maufl

Man, there have been so many cool ideas for the Linux desktop in the past, and somehow none of them worked out or were polished into a usable state. Some things I remember: * I think at one point Canonical tried to have a cool personal data sync with Ubuntu One using CouchDB which would have synced all your data between devices directly, not using a cloud? * KDE 4 tired to have everything be a plasmoid (widget)? You could drag contacts to your desktop? But now we mostly have panels and tray popups again * Similar, things like Evolution data server or Akonadi or Telepathy which promised to implement the "backend" for services like email, calendar and chat once and then you could integrate custom UIs into many apps and places in the desktop with a synchronized view (chat with a contact in your email programm? write a calendar appointment from you chat app that your friend sent you?) * Maemo on the N900 had one contact list which served both SMS, Skype and XMPP and starting a chat using any one of those would get you to the same app/interface, same for the call, all happening in a single interface.

That is really the direction of "UX" I'm interested in. Not so much about where to display what, but to make my computing device feel less like an accumulation of applications and data, but to have a more integrated experience, ideally even across devices. My laptop and phone barely talk to each other and the user account on each device is distinct, so sharing resources already fails on authentication not being solved.

I think open source is in a unique position to actually provide a much better UX than any proprietary computing environment, since it's not tied to a single company trying to sell you stuff. Gnome and KDE don't care where you store your emails or calendar, they don't want to upsell you into their cloud storage. Open source is free to integrate the best services in a way that has the best UX and it can even do things like sync directly between your devices, because it doesn't need to generate new business opportunities.

I did something similar, but less scientific, comparing ESP-IDF and esp-hal (Rust). Unfortunately I learned that the optimizations that are already in ESP-IDF (most of all automatic light sleep between BLE advertisments) are hard to replicate in Rust/esp-hal/embassy and so for battery powered devices you might want to stick to C++/ESP-IDF

My dream (actually one of them) is to one day build a wall-e that can collect trash from the environment. This is exactly what I would need for it!

It would be great if we could combine ReactOS with Good old Games to build a retro Windows games distribution. I could hand that out at LAN parties as USB boot stick.

One thing I learned the hard way is the antenna must not lie on your PCB! Even if it's just board without copper. I didn't see this stated anywhere, but once you look, every devkit is doing that, the antenna sticks over the PCB. When I had it on the PCB I had very bad connectivity and very high power usage.

Oh, I got bitten by that! I have my work Linux installation on an USB stick so I can boot it on either my desktop or laptop and one day tailscale stopped working. I thought that might be a rare situation, but it looks like TPM based encryption failed for other reasons too.

I don't know much about ARM SoCs, is this something you would built a phone with? With all the talk about Google locking down Android, can Pine64 please go and make a Pinephone with this if that brings us closer to a Linux phone?

I'm thinking of having Claude send me a notification when it needs my input. I already do that sometimes with desktop notifications and this way I could water the plants or hang the laundry while waiting.

Does anyone know whether more than one device can connect to a Pebble watch at the same time? I'm thinking using it with your phone but also sending notifications from your laptop.

The hunter2 joke makes me miss bash.org again

Why does the Core 2 Duo not have a heart rate monitor (which I think my Pebble 2 had) and why does the Core Time 2 not have the barometer and compass? It makes it really difficult for me to decide which to get. Also, I have a small preference for the design of the original Pebble Time 2 over the Core Time 2 ...

What I would really like is something like Docker to build images for my raspberry pis. Just a single file, shell commands, that's it. I feel that Yocto is already too complicated if you want a reproducable setup for you raspberry pi at home.

That reminds me of the second half of this sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQjUh4nWwaM

I'm still working on my first self designed PCB. It's nothing special, just a temperature and humidity sensor using esp32. I started it to teach myself more about PCB design and embedded programming. Yesterday I published a blog article on it. https://www.felixmaurer.de/blog/2024/10/27/building-an-iot-s...

Can anyone estimate what it would cost to develop a new phone that's like the N900 with updated hardware (slide out keyboard, camera cover, maybe drop the input stylus, a bit flatter and larger) and mainline Linux support for all components? I'm sometimes wondering if this is something I could have Pine64 do if I accidentally get rich enough. I think I would spent the rest of my days just writing the software for this.

This looks interesting for lab-on-a-chip use cases.

I'm a little confused, I thought Thread was exclusively based on open standards, like 6LowPAN, that already existed before Thread. How can a licence be required for those? I understand the application layer Matter is new (although also using open standards like CoAP) and might not be that open.

Do we know whether the camera will rely on DRMed drivers for good quality, like with Sony phones? Or is there hope that the camera would work well with a Linux distribution based on PostmarketOS?

My current experience is mostly in fullstack web development, network protocols and a bit DevOps. However, I'm open for any interesting position, the less I know and the more I need to learn the better.

Location: Aachen, Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, Python, C/C++, Typescript, Angular + React, C#, Ruby (on Rails), Elixir (Phoenix), Linux, Docker, ...

CV: https://cloud.maufl.de/s/YgMFS2Asokx9754

Email: maufl at maufl.de

Website: https://www.felixmaurer.de/

You need to look out for headsets that support the Hands Free Profile version 1.6 [0]. This version adds optional support for much better audio quality when using the microphone. I'm currently using the Sony WH-1000XM3. Unfortunately HFP 1.6 seems not yet to be supported on Linux (i.e. Bluez/Pulseaudio)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Han...

This is awesome! It looks like it could do several things for which I wanted to have a device.

Offline GPS tracker with very long run time for hiking. I'd like up to one month run time. On the other hand I only need low time resolution, one waypoint each minute. It also does not need to send the location anywhere, storing it local is fine.

Offline/Online GPS tracker for paragliding. Battery for one day, but also high resolution tracking, about one waypoint per second.

Long range communication extender for my mobile phone that does not require infrastructure like base stations. (For the prepper in me)

I use my PGP key (with a Yubikey) for two things, the pass password manager and as an SSH authentication key. Is there a replacement for those two use cases where I can store my private key on a hardware token?

As far as I understood, the transactions must be build interactively between sender and receiver. This would mean that you could only send grin to people how are online. Is this correct? And if so, is this going to change?

For XMPP on iOS I recommend Monal. https://monal.im/

Conversations for Android and Monal https://monal.im/ for iOS.

These guys also do other "internet measurement". You can find more here https://netray.io/

Please be nice to the developer. I didn't post it to shame him. I'm just very sad about the post because I was hoping to establish XMPP as the group chat in my family, of which half are iPhone users.

I have an Sailfish X, but I don't use it anymore. Unfortunately, even the build in apps lack features I want/need, and so in the end I would have to use all the Android apps again.

* The Mail app does not support GPG

* The Chat app does not support any modern XMPP extensions or even group chats (this is because Telepathy does not support it)

* The Calendar has no month view if I remember correctly

But I really wish Sailfish was usable for me, I would prefer to have a "real" Linux distro on my phone.

Can we maybe instead of/additional to a new Mozilla password manager get an API with which existing password managers can integrate with Firefox?

Reminds me of my own attempt to design a decentralized networking protocol FOSP (https://github.com/maufl/fosp-specification). I now think that a peer to peer solution would be more user friendly, it's sometimes difficult to explain to some of my peers that there can be a difference between an app and an service.