Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 09, 2026

• Rachel Kaufman ☛ 30 Days of coreutils: cat

  cat has some very useful flags, most of which are new to me.

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs coaching with Amin Bandali

  I met with Amin Bandali to talk about Emacs, specifically Amin’s upcoming ffs package. Amin informed me about changes to ffs in light of a discussion we had during a previous session.

• University of Toronto ☛ Notes on using GNU Emacs' Tramp system in an unusual shell environment

  Tramp is a famous and often praised GNU Emacs system for editing remote files; lots of people will call it one of Emacs' compelling features. I've always had a decidedly different view of Tramp because Tramp has mostly not worked for me in opaque ways. I recently took another run at getting Tramp working (so I could have an informed opinion on why I'm not a fan), and in the process I've learned a bunch of things that I don't want to forget.

• University of Toronto ☛ Splitting up my .emacs, or "use-package doesn't solve all problems"

  I got into my .emacs situation despite using use-package, which is the usual way people recommend to tame your Emacs configuration. Today I dealt with the whole thing by splitting my .emacs up into separate files, which is much better in general even if it's a bit more annoying in some ways.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Brad Taunt ☛ Serving a Website on a Raspberry Pi Zero Running Entirely in RAM

    This is even more impressive considering the Pi Zero only has 512MB of total memory, ~40MB of which is tied up running Alpine Linux. But since RAM is so abundant and cheap these days that we can… Oh, right.

    Anyway, what a time to be alive! If you’re interested in running your own website off a Pi Zero, follow along!

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Vikash Patel ☛ How to Handle PostgreSQL Database Migrations in Go with Goose

    Application code is stateless. You can tear down a container and spin up a new one in milliseconds without losing data. Databases are stateful. When you deploy new application logic that requires a new column, an index, or a table, you must transition the physical storage schema from state A to state B without destroying the underlying data or locking the system.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Twenty Years On, ODF Is Still the Only Open Standard for Office Documents, and the Only One Governments Can Trust

    Twenty years ago this week, on 3 May 2006, the Open Document Format cleared its Draft International Standard ballot at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 with unanimous approval. On 30 November 2006 it was published as ISO/IEC 26300.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ Concerning [Crackers] Who Break into Computer Systems

    Although Levy's book ``Hackers'' [Levy84] is not about today's security-breaking hackers, it articulates and interprets a ``hacker ethic'' that is shared by many of these hackers. The ethic includes two key principles that were formulated in the early days of the AI Lab at MIT: ``Access to computers -- and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works -- should be unlimited and total,'' and ``All information should be free.'' In the context in which these principles were formulated, the computers of interest were research machines and the information was software and systems information.

    Since Stallman is a leading advocate of open systems and freedom of information, especially software, I asked him what he means by this. He said: ``I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By `free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses.'' By ``generally useful'' he does not include confidential information about individuals or credit card information, for example. He further writes: ``When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.'' Stallman has argued strongly against user interface copyright, claiming that it does not serve the users or promote the evolutionary process [Stallman90].

• Standards/Consortia

  • Hackaday ☛ Broadcasting GPS On The Local Network To Help Geoclue Find You

    All that Geoclue looks for on the LAN is an mDNS service identifying as _nmea-0183._tcp that responds with the GPS coordinates as network packets containing an ASCII payload encoded using the NMEA 0183 standard. With this knowledge [Evert] was then able to quickly put together a Python-based server that simply blasts the static GPS coordinates of the LAN in question.

  • Tyler Hillery ☛ Why Don’t Lowercase Letters Come Right After Uppercase Letters in ASCII? – Tyler Hillery

    This works because 31 effectively clears the first three bits and keeps only the lower five bits. In ASCII, the lower five bits of letters line up with their alphabet position: A/a ends in 00001, B/b ends in 00010, and so on up to Z/z, which ends in 11010.

    Another way to think about it is that, for ASCII character codes, c & 31 is equivalent to c % 32, because 32 is a power of two. Masking with 31, which is binary 00011111, keeps only the part of the number “left over” after groups of 32 are removed.