Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 30, 2026

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: fontaine version 3.1.0

  Fontaine allows the user to define detailed font configurations and set them on demand. For example, one can have a regular-editing preset and another for presentation-mode (these are arbitrary, user-defined symbols): the former uses small fonts which are optimised for writing, while the latter applies typefaces that are pleasant to read at comfortable point sizes.

• John D Cook ☛ Who you gonna believe: Grok or the docs?

  The calculator utility bc has a minimal math library. For example, there’s no tangent function because you’re expected take the ratio of sine and cosine. (The Gnu version of bc does have a function for tangent, but the POSIX version does not.) And yet bc includes support for Bessel functions J(x).

• Events

  • Nathan Willis: Conferring notes (aka SCALE|LGM|WAVE|ATypI|LAS|Grapholinguistics)

    SCALE: The Southern California GNU/Linux Expo (which, for the record, I refuse to bacronymize in a mixed-case form, so don’t at me about the capital A). I’ve been a regular for yikes years at this point, and have helped coordinate the “libre graphics track” for the past several, but this time I actually had to present a workshop as part of that. It was on the subject of learning Scribus if you’re coming from the world of LibreOffice / Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Word / Surveillance Giant Google Docs / Etc. Turns out that’s an ambitious subject, scope-wise, and we didn’t get through everything I wanted to.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Ricardo Mendes ☛ Inbound and outbound RSS

    Most of the talk about RSS is about publishing. A feed is something your site emits: you write a post, and the feed is the machine-readable copy that goes out the door. Almost every blog does this. It is the easy half, and it has been solved for twenty years.

    The harder, rarer half is the other direction — not emitting feeds, but reading them. Treating other people’s feeds as the way you follow them, inside your own site, as a first-class thing rather than an export nobody looks at. Dave Winer has been asking who else builds this. Manton Reece replied that he isn’t aware of any social platform doing inbound RSS except Micro.blog.

    My site does both. The wiring is open source, so here is exactly how.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • YottaDB ☛ Nimetic - Zero-JS Single Page Applications with Nim, Datastar and YottaDB - YottaDB

    Modern SPAs usually require a massive node_modules folder, complex build pipelines, and heavy hydration steps. Nimetic changes the paradigm by handling state logic on the backend and streaming targeted HTML updates over Server-Sent Events (SSE).

    Here is how the three core components interact: [...]

  • Charles Leifer ☛ charles leifer | Peewee 4: Async, JSON, Eager-Loading and Types

    The best part is that the core stays synchronous and, as every query execution runs through execute_sql, we only need to bridge to the loop in one spot. In short, Peewee uses greenlets to pass coroutines out of synchronous code, so they can be await-ed, at the cost of two lightweight context switches. For more detail check out my earlier post.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice Marketing Activities in 2025 – TDF Annual Report

    This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community.

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

  • WordPress ☛ The First Hey Hi (AI) Leaders Graduates [Ed: Trying to jump the shark with slop]

    On June 23, around 40 students from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), Louisiana Tech University, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette were celebrated in Chicago as the first cohort to receive the Hey Hi (AI) Leaders Micro-Credential through Hey Hi (AI) Leaders, the nation’s first workforce-focused Hey Hi (AI) literacy course tied to a recognized credential.

• Education

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Europe 2026 – Building A Retro PC From Scratch

    If you’re big into retrocomputing, you probably spend a lot of time chasing parts and machines on online classifieds or through local swap meets. But what if there was a different way to build a classic retro PC? What if you could put one together from bare chips, from the ground up?

    [Jeroen Domburg] is no stranger to the pages of Hackaday. You might know him by his alias, [sprite_tm], under which he’s shared many projects, from miniaturizing old hardware to unearthing the secrets of undocumented commercial hardware. Now, he’s turning his considerable skills to figuring out how to build a retro PC in today’s world, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to show us all how it’s done.