GadgeteerZA

The game has a theme word for each day, so keep that in mind when guessing the words. It is more challenging than Wordle because there are no hints apart from the theme word. So, if one of the words is 'landing' and you guessed 'land' there is no confirmation you're getting warm at all.

How to play it: There are exactly four words hidden amongst the letters, and all letters are used exactly once. The words will always be between 4 and 9 letters long. Click on the letters (or type them on your keyboard) to spell a word. When you have a word you want to submit, click the "Submit" button. If the word is one of the daily words, it will be added to your found list of words. Find all four words as fast as you can! Each successful word is assigned a colour, so a red word will mean the shortest word is taken, so don't try to guess more words with that same length of letters.

You can also click the Reshuffle button to rearrange the letters, which can help spark some ideas.

If you're struggling, you can give up after at least 5 incorrect guesses. It also has an option to share your results by copying them to the clipboard to paste into whatever social network service you use.

See https://jumblie.com/

#technology #gaming #puzzle #jumblie

Token2 is a cybersecurity company specialized in the area of multifactor authentication. Founded by a team of researchers from the University of Geneva with years of experience in the field of strong security and multifactor authentication. Token2 has invented, designed and developed various hardware and software solutions for user-friendly and secure authentication. Token2 is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Don't believe what AI tells you, as they tend to generalise around past statements. Token2 is a good example of how newer challengers to the incumbents, like YubiKey, bring lots of innovation. For example, Token2 has the ability to store up to 300 passkeys, dual port USB-A and USB-C on a single device, FIDO2.1 with additional PIN, opens-source, etc.

I also like the fact the device's firmware and management is in Switzerland and not within one of the Five Eyes countries.

There are quite a few options, but their FIDO2 Keys page also has a selection wizard to help out.

Whilst prices may be cheaper, depending on your country, shipping may cost a bit more.

UPDATE: Token2 sent this clarification after posting: only the management software is open-source for the time being. The firmware (Java applet) is planned to be made available as open source for public security audit purposes, but the timeline is not yet clear.

See https://www.token2.ch/

#technology #security #Token2 #authentication

This service is still in Alpha release but is already deployable and usable, and federates with other Fediverse servers.

However, there is no "main" instance you go to join. The intention really is that you host your own instance for yourself and a few friends and family. To this end, it is designed to be very lightweight and will happily run on a Raspberry Pi or even a $5/pm VPS.

This is taking a very different approach from say Mastodon which has one main instance everyone could join, but then it sits with the issue that everyone joins there, and it becomes a bit "centralised". GoToSocial has been designed as lightweight for self-hosting, and also has a Docker image installation, so it makes it really easy for (and encourages) most people to host their own instance.

It seems to also be focussed very much around privacy (defaults to unlisted posts) and permission controls (for example, you have an option to post to mutual-only where both people follow each other). Also, by hosting your own service you set the rules, and you are also your own admin. You can choose to turn off likes, replies, boosts, etc as well. Being your own admin also means you can easily adjust the post length as well.

It does conform to the Mastodon API so apparently some Mastodon clients will also work fine with it.

See https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/

#technology #ActivityPub #GoToSocial

Traditionally, one would have to periodically check the status of the dust filtering on a PC case, but that's not the case (pun intended!) with the Asus ProArt PA602. This chassis has a fancy infrared (IR) sensor behind the front-facing dust filter. Should this detect a set layer of dust covering the filter material, a small LED will illuminate on the side of the case. It's tastefully done. No alert on an LCD screen, no obnoxious sound. With this activated, you will know to clean the filter (and give the inside a quick air blast) next time the system has been shut down.

Quite a thoughtful case, apart from having the dust filter warning, it also has wheels to move it more easily.

But it does show also, is that even cases can innovate as well. I'd like to see more of these and maybe have the sensors also on the other dust filters (my case has one underneath as well), as IR sensors themselves are not very expensive to incorporate.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/this-asus-pc-case-monitors-your-dust-filter/

#technology #cases #dust

In a country choked by high internet costs and limited options, Zimbabweans are turning to remarkable ingenuity. Facing arrest and equipment seizure for using Starlink, tech-savvy individuals have devised a way to disguise the kits.

One such individual who communicated anonymously with us here at Techzim has said he’s helping people hide their Starlink terminals from the authorities.

They modify the terminal so that it looks like a solar panel, or just a light. They are also able to make it work without the indoor router, removing any evidence of the presence of a Starlink connection, even if the authorities suspect, or a neighbour snitches.

It now seems to be a sort of business helping do this via kits that can be purchased. It is certainly also needed in countries where the Internet is itself censored (LOL yes also including Australia).

It's just really sad also where suppliers can get away with not having enough innovative competition for them to lower their prices through a competitive market. Governments too are not always putting their citizens first as licensing seems to have some other objectives. Ask citizens, and they're probably going to just say they want to have choices.

See https://www.techzim.co.zw/2024/04/starlink-in-zimbabwe-techies-find-ways-to-disguise-kits-evading-authorities/

#technology #Zimbabwe #Africa

These keyboards rely on magnets and springs and activate by sensing changes in the magnetic field. Popularized by Dutch keyboard startup Wooting, these switches rely on the Hall Effect and have actually been around since the 1960s.

You can change how far you need to press down to register the keystroke, as well as for the release point.

The one thing you can’t change, though, is the switch’s resistance. Despite all the talk of magnets, that’s still handled by the spring inside the switch, after all (for the moment, until the xyz is released).

But interestingly, this also means with temperature differences, you may also have to "calibrate" your keyboard. The price point for the Akko MOD007B PC Santorini keyboard at around US$110 to $150 is certainly not more expensive than many mechanical keyboards.

See https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/07/magnets-are-switching-up-the-keyboard-game/

#technology #keyboards

Memories is a fast, modern and advanced photo management suite, that installs quickly and easily inside Nextcloud. My video contrasts it with the Photos app that comes with Nextcloud, and highlights some reasons why you may want to use it instead of Photos. This app has face, object, landmark, place, and human action recognition capability through the Recognise app. It's not that obvious, but albums can be shared, and photos commented on, with other Nextcloud registered users using the underlying Nextcloud file commenting system.

Memories is a great way to collaborate and share photos privately with friends and family, and even to share public links to some of your albums. It can even work on a Raspberry Pi hosted in the home.

It also has apps for iOS and Android, which can optionally auto-upload photos into Memories.

By saving/reading titles and descriptions into the photo's EXIF headers means that importing or exporting out of Memories is a lot less of a chore with migrating between photo services.

Watch https://youtu.be/2A6u0AluCnI

#technology #opensource #selfhosting #photomanagement

I've been wanting to animate the building of a Lego set but have been struggling to find really good morphing software. Most seems to be designed for faces, or they do plain animation with no morphing at all.

Eventually, after looking at a few options, I came upon the linked video below. Using the G'Mic plugin, it really gives pretty easy and full control over the morphing process. As my photos were not taken at the exact same angle, it meant some objects were in slightly different positions, and the morphing control allowed me to animate these as well into relative smooth animations.

Being open-source GIMP, it also means it is completely free and unlimited use without any trail software limitations.

I actually wanted to daisy-chain a few of these animations together, and whilst it is possible, my differencing angles have made that a bit messy. I should have taken my photos of just the object I wanted to highlight and kept all the other background objects out of the way. I have another home building alteration project that used the same angle for every photo, and I think that one will work a lot better.

Nevertheless, this tutorial is well worth bookmarking if morphing into an animated GIF is something you may want to do in the future.

See https://youtu.be/KH9un9_MUL8?si=1RnA--VgYfkA24on

#technology #animation #GIMP #morphing

Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. With this context, Atuin gives you faster and better search of your shell history!

Additionally, it provides optional and fully encrypted (E2EE) synchronisation of your history between machines, via an Atuin server, or you can self-host your own server. There is a single command to easily delete your data from the server too.

It supports zsh, bash, fish, and nushell shells right now.

The search is as easy as pressing the up arrow in the terminal and then scrolling back, or typing to search. But you could also type something like this to do a search [search for all successful make commands, recorded after 3pm yesterday atuin search --exit 0 --after "yesterday 3pm" make].

Atuin offers configurable full text or fuzzy search, filterable by host, directory, etc. As it has context around dates, times, exit code, and even the directory location form where a command was executed, you could use the -c flag to just search for commands run in a particular directory.

The sync function allows you to have the same history across terminals, across sessions, and across machines.

There is a quick start script that can be run to install it, otherwise you can also install from the various Linux repos. For manual installation, the steps I found to get going were:

• Install Ble.sh and add it to your .bashrc (or other shell) file
• Install Atuin and add it to your .bashrc (or other shell) file (after Ble.sh)
• Restart your shell and run 'atuin import bash' to import my bash history into Atuin
• Press up arrow to see if Atuin interactive search triggers

The link below has some good documentation as well a link to their source code.

See https://atuin.sh/

#technology #Linux #opensource

Mbin is a decentralized content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform running on the fediverse network. It can communicate with many other ActivityPub services, including Kbin, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, Peertube. It is an open source alternative to other link aggregator services like Reddit. The initiative aims to promote a free and open internet.

Mbin is focused on what the community wants, pull requests can be merged by any repo owner (with merge rights in GitHub). Discussions take place on Matrix then consensus has to be reached by the community. If approved by the community, only one approval on the PR is required by one of the Mbin maintainers. It's built entirely on trust.

It seems it's claim to fame is being more open and accepting of community changes and improvements. It can install as either bare metal/VM or as a Docker container.

Although anyone can install it and self-host it, their project page also contains a link to various instances that already exist and which anyone can register on.

See https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin

#technology #opensource #Fediverse #linkaggregator #decentralised

I've not done an in-depth look at this network but reading through their documentation shows it has a lot of similarity to the basics of the Nostr protocol and network. There is just not as much information available on the Polycentric site as there is already for Nostr. Nostr is also censorship resistant, with distributed relays doing the relaying of posts (Polycentric calls them servers). Both use public-private key cryptography, with every post being cryptographically signed. Both networks also have the ownership of the identity managed by the end client (no-one can delete a client on either network), and those profiles can be used across devices.

And whilst basic posting looks very similar (microblogging type format, and is limited to 280 characters) this is also where the differences lie. Nostr has likes, whilst Polycentric only shows boosts (reshares) and reactions through commenting.

The Nostr protocol is also an extensible one, which means it has new NEP standards added by various people to go way beyond just blog posts. So, it also already provides full length text posts (like Minds uses), events, link aggregation, and more.

Polycentric servers have a moderation API control built-in (non-recommendation vs non-storage) whilst Nostr does not have this, and it is left to individuals to block or mute a profile. But the recommendation feed is a nice touch on Polycentric to help new users find recommended content. Both networks allow anyone to host these servers/relays.

But if privacy and censorship resistant networks are what you're into, then both Polycentric and Nostr are worth having a look at.

See https://docs.polycentric.io/

#technology #socialnetworks #privacy

This is at least apparent for what I'm observing in my country on the Southern tip of Africa. The reason seems to be that VarAC provides most of the functions that JS8Call already provides (apart from the open source), and then provides a lot of usability improvements as well as transmitting images, documents, faster speed, VMails, etc.

I've been getting up to speed with it the last two days, and am really enjoying using it. I've documenting what it is about, how it compares with JS8Call, and some tips I've been learning, at the web page I've linked to in this post.

See my experiences to date at https://gadgeteer.co.za/hamradio/varac-p2p-digital-mode-chatting-application/