Author: Michael G

Natalia Domagala on fighting for transparent AI, the power of algorithms, climate change and more

Posted on by Michael G

At Mozilla, we know we can’t create a better future alone, that is why each year we will be highlighting the work of 25 digital leaders using technology to amplify voices, effect change, and build new technologies globally through our Rise 25 Awards. These storytellers, innovators, activists, advocates, builders and artists are helping make the internet more diverse, […]

The post Natalia Domagala on fighting for transparent AI, the power of algorithms, climate change and more appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

health @ Savannah: MyGNUHealth 2.2 series released!

Posted on by Michael G

Dear all

I am happy to announce the release of MyGNUHealth 2.2.0!

The new series of the GNU Health Personal Health record comes with many improvements and bug fixes. Some highlights of this new version:

  • Support for Kivy 2.3.0
  • Localization. MyGNUHealth now has support for different languages. English, Spanish and Chinese are available to use, and French, German, Italian are ready to be translated. There will be a translation component for MyGNUHealth at Codeberg’s Weblate instance.
  • Bluetooth functionality: Starting with MyGH series 2.2 we provide bluetooth integration for open compatible devices and health trackers. We include the link with the Pinetime Smartwatch (experimental) and the possibility to link to any open hardware device (glucometer, scales, blood pressure monitors,  .. ). We need to get a list of available medical devices that respect our privacy and freedom, so let us know of any!
  • Charts now allow to select date ranges with calendar widgets
  • The Book of Life have a revised format for the pages.
  • The charts have been improved in the format and include x axis labels.


Thanks to Kivy, Mygnuhealth codebase can be ported to other architectures and operating systems such as Android AOSP (Pierre Michel is working on this) and GNU/Linux phones.

In addition to Savannah, we have incorporated Codeberg to the GNU Health development environment. Mailing lists, news and file downloads are at GNU, while the development repositories are at Codeberg (https://codeberg.org/gnuhealth)

You can download the latest MyGNUhealth sourcecode from GNU ftp site, pypi (using pip) or from your operating system package (like openSUSE).

Upgrading should be straightforward, and all the health history will remain in the MyGH database. In any case, please make sure you make a backup before upgrading (and daily 😉 ).

Thank you to all the contributors that have possible this milestone!

Happy hacking

Luis

Additional repos shaping the UI

Posted on by Michael G

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 20 Jun 2024, Week 25

F-Droid core

One feature of F-Droid Client since 2018 is the support of loading additional repositories from the custom partition, this is used by custom ROMs Android distributions to include their own repositories and provide updates for their own apps or more. Examples of such are CalyxOS and DivestOS.

Since the latest 1.20 update redesigned not only the way repos are shown but how priorities work, one issue that was raised was that additional repos are added at the bottom of the list with a lower priority. In the past, while these were at the top, with a lower priority (in that old design), F-Droid had no concept of favorite repo for an app, hence updates were installed from whichever one had a newer version with a correct signature. This means that now, additional repos not only end up at the bottom of the list but also F-Droid will ignore updates they host if they are not marked as favorites for an app. In last week’s TWIF we’ve encouraged users to at least take a look in Settings – Manage Repos, more so if you have repos from your Android distribution there, you can move them to the top as a quick fix.

There is an issue discussing this here and a proposed work-in-progress fix here. If you are integrating additional repos in your own custom Android, feel free to read and provide your feedback.

Talking about updates, and auto-updates more exactly, users of Android 14 should be all setup for that perfect flow of unattended F-Droid bliss. Yet, we’ve heard from Fedi users that latest Android 14 June 2024 Quarterly Platform Release might break this on certain distributions. Here’s the CalyxOS issue and the GrapheneOS report, so if you see the same do share your experience.

Community News

CineLog, Rate and review movies and series that you saw, was removed back in April as its dependencies were not fully FOSS. But this week version 2.0.0 is back!

Delta Chat was updated to 1.46.5. The developers recently blogged about “Hardening Guaranteed End-to-End encryption based on a security analysis from ETH researchers and the security improvements that got into version 1.44 and about the improved “Instant Onboarding and Instant Message Delivery”.

Fennec F-Droid and Mull were updated to 127.0.0 with a bit of a delay. Mozilla, the developers of Firefox, the base for both apps, have recently gone through some repo and code changes that took more time and more polish than usual. We hope future versions land faster now that fixes were applied. We want to thank @relan and @IratePorcupine, the F-Droid contributors that take care of this huge endeavor.

Newly Added Apps

5 apps were newly added
  • AlexCalc – Scientific calculator with LaTeX equation display
  • CaptureSposed – Add support for blocking the Screenshot Detection API introduced in Android 14!
  • Notification Listener – Get notified only of important notifications
  • Raven – Use APIs and web scraping to fetch news articles
  • The One App – Manage a player’s characters in the RPG The One Ring

Updated Apps

133 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

Is 2024 the year of Windows on the desktop?

Posted on by Michael G
It should be no secret to anyone reading OSNews that I’m not exactly a fan of Windows. While I grew up using MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, the move to Windows XP was a sour one for me, and ever since I’ve vastly preferred first BeOS, and then Linux. When, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Wine community and Valve gaming on Linux became a boring, it-just-works affair, I said goodbye to my final gaming-only Windows installation about four or so years ago. However, I also strongly believe that in order to be able to fairly criticise or dislike something, you should at least have experience with it. As such, I decided it was time for what I expected was going to be some serious technology BDSM, and I installed Windows 11 on my workstation and force myself to use it for a few weeks to see if Microsoft’s latest operating system truly was as bad as I make it out to be in my head. Installing Windows 11 Technically speaking, my workstation is not supported by Windows 11. Despite packing two Intel Xeon E5 V4 2640 CPUs for a total of 20 cores and 40 threads, 32 GB of ECC RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro w5700, and the usual stuff like an M.2 SSD, this machine apparently did not meet the minimum specifications for Windows 11 since it has no TPM 2.0 security chip, and the processors were deemed too old. Luckily, these limitations are entirely artificial and meaningless, and using Ventoy, which by default disables these silly restrictions, I was able to install Windows 11 just fine. During installation, you run into the first problem if you’re coming from a different operating system – even after all these years, Windows still does not give a single hootin’ toot about any existing operating systems or bootloaders on your machine. This wasn’t an issue for me since I was going to allow Windows to take over the entire machine, but for those of used to have control over what happens when we install our operating systems, be advised that your other operating systems will most likely be rendered unbootable. The tools you have access to during installation for things like disk partitioning are also incredibly limited, and there’s nothing like the live environments you’re used to from the Linux world – all you get is an installer. In addition, since Windows only really supports FAT and NTFS file systems, your existing ext4, btrfs, UFS, or ZFS partitions used by your Linux or BSD installs will not work at all in Windows. Again – be advised that Windows is a very limited operating system compared to Linux or BSD. Once the actual installation part is done, you’re treated to a lengthy – and I truly mean lengthy – out of box experience. This is where you first get a glimpse of just how much data Microsoft wants to collect from its Windows users, and it stands in stark contrast to what I’m used to as a Linux user. On my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE, there’s really only KDE’s opt-in, voluntary User Feedback option, which only collects basic system information in an entirely anonymous way. Windows, meanwhile, seems to want to collect pretty much everything you do on your machine, and while there’s some prompts to reduce the amount of data it collects, even with everything set to minimum it’s still quite a lot. Once you’re past the out of box experience, you can finally start using your new Windows installation – but actually not really. Unlike a Linux distribution, where all your hardware is detected automatically and will use the latest drivers, on Windows, you will most likely have to do some manual driver hunting, searching the web for PCI and vendor IDs to hopefully locate the correct drivers, which isn’t always easy. To make matters worse, even if Windows Update installs the correct drivers for you, those are often outdated, and you’re better off downloading the latest versions straight from the vendors’ websites. This is especially problematic for motherboard drivers – motherboard vendor websites often list horribly outdated drivers. Updating Windows 11 Once you have all the drivers installed and updated, which often requires several reboots, you might notice that your system seems to be awfully busy, even when you’re not actually doing anything with it. Most likely, this means Windows Update is running in the background, sucking up a lot of system resources. If you’re used to Linux or BSD, where updating is a quick and centralised process, updating things on Windows is a complete and utter mess. Instead of just updating everything all at once, Windows Update will often require several different rounds of updates, marked by reboots. You’ll also discover that Windows Update is not only incredibly slow both when it comes to downloading and installing, but that it’s also incredibly buggy. Updates will randomly fail to install for no apparent reason, and there’s a whole cottage industry of useless ML and SEO content on the internet trying to “help” you fix these issues. On my system, without doing anything, Windows Update managed to break itself in less than 24 hours – it listed 79 (!) driver updates related to the two Xeon processors (I assume it listed certain drivers for every single of the 40 threads), but every single one of them, save for one or two, would fail to install with a useless generic error code. Every time I tried to install them, one or two more would install, with everything else failing, until eventually the update process just hung the entire system. A few days later, the listed updated just disappeared entirely from Windows Update. The updates had no KB numbers, so it was impossible to find any information on them, and to this day, I have no idea what was going on here. Even after battling your way through Windows Update, you’re not done actually updating your system. Unlike,

Alan Ghani analisa Copom manter taxa Selic em 10,5

Posted on by Michael G

Video by via Dailymotion Source Nesta quarta (19), o Copom anunciou a manutenção da taxa básica de juros em 10,50%. A decisão já era esperada pelos bancos e investidores. A alta do dólar e as incertezas econômicas foram os principais motivos para a determinação do Banco Central sobre a Selic. Alan Ghani analisou. Assista ao…

Amazing Speaker – AI DIY

Posted on by Michael G

Video by via Dailymotion Source Unlock your creativity with AI DIY projects!Dive into a world where technology meets imagination, and transform everyday items into extraordinary creations.Whether you’re a seasoned maker or just getting started, our AI-powered tools and tutorials make it easy to bring your innovative ideas to life.From smart home gadgets to personalized art,…