Sharing and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 10, 2026

• Data Swamp ☛ Software to keep photos organized

  I have a lot of photos that I have been carrying since a long time, this is certainly my oldest files that I was able to not lost over 20 years. It has been stored as a hierarchy since then, and it had very poor metadata information, and poor ability to be browsed. It was time to improve on this.

  My goal was to fix metadata on my pictures, but also put geolocation metadata on them because I really enjoy see a map with thumbnails of memories (just make sure to trim this metadata before sharing). Then I found about "modern" features like face recognitions, which allowed me to easily sort pictures by people, which I found handy when I want to view photos of relatives who are no longer with us.

  I tried multiple solutions, each with pros and cons, here is an overview of my findings.

• Martin Chang ☛ Tarnet - Reimplementing the Internet's archicture

  So I took a very long pause from my other project kiln (CMake compatiable alternative) to work on tarnet. Tarnet in short is my re-imagination of GNUnet which I spent quite a lot of time in the past diving into. GNUnet VPN (Virtual Public Network) was a function I used extensivly to securily share services between my labs. However GNUnet has become quite unstable for me ever since GNUnet 0.20.0 and I never got it working well again. GNUnet truly has a lot of good ideas. Really good ideas. But the software is just not great.. Since AI is so capable in 2026 - I decide to rewrite my version with the help of AI. See my past posts on GNUnet. And let me nerd out in this post.

  The project has been used by me for a while and I finally deemed it good enough to release.

• Logikal Solutions ☛ Review – Aura

  If antivirus for a given platform is “free” and not Open-Source, you are the product.

  Feels like no antivirus vendor tests with email clients anymore. I’ve had most every one. Norton, Macafee, Bitdefender, Avg, Avast and a few I can’t remember right now. Same shit, different logo. Most of these companies believe they can make up for sub-par software by providing identity theft services. For some customers, maybe.

• LibreNews ☛ I made the ultimate productivity device for less than 50 bucks

  Simply put, Mirtillo is a digital agenda. It keeps track of what you're doing, your open tasks, events, it suggests you a schedule to follow, and it keeps track of your budgets. Its code is open-source and, well, I wrote it.

  Let's take a step back. This story begun in January, when I realized I was still mostly unhappy with my events and tasks handling. My workflow was the following: I added everything I was meant to do and my events into TickTick, and at the end of each day I would take a few minutes to schedule all of my tasks on my calendar, and I checked whether I was able to do all the tasks that I had assigned to that given day.

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #26.15: Rollback in apt, bad USB detection, Glass UI in KDE, GNU/Linux Kernel dropping older processor support and more

  Some things from the past find their way back. Others are eventually left behind.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice State of the Project (April 2025 – March 2026)

    As promised, we are releasing the updated State of the Project Slide Deck, based on data extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository.

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

  • Jono Alderson ☛ There are only four sensible ways to build a website - Jono Alderson

    Your choice of CMS is not a tooling decision. It is a constraint system. It decides what kinds of problems you can solve, which ones you will struggle with, and which ones you will never even see coming. It shapes how content is created, how it flows, who can touch it, how it evolves, and what breaks when the organisation changes. It quietly defines the ceiling of your ambition and the floor of your operational risk.

  • Andy Bell ☛ Getting started with the HTML only build

    I say a HTML-only build but I’m talking rubbish there. I’ll mostly only be writing HTML (via Astro components) here, but there is CSS. Over the last couple of years at the studio we’ve been trying to “solve” global styles. We repeat ourselves over and over with client work, so in an attempt to reduce that repetition (because it’s ever so boring), we wrote incredibly versatile, custom-property configurable global styles. They’re going to be loaded by default, thanks to our base project.

• Education

  • Arduino ☛ Arduino Days 2026 empowers students across Vietnam through hands-on technology experiences

    While hundreds of Arduino Days celebrations took place simultaneously in over 100 countries worldwide, on March 28th Vietnam stood out by hosting synchronized events in four major cities – Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, and Can Tho – bringing more than 1,000 students together for a day of hands-on technology learning. Activities included an international watch party, project showcases, workshops, talk shows, and a highlight Mini Hackathon where student teams were challenged to build functional health monitoring devices capable of measuring heart rate and SpO2 levels.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Cindy Cohn’s “Privacy’s Defender”

    I've known EFF executive director Cindy Cohn for 27 years. I met her when I needed cyberlaw advice for a startup I'd helped found. We got along so well that I ended up quitting the startup and going to work at EFF. Now, Cindy's memoir, Privacy's Defender, is on the shelves: [...]

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Digital Music News ☛ A Fan’s Recordings of Over 10K Concerts Are Now Online

      Since 1984, a music fan named Aadam Jacobs has been recording audio of sets from up-and-coming bands, predominantly in Chicago. Now, thanks to a group of volunteers across the United States and Europe, these recordings are being methodically catalogued, digitized, and uploaded to the Internet Archive.