news
Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty Leftovers
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Olimex ☛ TuxCon 2026 Has Come to an End
On Sunday, the traditional soldering workshop took place in the training building of Olimex.
Participants ranging in age from 5 to 60 years old gathered early and patiently waited for the workshop to begin at 11:00 AM. This year, the youngest participant was only 4.5 years old.
The best part: every single kit was soldered successfully and worked perfectly. Year after year, the participants continue to improve their skills, and it is impressive to see how quickly newcomers become confident with soldering and electronics assembly.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice Native Language Projects – TDF Annual Report 2025
LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages, thanks to the work of localisation communities around the world. We asked them to summarise their work in 2025 – here’s what they had to say… Czech The Czech community maintained an active presence both online and in-person.
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FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty
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The Age AU ☛ Pope Leo takes on AI’s wannabe trillionaires
The Pope sees risks to humanity from the “opaque algorithms” within a technology controlled by private companies – driven by “the idolatry of profit” – rather than governments.
“These entities effectively set the conditions for access, determine the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities of participation.
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GNU Projects
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GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20260522 ('Hantavirus') released
GNU Parallel 20260522 ('Hantavirus') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Mark Litwintschik ☛ 1.75B Airport Weather Observations
The Global Airport Observations dataset is a Parquet-formatted, 1.75B-record collection of weather observations from 1940 up to today. The 655 MB Parquet file containing the 2024 data collected observation from thousands of stations in 14 countries. Often, stations reported observations hourly if not more frequently.
The data is hosted with one file per year on Cloudflare on behalf of the Source Cooperative. The data was originally sourced from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.
In this post, I'll analyse this dataset.
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Standards/Consortia
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Sal ☛ Freedom units
As NPR reports, Thomas Jefferson thought the metric system was “was just what America needed.” He wrote to a French scientist friend of his, asking him to bring the system to the States. Unfortunately, the scientist’s ship hit a storm and blew down into the Caribbean, where it was captured by pirates. The scientist eventually died in captivity.
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