Just goes to show actually that Second Life really has evolved over the years (decades?) and a lot more is possible with it today. We are seeing quite a bit of art and photography appearing, which shows this off.

The sadder part is though that they have never again seemed to have reached their popularity of the earlier years, even though they are still going. Some popular (to me anyway) locations have gone.

But they are not alone either, as there are other open sim virtual worlds also in existence which are actually more open. The Firestorm viewer is a good one that works on many of these.

See https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/08/sl-avatar-bento-poses-flickr.html

#technology #secondlife #virtualworld #avatars

Sky Guide, created by Fifth Star Labs, is essentially a one-stop shop for all your skygazing questions. The very simplest of these is probably something to the effect of “What am I looking at right now?” Just train your device on your view, and Sky Guide will identify each element in it, from individual stars to constellations to satellites.

The app also tells you what to keep an eye out for in the coming days and months, including meteor showers, eclipses, and planets in opposition—along with informative descriptions and tips for witnessing each event.

There’s a similar (and similarly highly rated) astronomy app — Star Walk 2 — that is.

See https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/sky-guide-stargazing-app

#technology #astronomy #skyguide #mobile

In-app browsers are bunk compared to full-featured browsing apps, but they’re also a major privacy and security risk. Many apps sneak data trackers onto websites you visit through their in-app browser using a method called Javascript injection, which adds extra code to a page as it loads. These trackers can scoop up browsing history, login data, and even keyboard presses and text entry.

While not always used for nefarious means, Javascript injection is a potential security threat that, until now, was difficult to check for inside in-app browsers. Luckily, security researcher Flix Krause’s new ap(p)tly named tool, InAppBrowser, checks if an app’s built-in browser uses potentially dangerous Javascript injections to track your data.

For it to detect anything though, you need to open this website from inside that app you want to test (by posting/mailing the link to yourself for that app).

See https://lifehacker.com/this-tool-checks-if-in-app-browsers-are-tracking-you-1849443044

#technology #security #privacy #tracking #InAppBrowser

Bitwarden is one of the best open-source password managers on the market. I might even go so far as to say it’s the best password manager period. One of the many reasons why this is so is because of the tool’s flexibility, and a perfect illustration of that is the ability to deploy your very own Bitwarden server using Docker.

Why would you want to deploy your own Bitwarden server? You might have incredibly sensitive information that you only entrust to your internal teams. If that’s the case, why worry that data will be stored on a third-party host?

To be honest though, their own cloud hosted service is really not that expensive, and I do still subscribe through them mainly to support the open source service.

See https://www.techrepublic.com/article/deploy-bitwarden-server-docker/

#technology #bitwarden #opensource #passwordmanager #selhosting

Well, if you can find a Pi anywhere! DAKboard is not open source, but there is a free version for home use, and it is pretty good apparently at what it does. Would be interesting to hear if there is a good fully open source alternative dedicated to displaying different types of data like this for a screen.

I suppose at a pinch, one could actually have a Pi just with a browser page on, displaying a dashboard that you have set up with Home Assistant. HA can also display photos, RSS feed, some house stats, etc too.

Personally, seeing I have just set up a nice Home Assistant dashboard, I'd probably start off with that and see how it goes. Now I have an excuse to buy a new monitor as all my older ones are way too small.

See https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/i-turned-an-old-monitor-into-a-digital-dashboard-and-its-a-game-changer

#technology #dashboard #raspberrypi #DAKboard #HomeAssistant

According to Statista, as seen in the graph above, Email is clearly not dying; instead it is flourishing. Its growth from 2017 to 2022 is about 15%, reaching up to 4.6 Billion people in 2025! According to Hubspot, 4.2 Billion people check email daily. 78% of millennials prefer communications and alerts from businesses to come via email. More than 306 Billion emails are sent and received each day.

I was just reading this linked article about "GMail is dead" and it got me to thinking about how many people rely a lot still on Gmail for all their daily messaging, password resets, and a lot more. The history of their correspondence is all in there... so what happens if you get locked out of your Google account? Well that's all gone.

I do still use GMail, although I've been gradually migrating across to Proton Mail, because I have accounts and friends going back to the start of GMail, and it's a very long process to migrate fully off an e- mail platform you've been using fro so long. But yes there is a good reason why GMail has no encryption, as it is all scanned "for your convenience", and yes clouds get hacked, and Google does ban users.

So I run Thunderbird e-mail client on my desktop and regularly sync all my GMail to offline storage.

But yes e-mail still thrives even though it is the least secure means of communication we know today, mainly because it is thoroughly standard across all different e-mail providers and e-mail addresses. It can be secure actually (even GMail) if you added OpenPGP or similar encryption BUT the real challenge is that the other person must also have a similar encryption to decrypt it. And very sad to say, but easily more than 95% of e-mail users have no clue how to install the encryption, and even if they do so, all their friends need to have it installed too.

Proton Mail does try to make this easier and more transparent so all mail between Proton Mail users is encrypted, and mail sent to another e-mail user with PGP encryption can receive and decrypt the mail (if keys have been trusted), and you can even send an encrypted mail to any other e-mail user, but they will need to view it via a web interface with a password on Proton Mail's servers. Businesses don't like that form of correspondence though as they then have no copy to file on their side.

So what's the solution? Well, it's easy (technically)... we should all actually have encryption enabled e-mail. That can be free of cost, but does require some savvy to just set up. Or you can do it very easily by transferring all your GMail to Proton Mail, but that comes with a cost as the storage would exceed the free usage tier. So I suppose really it is us as humans holding the whole encrypted e-mail progression up, as the free tech has long been ready

See https://medium.com/illumination/gmail-is-dead-and-something-new-is-replacing-it-bc3623a11fbe

#technology #GMail #email #privacy #encryption

Home Assistant is an open source self-hosted home automation tool that puts local (not external cloud) control and privacy first. My system is running in a Docker container on a machine at home.

Home Assistant is more than just the monitoring and managing of smart home switches and lights. It has powerful automation that can be triggered by all sorts of events or device states to notify you, or manage even solar systems, garage doors, and much more. For example, I have an automation that announces it has started to rain so we can get the washing off the line before it gets too wet.

In this video I show what my HA dashboards look like, and how I managed to read lots of information via the universal Modbus TCP protocol from my Victron solar energy system, and to also write data back to the Victron system to change the battery minimum state of charge values from HA (or other registers).

I have shared my config files on a Github page so that it is easier for others to replicate some of the same functionality (without spending 4+ hours like I did on a single value statement line).

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlvlhou70VA

#technology #homeassistant #smarthome #opensource #selfhosting

Interesting confirmation on what most people suspected anyway. This video shows you may want to recalibrate your expectations if you're in the market for a new dashcam.

I've been through a few myself, and opted about 4 or so years ago to go with a Garmin Dash Cam 55 which has a larger lens with 1440p resolution, but also allowed me to mount a polarising lens filter on it. I use it without any subscription service, but it does still show regular fixed speed traps, location, speed limit and lane deviation warnings, as well as follow-distance alerts. I'm still pretty happy with it.

See https://youtu.be/4AnyhHl3_tE

#technology #dashcam #gadget

Turbo Boost is an Intel feature designed to pack more processing power into a computer chip for use when you need it. For most tasks, your Mac’s CPU maxes out at its base processing speed, say 2.7GHz. When the computer senses more processing power is needed, it can enable Turbo Boost to temporarily speed up the CPU, say to 3.6GHz.

Turbo Boost Switcher allows you to turn Turbo Boost on or off whenever you like. That way, whether you’re writing an email or editing a video in Final Cut Pro, your Mac’s CPU will never push above it’s base clock speed. This simple change can save hours of battery life and keep your laptop cool and fan speeds low. To let you know for sure how it’s working, Turbo Boost Pro allows you to monitor CPU speeds and temperatures at all times.

Turbo Boost Switcher claims to reduce battery usage by up to 25%, and CPU temperatures by 20%, though it only cites a 2015 blog post as evidence.

See https://lifehacker.com/this-free-utility-makes-your-ancient-macbook-battery-la-1849434686

#technology #macOS #batterylife #apple