Free Software and Software Development News

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 14, 2026

• Android Police ☛ I replaced Google Maps with an ad-free, open source navigation app; I couldn't be happier

  Recently, I came across an open source app called Horizon Maps that promises to do just that. It has no ads, no recommendations, and only does one thing. And I think it's great for that.

• Sacha Chua ☛ EmacsConf: recording and re-recording introductions

  I record brief introductions for all the EmacsConf talks so that they can be played automatically. That way, hosts don't have to worry about pronunciations on air, and there's one less changeover that might introduce technical issues. We can cut to the next talk a bit abruptly because everything runs off a crontab-powered schedule to keep things running on time on multiple tracks, so it helps to have a little transition between Q&A and the next talk. It's also nice having some kind of pronunciation reference so that when people discuss the talks or even just think about them with their internal monologues, they might have a better sense of how to say the speakers' names. We ask speakers to say their names at the beginning of their presentation, but people don't often include their last names, so the intro gets that consistently. The intro videos are available on the talk pages after the conference, and I've occasionally used them to remember how someone's name is pronounced.

• [Old] Gonçalo Valério ☛ Managing SSH keys with KeePassXC is actually quite nice

  There must be a better way than storing them encrypted on your disk and manually inputting the passphrases while loading them to the agent every morning.

  When KeePassXC showed up in multiple comments, I had to take a look at it.

• It's FOSS ☛ Developer's $300 Embroidery Machine Required a Subscription, So They Built This Open Source Tool

  ZigZag turns SVG art into stitches, exports five file formats, and can send designs over Bluetooth to an app-controlled Brother embroidery machine.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Michael Mitchell ☛ Where Did All the Feeds Go?

    And apparently, I'm not imagining the broader problem. A recent study by RSSLY found that only 24% of the websites it examined had a discoverable, working RSS feed. It also found that 57% of the websites in its historical comparison that advertised feeds in 2016 no longer advertised them in 2026.1 Another study by Mark Nottingham identified more than half a million RSS and Atom feeds, but found that only 38.1% had evidence of being updated within the preceding year.2

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ 1,000 donations, and counting

    Yesterday, The Document Foundation received over 1,000 donations in a single day, setting a new record. While we take no pleasure in the operational problems faced by other organisations, the timing suggests that many people are reconsidering their reliance on a single cloud service provider for their documents.

• Programming/Development

  • Java/Golang

    • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Probabilistic data structures in Go

      Probabilistic data structures give you approximate answers to questions about the data they handle. Does the set contain a certain item? How many unique items are in the collection? Which items appear most often? Unlike deterministic structures like sets and frequency tables, the answers might not be exact, but in return, you can drastically reduce memory usage.

  • Rust

    • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 677

      Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!