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Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's pandoc(1).

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    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's Inkscape. I've used it for years, for generating meme-type images, for producing my resume, for several portfolio projects, drafting SVG source images for laser-cutter/3d-printer work, and likely dozens of other projects I'm forgetting at the moment.Having implemented a *tiny fraction* of a vector image editor/viewer (in VB6 for the PocketPC using custom XML data-structures under the hood…so early-2000s), I appreciate all the more the hard work done by the Inkscape devs.
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    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today it's OpenSMTPD¹.In the past I've tried to set up Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and qmail at various junctures, but found them all unwieldy in their configuration syntax. Macros and compiling them, or digging through dozens of config files for relevant settings. Lots of "here are thousands of settings, but don't change them unless you really know what you're doing." It drove me a bit crazy.Then OpenBSD folks created OpenSMTPD.The configuration syntax was sensible and simple. It didn't try to do everything, just adequate SMTP serving with some privsep. It was easy to point it at certificates that acme-client(1) obtains for me via httpd(8) interactions scheduled in cron(8), all within the base system.It's the MTA with OpenBSD's fingerprints of simplicity & security all over it.⸻¹ https://opensmtpd.org/
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    Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/
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    Kicking off #FreeSoftwareAdvent (thanks, @neil), I'll open with remind(1)While it took several articles and a couple attempts before I switched over to using it, once you taste the power of what it can do, it's hard to go back to less-capable calendaring tools.While the classic "garbage day is on Thursday unless there was a holiday earlier in the week, in which case it moves back to Friday" scenario is a nice little demo of its power, one of the best examples from my daily use is the kids' school calendars:• the teen has an A/B schedule which doesn't mesh nicely with calendar days, week-days, etc• similarly, our elementary-age kiddo has a 4-day cycle schedule for her "specials" classBut remind's nonomitted() function makes quick work of both of those, taking into consideration weekends, the school holidays, and using PUSH/POP directives for high-school testing days that impact his A/B schedule but not her 4-day cycle. I've never encountered another calendar that handled all the edge-cases with so little effort.It's a little rocky interchanging with other calendars (you have to use rem2ics to create .ics files to share, and pulling in others' iCal is non-trivial and doesn't seem to maintain the fidelity of remote events).But otherwise, this runs a great deal of my life schedule.