This video was really food for thought for me.... At home, I'm running OpenMediaVault with Portainer and Docker, and all my services are in Docker containers. Updating them is as easy as clicking recreate, and redownload fresh image. The NGINX reverse proxy image makes ita pleasure to manage that side with SSL certs etc.

My paid for VPS server though is all set up with customised Webuzo scripts. I just checked and every service I run on that VPS server, is available in a Docker image... I pay extra monthly for the Webuzo service, and switching to Docker will be cheaper for me, and probably a lot easier to update, especially for my Drupal install. If you've been putting off diving into Docker, it is well worth trying out.

New 'To Do' just added to my task list!

Watch video at https://youtu.be/Wj0SsbRbCNo

#technology #opensource #nextcloud #selfhosting #Docker

After seven Release Candidates and two months of hard work, Linux kernel 5.15 is here and it’s ready for mass adoption as the latest LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel for GNU/Linux distributions. You can download it right now from the kernel.org website or from here (direct download link since kernel.org isn’t updated yet).

Highlights of Linux 5.15 include a brand new NTFS file system implementation from Parangon Software that’s fully functional and supports all NTFS versions up to 3.1, realtime preemption locking, an in-kernel SMB3 server called ksmbd, Btrfs now supports fs-verity file integrity assurance and ID-mapped mounts, as well as DAMON (Data Access MONitor) for monitoring the memory access pattern of user-space processes.

So this compatibility should also help where you have a Windows game in Steam Games on Linux sharing a NTFS partition with a dual-booted Windows boot up.

See https://9to5linux.com/linux-kernel-5-15-released-with-new-ntfs-file-system-in-kernel-smb-server-and-more

#technology #Linux #kernel #NTFS

Germany-based Nextcloud is releasing an easy-to-use backup application for its productivity and collaboration platform that’s designed not for the big enterprise customers who pay its bills, but for home users and small business who generally use the product for free.

Beside being focused on users who typically aren’t customers, there’s another big oddity to Nextcloud’s new Backup app: users can select a Nextcloud instance being run by a friend or family member as a backup location, even if that other instance doesn’t have the Backup app installed. Also, if that friend or family member turns out not to be as trustworthy as the user thought, the backup will still be secure; only the person initiating the backup has the encryption key.

According to Nextcloud, although more conventional backup locations are also available — such as a directory on the user’s hard drive or USB drive, FTP, samba, or any external storage supported by Nextcloud.

See https://fossforce.com/2021/11/nextcloud-announces-a-new-backup-application-for-its-home-users/

#technology #opensource #nextcloud #backups

In a booth at Ted’s Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse. It was November 1994, just as the graphical web was becoming a thing, and we thought that the 3-D web could be just a few tweaks down the road. In our version of the metaverse, a server would track the identity of objects and their location in virtual space, but you’d render the objects locally, loaded to your hard drive off of a CD-ROM.

So, after watching metaverses spring up and crumble for 27 years, and after building one myself, I feel fairly well equipped to offer context for what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with his firm’s pivot to “Meta.”

Zuckerberg isn’t building the metaverse because he has a remarkable new vision of how things could be. There’s not an original thought in his video, including the business model. Thirty-eight minutes in, Zuckerberg gets serious, talking about how humbling the past few years have been for him and his business. Remember, he’s not humbled by the problem of Russian disinformation, or the spread of anti-vax misinformation, or the challenge of how Instagram affects teen body image. No, he’s humbled by how hard it is to fight against Apple and Google.

Facebook can claim originality in at least one thing. Its combination of scale and irresponsibility has unleashed a set of diverse and fascinating sociopolitical challenges that it will take lawmakers, scholars, and activists at least a generation to fix.

So in summary, Facebook (Meta) could again be unleashing something they have no way of managing, and will likely create all sorts of new issues for them... Even VR already exists for Second Life, but no doubt Meta will make it popular now.

Read his full text at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/10/facebook-metaverse-was-always-terrible/620546/

#technology #metaverse #Meta #facebook

Not exactly revolutionary, but a large incremental gain across many fronts with Cobalt being dropped, the Graphite anode is being replaced with Silicon, the tabs are being dropped which reduce costs and formation of hotspots, and the larger size overall benefits capacity and costs.

The new design is 56% cheaper to produce and needs about half the real estate to generate the same power as a 74 kWh Model Y battery pack.

The redesign also means it could well exceed a 1 million mile lifetime use, with 94% of its life being retained after 4,000 charge cycles. It will also allow for a far faster charging time of around 15 minutes.

Solid state batteries should be the Holy Grail of batteries (long range with less fire risk), and they are in limited use, but the cost factor right now is too exorbitant for EVs and a breakthrough in that aspect is still needed.

Watch https://youtu.be/QnWQ50vWUvY

#technology #environment #EV #batteries

An investigation by The Financial Times found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube lost around $9.85 billion in revenue following Apple’s changes to its privacy practices. Last year, Apple announced the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy that requires apps to ask permission to track users’ data. The policy went into effect in April, barring apps from tracking users if they opt out.

Your metadata (even anonymised) is not the content of your posts or messages, but describes things about you and your behaviour whilst using the platform. So what you click to read, where you pause momentarily while scrolling, your location, what times of the day you are active, whether you use public transport or sit in the traffic in a vehicle, who you follow, how many followers you have, and lots more are all of use to advertisers to see where their campaigns work, and to help predict whether your behaviours may match their product or service.

So one strategy is to try to block some of that metadata at the phone level, or another is for you to try one of the alternative social media sites which do not engage in these practices such as Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, or the many others on the Fediverse. The big centralised social media sites rely heavily on advertising revenue to keep themselves going if they are to offer you their services for "free".

See https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/31/22756135/apple-app-tracking-transparency-policy-snapchat-facebook-twitter-youtube-lose-10-billion

#technology #privacy #socialnetworks #advertising #tracking

“Everybody’s had something like this stolen from them and wished they had gotten it back, had some agency in that scenario, had something they could do,” said Dan Guido, a technology CEO in Brooklyn who got his electric scooter back using AirTags. “It feels empowering and feels accessible, that’s what’s attractive about it.”

Apple has been careful to never say AirTags can be used to recover stolen property. The marketing for the device is light and wholesome, focusing on situations like lost keys between sofa cushions. The official tagline is “Lose your knack for losing things” and there’s no mention of crime, theft or stealing in any of the ads, webpages or support documents.

But in reality, the company has built a network that is ideal for that exact use case. Every compatible iPhone, iPad and Mac is being silently put to work as a location device without their owners knowing when it happens. The same applies for the Samsung and Tile tracker devices.

See https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airtags-theft/

#technology #trackers #theft #airtags #findit

An airborne Lidar survey recently revealed hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial sites in southern Mexico. The 32,800-square-mile area was surveyed by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia, which made the data public. When University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues examined the area, which spans the Olmec heartland along the Bay of Campeche and the western Maya Lowlands just north of the Guatemalan border, they identified the outlines of 478 ceremonial sites that had been mostly hidden beneath vegetation or were simply too large to recognize from the ground.

“It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago,” said Inomata. “Publicly available lidar is transforming archaeology.”

See https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-hundreds-of-long-lost-maya-and-olmec-ceremonial-centers/

#technology #Lidar #archaeology #3Dscanning #Mexico

This project really exemplifies what I believe should happen to Meta / Facebook too (the use of interoperable standards). Users should be able to opt to use free and open source self-hostable alternatives that can still keep them in contact with their family and friends that choose to stay behind on a platform. It's the best of both worlds for the individuals, and also means they can more freely move to another platform without being locked in.

Fosscord is free, open source, extendible, self-hostable, decentralised, themeable, secure, encrypted, and compatible with Discord... It's going to be better than Discord! Right now it is still a work in progress, so not everything is fully in place.

See https://fosscord.com/

#technology #opensource #decentralised #selfhosting #alternativeto #discord #privacy #deletemeta