Tired of zoom, meet, w/e video conferencing software collecting your data?

Signal's got you❤️

NEW: call links let you start a video call with your fave Signal users easily, no group needed. Announcing these, and other improvements to calling here👇

signal.org/blog/call-links/

Improving Private Signal Calls: Call Links & More

If you love group calls on Signal, but don’t want to create a group chat for every combination of your friends or colleagues, you’re in luck.

^{Signal Messenger}

I'm leaving the British Medical Journal after fifteen years and I'm looking for a new role.

I'm a senior system administrator doing Linux and AWS. My job at the BMJ changed completely three or four times and I expect this will continue as technology and trends march on.

As you know, I also write about technology and can explain the important bits of abstruse subjects to a non-technical audience, be it the general public or C-levels.

I'm still doing the writing gig - please enjoy the daily Pivot-to-AI posts! - and enjoying it hugely. But I probably need a main gig too.

I'll do a much louder call to my networks later. But for now - you know who I am and what I do. If you think that'd be useful to you, please get in touch. Email is dgerard@gmail.com, phone is 07733 223 584. Thank you all!

Welcome to the RB family, Habit Builder 🥳

apt.izzysoft.de/packages/com.o…

Habit Builder provides you with the right tools to keep track of your habits and understand your progress.

Once more, joint efforts with the developer managed to get the app reproducible

#reproducibleBuilds #IzzyOnDroid

„Habit Builder“ – IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

Simple habit tracker with insights

^{IzzyOnDroid App Repo}

I’m becoming quite a fan of the @FLOSS_Weekly podcast. The latest episode with @bagder about Curl was super interesting.

Surprisingly for a chat about a seemingly dry subject, had me chuckling to myself a good few times. 🙂

hackaday.com/2024/11/06/floss-…

FLOSS Weekly Episode 808: Curl – Gotta Download ’em All

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Randal Schwartz chat with Daniel Stenberg about curl! How many curl installs are there?! What’s the deal with CVEs? How has curl managed to not break its ABI f…

^Hackaday

It is a month and 2 weeks until Christmas.

All my shopping is done. All my important people will be provided for. Everything is right in my little pocket of the planet.

i have spent my entire day exclusively dedicated to this endeavour. I have no regrets. I will spend the next week collecting parcels with all the joy in my little heart.

This time of year always held so much misery for me. I have purposely reframed my thoughts until it contains only happiness. Some years bare fruit more actively than others. But I am the baker of biscuits. I put up the tree. I am the kid with all the gifts, and every little tightly clutched secret.

Contentment has been so, so hard to find of late. I found it today, in the simplicity of giving to all those who matter so much to me. So much thought went into every single gift, whether big or small, and I cannot wait to hand each carefully selected piece to the person in question.

From South Africa to England, from the oldest to the as yet not here, I am taking into consideration every human I can. I will let myself have this unrestrained, childlike exuberance. I will hold it tight and let it hold me in return until the bits all slowly fall into place.

Now to work on making people happy some more.

See you soon!

The 2024 Web Almanac is out, and this year the accessibility chapter is back, great work @mgifford!

almanac.httparchive.org/en/202…

Accessibility | 2024 | The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive

Accessibility chapter of the 2024 Web Almanac covering ease of reading, navigation, forms, media, ARIA, and accessibility apps.

^{Mike Gifford (HTTP Archive)}

An anecdote that I shared about rolling around on the floor back in 2000 to solve a math problem, both in my #Masterclass at masterclass.com/classes/terenc… , and on #MathOverflow at mathoverflow.net/a/38882/766 , as well as the #NewYorkTimes nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazin… , has for some reason recently gone viral on various social media. Just for the record, I wanted to add some mathematical background behind the story, which eventually led to my paper arxiv.org/abs/math/0010068 . At the time, I was trying to construct solutions to an equation known as the wave maps equation on the sphere: the solution was like a solution to the wave equation, except being forced to take values in a sphere rather than in a vector space.

I was trying to solve the equation iteratively, breaking up the solution to a low frequency base solution and a high frequency correction. As a first approximation, the low frequency base could also be assumed to stay on the sphere and solve the wave maps equation, so the main problem was to work out what the high frequency correction was doing.

Because the high frequency correction also had to keep the solution on the sphere, one could assume as a first approximation that the high frequency correction was tangent to the low frequency base. So, at any given point in space and time, the low frequency base solution was located on some point on the sphere, and the high frequency correction basically lived on the tangent plane to the sphere at that point. But because the base solution evolved (slowly) in space and time, this tangent space kept rotating around the sphere.

(1/3)

The Singular Mind of Terry Tao

A prodigy grows up to become one of the greatest mathematicians in the world.

^{Gareth Cook (The New York Times)}

Remember the Polish train hackers? The guys who identified why trains being serviced by an independent, licensed train servicing center, "randomly" started failing? And identified the root cause, namely geofencing and/or time-related triggers?

The face charges by the original train manufacturer, who claims the violated copyright and other laws. A fascinating story of contradictory arguments. Enjoy!
#Newag #PolishTrainHackers #Poland #Train #ReverseEngineering
rys.io/en/175.html

Dear authors, and if Netflix or whoever is listening, you too:

If you're out of fun ideas for historical drama, alternate history or the like, how about this: an all-female gang in a European capital, renowned for coming up on top against male gangs and taking good care of their members, and one which may have endured for generations. You don't even need to invent most of it if you don't want to. This gang really existed and they were known as the 40 thieves or the 40 elephants: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_El…

Please write something in this setting. Please!

19th- and 20th-century gang of female shoplifters in the UK

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Gotta love it. Two 90 year old men, Mike and Joe, have been friends all of their lives.
Long
When it's clear that Joe is dying, Mike visits him every day. One day Mike says, "Joe, we both loved football all our lives, and we played football on Saturdays together for so many years. Please do me one favour, when you get to Heaven, somehow you must let me know if there's football there."

Joe looks up at Mike from his death bed," Mike, you've been my best friend for many years. If it's at all possible, I'll do this favour for you.

Shortly after that, Joe passes on.

At midnight a couple of nights later, Mike is awakened from a sound sleep by a blinding flash of white light and a voice calling out to him, "Mike--Mike."

"Who is it? asks Mike sitting up suddenly. "Who is it?"

"Mike--it's me, Joe."

"You're not Joe. Joe just died."

"I'm telling you, it's me, Joe," insists the voice.

"Joe! Where are you?"

"In heaven", replies Joe. "I have some really good news and a little bad news."

"Tell me the good news first," says Mike.

"The good news," Joe says," is that there's football in heaven. Better yet, all of our old friends who died before us are here, too. Better than that, we're all young again. Better still, it's always spring time and it never rains or snows. And best of all, we can play football all we want, and we never get tired."

That's fantastic," says Mike. "It's beyond my wildest dreams! So what's the bad news?

"You're playing on Saturday."

This month in Servo…

🔒🔑 early SubtleCrypto support
🎨💡 ‘mix-blend-mode: plus-lighter’
📦↔️ CSS size keywords
📏🏎️ faster layout and compositing
📱🌃 OpenHarmony nightlies

More details → servo.org/blog/2024/11/08/this…

I've seen a number of toots today advising people against scanning random #QRCodes because they can be used in a number of malicious ways.

There are a number of legitimate ways people can use such codes to trick others, and it can require some deeper understanding of how systems work to avoid them. For that reason, I'm not going to contradict that recommendation, but I will add to it.

QR codes are usually just URLs encoded in a visual, machine-readable form, so they aren't necessarily more dangerous than a link. The danger comes from the fact that most scanner apps will directly open whatever URL you scan without giving you the opportunity to consider whether that's a good idea.

You can reduce the risk of scanning such codes by installing a better app which requires manual interaction to open URLs after decoding them.

For android users I recommend "BinaryEye", since it's open-source, ad-free, and has a bunch of other useful features.

Its github page links to both F-Droid and the play store:

github.com/markusfisch/BinaryE…

#privacy #security

GitHub - markusfisch/BinaryEye: Yet another barcode scanner for Android

Yet another barcode scanner for Android. Contribute to markusfisch/BinaryEye development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

I just released version 0.4.1 of #rsop, a stateless #OpenPGP ("SOP") CLI tool based on @rpgp:

crates.io/crates/rsop/0.4.1

This release adds support for the 'revoke-key' command.

For more on #SOP, see datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft…

#PGP #GnuPG #StatelessOpenPGP

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today brings you 9 updated and 1 added apps:

* Raccoon for Friendica: a mobile client for Friendica by @dieguitux8623 & team 🛡️

RB stats: 328 apps (27.1%)

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo

IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).

^{IzzyOnDroid App Repo}

There is some kind of issue with my Whatsapp ("Waiting for message, this may take a while" and my messages not sending), so I've been using @matrix with a couple of people, and it's working great. Stuff like location sharing just works, and my favorite different feature is that you can react to a post with multiple emoticons.

It looks like Whatsapp has some kind of key exchange error. I'm not saying matrix never has that (although I've never had it), but it tells you what the error is and gives you tools to diagnose/fix it. But Whatsapp is "User friendly", so it just tells you to wait forever.

There are many “what should we do next” thinkpieces, but this one is mine.

If you want an abstract summary, the idea is “we need to run a year-round parallel campaign apparatus that just introduces people to progressive ideas by making their lives better in whatever ways we can”.

That is a staggeringly huge project and if it does even happen, I can only be a tiny part of it, so I will need your help. Contact info is at the end of the blog post.

blog.glyph.im/2024/11/its-time…

Deciphering Glyph :: It’s Time For Democrats To Get More Annoying

Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.

^{blog.glyph.im}

⚙️ #EtchDroid umí vytvořit instalační USB disk z mobilu

🔗 infoek.cz/etchdroid-umi-vytvor…

#android #linux

The 2024 Web Almanac has been published:

almanac.httparchive.org/en/202…

I have contributed to the chapters on accessibility and sustainability.

#WebAlmanac #WebAlmanac24 #HTTPArchive

The 2024 Web Almanac

The Web Almanac is an annual state of the web report combining the expertise of the web community with the data and trends of the HTTP Archive.

^{Rick Viscomi (HTTP Archive)}