Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 22, 2026

• Hackaday ☛ Blender 5.2: Coming Soon With Improved Simulations

  Simulations aren’t a necessary part of a 3D animation software, but they are very, very nice to have. If you want realistic-looking fluids, hair, or cloth, it’s incredibly difficult to animate it by hand. One, because there are so many degrees of freedom in, say, flapping cloth, keyframing is a major pain, but also figuring out how to make the model move and deform realistically is by no means trivial. It’s easier to offload all that on a physics simulation; then, as long as the physics is realistic, the animations will be as well.

• Julio Merino ☛ Is anyone still using Emacs?

  In a recent discussion at the orange site sparked by the Emacs 31 Is Around the Corner: The Changes I’m Already Daily Driving article, people were asking themselves “Is anyone still using Emacs?” and then providing their own perspective.

  For me, the answer is a resounding yes… but the interesting part is that I’m not still using Emacs: I’m actually using Emacs again. And instead of burying my answer to the opening question in a long discussion thread, I thought I’d explain my journey with and without Emacs for the last… almost 30 years. At the end, I’ll unveil the specific feature that I feel gives me superpowers and that keeps me hooked.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Hackaday ☛ When A Favicon Becomes The Entire Website

    To pull this off, a very basic HTML page was turned into a series of UTF-8 encoded bytes that were then declared to be a standard PNG image. The original 208 byte payload plus 4-byte PNG header only used part of a 9×9 pixel favicon. With a larger favicon image as typically used you could thus easily store more data, whether as visual noise like here or a bit more hidden.

  • Homo Ludditus ☛ I’m so tired of all these “tech” news reports!

    It’s been weeks since I last wrote something remotely related to technology, and there are several reasons for that. One of them is that I’ve been rather busy; another one is that I’m literally saturated with news of all kinds, to the point I’m literally disgusted. Too much is too much. I postponed a post related to Linux, the only post I wanted to write (I’ll get to it one of these days), and now I’m trying to succinctly enumerate some relevant news that I decided not to comment in extenso.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • MariaDB ☛ Understanding the Hierarchical Database Model

    The earliest model was the hierarchical database model, resembling an upside-down tree. Files are related in a parent-child manner, with each parent capable of relating to more than one child, but each child only being related to one parent. Most of you will be familiar with this kind of structure—it’s the way most file systems work. There is usually a root, or top-level, directory that contains various other directories and files. Each subdirectory can then contain more files and directories, and so on. Each file or directory can only exist in one directory itself—it only has one parent. As you can see in the image below A1 is the root directory, and its children are B1 and B2. B1 is a parent to C1, C2, and C3, which in turn has children of its own.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ New Postgres Language Server: postgres-lsp

    Built on tree-sitter-postgres, postgres-lsp implements the Language Server Protocol for PostgreSQL SQL and PL/pgSQL. Point your editor at it for .sql files and get diagnostics, navigation, completion, and formatting backed by real PostgreSQL grammar rather than regex heuristics.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • Jan-Lukas Else ☛ My new European AWS SES alternative - Jan-Lukas Else

    Why am I migrating servers at all?

• Standards/Consortia

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Anti-virus scams are enabled by the vendors themselves

    I’m not singling out McAfee here; this is an industry-wide issue. But while email continues to be treated with reckless abandon as a marketing channel with such lax standards, it will remain fertile ground for sending scams.

    Also, if I can put my old man hat on: HTML email was a massive mistake! In the words of my late grandad, I hate when we’re right.