dcz_self

Totally, RAW processing is planned for after resolution changing works correctly. Do you have a recommendation about which implementation is easy to understand and work with?

If I have to rewrite stuff for low latency, I'd rather start it as an independent library so that other projects can reuse the code.

At Purism, our goal is not to build a phone or two, but to contribute to the ecosystem as well. That means the Linux kernel, and the Linux camera infrastructure. Now, we have two choices: either contribute support for our hardware, or use some hardware that was already supported.

In reality, UVC is not suitable for a phone, so we can't leverage that. There are some camera drivers in the kernel already, but not necessarily ones that we could buy or meeting our expectations. Even if there were, that still leaves us with the problem of connecting the cameras to applications in a standard way, so we can't really avoid working on libcamera.

Author here. While the essay comes from the side of smartphones, it's not really limited to them. As I mention, even some laptops use setups that require complex infrastructure to support. libcamera itself is also used in the Raspberry Pi, and the interfaces in the Linux kernel are used by the Axiom camera, which is truly a photo camera.

https://www.apertus.org/axiom

The problem of camera diversity is not limited to open source either, because a similar infrastructure to handle all the different cases must be replicated by closed drivers as well. I don't know about Macs, but the Surface laptop is a Windows beast.

Agreed. The "brutalism" in web design takes only the superficial look but forgets about the philosophy of nakedness and honesty.

How would that translate to the Web? IMO by blurring the distinction between the rendered page and the page source. Nothing to hide!

I went ahead and did just that on my own blog: https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/brutalism/

I do actually work for a tech startup (Purism). Been bouncing from one to another mostly interesting job for a few years before that.

I want to continue trying to make the world better, including sustaining myself through Open Source. Pretty much the dream.

The remaining piece of the dream is to challenge/indulge myself and build a bike computer (jazda.org).

If the world hadn't been on the brink of multiple crises I'd be doing basic science though.

The Nordic SDK is out of the question. It's not Free Software, and there's already plenty of non-free-software devices out there.

I will have to port the NimBLE stack to Tock OS, and that's guaranteed going to be complicated, so someone who knows at least how Bluetooth works in general would be invaluable.

The watch hardware is waterproof (but not submergeable), it works for 1 day without special optimizations (all-disabled-low-power-mode on original firmware about 2 months), it has a sunlight-readable display which should work with GPS for at least 6 hours without any optimizations. That's enough for a trip. It only has 8MiB storage space, but that should cover a couple hours worth of GPS track. It's the same device as used by Bangle.js 2.

The web site was put up before I started the firmware work, so obviously no pictures :) They will come once the project becomes more useful.

Yes, I have ordered a batch of smart watches that go on the handlebars, same as the prototype on the photo.

I will sell them together with a Bluetooth wheel/cadence sensor once I figure out Bluetooth.

A bike computer is the name for a device you put on your bike to show you useful info like speed etc.

Typically they are about as flexible as calculators, but this CPU has been shown to run Doom, so it's a general-purpose computer too :)

https://github.com/next-hack/nRF52840Doom

I'm still going at my bike computer - you know, the open source, hackable one.

I spent the past 2 months improving Tock OS - added GPS and file system - and yesterday got the display running:

https://github.com/tock/tock/issues/2846#issuecomment-108617...

I could use some help adding new drivers (esp. Bluetooth, but also simple ones like touch screen) and if someone explained Bluetooth Low Energy or Apache NimBLE to me, that would be awesome.

Contact me here or through the web page (which needs some work too): https://jazda.org/community/

That was the case for me: I built a static site generator in 500 lines of Python.

Adding comments took me a long time and lots of effort in comparison – I described that on the blog too: https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/potion/

It's been up for almost a month and I already engaged one person. That's less than discussions on Mastodon, but it serves as an obvious meeting point for readers, so I guess it's not entirely a wasted effort.

The idea is great!

The hardware is a little less to my tastes: the one I picked up has a GPS unit, plus a display that can stay on for days (weeks?) on a single battery charge, plus it's readable in the sunlight.

Otherwise I think there will be a fair share of software reuse between the projects.

An open source bicycle computer.

The goal: a privacy-preserving, standalone fitness assistant on which you can load custom apps.

I always wanted a bicycle computer that I could program, which would help me not gethurt while training, and which would remember where I like to cycle. The modern ecosystem is full of devices, but I haven't seen a programmable one, much less one that can also survive for weeks on battery and wouldn't sell my data.

The moment has finally come, and I found a decent base!

I bought a Bangle.js 2 smart watch and a couple sensors, and have just started adapting it for this purpose. I'll need help getting the Bluetooth stack running, as well as creating an application to download and compare GPS trails.

The project is not formally announced yet, but feel free to contact me over email or Matrix (see profile).

Edit: obligatory mention of Rust as the preferred language ;)

I'm not sure about a file system enforcing hierarchy. Historically, they didn't even support directories at first.

Which use cases would a query language fail to help with?

Would you be interested in cooperating on that? You can ping me over email (see my profile or the blog).

My second impression about the Bangle.js is: "oh no, JavaScript only?". Still, it's much better than building the same thing from scratch, except it may still take effort on the software side.

Having another interested person involved would be amazing for my motivation! Btw, one of the reasons I wanted hackable hardware was to map road surfaces on OSM ;) GPS alone doesn't add much to OSM in my area any more.

Do you have any writeups/examples in the public?

I am on purpose not addressing the exchange of information between people – never considered it, no vision, would just confuse me.

I'm also not so keen on indexing. I'm envisioning this more as a file system layer, where data is added to the database as it gets saved. Ideally there would be no way to access the data outside of the database (that would cause desyncs and the need to reindex stuff). We don't need no POSIX file systems ;)

Nice, thanks! Now I need to reconsider. My goals were to have 180+ days battery life and wired connectors, but maybe no one really wants those.

I identify the hierarchy as the source of my problems. I don't need hierarchy, and when I use it, it's because that's the one tool I have. There's no hierarchy between time and place, and I shouldn't be forced to establish it.

There might be some hierarchy between tags: PhD/laser experiment, PhD/dissertation, but there's rarely a need for it to be more than 1-2 levels deep, so I prefer to suffer the pains of inadequate hierarchy rather than inadequate queries. Or at least I would if I could try it out.

Thanks, that's a great summary. It does seem it's most of the way there already. How does it handle removable storage?

Ironically, the fact that a topic-specific UI is needed for topic-related tasks is another strike against closed software. Something open would have been a starting point for other sorts of views (email? PDFs?), but when there's no modification, there's no ability to do that.

That's what I'm thinking about too. Most directories are describing what's already available for the computer to extract: the place of something being created, the time of it, the source where it came from (e.g. who sent this as email attachment). Only a minority needs to be explicitly added, like emotional meaning ("my favorites"), or external organization ("experiment 1", "driver's licence"). While we can't use the computer for the latter, it's nonsense that we leverage computers so little for the former.

Thanks for confirming. I intended to check on perkeep, but my frustration never reached that point before.

I hope it can be adjusted to my needs: I expect I'm going to have to find solutions for tracking files' sources, for snapshots, and for remote/removable storage, in addition to all the UI work.

Do you have any links confirming that? I'm failing to find any resources.

That depends on how easily I could compile it, and how much more effective it would be than querying. At the moment I can't come up with anything better than queries.

I'm willing to part with some money to have someone implement it for me if I see there's demand.

Lightroom is closed and comes from Adobe, so it was never on my radar. Being able to modify the software is a must: photos are only part of the problem, so any solution must be open to integration with other sources of data.

It would have been interesting to see how it organizes the UI, but there's no demo version for Linux :P

Too many ideas given the time, but now I'm focused on two:

1. Building an open source bicycle computer. It's been over 20 years since they arrived at the scene, and there still isn't one that you could hack! An outrage! No published sources yet, I'm getting stuck on not having much experience building physical things.

2. Getting rid of the directory hierarchy. I have 10K photos, 30K emails, 10000km of GPS tracks, and 10 years of chat logs. Why can't I find anything among them? I own a computer, after all. I have 10 folders called some variation of photos/Cologne/2020/flowers! Having to organize them myself is tedious and a fool's errand, so I'm leaning towards using a database as a file system, to let me just query for files. Geo queries using a map? Yes please. Selecting bounds on a timeline? Oh yeah!

Turns out I'm not alone, Microsoft tried this with WinFS, and failed. But the idea lives on: https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...

3. Writing. I hope I can find the time to expand on the above on my blog.

Similar here. I've been spoiled by Lenovo, although it's not perfect. It's mostly a coding machine for me too.

0. Linux compatibility: minimal driver problems, hibernation can fail less than 1% of the time. 1. Touchpad with mouse buttons (ideally 3) is not negotiable. 2. A decent keyboard with all keys from the home/end/... block. Full sized arrows would be nice, half-sized are a no. 3. Not bigger than a sheet of A4 paper. 4. A non-glare, wide angle display. 5. Good WiFi sensitivity and performance. 6. A hard drive activity light is quite useful. 7. When it inevitable gets thermally throttled, it should still be useful for web browsing. 8. Mute/mic mute buttons are nice. So are volume buttons. 9. Open firmware: WiFi, coreboot, libreboot. I'm a hacker, and don't like fences.

Same thoughts about the Framework laptop. I hope it becomes an option in the future.

Here's some glitch "art" I made (witnessed?) while working on an image sensor:

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux-next/-/issues/44

That's not far off, at least based on the English descriptions of Framasoft.

With self-governance included in the package, it's not imposible to turn into another Framasoft in the long term.

Looking for freelancers to start an IT cooperative | EU/REMOTE

The cooperative will have a strong free software focus, equal salaries, and ownership=membership.

The aim is to start with freelancing to reduce risk, and then develop more product-like projects. Let's see if we can make the social side work.

Email in my profile.

I had enough of mounting and decrypting devices before and after doing offline backups, so I ended up writing a tool to automate "acquire and release" tasks that I'm a bit too proud of:

https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/blossom/