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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • marv99@feddit.detoDo It Yourself@beehaw.orgDIY smartphone?
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    8 months ago

    Your question reminded my immediately about one of my favorite 35c3 talks Butterbrotdosen-Smartphone - Mein DIY-Smartphone-Bau from 2018-12-29. It is in German language, but has an English translation, too. Maybe it can give you some good starting ideas?

    Video: 1080p

    Story, Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

    I would like to show you how I built a smartphone from a Raspberry PI. The problems and difficulties I encountered and the solutions I found. The project is not yet finished, there are still a few small things missing. Nevertheless, I want to show you my smartphone in the practical sandwich box and tell you how it came about.

    I had no idea that building a smartphone could be so complicated. Raspberry Pi + touch display is not all there is to think about in this project. At the moment, the smartphone project lives in a sandwich box and attracts attention on the subway. If the power bank can passthrough, that’s an advantage, I’ve found. Setting up the X and Y axes on the touch display so that you can also use the on-screen keyboard was not so easy. And I had to realize that Landscape is not the right size to work smoothly. Most Linux programs are not directly touch-compatible or require too much memory. Then there were also big challenges! Learning to solder was one of them. First learning how to solder, then learning how to desolder, and then daring to use the PI. I would like to tell you these and other stories about building my smartphone.







  • Definitely dislike MS, generations of my workstations have small, yellow “Microsoft Free Workstation” stickers on their monitors, but VSCodium (in my case) is not really bad.

    Also I really like the Xbox360 console and (as a hacker and maker) still love the first Kinnect. The Kinnect is an excellent piece of sensor-hardware, was rather cheap when purchased in used condition and it works very well with Linux.










  • Looks like a really nice and useful initiative.

    Suggestion to the owners of the SFD webpage

    I would appreciate the SFD initiative even more, if on the SFD webpage you would “live by your own words”.

    Facebook and the blue bird are by no means free software, also not according to your definitions “free to study [how the program works]”, “free to distribute [copies]”, “free to modify [the software]”, “free to access [the source code]”.

    So why not at least show the benefits and use FOSS social media alternatives in action?
    If you need the momentum of the unfree social media, you still could do this additionally.





  • MetaGer is a German meta search engine (utilizing several search engines in the back). UI and results are of course available in many languages.

    https://metager.org | https://metager.de

    From their About page:

    What makes MetaGer special?

    MetaGer is different from other search engines. This is reflected not only in our public good orientation and focus on privacy, but also through some unique features:

    • Possibility of creating a personal blacklist
    • Function of the search in the search
    • Advertising-free search possible
    • Integration of search engine projects like YaCy
    • The only German search engine that combines results from several large web indexes
    • And much more…

    What We Stand For

    Guaranteed Privacy

    Data protection and privacy are important to us. That’s why we don’t track or store personal data and offer several services to protect your privacy, for example our anonymizing proxy (“Open Anonymously” feature).

    Non-Profit Association

    MetaGer is a project of the non-profit association SUMA-EV, Association for Free Access to Knowledge. SUMA-EV is primarily committed to promoting media literacy.

    Diverse and Free

    MetaGer produces diverse results because it is a metasearch engine. We have explained exactly what this means in our transparency statement. By publishing our source code, we show that free access to knowledge is important to us. Our source code is free and open source.

    100% Renewable Energy

    Sustainability and resource consumption is also a big issue for us. Therefore we pay attention to the energy consumption of our services and only use electricity from renewable energy sources.


  • If you are unhappy with suggested XSane, but only want an OSS solution, I do not know a good alternative.

    Possible non-OSS solution

    Although I am an open source enthusiast, there are few application where I use commercial, even non-OSS solutions on Linux. One of this exceptions is for scanning.

    Background: I “administrate” some legacy Epson scanners used with my family’s Linux boxes and got them all to run with a software called VueScan, with the following restrictions:

    • Perfection 3490 worked out of the box, no drivers required
    • Perfection 3170 requires Epson drivers (iscan_2.10.0-2_i386.deb, iscan-plugin-gt-9400_1.0.0-2_i386.deb), but only runs on 32bit Linux
    • Perfection V30 requires Epson drivers (scan-gt-f720-bundle-2.30.4.x64.deb.tar.gz) and simply works on 64bit Debian

    As you see, it might be a bit of luck, if a device works out of the box or not.

    Unfortunately your Epson Stylus SX435W seems not to be listed under the supported Epson devices (click red button “All drivers” to see all supported Epson scanners).

    If you happen to find no solution, I suggest to use the trial version of VueScan and check if your Epson simply runs or not.

    EDIT: sorry, I forgot to mention. that the VueScan GUI has plenty of those processing options you are searching for.