Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 11, 2026

• Hendrik Mans ☛ Chatto is now Open Source!

  I’m happy to announce that Chatto, the group and team chat application that I’ve been working on for the past year or so, is now officially Open Source, and available for anyone to self-host.

  The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew: [...]

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: global keybinding overrides

  In this video I demonstrate how to define key bindings that have a global overriding effect so that major modes cannot change them. This is important if you want to redefine keys that are not meant to be configured by the user.

  Below is the code I showed in the video: [...]

• Martin Chang ☛ Moving my photos from Nextcloud to Immich

  A fried at my local hackerspace recommended I try Immich for managing my photos. I had for the longest of time been complaining about how slow Nextcloud is when it comes to photo management. The map took literal 20 seconds to load because of a N+1 query issue on very capable hardware, the phone app OOM and crash loading the folder containing thousands of photos and the browser UI insists on querying everything before loading the actual imagee I want to see. It was painful and I wanted alternatives.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Designing a listen later pipeline • Cory Dransfeldt

    Everything I've been building for myself lately has been built in Go and Preact. It's fast, robust and has been a good learning experience. I love different parts of a number of different RSS readers and Feedbin is as close to perfect as they get. I wanted something I could easily self-host and build as many or as few features as I wanted.

    What I built isn't terribly unique: it polls feeds, lets me manage them and organize them into folders. I didn't bother to implement starring (I've never used it in the near two decades I've used RSS). I built support for the following: [...]

  • Rachel ☛ EPIPE on write might mean you're doing it wrong

    Last month, I had an opportunity to dip into a part of the world I don't normally touch: Apache (as in, the web server) and the way it runs PHP code. This might seem ironic to some people since I used to support a colossal amount of PHP-ish code, but that was done with a virtual machine and had long since evolved out of the Apache ecosystem.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Wrexham AFC and Firefox announce a multi-year, front-of-kit partnership

      We don’t put our name on much. So when we do, it means something.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Haki Benita ☛ How to Achieve Pruning When Querying by Non-Partitioned Columns in PostgreSQL

    One of the most valuable things about partitioned tables is pruning - the database's ability to eliminate entire partitions based on a query predicate. Under conventional wisdom, pruning can only be achieved when querying by the partition key - this makes choosing the right key extremely difficult. However, if your data follows certain patterns, using some clever tricks you can achieve pruning even when filtering by non-partition key columns.

    In this article, I demonstrate how to achieve partition pruning when filtering by non-partition key columns.

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

  • Terence Eden ☛ A bug which only affected left-handed users

    One of those modifications is reducing the amount of JavaScript in use to the bare minimum. Everything functions without it, but there are a few places where it helps - the most notable being comments.

    That's why I was distressed when a loyal reader wrote in saying there was a bug on my site. When they were scrolling the page a comment box would suddenly appear and interrupt their browsing.

  • David Bushell ☛ Astro is fine I guess

    When I’m not fighting WordPress I deliver static HTML or the occasional JavaScript framework integration. For personal projects I have ‘fun’ with my own static site generator.

    This week was a side quest (soon to be main quest) to build my new company website. We’re talking proper business here so I can’t be messing about. I figured an off the shelf SSG would be most suitable.

    I asked the socials, “11ty or Astro?” Both are popular but Astro had the edge. I gave Astro an early spin back in 2022 and found it slow. Maybe it’s good now?

• Education

  • Rlang ☛ How to Put your Course Book Online

    I recently gave a talk, The value in teaching is not the content it’s the teacher

    My main point in this is:

    Your course materials should be out there in public for free online.

    To help support this, this blog post goes through the technical details I note in one of my slides: How to Put your Course Book Online.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ New public tool grants customers access to utility reliability data

      Utility customers and other interested individuals can access the new data and maps at the MPSC’s GIS Hub Site, where links to other MPSC geographic information system (GIS) maps and applications that provide a growing amount of important energy data to the public can be found. The public can access the data from that page by clicking on “Electric Reliability” or directly at the app’s webpage.

    • Rlang ☛ Crude oil stocks at Cushing, Oklahoma by @ellis2013nz

      It shows the amount of crude oil in the Cushing facility in Oklahoma and is one of the most timely and frequently updating (every Wednesday) indicators of the overall health of the crude oil market in the USA. As the chart says, below 20 million barrels is widely cited as problematic, “tank bottom”, or the “operational floor”. Below this level is expected to cause risks to oil quality, to the ability of infrastructure to move oil around, and to service the commodities markets that rely on this facility for actual delivery.