news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Open Data, and Standards
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Scott Laird ☛ Formatting Data Links in Grafana Tables
Data links are Grafana’s way to add HTML links to a dashboard, but they don’t quite work the way you’d expect them to with tables.
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Kevin Boone ☛ Announcing Caztor 1.0 – a browser for small-net protocols like Gemini and Gopher
Caztor is the latest iteration of the JGemini browser. It has a new name, and a heap of new features.
JGemini started life in 2021, as a Java-based graphical browser for the Gemini protocol. There weren’t any graphical browsers for Linux at that time and, as one of the stated design goals of the Gemini protocol was that it should be possible to write a browser “in a weekend”, I undertook to do just that.
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Applications
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Barry Kauler ☛ Limine Installer bug fix
Forum member peasthope discovered a bug with Limine Installer:
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=16680
Looking at the posts in that thread and in the Limine Installer code, I found a potential bug. I'm not 100% sure that it is the specific bug that peasthope has encountered, but it is a bug.
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Education
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APNIC ☛ Strengthening your network security with APNIC’s products and tools
Over the past few years, the APNIC community has increasingly recognized that routing security isn’t a single task, it’s an evolving practice. At APNIC, this has meant not only supporting operators with familiar tools like the Internet Routing Registry (IRR), but also developing clearer pathways toward modern, cryptographically robust approaches such as RPKI Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs) and, soon, Autonomous System Provider Authorizations (ASPAs). Alongside this, new services like APNIC DASH are helping Members turn complex routing data into something more accessible, actionable, and timely.
The webinar Strengthen your network security with APNIC products and tools in late March 2026 brought those threads together for 211 participants, discussed what routing security looks like in 2026, how it’s changing, and the role APNIC’s tools can play in helping operators strengthen the resilience of the global Internet.
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postmarketOS ☛ The postmarketOS Conference
We are very excited to organize and present to you the inaugural postmarketOS conference in Autumn later this year. It's the perfect place for discussions, workshops and collaboration in the postmarketOS and Linux Mobile space, including our upstream projects. We want to connect developers and users with each other, provide room for technological deep-dives, governance round-tables, hands-on learning and hacking sessions.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Kieran Healy ☛ New York City Hexmaps
The five boroughs of New York City can be informally or formally carved up into many different pieces, depending on what it is that you’re doing. As part of an ongoing project, I recently made an R package, nycmaps, that lets you draw maps of some of these geographies. Things being what they are, these spatial units don’t necessarily overlap in compatible ways. City, State, and Congressional Districts, School Districts, Police Precincts, Fire Companies, Election Precincts, Municipal Court Districts, Zip Codes … there are loads of them. Some of them are quite straightforward; others patiently lie in wait to trap unwary analysts (I’m looking at you, Zip Codes / ZCTAs).
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Standards/Consortia
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Android Police ☛ This is the decades-old Gmail trick I still use every day
That changed when I started using a simple feature built into Gmail that most people either forget exists or don't know about.
It's called plus addressing, and it's rarely, if ever, addressed by Google. But after you start using it deliberately, it easily restructures how your inbox works without adding any complexity or cognitive overhead.
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[Old] Noah Petherbridge ☛ What we once had (at the height of the XMPP era of the Internet)
A discussion thread I got pulled into on Mastodon had me suddenly nostalgic for something we once had on the Internet, and which was really nice while it lasted: the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, or sometimes referred to by its original name, Jabber.
What kicked off the discussion was somebody asking about a more modern "decentralized chat platform" known as Matrix (not the movie). A lot of people online talk about how they like Matrix, but I one time had a go at self-hosting my own Matrix node (which I feel I should rant about briefly, below), and the discussion turned back towards something that we used to have which was (in my opinion) loads better, XMPP.
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