• 57 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 5th, 2023
  • marv99@feddit.detoDo It Yourself@beehaw.org•DIY smartphone?English
    4·
    5 months ago

    Your question reminded my immediately about one of my favorite 35c3 talks Butterbrotdosen-Smartphone - Mein DIY-Smartphone-Bau from 2018-12-29. It is in German language, but has an English translation, too. Maybe it can give you some good starting ideas?

    Video: 1080p

    Story, Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

    I would like to show you how I built a smartphone from a Raspberry PI. The problems and difficulties I encountered and the solutions I found. The project is not yet finished, there are still a few small things missing. Nevertheless, I want to show you my smartphone in the practical sandwich box and tell you how it came about.

    I had no idea that building a smartphone could be so complicated. Raspberry Pi + touch display is not all there is to think about in this project. At the moment, the smartphone project lives in a sandwich box and attracts attention on the subway. If the power bank can passthrough, that’s an advantage, I’ve found. Setting up the X and Y axes on the touch display so that you can also use the on-screen keyboard was not so easy. And I had to realize that Landscape is not the right size to work smoothly. Most Linux programs are not directly touch-compatible or require too much memory. Then there were also big challenges! Learning to solder was one of them. First learning how to solder, then learning how to desolder, and then daring to use the PI. I would like to tell you these and other stories about building my smartphone.

  • marv99@feddit.detoTechnology@lemmy.world•Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worseEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    You can start with The Uber files, which “is a global investigation into a trove of 124,000 confidential documents from the tech company that were leaked to the Guardian.”

    Summary

    Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals

    Some examples:

    • The cache of more than 124,000 internal Uber files lays bare the ethically questionable practices through which the company barged its way into new markets, often where existing laws or regulations made its operations illegal, before lobbying aggressively for those same laws or regulations to be altered to accommodate it. Read here
    • Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries. Read here
    • Two of Barack Obama’s most senior presidential campaign advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, discussed helping Uber get to access leaders, officials and diplomats. Read here
    • At least six UK government ministers, including the then chancellor, George Osborne, and the future health secretary Matt Hancock, did not declare secret meetings at which they were lobbied by Uber. Read here
    • The inside story of how Uber used its connections to the Conservative party to lobby Boris Johnson in a rearguard effort to stop Transport for London introducing new regulations. Read here
    • One of Uber’s top executives quit amid questions for the company about whether its European operations were structured in a way that avoided tax. Read here
    • Uber secretly hired a political operative linked to Russian oligarchs allegedly aligned with Vladimir Putin in an attempt to secure its place in the Russian market, despite internal bribery concerns. Read here

    […]

    As Bonus some older articles about their overall ethics and practices:

  • marv99@feddit.detoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Search engines compared
    6·
    10 months ago

    MetaGer is a German meta search engine (utilizing several search engines in the back). UI and results are of course available in many languages.

    https://metager.org | https://metager.de

    From their About page:

    What makes MetaGer special?

    MetaGer is different from other search engines. This is reflected not only in our public good orientation and focus on privacy, but also through some unique features:

    • Possibility of creating a personal blacklist
    • Function of the search in the search
    • Advertising-free search possible
    • Integration of search engine projects like YaCy
    • The only German search engine that combines results from several large web indexes
    • And much more…

    What We Stand For

    Guaranteed Privacy

    Data protection and privacy are important to us. That’s why we don’t track or store personal data and offer several services to protect your privacy, for example our anonymizing proxy (“Open Anonymously” feature).

    Non-Profit Association

    MetaGer is a project of the non-profit association SUMA-EV, Association for Free Access to Knowledge. SUMA-EV is primarily committed to promoting media literacy.

    Diverse and Free

    MetaGer produces diverse results because it is a metasearch engine. We have explained exactly what this means in our transparency statement. By publishing our source code, we show that free access to knowledge is important to us. Our source code is free and open source.

    100% Renewable Energy

    Sustainability and resource consumption is also a big issue for us. Therefore we pay attention to the energy consumption of our services and only use electricity from renewable energy sources.

  • marv99@feddit.detoLinux@lemmy.ml•What's the best Epson scanner software for Mint?English
    3·
    10 months ago

    If you are unhappy with suggested XSane, but only want an OSS solution, I do not know a good alternative.

    Possible non-OSS solution

    Although I am an open source enthusiast, there are few application where I use commercial, even non-OSS solutions on Linux. One of this exceptions is for scanning.

    Background: I “administrate” some legacy Epson scanners used with my family’s Linux boxes and got them all to run with a software called VueScan, with the following restrictions:

    • Perfection 3490 worked out of the box, no drivers required
    • Perfection 3170 requires Epson drivers (iscan_2.10.0-2_i386.deb, iscan-plugin-gt-9400_1.0.0-2_i386.deb), but only runs on 32bit Linux
    • Perfection V30 requires Epson drivers (scan-gt-f720-bundle-2.30.4.x64.deb.tar.gz) and simply works on 64bit Debian

    As you see, it might be a bit of luck, if a device works out of the box or not.

    Unfortunately your Epson Stylus SX435W seems not to be listed under the supported Epson devices (click red button “All drivers” to see all supported Epson scanners).

    If you happen to find no solution, I suggest to use the trial version of VueScan and check if your Epson simply runs or not.

    EDIT: sorry, I forgot to mention. that the VueScan GUI has plenty of those processing options you are searching for.

  • marv99@feddit.deOPtoRaspberry Pi@feddit.de•Fünf Raspi-Projekte, die Sie jetzt (endlich) machen können | Make Magazin
    2·
    10 months ago

    Tageszeitgenaue Stromabrechnung bzw. Verbraucher zu günstigen Zeiten schalten, ist das eigentliche (noch nicht erreichte Ziel). Bisher habe ich aber einfach nur sehr (sehr) viele Daten über unseren Stromverbrauch gesammelt.

    So sieht ein aktueller Ausschnitt aus dem Volkszaehler aus. In dessen Datenbank speichere ich alle Rohdaten, ohne sie zusammenzufassen.

    In der Heimautomatisierung, werden die Daten aber nur minutengenau geholt und gespeichert und später dann zu noch größeren Zeiträumen und Durchscnnitten zusammengefasst.

  • marv99@feddit.deOPtoRaspberry Pi@feddit.de•Fünf Raspi-Projekte, die Sie jetzt (endlich) machen können | Make Magazin
    3·
    10 months ago

    Gerne.

    Für das Auslesen des Stromzählers musste ich mir einen Code beim Stromanbieter geben lassen und habe dann mit Lichtsignalen am optischen Ein-/Ausgang die bessere Auflösung freigeschaltet (also genauere Zahlenwerte). Die schlechte Auflösung sei wohl aus Datenschutzgründen standardmäßig aktiv.

    Dann habe ich einen “Weidmann IR Schreib/Lesekopf USB (Optokopf)” für ca 50 Euro gekauft (soweit ich mich erinnere könnte man auch etwas günstigeres selbstbauen) und diesen an einen alten Raspi 1 gehängt. Der Magnetkopf wird am optischen Ein-/Ausgang des Stromzählers befestigt.

    Auf dem Raspi läuft ein Image des Volkszaehler Projekts, bei mir ist das noch Debian 9.

    Da mir eine mysql-Datenbank mit vielen Schreibzugriffen auf der Raspi SD-Karte zu heikel war, habe ich die Volkszaehler-Datenbank ausgelagert auf einen vorhandenen Server mit echten Festplatten. Der Raspi übernimmt “nur” noch das Auslesen und Verarbeiten der Daten, sowie das Webinterface.

    Für FHEM habe ich mich an diese Anleitung gehalten: https://wiki.fhem.de/wiki/Volkszaehler (vermutlich nicht ganz so interessant). Damit kann ich in meiner Heimautomatisierung den Stromverbrauch entsprechend auswerten.

    Wenn noch weitere Details benötigt werden, bitte einfach melden 🙂