Smartphone-oriented websites tend to focus only on the latest devices, but a large chunk of users choose not to upgrade their phones for one reason or another. Barring hardware failure, many of these devices may still have years of use ahead of them because, to their owners, they still work just fine. While custom ROMs can keep legacy smartphones alive for ages, it can be a nightmare for the modders to keep things like the camera and graphics drivers up to date without official manufacturer support.

Unlike the smartphone ecosystem, updating the graphics driver on your PC is something you can always think about. This is possible because of the modular architecture of PC hardware drivers, which allows power users to tinker with closed source driver packages, or even opt for open source drivers instead of OEM-provided binaries. In the case of Android, however, driver updates generally only come to your phone alongside larger OS updates.

Updatable GPU drivers can come in handy for fixing bugs, improving graphics performance, or adding new features from OpenGL or Vulkan APIs. Nowadays, smartphones are bigger and faster than ever, making them the perfect vehicle for gaming, hence porting the PC-esque driver design to them does make sense.

Thanks to XDA Senior Member bylaws, we now have a genius solution named Adreno Tools that allows on-the-fly GPU driver modifications or replacements on Android — that too without root! Fellow Skyline developer Mark “Pixelylon” pitched the idea of runtime drive replacement to bylaws, which eventually materialized into Adreno Tools. Being a rootless library, Adreno Tools can help any regular app to load custom GPU drivers, deal with BCn textures, and redirect file operations for further complex modifications. It does so by hooking into system libraries and seamlessly swapping in the new driver.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/adreno-tools-update-android-graphics-drivers/

#technology #android #gaming #adrenotools #graphics

I only see posts dating up to Sep '21 and nothing more. I've cleared my profile, reinstalled a new profile, etc, but still Sep '21.

I also noticed neither the blog, the community nor their Twitter account shows anything past Sep '21.

Now I'm starting to think maybe it's not me.... But how does a P2P network just stop working, if so?

There is a common misconception that large open source projects are well-funded. In practice, many rely on a small group of maintainers.

The PHP programming language is one of them. Despite being used by 75%+ of the web, PHP only has a few full-time contributors.

See https://dri.es/php-foundation-launched

#php #opensource

Optillusion is a new indie developer that just released its first game today, and it's a doozy. This game is called Moncage, and it's a drop-dead gorgeous puzzler that offers a uniquely interesting mechanic.

You see, the whole game takes place in a cube that you can rotate, and each side offers unique imagery. In order to solve the game's puzzles, you'll rotate this cube to line up the perspective of the cube's imagery. The goal? To collect photos of your perfectly aligned imagery, which reveals the story of the game. Moncage is an interactive optical illusion puzzle game, and not only is the presentation superb, but the gameplay is also a hoot that's perfect for play on a touchscreen.

It's also available on Steam Games for desktops.

See https://www.androidpolice.com/clever-perspective-puzzler-moncage-is-now-available-on-android/

#technology #gaming #puzzles #Moncage

Spyware maker NSO Group cannot use its government clients to shield itself from litigation, a US appeals court ruled on Monday, a decision that allows WhatsApp's lawsuit against the Israel-based firm to resume.

In 2019, Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary sued NSO claiming the firm's intrusion software, known as Pegasus, was used to unlawfully compromise the accounts of WhatsApp customers.

NSO denies any wrongdoing. While WhatsApp claimed members of civil society had their phones infiltrated by Pegasus, NSO insisted it only sold its software to "licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to help them fight terrorism and serious crime," and that using its software to surveil political opponents, advocacy groups, and journalists is contractually prohibited.

"Whatever NSO’s government customers do with its technology and services does not render NSO an 'agency or instrumentality of a foreign state,' as Congress has defined that term," the appeals panel said. "Thus, NSO is not entitled to the protection of foreign sovereign immunity."

Darling is a translation layer that allows us to run macOS applications on Linux. It emulates a complete Darwin environment, including Mach, dyld, launchd and everything you'd expect. It lets you to instantly switch to a Bash shell and start running the applications built for macOS in your Linux system.

Like Wine, it can be a lot quicker to run a single application this way, instead of booting a VM up. But it is early days for Darling still, and it is not as mature as Wine, so is mostly still running non-GUI apps. The developers of Darling are planning to build a nice and user-friendly GUI for interacting with Darling. But for now, we can interact with Darling via command line only.

See https://ostechnix.com/run-macos-software-on-linux-using-darling/

#technology #opensource #Linux #macOS #Darling

It uses LaMa, an open-source model from Samsung's AI lab to automatically and accurately redraw the areas that you delete. It is open-source under the Apache License 2.0.

It worked really well for two photos I tested with it, but they also have some demo photos you can test it with. If it's not perfect on the first erase, just try a second time.

See https://cleanup.pictures/

#technology #opensource #photography #alternativeto #photos

Friendica is a decentralized open-source social network which federates with many other social networks including diaspora*, Hubzilla, and the Fediverse of social networks. It can mirror too with Twitter and IFTTT, or export posts to Discourse, libertree, Tumblr, Wordpress and e-mail.

It is a good candidate for being an alternative to Facebook, and you can either join a public server, or self-host your own instance.

In this video I give an overview of Friendica's functionality and features, a comparison with Hubzilla, a look at it's interface, and a tour through the settings menu. I also make the case for it being a cleaner way to use Twitter.

Watch https://youtu.be/nS6oAy7ibqc

#technology #opensource #friendica #decentralized #selfhosted

SimpleHTTPServer is a python module which allows you to instantly create a web server or serve your files in a snap. The main advantage of python’s SimpleHTTPServer is you don’t need to install anything since you have python interpreter installed. You don’t have to worry about python interpreter because almost all Linux distributions, python interpreter come handy by default.

You also can use SimpleHTTPServer as a file sharing method. You just have to enable the module within the location of your shareable files are located.

The article below guides you on how to set up and use it.

See https://www.tecmint.com/python-simplehttpserver-to-create-webserver-or-serve-files-instantly/

#technology #Linux #Python #Webserver

Depending on whom you ask, PC Building Simulator is either utterly ridiculous or incredibly satisfying. You can decide for yourself by downloading this niche simulator for free from the Epic Games Store before October 17th.

Like the majority of sim games, PCBS speaks to a very specific type of fantasy. If your idea of a good time is overclocking your computer while managing a small business, this is a game that does exactly that.

See https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/8/22715201/pc-building-simulator-free-epic-games-store

#technology #gaming #epicgames #PCBuildingSimulator #simulator

Know when web pages change! Stay on top of new information! Live your data-life pro-actively instead of re-actively, do not rely on manipulative social media for consuming important information.

Maybe you need to be notified the moment a government or company web page changes, or possibly you're waiting for an item to go on sale.

This can be installed and run on a Raspberry Pi at home, or installed quickly as a Docker image.

See https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

#technology #opensource #selfhosted #changedetection #monitoring

This application used to be called PulseEffects but it was renamed to EasyEffects after we started to use GTK4 and replaced GStreamer by native PipeWire filters.

This is really useful for cleaning up audio when doing recordings for videos. Yes OBS Studio has many of these built-in, but if you are using third party screen recorders like say SimpleScreenRecorder, they have no audio input processing, and this is where EasyEffects is really useful. There are a good 23 effects, but some like auto gain, compressor, equalizer, and noise reduction will be most useful.

I installed from AUR for Arch Linux, but there is also a Flatpak install that should install on most Linux distros.

See https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

#technology #Linux #EasyEffects #Audio #Recording