news
Free Software, Open Data, and Standards Leftovers
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Kevin McDonald ☛ Introducing ProtoDocs
ProtoDocs is a web-based documentation browser for Protocol Buffer definitions. Its model follows protobuf directly: files, packages, services, RPCs, messages, enums, fields, oneofs, options, and comments.
What does “protobuf-first” actually mean? It means the tool treats the source as the primary interface. I think protobuf schemas are clean, expressive, and readable, especially compared with the nested JSON or YAML you often end up reading in OpenAPI. ProtoDocs renders the actual protobuf syntax, adds highlighting, and layers interactive tooltips over keywords, field names, type references, and custom options. You can read the source and explore it at the same time.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers
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Hackaday ☛ Raspberry Pi Locator Website To Shut Down In July
One of the main reasons is that the indexing bot used by the site has been blocked by most shopping sites. It’s not clear whether this blocking is on purpose or just another consequence of website owners protecting themselves from the onslaught of obnoxious ‘AI’ scraping bots. But in any event, the effort of finding workarounds that may only work for a few days or weeks was becoming too much.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl 8.21.0
As always, we have document each vulnerability in detail and I encourage you to read up on the details.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Kiwi TCMS: Kiwi TCMS 16.1
Dear testers, we're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 16.1!
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FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty
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OpenRightsGroup ☛ Dear Andy, we need a complete reset on digital policy
There is a consensus that AWS and Microsoft have been ripping off both British businesses and the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of inflated cloud charges, according to investigations by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The difficulty of taxing companies like Amazon and Uber is also well understood. There is widespread knowledge that US multinationals are using tax efficiency measures to ensure that they do not pay their way towards the maintenance of basic state functions. Such companies, many of them being tech giants, now occupy a very large part of our economy, as detailed in Vassal State; whose author, Angus Hanton, can hardly be accused of being a radical leftist.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Rlang ☛ SIM2 climate data
MétéoFrance offers its monthly SIM2 dataset albeit over a shorter time span (currently 1970–2025). The dataset includes temperature, precipitation and other variables on an 8 km resolution grid.
We will select a French city, retrieve its geographic coordinates, build the grid for a specific month over the 1970–2025 period, extract the data from the grid at that location and plot the temperature anomaly.
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Michaël ☛ SIM2 climate data
As France enters its second heatwave of 2026, can we produce more detailed plots than the excellent visualizations provided by ShowYourStripes?
MétéoFrance offers its monthly SIM2 dataset albeit over a shorter time span (currently 1970–2025). The dataset includes temperature, precipitation and other variables on an 8 km resolution grid.
We will select a French city, retrieve its geographic coordinates, build the grid for a specific month over the 1970–2025 period, extract the data from the grid at that location and plot the temperature anomaly.
We will use {terra} to create the grid from the tabular files containing cell centers and weather variables, and terra::extract() to get all temperatures.
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Standards/Consortia
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GreyCoder ☛ Eweka: The Gold Standard of European Usenet Providers - GreyCoder
Eweka offers over 6,500 days of complete binary and text article retention — the longest of any EU-based provider, and one of the longest in the world. The archive grows daily, meaning older articles are continuously preserved rather than purged. For context, 6,500 days is roughly 17+ years of Usenet history.
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