Web Sites and Free Software: PersonalSit.es, Kanata, Neovim/Lilypond

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 14, 2026

• Personalsit.es ☛ PersonalSit.es

  This site was built to share and revel in each others’ personal sites, and is currently home to ~1003 of them. Witness these in wonderment and awe. Immaculate. Stunning. How did they do that? Yes, you should definitely get around to redesigning yours soon.

• James G ☛ Growing with my website

  There are many lenses through which to think about the question – the technology behind a website, the design of a website 1, the philosophies and goals behind our website, and more. My answer was that a few years ago I started worrying less about posting on lots of different topics, and accepted the joy of putting all my writing in one place.

• Sacha Chua ☛ Trying out Kanata for one-shot modifiers and home row mods on Linux

  Prot is a fan of one-shot modifiers. I started experimenting with them using keyd, but now I've moved to using kanata based on his recommendation. I also want to experiment with home row mods so that I can hold down: [...]

• Reilly Spitzfaden ☛ Neovim/Lilypond: MIDI Files in the Terminal and More

  The workflow I described worked OK, but there were a few issues with MIDI in Audacity. I had chosen to play the MIDI file from Audacity since I could conveniently script it to reload the MIDI file whenever the file updated, and Audacity works with IAC. Audacity note tracks seem to internally convert MIDI to the Allegro format, and whether because of that or something else, I noticed that faster rhythms played back with some lag. I also wasn't able to place the cursor partway through the track and start there — I had to select a region in order to start later in the track.

  Finally, I had never been fully satisfied having to use a GUI program for MIDI playback. I have joint pain, and I've found that working in the terminal using only the keyboard both helps with that and is faster for me at this point. Today I want to discuss what I've found about playing MIDI files from the terminal, as well as some Neovim setup tweaks I've found helpful. Let's get started!

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • LWN ☛ Version-controlled databases using Prolly trees

    Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use of B-trees, which are tree structures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on block devices. Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of a variant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire database. The data structure it uses could well be of interest to other projects.

    The company behind Dolt, DoltHub, makes its money selling hosted versions of three Apache-licensed open-source projects: Dolt, Doltgres, and DoltLite. The projects are intended to be drop-in replacements for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, respectively. They have separate frontends for the different SQL dialects, but the projects share a common storage backend that supports version-control operations.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • LWN ☛ Bug-monitoring expectations and Fedora GNOME packages

    For a number of years, users submitting bugs reports against GNOME packages in Fedora have received an auto-reply saying that the reports were not actively monitored; users were encouraged to file bugs with GNOME upstream instead. However, that practice seems to be in conflict with the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) policy that package maintainers ""deal with reported bugs in a timely manner"". On April 28, FESCo discussed the disconnect between practice and policy; so far, it has only opted to tweak the wording of the automatic response.

    Many of the GNOME packages in Fedora are maintained by members of Red Hat's desktop team. Bugs filed against some of those packages, such as gnome-disk-utility, gnome-session, and nautilus, are automatically assigned to the "gnome-sig" alias in the Bugzilla bug tracker. There are 21 members in the group, but it is unclear if all users in that group are currently active