GadgeteerZA

Just like passports for real life identities, Keyoxide can be used to verify the online identity of people to make sure one is interacting with whom they are supposed to be and not imposters. Unlike real life passports, Keyoxide works with online identities or "personas", meaning these identities can be anonymous and one can...

One reason for browsers getting sluggish is having too many extensions open, which just consumes extra RAM. Sometimes, too, they can interfere with each other. Even though my computer has 32GB of RAM, using a lot more than is needed, certainly increases the browser start up time a lot....

Chris Titus has done a video about this awesome open source tool he has built to install various common applications, do global software updates (yes I also can’t believe Windows does not yet do that), various system tweaks, and config settings....

Once your archive is on your machine, you will have a browsable HTML archive of your tweets, direct messages, and moments including media like images, videos, and GIFs. This is nice, but it also has a few flaws. For one, you can’t easily copy your Tweets somewhere else, for example, into your website because they are stored in...

You can append to your existing e-mail address in various ways, and this could be pretty useful for seeing who leaked your e-mail address to spammers. For example, for your bank, give them the address myaddress+banking@gamil.com. Then, if spammers send to that address, you can quickly see where they got the e-mail address from!...

I’ve happily been using self-hosted web-based FreshRSS for a while now. I chose it mainly because it suited my needs, and when I travelled regularly, I could work from the same shared source of articles. But the last while I’ve noticed some feeds lag really slowly with fetching the feed content (it may be my slowish hosting...

Chris did a nice breakdown of how this can work in conjunction with a self-hosted Fresh RSS reader (same as I’m using). It solves that issue with some RSS feeds only showing a short snippet of the content....

For those who don’t even trust a zero trust online service like Bitwarden, there is this option…...

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100....

Yes, progress with Bluesky has been super slow (a bit like Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid) but at least we now know what protocol it will use, which will help explain a bit more about what could be expected....

An interesting read at the linked article below. Whilst it is a given that eSIMs (and their successor) are going to happen, there are clearly some rough edges that need to be worked on. What was going to be greater freedom to switch SIMs, could end up being a bit of a lock-in with an existing eSIM ;-)...

Big Tech wants to kill the password, with “Passkeys” being the hot, new password replacement standard on the block. Passkeys are backed by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the FIDO Alliance, so expect to see them everywhere soon. iOS picked up the standard in version 16, and now Google is launching passkey betas on Chrome and...

Just noticed this really useful GUI tool that was not around a year ago or so when I switched my Home folder partition to Btrfs. It seems to cover all the generally used type of Btrfs features you’d use including running and monitoring scrubs or balance operations, and even viewing and browsing snapshots, with options to...

Google Camera and its post-processing algorithms undoubtedly changed the game in terms of what we expect from smartphone cameras, elevating the Google Pixels to some of the best Android phones you can buy for the camera. That’s the exact reason why Google Camera ports are so highly requested for non-Google devices. With the...

Scientists have developed a laser with artificial intelligence (AI) designed to neutralise cockroaches as a new form of pest control....

The Open Book project pairs a 4.2″ E-Ink screen with microprocessors we all know and love, building a hacker-friendly e-reader platform. Two years ago, this project won first place in our Adafruit Feather contest — the Feather footprint making the Open Book compatible with a wide range of MCUs, giving hackers choice on which...

Open source Duplicati allows you to set your own encryption and compression before efficiently backing up to many remote services. But good candidate targets too are a second drive, or even FTP to a remote computer on the network....