Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Development Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 07, 2026

• Sven Luijten ☛ Mailpit for local mail

  I recently had to install a new laptop as a development machine, and I just sort of blindly installed all software I was used to, including Mailhog. It turns out that Mailhog isn't supported anymore though, which I only realized as I saw Homebrew's warning about it being deprecated because of upstream deprecation.

• Dmitry Dolzhenko ☛ File name completion in Emacs

  Emacs has a myriad of ways to complete things for you in different contexts.

  While the one I’d like to share with you may seem trivial, the feature is so ingrained into my workflow so that I even forgot that it’s not part of the core Emacs functionality.

• It's FOSS ☛ DI.DAY is a Movement to Encourage People to Ditch Big Tech

  A new day for privacy advocates to look forward to.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • The New Stack ☛ How Homepage simplifies monitoring your self-hosted services

    Slowly but surely, I’ve been migrating over to self-hosted services so I can finally cut the cord to third parties.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Performance Blog: The Road to Better Performance Profiles

      Since joining the Firefox Performance team as a Software Engineering Intern back in May, I’ve been working on improving performance profiles. Firefox developers need performance profiles that are readable, readily accessible, and automated. This makes it easier to identify performance regressions and bugs introduced by patches, as well as to diagnose and understand existing performance behavior. Let’s take a closer look at two notable improvements to our performance profiling pipelines that strive toward these goals: [...]

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

  • Chris Enns ☛ Ghost Added Improved Comment Moderation Tools

    Since I've been critical of Ghost in the past for their lack of comment management tools on their dashboard, it's only fair that I note they've built a much improved comment management system into Ghost recently.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Why Science Communication Must be the Next Competitive Edge for Scholarly Publishers

      Imagine a world where scientific breakthroughs don’t vanish behind paywalls or suffocate under jargon. A world where discoveries flow seamlessly from the lab bench to everyday conversations, where people make informed choices based not on speculation but on evidence. In this world, scholarly publishers flourish because their work is indispensable to public discourse.

    • Techdirt ☛ The CIA Erased The World Factbook With No Warning… And Told Everyone To ‘Stay Curious’

      For over half a century, the CIA’s World Factbook has been one of the most quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country in the world—population stats, government structures, economic data, geography, the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, “Okay, at least some tax dollars are going toward something genuinely helpful.”

      And then, this week, the CIA just… deleted it. No warning. No explanation. Every single page now redirects to a brief announcement that the Factbook has “sunset.” That’s it. That’s all you get.

• Programming/Development

  • Remi Collet ☛ Remi Collet: 💎 PHPUnit 13

    ℹ️ This new major version requires PHP ≥ 8.4 and is not backward compatible with previous versions, so the package is designed to be installed beside versions 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.

  • Godot Engine ☛ Release candidate: Godot 4.6.1 RC 1

    Bring out the regression fixes!

  • Python

    • Linuxize ☛ Python Switch Case Statement (match-case)

      Learn how to use Python's match-case statement (structural pattern matching) as a switch-case equivalent. Covers if-elif-else, dictionary lookup, and match-case with examples.