OpenZL 0.2 Released For Meta’s Content-Aware Compression Software
Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there’s finally a new OpenZL software release available… ⌘ Read more

Flattened Image Tree 1.0 Specification For Embedded Linux Systems
The Flattened Image Tree “FIT” 1.0 specification was recently finalized for this container format used by U-Boot on embedded systems for providing various boot components like DTBs, the Linux kernel image, and more into a single file… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Glad you like it. At least it’s in landscape format. :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Really depends on the genre, I guess. 🤔 Quite a lot of “non-pop” music still uses the format “concept album”, I think. 🤔 But don’t ask me for any solid statistics. 😅

Opera GX Browser Gets Flatpak’ed & Snap’ed On Linux
Last month Opera released the Opera GX gaming-focused web browser for Linux. It rolled out in RPM and Debian package format support while now for those interested is also available via Flatpak and Snap sandboxed app formats… ⌘ Read more

Remembering Zip Drives - the Trendy Storage Technology of the 1990s
Back in the 1990s, floppy disks “had a mere capacity of 1.44MB,” remembers XDA Developers, “which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about.”

Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got “superfloppy” formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those w … ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2.2 Released With Minor UI/UX Updates & Bug Fixes
It was just two weeks ago that GIMP 3.2 released, one year after the big GIMP 3.0 debut. Out today is GIMP 3.2.2 with various bug fixes, plug-in / file format handling updates, and some minor UI/UX work… ⌘ Read more

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

AMD, NVIDIA, OpenAI & Others Form An Optical Scale-up Consortium
AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI jointly announced today the formation of the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) optical scale-up consortium… ⌘ Read more

Nice cloud formations this evening. Obviously, they looked much cooler in person. https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2026-03-09/

The National Videogame Museum Acquires the Mythical Nintendo Playstation
The National Videogame Museum has acquired an extremely rare MSF-1 development kit, believed to be the oldest surviving prototype of the canceled Nintendo PlayStation. Engadget reports: Nicknamed the Nintendo PlayStation, the idea was that a new CD-ROM format backed by Sony would be added to the cartridge-based Super NES, resultin … ⌘ Read more

LibreOffice Says Its UI Is Way Better Than Microsoft Office’s
darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its “better” ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a “clunky” UI instead of the “standard” ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and ot … ⌘ Read more

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me You need to use the RFC3339 format. I would recommend you read the specs at https://twtxt.dev – This is what is used by many moden clients these days 😅

‘How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?’
Despite AI’s progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge – a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them wil … ⌘ Read more

AOMedia Open Audio Codec “OAC” Aims To Be The Successor To Opus
While the Alliance For Open Media “AOMedia” is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (AOC)… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Here is a properly formatted version of your message:

Not yet — but that’s probably a good idea.

Instructions:

1. Clone the repository
   

git clone https://git.mills.io/saltyim/saltyim.git
cd saltyim

1. Check out the v2 branch
   

git checkout v2

1. Build and install the CLI/TUI
   

make DESTDIR=$HOME/bin install

After installation, run:

salty-chat

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … at least this story was entertaining to read. 😅 If only Firefox’s storage format wasn’t so convoluted, you could have just shut it down and removed all the unwanted tabs. 🫤

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice, it’s coming together! Despite it being ages ago that I used a hex editor or viewer, these different representations of information appear very handy to me. If I had to mess around on binary formats, I’d definitely appreciate them. I can’t remember if the hex viewer back then had these options. Don’t even recall what software that was. :-)

I, too, only very, very rarely use the mouse in the terminal. Apart from selecting text to copy into the clipboard. But that probably has the potential for trouble and interference with button clicks, etc. If one isn’t careful.

How did the startup times develop?

The Last Of The Dolby Digital Plus “E-AC3” Patents Might Now Be Expired
For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus “Enhanced AC-3” audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research
OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific docume … ⌘ Read more

Wikipedia’s Guide to Spotting AI Is Now Being Used To Hide AI
Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards reports: On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called “Humanizer,” the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as ch … ⌘ Read more

Google Temporarily Disabled YouTube’s Advanced Captions Without Warning
Google has temporarily disabled YouTube’s advanced SRV3 caption format after discovering the feature was causing playback errors for some users, according to a statement the company posted. SRV3, also known as YouTube Timed Text, is a custom subtitle system Google introduced around 2018 that allows creators to use custom colors, tran … ⌘ Read more

JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome/Chromium Code
After widespread backlash over its 2022 decision to remove JPEG-XL support, Google has quietly restored the image format in the latest Chrome/Chromium codebase. Phoronix reports: Back in December they merged jxl-rs as a pure Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder from the official libjxl organization. At the end of December they did more JPEG-XL plumbing with the en … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg Merges A Number Of Vulkan Improvements To Start 2026
FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan-related imporvements to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Over the past year FFmpeg saw Vulkan shader-based decoding for more video formats, AV1 and VP9 extension work, performance improvements, and other work around Vulkan Video. It will be very exciting to see how FFmpeg delivers in 2026 with Vulkan Video and how the software ecosystem as a whole begins taking up this cross-platform, … ⌘ Read more

• @kirschner@kirschner ’s “Ada & Zangemann: A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream” was a wonderful surprise – I knew I’d like this book since I’ve heard he had written it, but I’ll admit I only actually read it once I had the actual physical book in my hands… and ended up being surprised by it a couple of times, the book has plenty more depth than I assumed! Sure, it is what I thought it would be, “a book for children about free software”, but it is so much more than that…

• @o_sarilho@o_sarilho is a webcomic - and fortunately it is also collected in physical format. There are versions in Portuguese and English, but this is a SciFi comic book from a Portuguese author, and that alone would get my attention… the fact that part of the action happens on the region where I actually live just made it even more interesting! So, well, I knew I would need to read it, and I bought the books, but only in 2025 did I actually started reading it… and, well - all I can say is that I glad I have the rest of the series so far, so I can catch up!

How Markdown Took Over the World
22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing.

Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Goo … ⌘ Read more

Since I used so much Rust during the holidays, I got totally used to rustfmt. I now use similar tools for Python (black and isort).

What have I been doing all these years?! I never want to format code manually again. 🤣😅

Amazon Plans Massive Superstore Larger Than a Walmart Supercenter Near Chicago
Amazon “has submitted plans for a large-format store near Chicago that would be larger than a Walmart Supercenter,” reports CNBC:

As part of the plans, Amazon has proposed building a one-story, 229,000-square-foot building [on a 35-acre lot] in Orland Park, Illinois, that would offer a range of products, such as grocerie … ⌘ Read more

Send To Kindle from Microsoft Word is Discontinued
Microsoft is discontinuing its Send to Kindle integration in Word, ending a feature that allowed Microsoft 365 subscribers to send documents directly to their Kindle e-readers and preserve complex formatting through fixed layouts.

The company updated its documentation to announce that beginning February 9th, 2026, the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work across Web, Wi … ⌘ Read more

Disney+ To Add Vertical Videos In Push To Boost Daily Engagement
Disney+, which is looking to catch up with some streaming and digital rivals in terms of daily engagement, is adding vertical videos to the service. From a report: The arrival of the new format later this year was one of several advertising-oriented announcements the company made Wednesday at its Tech + Data Showcase at CES in Las Vegas. … ⌘ Read more

Next-Gen AMD Server SoCs To Enjoy Firmware-Agnostic Platform Configuration Approach
Next-generation AMD server SoCs – presumably the AMD EPYC “Venice” on Zen 6 – is poised to introduce a firmware-agnostic platform configuration platform configuration change method/format. This is This aims to improve server platform interoperability and eliminate redundant configuration efforts for different firmware solutions… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Glycin Adds XPM/XBM Support To Address Fedora’s Last Unsandboxed Image Loader
GNOME’s Glycin project as the Rust-based sandboxed and extendable image loading library now supports XPM and XBM images. This is notable since those formats were the last unsandboxed image loading formats used on Fedora Linux… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that your feed’s last modification timestamp was missing in my database. I cannot tell for certain, but I think it did work before. Turns out, your httpd now sends the Last-Modified with UTC instead of GMT. Current example:

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:50:20 UTC

I’m not a fan of this timestamp format at all, but according to the HTTP specification, HTTP-date must always use GMT for a timezone, nothing else: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#http.date

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Prints Final Newspaper, Shifts To All-Digital Format
CBS News: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has printed its final newspaper, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history and officially transitioning the longtime publication into a fully digital news outlet.

The front-page story of the final print edition asks a fitting question: “What is the … ⌘ Read more

Debian’s Bug Tracker With No Web UI For Editing Bugs Is Very Obscure For 2026
Debian’s maintainer of the Meson build system package is calling attention to the unfortunate state of Debian’s bug tracker in 2026. Editing bug data within Debian’s bug tracker still relies on writing custom-formatted emails and submitting them via your mail client. There still is no modern web UI for managing the Debian bug tracker as it was largely written in the early 90s… ⌘ Read more

mu (µ) now has builtin code formatting and linting tools, making µ far more useful and useable as a general purpose programming language. Mu now includes:

• An interpreter for quick “scriptinog”
  
• A native code compiler for building native executables (Darwin / macOS only for now)
  
• A builtin set of developer tools, currently: fmt (-fmt), check (-check) and test (-test).

Why Some Avatar: Fire and Ash Scenes Look So Smooth, and Others Don’t
If you watched Avatar: Fire and Ash in James Cameron’s preferred high frame rate 3D format and noticed certain sequences appearing unusually smooth while others had the traditional cinematic look, that visual inconsistency is entirely intentional. The third Avatar film continues Cameron’s frame rate experimentation from The Way of … ⌘ Read more

Cryptsetup 2.8.2 Released With BitLocker Clear Key Support
Cryptsetup 2.8.2 released on Thursday for this open-source utility used for setting up disk encryption with dm-crypt on Linux systems, including for LUKS volumes, TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and other formats… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Changes How Copyright Protection is Applied To Kindle Direct’s Self-Published Ebooks
Amazon says it will allow authors to offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through its self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Starting on January 20, 2026, authors who set their titles as DRM-free will see their books made available in these more open formats. Fro … ⌘ Read more

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats have been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

Fragile, inconvenient and low quality: Why are cassettes back in vogue?
For a supposedly obsolete music format, audio cassette sales seem to be set on fast forward at the moment. ⌘ Read more

QuickTime Turns 34
On Dec. 2, QuickTime turned 34, and despite its origins in Apple’s chaotic 1990s (1991 to be exact), “it’s still the backbone of video on our devices,” writes Macworld’s Jason Snell. That includes MP4 and Apple’s immersive video formats for Vision Pro. From the report: By the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, digital audio had been thoroughly integrated into Macs. (PCs needed add-on cards to do much more than issue beeps.) The next frontier was … ⌘ Read more

AV1 Open Video Codec Now Powers 30% of Netflix Streaming
Netflix says its open AV1 video codec now powers about 30% of all streaming on the platform and is rapidly becoming its primary delivery format thanks to major gains in compression, bandwidth efficiency, HDR support, and film-grain rendering. TVTechnology reports: The blog by Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford and Jeff Watts comes at a time when AV2 is on the hor … ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Stop Telling Us XMPP Should Use JSON

Image

We hear this too often: “XMPP uses XML. It should use JSON—it’s more modern.”

The logic seems straightforward: JSON came later, so it must be better. But better for what, exactly?

JSON became successful because it’s the standard serialization format for JavaScript. That made it convenient for browser-based applications.

Does that m … ⌘ Read more

Google Looks To Bring JPEG-XL Support Back To Chrome / Chromium
Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser… ⌘ Read more

The EU “19.11.2025 COM(2025) 837 final 2025/0360 (COD): Digital Omnibus” Regulation Proposal is out, and it it we have:

• “proposed simplification measures” watering down personal data protection
  
• There are two terms, “open format” and “formal open standard” with different definitions - none “open enough”
  

I’m sure there is a lot more to digest from it, so here you go:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-omnibus-regulation-proposal

Sam Altman Celebrates ChatGPT Finally Following Em Dash Formatting Rules
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT has started following custom instructions to avoid using em dashes. “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!” he wrote.

… ⌘ Read more

Slovensko bez hraníc č. 8
Úrad pre Slovákov žijúcich v zahraničí (ÚSŽZ) predstavil nové, novembrové vydanie spravodajcu Slovensko bez hraníc, ktoré prináša aktuálne informácie o činnosti úradu, významných udalostiach a aktivitách krajanov na všetkých kontinentoch. Najnovšie číslo (8/2025) je dostupné vo formáte pdf na webovej stránke ÚSŽZ. ⌘ Read more

Deutsch-österreichischer Doppelgänger: Der falsche Kurz
Für ein neues Talk-Format hat Welt-TV Sebastian Kurz eingeladen – den falschen. Der ist zwar auch Politiker, aber nicht „Austrias Next-Top-Kanzler“. mehr… ⌘ Read more

PDF Will Support JPEG XL Format As ‘Preferred Solution’
The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google’s decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: “We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] c … ⌘ Read more