Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Education, Digital Sovereignty, Open Data, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 21, 2026

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Tyler Sticka ☛ My Own Little New Post CLI – Tyler Sticka

    Since refactoring my site back in 2023, authoring posts is pretty simple. But to make it even easier, I wrote a little helper script.

    When I run node tools/new from my project directory, the script…

  • Rlang ☛ [R] How to modify the theme used by blogdown?

    My website is built using blogdown and published on Netlify via CI/CD. Recently, I updated my Hugo version from 0.92 to 0.154.2. Unfortunately, this update broke the deployment pipeline due to an incompatibility in one of the files within the diary theme.

    When your Hugo theme is no longer compatible with a newer Hugo version or if you simply want to customize its behavior, there are two primary ways to handle it.

• Education

  • Arcan ☛ Arcan Spring Hackathon Report

    In terms of actual work, this time around was less flashy than the last (part 1, part 2) as everyone already had their thing to work on and we are in more of a ‘spit and polish’ phase than one of ‘adding more fuel to the fire’. Newcomers (Mirco) had to be on-boarded, and Valts ran around stomping bugs like a kid from that one recruitment ad in Starship Troopers.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • Jan Wildeboer ☛ Hello Digital Autonomy

    I never really liked the term Digital Sovereignty for the way I have built my digital presence. Sovereignty is about nations. Big, bureaucratic, faceless organisations. It feels heavy. Burdensome. Static.

    I want to switch to a term that better expresses how I aim to be in control of my digital presence. Free to do things the way I want them to be. Sharing all of it. Helping others, based on agreed values and principles. And I think I have a better term for that, a term that feels much more natural Digital Autonomy.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Creative Commons ☛ Licensing Best Practices for the Sharing of Scientific Data

      Open data is central to accelerating scientific progress because it allows researchers everywhere to freely access, verify, combine, and build upon existing data without legal or technical barriers, dramatically increasing the speed, scale, and collaboration of discovery.

      By encouraging adoption alongside those already maximizing open access to publicly funded data, our recommendations provide a baseline for globally interoperable and practical licensing and attribution practices. They make open data easier to access, share, and reuse with clear guidance and actionable steps. Consistent licensing reduces legal uncertainty, improves interoperability, and enables faster discovery and collaboration. Adopting these practices strengthens trust, transparency, and global scientific cooperation.

      This updated report expands the scope of the original beyond climate while retaining the core principles around standard legal terms and metadata for maximized sharing and interoperability. The report and its summary version are resources that anyone who wants to publish open data can use and include guidance on both licensing and metadata.

    • Rlang ☛ 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).

• Standards/Consortia

  • Raphael Amorim ☛ Introducing Glyph Protocol for Terminals

    There’s one thing about terminals that has always bothered me: to get your favorite editor, prompt, or TUI to render nicely, you are almost always forced to install a patched font.

    You know the drill. You open a fresh terminal, pull up your editor, and half of the UI is replaced by little rectangles — the infamous tofu. The fix is to go download a Nerd Font, or Powerline, or some other patched set, and switch your terminal font to it. A font that is often well above 10MB in size1. All of that — just so you can render one icon, or maybe a handful of them.