The Android developer just published an updated landing page for Google Messages, showing off key features ranging from customization, privacy and security, and, of course, AI.

On this landing page, there are different sections for each feature set, including one for RCS. As spotted by 9to5Google, if you expand this list of RCS features and scroll to the bottom, you see a section on "Coming soon on iOS: Better messaging for all." That's no surprise: We've known Apple was adopting RCS since November. However, it's the next line that brings the news: "Apple has announced it will be adopting RCS in the fall of 2024."

Of course, this does not say a lot as it is "in the fall" which is anywhere over a couple of months, and Google has tried to embarrass Apple into making moves before. I suppose, though, there is the looming court case against Apple which is anyway keeping pressure on Apple. If it were not for the US court case, I would have guessed Apple may have pulled out after the EU had ruled Apple was not a dominant player in the market (although the EU case was looking more at interoperability with WhatsApp and others in Apple Messages).

Of course, with Apple actually including RCS now, they can probably argue that there is interoperability via RCS between their platform and Android too. It must be remembered that in many countries, like mine, SMS's are paid for so are very expensive to use for any form of chatting, and the costs go up exponentially when you text an international number.

I personally have quite a few issues with interoperability with Apple:

• I still have AirTags from when I had an iPhone and I daily get the audio beeps warning me the AirTags are not connected (I use an Android phone and alternate between an iPad and an Android tablet)
• I can't wait to sell my AirTags and get the new one's Google was working on that will interoperate with Apple, but supposedly Apple has been delaying building in that support into their devices (which Google already built into Android for AirTags in 2023)
• Because I was on Apple Messages and my iPad still sometimes connects, I find a message on my iPad that arrived a week ago which I had not seen (I had Beeper which was solving this problem)

Apple is not at all dominant outside the USA, but it makes interacting with Apple users quite a pain, as Apple has gone out of their way to try to keep their users inside the walled garden.

See https://lifehacker.com/tech/google-just-revealed-when-apple-will-officially-adopt-rcs

#technology #RCS #Apple #interoperability

Passkeys are an easy and secure alternative to traditional passwords that can help prevent phishing attacks and make your online experience smoother and safer.

Unfortunately, Big Tech’s rollout of this technology prioritized using passkeys to lock people into their walled gardens over providing universal security for everyone (you have to use their platform, which often does not work across all platforms). And many password managers only support passkeys on specific platforms or provide them with paid plans, meaning you only get to reap passkeys’ security benefits if you can afford them.

They’ve reimagined passkeys, helping them reach their full potential as free, universal, and open-source tech. They have made online privacy and security accessible to everyone, regardless of what device you use or your ability to pay.

I'm still a paying customer of Bitwarden as Proton Pass was up to now still not doing everything, but this may make me re-evaluate using Proton Pass as I'm also a paying customer of Proton Pass. It certainly looks like Proton Pass is advancing at quite a pace, and Proton has already built up a good reputation for private e-mail and an excellent VPN client.

Proton is also the ONLY passkey provider that I've seen allowing you to store, share, and export passkeys just like you can with passwords!

See https://proton.me/blog/proton-pass-passkeys

#technology #passkeys #security #ProtonPass #opensource

Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. With this context, Atuin gives you faster and better search of your shell history!

Additionally, it provides optional and fully encrypted (E2EE) synchronisation of your history between machines, via an Atuin server, or you can self-host your own server. There is a single command to easily delete your data from the server too.

It supports zsh, bash, fish, and nushell shells right now.

The search is as easy as pressing the up arrow in the terminal and then scrolling back, or typing to search. But you could also type something like this to do a search [search for all successful make commands, recorded after 3pm yesterday atuin search --exit 0 --after "yesterday 3pm" make].

Atuin offers configurable full text or fuzzy search, filterable by host, directory, etc. As it has context around dates, times, exit code, and even the directory location form where a command was executed, you could use the -c flag to just search for commands run in a particular directory.

The sync function allows you to have the same history across terminals, across sessions, and across machines.

There is a quick start script that can be run to install it, otherwise you can also install from the various Linux repos. For manual installation, the steps I found to get going were:

• Install Ble.sh and add it to your .bashrc (or other shell) file
• Install Atuin and add it to your .bashrc (or other shell) file (after Ble.sh)
• Restart your shell and run 'atuin import bash' to import my bash history into Atuin
• Press up arrow to see if Atuin interactive search triggers

The link below has some good documentation as well a link to their source code.

See https://atuin.sh/

#technology #Linux #opensource

Mbin is a decentralized content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform running on the fediverse network. It can communicate with many other ActivityPub services, including Kbin, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, Peertube. It is an open source alternative to other link aggregator services like Reddit. The initiative aims to promote a free and open internet.

Mbin is focused on what the community wants, pull requests can be merged by any repo owner (with merge rights in GitHub). Discussions take place on Matrix then consensus has to be reached by the community. If approved by the community, only one approval on the PR is required by one of the Mbin maintainers. It's built entirely on trust.

It seems it's claim to fame is being more open and accepting of community changes and improvements. It can install as either bare metal/VM or as a Docker container.

Although anyone can install it and self-host it, their project page also contains a link to various instances that already exist and which anyone can register on.

See https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin

#technology #opensource #Fediverse #linkaggregator #decentralised

KDE, especially, is known for its amazing themes and theme customisations. With that can come lots of tweaking, and then forgetting how to get back to what you really liked. Or maybe you want to share that fantastic theme combination that you got right with friends.

Konsave helps do all of this very simply and effectively. I do like that all its options are logically named like -r for remove, -l for list, etc. So, although it is command line driven, it is really easy to use.

It officially supports KDE Plasma, but can be used on all other Linux desktop environments too. It is an open source application written in Python.

See https://github.com/Prayag2/konsave

#technology #opensource #Linux #themes

Not made by Meta = Tick. The price though is almost the cost of three monitors...

These may not be full time permanent replacements for monitors, but they are great for portable use, and could potentially save a ton of desk area space. You can also work in a confined area (even on a plane trip, without the neck strain of having to look down the whole time), with the illusion of space and the monitors being further away from you. Or they can also be used so that they don't disturb someone sleeping (or working) next to you, or you can use them instead of having a large screen TV.

At even 60Hz to 120Hz, that is a pretty decent refresh rate, and more than I expected it to be. They are also not as heavy or cumbersome as many VR goggles are, weighing it at around 75g. Resolution is 1080p per eye.

It seems too that the glasses can connect to Linux computers that support USB-C DP video output.

But this type of device really needs to be tested in person before buying. It's not the sort of thing you can easily show someone remotely, or via a video, to help make a choice.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/replaced-monitors-smart-glasses/ and the video at https://youtu.be/m5pTpB9x-es?si=V1K--m2ZwWQxPSLM is also worth watching

#technology #glasses #smartglasses #AR

Many of us Linux users may have been using Timothy Crosley's excellent app for Linux. But with the Pillow library causing a problem after it was updated, we realised Timothy seems to have disappeared. Within a week or so of that realisation, the project was now forked to https://github.com/streamdeck-linux-gui/streamdeck-linux-gui and even the AUR package has now updated from the new fork The bug was fixed and the Linux support is again fully working.

The project has a coordinator, and a few people looking at issues, but it would be great to see if there are more devs who are interested in assisting, especially with adding of any new features. For example, users would like to see hold for repeat key presses, buttons showing dynamic display information, etc. So right now we can't expect too much to happen, but if any of you know any devs who may be able to assist, that would be greatly appreciated.

It's a long shot, but maybe even someone from Elgato wants to unofficially assist as well, after all even though we use Linux, we have bought and support the Elgato Stream Deck. The more features we can use of it, means we are less likely to migrate off onto some other brand.

This solves a problem I had with wanting to quickly start up a Distrobox container using a shortcut key, but also being able to differentiate it visually from my normal Konsole terminal screen I'd use on Manjaro Linux. It is extremely quick and the named Konsole Profile has a different colour as well as a different window title bar. I needed this as my Starship custom prompt was not playing ball with showing the change of OS properly (it could do so, but the formatting broke all the time). This method I describe here is solid, and works irrespective of the prompt.

I thought this was worth sharing as firstly I could find no search results showing how to do this, and secondly, it can actually be applied for purposes other than just starting a Distrobox container. Any terminal command can be used. It is also a useful way to actually use these named Profiles that Konsole has in KDE Plasma.

My video also gives a taste of what Distrobox does, so if you're interested further in Distrobox I have also included a link below my video, to a Distrobox overview video by someone else.

Watch https://youtu.be/g7x_ngYtj6Y

#technology #opensource #Linux #Distrobox #Konsole

Bionic Reading is a new way of reading text that uses a patented algorithm to highlight the most important parts of words, making it easier and faster to read. The method was developed by a German software developer named Renato Cukar, who was inspired by the way the human eye reads text.

Bionic Reading works by highlighting the most important parts of words, which helps the eye to follow the text more smoothly and efficiently. This makes it easier to read longer passages of text, and can also help to improve comprehension.

Bionic Reading is available as a free Chrome extension, as well as a mobile app for iOS and Android. It can also be used on websites and in PDFs.

See https://www.howtogeek.com/882688/why-you-should-use-bionic-reading-in-chrome-or-any-browser/

EDIT: Although some individuals claim to see improvement, it may be that results do vary as one test shows no real improvement across the board - https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/

#technology #bionicreading #reading

** Now in Android and iOS app stores **

No Face, No Name, No Number, No SIM card, No Internet! Berty is a messenger that doesn’t require any of your personal data or network connection (using Bluetooth Low Energy BLE). All conversations are encrypted with end-to-end encryption, in a fully distributed network.

It is a peer-to-peer messenger with no servers, no cloud - your data is only stored on the device where Berty is installed and used. No one would be able to access the data or shut the app down, not even the developers.

Being P2P, it means the IP address needs to be available to route messaging, but their site explains a bit about how they've tried to mask this. Whilst Briar is an excellent alternative, it is still Android only. The closest alternative is maybe Jami, but it lacks a non-Internet Bluetooth alternative if I recall correctly. Interestingly, Berty also can use Airdrop (iOS to iOS) and Android's Nearby as alternative protocols.

You can share your details and add contacts via a QR code, public key, or an invite link. It is currently available on both iOS and Android, with desktop clients to follow.

See https://berty.tech/

#technology #messenger #berty #P2P #IPFS #privacy

Smartphone-oriented websites tend to focus only on the latest devices, but a large chunk of users choose not to upgrade their phones for one reason or another. Barring hardware failure, many of these devices may still have years of use ahead of them because, to their owners, they still work just fine. While custom ROMs can keep legacy smartphones alive for ages, it can be a nightmare for the modders to keep things like the camera and graphics drivers up to date without official manufacturer support.

Unlike the smartphone ecosystem, updating the graphics driver on your PC is something you can always think about. This is possible because of the modular architecture of PC hardware drivers, which allows power users to tinker with closed source driver packages, or even opt for open source drivers instead of OEM-provided binaries. In the case of Android, however, driver updates generally only come to your phone alongside larger OS updates.

Updatable GPU drivers can come in handy for fixing bugs, improving graphics performance, or adding new features from OpenGL or Vulkan APIs. Nowadays, smartphones are bigger and faster than ever, making them the perfect vehicle for gaming, hence porting the PC-esque driver design to them does make sense.

Thanks to XDA Senior Member bylaws, we now have a genius solution named Adreno Tools that allows on-the-fly GPU driver modifications or replacements on Android — that too without root! Fellow Skyline developer Mark “Pixelylon” pitched the idea of runtime drive replacement to bylaws, which eventually materialized into Adreno Tools. Being a rootless library, Adreno Tools can help any regular app to load custom GPU drivers, deal with BCn textures, and redirect file operations for further complex modifications. It does so by hooking into system libraries and seamlessly swapping in the new driver.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/adreno-tools-update-android-graphics-drivers/

#technology #android #gaming #adrenotools #graphics

Optillusion is a new indie developer that just released its first game today, and it's a doozy. This game is called Moncage, and it's a drop-dead gorgeous puzzler that offers a uniquely interesting mechanic.

You see, the whole game takes place in a cube that you can rotate, and each side offers unique imagery. In order to solve the game's puzzles, you'll rotate this cube to line up the perspective of the cube's imagery. The goal? To collect photos of your perfectly aligned imagery, which reveals the story of the game. Moncage is an interactive optical illusion puzzle game, and not only is the presentation superb, but the gameplay is also a hoot that's perfect for play on a touchscreen.

It's also available on Steam Games for desktops.

See https://www.androidpolice.com/clever-perspective-puzzler-moncage-is-now-available-on-android/

#technology #gaming #puzzles #Moncage