Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards-Related Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 26, 2026

• Matthew Weber ☛ Why I Don't Use A Dedicated Music Player

  With my phone with me all the time, and access to my Navidrome server, I have all of my 3TB of music with me at all times. I can listen to whatever I want, wherever I want. I’m not limited to whatever I loaded up on the Y1 the last time I hooked it up to my computer. I also don’t have another device to carry around, something just begging to be left behind at the library or cafe.

• FileBrowser Quantum ☛ FileBrowser Quantum Documentation

  The best free self-hosted web-based file manager with source configuration, modern authentication, office support, and lightning-fast search.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • [Old] Major Hayden ☛ Connect Caddy to Porkbun

    I recently told a coworker about Caddy, a small web and proxy server with a very simple configuration. It also has a handy feature where it manages your TLS certificate for you automatically.

    However, one problem I had at home with my CoreOS deployment is that I don’t have inbound network access to handle the certificate verification process. Most automated certificate vendors need to reach your web server to verify that you have control over your domain.

    This post talks about how to work around this problem with domains registered at Porkbun.

  • [Old] Jordan CookCooks ☛ Caddy DNS challenge and Porkbun

    Today, I decided to test this out with my domain registrar Porkbun's hosted DNS via their API. Thankfully, someone has recently published a Caddy plugin for Porkbun - although their README is incorrect and I have PRed a fix, it seems to work great after some propagation delays.

    I set up the global option in Caddyfile for Porkbun, as I know any workloads deployed locally will not be internet-accessible. In the future, I may split between Porkbun DNS for local resources and Cloudflare for internet-facing ones, to take advantage of Cloudflare's WAF services.

  • [Old] Jeffrey Wong ☛ HTTPS on Internal Network (Local) Domain

    I decided to set up a server on my home network to do a variety of things. Since it’s to be shared with other family members, it’s best to use something easy to remember like a domain name. However, as I soon discovered, setting up a domain on my internal network with HTTPS is not straightforward.

    For example, we can’t directly use Let’s Encrypt as the server is only available on an internal network. So no computers outside the network will be able to reach the server, including the Let’s Encrypt server to validate the domain for SSL purposes.

    This is a set of notes of what I did to make this feat possible. I hope this helps you out.

    In the following steps, I assume you already have Ubuntu installed on your server, you have access to the server via SSH or physical access, and you can do basic tasks on Ubuntu like installing programs, creating directories, etc.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Tim Kellogg ☛ Shared Nothing Engineering

    Have you ever partitioned a database table? The idea is, if a table is receiving too much traffic, you can split the table into 2 parts (partitions) and each table only needs to handle half the traffic. Then you relocate those partitions onto different computers, and voila! Scale. 10 partitions = 10x the traffic.

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

  • Saneef H Ansari ☛ Sunsets eleventy-plugin-img2picture

    Following the spirit of Eleventy maintainers meticulously reducing third-party dependencies, I urge folks to use the official Image plugin.

    Today, I’m marking my plugin on NPM repository as deprecated.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The world is not a database

    And yes: computers should support people. People shouldn’t support computers. The idea that we’ll all be left behind if we don’t pour our experiences, information, source material, communications, creativity, and all the rest of it into a computer system is absurd and offensive. By extracting that experience, flattening it, and changing ownership of it, it inherently devalues us, the humans who were its previous custodians. It certainly devalues labor, which is a problem in itself, but it also devalues all of the frictionful, living, breathing parts of being an actual human being.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Hourly Subway Station Flows

      The New York City Subway system is very large and carries a lot of passengers every day. The MTA makes quite a bit of data available about the subway, including data on hourly flow through the system. Now, the MTA can’t track individual pathways people take through the subway. If you use an OMNY card (or before that, a Metrocard) to enter the system, this signals the start of a trip from some specific station or station complex. But unlike some systems, you don’t need to “tag out” of the subway, you just exit through a turnstile. So the system doesn’t know where you exit it. In addition, while many stations are just on a single line, some (like 34 St/Penn Station, or Fulton Street) are station complexes that serve many lines and allow transfers between them.

      However, the MTA does publish hourly Origin-Destination estimates for all pairs of stations. These are their best guess about the flow of traffic from any particular station to any other. Because there are so many combinations, visualizing that sort of data is quite tricky. Even then, you don’t get information about routes through the system, just start and end points. Transit analysts and planners can go further by introducing some further assumptions about Subway users. For example we might assume that commuters take the most efficient route between any given pair of entry and exit stations, and build from there to a picture of flow through the system.

  • Open Access/Content

    • BoingBoing ☛ Tempest arcade source code

      TEMPEST vs TEMPEST is a free book about two of the strangest-looking arcade games ever made. The first is Dave Theurer's Tempest from 1981, the Atari cabinet where you spun a metal knob to rotate around the rim of a glowing geometric tube, shooting spiders and flippers as they crawled up toward you. The game was drawn with bright neon lines on a black screen instead of regular pixels, which is why everything in Tempest looks like it's glowing from inside. The second game is Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 from 1994, a remake for the Atari Jaguar that kept the tube and the shooting but wrapped it all in a psychedelic techno freakout.

• Standards/Consortia

  • BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: The implementation of the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, RFC1149, 25 years later

    Good evening. My name is Peter Hansteen. I was part of the project group at the Bergen Linux User Group which was the first, and to my knowledge the only group to implement and test Internet communications via avian carriers as specified in the internet draft standard called RFC 1149.

  • [Old] Richard Green ☛ Accessible UML Diagrams

    Back in January (how has it been two months already!?), I was working on the UML diagrams for my Kindle Display post and realized I had no idea how to make them accessible for screen readers.

    For those who don’t know, UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a specification for creating visual diagrams to explain computer systems and code.

    Specifically, I was making UML Sequence diagrams which are images used to explain how data flows around a system.

  • Alexandru Scvorțov ☛ What the hell is a decibel?

    Decibels come up often in digital audio and I’ve always found them to be confusing. In this post, I try to explain what decibels are and more importantly, how they’re used in practice.