news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards
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ROS Industrial ☛ ROSCon 2025 & RIC-AP Summit 2025 Blog Series: Singapore’s Defining Week for Open-Source Robotics
On 30 October, the RIC-AP Summit expanded beyond conference halls into the real world with a series of curated site tours across Singapore. These tours showcased how ROS and Open-RMF are not just concepts but living deployments across manufacturing, healthcare, and smart infrastructure.
If the Summit sessions were about vision and strategy, the tours were about seeing robotics in motion—from factory floors to hospitals, airports, and digital districts.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Robin Rendle ☛ v19
Next steps? Tweak the 11ty image plugin for sure. There’s some problems I’ve introduced with it, even though the plugin is genuinely magic and ultimately will improve everyone’s experience of clicking around. Maybe I could add more typography and layout options, too? Oh and keyboard shortcuts. Oh, oh, oh and add a feed for photos. And maybe a books section? And and and…yes yes yes...
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Standards/Consortia
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SusamPal ☛ A4 Paper Stories
The dimensions of A4 paper are the solution to a simple, elegant problem. Imagine designing a sheet of paper such that, when you cut it in half parallel to its shorter side, both halves have exactly the same aspect ratio as the original. In other words, if the shorter side has length \( x \) and the longer side has length \( y , \) then \[ \frac{y}{x} = \frac{x}{y / 2} \] which gives us \[ \frac{y}{x} = \sqrt{2}. \] Test it out. Suppose we have \( y/x = \sqrt{2}. \) We cut the paper in half parallel to the shorter side to get two halves, each with shorter side \( x' = y / 2 = x \sqrt{2} / 2 = x / \sqrt{2} \) and longer side \( y' = x. \) Then indeed \[ \frac{y'}{x'} = \frac{x}{x / \sqrt{2}} = \sqrt{2}. \] In fact, we can keep cutting the halves like this and we'll keep getting even smaller sheets with the aspect ratio \( \sqrt{2} \) intact. To summarise, when a sheet of paper has the aspect ratio \( \sqrt{2}, \) bisecting it parallel to the shorter side leaves us with two halves that preserve the aspect ratio. A4 paper has this property.
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The Register UK ☛ Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching
The company hasn't exactly gone out of its way to call attention to this – like actually telling anybody anything. The news appears in a support note with a sign on the door saying "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail." The article itself is less euphemistic than its title: [...]
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Kevin McDonald ☛ WHOIS is dead, long live RDAP
The whois protocol is dead. For decades, it was a fundamental tool for network reconnaissance, but its time has passed. The protocol was officially sunset for all generic top-level domains in early 2025, replaced by the more modern, web-based protocol, RDAP.
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