Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Open Data

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 13, 2025

• [Repeat] The Register UK ☛ VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong [Ed: Microsoft-Sponsored FSFE is Exploiting the Success of Jean-Baptiste Kempf to Market Itself and Its GAFAM-Funded Messaging (While Pretending to be "FSF" Europe)]

  If you don't know what app will open a random media file (or URL), VLC is the answer. It runs on everything, plays anything, and it's free – thanks to Jean-Baptiste Kempf.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Configure Quick Terminal Size in Ghostty

  I’m a very heavy quick (dropdown) terminal user, so after adopting Ghostty one of the points of frustration for me was that I could not specify a default size for my quick terminal. Instead I had to adjust the size every time I started Ghostty.

  Fortunately, the problem recently got solved with the introduction of the quick-terminal-size config option in Ghostty 1.2. Its behavior is linked to that of quick-terminal-position (top by default). You can configure the default size for both the primary axis (e.g. height) and the secondary axis (e.g. width) in either a percentage or pixels. I like my dropdown terminal to be relatively big, so I just do the following: [...]

• Chris Biscardi ☛ I use Typst now

  I first came across Typst a number of years ago [1], around the time it launched and it has been on my radar ever since. For a long time now, Typst has made great strides in being a modern LaTeX competitor, which means I’ve been using it to write book-length content in a directory on my laptop all that time. More recently they’ve expanded their sights to be more general, “The new foundation for documents”, and I think it’s a good direction.

• JYN ☛ the terminal of the future

  I do some weird things with terminals. However, the amount of hacks I can get up to are pretty limited, because terminals are pretty limited. I won't go into all the ways they're limited, because it's been rehashed many times before. What I want to do instead is imagine what a better terminal can look like.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Simon Willison ☛ Scaling HNSWs

    Salvatore's detailed notes on the Redis implementation here offer an immersive trip through a fascinating modern field of computer science. He describes several new contributions he's made to the HNSW algorithm, mainly around efficient deletion and updating of existing indexes.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ On Hacking Back

    Former DoJ attorney John Carlin writes about hackback, which he defines thus: “A hack back is a type of cyber response that incorporates a counterattack designed to proactively engage with, disable, or collect evidence about an attacker. Although hack backs can take on various forms, they are—­by definition­—not passive defensive measures.”

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ 2125

      Vidaller et al. (2021) "indicate that Pyrenean glaciers are in a clear imbalance with the regional climate and will likely disappear in the next few decades".

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Save public health data to save American lives

      The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has made protecting America’s essential health data a priority. To that end, the foundation supported an expert roundtable in July hosted by the nonprofit Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) and the National Conference on Citizenship. CODE has synthesized the results of that roundtable and extensive additional research in a new report, Ensuring the Future of Essential Health Data for All Americans. The report is a timely and comprehensive summary of the sweeping shifts endangering both the health of Americans and the capacity to measure how everyday conditions — like access to food, safe neighborhoods, and jobs — shape health outcomes. It presents five recommendations and several tactics to protect and improve critical health data. The recommendations are: [...]