today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 01, 2026

• Hackaday ☛ Bite Into Strange Sounds With NOISFERATU

  The NOISFERATU is an open source generative textural sound synthesizer, or as creator [Robert Heel] puts it, “a sound designer’s dream and audiophile’s worst nightmare”.

  NOISFERATU offers 45 different sound algorithms grouped into five banks to produce a dazzling range of evolving soundscapes and patterns that resist repetition or settling, each influenced and shaped — the word controlled does not quite apply — by a volume slider and a few hardware knobs.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ CIDER 2.0 is Brewing…

  Normally I write these posts after a CIDER release is out, with the smug satisfaction of someone who has already tagged the version and updated the changelog. Today I’m flipping the script a little: the release isn’t out yet, but I’m too excited to keep quiet about it.

  Here’s the thing. The next CIDER release was supposed to be 1.23. But as I kept piling change upon change, it slowly dawned on me that calling this “1.23” would be doing it a disservice. So I’m now strongly considering shipping it as CIDER 2.0 instead.

• PowerDNS ☛ PowerDNS Authoritative Server 5.1.3 Released

  The tarball and its signature are available at downloads.powerdns.com. Packages for various distributions are available from repo.powerdns.com.

• Applications

  • HowTo Geek ☛ 5 reasons I still prefer Linux terminal apps over graphical ones

    You're not wrong that the modern graphical apps on Linux have improved—by a lot. You're also not wrong to wonder why that improvement hasn't pulled more terminal users over to the graphical side. However, the answer isn't necessarily about loyalty or habit. While I can’t speak for everyone, here’s are five reasons why I personally like using command-line interface (CLI) and terminal user interface (TUI) apps over graphical user interface (GUI) apps.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Wonders of Web Weaving ☛ #8: Brennan (brennan.day) - Wonders of Web Weaving

      In Episode 8, I chat with Brennan, the author of brennan.day. We talk about, among other things, writing routines, building community in the indie web, "start here" pages on personal websites, and more.

  • Mozilla

    • Servo (Linux Foundation) ☛ The Servo Blog: May in Servo: user scripts, mp4 compat, blackboxing in DevTools, and more!

      Servo 0.3.0 contains all of the changes we landed in May, which came out to 391 commits (March: 534).

    • Firefox Tooling Announcements: Happy BMO Push Day! (20260630.1)

      Github Link

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Peter Eisentraut ☛ Waiting for SQL:202y: Stockholm (BMA) meeting report

    The most recent meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32 WG3 “Database Languages” took place from the 15th to the 19th of June 2026 in Stockholm. “WG3”, as we call it, works on standardizing the database languages SQL and GQL. In that meeting, a number of proposals that are of interest to SQL and PostgreSQL were accepted, which I want to report about here.

    The meeting code of this meeting was “BMA”, which is the code for a small airport in Stockholm. All in-person WG3 meetings are named after a nearby airport. In this case, the code “ARN” for Stockholm’s main airport had already been used for a meeting in 2003. (It is whimsically intentional that this system prevents the group from meeting in the same place too many times.)

    Now let’s look at the new SQL features that were discussed. (Regards to all the GQL practitioners, but I’m not qualified enough to report on that.)

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ The invisible architecture of lock-in: the layering of dependencies

    There is a sophisticated mechanism by which proprietary technology ecosystems maintain their grip on users and institutions, even when those users and institutions believe they are making free choices, using open standards, and building independent digital infrastructure.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Distro Watch ☛ Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

    [...] Our News column this week reports on the Xfce desktop testing a new Wayland compositor and link to a FreeBSD "ask me anything" presentation which will happen this week. [...]

• Events

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ United Nations Open Source Week 2026

    I was among the delegation of “open source experts” invited to the UN Open Source Week 2026 in New York City by the Sovereign Tech Agency. Thank you to the Sovereign Tech Agency for inviting and supporting my stay and travel for the event. Thanks to Alpha-Omega for sponsoring my position at the Python Software Foundation.

    UN Open Source Week is a week-long event with a different focus for each day. In order, the focuses were: Maintain-a-thon (UN Tech Over), Open Source × AI, Digital Public Infrastructure Day, OSPOs for Good, and Community Day. The event is structured into a series of presentations, panels, parallel sessions, interactive break-outs that start in the morning and carry on through into the evening at local partnered events.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, July 3, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)

    Join the FSF and friends on Friday, July 3 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: LibrePhone update, organizing locally, and more in issue 48 of the digital Bulletin

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Mark Litwintschik ☛ Vantor's Open Satellite Feed

      Vantor is the Colorado-based Intelligence offshoot of Maxar. It was formed last year after Maxar, a once-publicly traded satellite manufacturer and constellation operator, was split into two firms.

      Vantor publishes satellite imagery from constellations that were built and launched between the late 1990s and as recently as February of last year.