Free Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 30, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ A fun debugging story from this weekend

    I probably spent a good 15-20 minutes trying to reason why my simple filter and map loops didn’t work.

    Eventually, I found out that when I was trying to find one player from the list to copy their name, I had accidentally searched in the developer console which filters the output shown.

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Don’t let RSS rob you

    That is, you can read some sites in your reader and visit others where they live. In fact Newsblur (and others probably) will allow you to choose on a per-feed basis whether to see the plain text or the styled version.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Dedoimedo ☛ OpenOffice in 2026 - A relic from a better time

    For many years, OpenOffice was my go-to non-Microsoft office suite. I used it well, and extensively, and even wrote a whole bunch of articles on its use, including various different tools and spins and such. But then, LibreOffice happened, and OpenOffice sort of languished behind. Funnily, I was under the impression that the development had ceased. To my amazement, recently, I figured that this wasn't the case. While the pace ain't relativistic, there sure are up-to-date versions of the software available. So I thought, well, I must take it for a ride, no.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Daniel Doubrovkine ☛ Adventures in Daylight Saving, Norfolk Island, and Time Zone Math (in Ruby)

    distance_of_time_in_words is a small Ruby gem that turns two Time objects into a human-readable string like “3 days and 4 hours”. Two separate bug reports against it this year turned out to be variations on the same theme: computing a duration between two timestamps is not the trivial subtraction it looks like, the moment time zones are involved. Both fixes shipped in dotiw 5.6.0.

  • [Old] Paul McCann ☛ Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV

    The README for the file explains that lines with overly long fields will be broken up into multiple lines. Specifically, if the neighborhood name is over 38 characters, or if the half-width katakana (half-width katakana) pronunciation field is over 76 characters, the line will be split into two lines. The overly-long neighborhood field will be continued and all other fields will be duplicated. This is an abbreviated sample of what that looks like: [...]