LibreOffice has a new fix for Microsoft changing its default font to Aptos “Microsoft has moved away from its legacy ClearType fonts. This includes familiar names like Calibri, Candida, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel, and Segoe for Western languages. Microsoft is now using Aptos as the new default font for Western languages. This shift is apparently what prompted The Document Foundation to refresh its guidance and tools. For years, proprietary fonts standard on Windows and macOS have been used as a lock-in tool.” Despite Microsoft's lip service to supporting open standards, it seems to have gone out of its way to keep tweaking thing which end up breaking compatibility with open standards. Fonts had come right years ago when most Microsoft fonts also became available on Linux, but of course now Microsoft has again shifted its ground. Of course, if more users opted to use free and open standards, we'd have a lot less of this problem in the first place. It does appear though that the Aptos font can be downloaded from Microsoft, so hopefully LibreOffice's solution also gets implemented soon by ONLYoffice, FreeOffice, etc too. See

How-To Geek

LibreOffice has a new fix for your font problems

Say goodbye to your document getting messed up over a font change.

#technology #opensource #openstandards #officesuites

Hate Meta (Facebook)? Even Realities Is Making the Smart Glasses You Want “As Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses continue to turn your face into a computer, with a camera and speaker, Even Realities is doubling down on a design that eschews those components. Instead, it's focusing on extending your smartphone through the display of its smart glasses while figuring out new mechanisms for controlling the experience.” What I like is that there is no camera on these glasses, so there should be no embarrassing privacy issues or making others feel uncomfortable when you are wearing them. And, of course, not being made by Meta, it already scores a lot higher in terms of privacy and not selling your user data. The Even R1 smart ring is also interesting, as it can pair with the glasses to display its health info to the glasses, and also be used to scroll the display on the glasses. See

WIRED

Hate Meta? Even Realities Is Making the Smart Glasses You Want

The company announced the Even G2 smart glasses, sporting a bigger display in a lighter frame, alongside the R1 smart ring, which can control the d...

#technology #smartglasses

In-depth Comparison between Open Source AFFiNE and Joplin Notes for Note-Taking Both AFFiNE and Joplin Notes are intended for creating and editing notes, with a view to building up your searchable personal knowledge base. My video does an in-depth dive comparison between AFFiNE and Joplin Notes with a primary focus on the note-taking capabilities and their Markdown format compatibility. AFFiNE has the added advantage of providing some great graphical tools with its edgeless canvas mode, whilst Joplin Notes has tremendous extendability through its numerous community plugins. They do things slightly differently and neither, though, does everything perfectly, so my video will hopefully highlight some of their differences which may appeal to you. Watch #technology #opensource #notes #markdown

I replaced Microsoft Word with a self-hosted, open-source alternative No, not I, as I had replaced Microsoft Office many years ago. But nevertheless an interesting read and a good reminder that most folks don't really NEED Microsoft Word, with all the great alternatives around today. My go-to office suite is actually FreeOffice which has much the same going for it as ONLYoffice, which I also have installed. Apart from being open source, these alternative suites are also truly cross-platform and friendlier when it comes to adhering to open standard formats such as the Open Document Format. The network effect though is still super strong around the world, being fuelled by a powerful PR machine, which is now telling everyone they need to have AI built into their office suites. Actually, FreeOffice does have an option for that, as well as a dramatically lower once-off pro-plan cost, but do you need it inside your office suite? See

How-To Geek

I replaced Microsoft Word with a self-hosted, open-source alternative

It also includes a spreadsheet and presentation editor!

#technology #opensource #officesuites

Join The Newest Social Network And Party Like Its 1987 "Algorithms? Datamining? Brainrot? You don’t need those things to have a social network. As we knew back in the BBS days, long before anyone coined the phrase “social network”, all you need is a place for people to make text posts. [euklides] is providing just such a place, at cyberspace.online. It’s a great mix of old and new — the IRC inspired chatrooms, e-mail inspired DMs (“cybermail”) make it feel like the good old days, while a sprinkling of more modern concepts such as friends lists, a real-time feed, and even the late-lamented “poke” feature (from before Facebook took over the world) provide some welcome conveniences." Yep many are getting sick and tired of the big centralised social networks with their algorithms and data mining. There are actually countless alternatives around, and this is merely one of the latest to arrive on the scene. I have lost count of which social networks I'm actually on. I'm probably only active on around 8 or 9 on a daily basis, but we are spoilt for choice, and many are very welcoming and have a different sort of feel and niche they cater for. From

Hackaday

Join The The Newest Social Network And Party Like Its 1987

Algorithms? Datamining? Brainrot? You don’t need those things to have a social network. As we knew back in the BBS days, long before anyone c...

#technology #socialnetworks

Testing Whether Fast Charging Kills Smartphone Batteries, And Other Myths It will be a lot clearer if you watch the video in the linked article, as the article text does not really clearly summarise all the conclusions. See

Hackaday

Testing Whether Fast Charging Kills Smartphone Batteries, And Other Myths

With batteries being such an integral part of smartphones, it’s little wonder that extending the period between charging and battery replacem...

#technology #batteries

ODF 1.4 Release Marks 20 Years of OpenDocument Format “Microsoft's proprietary formats like .doc and .docx dominate the office productivity landscape. Most people and organisations rely on these formats for daily document work. This creates a predatory situation where vendor lock-in is the norm and compatibility issues are taken as an omen that moving away from Microsoft Office is a bad idea. OpenDocument Format (ODF) offers an open alternative. It is an ISO-standard XML-based format for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics. ODF works across multiple office suites, including LibreOffice, Collabora Online, and Microsoft Office itself.” Open standards are critical to the future use and access to data. Open data also helps prevent vendors locking you into their service. Open standards also help lower the costs of services as it increases competition in the market. In summary, open standards protect users. Unfortunately, many organisations work actively against open standards as they stand in the way of their profits, and of course big organisations can lobby governments... As users, we all need to support open standards. We cannot take on the big organisations, but we can decide to prefer to use services based on open standards. And yes, believe it or not, besides the marketing PR, you do NOT NEED to use MS Office. There are perfectly good alternatives, with many being free of cost. If you do still use MS Office, at least choose to save everything in ODF format. See

It's FOSS

ODF 1.4 Release Marks 20 Years of OpenDocument Format

Accessibility and compatibility upgrades mark 20th anniversary of document standard at OASIS Open.

#technology #openstandards #ODF

This OpenWrt-Based Router Has Swappable Wi-Fi Modules for Future Upgrades “Their Turris router project started as an internal research effort focused on understanding network threats that has now evolved into offering commercial products with rock-solid security and convenient features. Now, they have launched the Turris Omnia NG, the next generation of their security-focused router line. Like its predecessors, the router is manufactured in the Czech Republic.” Yes, part of the news is the swappable Wi-Fi hardware modules, but also very interesting is that the router comes with an open source operating system based on OpenWrt. I really like that! That means that you can do a lot more with it than just being a basic, cripple proprietary router. It can work as a NAS, VPN gateway, run LXC containers or even full Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Debian on virtual machines, or a self-hosted cloud server running Nextcloud. Try doing that on a commercial Asus or T-Link router! See

It's FOSS

This OpenWrt-Based Router Has Swappable Wi-Fi Modules for Future Upgrades

The Turris Omnia NG promises lifetime updates and a modular design for a real long-term use.

#technology #opensource #routers #openwrt

Scientists Say They’ve Figured Out How to Transcribe Your Thoughts From an MRI Scan “They’re calling the technique “mind captioning,” and it may represent an effective way for transcribing what someone’s thinking, with impressively comprehensive and accurate results.” It is certainly not reading of specific thoughts, but nonetheless statistically the results are way above just random guesses, with some sounding impressive. And yes, it seems AI does the number crunching to arrive at suggestions. As with any technology, there can be good and bad applications for it. The usual culprits will try to exploit the bad side, but think of the good for those with seriously impaired communication capabilities (stroke, aphasia, and other medical difficulties). Right now, of course this is not possible yet to use without an MRI machine, but it is quite promising so far, and possibly better ways to scan will be found. See

Futurism

Scientists Say They've Figured Out How to Transcribe Your Thoughts From an MRI Scan

The team showed that the brain scan analyzing technique could generate accurate descriptions of a video someone was watching.

#technology #health

Why self-hosting matters now more than ever in the age of cloud "A little over a week ago, a DNS update conflict brought down AWS, crippling hundreds of apps and services worldwide. Along with many of Amazon’s own platforms, Netflix, Spotify, Google Drive, Zoom, and many others were affected by the failure. At ground level, online shops went silent. One Reddit user lamented that they had missed out on thousands of dollars in profit because their trading platform couldn’t execute a trade, while another unlucky person’s bed stopped functioning." And just this morning there we suffered a Teraco outage for an hour and a half that affected Internet services too. All my self-hosted services in the house continued to work so I could watch movies, read my RSS news feeds, update my notes management, etc. The linked article goes on to show many other advantages too of self-hosting. That said though, you do at least want to have two hard drives so that there is a rsync backing up daily to the second drive. Just because self-hosting may save you money, does not mean you should skimp on the essentials. You have to take accountability for your data if you self-host. See

XDA

Why self-hosting matters now more than ever in the age of cloud

Break free from reliance on the cloud and build digital independence.

#technology #selfhosting