Follow updates across the web in a feed that only you control, even if the site does not offer an RSS feed Open RSS offers feeds that are a much healthier alternative to the intrusive, algorithmic feeds on websites that harm and manipulate us. But several sites, including Tumblr and Craigslist, have removed their RSS feeds, so that you are forced into their algorithms and tracking. This is annoying if you want to follow things without creating an account, the way you can with Bluesky and all the various Fediverse sites. Instead of manually checking individual websites for updates, you can automatically get updates through a website's RSS feed using an RSS Reader app. This allows you to build a single collection of updates across the web in a single feed, that only you control. OpenRSS offers feeds for more than the apps listed on their feeds page. You can find others by adding the URL openrss.org to the beginning of any website on the web—if OpenRSS offers a feed for the site, it gives it to you (and if not, you'll see a page explaining that). To follow any site that does not have an RSS feeds, go to the site where you'd view the news, or the social profile where posts are shown, and then prepend `openrss.org/` to the beginning of the URL. For example my blog is at , you'd then enter it as gadgeteer.co.za/blog. The advantage here is that the OpenRSS service will even clean up and correct some errors for existing RSS feeds. Their site also directs you to some excellent RSS reader apps to use, with a table comparing their key features. But in many cases, quite a few browsers also have built in RSS reader capabilities such as Brave, Edge and Firefox I recall. Fluent Reader is an excellent desktop app for RSS feeds too. The whole point is that RSS is an open standard so anyone can support and use it. This is why many closed corporations want to prevent their users from using RSS. They lose the ability to track you, push adverts, apply their algorithm, etc. It is also probably why Google shut down their RSS reader service. But RSS is everywhere, and gaining some ability to read RSS for sites that have disabled their RSS, is empowering for individuals. See #technology #RSS #adverts #privacy
Linden Lab Test Launches Browser-Based Streaming for Second Life -- And You Can Try it Now This works pretty well, actually. Starts up in about a minute, although on Brave browser I did have to disable Shields and uBlock Origin (may have been the latter that was blocking something). Interestingly enough, I caught a brief glimpse of a Windows OS window during start up, so it appears to be running on a Windows emulator inside the browser (worked perfectly well on my Linux PC). After I logged in (only needed to the first time) my avatar was where I last left it, and everything looks like the desktop app version does. Mouse control is slightly different as I could not long-click and drag the view around with my mouse, but the arrows etc all worked perfectly. The resolution also looked very sharp. In truth, this could be easier than using the desktop app, as when you go in a second time, you don't have to again fill the password in. And of course for new users, no installation first. See https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/01/sl-browser-streaming-project-zero.html #technology #gaming #SecondLife image
Openreads: A Private and Open Source Mobile App To Keep Track of Your Books as an Alternative to Goodreads Reading books, digital or a physical copy, is one of the best things one can do for fostering personal growth, knowledge, ideas, and experiences. In the fast-moving digital world of 15-second short videos, there is a good case to be made of getting into the habit of reading books. Much like Goodreads and BookWyrm does, this app will keep track of what you have already read, are reading, and planning to read. The app uses the Internet Archive's Open Library for sourcing metadata about books. Open Library actually has its own reading lists, reviews, notes, sharing, etc too. I see there is a request logged to allow users to share data back to Open Library, so this may happen in the future but it would certainly be a choice controlled by each user. It has no tracking, no ads, and is free to use on Android and iOS (there is an appeal to iOS users to donate as the dev must pay $99 per year to Apple to host this free app). Openreads will import your collections and status from Goodreads and BookWyrm, but I should stress that whilst Amazon owns Goodreads, BookWrym is an open source decentralised alternative to Goodreads itself. BookWyrm is actually part of the Fediverse so can be followed by Mastodon and other Fediverse services. The app can export data to a CSV file so you can keep your own backups if you wish. This would also be quite a killer app for BookWyrm integration as well if someone were interested in developing that. See the article at and the Openreads source at #technology #reading #opensource #privacy #goodreads
Ghostty – The Fast GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator for Linux and macOS Ghostty is an open source and cross-platform terminal emulator created by Mitchell Hashimoto, the co-founder of HashiCorp. Hashimoto’s goal with Ghostty was clear: to build a terminal emulator that is fast, feature-rich, and provides a platform-native GUI, all while remaining cross-platform. What sets Ghostty apart from other cross-platform terminal tools is its focus on a platform-native GUI. On Linux, the GUI is built using Zig and GTK4/libadwaita, while on macOS, it uses Swift, AppKit, and SwiftUI, which means that Ghostty’s interface is not only visually native but also deeply integrated with the operating system. One of the standout features of Ghostty is its GPU-accelerated rendering, which provides a smoother, faster experience, especially when handling complex processes or multiple terminal windows. However, given all of this, it only started with releases in December 2024, so I'm going to wait another month or two before trying it out. Some have reported it hogging system resources. The linked article is already out of date though, as the first releases have already appeared in Arch's AUR so are available to install. See #technology #opensource #terminalemulators image