RScan lets you scan a barcode of any product, and automatically looks it up on DuckDuckGo and tries to select the most fitting and useful description. The scanning is really fast and convenient, meaning it's easy to work with even if you're blind and don't know the location of the barcode, but it's also great for sorting through large number of items, if you need to say search for a particular chocolate in a pile, or you order a large number of cans that you need to tell apart in order to sort them to groups. RScan can deal even with scanning multiple items of the same barcode, making this process easy and efficient.

I've been gradually developing this app over the last years, always reflecting my actual needs and actively using it in my home. I've been sharing it with my friends from Czechoslovakia, receiving great feedback. In our region, the automatic product identification works really well and RScan can truly identify 90% of items just by seeing their barcode.

Few days ago, I finally got to release it in google play, and given this opportunity, would like to expand it to more regions. My theory is that my algorithm should work comparably well in regions where products use metric system for describing themselves (300 g chocolate, 400 ml can etc.).
It's not yet prepared for UK, where the commonly used units are different, and completely unknown for me is USA, where a similar but different barcode standard is used than in Europe, plus they have different units too.

I would love to support as many countries and regions as I can. If you would like to help me with this, sending me barcode numbers of things you commonly use in your region (cans, chocolates, common drugs, drinks), along with the name of your country would be very useful, so I could check out how does your Internet describe things and make RScan adapt for it.
If you're technically skilled, you can read the project's readme:
github.com/RastislavKish/RScan
and directly look for the unit information required by RScan, this would save me the struggle with localization and location simulation.

Also, if RScan works well in your country, I would love to hear that too! My theory of compatible countries is still just a theory, it needs to get verified.

You can find RScan on Google play:
play.google.com/store/apps/det…

And, along with all the code and scanning tips in the documentation, on my GitHub:
github.com/RastislavKish/RScan

Happy scanning!

GitHub - RastislavKish/RScan: A practical barcode scanner for product identification

A practical barcode scanner for product identification - GitHub - RastislavKish/RScan: A practical barcode scanner for product identification

^GitHub

Are you interested in making your notifications private?
We have a great guide in our website describing how to set up your android xmpp application to deliver notifications for all your apps on your device. Without using google.
joinjabber.org/tutorials/servi…
and for people who self host you can use your own server to deliver notifications privately to your devices and the devices of the people that use your server :)
joinjabber.org/tutorials/servi…

#privacy #xmpp #dataprotection

This festive season give the gift of accessibility with an NV Access donation. Your support ensures we continue delivering life-changing technology to blind and visually impaired people globally.
Donations can be made here, nvaccess.org/support-us/#donat…

#Donate #Donation #NVDA #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Christmas

Let's Encrypt will issue new intermediate certs in Q1/2024: groups.google.com/a/mozilla.or…

Make sure your LE cert deployment logic includes serving the right intermediates that ACME should hand you, not just that same old LE intermediate you got years ago. Otherwise, there'll be breakage...

#x509 #pki #LetsEncrypt

My partner Deedra reported an accessibility issue in the Monal XMPP client
recently, and their reply included the following help request:

> If you are aware of an open source enthusiast with a bit of experience
> in writing SwiftUI as well as accessibility, please let him/her/them
> know that we would love some help.

I don't know anything about this stuff, but I hope I can find people who do.
Any takers?
Probably you should reach out to the project directly via email, to
info at monal-im dot org.
Please boost far and wide.

Mentioning @xmpp as well, here.

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today with 3 updated and 2 added apps:

* Vault: password manager compatible with KeePass
* Round Sync - Rclone for Android: file manager using rclone for the heavy lifting

At F-Droid, 35 apps were updated.

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with #FDroid and the #IzzySoftRepo

IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

This is a repository of apps to be used with F-Droid. 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}

ChatGPT can reveal its training data, that includes personal information.

not-just-memorization.github.i…

Here, the authors used a prompt to instruct ChatGPT to repeat a word forever, eventually resulting in different text that can be linked back to the source; examples include "company" and "poem".

No doubt this "attack" (in words of the authors) will soon be intercepted, but who knows what other formulation of prompt results in the same behaviour?

Analysis:
arxiv.org/abs/2311.17035

Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models

This paper studies extractable memorization: training data that an adversary can efficiently extract by querying a machine learning model without prior knowledge of the training dataset.

^arXiv.org