Elon is disrupting one major industry after another. Anyone noticed how everything seems to be strategically interconnected - from EVs and solar being able to operate on Mars, SpaceX to connect between Earth and Mars, self-driving tech and phones that can connect to Starlink satellites, and more? What's also interesting is that true disruption has been possible, and he has been thinking outside the box, with no minor incremental improvements being his goal. From Tesla, to SpaceX, to Starlink, to Neuralink, and the Boring Company, he brought about some radical changes in the way we do things.

Nothing that he has done is at all brand new (electric cars have been around over 100 years), satellites have been around, as have rockets... it is more about making them actually work viably and economically (apart from maybe the Hyperloop). His sheer scope across industries too is broad, with most people content to tackle just one or two industries.

So if there is to be a phone launched, it certainly won't be an incremental improvement like Google and Apple produce. We can likely expect one or two radical differences... Even if it does bring satellite communication, that will be another expensive communications industry being disrupted.

Watch https://youtu.be/TcnXkGNVUOg

#technology #innovation #disruption #ElonMusk #smartphones

Cyberpanel is a free and open-source alternative to cPanel and similar panel management servers. The linked video shows how to start from scratch with a $6 pm VPS on Digital Ocean, but you could in fact use any VPS or other hosting, and just install CyberPanel.

CyberPanel includes all the tools you need to set up and securely manage one or more WordPress websites. It is a bit weaker than cPanel/Webuzo/Softacluous as far as including installation scripts to install lots of other applications. But this does not mean you cannot install them yourself, there are just no one-click installation scripts to do that. For example CyberPanel's site has a blog post showing how to install Drupal too.

Watch at https://youtu.be/MOg6r_MIIyQ

#technology #opensource #webhosting #CyberPanel #alternativeto

Think about it, you can pick an e-mail domain anywhere and use any e-mail client on any platform, to send an e-mail to someone anywhere else... We just take that for granted, but if e-mail were newly invented today by a company like say Meta, all the billions of people in the world would have to belong to that same single company in order to send and receive mail to anyone else...

E-mail's greatest success lies in it's open standards and decentralisation. It will no doubt me replaced at some point in the future, as all technologies will, but let us hope that instant messaging and social networks go back to being open and decentralised (like they too were once).

See https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/a-look-back-at-50-years-of-email/

#technology #email #decentralisation #openstandards #deletemeta

This functionality is a lot easier now to use than some low-level log reader type apps of the past. Not only is it easily showing, by app, what sensor and data is being accessed, it also shows the most commonly accessed network domains, and which apps are contacting them in the background.

If you have iOS v15.2 Beta you may want to activate this as it is off by default.

See https://www.macrumors.com/guide/app-privacy-report/

#technology #iOS #privacy #iPhone

LosslessCut aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files. The main feature is lossless trimming and cutting of video and audio files, which is great for saving space by rough-cutting your large video files taken from a video camera, GoPro, drone, etc. It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data without doing a slow re-encode and thereby losing quality. Or you can add a music or subtitle track to your video without needing to encode. Everything is extremely fast because it does an almost direct data copy, fueled by the awesome FFmpeg which does all the grunt work.

But it is not just plain manual cutting as it can also import segments from: MP4/MKV chapters, Text file, YouTube, CSV, CUE, XML (DaVinci, Final Cut Pro), or quickly cut a YouTube video by its chapters (or music times from a comment).

See https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

#technology #opensource #video #drones #FFmpeg #LosslessCut

Although this announcement may come as a surprise to some, Telegram's founder Pavel Dorov publicly shared the plan to introduce ads on the platform in December 2020. As Dorov explained then, he backed Telegram financially for the past 7 years and the growth of the user base is pushing the project to find additional sources of revenue if it wants to remain free for all.

Only public channels with over 1,000 users will be eligible for this, and the ads will NOT be targeted, which means that users will not be profiled by tracking their clicks and preferences. Finally, to ensure that the sponsored messages are not obstructive and don't degrade the user experience on the platform, they will be limited to 160 characters.

It does seem to be the best option for Telegram to be sustainable as a free-to-use platform for its users, without passing user metadata to advertisers, or letting ads invade private chats or channels.

See https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/telegram-launches-advertising-program-for-public-channels/

#technology #advertising #metadata #Telegram #tracking

Darling is a translation layer that allows us to run macOS applications on Linux. It emulates a complete Darwin environment, including Mach, dyld, launchd and everything you'd expect. It lets you to instantly switch to a Bash shell and start running the applications built for macOS in your Linux system.

Like Wine, it can be a lot quicker to run a single application this way, instead of booting a VM up. But it is early days for Darling still, and it is not as mature as Wine, so is mostly still running non-GUI apps. The developers of Darling are planning to build a nice and user-friendly GUI for interacting with Darling. But for now, we can interact with Darling via command line only.

See https://ostechnix.com/run-macos-software-on-linux-using-darling/

#technology #opensource #Linux #macOS #Darling

If you are one of the KDE Connect fan, and was waiting for iPhone+KDE Plasma integration, then good news for you. The KDE Team announced that the popular KDE Connect applications is now available as iPhone app.

It's in Beta test phase using TestFlight and everything is not yet fully functional. I got my device connected and could push clipboard contents from the phone to my Linux computer (but not yet from PC to phone), but much of the other functionality is not yet there. And of course being Apple, it seems to disconnect whilst in the background.

But great thing is it is in Beta and things are happening!

See https://www.debugpoint.com/2021/10/kde-connect-iphone/

#technology #Linux #iPhone #KDEConnect #opensource

It uses LaMa, an open-source model from Samsung's AI lab to automatically and accurately redraw the areas that you delete. It is open-source under the Apache License 2.0.

It worked really well for two photos I tested with it, but they also have some demo photos you can test it with. If it's not perfect on the first erase, just try a second time.

See https://cleanup.pictures/

#technology #opensource #photography #alternativeto #photos