Update

Due to a change in family responsibilities, I've had to work with a lot more documents in many more ways much more frequently than I have had to in the past. A lot of the tools and approaches are the same that I have used, but I'm using them all …

In those late 20th century days of FOSS ascendancy, any adoption of FOSS by some organization, whether a business or a government, might be heralded loudly in headlines or comment sections or even by the organization PR departments themselves. Stencils proclaiming a company's "love" for Linux are the archetype from …

Welp. My brain reached for the name of the tool used to show the process identification numbers (PIDs) for processes using various ports.
But, it couldn't come up right away with fuser.

So, here I am, leaving a memento of sorts to help me.

Getting older, have a lot beyond …

I wish I could say I was more shocked or disappointed to read the statement from the Free Software Foundation today. But I'm not. I was surprised, a little, when I saw people starting to talk about it, I didn't have any idea what the FSF's next move would be …

I've spent a good part of the day flailing away at the keyboard trying to cram a lot of disparate thoughts about this weekend's news into a text file, but decided my three lines in the exchange below captured the moment as well as anything might for a while:

11 …

Germany's smartphone tracker is open source (Apache 2.0) with a version available on the F-Droid repository. This is the sort of thing that encourages confidence in claims about how the application works.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.corona.tracing/

The multi-colored 3.5" floppy disk pack gave the effort a sort of festive air, as if somehow the huge, colorful murals spread across either side of the dining area in my favorite tacqueria across town were witness to the process via small-but-inedible emissaries.

My only connection was over our …

I've struggled to find good ways to talk about the different levels at which people and groups of people participate in furthering software freedom.

I've found it especially difficult to do this for participation that seems so typical for a particular kind of group, the corporation.

Corporate particpation seems to …

A candidate installment of the mostly-only-imagined series Command-line arcana**

Perhaps the most arcane invocation I regularly direct into a terminal emulator window these last few years is:

mv !$??* !$

Those familiar with the intricacies of bash, particularly history expansion and parameter expansion patterns, probably won't be challenged by this very much …

A basic concept in mathematical physics is the distinction between a scalar and a vector. The first has a magnitude only, the second has a magnitude and a direction.

The concept is broadly applicable but a typical example to illustrate the point notes the difference between speed and velocity. Two …