Hacker News Reader

jvanveenon Purism Librem 14 review (part 1): The ethical flagship

Still waiting on a Librem 5 from 2019, while the Puri.sm site claims it takes 52 weeks to deliver new orders. Draw your own conclusions.

jvanveenon Ask HN: Is it ok to reject a job because I don’t like their software?

Teams only show 4 streams at a time on Linux, the video/audio quality is mediocre and the video quality in the webclient is worse than the one using an Electron container, probably to force the app. Screensharing always tends to get stuck after a while, and they ignore any requests to start supporting Wayland, even while it takes minimal changes(update Electron).

Nowadays it's easy to setup your own conference server, and use webbased clients that don't require yet another Electron container. For instance, Galene(https://github.com/jech/galene) is an excellent resource-friendly SFU built on top of Pion(Golang).

Shameless plug: I'm the author of Pyrite(https://github.com/garage44/pyrite), an alternative WebRTC frontend for Galene

jvanveenon Ask HN: Open-Source alternative to Zoom – Teams – Google meet and so on

Still alpha software, but may be usable already: https://github.com/garage44/pyrite

jvanveenon Zoom adding advertisements to the free tier of its service

In case anyone is looking for an alternative to hosted services like Zoom/Teams: https://github.com/garage44/pyrite is an open-source Vue frontend for The Galène videoconference server(Pion/Golang).

jvanveenon Ask HN: What features would improve video chat/meeting software

Option 2 might be interesting in conbination with push-to-talk?

jvanveenon Ask HN: What features would improve video chat/meeting software

Any particular use-case you have in mind?

jvanveenon Ask HN: What features would improve video chat/meeting software

Sounds good! Fixed tiles make sense. Turning the cam on at certain sound levels should be possible. I am working on a video conferencing ui for the Galene sfu(https://github.com/garage44/pyrite). Does anyone know of a good Javascript/canvas sound visualizer? Pyrite already got one, but I prefer circular visualization that can take more space in audio-only streams.

jvanveenon Making Librem 5 Apps [video]

Just be aware of the long and untransparent waiting queue; afaik orders from 2017 backers are still being processed.

jvanveenon PinePhone Beta

I've been using the Pinephone with Manjaro Phosh since beta5 as my daily phone and tablet(Angelfish ftw). Works just fine for me. Calls work a lot better recently, due to improving modem software. Can't imagine ever going back to a walled garden ecosystem anymore!

jvanveenon Rome: An experimental JavaScript toolchain

An alternative lightweight and fast JavaScript buildchain using Snowpack: https://github.com/garage11/vuepack-demo

jvanveenon Running your own secure communication service with Matrix and Jitsi

I've been experimenting with Asterisk WebRTC (video & audio) and developing a SIP + P2P webphone for some time now. Quite close to something that's useable imho. See https://github.com/garage11/ca11 in case you're interested

jvanveenon Ask HN: What are you working on in lockdown?

Working on an open-source privacy-friendly video calling solution: https://github.com/garage11/ca11

jvanveenon Zoom monitors activity on your computer

Working on a webbased foss sip/WebRTC/p2p conferencing solution(WIP): https://github.com/garage11/ca11

jvanveenon Ask HN: Are there good self-hosted video conference tools?

Working on a webbased FOSS video conferencing/telephony solution: https://github.com/garage11/ca11

jvanveenon Small business VoIP phone system setup tutorial

I've been working on a webbased (WebRTC) softphone with Asterisk PBX support. Just opensourced it(WIP): https://github.com/garage11/ca11

jvanveenon Show HN: Relayed encrypted signalling for P2P WebRTC calls

The relayed signalling in CA11 is meant for small event-like messages, not for media streams. The goal is to establish a secure e2e encrypted messaging channel between nodes(browsers) on an open, untrusted, overlay network. The network relays these encrypted messages between nodes. The messaging is primarily built for SDP/ICE and node discovery, but can carry any JSON data. The initial purpose is to see if this can act as a decentralized telephony system for p2p calling, using STUN and TURN. This would be an alternative for SIP-based calling(CA11 also does SIP). Afaik TURN just relays application data, which is already encrypted with WebRTC using DTLS/SRTP.

IPOP looks very interesting. I didn't thought of VPN use-cases yet. Thanks!

jvanveenon Show HN: Relayed encrypted signalling for P2P WebRTC calls

For more info, see https://github.com/garage11/ca11

jvanveenon Plans for the Next Iteration of Vue.js

Using such an approach in this project: https://github.com/garage11/ca11 You can just use the vue template compiler for that.

jvanveenon Vbuild: “Compile” Vue components to standalone HTML/JS/CSS

I personally don't like SFC, because it involves build tasks that are better left to specialised tools IMO.An alternative is to use the vue template compiler directly, without SFC, by making a simple wrapper around it. An example of this: https://github.com/wearespindle/fuet

jvanveenon Vue CLI 3: A Game Changer for Front End Development?

I also didn't like SFC (mainly because of lack of control and performance issues) and made a small wrapper around the reference template compiler (https://github.com/wearespindle/fuet and https://github.com/wearespindle/gulp-fuet), which makes it easy to keep buildsteps for component js, template markup and styling separated.

jvanveenon Show HN: Vialer-js – Open-source WebRTC communication platform

Some more background info about the project: https://wearespindle.com/articles/building-a-softphone-a-jou...

jvanveenon Show HN: Vialer-js – Open-source WebRTC communication platform

I need to change that description, because it is too premature at the moment. The main Calls handling code is in https://github.com/vialer/vialer-js/blob/develop/src/js/bg/m... and still relies on SIP. It is a small step to add the required abstractions for alternative signalling mechanisms though, because most of the SIP-related logic is centralized already.

There is currently a SIP Call implementation in https://github.com/vialer/vialer-js/blob/develop/src/js/bg/m...

The first approach to use the Call abstraction is in https://github.com/vialer/vialer-js/blob/develop/src/js/bg/m...

It is a proprietary API-based click-to-dial calling method(which still need to be moved to its own repo) that doesn't use SIP or WebRTC, but uses the same call flow nevertheless.

At the moment, most of the focus is on stabilizing the SIP-based softphone. We're about to complete a first working opensource build without proprietary modules this week.

The Calls-related code will be dealt with when there is an alternative signalling mechanism available. It would be interesting to investigate existing networking solutions like Matrix, but also to experiment a bit with p2p overlay networks ourselves. I did some prior R&D on the subject (https://wearespindle.com/articles/end-to-end-encryption-betw...) to tackle issues like ECDH encryption with WebCrypto, but there are still a lot of uncertainties and unhandled topics that need to be addressed. Work in progress :-)

jvanveenon Show HN: Vialer-js – Open-source WebRTC communication platform

Author here: The first priority of the project is to offer a solid generic audio-only calling experience to our users. This includes all functionality that people would expect from a softphone. At the same time, we want to build something that is generic and useful to any SIP-over-wss provider in the short term. The build mechanism and module-system should accomodate this. It is still under construction (https://github.com/vialer/vialer-js/tree/feature/restructure...), but most of the hardcoded dependencies are already dealt with.

Besides the current SIP Call implementation, we are preparing the codebase for additional signalling implementations as well. The centralized SIP Call implementation is great to use with all the functionalities a PBX offers (queues, on-hold, transfers, being available to any device), but browser-to-browser p2p also has its strong points. Privacy-aware chat, video and file transfer seem easier to implement and maintain with nothing more than JavaScript and another browser as a backend. The signalling part will be a bit of a design challenge. Ideally, this would be p2p and encrypted too, so people don't need to rely on one server/provider to find their contacts and setup connections with.

jvanveenon Ask HN: What browser extensions have you built for yourself?

https://github.com/VoIPGRID/vialer-js/

A softphone built on top of Sip.js and Vue. It also runs in a webpage or as an Electron app.

jvanveenon RxDB – Local JavaScript-Database

Also checkout js-data.io

jvanveenon Why we chose Vue.js

Nice readup. There are fine alternatives to react. Another vdom lib that's pretty good and not often mentioned is ractivejs.

jvanveenon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

Developing a library to build p2p webapps with that runs in the browser and on nodejs using transport/connector adapters, ecdh/aes encryption, ractivejs templating/prerendering and js-data orm. Not near alpha quality yet. What I like about the project is the potential to easily connect users/systems to each other, without the need of a centralized webrtc sdp message broker and the fun of writing one codebase that runs simultaneously on the 'server' and the browser.See https://github.com/jvanveen/high5 for more info

jvanveenon Ask HN: Canvas Drawing Library

i really liked to use fabric.js(http://fabricjs.com) for a small collaborative drawing tool(https://github.com/wearespindle/dotd). It runs both on node.js and in the browser, has pretty awesome serialization options and has all batteries included in general.

jvanveenon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2014)

Groningen(Netherlands), Remote: yes, Relocation: yes, Full-time Stack: nodejs, javascript, express, html(5), css/less/sass, handlebars, meteor, high5, jquery, ractivejs, python, django, twisted, ... Resume: nl.linkedin.com/in/jvanveen/ Contact: j.veenvan@gmail.com Info: https://github.com/jvanveen

Passionate & dedicated frontend & backend webdeveloper with a special interest in websocket/webrtc/isomorphic webapp implementation & design. I'm currently writing an open-source isomorphic p2p web-framework called high5. Together with a former collegue, I wrote a simple but effective webrtc video-conferencing prototype app(https://r00my.com/) as part of an YC-application. The past year I worked on a few Meteor projects and learned some things about reactive programming styles and two-way data-binding. I also worked on projects using Python, Django, Flask, Pyramid, Twisted & Plone.

I'm looking for a mid-sized, informal & inspiring tech-company, with nodejs in it's backend stack, and is offering a challenging and interesting backend/frontend vacancy with relocation option or with the option to work remotely. Feel free to email me for more information.