https://jon.kelbie.scot/category/open-source/ Recent content in Open Source on Jon Kelbie | My Site | jon.kelbie.scot Hugo -- gohugo.io en Tue, 23 Feb 2021 14:33:42 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/fitotrack-is-good/ Yesterday, for the first time in many years (almost a decade), I took an hour long lunch break, during which, again for the first time in many years (much less than a decade though) I went out for a bike ride. It was suprisingly a beautiful, if not slightly cold day which definitely helped me start this new and hopefully lasting exercise routine. Today, it is basically a storm outside with very strong wind and much rain but as I noted on a social media site (distributed, federated, free and open source obviously), “Bit of a dreich day for my 2nd lunchtime bike ride.. but I am of rain, I was born in Scotland, dreich is my daily driver, a wee bit of rain and wind won’t stop me… Only my resistant legs can do that! 33 minutes more of this psyching up to go.” and psych me up it did, I completed a revised circuit and though I considered doing a second circuit (as I intend to progress to soon), I figured that it would be better to stop after one so that I can cycle again tomorrow, rather than push through and encourage the jellification of my legs. In the same update I also said that I’m “Going to give FitoTrack a go today.”, which is a free and open source fitness tracker app with lots of stats, devoid of any data harvesting or adverts, that enables me to track and monitor my progress in much the same way as you might expect of a similar, commercial app tied and bound eternally to a google data centre. The GPS seemed to be reasonably accurate though admittedly not 100%, I seem to recall my garmin watch being of an equivalent level of accuracy and you are able to export your workouts as GPX files or share to whichever apps you have installed on your phone that you may wish to share to, in the form of a png image file. On this point, I have raised a feature support ticket requesting an option to choose the size and file format of the shared file as it is quite large. If this sounds like something you might like then you can find the FitoTrack app on F-Droid - or other non-ethical purveyors of apps which I’ll not link to here, alternatively you can download the source from their codeberg page . (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/fitotrack-is-good/) Tue, 23 Feb 2021 14:33:42 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/fitotrack-is-good/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/photo/2021/02/6035099a/ Yesterday, for the first time in many years, I took a whole one hour for lunch break and, again for the first time in many years, my newly re-wheeled bike out for a ride. Naturally, once home I looked for a free and open source fitness tracker in order to record my progress.. on the advice of a friend in the designers, I found FitoTrack and it is perfect for my needs. Today, despite the stormy winds, I went out for a second bike ride and refined my circuit. Don’t judge me, I am very unfit and this is the start of my journey back to fitness! Anyway, I hope to build up to two then three circuits in a lunch hour but for now one is enough of a challenge. (https://jon.kelbie.scot/photo/2021/02/6035099a/) Export of the FitoTrack workout session summary with openstreetmap routing and some unimportant stats Tue, 23 Feb 2021 13:56:42 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/photo/2021/02/6035099a/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/the-fediverse/ Back in April last year I posted a long update on facebook describing my rookie understanding of distributed and federated networks and my opinions on the options that I had tried at the time. Of course, chances are no-one actually saw the post due to Facebook’s algorithms but there we are, the original post has been reproduced here . Since then I’ve built and destroyed multiple instances of various flavours of federated social media: Diaspora x 2 Friendica x 2 Mastodon x 1 Pleroma x 1 - still active. Plume x 2 - unfortunately the main devs are stepping down so moved blogs here. Pixelfed x 1 - well.. many iterations but still active. Peertube x 1 Osada x 1 Zap x 1 Matrix x 2 - now lighter and more responsive, but still awaiting cross-signing before inviting folks on to it. Funkwhale x 1 - active In addition I’ve built a nextcloud server and an xmpp server, as well as self-hosting all of my email accounts. There are other types of federated services such as Prismo and GetTogether that I haven’t even had a chance to properly explore and I am perpetually on the lookout for a federated photo album application which can replace my koken photo website (even briefly considered writing it myself!). Why bother doing any of this, when most of the services are already provided by Google, Facebook or Twitter? READ A NEWSPAPER! I am done with being harvested for marketing data or for national election\referenda manipulation.. I don’t want an algorithm to decide what content (that has been shared with me) I am or am not permitted to see.. I am sick and tired of opening an app on my phone and being presented with ads for products and services that the app should not know are suitable (or not) for me.. and I don’t want my daughter and any future kids to be no more than a cog in a data machine, inadvertently being harvested by corrupt mega corporations for profit or indeed, worse. As such, I’ve decided to provide alternative services for those of my family and close friends who wish to use them as privacy focussed, decentralised alternatives. It may well be that they have little to no interest and that’s fine, but should they be curious or change their mind then I have their back - and if they don’t trust me with their data more than they do Facebook then, I will happily help them set up their own self-hosted services. So why have I chosen the services I am currently hosting? They are privacy and security focused by default and being self-hosted, hardened where possible by myself. They are federated services built on the ActivityPub protocol. This means that the different sites speak the same language and therefore can communicate with each other despite providing different services. So a pleroma user can follow a friendica user or a mastodon user, a pixelfed user or a writefreely user etc. They are distributed services. Rather than being in one global corporations’ data centre(s) the network is comprised of thousands of smaller, often self-hosted installations. This makes them less vulnerable to attacks, and much harder to censor. They are open-source applications. The source code is available for anyone to verify it, report bugs/flaws and strengthen the application on a community basis. They can be self-hosted, which means I am in complete control of my content. They are free - though buying the developers, moderators, hosts and contributors a coffee would be appreciated. There are no ads, no algorithms and complete transparency. The services which I currently host Pleroma - this is my main social media site, it is a micro-blogging site (think twitter) with several front end options. It is light enough to run on a raspberry pi on a home network (mine now runs on a RockPro64 from Pine64 alongside my matrix and xmpp servers). The devs are very approachable and are very active. Pixelfed - an instagram replacement, it is still under development though basically functional, the next beta update (due very soon) should bring a lot more functionality and the following update will bring instagram & tumblr import functionality. I wrote a bit more about why I like pixelfed here . Matrix - It can provide audio, video and text chat as well as conferencing.. rooms can be bridged to other services such as RSS feeds, IRC etc. It could be a replacement for WhatsApp, LINE and Telegram but has a little more work to do for multi-user encryption. XMPP - A simple enough FB messenger replacement, a chat service with file sharing capabilities, fully end-to-end encrypted. Nextcloud - this is a home cloud system with a huge amount of customisation and applications including text, audio, video chat, social media (via ActivityPub ), distributed filesharing and collaboration, phone tracking, email client, phone backups, rss reader, calendar, audio player etc. This is just for us in our house but potentially in the future I may re-create a shared talk/social media nextcloud server with limited storage quotas. Funkwhale - a music site soon to be podcast capable. I host my music collection here privately so that I can lien remotely (replaces spotify for me). It can be used to host and share creative commons music but I’m a novice in finding CC music (that I like) so I haven’t yet explored this. The website switching.software has a lot more information about different alternatives to centralised srvices, written in plain, non-techy language, however here are some of the main alternatives (disclaimer: in various states of active development) Good Guys Wank pleroma, mastodon, zap, friendica, diaspora facebook, twitter pixelfed instagram peertube youtube writefreely, plume medium, blogger nextcloud dropbox, google drive, onedrive, box xmpp, matrix messenger, whatsapp, LINE, telegram I recently saw a post via pleroma: Friend: Are you OK? You haven’t posted on Instagram in ages Me: I quit FB, Instagram, and Twitter. Friend: Why’d you quit the internet? Me: Actually I’ve rejoined the Internet. This about sums it up for me, I’ve left the data harvesting silos but I’ve re-joined the internet. One common observation of those on “the fediverse” is that everyone is much friendlier.. that’s because we’re not being manipulated, our timelines are not manufactured and we’re able to have genuine discourse with humans free of corporate interference. There are still asshats and bots but you have the ability to curate your own timeline and have the support of an admin who cares about his instance who will assist if required.. and if you don’t feel that your admin has your back.. then you can just move to another instance or make your own. As a side note: I have also replaced Google’s android on my phone with LineageOS without any google services and have deleted my google, facebook (including whatsapp & instagram) and twitter accounts. In April, I’ll hopefully take delivery of a Purism Librem 5 phone which is built on a security and privacy focused linux distribution and not android at all. Edited (February 5, 2020) to update currently hosted apps and mention I’m ill waiting for the fucking Librem 5 phone.. Edited (April 23, 2020) to update currently hosted apps and mention that Purism are on rocky ground, if I don’t get some sort of update about my Librem 5 phone soon then I’ll be requesting a refund and opting for a PinePhone. (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/the-fediverse/) Tue, 05 Feb 2019 13:41:25 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/the-fediverse/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/distributed-social-networks/ EDIT: This was written in the early-ish days of my federated social network exploration and posted to facebook, some of the opinions are out of date and a newer, related article can be found here . These are decentralised, open source, social networks which are interoperable (they all talk to one another). There is no advertising, no data-mining, no central ownership, but also no censorship. The don’t insist you sign up with your full name and indeed recommend you not doing so. There are a number of different networks available with the most popular currently being Mastodon, Diaspora*, Hubzilla, Friendica etc. Each flavour offers slightly different services\functions such as chat, RSS feeds, photo albums, interactions with other social networks etc. However, they are not owned by corporations and as such are generally not as feature-rich as those centralised, closed-source social networks such as facebook, google+ and twitter etc. Each has a learning curve though not unsurmountable, I’d imagine pretty easy to overcome if you join one of the bigger population public servers. I’ve set up my own server so it was a slightly more complex process for me. I tried diaspora*, friendica and briefly mastodon.. I loved the simplicity of diaspora* but it lacked some functionality that I was looking for (such as photo albums). Mastodon is very twitter like and the server that I joined was overwhelmingly full of Japanese anime otaku so it wasn’t a great experience. So I don’t have much info to share on that one. So I have settled (I think) on Friendica, it has an integrated RSS feed so I can see news articles etc. that I was accustomed to seeing in FB. It can integrate with other non-federated social networks. You can have multiple profiles, so for example a work profile and one for more personal relationships. I’ve integrated a FB like chat. The bigger public servers will have these features and more. Friendica also has the greatest connectivity to other networks with in the two entities that are the federation and the fediverse (free network link below) More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network A quick guide to the free network Popular public sites for diaspora*, friendica and mastodon: Diaspora*: joindiaspora.com framasphere.org diasp.org diasp.eu Friendica: libranet.de squeet.me Mastodon: instances.social (a good tool to find a suitable instance) (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/distributed-social-networks/) Fri, 20 Apr 2018 13:21:21 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/distributed-social-networks/