I wish well-done XMPP/Jabber clients that do voice come up. If you are an XMPP protocol developer / implementer reading this, thank you for what is there so far. Please don't stop.
If you have been watching the news this week about Jeff Bezos.. I don't like that someone can share a message/picture/video on WhatsApp and crack into a phone. There are too many closed source vendor components in an Android phone even if you're using an open source phone OS like Lineage OS, and these may go stale over time or have something vulnerable in them on purpose.
WhatsApp always seems to need a phone. It works in a web browser in an inconvenient manner that still needs the phone to login. It is a centrally controlled system. While Signal is open source, it is also centrally controlled. I prefer and hope Jabber implementations get much better. Spam for Jabber can be managed the way it is managed for email. Some spam would get through, but it does on WhatsApp too.
Email hasn't gone away or lost its place because it's federated (distributed). It works on multiple platforms, and if you don't like a particular way of doing email, there are a lot of choices. Jabber is similar for instant messaging, but it can do with a renaissance. (I use Jabber at work and home, but the clients I use such as Conversations don't have the features and experience that WhatsApp/Telegram do.)
The oldest and most used services are federated - HTTP, email.. and at the start of a communication - DNS.
WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. are very entrenched services. It's not enough that you move from WhatsApp - your family, friends, businesses that you work with, all have to use the new service you are switching to, so you can chat with them on that other service.
It's easier to switch your search engine. :) DuckDuckGo has worked very well for web search for me. I use it about 95% of the time and Google Search the other 5%.
This isn't true for India. Until last year, all the cards I'd seen in India were either Visa, Mastercard or AMEX. This year my bank tried to send me a "Rupay" card which is an Indian processor; on speaking to the bank staff, it appears that the central bank (RBI) are asking banks to promote Rupay by default to avoid transaction data from leaving the country. But it's still possible to change to a Mastercard or Visa card.
Many businesses and individuals would still prefer to have a Mastercard or Visa at this time as most international websites that sell services and goods don't accept Rupay.
This was after I reported that my 72 year old mother was asked to get out of the car by the driver after sitting in it, because he learned of the destination after starting the trip and did not want to take her there. Uber does not show the destination to the driver before starting the trip.
I was probably speaking to a bot, or nobody had the patience to fix the problem.
Wow.. wow.. there are others who have read the same things. :)
The hydro pneumatic rocket!
I tried to find Mir publishers books about 10 years ago. Apparently Mir got bought out and publishing ceased.
Another gem is "Fun with maths and physics" by Ya Perelman. It's available in a cheap reprint now, nothing that matches the original Mir publishers book.
I read the Kannada translation of the book "Fun with Physics" back when I was in primary school. Didn't understand large parts of it but that didn't stop me from repeatedly reading the books. As high quality as the content was I absolutely loved the high quality print, glossy and gorgeous paper, and really beautiful and durable hard cover. The illustrations were also of high quality. They also had a very distinct smell.
Another Kannada translated book I read (countless times) is stories from Russian history.
Needless to say Russian books are a part of my childhood :)
Holy mother!!! Never in my dreams could I imagine I'd be seeing it again. You've made my day :-). And, as you'd know surely, how similar/close Kannada and Telugu scripts are I could effortlessly read it!
It does bring back a flood of memories. Thanks again :-)
You're welcome :) Memorable tales and gorgeous illustrations. This is one of the few books I managed to keep in absolute mint condition :) I have a scanned version lying around in my collection. Will upload sometime soon on my blog.
I can give you a link to download my build if you want (which is a pristine unofficial build with Android security patches till February 5, 2019), but in the end, it depends on whether you'll trust a binary build from some random person: https://mukund.org/tmp/lineage-15.1-20190214-UNOFFICIAL-whyr...
It is neither difficult nor very slow to build it from source, but it can do with a fast internet link (~fiber speeds) as the build process initially clones from several git repositories (but later syncs just fetch the changes which is very fast). Unfortunately not everyone has access to fiber.
With fiber, the clone and build ought to complete in about a day depending on your machine's performance. I recommend that you build your own (let the initial build run in the background even if it takes more than a day to finish). If you do it once and use the built OS, you'll not search again.
Thanks as lot! But yeah, I'd rather build it myself or at the very least, get a signed binary that's somehow official.
I'm a bit reassured by your words about the build, but the hard part for me is the download as I don't have fiber at home: I've already tried once and given up after a few hours. Compiling should be okay as I've some horsepower :)
> With fiber, the clone and build ought to complete in about a day
That's insane btw. Great that you're ok with it, but utterly impractical for me: ADSL is maxed out at 800kbps and due to line noise generally get 80kbps. So I tether, using 4g and 0 to 1 bar of strength. During heavy cloud and rain it drops to hdpsa.
Same device here (whyred). If you want an "original" build, you can still build an up-to-date Lineage OS with the latest Android security patches from source from their repo. It is very easy to build it on Fedora or Ubuntu and it doesn't take more than a few minutes to do updated builds once you do the first complete build.
(Getting the tree from an existing Lineage OS phone per the build instructions did not work for me.) Note that the latest version of whyred vendor tree for Android Oreo is from last year. I suspect this is because Xiaomi has moved on to Android Pie for whyred.
What all this gets for you is a build with the latest Android security patches applied (February 5, 2019 as of today).
Good luck. I can report that it builds and works well and it is straightforward to build it (more so for a programmer).
Hacker News guidelines are summarized by this statement: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I'd agree that if it was an article about a Cessna 172 crashing, it wouldn't belong on Hacker News, but in this case, the interesting fact about this aircraft accident is that it's a brand new airliner model, one that has never been in an accident before. Furthermore, we have some basic flight data, so perhaps a bored hacker might decide to debug what they think happened using this data.
If you have been watching the news this week about Jeff Bezos.. I don't like that someone can share a message/picture/video on WhatsApp and crack into a phone. There are too many closed source vendor components in an Android phone even if you're using an open source phone OS like Lineage OS, and these may go stale over time or have something vulnerable in them on purpose.
WhatsApp always seems to need a phone. It works in a web browser in an inconvenient manner that still needs the phone to login. It is a centrally controlled system. While Signal is open source, it is also centrally controlled. I prefer and hope Jabber implementations get much better. Spam for Jabber can be managed the way it is managed for email. Some spam would get through, but it does on WhatsApp too.
Email hasn't gone away or lost its place because it's federated (distributed). It works on multiple platforms, and if you don't like a particular way of doing email, there are a lot of choices. Jabber is similar for instant messaging, but it can do with a renaissance. (I use Jabber at work and home, but the clients I use such as Conversations don't have the features and experience that WhatsApp/Telegram do.)
The oldest and most used services are federated - HTTP, email.. and at the start of a communication - DNS.
WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. are very entrenched services. It's not enough that you move from WhatsApp - your family, friends, businesses that you work with, all have to use the new service you are switching to, so you can chat with them on that other service.
It's easier to switch your search engine. :) DuckDuckGo has worked very well for web search for me. I use it about 95% of the time and Google Search the other 5%.