Free, Libre Software and Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 07, 2026

• Feld ☛ Immich: Ending The Blood Pact With iCloud Photos

  This poor guy wrote about his frustrations escaping iCloud Photos. I went down this path last year and it was annoying. You can't just trust the copies of photos on your device because they might not be the original/full version, and forcing them to all download might not work as expected. I was running into duplicates, missing files (my local count didn't actually match the official Library count), etc.

• Chris Maiorana ☛ The Emacs Way: Deleting Files

  I know it’s scary, but sometimes you have to delete files, and once they’re gone—they’re gone. I guess that was why GUI systems invented the trash folder. The trash is a safe place to store files you want to delete, just in case you made a mistake.

  In the UNIXy and Emacs worlds, once you delete that file, it’s gone, so you better have your story straight.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Heather J Meeker ☛ The Schisms of Open/Libre/Only Office

    A governance crisis at LibreOffice and a licensing war over OnlyOffice have resulted in the biggest threat to open source office software since Oracle nearly killed the whole Open Office project back in the early 2010s. The open source office software world rarely makes headlines.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Two Years of Valkey

    Two years ago last month, a group of former contributors to the Redis project announced their intention to collaborate instead on a competitive fork.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Marathon Man: how to pace a marathon

      Why is it so hard to know what pace you can maintain? Well, you can predict a pace based on existing races e.g. half marathon, and there are various ways to do this, but it is difficult to tell if you can hold that pace for the marathon. It’s such a brutal event that training up to run one takes time and it equally takes a while to recover, so experimentation is limited. Running a full marathon (at pace) in training, is not advised. So determining an ideal pace involves quite a bit of guesswork.

      Let’s take a look at a big dataset of marathon times – we’ll use the New York City Marathon from 2025 – to see if we can understand how to pace a marathon. There’s an available dataset of chip times (meaning we don’t have to worry about dodgy GPS data) and the course has similar first and second half profiles, allowing us to use these times to understand negative/even/positive splitting. Let’s dive in.

• Programming/Development

  • It's FOSS ☛ I Found A Terminal Tool That Makes CSV Files Look Stunning

    This new tool called Tennis makes CSV files look clean, colorful, surprisingly beautiful and ever more useful.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ Raku Weekly 2026.14 Trim Flip-flops

      Habere’s Corner Habere-et-Dispertire has shared some new notes on using the raku command: TPRC Submit your Talk Don’t Miss the Perl and Raku Conference 2026 in Greenville, SCSAVE THE DATES! Friday through Sunday, June 26-28 Registration is open: https://tprc.us/tprc-2026-gsp Weekly Challenge Weekly Challenge #368 is available for your entertainment.