#Android Open Source Project

[hellsite-yano]

speaking of here's a curated list of open-source android apps which includes ad-free alternative clients for sites like youtube, twitter, and instagram, as well more lightweight email clients like FairEmail and much much more

[smellslikebot]

heads up for anyone using Authy for 2FA

authy's desktop app is being discontinued on March 19, 2024-- apparently moved up from an initially-planned date of August 19 for some reason

i think authy gets recommended a lot specifically for having a desktop option, and the EOL announcement email ended up in my spam folder, so i figured i should try to spread the word.

as far as potential alternatives go, so far i've found ente Authenticator, which has apps for Android and iOS and apparently allows you to access your 2FA codes on web as well. there's also 2FAS, which is open source and has a browser extension, but it sounds like the extension still requires your phone and they recently launched an NFT project(???) so... ymmv!

(of course there are plenty of good mobile-only authenticators, but again, the appeal of authy was that it enabled you to access your keys even if you lost your smartphone or didn't have one in the first place)

[sgiandubh]

Good morning to you...as always, this person is very indignant and enraged.

https://www.tumblr.com/maximumwobblerbanditdonut/748583730081333248/the-unexpected-guests?source=share

Dear (returning) Mythomaniac Anon,

Sorry for the delay and see below why. Well, then: how was that, at their end of the rope, across the street?

I know, I am quoting BIF (that petty, nasty, condescending woman), their Main Intellectual Luminary (LOL for years), but see how easy it is to boomerang anything?

And I will even suit myself and quote her some more, lookie here:

I am not even sorry. Karma is a bitch, like that and it seems to have backfired badly on BIF's comadre, 'Max'. You see, I can immediately tell when people who have NO idea about what LAW really is, start talking about it. They will always be oh so damn literal and oh so damn mechanical in their 'reasonings'. I mean, if law were to be read as is, why would we even bother going to law school, right? Why not have AI sort it out, literally and mechanically, too (and boy does 'Max' sound like an android when she starts droning her maximum wobbling bullshit)? You see, in law, it's never enough to copy/paste something, because this is about people, money and interests, being those individual or collective. Timelines are important (and indispensable in any legal approach), but never enough: what makes the difference is always the particular context and the interpretation of facts - that is, by the way, called jurisprudence, when it becomes a legally binding precedent (not our modest case, here), in common law system countries (the UK, the US) or a complementary source of law, like in Roman/Civil law systems, such as the French and Romanian ones, which I know best. There is a technical distinction between those two concepts (legally binding precedent and complementary source of law) and I once passed a whole year written exam in Public French Law with honors, picking this exact topic, but I won't bother you with it, Anon. In a nutshell, tread carefully when you open that droning mouth and leave no stone unturned, if possible. Otherwise, you'd make a fool out of yourself, with bullshit like this:

There is no Midhope Distillery Company Ltd, you fool. There once was the Midhope Castle Distillery Ltd, as I have abundantly shown in not one, but two posts. It did not 'change its name' in 2023, it was dissolved by voluntary write-off (third time might be a charm, across the street, maybe the coin would drop?). And one more time, for you Mordor people in the back: there is no way to know who the shareholders of a given company are, based on the Company House records, nor the amount of their participation. This is confidential information, as shown also in the Planning Proposal - once more, I repost the screenshot:

' The Business Plan, submitted (...) under Private and Confidential cover, provides background information on the applicant'. Including, but not limited to, the existing investors/shareholders - it is essential to show the local authorities your business project is not a whim or a dream.

She also writes confidently stuff like:

That is simply not true. As I have also shown in my last post, Outlander is explicitly mentioned in both the first and the revised Planning Proposals, as a strong argument for the entire business project. It may serve to remember that one of the elements justifying it was to provide the 20k seasonal visitors of the Midhope Castle Grounds an opportunity to access the (vastly) improved interior of the castle, along with a whisky related experience/discovery activity, accommodation and high-end dining opportunity. Again, I repost the screenshot, because those people are mendacious by nature and it is perhaps the only way to show them some facts (not useless factoids):

That being said, we can speculate and deduct a simple correlation between a company actively looking for investors to support their now vastly revised, ten-year project and an actor-cum-entrepreneur who might be interested/already involved in that project. Unless he'd make a formal announcement himself, at some point in time, there is no way to confirm. 'Max' should perhaps learn to water down her confident tone, sometimes, especially when it is obvious she did not look at the documents herself, used only Google in the arrogant and foolish hope 'those tinhat shippers are stupid' and has 0 (zero) legal expertise.

This whole thing might be pending approval, but let's not forget the first Planning Statement was approved back in 2020 (which is a good starting point), that they have secured a business partnership with the owner of the land, Lord Hope (the 4th Marquess of Linlithgow) and that as far as I could read during those past two days, all the reports seem ok, at least up until this point in time. I see no reason why they wouldn't meet and talk about it: on which planet is that such a big deal and on which planet could that be construed as 'conflict of interest' (another one of 'Max's' arguments), given the organic link between OL and Midhope, since 2013?

I also have made a hasty mistake, in my previous post, when dealing with Ken Robertson's participation to the project. He continued to be involved, as my penned timeline shows, in both Hopetoun Estate Distillery Ltd and Hopetoun Estate Whiskies Ltd, as a Director, continuously from May 2017 until their dissolution, in December 2022. Again, it's all on the timeline - see what I just did, here? LOL for a century and a half.

And for Marple's 'Sorry' clip, I have the perfect reply. Especially the chorus, of course - ignore the rest, it's about some Seventies playboy, quite an Alternate Universe from hers:

I will stop now, Anon. With the MPC Gala just round the corner, all the eyes will be on that one. This drama will probably draw to a fizzled denouement, as they always do, in this fandom. But I will follow that business project and report from time to time. I bet the farm we'll have news, rather sooner than later.

[chattercap]

Monthly Update: May 2025

Hello everyone, happy May!

It's a bit of a long one this time, so I'll get right into it.

What did I do this month?

I started off the month absolutely raring to finish refactoring my code to add much needed QOL features, including rollback and controller support, so that it would finally all be ready for my planned releases in the summer. However, after wrestling with the code for around a week, I ran into a frame rate issue that I simply could not fix, even in a completely empty project.

After tearing my hair out for around 6 hours working on it, I made a 4AM decision (which is apparently when I make all of my semi-significant game dev decisions): I would try out a new game engine.

If any of you have played my games since Karamu, you know that I originally worked in Unity. This was for a variety of reasons, but mainly I was a novice dev and I wanted a flexible engine that would allow me to target mobile devices. After the Unity pricing debacle a couple of years ago, I swapped to Godot because it was open-source and would allow me to reuse my C# code that I wrote for Unity. It was also the only open-source engine that supported the 2D animations that I used. However, of course, after the 2D animations weren't supported on Android for the longest time and proved to be controversial (some people did note that they were the only things they didn't like about my games, haha!), I decided to drop them - and there was really no reason for me to stick with Godot, other than sunk-cost fallacy.

Most of you probably enjoy OELVNs, and if so you're probably familiar with Ren'py. It's a game engine designed specifically for making visual novels, which is why it's so popular in the indie VN space, and it comes with most of the features that you would like when playing or making a VN. This included a lot of features that I wanted to implement myself in Godot, including rollback and controller support. Ren'py also runs rather well on a wide variety of platforms, both when making and playing games - which was ultimately the reason that I decided to try it for a few weeks.

Without getting into the nitty gritty, I spent the latter half of the month working in Ren'py, and I found it to be wonderfully easy, convenient to use, and logically organized. I pretty quickly implemented the GUI for My Husband is a Stranger and Project R, and also implemented the basic script, voice acting, and game selection for the Karamu trilogy.

You can check out some of the screenshots sprinkled in between the wall of text here (it's all looking very spiffy, if I do say so myself! A big thank you to my talented GUI artists, Kathaeris and Elduator!)

Since everything is going rather well, I've decided to shift all of my future projects to Ren'py for the time being. This includes My Husband is a Stranger, Project R, the Karamu trilogy, the MindMindMind Android port (I hope to make a Web build of this one as well since the assets are pretty lean?), and the full version of The Deepwater Witch (+ other various unannounced projects).

Here is a (not definitive) list of features that I will be removing/changing because of the change in engine:

-The speech bubbles will not dynamically resize to fit the size of the text. This isn't impossible to implement, but it's a little more work than it's worth. Instead, speech bubbles will remain a static size for several lines until I manually change them. I don't think this in particular should bother anyone, but this will lead to a few other changes as well.

-Because the speech bubbles aren't dynamically sized based on the size of the text, I will be removing the ability to choose the font size. I will, of course, make the default font size relatively large and readable (I want everyone to be able to experience my games without getting headaches, after all!) It just doesn't make sense to accommodate smaller text sizes that won't fit well in the speech bubbles.

-I will also be limiting the amount of chooseable fonts. Beforehand I basically added as many fonts as I thought was reasonable (6 with MindMindMind… I basically just kept adding fonts as I made more games…) since more options = better, but because I'll be manually sizing the text bubbles from now on, I'll need to check that the sizes work for each font. To make this doable, I'll probably be limiting the font options to 4: a serif font, a sans-serif font, Open Dyslexic, and Atkinson Hyperlegible. If you have any requests for accessibility fonts, please let me know and I'll try to accommodate those as well!

-I'll be removing the dark and light reading options. It's not impossible to implement in Ren'py, but it's a little more difficult. Instead, I plan to use a more varied amount of speech bubble designs and layouts that are designed to fit the overall presentation of the games better.

Here are features that will be added in my Ren'py games:

-All of Ren'py's built-in QOL features 🙏. If you're a visual novel enjoyer, these will probably be familiar to you, but they include: rollback, quick save/load, optional self-voicing, full controller and keyboard navigation, etc.

-Better performance and platform support (I hope). From what I've heard, Ren'py games are a bit faster and easier to run than either Unity or Godot games, on a wider variety of operating systems. My Godot games also didn't run on MacOS Monterey at all for some reason, which shouldn't be a problem in Ren'py (unless I am somehow cursed by the Apple gods). As I mentioned before, I plan on adding Android builds for my future games, and with Ren'py I will also look into adding Web builds (if I can - a lot of my games will be a little too heavy for it, most likely!)

For anyone who just wants to play my games, the tl;dr of all this nonsense is: I'll be making games faster, they should run better, and I'll be trading some QOL features for much more helpful and better QOL features. For anyone who plays a lot of OELVNs, essentially you should expect my games to run like and have the same features as most of the other games you play 😂

What will I be doing this month?

Since this month is Otome Jam, I really want to release something for it! The last Karamu part needs to cook a little bit longer because I'm waiting on some assets, but I plan on releasing the demo for My Husband is a Stranger, likely sometime next month. For that, I'll be working on the final CGs and coding in the script. If I have time, I'll also work on putting together the CGs for the demo of Project R and tinkering away on the Karamu trilogy and the MMM port.

Thank you to everyone who's following along, and see you next month!

Chattercap

[herrenxenoberg]

Introducing my fanschool project...

I have two TWST fanschools in progress but I want to show the one I have been developing for a long while...

Luxglow Prep (Fanschool based on Pixar)

Location of the school (Pinpointed on the game's map):

The school is situated in the Land of Dawning, a distance away from Sage's Island but still relatively close.

Description of the School:

"A magical academy that has the same long-standing reputation as Night Raven College, its door are open to students of all backgrounds who wishes to learn and familiarize with the concept of balanced morality."

This school is founded much later than Night Raven College, but has gained an equal amount of recognition by scholars who are given options after their elementary graduation for its highly advanced facilities and utilities, as well as a very well-organized study environment. Thanks to the advancements of magitech, Luxglow Prep is the first ever arcane academy that adapted the use of the technology into their navigation, organization and power source management. At the core of this academy, lies a highly advanced artificial intelligence going by the name "Lampi", who is tasked with managing the student body, the school network and the dorm sorting process. Unlike Night Raven College, their historical inspirations come from spoken tales about each dorm's motto and theme.

How the school system works:

Because it is more advanced technologically, the school system is vastly different than the other arcane academies in Twisted Wonderland. The admission process revolves a transportation vehicle (similar to MVR-A from WALL-E) arriving at the student's residence, before being asked to rest inside a special pod designed with soft cushions like the NRC coffins. They'll be put into a slumber within the pod by a specially-programmed sleep mist administrator.

Once they arrived at the academy, they'll be placed in a stasis chamber, which is where the sorting ceremony will be held, and will be awakened when the time calls for it. Once awoken, they'll be dressed in the ceremonial robes by automated androids situated in the chamber and brought to the sorting area. The sorting area is where Luxglow Prep's sacred magitech artefact resides, a massive enchanted lamp that is said to sort mages by illuminating them with the light that befits their aptitude and their dorm.

The dorms in Luxglow Prep are labeled as "houses" instead (like sorority houses in colleges), and instead of travelling by mirrors, they travel by doors (similar to ones from Monsters Inc), enchanted doorways that can lead a person to a desired location or contains a dimensional pocket space upon entering.

Luxglow Prep Uniforms:

For the uniform look, I wanted to capture the feel of more rich type of school uniforms with the sweater vest and long sleeve shirts. The PE outfit is mostly a full-body tights and a jersey set they can wear. For the alchemy/lab fit, I took some reference inspirations from the CDA hazmat suits from Monsters Inc as a base. And for the ceremonial robe, I picked the one fit Merida is dressed in from Brave, and made it androgynous enough to work as a ceremonial fit. As for the standard wand they'll use, I went for the staff Ian Lightfoot wields from Onward. (Yeap, a lot of pixar references are packed in one go here).

Staff Members and Dorms will be revealed soon.

[redbo-and-simbo]

(door opens)

Hey, got your food, boss.

(nearly inaudible chortle)

Don't call me that.

What, too professional?

You don't work for me.

I know, I know. I was using it more like..a turn of phrase, I guess?

I see.

(two boxes set down)

You didn't want to eat in the cafeteria?

(rolling chair is dragged from a workbench)

Uh..not really. I don't like hanging out around the workers.

(weight settles onto chair)

Which one's mine?

Whichever. It's the same thing.

Ha. Makes sense. Your body, at least, is still a copy of mine.

We have the same tongue.

I..guess you could put it like that, yeah.

(slightly awkward chuckle)

(boxes open)

You cleaned up the android.

Yeah. Some of the dermal material is stained so..I'll have to replace it since I don't want to deep clean all that.

..You gotten around to repairing it at all?

...

Hey, it's alright..

I don't know why I'm struggling with it so much. I've built this thing dozens of times with no problems. Now..I don't even wanna look at it.

Why?

...

I'm..not sure.

I guess I feel..bitter, about this whole project.

I mean- You have been for a while. If that were the problem, then nothing would've changed.

What's wrong then?

Huh?

Please..prophet, I- I feel lost. Okay? I need to know what's wrong, in your eyes.

(deep breath)

(long sigh)

...

From what I can tell you.. It seems like you don't want to confront your guilt, y'know? I can respect the stubbornness on insisting your way is right all the time, but..

I think you know that how you treat the android is no better than how the Creator treats you. How he feels just as unseen and uncared about as you do.

It's kind of weird from my perspective but..I get why both of you gravitate towards me. It's not because of who I am. I act like any other Evbo. It's because of what I am to you both. To you, I'm the creator's right hand man, I guess. The first scrap of his presence since you made this world.

And to him, well..I'm a source for that Evbo attention be was coded to need. Y'know, so your project was easier. And I know you're gonna tone it back but, still. My point stands. You said it yourself, you're a lot more similar to him than you thought.

I think you've gone through a lot here. I think..you don't really want to deal with to this kinda..parallel, I guess, that you accidentally made. Does that..make sense? Am I on the mark?

(deep sigh)

..I don't understand how everyone can read me like a book. I thought- I thought I was doing well. I don't..want to feel like this. I don't want to think like this. I don't want to feel and think, period. All I want is to be the creator's vessel.

I know..

But you have to work with what you've got. And hey, maybe getting through this will bring you closer to being the perfect Evbo for him. Evbos are all kinds of underdogs and unlikely heroes after all.

...

I'll..

I can.. I can start working on him after we eat.

Just..

Could you..stay with me?

It's..idiotic, but..I'm not quite sure I want to be alone with my thoughts right now.

(sympathetic sigh)

Of course, Red.

I'll be by your side the whole time.

[slippery-minghus]

System Breach Sunday 🟡

#8

Threat assessment protocols fizzled sharply at the edges of his vision, ready to take action—but there was nothing he could do. Detective Reed was an ally. Any act of defiance, any harm to a human without explicit orders…

>WARNING: STRESS LEVELS RISING - 43%

Connor focused on his objective. “The Lieutenant is due to arrive shortly, Detective,” he supplied, tone modulated to register as calm and even, unaffected. With a possible lead to uncover in the deviant’s notebook, the statement was based more in truth than the vague excuse he’d offered Detective Collins. The sooner he could placate Reed, retrieve the notebook, and get back to work—the sooner he would have a reason to summon the Lieutenant.

Gavin all but cringed in contempt, nose wrinkling as he peered down at Connor. “Sure he is,” Reed replied, rolling his eyes.

Decidedly, Connor did not refute the Detective’s apparent skepticism. His stress levels were still on the rise, and the efficiency of the supplemental charge entering the port at his wrist was beginning to suffer. Even with his threat assessment protocols pushed as far into the background as he could manage, Connor’s overtaxed system would tip back over into draining power if he did not resolve this exchange soon.

This time, he chose a tone that was pleasant, perhaps even supplicating. Appeasement projections deemed it to have the highest chance of success. “Thank you for stopping by, Detective. If I may have the notebook back, I would like to return to work.”

Connor had hardly finished speaking before his algorithms stuttered in recognition. He’d made the wrong choice.

Reed grinned, but it wasn’t kind. Far from it. “Oh, this?” he asked, making a show of examining the notebook, as if he had not been aware of what he was holding. His grin widened. It was nothing like that moment in the alley, but Connor remembered the deviant, the predatory look it gave, and—

Reed slapped the notebook a few times against his open palm, before waving it at the android. “So what do we have here? A clue from the hunk of plastic you and Lieutenant ‘Jack Daniels’ still can’t get your act together enough to catch?” He thumbed through the pages, only to click his tongue in disgust, “The fuck even is this, your deviant Little Miss Teen Angst, or some shit? This its diary?”

Connor remained silent. It was a gamble, but there was a chance that refusing to engage would persuade Reed to lose interest.

Finally, for the first time since the interaction began, it seemed Connor had chosen the correct course of action. Gavin had hardly paused long enough to allow the android to speak anyway, instead finding further amusement in the deviant’s notebook. Before long, the Detective’s sneer of disgust gave way to a poorly stifled laugh.

Reed turned the book to show Connor the reason for his amusement, continuing to snicker in revulsion. Across the open pages was a spread of pasted in photographs, neat and uniform; each was of a human face, displaying varied expressions of physical pain. Connor’s databanks were quick to supply the collection of films and television episodes the images had been sourced from, but he was no less perplexed by the sight.

“What a joke!” Gavin barked a garish laugh. He contorted his expression mockingly, mimicking an image of a woman crying in distress—only for his face to fall a moment later, dark and angry. He slammed the notebook shut. “If Fowler had just listened to me, he’d have agreed that this isn’t even a fucking case. But no, it’s the top investigation for the walking fleshlight Cyberlife sent to steal our damn jobs. Unbelievable.”

Reed huffed through gritted teeth, still seething. He ran a hand through his hair. “I’d have caught the piece of trash already, but whatever, take your time, the fucker’s only killing androids anyway. Not even worth the damn recycling fee.” With a noise of disgust, Gavin dropped the notebook into the wastebasket beside Connor’s desk and stiffly wiped his hands. “Shame about all your dead friends though,” the Detective chuckled, giving a dismissive wave as he turned to walk away.

Connor’s stress levels dropped so sharply at Gavin’s departure that he nearly lost control of his expression and posture.

[bananiballecter]

Ive been going down a rabbit hole of open source robotics and really want to build a 6 axis arm just so I can stick a dildo on the end of it.

On a tangential project, there's a control mechanism that can be theoretically used to control each axis of the arm by using a contraption that looks the same, but has encoders instead of motors for each joint. By moving the end of the arm on the controller, I can move the arm of the robot.

SO, what does this mean? I could hook a fleshlight up to one unit and the dildo up to the other, and experience some odd mechanized sensation of fucking myself in either direction.

That got me thinking about gathering data about how I fuck myself. I could hook up some electrodes and analyze physical response tagged vocally while I use robots to masturbate. I could then analyze the data, pull out movement sequences that I really like, then build a second arm to join the first. With the data I could just sit back and have some automated gooning.

BUT Wait, there's more! With that kind of automation, I could either rig up the program to a model in unreal and fuck a character in VR, or I could add trackers to the physical robots and have the assets rigged to the trackers and if I decide to take manual control, the scene would be dynamic (of course I could close loop my motors and pull that data but that get into a different realm of expense plus a big redesign). Maybe an existing dev would be willing to add trackable characters if I could sell them on gonners wanting to track dolls. Hmmmm...

These aren't even sexy androids, they are automation hardware that I'm trying to use to turn myself into a cum factory. My brain broke. Anyhow, just thought I'd share my day browsing github and Ali express while actively resisting the urge to buy the gyno chair for sale on govdeals.com.

[mariacallous]

The Chinese government announced Tuesday it is opening an investigation into Google in response to 10 percent tariffs imposed on Chinese imports by US president Donald Trump. Minutes after the tariffs went into effect, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said it was probing the American tech giant for potentially violating the country’s anti-monopoly law.

The Chinese government may have strategically chosen to go after Google because it has limited operations in the country, ensuring the hit to the US tech giant would be relatively minimal. The move gives China plenty of room to escalate if the Trump administration announces further tariffs or other trade measures. Google declined to comment.

China also announced it was putting more restrictions on the sale of some critical minerals like tungsten and slapping additional tariffs on farm equipment, pickup trucks, liquified natural gas, coal, and other goods from the US. While the US isn’t reliant on China for all of the impacted minerals, the country does control the majority of the world’s tungsten supply, which is used in light bulbs, semiconductors, and ammunition.

“China’s position is firm and consistent. Trade and tariff wars have no winners,” China’s Ministry of Foreign affairs said in a statement Sunday shortly after the tariffs were announced. “This move cannot solve the US’s problems at home and, more importantly, does not benefit either side, still less the world.”

China has kept Google in its crosshairs during the ongoing trade war with the US over the last few years. In 2020, the government reportedly considered opening an antitrust investigation into Google's Android business, according to Reuters. The deliberations followed a complaint from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which was targeted by Trump during his first term.

Because of US sanctions, Huawei is unable to use American-made software like Google Mobile Services, a suite of tools widely used across the smartphone industry. The restrictions forced the company to develop its own operating system called Harmony OS.

But most smartphones around the world still run on Android, which has sparked competition investigations in a number of countries, some of which have led to concessionary changes designed to give consumers and app developers more choices and lower fees. In China, several smartphone makers continue to rely on an open source version of Android.

This past December, Chinese authorities also opened an anti-monopoly investigation into Nvidia, the chipmaker whose GPUs play a crucial role in the development of generative AI and have become a significant source of trade sparring between the US and China. The announcement came soon after the Biden administration further tightened China’s access to high-end semiconductors.

About 15 years ago, Google stopped offering a search experience tailored for China following a series of Chinese government-linked cyberattacks against it and other US companies. Google debated reentering China with a search engine about seven years ago, but the project was scuttled following protests from some employees concerned about supporting Chinese surveillance and censorship.

Google has also stopped short of directly selling cloud technologies in China, as local laws could threaten the privacy and security assurances it offers to customers in other markets. Other Google services such as YouTube are blocked by Chinese internet regulators.

China has allowed domestic companies to buy advertisements through Google so that they can market to customers abroad. But the revenue from those deals is relatively small, and China didn't even garner a mention in parent company Alphabet's annual financial report last year. That stands in contrast to Meta, which lists China among its biggest markets in terms of advertiser location and said last year that China-based advertisers account for 10 percent of its annual revenue.

[abbiistabbii]

so i found you from that post (which will be obvious once you read the rest off this ask) and want to say the following: get nazipie and the defender of that (or any for that matter) billionaire pdf file off of linux and maybe i’ll consider switching to linux

also please give the mad computer scientist an albert wesker makeover

A...are you not using Linux because Pewdiepie and Stallman are Linux users?

You know that, for one, you, potentially using Linux, will not positively or negatively affect the Lives of Stallman or Kjellberg and for two, there are some even worse people using Windows and Mac and Android and iOS, yet you still use it. You using Linux will have no positive or negative baring on you or anyone else.

This isn’t like JK Rowing and Harry Potter, where watching the new Harry Potter or buying a Galbraith book gives money to the Wicked Witch of Weem which she then uses to strip trans and gender variant people of their rights. Even when Stallman was fucking Head of the FSF before being kicked out, you using nano or any other GNU project did nothing to benefit Stallman or anyone because it was Free and Open Source Software! The whole point was that Stallman didn’t really own it as we would know it and he would not benefit financially because, again, it’s Free and Open Source Software: he doesn’t benefit financially because the whole point of it is that it’s released, free of charge, as a public good.

Also Pewdiepie is just a Linux user. You using Linux does not benefit him nor should it reflect badly on you. He’s not getting a check from the Linux Foundation every time someone downloads and installs Mint or Ubuntu. He’s literally just using Arch and Hyprland. Now would I use Arch? No, but that’s because Arch is a complicated Distro and I like GUIs, simple to use TUIs and a set up that doesn’t break with every update. Do I use Hyprland (despite some of it’s own drama)? Yes, because it’s a great Window Manager. I’m writing this post while using Hyprland! It does not, however, make me a Nazi because Pewds is too.

Unless you’re using a Distro that does something like, charge you to use it and sends money to the KKK or something, using Linux has no baring on you and provides no benefit to anyone like Stallman or Kjellberg because again, they do not benefit financially benefit or benefit in any way from you using it. Stallman doesn’t financially benefit from you using it on principle and right now, he’s toxic goods and nobody wants to even go near him, so he can’t even benefit on clout.

Terrible people are going to be using Linux, terrible people are going to even contribute to projects, hell, terrible people are going to start and lead projects (see xLibre, which is a laughing stock anyway because nobody is going to use X.org anyway and the guy leading it is a toxic rightwing nutcase who’s been kicked out of projects for being a right wing nutjob) but the thing about Open Source Software is that they don’t really benefit in any tangible ways because, by definition, Free and Open Source Software is free and Open Source. If you don’t use any technology used by horrible people, you’d be butt naked and living in the woods.

Go use Linux, Stallman and Kjellberg aren’t gonna benefit from it in anyway and the other people using it won’t have any baring on you as a person. If anything, using Linux is a net positive because it saves eWaste from going to the tip. If using the same distro as Stallman and Kjellberg bothers you, don’t use Trisquel or Arch. I don’t, but it’s not because of Stallman and Kjellberg, it’s because I wanna use Non-free stuff on my system and Arch is...well...Arch.

[genericpuff]

(about the bell post) i dont know anything about lore olympus but is there something inherently bad in using free stock images? like, thats what stock images are for right? i know that its probably lazy or whatever but is that the only problem? /genuine

Part of the issue with using stock photos is licensing. Like fonts, they're in abundance online and easy to snag for "free", but as soon as you enter commercial work, it becomes a legal minefield. Stock photos typically belong to either individuals or corporations that rely on people buying the rights to those photos to use them; if they don't, they could very well be sued for copyright infringement.

In that respect, emojis fall into a similar grey area. Some emojis are public domain/open source meaning they're free to use for everyone. But many are not. It's why different social media platforms and different phone providers use different emoji's - it's not purely for branding (though that is a factor as Facebook emojis have become distinguishable from Android emojis) but also for ownership.

So, in the legal sense, I do not know if the bell emoji that Rachel used in LO is legally hers to use, or if it's even subject to such laws (it could be an open source image meaning it's free-for-all). I'm hoping for her sake she's not breaking any sort of copyright ownership laws, but I'm also not a lawyer and wouldn't know how to get that information even if I wanted to lmao

Aside from the legal, it's also just... sigh I'm gonna get into more opinionated territory here, but even if something is open source, even if you're legally free to use a stock photo or other tool to create your comic, there's also the ethics/integrity of it. Lore Olympus is not a Canvas comic. It is not an indie hobbyist project. It's a commercial product with multiple people working on it behind the scenes, book deals, merch deals, a TV deal, and an upcoming feature at this year's SDCC, with Rachel headlining alongside Cassandra Claire (Mortal Instruments) and Jeff Smith (BONE). Webtoons is trying very hard to market LO as a 'flagship' series and convince the public that it can stand alongside other literature juggernauts.

What I'm trying to say here is, if Rachel did legally use it, it doesn't make it any less cheap. There's a lot of discussion in the art field over the usage of external tools and assets in art creation, especially here in the west. 3D models, AI shaders, gradient maps - there are tons of things that exist now that stand to benefit artists, but can be abused or used poorly, being used as less of a tool to benefit an artist with pre-existing skills and more as a cheap shortcut to circumvent actual skill/effort.

The bell emoji isn't the heart of the issue I pointed out in that post. If it were an isolated thing, if LO were an otherwise impeccable comic with high-effort art and just one little picture of a bell, it wouldn't be that big of an issue.

But LO isn't that comic. The recipe of its art development week after week has become very cheap and low-effort, and the bell is really just the cherry on top.

And just to make it clear, I do stand by artists being able to use tools that make their lives easier. None of this is to say it's wrong to use stock images, or 3D models, or gradient maps, or whatever have you. Those tools exist to help and can be used in fun and experimental ways to bring new perspectives and life to your work. And I'm not going to scrutinize whatever shortcuts are being used in a comic that's being made for free by a hobbyist or someone who's still learning.

But like all tools, there are still ways to use them to the detriment of your own work, either due to a lack of understanding as to how that tool works, or lack of effort to blend it into your work. It can make it glaringly obvious that third-party assets are being used, and can often distract from what you've drawn (the complete opposite of what most people are trying to achieve).

When I think of art shortcuts and tools being used poorly, I think of Let's Play and its stock photo background characters.

I think of Time Gate: [AFTERBIRTH]'s stiff default 3D models that result in lifeless poses and restricted body types, which I am VERY eager to move on from LMAO

I think of LO's 3D backgrounds with only 1-2 colors thrown in and the characters floating in front of them. Or sometimes no characters at all even when people are speaking.

And of course, I think of the emoji bell, which could have easily just been drawn as a door or an actual doorbell, and not some random grey bell copied and pasted from a Google search.

All that's to say, too much reliance on poorly-implemented assets can take a great piece of work down to a mediocre one. Of course, the assets definitely aren't the only issue with LO, but they are definitely a piece of the problem. There might not be anything 'wrong' with using assets, but they can still be used poorly or result in cheap-looking work and that's primarily what I'm calling out here.

[harawata44]

スマホをアマチュア無線トランシーバーに変身させる「kv4p HT」 - GIGAZINE

・kv4p HT - open source ham radio transceiver for your smartphone

以下引用

「kv4p HT」はAndroidスマートフォンと組み合わせて使うアマチュア無線トランシーバーで、音声通信やテキストメッセージの送受信が可能です。kv4p HTはハードウェアもソフトウェアもすべてオープンソースで開発されており、合計35ドル(約5300円)の部品で作ることができます。

以下がkv4p HTです。本体部分は手のひらサイズで、長いアンテナが装着されています。

Androidスマートフォンの背面に貼り付けて、USBケーブルで接続。kv4p HTにバッテリーは内蔵されておらず、スマートフォンから電力供給を受ける仕組みです。このため、「車のグローブボックスに入れっぱなしにする」という使い方でも火災の心配なし。

短いタイプのアンテナに付け替えることもできます。

専用アプリの操作画面はこんな感じ。お気に入りの周波数を登���しておけます。 また、無線を用いたテキストメッセージの送受信にも対応しています。

kv4p HTはファームウェアや基板の設計図が公開されており、無線モジュールやマイクロコントローラーなどの部品を自分で集めて組み立てられます。必要な部品は以下のリンク先で確認可能で、合計金額は35ドル(約5300円)です。

・Quickstart - kv4p HT

また、ケースやスタンドの3Dデータも公開されており、3Dプリンターで出力可能です。

・kv4p HT case and stand by kv4p - Thingiverse

kv4p HTの組み立て手順は以下の動画で解説されています。

・kv4p HT step-by-step build instructions - turn your phone into a modern ham radio - YouTube

kv4p HTのAndroidアプリは記事作成時点ではベータ版の段階で、プロジェクトチームに連絡することでベータテストに参加できます。また、アプリやファームウェアのソースコードは以下のリンク先で公開されています。

・GitHub - VanceVagell/kv4p-ht: Open source handheld ham radio project KV4P-HT

基板の設計図も以下で公開中。ハードウェアとソフトウェア双方ともライセンスはGPLv3です。

・kv4p HT - ESP-WROOM-32 - OSHWLab

[staticbluue]

Greetings and Salutations! Commissions Open!!

Commission me on artistree! They use your money to plant trees!

Read my horror comic Dreams for Sale on Webtoon and Tapas!!!!!

Buy a print!

I'm Brian (he/him) and I make art. This blog is mostly for my illustrations, but I also do comics, short and weird writing, and vocal synth music. I have a sideblog for reblogs, doodles, and photographs. You can find me on Instagram with art and music, and YouTube with music.

I have a short psychological horror comic on Webtoon Canvas and Tapas from Halloween of 2023.

Here is a guide to what I post on this blog:

CURRENT FIXATION: M*A*S*H

Star Trek: Lots of Data. I swear I'm a comic artist, I swear I'm working on my original projects, but. . . Data. . .

Dreams for Sale: A horror anthology about the colliding paths of a journalist and a shopkeeper.

Status: UPDATES MONTHLY ON WEBTOON AND TAPAS !!!

Forget Me Not: A drama about mental illness, loss, talent, and rock music.

Status: scripting in progress

Cicada Season: A short story about the unsettling events that occur before an aspiring writer goes off to college.

Status: scripting in progress

1920s story, currently untitled: A supernatural horror story involving a private detective and the. . . person. . . he finds by the side of the road.

Status: saved for later

Beautiful Machine: A sci-fi story about a guy with an android repair shop, his assistant, and an android who refuses to be turned off.

Status: saved for later

Circuit: A far-future sci-fi mystery about the power source of a country that exists entirely in an underground silo.

Status: saved for later

Mari: A surreal story about the way one artist sees the world.

Status: saved for later

Death of the Author: A dark comedy about a struggling author, a spirit, and a medium running a Korean exorcism business out of a New Jersey apartment.

Status: saved for later

Today's reminder: Short and usually surreal posts that I write just for fun!

[marxistfurry]

Pinned Post

Side Blog: https://somethingdifferent.wordpress.com/

Software Projects (Fallen Star/Marxist Furry)

Completed Projects 

Reddit 

A simple picture posting reddit iphone app. A Computer Science University Project at Weber State University for an ios/iphone development class. It uses the reddit api for logging into an account to upload a photo to imgur and posting it to a user defined subredit. It also finds all the images on a subreddit and displays them in a list where the user can click ont one of the items in the list and it will display the image 

https://github.com/ballju/iReddit

In Progress 

Fallen Star 

Converting Gamemaker School Project from Gamemaker 8 to Godot 

Playlist Transfer 

Transfers Playlists from streaming apps from one service to another. Using C# and .Net framework. It will be a console application.

Mood Tracker 

Open-source daily journal and daily tracking of both mood and other important things. 

Avatar Sim 

Choose your own adventure based on JC’s Avatar 

ADHD Tracker

(Private Github Repo for now) An time tracker that using Android TTS to help those with poor time management to keep on track storing tasks by priority

DBT Diary Card

(Private Github Repo for now) An application for generating dbt diary cards for thearpy and personal tracking

videowyrm

A fork of a decentralized movie/tv/anime social tracker based on a book tracking app

Frequently Used Tags

For most of the posts the were posted by me its #original post 

#journal

#history #socialism 

#song lyrics   #song of the day   #metal #music   #Bandcamp 

#hg wells   #old movies   #colorized   #youtube movies   #Youtube

#movies

#open source   #linux   #computer #piracy #tech

#video games #mods   #quake 

[govindhtech]

Obsidian And RTX AI PCs For Advanced Large Language Model

How to Utilize Obsidian‘s Generative AI Tools. Two plug-ins created by the community demonstrate how RTX AI PCs can support large language models for the next generation of app developers.

Obsidian Meaning

Obsidian is a note-taking and personal knowledge base program that works with Markdown files. Users may create internal linkages for notes using it, and they can see the relationships as a graph. It is intended to assist users in flexible, non-linearly structuring and organizing their ideas and information. Commercial licenses are available for purchase, however personal usage of the program is free.

Obsidian Features

Electron is the foundation of Obsidian. It is a cross-platform program that works on mobile operating systems like iOS and Android in addition to Windows, Linux, and macOS. The program does not have a web-based version. By installing plugins and themes, users may expand the functionality of Obsidian across all platforms by integrating it with other tools or adding new capabilities.

Obsidian distinguishes between community plugins, which are submitted by users and made available as open-source software via GitHub, and core plugins, which are made available and maintained by the Obsidian team. A calendar widget and a task board in the Kanban style are two examples of community plugins. The software comes with more than 200 community-made themes.

Every new note in Obsidian creates a new text document, and all of the documents are searchable inside the app. Obsidian works with a folder of text documents. Obsidian generates an interactive graph that illustrates the connections between notes and permits internal connectivity between notes. While Markdown is used to accomplish text formatting in Obsidian, Obsidian offers quick previewing of produced content.

Generative AI Tools In Obsidian

A group of AI aficionados is exploring with methods to incorporate the potent technology into standard productivity practices as generative AI develops and speeds up industry.

Community plug-in-supporting applications empower users to investigate the ways in which large language models (LLMs) might improve a range of activities. Users using RTX AI PCs may easily incorporate local LLMs by employing local inference servers that are powered by the NVIDIA RTX-accelerated llama.cpp software library.

It previously examined how consumers might maximize their online surfing experience by using Leo AI in the Brave web browser. Today, it examine Obsidian, a well-known writing and note-taking tool that uses the Markdown markup language and is helpful for managing intricate and connected records for many projects. Several of the community-developed plug-ins that add functionality to the app allow users to connect Obsidian to a local inferencing server, such as LM Studio or Ollama.

To connect Obsidian to LM Studio, just select the “Developer” button on the left panel, load any downloaded model, enable the CORS toggle, and click “Start.” This will enable LM Studio’s local server capabilities. Because the plug-ins will need this information to connect, make a note of the chat completion URL from the “Developer” log console (“http://localhost:1234/v1/chat/completions” by default).

Next, visit the “Settings” tab after launching Obsidian. After selecting “Community plug-ins,” choose “Browse.” Although there are a number of LLM-related community plug-ins, Text Generator and Smart Connections are two well-liked choices.

For creating notes and summaries on a study subject, for example, Text Generator is useful in an Obsidian vault.

Asking queries about the contents of an Obsidian vault, such the solution to a trivia question that was stored years ago, is made easier using Smart Connections.

Open the Text Generator settings, choose “Custom” under “Provider profile,” and then enter the whole URL in the “Endpoint” section. After turning on the plug-in, adjust the settings for Smart Connections. For the model platform, choose “Custom Local (OpenAI Format)” from the options panel on the right side of the screen. Next, as they appear in LM Studio, type the model name (for example, “gemma-2-27b-instruct”) and the URL into the corresponding fields.

The plug-ins will work when the fields are completed. If users are interested in what’s going on on the local server side, the LM Studio user interface will also display recorded activities.

Transforming Workflows With Obsidian AI Plug-Ins

Consider a scenario where a user want to organize a trip to the made-up city of Lunar City and come up with suggestions for things to do there. “What to Do in Lunar City” would be the title of the new note that the user would begin. A few more instructions must be included in the query submitted to the LLM in order to direct the results, since Lunar City is not an actual location. The model will create a list of things to do while traveling if you click the Text Generator plug-in button.

Obsidian will ask LM Studio to provide a response using the Text Generator plug-in, and LM Studio will then execute the Gemma 2 27B model. The model can rapidly provide a list of tasks if the user’s machine has RTX GPU acceleration.

Or let’s say that years later, the user’s buddy is visiting Lunar City and is looking for a place to dine. Although the user may not be able to recall the names of the restaurants they visited, they can review the notes in their vault Obsidian‘s word for a collection of notes to see whether they have any written notes.

A user may ask inquiries about their vault of notes and other material using the Smart Connections plug-in instead of going through all of the notes by hand. In order to help with the process, the plug-in retrieves pertinent information from the user’s notes and responds to the request using the same LM Studio server. The plug-in uses a method known as retrieval-augmented generation to do this.

Although these are entertaining examples, users may see the true advantages and enhancements in daily productivity after experimenting with these features for a while. Two examples of how community developers and AI fans are using AI to enhance their PC experiences are Obsidian plug-ins.

Thousands of open-source models are available for developers to include into their Windows programs using NVIDIA GeForce RTX technology.

Read more on Govindhtech.com

[santhosheswaran]

Flutter

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit (SDK) created by Google. It allows developers to build natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. With Flutter, you can create visually rich and highly performant apps that work on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and the web.

Here are the key features of Flutter:

Single Codebase for Multiple Platforms: You can write one codebase in Dart (Flutter’s programming language) and deploy it to different platforms like Android, iOS, web, and desktop.

Fast Development: Flutter offers a feature called "hot reload," which lets developers see changes instantly without needing to restart the app, speeding up the development process.

Rich UI Components: Flutter comes with a wide range of pre-built widgets that make it easy to create beautiful and responsive user interfaces. These widgets are customizable, and you can also create your own.

High Performance: Since Flutter apps are compiled to native code, they tend to have high performance, with smoother animations and faster startup times.

Dart Language: Flutter uses Dart, a language developed by Google, known for being easy to learn and offering a balance between performance and productivity.

Growing Ecosystem: There’s a large community around Flutter, which means lots of packages and plugins are available for adding functionality like accessing device hardware, network requests, animations, and more.

Flutter is popular among developers for its versatility and efficiency, especially for projects targeting multiple platforms.

Contact for more information : Sam Jose - 824-816-2712