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" class

But 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.

#freesoftwareadvent day 4!

#yazi is a terminal file manager, which is both simple (if you're into that kind of things - you like vim, right?) and efficient.

- jump directly to usual folders with zoxide integration
- jump to a file based on partial name matching with just g-H
- search for files super fast with ripgrep and fd integration
- simple multi tab concept, open a new tab with t
- multi-select using vim concepts, or simply pressing space; copy, cut, paste, rename... Easily

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is `tmux`, the terminal multiplexer.

I know that `tmux` will be second nature to many of you, but I've been gradually learning it over the last year (https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/06/more-tinkering-with-tmux/), and I find it invaluable.

Although I had used `screen` for years, I wish that I had known about `tmux` sooner.

I use `tmux` both on local machines, for a convenient terminal environment (from which I can do an awful lot of what I want to do, computing-wise), and also on remote machines for persistent / re-attachable terminal sessions.

https://github.com/tmux/tmux

#Linux #tmux #terminal

hmm, #freesoftwareadvent - I think I'd go for 'perf' for my first one; it's a good simple way to see where your CPU time is going inside a program or the kernel; it's got about a million options for deeper stuff, but a simple 'perf top' (as root) or 'perf record' followed by 'perf report' can give you a lot of hints, especially with the -g for stack traces.

Let's kick off #FreeSoftwareAdvent with some fun!

https://www.openttd.org/

#OpenTTD is an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It's been around for 20 years and still continues to deliver new patches and features!

Build your dream rail system, or air travel system, or even boat system. Perfect for people, like me, who live in places where functional public transit and infrastructure are actively undermined by both the government and corporations!

Thanks for the idea, @neil !

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry: ledger(1) & hledger(1)

I primarily use ledger use for my #plaintextaccounting purposes¹ but try to mostly keep my data-files in a form that hledger can process them too.

Getting started involved a crash-course in accounting terms, but the use of positive/negative numbers (rather than "debits" and "credits" which always bugged me; though both have ways of specifying that output should be in credit/debit format) eased the transition.

While it started a little tedious, a few helper-scripts and shell-functions simplified adding new common entries and gave me lazy access to common reports.

I still struggle a little bit with closing the books (I though I'd figured it out, and documented it², but had some hiccups so I'll need to revisit my documentation in January)

But it's been incredibly helpful to see and track our household net worth, spot trends, keep tabs on gift-card balances that would otherwise get forgotten, track invoices sent to clients, and it simplifies balancing the checkbook monthly.

⸻
¹ http://plaintextaccounting.org/
² https://blog.thechases.com/posts/closing-out-the-books-in-ledger/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent day 1.

Today I'll start with Ghost, the blogging platform! I've been using Ghost to power my blog for many years now.

I love the focused writing experience, it really helps me get in the zone by hiding anything I don't need. But it also has all the important features I do need just a click or two away.

There are loads of good free themes around, but it's not hard to build your own if you're familiar with web tech.

https://ghost.org

Thanks for the inspiration @neil

If you fancy joining in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, please do!

Obviously, it is just a hashtag, so you can use it however you want, but I tend to post:

* the name of the Free software

* what it does

* the associated website / repo (accepting that there may be many places from which to get it)

For today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm going to build on @neil list of handy tools for putting together your own media library.

https://aegisub.org/

#Aegisub is a powerful editor for .srt, .sub, .ssa, etc. #subtitle files! If you have a video without embedded subtitles and a separate file for the subs, but they don't quite line up, this is for you. Tweak the timing, edit the contents, and see the results immediately on-screen. A life-saver if you import discs in languages you don't speak!

I love the idea of #FreeSoftwareAdvent (thanks go to @neil for bringing it to my attention)! Since I'm late getting started, though, and I'm already *so* tired of Christmas this year (no offense to those who appreciate it), I want to do something similar for #Hanukkah instead. I'm not Jewish, but my husband is, culturally, and I've been really liking a lot of the meaning behind some of the traditions he's been following since we met.

Any thoughts on the best hashtag? #FreeSoftwareForHanukkah
#FreeSoftwareMenorah
#FreeSoftwareHanukkiah
Something else?

Hanukkah starts December 14 this year, so I've got some time to figure this out...

#FreeSoftwareAdvent

it's been some time since I published anything under this hashtag, but one of my recent favourite apps have been Easy Notes

it is... well, a notes app. but as simple as it can be: no permissions AT ALL, full Markdown support, cloud backup is entirely opt-in, and minimalistic

it also supports useful privacy & security features e.g ability to lock app with password or encrypt notes vault

best part? it's accessible via my fav app store - Accrescent!

https://github.com/Kin69/EasyNotes

#FreeSoftwareAdvent

I'm not sure if I will keep this up for the whole of advent (good luck @neil ), but if there's one piece of Free Software I want to highlight, it's vim.

I learned vim because it was the default vi implementation in RedHat Linux 5.x back in the distant past and vi is required by POSIX and so was installed everywhere (except Windows, where nothing useful is in the default install, but it is easy to add). I mostly use gVim early on, but once I was fairly comfortable with it, I started using it in the terminal.

And it's great to be able to use the same editor whether I'm local, on via SSH on a remote Linux or *BSD machine. I tried using VS Code's remote mode, but it's Linux only, and only fairly mainstream Linux even there. Want to connect to a RISC-V Linux? Sorry. Alpine on x86-64? If you jump through some hoops. CheriBSD on Morello? Or even OpenBSD on x86-64? No chance. Vim? All of those. And even things like Amiga, VMS, or QNX. Or iPad, or Android, or Haiku (the BeOS port seems to have died, but I haven't run BeOS for around 20 years).

I have written a few hundred lines of code, over a hundred and fifty articles, five books, two dissertations, and a couple of dozen papers in it. Most on a laptop, a bit on a desktop, and a surprising amount on a Nokia 770 with a folding Bluetooth keyboard (great for writing in a cafe by the sea).

When I started, the main benefit of vim over vi was multi-level undo. Since then, it's gained plugins for LSP support (so I even get nice error messages and autocompletion with our custom version of clangd with all of the CHERIoT extensions!), spell checking, and unlimited persistent undo. The last of which is the reason I don't use NeoVim (they didn't consider breaking the on-disk format for persistent undo a problem, I consider data loss very bad, and so don't trust them with my data).

At this point, my fingers are so trained to use vim shortcuts that I end up with :w scattered in the middle of random documents if I wrote them in anything else.

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent - 24 days of toots about Free software that I value - is off to a strong start, since you get not one, not two, not three, but *four* pieces of software:

* yt-dlp: command line tools for downloading from various online sources: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

* Handbrake: ripping DVDs you've bought: https://handbrake.fr/

* SoundJuicer: ripping CDs you've bought: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/sound-juicer

* Libation: downloading audiobooks you've bought: https://github.com/rmcrackan/Libation

Each is a useful starting point for building your own media library.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent day 1: Joplin

Inspired by @neil, each day until the 24th, I'm going to post about one piece of open source software that I use, under the #FreeSoftwareAdvent hashtag.

When I decided to do that, I immediately created a notebook in Joplin. Both as a place to list what software I was going to toot about, and to draft those toots.

So it seems appropriate to start with Joplin. It's a note-taking app that organises notes in a tree-based hierarchy, and is available for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

It can synchronise notes, so you can switch quickly between devices. Synchronisation can be done through various services. Initially, I used the Joplin cloud, then moved to using my own Nextcloud instance. Both work very well. If conflicts are found during a sync, they appear in a special "Conflicts" notebook, so you can check both versions of the note and resolve any issues.

Notes are formatted in Markdown, and it has a formatting toolbar for anyone who isn't familiar with Markdown syntax.

I have two profiles set up. One for general notes, the other for research related to the book I'm currently writing. There are lots of plugins available to add extra functionality - I have plugins installed to do automatic backups, allow me to have some notes pinned for quick access, and to show an outline of the current note. The latter two are most useful for when I'm using Joplin for research.

https://joplinapp.org/

@joplinapp

#freesoftwareadvent day 4!

#yazi is a terminal file manager, which is both simple (if you're into that kind of things - you like vim, right?) and efficient.

- jump directly to usual folders with zoxide integration
- jump to a file based on partial name matching with just g-H
- search for files super fast with ripgrep and fd integration
- simple multi tab concept, open a new tab with t
- multi-select using vim concepts, or simply pressing space; copy, cut, paste, rename... Easily

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is `tmux`, the terminal multiplexer.

I know that `tmux` will be second nature to many of you, but I've been gradually learning it over the last year (https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/06/more-tinkering-with-tmux/), and I find it invaluable.

Although I had used `screen` for years, I wish that I had known about `tmux` sooner.

I use `tmux` both on local machines, for a convenient terminal environment (from which I can do an awful lot of what I want to do, computing-wise), and also on remote machines for persistent / re-attachable terminal sessions.

https://github.com/tmux/tmux

#Linux #tmux #terminal