Nextcloud, Mastodon, OpenStreetMap and More
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Nextcloud Taking On Microsoft and Google in Germany and the EU
The PR folks at Germany-based Nextcloud, the open source platform that allows individuals and organizations to host their own cloud, were working overtime on Wednesday issuing two major announcements. The first was that they’ve released a ready-for-prime-time SharePoint replacement, complete with migration services for their enterprise customers. The second was was that Nextcloud Office is now available to users of Deutsche Telekom’s MagentaCLOUD.
While the suits at Microsoft and Google would scoff at the suggestion, neither of these announcements is good news for either company.
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Posting Untappd Checkins to Mastodon (and other services)
I'm a big fan of Untappd. It's a social drinking app which lets you check in to a beer and rate it. Look, we all need hobbies, mine is drinking cider. You can see a list of everything I've drunk over the 13 last years. Nearly 900 different pints!
After checking in, the app automatically posts to Twitter. But who wants to prop up Alan's failing empire? Not me! So here's some quick code to liberate your data and post it elsewhere.
There are two ways - APIs and Screen Scraping.
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Fix your mutt
At some point in the recent past, mutt changed the way it generates Message-ID header values. Instead of the perfectly good old way of doing it, the developers switched to using base64-encoded random bytes. The base64 dictionary contains the / character, which causes unnecessary difficulties when linking to these messages on lore.kernel.org, since the / character needs to be escaped as %2F for everything to work properly.
Mutt developers seem completely uninterested in changing this, so please save everyone a lot of trouble and do the following if you're using mutt for your kernel development needs (should work for all mutt versions): [...]
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This week, I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap — a collaborative free software project that aims to create a free, editable map of the world
Assuming 99% of people don’t bother hiding their SSID after setting up their router. Other Google users can pin (your) nearby WiFi Acess Points & associate it with the GPS co-ordinates of that area. So that the next time a device queries Google’s servers for a location fix — it’d find that there’s a certain Wi-Fi AP nearby & doesn’t have to wait for a GPS signal.
This can be extensively used inside of malls, shopping complexes & stadiums where each shop has their own radio hotspot that can be used for indoor mapping. This technology already exists, across certain 4G mobile carriers it’s called MIMO & the upcoming hype around 5G. Indoor mapping, is going to get even more better.
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Spidermonkey Development Blog: JavaScript Import maps, Part 2: In-Depth Exploration
We recently shipped import maps in Firefox 108. you might be wondering what this new feature is and what problems it solves. In the previous post we introduced what import maps are and how they work, in this article we are going to explore the feature in depth.
Explanation in-depth
Let’s explain the terms first. The string literal
"app.mjs"
in the above examples is called a Module Specifier in ECMAScript, and the map which maps"app.mjs"
to a URL is called a Module Specifier Map.An import map is an object with two optional items:
- imports, which is a module specifier map.
- scopes, which is a map of URLs to module specifier maps.
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Right to repair advocate Elizabeth Chamberlain to keynote FSF's LibrePlanet
Elizabeth Chamberlain is director of sustainability at iFixit and a passionate advocate of the right to repair. iFixit sells repair parts and publishes gratis repair guides for electronic devices such as smartphones, tractors, and toasters on their Web site. With these, iFixit is helping thousands of people repair their devices every day instead of throwing them away.
Chamberlain will keynote LibrePlanet 2023, the fifteenth edition of the FSF's annual conference on ethical technology and user freedom. Regarding her talk, titled "The future of the right to repair and free software," she says, "Free software and the right to repair are founded on so many of the same principles: We should have the right to learn how our things work. If we want to train up a new generation of technological innovators, we've got to make sure they can get into the guts and brains of their devices. That's why we need both free software and the right to repair to chart our course to a freer future."
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Hacker Hotel 2023: Back Again!
After three years, it’s odd to think back to those few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic morphed from something on the news into an immediate and ever-present threat which kept us isolating for so long. For me, some of the last moments of normality were a trip to the Netherlands for Hacker Hotel, a hacker event in the comfort of a resort hotel. Now three years later and after two cancelled events, Hacker Hotel is back, and I made the same journey to Garderen to hang out for a weekend with a bunch of hacker friends over some good Dutch beer and a lot of bitterbollen.