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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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FSF ☛ February GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring nineteen new GNU releases: Nano, Pies, and more!
Nineteen new GNU releases in the last month (as of February 28, 2026): [...]
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Sal ☛ Vim mode, again (again)
And, disclaimer: pretty much the only reason I'm writing this is to test out blog writing with Zed's Vim mode. I'm at the end of a long day and am not sure I can put coherent sentences together. So, dear reader, caveat emptor.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Tiling a small image with ImageMagick
Say you have a tiny image you want to tile across a larger canvas. Today I learned you can do this with ImageMagick: [...]
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University of Toronto ☛ Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software
I recently read Evan Hahn's The two kinds of error (via), which talks very briefly in passing about logging, and it sparked a thought. I've previously written my system administrator's view of what an error log level should mean, but that entry leaves out something fundamental about log messages, which is that under most circumstances, log messages are for the people operating your software (I've sort of said this before in a different context). When you're about to add a non-debug log message, one of the questions you should ask is what does someone running your program get out of seeing the message.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Closing the gap: why traditional security fails to protect the modern web browser
The once-humble browser is now being redefined as a frontline security control – one capable of preventing both unauthorised access and the exfiltration of sensitive data. Unsurprisingly, attackers have shifted their focus, targeting the browser as both an entry point and an extraction channel.
Security leaders are therefore reassessing the browser’s role within their defensive architecture. What was once treated as a passive access tool is now increasingly viewed as an active enforcement layer, one capable of reducing risk at the precise point where users interact with applications and data.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Jono Alderson ☛ Raise the floor
Most of us build on foundations we did not pour.
WordPress. Shopify. React. Stripe. Chromium. Schema.org. Just part of the soup of open source projects and SaaS products, standards and systems that quietly determine what our websites can and cannot do. We inherit their constraints, layer our ambitions on top, and then try to win inside the boundaries they have set.
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Licensing / Legal
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Consensus Labs LLC ☛ Source-available projects and their AI contribution policies - The Consensus
I surveyed 112 major source-available projects to understand their AI contribution policy and whether or not they have actually accepted explicitly-labeled AI contributions. This survey included programming language implementations, databases, web browsers, programming libraries, operating systems, applications, and infrastructure projects.
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