cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/27882871

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/27852459

It allows to launch exported activities from various apps and helps to create useful shortcuts

2 examples where I find it to be quite useful:
1. Quick Record shortcut for Audio Recorder

It currently does not have a quick recording shortcut.

Audio Recorder Gitlab issue where a user requests the feature. Maybe attention from someone here would be helpful?

You can directy search for the app in Activity manager, open it and create a a shortcut for the Recording activity.

2. Shortcut to open Android/data folder in the native Files app

Context for the folder location I use here

For Android 11 & onwards, you can't access the Android/data folder(without root) from regular file manager apps like Material files(awesome opensource file manager).
The Telegram X app stores it's downloaded files in a folder there.
Material files calls the native Android Files(not GFiles, documentsui.files) app to open the Android/data folder.
Activity manager can be used to create a shortcut for that

1. Search for and open the Files app in Activity Manager and choose the Launch with parameters option for the FilesActivity
2. Action, choose ACTION_VIEW
3. Data = content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/document/primary%3AAndroid%2Fdata%2Forg.thunderdog.challegram%2Ffiles%2Fdocuments or any other directory you like
4. Mime type, choose vnd.android.document/directory

You can then launch the activity with the parameter.
This will be recorded in History(the clock sign). You can long-press the entry and create a Shortcut.

---

Do you have any other cases or ideas where this would be usedul? Please do share them here.

---

On a tangent, Material files allows making shortcuts to files and folders. Markor, text editor app, allows the same too.

I really hope the answer is "yes," but gosh-darned if I can find one. The FreeTube app still works as long as my VPN is off, but as for Invidious . . . (also, sorry if this has already been covered earlier).

Is there was a software (preferably on Linux) where I can drag and drop to quickly make a website with HTML and CSS and export the resulting code?

I know of a lot of online site that charge a lot of money for this, but I was hoping that an open source software exists for this.

P.S: I want to make a simple static personal website. Possible have a link from where they can download PDF samples of my writing/ literature / creative work.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24707054

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24707049

from #TheRegister #Register Thomas Claburn Fri 10 Jan 2025 // 13:37 UTC

Sebastian Steck, a software developer based in Germany, has obtained the source code and library installation scripts for his AVM FRITZ!Box 4020 router, thanks to a lawsuit funded by the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).

Scira (Formerly MiniPerplx) is an minimalistic AI-powered search engine that combines multiple data sources to provide comprehensive answers. The name ‘Scira’ is derived from the Latin word ‘scire’, meaning ‘to know’ - reflecting our mission to make knowledge accessible and intuitive.

https://github.com/zaidmukaddam/scira

Are there any Snapchat or BeReal like FOSS alternatives?

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/17051418

• Obsidian
• AppFlowy
• Coda
• Anytype
• Logseq
• (Probably more I haven’t come across yet)

I love the idea of having all my quick notes, to-do lists, knowledge base, journal, plans, etc., in one single, neatly organized place. Why wouldn’t I? But deciding on which Notion alternative to use is overwhelming.

There are so many options, and all claim to be the best. Online opinions are all over the place (as expected), and these apps aren’t exactly simple—they’re complex for good reasons, but that makes choosing one even harder. And don’t get me started on the endless YouTube videos on the topic—I could spend weeks or months researching this and testing every single one of them, but honestly, this is not how I wanna spend my time so I will ask you guys instead.

---

My Current Setup:

• Markor: Used it for quick thoughts, journaling, and to-do lists but stopped using it because it’s not suited for everything, and there’s no sync between Android and Linux (becsuse it is android only).

• Obsidian: Currently using it as my knowledge base and for long notes, simple to-do lists, and occasional journaling. Haven’t fully migrated to it or created an organized setup because I’m looking for a FOSS Notion alternative.

• Standard Notes: Good for quick notes, but most features are paywalled, making it feel limited.

• jtx Board: My go-to for journaling—it’s simple and quick to use.

---

What I need:

• FOSS, but only if it’s just as good as proprietary options in:
  • Auto-sync between my Android phone and Linux desktop
  • Journaling
  • Quick notes
  • To-do lists
  • Planning
  • Managing personal projects
  • Writing down thoughts
  • A really good Android app
  • Easy to use
  • Free for personal use

What I don’t care about:

Collaboration. This is for my personal use—no sharing, no team features.

---

Given my messy current setup and specific requirements, can anyone give me some recommendations?

Hello Lemmy!

I'm excited to celebrate the 100th release of my project, Open Source Everything! Open Source Everything is my own curated list of open source (or at least source-available) software. It started out with a bit of a bumpy start, even being deleted at one point, but the project is still going strong!

Over the past 4 months, the project has seen releases, both big and small, but it has grown so much since its initial release. It started out with a small list of 128 software I'd kept on my phone for months, but since then it has over doubled, and now has almost 300 pieces of software listed! It's truly inspiring to see the community come together and help the list out, so thank you very much to everyone who suggested software and contributed to the list!

With that said, the list has a long way to go. There are many sections that need improvement, and many mistakes to be fixed. I try to focus on quality over quantity, which means a lot of the software needs to be personally tested before I can definitively make sure that it belongs on the list. Of course, that's difficult for one person to achieve. I kindly ask for community feedback on software listed there, and if you feel there is a better alternative, please let me know!

I'm also considering moving Open Source Everything to a website structure, since I'm currently limited by the functionality of a markdown file. If there's some way to do inline tables and rounded images in a markdown file, let me know. Otherwise, I'll start working on creating a website for it.

Finally, if you're a good SVG artist, many of the software logos don't have high quality svg options available (or some SVGs, like Wikipedia, are broken for whatever reason). I would appreciate anyone with the skills available to help replace all PNG images with SVG counterparts, especially projects that are missing logos.

Thank you so much all of you, and I hope to make 2025 a great year for Open Source Everything!

P.S. Open Source Everything is hosted on GitLab, and mirrored on GitHub. I'm linking to the GitHub version because it supports slightly better formatting and header links are broken on GitLab due to a bug.

There were some posts over the holiday season asking for projects to donate to, and for those who have the means to comfortably do so, this is an important gift to consider.

If there's only a limited amount each of us is able to give, I assume there's no point giving it all to, for one example, The Linux Foundation, because a small personal donation is trivial next to the ~$15,000,000 USD they receive from sponsors dependent on them[1]. I understand that funding sources can be a major and profound source of bias[2] and ideally we would be, for example, helping to make Firefox independent of Google, but until we have more collective power, it's not worth letting smaller important projects struggle instead.

So, which important projects should we leave to the sponsors, and which really need our support?

Hi, I'm trying to add value to a community by creating a curated feed of webpages about a specific topic. For example, if it was Scottish snakes (it isn't) then I would archive every news article I saw on the topic, and host the feed on a webpage or similar.

I've tried Wallabag, and I can't find a way to publish the whole feed - just an individual article.

Any suggestions for other open source tools for this?

Fossify Gallery says it can remove EXIF data, but I can't figure it out. When I click the ellipsis menu, then properties, there is no option to remove the EXIF data. What am I missing?

If there with AGPLv3 AI, I would definitely try, would there be a reason not to use it? I wish there was a GPLv3 AI to install. I would not use a GPL2 AI.

As a real would code example of the difference between GPL2 and 3, not license but code, look at Linux kernel vs Linux-libre. For the limited hardware that a Linux-libre distribution supports, it's a much smoother and cleaner system to run.

An AGPL3 AI can't hide any nefarious or bias programming, so I see it truely working as a servant, while retaining zero information of users for data collecting. Look at open hardware like RISC V and how far that has come once companies saw they were free to engineer their own version of a RISC V CPU. It's made RISC V to be at the very beginning point to get closer to ARM, when it was once worthless. Having a AGPLv3 AI for anyone to design their own version with everybody pushlishing their server source code for AI, would there be a downside to using it?

Skribisto is born from the ashes of Plume Creator icon Plume Creator , keeping the goals while adopting more recent ways to think an application. Where its ancestor was geared toward writing novels, Skribisto aims to be more generic. Ther user can organize his project with items and folders. Each item displays a 'page' and can be of a different type : Text Dedicated to writing. Texts can have its own plan and can be linked to other items, or create them on the fly while writing. Folder Can contain child items or folders. Whiteboard (to be implemented) Think "OneNote". Write wherever you want on a white board, insert images, tables, lists... Then, you can modify, move and resize elements on the board. Section (to be implemented) Visible separations (book, act, chapter, end of book) Folder-Section (to be implemented) Folder with a section role.

Why are open source projects too rigid and stuck in dogmatic position ?

take for example mastodon, its CEO recently posted a toot asking who has already considered deleting facebook / threads after the recent controversies, but on the other hand ignores that his stubbornness about certain points like not adding quotes just doesn't make the project appealing for ordinary people, this feature has been the most request since twitter exodus two years ago. and at every surge of new users mastodon struggles to keep them using the platform, why do these projects struggle to acknowledge what people want the most and deliver on it.

another example is LibreOffice, I was trying to get acclimated to this new office suite and was happy to find that I can theme it to my liking to ease up my transition. but it wasn't long before I found out how tiny dogmatic decision really pushes to give up on it. I found that LO doesn't auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in "proper English". line breaks don't qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.

For people coming from proprietary software that among many short comings still strive to offer the best features and smoothest user experience, it is hard to try and stick to open source projects and even contribute back.

Should big OSS project shift to more democratic structures, where decisions are made based on consensus? or do you think the actual models are fine, and I am an entitled user ??

Hi,

over the last six months I have been building PdfDing. You can find it on github.

PdfDing is a selfhosted PDF manager, viewer and editor offering a seamless user experience on multiple devices. Some of its features include:

• Remembers current position - continue where you stopped reading on any device
• Edit PDFs by adding annotations, highlighting and drawings
• Share PDFs with an external audience via a link or a QR Code. Shared PDFs can be access controlled
• Dark Mode, colored themes and custom theme colors
• Inverted color mode for reading PDFs
• SSO support via OIDC
• Markdown Notes

The project is built using Django, Alpine JS, htmx, Tailwind CSS and Mozilla's pdf.js.

If you like PdfDing please consider giving the project a star on github. If anyone wants to contribute you are welcome to do so!

Document Freedom Day is March 26th. The Digital Freedom Foundation and the Document Foundation will be gearing up to celebrate open standards, Free document and multimedia formats and even CC and Public Domain content using open formats. Hope you'll join in.

Hi,

I'm looking for a program (Windows) that helps me to keep focused and locks Program X for a certain time.

Why:

I'm super chaotic and impulsive. When I'm studying with Anki, after a couple minutes I'm browsing the internet again, to 'find more info' about that super small insignificant detail I dont know in Anki. *Checks clock; 2 hours lost

My solution (which I'm hoping to find):

Have a pre-select set of rules, in which order and time I can use a program. For example:

25 min - Anki - Locked, no internet connection, no windows start button, no task manager, no switching to other windows, full screen

5 min. - free - nothing locked, no restrictions, (but I can't change my preselected set of rules)

25 min - LogSeq - Locked, no internet connection, no windows start button, no task manager, no switching to other windows, full screen

5 min. - free - nothing locked, no restrictions, (but I can't change my preselected set of rules)

25 min. - Firefox - Locked, WITH internet connection, no windows start button, no task manager, no switching to other windows, only 1 Firefox-window allowed (IF POSSIBLE), full screen

5 min - free - nothing locked, no restrictions, (but I can't change my preselected set of rules)

Does someone have a solution for me?

I already found Lockdown Browser (https://web.respondus.com/he/lockdownbrowser/), however that's only for the browser, that's not what I meant. I want to use it system-wide and I want to preselect the order and time I can use the programs.

The project is called "Tactility" and its website is https://tactility.one/

You can run ELF binary apps directly from an SD card without restarting or flashing the ROM. There's an SDK for building these apps, but I haven't made an official release yet.

I wrote a blog post with some background information: https://bytewelder.com/posts/2025/01/06/tactility-one-year-later.html

Source code and project files: https://github.com/ByteWelder/Tactility

cross-posted from: https://rblind.com/post/3476242

As part of OurBlind's continued efforts to provide accessible online spaces for the blind and visually impaired community, we've developed custom themes for Lemmy, to use on our Lemmy instance on Rblind, and to make available for others, in keeping with the themes' license terms and the spirit of free and open source software.

If you're reading this on www.rblind.com and are not signed in, you're using RBlind-Dark. We hope you're enjoying it! If you log in, you can switch to RBlind-Light. Once logged in, go to your username, then Settings and, use the Themes dropdown to make your selection: we suggest RBlind-Dark or RBlind-Light at the end of the list.

Why these themes matter to us

We started this Lemmy instance back in 2023, prompted by the Reddit API protests. Reddit Inc., the company that controls the website our community r/Blind is on, had announced policy changes that made the apps most of us used to participate in the Reddit community impossible to maintain. During this time it became clear to us and many other online communities that a corporate-owned platform would always be subject to pressures that are contrary to our needs. We launched this site as our blind-friendly home base in the fediverse, a decentralized and often self-hosted social media platform.

The goal of having our own home server was always to be able to make our own decisions about the software we run on it. One of those decisions is that the visual styling should always be comfortable for low-vision users and other disabled people, as part of our core audience. That meant designing and providing themes that, within our technical limitations, conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

How we designed our Lemmy themes

OurBlind admins contracted Travis, a talented graphic designer from within the community, for this project. Check out his website here. Together we went over specific requirenments within WCAG and the site's usage, colors, layout, preliminary testing, and communication, to develop both the themes themselves and the framework for future work and sharing.

How these themes meet our goals

In short, the new themes ensure high contrast, colorblind friendly colors, readable fonts, and appropriately-sized and readable buttons and links.

Following are examples of the home feed using the new themes.

RBlind-Dark example

RBlind-Light example

Time for testing and feedback

These have been audited by OurBlind admins, but that's only part of the validation process. If you're using this site and have low vision, colorblindness, a cognitive or a motor disability, consider providing feedback. Do they work well given your needs and use case? Do you like them? Does something not work quite right? Comment below or fill out the anonymous survey. Don't hesitate to comment if you're not a member of this instance or not disabled - we want these to be helpful to as many people as possible. Thank you!

We'll be collecting feedback and open to revisions until February 1st 2025. Even after that, we'll still be interested in your experience, but will take longer to respond and adjust.

How to use these themes on your own instance

As mentioned, this project is all about the value of free and open source software in ensuring control and autonomy. We're making this our home in the fediverse and we want to be good neighbors. We already offer the broader community a place for discussions around blindness, but we also want to contribute back.

These themes are licensed under GNU AFFERO General Public License and available at the Codeberg repo to be used or modified. Updates to the themes that come as a result of user feedback will be available there. Definitely give Travis a star and consider hiring for your own design needs, he's been a delight to work with.

The repo is also mirrored on GitHub for accessibility reasons.

Thanks, from RBlind

This community's journey has been long and thrilling, across three platforms and over a decade. Everybody on the admin and moderation team has deeply benefitted from and grown with the community. These themes are a humble gift to our members and our neighbors on the fediverse. May they make all our lives that bit more comfortable.

Hey everyone. I thought someone might enjoy my simple bash script that I use to go through my fs.

It requires eza, fzf, and zoxide. I use eza and zoxide as my main to-go vanilla replacements, but I'm sure vanilla ls and cd will work too!

https://github.com/razorozx/cd-ls

About Habit-Maker

Have you found it difficult to build new habits? Habit-Maker uses rewards and encouragements to help get over initial willpower required to form new habits.

Features

Rewards

Habit-Maker game-ifies making habits by giving you rewards each time you check a habit. It shows the following progress metrics:

• Streaks - The # of days you've completed your habit in a row.
• Points - points for checking habits, with multipliers for continuing your streak.
• % progress to your 66-day-ingrained habit.

Encouragements

Studies have found that encouragements are vital to building new habits. Habit-Maker takes advantage of this by allowing you to create your own custom encouragements.

Before creating a habit, take a few minutes and think about why you want to build this habit. What benefits will it bring you, and how your life will improve by doing it?

A good encouragement should have:

• An initial congratulations for completing the habit.
• A message tailored to you, about the benefits or reasons why you should continue.

Some examples of good encouragements:

Completing a habit

Once a habit has been formed, its relatively easy to continue doing it, almost as if it were on auto-pilot. Research shows that ~40% of our daily activities are habits that don't require much (if any) willpower once they've been formed.

Built With

• Android Jetpack Compose
• kizitonwose Calendar
• iSoron/uhabits (For score calculations)

Installation / Releases

• Releases
• IzzyOnDroid
• F-Droid
• Google Play

Support / Donate

Habit-Maker will always remain free, open-source software. We've seen many open-source projects go unmaintained after a few years. Recurring donations have proven to be the only way these projects can stay alive.

Your donations directly support full-time development, and help keep this maintained. If you find yourself using habit-maker every day, consider donating:

• Support me on Liberapay.
• Support me Patreon.

Crypto

• bitcoin: 1Hefs7miXS5ff5Ck5xvmjKjXf5242KzRtK
• ethereum: 0x400c96c96acbC6E7B3B43B1dc1BB446540a88A01
• monero: 41taVyY6e1xApqKyMVDRVxJ76sPkfZhALLTjRvVKpaAh2pBd4wv9RgYj1tSPrx8wc6iE1uWUfjtQdTmTy2FGMeChGVKPQuV

Social / Contact

• lemmy.ml/c/habitmaker
• Mastodon
• Matrix chat

Habit Resources

• James clear - 3 steps habit change
• I got addicted to a habit app.
• Develop good habits
• James clear - how to build a new habit
• CNN habit tips

Icons

Work in progress icons created by Cap Cool - Flaticon

More generally, this kind of task is called "Knowledge Base Question Answering" (KBQA). The authors observe that many benchmarks have been published for it over the last decade, and that recently, the KBQA community has shifted toward using Wikidata as the underlying knowledge base for KBQA datasets. However, they criticize those existing benchmarks as either contain[ing] only simple questions [...] or synthetically generated complex logical forms that are not representative enough of real-world queries. To remedy this, they "introduce the SPINACH dataset, an expert-annotated KBQA dataset collected from forum discussions on Wikidata's 'Request a Query' forum with 320 decontextualized question-SPARQL pairs. Much more complex than existing datasets, SPINACH calls for strong KBQA systems that do not rely on training data to learn the KB schema, but can dynamically explore large and often incomplete schemas and reason about them."

The paper's second contribution is an LLM-based system, also called "SPINACH", that on the authors' own dataset outperforms all baselines, including the best GPT-4-based KBQA agent by a large margin, and also achiev[es] a new state of the art on several existing KBQA benchmarks, although on it narrowly remains behind the aforementioned WikiSP model on the WikiWebQuestions dataset (both also out of Lam's lab).