julian

This is an informal summary of my recent (2016 ~ 2023) experience and explorations in the areas of Matrix and Android and self-hosting. For my employment history please see my more formal CV/resumé at https://blog.foad.me.uk/cv/.

Passions

• Matrix, FOSS, services-as-FOSS, digital Freedom for everyone

Recent skills

for secure location sharing with Matrix

I set up my own OpenStreetMap tiles server for use with matrix location sharing.

This guide explains how I did it, including the Ansible role scripts I wrote.

This is my POSSE copy of the Matrix Scribe announcement of that I posted in This Week in Matrix (TWIM) 2022-03-04.

I'm working on my project, The Matrix Scribe.

The Matrix Scribe helps us re-post or transcribe messages into matrix that we received from somewhere else, posing as different ghost users to represent the original authors.

Scribe will post this:

Ann I'm Ann.

Bob Hello! I'm Bob.

when I write this to @scribe-bot:

@julian /scribe as Ann

@julian I'm Ann.

@julian /scribe as Bob

@julian Hello! I'm Bob.

Problem: Android users can't receive push notifications from most services except through Google.

Solution: UnifiedPush

Issue #525 is one of the earliest feature requests for Apache Subversion. The request is to make the pristine or base files optional, so that the disk space occupied by a working copy would be little more that of the working files, in contrast to the existing situation where each file is stored twice.

Bitwarden is a decent modern password manager. While it is available as a cheap hosted service like many other password managers, the awesome thing about Bitwarden is it is commercially developed as open source software that optionally can be self-hosted. The perfect combination. Hurray!

This Diary app for android, by Bill Farmer, has made it a pleasure to keep a diary of short observations. I wasn't a diary writer until I installed it about two years ago and now I have been using it nearly every day, ever since.

Suddenly in 2021 there appeared an open source desktop email program that I can recommend as a great choice for general users.

MailSpring

Organic Maps is a great open source app for casual every-day navigation. It has an easy-to-read map display, navigation directions with voice, search for places, save favourite places and add new places, and not a lot else. The usability is decent and it looks good.

It's become my default mapping app, and it makes me ever so happy to have such a good open-source solution.