Category: Blog

Beware of supposedly “free” proprietary software offered to educational institutions.

We must reverse the trend of forsaking young people’s freedom, which has been accelerating as corporations try to capitalize on the need to establish new remote education practices. Free software not only protects the freedoms of your child or grandchild by allowing people to study the source code for any malicious functionalities, it also communicates important values like autonomy, sharing, social responsibility, and collaboration.

See The University of Costumed Heroes: A video from the FSF — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

#technology #FOSS #education #proprietary #FSF

People around the world are realizing their responsibility to stand for user freedom against technological injustice. Now is the time to help each other move forward to full software freedom. Without free (as in freedom) software, we cannot and will not have a free society. Your membership will help us pave a way to #UserFreedom. Join us today for…

The KDE has a long history. How it was conceptualized, progressed and became a winner as a “go-to” desktop for all user base. In this post, we give you some interesting facts and trivia of KDE that you may be not aware of. And it’s good to know.

See Interesting KDE Facts and Trivia that You Should Know About

#technology #Linux #KDE #trivia

We looked back in time and found out some “Kool” KDE Facts and Trivia. Here it is. The KDE has a long history. How it was conceptualized, progressed and became a winner as a “go-to” desktop for all user base. In this post, we give you some interesting facts and trivia of KDE that you…

Chatwoot is an open source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, and other proprietary communications platforms.

Chatwoot supports a wide range of platforms as messaging Channels (including website widgets, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, email, and others). Integration Webhooks allows you to integrate Chatwoot into external systems so that it can send out relevant information.

Chatwoot has an integrated dashboard that gives a birds-eye view of the most important metrics, like total messages, response times, resolution times, etc.

See Try Chatwoot, an open source customer relationship platform

#technology #opensource #CRM #ticketmanagement #Chatwood

Chatwoot is an open source customer relationship platform built with Ruby and Vue.js. It was written from scratch to allow customer-relations teams to build end-to-end platforms for ticket management and support. This article looks at Chatwoot’s architecture, installation, and key features. Chatwoot’s architecture Chatwoot requires the following components to function properly:

Apart from the information on how to use these Python libraries (hand recognition and tracking), it’s a very interesting exercise which shows how you build out any program piece by piece, by testing the logic at each step. This is, of course, not possible if you don’t have open source code to examine and re-use.

I love how the logic is unpacked at each stage, and it is the approach most programmers will use to simplify what can become complex as it progresses to completion. You test each stage before starting a new one, and this is where you’d notice the X measurement is not sufficient to provide accurate results, and why the diagonal measurement is more accurate. Then testing whether it is a linear relationship or not, and so you keep building up the following stages.

Although this was for hand recognition and distance interpretation, the type of approach could be followed for face tracking or anything else.

See OpenCV Knows Where Your Hand Is

#technology #opensource #programming #coding #Python

We have to say, [Murtaza]’s example game in his latest video isn’t very exciting. However, the OpenCV technique he uses to track a hand and determine its distance from a single camera i…

In animation, there’s an old saying that animation is easy, it’s the tweening that’s hard. In traditional animation practices established in the 1920s, key frames are drawn by a lead artist, and staff artists draw the in-between frames. This is called inbetweening, or “tweening” for short. Today, computers are often recruited for the work of inbetweening.

That’s why animation is (relatively) easy with Synfig Studio. As the animator, you only have to account for an element at the start and at the end of its movement. Synfig calculates everything else.

See Create your own animations with this open source motion graphics tool

#technology #opensource #animation #graphics

In animation, there’s an old saying that animation is easy, it’s the tweening that’s hard. In traditional animation practices established in the 1920s, key frames are drawn by a lead artist, and staff artists draw the in-between frames. This is called inbetweening, or “tweening” for short. Today, computers are often recruited for the work of inbetweening. In the words of Tony DeRose, of Pixar:

This sounds a bit like an advert, but I have tried to avoid use of Cloudflare (mainly because of how they intercept end-to-end SSL to speed up hosted services), but like it or not, I have seen a dramatic thing happen. Since moving to a new hosting service, the webpages there which I administer, take 30 to 60 seconds usually to load. I’ve tried different DNS providers as well as using my ExpressVPN and even changing browsers, but even other webpages were sluggish, taking a good few seconds to load.

So I saw this YouTube reviewer speaking about his experience with Cloudflare WARP, and I thought, what have I got to lose by just trying it as it costs nothing. For Manjaro (Arch based) Linux, I installed the warp-cli binary from AUR, and did the three or four steps to activate it. Well just wow, the same long loading pages now jumped up in about 1 second! Yes, WARP is technically a VPN, but I would not recommend it for privacy or security, just speed (if it helps you). I still have my ExpressVPN (and there is ProtonVPN) if you want to be more sure of privacy.

This may also help me try to pinpoint why I was getting such exceptionally bad load times before, as I can see the problem was not distance, nor my ISP link, computer or browser. It is likely some DNS or configuration issue. At least it shows it is not my new hosting that I moved to, or the docker setup I’m using.

See Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode

#technology #networking #DNS #cloudflare #Linux

Starting today Cloudflare WARP is available for Linux and comes with the ability to run as a local proxy.

Wet shaving doesn’t involve some new disposable razors or cartridges, making it a more sustainable practice. Many shaving soaps and creams are in reusable containers, which means it is not as much waste if you are responsible. And check to make sure you are buying a biodegradable one, which means the little you throw away also doesn’t kill the planet.

A double-edged razor is an upgrade, no matter how you look at it. It is heavy and sturdy and better than a plastic razor. This one will also last longer, which is the cheaper option. You can pick from the many universally fitting blades available in the market. A straight razor also comes with the same benefits.

See Wet Shaving – Ultimate Guide to Traditional Shaving Practice – Beardoholic

#traditionalshaving #environment #shaving

No-shave November is behind us. Now it’s time to revisit the techniques that give your beard the best look. Your beard is a critical part of your look which conveys style, hygiene and attention to detail. So, we thought we’d put together a guide that will tell you how to kick it old school with […]

Think of it as a free, fast and secure open-source alternative for LinkedIn or XING (remembering that LinkedIn has featured plenty of times as the number one collector of user metadata, even above Facebook). This is one of the very few fully open source alternatives to LinkedIn. It is designed around speed and lack of clutter, so it is suited to slow network speeds.

Your profile consists of job experience listings as well as tags to identify your various skills. Users can follow and vote up those specified tags.

There are no status update posts, and also no user to user messaging, so this keeps everything very focussed and spam free. A profile can optionally publish an e-mail address, and have links to other sites and to social media accounts, as different ways to contact a person.

It’s not all perfect though as some concerns are the last code submit was 17 months ago, and users have been asking for a proper listing functionality for certifications and education, along with books / papers published, and also for Mastodon accounts to be linked to profiles.

See vutuv is a free and fast career network | Hacker Noon

#opensource #careers #alternativeto #LinkedIn #vutuv

[url=https://hackernoon.com/vutuv-is-a-free-and-fast-career-network-4daf2a80e196]

I was tired of the endless “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” emails from LinkedIn and I was tired of them trying to sell me a so called “Premium account”. I like the idea of LinkedIn and the German equivalent XING but I don’t like how they are solving the given problem. Too many emails, too many pop-ups, too…