Free Software and Open Data Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 05, 2026

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: doric-themes version 1.3.0

  These are my minimalist themes. They use few colours and will appear mostly monochromatic in many contexts. Styles involve the careful use of typography, such as italics and bold italics.

• James Cherti ☛ Optimizing Emacs Startup - Guide to Deferred Package Loading with use-package

  As an Emacs user, your configuration can easily grow from a few lightweight adjustments to a massive, hundred-package IDE. Without careful management, Emacs startup time can degrade from sub-second execution to several seconds, or minutes, in the worst cases. Eager package loading is one common source of startup overhead. This guide explains how Emacs loads libraries, how use-package configures package loading, and how deferred loading can reduce startup time.

• Neovim ☛ Lua-async - Neovim docs

  Structured async API for Lua code that waits on event-loop work. vim.async lets Lua code wait for timers, callbacks, and other tasks without blocking Nvim's event loop. Async work runs inside tasks, which can pause at checkpoints and manage child tasks created while they are running.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Rachel Kaufman ☛ GNU Terry Pratchett - 'A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.'

    Well, over the last decade, nearly 2000 websites have added the HTTP header x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett, meaning that his name continues to travel the Internet and will never be forgotten. As of this week, this site is one of them.

• Server

  • Kubernetes Blog ☛ Kubernetes v1.37: KubeletInUserNamespace (aka Rootless mode) Graduates to Beta

    Kubernetes v1.37 promotes the KubeletInUserNamespace feature gate to beta. With this feature enabled, all of the node components (kubelet, CRI and OCI runtimes, CNI plugins, and kube-proxy) can run as a non-root user on the host, using a Linux user namespace. This technique is also known as rootless mode.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ How much should you trust your OSS data?

      …Said every researcher, everywhere. However in most cases of open source related data, we are only looking at part of the whole. Why am I writing this post? Because many of us (including many business decision-makers) are too comfortable with unsubstantiated data. We’ve gotten used to it. Our models assume that it’s smelly and we adjust the logic and weights to compromise. When it comes to open source, our confidence is even lower, even though our resulting decisions can directly impact individuals whom we collectively depend on.

    • Techdirt ☛ Apple, Google Pathetically Buckle To Trump’s Dim And Lazy Effort To Rename Lake Ontario

      Google was the first to quickly make the change to appease Trump; in fact they acted so quickly on this the change to Google Maps happened before the government had even finished implementing it. Apple was very quick to follow suit, despite the fact that nobody at the company actually supports the ridiculous and pointless change: [...]