A developer built Yara Reads, a web-based reading app for children who have just learned phonics sounds, naming it after his six-year-old daughter. The app marks each word with dots, bars or arcs showing its phonetic breakdown, and a speaker button sounds out each part before saying the full word. It's free, requires no account, and includes a checker that verifies every story word matches sounds the child has actually learned.
github.com
· 2026-10-19
A CNET writer detailed switching from Microsoft 365 to LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite developed by The Document Foundation since 2010. The suite includes six applications—Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math—that mirror Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Access, and it runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
cnet.com
· 2026-10-17
A new service called OneDeploy lets users deploy open-source applications on dedicated virtual servers that come with a web address, TLS certificate, admin account, and scheduled backups. Billing is hourly against a prepaid credit balance with a monthly price cap, and users can add custom domains, resize or migrate servers between regions or clouds, and restore encrypted off-site backups for about two weeks after funds run out. Pricing is per-server rather than per-user, and only open-source editions of apps are installed, with paid editions sold separately by their makers.
onedeploy.co
· 2026-10-16
A commentator argues that Rust's growing adoption carries risks, pointing out that the Rust Foundation was founded by Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft and Mozilla, and that a board seat costs $325,000 per year. The piece also criticizes the trend of rewriting existing, mature software projects in Rust purely for the sake of using the language.
oxetene.net
· 2026-10-14
Petal is a new screen-sharing tool, released as open source and free to use, that lets multiple users share windows simultaneously. Shared windows appear as movable, resizable desktop windows rather than static tiles, and participants can click, type and scroll inside them using labeled cursors with instant remote input.
petal.live
· 2026-10-14
The Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration has cancelled its planned rollout of Microsoft 365 on the public cloud after about 5,000 employees had already migrated. The government paused the project in July following a June recommendation from the Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment, and State Secretary Eelco Eerenberg has now outlined a replacement plan moving mail and calendar functions on-premises in 2027, followed by European open-source tools for storage and collaboration in 2027-2028.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-14
Organizers of Hack the North, Canada's largest hackathon, replaced the traditional cardstock name tag with a custom hardware badge featuring an LED display, buttons, audio and wireless radio that attendees could fully program. The project, pitched eight months earlier, went through four hardware iterations before reaching a final production run of 1,750 units, with the design, firmware and an emulator all released as open source.
va3ndf.com
· 2026-10-14
Iosevka is an open-source monospace typeface offering both sans-serif and slab-serif styles, aimed at developers and terminal users. The font is freely available for download and customization, with source files published for community contribution.
typeof.net
· 2026-10-14
After TypeSafe released its Jev decision-model API, which answers yes/no or multiple-choice questions with probabilities instead of generating text, several companies including Microsoft and OpenAI released similar open-source tools. Nandakishor Mukkunnoth of ConvAI Innovations then said he had designed a nearly identical architecture over a year earlier, pointing to his March 2025 arXiv paper on SalesRLAgent, which included published model weights and a dataset.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-12
The QGIS open-source geographic information system project has merged a policy change prohibiting contributions created with the assistance of AI tools. The decision was implemented through a pull request to the project's governance documentation on GitHub.
github.com
· 2026-10-12
A project called Nanolathe has rebuilt Total Annihilation as a 2.5D RTS engine released under an MIT license, allowing anyone to study, modify or extend the code. It ships with three original demo missions playable directly in desktop Chrome, Edge or Safari using just a keyboard and mouse, with no installation or game files required.
nanolathe.gg
· 2026-10-11
A maker has released the PSPi 6, a custom circuit board that replaces a PSP 1000's original mainboard with a Raspberry Pi Zero, Zero 2W, or CM4. The project includes an 800x480 display, power management, original PSP controls, and audio support, with hardware designs and firmware released as open-source files under a Creative Commons license.
github.com
· 2026-10-11
GoKawiil