julian

This is my POSSE copy of my comment on a SilverBullet issue, Feature Request: relative path for images #363.

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Resources around development of camera apps, camera API standards, and photos management, in Indie Phones, degoogled Android, Murena /e/-OS, Purism Librem, etc.

Independent smart-phones have recently become a reality for those of us unhappy with the way Apple and Google seek to control, own and use us. We can now choose a user-respecting alternative, thanks to Murena /e/-OS, Purism Librem 5, LineageOS and more.

With sustained dedication from their producers working with very limited budgets, these alternatives are coming along nicely and by now are certainly usable. Understandably, however, they are not yet as slick as those funded (and controlled) by the mega-corps Apple and Google.

There is much more to be done to bring the indie phones up to a level of sophistication that ordinary people find a pleasure to use and to trust. In this article I look at one rather technical aspect of it: what developments do we need on the infra side?

These are some of the talks I'm most interested in, at FOSDEM '23.

I won't be there in person, I'll be watching some from home and in the matrix.

By Tracks or Dev Rooms | Times are UTC+1

Special Extras

• Sat 18:00 Book reading: Ada & Zangemann – A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream — “In this hopeful story Ada and her friends join a movement that started back in 1983. Their courageous adventure of software freedom and learning how technology works is a wonderful way to introduce young people everywhere to the joys of tinkering!” —Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation

Main Tracks (Janson, K Building)

There are a lot of good main track talks.

• Sat 11:00 Can we do an open source chip design in 45 minutes? — The state of free and open source silicon
• Sat 14:00 Linux Inlaws — A how-to on world domination by accident — the story of this podcast and its tech stack
• Sun 12:00 Rosegarden: A Slumbering Giant — How a 20-year old OSS project is still going strong — music composition and score software
• Sun 12:00 Practical Computerized Home Automation — “Home automation is an elusive technology — often desired, rarely achieved. This talk explores a successful ten-year home automation deployment, outlining the challenges that derail many attempts. It will cover technology choices, programing basics, and a dozen successful applications.”
• Sun 13:00 Podcasting 2.0: it's all about Interoperability — How Podcasting 2.0 will save the Open Internet
• Sun 14:00 Decentralized Social Media with Hachyderm — The unexpected Mastodon cooperative that broke Silicon Valley
• Sun 15:00 Running a Hybrid Event with Open Source — The Plumbers Experience
• Sun 15:00 Clear skies, no clouds in sight. Running a 14 person company on only free software. — They say it can't be done, they say it's too much work. But is it really? After 5 years of running Prehensile Tales on entirely free software I think I can answer this.
• Sun 16:00 Matrix 2.0 — How we’re making Matrix go voom
• Sun 16:00 The End of Free Software — How the Cloud threatens FOSS and what we can do about it

And one of the Keynotes I'd like to call out:

• Sun 17:00 Open Source Software at NASA

I have been trying out a matrix-based blog comments system.

WriteFreely is a simple self-hosted blogging system. It uses Markdown for content. To let readers subscribe to follow new posts, it supports both RSS and ActivityPub (Fediverse). It has no comments system of its own.

Cactus Comments is a simple self-hosted comments system. It lets us add a comments section to any web page we control, such as a blog. It uses Matrix for the comments.

I describe a self-hosted deployment.

Great news: someone at the EU understands that public services must not foist Big Tech on their citizens.

F-Droid.org tooted the news yesterday: “EU Pilot project — De-monopolized access to EU applications”

What does this mean and why is it important?

I recently framed a take on this issue as “FOSS Apps Live In FOSS App Stores”. Free (Libre) Open Source Software apps should be distributed in such a way as to be available to everyone, not only to Apple's and Google's users.

I wish our children could grow up making their digital footprints in their own digital gardens. In the current system our children visit shopping malls run by the Big Tech companies whose business model is to find every way to maximise profit from their “users”.

This is my list of Open EdTech resources that I see as helpful toward my goals.

From: Google

“Your Google Account will soon be considered as inactive“

”... if you don't sign in soon”

“Is this a phishing scam?” was my first thought. But no, it's true! This officially confirms I am freed at last from Google's clutches on my data, on my digital life.

Hurray!

I once thought Google was my friend. The most convenient email, the most convenient search, a great phone, with a feeling of being quite open-source-y, not too locked-in. But of course their lock-in is immense, almost inescapable, just like all the other Big Tech silos. Once disillusionment set in, it was hard to leave that all behind. Took me five years.

Now, for months and months I haven't signed in to my gmail, to play store, to youtube, nothing.

And I feel great!

Want to know more?

This is my POSSE copy of announcements I posted to the Matrix Community Year In Review 2022, which was subsequently published on Nico's blog and on Matrix.org's blog.

One day in the late '80s or early '90s I heard on the radio an old recording from 1936, “mush along you huskies... at the end of the caribou trail,” from a crackly old 78 rpm record. Simple, quaint, nostalgic. I liked it and noted down the title on one of my many lists I used to keep.