Free, Libre Software and Sharing Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 07, 2026

• Hylki ☛ Hylki — a modern email client for the Linux desktop

  Hylki is a fast, GNOME-native email client with a three-pane layout, unified inbox, and support for OAuth accounts. Fast to open, effortless to read, and private by default.

• It's FOSS ☛ Siemens Abruptly Takes Down OpenRadioss, But a Fork is Already Live

  Another reminder of why open source saves software from being lost forever.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ dbForge 2026.2 Adds a PostgreSQL Debugger, Visual Object Editors and Broader Context for dbForge Hey Hi (AI) Assistant

    The release adds a PostgreSQL Debugger, visual editors for event triggers, functions and procedures, as well as file attachments and model choice in dbForge Hey Hi (AI) Assistant.

    Devart, a leading developer of database management software, has released dbForge 2026.2, the latest update to its unified ecosystem of professional database tools. The new version adds a brand-new embedded PostgreSQL Debugger and visual object editors to dbForge Studio for PostgreSQL. dbForge Hey Hi (AI) Assistant gains broader context awareness through file attachments, supports models from Anthropic and OpenAI, and is now available in a free Express edition. The release also brings SQL refactoring enhancements, quicker access to test data generation, a new “Last modified” column in schema comparison documents and reports, and much more.

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

  • Sal ☛ Pico.sh has been great

    Pico deployments use rsync, which is a great way to ship a static site. I build the site locally on my home server, which takes a fraction of a second, and then rsync sends only the files that have meaningfully changed over to the live site. This is simple and efficient, not to mention transparent, as the rsync logs tell me exactly what’s changing.

  • Max Glenister ☛ Chasing build speed on Jekyll 4

    I’ve been putting off upgrading from Jekyll 3.10. Partly late-adopter habit, partly because my setup worked fine, and a version bump seemed simple enough. I should know better by now. It mostly was.

    I run Jekyll on my NAS, in Docker, with a Gemfile shared by the GitHub Pages deploy. I don’t use Jekyll’s incremental build locally, so every time I saved a post I was writing, Jekyll did a full rebuild before I could preview the change. This year that’s added up, the best part of 90 new posts and the site’s up to 360 files for Jekyll to churn through each time. That wait had crept up to 46 seconds, long enough that I’d lost the thread of what I was writing by the time the page reloaded.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • Ruud van Asseldonk ☛ Hosting without hyperscalers

    Today, 20 years later, the web no longer works likes this. Shared hosting still exists, but like PHP, it feels like a relic of a different time. Instead of local companies that advertise in paper magazines, we ended up with a small number of giants that almost everybody depends on: the hyperscalers. And somehow, they are all based in the United States. As our society grew dependent on the web and the [Internet], this hosting monoculture has created a precarious situation. So after 10 years of hosting my blog on Google Cloud, I’m now back hosting on European infrastructure. Let’s dive in.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Hackaday ☛ The EDG C++ Compiler Frontend Has Been Open Sourced

    Recently [John Spicer] of the EDG C++ compiler front-end project announced that the project will be made open source, from now on managed by the non-profit C++ Alliance. Related source code can be found on the GitHub account.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Chris ☛ Predicting Peace

      The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (ucdp) provides free, high-quality data on the durations of armed conflicts. This is their extensive conflict termination dataset covering all armed conflicts (interstate and intrastate) where there have been flare-ups of violence (called episodes in the data) after the second world war.

    • Free Range Statistics ☛ World crude oil stocks

      How much crude oil does the world have in its ready-to-use stocks? Data is collected by the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI) but rarely presented as a total due to missingness and other issues. I do my best in showing at least the stocks of consistently reporting countries, which includes most but not all of the major countries we're be interested in.