Matthias @totoroot@fosstodon.org

RT @anvaka@twitter.com

Announcing https://anvaka.github.io/city-roads/ website that allows you to print roads of any city

.:: ♪ There's someone in my head, but it's not me ♫ ::.

Have a great week Mastodon !

---
The dark side of the Moose...

Yeah, I know that's a bit silly but I found that funny :)
Though there's probably already tons of lame pun like this one, I still felt motivated enough to draw it ;)
And that's one of my favorite albums.

- #mastoart #art #illustration #lamePun-
:: Better res on website ::
https://www.gynux.com/v2/lesnews/?p=2794&rub=news&tag=fr&pano=1&preview=true

A happy #MLK day to everyone. May he continue to be a reminder that even unjust laws and societies can be persevered though. That action is required to make things right and that the most important judge of a person is through their actions and their words, not their appearance or orientation.

@EclecticEclipse

glitchin-out

When promoting your startup, don't pretend that a popular competitor doesn't exist. People know. Be upfront and honest. Use their existence to your advantage.

What makes you different? Why is your product better? Why should someone consider your solution rather than theirs?

Pre-orders are open for the @Kubuntu Focus, a high-end Plasma-powered laptop designed for work that requires intense GPU computing, fast NVMe storage and optimal cooling to unleash the CPU's maximum potential.

https://kfocus.org/

A complete KDE review coming soon!

Update: PineBook Pro is updated and currently being used for its intended purpose as a cat chair. 🐱

Other than a small sticker on the bottom there is no visible branding on the @PINE64 PineBook Pro. All the stickers I add now will be for purely aesthetic reasons.

(Images: Three views of the unboxed PineBook, bottom, top, and open)

IT curriculum should include way more ethics and social awareness

Generating Beetles from Public Domain Images

Ever since [Ian Goodfellow] and his colleagues invented the generative adversarial network (GAN) in 2014, hundreds of projects, from style transfers to poetry generators, have been produced using the concept … https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/generating-beetles-from-public-domain-images/

Original tweet : https://twitter.com/hackaday/status/1216334803131412483

Of the 223 companies that have manufactured hard disk drives, there are only three left: Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

None of the first four pioneers in the field continue in the industry today.

So I was recently asked why I prefer to use free and open source software over more conventional and popular proprietary software and services.

A few years ago I was an avid Google user. I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem and used their products everywhere. I used Gmail for email, Google Calendar and Contacts for PIM, YouTube for entertainment, Google Newsstand for news, Android for mobile, and Chrome as my web browser.

I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive (which were all in Google Docs format). I used Google Domains to register my domain names for websites where I would keep track of my users using Google Analytics and monetize them using Google AdSense.

I used Google Hangouts (one of Google’s previous messaging plays) to communicate with friends and family and Google Wallet (with debit card) to buy things online and in-store.

My home is covered with Google Homes (1 in my office, 1 in my bedroom, 1 in the main living area) which I would use to play music on my Google Play Music subscription and podcasts from Google Podcasts.

I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google account to buy movies, TV shows, apps, and Google hardware devices. This was truly the Google life.

Then one day, I received an email from Google that changed everything.

“Your account has been suspended”

Just the thing you want to wake up to in the morning. An email from Google saying that your account has been suspended due to a perceived Terms of Use violation. No prior warning. No appeals process. No number to call. Trying to sign in to your Google account yields an error and all of your connected devices are signed out. All of your Google data, your photos, emails, contacts, calendars, purchased movies and TV shows. All gone.

I nearly had a heart attack, until I saw that the Google account that had been suspended was in fact not my main personal Google account, but a throwaway Gmail account that I created years prior for a project. I hadn’t touched the other account since creation and forgot it existed. Apparently my personal Gmail was listed as the recovery address for the throwaway account and that’s why I received the termination email.

Although I was able to breathe a sigh of relief this time, the email was wake up call. I was forced to critically reevaluate my dependence on a single company for all the tech products and services in my life.

I found myself to be a frog in a heating pot of water and I made the decision that I was going to jump out.

Leaving Google

Today there are plenty of lists on the internet providing alternatives to Google services such as this and this. Although the “DeGoogle” movement was still in its infancy when I was making the move.

The first Google service I decided to drop was Gmail, the heart of my online identity. I migrated to Fastmail with my own domain in case I needed to move again (hint: glad I did, now I self host my email). Fastmail also provided calendar and contacts solutions so that took care of leaving Google Calendar and Contacts.

Here are some other alternatives that I moved to:

Gmail → Fastmail → Self-hosted (via Cloudron)
Google Contacts → Fastmail → Nextcloud Contacts
Google Calendar → Fastmail → Nextcloud Calendar
Google Search → Bing → DuckDuckGo
Google Maps → Bing Maps → OpenStreetMaps and OsmAnd
Google Analytics → Matomo Analytics
Google Drive → Nextcloud Files
Google Photos → Nextcloud Files/Gallery
Google Docs → Collabora Office (Nextcloud integration) and LibreOffice
Google Play Music → Spotify / Plex → Spotify / Jellyfin
Google Play Movies/TV → Plex → Jellyfin
Google Play Audiobooks/Books → Audible/Kindle
Google Play Store (apps) → F-Droid / Aurora Store
Google Android → Lineage OS → Ubuntu Touch on PinePhone (coming soon?)
Google’s Android Apps → Simple Mobile Tools
Google Chrome → Mozilla Firefox
Google Domains → Hover
Google Hangouts → Matrix and Nextcloud Talk
Google Allo → Signal
Google Podcasts → PocketCasts → AntennaPod
Google Newsstand → RSS
Google Wallet → PayPal and Cash App
Google Voice →Ting Mobile

Migrating away from Google was not a fast or easy process. It took years to get where I am now and there are still several Google services that I depend on: YouTube and Google Home.

Eventually, my Google Home’s will grow old and become unsupported at which point hopefully the Mycroft devices have matured and become available for purchase. YouTube may never be replaced (although I do hope for projects like PeerTube to succeed) but I find the compromise of using only one or two Google services to be acceptable.

At this point losing my Google account due to a mistake in their machine learning would largely be inconsequential and my focus has shifted to leaving Amazon which I use for most of my shopping and cloud services.

The reason that I moved to mostly FOSS applications is that it seems to be the only software ecosystem where everything works seamlessly together and I don’t have to cede control to any single company. Alternatively I could have simply split my service usage up evenly across Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple but I don’t feel that they would have worked as nicely together.

Overall I’m very happy with the open source ecosystem. I use Ubuntu with KDE on all of my computers and Android (no GApps) on my mobile phone. I’ve ordered the PinePhone “Brave Heart” and hope to one day be able to use it or one of its successors as a daily driver with Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile.

I don’t want to give the impression that I exclusively use open source software either, I do use a number of proprietary apps including: Sublime Text, Typora, and Cloudron.

https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/01/09/why-i-quit-google/

The Carbon project is a great tool for sharing source code snippet screenshot mockup images

https://github.com/carbon-app/carbon

Web app available here https://carbon.now.sh/

MIT license / #freesoftware

The #PinePhone is a smart reminder of what the #mobile and every #smartphone should be : an hardware platform that allow you to install the OS you want and not a golden prison on which to spend time uninstalling every carefully stashed trojan 🤔 #OpenHardware #Privacy

RT @rfreebern@twitter.com

Spooky dev environment hack: add

127.0.0.1 xn--9q8h

to /etc/hosts and then all your dev servers can be accessed at http://👻

It's localghost!

@kev I would love to see more services integrate encryption automatically. The reason encryption isn't used is because it's a pain most of the time. If using Keybase encryption was as simple as checking a box in Thunderbird and when you send an email Thunderbird would just go out there, see if the To address has a key and encrypt if it does, more people would use it. Keybase's aim is to make encryption easy for the average person, but they've still got a ways to go before that's true.

It you have a google account please help with reporting this as harmful and impersonating.

*DO NOT INSTALL* (except if you are a malware researcher 😉)

Fake F-Droid app, please report:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.source.managefile

Hi Fediverse 👋

what do you think of this new landing page design? ✨

https://pages.codeberg.org/swiso-en/index.html

Feel free to leave your feedback here 🙂