The British Library on Flickr Commons
A trove of illustrations spanning three centuries was released into the Public Domain by the British Library. Coming in 2014, a crowdsourced platform for tagging and identifying the images.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html
L’Ève future—Spécimens de fontes libres
From Greyscale Press comes a book packed full of gorgeous, permissively licensed type specimens. An indispensable tool for designers considering F/LOSS fonts.
http://greyscalepress.com/2013/books/eve-future-specimens-de-fontes-libres
Fait Main magazine, Volume 3
An almanac of all things homebrew (in some cases, quite literally), the current issue of Fait Main offers lessons about stereos, soap and yes, beer.
http://faitmain.org/volume-3/edito.html
Multimedia programming with Pure Data
Pure Data is a powerful tool for visual coding, but its learning curve might be too steep for some. This book comes to clarify and demonstrate how to use PD for audio-visual performances, interactive displays, animation and interface design.
http://www.packtpub.com/multimedia-programming-with-pure-data/book
Calligra
The KDE application suite is seeing fast progress: the 2.7.4 stable version is just out, and the 2.8 beta is available if you want a taste of the bleeding edge.
http://www.calligra.org/get-calligra
Subtle patterns
Simple, well designed and indeed subtle patterns, available with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
A subset of 88 Subtle Patterns is available as GIMP ready-to-use patterns. Get the zip at https://github.com/dbb/subtle-patterns-gimp
Fedora 20
Following a tradition of funky version naming, the twentieth major release of Red Hat's community distro is known as "Heisenbug," and comes with sweet new things like more powerful networking, plus thin-client and ARM support. The release coincides with Fedora's 10th birthday.
Stdin Bazar
The Brussels-based design studio opened up their cupboards, sharing their homebrew HOWTOs, recipes and guides for a number of purposes, ranging from command-line image and video manipulation to database and typesetting software tips. All available under the Free Art License.
AlphabeNt
Beautifully printed and put together, this publication by Drew Taylor and Daniel Purvis presents an alternative view of the latin alphabet from a glitch art perspective.
Considering your tools
Introduced as "a reader for designers and developers," Considering your tools responds to a dearth of literature around the use of digital tools in graphic design. The collection is an extensive and diverse set of texts and essays around language, gestures, devices and tools.