Free Software, Digital Sovereignty, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 31, 2026

• Sacha Chua ☛ Emacs Carnival Aug 2026: Information management and knowledge graphs

  This article was inspired by the Emacs Carnival on the search for knowledge. Thanks to Charlie Holland for hosting! It's a good excuse to reflect on how I manage my notes, which is something I'm really interested in.

• James Cherti ☛ Fixing Emacs Dired Defaults: Settings for Better File Management

  This article presents a set of Emacs Dired configuration changes to enhance file management. The configurations sort directories before files for easier navigation, hide dotfiles, reduce unnecessary confirmation prompts, prevent UI lockups caused by network latency, among other improvements. Each configuration explains the behavior of the relevant setting, its benefits, and its tradeoffs, making it easier to determine which changes are appropriate.

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

  • Leon Mika ☛ Vibelog: MD Treatment - Trying Out Pi and Kimi k3

    I’m moving markdown files from an Obsidian vault to a private Hugo site, and I needed something that did text transformations. And these were text transformations that would’ve been… well, not difficult to automate, but annoying to automate. The transformations themselves would be easy, it’s just knowing where to apply them. Context is important, and I was not confident that a simple pattern matcher would’ve picked up or applied the transformations correctly.

  • [Old] Charalampos Kardaris ☛ My comments run on email

    Doing so in a static blog poses a big challenge. There is no actual server running that can handle requests and process data. That means that you do not have the necessary infrastructure for user accounts. The readers cannot log in and send their comments and there is no straightforward way to take those comments and automatically post them online.

    Another method is therefore needed to receive the comments and provide them as input to the static site generator, in my case jekyll.

• Education

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ A lot of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from open web

    I got access to [Internet] (through one of those 56K modems that cried like it was tortured every time we connected to the high way of [Internet]) when I was maybe 10 years old, back in the 1990s. I grew up with three excellent sources of open knowledge: school, library and the [Internet].

    I’ve learned so much over the years from the [Internet], thanks to other people who shared that information in open, public websites and discussion forums. Finnish programming forums like Ohjelmointiputka and Mureakuha were instrumental in my early years of learning programming and later on, Stack Overflow and various blogs continued my learning journey.

• Digital Sovereignty

  • Politico ☛ Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech

    The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.

    My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.

    But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.

• Standards/Consortia

  • SneakerWeb ☛ sneakerweb

    Instead, websites are stored directly on user devices, and transferred between them through the ultimate fallback infrastructure: physical storage media.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Before NTP there were Time and Daytime

    In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest, I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868, for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively.