news
Free, Libre Software and Sharing Leftovers
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Sacha Chua ☛ 2026-10-12 Emacs news
People have been having lots of fun playing Emacs Golf over in r/emacs. Check out the "Fun" category for some examples of people comparing how few keystrokes they need in order to get something done.
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James Cherti ☛ org-ibullets - Display Org mode heading stars as UTF-8 bullets
The org-ibullet Emacs package provides a minor mode that enhances org-mode by displaying headings bullets as UTF-8 characters.
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James Cherti ☛ wizard.el - A Lightweight suite of useful Emacs functions
The philosophy behind this package is simple: use the built-in functions Emacs already provides to do what complex third-party packages do.
Instead of rewriting complex logic from scratch or adding heavy external dependencies, wizard uses built-in Emacs functions to deliver practical features. (For example, to highlighting TODO, it uses the built-in hi-lock)
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Events
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Rajeesh K Nambiar: ICFK 2026: Calligraphy Festival
This year’s edition of International Calligraphy Festival Keralam was yet another great experience, consisting of workshops, demonstrations and talks surrounding calligraphy & typography, much like the last time. Eminent calligraphers of about a dozen scripts shared their expertise and experience.
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Funding
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Linux Magazine ☛ DigitalOcean Ends Open Source Credits Program
In a change that has surprised many open source developers, DigitalOcean has decided to sunset its Open Source Credits Program.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Internet Archive ☛ The People, Counted: Browse Raw Census Records at the Internet Archive - Internet Archive Blogs
The U.S. Census has been in the headlines lately, as proposed changes to the 2030 count have sparked debate over who gets counted and what information should be recorded as part of that process. Few government records say more about a democracy than the census, the once-a-decade count that decides who is represented in Congress, which makes it a natural fit for Democracy’s Library, the Internet Archive’s effort to make government information freely available to everyone. Thanks to the Allen County Public Library, the Internet Archive holds the U.S. Census collection. This collection contains digitized microfilm of the United States federal population census, 1790 to 1930 (minus the lost 1890 Census), and including the Indian Census rolls of 1885 to 1940, which were compiled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
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Standards/Consortia
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J B Crawford ☛ from plesiochronous to synchronous
During the Second World War, it became apparent that many of the long distance network's challenges could be greatly simplified by using digital signaling as the basis of the entire long distance system. In 1943, Bell Labs contributed to the design of an early encrypted voice communications system called SIGSALY. Unlike the "voice scramblers" and other analog techniques of the early phase of the war, SIGSALY was recognizably similar to modern encryption. The voice data was quantized into numerical values, so that digital arithmetic could be used to encode it. In the quest to build a cryptosystem for voice, Bell Labs incidentally built the first applied system for PCM digital voice transmission. After the war, it was an obvious next step to refine this technology and apply it to regular service.
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