My friend who uses google wants to share their calendar (read-only). I don't use google. How can they do that?

First of all hi all! I am a software engineer and in my free time I develop self-hostable alternative to big tech products (see Jotty and Cr*nmaster for example), been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it (mostly stuff I personally would prefer worked differently) so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there's no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do.. pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server and from /c/selfhosted have been testing it fairly successfully and i've been on top of bug fixing). Last BIG thing to do is coming up with a good name for the official release, I'll create a community poll for it and ask opinions on the repo discussion tabs too.

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

By Developer @fccview@lemmy.world

Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decides on Android smartphones with Google Play services whether banking, government, or wallet apps are allowed to run on a smartphone.

So, I just learned about this the very, very hard way. After buying a second hand S10 and finding american ones can't be unlocked, traveling 4 hours to buy another one after much research, much annoyances to unlock it (samsung requires you to be online, which I didn't know) and testing multiple ROMs, I finally read this page more properly https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/beyond1lte/ which says "known quirks: IMS". I thought it was just something like dolby sound.

What it means is that it doesn't suport VoLTE and most currently used phone systems. Samsung made their proprietary mess, unlike most other developers, which means it will probably never have an open source version.

And that applies to ALL modern samsung phones. I had samsung phone before with a custom OS, but didn't realize because VoLTE wasn't mandatory back then. Now it is here in Australia, and many countries. So if you ever plan to buy a samsung phone to degoogle it, know that it won't make phone calls. SMS and mobile data also doesn't work.

I don't know how I missed this. It should be talked more often given how popular samsung is. There should always be a warning "YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO MAKE PHONE CALLS IN THE FUTURE IF YOU CONTINUE".

S10 was the last decent phone ever made (for me). Not too big, SD card, headphone jack (one of the most important things for me), good camera, etc, etc... That's why I was so persistent to find one to degoogle.

So I'm stuck with my amazingly shitty pixel 5 (and other ones are even worse for me). And considering the possibility of a life without smartphones at all, since this is a losing battle. Mainstream doesn't care and evil companies have every incentive to kill freedom. It has been getting really bad and it will just get worse. But anyway... this post is not about this.

Be warned, if you care about freedom don't ever buy samsung again. Not because they are evil (they are), but because you won't be able to make phone calls on your "phone".

OC writeup by @guismo@aussie.zone

Your daily reminder that by supporting Big Tech, you are contributing to the insane wealth disparity.

Rather support smaller businesses, where your money helps create actual jobs and grow the working class.

If you haven't started your journey, please check out: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/

There are so many excellent choices out there that give you a similar or better experience.

Interesting article from a generalist magazine. According to it:

• Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS
• Best for Pixel Phones: GrapheneOS
• Best for Non-Pixel Phones: /e/OS
• For the DIY Tinkerer: LineageOS

Like Google Docs, also with permissions for Owner, Editor and Viewer, and can be linked. I know making websites exist but I'm not sure if I could access buying any relevant hardware in my city and idk how to self-host.

I remember the days (long past) when Google would refuse this type of work... back when their employees actually had a voice.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/37920667

There are dozens of options across all platforms to seamlessly integrate PGP email signing and encryption.

I use Gnome's key manager with evolution and it's ridiculously simple...

It's been like 30 years -- what's holding us all back?

[Announcement] PipePipe X (formerly 5.0 beta) is now available

Rewrite with a modern design, PipePipe X is now a separate app. It coexists with the current PipePipe installation

Both versions will continue to be maintained.

Some time ago I started replacing all services and apps that I use with FOSS altnernatives. Most of them were easy to replace but some corpo/big-tech apps had ecosystems too advanced to be conveniently replaced. For example, substituting Google Maps on Android (or I guess Apple Maps on iOS) was a bit of a struggle as the most popular FOSS alternative app was OsmAnd. First of all mad respect and huge kudos to OsmAnd team of contributors but for me the UX was overwhelming and too customizable which is probably a huge bonus to power users but IMO that makes it very unlikely to become a large scale alternative to Google maps. Probably other people realized that too and some 6-7 months ago CoMaps was released, a FOSS app that is also based on OpenStreetMap layer but this time with a simplistic and smooth UX/GUI.

In case somebody is not familiar with OpenStreetMap (OSM) - basically it is a non-profit org, but its heavily maintained by community members and anybody around the world is allowed to contribute and enrich map content. Even if org can theoretically get corrupt I think anybody can make a fork and continue with community contribution. Creating an account is easy, you could start contributing in like 3 minutes. A huge number of services and apps are basing their map layers on OpenStreetMap, such as CoMaps above.

The quality of OpenStreetMap/CoMaps/OsmAnd is as good as the contributions to it are - so the more people use it - the better and more content it will contain. I would like to invite everybody to give it a chance and use openstreetmaps.org on desktop and CoMaps on mobile devices. You should have enough motivation to abandon Google or Apple products, but final piece of motivation is that eventually Google Maps will start censoring content (like Reddit or Instagram) or just share your location history to ICE or perform some other serious violation like that (like Microsoft did recently).

CoMaps has a really nice and simple interface where you can add missing places (business, community services, recreation areas etc) while OpenStreetMap on web browser allows to update anything you imagine (e.g. see a missing street? Add it. A new building was developed - just add it!). If everybody enriched only their local neighborhood with features on the map we could really build something beautiful. Existing layer probably already contains 90% of the stuff you'd ever search for as contributors really did a outstanding job throughout all these years. But that additional 10% makes a real difference for it turning into a much bigger scale tool, and this feels like the right time to kick that off.

It is important not to get demotivated that not many people maintain and contribute as your neighborhood might remain a lonely detailed places for years. OSM existed for a long time now and is very likely to keep existing for decades to come, everything that you update or create remains a legacy that stays forever saved in the map (unless somebody further updates it). Perhaps, in 20 years time people will be grateful. And to tidy up and make max out of your neighborhood you really need one weekend or so.

For example, in my local area I've started adding location marks of recycling bins, dumpsters, parking lots, playgrounds, pathways, building tunnels and monuments, but also I've added missing shops and updated working hours and websites for shops that existed.

Also #1, be responsible when making changes, don't overwrite other people's work unless it is an improvement. Double check everything that you add, and also if you don't have any experience with map editors or GIS software take a watch of some OSM editing tutorial.

Also #2, I most likely omitted some other useful FOSS tools, and it doesn't matter which one you decide to use as long as it is based on OpenStreetMap or any other community driven layer.

Also #3, tell all your friends and family to do the same.

Yeah, this might not be the most important thing to cure the world at this moment but developing community-driven mindset where everybody takes a small or big part in it is the way to go. Cheers!

OC by @frondo@lemmy.ml

I currently keep track of which model kits, brick building sets, and painting miniatures that I own and whether I have made progress on them in a Google Sheet. As part of my attempt to degoogle, I am looking into various alternatives.

My current preferences for an alternative are:

• Accessible online
• Can be edited online/in-browser (potentially through some frontend)
• Loads relatively quickly/efficiently
  • Hardware is an issue here; my server computer is quite low end
• Accessible on an Android device (does not have to be able to be edited on mobile)
• Preferably can display linked images, whether on Nextcloud's filesystem or through hyperlinks

One of the alternatives I've already tried is the Nexcloud Office plugin for my existing Nextcloud server using Collabora Online as a backend. In addition to it loading quite slowly, I had issues editing any files created with the plugin, and after tinkering with it for a while I decided to put that solution aside. This was several months ago.

Another alternative I have considered is coverting this sheet into a database. I do not have much experience with databases (pretty much just creating one in MariaDB for Nextcloud), but from what I know about them this seems like a good use case for one. I do not know what would be best as a frontend; phpMyAdmin? DBeaver?

Any suggestions? If all else fails, I'll just keep an .ods document on Nexcloud and install LibreOffice Viewer on my phone, but I would prefer not to have to download and upload the .ods through Nextcloud every time I want to update my inventory (this is primarily an issue when I update it at work).

This is what I currently use:

There are only a few formulae used:

• One to both link to a webpage for that kit and display an image of it; these could be easily separated into two fields
  Formula 1: =HYPERLINK("https://bandai-hobby.net/item/5886/",IMAGE("https://bandai-hobby.net/images/157_5886_s_5pwg9tvxlm5v4gwrz49ly8ry3j8e.jpg"))
• One to convert the Japanese retail of a product (in the Yen column) to equivalent USD in the release year (could easily be replaced with a manual conversion or a researched US retail)
  Formula 2: =M36&"円 / $"&TEXT(M36*VLOOKUP(F36,'Currency Rates'!$A$2:$B$52,2,FALSE),"#,##0.00")
• And one to grab the current average conversion rate for the year (again, could be replaced with a quick search)
  Formula 3: =QUERY(GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:JPYUSD","price",DATE(A47,1,1),IF(DATE(A47,12,31)-TODAY()>0,TODAY(),DATE(A47,12,31)),"DAILY"),"select avg(Col2) where Col1 is not null label avg(Col2)''",1)

This last formula is used on a conversion sheet referenced in Formula 2, which looks like this:

I appreciate any help.

Let 2026 the year to really write... I want to start with an update on my apps as I (and we) use everyday our smartphones. And a smartphone without Google shit on it is always better.

The hope is that this guide and website can act as a simple way to introduce newcomers - whether it’s you, friends or family - into this space and try something else besides the default options.

There is also a community-driven, open-source site ( https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/email/ ) that aims to make this even easier. This includes screenshots, ratings and a larger feature list.

I’ve also started tracking impact to help keep the momentum. If there are any other stats, please share them so I can add them to the guides and, eventually, the website.

OC by @FallenWalnut@lemmy.world