Education, Free Software, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 19, 2026

• Watts Martin ☛ Org Mode, Marked, and Workflows

  Which is true. The thing is, the obverse is also true: when you focus purely on the markup semantics, it’s hard to argue that Markdown is “better” than any other system. I’ve been doing more writing in Org Mode lately, partially just as an experiment, and partially because—as I’ve noted more than once—the strength of Org Mode isn’t the markup part, it’s the mode part: properties and tags and dates and other bits and bobs entirely outside Markdown’s purview. Here’s a few things I’ve noticed: [...]

• Sal ☛ Re: Org mode

  It’s so true. Org mode should be called God mode because that’s what it is for plain text inside Emacs. But that’s the catch: inside Emacs. As Watts says: [...]

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: beframe version 1.6.0

  beframe enables a frame-oriented Emacs workflow where each frame has access only to the list of buffers visited therein. In the interest of brevity, we call buffers that belong to frames “beframed”.

• James Cherti ☛ Is Emacs slow on files with very long lines? Here is how to fix it (e.g, minified JavaScript or CSS, SQL dumps, large JSON files...)

  Emacs can slow down when opening files with exceptionally long lines, such as minified JavaScript or CSS, SQL dumps, or large JSON files. One solution to prevent these files from slowing down Emacs is to use the built-in global-so-long-mode (or so-long-mode). When you visit such files, this mode detects abnormally long lines and automatically disables expensive minor modes that could slow down or, in the worst cases, freeze Emacs.

  Below is a configuration to improve how global-so-long-mode handles these files, balancing performance and usability.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Tooling Announcements: Firefox DevTools MCP 0.10.3 released

    • It's FOSS ☛ Bonjour! Firefox Smart Window Users Now Get to Use a French AI [Ed: Mozilla pushing slop is moral bankruptcy of this "GAFAMozilla" outfit, which once upon a time has a goal of Open Web; If slop browsers had real potential, not just hype and buzzwords, many people would use them; instead many of them shut down and throw in the towel, there's nothing to see there]

      Mistral Small 4 is the latest in Smart Window's model lineup, available for users in France, Canada, and the US.

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

  • Paul Tagliamonte ☛ Paul Tagliamonte: Why Write?

    As a graduate of a liberal arts university, I wound up, unsurprisingly, taking a lot of classes in every possible academic discipline. Thinking back to the person that I was going into university, I don’t think I would have chosen to take them – after all, my degree was in the sciences; I’d have been stoked to do nothing more than wall-to-wall computer science until I ran out of coursework and filled the rest of my hours with research and independent studies with my professors (which, I guess I did actually do, just not as much as I would have otherwise).

• Education

  • Chris Coyier ☛ I’ll be at Axe-Con 2027

    Axe-con ’27: The world’s largest digital accessibility event.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Victor Kropp ☛ Modern graphic file formats

    There are now not one, but two formats, that can efficiently handle both 12MP photos and 16×16 icons. WebP is slightly older and supported more widely, AVIF is even more compact, and has wide enough support in modern browsers.

  • John D Cook ☛ Phone words

    The telephone keypad mapping (ITU E.161 standard) is a poor attempt at making phone numbers more memorable. For starters, there’s no way to encode 0 or 1 [2]. It’s unlikely a phone number will correspond to anything memorable unless you come up with the word first and then try to obtain the phone number, such as 800 FLOWERS.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ NTP, an atomic clock, and having a great time at the world's largest VCF

    After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server).

    Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of my 'time tokens'), and in some ways worse (I only got to see about 10% of the exhibits—if that).

    But I made this video summarizing my experience: [...]