GadgeteerZA
Website https://gadgeteer.co.za and Mastodon danie10@mastodon.social
- 28 Posts
- 27 Comments
Joined 4Y ago
Cake day: Jan 20, 2021
Their goal is to encourage the adoption of the fediverse by providing an extensive guide and lists of resources for the community. It uses the hashtags found on your profile to establish what your interests are. All you have to do is to add a supplied hasthtag #fedi22 to your profile, and then add the URL or webfinger for your profile.
Most ActivityPub projects are supported (eg. Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc), and your profile will automatically be re-crawled after 7 days so that updated hashtags can be linked.
See https://fediverse.info/explore/people
#technology #fediverse #activitypub #fedi22 #discover
A pair of high-end in-ear wireless headphones called PineBuds are on the horizon. These include features most would expect in 2022, like ambient and environment noise cancellation, and a lengthy battery life. The earbuds will also be end-user flashable, opening up a world of possible uses.
“There will be a wide variety of things developers and (eventually) end-users will be able to do with the earbuds – flash custom sound signatures, determine touch controls, adjust resonance to fit the user’s ear canal resonance,” Pine64 say.
If I can change the batteries, that would be a major winner for me!
See https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/pine64-open-source-pinebuds-wireless-ear-buds
#technology #audio #earbuds #pine64 #pinebuds #opensource
It’s not just ads, but also trackers. Idea is to filter all devices across the house. So far about 20% of all my devices’ DNS queries are blocked ads and trackers (that’s on Linux, Android, iOS, etc). I notice as soon as I hit a news site, things go sky high on the blocking.
But remember, a VPN is not going to filter out DNS ads and trackers - it just routes to a remote point and drops you out there. But yes this is a transparent on-site solution where we spend 98% of our time. Out and about is not covered by this.
Well maybe but that product only covers Windows and Linux desktops so my Macbook, phone, TV, and other devices are not covered. By doing this upstream on my router I have the whole house’s devices covered by one product that I can manage globally. AdGuard is not a VPN product though, for that I have a product which I can enable per device or also on my router for the whole house.
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Both AdGuard Home and Pi-hole are free and open source, and both do pretty well much the same as far as functionality goes. They can also both be installed natively or as a docker container image, and will run on Raspberry Pi's or larger hardware.
The differences really come with AdGuard Home's UI looking a touch more modern and less cluttered, and supposedly AdGuard Home has additional functionality already included, where that must be installed additionally for Pi-hole.
So I managed to get up and running quite quickly with AdGuard Home by following DB Tech's video. One thing that tripped me up was that the container would not start, and reported a clash on port 53 (the DNS port). But one of the commenters on the video, Wesley O'Brien, suggested a solution which worked perfectly for me. I set my router's DHCP server to provide the IP of my AdGuard Home server as the DNS, and now all devices throughout the home network are using it. Speed tests and website page loading appears unaffected (not slower, anyway).
See https://youtu.be/u9ylq5Gry_A
#technology #opensource #adguardhome #pihole #trackers
Well thanks for mentioning that as I saw no mention of that condition nor anything about crypto links in their T&C at https://internxt.com/legal. I agree that I’d be a bit suspicious of both. They only talked about credit for referred members. This is a real pity, as a proper Linux client made it quite attractive.
I see though in the ItsFOSS article they do mention that it is actually 2GB free, which is expanded to 10GB through various things you do: “Internxt offers 2 GB of free cloud storage when you sign up. The free storage can be stretched up to 10 GB by ‘completing challenges’ like downloading its mobile app.”
There are a handful of cloud services available for Linux users that provide native applications. Dropbox is one of the oldest and most popular. Then there is Mega and pCloud. Google has shamelessly decided to not create a Google Drive client for Linux. You may also self-host Nextcloud or Seafile, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Internxt is based out of Spain. Like several other EU-based companies, encryption and privacy are at its core. With Internxt Drive, they focus on user-friendly encrypted storage with military-grade encryption and file sharding, so only you have control over your files and data. Internxt uses your password to encrypt and decrypt your files. That means they do not know your password, and if you forget it, your files will be gone (the way security should be).
There are desktop clients for all three major OSes, as well as a web based client, and a client for iOS. I don't see an Android client. Each user gets a free 10GB forever, and 20GB is €10.68 annually, or 200GB for €41.88 annually. They also have monthly plans, and very interestingly, also lifetime plans. I'm currently using SpiderOak, which has a Linux client too, and it is costs US$14 pm for 2TB (Internxt €9.99 or $11.34 monthly).
One downside many will notice though, is the desktop client appears to be Electron based, which is never ideal from a resource perspective.
See https://itsfoss.com/internxt-cloud-service/
#technology #backup #cloudstorage #opensource #internxt
A web based tool for those who really like to run an organised home. The app can be run as a docker container, apart from desktop and browser access it also Android and iOS apps (mobile view).
Some of the functionality includes:
* Pantry inventory with expiry dates
* Recipes
* Shopping list grouped by category, and integrates with pantry inventory and recipes
* Household chore management
* Tasks
* Home equipment / appliances with instruction manuals and notes for each
* Battery management to track when device batteries last charged or replaced
* Community contributed tools, integrations, and useful add-ons
See https://grocy.info/
#technology #household #opensource #chores #organising
I did a webpage on some of that at https://gadgeteer.co.za/altsocialmedia/ showing some info on each alternative, and matching it to it’s closest proprietary equivalent, as well as some video links to those which I did a video overview about.
Not saying Element is the best one, but it is probably best known client for Matrix, with clients for desktop, Android and iOS. When I did my video overview of Matrix at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AVsNqH_-9M, I used Element to show it (that may be of use to familiarise your family with what it looks like.
"Over the past few years we have seen a slowdown on the project as people move on, and not a lot of interest in supporting the project. Right now the project is supported by 2 people and these are primarily bug fixes or dependency updates. You can see from the project graph what this looks like in terms of activity, with significant drops over the past few years."
Interesting as many users are saying Reddit will be unusable for them, and they plan to no longer use Reddit. Well maybe, well maybe not, but interesting that the interest is waning on the Reddit side.
This is a router from the Czech Republic using open source firmware built on top of OpenWrt. It has everything you'd expect from hardware running open source, and quite a lot more, including installable packages, so you can add exactly what your home or business network needs the most while ignoring the parts you won't use.
It'll change your perception of what a router is, what a router can do for your network, and even how you interact with your entire network.
In addition to the flexibility of its interface, the Turris Omnia also features a package manager. You can install plugins, including Network Attached Storage (NAS) configuration, a Nextcloud server, an SSH honeypot, speed test, OpenVPN, print server, a Tor node, LXC for running containers, and much more.
It is available on Amazon for $395, but consider it more than "just a router". The CPU is a Marvell Armada 385, Dual Core 1.6 GHz with 2 GB RAM and 8 GB eMMC. It is possible to operate Wifi at 5 GHz (802.11 AC) and 2.4 GHz (802.11 b / g / n) at the same time.
Distributed adaptive firewall – The Turris headquarters compares data received from thousands of connected routers and if it identifies an attack, updates are sent right away to all Turris devices.
See https://opensource.com/article/22/1/turris-omnia-open-source-router
#technology #opensource #router #openwrt #hardware
Visual Basic is a fully proprietary software programming platform, that means, the language, the IDE, the resulting programs, and the OS where it can run, are all proprietary. This makes programs created with VB proprietary, and can only run on Windows.
This is a list of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) alternatives to Visual Basic (part of Microsoft Visual Studio) computer programming platform. If your school is still teaching VB 6, or if you now use Ubuntu for programming classroom, we strongly suggest you to switch to either one of these alternatives. With these, one can create computer programs visually by drag and drop as well as coding just like what one can do with VB.
I'm a big fan of open source software, but along with that, also cross-platform applications as they do not lock you into one OS or a single vendor. This just keeps all your options open, maximises competition (innovation), and covers the broadest possible potential user base.
See https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2022/01/alternatives-to-visual-basic.html
#technology #opensource #alternativeto #programming #crossplatform
Support calls are important and often satisfying in the end, but the act of clear communication can be arduous for everyone involved. If you've ever been on a support call, you've probably spent several minutes spelling out even the shortest commands and explaining in detail where the spaces and returns fall. While it's often easier to just seize control of a user's computer, that's not really the best way to educate. What you might try instead is sending a user a screen recording, but one that they can copy commands from and paste into their own terminal.
It does not actually execute any commands itself, it merely displays them, with a file size far smaller than an MP4 video file.
See https://opensource.com/article/22/1/record-terminal-session-asciinema
#technology #opensource #asciinema #helpdesk #youtubers
Using SSH profiles can help you in cases where you regularly connect to various servers (especially if you've added custom SSH ports to the mix too). No need to remember the IP address and other such details for SSH connection.
So once you've configured this config file in ~/.ssh all you need to login is something like 'ssh webserver' or 'ssh omv-server'. It won't remember passwords, but if you have set up public key access, you won't need any password to login.
This is on my todo list now as I have two servers and two Raspberry Pi's that I log into quite regularly, and every time it is a check for the IP address, correct user name, password, etc.
See https://linuxhandbook.com/ssh-config-file/
#technology #security #Linux #SSH #tips
The plugin implements the ActivityPub protocol for your blog. Your readers will be able to follow your blogposts on Mastodon and other federated platforms that support ActivityPub.
The plugin works with the following federated platforms:
* Mastodon
* Pleroma
* Friendica
* HubZilla
* Pixelfed
* SocialHome
* Misskey
See https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
#technology #WordPress #activitypub #fediverse #decentralised
You need to separate the commercial website side from the self-hosted code we can use. I posted about the self-hostable code. You are in control of the settings and can examine the code. As it comes the Google API’s etc are all blank and are options for users to use if they wish or not. Unless there is some evidence that they have embedded some evil tracking in the source code, there is no point to just supposing there is something. I did not see any evidence of trackers in the self-hostable code.
Unfortunately not - that and business platforms like LinkedIn have been difficult to replicate for some reason. The only one I’m aware of is https://github.com/vutuv/vutuv which may be worth looking at. The challenge will be how many people are there as business networks especially rely on networking. But I Must look into it a bit more and also promote it myself.
It provides a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering, texturing and converting meshes. It offers features for processing raw data produced by 3D digitization tools/devices and for preparing models for 3D printing.
As with anything 3D, there is a bit of a learning curve, but I did manage to select some "noise" in my iPhone's 3D LiDAR images and clean those up a bit. They do have a series of YouTube playlist tutorials which should help, as well as some sample 3D scans to practice on.
See https://www.meshlab.net/
#technology #opensource #3Dscans #LiDAR #Meshlab #3Dprinting
LimeSurvey allows users to quickly create intuitive, powerful online forms and surveys that can work for anyone from small business to large business. The survey software is self-guiding for the respondents. They have a cloud hosted option with free and paid tiers, much the same as SurveyMonkey, but there is also the Community Edition which is fully free and open source software which you can self-host. Apart from the freedoms that brings, it also means that any respondent data is also free from tracking and data mining by any 3rd parties.
In this video I tour through a sample survey that I created, where I run through the survey options, I also show how easily a new survey with questions can be started, and I end off with a run through the various general menu configuration options.
Watch https://youtu.be/tPDIO6mr-mU
#technology #opensource #limesurvey #selfhosting #surveymonkey
LinkAce is a self-hosted archive to collect links of your favourite websites. Save articles to read them later, tools to use them in your next project, or historic content to archive it for the long term. LinkAce comes with a lot of features while keeping a clean and minimal interface.
All saved links are monitored. Get a notification when a website moves or becomes unavailable. Links are backed up via the Internet Archive after you saved them. Choose tags to categorize links, add them to custom lists to group them by a topic or occasion.
Your link archive can be accessed by guests, or kept private. Links, tags and lists can be set private separately. Both private and public links are accessible via RSS feeds. Feeds are also available for tags and lists.
It will import from a browser's bookmarks, and export to a browser, but it does not integrate with any browser bookmark systems. So it is a stand-alone solution. However, if you use different browsers this may be an interesting solution, or you like to share categories of links with others, or just keep track of links without having a bunch of dead links (most browser bookmarks don't check validity of links).
Their site also has a demo you can try out. If you're looking more for a Read It Later service though, Wallabag is probably more suited to that.
See https://www.linkace.org/
#technology #bookmarks #links #linkace #opensource
Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it.
Through interviews with two former employees of the company, along with two individuals who formerly worked at location data brokers Cuebiq and X-Mode, The Markup discovered that the app acts as a firehose of data for a controversial industry that has operated in the shadows with few safeguards to prevent the misuse of this sensitive information.
“We have no means to confirm or deny the accuracy” of whether Life360 is among the largest sources of data for the industry, Life360 founder and CEO Chris Hulls said in an emailed response to questions from The Markup. “We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for the majority of our users, including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives.”
Supposedly the data should be aggregated and anonymised, but like we know from many backdoor vulnerabilities, as well as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this not always what happens when a "capability" is put in place. "Prohibiting selling or marketing data to any government agency" is no real guarantee. This is just not going to go down well, especially with Tile users after their service was bought out by Life360.
See https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user
#technology #tracking #privacy #life360 #tiletracker
The report was put together by 8 Swedish government agencies, including the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Companies Registration Office and the Försäkringskassan. The report gives an exhaustive definition of digital collaboration, noting the important components needed for teams to work together.
Nextcloud is already in use at the Swedish Transport Agency and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, while Försäkringskassan offers authorities Nextcloud as a service.
See https://nextcloud.com/blog/swedish-government-nextcloud-premier-digital-collaboration-platform/
#technology #opensource #sweden #government #nextcloud
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There is a common misconception that large open source projects are well-funded. In practice, many rely on a small group of maintainers.
The PHP programming language is one of them. Despite being used by 75%+ of the web, PHP only has a few full-time contributors.
See https://dri.es/php-foundation-launched
#php #opensource
As alert folks of a cross-platform inclination will have noticed, Paragon's NTFS driver was accepted into the Linux kernel, and was released as part of 5.15. This has had a consequence they probably didn't consider, though: you can now boot Linux from an NTFS partition.
But wait, there's more. Since a Linux installation doesn't use any of the same file or folder names in the root directory, you can even install them into the same partition.
Yes, you probably really don't want to do this. I keep my OS's on separate drives altogether, and rather share common data partitions where needed.
See https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/22/install_linux_on_ntfs/
#technology #opensource #Linux #NTFS
ToF is a measurement technique that relies on reflected light to quickly determine the distance of objects. ToF sensors are used in LIDAR (light detection and ranging) systems and in other applications that utilize SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) algorithms, all of which involve the analysis of the visible and near-visible spectrum.
These sensors have started showing up in smartphones recently – Apple's iPhone 12 and 13, and Samsung's Galaxy S20+, among others, include a laser-based Sony ToF sensor – for augmented reality applications and adding depth information to 2D imagery.
Now, four researchers based in Singapore and South Korea have another application in mind: They see ToF sensors as a way to spot concealed cameras.
Sami said he intends to release the source code for Laser-Assisted Photography Detection (LAPD) but has to coordinate that with his colleagues.
See https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/18/smartphone_camera_detection/
#technology #hiddencameras #spying #LIDAR
The release happened as a result of a decree of Open Government from 30 October 2019 after the French government joined the Open Government Partnership in April 2014. After two years of work, the site hit version 1.0 on Wednesday.
This really allows further re-use of publicly funded code, and also serves as a boost for their own small businesses who want to make use of it for themselves or to serve their customers.
See https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/11/french_government_foss/
#opensource #opengovernment #france #publicsector
Wow!!!