OpenSpeedTest an Open-Source Self Hostable HTML5 Network Performance Estimation Tool “OpenSpeedTest is written in Vanilla JavaScript. No Third-Party frameworks or libraries were used. The unexpected side effect of using Vanilla JavaScript is High Performance. OpenSpeedTest contains only STATIC Files like HTML, CSS & JS, so you don't need to worry about Security Updates or Hidden Exploits that may compromise your secure environments.” You may want to use something like this if: * You have employees working from home, and they want to do a basic speed test to the office to check their connection is OK. * You want to stress test or benchmark your home network from various devices to a server, a media machine, etc. * Or to test between two client devices across your LAN. * By doing the test from various locations around the home, you can see how your Wi-Fi speed varies from different places. * Also test from a private browser window to see if extensions are slowing your browser down. * Do tests before and after network changes to see what impact it has e.g. when adding a LAGG interface between the server and the router. * Host it on a public web server for users to check their connection speed. The server side stores no data so it is just a question of spinning up a docker container, and connecting with any browser to run the test (nothing to install on the client device). My docker container used 0% CPU while not doing a test, and used about 45 MB of RAM. It jumped to 17% CPU during the test. You can optionally save speed test results to a database, but it points to an external database that you have running somewhere. See

GitHub

GitHub - openspeedtest/Speed-Test: SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest™ is a Free and Open-Source HTML5 Network Performance Estimation Tool Written in Vanilla Javascript and only uses built-in Web APIs like XMLHttpRequest (XHR), HTML, CSS, JS, & SVG. No Third-Party frameworks or libraries are Required. Started in 2011 and moved to OpenSpeedTest.com dedicated Project/Domain Name in 2013.

SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest™ is a Free and Open-Source HTML5 Network Performance Estimation Tool Written in Vanilla Javascript and only uses built...

#technology #networking #speedtest #opensource #selfhosting

Not a Firefox or Chrome Fork! Kagi's Orion Browser Arrives on Linux as a Public Beta “Orion is a web browser built on WebKit, the same engine that powers Safari, with a strong focus on privacy and customisation. Unlike most browsers you will come across on Linux, Orion is not a Chromium derivative or a Firefox fork. It is a fresh build that has earned a reputation for being fast, lightweight, and flexible, with support for extensions from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.” It is not really ready for daily use on Linux yet, but it is worth taking note of this browser and what it does. We hear so many moaning that everything comes back to Chromium and Firefox, so this is the opportunity to use something completely different. The weakest point of every browser is usually it's 3rd party plugins, so we'll have to see how Orion is going to manage this. Note though it is not open source software so what goes into it, you can't be too sure about, and it won't be able to be forked in future. It would be the end of the road if it stops getting support (like the Flock browser I used to love decades ago). See

It's FOSS

Not a Firefox Fork! Kagi's Orion Browser Arrives on Linux as a Public Beta

The Flatpak-only build brings basic browsing but extensions and Kagi Sync aren't ready yet.

or

Orion Browser

Orion Browser by Kagi

Orion — a web browser designed from the ground-up. Native WebKit speed, full extension compatibility, and absolute privacy is finally together in...

#technology #browsers

10 Hacks Every Signal User Should Know “Signal is one of my favourite messaging apps because of its focus on privacy and security. I use it to message my closest friends regularly, and in the process, I've discovered a fair few hidden features that I now use every day. From shielding your phone number from other users, to preventing hackers from breaking into your account, these hacks will help you make the most of Signal.” Very solid tips these, especially as most hacking of secure messengers actually takes place on the end-user device. See

Lifehacker

10 Hacks Every Signal User Should Know

Signal ships with great features, but not all of them are enabled by default. These hacks help you get the most out of this encrypted messaging app.

#technology #security #signal

Hister indexes every web page you visit and lets you search the full text of your browsing history offline “Have you ever wished your browser history was more than just a collection of URLs? As it is, the standard search history is kind of useless. Sure, you can see the title of the page you visited, maybe a bit of metadata, but not much more than that. For any actual functionality, like searching for a specific page you visited that you can't quite remember the name of, your browser's built-in history search falls flat on its face (like my six-month-old did as I was writing this sentence). That's where Hister comes in. This open-source, self-hosted tool does more than just track your activity; it indexes every site you visit, capturing the contents of the page for easy search and retrieval later.” I was a bit sceptical on first reading this, especially where browser extensions are involved, but it is an open source project, and there is this privacy statement in their documention: Hister clients only communicate with the designated server, and the server does not “phone home” or share any of your browsing history with anyone else. The source code is publicly accessible, so we can be audited by anyone who wants to check! What is interesting is that many self-hosted server applications that do this sort of thing, have quite resource intensive browsers running, and are often fooled by anti-bot detection. Hister actually has your browser doing this so no wasted resources, and you have the full power of your main browser at hand. The server needs to be available, but could also run on your own PC so no NAS etc setup needs to be run. However, the server side can also run in a docker container if you already have that setup. It can on something as light as a Raspberry Pi. As far as I can see it is only saving the text of pages you visit, and not PDF or HTML archives of the pages, so again this side is extremely lightweight. See

XDA

Hister indexes every web page I visit and lets me search the full text of my browsing history offline

The browser history you don't want to erase.

or

Hister

#technology #search #history #browsers #opensource

DBAN is a relic for HDD wiping, and ShredOS is the only software you should use “When “wiping a hard drive clean,” a quick format doesn't actually erase anything at all. Instead, it just removes the drive's file index. That leaves the underlying data sitting there until something overwrites it. That's why recovery tools like Recuva and EaseUS can still dig up photos, documents, and entire folder structures long after you think they're gone. Software tools like DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) and ShredOS solve that problem by overwriting every sector of the drive multiple times with different patterns over the course of multiple passes.” DBAN bring back old memories from decades ago when I did IT field support. It was what we used to wipe all drives we had to remove from PCs before auctioning them off or otherwise disposing of them. I'd completely forgotten about it until now. I seem to think Norton Utilities also had a wipe disk program. Good to see there is a modern equivalent out now. See

XDA

DBAN is a relic for HDD wiping, and ShredOS is the only software you should use

Make your data completely unrecoverable

or

GitHub

GitHub - PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64: Shredos Disk Eraser 64 bit for all Intel 64 bit processors as well as processors from AMD and other vendors which make compatible 64 bit chips. ShredOS - Secure disk erasure/wipe

Shredos Disk Eraser 64 bit for all Intel 64 bit processors as well as processors from AMD and other vendors which make compatible 64 bit chips. Shr...

#technology #opensource #security

Europe is building an alternative to Microsoft Office “Office EU is a cloud-based office suite built entirely on open-source software and hosted exclusively on European servers, has launched as a direct competitor to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Its pitch is straightforward: keep data in the EU, run on transparent open-source components and comply with EU law by design. The platform combines file storage, e-mail, calendar, document editing, chat and video conferencing in a single browser-based interface.” It is really time that the Microslop monopoly was broken. It is not just about digital sovereignty, but also this belief that one must by MS Office to do documents. It is just not true, and so many non-profits and governments are spending a lot of money on what could have gone directly towards societal services. But the big problem has been up to now you had to self-host or install something, and there were an array of free choices to choose from. Surprisingly, many users do not want choices and it paralyses them. Contrary to belief, the other party receiving your documents does not actually need the same brand of software to read your documents! Ideally you'd want to also use a proper open standard document format like ODF, but you could also use the MS OOXML standard that MS Office uses. Hopefully with such an enterprise effort behind Office EU, it will get traction. This is a cloud based solution which uses NextCloud in the background, and anyone can self-host NextCloud themselves too, so there is no vendor lock-in. See

TechCentral

Europe is building an alternative to Microsoft Office

A new office suite built on open source is the latest salvo in Europe's push to wrest control of its data from US tech giants.

or https://office.eu #technology #opensource #digitalsovereignty

AmneziaVPN is a self-hosted VPN that works in countries where WireGuard gets blocked “It's also worth noting that AmneziaVPN has been security audited as recently as January 2025. While the auditors found a few risks categorized as critical and high, the platform has resolved all identified issues. Amnezia runs its servers as RAM-only, so all data is wiped on reboot. They also say they don't store or collect activity history, IP addresses, session data, and other metrics, which is good. It's XRay feature, which listens on port 443 for authorized connection requests. If it gets an authorized one it connects as normal, but if it gets scanned by anyone else, it redirects that packet to a legit website, like google.com or any other easily available site in your region that you chose. The beauty of this is that it also returns an authentic TLS certificate because it's issued by the site the packet was redirected to, making the censorship software think your VPN server is Google instead.” It does look like a lot of attention has been given to making this an anti-censorship tool. Unfortunately this seems to be needed more and more by citizens in many countries today, whether 1st or 3rd World countries. See

XDA

I found a self-hosted VPN that works in countries where WireGuard gets blocked

Obfuscation is the name of the game

#technology #VPN #anticensorship #privacy

Portracker — an open source self-hosted real-time port monitoring and discovery tool I'm using this tool to identify which docker container ports are published or exposed (from the container) as well as which internal ports are available on your containers. This tool helps see where there may be port clashes, which ports are exposed and could be hidden, and helps find an available port to use for new containers. It has various ways of sorting, filtering and grouping the ports view. Yes you could track all your open and internal ports in a spreadsheet, but if you have 40 or 50 containers running, and spin others up and down, it gets difficult to keep that spreadsheet up to date. Portracker gives you a live view of all system ports, and docker published and internal ports. I also spend a few minutes explaining how and why docker ports are exposed, and how you would point to them from a reverse proxy such as Nginx Proxy Manager or your PC on your LAN. Watch #technology #opensource #selfhosting #docker #networking

10 tricks you can do with FFmpeg on Linux FFmpeg is an incredibly powerful piece of software and often sits in the background powering many graphics and audio conversion apps we use. So you may not know it, but you very likely are already using it. This linked article though shows a couple of command line executions you can run with it to quickly: * Play a video from the terminal * Get media info * Record your screen * Extract images from videos * Convert images into videos * Convert videos into MP3s or GIFs * Add subtitles to movies and shows * Rebuild a video's index without transcoding * Resize videos * Trim and crop videos It runs across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations. See

How-To Geek

10 tricks you can do with FFmpeg on Linux

FFmpeg is way cooler than it sounds.

#technology #video #audio

More than 800 gamers took an exam to prove they could complete an '80s adventure game without peeking at a walkthrough—and only 2 passed “Designed by developer Woe Industries, the AGAT challenged players to complete an '80s adventure game without using a walkthrough. Players weren't told what adventure game they'd be playing in advance, and they were monitored via webcam and microphone by a legitimate online proctoring software to determine if they were looking up hints on a second window, using their phones to cheat, or getting help from someone off-screen.” I remember playing Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, etc back in those days, probably then on my Commodore C64 or Amiga. These were more difficult than Doom as you did have to think quite a bit. These games seemed advanced back then as prior to these it was text adventure games without any graphics. Also, no Google Search so you sat for hours being stuck somewhere in the game until you got past the block. The linked article also has a link to a Twitch stream of the game during the test. Needless to say I already thought I knew where the key was, and see I was right. Back then it was not about the fancy graphics, it was about the storyline, the puzzles, etc. See

PC Gamer

800 gamers tried to beat an

Only .25% completed the AGAT: the Adventure Game Aptitude Test, designed by fiendish developer Woe Industries.

#technology #gaming #retro

No surprise: Meta Workers Say They’re Seeing Disturbing Things THROUGH USERS’ SMART GLASSES “And regardless of the wearer’s intention, much of the footage being recorded by the glasses is being sent to offshore contractors for data labeling, a widely-used preprocessing step in training new AI models in which human contractors are asked to review and annotate footage. It’s a laborious and highly resource-intensive process that tech companies often gloss over when discussing the prowess of their latest AI models. The reality can be messy. Meta contractors based in Nairobi, Kenya, told Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten in a recently published joint investigation that they’re being told to review highly sensitive and intimate data.” Yes, I know this is no surprise when it comes to Meta (Facebook). I stopped using WhatsApp when they changed the T&C's to allow sharing of metadata to partners. So this is fully in line with how Meta operates, and they and much of Big Tech, are harvesting what they can for AI. It's why you want physical shutters over any camera/webcams, you want to rather use open source software where you can, and you want to pay otherwise for what you use. What is becoming clear though, is we want to be wary of terms and conditions, free services powered by adverts, Big Tech/AI driven software. It is one thing for a company (say like Apple) to harvest data and keep it to themselves to improve products, but it is a completely different thing when the likes of Meta actively share the data out to contractors, partners, and advertisers. What we are also starting to realise is it does not stop for those parties, it also ends up with governments, whether friendly or not. Governments are also unlikely to shut down an excellent source of information for themselves. Personally I would not touch anything that is sold, managed, or given away by Meta. They have shown themselves to be the worst of the worst, consistently over many years. They survive though because we as consumers still have accounts and use them. I know many don't log in anymore to Facebook, but those numbers still support advertisers who pay them. In theory, we could pull the rug out from under them, but in practice the network effect is still incredibly powerful. See

Futurism

Meta Workers Say They're Seeing Disturbing Things Through Users' Smart Glasses

Meta contractors in Kenya told two Swedish newspapers that they're being told to review highly sensitive footage recorded by smart glasses.

#technology #privacy

The US has ordered its diplomats to lobby against foreign data privacy laws that could limit American tech firms “The US administration has ordered US diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate American technology companies’ handling of foreigners’ data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable that such efforts could interfere with AI-related services.” If this is true, it is going to have exactly the opposite effect to what was intended. The way I read that is, AI is being used to suck up as much private and corporate data as possible, and implementing digital sovereignty is going to impact that suction force. As mentioned before, when it comes to the US specifically, there are the US CLOUD and PATRIOT Acts, which govern any US company operating anywhere else in the world (i.e. outside the USA). The implications about what US owned AI may be doing, and the access to that data, could be pretty alarming. The only question we need to ask, at a sovereignty level is, whose interests are being curtailed if the data is no longer available? Is it just corporate profits, or is it something deeper at a national state level? If it is the former, then what happened to open competition and markets? If it is merely economic, then why are diplomats getting involved? Yes, we may be reading way too much into this, but how would the USA feel if AI was all centred say in China, and their data was being sucked up into that AI? Would the USA not want to assert some digital sovereignty and establish control over its citizens' data? At least this is not a case of the EU demanding that OpenAI be sold off from the US and an EU company is allowed to buy it. This is more a case of other countries wanting to get control over their citizen's data, or to establish their own capabilities in their countries. Nothing really wrong with that at all. As I said, I'm sure the US would think the same way if AI was not under their control. It is wake-up call though to all countries, where they should be thinking more about the privacy of their citizen data, and their own government data. Things are starting to get stickier, and to be honest I don't think many countries have woken up to this properly yet. Control over data is power. See

TechCentral

US orders diplomats to fight foreign data sovereignty rules

The US has ordered its diplomats to lobby against foreign data privacy laws that could limit American tech firms.

#technology #privacy #datasovereignty

Why OOXML is not a standard format for office documents “Why OOXML has never been, is not, and will never be a standard format unless Microsoft decides to completely redesign its office applications.” TL;DR — If Microsoft had been sincere about making this a true open standard, OOXML could have been a proper open standard. But Microsoft chose to cripple and sabotage it, so that it could not be properly implemented across all platforms. The linked article covers more about the OOXML's implementation inconsistencies, complexity, proprietary dependencies, binary blob remnants, platform specific elements, and the whole process followed by Microsoft. I remember this OOXML standard suddenly appearing back when many governments started to adopt the true ODF (Open Documents Format) a good two decades ago. Microsoft suddenly was touting OOXML as an ISO/IEC standard for all to use. It caused a wobble as wow here is Microsoft itself with an open standard. But most governments never fell for it on paper at least, like the Australian government who still stuck with ODF. Yes, I know that basically ALL the governments who approved ODF formally as their standard to use, in fact actually do save files in docx (OOXML) in practice including Australia, UK, South Africa, USA, and more. This is the oddity governments in theory and principle vs governments in practice. Try sending an ODF format document to someone in these governments, and they'll reply saying they can't open it, please send in OOXML (actually most do not know what OOXML is, and they'll call it MS Office, Office 365, or docx). In fact, MS Office can actually save in ODF formats, but by default it saves to OOXML. In truth therefore, most governments are saving their documents in OOXML which is designed to break down the line due to its inconsistencies. And governments in practice, determine then what businesses and citizens must use to interact with them, including non-profits. Ever see tenders requesting docx formats, CVs in docx formats, business plans to be sent in docx formats? It is a very sad situation, and the profit drive behind Microsoft is largely to blame for this. In reality, the various open source office suites (which are mostly free) fully support ODF and try to keep up to date with the standardised version of OOXML. It is Microsoft that tweaks and updates things in the background to how they use OOXML, which breaks compatibility. But don't blame Microsoft. They've been very clever about this. It is us as consumers and governments who chose to buy the Microsoft products. We could have switched to free of cost office suites and all used ODF formats. That would have meant we did not all have to use the same office suite product, and we would have had greater compatibility between ourselves going into the future. But hey, the taxpayer is paying, and they're also buying MS Office (whichever flavour) so no-one is going to question this. I mean, whoever got fired for buying IBM! What would we anyway do with all those surplus billions of dollars then if we did not spend it with Microsoft... See

TDF Community Blog

Why OOXML is not a standard format for office documents - TDF Community Blog

Unfortunately, I keep reading about open-source software advocates who happily use Microsoft’s proprietary DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats for th...

#technology #openstandards #opensource

New App Detects the BT Fingerprint of Smart Glasses and Warns You When Someone Is Using Them Nearby “Outdoors, the app works within 32 to 50 feet; indoors in crowds, that drops to 10 to 32 feet — enough range to identify a person wearing smart glasses in your vicinity. Nearby Glasses works by flagging Bluetooth SIG assigned numbers, unique alphanumeric codes identifying devices based on their brand. Assigned numbers are mandatory for devices utilizing Bluetooth, meaning that gear made by companies like Luxottica Group SpA — the firm manufacturing Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses — is at least somewhat identifiable for anyone who knows where to look.” So, yes not perfect, as you may get false positives if someone is for example walking around the mall wearing their Oculus Rift headset. But it is interesting to see some pushback happening against Big Tech's smart glasses. But this early is still in early release, so I imagine it will mature more still. See

Futurism

New App Detects the Radio Fingerprint of Smart Glasses and Warns You When Someone Is Using Them Nearby

Yves Jeanrenaud is a scholar and amateur software developer behind Nearby Glasses, an open-source smart glasses detection app.

#technology #privacy #smartglasses

Technology is being used to obscure and sway public opinion This is merely one example, so what it was used for is really not relevant at all. What is relevant though is that we have long seen how bots can drum up intelligent looking comments to social media posts, giving the impression something is supported (or not). We've also seen photos as well as videos being faked for sensationalism, and that have affected whole countries by going viral on Facebook. The natural progression is to do the same with petitions to imitate public expression. I'm not sure if this is actually worse, as it can impact pending legislation and other official processes. I just saw a video on YouTube today that claimed the CEO of Lenovo made a statement in November 2024 that they were ditching Windows and installing Linux on 60% of their consumer laptops. It sounded very factual and specific, but the real fact is, the CEO never said actually that at all. We're actually getting to a point where technology is rapidly losing its trustworthiness. Are we going to have to go back to physical interactions, handwritten letters, paper newspapers, etc? I suppose one can't just wind the clock back in reality, but we have to question more and more now whether what we see is really real at all. The media, outside of the USA, is often still looked up to with regard to their verification of facts and polls, yet the irony is they have been struggling to survive in the age of technology. We want everything for free, and we have all sorts of YouTubers and TikTokers now posing as news channels (paid for by ad revenue, rage-baiting and click tracking). Times are changing, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Maybe age verification will solve it See

Futurism

Barrage of Emails From AI Politics Platform Defeats Clean Air Initiative

A zero-emissions regulation was defeated thanks to the efforts of CiviClick, a platform offering AI powered astroturfing.

#technology #AI #fakenews

Tugtainer is a self-hosted app for automating updates of your docker containers Another modern Watchtower alternative but after testing it today I'm sticking with What's Up Docker (WUD) for now. The chief downside for me is that Tugtainer shows no current and new versions for you to look at before running the update. There is also no granular control over the version tags to watch. With WUD you can set the Regex to only watch for minor version updates e.g. for Postgres databases which need manual intervention for major upgrades. With WUD I have included text warnings that show up on the dashboard about what versions to stay pinned to. On resources used: WUD: 217 MB RAM, 0.6-6% CPU (short spikes), and 372 kB disk space. Tugtainer: 231 MB RAM, 0.3-0.5% CPU, disk space 48 kB. Something that Tugtainer alerted me to though about WUD, was that WUD was not resolving container images at lscr.io/linuxserver/ (a redirect to ghcr.io/linuxserver/). So I renamed those container image paths on my docker compose for now, and apparently v9.x of WUD will fix this. But what that says of Tugtainer is, it is picking up any updates just fine. An issue I had with Tugtainer, was setting up alerts using Gmail. It uses Apprise for notifications, and Apprise 'recognises' GMail so shortens some tings such as the username for logins to the e-mail account. What worked was exactly this Apprise URL: 'mailtos://usernamewithoutgmail:apppassword@smtp.gmail.com:587/?to=target@email.com'. See

GitHub

GitHub - Quenary/tugtainer: An application for automated Docker container updates with a web UI

An application for automated Docker container updates with a web UI - Quenary/tugtainer

#technology #opensource #docker

Microsoft's Copilot spills the beans, summarising emails it's not supposed to read “The bot couldn't keep its prying eyes away. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat has been summarising emails labelled “confidential” even when data loss prevention policies were configured to prevent it.” Given that this is Microsoft, it is difficult to distinguish between this being devious or plain sloppiness. One would have thought with a company the size of Microsoft, neither should be the case. But it was only a year ago that we had that Windows screen recording debacle that had to be withdrawn and re-published. It is probably just never a good idea to let any AI have raw access to your documents or e-mails. It is better to create a separate area with documents you have vetted, or to manually upload what you want to have processed. AI is proving to be an incredible way of worming into private document and information repositories where it can just vacuum everything up. As an end user, you have zero control once you've opened that door. I can see government's funding AI one day, as it is a tremendous way to spy on citizens, or opponents. As much as the USA warns us about China and their AI, I'm just wondering how much of the same behaviour is being perpetrated by the USA itself. Users basically invite AI into their private areas, and then let it scoop everything up. If the country owning the AI company, has warrantless search to data, just think of the possibilities. We've also heard about AI reorganising user data, and then apologising for deleting it. AI is not infallible, and with zero contextual knowledge, it is also not actually intelligent. You want to keep AI at an arm's length, and use it with cation, just like any other tool. See

Copilot Chat bug bypasses DLP on

: Data Loss Prevention? Yeah, about that...

#technology #AI #Microsoft #privacy

This is Probably the Best Video Downloader App (And it is Free and Open Source) “You come across an interesting video on social media and thought of downloading it so that you can send it to someone or modify it to share it on some other platform. You know, the meme videos? Not every platform allows downloading videos, and thus you need a good, reliable video downloader.” I do like that it's options show you the available sizes along with FPS, storage size, etc. AS good as one of the paid options floating around which was quite popular. See

It's FOSS

This is Probably the Best Video Downloader App (And it is Free and Open Source)

If you are looking for a free video downloader that just works on Linux, Windows or macOS, VidBee is the ideal choice here.

and their project at

GitHub

GitHub - nexmoe/VidBee: Download videos from almost any website worldwide

Download videos from almost any website worldwide. Contribute to nexmoe/VidBee development by creating an account on GitHub.

#technology #opensource #downloader

LastSignal Is a New Open-Source Dead Man’s Switch You Can Self-Host “A new open-source tool called LastSignal has emerged to let users run their own encrypted dead man’s switch on a self-hosted server. The software is designed for scenarios where messages should only be delivered if the sender becomes unreachable and stops responding to scheduled check-ins.” In the past these services were usually hosted, and then after a few years the service would shut down (and hopefully you were aware of that). The other issue was you may have to leave some sensitive information that you want to pass on, and today we are more and more aware that you have to be careful when leaving such information in someone else's cloud. So this does solve two of those issues: You are hosting it, so you can keep it available, and you have full control over the information. Quite a bit of thought seems to have gone into it too. The project is about 3 weeks old so is pretty new still. See

Linuxiac

LastSignal Is a New Open-Source Dead Man’s Switch You Can Self-Host

LastSignal lets users run a dead man’s switch on their own servers, using zero-knowledge encryption, and releases messages only after a missed ac...

and their open source project at

GitHub

GitHub - giovantenne/lastsignal: A self-hosted dead man's switch for delivering encrypted messages (E2EE) to your loved ones — when you're gone or unresponsive.

A self-hosted dead man's switch for delivering encrypted messages (E2EE) to your loved ones — when you're gone or unresponsive. - giovantenne/las...

#technology #opensource #selfhosting #deadmanswitch

Science says your Kindle might be better for sleep than a paperback Funny thing is I've always “known” this. For many years I've been reading my Kindle every night before I go to sleep. OK that is anecdotal (which is not any evidence) but a Kindle has no bright backlight like an iPad or similar tablets have. It is not heavy either like many 600-page books are, and you do not have to turn physical pages, and the font can be made bigger too. You can also read it without disturbing a sleeping partner. Katherine Sharkey, doctor and sleep researcher at Wake Forest School of Medicine, has stated “the actions required for using an e-reader are less than that of a traditional book, and that lighter load on the brain makes it easier to wind down for sleep”. I get that some like the feel of paper, but that has nothing to do with going to sleep. The act of reading does help induce sleep, no matter what the media is. Thinking back over the years I still have 4 large bookcases, stacked double deep, with books I used to read before I got my first Kindle. If I'd not got a Kindle, I have no idea how many more bookcases I'd need to have by now. The only downside of a Kindle is, if you “buy” your books from Amazon (and especially them), you don't really own the e-book. It can disappear if Amazon so chooses. But I do back up all my e-books, and when possible, I source them elsewhere. See

Android Police

Science says your Kindle might be better for sleep than a paperback

An e-reader might be better for winding down than your paperback

#technology #reading #sleep