn’t sleep last night due to IRL moving anxiety and I ended up moving this site to Ghost. Still not sure if that was a good decision or not, but I’m typing this in iA Writer and it integrates with Ghost so that’s cool.

• Education

  • [Old] OpenPGP ☛ 2. A high-level view — OpenPGP for application developers

    OpenPGP is a widely recognized, IETF-standardized set of cryptographic operations. It is broadly used in securing communications, like encrypted messages and email, and ensuring the integrity of software packages in most Linux distributions. It enjoys a vast ecosystem of libraries, tools, and community support forums. Moreover, its robustness and versatility have made OpenPGP a security choice for other use cases in which encryption and integrity are important. These include file transfer applications, password managers, secure data storage, and signing source code in git repositories.

    There are other compelling reasons for why you might consider using OpenPGP in your project: [...]

• GNU Projects

  • Amin Bandali: Mirroring Protesilaos' videos to Internet Archive

    I enjoy reading and watching the writings and videos that Protesilaos publishes on his website, with his work ranging from philosophy and various life issues to GNU Emacs and programming. Currently, Prot uploads his videos to YouTube and embeds them on his website. YouTube, diligently working their way down the spiral of enshittification, have been making it increasingly difficult to watch the videos without using their nonfree JavaScript interface or their nonfree mobile applications. This got me thinking about mirroring Prot’s videos to the Internet Archive to make them more easily accessible in freedom.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Insanity is trying the same thing over again expecting a different result

      Basically, if you’re a Republican, the man can do no wrong, you will die for your boy…although there is a slight downward trend. Democrats never liked him and they like him even less now. But independents are the middle 30% of the US and are who move elections, and their approval has dropped from 46% to a dismal 29% today. Not a great look.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Terence Eden ☛ Would adding Brotli Compression help shrink ePubs?

    The ePub format is the cross-platform way to package an eBook. At its heart, an ePub is just a bundled webpage with extra metadata - that makes it extremely easy to build workflows to create them and apps to read them.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of time synchronisation

    Two centuries ago it was quite normal for adjacent towns to be running local times that differed by many minutes. Even after the railways came and forced synchronisation so their timetables could work, many adults were content to keep time by the occasional glance at the clock on a church or civic building. In the decade before the arrival of the Mac, one of the everyday duties of the police was to respond to requests for the time. Over the last 40 years we have come to expect our computers to keep very accurate time, something that’s particularly important in networking.