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Standards/Consortia: ODF 1.4 Release, Rather Impressive Image Compression, Recursive DNS, and More (Unicode, UTF-8)
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It's FOSS ☛ ODF 1.4 Release Marks 20 Years of OpenDocument Format
Accessibility and compatibility upgrades mark 20th anniversary of document standard at OASIS Open.
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Nate ☛ Rather Impressive Image Compression
Can you tell the difference between the two images above? At first glance, probably not. If you look at them side by side long enough, at least in fullscreen on an HD display, you might notice a little bit of a difference. In one the sky looks an ever so slightly darker shade, and if you look close enough, color shades seem to change in a more blocky structure instead of a more smooth transition. Zoom in, and you might notice the word “Excel” on the side of the windmill is mostly legible on one, and mostly illegible on the other.
The real difference, however, comes in the image’s size. The first one, completely unmodified from the camera, clocks in at 3,862,528 bytes - or 3.8 Megabytes. The second one, on the other hand, clocks in at a tiny 20,401 bytes, or 20.4 kilobytes - a whopping 0.005% of the original image’s size.
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Jan Lukas Else ☛ Recursive DNS
I try it with AdGuard Home first, as I later also want to set up a second PowerDNS Recursor instance on my mail server to make use of some more spam protection features.
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Evan Hahn ☛ "Understanding Unicode": my October 2025 talk at Longhorn PHP
Though the talk is for PHP developers, I think it’s applicable to anyone who wants to understand more about Unicode, UTF-8, and more.
Here’s the recording: [...]