nilesh @nilesh@fosstodon.org

Announcing LearnAwesome.org - an open-source, ActivityPub-compliant alternative to GoodReads, Coursera etc.

The goal is to build humanity's universal learning map by tagging learning resources with rich metadata such as topics, format, length, cost etc. There's a companion browser extension, a mobile app and peer-groups for project-based learning, mentored by selected experts and more.

The webapp is built with Ruby, Rails and PostgreSQL. Inviting devs: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn

Ran into minor gotchas because SQFlite doesn't natively support Windows or Linux, but it's solvable: https://github.com/tekartik/sqflite/blob/develop/sqflite_common_ffi/doc/using_ffi_instead_of_sqflite.md

Giving Flutter a try for building Linux desktop apps. I'm always a sucker for the hype of "Write once, run everywhere" promises. 😂

7yo is fascinated with the idea of Zugzwang from chess. I think I will show her Wargames this weekend. 😀

The perfect tablet does not exist:

A: Good hardware+software to achieve low latency

B: Supports multiple user accounts

C: Has alternative app stores so it doesn't choke innovation

D: Provides regular software upgrades for long life.

Apple scores on A & D whereas Android on B & C.

FOSS Hackathon for Indian developers. Spread the word! Their Telegram group is here: https://t.me/fossunited and Discourse forum here: https://forum.fossunited.org

Why is Google & Android so bad at audio latency? It's 2020 and they have been at it since v4.1: https://source.android.com/devices/audio/latency/design

They still can't beat the original iPod Touch from 2008. And this is when the underlying Linux OS has been shown to achieve latency as low as 1ms.

AMD and Nvidia are kicking ass lately! Amazing what a bit of competition can bring. A machine with Zen 3 CPU + 3070Ti + USB 4 + Wifi 6 would be really sweet.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/09/01/nvidia-ceo-geforce-rtx-30-series-gpus/

New feature! 🎉

You can now subscribe to topics and learning resources right within your existing Slack channels by adding our Slack bot: https://learnawesome.org/join_slack

Not a lot of interest in expanding the alternatives list for this extension: Just got a single PR so far: https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/better

Perhaps I should just hand it over to folks at @privacytools or @switchingsoftware ?

I have been using MailGun for to send email updates to LearnAwesome.org users. Is there an alternative who has slightly more generous quota for FOSS projects?

I know Amazon SES offers 60K emails / month but they require migrating from Heroku to AWS which I'd like to avoid for now.

ActivityPub clients don't have to look like Twitter / Mastodon. I'd love to see a client that works like RSS feed reader apps.

This Hachi projector with Android and multi-touch built-in is super cool! https://youtu.be/5NNO5Kb-PZo?t=186

Who is building Airtable-like UI for a real PostgreSQL database instance?

"Better" can be subjective. So, eventually, the users will be able to subscribe to multiple lists maintained by different communities using different parameters.

This is why I released early: To be able to attract more contributors. 😉

LearnAwesome.org now has RSS feeds for each topic. Users can get updated whenever new learning resources on their favorite topics are added. For eg, here is the one for Category Theory: https://learnawesome.org/topics/22eca164-ba03-4334-8a9e-4894f2a89426-category-theory.rss

Haven't added a subscribe button/icon on the topic pages, but the auto-discovery works.

I made a thing! 🎉
https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/better

It's a browser extension that recommends "better" alternative products and services via in-page popups, based on community-curated lists. Available for all Chromium and Firefox-based browsers.

We live in times where the distributions costs are hampering the adoption of higher-quality (which could mean security, privacy, ethics, local etc) products. I am hoping that this extension can eventually be managed by orgs like IFF, EFF or FSF.