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Free and Open Source Software, and Review
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charmascii - generate decorative ASCII art from text
The application provides a collection of font styles, decorative borders and colour effects. Users can customise the appearance of their text and produce anything from simple monochrome headings to colourful banners with gradients and framing.
charmascii can display its output directly in a terminal or generate files for use elsewhere. It is also available as a Go library, allowing developers to incorporate its rendering capabilities into their own applications.
The software includes an interface based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling compatible AI agents and other tools to request ASCII art generation programmatically.
This is free and open source software.
Pully - Numberlink-style logic puzzle game
Pully is a logic puzzle game in which the objective is to draw a single continuous line through a grid. The line must visit every square exactly once while passing through numbered checkpoints in the correct order.
The game is inspired by Numberlink-style puzzles but introduces additional constraints that require careful planning. Later levels feature larger grids, fewer checkpoints and obstacles that restrict how the line can travel across the board.
The controls are designed around direct interaction with the puzzle. Players extend their path by dragging between adjacent squares and can return to an earlier point when they need to reconsider their solution.
Apache cTAKES - clinical natural language processing platform
The software combines rule-based processing, dictionaries and machine learning techniques to identify medical concepts and their relationships. It can recognise clinical terminology and associate extracted information with standard medical vocabularies, making the results more useful for subsequent analysis.
Apache cTAKES uses a modular architecture that allows different components to be assembled into processing pipelines. It is particularly suited to clinical research, information extraction and applications that need to interpret large collections of medical narratives.
This is free and open source software.
SSort - automatically organise Python statements
SSort applies a bottom-up approach to source code organisation. Lower-level definitions appear earlier in a module, while statements depending on those definitions appear further down. This follows Python’s execution model, where statements are evaluated sequentially when modules are loaded.
The utility also organises statements inside classes, applying conventions for attributes, constructors, public methods and other class members. It deliberately avoids imposing unnecessary grouping decisions where no dependencies exist.
SSort complements tools such as Black and isort. Rather than replacing their formatting capabilities, it concentrates on the structural ordering of Python statements.
This is free and open source software.
Koko - image gallery for desktop and touch devices
The application is particularly suited to users who want to browse their photograph collections without the complexity of a full-featured photo management system. Its interface presents pictures as collections of thumbnails, allowing users to move between groups of images and examine individual photographs.
Koko forms part of KDE’s family of convergent applications, which are designed to adapt their interfaces to different screen sizes and input methods. This makes it suitable for Linux desktops as well as devices running Plasma Mobile.
This is free and open source software.
BOSGAME VTA-439 Mini PC Running Linux: Thief
Thief is a good fit for the VTA-439 at 1920×1080. Based on the benchmark, I’d start with Normal under CachyOS: its 65 FPS average and 52 FPS minimum leave enough performance to make the higher settings tempting without pushing the Radeon 890M too hard. Low is the better choice if you want more headroom.
Windows 11 takes the honours here. It beats CachyOS at four of the five presets, and its higher minimum at Very High is particularly welcome. The Linux lead at Very Low is real, but it doesn’t reflect the rest of the results.
I’d still be happy to use CachyOS for this one. There’s enough performance at Low and Normal that I wouldn’t feel compelled to boot into Windows just to play Thief.
MicroCloud - automated private cloud infrastructure
The platform combines LXD for running virtual machines and system containers, MicroCeph for distributed storage and MicroOVN for networking. These components work together to provide a consistent environment for hosting applications and services across multiple physical machines.
MicroCloud is particularly suitable for organisations that need local computing infrastructure without the complexity of a large-scale cloud deployment. Typical uses include edge computing, development and testing environments, distributed offices and small private data centres.
The software automates much of the initial infrastructure configuration, while the underlying components retain their own management interfaces. Administrators can subsequently expand clusters, manage workloads and configure access to shared resources.
This is free and open source software.