CoolerControl is a Powerful cooling control and monitoring tool for Linux This open-source application not only has a very modern looking and configurable interface, it also has some powerful ways to control the cooling too. It can combine different device sensors (mixed profiles) to set cooling using multiple fans. Profiles for each device can be BIOS, fixed, graph curve, mix, or overlays. Thresholds can also be adjusted to eliminate false positive alerts or to smooth the response of the fans. The application can also run in headless mode on remote Linux systems, and there is a REST API that can be used to integrate remote monitoring systems. My video gives an overview of how I am using it, and what I am finding very useful. It should help you decide whether the application will be of use to you or not. Watch #technology #opensource #Linux #CoolerControl
The EFF's How to: Get to Know iPhone Privacy and Security Settings “Open up your iPhone’s Settings app and you’ll find dozens of different options with little guidance on what those options do. Some of these settings have a serious impact on your privacy and security, altering what data gets shared automatically with apps, data brokers, and Apple itself. What sorts of changes you should make depends on how you use your phone and your security plan. There is no one-size-fits-all collection of recommended settings to change, instead, we’ll explain what settings do to help you decide if they’re worth altering.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the user's back, unlike the case is often with Big Tech or government's themselves. This How To may be well worth reading if you use an iPhone. See #technology #privacy #iOS
You Must Be Joking: Facebook’s new button lets its AI look at photos you haven’t uploaded yet “Meta has rolled out an opt-in AI feature to its US and Canadian Facebook users that claims to make their photos and videos more shareworthy. The only catch is that the feature is designed for your phone’s camera roll — not the media you’ve already uploaded to Facebook. If you opt in, Meta’s AI will comb through your camera roll, upload your unpublished photos to Meta’s cloud, and surface “hidden gems” that are “lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps,” the company says.” By accessing or using this feature, users will have opted in to this. The real problem is Facebook's horrific record of privacy abuses from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to WhatsApp T&Cs sharing metadata with partners, to being under US CLOUD Act jurisdiction, to the video I have of Mark Zuckerberg assuring everyone they will always own their own data. This is just not a company anyone can believe, and the line mentioning “might hold onto some of that data for longer than 30 days” will mean all of your data will be in there forever. I deleted the Facebook app off my phone many years ago, and I block any of their login code found littered across all of the web too. Facebook's business model is all centred around profiling users to an extreme level of accuracy, and selling that data to “partners”. They are NOT in the social network business, but rather the data harvesting/sales business. Unfortunately, yet again, most Facebook users will just fall for the glitzy pictures and the pretty user interface, and go all in. Mark will testify again in Congress at some point with his carefully crafted responses, and the cycle keeps repeating. The only power that will make any difference is when the sheep all stand together and just delete themselves from his data harvesting machine. That, though, will likely never happen unless there is some cleaner better social network (not a microblogging service) that can support a few billion users and which is not funded from a profit driven US-corporation... The next best thing is we just give up on a general social network, and all revert to microblogging platforms (like the few have done already). See #technology #privacy #facebook
Free Software Foundation announced its Librephone project to bring mobile phone freedom to users “Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.” There are of course a few such phone freedom projects on Android, but most have a few shortcomings still, and one of the shortcomings has often been that binary blobs are still included for various firmware drivers. Such devices of course eliminate all the corporate spyware and tracking that Google, Apple, etc tend to pack into their phones. Bearing in mind of course if you install the Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google Search, etc apps into this phone, you are just wide open again. An issue for me though, on my last LineageOS phone, was my bank was detecting the phone was not locked down even though I had Magisk modules to mask the rooting. So we are also seeing in some cases that certain security apps may not run properly either. You just have to venture carefully into changes of phone OS and be sure what you need to use, will in fact work fine. But more options are always good to see. See https://www.fsf.org/news/librephone-project #technology #privacy #tracking #opensource #android
How to Control Kernel Boot-Time Parameters in Linux “Boot-time parameters are like secret keys to the Linux kernel; they allow you to control exactly how the system starts, how hardware is initialized, and how problems are handled. Whether you are debugging a stubborn boot issue, tuning performance, or experimenting with kernel features, these parameters give you low-level power over your Linux machine.” There is no GUI managed options here, but this linked article does give a pretty good overview of how it works and what some of the most common options do. See #technology #Linux #opensource
German state replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email “The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has dumped its government email and calendar systems for open-source software. The six-month migration has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with Open-Xchange and Mozilla Thunderbird. The transfer covered more than 40,000 mailboxes and over 100 million messages and calendar entries.” Again, this is not about necessarily having better or flashier functionality (e-mail and calendaring are basically decades old and open standards). It is about digital sovereignty, preventing vendor lock-in, potentially more local economic investment, and not getting locked into annual increases in cost without any end in sight. All I can say is, be very wary of corporate PR trying to push any organisation into their cloud-owned service. Losing control of your IT is just not a strategy for the long (or short) term. See #technology #opensource #Germany #digitalsovereignty
LACT - Linux GPU Configuration And Monitoring Tool for AMD, Nvidia or Intel GPUs Detailed GPU information reporting, monitoring (with historical graphs), power configuration, thermals configuration, overclocking, and settings profiles. GPU configuration is handled by a system service that does not depend on a graphical session (Wayland/X11). The service can also be used standalone with a config file, for example in headless scenarios. It's even possible to have the LACT daemon running on one machine, and then manage it remotely from another. See #technology #Linux #opensource #GPU
Fantastic News! South Africa's Outeniqua Choo-Tjoe to steam ahead again after 19 years “The return of the Outeniqua Choo-Tjoe steam train, which was officially announced on Monday, will not just be the revival of a beloved heritage attraction, but a major economic boost for the entire region.” It really looks like everything is in place now for this to happen. This is an incredibly beautiful piece of railway line, and I'll certainly make an effort to get there to once again experience this train ride. Hopefully the ride also encourages slightly longer stays by tourists too. But it looks like the full line opening could take nearly two years to complete. See #southafrica #tourism #steamlocomotives
The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare — Why Uploaded IDs are a Problem “A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive information online.” This was EXACTLY my concern about having to upload one's ID document to any private (or government) website. Neither a private organisation nor most government websites are immune to hacking. A password is easy to change, but an ID document is often a nightmare to change, and the ID number anyway stays the same. A fine does absolutely zero to benefit any end users, either. In South Africa we do have the POPI Act that has restrictions on what sort of data may be collected and stored about individuals, but in practice that is still a big problem as companies always want to collect for the sake of collecting. We've yet to see any CEO or a government official do jail time for weak controls of hacked sites. We need more severe penalties for companies (and governments) who lose control of private data, as well as for the hackers, and also to limit want really needs to be collected. At least I am finding now most banks and private organisations, who require some personal data for tax purposes, do insist it is encrypted with a password before sending over e-mail. Things are improving, but are still way behind where they need to be by now in 2025. See #technology #privacy #hacks
ProtonUp-Qt v2.14 Brings New Proton-EM Compatibility Tool “ProtonUp-Qt, an open-source GUI that streamlines the installation and updating of Proton-GE and Wine-based compatibility layers, enabling Linux gamers to run Windows-exclusive titles on their preferred distributions, has rolled out the brand-new 2.14 version. The key change in this release is the addition of Proton-EM, a new compatibility tool that places emphasis on Wayland, expanding gaming support for users who rely on custom Proton builds.” The tool has gotten really useful actually as I see you can also see which layers are not in use by any games, and the game list view shows which games are using which layers as well as which ones are compatible, and you can change those. I'm just not seeing the Proton-EM option yet for Wayland. See #technology #gaming #Linux