GadgeteerZA

Most people agree that Social Media is broken and that we need to find new solutions. Max DeMarco embarked on a journey to find out more about a new invention called NOSTR. This is his documentary about that journey and his interview with key players....

It is a Java-based app that runs on Windows, Linux and macOS that provides an amazing amount of rich text formatting options for sticky notes, auto-roll up notes, protection and encryption of notes, alarms, colours, attaching images or files, and much more. Although you could use it for organising masses of notes into groups and...

I like devices that are not locked into an OS ecosystem (Apple, I’m looking at you!) and although I already have a Fitbit Aria scale, it gets thrown out when my wife stands on the scale with a pet, to get the pet’s weight (you weigh yourself, hold the pet, and then work out the difference). Having a built-in pet/baby mode is...

Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it's visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit....

A Japanese team of researchers are working on a positioning system using muons, which could be used in places where GPS signals can’t be received (such as underwater or underground)....

As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."...

Reddit has a form where you can request a copy of your data. The process can take up to 30 days, after which you will get a private message on your Reddit account with a download link. The data comes in the form of CSV files that you can open using Microsoft Excel or any text editor....

It is interesting how easy this has got with a popular service like Prime Voice AI, and when you realise that many use voice recognition for authenticated access to systems, we can see where the risks come in. Like most technology, there are lots of positive upsides, but it always opens up the negatives as well. As Steve points...

Today, most messaging apps have true end-to-end-encryption (Telegram’s must be activated per contact for Secret Chat), but what really differs now is how many can tie your communications back to you through metadata. Obviously those which require a phone number or an e-mail address, do have your activity tied to you...

When you’re on the hunt for a new USB power adaptor, you may come across a few options with gallium nitride (GaN) technology. These charging bricks tend to be a bit expensive. But due to their reduced size and increased charging ability, a GaN charger may be your ideal purchase. It could even help you save money in the long...

Bionic Reading is a new way of reading text that uses a patented algorithm to highlight the most important parts of words, making it easier and faster to read. The method was developed by a German software developer named Renato Cukar, who was inspired by the way the human eye reads text....

Nostr is unique in that it has a global public key ID that replicates posts (notes) via relays, so it is scalable, resistant to censorship, and the user fully owns their identity profile. There are only two parts to the network, namely relays and clients, with the Nostr protocol linking them. Every post is signed, and every...

Linus' thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can't seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)

You host your own service, which can also federate with other Databag nodes. It is Public-Private key based identity (not bound to any blockchain or hosting domain) and End-to-End encrypted (the hosting admin cannot view sealed topics, default unsealed)....

To normally access say two Raspberry Pi’s, maybe a remote virtual private server, a media machine in the sitting room, etc you’d probably use SSH from a terminal, as well as say a VNC Viewer, and maybe more applications. And you’d have to do that from the admin machine you’ve set it all up on....

It is inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft....

Yes, there is quite a debate raging across different networks about what protocol to support. Obviously, those who know only one well, are going to root for that one, irrespective of whether it may be the best one....

One of the best parts of gaming is gaming with friends, but often this requires everyone involved to have the same expensive piece of hardware. Almost everyone has a computer with a browser already, though, so if you’d like to play online with friends who don’t have the same gaming machine as you, they can play along now...

This is a complete rewrite in Rust of the UAD project, which aims to improve privacy and battery performance by removing unnecessary and obscure system apps. This can also contribute to improve security by reducing the attack surface....

Ideas can come from all sorts of places, and inspiration can hit in a flash—think of Archimedes supposedly yelling “Eureka! Eureka!” in the bath when he realized that irregular items could be accurately measured through water displacement. But sometimes, it’s fiction, not reality, that provides the spark of inspiration....

Germany’s federal and state data protection authorities (DSK) have raised concerns about the compatibility of Microsoft 365 with data protection laws in Germany and the wider European Union....

These days, social media gets all the attention, but the Bulletin Board System (BBS), a relic from a kinder, gentler time in computer communications, persists. Each BBS is its own retro-flavored community with messages, text-based games, and files you can download. And you can still connect to one today....

The device, nicknamed Wi-Peep, can fly near a building and then use the inhabitants’ Wi-Fi network to identify and locate all Wi-Fi-enabled devices inside in a matter of seconds....

Just like passports for real life identities, Keyoxide can be used to verify the online identity of people to make sure one is interacting with whom they are supposed to be and not imposters. Unlike real life passports, Keyoxide works with online identities or “personas”, meaning these identities can be anonymous and one can...

One reason for browsers getting sluggish is having too many extensions open, which just consumes extra RAM. Sometimes, too, they can interfere with each other. Even though my computer has 32GB of RAM, using a lot more than is needed, certainly increases the browser start up time a lot....

Chris Titus has done a video about this awesome open source tool he has built to install various common applications, do global software updates (yes I also can’t believe Windows does not yet do that), various system tweaks, and config settings....

Once your archive is on your machine, you will have a browsable HTML archive of your tweets, direct messages, and moments including media like images, videos, and GIFs. This is nice, but it also has a few flaws. For one, you can’t easily copy your Tweets somewhere else, for example, into your website because they are stored in...

You can append to your existing e-mail address in various ways, and this could be pretty useful for seeing who leaked your e-mail address to spammers. For example, for your bank, give them the address [email protected]. Then, if spammers send to that address, you can quickly see where they got the e-mail address from!...

I’ve happily been using self-hosted web-based FreshRSS for a while now. I chose it mainly because it suited my needs, and when I travelled regularly, I could work from the same shared source of articles. But the last while I’ve noticed some feeds lag really slowly with fetching the feed content (it may be my slowish hosting...

Chris did a nice breakdown of how this can work in conjunction with a self-hosted Fresh RSS reader (same as I’m using). It solves that issue with some RSS feeds only showing a short snippet of the content....

For those who don’t even trust a zero trust online service like Bitwarden, there is this option…...

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100....

Yes, progress with Bluesky has been super slow (a bit like Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid) but at least we now know what protocol it will use, which will help explain a bit more about what could be expected....

An interesting read at the linked article below. Whilst it is a given that eSIMs (and their successor) are going to happen, there are clearly some rough edges that need to be worked on. What was going to be greater freedom to switch SIMs, could end up being a bit of a lock-in with an existing eSIM ;-)...

Big Tech wants to kill the password, with “Passkeys” being the hot, new password replacement standard on the block. Passkeys are backed by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the FIDO Alliance, so expect to see them everywhere soon. iOS picked up the standard in version 16, and now Google is launching passkey betas on Chrome and...

In the words of the American writer Susan Sontag, “To collect photographs is to collect the world.” And to see the world as it was, from dramatic historical events to the quirks of everyday life, there’s no better place to begin than a photo archive. Newspapers – whose photojournalists capture everything from grand state...

Just noticed this really useful GUI tool that was not around a year ago or so when I switched my Home folder partition to Btrfs. It seems to cover all the generally used type of Btrfs features you’d use including running and monitoring scrubs or balance operations, and even viewing and browsing snapshots, with options to...

Google Camera and its post-processing algorithms undoubtedly changed the game in terms of what we expect from smartphone cameras, elevating the Google Pixels to some of the best Android phones you can buy for the camera. That’s the exact reason why Google Camera ports are so highly requested for non-Google devices. With the...

Blood glucose monitoring is touted to be the next big breakthrough for wearable devices like the Apple Watch. However, the hardware is yet to be seen on a commercially available, mass-market device. That might change soon....

Scientists have developed a laser with artificial intelligence (AI) designed to neutralise cockroaches as a new form of pest control....

The Open Book project pairs a 4.2″ E-Ink screen with microprocessors we all know and love, building a hacker-friendly e-reader platform. Two years ago, this project won first place in our Adafruit Feather contest — the Feather footprint making the Open Book compatible with a wide range of MCUs, giving hackers choice on which...