news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards
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University of Toronto ☛ More on the tools I use to read email affecting my email reading
About two years ago I wrote an entry about how my switch from reading email with exmh to reading it in GNU Emacs with MH-E had affected my email reading behavior more than I expected. As time has passed and I've made more extensive customizations to my MH-E environment, this has continued. One of the recent ways I've noticed is that I'm slowly making more and more use of the fact that GNU Emacs is a multi-window editor ('multi-frame' in Emacs terminology) and reading email with MH-E inside it still leaves me with all of the basic Emacs facilities. Specifically, I can create several Emacs windows (frames) and use this to be working in multiple MH folders at the same time.
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SusamPal ☛ QuickQWERTY 1.1.0
There has been a new release of QuickQWERTY after over 10 years! QuickQWERTY is a web-based touch typing tutor for QWERTY keyboards that runs directly in the web browser. You can try it out here: quickqwerty.html.
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Unicorn Media ☛ Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn Ups the Ante for Open Source Clouds
The latest Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn brings a polished new interface, streamlined workflows, and a host of usability upgrades—check out our screenshots of the refreshed user experience.
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Events
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Finding reason, finding belonging
I’ve been around in the Free and Open Source world for over 20 years now, initially as a user but largely as a hacker. Since I started making money using (and growing) my technical skills, it never once occurred to me that I’d be doing anything other than writing FOS software. Which is why over the years as I grew up the Engineer Value Stack* in my career, I started shedding some things that once used to give my joy. With that train of thought, I almost did not go to the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron that just concluded in Porto today.
Dear reader, if you’re expecting a review of all of the technically awesome things that happened at Cauldron this weekend, stop reading and wait a couple of days. Jonathan Corbett was there so I assume he will have something interesting to write in that space. Go watch the LWN feed and maybe even buy a subscription if you haven’t already.
So yeah, I almost decided to not go to Porto for Cauldron, because for the past year or so, I didn’t feel like I did anything of consequence in the GNU toolchain community. Sitting alone in my basement in Waterloo, I had already concluded to myself that nobody would miss that I wasn’t there. Things would go on as usual. I had already forgotten whatever work I had done over the last years; they didn’t feel valuable enough. I had concluded that I was mostly a glorified Jira wrangler (the modern equivalent of the “paper pusher” slur one could use to denigrate anybody who doesn’t do Real Work™) and I wasn’t needed.
[...]
Was it the fact that all of the most amazing leaders in the GNU tools ecosystem were there? Or was it the relief at seeing an old friend and mentor (I don’t know if he knows how much my interactions with him meant to me) safe and doing well? Or, in fact, was it the realization of how much I owe it to pretty much every person who has been coming to Cauldron regularly, probably with their own personal reasons, but leaving their own, indelible impression on me as a person? Or, of course, the annual JL (if you know you know) therapy session?
Maybe it was the fantastic surprise musical performance by a group of school kids, which reminded me of my kiddo back home. OK maybe that one actually had me longing to return home soon.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Chromium
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Linuxiac ☛ Brave Browser Introduces Ask Brave, Merging Search and AI
The idea behind Ask Brave is straightforward: instead of requiring people to bounce between a standard search engine and a separate AI chatbot, Brave now combines both in one place. You can type in a simple search query and get links, videos, or products, or you can ask more detailed questions and get a longer, chat-like answer with follow-ups.
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Mozilla
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Dedoimedo ☛ How to change address bar color in Firefox 143
Come Firefox 143, the address bar tweak no longer works. Namely, I have changed the pointless gray background to white, so there's more contrast between the URL text and the canvas on which it is written. The whole gray on gray nonsense is exactly that. But alas, Mozilla decided to make my life harder, and based on the emails in my inbox, yours too. Well, we shall rectify this. Let me show you the code you need to introduce to your CSS to tweak the address bar background color to anything you like. After me.
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Licensing / Legal
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The Register UK ☛ AI answers Microsoft licensing questions, helps you choose
He compares selecting the correct licensing model to "having to spin the wheel," where Microsoft might say one thing, the partner ecosystem might say another, and LLMs such as Copilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT might come up with something else. That's hardly ideal for an organization faced with spending several million dollars or more per year on licensing.
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The Drone Girl ☛ FAA's proposed Part 108 drone rules raise concerns for DJI
The FAA’s proposed Part 108 regulations are supposed to revolutionize Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operations in the United States. And though the drone industry has largely applauded the proposed changes, there are still some concerns.
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Standards/Consortia
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APNIC ☛ Geolocation and Starlink
Why are these geolocation databases useful? There are obvious uses in the ongoing fight against various forms of cyberattacks, trying to de-anonymize the identity and location of the attacker. This information is also used in attempting to enforce various intellectual property rights that are often assigned to rights holders on an economy-by-economy basis. And then there are statistical reports. Economies like to compare themselves to others. But even simple questions, such as ‘How many Internet users are in each economy?’ are challenging to answer without the underlying seed data of a geolocation database.
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