Well here we are again, more than two months has passed by without another issue of Little Bits and this is not acceptable for me. I need to start getting more organized by using a content schedule and improve how I produce a new issue. All these thoughts just recently clicked into place when I was reading Joel’s post entitled, What interested me today (#1?). You see, when I sit down to produce another issue of Little Bits, I go to my bookmarks found in my personal knowledge management system (PKMS) and start grabbing links that I wish to share. This method is not ideal and doesn’t feel natural to me, plus it’s time-consuming. From now on I will share what I am discovering online organized by topics since the last issue. This allows for me to create a new issue as I go instead of piecing it all together in one sitting. This should provide a more natural experience and also will mean some issues will be bigger or smaller depending on how much I’ve discovered. As well, I feel having topic headings would be beneficial for not just myself, but for the reader and search engine discovery. My workflow maybe changing, but Little Bits should now continue with more frequency, having more value and still remain short and sweet. Enjoy!
Books
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Free e-books on birds and wildlife.
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Book Freebies by Michael W Lucas
Free fictional stories and novels.
Gaming
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A free, fan made modification for Half-Life aiming to refine player’s arsenal and further expand player’s combat options. Featuring AI tweaks, VFX and SFX overhaul in spirit of original, additional weapon functionality and bug fixes, while keeping most changes optional.
Hardware
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A do-it-yourself (DIY) customizable six key macropad powered by Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller.
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Review: XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro on Linux by David Revoy
Knowledge
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Guides, papers, lecture, notebooks and resources for prompt engineering.
Language: MDX, License: MIT
- Demystifying the Apostrophe - how and when to use an apostrophe
- Page styles in LibreOffice Writer
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Built to help teach blind and low-vision folks how to code their own graphics with SVG.
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A markup language for writing e-books.
License: GNU Free Documentation
- How to Propose Features to GNOME
Music
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Awesome List of Music Retailers
List of online stores offering music in high quality, accessible, and permanently ownable formats. Each provider must have the option of lossless audio file format, ability to download media to your system locally without DRM and no special tools required and not require a subscription to purchase media.
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A user-generated music database and marketplace that is open source and crowdsourced.
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24/7 music and sounds from the fediverse.
News
- Google’s decision to deprecate JPEG-XL emphasizes the need for browser choice and free formats
- Edge browser feature sends images you view back to Microsoft
- The Falcon has landed in the Hugging Face ecosystem
- KeePassXC Audit Report
- What to know about Threads by Eugen Rochko (CEO/Founder of Mastodon)
Open Source Software
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Grep-like source code search tool.
Language: Perl, License: Artistic v2.0
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Bandcamp collection downloader
A command-line tool to automatically download all releases purchased with a Bandcamp account.
Language: Kotlin, License: GNU AGPLv3
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The Doszip Commander is an LFN (long file name) aware text user interface (TUI) file manager (Norton Commander clone) with built-in Zip and Unzip for DOS and Windows.
Language: Assembly, License: GNU GPLv2
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A straight-forward and modern application to create bootable drives. Available officially via a flatpak.
Language: Rust, License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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Make JSON greppable (searchable)!
Language: Go, License: MIT
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jless is a command-line JSON viewer designed for reading, exploring, and searching through JSON data. Available on FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and NetBSD.
Language: Go, License: MIT
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A web client for Mastodon and Pleroma. There are two key benefit of this software, one having the option to host it yourself or use the hosted instance at brutaldon.org and two having the ability to work without JavaScript. This makes it possible to use text based browsers such as Lynx, w3m, or elinks.
Language: Python, License: GNU AGPLv3
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Generate a manpage using the source of a documentation site using MkDocs.
Language: Python, License: ISC
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An integrated development environment (IDE) layer for Neovim with sane defaults. Completely free and community driven.
Language: Lua, License: GNU GPLv3
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A website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast and frictionless.
References
- Binary Matrix code, image by abbiefyregraphics, published Jul 12, 2022, Pixabay
- The Neue Black font, open font license