I’m glad to announce v0.4.0 release!

The major feature of the new release is fltk-frontend and improvements BEP protocol implementation.

You can download ready-to-use binaries for Linux x86_64, Windows (WindowsXP is supported!) and Mac OS X (Apple silicon).

Syncspirit is a syncthing-compatible synchronization program that implements BEP-protocol. Syncspirit is a syncthing-compatible is written from the scratch software in C++ as classical desktop application, which had different technical decisions on its foundation to overcome syncthing limitations.

Syncspirt source code uses GPLv3 license.

Any feedback is welcome!

WBR, basiliscos.

Select the square on OpenStreeMap and the app will generate the world directory, which can be opened in Minecraft Java Edition.

I haven't figured out yet what's the best world scale ratio, but visiting known locations is fun.

If you use Freetube, you haven't failed to notice that Google is on the war path again and broke it a few days ago. See this bug report.

Please note that it's been fixed in this PR. If you download the nightly build #5652, it now works like a champ.

Thanks team Freetube!

Was reading this article, and it got me thinking. There's lots of people who are happy to complain at length, but what if we made it a point to pick a particular day each year to express our collective gratitude for the work people do for FOSS?

Whether in the form of donations or kind words (maybe even joining a project), it might be something that helps keep people going on the things they love but for which they don't get a lot of appreciation.

Curious to hear y'all's thoughts.

Edit: Someone mentioned I Love Free Software Day, which is cool that it exists. I like the idea behind it, but I'm hesitant to piggyback upon a well-known holiday, for fear of being wholly overshadowed (Valentine's Day is already stressful enough for some people).

ArcaneChat is a FLOSS private and secure messenger focused on privacy and friendly user experience.

💬 Reliable instant messaging with multi-profile and multi-device support.

⚡️ Sign-up easily and anonymously, no phone number or any private data required.

🎮 Interactive mini-apps in chats for gaming, shopping lists, productivity and collaboration.

🔒 End-to-end encrypted chats safe against network and server attacks.

ArcaneChat is a Delta Chat client and it is compatible with other Delta Chat clients.

Source code: https://github.com/ArcaneChat/

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/32660327

Almost after a year since the first release in the sixth generation of the popular Linux and UNIX desktop environment, KDE community announces the release of the latest version of KDE Plasma 6.3. In this major release the System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page has been overhauled and split into multiple tabs to improve how things are organized, and new configuration options have been added to each section. KWin window manager makes a stronger effort to snap things to the screen’s pixel grid, greatly reducing blurriness and visual gaps everywhere and producing sharper and crisper images. In the color department, screen colors are more accurate when using the Night Light feature both with and without ICC profiles, and KWin offers the option to choose screen color accuracy. Hardware and system monitoring and information tools have also received new features and performance optimizations. KRunner (the built-in search tool that also does conversions, calculations, definitions, graph plotting, and much more) now let you jump between categories using keyboard shortcuts. A security enhancement landing in Discover software management/app store application highlights sandboxed apps whose permissions will change after being updated. If you’re a fan of the forecasts provided by Deutcher Wetterdienst, you’re in luck: Plasma 6.3’s weather widget allows using this source for weather data. You can now configure its built-in touchpad to switch off automatically, so it doesn’t interfere with your typing. When you drag a file out of a window that’s partially below other windows, it no longer jumps to the top, potentially obscuring what you wanted to drag it into. Plasma panels can now be cloned You can also use scripting to change your panels’ opacity levels and what screen they appear on. And there’s much more. To see the full list of changes, check out the complete changelog for KDE Plasma 6.3.

Or maybe a catchier name would be a "basic human decency GPL extension"

I can't help but notice that organisations constantly co-opt free software which was developed with the intent to promote freedom, use it to spread hate and ideas which will ultimately infringe on freedom for many.

The fact that hateful people who use such software may then go on to use it to promote or otherwise support fascism which prevents others from enjoying the software in the way it was imagined, is one potential manifestation of the paradox of tolerance in this respect. I think this is particularly true for e.g. social media platforms and the fediverse.

My proposal to combat this would be the introduction of a "paradox of tolerance" license which says that organisations which use the software must enforce a bare-minimum set of rules to combat intolerance. So anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, etc. The idea is then to make overtly hateful organisations legally liable for the use of the software through the incompatibility of the requirements with their hateful belief system.

This could be an extension to GPL and AGPL where the license must be replicated in modified versions of the software, thereby creating virality with these rules.

Is this a thing already? I understand OS and FOSS have historically had a thing for political neutrality but are we not starting to find the faults with this now?

I saw a post on reddit asking for open source android keyboards in recent years since a lot of the posts were older. One user recommended "Futo Keyboard".

To be clear, I'm not affiliated with them but I've been trying them based on that reddit response and I just wanted to share here in case anyone else has been looking.

In short, this keyboard is about as close to awesome as you can get so far. Features I like:

• Feels like GBOARD
• Works fully offline
• Gesture typing (about 75% as accurate as GBoard)
• Built in offline speech to text (no third party engine needed to download

I've tried other options like heliboard and openboard and they are great too, but I think so far this has been the best I've tried and I wanted to recommend it on here in case anyone else is looking. Feel free to share any other setups or recommendations below!

EDIT: it was pointed out that it is source-available and not open source. Apologize for my initial assumption. The source and license can be viewed here: Futo Keyboard. It is fully open for non-commercial use. Anything commercial can have restrictions.

Anything better?

I basically gave up on finding a custom ROM for this TV so I'm looking for alternative TV apps to at least change the default app. Do you know if there is an app like this exist? It should work with satellite, I'm not looking for IPTV or streaming services, just something that supports plain satellite TV.

Edit: Currently experimenting with KODI, no luck yet though. If you also have suggestions regarding to it, I'm all ears.

Edit 2: KODI (and so Jellyfin, Plex etc.) needs a backend server for Live TV so add-ons alone won't work. According to KODI Wiki, currently there are no backends that work on Android. I also tried Google's older app called Live Channels but Google doesn't let you to run it because it's old ~~more useful~~.

Edit 3: I at least blocked ~~all~~ many of those ad streaming domains on pi-hole. Here is the regex I added to my blacklist. Maybe it will be useful for another poor soul who bought TCL TV.

^(.*\.)?(leiniao\.com|kedo-tclrestream\.b-cdn\.net|now\.amagi\.tv|huan\.tv|rttv\.com|kaltura\.com|plex\.tv|otteravision\.com|ads\.ottera\.tv|sofast\.tv|jwplayer\.com|fuelmedia\.io|molotov\.tv|mcncdndigital\.com|evrideo\.tv|aniview\.com|partytymestreaming\.com|playmoviesdfe-pa\.googleapis\.com|ov-static\.ottera\.tv|ottera\.tv)$

There are also some cloudfront domains however they use hash, so it's not possible to block the future hashes by now and they will appear again.

Edit 4: After some hiatus, I have one more update to add here. I decided to go uninstalling apps via adb, since it's always possible to factory reset. However it didn't go as planned at first.

After enabling developer options on TV, I connected to it with adb connect 192.168.X.XX. You'll need android-platform-tools package on your PC to do this (it basically provides adb and fasboot). Anyway, after connected to it, I deleted apps with adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 app.name.here. I went medieval at first and deleted everything that has TCL in it. And that broke everything. I couldn't even factory reset. Apparently TCL swapped some system apps with theirs. After some adrenaline, I realized that I can create another user, so that would bring all the apps I deleted.

I created user via adb with:

adb shell

pm create-user "NewUser"

and switched to that user via

am switch-user userID. To see users command pm list users. In my case the user ID was 10. After this, I was able to factory reset.

These are the apps I deleted to remove bloatware:

com.netflix.ninja
com.tcl.tv.tclhome_passive
com.tcl.dashboard
com.tcl.partnercustomizer
com.tcl.t_solo
au.com.stan.and
tv.wuaki.apptv
com.tcl.suspension
com.amazon.amazonvideo.livingroom
com.tcl.ui_mediaCenter
com.tcl.MultiScreenInteraction_TV
com.tcl.hotelmenu
com.tcl.guard
com.tcl.channelplus
com.tcl.miracast
com.tcl.inputmethod.international
com.tcl.waterfall.overseas
com.tcl.ttvs
com.tcl.useragreement
com.tcl.keyhelp

And these are the one I didn't delete:

com.tcl.initsetup
com.tcl.factory.view
com.tcl.system.server
com.tvos
com.tcl.providers.config
com.tcl.autopair
com.tcl.android.webview

Since there is no Google account login this time, I had to install some apps via adb as well.

I did it with this command: adb install app_name.apk

I installed Projectivity Launcher for a better default launcher experience.

I also played with Shizuku and Canta and it's great to be able to use those too.

Hi /c/opensource,

I am developing PdfDing - a selfhosted PDF manager, viewer and editor. You can find the repo here.

Today I reached a big milestone as PdfDing reached over 600 stars on github. A good portion of these stars probably comes from being included in the favorite selfhosted apps launched in 2024 on selfh.st.

Here is a quick overview over the project's features:

• Seamless browser based PDF viewing on multiple devices. Remembers current position - continue where you stopped reading
• Stay on top of your PDF collection with multi-level tagging, starring and archiving functionalities
• Edit PDFs by adding annotations, highlighting and drawings
• Clean, intuitive UI with dark mode, inverted color mode and custom theme colors
• SSO support via OIDC
• Share PDFs with an external audience via a link or a QR Code with optional access control
• Markdown Notes
• Progress bars show the reading progress of each PDF at a quick glance

As always I am happy if you star the repo or if someone wants to contribute.

I just wanted to shout out TRMNL.

They have an interesting product, and they're trying to build a business that includes a lot of open source aspects.

The device that they sell is proprietary, but it's also just an ESP32, screen, enclosure, and battery, with a custom PCB for convenience. They plan to add instructions to build your own device, and their firmware is open source under a GPLv3 license.

By default, their device connects to their servers, and they have a slick web configuration tool for people who don't care about having smart devices call home, but you can easily modify the firmware to connect to your own self-hosted server instead. As of this evening, both the Phoenix and Sinatra server implementations are open source under an MIT license after I pointed out that they had no license in an issue, and they pretty much immediately updated the repositories.

There are two other repositories that they have not added a license to, but given their swift response, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and I would expect them to be updated shortly.

They have not shared all of the plugins that are available on their hosted service for use on a self-hosted instance, but a few are available for use and there are many plugins made by others available as well!

As soon as they update those last two repositories, I plan to pre-order one (unlike the conceptually cool VU Dials who's creators still have not added a license even after being called out by the co-creator of Rocky Linux).

Happy 2025! The Eco-Libre project published our 2024 Annual Report for last year.

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Executive Summary

• Continuing search for land in Ecuador
• Prototype Progress of Life-Line
• Design changes to Launch-Nest and Treasure-Tower

Read the full report here.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre tech, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/

I've always used custom launchers on Android. The stock launchers like One UI Home and Launcher3 just don't cut it for me.

Despite that, I'm hard pressed to find any open-source launcher that meets my expectations like Smart Launcher does.

Any suggestions?

Just learned about the FUTO keyboard. The source code license, the AI features and the requiremen to activate my microphone, made my BS/malware alarm go bzzz. So I looked up FUTO, and apparently it is an organization similar to FSF (but different).

So what is this FUTO thing? Are they good and trustworthy? Or is this just some new drug fueled eccentric crypto AI BS from Texas?

Is it "safe" to use the FUTO keyboard?

EDIT: Thanks, guys! I ended up downloading Heliboard from f-droid :)

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/17051418

• Obsidian
• AppFlowy
• Coda
• Anytype
• Logseq
• (Probably more I haven’t come across yet)

I love the idea of having all my quick notes, to-do lists, knowledge base, journal, plans, etc., in one single, neatly organized place. Why wouldn’t I? But deciding on which Notion alternative to use is overwhelming.

There are so many options, and all claim to be the best. Online opinions are all over the place (as expected), and these apps aren’t exactly simple—they’re complex for good reasons, but that makes choosing one even harder. And don’t get me started on the endless YouTube videos on the topic—I could spend weeks or months researching this and testing every single one of them, but honestly, this is not how I wanna spend my time so I will ask you guys instead.

---

My Current Setup:

• Markor: Used it for quick thoughts, journaling, and to-do lists but stopped using it because it’s not suited for everything, and there’s no sync between Android and Linux (becsuse it is android only).

• Obsidian: Currently using it as my knowledge base and for long notes, simple to-do lists, and occasional journaling. Haven’t fully migrated to it or created an organized setup because I’m looking for a FOSS Notion alternative.

• Standard Notes: Good for quick notes, but most features are paywalled, making it feel limited.

• jtx Board: My go-to for journaling—it’s simple and quick to use.

---

What I need:

• FOSS, but only if it’s just as good as proprietary options in:
  • Auto-sync between my Android phone and Linux desktop
  • Journaling
  • Quick notes
  • To-do lists
  • Planning
  • Managing personal projects
  • Writing down thoughts
  • A really good Android app
  • Easy to use
  • Free for personal use

What I don’t care about:

Collaboration. This is for my personal use—no sharing, no team features.

---

Given my messy current setup and specific requirements, can anyone give me some recommendations?

This doesn't surprise me at all... Just like bots in games. Selling a service that benefits another. Its shady, but definitely believable.

Also, what if this is an actual viable way to "market" for an open source project?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-31-million-fake-stars-on-github-projects-used-to-boost-rankings