Ein kleiner, aber ein Abschied

Meine Entscheidung, mich von meinem Blog Gerhards Gedankenbuch als eigenständige Seite zu verabschieden und sie in meiner oldie-Timeline fortzuführen, ist mir nicht so ganz leicht gefallen. Das Blog hatte ich schon 2007 begonnen, lange bevor ich das Fediverse und Friendica kennen gelernt habe. Es war mir immer wichtig, zu meinen Gedanken und Gefühlen zu stehen und andere - soweit es sie interessiert - daran teilhaben zu lassen. Letztlich habe ich immer mehr erkannt, dass ich sowohl in meiner oldie-Instanz wie in meiner Blog-Instanz authentisch über mich und aus meiner Sicht schreibe.

Ein Stück Blog ist jedoch in oldie geblieben: Die Artikel, die ich ansonsten in meinem Gedankenbuch geschrieben hätte, habe einen in fett blau geschriebenen Titel.

#gerhardsgedankenbuch #abschied #blog #gedanken #gefühle #teilhabe

Gerhards Gedankenbuch

*Die Zukunft meines Blogs Gerhards Gedankenbuch* Mein Blog pflege ich schon seit einigen Jahren als als eigenständige Seite - von 2007 bis 2022 auf Blogger...

Your brain can grow from reading and learning – e-books offer the same benefit as paper books

The number of people who read for fun appears to be steadily dropping. Fifty percent of UK adults say they don’t read regularly (up from 42 percent in 2015) and almost one in four young people aged 16 to 24 say they’ve never been readers, according to research by The Reading Agency.

Two regions in the left hemisphere of the brain, which are crucial for language, are different in people who are good at reading and are likely to be shaped by the habit.

Clearly, brain structure can tell us a lot about reading skills. Importantly, though, the brain is malleable—it changes when we learn a new skill or practice an already acquired one. Reading is likely to shape the structure of the left Heschl’s gyrus and temporal pole. So, if you want to keep your Heschl’s thick and thriving, pick up a good book and start reading.

Reading is the same whether you read an e-book or a paper book. The big difference is e-books are generally a lot more accessible, are cheaper, take up less space, and usually have some form of dictionary for quick word lookups.

There is really no excuse not to read: Books are freely available in libraries, many classics are in the public domain, and there are very diverse topics to cover ever possible interest type. Time though is typically the excuse most give, but this is also not very true, if you consider carefully what a 24-hour day looks like. I set aside 30 mins, when going to bed at night, to read. It also has the added bonus of relaxing the mind and readying it for sleep.

See wired.com/story/good-at-readin…
#Blog, #ebooks, #health, #reading, #technology

5 self-hosted apps that could improve your life

Useful self-hosted solutions can make great weekend projects (just saying).

This collection covers:

• Recipe management
• Gamifying productivity and habit management
• Expenditure management
• Workout manager
• Password manager

Often these solutions will run even on a Raspberry Pi connected to your network at home. They are open source, too, so there is no cost to installing or running them.

See xda-developers.com/self-hosted…
#Blog, #opensource, #selfhosting, #technology

6 reasons why OnlyOffice is a great Microsoft Office alternative

OnlyOffice is a suite that is available as a paid enterprise version for broad deployments, but also works completely for free on desktop and mobile operating systems. It is fully cross-platform, including Linux.

While it’s not exactly the same, the OnlyOffice UI is very close to what Microsoft offers with its own Office suite. There’s a ribbon-style UI and all the tabs are very similar, with the same options generally being available in each tab and presented in a very similar way, too.

Another great thing about OnlyOffice is that it includes some PDF tools that you can use for free, too. Essentially, this allows you to create easily fillable PDF forms, which you can send to people when you need to collect some kind of information from them.

There is also online collaboration and an OnlyOffice account is available for free with 2 GB of cloud storage.

What I do like about the cross-platform support is that you can use and be familiar with one tool across all your operating systems.

Another plus is, apart from full Microsoft DOCX compatibility and some other formats as well, it also supports the open standards ODF format.

It is free to use for non-enterprise users, but is not open source.

See xda-developers.com/reasons-onl…
#Blog, #alternativeto, #crossplatform, #officesuite, #technology

Why a Chest Strap Is the Best Way to Track Your Heart Rate During Exercise

I knew that a chest strap was going to be more accurate than any watch based tracker, but I was not aware that a Coospo H808S chest strap heart rate monitor (quite a bit cheaper than the Polar H10 chest strap I’m using) can also connect to various third-party fitness apps like Polar, Wahoo, Endomondo, UA Run, Garmin, Peloton and more (seemingly via its own CoospoRide app).

This chest strap does basically what the H10 does, and is also waterproof, and has Wireless HRM Dual Mode Connection like the H10.

I’m very happy with the Polar H10, but I’m due to replace the strap soon, and they are not exactly cheap (in South Africa anyway). For me, it looks the Polar strap will need replacing every 14 or 15 months.

See lifehacker.com/why-a-chest-str…
#Blog, #health, #heartrate, #technology

Simulacron

#ecrire #lire #actu #alainlasverne #poesie #poesiecontemporaine #blog #auteur

https://alainlasverne.eklablog.com/2024/12/simulacron.html

Simulacron - Alain Lasverne.

... et peut-être nous-même qui ne sommes plus vraiment dans le réel, comme des caricatures ou des fantômes regardant ce qu’ils furent s’éloigner. Caricréature , série comme une dénonciation, un exorcisme sous la pluie. ans l’antichambre de la mort...

RIP Safely Home Reporter — Western Cape Government has discontinued the service

I encounter quite a few reckless drivers on the road, of which more than half are red traffic light jumpers. Some of these end up being close encounters with other drivers. I used to nearly blow a gasket when I saw these things happening. Then I bought a dashcam (well, actually replaced it twice with upgrades), and could give voice commands to save the video clip. Those clips I uploaded every few months, when the SD card was full, to the WCG Safely Home Reporter website. The website would capture details such as the location, time, what the offence was, the registration number, etc. It could also show which vehicles had multiple offences reported.

Safely Home Reporter site showing already logged offenses

The reports were not used per se for actual prosecutions, but I was told that the taxi offences were passed on to the Taxi Unit to look at.

The point is, though, instead of my pressure cooker popping, I’d smile and say “Garmin save video” and carry on driving. So, for many, this was a way of neutralising any road rage they may have experienced. As I say, though, it is doubtful it had any actual outcomes other than that. These were offences recorded in public, showing what happened. Some were for red light offences, others were stop streets ignored, and even inconsiderate parking. These are usually all drivers who got away with whatever their anti-social behaviour was.

Today, I was ready to upload my next batch of dashcam videos, including a truck going through a red light, and a couple of cars happily ignoring red lights as well, when I could not find the website. After logging an issue, I was told it was discontinued. It seems to have discontinued quietly, as I never saw any announcement anywhere. This is pretty sad as the site has been in operation for many years now. I made a post about it at gadgeteer.co.za/dont-get-mad-i… back in 2019. Back in 2017 I made this post about it at gadgeteer.co.za/uploaded-more-…, and I also included a link to many of the videos I’d uploaded to the site.

Hopefully though this is not the end of such a service as I see on the City of Cape Town’s Innovation Ideas website, someone has also proposed a similar type of concept at flui.city/capetown/posts/71086…. If you live in Cape Town, you can support or comment on that idea. It goes to show though that many law-abiding drivers do get quite infuriated about other drivers who have no regard at all for the law, or their fellow drivers. It is quite an interesting idea about making some money off the fines of those transgressors. Gamifying the system could also very well have a positive knock-on effect, and make our roads a bit safer at the same time.

So RIP Safely Home Reporter service! You made my driving more bearable over quite a few years. The link below takes you to the web archive version of the site. It looks like it was still active up to around July 2024. It was an initiative of the Provincial Department of Transport, of the Western Cape Government. I do recall, too, that their long serving HOD of the Department did leave earlier this year, so maybe this was just part of a clean sweep of the broom.

See web.archive.org/web/2024070705…
#Blog, #safelyhomereporter, #southafrica, #technology, #WCG, #weterncape

EFF Launches Digital Rights Bytes to Answer Tech Questions that Bug Us All

Yes, politicians and Big Corporates do twist narratives to suite their own agendas. EFF is aiming to try to give more objective and honest answers to technology questions, especially those which affect users’ privacy and security.

EFF is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology Development. Its mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all people of the world.

An interesting twist is that you can submit your own questions and answers too (without providing your name, e-mail address, or a completed reCaptcha).

See eff.org/press/releases/eff-lau…
#Blog, #EFF, #privacy, #security, #technology

PeerTube, the Open-Source YouTube in the Fediverse, Now Has Official Mobile Apps

PeerTube is an open-source and decentralized video network, with videos hosted across thousands of interconnected servers, from large YouTube-like public servers to smaller ones set up by individual creators.

You can browse and watch videos from over a thousand different servers—the app calls them “platforms” in some places—and you don’t need an account with any of them to use the mobile app. You can also favourite videos, subscribe to channels, follow your favourite creators (regardless of the server they’re hosted on), create custom playlists, and add videos to a watch list.

Created in 2017 by a single developer, PeerTube is now maintained by the French non-profit Framasoft.

PeerTube uses the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon, Meta’s Threads, PixelFed, and other services, meaning you have a bunch of servers to play videos from.

I can imagine that funding for a video based platform is going to be a bigger challenge than for text based posts. I also post my own videos to a Peertube server.

See howtogeek.com/peertube-now-has…
#Blog, #opensource, #Peertube, #technology, #videos

Location data firm helps US police find out when suspects visited their doctor

A location-tracking company that sells its services to police departments is apparently using addresses and coordinates of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices and other types of locations to help cops compile lists of places visited by suspects, according to a 404 Media report published today.

Fog Data Science, which says it “harness[es] the power of data to safeguard national security and provide law enforcement with actionable intelligence,” has a “Project Intake Form” that asks police for locations where potential suspects and their mobile devices might be found.

Who needs a surveillance state when the data can just be purchased by the government?

This all comes down to the power of aggregating lots of metadata. If one takes just a single app like WhatsApp where the T&C’s allow for a full range of metadata to be collected by the app and passed upstream to Meta, who leaks data to 3rd parties, it is very easy to see how all this is possible. WhatsApp (just as an example as it is not known whether WhatsApp is the source of this data) knows who you talk to, when you talk to them, where you are exactly, where you live, how often you use your phone, what roads you travel on, where you visit, and lost more. It may not be able to read your E2EE messages, but it knows everything else, and its users have given consent for the data to be passed to 3rd parties.

I really have no idea how such information can be allowed to be traded and sold to interested parties. Many countries only allow such data to be collected and provided to law enforcement after a court order is obtained by law enforcement. As TikTok is still Chinese owned, I’m doubting if this data is being provided by TikTok to US data brokers. It is more likely US owned social networks providing this data themselves (purely my guess, though).

I can see why more and more users are distrusting these companies which provide free services, and then sell their data. The thing is, if law enforcement and governments are buying the data to get around their own legal restrictions, I just don’t see this situation really changing.

As users, we need to shun the use of such services (which is why I deleted my WhatsApp account when the T&C’s changed). It is also worth trying to rather use social networks that fall under the legislation of more privacy-friendly countries. Which also makes me a bit suspicious of why the US wants to maybe force the sale of TikTok to a US company… If that happens, I’ll be deleting my TikTok account too.

It seems more and more to me that social networks are the ideal way to find out who goes where and who they are communicating with… There is certainly lots of economic value in this, otherwise data brokers would not be doing such a roaring trade. They should just be aware though that they are very likely breaking the privacy laws of many non-US countries (not just the EU) if those citizens data is being sold in the USA. It’s time these other countries woke up and took note of what is going on.

See arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
#Blog, #privacy, #technology, #tracking

Before Replacing Your Phone Battery Watch This — Scams Abound

Bottom line is, you really cannot trust ad hoc online or flea market sellers (and neither Facebook Marketplace sellers). As shown in this video, even 500+ “positive” reviews really mean nothing at all. That online “bargain” may not just cost you a fake battery, but could even damage your device.

Watch youtube.com/watch?v=g41ivRm1AB…
#Blog, #batteries, #scams, #technology

The Raspberry Pi 500 with an integrated keyboard is the perfect starter mini-PC

The Raspberry Pi 500 is a mini-PC that’s tucked away within a keyboard, which makes it super portable and easy to plug in wherever you want. It’s the next step up from the Pi 400, utilizing the Pi 5’s hardware to make an even better companion.

I’m thinking that this enclosure should probably also be able to have a SSD drive tucked into it.

The new Raspberry Pi Monitor is also interesting as it can be connected, and powered, directly from the keyboard.

Now that it also includes a GPU, and can run most OSes as well, this all makes it a very compact and useful computer. It looks like it will even handle two display outputs.

The total cost then would probably come to about $220 (with mouse, screen, and power supply), but that really includes everything you need.

See xda-developers.com/raspberry-p…
#Blog, #raspberrypi, #technology

You can ‘play’ AAA games on a Pi (or anything else) using open source Sunshine and Moonlight

Moonlight allows you to play your PC games on almost any device, whether you’re in another room or miles away from your gaming rig.

Moonlight (formerly Limelight) is an open source implementation of NVIDIA’s GameStream protocol. They implemented the protocol used by the NVIDIA Shield and wrote a set of 3rd party clients.

You can stream your collection of PC games from your gaming PC to any supported device and play them remotely (even over the Internet). Moonlight is perfect for gaming on the go without sacrificing the graphics and game selection available on a PC.

Sunshine is a self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight (where you are running the game from). Offering low latency, cloud gaming server capabilities with support for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs for hardware encoding. Software encoding is also available. You can connect to Sunshine from any Moonlight client on a variety of devices. A web UI is provided to allow configuration, and client pairing, from your favorite web browser. Pair from the local server or any mobile device.

Sunshine can host a game from a device running Android, ChromeOS, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Xbox One/Series, PS Vita, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Wii U, or LG webOS TV. Run Sunshine on your own hardware. No need to pay monthly fees to a cloud gaming provider. It works with Intel, AMD or Nvidia GPUs.

So yes, you could have a game running on a Windows or Linux or other computer, and be accessing and playing it from a Raspberry Pi or a mobile device.

This is also useful if you have one main gaming computer with a good GPU, but others in the home have smaller computers and also wish to play games.

See itsfoss.com/raspberry-pi-moonl…
#Blog, #gaming, #opensource, #remoteaccess, #technology

The OTIO standard can allow importing of a video editor’s timeline into a different video editor

This means a timeline that contains various media with multiple tracks and clips with cuts, can be exported, for example, from Kdenlive and imported into DaVinci Resolve. This is useful where often one editor can do things that another editor cannot do.

You can read more about the OpenTimelineIO, or OTIO, standard at opentimelineio.readthedocs.io/…. Their site does state: OTIO supports clips, timing, tracks, transitions, markers, metadata, etc. but not embedded video or audio. Video and audio media are referenced externally.

I picked up on this from Kdenlive’s post on Mastodon, about how they have achieved exporting a timeline from Kdenlive and importing it into DaVinci Resolve. The attached image shows this announcement, which can also be seen at mastodon.social/deck/@kdenlive….

Despite this though there may still be some challenges, for example with DaVinci Resolve on Linux not supporting AAC audio, so no audio editing will be possible then on the DaVinci side (without conversion). Although I’d expect the audio could be left intact as AAC if it is just re-imported back to Kdenlive.

On DaVinci Resolve’s side, I see they announced support for OTIO was added already from their version 18.5.
#Blog, #interoperability, #openstandards, #technology, #video

RaspController is an Android app for remotely managing a Raspberry Pi

RaspController is an application designed to monitor, access, and control your Raspberry Pi over a network. Once you pair the app with your lean, mean, green board, you can access the files, monitor the resource consumption, and check the outputs of the sensors and cameras connected to the SBC. Plus, if you’ve got the necessary packages installed on your Raspberry Pi, you can send wake-on-LAN packets over the network to activate it remotely.

For tinkerers who often pair extra devices to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins, you can consult the pinouts and wiring diagrams inside RaspController. As if that’s not enough, you can even use the app to execute shell commands on the SBC, making it perfect for a headless Raspberry Pi setup.

See xda-developers.com/raspcontrol…
#Blog, #raspberrypi, #technology

If your webcam didn’t come with customization software, you can use OBS to reframe it

OBS is free and open source software that will provide various filters and effects you can apply to an input such as a webcam. It will generate an output stream which any app will think is a webcam.

In this way you can apply custom masks, overlays, zoom in, add a title, change colours, change scenes between multiple cameras, or share your screen, change the background, and lots more.

See xda-developers.com/how-i-use-o…
#Blog, #opensource, #technology, #webcam

Android’s AirDrop-Like Quick Share Just Got an Upgrade

Google has just announced a new, neat change to Quick Share. Now, instead of having to change around your settings or add people as a contact every time you want to share something, you can now just generate a QR code. The other person will be able to scan that very QR code to instantly initiate the actual file transfer, without the other user having to change their existing settings, verify devices, or do anything else.

This is part of a larger effort by Google to actually make Quick Share a useful, widely-used feature on Android phones. The feature, formerly named Nearby Share, recently got merged with Samsung’s Quick Share, adopting the latter’s name. The feature is also available for Windows computers to share files back and forth with Android phones.

So, all good it works really well between by Android devices, but I have a Linux desktop and file transfer is something I do quite often. There is a rQuickShare I found in the AUR, but it only shows a black screen, so something is wrong there.

I’m still using LocalSend which does work well between all my Android, Linux, and even iOS devices. But thinking about file transfers, maybe I will also just add the Android download folder on my folder to the SyncThing for my desktop.

See howtogeek.com/android-quick-sh…
#Blog, #quickshare, #technology

5 signs it might finally be time to upgrade your PSU

As a PC user, you probably already appreciate the crucial role of a power supply unit (PSU). It’s not only responsible for routing the correct voltage to every component inside the PC, but also keeping everything operating at peak performance (and importantly, stability). Without adequate and clean power, your CPU, and GPU can easily encounter issues that you might fail to diagnose at first glance.

Two places many PC sellers compromise on to save costs, are the power supply and the case. So often upgrading your PSU with a quality one, can make a real difference, and you may need to anyway if you want to install one of the newer graphics cards.

Quite frequently stability issues arise from cheap PSUs where they cannot sustain loads nearer their rated limits. Another big plus is many after market PSUs are dead silent.

Another overlooked issue with cheap PSUs, is they typically just have a thick bundle of cables coming out of the PSU, no matter whether you many only be using a few of them. After market PSUs will usually have connectors on their casing (like the featured image on this post), so that you only connect what you need to use, and cut down on the cabling clutter inside the PC case.

See xda-developers.com/signs-to-fi…
#Blog, #hardware, #PSU, #technology

iVerify’s $1 phone scanner finds seven Pegasus spyware infections

In recent years, commercial spyware has been deployed by more actors against a wider range of victims, but the prevailing narrative has still been that the malware is used in targeted attacks against an extremely small number of people. At the same time, though, it has been difficult to check devices for infection, leading individuals to navigate an ad hoc array of academic institutions and NGOs that have been on the front lines of developing forensic techniques to detect mobile spyware. On Tuesday, the mobile device security firm iVerify is publishing findings from a spyware detection feature it launched in May. Of 2,500 device scans that the company’s customers elected to submit for inspection, seven revealed infections by the notorious NSO Group malware known as Pegasus.

“The really fascinating thing is that the people who were targeted were not just journalists and activists, but business leaders, people running commercial enterprises, people in government positions,” says Rocky Cole, chief operating officer of iVerify and a former US National Security Agency analyst.

“The age of assuming that iPhones and Android phones are safe out of the box is over,” Cole says.

iVerify’s app was released earlier this year for Android, too.

See arstechnica.com/security/2024/…
#Blog, #security, #technology

Jack Dorsey explains very concisely how Nostr works in 2 minutes

One of the best descriptions I’ve seen. No fluff, no technical jargon. Why Jack left X and Bluesky, was because he wanted a social platform that was also going to be censorship free. The Nostr design depends on numerous hosted relays, and there is/are no central server/s that store posts. Nostr is quite different from the decentralised type hosting of Bluesky or Fediverse servers.

I’m glad too he touched on Nostr not working on top of blockchain, because although there are many who punt crypto on Nostr, and you can tip any poster in crypto if you wish for their post, you firstly do not have to use any of that (it is optional) and the network does not rest on top of it. Many users on Nostr (like myself) don’t mention crypto and post about perfectly normal things.

Watch youtube.com/watch?v=0YDj1QdL2Z…
#Blog, #Nostr, #socialnetworks, #technology