I was looking for a mobile app that would globally delete notifications (from desktop view too) and be able to display a feed filtered on a combination of hashtags (so I can watch for posts about my interests). Although Tusky is a beautifully rendered app, it lacked these options.

Then I found Subway Tooter! It's not as pretty, or as slick, as Tusky, but it is far more functional and customisable. So power users may well want to consider using Subway Tooter. This video will give a feel for it looks like, how the columns, filtering, posting, etc work. I also delve into the app privacy notice a bit, as it was clear some were put off from installing it, after seeing such a lot of text.

I'm trying out posting this video in a portrait format so that it can be better viewed on mobile devices. Unfortunately some artefacts and banding are visible at the beginning of the video, which appeared during the rendering, and I could not remove it (I think the issue was partly due to the variable bitrate of the recording on my phone).

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Links:

Follow my daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #mastodon #subwaytooter #android #opensource

Many remote (and even local) commands can be executed so much quicker when using Bash instead of graphical user interfaces, but for newer users, Bash can be an unfriendly and cumbersome environment.

In this video I show how, with the installation of just three applications and some alias commands, we can make working with Bash much faster, easier, and prettier!

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You can follow my daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za where there are also links to the 10+ social networks I post to as well.

#technology #Linux #Bash #tips #productivity

Self-Hosted photo albums are often considered as alternatives to Flickr or Google Photos. Both PhotoPrism and Piwigo provide something similar, but they do it differently, and in this video I highlight some of those differences. You may just want to host something for yourself, or your family and friends, or for the greater public at large.

PhotoPrism is newer and better looking than Piwigo, but does it have what is needed to provide the functionality you need?

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Reference Links:

See my blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za where you can also see where else I post daily about interesting tech news.

#technology #photoprism #piwigo #photoalbums #opensource #selfhosting

In this video I (try to) explain how I used battery current readings and the battery state of charge, to display gauges on my Home Assistant dashboard showing the amount of battery time left based on the current inverter load. It adjusts as the battery level (SoC) drops and as the loads change.

But it was not all plain sailing as some oddities arose which needed to be accounted for, and I also expand on these. Two issues I had were to estimate time left when the battery is actually charging, and also how to deal with very small loads that show unrealistically long projection times.

As I explain in the wrap up, even if you have a plain battery inverter or other device that does not have the MQTT protocol, or have Modbus registers that can supply this information, there are other innovative ways of reading loads, voltages, and currents that may also work for you. So this video need not only be for those using Victron or similar solar systems.

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My Home Assistant Dashboard code: https://github.com/Danie10/gadgeteerza-homeassistant

#technology #batteries #timetogo #solarsystem #homeassistant

You can self-host these open source apps that will regularly scan the devices connected to your WIFI / LAN and alert you the connection of unknown devices. Pi.Alert has a few extras like warning of the disconnection of "always connected" devices, ...

Home Assistant is an open source self-hosted home automation tool that puts local (not external cloud) control and privacy first. My system is running in a Docker container on a machine at home.

Home Assistant is more than just the monitoring and managing of smart home switches and lights. It has powerful automation that can be triggered by all sorts of events or device states to notify you, or manage even solar systems, garage doors, and much more. For example, I have an automation that announces it has started to rain so we can get the washing off the line before it gets too wet.

In this video I show what my HA dashboards look like, and how I managed to read lots of information via the universal Modbus TCP protocol from my Victron solar energy system, and to also write data back to the Victron system to change the battery minimum state of charge values from HA (or other registers).

I have shared my config files on a Github page so that it is easier for others to replicate some of the same functionality (without spending 4+ hours like I did on a single value statement line).

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This multi-track video editor runs on Linux, Intel macOS and Windows. You can use it for simple editing as well as far more complex work. I've been using it for many years for all my video editing work.

In this video I cover the layout of the user interface, show how I use it to apply all the basic edits I do to my videos, and end off with briefly looking at the settings.

This video is for you if you wondering whether you want to choose Kdenlive as your video editor, or if you have done so, and want to just get started quickly with the basics.

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#technology #video #videoediting #Kdenlive #opensource

I explain in this video how and why I use a dashboard, and contrast some differences between Heimdall and Dashy. I'll also highlight some features, such status indicators and widgets that display data from the Glances monitoring tool.

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Links:

Follow my daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog (links to other sources here too)

#technology #dashy #dashboard #opensource

MeshCentral is an open source, multi-platform, self-hosted and feature packed portal for remote device management (it even runs off a Pi!). It is one of the easiest I've seen for adding new devices, but that really only works once you have the server setup correctly for agents to connect automatically to it when using it in WAN mode.

The challenge I had was firstly that my server is behind a reverse proxy, which claims the SSL port 443 for itself, and secondly that the agent SSL pattern hash was not matching the SSL pattern hash that MeshCentral was using from my Cloudflare issued SSL cert, and MeshCentral then rejects the agent's connection as it wants to ensure there is no man-in-the-middle attack in progress.

So half of this video is quickly showing what MeshCentral looks like, and the second half is about how I solved the two issues I was faced with. I only found the dev's video much later about Nginx Proxy, after I'd spent two days pouring through support forums trying to piece a solution together, but I'll include a link to it as well. My solution was considering specifically the Nginx Proxy Manager with the GUI interface, and I discovered a way to enter the custom proxy set header commands into it.

Don't get me wrong, though, as MeshCentral has excellent documentation as well as dev videos - definitely one of the better documented open source projects that I've seen. It even has support for MQTT clients, which may have potential for smart home devices.

Intro 00:00

MeshCentral website: https://meshcentral.com

#technology #opensource #meshcentral #cloudflare #nginxpm

This video is long, so please use Chapters below to skip parts. Obsidian is a free (non-commercial use), not open source, text editor and works with open standard Markdown formatting on plain text files.

Apart from quite advanced editing and UI options, I find Obsidian attractive because of its over 500 quality community plugins, and its ability to visually show the relationships between your notes. Recording notes from meetings, or as you are daily learning new things or solving problems, is an excellent way to build your personal knowledge base. Using Markdown format can be fun, and can achieve a lot in terms of readability when you use some of the more advanced features of Markdown formatting.

Despite not being open source, you are not locked into Obsidian, and can use other Markdown editors interchangeably. In my video, I also touch on integrating with NextCloud to sync your notes, and especially some issues that iOS presents for apps.

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Obsidian Website: https://obsidian.md/

#technology #obsidian #markdown #notes #editor