Big fan of Krita as a painting program. You’ve gotta learn some different hotkeys and all that, but it’s better laid out and easier to learn than like, GIMP or Blender ime. Lots of good tutorials, plenty of free brushes, quite customizable. I really like its alpha-locking and groups as an alternative system to clipping masks.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source (open data) project. OpenStreetMap is a collaborative mapping platform that allows users from around the world to contribute, edit, and use geographical data. The data and software behind OSM are open-source, which means they are freely available for anyone to view, use, modify, and distribute under open licenses.
The data contributed to OpenStreetMap islicensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). This license allows for the free use of the data as long as proper attribution is given and any derivative works are also made available under the same open license.
I got addicted to using and contributing on OSM daily and enjoy spending my time improving the map. In fact a lot of closed source maps such as Google Maps and Apple Maps pull from some of the OSM data, so everyone gets to benefit from contributions.
In case you’re looking into this out of curiosity, check out the Beginner’s Guide and try to verify that the data around your neighborhood is correct and maybe add a point of interest (PoI) or a street name or two. Beware, it gets addictive quite fast.
OSM is also used for humanitarian use thanks to the HOT tasking platform. For example the majority of relief effort in Turkey’s February earthquake, Sri Lanka flooding, and the recent Marocco earthquake. Mapping can literally help save lives. It’s fun and easy too!
Also OSM usually beats Apple and Google by a mile when it comes to route planning for bicycles. I think it’s one part techbros being eternally car brained and one part if you’re a cyclist the chance you’re the kind of crank to contribute to things like OSM is exponentially increased.
You can start light, just by verifying that the data is up to date or adding some information eg. wheelchairs facilities or payment methods accepted. I use a tool called Every Door (Android) and it makes this surveying really simple and quick.
That was very likely Street Complete which is self explanatory and a great way to start. You are adding all kinds of useful information about any kind of object or building with this.
There’s also Vespucci which allows to alter the whole map (ie edit streets, POIs and so on) but takes a lot more to get familiar with.
I love OSM, I try to put notes to fix things when I see them (for example, one-way streets that aren’t properly set up, or left turns that aren’t allowed). One day I’ll hopefully have the confidence to fix things myself.
I use Osmand mostly, as it allows me to easily have everything offline. (Plus I can sideload/back up the maps on android)
Is there a decent option for using OSM with Android Auto? I want to move away from Google as much as possible, but Mapfactor’s routing is… well, terrible.
Give OsmAnd a try. Organic Maps are also working on the integration, but its not yet there and fully refined, though it is my preferred map for navigation while driving.
Hmmm, I’m using osmand from Fdroid and it does not support it. It looks like you need to use the subscription version which is a bit much but I’ll take a look.
I love OSM and use it through OsmAnd. I also contributed in the past, creating the first mapping for the area I lived in back then. I want to contribute again. But I find that wherever I go, everything is already mapped to the finest detail. A good problem to have, I think.
+1 for Navidrome. I have just set it up in a docker for serving grateful dead shows. I may set up a second navidrome for other assorted music. I am experimenting with Clementine, also free, as a front end for playing the music.
Ublock Origin. The amount of people going through life exposing themselves to ads is tragic. It’s so unhealthy and most people aren’t aware that there is a simple and free way of protecting yourself from the psychological warfare that corpos use against society
I don’t understand how people do not get blood red angry at advertising more often. Its the root of a lot of our problems with censorship and they flat out just exploit what little free time we all get.
By the time I get home I got 3 hours to chill. Then these ads take up 1/3 of that selling me shit I never asked for. They indirectly forced every platform I ever enjoyed to become these homogenous boring vanilla time sinks. That’s because they pay one content safe creator and then the rest start to copy them. Now if I want to avoid ads, I have to pay extra fees which fuck it, the content creators circumvent by putting ads directly into the media.
We should all be more hostile to any encroachment of ads into our lives. Its weird that instead I see people embracing it like it isn’t a cancer. We’ve lost the freedoms we had on thr internet to these ads and nobody seems to care.
I don’t consider myself someone who gets really worked up about much, but goddamn if ads and corporate bullshit isn’t a hot button for me. Somehow the fact that it’s become so normalized just makes me angrier about it.
Given that there is a lot of effort put into research into making advertisements more ‘effective’, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is also some research put into influencing people to accept advertisements as a normal part of life, justifying it as a necessary evil, or even embracing it as an essential part of what makes the free market ‘work’.
I'm not as well versed in FOSS as other posters but FOSS Android apps that I learned about on Lemmy/kbin and am enjoying:
AntennaPod (podcast player)
Inoreader (RSS reader)
Newpipe (YT player)
Bitwarden (password manager)
LibreraFD (PDF and other format reader, substitute for OverDrive)
kbin (I subscribe to Lwmmy communities thru kbin, also)
And I rely in Firefox with UBO, as other posters have mentioned.
Home Assistant. If you ever want to do home automation properly, this is the way. Works with pretty much anything—Zigbee, zWave, BT LE, MQTT—while keeping things manufacturer agnostic, local, private and highly responsive (your commands don't need to go through some server 3000 km away and won't have ugly 1 second latency as a result).
DAVx⁵ and Radicale to sync contacts and calendars between devices without snooping middle-men.
Syncthing to sync any files between devices. Works remotely, too, thanks to Syncthing relays.
Navidrome for your personal music streaming service.
Debian, Docker, Docker Compose and Portainer as the backbone to run all your services.
One of the best things about HASS is the counterweight it applies to the home automation industry.
When everyone is trying to lock people in to proprietary systems, the hass community is keen to find alternatives.
“To use this temperature sensor, you must use our hub and app”
2 days later: ‘Good news everyone, it’s manchester coding on 433Mhz, and I’ve written a direct integration for rtl_433’
(I only own older Tuya devices that I flashed with Tasmota before setting them up with Home-Assistant. But I think what they sell nowadays can’t be flashed with a free and open-source firmware. So the Tuya integration should work. But I haven’t tried it.)
It does work although breaks occasionally and you seem to need a (free) token from tuya to get it running now. That said it let’s me use my tuya devices through homekit now which is pretty handy.
Unfortunately with the smart home stuff, you’re often stuck with some vendor and their decisions. You have to pay close attention before buying devices. There is a chance your Tuya devices are supported by something like the mentioned Tasmota. They have a long list. But flashing a new firmware on some lightbulb is a bit cumbersome and you can brick the devices easily. It’s probably not something you want to do unless this is your hobby.
I can recommend buying Zigbee devices and a supported gateway, or something alike. That works without some cloud service.
I have a zigbee gateway. I use it for physical buttons that control other smart devices using the scenes in the Smart Life app.
The zigbee stuff has been the devices to give me the most trouble, plus they cost more.
Most of the affordable plugs and sockets are all compatible with Smart Life (which is just Tuya with another brand label). Quite a number of real cheap devices that have their own apps are also just copies of Tuya so they all end up working with Smart Life.
I am going to start looking into flashing firmwares. There’s SO MANY devices running hardware for those platforms, it would be great to break them free of the cloud apps.
Unfortunately things once have been easier. The first Tuya devices contained ESP8266 microcontrollers and had a vulnerability that allowed users to just upload a different firmware. But at some point they started using some cheaper microcontrollers that aren’t as easy to program. So there is no custom firmware available for many/most of the recent devices. Beware if the supported devices repository says “soldering required” or “module needs to be replaced”. I don’t know why they do this, but it requires a hot air soldering station and proper soldering skills.
Regarding Zigbee: I bought some Ikea stuff. The lightbulbs work fine. But I also had issues with the buttons.
I’d actually recommend Podman over Docker nowadays. It’s basically a drop in replacement and embraces open source while Docker’s moving more in the direction of a closed monetized model.
I was searching for some nice way to keep my KeePass files in sync across my phone + pc. Tried Syncthing as soon as I saw your comment and it’s a life saver :D Thanks so much!
Yeah, you don’t need a VPN as their is also a relay component that forms a sorta sync thing network. While the data is always encrypted, with the relaying you are using external servers to route the traffic. The relaying also isn’t required, but ensures data can be synced even when a direct connection isn’t possible (e.g. You arent home and aren’t on your VPN).
Yes, you can sync between two on devices anywhere in the world as long as a connection path can be found.
The downside of this is that both devices have to be on. If not on the LAN it may go though some unknown gateways too which makes me nervous (though it should be all encrypted). It can take some time too for the devices to find each other and then do the transfer (even on the LAN).
Some people place syncthing on their NAS so it is the always on device. Also if you do not want your connection to go through other peoples bridges then you can disable that feature (and loose the global WAN transfer capability), or you can put up your own bridge in a VPS on the WAN.
I am no expert on this. For me I use syncthing only sometimes and only on my LAN. Mostly I use SSH, Nextcloud, or Bitwarden Send myself. I’d like to play more with some of the other options though. Seafile or placing Send on my VPS for example seems interesting to me.
This app isn’t fully ready yet but Accrescent is a secure and private app store for Android. It aims to be a better alternative app store on Android rather than using the Google Play Store. It currently has 11 apps right now and more to come soon.
Highly recommend to check out and support this project cuz this appstore is the best out there right now security and privacy wise.
#2 can be solved by using one of several alternative clients with root permissions. Yes, manual APK install is tedious but not inherently insecure, and the only option for nonroot devices without an ADB host.
#4 is not really true. They are just very lenient, mostly just flagging apps with problems (known vulnerabilities, telemetry, non-FOSS services/assets/libs, ads).
#5, #6 and #7 are actually advantages. It’s nice to know that all apps are FOSS and correspond to source, and I can install old apps / earlier versions on old phones – as opposed to Google Play, which denies an app’s existence if your device is incompatible, resulting in shady alternatives and adware typosquatters topping search results.
2 - Manual installation methods can be insecure because a lot of people don’t update their apps all the time. Obviously rooting a phone is insecure, but having no auto updates in 2023 is crazy.
4 - It is very true, having zero quality control on new apps. The flagging of apps with problems is just following the FOSS philosophy. Any FOSS app can be added to F-Droid.
5 - Not sure why you would want to install abandoned apps on F-Droid, let alone use an EOL device. A lot of people don’t check if apps are maintained because they trust their app store.
6 - FOSS doesn’t automatically mean its secure or private. Also, why is it that I have to install proprietary apps only on the Google Play Store?
7 - FDroid signing keys isn’t an advantage because it requires an extra layer of trust. I’m already trusting the developer by installing their app, so the developer should be signing the keys. This is a reason why Signal is not on F-Droid.
2 - You cannot really fix this unless an alternative F-Droid client is installed as a system app by the manufacturer, or they allow relocking the bootloader. Good luck convincing them.
5 - I can run anything of any age on my devices, accepting the security risk. I want to be able to factory reset and use one of my Android 4.4 phones with an unmatched speaker as an Internet radio receiver instead of throwing it out. F-Droid explicitly tells you how long it’s been since the last update and ranks old apps low in lists and searches.
This is why Accrescent is amazing. It has automatic updates for Android 12+. Also leaving the bootloader unlocked is a security risk. Using stock or GrapheneOS (better option) on Android is best because you can lock the bootloader.
I don’t mind Fdroid being around. If you’re okay with the security risk, I have no problem. I’ve explained to you the security issues and the misinformation that people give that FDroid is secure. I was just explaining their security vulnerabilities and explaining why Accrescent is a much better option for installing apps.
For anyone doing academic writing, I use a combination of Logseq, Zotero, and Zettlr. All open source. Collect articles in Zotero. Annotate and take notes on those articles in Logseq with absolutely amazing PDF annotation tools. Write draft in Zettlr which allows me to enter Zotero citations and reference Logseq notes.
Bonus shoutout to LibreOffice for exporting and formatting the final draft. And that’s your recipe for one all-natural, organic, FOSS thesis!
Zotero is such a lifesaver. I started using it to allow for easier citations and reference lists but I’ve loved being able to keep my sources organized and saved in one place while doing research. The browser extensions are also super convenient to save everything to sort later on.
Jellyfin, it’s pretty simple and if you have a spare computer, a decent connection (and by decent I don’t mean even a decent one by 21th century standards, I still have a 100/10mbps ADSL) and a 2/4tb Hdd, you can host your own FOSS Netflix/Hulu with all the shows you want, if you’re in a county where “sailing the seven seas” is a huge deal, the only subscription would be a cheap VPN or even better something like real debrid.
I tried to use Emby and Plex since both were available bydefault on my NAS, good lord they both suck ass and charge for the most basic functions. Switched to Jellyfin, so much smoother and completely free.
Literally, and I mean literally, just downloaded this yesterday because I was tired of using Syncthing to pass media files back and forth between my phone and my NAS.
Plex is a shit show, charging you to view remote files.
Got any recommendations on where to put together a decent setup? The documentation seems a bit sparse.
Do you use the flatpak version on Linux? I’m a bit of a noob but I think due to flatpak sandboxing it can’t access your home folder or something, so I had this problem where it could only access my /media/ external HDD.
Aside from that, I just make folders named something unambiguous like “jellyfin documentaries”, make a jellyfin directory from the control panel, name it something like “documentaries” link the two and then add the documentaries and then scan the libraries. (i may have misunderstood your question lol sry, English is my 2nd Lang)
I run Jellyfin in Docker on a Pi4 and it works great. The only problem are x265 files, because Jellyfin tries to transcode them and the Pi cannot handle that.
You have to change it for each user. Go to the users settings and scroll down, under Media Playback there are options to allow audio and video transcoding. I still have audio transcoding on but that doesn’t seem to cause any issues.
The “best” setup (simplest to maintain, not to set up), is using docker to host jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, transmission with wireguard VPN, and prowlarr for all of your media needs. Jellyfin plays stuff, sonarr manages shows, radarr: movies, lidarr: music, prowlarr: your sources for said media. Transmission + wireguard VPN for the downloading.
But then you are getting into self hosting stuff which opens up a whole good, but time consuming rabbit hole
For self hosting I recommend Yunohost. It allows you to install a lot of stuff with just one click but you can still install things manually if you want.
perfectmediaserver.comCheck that out, one of the guys who is a main personality of the self-hosted podcast made that website. It’s all about setting up automations to download movies and TV shows automatically and stuff.
Wow, I’ve just downloaded and set up Jellyfin based on your post. It took literally 20 minutes and looks like it will immediately replace the awkward DLNA Serviio setup I had running. Amazing
Just so you know, there are custom CSS themes aviable on some official page I don’t remember, but if you look up “jellyfin custom CSS” an official jellyfin page should come up, they look so much better.
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