Pinned toot

I actually missed the article being published in the ft:pedia, but now it's also on my blog with a more explanation about what fischertechnik is doing in the smart home space:

I guess I understand beam because I used to share stuff over bluetooth with friends. And before that saw people share stuff over IR. Android Beam is all of that just much less unwieldy (which I guess is wifi direct's issue? Or does Beam even use wifi direct?)

I just used Android Beam for the first time (noe that it's dying?) and it's great. I think its main issue is that it only works between Android phones. Imagine being able to tap your laptop to transfer photos. Or more importantly your parents being able to transfer photos from their phone by touching their laptop. Most importantly transmitting without any involvement of any cloud service.

As a more positive outlook, I hope browsers end up using compositor provided PiP features. Not only will that lead to a more consistent PiP experience for the user, it also avoids having to invent your own PiP system (Firefox's lacks screen snapping, for example).

Another big hope of mine is that will see the PiP web API as a discoverability enhancement of their pip feature and not a competitor.

I really don't like how dismissive this is on using existing systems and solutions. It feels a bit like in the early days of web notifications where browsers wouldn't use system notification systems because they were missing a feature or two. In the end it helped notification systems, but some of it was also just pure arrogance from browsers.

"How we built Picture-in-Picture in Firefox Desktop with more control over video" drops a bunch of interesting federated projects. Especially ones solving issues I've talked about on here before. Namely xwiki adding activitypub to their wiki software ( and Forgefed trying to expand activitypub to work for source code collaboration ( and @forgefed )

I wonder when the big media corporations will figure out an accepted way to lock down podcasts. Though given spotify's market share, maybe they already have?

I'll still celebrate the swaths of content that I can download with the publisher's consent and often without a trace of DRM.

The "subito" self-service cash registers at Migros Bahnhof Bern have exposed USB ports.

Are there ideas for doing e2ee for private toots on mastodon, or even activitypub more generally?

My receiver recently got a software update to support bluetooth headphones. I honestly didn't expect that to happen.

Christmas day project already done and we're only half way through: set up pgp WKD for my e-mail and updated all my devices to use the new keyserver.

The 2019 Matrix Holiday Special is here!! Our very own festive attempt to review everything that happened in 2019 while looking forward into the mists of 2020. Thanks all supporting Matrix through a crazy year - here’s to the next decade!

Mr. Robot finale 

For a fun view into contemporary web standards making, walk backwards up this thread.

Or call toll-free:

@bz_moz @BrendanEich @tomayac @yoavweiss @chrishtr @DanielBratell @slightlylate I look forward to seeing Mozilla’s comments and this may affect Apple’s viewpoint.

I'm super stoked about Mozilla announcing they are going to use @matrix as their open real-time communication platform starting next year.

Spent the evening writing a node module to modify contents of an ar archive in-place. Turns out I didn't quite address my use-case and will have to do a lot more parsing when reading.

However, I have to admit that ar is a nice and simple format except for the mess that is how to store file names.

More specifically: twitter wanting a decentralized social network and amazon/google/apple having a "joint effort" for an open smart home control standard over IP.

Some of the big tech companies seem to be making moves toward "open standards". Sadly it also feels like that xkcd, where the only viable solution is a new standard to add to the pile.

Not only should we federate more things (my gotos here are wikis, code hosting with issue tracking etc. but there's also things like collaborative todo lists) but also try to get interop between different federation standards. I don't think it's reasonable to expect federation between every matrix usage to activitypub. But some sure could. And the other way around should work for sure

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