nonserf

This problem is specific to the stock Lemmy client web app. When I visit !foss_requests@libretechni.ca, there is a NEXT button at the bottom. Clicking it simply refreshes the current page and does not advance to the next page. This problem manifests in both Firefox and Chromium based browsers.

Worth noting that other clients (e.g. alexandrite) work fine.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/1165681

The BBC’s radio schedule (on the linked page) is apparently only available in HTML format. I wonder if open data laws in the UK would compel them to make the schedule available in a machine-readable format like JSON or XML. Anyone know about the UK open data law in this regard?

I have accummulated half a dozen DAB radios. None of them have an antenna jack, thus limited to the stock built-in telescopic antenna. Most of the radios do not pick up BBC.

A Noxon DAB USB stick just appeared at a local flea market dirt cheap. A quick search suggests folks have apparently got it working on linux, and even rasberry pi. It comes with a tiny rubber ducky type of antenna but it’s detachable, so a high end antenna could perhaps replace it.

Also looks like this hardware is ~14 years old, so probably as mature as it’s going to get. Is anyone grabbing album art and scheduling metadata over these USB sticks?

I think in principle these sticks could run off a linux-based phone like PostmarketOS. Perhaps facilitating this idea.

These apps are designed to combine bittorrent tech with a web browser to enable people to share websites peer to peer, so excluded people can reach restricted access websites indirectly and enjoy some liberation from Cloudflare:

• CENO [Android & Windows] has been around a while but apparently lost steam. It’s archived and had no development apparently in 4 years. It’s also broken in my attempt to launch it. (update: a fork of CENO apparently had a commit ~2 weeks ago.. so perhaps not a dead project after all)

• Akoopa [linux] is new and was just presented at FOSDEM 2026. It’s a Tor Browser fork in very early stages. Apparently it only functions as a bittorrent client for grabbing static data at this point.

• (update) Agregore looks like a healthy project.

I personally would be happy with just a backend. If I could pass an URL to rtorrent and end up with a local .mhtml file that any browser of my choice could open, I would be very happy.

Conceptually this seems like it could be a quite useful app for getting web pages. I learned about it from @morphite88 @thelemmy.club in this thread. It’s implemented on Android and Windows (not linux? wtf).

I installed the AOS f-droid version, which is ~100mb compressed and over 500mb unpacked. Wow.. wtf that is huge. It’s based on Firefox so I wonder if that’s where all the fat comes from.

In any case, the app simply does not work. When I launch the massive thing, it tries to contact a “bootstrap server”, and fails. I do not trust the clearnet and thus force CENO over Orbot (Tor). Perhaps that’s the issue.

CENO gives an option to enter a custom bootstrap server, but my searches come up empty. Perhaps this app it too unpopular to have alternative public servers.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/786769

FOSDEM presenter Jah Kosha will pitch the idea that the web can be made inclusive by introducing some middleware called #akoopa to share websites using torrents. This is severely needed. I cannot even read legal statutes that I am bound by because the gov publishes law on exclusive websites.

It’s similar to my youtube-torrent idea:

https://libretechni.ca/post/420147

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

Most FOSS projects are jailed in Microsoft Github’s access restricted walled garden. The 4 freedoms are very basic. Sure I can grab the code and do what I want with it, but then what? Rage fork because devs only pay attention to a bug tracker hosted by a corporate oppressor?

Of course devs rightfully get to choose the venue for their work. It’s astonishing how many are okay with licking MS’s boots.

The free world can do better. The current hack: if an app has official Debian support, we can report upstream bugs to the Debian bug tracker (or Launchpad for Ubuntu). Any others?

For non-Debian, it really gets shitty. You can stash a bug report here, where it gets seen by sideline hecklers, not devs or users, and only gets retained as long as sopuli.xyz has resources. If they one day need to free up disk space, they will erase old posts.

Select apps that exist in Debian when possible

Debian has a higher quality standard than most distros and it’s also mainstream. When an app becomes officially maintained in Debian, a right of passage of sorts has been demonstrated. It’s not a high bar but it’s relatively the best measure of quality and maturity there is. Many FOSS projects cannot manage to satisfy Debian’s standards.

So if you have a choice of apps, it’s a good idea to short-list those that appear in https://packages.debian.org/ even if you run a different distro than Debian. You can participate in bug discussion at https://bugs.debian.org/ without registration. And if you verify a bug exists in Debian you have a decent place to report it (yes, even if the bug originates upstream).

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/559409

All words ending in “tion” or “ty” are both French and English. Apart from that, English gets many words from both Dutch and French that are similar. But there is no effort to exploit this because so many people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

I am firmly outside of that school of thought. When someone uttered the opening sentence of this post to me, I probably learnt ~6000+¹ words in French in 5 seconds. You cannot beat that. This would have taken years of playing charades using the popular immersion teaching style.

So the question is, are there any language learning tools whereby you specify two langauges and it produces a list or dictionary of true friends? The idea is that you can make a quick gain in vocabulary before progressing into unfamiliar/alienating words.

There are instances where I am writing a bilingual paper in English and French. The French column is a machine translation. Knowing some French (but not fluent), there are situations where the translation tool chooses a synonym for a true friend. If the machine had chosen a true friend, it would be easier for me to verify the quality of the translation and also easier for me to learn from. Considering my reader(s) are often native French and /possibly/ decent with English, there are also situations where I fail to choose an English word that would be easier for a francophone. So it would be useful as well if a translation tool would reverse the French back to English while trying to select true friends in English.

Furthermore, a reader of my French-English text may be a native Dutch speaker. So I would like an translation tool that adds some secondary gravity toward choosing English-Dutch friends when English-French falls short. Or another way to state this: I want a bilingual text that minimises the frequency of unique original words that are not borrowed by any of the relevant languages.

I realise gravitating toward true friends may cause a longer text in some cases, so I suppose I would also want to set a threshold of tolerance on additional words or syllables. In the end there would be some manual effort in the end anyway.

¹ $ grep -iE '(ty|tion)$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge | wc -l