Free OpenSource Software

Check out my new book : LibreOffice Calc - Spreadsheet Macros Using BASIC. I cover the basics of macros and include sample code for advanced topics like duplicating sheets, using file dialogs and writing the sheet to PDF. Well worth a try.

Available at Tolino: https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1081072501

Vivlio: https://shop.vivlio.com/product/9798235750753_9798235750753_10020/libreoffice-calc-spreadsheet-macros-using-basic

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ie/en/ebook/libreoffice-calc-spreadsheet-macros-using-basic?sId=b01f3d9e-16c3-4b66-a293-b61ad6149d0d&ssId=fI_994IClwPaGmrbxiTub

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/libreoffice-calc-spreadsheet-macros-using-basic-michael-anderson/1150881741?ean=2940196750618

Hi there!

I've just released a new open-source Android app called DNS Toggle over on IzzyOnDroid (I'm still waiting for it to get added to F-Droid's main repository).

The app adds a quick settings tile to easily toggle your phone's private DNS setting on and off with a single tap!

For those who may not be familiar with this setting, one of the main uses for private DNS is content filtering (ad blocking or simply blocking dangerous domains for security) and better privacy (default DNS providers often track your activity). You can do this for more or less free using services like NextDNS.

The app is built to respect user privacy, so it doesn't store, collect, or share any personal data. I've also built in some optional advanced features that you can access by long-pressing the tile:

• Custom DNS:
  Set your own custom hostname for Private DNS (e.g., dns.adguard.com).
• Wi-Fi Blocklist:
  Automatically disable private DNS when you connect to specific Wi-Fi networks. This comes in handy with public Wi-Fi networks (hotels, cafes, etc.) that rely on DNS tricks to serve a login page, which usually break when private DNS is enabled.
  You can even automate adding/removing Wi-Fi network names (SSIDs) from this list.
• Hide App Icon:
  Because I hate having tons of apps I never actually need to open listed on my phone, I've made it so you can hide the app from the launcher drawer.

⚠️ Permission Required
To modify Private DNS system settings, this app requires the WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS permission. You will be prompted to grant this on rooted devices If your device is not rooted, you can easily grant it manually using this ADB command:

adb shell pm grant com.ericlowry.dnstoggle android.permission.WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS`

You can check out the source code over on GitHub or get it from IzzyOnDroid.

A cool calculator and unit conversion utility written in Clojure. Parses natural English phrases like "how many inches are in 3 feet?" and evaluates them using arbitrary-precision arithmetic on all platforms.

calc can be accessed from several runtimes:

• In your CLI via Babashka, JVM Clojure, or Python (Basilisp).
• On the Web at calc.rymcg.tech (100% client-side) or by downloading a copy of of the bundled website: calc.html.
• As a Library in your Clojure/ClojureScript/Basilisp applications.

Local only, no LLM used for natural English phases.

I can confirm this works. Jooan A2R, Wyze Cam 2, Cinnado D1 are extremely cheap and easy to set up.

Happy 2026! The Eco-Libre project published our 2025 Annual Report for last year.

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Executive Summary

• Continuing search for land in Ecuador
• New Eco-Libre Logo
• First Release of Life-Line Project
• Two Prototypes of Life-Line Project

Read the full report here.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre tech, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/

Most FOSS projects are jailed in Microsoft Github’s access restricted walled garden. The 4 freedoms are very basic. Sure I can grab the code and do what I want with it, but then what? Rage fork because devs only pay attention to a bug tracker hosted by a corporate oppressor?

Of course devs rightfully get to choose the venue for their work. It’s astonishing how many are okay with licking MS’s boots.

The free world can do better. The current hack: if an app has official Debian support, we can report upstream bugs to the Debian bug tracker (or Launchpad for Ubuntu). Any others?

For non-Debian, it really gets shitty. You can stash a bug report here, where it gets seen by sideline hecklers, not devs or users, and only gets retained as long as sopuli.xyz has resources. If they one day need to free up disk space, they will erase old posts.

Select apps that exist in Debian when possible

Debian has a higher quality standard than most distros and it’s also mainstream. When an app becomes officially maintained in Debian, a right of passage of sorts has been demonstrated. It’s not a high bar but it’s relatively the best measure of quality and maturity there is. Many FOSS projects cannot manage to satisfy Debian’s standards.

So if you have a choice of apps, it’s a good idea to short-list those that appear in https://packages.debian.org/ even if you run a different distro than Debian. You can participate in bug discussion at https://bugs.debian.org/ without registration. And if you verify a bug exists in Debian you have a decent place to report it (yes, even if the bug originates upstream).

On the interaction between free-software licensing and large language models.

We’re happy to announce the release of the Eco-Libre Life-Line version 2025.10.

• https://www.eco-libre.org/life-line-2025-10-released/

Who is Eco-Libre?

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre tech, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/

This article will show how to model sheets of Expanded Metal in FreeCAD, without slowing (or killing) FreeCAD.

• https://www.eco-libre.org/expanded-metal-hatch-freecad/

Who is Eco-Libre?

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre tech, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/

Hi all,

I'm wondering if there's anything out there that's decent for using voice command and natural language queries to help me - preferably one that can run on Android, but Linux would do also. Basically a FOSS version of Siri, but maybe more effective in terms of natural language. Siri is actually quite good at what it does, but what it does is very limited. It's mostly limiter to a robust set of voice activated commands than an actual assistant with natural language flexibility.

If nothing's available I figure I could use an Android device with a custom ROM and use one of the ones that aren't FOSS, and just keep that device free of any personal info.

Please advise, thanks.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/302171

The websites of trains, planes, buses, and ride shares have become bot-hostile and also tor-hostile. This forces us to make a manual labor-intensive effort of pointing and clicking through shitty proprietary GUIs. We cannot simply query for the cheapest trip over a span of time for specified parameters of our choice. We typically must also search one day per query.

Suppose I want to go to Paris, Lyon, Lille, or Marseilles, and I can leave any morning in the next 2 weeks. Finding the cheapest ticket requires 56 manual web queries (4 destinations × 14 days). And that’s for just one carrier. If I want to query both Flixbus and BlaBlaCar, we’re talking 112 queries. Then I have to keep notes - a shortlist of prospective tickets. Fuck me. Why do people tolerate this? (They probably just search less and take a suboptimal deal).

If we write web scraping software, the websites bogart their inventory with anti-bot protectionist mechanisms that would blacklist your IP address. Thereafter, we would not even be able to do manual searches. So of course a bot would have to run over Tor or a VPN. But those IPs are generally blocked outright anyway.

The solution: MitM software

We need some browser-independent middleware that collects the data and shares it. Ideally it would work like a special purpose socat command. It would have to do the TLS handshake with the travel site and offer a local unencrypted port for the GUI browser to connect to. That would be a generic tool comparable to Wireshark (or perhaps #Wireshark can even serve this purpose?) Then a site-specific program could monitor the traffic, parse it, and populate a local SQLite DB. Another tool could sync the local DB with a centralised cloud DB. A fourth tool could provide a UI to the DB that gives us the queries we need.

A browser extension that monitors and shares would be an alternative solution -- but not as good. It would impose a particular browser. And it would be impossible to make the connection to the central DB over Tor while making the browser connection over a different network.

Fares often change daily, so the DB would of course timestamp fares. Perhaps an AI mechanism could approximate the price based on past pricing trends for a particular route. A Flixbus fare will start at 10 but climb to 40 on the day of travel. Stale price quotes would obviously be inexact but when the DB shows an interesting price and you search it manually, the DBs would be updated. The route and schedule info would of course be quite useful (and unlikely stale).

The end result would be an Amadeus DB of sorts, but with the inclusion of environmentally sound ground transport. It could give a direct comparison and perhaps even cause air travelers to switch to ground travel. It could even give us a Matrix ITA Software UI/query tool that’s more broad.

This article will show you how to find out exactly which layer is causing your FreeCAD file to balloon in size, by getting a granular list of all of the layers in your document tree, sorted by size.

• https://www.eco-libre.org/big-freecad-file-size/

Who is Eco-Libre?

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre tech, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/