Use FilePizza App to Send Someone a File Without Using Any Cloud Storage “FilePizza isn't the only application like this. There's p2pfileshare.com and sharedrop.io, to name a couple. FilePizza stands out because of the simplicity—just share a file and copy the URL—and because it has a unique URL. These links only work as long as the computer is on and the browser window offering the file is open. Without a cloud service, it's on your device to share the file with whoever might download it. Close the tab, and the file is gone.” What is good about this app (as the article also says, not the only one that does this) is there is no uploading of your file to any remote service, and once you close the browser, the access to the file is gone. The best part is just having to remember the domain name and that is really all — no accounts, no login, no installations, no complications. See

Lifehacker

Use This App to Send Someone a File Without Using Any Cloud Storage

File.pizza is a web service that allows you to directly share a file from your computer with another device—no cloud storage or app needed. The n...

#technology #filesharing

Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options, says Dutch parliament “The motions were submitted and all passed yesterday during a discussion in the Netherlands' House of Representatives on concerns about government data being shipped overseas. While varied, they all center on the theme of calling on the government to replace software and hardware made by US tech companies, acquire new contracts with Dutch companies who offer similar services, and generally safeguard the country's digital sovereignty.” “With each IT service our government moves to American tech giants, we become dumber and weaker,” Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four of the motions, told The Register. The BRICS countries actually made this decision a few years ago, for the same reasons. Not all BRICS countries followed through on this, for example South Africa. But Russia, Brazil, China, and India had made quite a few strides towards even implementing their own desktop OS. But apart from digital sovereignty, the second issue is just as important regarding dumbing down of your own skills. This is something I have also blogged about with regard to outsourcing of services to any cloud provider. An organisation not only loses its ability to provide its own services, but finds it more difficult over time to even technically evaluate any IT offerings, as there are no longer any staff with real technical skills left. See

Time to ditch US tech services, says Dutch parliament

: Trump administration 'has made the call for tech sovereignty an urgent geopolitical issue'

#technology #outsourcing #cloudservices #digitalsovereignty

Photography Sim Games are now a Thing too I was just watching demos of two photography sim games, supposedly launching officially in 2025. But what stood out for me was that both involve walking through the wilderness in some really stunning scenery, and taking into account all the normal environmental variables and technical camera challenges, you need to capture the photos. So no rushing, racing, or shooting is required. “The in-game camera includes an abundance of settings that you’d expect from a real-world professional DSLR camera. The camera simulates settings such as Auto/Manual Focus, Flash, Exposure, Contrast, White Balance, Aperture, Burst Shot, and other effects for full creative control over your photography. The game further provides tools that allow for manipulation of the environmental conditions for your photos, such as manual adjustment of light angles, fog, snow, wind, and rain.” The two games I looked at are: * Lushfoil Photography Sim at

Annapurna Interactive

Annapurna Interactive

Annapurna Interactive works with game creators from around the world, helping them create and release personal experiences for everyone.

* Photography Simulator at

Photography Simulator

These look really relaxing, and it's also a great way to practice some skills before setting out in the real world to try to capture these types of scenes. #technology #gaming #photography

GIMP 3's New Features Make the Best Free and Open Source Image Editor Even Better “Among the biggest changes is nondestructive filters. Previously applying filters, such as blurs, was final—you could use the undo function to get back to a pre-filtered state, but you couldn't simply edit or remove the filter. You can now tweak the settings of filters, or even remove filters entirely from the layer panel.” The UI scaling is a lot better now, but I still struggle a bit with the interface, trying to find what I want to use. So I set a few tweaks and must say it looks a bit easier for me now. I included a screenshot with this post, but I set the Icon theme to Default (mine was on Legacy) and disabled the Use symbolic icons toggle. I toggled on the merge menu and title bar, and toggled off the Use tool groups. The last setting just makes it easier to scroll over all those icons to see what does what. See

Lifehacker

GIMP 3

New features in GIMP 3 include non-destructive filters, improved text editing, and simpler layer management. Working with filters, layers, and text...

#technology #opensource #GIMP

PeerTube 7.1 Expands Podcast 2.0 and Apple Podcast Support For those who don't know PeerTube, it is an open source decentralised alternative to YouTube with many of the same features. But importantly it also integrates with the Fediverse so anyone from Mastodon, Hubzilla, Friendica, etc can follow a channel on PeerTube and like and comment on the videos, all from the social network they call their home. “Recognizing that many people like to listen on the go, PeerTube has improved its support for Podcast 2.0 standards, ensuring creators can distribute and manage their shows more efficiently. Even better, these upgrades now enable channels to be submitted directly to Apple Podcasts, provided the channel owner has added the required banner, avatar, and description.” See

Linuxiac

PeerTube 7.1 Expands Podcast 2.0 and Apple Podcast Support

PeerTube 7.1 open-source decentralized video platform released with improved podcast support, better playback stability, and more.

#technology #opensource #decentralised #PeerTube

These 6 myths about gaming on Linux just aren't true (except one) For many (like myself) I had to dual boot into Linux years ago mainly because my higher end games did not work on Linux. As far as word processing and most other things, those all worked OK on Linux from way back already. But with Steam Games I found that Euro Truck Sim 2, Read Dead Redemption II, Assetto Corsa, SnowRunner, etc were all working fine for me on Linux, and my full transition was just fine. So if gaming is what still holds you back, this linked article may put some myths to rest for you. It's true there may be some specific exceptions still, but for most users, Linux should just be fine nowadays as far as gaming goes. Yes, some of the latest Adobe products may still not work on it, but Adobe is pricing itself out of its market for non-professionals anyway. See

XDA

These 6 myths about gaming on Linux just aren't true (except one)

Gaming on Linux has never been better.

#technology #Linux #gaming #myths

There is a lot of good news to be found outside of your social media feeds Contrary to what often gets surfaced in social media feeds, and many newspapers too, there is actually a lot of good news going around. Unfortunately, good news does not sell well at all, and it is usually clickbait headlines causing rage or anger, that seem to draw attention. It is for this reason that some social networks make a point of pushing these posts into people's feeds so that it increases engagement and drives comments etc. They design algorithms that analyse what buttons can be pressed to drive engagement and thereby surface posts that will do this driving. The alternative is a cleaner chronological feed just based on who you follow, and when they posted. These users may have a more positive experience depending on who they follow. Which is why many want to break away from watching traditional news channels and legacy social networks. There are actually many places dedicated to positive and uplifting news. Some are websites like:

The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News

Good News Network

The Good News Network: Positive Stories 24/7

Your daily source for only good news: Inspiring stories and images from around the world will make you feel uplifted, optimistic and positive about...

Positive News

Positive News | Good journalism about good things

Positive News is the first media organisation in the world dedicated to quality, independent reporting about what’s going right

Whilst some are focussed Subreddits such as: https://www.reddit.com/r/goodnews/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/ Fediverse https://kglitch.social/m/positivenews Fediverse upliftingnews@lemmy.world Bluesky also has two curated feeds called 'Positive News' and 'Uplifting and Good News'. To make this easier, you could also install or use an RSS reader which will bring various sources to you in one place, without all the distractions of visiting the various sites. There is also a hack at

How-To Geek

How I Use Reddit to Stay on Top of The News

Stay on top of the news the fun way.

which explains how to cobble a couple of different positive news Subreddits into a single feed to follow. #technology #positivenews #goodnews

‘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