Clothes dryers are great, and a key part of modern life, but they do use a lot of energy.

"Early testing found ultrasonic transducers could indeed blast droplets of moisture away from fabric, effectively drying it. However, unlike heat, the ultrasonic field doesn’t effectively permeate through a pile of clothes, nor can it readily be used with a spinning drum to dry many garments at once."

But despite this, like may other ideas including batteries, maybe the idea has a lot of merit and needs to be developed further. It has the potential to not only use less energy, but also to cause less damage to clothes with the absence of heat.

I was certainly surprised to see how well an ultrasonic cleaner could just clean some hardware items I put through mine.

See https://hackaday.com/2022/09/04/hackaday-prize-2022-drying-clothes-with-ultrasound/

#technology #ultrasonic #energy #environment #clothes

There are (at least) two ways to look at the move to more green power generation: the supply side and the demand side. The supply side emphasizes a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and carbon-free energy. The demand side, however, looks at how to reduce energy use, preferably without hurting the current standard of living.

Imagine two salespeople who sell electricity for a utility company. They decide they don't want to promote or sell electricity use anymore because of its negative environmental and climate change impact. They retire and then decide they want to work together to assemble an Open Organization Community to reduce energy consumption in a way that does not adversely impact people's standard of living. Simply put, they want to consult and collaborate with energy users on reducing waste with the indirect goal of eliminating the use of fossil fuels as an energy source by 2050.

Since globally energy costs seem to be rising in the last few months, I've also been seeing an uptick in interest around better management of home energy use. I did a video recently about using Home Assistant, and mentioned one small example with my system announcing when the hot water is ready for use, thereby saving unnecessary power usage. There are so many other things that be done, and they all add up. Just like the extreme drought facing Cape Town resulted in water usage falling in Cape Town, we'll probably see the same with energy.

Not everyone can program Home Assistant dashboards (even though it is free and open to anyone to attempt to do so), so there will also be fresh opportunities for many to provide this type of service to businesses and homes.

But as I've said before, try and ensure that any system is still under your own control, so that you do not end up being locked out of your system, or locked into a provider. Stick to open standards based devices and software as a minimum requirement.

See https://opensource.com/open-organization/22/9/saving-home-energy-open-organization-principles

#technology #energy #environment #demandmanagement #homeenergy

Google does a lot of stupid things. All giant corporations are the same in that regard. But it takes special effort to do something truly terrible. That's where Google's Project Nimbus comes in on the spectrum.

Project Nimbus is a joint effort of Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government that provides futuristic surveillance capabilities through the use of advanced machine learning models. Like it or not, that's part of the future of state security, and not any more terrible than many other similar projects. Many of us even use similar tech in and around our homes.

Where things get dark and ugly is what Google says about Project Nimbus' capabilities using the company's technology: Nimbus training documents emphasize “the ‘faces, facial landmarks, emotions’-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API,” and in one Nimbus training webinar, a Google engineer confirmed for an Israeli customer that it would be possible to “process data through Nimbus in order to determine if someone is lying”.

A few years ago I would have thought the possibilities around this would be amazing, for doing good... But very unfortunately we've not only seen tech going horribly wrong (misidentifying people), but it also gets vastly abused by friendly and unfriendly governments. The problem with governments is, that if you have, or can decrypt, the information you can be subpoena'd to hand that information over, especially if you're a US company falling under the Patriot Act and the CLOUD Act. We've also seen both "friendly" and unfriendly governments abusing that power.

So who knows where this is going to go, but what is also clear, is that Google is contractually tied into this agreement and there is no easy backing out.

See https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/google/google-project-nimbus-ai-surveillance-evil

#technology #AI #ProjectNimbus #Google #Amazon

This is the great thing about having open standards supported applications, as they can intercommunicate securely using those standards with no lock-in to a single Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Let's ignore the fact that Facebook Messenger of course once also supported XMPP....

Sign up once with any XMPP service and communicate with all other XMPP-using users, just like e-mail does with any other e-mail provider. One advantage that XMPP messengers have over e-mail though for encryption, is that the OMEMO encryption protocol is easier for most end users to get going, so it is more broadly used.

Kaiden runs on various flavours of Linux as well as Android, but you can actually use any XMPP client on Windows, macOS, iOS, etc to communicate with any XMPP user anywhere. The way messaging should be!!!

See https://www.phoronix.com/news/Kaidan-Encrypt-Audio-Video-Call

#technology #opensource #XMPP #Kaidan #openstandards

Thunderbird e-mail client does collect some basic information about installation numbers, versions in use, crashes, add-ons, etc that relate to technical data and which does not identify individual users. This defaults to ON, but can be disabled by users.

It does also have a category called "highly sensitive or clearly identifiable information" that defaults to OFF. This requires users' consent with advanced user notice and an opt-out.

So as things stand, users have pretty good control over their Thunderbird e-mail clients for privacy.

Betterbird may of interest too as it is a soft fork of Thunderbird ESR version, and retains compatibility with the same version of Thunderbird (you can switch between them), where Betterbird has fixed some Thunderbird glitches and bugs (and which they pass back to the Thunderbird project), and they default all telemetry to OFF.

Betterbird is headed by Thunderbird's former maintainer who has been joined by a group of people who share the view that users deserve a better experience and who do not agree with the approach of the Thunderbird management.

Chat accounts for IRC, Matrix, XMPP and Odnoklassniki can also be managed from within the client, and even RSS news feeds.

See https://www.betterbird.eu/

#technology #email #Betterbird #Thunderbird #opensource

You can upload from a mobile device or desktop PC as the AI work is done server-side. I must say it does a very good but subtle improvement.

According to the ByteXD post, in addition to fixing or restoring faces in old photos, you can also use GFPGAN to increase the resolution of the entire image. Plus, because the tool works using artificial intelligence, it can also come in handy if you need to fix AI art portraits. ByteXD provides instructions for both upscaling and improving the quality of AI art portraits, for people interested in those features.

See https://lifehacker.com/use-this-free-tool-to-restore-faces-in-old-family-photo-1849492377

#technology #AI #restoration #fixes #photographs

Portainer is a lightweight, cross-platform, and open source management UI for Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, and ACI environments. Portainer allows you to manage containers, images, networks and volumes via simple web-based dashboard and/or an extensive API.

Using Portainer, we can easily deploy, configure and secure containers in minutes on Docker, Kubernetes, Swarm and Nomad in any cloud, datacenter or device.

So whilst many tutorials show command line options to create and manage Docker containers, you can do most of that through Portainer. Docker-compose files are scripts that get set up to automate the creation of Docker containers within Portainer. So if you want to use Portainer lookout for those docker-compose files in tutorials and you can adapt them as needed, or you can set them up manually within Portainer as shown in this tutorial.

See https://ostechnix.com/portainer-an-easiest-way-to-manage-docker/

#technology #Linux #Docker #Portainer #Containers

Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defence attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used.

It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog.

The problem is likely too though that the information is not just sold to the police. We are only starting to scratch the surface of what our personal metadata is worth, and what it all can be used for. Too many people only worry about the content of their actual messages or posts, but it is our metadata that reveals where we live, where we go, what we look at online, what time we get up and go to sleep, who our friends are, who else we are in proximity to, what speed we drive at, and so many more of our habits.

We decide what to post in a message, but we don't decide about our leaked metadata. The value is in the metadata, not in our carefully crafted messages or posts.

See https://apnews.com/article/technology-police-government-surveillance-d395409ef5a8c6c3f6cdab5b1d0e27ef

#technology #privacy #metadata #FogReveal #surveillance

It is a solid controller that can transform your smartphone into a portable gaming machine with excellent physical controls. There are several improvements over its predecessor, like its sliding support bridge, microswitch inputs, and expanded support for phones that are in cases.

Since the controller creates a direct connection with the iPhone, it eliminates input latency, giving users seamless control when playing games. If you’re worried about the phone’s battery, the controller offers passthrough charging, allowing you to play for hours while your iPhone stays topped up.

The Razer Kishi v2 isn’t just for playing games on your iPhone, you can also take advantage of online gaming services like Xbox Game Pass, Nvidia GeForce Now, Google Stadia, and other remote streaming platforms.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/the-razer-kishi-v2-is-now-available-for-apple-iphones/

#technology #gaming #mobile #iphone #RazerKishi