Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Education, and Data

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 26, 2025

• [Repeat] Thunderbird ☛ Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: August 2025

  Hello again from the Thunderbird development team! As autumn settles in, we’re balancing the steady pace of ongoing projects with some forward-looking planning for 2026. Alongside coding and testing, some of our recent attention has gone into budgets, roadmaps, and setting priorities for the year ahead. It’s not the most glamorous work, but it’s essential for keeping our momentum strong and ensuring that the big features we’re building today continue to deliver value well into the future. In the meantime, plenty of exciting progress has landed across the application, and here are some of the highlights.

• [Repeat] Thunderbird ☛ State of the Thunder 12: Community, Android, and Mozilla Connect

  We’re back with our twelfth episode of the State of the Thunder! In this episode, we’re talking about community initiatives, filling you in on Android development, and finishing our updates on popular Mozilla Connect requests.

  Want to find out how to join future State of the Thunders? Be sure to join our Thunderbird planning mailing list for all the details.

• [Repeat] Krita ☛ Krita 5.2.13 bugfix release!

  Today we are releasing Krita 5.2.13! This is a bugfix release containing a number of important Android fixes, courtesy of Carsten Hartenfels, our new Android Maintainer. The release also includes a security fix that affected the work with TGA files.

• [Repeat] Linuxiac ☛ Krita 5.2.13 Bugfix Update Brings 16K Page Size Support

  Krita, a popular open-source, cross-platform digital painting app for artists, from beginners to professionals, has just released version 5.2.13—a maintenance update that focuses mainly on Android stability but also delivers a critical security fix.

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Trip report: CppCon 2025

  A dream came true. My C++ conference journey started with CppCon. Well, almost. Back in 2019, my senior manager told me I would travel to the USA for a week to attend CppCon. In the end, cost-cutting measures changed the plan, and I was sent instead to a one-day conference within my country — CPPP. It was a wonderful event and formative in two ways: [...]

• Rui Carmo ☛ Blender - Tao of Mac

  I’ve been trying to use Blender since what feels like the dawn of time, but its notoriously opinionated user interface clearly hasn’t stuck, and every time I go back to it I find myself having to re-learn the basics.

• GreyCoder ☛ A List Of YouTube Alternatives for Video Creators and Viewers - GreyCoder

  Here are some good streaming sites beyond YouTube: [...]

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chris O'Donnnell ☛ ODonnellWeb - now on Gopher

    You'll need Lynx or some sort of browser plug-in to surf around Gopher space, and you should absolutely do it. There is a surprisingly active community of people maintaining Gopher blogs, or phlogs. You can go here as a starting point.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Linuxiac ☛ DuckDB 1.4 LTS Released with Database Encryption, MERGE, and Iceberg Writes

    One of the most significant additions is the added support for database encryption. DuckDB now supports AES-256 in GCM mode, covering the main database file, WAL, and even temporary files.

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

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ File organisation in Eleventy: Filters

    Filters are a handy feature in Eleventy that allows you to run functions on input from templates.

• Education

  • APNIC ☛ APNIC / FIRST Security 1 at APNIC 60

    Cybersecurity professionals, researchers, and network operators from across the Asia Pacific gathered at APNIC 60 for two sessions co-organized by FIRST and APNIC. These sessions aimed to strengthen regional collaboration and share actionable insights on emerging threats.

    This post covers highlights from the first session, held on Wednesday, 10 September 2025, including presentations on Advanced Persistent Treat (APT) activity in South East Asia, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) spam and keyword hacking, and a new open-source platform to improve cyber resilience in academic networks.

  • APNIC ☛ APNIC / FIRST Security 2 at APNIC 60

    This post covers highlights from the second session on Wednesday, 10 September 2025 (16:30–18:00 UTC +7:00), including presentations on collaborative responses to emerging threats (including remote code execution vulnerabilities), lateral movement risks in network architecture, and a train-the-trainer model for building cyber resilience in South East Asia.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Find My Parking Cops uses data scraped from City website to track parking fines in real time — entire website dedicated to helping San Francisco motorists avoid parking tickets goes live

      Armed with this information, he created a scraper that copied and stored all the parking tickets as soon as they were created. They then used a borrowed Apple Maps API key to put the data on a map, allowing anyone to see the locations, the number of tickets, as well as the total fines a particular parking cop has issued during their shift. Naturally, this information could be used to avoid parking fines, a benefit Walz himself touts, with users able to see a rough spread of where parking cops might be issuing tickets at any given time.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Matt Wedel ☛ Want to help fund the free publication of sauropod science? Now’s your chance!

      Two more chapters have already been accepted and are in press; and a fifth is in review. There are plenty more in preparation, including at least one more new diplodocoid. A link to each paper will appear in the Table of Contents page, so that page will always be an index to all the available content.