Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 30, 2025

• Matthew Brunelle ☛ Installing Jellyfin Tizen On Your Inlaw's Samsung TV In Just N Simple Steps

  Also, these are not actually instructions. Do not follow them top to bottom. If you actually want to install Jellyfin Tizen, skip all the way to the end of the article. The full steps are written here to highlight how absurd the whole ordeal was.

• Michael Stapelberg ☛ Self-hosting my photos with Immich

  For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of my data for backup purposes and independence. Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup. In this post, I describe how I have set up Immich, a self-hostable photo manager.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • [Repeat] Daniel Lemire ☛ How fast can browsers process base64 data?

    Base64 is a binary-to-text encoding scheme that converts arbitrary binary data (like images, files, or any sequence of bytes) into a safe, printable ASCII string using a 64-character alphabet (A–Z, a–z, 0–9, +, /). Browsers use it in JavaScript to embedding binary data directly in code or HTML or to transmitting binary data as text.

    Browsers recently added convenient and safe functions to process base 64 functions Uint8Array.toBase64() and Uint8Array.fromBase64(). Though they are several parameters, it comes down to an encoding and a decoding function.

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

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ My Photograph Portfolio

    One important decision related to image size. Hugo gallery downsamples each image to produce two or three alternatives, depending on orientation. Three for portrait, two for landscape, as far as I could tell. That is very efficient. But it also uploads the original which at least on my screen, and probably most screens, would never be displayed. So I did a little test, reducing the original image by 50% to a quarter of the size. The difference was huge, 28MB versus 4.2 MB for one album.

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • Digital Homesteading

    In the history of human freedom, there's always been the frontier - a place to escape the confines of established society and build a life of self-reliance. For the 19th-century homesteader, it was a plot of land and the promise of a home built by their own hands. In the 21st century, a new frontier calls to us, not of soil and timber, but of data and protocols. The vast, centralized empires of Big Tech have enclosed the digital commons, and it's time for a new generation of pioneers to stake their claim. This is the era of the digital homesteader, and our tool is self-hosting.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Seth Godin ☛ Two kinds of useful specifications

    Professionals use specs to invite others to participate in the work.