Software: RedPen, Jitsi Meet, Opera, LibreOffice

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Tools to improve English text
The Grumpy Editor reviewed proselint in 2016 and compared it to "one of the world's worst elementary-school teachers criticizing you in front of the entire class about irrelevant details". I wanted to check whether the teacher had matured, but, alas, the project has been inactive since 2018. There are several contenders for the nagging teacher position, though. One is alex whose aim is to point out insensitive and inconsiderate writing. While alex is useful in some cases (changing "chairman" to "chair" or "chairperson" is a good improvement that doesn't introduce unnatural language, for example), I found the tool too noisy. It complained about "simple math" and "invalid characters" in a technical manual (although "basic math" might indeed be an improvement). Computers are good at pattern matching but language is all about context. The documentation observes that "alex isn't very smart" and I tend to agree. (Interestingly, alex doesn't find that phrase offensive.)
Another tool is write good which flags "weasel" words (like "very") and passive voice. LWN previously looked at writegood-mode in the context of Emacs. Personally, I didn't find the feedback from write-good particularly useful, but opinions differ when it comes to passive voice.
RedPen looks like a credible alternative to proselint. It specifically mentions technical documentation and has support for several common markup formats, including Markdown, Textile, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, and LaTeX. Installation seemed tricky at first. I couldn't find a Debian or RPM package, no Flatpak, and the Snap image is from 2016 (while the latest release is from earlier this year).
As I was waiting for the download of the 150MB file, I found an online instance into which text can be copied. The online version is particularly useful since it makes it easy to disable checks. One does not need to learn about the configuration file but can simply click some check boxes. Obviously, the online instance is not a solution if the text is private or has too many embarrassing mistakes to copy it to a random web site. I also found PyRedPen, which is a set of Python scripts that allow sending a file to this online instance of RedPen for analysis.
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Bryan Quigley: Don't Download Zoom!
First, I strongly recommend switching to Jitsi Meet:
It's free
It doesn't require you to sign up at all
It's open source
It's on the cutting edge of privacy and security features -
Opera Web Browser 69 Released with Twitter Integration
Opera web browser released the new stable version 69 today. The new release features built-in Twitter support.
Click the three-dot icon at the bottom of the sidebar, then you can tick Twitter in the Messengers section.
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Annual Report 2019: Updates from the Design community
Based on LibreOffice’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which provide the core framework, several significant changes were made to LibreOffice’s user interface during 2019. The most important were the improvements and the additions to icon styles, and the release of the NotebookBar in additional flavours.
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