Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Programming, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 29, 2026

• Redowan Delowar ☛ Background jobs and inherited file descriptors | redowan's reflections

  I keep a brew update && brew upgrade && brew cleanup alias around. Every now and then I wrap it in a subshell and put an & on the end, expecting it to go to the background and come back when it’s done: [...]

• Marcel Kapfer ☛ Future of my IntelliJ IDEA Ubuntu packages

  That's why it took me so long to sit down and write this blog post. Perhaps it was not only that but also the fact that the decision was not an easy one. To make it short: I have decided to not further maintain my IntelliJ IDEA packages. If you were a user, thank you very much for the trust you placed in me! If you were a contributor of any kind (code, issues, whatever): Thank you very much for taking the time helping with the project.

  Now, I'd like to say a few words about my history of the project, the changes in the IntelliJ platform during these years, and the multiple reasons that lead my to my decision. Of course, you may browse on, if you are not interested. If you are searching for an alternative, read the last paragraph.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Don Marti ☛ Is it safe to turn off your ad blocker?

    I think I said I would post here when it’s safe to turn off your ad blocker. The tl;dr is: no. Will update if that changes.

  • Aman Mittal ☛ Docs discoverability layers

    At my day job, I work primarily on a documentation site which has more than 1,000 pages. I have observed that treating “discoverability” as a single concern can lead to blind spots that only became visible when I started looking at what each machine reader actually needs.

    This post highlights some key points I found after attempting to satisfy all three. It is based on what we’ve shipped so far, including what we already had in place and was working for us (mostly for search engines).

  • Mozilla

    • Alex & Manu ☛ firefox is and always has been terrible

      let me tell you what happened. i was just trying to browse the web like a normal person. youtube video. couple tabs open. maybe like 8 tabs which is basically nothing. and firefox decided to eat 4 gigabytes of ram. four. gigabytes. for a web browser. in 2026. my computer has 16 gigs of ram and firefox alone was using a quarter of it doing absolutely nothing special.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ Designing a single-file mmap-backed read-only hashed multi-table database

    The goal is to have a persistent multi-namespace key-value database that is written once and read multiple times afterward.

    Think something similar to CDB or Sparkey.

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

  • Joel Chrono ☛ Website changes: new section, music widget, and upvotes

    I made a couple of additions to my Jekyll site and decided to share them all here!

• Programming/Development

  • Rlang ☛ February 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

    Two hundred and fifty-five of the new packages submitted to CRAN in February were still there in mid-March.

  • Rlang ☛ ECMLE on CRAN

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Vincent Bernat ☛ Vincent Bernat: Calculate “1/(40rods/hogshead) → L/100km” from your Zsh prompt

      I often need a quick calculation or a unit conversion. Rather than reaching for

      Zsh calls the line-finish widget before submitting a command. We hook a function that detects the = prefix and quotes the expression: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • Victor Kropp ☛ LEGO

    A well-known fact mentioned in the video, is that the very first LEGO bricks from 1958 are compatible with those produced nowadays. The tolerance required to achieve this is 0.002mm. But their actual mold precision is 10 microns! Each model consists of hundreds or even thousands of various bricks, and all those tolerances add up. The quality is remarkable and it is in LEGO’s DNA.