Free Software, Edcuation, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 19, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Untrusem ☛ How I browse the Web with uBlock (Hard Mode)

    I have been asked quite a few times, whenever I show my browsing setup to people, Why don't you use the web as a normal user?, Well… Isn't it normal to see or read what you actually want, without all the all the crap ads & trackers being shoved down our throat by every site on the web.

    Actually, my first choice to browse the web are text based browsers like eww, links, offpunk. chawan is nice too (It is more featureful than the others I mentioned). I use librewolf browser for normal browsing, part of it because I help maintain it for guix but if you want more customized and personal experience you should go with using user.js and profiles.json configuration setups.

    Anyway, all it takes is one comment to motivate someone to write something, So with this I want to share how I browse the web with the help of Ublock, Redirector and Localcdn.

• Education

  • Perl ☛ German Perl/Raku Workshop 2027 in Hanover - 14.04.2027-16.04.2027

    The workshop will take place next year from Wednesday, April 14, through Friday, April 16, at the Stadteilzentrum Nordstadt in Hanover.

  • CNET ☛ Inside Defcon, the Conference That Made Cybersecurity Noob-Friendly

    Defcon featured talks and scheduled events, but much of the convention was divided into villages dedicated to particular corners of hacking. There were villages for lock picking, artificial intelligence, aerospace, cars and even boats. Inside them, people were hacking devices, building things, competing in challenges or sitting around tables working on projects I couldn’t begin to identify.

    Elsewhere, teams competed in capture the flag contests, or CTFs, where players solve cybersecurity puzzles to uncover hidden pieces of text known as flags. Some competitions were designed for experts. Others were specifically meant to help beginners learn. I wanted to try one, but never did. There was always another room to explore, another talk to catch or another unfamiliar object I needed someone to explain to me.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: Six more global stories: LibreLocal 2026, part two

  • University of Toronto ☛ Some notes on rectangle regions in GNU Emacs

    What I called a rectangle selection is more correctly called a region rectangle, a rectangular region. In GNU Emacs, a region in general is the text between point (the cursor) and an active mark. When I do the wrong thing with a region rectangle active, the mark and the region (rectangle) deactivate, but the mark remains. When I do the first C-x C-x (exchange-point-and-mark), point and mark flip and the mark is reactivated so I have an active region again, although not a region rectangle. However my cursor is now at the start of the region, not where it was when I fumbled things. Doing C-x C-x flips point and mark again, leaving the mark and region active and returning my cursor to where it was. Then C-x SPC (rectangle-mark-mode) switches from a regular region to a region rectangle.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Hackaday ☛ Compress Links For Optimal QR Codes

    You see, a traditional URL shortener like tinyurl just generates a random code and associates that with your original link in its database. That’s fine, but you’re relying on a third party database. The alternative is to take the URL, encode it in some way, and apply some compression algorithm to the data. If the encoding and compression are open-source– which [Portal ]’s absolutely are— then you can check yourself before following the link, and/or self-host the whole thing for piece of mind. As a bonus [Portal]’s Ha.mr– that’s pronounced Hammer– also gives you a QR code optimized for easy scanning. QR codes have a specific alphanumeric character set built in, and it isn’t the full UTF-8– if you naively use random text, you’re in byte mode, which needs a lot more QR real estate. Or inverting that, the fewer bits it has to store, the easier a qr code is to scan at the same size. The text version of the compressed links can use UTF-8– including emoticons– but they don’t have to.