Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 19, 2026

• Rachel Kaufman ☛ 30 Days of coreutils: head and tail

  tail and head are incredibly useful tools for monitoring processes, ones that I honestly don’t use enough. These programs output the first part of files (head) or the last (tail).

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Nicolas Magand ☛ Another rant about web browsing

    Yes, I’m writing again about my ongoing experiment with blocking JavaScript on a per-site basis. This time, I’m not here to explain how I operate in detail, but to complain about the work needed to maintain this web browsing hygiene.

    In short, the web is a mess, and while messy things can be fun, I’ve recently grown very frustrated with the need to dance around my extensions every time I visit a new site where displaying simple text apparently requires JavaScript, or where scrolling requires dismissing a cookie modal that is only visible if content blockers are turned off first.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ pg_sorted_heap 0.14.0 released

    I am pleased to announce pg_sorted_heap 0.14.0, a PostgreSQL extension for physically sorted heap storage, zone-map pruning, planner-integrated vector search, and PostgreSQL-native GraphRAG experiments.

    This release is verified on PostgreSQL 16, 17, and 18. It is also now available on PGXN.

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

  • James Cherti ☛ Disabling XML-RPC in WordPress for Security and Performance

    When deploying WordPress in a production environment, every enabled feature should be evaluated for its security and performance implications. By default, WordPress prioritizes backward compatibility, which often results in legacy protocols remaining active on every request.

    XML-RPC is a legacy API protocol that allows external applications to interact with a WordPress installation over HTTP. Long before the integration of the modern WordPress REST API, XML-RPC was the standard method for third-party clients to execute remote commands, such as creating posts, managing comments, and uploading media.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Europe Versus America: A Wonkish Data Follow-up

      Again, I am not saying that all is well with Europe. But the common diagnosis of the continent as a museum, unable to keep up with modern technology, rests on bad data analysis.

    • PerThirtySix ☛ Our Reddening Globe: Visualizing Climate Change With a 3D Globe

      This tool visualizes global, regional, and coordinate temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2025. A temperature anomaly is the difference between the observed temperature and the average temperature over a baseline period of time for a location.

      The globe shows coordinate data for over 1,000 relatively evenly distributed points on Earth's landmasses over time. The graphs on the right give a global and regional view of the same timeframe.

      All data on this page comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). For each year, this visualization uses anomaly data from June of that year.