cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/2238534

This is the thread:

https://libretechni.ca/post/2232241

The comment count is 3, but when I enter the thread I only find 2.

From a logged out browser, I can see 3 comments, thus the comment from @rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr. Really bizarre because I have not configured my profile to block anything yet.

UPDATE: as someone pointed out, a profile setting for language was the culprit.

I wouldn’t exactly flip to “not a bug”, however, because the client should inform the user. The suppressed post should just be folded with a “(comment suppressed due to language preference)”.

And as a 2nd bug, the language parameter in the settings should make it clear what the setting does.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/2163451

The fax service demands an email address for confirmation purposes. I give a disposable address using a service that lets me choose the username portion. So I choose an address like dysfunctionaladdress@disposablebox.xyz. Then I use that disposable acct to confirm the fax.

The fax service discloses the email address to the recipient. I would expect my email address wording would make it loud and clear to the recipient that it is unfit for sending email. But motherfuckers use it anyway! I suppose they are too lazy to send snail mail to the address I provided. So then their response to dysfunctionaladdress@disposablebox.xyz is publicly shared with the world. And not me, generally, because I don’t return to the disposable box.

It’s such a shit-show. How can I control for this? I need a fax service that does not force exposure of email address to recipients. I don’t mind paying to send a fax so long as it’s a pyg (pay-as-you-go) service. I can only find fax services that require a plan with monthly payments.

Any suggestions? The whole point in using a fax is to prevent the recipient from reaching me over email.

If you scan paper receipts which you will then later submit copies of (either to your accountant, to a tax auditor, or to your employer), it is often useful to organize them on a PDF or to print them.

Today’s FOSS tools leave a lot to be desired. We have:

• ImageMagick’s montage app, which lacks a smart rectangle-fitting algo. The user must specify which images to tile in what order. Not even sure it’s sophisticated enough to not overlap images after the first row when different dimensioned images are involved.
• LaTeX is manual labor intensive. You must micromanage the orientation and position of images.
• Arranged by hand when scanning: probably even more manually intensive than LaTeX because it requires a steady hand to precisely place the images.

Human limitations will often likely have some paper waste due to inefficient placement. A clever algorithm could determine orientation and placement of each receipt to optimise minimisation of whitespace, thus wasting less paper.

A receipt-specific montage algo could detect the font size of each receipt and either shrink or enlarge depending on user-supplied constraints. The goal should be as few A4, A3, or US letter pages as possible, but then enlarge receipts to make better use of the available page space.

In principle, someone with a big brain creates an algorithm distributed as a library. Then ideally there would be an app that uses the library to generate LaTeX code. There could also be an enhancement to ImageMagick’s montage app to do the same.

Rectangle Repacking

After the rectangle packing app is created, it would then be useful to have an app that does the opposite. We arbitrarily put many receipts on the glass for scanning. Some receipts might not relate to others with respect to who it is presented to. A GUI app would accommodate drawing many boxes to mark the boundaries of each receipt and give a way to assign a filename to each box and write the files. Then any selection of resulting files could be fed into the rectangle-packing app. ATM we have to use GIMP to crop a single box, write the file, then reload the original image and repeat for each receipt, taking care to remember what was already cropped.

mastodon-archive is very useful, for Mastodon. We need the same for Lemmy.

There are at least a dozen FOSS platforms for phones now. Off the top of my head:

• Replicant
• Jolla
• Sailfish
• Lineage
• PostmarketOS
• Graphene
• e/os

Several more were mentioned in a recent FOSDEM talk. It’s becoming unsurmountable for someone to search on which OS works to what extent on what device. These FOSS platforms all have wikis and various ad hoc scattered datasets that are not in a proper importable format, like JSON or XML.

As always with FOSS, it’s disorganised. We need every portable platform project to publish a dataset in a standard format and ideally in somewhat standardized tables so folks can grab all the datasets to search more sensibly. I should be able to run an SQL command to show, e.g., what all platforms are available on phone model X which have wifi capability. And the reverse… I might want to say which phone has wi-fi support on the most linux-based OSs.

Personally I wouldn’t even need an app. Just datasets to import into SQLite. But an app would make the data useful for more people.

These apps are designed to combine bittorrent tech with a web browser to enable people to share websites peer to peer, so excluded people can reach restricted access websites indirectly and enjoy some liberation from Cloudflare:

• CENO [Android & Windows] has been around a while but apparently lost steam. It’s archived and had no development apparently in 4 years. It’s also broken in my attempt to launch it. (update: a fork of CENO apparently had a commit ~2 weeks ago… so perhaps not a dead project after all)

• Akoopa [linux] is new and was just presented at FOSDEM 2026. It’s a Tor Browser fork in very early stages. Apparently it only functions as a bittorrent client for grabbing static data at this point.

• (update) Agregore looks like a healthy project.

I personally would be happy with just a backend. If I could pass an URL to rtorrent and end up with a local .mhtml file that any browser of my choice could open, I would be very happy.

Conceptually this seems like it could be a quite useful app for getting web pages. I learned about it from @morphite88 @thelemmy.club in this thread. It’s implemented on Android and Windows (not linux? wtf).

I installed the AOS f-droid version, which is ~100mb compressed and over 500mb unpacked. Wow… wtf that is huge. It’s based on Firefox so I wonder if that’s where all the fat comes from.

In any case, the app simply does not work. When I launch the massive thing, it tries to contact a “bootstrap server”, and fails. I do not trust the clearnet and thus force CENO over Orbot (Tor). Perhaps that’s the issue.

CENO gives an option to enter a custom bootstrap server, but my searches come up empty. Perhaps this app it too unpopular to have alternative public servers.

FOSDEM presenter Jah Kosha will pitch the idea that the web can be made inclusive by introducing some middleware called #akoopa to share websites using torrents. This is severely needed. I cannot even read legal statutes that I am bound by because the gov publishes law on exclusive websites.

It’s similar to my youtube-torrent idea:

https://libretechni.ca/post/420147