Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 23, 2026

• But she's a girl... ☛ BSAG » A new backup strategy using restic

  After quite a bit of reading on what might work well, I settled on Restic. This is cross-platform, has a long development history, is now quite well-established and stable, and has incremental snapshots and encryption built in. It enables backing up to a variety of remote locations natively, but can also be paired with rclone backends to enable an even wider range of possibilities. It is available as a brew on macOS, but on NixOS, you can set it up as a service for automatic backups using a systemd timer.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ How to Vim: Build your .vimrc from Scratch

  People often think that getting started with Vim means spending hours crafting an elaborate .vimrc with dozens of plugins. In reality, modern Vim (9+) and Neovim ship with remarkably sane defaults, and you can get very far with a configuration that’s just a few lines long – or even no configuration at all.

• Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Status update, February 2026

  Hi all!

  Lars has contributed an implementation independent test suite for the scfg configuration file format. This is quite nice for implementors, they get a base test suite for free. I’ve added support for it for libscfg, the C

  I’ve spent some time working on the go-proxyproto library. While adding support for PP2_SUBTYPE_SSL_CLIENT_CERT (a PROXY protocol addition to carry the TLS client certificate I’ve introduced last month), I’ve fixed large PROXY protocol headers being rejected (TLS certificates can be a few kilobytes), I’ve fixed some issues in the test suite, and I’ve improved the HTTP/2 helper. I’ve merged support for PP2_SUBTYPE_SSL_CLIENT_CERT in tlstunnel, soju and kimchi.

• Benjamin Mako Hill ☛ Benjamin Mako Hill: What makes online groups vulnerable to governance capture?

  Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some “older” published projects. This post is closely based on a previously published post by Zarine Kharazian on the Community Data Science Blog.

• XDA ☛ The FOSS community has made its own MinIO fork after the original went read-only

  MinIO has had a really rough time over the past few years. Once the number one way to set up open-source object storage, the people behind MinIO began making changes to the software that people really did not gel with. This included swapping to GNU AGPLv3 in 2021, which demanded its users share their source code if they used MinIO, coming to a head in 2025 when the developers gutted the free admin console and stopped publishing Docker images.

  Well, the bad news is that MinIO has finally ended development, and the official GitHub page has gone into read-only mode. The good news is that, because it still kept AGPLv3 around, it's totally legal to make a fork of it and make your own MinIO. And the even better news is that someone has already done just that.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Scott Jehl ☛ Standard HTML Video & Audio Lazy-loading is Coming!

    This feature began as an issue filed in the HTML tracker in 2024, but in the span of the last 3 months the actual work on it has ramped up! As is the nature of web standards work, this has all been happening in public and progressing fast, so I wanted to post a summary of what's happened so far and how and where the feature works today.

    Long story short, the feature is not yet standard, but the HTML spec proposal, platform tests, and browser patches have been in review for many weeks and support just landed behind a flag in Chrome Canary! Things are moving along in a very positive direction and you can start experimenting with it today!

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Dan Langille ☛ Upgrading PostgreSQL in place on FreeBSD

    I’ve updated one of my PostgreSQL instances to PostgreSQL 18, it’s time to update the others. This time, I’m going to try pg_update. My usual approach is pg_dump and pg_restore.

    As this is my first attempt doing this, I’m posting this mostly for future reference when I try this again. There will be another blog post when I try this again. Which should be soon. This paragraph will link to that post when it is available.

    In this post: [...]

  • Consensus Labs LLC ☛ We have pgvector at home

    It’s Postgres and we’re talking about vector embeddings. There’s no vector datatype in Postgres so we have to use some fancy new extension like pgvector, right?

    Vector similarity search is a generalization of something people have been trying to do for decades, find points nearest to each other (such as on a globe). Postgres’s point datatype is limited to two dimensions. But Postgres ships with a builtin extension called cube that allows up to 100 dimensions (this is a seemingly arbitrary hard-coded limit you could increase if you built Postgres from source). It comes with an operator for calculating Euclidean distance between points, and you can even index cube fields to potentially speed up similarity search.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20260222 ('Epstein files') released [stable]

    GNU Parallel 20260222 ('Epstein files') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4