cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48914616

Like a cult classic movie, Godot 4 has only gotten better with age. The first few releases focused on stability, granting the engine a rock-solid foundation that could be safely and easily iterated upon. Gradually, this has shifted more towards polish and quality-of-life, peaking in Godot 4.6 giving developers the tools to put them and their workflow first.

This brings us to Godot 4.7. With 3 years under its belt, the 4.7 Director’s Cut offers colors of never-before-reached intensity. HDR output radiates bold and brilliant new hues, allowing your projects to shine like never before. Inject some juice to your UI without breaking a sweat using the new Control offset transforms. Find the plugin that will help push your game even further with the new Asset Store, bask in the ease of creation with standalone Android exporting and publishing, and helm a bevy of new features to eliminate any remaining friction between you and your vision.

A six-axis robot arm sitting on your desk used to mean five figures and a service contract. Chris Annin's AR4 quietly tore that idea up — and with the brand-new Mark 5 revision, he's calling the hardware officially finished.

The AR4 is an open-source, six-degrees-of-freedom robot arm you build yourself from CNC-cut aluminum, 3D-printed parts, and off-the-shelf motors and electronics. It's the latest in a lineage that started with the AR2 and has been refined release after release. The Mark 5 isn't a dramatic redesign so much as a final polish: Annin says it's the last item on his hardware to-do list, with future effort going into software and tutorials instead.

What changed in the Mark 5

The headline tweak is sensing. Joints one, two, and three now use Hall effect sensors for their calibration limit switches instead of mechanical microswitches, which meant reworking a few mounting points on the aluminum parts. Joints four, five, and six keep the small microswitches. Annin has also shipped a fresh build manual and published the arm's modified Denavit-Hartenberg parameters — the math that describes how each joint moves — as fully worked-out spreadsheets, so the kinematics aren't a mystery you have to reverse-engineer.

https://github.com/sv1sjp/geotagphotosJust released GeoTag Photos, a Nextcloud Files plugin to add, read, or remove geolocation metadata from photos in one click.

This tool works both ways: inspect or add location metadata during investigations, visualize where photos were taken via Nextcloud Maps/Memories, or scrub it before sharing sensitive files, all self-hosted, without third parties.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48865817

After many months of design, development, gathering feedback, and testing, today we’re releasing a big update with Mastodon 4.6. The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon’s work ethos is our commitment to trust and safety, so we’ve put a lot of thought and care into the design of this feature to avoid some of the pitfalls and abuse people have experienced with similar features on other platforms, while focusing on its primary goal: Helping new users discover more of the Fediverse.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48812123

KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. In addition to other hardware, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.7.

This new major release brings back the Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4 era, including the Horos wallpaper. The ability to switch virtual desktops independently for each output/display was added. It is now easier to toggle between light and dark mode directly from the Brightness & Color widget. You can now test microphones from the audio settings, and assign a custom global keyboard shortcut for "push-to-talk" microphone un-mute. If you have Plasma keyboard enabled and a physical keyboard key is long-pressed a selection of related special characters is presented to choose from. When it comes to printing it is now much easier to connect to shared printers on Windows networks, and a new print queue management tool offers more power than ever before. Vietnamese lunar calendar was added, and you can now select the default system calendar application. It is now possible to set mouse and tablet stylus pointers to be synced. ICC color profile can now be applied when HDR mode is active. Graphical performance has been improved and power usage lowered for CPU-rendered applications, some full-screen applications and on Intel graphics hardware. This release also features an experimental preview of the Union theming engine, which is based on web-like CSS definitions and will make creating and using new themes easier in the future.

For complete list of new features and changes check out the KDE Plasma 6.7 release announcement and the complete changelog.

Most AI translation tools rely on cloud services.

Audio leaves your device, gets processed elsewhere, and comes back translated.

As open speech recognition, translation, and TTS models continue to improve, it feels increasingly possible to build communication tools that run on infrastructure users actually control.

That's one of the ideas behind PolyTalk, an open-source translation platform we're building.

Privacy, ownership, and transparency may soon matter as much as model quality.

Do you think communication tools like translation, transcription, and speech interfaces will eventually move back toward local and self-hosted deployments?

GitHub: https://github.com/PolyTalkIO/polytalk

Since ProtonDB is proprietary and also directly linked with Steam games instead of any game possible, I was looking around for open source alternatives to it. I found Are we anti cheat yet which is pretty cool but it's limited just to the anti cheat working or not, and also PC Gaming wiki which is for all games but no longer for Linux compatibility in specific, so the answers are also much more vague.

Is there anything I haven't discovered? It seems like there's no good alternative to it currently, not even one that just lacks user input.

Over the past few months, we've been working on a project called PolyTalk.

The original goal was pretty simple: make real-time multilingual communication possible without depending on external translation APIs or cloud-only services.

While testing existing solutions, we noticed that many of them required sending conversations through third-party infrastructure. That works for some use cases, but it wasn't a great fit for organizations that care about privacy, deployment flexibility, or keeping communication workflows under their own control.

So we started building a self-hosted, open-source speech-to-speech translation platform instead.

A few things we've focused on:

Real-time speech translation Self-hosted deployment Open-source core No external translation APIs Live audio translation

The project is still evolving, but it's been interesting exploring the challenges of multilingual communication, local AI infrastructure, and real-time translation workflows.

I'd be curious to hear how others here approach translation.

Are you using cloud-based services, self-hosted tools, or something in between?

GitHub: https://github.com/PolyTalkIO/polytalk

Website: https://polytalk.io/

I need some help choosing a synchronisation programme for my small business (~15 people, in construction).

Our freelance IT technician who set up our OMV NAS has been hired by a large company and is no longer available, so as a partner who’s considered vaguely competent in IT I’m filling in for the time being. To be honest, I’m not actually competent.

I’m hesitating between FreeFileSync and Syncthing. I was thinking of using the former as I used it personnally a long time ago, but I’ve seen the latter mentioned on Lemmy.

The aim is to copy our data, which is stored in a commercial cloud, to our NAS running OMV. We’d do this via a Windows computer in the office where the cloud is always synced. The NAS is in my flat.

The copy would take place twice a week at predefined times.

Syncthing seems a bit overkill, but more modern than FreeFileSync.

If we choose Syncthing, we will make a donation equivalent to the cost of the FreeFileSync Pro licence.

Any advice to help me avoid any pitfalls in my attempt to set this up?

Hi there!

I like to spend my evenings mapping world, city and transportation, but wonder myself if there any kinda non-profit or small organizations that donate tips to local map contributors?

Maybe some city councils, emergency services, logistic companies and so on?

Thanks a lot

I found this very promising app that looks like it can be an alternative to Ferdium, Rambox, Franz, Hamsket.

WebSpace is an app that brings websites and web apps together in one organized, streamlined interface. Any web app you can think off can be used in WebSpace in its own web instance instead of your main web browser. Basically it is a web browser but for web apps you use often and may want running in the background.

For use degoogled users who use website, web apps, PWAs over native apps, this makes using these services much easer.

WebSpace also adds many privacy features such as ad blocking and filtering, cookie isolation, and more.

Also it is written in Flutter! Meaning this could become available on desktop in the future! One app, one codebase for all major OSes!

Check it out and contribute!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47988648

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/hanoi

Hanoi is a simple terminal version of the known classical game Tower of Hanoi, written in Bash.

During the game, the user can move left and right, pick disks and drop them in other stacks.

The aim is to move all the disks from the ORIGIN pile to the DESTINATION pile, in as little moves as possible

We are open-sourcing (AGPLv3) and going live with our mobile app beta on June 15th. This beta is locked to Android users and Plutonium iOS users. We plan a full rollout in 1 month to Google Play, Apple App Store, F-Droid, and Obtanium after we knock out a few more bugs and features.

A bit late but I didn't see anyone else sharing this.

WebKit and Chromium are hard forks. The former is a fork of KHTML, and the latter is a hard fork of the former. However, in recent years I've only seen soft forks, and as for hard forks, I've only seen one with Pale Moon, which hard forked Gecko and named it Goanna due to disagreements with the direction the Mozilla Project was taking.

But why wouldn't any organization make a hard fork, whether of WebKit, Chromium, Firefox, or another browser not based on the three mentioned above?

Source release soon, I made this as my final project for a course I am currently doing(pretty overkill for a 1 credit course but i digress), I am planning on hosting the project on codeberg, but I am deferring for now as final grading is still left.

for those who are interested: Its written completely in C, with SDL_GPU as the graphics api.(I didn't want to make it in openGl as its pretty clear its dying)

Its deeply integrated with a companion C extension I wrote for python, this allows me to write game scripts in python, and crucially allows the game developer to leverage existing popular python libraries. Because of Python's recent proposal to drop the GiL, I feel that choosing python as the scripting layer is the right call for wider adoption

I was pretty prudent with my design philosophy regarding what python is allowed to do and what the engine handles(limiting my use of creating PyTypeObjects for everything for instance, even game objects are just integer handles in python).

Whats not here yet is multithreading, a collision system and a physics engine, but because of python support I was able to demonstrate physics using the pyBullet library, its quite performant and was able to handle about 300 physics object on screen with collisions without dropping frames.

I am planning on opensourcing it under a suitable license that is not MIT, something like GPLv2 but I might change my mind.

I am looking for contributors, this was the culmination of over two months of research, scrapped code and sleepless nights, it took me a solid month of experimenting and headbanging with various existing rendering libraries like bgfx before I finally bit the bullet and wrote a renderer based on SDL instead, but i am still new to graphics programming, hence the default shaders are a bit wack.

I hope this generates enough interests to garner some momentum, and if you have any questions regarding this project, how an object script looks in python etc feel free to ask.

I wasn't familiar with the author before this article. You can see his wikipedia page here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_M._K%C3%BChn

He is best known for his efforts in GPL enforcement,[7] as the creator of FSF's license list, and as original author of the Affero General Public License. He has long been a proponent for non-profit structures for FLOSS development, and leads efforts in this direction through the Software Freedom Conservancy. He is a recipient of the 2012 O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Excerpt from the first part of the piece:

In this philosophical essay, I explore the question: “When (if at all) is it ethically and morally acceptable to use proprietary software in the production and/or improvement of urgently needed copylefted FOSS?”

The question presents a complex conundrum. I attempt herein to rigoriously examine it through both a priori ethical analysis and a posteriori (and folksy) consideration of my personal experience and the shared experiences of the early software freedom movement.

I surprised myself at the outcome of my analysis. I conclude that under some circumstances (of which we have already witnessed in key historical examples), use of proprietary software by FOSS contributors to create/improve FOSS becomes a moral imperative. And, that imperitive often supersedes the moral imperative to avoid using that proprietary software.