I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.

I work in IT, and different definitions of what SaaS means are starting to wreak real havoc on the architecture as a whole.

We are better served just quitting the acronyms and taking the time to talk about a more detailed description of what the service actually adds in terms of value.

Amazon Prime is a subscription for shipping, video streaming, gaming benefits and more. Since software is not the primary goal, but a means of delivery for these other services, I will not consider Amazon Prime SaaS.

Salamanders are awesome. Growing up with a pond in the garden we used to go out fishing for frogspawn and salamanders all the time.

We’d hatch the frogspawn in a large aquarium out in the yard and we would watch the little frogs grow. Great way to learn about these little critters as a kid.

Salamanders were released in the pondside vegetation and eventually claimed the pond as their own. Little guys are still hanging around, even after all these years.

Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven’t grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don’t fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you’ve failed to be a self-aware tech user and you’re now demoted to a braindead consumer.

I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what’s happening here.

It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It’s just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.

I think it depends on the adoption of Linux on the desktop. When more people get a taste of what freedom of software brings, they are going to want that for their phones as well.

That or we might just be years away from the next big thing where everyone walks around with AR glasses and the cycle starts all over again with companies competing for a duopoly, and we’re just fucked.

Others in this thread have covered most of the points already, but it is mainly software support for certain key things I want to do using my phone, such as online banking.

I realise most of this is just anxiety about taking the plunge and seeing what it’s like, so if I have money to burn I might just buy a second phone just to see if it’s a viable option for me.

But yeah, I wish mobile Linux was popular enough for there to be support from key service providers. Though it might be a long shot since “desktop” Linux is still growing and we haven’t yet seen the support shift.

It was a big mistake by Google to base the Android Framework entirely on Java. Pivoting to Kotlin because you’ve discovered that working in Java produces nothing but garbage does nothing to fix the situation either.

Can’t wait for generic Linux phones to be a (more popular) thing so we won’t have to deal with this clown world nonsense anymore.

For this to become a serious issue a couple of conditions need to be met:

• there has to be enough second hand supply to meet demand and keep prices low.
• …which means lots of people need to circulate their games.
• …which means they didn’t like your game enough to want to keep it in their collection for replayability
• …which means you made an unremarkable game

Now, given the fact that I have full confidence in your ability to create something worthwhile (because you would do so from passion), this cycle will likely be broken at some point.

There’s also the other option where people will circulate their second hand games with the knowledge they’ll be able to buy back another copy somewhere down the road.

But yes, you’re right that this will bring a new factor to the gaming industry that everyone has to take into account. Keep in mind that your financial security in the indie gaming sector is fully dependant on wether you develop something worthwhile. You are in no way entitled to be able to make a living from publishing games regardless of their quality. Which is the beauty of the indie games segment: the more love and care you put into your game, the bigger the chances are that it’ll be a success.

A trend I’ve noticed over the years is that there are just very little jobs available where you “design shit”. It feels like the market is saturated with designers and companies already have all the workers they are looking for.

Meanwhile most people I’ve seen graduate have no real talent for the job. And they never seem to get hired for positions that require talent in design for manufacturing.

You’d think there would be more jobs available, but there simply aren’t. All the jobs are either trade skills, pure CAD or some other part of the product lifecycle that doesn’t require any real design skill.

engineer UK /ˌen.dʒɪˈnɪər/ US /ˌen.dʒɪˈnɪr/

a person whose job is to design or build machines, engines, or electrical equipment, or things such as roads, railways, or bridges, using scientific principles:

• a civil engineer

• a mechanical/structural engineer

• a software engineer

Cambridge Dictionary

I’m all for letting people ramble, but Engineering is, by definition, the design of tecnical stuff.

Risk management is a part of “designing things”, but it is not what makes you an engineer. Converting technology into objects that solve problems is what makes you an engineer.

And there are lots of disciplines out there that started calling themselves engineers while they are objectively very deep into the grey area. If your work does not involve calculus, logic or physics of some kind, it is highly likely that you are not in fact a real engineer. (Looking at you, Sales and Marketing Engineers)

Good! Now let’s extend this movement to other countries as well. I want to see the impact women make in the workforce and what critical parts of the economy will collapse if women collectively decide to stop taking shit.

Naturally, parts of the economy that won’t come to a grinding halt need more female representation.

We need equal pay, equal opportunities, equal responsibility and equal representation.

Additionally, if you’re into mapping, give QGIS a try.

It’s an open source geospatial data management application, which is available cross-platform.

It neatly integrates many processing tools into a relatively intuitive GUI, and having even some basic skill can lead to some job opportunities.

You can even import OSM data through plugins or download services, which you can use for all kinds of fancy things.

That was awesome, thanks for sharing.

I fully get what you’re saying and I think I know a thing or two about how lifestyle branding consumes people’s lives to the point where they’re fully absorbed.

Social media platforms seem to be by far the worst offenders of stimulating this kind of addiction (let’s just name it for what it is).

Coming from a background of designing products, as opposed to selling them I tend to be focused on product representation, rather than selling an idea. Which is not actually the route to making stupid amounts of money.

You’ve convinced me that marketing is definitely part of the problem. Here in the Netherlands they’ve recently (about two years ago) relaxed some legislation on online gambling (gambling itself is legal, just the ads weren’t) and since we’ve seen a surge of ads on television and social media featuring sports icons and influencers. The result has been a giant increase in profits, which directly corelates to figures of increased debt, prevalent mostly in young adults. I firmly believe this is toxic and needs to be fixed asap.

If you do decide to host a Q&A I’ll be sure to have a look for more cool insights.

Interesting take, mind if I dig a little deeper?

The key part of Apple’s success is that they make idiotproof devices for people who want something to “just work” (insert linux desktop memes here). The way I’ve come to understand it in the last couple years (having relatives who’ve drank the cool-aid and are starting to spot the cracks in the facade), is that they have been pulled in by values way up high in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. They are locked into the ecosystem, believing that their current solution is somehow ideal and they seem most of all afraid that anything else will completely turn their world upside down. The weird part is that Apple manages somehow to convince people they are the only ones capable of providing an experience that will cover those needs.

The thing is: Being convinced that there is no greener grass elsewhere puts up a barrier to entry into the unknown. I really do wonder if the solution there is cracking down on marketing, as it would require broad sweeping legislation that would likely defeat the purpose.

Sure, companies will put forth the occasional blatant lie, misrepresenting their product, but oftentimes the heavy lifting is done by the established brand image. I would not know where to begin preventing such an image from forming in the first place without community pushback.

And that is where my original point comes in: If we push back by ridiculing the userbase we’ll have a culture war on our hands. The trick is to be smarter than that and actually show them that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Every time the consumer gets fucked over by corporate greed, it is because we’ve let it happen by accepting the slippery slope brought upon us. (Publicly traded) companies will only listen to financial consequences from their actions, which means we have the power to stop their bullshit by not buying into it. Doing so requires a large enough group of people to start spending money elsewhere.

Problem is: The current market is affected by Apple’s shenanigans (though examples of the same pattern are also found in other industries). Which means other manufacturers are copying all the anti-consumer design decisions and you’re not left with much of a choice.

This is where legislation comes in. By providing basic consumer protections like in the proposed right to repair bills, we can at least be sure to have the option of choosing our own repair provider.

Though I’m curious if there is an additional angle we need to explore as consumers. Having said all the above, would you still disagree that educating our peers in a respectful manner will lead to people changing their behaviour, and if so, why?

Agreed, they’re usually influenced by their emotional attachment to the Apple brand (or [insert fashionable electronics manufacturer here]). And my hunch is they respond to valid criticism with a defense along the lines of “they obviously know what they’re doing” or “tech is hard/dangerous/intellectual property, we can’t have just anybody working on it”.

The reality is, they often fail to see the bigger picture because they’re blinded by what they’ve convinced themselves is the truth. This unfortunately also means that clowning on them is counterproductive, as they won’t see the light without being eased into it.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t judge people for believing soldering an SSD to the motherboard is somehow innovative and progress, but it is hard to accompany our laughter with the patience to actually explain to them in a respectful manner that this is not the way.

It takes a hard reality check in the form of their data being gone when their SSD inevitably dies someday, and recovery not being an option “because you should have paid for an iCloud subscription”. Or it takes a way for “them” not to see “us” as the enemy when we’re advocating for Apple and competitors not to pull us further into a dystopian technological hellscape where devices are single use. Try convincing a cultists that they’re in a cult and they’ll see you as a threat. We have to make sure this doesn’t escalate into polarizing tech culture war any further than it already has.

We need repairability and sustainability to be the basis for consumer electronics going forward. Corporate profits don’t justify wasting resources on single-use electronics.

While this is very much welcome news, I am a little skeptical because this might still be a PR stunt.

Apple has shown they have the engineering capacity to design their devices to be virtually unfixable, all while still technically being compliant with this proposed piece of legislation.

Nonetheless, this show of support might finally be a means for us to end the ongoing culture war on repairability. It has been too much of a polarized debate lately, where opponents seem to be under the impression that a lack of repairability is a good thing for everyone, when it is really just having a choice that matters most.

Now that Apple has officially put in writing it’s support for repairability of consumer electronics, we can finally stop debating wether or not repairability is a good thing, and instead how we’re going to ensure the new situation works for everyone involved. Hopefully.

You might want to consider setting up a VPN tunnel to your own network. Main benefit is that you can access your home network as if you were connected to it locally. Which makes switching between mobile data and WiFi a non-issue.

This requires some sort of VPN server and usually a single port-forwarding rule for the protocol which your VPN software of choice uses. For the simplest default configuration of OpenVPN this means setting UDP port 1194 to point to your OpenVPN server.

Generally, keeping things simple, there’s two types of VPN you can set up:

• split tunnel VPN, which gives you access to your home network but accesses the internet directly.
• full tunnel VPN, which sends all of your traffic through your home router.

It is a little more complicated than that, and there’s more nuance to it, such as wether to user your own DNS server or not, but all that is best left to some further reading.

I’ve setup an OpenVPN server myself, wich is open source and completely free to mess around with. (Save for maybe some costs for registring your own domain or DDNS serviced. Those are all optional though, and mainly provide convienience and continuity benefits. You can definitely just setup a VPN server and connect with your external IP adress)

Going into a little more detail:

There are plenty of ways to do open source, and the differences mostly come down to the license something is published under. Some licenses prohibit redistribution, while others restrict commercial use. One of the more popular permissive licenses is the GNU General Public License (or GPL for short). Which you can read up on over here.

Technically there’s nothing stopping you from ignoring the terms of the license agreement and just doing whatever. Think “agreeing to the terms without actually reading them”. While the licenses are usually proper grounds for legal action, it depends on the project and the resources associated wether actual legal action is within the realm of possibilities.

When it comes to “everything is open source”, you’re technically correct in the sense that you can reverse engineer everything and the amount of work you’re willing to put in is the only limiting factor. Compiled code and techniques like code obfuscation and encryption will pose barriers, but they will not protect from someone determined to get in. In the same way a door lock will not protect you from someone who brings a blowtorch.

Some code is technically not open source, but is delivered in human-readable form. This is the case for things like websites and scripts in languages like python. Other software is compiled (pre-converted to specific instructions for your processor), and is delivered in binary, which is not particularly human-readable. But with the right tools even binary applications can be “decompiled” and converted into something slightly more closely resembling the original source code.

A great one liner from the YouTube channel Low-level Learning is “everything is open source if you can read assembly”.

So, in summary: It depends how you look at it, generally speaking open source means that te source code is available for the public to see and that you’re free to submit any suggestions or improvements to the code, no matter who you are. In practise the source code is sometimes visible (out of technical necessity or for troubleshooting purposes) even though the product is not open source, in which case the end user license agreement will likely contain a clause prohibiting you from doing anything with it.

Wow that’s a cool setup, I’ll definitely steal some ideas.

I’m used to slinging lots of data around and one of the more helpful tools for general purpose automation has been n8n. Though it might have limited use if you’re not trying to glue all kinds of services together. I also host actualbudget to keep track of finances. Both are running comfortably in their own little docker containers.

I’m currently looking into setting up Nextcloud and experimenting some more with presence detection for Home Assistant. I’m considering CO2 sensors, which will either tell me my home is ventilated properly, or which rooms are occupied.