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Free and Open Source Software, and Benchmark
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Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy
Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy is a short, cosy point-and-click adventure set in a modern fantasy world.
Aster Pebble is a mystery-novel enthusiast beginning her first day as an apprentice at The Bureau, an organisation that helps people with magical problems.
When a small village becomes trapped in a time loop and official procedures prove less than helpful, Aster takes the investigation into her own hands. Players explore handcrafted pixel-art locations, question an eccentric cast of characters, solve cases and tackle casual puzzles while uncovering the cause of the repeating day.
This is free and open source software.
Perron - Rails-based static site generator
Perron is a Rails-based static site generator for building static websites.
It follows familiar Rails conventions, allowing developers to create content collections with Markdown or ERB, use structured data within views, configure metadata, and generate production-ready static output.
This is free and open source software.
naif-blog-engine - static blog generator
naif-blog-engine is a static blog generator powered by Make, Node.js and SQLite. Blog posts are written in Markdown, while themes use EJS templates.
It supports RSS and podcast feeds, configurable post metadata, tags, author information, audio enclosures and optional full-text search.
This is free and open source software.
FirewallFabrik - graphical firewall policy management tool
FirewallFabrik is a graphical firewall policy management tool and modern successor to Firewall Builder.
Its Qt 6 interface provides centralised policy design for multiple Linux firewalls, with support for both iptables and nftables.
Administrators create reusable objects representing hosts, networks, services and interfaces, then arrange them into firewall rules. FirewallFabrik compiles these policies into deployment-ready configurations that can be installed manually, through automation tools, or with its built-in SSH installer.
This is free and open source software.
Imagine Plus - desktop image optimisation utility
Imagine Plus is a desktop image optimisation utility for compressing, converting and resizing images.
It is a fork of Imagine with an improved interface, broader format support and tools for comparing the original and processed images.
This is free and open source software.
Jimmer - object-relational mapping framework
Jimmer is an object-relational mapping framework for Java and Kotlin applications running on the JVM.
It offers strongly typed query DSLs, compile-time code generation and flexible handling of complex data structures. Jimmer can query and save object graphs of arbitrary shapes while avoiding the N+1 query problem. It also provides DTO generation, caching, SQL optimisation, pagination, GraphQL integration and client contract generation.
This is free and open source software.
nixtml - static website generator
nixtml is a static website generator written entirely in Nix.
It transforms Markdown content into HTML and integrates directly with Nix flakes. Websites can use configurable layouts, reusable partials, collections, pagination, taxonomies and RSS feeds. Templates may be written with nixtml’s functional HTML helpers or as regular Nix strings.
This is free and open source software.
Beelink EQi 304 Mini PC Review - Benchmarking
This is a new series looking at the Beelink EQi Core 3 304 mini PC running Linux. In this series, I’ll put the Beelink mini PC through its paces from a Linux perspective, comparing it with other systems to see how it performs in real-world Linux use.
The Beelink EQi Core 3 304 is a recent addition to Beelink’s EQ range of compact PCs. It’s built around Intel’s Wildcat Lake Core 3 304 processor, a 5-core, 5-thread chip comprising one performance core and four low-power efficiency cores. The processor integrates Xe3-LPG graphics and currently has a CPU Mark of 11,720. The review unit comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 6400MT/s memory and 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage, giving the system a capable hardware base for everyday desktop use, office work, media playback and lighter Linux workloads.
In this article, I benchmark the Beelink EQi 304 across a range of tests, most of which are run using the Phoronix Test Suite. Together with the Beelink EQi 304, I’ve run the same benchmarks on a few other machines to put the results into context. Note the N100 machine is much cheaper than the other machines. It’s included simply to put the performance improvement offered by the higher-specification machines into perspective.
Sitebrew - static site generator
Sitebrew is a static site generator. It converts Markdown content into HTML while preserving a directory structure that corresponds with the published website’s URL paths.
Content can include metadata for use in templates, with Text::Xslate providing the templating engine. Sitebrew can also copy static assets and generate Atom feeds.
This is free and open source software.
Grimoire - lightweight, Groovy-first static site generator
Grimoire is a lightweight, Groovy-first static site generator distributed as a Gradle plugin.
It transforms Markdown and HTML content into static websites using Groovy’s SimpleTemplateEngine for pages, layouts and reusable partials.
Pages can include native Groovy front matter, while structured data and automatically generated navigation trees are available to templates. Grimoire also handles assets, compiles Sass and SCSS stylesheets, and provides a local development server for previewing the generated site.
This is free and open source software.
usbtree - TUI tool to inspect the USB device tree
usbtree is a cross-platform terminal user interface for inspecting USB device hierarchies.
It presents connected devices and hubs as a live, colour-coded tree with device classes, connection speeds, friendly names, port paths, identifiers, serial numbers, power requirements, and child devices.
The utility automatically detects hardware being connected or removed and records these events in a timestamped log. On Linux, it can display live device activity, measure bandwidth through usbmon, safely eject storage devices, and show PCI hardware in a separate view.
usbtree uses nusb for USB enumeration, avoiding dependencies on libusb. Basic operation does not require root privileges.
This is free and open source software.