Category: Blog

It’s not yet quite perfection, but this analysis does really unpack some of the depth of meaning behind the playable demo, and makes you more fully realise how mind-blowing this really is. It’s one thing to just fake some special effects and do pre-rendered graphics for a movie or a game intro, but quite another thing to have that level of realism actually generated in real-time (and on today’s console hardware).

Watching the recently released Epic Games trailer was impressive, but this video really explains what you should be noticing from watching it, and gives some idea of the amazing games we’re expecting to see in the near future. Chances are, that the same technology may well be seen in real movies too.

See

Next-Gen Graphics FINALLY Arrive [Unreal Engine 5]
by ColdFusion on YouTube

#technology #gaming #cinematography #unrealengine5

On the occasion of the 2019 European elections and ahead of France’s 2022 presidential elections, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched in 2019 a toolbox of open source software and open resources to fight disinformation. As of December 2021, Internet users can access software to detect fake Twitter accounts, assess the legality of political advertisement on Facebook, and use multiple further resources on good practices to counter disinformation. Further work is ongoing to develop and deploy additional online resources.

Fake news, disinformation, misinformation: in the past decade, the manipulation of publicly available information on online platforms and social media soared tremendously in Europe and beyond. In 2018, 83% of respondents to a Eurobarometer survey indicated that fake news represent a danger to democracy.

See Disinfo, the open toolbox to fight disinformation

#technology #opensource #France #fakenews  

On the occasion of the 2019 European elections and ahead of France’s 2022 presidential elections, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched in 2019 a toolbox of open source software and open resources to fight disinformation. As of December 2021, Internet users can access software to detect fake Twitter accounts, assess the legality of political advertisement on Facebook, and use multiple further resources on good practices to counter disinformation. Further work is ongoing to develop and deploy additional online resources.

It provides a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering, texturing and converting meshes. It offers features for processing raw data produced by 3D digitization tools/devices and for preparing models for 3D printing.

As with anything 3D, there is a bit of a learning curve, but I did manage to select some “noise” in my iPhone’s 3D LiDAR images and clean those up a bit. They do have a series of YouTube playlist tutorials which should help, as well as some sample 3D scans to practice on.

See MeshLab

#technology #opensource #3Dscans #LiDAR #Meshlab

MeshLab the open source system for processing and editing 3D triangular meshes. It provides a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering, texturing and converting meshes. It offers features for processing raw data produced by 3D digitization tools/devices and for preparing models for 3D printing. MeshLab and PyMeshLab…

LimeSurvey allows users to quickly create intuitive, powerful online forms and surveys that can work for anyone from small business to large business. The survey software is self-guiding for the respondents. They have a cloud hosted option with free and paid tiers, much the same as SurveyMonkey, but there is also the Community Edition which is fully free and open source software which you can self-host. Apart from the freedoms that brings, it also means that any respondent data is also free from tracking and data mining by any 3rd parties.

In this video I tour through a sample survey that I created, where I run through the survey options, I also show how easily a new survey with questions can be started, and I end off with a run through the various general menu configuration options.

Watch

LimeSurvey – a free and open source self-hosted alternative to SurveyMonkey
by Danie van der Merwe on YouTube

#technology #opensource #limesurvey #selfhosting #surveymonkey

PeerTube is decentralised by most useful definitions of the word. Anybody can run their own PeerTube instance, and the instances can follow (or “connect”) to each other to form a larger whole. This is not an option you have with YouTube.

When you watch a video on PeerTube the data will come from the instance hosting the video, any other instance that follows that instance and has redundancy enabled and other people watching the video at the same time as you do.

See the new features at PeerTube 4.0 Free Video Platform Comes More Powerful Than Ever

#technology #opensource #alternativeto #decentralised #PeerTube

An overview of the new version of PeerTube, a software solution to create alternative platforms to YouTube.

LinkAce is a self-hosted archive to collect links of your favourite websites. Save articles to read them later, tools to use them in your next project, or historic content to archive it for the long term. LinkAce comes with a lot of features while keeping a clean and minimal interface.

All saved links are monitored. Get a notification when a website moves or becomes unavailable. Links are backed up via the Internet Archive after you saved them. Choose tags to categorize links, add them to custom lists to group them by a topic or occasion.

Your link archive can be accessed by guests, or kept private. Links, tags and lists can be set private separately. Both private and public links are accessible via RSS feeds. Feeds are also available for tags and lists.

It will import from a browser’s bookmarks, and export to a browser, but it does not integrate with any browser bookmark systems. So it is a stand-alone solution. However, if you use different browsers this may be an interesting solution, or you like to share categories of links with others, or just keep track of links without having a bunch of dead links (most browser bookmarks don’t check validity of links).

Their site also has a demo you can try out. If you’re looking more for a Read It Later service though, Wallabag is probably more suited to that, although you could label a category as ‘Read Later’ and use it for that.

See LinkAce – Your self-hosted bookmark archive. Free and open source.

#technology #bookmarks #links #linkace #opensource

LinkAce is a free and open source bookmark archive for long-term storage and organization of your favorite links.

While WhatsApp and most other messengers support end-to-end encryption, Signal is probably still your best choice (of the popularly used options) when you want your conversations and calls to stay private. Given that all communication on Signal is encrypted, including group video calls, the company is running into some unique challenges that need to be addressed when scaling its service. As such, Signal has only supported group calls with up to five participants until now, but it has finally managed to significantly up the limit to 40 people at a time.

See Signal significantly ups its video group call limit, surpassing WhatsApp

#technology #E2EE #encryptedvideo #Signal #instantmessengers

Up to 40 people can now join an end-to-end encrypted video call

A large-scale phishing study involving 14,733 participants over a 15-month experiment has produced some surprising findings that contradict previous research results that formed the basis for popular industry practices. The study was conducted by researchers at ETH Zurich in collaboration with an unnamed company that did not inform the participants about the simulated phishing program.

To conduct the test, the researchers sent fake phishing emails to participants’ regular work email and deployed an email client button that allowed them to report suspicious emails easily.

See Large-scale phishing study shows who bites the bait more often

#technology #security #phishing #email

A large-scale phishing study involving 14,733 participants over a 15-month experiment has produced some surprising findings that contradict previous research results that formed the basis for popular industry practices.