Just a stranger trying things.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • My number one gripe with organic maps is how fragile the search is. If you don’t write it exactly right, you get no or irrelevant results. Also, it seems to have no clue of what is popular and what people expect when they search for something. I’m not talking about personalized results but for example the following: searching for “Eiffel”, leads me to minor roads, restaurants and all kinds of results unrelated to the Eiffel tower. This is what is troubling me the most.


  • Exactly, this is about compression. Just imagine a full HD image, 1920x1080, with 8 bits of colors for each of the 3 RGB channels. That would lead to 1920x1080x8x3 = 49 766 400 bits, or roughly 50Mb (or roughly 6MB). This is uncompressed. Now imagine a video, at 24 frames per second (typical for movies), that’s almost 1200 Mb/second. For a 1h30 movie, that would be an immense amount of storage, just compute it :)

    To solve this, movies are compressed (encoded). There are two types, lossless (where the information is exact and no quality loss is resulted) and lossy (where quality is degraded). It is common to use lossy compression because it is what leads to the most storage savings. For a given compression algorithms, the less bandwidth you allow the algorithm, the more it has to sacrifice video quality to meet your requirements. And this is what bitrate is referring to.

    Of note: different compression algorithms are more or less effective at storing data within the same file size. AV1 for instance, will allow for significantly higher video quality than h264, at the same file size (or bitrate).















  • It’s unfortunate the grapheneos community has a bad reputation, but I think the fact that Daniel stepped down and that the project is very committed and ticking all my personal boxes (and more) really keeps me devoted. I wish there were more options of phones, but I have no issue personally with it requiring google pixels as they have convinced me with what seems like rational and well supported arguments. I do wonder if as someone else mentioned, it may be interesting to have a GOS-light for other phones, just to give them a chance to get into GOS and try it out before getting a dedicated phone. It feels like a high barrier to entry, and a limited version may still be better than anything else available to those people? Just a thought.


  • I’m sorry, I don’t have any specific suggestions for you, but I am wondering: is there no open source app you yourself wish existed because you would need it?

    Working on an open source app because some else (and not you) needs it, is not a good way of staying engaged and caring about the solution. Being the user and target of a project yourself is usually a much netter way of caring and proposing something tailored to at least one individual, maybe more.

    Of course, if you are looking for a programming exercise, go for it, but then you don’t need ideas, you can reimplement something which already exists, perhaps which you like, but in your own way. But if you want to have an impact in the open source, it starts by needing something which you don’t really find anywhere and taking matter in your own hands to fix it :) this is not meant to disincentivize you, quite the opposite! I hope you stay attentive to your digital ecosystem to see which holes can be plugged :)

    I maintain a private list of ideas I just think of as I go about my day, of things I would like to write/create for myself and while I won’t be going through with all of them, I hope to be able to pick up one or several of them whenever I have time. I can through some ideas here, not as a hint that you should do it (I’ll probably do them myself regardless), but just to inspire you, maybe:

    • I am subscribed to a teachable program which has no app and the program is just static information. I want to pull it all and represent it to me offline, not requiring internet to manage my progress. It is also intended to help me archive what I paid for and not depend on the goodwill of teachables to allow me to continue access the resource.
    • an RSS feed manager which uses embeddings to automatically organise the content by topic rather than by source.
    • an anki plugin to highlight content in the browser based on words from anki that I have and have not learned, to improve my language learning and reading ability.

    I have a few more, but this should give you some hints, I hope! Good luck!


  • The Hobbyist@lemmy.ziptoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPixel 8A and Grapheneos
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    1 month ago

    Congratulations on your first steps in GrapheneOS!

    In order to best help you and give relevant suggestions, we need more information of who you are trying to be private from.

    If your threat model is particularly sophisticated, it may be recommended that you do not use a sim card, or at least never when your phone is at home. Instead, exclusively rely on WiFi. It may also involve desoldering your microphone and camera and only make calls using an earpiece.

    These are not recommendations, but simply examples of how far one can go with respect to their threat model. If you would rather want to avoid “regular” spying by google, Facebook and the likes, you may be better off selecting a private DNS (for example Mullvad’s extended DNS which comes with social media filtering https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls ). You would need to make sure you do not install Google services (nor microg) and especially no google apps.

    Much more can be said, but we would need specific information about your case to provide better guidance.

    EDIT: I do not want to give the impression that GrapheneOS does not make a good job in improving your situation already. They do! But to do more you would need to justify it with your threat model, that’s what I’m getting at.