danie10

Following heavy criticism regarding anti-repair practices on the iPhone 13 lineup, Apple has just announced its Self Service Repair program. The company shared earlier that it wouldn’t be disabling Face ID after third-party screen repairs, after online outrage. The Cupertino giant is now taking an unexpected step further and making repairs easily accessible to individuals.

In a newsroom post, Apple has stated that iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 users will be able to order genuine spare parts and tools to repair their own iPhones. The move is unprecedented by Apple, but it’s most definitely a welcome one that will help dodge anti-trust lawsuits.

Clearly, without lawsuits and pressure groups, this would never have changed. Whilst I really love some of what Apple does (very long software update cycles, the best health smartwatch, etc) there is also a lot I really dislike (a crippled Shortcuts app, iCloud web apps that lack features, Photos is dismal compared to Google Photos, etc). So this is yet another incremental improvement (like widgets, 3rd party keyboards and browsers, copy-and-paste, etc that eventually arrived).

See https://www.xda-developers.com/apple-now-lets-you-repair-your-own-iphone/

#technology #righttorepair #iphone #DIY

Motorcycle rally racing is a high-speed, exciting, off-road motorsport that involves zipping across all types of terrain on two wheels. While riding, it’s extremely important for riders to know what’s coming up next — turns, straightaways, stream crossings, the list goes on. Generally, this is handled by a roadbook — a paper scroll that has diagrams of each turn or course checkpoint, along with the distances between them and any other pertinent information. Of course, this needs to be paired with a readout that tells you how far you’ve travelled since the last waypoint so you’re not just guessing. This readout usually takes the form of a rally computer, a device that can display speed, distance travelled, and course heading (and some of the fancier ones have even more data available).

See https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/motorcycle-rally-computer-goes-open-source/

#technology #opensource #motorcyclerally #rallycomputer

The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. Parents and teachers have complained about the complexity of the system—its launch was delayed, there have been reports of project mismanagement, and it has been labelled an IT disaster. The Android version of the app has an average 1.2 star rating.

A pity that the parents' open source alternative was originally so negatively received by the officials, but good that in the end there was acceptance. It goes to show though that with open data APIs, some tremendous innovation and improvements can be made available. There is nothing wrong with having two or three alternative apps to use. Application Program Interfaces (API) just need to differentiate between public data to be used vs data that an authenticated individual is allowed to access.

See https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-stockholm-school-app-open-source/

#technology #schools #sweden #opensource

Think about it, you can pick an e-mail domain anywhere and use any e-mail client on any platform, to send an e-mail to someone anywhere else... We just take that for granted, but if e-mail were newly invented today by a company like say Meta, all the billions of people in the world would have to belong to that same single company in order to send and receive mail to anyone else...

E-mail's greatest success lies in it's open standards and decentralisation. It will no doubt me replaced at some point in the future, as all technologies will, but let us hope that instant messaging and social networks go back to being open and decentralised (like they too were once).

See https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/a-look-back-at-50-years-of-email/

#technology #email #decentralisation #openstandards #deletemeta

Depending on whom you ask, PC Building Simulator is either utterly ridiculous or incredibly satisfying. You can decide for yourself by downloading this niche simulator for free from the Epic Games Store before October 17th.

Like the majority of sim games, PCBS speaks to a very specific type of fantasy. If your idea of a good time is overclocking your computer while managing a small business, this is a game that does exactly that.

See https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/8/22715201/pc-building-simulator-free-epic-games-store

#technology #gaming #epicgames #PCBuildingSimulator #simulator

Looking for an open source smartwatch you’re in total control of? If so, check out the Bangle.js 2 which is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. This hacker-friendly piece of horological hardware is the brainchild of Espruino developer Gordon Williams. Much like Williams’ earlier efforts in this area, the Bangle.js 2 runs on JavaScript.

An open-source online “app store” is also available where you can browse apps created by others, and quickly ‘download’ them to the watch itself wirelessly.

The watch is an off-the-shelf model from China. However, all of the software and firmware that runs on it is open source, having been reverse engineered and retro-fitted to it.

Gordon Williams has run 4 crowdfunding campaigns before and delivered on all of them, which should offer some reassurance should you need it.

See https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/09/bangle-js-2-is-a-hackable-open-source-smartwatch-that-runs-javascript

#technology #opensource #smartwatch #hacking

Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter all have their European headquarters in Dublin, making Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner the lead EU regulator responsible for holding them to the law.

But the Irish DPC has been repeatedly criticized, both by privacy campaigners and by other EU regulators, for failing to take action.

Is it because they rely on the massive income from Big Tech....

See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/ireland-fails-to-enforce-eu-law-against-big-tech

#technology #BigTech #Ireland

The company recommends against mounting an iPhone on a motorcycle, as the vibrations may be transmitted via the bike’s handlebars and chassis. Long-term direct exposure to high-amplitude vibrations within certain frequency ranges may degrade the performance of these systems and lead to reduced image quality for photos and videos. It is recommended to avoid exposing your iPhone to extended high-amplitude vibrations.

Apple says if you’re planning to mount your iPhone to a scooter or a moped, it recommends using a vibration-dampening mount to lessen the risk to the phone and its camera system.

See https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/11/22668294/motorcycle-vibrations-damage-iphone-camera-apple

#technology #iphone #motorcycles #scooters #mobilephone

Know when web pages change! Stay on top of new information! Live your data-life pro-actively instead of re-actively, do not rely on manipulative social media for consuming important information.

Maybe you need to be notified the moment a government or company web page changes, or possibly you're waiting for an item to go on sale.

This can be installed and run on a Raspberry Pi at home, or installed quickly as a Docker image.

See https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

#technology #opensource #selfhosted #changedetection #monitoring

Features include:

• Monitoring uptime for HTTP(s) / TCP / Ping / DNS Record
• Fancy, Reactive, Fast UI/UX
• Notifications via Telegram, Discord, Gotify, Slack, Pushover, Email (SMTP), and 70+ notification services
• 20 seconds interval

See https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

#technology #opensource #selfhosted #alternativeto #uptimekuma

This application used to be called PulseEffects but it was renamed to EasyEffects after we started to use GTK4 and replaced GStreamer by native PipeWire filters.

This is really useful for cleaning up audio when doing recordings for videos. Yes OBS Studio has many of these built-in, but if you are using third party screen recorders like say SimpleScreenRecorder, they have no audio input processing, and this is where EasyEffects is really useful. There are a good 23 effects, but some like auto gain, compressor, equalizer, and noise reduction will be most useful.

I installed from AUR for Arch Linux, but there is also a Flatpak install that should install on most Linux distros.

See https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

#technology #Linux #EasyEffects #Audio #Recording

Google's 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google's messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old)—Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.

Currently, you would probably rank Google's offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers.

Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for a non-stop rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established products, unexpected shut-downs, and legions of confused, frustrated, and exiled users.

In the beginning, there was Google Talk, and things were good...

See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/

#technology #Google #messengers