This cuts out the existing separate hardware terminal that has until now been issued to merchants. This system requires only a phone with NFC (and of course the Mastercard merchant app).

Tap on Phone allows businesses to accept payments from any contactless card or mobile wallet right from their NFC-enabled device. With no extra hardware required, businesses can take advantage of this on-the-go solution to enable quick and convenient payment options. There is an option to send a receipt to customers through SMS or email.

See https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/overview/start-accepting/tap-on-phone.html

#technology #banking #SMME #mobile #NFC

Already in use on some Android smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy S21 Ultra, pixel binning merges data from multiple smaller pixels on the camera's image sensor into one "super-pixel" for improved low-light sensitivity.

Pixel binning is beneficial because simply increasing a smartphone camera's megapixels while maintaining the same camera sensor size results in smaller pixels, which generally capture less light, leading to lower-quality low-light photos. Pixel binning would allow iPhone 14 Pro models to shoot high-resolution 48-megapixel photos in bright conditions and 12-megapixel photos in low-light conditions that are still of high quality.

See https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/14/iphone-14-pro-pixel-binning-rumor/

#technology #photography #pixelbinning #mobilephotography

Its team has developed two different sensor nodes for this purpose: an indoor one that can measure CO2, and a mobile one that can measure particulate matter (PM) levels. Both versions are powered by an ESP32 microcontroller that reads out the air quality sensors and connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The data can then be shared online to create detailed maps showing local variations in air quality.

The design of the sensor nodes is fully open-source, allowing anyone with basic electronic skills to build them.

See https://hackaday.com/2021/12/13/measuring-air-quality-using-mobile-sensors-for-the-masses/

#technology #opensource #airpollution #citizenscience #CanAirIO

Much of today's music features the exacting work of a drum machine. The term might make you think of a drum set with mechanical levers and cranks armed with drumsticks, but all it actually refers to is a synthesizer programmed to play drum sounds.

The excellent LMMS application contains a drum machine, and there's the drumkv1 plugin for DAWs like Ardour, Qtractor, and Rosegarden. But there's also the dedicated Hydrogen drum machine that has just one job, which it does very well, and has done for the past 20 years: be a great, fully-featured, and open source drum machine.

See https://opensource.com/article/21/12/open-source-drum-hydrogen

#technology #music #drums #opensource #hydrogen

Apple announced that this app was coming in June, promising that it would allow Android users to find potentially malicious trackers being used without their knowledge. Unlike on iOS, though, it doesn’t seem like this app will constantly do scans in the background and alert you if something is up — it’s purely a manual search. Tracker Detect also doesn’t help you keep track of the AirTags attached to an Apple account, so it’s not helping Android users actually use AirTags.

Good effort in developing such an app for Android, but it does seem to fall short of what the app could have really done.

See https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/13/22832731/apple-android-app-airtag-search-tracker-detect-find-my

#technology #AirTags #Android

As Firefox's share of the browser market continues to slide, the Waterfox Project shows some of the ways that Mozilla is failing to listen to its users – and it's far from the only example.

Waterfox, which has just released its fourth version, came to your correspondent's attention after the arrival of Firefox 57, codenamed Quantum, which represented a major change in the program, complete with parts of the browser engine written in Rust.

(The Rust language itself started out as a Mozilla project. Despite Rust's popularity, within three years, Mozilla would also lay off members of the Rust language team.)

The problem with Firefox Quantum is that it also dropped a very significant feature: Netscape's XUL-based extension engine, added way back in 1997. To quote the Classic Addons Archive, dropping XUL meant losing "19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers over the past 15 years." At a stroke this crippled one of Firefox's killer features: how users could extensively customise it – unlike, say, Google Chrome.

See https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/

#technology #opensource #waterfox #firefox #browser

Today, the Linux operating system powers supercomputers, bullet trains, Hollywood films, submarines, the International Space Station, the New York Stock Exchange, and so on. However, the birth and journey of Linux have many thought-provoking and amazing facts.

See https://linuxiac.com/10-interesting-and-fun-facts-about-linux/

#technology #opensource #linux #funfacts

My Smart City is a platform that empowers you, the citizen, with tools to navigate, learn about and improve your city Whether you are logging issues that need attention or simply want to gain access to resources and information, My Smart City is where you can do it all.

Log issues and faults such as potholes, burst water pipes, street and traffic lights that are out, vandalism and more - or simply find information and resources such as schedules, contact details, locations, news and more.

No more frustratingly long phone calls with customer service agents, just log it on My Smart City and encourage others to "upvote" the issue's resolution. It can then be escalated, monitored, tracked and traced as the service provider resolves the issues that are important to you.

Access the My Smart City real-time map to view, log, upvote, track and manage requests, issues, faults and petitions that have been logged nearest to you.

See https://mysmart.city/home/citizens

#technology #southafrica #municipalservices #servicedelivery

Nativefier takes a URL and wraps it with the Electron framework, which runs the open source Chromium browser as its backend but runs as its own executable application. Nativefier is licensed under the MIT license and is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Nativefier runs Chromium underneath. So it's able to remember your session just like any browser does. And it's worth reiterating that this is likely not going to be lighter on resources at all, but it may be a nice option for some who like to autostart specific web apps.

See https://opensource.com/article/21/11/linux-apps-nativefier

#technology #opensource #nativeapps #nativefier