There are a lot of things that get landfilled that have some marginal value, but generally if there’s not a huge amount of money to be made recycling things they won’t get recycled. It might not be surprising to most that this is true of almost all plastic, a substantial portion of glass, and even a lot of paper and metals, but what might come as a shock is that plenty of rechargeable lithium batteries are included in this list as well. It’s cheaper to build lithium batteries into one-time-use items like disposable vape pens and just throw them out after one (or less than one) charge cycle, but if you have some spare time these batteries are plenty useful.
[Chris Doel] found over a hundred disposable vape pens after a local music festival and collected them all to build into a battery powerful enough for an ebike. Granted, this involves a lot of work disassembling each vape which is full of some fairly toxic compounds and which also generally tend to have some sensitive electronics, but once each pen was disassembled the real work of building a battery gets going. He starts with testing each cell and charging them to the same voltage, grouping cells with similar internal resistances. From there he assembles them into a 48V pack with a battery management system and custom 3D printed cell holders to accommodate the wide range of cell sizes. A 3D printed enclosure with charge/discharge ports, a power switch, and a status display round out the build.
With the battery bank completed he straps it to his existing ebike and hits the trails, easily traveling 20 miles with barely any pedal input. These cells are only rated for 300 charge-discharge cycles which is on par for plenty of similar 18650 cells, making this an impressive build for essentially free materials minus the costs of filament, a few parts, and the sweat equity that went into sourcing the cells. If you want to take an ebike to the next level of low-cost, we’d recommend pairing this battery with the drivetrain from the Spin Cycle.\
Europe’s electronic communications operators have an essential role to play in achieving the EU’s ambitions for digital leadership, industrial competitiveness – but the sector is also a driver for social inclusion and ecological transition.
Law enforcement believe the activity, which makes it harder to then unlock the phones, may be due to a potential update in iOS 18 which tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have not been in contact with a cellular network for some time, according to a document obtained by 404 Media.#News #Privacy
Law enforcement believe the activity, which makes it harder to then unlock the phones, may be due to a potential update in iOS 18 which tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have not been in contact with a cellular network for some time, according t…
The telecommunications sector needs substantial investment and regulatory reforms to meet the European Union’s digital and sustainability targets. Nicolas Guérin, President of the French Telecoms Federation (FFTélécoms), spoke with Euractiv’s Xhoi Zajmi.
Visualise statistics about your account with multiple new tools, Bridgy Fed discusses governance, and further integration of the ATmosphere ecosystem with 3p clients
One of the main goals of writing this newsletter is not only to share links, but more importantly, to give context to help you make sense of what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks.
One of the main goals of writing this newsletter is not only to share links, but more importantly, to give context to help you make sense of what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks. Yesterday and today I thoroughly exhausted my ability to make sense of things, and as such this edition is more of a collection links to everything.
For an in-depth analysis, earlier this week I wrote about how to think about how ATProto works, how that relates to governance and power, and what decentralisation and federation mean in this new context.
In an update on Bridgy Fed, the software that allows bridging between different protocols, creator Ryan Barrett talks about possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Barrett says that Bridgy Fed is currently a side project for him, but people make requests for Bridgy Fed to become bigger, and become ‘core infrastructure of the social web’. Barrett is open to that possibility, but not while the project is his personal side project, and is open for conversations to house the project in a larger organisation, and with someone with experience to lead the project.
Atmosphere Stats and Blueview.app both allow you to show you statistics about your account. Blueview shows you your follower growth over time, and Atmosphere Stats assigns you an animal based on your posting style, as well as showing an overview of your posts by time of day.
The Links
Some updates on Bluesky:
Bluesky will added the ability to post Threads in one go soon, and the feature is already available to test, and a preview of what it looks like here.
A short thread on how the Discover feed works, and some of the steps the Bluesky team is taking to improve the quality of it.
Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shares some aspects about what the Bluesky team currently is working on.
There is a renewed call for private data on ATProto: Bluesky Engineer Devin Ivy shares some ideas the team is considering, while Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold reiterates that the team understands the need for it, and says it is a ‘heavy lift’ to implement.
Bluesky Wall is a simple web app that shows you a realtime feed of posts with any given keyword.
Further integrations of ATProto applications
Hagoromo is a third-party client for Bluesky, focusing on multi-column, and their latest update now also adds support for your Linkat.blue profile.
Third-party client Klearsky now supports showing all other ATProto-powered profiles on your Bluesky profile (as well as other updates).
Blogging platform WhiteWind has added support Frontpage; if a WhiteWind blog is posted on Frontpage, this now automatically shows up in the comment section of the WhiteWind blog as well.
Links for developers:
Supercell is a lightweight and configurable atproto feed generator.
Bluesky COO Rose talked with the Quiet Riot podcast about elections and platform values.
Bluesky board member Mike Masnick talks on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline about tech media and joining the Bluesky board.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.
As Election Day in the U.S. nears, social networking startup Bluesky, now flush with new capital, hopes to demonstrate that its platform can serve as a
Do you remember the fourth-place winner in the 2022 Hackaday Prize? If it’s slipped your mind, that’s okay—it was Boondock Echo. It was a radio project that aimed to make it easy to record and playback conversations from two-way radio communications. The project was entered via Hackaday.io, the judges dug it, and it was one of the top projects of that year’s competition.
The talk begins with a simple video explainer of the Boondock Echo project. Basically, it points out the simple problem with two-way radio communications. If you’re not sitting in front of the receiver at the right time, you’re going to miss the message someone’s trying to send you. Unlike cellular communications, Skype calls, or email, there’s no log of missed calls or messages waiting for you. If you weren’t listening, you’re out of luck. The device works with conventional amateur radios and can capture messages, store them in the cloud, and even react to them. Mark was inspired to create a device to solve these problems by his father’s experience as an emergency responder with FEMA. Often, his father would tell stories about problems with radios and missed transmissions, and Mark had always wondered if something could be done.
Boondock Echo is the device that hopes to change all that. It’s a device designed for recording and playback of two-way radio communications. The hardware is based around the ESP32, which is able to capture analog audio from a radio, digitize it, and submit it to the Boondock Echo online service. This also enables more advanced features—the system can transcribe audio to text, and even do keyword monitoring on the results and email you any important relevant messages. The Boondock Echo service can be set up to react to keywords and provide notifications in turn. Rather amazingly, Hackaday actually helped spawn this project. Mark had an idea of what Boondock Echo should do, but he didn’t feel like he had the full set of technical skills to implement it. Then, Mark met KC via a Hackaday Hackchat, and the two started a partnership to develop the project further. Eventually, they won fourth place in the 2022 Hackaday Prize, which netted them a tasty $10,000 which they could use to develop the project further. They then brought in Mark’s friend Jesse on the hardware side, and things really got rolling.
The hope was to start producing and delivering Boondock Echo devices. Of course, nobody is immune to production hell, and it was no different for this team. KC dives into the story of how the device relied on the ESP32-A1S module. When they went to make more, this turned out to be problematic. They found some of the purchased modules worked and some didn’t. Stripping the RF shields off the pre-baked modules, they found that while they all included audio codec chips marked “8388,” some modules had a different layout and functioned differently. And these were parts with FCC IDs, identical part numbers, and everything! This turned into a huge mess that derailed the project for some time. The project had to be retooled to work with the ESP32-based AI Thinker Audio Kit, to which they added a custom “sidekick” board to handle interfacing with the desired radio hardware. Dodgy parts caused a great deal of trouble for the team. Mark notes that there were some organizational lessons learned through this difficult journey. He talks about the value of planning and budgets when it comes to any attempt to escape the “Valley of Death” as a nascent startup. Mark also explains how Boondock Echo came to seek investors to grow further when he realized they didn’t have the resources to make it on their own.
“You don’t go out asking for $10,000 from family and friends, you go out and you ask for a heck of a lot more than that from professional investors,” explains Mark. “It’s a lot easier to come up with $100,000 than $10,000, because the venture capitalists don’t play in the $10,000 price range.” Of course, he notes that this comes with a tradeoff—investors want a stake in the company in exchange for cold, hard cash. Moving to this mode of operation involved creating a company and then dividing up shares for all the relevant stakeholders—a unique challenge of its own. Mark and KC explain how they handled the growing pains and grew their team from there. The successful live demo was a moment of some joy. It used a modified Supercon badge to display transcription of an audio message captured by a Boondock Echo device. The rest of the talk covers the product itself, and we get a demo of what it can do. KC and Mark show us how the Boondock Echo units capture audio, record it, and submit it to the cloud. From there, we get to see how things like AI transcription, keyword triggers, and notifications work, and there’s even a fun live demo. Beyond that, Mark explains how you can order the hardware via CrowdSupply, and sign up with the Boondock Echo cloud service.
It’s not just neat to see a cool project, it’s neat to see something like this grow from an idea into a fully-fledged business. Even better, it grew out of the Hackaday community itself, and has flourished from there. It’s a wonderful testament to what hackers can achieve with a good idea and the will to pursue it.
[quote]Il candidato Commissario europeo a Difesa e Spazio, Andrius Kubilius, è stato sentito dalle Commissioni per gli affari esteri e per l’industria, la ricerca e l’energia del Parlamento europeo in vista delle votazioni sulla
Sound chips from back in the day were capable of much more than a few beeps and boops, and [InazumaDenki] proves it in a video recreating recognizable real-world sounds with the AY-3-8910, a chip that was in everything from arcade games to home computers. Results are a bit mixed but it’s surprising how versatile a vintage sound chip that first came out in the late 70s is capable of, with the right configuration. Recreating a sound begins by analyzing a spectrograph. Chips like the AY-3-8910 work at a low level, and rely on being driven with the right inputs to generate something useful. It can generate up to three independent square-wave tones, but with the right approach and setup that’s enough to get outputs of varying recognizability for a pedestrian signal, bird call, jackhammer, and referee’s whistle.
To recreate a sound [InazumaDenki] begins by analyzing a recording with a spectrogram, which is a visual representation of frequency changes over time. Because real-world sounds consist of more than just one frequency (and the AY-3-8910 can only do three at once), this is how [InazumaDenki] chooses what frequencies to play, and when. The limitations make it an imperfect reproduction, but as you can hear for yourself, it can certainly be enough to do the job.
How does one go about actually programming the AY-3-8910? Happily there’s a handy Arduino AY3891x library by [Andreas Taylor] that makes it about as simple as can be to explore this part’s capabilities for yourself.
If you think retro-styled sound synthesis might fit into your next project, keep in mind that just about any modern microcontrollers has more than enough capability to do things like 80s-style speech synthesis entirely in software.
[quote]Il Regno Unito, nonostante gli annunci che parlano di una spending review imminente, intende aumentare le spese per la Difesa. Dopo un primo momento di riflessione, l’esecutivo laburista guidato da Keir Starmer ha confermato che i tagli non riguarderanno le spese militari e che anzi Londra punta a
After getting hit with a 4 a.m. emergency alert about a shooting hundreds of miles away from where they were sleeping, a lot of Texans were very pissed.#News #texas #fcc
[quote]L’Italia è una cerniera tra due sistemi geopolitici, e per questo investire in Difesa è per il Paese una necessità, non una scelta. A sottolinearlo è stato il ministro della Difesa, Guido Crosetto, in audizione al Senato per illustrare i principali punti
È stata approvata la legge che garantisce l’assistenza sanitaria ai senza fissa dimora - L'Indipendente
"Questa legge, frutto di un lungo dibattito politico e sociale, punta a garantire un accesso equo ai servizi sanitari di base indipendentemente dallo status abitativo o dalla mancanza di documenti formali. Fino ad oggi, infatti, le persone senza fissa dimora, spesso prive di documenti e residenza, si trovavano escluse da una piena partecipazione al sistema sanitario."
Phantom Secure started legitimate before turning into a tech company for organized crime. Its owner, Vincent Ramos, is now out of prison.#News #Privacy
[quote]A settantacinque anni dalla sua fondazione, la Nato rimane il principale foro politico e militare tra Stati Uniti ed Europa. Le nuove sfide portate dalla guerra in Ucraina e dall’emergere di nuovi attori obbligano oggi l’Alleanza Atlantica a riprendere il suo processo evolutivo. In questo
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Dopo 13 mesi di offensiva israeliana incessante, i palestinesi hanno perso tutto. Visitando Gaza questa settimana, il segretario generale del Norwegian Refugee Council Jan Egeland ha assistito alla sofferenza senza pari delle famiglie lì L'articolo L’umanità pagineesteri.it/2024/11/07/med…
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo La Northern Rangelands Trust sostiene che il suo sia "ad oggi, il più grande progetto di rimozione del carbonio dal suolo esistente al mondo, e il primo progetto generatore di crediti di carbonio derivanti dalla modificazione di pratiche di pascolo
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Mentre il mondo rimane concentrato sul Medio Oriente e sulle guerre di Israele a Gaza e in Libano, che minacciano di innescare un confronto aperto con l'Iran, quale impatto avrà sulla regione il ritorno di Trump alla guida della prima potenza mondiale? L'articolo Dopo
Si concludono oggi a Palermo le Giornate Nazionali del Cinema per la Scuola 2024.
“Le Giornate sono un elemento fondamentale del Piano Nazionale Cinema e Immagini per la Scuola, non solo perché rappresentano un’offerta formativa d’eccellenza, ma anc…
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Trump vince anche a Springfield nonostante le polemiche sull’immigrazione C’è un dato clamoroso che è la fotografia perfetta di quanto accaduto in America dove Donald Trump ha trionfato alle elezioni presidenziali statunitensi divenendo,
Penso che starò fuori dai social e dal giro delle news per un po'. Dire che sono allibiza è poco. Mai sottovalutare i redneck. Buona fortuna a tutti noi, ne avremo bisogno. #uspol #electionday #trump
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo L'Arabia saudita vuole l'accordo bilaterale di sicurezza con gli Usa prima della fine del mandato di Joe Biden. Ma non intende normalizzare le relazioni con Israele. Senza Riyadh, gli Accordi di Abramo tra Tel Aviv e quattro paesi arabi hanno scarso valore
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Donald Trump torna alla Casa Bianca grazie ad una vittoria netta. Hanno vinto le promesse demagogiche in campo economico e un'idea vendicativa dei rapporti con nemici ed alleati L'articolo Trump presidente. Paura e delirio a pagineesteri.it/2024/11/06/mon…
La dichiarazione sulle raccomandazioni del gruppo ad alto livello sull'accesso ai dati per un'applicazione efficace della legge sottolinea che i diritti fondamentali devono essere salvaguardati quando le autorità di contrasto accedono ai dati personali delle persone fisiche. Pur sostenendo l'obiettivo di un'efficace attività di contrasto, l'EDPB sottolinea che alcune delle raccomandazioni del gruppo ad alto livello potrebbero causare gravi intrusioni nei confronti dei diritti fondamentali, in particolare il rispetto della vita privata e della vita familiare.
Pur prendendo atto con soddisfazione della raccomandazione, l'EDPB può portare alla creazione di condizioni di parità in materia di conservazione dei dati, ma ritiene che un obbligo ampio e generale di conservazione dei dati in forma elettronica da parte di tutti i fornitori di servizi creerebbe un'interferenza significativa con i diritti delle persone fisiche. Pertanto, l'EDPB si chiede se ciò soddisferebbe i requisiti di necessità e proporzionalità della Carta dei diritti fondamentali dell'UE e della giurisprudenza della CGUE.
Nella sua dichiarazione, l'EDPB sottolinea inoltre che le raccomandazioni relative alla cifratura non dovrebbero impedirne l'uso né indebolire l'efficacia della protezione che fornisce. Ad esempio, l'introduzione di un processo lato client che consenta l'accesso remoto ai dati prima che siano crittografati e inviati su un canale di comunicazione, o dopo che siano decifrati presso il destinatario, in pratica indebolirebbe la crittografia. Preservare la protezione e l'efficacia della cifratura è importante per evitare ripercussioni negative sul rispetto della vita privata e della riservatezza e per garantire che siano salvaguardate la libertà di espressione e la crescita economica, che dipendono da tecnologie affidabili.
"People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, and unwind wherever you are. Take a breath and soak in the forest sounds as they breathe with life and beauty!"
People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, while in lockdown or unable to travel. Use this site to chill, meditate or do some digital shinrin-yoku.
Loops has finally launched, Radio Free Fedi will shut down, and governance for Bridgy Fed.
The News
Loops.video, the short-form video platform has finally launched, after weeks of delays. There is now an iOS app on TestFlight available, as well as an Android APK, and it there is no waitlist anymore. In some statistics shared by Loops developed Daniel Supernault, Loops now has more than 8000 people signed up and close to a 1000 videos posted. The app has the bare minimum of features, with only one feed that seems to be algorithmic, and there is no following feed. Supernault says that he is currently working on adding discovery features as well as notifications to the app. The app currently loads videos smoothly and quickly, and Supernault has already had to upgrade the server to deal with traffic. Loops is currently not federating with the rest of the fediverse, and you cannot interact with Loops from another fediverse account. This feature is planned, but there is no estimation when this will happen. Third party clients are already possible with Loops, and one is already available.
Radio Free Fedi has announced that it will shut down in January 2025. Radio Free Fedi is a radio station and community that broadcasts music by people on the fediverse. The project has grown from a simple stream into multiple non-stop radio streams, a specialty channel and a channel for spoken word, and build up a catalogue of over 400 artists who’s art are broadcast on the radio. Running a project requires a large amount of work, and was largely done by one person. They say that this is not sustainable anymore, and that the way that the project is structured make handing the project over to someone else not an option. Radio Free Fedi has been a big part of the artist’s community on the fediverse, which has contributed to a culture of celebrating independent art, and the sunset of Radio Free Fedi is a loss for fediverse culture.
In an update on Bridgy Fed, the software that allows bridging between different protocols, creator Ryan Barrett talks about possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Barrett says that Bridgy Fed is currently a side project for him, but people make requests for Bridgy Fed to become bigger, and become ‘core infrastructure of the social web’. Barrett is open to that possibility, but not while the project is his personal side project, and is open for conversations to house the project in a larger organisation, and with someone with experience to lead the project.
The Social Web Foundation will organise a Devroom at FOSDEM. FOSDEM is a yearly conference in Brussels for free and open source software, and will be on February 1-2, 2025. The Social Web Foundation is inviting people and projects to give talks about ActivityPub, in the format of either a talk of 25 minutes for bigger projects, or a lightning talk of 8 minutes.
OpenVibe is a client for Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, and has now added support for cross-posting to Threads as well. OpenVibe also offers the ability to have a combined feed, that shows posts from your accounts on all the different networks into a single feed, which now can include your Threads account, as well as your Mastodon, Nostr and Bluesky accounts.
The shutdown of the botsin.space server lead to some new experiments with bots on the fediverse:
Ktistec is a single-user ActivityPub server that added support for bots in the form of scripts that the server itself periodically runs.
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Campania, via libera al terzo mandato per De Luca. Ma il Pd: “Non sarà il nostro candidato” Il Consiglio Regionale della Campania ha approvato la legge regionale che consentirebbe al governatore in carica Vincenzo
#Scuola, disponibili i dati provvisori sullo sciopero del #31ottobre. L’adesione, a livello nazionale, rilevata alla data del 4 novembre, è stata del 5,49%.
#Scuola, disponibili i dati provvisori sullo sciopero del #31ottobre.
L’adesione, a livello nazionale, rilevata alla data del 4 novembre, è stata del 5,49%.
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Pier Luigi Bersani è stato assolto dall’accusa di diffamazione nei confronti del generale Roberto Vannacci, europarlamentare della Lega: per il giudice del Tribunale di Ravenna “il fatto non sussiste”. Bersani era stato denunciato da Vannacci perché il primo settembre 2023, durante
Changelog: 🦝 fix crash in search when result type is hashtags or users; 🦝 improved login flow, especially for Mastodon users; 🦝 remove channels from selection when using the "Circle" visibility for posts (Friendica-only); 🦝 improved hashtag and mention opening, especially on Mastodon; 🦝 experimental UnifiedPush integration for push notifications; 🦝 dependency updates.
@Privacy Pride Il post completo di Christian Bernieri è sul suo blog: garantepiracy.it/blog/document… Tempo di lettura: 10 minuti. Ma la parte utile è alla fine. (Lo so, sono malefico) In questi giorni è iniziata la fase di test dell'integrazione di IO, l'app di PAGO-PA
#NoiSiamoLeScuole questa settimana è dedicato al Liceo “Melchiorre Gioia” di Piacenza e all’Istituto Superiore “Mattei” di Fiorenzuola d’Arda (PC) che, con i fondi del #PNRR, hanno avviato percorsi di mentoring per la dispersione implicita e creato n…
#NoiSiamoLeScuole questa settimana è dedicato al Liceo “Melchiorre Gioia” di Piacenza e all’Istituto Superiore “Mattei” di Fiorenzuola d’Arda (PC) che, con i fondi del #PNRR, hanno avviato percorsi di mentoring per la dispersione implicita e creato n…
Il Ministro Giuseppe Valditara, ha firmato oggi un nuovo decreto per finanziare ulteriori 64 asili nido, nell’ambito del #PNRR, per un importo pari a 40,8 milioni di euro, di cui il 55% è destinato ai comuni delle regioni del Mezzogiorno.
Il Ministro Giuseppe Valditara, ha firmato oggi un nuovo decreto per finanziare ulteriori 64 asili nido, nell’ambito del #PNRR, per un importo pari a 40,8 milioni di euro, di cui il 55% è destinato ai comuni delle regioni del Mezzogiorno.
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale L’inchiesta di Report su Antonella Giuli, sorella del ministro della Cultura “Si può costringere una donna, una madre, una professionista che gode della stima dei suoi datori di lavoro a rivelare la verità dolente di una vita
@Privacy Pride Il post completo di Christian Bernieri è sul suo blog: garantepiracy.it/blog/blocati-… https://x.com/xeng/status/1852934762144698736?s=46&t=h5DrgTbndHlziv2P4_H0NQ Oggi inizia l’attivazione dell’annunciata modifica alla funzione “blocca” di X. Per me è un grave errore che può avere conseguenze negative nella vita reale delle persone. Forse
Pirati.io
in reply to The Privacy Post • • •PS: qualcuno ha notato le differenze tra la versione inglese e quella italiana?
edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/…
L'EDPB adotta la sua prima relazione nell'ambito del quadro UE-USA sulla privacy dei dati e una dichiarazione sulle raccomandazioni sull'accesso ai dati per le attività di contrasto | European Data Protection Board
www.edpb.europa.eureshared this
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Lord Vetinari
in reply to Pirati.io • • •In quello italiano si parla di "attività di contrasto", in quello inglese di "law enforcement", in quello tedesco "wirksame Strafverfolgung"