Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Sharing Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 20, 2026

• University of Toronto ☛ How GNU Tar handles deleted things in incremental tar archives

  Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have a system that uses GNU Tar for its full and incremental backups (such as Amanda). Or maybe you use GNU Tar directly for this. If you have an incremental backup tar archive, you might be interested in one or both of two questions, which are in some ways mirrors of each other: what files were deleted between the previous incremental and this incremental, or what's the state of the directory tree as of this incremental (if it and all previous backups it depends on were properly restored).

• It's FOSS ☛ This is Probably the Best Video Downloader App (And it is Free and Open Source)

  If you are looking for a free video downloader that just works on Linux, backdoored Windows or macOS, VidBee is the ideal choice here.

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #26.08: KDE Plasma 6.6, Mint Release Schedule Change, ASCII Weather, Firefox Tweaking and More GNU/Linux Stuff

  Quizzes and Puzzles? Yes or no?

• Events

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: LibreLocal 2026 is in May: Start organizing meetups — we'll help

    null

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Bryce Wray ☛ Browsing tips

    If you spend lots of hours per week perusing content on one or more web browsers as I’ve been doing since, oh, the mid-1990s, there are ways you can tailor that activity somewhat more to your liking. Many of you probably already know about the potential solutions I’ll mention in this post but, on the off-chance that you don’t, here are some tips for improving your browsing experience. Specifically, this is about: (1.) adjusting how the browsers actually render web pages; and (2.) filtering out ads and certain other content types that interfere with one’s browsing pleasure. To be sure, there’s a certain degree of interaction between those two, but I’ve found that they require two different sets of solutions.

  • Paweł Grzybek ☛ Generate RSS feed for Bandcamp artists using Deno Deploy

    I mentioned multiple times how much I like RSS. I use them to read my favourite blogs, follow YouTube channels, stay up to date with GitHub releases and much more. But unfortunately, not every website I use generates feeds — Bandcamp is one of them.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL Anonymizer 3.0 : Parallel Static Masking + JSON import / export

    Eymoutiers, France, Februrary 11th, 2026

    Dalibo publishes PostgreSQL Anonymizer 3.0, a new major version of our privacy by design extension.

    The extension offers 6 different masking strategies:

    The extension can be installed with Debian and RPM packages, an Ansible role, a Docker image, etc. You can use it on most major DBaaS providers including : Alibaba Cloud, Crunchy Bridge, Surveillance Giant Google Cloud SQL, I.C.B.M. Cloud, Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Microsoft trap Azure Database, Neon, Yandex.

• Education

  • The Register UK ☛ DEF CON bans three Epstein-linked men from future events

    Pablos Holman, Vincenzo Iozzo, and Joichi Ito are the first names to be added to the shortlist this year, preventing them from attending any future conferences. Organizers said contact with the sex offender provided a rationale for the sanction.

    All three are named in the Epstein files as having worked with, benefited from, or were otherwise tied to the disgraced financier during the prior decade, although as mentioned, they aren't accused of being involved in crimes.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • [Old] US Argonne National Laboratory ☛ Designing and Building Parallel Programs

      Designing and Building Parallel Programs (Online) is an innovative traditional print and online resource publishing project. It incorporates the content of a textbook published by Addison-Wesley into an evolving online resource. Here is a description of the book, and here is the table of contents. See also the list of mirror sites around the world.

      Designing and Building Parallel Programs (Online) integrates four resources concerned with parallel programming and parallel computing: [...]

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes

      Today’s scholarly communication system operates at a radically different scale, with millions of papers published each year (according to estimates from the STM Association and Crossref). What once worked through personal commitment and small-scale networks now requires infrastructure: platforms, preservation, metadata standards, governance, and long-term coordination. Volunteer labor has not disappeared, even though expectations for this have multiplied far faster than corresponding institutional support. The result is a profound disconnect between the necessity of volunteer publishing labor and how weakly it is supported. This is the context in which diamond open access has become a policy priority.

      But a quiet tension remains. Diamond open access is often described as “community-led,” and implicitly sustained by goodwill. While that may be viable on a small scale, it is not viable at the scale suggested by current policy ambitions.