Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 23, 2026,
updated Aug 23, 2026

• Evan Hahn ☛ Vim's UserGettingBored autocmd

  Vim’s automatic commands feature, usually shortened to “autocmd”, lets you run code when various events occur. For example, you could implement an auto-save feature by binding the TextChanged event to the :w command.

  Vim has over 100 events, from “buffer was created” to “file was saved”. But one of them sticks out to me: UserGettingBored. Here’s the documentation: [...]

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Allen Downey ☛ Think Java, but interactive

    The online version of Think Java now features interactive widgets that run the code examples in the browser. For readers, it means you can try out the examples, modify them, and test your code. And for us it means we can publish an interactive version of the book without providing servers.

  • Perl ☛ WebDyne 3.0 released -- now with PAGI, Server-Sent Events and WebSockets

    I’ve released WebDyne 3.0, an update to the Perl-based dynamic HTML engine I have created.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Fernando Borretti ☛ A Syncthing and SQLite Gotcha

    So, I have this little app, Epoch, that I use to keep a journal. It’s a tiny Rust web app that runs as a systemd service and uses SQLite as the database. I use a desktop and a laptop regularly, and use Syncthing to synchronize them, including Epoch’s database. That way I can use the app on both devices without needing a server to synchronize them, the tradeoff being that I have to make sure the sync is finished before performing any mutations.

    But I had this bug. Say I edit today’s entry on the laptop, come home, wait for Syncthing to finish, then I’d open today’s entry on the desktop, and the text would be missing. It’s not that the server is holding a lock on the file and preventing the sync: opening the database with the sqlite3 command line tool shows the new text is there. If I restart the server, Epoch can read the new text.

    My mental model was: [...]

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • British Library ☛ Sharing British Library Open Metadata with Our Communities

      This policy reaffirms the British Library’s commitment to making metadata as open as possible, and confirms the terms of licence, limitations and exceptions for sharing the British Library's open metadata.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Yash Garg ☛ The Schrödinger Email

    How hard can emails be? Or so I thought. Boy, was I wrong. This post is basically me fucking around with email infrastructure and finding out the hard way.

  • Justin Duke ☛ EPUB is not that scary

    EPUB is a zip file that contains some metadata files and a bunch of XHTML. That is all.

    This was delightful as a discovery and disastrous as a derailment, since now I'm going to use that as license to spend some time — just like I did when I did my deep dive into ICS a while back Are calendars underrated? — to daydream about some features that might be frivolous and unjustifiable, but nonetheless fun to take advantage of.

  • J B Crawford ☛ the figure of the earth

    Ribbons and medals, though, do not quite capture the breadth of Hotine's work. His greatest memorial is an artifact of his work: squat concrete pillars surmounted by a triangular brass plate. Found atop mountains and hills throughout the United Kingdom, these "trig points," designed by Hotine himself, are the physical references of the Retriangulation of Great Britain. This effort, spanning from 1935 to 1962 with the interruption of WWII, revised an original triangulation (initiated in the 18th century) as the basis for British surveying. Through the course of this effort, Hotine developed methods that would revolutionize the field of geodesy. His collaboration with mapmakers from the United States, a continuation of his wartime surveying for the Allied Forces, set the stage for one of geodesy's most ambitious projects: a measurement taken across the Atlantic Ocean.