gabek

gabek, 7 months ago to iOS

I was going to wait to talk about this until I could actually release it, but it’s becoming unlikely that will happen.

A few months ago I built an #iOS and #tvOS app for watching #Owncast streams natively on your phone and tv. You could browse the directory, or add your own private servers that aren’t listed publicly. It would send you push notifications when your favorite streams went live and it all worked pretty well.

Apple has been unable to understand how the “rights” work in this case. I can’t get them to understand that people opt into the directory, and the Owncast project owns and runs the directory. Instead they see it as me “using content without rights” and “accessing a catalog without proper rights”. They asked me to provide the paperwork detailing the agreement I have with every Owncast server. Clearly that’s impossible. The number of servers that want to be public on the directory change every day, I couldn’t send them new documentation every day. I tried to explain that the directory is kind of like a search engine and the application is like a browser. A browser doesn’t have explicit rights to every webpage ever made, as that would be ridiculous. I also tried to compare it to a podcast client. A podcast client can play back any podcast without asking for permission, and there are tons of podcast directories.

They’ll approve the application if I don’t use the directory and don’t have any Owncast servers directly available from the application, however. But I’m not willing to do that as that kind of defeats the point of the convenience.

I contacted a handful of attorneys, and I was willing to fight this. I hoped if I could get an attorney to draft a document that explains, in legal terms, something that Apple’s legal team would understand it could be cleared up. But I haven’t been able to have a meaningful conversation with any of them, as none of them understand what I’m doing or aren’t interested in working with a non-corporate entity.

So I think this is dead, killed by Apple. I tried to build something cool for you all, as a side project, to make viewing Owncast streams more convenient. It’s just not going to happen and I feel bad about it.

Screenshot from the Owncasts iOS application showing the stream detail.
Screenshot from the Owncasts iOS application showing the stream detail menu.
Screenshot from the Owncasts iOS application showing an offline stream.
Screenshot from the Owncasts iOS application showing an in-app action.
Screenshot from the Owncasts iOS application showing the landscape full screen player.

gabek, 1 month ago to random

I noticed the company who wanted to add their service directly into Owncast, and I said no, started releasing their own version of Owncast with their own changes in it to support this use case.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. It's kind of a fork, but it's really just another release of Owncast by somebody else. They're releasing something called Owncast with functionality and decisions that have nothing to do with the real Owncast. It specifically says stuff like "Owncast does X", and Owncast does not do X, and will never do X. Only their changes do X.

I fear this may confuse people. If something goes wrong with their version of the software, people are going to ask me for support, and might make the real Owncast look bad. But I don't know if this is wrong, or if this is completely acceptable. It's open source, and the name "Owncast" isn't owned by anybody, as Owncast is an open source project, not a company. So I guess they have the right to do whatever they want and call it Owncast.

But it feels wrong, and it seems like really bad things could come of this.

gabek, 7 days ago to random

I’ve been having a great time with my new @frameworkcomputer laptop. The flexibility is really unique. First I got to build the laptop myself with parts, and now I get it to be what I want it to be with regards to input and ports and such. I’ll probably swap out the screen bezel for a bolder color, though. The purple is not very purple. Worth the 6 month wait!

Framework laptop with keyboard aligned left and rgb macro pad on the right.

gabek, 5 months ago to random

I respond to VCs about Owncast pretty often, and I’ve never been super transparent about it. So here’s a response I just sent.

gabek, 15 days ago to random

@shadowfacts Where would you prefer support style feedback takes place for Tusker?

gabek, 11 months ago to random

I wish I had somebody else seriously involved with Owncast. It would be amazing to have somebody to share things with, positive or negative. But there's nobody else in the world who cares, or even understands the nitty gritty day to day that I can talk to. I'm sure there's people who would listen, but nobody would care.

gabek, 9 months ago to random

Idea: A "Switch from Gmail day". An annual day that is dedicated to moving your email from being Google-owned to another, better, email provider.

It could have branding, and documentation on how to switch, and during that day people would go out of their way to really be helpful in guiding people to switch.

Switching away from Gmail seems like a tough thing for people, so I'd really love to normalize it. This is an important part of taking the internet back from big tech. Since moving email providers falls under "someday/maybe" list for many people, I think seeing other people might make the plunge would encourage others to do so, too.

What do you think?

gabek, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

Nothing is wrong, and it's no emergency, but I'm curious if anybody in my Fediverse circle is in a place to offer Owncast some legal advice.

Alternatively, can anybody recommend any online options that work on an open source budget that would be able to answer specific questions on an as-needed basis?

I'm in the US (California) and Owncast is... on the internet? Nowhere? Everywhere? I don't know.

gabek, 5 months ago to random

Serious question: Why does anybody use Cookies? They have a negative connotation these days, and it’s a pretty lousy way to save state. I haven’t used cookies in years, I use local storage for anything that needs to be saved locally, and I send those values along in a header, payload, or parameter. Like you do everywhere else.

Every other development platform, other than the web, doesn’t natively support cookies (some have bad support as a 5th class citizen that are never used). Why does the web need them? Why use them?

gabek, 4 months ago to random

So, an honest question here. I’m not a fan of the broad use of language models (to put it lightly), but it seems like small scale, targeted uses can be somewhat helpful with some really specific problems.

For example, I find some people refusing to read Owncast documentation and instead asking the same basic questions over and over. I think something being able to answer those questions for those people would be really helpful for them, so they don’t have to wait for me to get back to them.

But it seems from what I see people are pretty against that. Am I reading the room correctly? What do people think?

gabek, 8 months ago to random

If ChatGPT were to purposefully lie to you, would you know?

gabek, 9 months ago to random

It's probably time for me to make the switch to Firefox. I was a full time Firefox user back in the day, but as Chrome got mainstreamed I moved to that, and then later to Brave, since I felt like "at least it's not Chrome". But it's hard to even justify that now.

gabek, 1 year ago to random

The other night somebody asked me to take a photo of their group. I asked them "Do you want me to take it normal style or Millennial style?" and they said "Normal, please". I was happy to hear that and turned the phone landscape to take the photo. They interrupted me and said "Oh no, we mean normal, like up and down".

I'm still not over this. The world is crumbling.

gabek, 4 months ago to random

Thank you for making @owncast have a fantastic 2023. I wanted to share some of my thoughts and appreciation before the spirit of the new year ran away from me. https://gabekangas.com/blog/2024/01/thank-you-for-making-owncast-a-success-in-2023/

gabek, 4 months ago to random

I plugged in a Roku yesterday, and it's already the device that's had the most blocked advertising and analytics requests on my home network. One day, and it's made the most gross requests compared to everything else that's been monitored much, much longer.

They are such a trash company in every possible way. I don't know why anybody chooses to use them for anything. I'm doing this for development purposes. But after I'm done, I'm locking this in a box and dropping it in a hole, just to be safe.

gabek, 3 months ago to random

I was never going to share this, because I feared for aggressively being fought with and being labeled as problematic or anti-moderation. But I think it’s worthwhile to offer different viewpoints, and datapoints.

I hear a lot of discussions about shared blocklists on the Fediverse. And I know some of them are about instances blocklists, but I’ll tell you about my experience with shared account blocklists.

One day I made an, admittedly stupid, comment on Twitter, about Wil Wheaton. It was just an opinion, but I should have said nothing at all. But it was no big deal.

He saw what I said and he blocked me, as he 100% has the right to do. That’s what it’s there for. What I didn’t know was he was a part of some kind of shared Twitter blocklist that would completely change my experience on Twitter after that day.

It started slow, I’d click on somebody’s profile and see that they had blocked me, even though we didn’t know each other. As time went on an increasingly growing number of people I had never met were blocking me, until it was materially impacting my usage of the platform. I’d click on people’s profiles multiple times a day and see they were already blocking me and they wouldn’t even know why. Over time I felt like Twitter was borderline unusable for me because I simply couldn’t talk to some percentage of the users.

The system worked as it was designed. The design was faulty. I’d hate to see that replicated here.

gabek, 9 months ago to random

One downside I didn't think of when switching to Firefox. There's no way to run it on iOS and have ad blocking. Brave had ad blocking built into the browser, but there's no way to add Firefox extensions. I could run Brave when mobile and Firefox on the desktop, but I like standardizing my tools.

gabek, 8 months ago to random

I’m beginning to think that I might have to learn Python. It’s something I’ve gotten away with not touching, at all, my entire career. It was never the right tool for any job I had. As it got more popular, I got less interested in interpreted, weakly-typed languages. Plus every time I’ve had to use software that was written in Python it was always a nightmare getting it to run. Somehow it was a mess of needing to compile things in broken ways, and it wasn’t even a compiled language. (See https://gabekangas.com/blog/2022/06/ship-software-not-code/ for my thoughts on this kind of software distribution). It can’t be worse than JavaScript, I suppose.

gabek, 8 months ago to random

I’ll miss lightning. It’s physically a better cable connector than usb-c. I’ll also miss the predictability of lightning. With usb you have to first make sure it’s usb-c, then worry about if it’s usb 2 or usb 3 or thunderbolt compatible. And then worry about power delivery abilities. And some usb-c cables only do power delivery, no data. Compared to lightning this is not simpler. My label maker will be working overtime going forward to make sure the cables are clearly labeled, since just by looking at them there’s no way to know anything about if they’ll work for you or not.

gabek, 5 months ago to random

I’ve been eating only once per day for over a year now, and I’ve never looked too much into if it’s a good idea or not. It was kind of a calorie intake compromise. I did some digging, and apparently there’s more negatives than positives.

Whoops. My bad.

gabek, 4 months ago to random

Does anybody have any suggestions for managing their Vulnerability Disclosure Platform? I’ve probably mentioned it before, but Owncast used to rely on Huntr.dev, but they kicked everyone off to focus on AI, because of course they did. The GitHub version of this kind of thing sucks. I just got off a call with HackerOne and they quoted me $15,000. So right now people just email me directly and threaten me, and I don’t like this workflow.

gabek, 1 year ago to fedidevs

Every bot on the Fediverse should be its own Fediverse server and none of them should use the Mastodon API. This isn’t a “hot take”, it’s just a fact.

I kind of want to build a bot framework that is 100% ActivityPub that people can build bots on top of. I wonder if this could be a nice @fedidevs collaborative project.

gabek, 6 months ago to random

Why are podcasts and YouTube videos concerned about length? I always hear people say "we don't have time" or "we're running out of time". They're not on network TV. Go ahead and take the time, storage for your extra few megs of content won't break the bank. That's the beauty of this type of content, you can take as long as you like.

gabek, 5 months ago to random

I'm legitimately really upset to read this news. Letterboxd was one of the last places where people were hanging out and talking about media. I discovered so many great films through the lists people posted.

Fuck investors. Jesus christ.

https://gizmodo.com/letterboxd-majority-acquired-by-tiny-for-50-million-1850887306

gabek, 9 months ago to random

Pretty disappointed in the internet today. I just tried to find the details of how a flux capacitor works, and there's nothing.