South African app Sociable aims to shake up social media Cape Town-based social media platform Sociable combines online activity with in-person meetups. The Sociable feed makes it easier than ever to find everything happening around you in real time. No more outdated articles, just real experiences. So this app is not your general status posting app from what I can see. Users can choose from categories such as Party, Sport, Food, Adventure, or Lifestyle to create an event based on a location, which others can subscribe to or follow. An event has a description, FAQ, a capacity, etc to get more information, and users can also indicate if they will attend. The aim seems to be to create a safer environment without AI driven bot posts etc. I suppose it is also a great way to meet up in person with like-minded people to enjoy a common interest. Certainly for Cape Town I see organised walks, hikes, runs, pottery classes, and more, some of which are intended just for women. Interestingly, it also makes provision for paid events with tickets, and even private events that can only be accessed with a unique pin code. There are mobile apps for iOS and Android available. See

TechCentral

Less scroll, more soul: SA app Sociable aims to shake up social media

Cape Town-based social media platform Sociable combines online activity with in-person meetups.

and their website at

Sociable

Sociable - The New Community | Connect Through Real Experiences

Sociable is the best way for people seeking real experiences to connect with their passions, meet new people and share unforgettable moments.

#technology #social #southafrica #events

Navidrome is an open source web-based music collection server and streamer Navidrome gives you freedom to listen to your music collection from any browser or mobile device. It's like your personal Spotify! It handles very large music collections, will stream virtually any audio format available, and reads and uses all your beautifully curated metadata. Furthermore, it has full support for playlists, with option to auto-import .m3u files and to keep them in sync. Additionally, it can also work as a lightweight Subsonic-API compatible server, that can be used with any Subsonic compatible client. This means there are a number of additional client apps that will also work with it. They also have a demo site where you can try it out. See

GitHub

GitHub - navidrome/navidrome: 🎧☁️ Your Personal Streaming Service

🎧☁️ Your Personal Streaming Service. Contribute to navidrome/navidrome development by creating an account on GitHub.

#technology #opensource #selfhosted #music

How to Keep Containers Up-to-Date with What’s Up Docker (WUD) This looks really promising over both Watchtower and DIUN. It takes a bit more tweaking to get to where you want to be, but some key highlights that I really like about WUD are: * Plenty of docker container labels and environmental settings * Being able to custom name any specific docker image with `wud.display.name: Maria DB` label in the docker compose file for the container * Being able to just watch the major, minor, and patch version changes with the 'wud.tag.include' label * Being able to set a changelog link per image with the 'wud.link.template' label (although this is a pain to set up) * Being able to actually trigger an update from within WUD's GUI with the prune and auto settings set All past solutions up to now have been really messy with notifications not really pointing you to exactly which image is ready for updating (when you have three Postgres database images) but WUD is zooming straight into which one/s are ready to update. Once I bed down what is working well, I may do a video about WUD in the near future. See a how-to at

Linuxiac

How to Keep Containers Up-to-Date with What’s Up Docker (WUD)

Learn how to automate Docker container updates using What’s Up Docker (WUD) to get notified and keep your images fresh.

and their GitHub project at

WUD

WUD (aka What

#technology #docker #selfhosting #opensource

Speedtest-Tracker is a self-hosted Internet Performance Dashboard “Do you keep tabs on how much your network speed varies day to day? What about hour by hour? With this simple Docker container, you can not only automatically monitor your network performance, but also view it in a gorgeous graph with the click of a button.” This can be pretty useful to see what your Internet connection performs like normally, and to show when things have gone wrong. See

How-To Geek

This Docker Container Turned My NAS Into an Internet Performance Dashboard

Do you monitor your internet speed?

#technology #speedtest #selfhosted #opensource

Europe plots escape hatch from the enshittification of search “If you ever get the impression that search engines are getting worse, or that alternatives are not all they seem, it's not just you. It's what journalist Cory Doctorow calls “It has 14 partners funding it so firstly enshitiffication." Many alternatives use Microsoft's Bing for search, so when Bing goes down so does DuckDuckGo, for instance. It's important to note what this isn't, though. It's not a new search engine. Rather, the project is building a web index, the idea being to make it easier for others to build search engines that can use the OpenWebSearch database as their index.” Nevertheless, this does look very interesting. It has 14 partners funding it, so hopefully that means it won't just run out of steam in a few months, and also means there should not be any single corporation just calling all the shots. It also says it aims not to provide a search API, but rather it is shared as open data so that others use it in building a search engine. But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as the web is changing daily, so this all has to come together and bring meaningful search results to end users. So, I guess we'll only be able to tell when such search engines are established and many people have actually tested and evaluated the results. See

OpenWebSearch – a European index for European search engines

: Plus: How to make Google less unhelpful

#technology #opendata #search

This is probably what desktop Linux needed: PewDiePie installs Linux His video has hit over 4 million views in just 2 days. Most videos about desktop Linux are done by passionate techies, and they just don't tend to sway or influence most ordinary desktop OS users. What Linux has probably long needed is a few real “non-tech” celebrities to promote it more. PewDiePie is one of the last people I'd have ever expected to install Linux, let alone to dive into some of the depths that he did. I've watched a few commentary videos today by some popular tech channels, and they are all very complimentary about the tech content he covered. No-one is faulting him on anything he mentioned in his video. He made a very entertaining, but also very informative video. It is clear that PewDiePie is not as superficial as I thought him to be. This is no basic installation that he did, and certainly most beginners are better off just installing Linux Mint and taking it slowly from there. His timing is probably really spot-on, too, given the looming deadline for the cessation of support for Windows 10 later this year. See #technology #Linux #PewDiePie #opensource

This is why Big Tech sites are free of cost, and thriving I picked up on this today after noticing ZenArmor blocking masses of attempts on my network from a mobile device trying to phone home for an app called Appsflyer. It seems it is embedded into apps for Meta (which operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), X, TikTok, Google Ads, Hulu, eBay, etc. It tracks and analyses user behaviour, supposedly inside those apps. The linked video is explaining to app developers and its customers how it works, and how in 2022 there were nearly 2 billion active users. But pretty damning, at 04:14 it says it can even track users who have uninstalled the application (really, how?). No mention at all in the video about any customer rights, or rights to opt out of this tracking. The company, Appsflyer I imagine, is a licensed partner of Apple and Google. Now we can see why some companies get really rich off their free sites, and why decentralised open source platforms have to keep appealing for donations and cannot scale very big otherwise. The difference is those open source platforms respect their users' privacy, and they live or die by donations and grants (whether in money or labour forms). See #technology #adverts #tracking #BigTech

Samsung's Glasses-Free 3D Gaming Monitors Are Now Available I do love my 3D TV, so this looks quite interesting. But lots of information not really given, so it is difficult to tell whether there is processing in the display too, or is it all driven on the computer side. Yes, no glasses required, but does it work on Linux or is Windows required (I'd rather buy glasses to be honest). So, this is rather going to be a matter of watching some real-life reviews when those get published. And of course, the little matter of the price tag being basically US$2,000. See

How-To Geek

Samsung's Glasses-Free 3D Gaming Monitors Are Now Available

Samsungs got some great gaming monitors for those who want them.

#technology #3D

Bluesky Is Rolling Out Official Verification “Starting today, Bluesky is rolling out a new verification system, complete with the familiar blue check marks popularized by Twitter. The highest-priority accounts right now are government officials, news organizations and journalists, and celebrities.” This is a good move as the platform has attracted quite a few celebrities as well as mainstream news media. There is also provision for some organisations to become their own trusted verifiers, I imagine for their journalists. And of course, anyone can still self-verify against their own domain name (just without a blue tick mark). See

WIRED

Bluesky's Blue Check Is Finally Here

Bluesky’s new verification process launches today. It mixes the old-school, Twitter-style blue check bestowed by the platform with a more decentr...

#technology #bluesky #socialnetworks

Someone made a LiDAR scanner with a Raspberry Pi, and it looks awesome “If you've never heard of LiDAR before, it stands for “Light Detection and Ranging.” It can map out an area by firing lasers at it and recording how long it takes for the reflected light to return. It's a handy way of creating a 3D model of a physical space, and you may have even played horror games that use LiDAR scanners to particularly creepy effect.” When I still had an iPhone, I remember having lots of fun using its LiDAR to create 3D models of all sorts of things, including my wife's car. LiDAR sensors are not very prevalent on phones, so this open source project could be a good alternative if you are looking to create 3D models for gaming, home design, etc. See

XDA

Someone made a LiDAR scanner with a Raspberry Pi, and it looks awesome

Want to see a 3D Raspberry Pi LiDAR scan of someone's backyard? Of course you do.

#technology #LiDAR #3D #opensource