Be Careful What You Wish For — What is RedNote, the Chinese social media app that US TikTokers are flocking to? As Supreme Court justices ponder the future of TikTok in the United States, a growing number of American social media users have responded by moving to an unlikely alternative: Xiaohongshu, a hugely popular social media app in China. The app, which means “Little Red Book,” often shortened by US users to RedNote, surged to the top position on Apple’s US App Store on Tuesday. Founded in 2013, Xiaohongshu is one of China’s biggest social media platforms with 300 million users, according to research firm Qian Gua. Described as China’s answer to Instagram, the app has become especially popular for sharing tips on travel, makeup and fashion. But while it has cornered the Chinese market, it hasn’t gained much prominence beyond the Chinese-speaking world. Until now. If this migration is true, it is not going to make some people happy in the USA. I don't think the intention of banning TikTok, was for users to move to a platform that is not even hosted in the USA at all. I think I tried to join RedNote once but seem to recall it may have been invite only. That said, RedNote is not actually a direct TikTok alternative, as it seems to be more of an Instagram alternative (like the decentralised Pixelfed). In fact, Loops maybe be more of an alternative TikTok (a decentralised one at that), but it is not quite ready for prime time yet. Although existing users on RedNote seem to be very welcoming to the new refugees, there may be a clash down the line still, as the Chinese culture is more one for being respectful, and not brandishing politics around. Still, like with amateur radio, it is often an eye-opener when ordinary people from different countries can chat and socialise together, to get a better understanding of what they have in common, and what is different. The censorship Czars, though, may well find that when you slap down one company/social network, there is more than another ready to pop up and take its place (remember Huawei and Xiaomi/OPPO/HONOR/etc). My country will still have TikTok, so I'll just be watching this as this all unfolds. See https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/14/tech/rednote-china-popularity-us-tiktok-ban-intl-hnk/index.html #technology #ban #censorship #socialnetworks

Why I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back Yes, Firefox is actually a pretty solid browser and has none of the drama that surrounds what Google does next to Chrome. After reading the linked article, I've also switched back to it in place of the one Brave Beta browser I've been using (due to a weirdly irritating right-click action on Brave Beta specifically). One or two things to note: * Firefox now does have a built-in vertical tabs option (needs to be activated in about:config settings) so it is not necessary to have to use the Tree Style Tabs extension. * I do like the built-in screenshot tool, too. * When doing a search in the Omnibar, you can quickly also pick which search engine to use. Firefox lets you pick how you want to run a search each time. * Firefox is already renown for it network settings allowing proxies to easily be used, for bypassing ISP blocking or to use I2P. * It's not a Chromium based browser, so it is good to also support competition in the market. See

How-To Geek

Why I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

And I think you should too.

 #technolgy #browsers #Firefox

German router maker is reminded that open source licences are legally enforceable The GNU General Public License (GPL) and its "Lesser" version (LGPL) are widely known and used. Still, every so often, a networking hardware maker has to get sued to make sure everyone knows how it works. "The favourable result of this lawsuit exemplifies the power of copyleft—granting users the freedom to modify, repair, and secure the software on their own devices," the SFC said in a press release. "Companies like AVM receive these immense benefits themselves. This lawsuit reminded AVM that downstream users must receive those very same rights under copyleft." Just because something is free of cost, does not mean it is free of licensing conditions. Cisco has also found this out in the last. It's really sad when companies profit off the use of open source, but then don't want to give back themselves. See

Ars Technica

German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license

A recently closed lawsuit in Germany is the latest in a long-running trend of hardware makers using GPL source code, but not fairly providing it back.

#technology #opensource

Remembering Usenet - The OG Social Network that Existed Even Before the World Wide Web Before Reddit, before GitHub, and even before the World Wide Web went online, there was Usenet. This decentralized network of discussion groups was a main line of communication of the early internet - ideas were exchanged, debates raged, research conducted, and friendships formed. Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It went online in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. Linux was officially announced on a Usenet newsgroup. Usenet's use may have declined over the years, but it is still quite active. It is good to see that although the masses may often only know about Reddit, Facebook, etc, there are many of the older social networks still running, with thousands of daily users. Another such example is IRC (I post to my own IRC group daily). Despite new social networks there is still plenty of space and use on the older networks. Not everyone just flocks to the newer, flashy websites. I suppose it also means that the users on Usenet and IRC are also likely to have a slightly different focus on how they communicate. I also doubt you'll find many Gen Z etc users on those older networks. Whilst the original Usenet is paid access, If you want to 'lurk' on Usenet groups you can also try out the free Eternal September service. I use a client app called Pan to read Usenet groups. See

It's FOSS

Remembering Usenet - The OG Social Network that Existed Even Before the World Wide Web

Before Facebook, before MySpace and even before the Word Wide Web, there existed Usenet. From LOL to Linux, we owe a lot to Usenet.

#technology #usenet #retro #socialnetworks

Bike Index — Over $28,937,727 Worth of Bikes Recovered Globally Through Crowdsourcing It's simple. Submit your name, bike manufacturer, serial number, and component information to enter your bike into the most widely used bike registry on the planet. If your bike goes missing, mark it as lost or stolen to notify the entire Bike Index community and its partners. A user or partner encounters your bike, uses Bike Index to identify it, and contacts you. With the help of the Bike Index community and its partners, you have the information necessary to recover your lost or stolen bike at no cost to you. It is great when technology can be harnessed to protect someone's investments. This is a perfect way of harnessing the power of crowd collaboration. See

Bike Index

Bike Index - Bike registration that works

The best bike registry: Simple, secure and free.

#technology #stolen #bikes #crowdsourcing

Penpot is the web-based open-source design tool that bridges the gap between designers and developers Penpot expresses designs natively as CSS, SVG and HTML. Developers feel right at home in the interface. The whole team enjoys one seamless workflow. No more handoffs. Create rich interactions to mimic the product behaviour. Share them to stakeholders, present proposals to your team and start user testing with your designs, all in one place. Penpot provides features that allow designers, developers and stakeholders to collaborate, sharing the same space in real-time. With free and open source software, too (and using open standards), no-one gets left out in the cold by having to buy the same package someone else is using. Penpot is the only design & prototype platform that is deployment agnostic. You can use it or deploy it anywhere. It reminds me many years ago of the narrow-mindedness of government, where they could splash taxpayer money on buying expensive MS Word, and sending out all their letters and plans in doc format. No matter that all the private citizens receiving these did not actually have MS Word (were they expected to all go out and buy it?). Yes, later on there was better compatibility with LibreOffice and docx, but it still amazes me that there is so little effort made to use proper open standards or free software that everyone has easy access to. See

Penpot: The Design Tool for Design & Code Collaboration

Penpot is the open-source free design software that connects designers and developers with no handoff drama. Prototyping, UI design and code - all ...

#technology #design #opensource #openstandards

Warning for people buying electronics in South Africa South Africa’s electrical and electronic goods market is awash with products that are fake, counterfeit, and don’t comply with local safety standards and other regulations. Aside from non-compliant and illegal consumer electronics, CBI-electric engineering executive Andrew Dickson revealed last year that South Africa was seeing an influx of counterfeit electrical goods from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia. These include knock-off circuit breakers, light switches, and other common electrical items people install in their homes. The biggest problem really with many of these goods are, they don't carry the necessary regulatory standards approvals. These standards are actually quite important as they relate to safety (especially fire and electrical insulation against shocks) as well as radio interference. There are countless frequencies of radio transmission in every house, and it is important that these stay within their approved frequencies and power levels, otherwise they generate noise and interference for other devices. These disturbances can often reach as far as neighbouring homes. Sometimes it is just annoying hums on speakers, but it can both block and trigger other devices nearby, like opening a garage door. Radio communications are also sensitive to noise and these often happens on harmonics, so noise on one frequency is picked up on a number of other frequencies. It can interfere with not only your own WiFi but also emergency radios etc. This is why all radio equipment is approved for use in a country. The importer is usually responsible to ensure compliance (whether with a local standard, or with a locally accepted international standard). So if you import your own electronics, you'd want to be sure they are compliant. Apart from facing a R20,000 ICASA fine, there may also be medical or insurance liabilities if such devices cause damage to property or human life. It's true that many smaller devices may not have the potential to cause such problems, but certainly inverters of many types do (including electric fences), and I've also seen a robot vacuum cleaner causing a lot of disturbance. See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/gadgets/577606-warning-for-people-buying-electronics-in-south-africa.html #technical #radio #interference #standards

Love KDE Plasma? These 7 Linux Distros Use Plasma as Their Default Desktops KDE Plasma is a powerful desktop environment that gives you tons of customisation over how your system looks and feels. However, you need to pair it with the right base distro to get the perfect user experience. To help you make your pick, here are five awesome distros running KDE Plasma. Apart from my initial start on Linux with Ubuntu, I've actually consistently been using KDE as my desktop on Linux. I've just always loved all its look and feel customisations. Many Linux distros will offer a choice of desktops (just the presentation layer on top). Linux is not like Windows where there is just "one" desktop that Microsoft provides. It may appear that Linux is all different between the different distros, but it is really not so. So, you can actually take any Linux distro, even that does not have KDE, and just install the KDE desktop on top of it, and then switch between desktops at login (many don't recommend you do this though as some settings could clash - but it is quite possible). But if you are a new user, it is always best to start out rather with one of these distros that natively supports KDE with their installation. It is the cleaner and more stable way to do it. See

How-To Geek

Love KDE Plasma? These 5 Linux Distros Use Plasma as Their Default Desktops

Discover which KDE Plasma distro matches your style.

#technology #Linux #opensource #KDE

ChangeDetection.io is a private self-hosted website change detection and price monitor service Monitor web pages for changes - (such as watching prices, restock notifications), to deep inspection such as PDF text support, JSON and XML monitoring and extensive text triggers. Get notifications when a website updates. The service is not only useful for bargain hunters but also those who monitor websites for defacement, or important regulatory changes, and lots more. My video looks at ChangeDetction.io's features, what it can be used for, how to add watches, and also useful some tips on how to use it. It also gets contrasted with Distill.io at an overview level. See #technology #opensource #selfhosting #pricebargains #privacy

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

GadgeteerZA

Page Not Found - GadgeteerZA

It was either a typo or a non-existent page. But please try the following before you leave, as the page may exist elsewhere on the site:

you'd then enter it as

Open RSS

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

Open RSS

#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

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

It's FOSS

Openreads: An Open Source Mobile App To Keep Track of Your Books

You can keep track of your book progresses using the Openreads app. Here's how.

and the Openreads source at

GitHub

GitHub - mateusz-bak/openreads: A mobile books tracker written in Flutter that respects your privacy.

A mobile books tracker written in Flutter that respects your privacy. - mateusz-bak/openreads

#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

Ghostty – The Fast GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator for Linux

Ghostty - A Feature-Rich Terminal Emulator for Linux

Ghostty is a fast, GPU-accelerated, open-source terminal emulator with native UI, rich features, and cross-platform support for Linux, macOS, and m...

#technology #opensource #terminalemulators

Most users don't own their social profiles nor domain names or any other presence on the Internet I'm busy listening to episode 147 Tornado of the Darknet Diaries podcast, where there was some interesting commentary about what we think we “own”, especially on the Internet. We register a profile on X, Facebook, MeWe, TikTok, etc, and we pay for a domain name to host our website. But in fact those centralised social platforms own the profile name, like we saw X take away the profile @x when the network changed its name. Or if you as a user transgress the rules, you can be banned from a social network, and you cannot take that profile with you and use it elsewhere. The same goes for a domain name, if you stop paying for it, you lose access to using it. The same goes for books “bought” on Amazon or Audible, or music on Spotify. At best, we are all paying for temporary access rights. Yes, some networks offer the ability to export your posts, but tell me where else you can then use those posts? You can buy a razor from Gillette, that is true, but mostly then you have to keep buying their blades to use it. But the digital world especially is fraught with ownership issues. Which is one reason why some folks have been exploring decentralised networks, whether just distributed, or whether they are full-blown peer-to-peer networks. I don't really count Mastodon and the Fediverse amongst this, as you need to have access to your account to migrate it, and then anyway your handle changes as it is tied to a server. Hubzilla's nomadic identities are probably closest to this ideal as far as decentralised networks go. The purer forms of real ownership, though, exist on social networks such as Nostr, Aether, RetroShare, Reticulum, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc where you generate a key pair — you share the public key and keep the private key to unlock and use your public key. No matter where you are deleted or blocked, you can resurface using your same public key. Your followers and friends know that public key and will instantly recognise you. Many such networks will resync your posts where they exist at other nodes or relays, even. On the hosting and network communications side we do have networks such as the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) and communication services such as Reticulum, which connects on top of (over) a myriad of other networks from TCP, radio, UDP, RNodes, etc. Again, here you don't “purchase” any IP address, you generate a I2P address (profile or website) for yourself with the private key that you own. You can host your own I2P website with your own address, and move it wherever you want to physically (a bit like an Onion website). It will be found by its I2P address. At a more simplistic level, this is also where Meshtastic and LoRaWAN devices come in — they work on license-free frequencies and interconnect with each other to form their own mesh network with no Internet or other infrastructure required. In some ways the Tor Onion network is similar, although it exists really on top of TCP networks, and it has no concept of a user or a social profile. It also connects to the regular Internet, whilst the I2P network normally does not do so. That said, every I2P node routes I2P traffic, so it is a gigantic-shared mesh network of tens of thousands of nodes all relaying I2P traffic. The downside, though, of better security, privacy, and ownership is of course you have to take more responsibility yourself. Apart from a bit more configuration required, if you lose your private key access, you've lost your profile access. You can create another one just as easily, but it will be a different one. I've spent the last few days exploring Reticulum and I2P specifically, and although the basics are quite easy to get going with (for example just installing the Sideband app off F-Droid), the understanding of exactly how the I2P network operates, has been more challenging. I'd like to get a level deeper still in understanding what and why each part of it does. And there are not a lot of YouTube videos that explain this properly. But it will be a fun project for the next month or so, I think. Hopefully, too, I can do my own video about it if I can break it down into much simpler concepts to explain. #technology #privacy #security #I2P #reticulum

If Online Grammar Checks Concern You, Run Your Own Private Grammarly Clone Using Docker and LanguageTool I can't see any feature advantages with this apart from all your checking being done locally. So for really privacy conscious folks this may be a big plus to host this service on your own PC, or even an accessible server or Raspberry Pi. One advantage with hosting it locally, even on your PC, is that it will work fully offline without any Internet needed. Although they describe how to do this for Windows, there are actually other operating systems out there, so this will work just as well on Linux or macOS too. It may just be that HowToGeek thinks that Linux and macOS users know how to do this themselves already? The Docker install is open source, but it is the core product, so it will not have the paid pro version functions. See

How-To Geek

Run Your Own Private Grammarly Clone Using Docker and LanguageTool

Setting up a local grammar checker with Docker and LanguageTool is a fun project that keeps you in control of your content.

#technology #grammar #selfhosting #opensource

5 reasons you should use Markdown for documentation and notetaking A good reminder again about the future-proofed nature of Markdown format notes. They are essentially plain text and will be read my many apps well into the future. Also true that Markdown's "shortcuts" for headings, lists, are largely universal, so that as you may switch apps or operating systems you don't have any different "shortcut" keys to remember. See

XDA

5 reasons you should use Markdown for documentation and notetaking

The secret weapon of productive note-takers

#technology #notes #markdown #openstandards

Bringing OpenStreetMap Data Into Minecraft Over the years, dedicated gamers have created incredible recreations of real (and not so real) locations and structures within the confines of Minecraft. Thanks to their efforts, you can explore everything from New York city to Middle Earth and the U.S.S. Enterprise in 1:1: scale. But what if you wanted to recreate your own town, and didn’t have the hundreds of hours of spare time necessary to do it by hand? Enter Arnis, an open source project from [Louis Erbkamm] that can pull in geographic data from OpenStreetMap and turn it into a highly detailed Minecraft map with just a few keystrokes. Once generated, the map can be loaded into the Java Edition of Minecraft. This refers to the original build of the game that predates the Microsoft buyout. Looks like a pretty interesting holiday project! See

Hackaday

Bringing OpenStreetMap Data Into Minecraft

Over the years, dedicated gamers have created incredible recreations of real (and not so real) locations and structures within the confines of Mine...

#technology #gaming #openstreetmap #minecraft

Microsoft claims its new Windows 11 Xbox popups aren't ads, merely "options you can purchase" With Windows 11 slowly receiving more and more ads across its system, people are getting a little tired of seeing new ones pop up. Over the past few days, some users have spotted ad pop-ups advertising the new Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and the paid Microsoft Defender security app. Fortunately, Microsoft has cleared up this little mess by stating that these aren't ads at all but instead "giving the people the option to purchase" a product. Phew. Well, that clears that up, doesn't it? This is the very best of PR technobabble. You just know if a company dresses something up like this, that they actually do feel a bit guilty about it. But it's like a lie is to a mistruth. A lot of the problems we have today are because of propaganda being applied by corporates and governments. So there you go, all those pop-ups on websites, and the things that YouTube interrupts your videos with, are actually just options you can purchase. I feel the Oxford Dictionary word of 2025 may be something along these lines. We just need to invent the word now. See

XDA

Microsoft claims its new Windows 11 Xbox popups aren't ads, merely "options you can purchase"

Kinda like ads, but not. Somehow.

#technology #Microsoft #adverts

How to test if a self-hosted Alby Hub wallet is connected, and to get an alert if not I hope my blog post at

GadgeteerZA

How to test if a self-hosted Alby Hub wallet is connected, and to get an alert if not

For those using a self-hosted Alby Hub that hosts their Lightning Network Wallet to send/receive sats on the Nostr network, it is crucial that the ...

will help out other Alby Hub self-hosters who want to get alerts if their wallets are offline. This seems to be working fine for me now, and the same theory can be applied for a Python script or even a bash script.

Absolute Essentials You Need to Know to Survive Vi Editor The most common question most people ask about the vi editor is: How do I exit vi? The joke answer goes: "You don't. You learn to live with it." but the serious answer is to press Esc to ensure you're in command mode first, then type `:q!` and hit Enter (or `:wq!` to save and quit). The problem most modern users sit with, is that the vi editor originates from the 1970s and still uses those unique keyboard shortcuts (it did not modernise like the nano editor did in 2024). There is no doubt that the vi editor (or vim if you use the GUI) is very powerful with its long history of support and plugins. But for most users, like myself, the first thing I do on any new VPS I set up is run `sudo apt install nano`. The vi editor is usually already installed by default on most Unix or Linux systems, so you rarely need to ever install it. But there are many die-hard vi users, and none of those will ever be caught dead using anything else. Certainly if you are looking for more advanced usage out of an editor, it may be well worth learning how to use vi, and you'll also be safe in the knowledge that nothing will suddenly change in the next few years. It is an editor grounded in stability, extensibility, and consistency. The linked article is one of the best I've seen as a really easy to understand getting started guide with the vi editor. So, if you are curious to just have a look at it, this article will help you understand better how it works (and of course how to exit it). See

It's FOSS

Vi Editor Basics: Must Know Commands

Here are the absolute basic commands you need to navigate through the Vi editor in the command line.

#technology #opensource #editors #Linux