"The BT SIG expects products supporting LE Audio to increase as the holiday season approaches"

An interesting and candid article below, and it does also differentiate some of the Bluetooth acronyms being pushed around. It is too true that manufacturers want to keep incrementally upping the spec numbers, in order to sell more new hardware.

The observation too is that improvements so far with Bluetooth have all been about increasing range and battery life, often at the cost of audio bit-rate quality.

Right now wired is still longest "battery life", best quality, and lowest latency. That is not to say that Bluetooth sound is bad, just that most may not really hear much difference, and of course cordless is super convenient, no snagging cables, etc.

See https://www.whathifi.com/us/features/why-bluetooth-le-and-the-new-lc3-codec-will-not-repeat-not-improve-your-sound-quality

#technology #Bluetooth #audio #codecs

“The new device will enable electric vehicle (EV) owners to charge EVs by connecting chargers directly through the meter socket, a convenient and efficient location available on every home,” Siemens explained. “By bypassing a home’s electric service panel, the adapter will save an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the charger installation cost by avoiding the need for electric panel upgrades.”

“By allowing for a simple, 15-minute EV charger install, the technology eliminates the need for complex and prohibitively expensive installations,” they emphasized.

Using Level 1 charging, there is no extra cost beyond the cost of electricity, and charging overnight or at other times the car is parked is ample for normal daily driving needs. This solution though provides Level 2 charging which is obviously a lot faster, but does require 240 V. For now it is exclusively through Siemens, which means it won't be as cheap as it could be. That said, be very careful of cheap knock-offs. Siemens is at least a reliable brand.

Yes, probably not really an issue for most of the rest of the world, already using 204 V systems.

See https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/31/installing-home-ev-chargers-just-got-much-easier-and-cheaper/

#technology #EV #charging #Siemens

Known as C64OS, it squeezes everything it can out of the 8 bit processor and 64 kB of memory. The new OS includes switchable desktop workspaces, a windowing system, draggable icons, a Mac-style menu bar at the top, and drop-down menus for the icons (known as aliases in the demonstrations).

The filesystem is largely revamped as well and enables a more modern directory system to be used. There are still some limitations like a screen resolution of 320×200 pixels and a fixed color palette which only allows for a handful of colors, but this OS might give Windows 3.1 a run for its money.

See https://hackaday.com/2022/07/28/new-os-for-commodore-64-adds-modern-features/

#technology #C64 #C64OS #retrocomputing #retro

The global internet—a vast matrix of telecommunications, fiber optics, and satellite networks—is in large part a creation of the United States. Moreover, U.S. strategic, economic, political, and foreign policy interests were served by the global, open internet. The United States now confronts a starkly different reality. The utopian vision of an open, reliable, and secure global network has not been achieved and is unlikely ever to be realized. Today, the internet is less free, more fragmented, and less secure.

Countries around the world now exert a greater degree of control over the internet, localizing data, blocking and moderating content, and launching political influence campaigns. Nation-states conduct massive cyber campaigns, and the number of disruptive attacks is growing.

Malicious actors have exploited social media platforms, spread disinformation and misinformation, incited disparate forms of political participation that can sway elections, engendered fierce violence, and promoted toxic forms of civic division.

The report is a really frank and stark look at the situation. It identifies quite correctly that there is a greater fragmentation of the Internet (they may be referring more to separated networks) but the same is true of social networks moving to a more decentralised nature. And yes the Internet is now an advantage as well as disadvantage for any country, not just the USA, and not just from a security point of view, but also economic, privacy, stability, etc perspectives.

The Internet of Things (IoT), along with IP6 addressing, and other factors will make it vastly more complex and amplify further the issues already being experienced.

We can expect that any responsible country will be taking the recommendations to heart, and these will also require countries that normally sit on the fence, to be forced to side with one of the country groupings that emerge. It is unlikely that a country will be able to belong to two or more of these types of groups, and existing alone will leave that country exposed and alone...

See https://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20220720-confronting-reality-in-cyberspace-foreign-policy-for-a-fragmented-internet

#technology #Internet #Security #Cyberspace #ForeignRelations

Excluding HTML, PDF files are probably the most popular document format on the web. Unfortunately, they're not compact.

Couldn't I save some storage space by compressing those files? What if I want to send a bundle of them through email? Or host them for download on a website? The transmission would be faster if these files were made smaller. This article shows a simple way to reduce PDF file size. The benefit is that it shrinks your PDFs transparently without altering the data content in any way. Plus, you can also compact many PDF files with a single command.

See https://opensource.com/article/22/7/shrink-pdfs-minuimus-linux

#technology #opensource #Minuimus #PDF

When Apple develops some of its products, it sometimes pretends that no other devices exist outside its walled garden. For example, the company never supported Bluetooth file sharing between iOS and Android — even when the technology was still popular and actively depended on. That’s because it has its own proprietary AirDrop feature, which works on its devices only.

Another example is AirPods. While you can use AirPods for basic listening on an Android device, you still miss out on a lot of privileges that are exclusive to newer iPhones, iPads, and Macs. These include checking the individual battery percentages of each earbud and the case, remapping the playback controls, etc. CAPod is a free companion app for AirPods users on Android. While it doesn’t support all of iOS’ features, it still bridges part of the gap on Android.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/capod-airpods-android/

#technology #android #airpods #CAPod

Multi-Account Containers is a Firefox add-on that lets you separate your work, shopping, or personal browsing without having to clear your history, log in and out, or use multiple browsers. It's an improved version of the Containers feature built into Firefox and available to advanced users by setting certain preferences.

Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously, as well as integrating Mozilla VPN for an extra layer of privacy.

What you can do with Multi-Account Containers:

• Log in to multiple accounts on a single website at the same time. For example, if you have a personal Gmail account and a work Gmail account, you can log in to both accounts in separate containers.
• Protect yourself against tracking without having to log out of websites while you browse. Websites in one container can't track your activity in other containers.
• Protect yourself against Web security attacks. Any harmful clicks will be kept within that website's container, so attackers won't be able to hijack your information in other containers.
• Assign a website to a container, so that a specific website will always open in a specific container. This helps protect from accidents, stopping you from accidentally visiting a shopping site in your banking container, for example.
• Hide and Show: If you use your browser for both Work and Personal tasks and don’t want to be thinking about “Work” when you come home, you can “Hide” your Work tabs and proceed with your Personal tasks. Then the next day, when you are back at work, you can “Hide” your Personal tabs and “Show” your Work tabs.
• The sync feature will align Multi-Account Containers on different computers. The add-on carries over Container names, colours, icons, and site assignments on to any other machines with the same Firefox account.
• Avoid leaving social-network footprints all over the web (for example, you could use a Container tab for signing in to a social network, and use a different tab for visiting online news sites, keeping your social identity separate from tracking scripts on news sites).

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

#technology #privacy #firefox #browsers #containers

This multi-track video editor runs on Linux, Intel macOS and Windows. You can use it for simple editing as well as far more complex work. I've been using it for many years for all my video editing work.

In this video I cover the layout of the user interface, show how I use it to apply all the basic edits I do to my videos, and end off with briefly looking at the settings.

This video is for you if you wondering whether you want to choose Kdenlive as your video editor, or if you have done so, and want to just get started quickly with the basics.

Watch https://youtu.be/nwl6RzymZVg

#technology #video #videoediting #Kdenlive #opensource

In the new version, users no longer have to manually try out bridge configurations to unblock Tor.

Tor Browser version 11.5 comes with a new feature called “Connection Assist”, which assigns automatically the bridge configuration known to work best for the user’s location.

“Connection Assist works by looking up and downloading an up-to-date list of country-specific options to try using your location (with your consent),” explains the release announcement.

See https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tor-browser-now-bypasses-internet-censorship-automatically/

#technology #privacy #censorship #torbrowser