GNU/Linux, BSD, and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 04, 2026

• Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2026/05/03

      Several of these links were discovered via bubbles.town, including a min e-ink hardware trend you’ll notice below. The Utah teapot in tandem with the recent Unix V4 tape discovery.  (via) Roguelike Celebration 2026 Call for Proposals.  Look at previous years to see the topics. The Adventure Shell, your shell prompt as text adventure.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Red Hat ☛ Deploy hosted control planes with OpenShift Virtualization: Distributed hosting

      In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we covered an all-in-one deployment and the common two-cluster hub/management split. In this final installment, we will discuss a stronger separation suited for large enterprises, including the following three clusters with a single, clear responsibility.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions

      I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach:

    • Andre Franca ☛ How to style a Hugo Atom feed with XSL

      If you open my rss feed url in your browser, you’ll won’t see raw XML content anymore, but a styled HTML page with the same header and footer as the main site, and a list of recent posts in between. This won’t affect feed readers, which will still see the original XML content. The styling is applied only when a human visits the feed URL in a browser, to make it more readable.

    • The Ladybird Browser Initiative ☛ This Month in Ladybird - April 2026 - Ladybird

      And of course we’d like to thank everyone who contributed code this month: [...]

  • Education

    • Rlang ☛ Regression Modeling Strategies Short Course 2026, with Frank Harrell; May 14, 15, 18, 19

      This workshop covers principled strategies for building, validating, and interpreting multivariable regression models for a wide range of outcomes, with emphasis on predictive accuracy, avoiding overfitting, and interpreting estimated effects. It explores spline methods, data reduction, benefits of Bayesian modeling, robust semiparametric ordinal, longitudinal, and survival models, and rigorous resampling-based validation, illustrated with applied case studies and R examples. More details here.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Omicron Limited ☛ UK's national soil database released as open-access repository

        Cranfield University has launched a new soil and environmental online database and mapping tool, opening up detailed information about land in England and Wales. In collaboration with Defra, Cranfield's Land Information System (LandISPortal)—which includes the National Soil Map of England and Wales (NATMAP)—is now on a new platform and open access, free and available for everyone to use. The initiative delivers the commitment in the government's Land Use Framework to make this soil data open access.

      • Rlang ☛ Bad Weather and the Subway

        Regular readers will recall that the subway system carries a lot of passengers every day. The ridership data for the whole of 2025 represents just over 1.3 billion entries into the system via an OMNY tap or Metrocard. It’s available aggregated to hourly resolution by station complex. With that data in hand, we can calculate average hourly ridership for every day of the week. This gives us a profile of what, for example, a Monday or a Wednesday typically looks like, by hour. When calculating the average day-of-the week profile we exclude holidays and the like.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Evert Pot ☛ Broadcasting GPS on the local network

      I could try to find an alternative service (suggestions welcome!), but I have some servers at home, and it made me wonder if there’s something I can run locally. The servers don’t move, so the logic was that as long as I’m on the home network, I can just decide what GPS coordinates to emit.

      Turns out, there is!

      The protocol is called NMEA 0183, which appears to be a suite of specifications for marine electronics (ships!). The messages can be sent over a serial port or over a TCP socket.

    • Coywolf LLC ☛ Adding author context to RSS

      The spec is under consideration and is expected to be accepted and published for use before or by the end of this year.

    • Stuart Breckenridge ☛ Enhanced Feeds with Byline Data — Stuart Breckenridge

      The feeds on this site now support the nascent Byline specification. While this is a single-person blog, the change gives supporting feed readers the data they need to differentiate between linked items (curation), reviews (review), and announcements