‘Critical concerns’ about internet of things security “GlobalData’s Internet of Things report outlines that the fragmented security standards landscape and the weak security of many internet of things (IoT) devices could hold back further adoption of the technology. Furthermore, it suggests that existing IoT deployments could become a security risk due to the current state of affairs.” Way too many IoT devices have no real security (they don't get updates and patches, they freely call out onto the Internet, sometimes have no login security, use weak security standards, etc). It's partly because they are cheap devices and do not adhere to any strict security compliance. So whilst many users have a firewall turned on for their router, that usually only blocks incoming traffic. These IoT devices can still freely establish links with the outside world, and if compromised, could end up creatinga bridge to everything else on the LAN behind the firewall. Which is why I went to quite a bit of trouble to isolate my IoT devices onto their own VLANs. If you do not have the hardware to configure VLANs for them, at least ensure they are connected to your guest network, and that the guest network is isolated from the main LAN network (there is typically a toggle setting for that). See https://www.verdict.co.uk/critical-concerns-about-internet-of-things-security #technology #security #IoT

RCS Universal Profile 3.0 will fully encrypt texts between iPhone and Android “RCS messaging has been a hot topic of debate over the past couple of years, with Google leaving no chance of mocking Apple for refusing to adopt it — until it finally did with iOS 18 last year. However, Apple’s version of RCS came with a major catch: it lacked end-to-end encryption (E2EE), unlike what you’ve used on Android through Google Messages. That’s about to change, and it’s great news for your chats with iPhone users and mixed group chats.” What is quite obvious is that Google has rushed this implementation a bit. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have had this in place a year or two back, but the sad part (in my opinion) is that Google does not seem to have thought this out properly with regard to decentralisation and interoperability. It needed to have E2EE (in this day and age) and it could not just be Google managing the world's messaging, so it needed to allow for functionality across more than just a centralised service. Give the state of the USA and the UK around “backdoors” there will also be global concerns around how secure the service will be if the servers are hosted inside the USA or under the control of a US owned organisation. Also, will the service continue to be available if a trade, or other, war breaks out. Yes, I know everything is better than SMS, but still the design process is the chance to get all this right. But despite this, I'm happy to see RCS moving forward, and I'm hoping it fully replaces SMS at some point in the future for business notifications, and can be a common standard (versus all the different messenger services we see today, of which everyone is not on all the services). See

Android Police

RCS chats between Android and iPhone will be fully encrypted soon

Chatting with your friends with iPhones is going to get secure with strong encryption

#technology #RCS #messaging

An SSD docking station is a great idea to easily utilise replaced SSSD drives This is an interesting idea to use those SSD drives that you may have upgraded, because if an SSD drive is left for too many months without being plugged in, it can lose its data. This is an easy way to plug one or more in and use it for ad-hoc storage. It is true that a USB-C connector may have got much better speeds, but I suppose a USB-A connector provides maximum compatibility. See

ZDNET

Why this SSD docking station is one of the best investments I've made for my PC

This all-in-one docking station and external storage drive is a great way to expand both your storage and connectivity.

#technology #SSD #storage

OPNManager is a beta version Android app for the OPNsense firewall OPNManager is a streamlined, user-friendly application designed to simplify the management of OPNsense firewalls. Built with Tauri and SvelteKit, this cross-platform app provides an intuitive interface for users who need a more simplified alternative to the standard OPNsense web interface. It is not an official OPNsense mobile app but will use the OPNsense API to allow a user to view and manage some basic dashboard functionality. The dev is trying to get enough testers together (see on the r/opnsense Subreddit) and then the app can appear as a beta testing app on Android's app store. But if you look at the GitHub site you will see an Android APK release, as well as Linux releases including an AppImage so far. See https://github.com/Red-Swingline/OPNManager #technology #OPNsense #opensource

It's Already Worth Downloading the Mobile Epic Games Store “Google makes a bunch of its money through in-app purchases and virtual microcurrencies. Pay-to-win mechanics may be atrocious, but it's good for Google's bottom line. The more intrusive a game's monetization is, the more money Google stands to make. The Epic Games Store mobile app may be available for both Android and iOS (the latter only in the EU), but Android needs it more.” Apart from some free games, it is an interesting point made that Epic has more interest in providing quality games and not from profiting from ads in low quality games. More options for users is also a good thing. See

How-To Geek

It's Already Worth Downloading the Mobile Epic Games Store

Even though it's far from epic.

#technology #gaming

Homebrew Traffic Monitor Performs Useful Traffic Surveys “How many cars go down your street each day? How fast were they going? What about folks out on a walk or people riding bikes? It’s not an easy question to answer, as most of us have better things to do than watch the street all day and keep a tally. But at the same time, this is critically important data from an urban planning perspective.” Certainly could be an interesting project to build (I suppose any local authority would pay a fortune for someone to provide this for them normally). It can run off a Raspberry Pi, and it does process the data locally which is good for privacy. See

Hackaday

Homebrew Traffic Monitor Keeps Eyes On The Streets

How many cars go down your street each day? How fast were they going? What about folks out on a walk or people riding bikes? It’s not an easy...

#technology #traffic #RaspberryPi #opensource

Windows Has a Hidden Software Package Manager “Installing a bunch of applications at once on Windows can be annoying. Linux users have long used package managers to accomplish this with far greater ease—as have some Mac users. Using a package manager, you can type a single command to install as many different applications as you want. And, it turns out, Windows comes with a package manager. It's called Winget.” I just wonder then why this is such a well-kept secret in the Windows world. I suppose, though, many users just accept the status quo, because without having tried other OS's, one is really not going to know that the status quo is not the best that there is. What used to happen on my Windows laptop was, as soon as I wanted to run an app I had not used for a while, it would tell me on start up that it needed to be updated (very irritating). Updates are best done as soon as they are released, as many are also security patch updates. See

Lifehacker

Windows Has a Hidden Package Manager

Linux and Mac users have long used package managers to install multiple applications at once. But it turns out Windows has its own hidden package m...

#technology #windows

Over 360,000km on one battery — South Africa’s highest mileage electric car “By the time the car had covered over 300,000km, the pack still had well over 80% of its original capacity available.” Well, there goes that theory that batteries won't last very long. Ironically enough, it has been the petrol-powered range extender engine that has given the most trouble. If anything, this car really appears to have racked up very few running costs, actually. See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/585602-over-360000km-on-one-battery-south-africas-highest-mileage-electric-car.html #technology #EV #southafrica #batteries #environment

Prolong Laptop Battery Life in Linux by Limiting Charging Levels “In case you didn't know it already, regularly charging the battery to 100% or fully discharging it puts your battery at stress and may lead to poor battery life in the long run. Well, to control the battery charging on Linux, you have a few options: * KDE Plasma has this as an in-built feature. That's why KDE is ❤️ * GNOME has extensions for this. Typical GNOME thing. * There are command line tools to limit battery charging levels. Typical Linux thing 😍” It is well worth using these available settings if you use Linux on a laptop. The article linked below goes into more detail on how to use each option. See

It's FOSS

How to Limit Charging Level in Linux (and Prolong Battery Life)

Prolong your laptop's battery life in long run by limiting the charging to 80%.

#technology #Linux #batteries

Notesnook is a cross-platform end-to-end encrypted open source note-taking alternative to Evernote Notesnook is a free (as in speech) & open-source note-taking app focused on user privacy & ease of use. To ensure zero knowledge principles, Notesnook encrypts everything on your device using XChaCha20-Poly1305 & Argon2. I've not tried the app myself, but what does stand out for me is the free plan does have unlimited notes, and I must say that the Android UI looks very good. Too many note-taking apps (e.g. Obsidian) have a difficult to use mobile interface. A possible downside of the free plan is that there are no attachments or images, and tags are limited to only 5. That said, I suppose about US$2 per month is not too band for the Pro version, and that also works out to about half of Obsidian Notes' Pro version. It supports Markdown and basic rich text formatting. A further plus is block based linking (like Logseq does) where you can link directly to headings or paragraphs in remote links. Exports are limited to text only for the free version versus the Pro version with PDF, HTML, and Markdown. But the open source code is really only getting you the client app. So this is not the same as say Joplin where you also get the code to self-host the sync server. See

Android Police

I tried this encrypted all-in-one productivity app on Android and it blew my mind

Best way to organize your digital life (privately)

#technology #opensource #notes

Bitfocus Companion buttons can show status info from OS commands or OPNsense firewall on Stream Deck This video will help if you need to execute various OS commands from a Stream Deck and you want to have your buttons show what the status is of what was executed. I demonstrate how a button that toggles the mute status of a microphone, or the speakers, can change the button between green and red colours to indicate the status. The only proviso is that there should be an OS command that can query the status of whatever you want to monitor. A further example shown uses a curl command to fetch information via the API from OPNsense to display the OPNsense firewall temperature and disk space used on the Stream Deck. This could be expanded to use any of the other available API functions too. So whilst having some connectors provided by Bitfocus and the community, there is no need to be limited to only having those to use on Bitfocus Companion. Using script files and curl commands, can open up a whole new world of possibilities. If any other Stream Deck app (or any app) can execute OS commands and do something with the feedback, this video may also be of use for that type of scenario too. This video follows on from my first video I did about Bitfocus Companion. It is worth watching the first video if you want to get a better overview of Companion and how it works with some existing connectors to VLC, Home Assistant, opening apps, etc. Watch #technology #bitfocuscompanion #streamdeck

ExpressVPN Finally Gives Linux Users Split Tunnelling and a GUI “The ExpressVPN on Linux GUI, now available in beta, will enjoy a general release with the v4 update later this year. It's essentially a 1:1 port of the ExpressVPN GUI that Windows and macOS users have enjoyed for some time. It's got the same interface, it offers dark mode support, and it works in 17 languages.” Very nice, and this would put ExpressVPN ahead of Proton VPN on Linux. Proton's VPN client is a GUI client, but it lacks some of the Windows client's features, such as the split tunnelling. Linux users can add manual routing to their GUI Network Manager to achieve this, but I'm sure novice users will be unsure how to do this. So, well done ExpressVPN! See

How-To Geek

ExpressVPN Finally Gives Linux Users Split Tunneling and a GUI

Thankfully, new ExpressVPN for Linux functionality also extends to the CLI.

#technology #VPN #Linux

Ente Photos is an Open Source End-to-End Encrypted Cloud Management Photo Management Service Ente is a service that provides a fully open source, end-to-end encrypted platform for you to store your data in the cloud without needing to trust the service provider. Ente Photos is a paid service, but they also offer 5GB of free storage, and there is the option to self-host yourself too. It has built-in machine learning, much like Immich has. What may be more unique is their Legacy option, allowing pre-determined family members or friends to gain access to your account if you have passed away. See

XDA

9 reasons Ente Photos is my favorite open-source photo management tool

Store your photos with utmost privacy and accessibility

#technology #photography #photomanagement #opensource

Top 7 Best Open Source Skype Alternatives In 2025 Skype feels like it has been around forever but “May 5 2025, is the day Skype will cease to exist as Microsoft retires it, pushing people to switch to their Teams offering. The death of Skype was a slow one, but one that has been coming for quite some time now.” But there are some excellent alternatives. I've long been using Jitsi myself, and even if you don't want to self-host it, you can use their cloud hosted version for free (with no 40 minute limit). See

It's FOSS

Top 7 Best Open Source Skype Alternatives In 2025

With Skype going down, a switch to open source alternatives has never been more compelling.

#technology #videoconferencing #opensource

4 reasons I choose Firefox over Brave for maximum security “Brave and Firefox are two of the most secure browsers out there. Brave has made privacy its key selling point, integrating features that block ads, prevent tracking, and stop fingerprinting. Firefox, on the other hand, is the OG secure browser, challenging Chrome’s dominance for as long as we can remember. Both Firefox and Brave offer strong security, but if you’re looking for the most secure option, Firefox takes the lead.” Ironically enough, I did not move from Brave to Firefox for the security considerations. In my case, there was an annoying UI issue creeping in, supposedly inherited from Chromium. But regardless, I did check out the Firefox privacy and security considerations and was happy with them. One feature I really like is the master password for the Firefox profile that locks and unlocks the whole browser. The other thing I like is that Firefox still runs a fully functional uBlock Origin extension, along with its own built-in protections. See

XDA

4 reasons I choose Firefox over Brave for maximum security

Both Firefox and Brave offer strong security, but if you’re looking for the most secure option, Firefox takes the lead

#technology #security #privacy #browsers

How Noise-Cancelling Headphones Work—and Why You’ll Never Go Back “Have you ever wondered about the magic behind noise-canceling headphones? It's an amazing feature to have for headphones, shutting you out from outside noise that can be distracting. The truth is, I can't ever go back to regular ones anymore.” So very true. I forgot my noise-cancelling earbuds at home a week or two back, and I was amazed at the constant barrage of music, announcements, and noise at my local shopping mall. Once you've used noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds, it is very difficult to go back. The same goes for a vacuum cleaner operating nearby. What I also like is that without that background noise, it is also possible to listen to quieter music like classical music. It may be that the sound quality is slightly affected, but certainly not that I've ever noticed. For me, the absence of background noise is far more important. See

How-To Geek

How Noise-Canceling Headphones Work—and Why You’ll Never Go Back

How do noise-canceling headphones know what to block? The secret is inside.

#technology #audio

Forget about Excel — You can self-host open source Grist to manage your spreadsheets “Excel may be the dominant spreadsheet-editing software, but there are plenty of alternatives that can fulfill your data analysis and number-crunching needs. Whether you’re paranoid about storing your precious files on Microsoft’s servers or want a neat app that doesn’t force you to pay subscription fees, you’ll find plenty of decent Excel alternatives. Grist is one such option that you can self-host on your local hardware, and here’s a byte-sized guide to help you integrate this neat utility into your workflows.” Grist is definitely NOT an Excel clone. It does things quite differently. My biggest pain was to ditch the “=sum(formula)" type approach. It's easy once you realise you must use the + to add a new column and choose formula. Another key difference is the way that you set a format for currency. Excel (or LibreOffice) would be a right-click and select currency. With Grist you pick a type as numeric, then click on spinner, and then select the $ symbol. Because it is powered on the backend by a database, a column is essentially a field name and type, whilst the rows would be records. One advantage of this is that by changing a column to be say hyperlinks, the whole columns records instantly become hyperlinks. The reasons why it is different, is partly because although it is a spreadsheet UI, it can have relational database tables working from the spreadsheet view, and it also supports Python syntax. It has various widgets, or you can also build your own for various custom views. There is a paid enterprise service, but the core version is fully open source. Docker is also not the only way to install and run this app. Yes, there is LibreOffice, FreeOffice, etc but if you want a modern looking and solid cloud based spreadsheet service, this looks pretty interesting. Actually, it is pretty good to see a “spreadsheet” that looks and works differently! See

XDA

Forget about Excel - I self-host Grist to manage my spreadsheets

Step aside Excel, there's a new spreadsheet tool in town!

#technology #spreadsheets #opensource #selfhosting

Breezy Weather is an open source Android weather app with many local weather services supported inc 17 African states More than 50 weather sources are supported (none of which are pay only sites), and it has a large selection of home screen widgets, and even live wallpapers. Very importantly (especially for weather type apps), it is privacy respecting. Of course, weather forecast data is very relative to the location it is being used, so mileage will certainly vary depending on where you are. But even so, this app does give many options to choose from for weather data sources. See

GitHub

GitHub - breezy-weather/breezy-weather: A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources.

A feature-rich weather app with good visualizations and more than 50 sources. - breezy-weather/breezy-weather

#technology #weather #opensource

Poynting Antennas is an internationally recognised manufacturer of antennas based in South Africa “Poynting Antennas founder and CEO Andre Fourie is not only an entrepreneur and former Wits University professor; he and his team are arguably the top antenna engineers in the world. Poynting has over 50 patents and registered trademarks, including 12 registered patent families consisting of 26 registered patents, and 41 registered designs.” Many of us have likely seen the brand around, but probably don't realise this was some really solid engineering design and building that came out of South Africa. They have been around for many years and their products have stood the test of time. I remember having one of their outdoor fixed wireless LTE antennas when I used fixed wireless for my Internet connection at one time. I sold that antenna about 2+ years later, and it was still like new. See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/584196-the-south-african-who-revolutionised-antenna-design.html #technology #southafrica #antennas #radio

Firefox continues Manifest V2 support as Chrome disables MV2 ad-blockers “Mozilla has renewed its promise to continue supporting Manifest V2 extensions alongside Manifest V3, giving users the freedom to use the extensions they want in their browser. Despite the intentions, Manifest V3 places restrictions on certain types of add-ons, like ad-blockers, that can render them less effective. As Manifest V3 enforcement is rolling out, extensions not compatible with it are being disabled from people's browsers, depriving users of the choice of functionality over risk.” I moved back to Firefox about a month ago, not due to the Manifest V3 roll out, but rather because the mouse right-click was broken on Brave browser (it kept triggering the menu actions when I released the mouse button). I can say that everything I need to do, works just fine on Firefox. It also has a very rich selection of extensions to choose from. Firefox actually had vertical tabs before Chrome did, which an extension implemented very well. Firefox, not being Chrome at all, is also a positive factor for many. See

BleepingComputer

Firefox continues Manifest V2 support as Chrome disables MV2 ad-blockers

Mozilla has renewed its promise to continue supporting Manifest V2 extensions alongside Manifest V3, giving users the freedom to use the extensions...

#technology #browsers