The wonders of improvised Mastodon instances: one node disappears after an outage caused by a summer heatwave, leaving its users no way to migrate their data or to notify their followers.

After about one month of waiting for the node to come up or give some signals of life, I've decided to create a new account on another instance. If you use Mastodon and you were following me, please forgive me for the annoyance and follow me again here.

Camera calibration just got even easier now. The pose calibration algorithm mentioned here is available as web-service now.

This means that calibration is no longer restricted to a Linux PC – you can also calibrate cameras attached to Windows/ OSX and even mobile phones.
Furthermore you will not have to calibrate at all if your device is already known to the service.
The underlying algorithm ensures that the obtained calibrations are reliable and thus can be shared between devices of the same series.

Aggregating calibrations while providing on-the-fly calibrations for unknown devices form the calibDB web-service.

In the future we will make our REST API public so you can transparently retrieve calibrations for use with your computer vision algorithms.
This will make them accessible to a variety of devices, without you having to worry about the calibration data.

When using Nextcloud it makes some sense to host it yourself at home to get the maximum benefit of having your own cloud.

I was looking at TripAdvisor, some days ago. It's a very useful site, filled with user-generated advice and reviews, which has become almost a must for travellers. But I never like it when a private entity gets so much power over our lives (even if it's — currently — exercised in total fairness).

I would like to have a federated TripAdvisor-like network. I duckduckwent for a while, but I didn't find anything similar (if you know of some project of that kind, please let me know in the comments).

But thinking more about the issue, I realised that I probably wouldn't even bother to type my reviews into that site; I have a blog, so ideally I would like to have the option to write my review here, and then have the site import it. Technically, it could work with a webhook, or even a periodic check (real-time updates would not be a requirement here) over a URL I've linked to in my profile on that site. Then, in order for the posts to be imported, they would have to be entered in a standard format: maybe some keywords (or invisible HTML elements) could be used as markers for the content that need to be extracted from an otherwise ordinary blog post, or the relevant content could be replicated in a different format in the HTML headers (this, though, would require some additional work).

And while we are at it, why not extend this to other social networks? I use Mastodon, for example, and occasionally I send out a toot with a link to my latest blog post in there. But it would be much nicer if I could somehow set a special mark into my posts while composing them, to have them automatically tooted out on my account (this could probably be implemented as a standalone service, authorized to act on my Mastodon account — similarly to how the Mastodon-Twitter crossposter app works).

But I'm rather confident that I'm not the only one having this kind of needs, and that's why I'm writing this blog post: maybe someone out there has already found a solution, or has some more concrete ideas? If so, I'm all eyes!

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You know that I'm not an early adopter. That's why it was only a couple of weeks ago when I decided to give Qbs a try, by using the good old Mappero (and its spin-off, Mappero Geotagger) as a test bench. Yes, I know that the Qt company is not going to maintain Qbs anymore in the future, but the little I knew about Qbs was enough to convince me that it's a project worth supporting. So, better late than never -- and hopefully the community (me included) will do a good job in keeping Qbs thriving.

More than one year has passed since the initial announcement of my plan to investigate using a different backend for contact storage. If you want to get a better understanding of the plan, that mail is still a good read -- not much has changed since them, planning wise.

The Lenovo D330 2-in-1 convertible (or netbook as we used to say) is a quite interesting device. It is based on Intels current low-power core platform, Gemini Lake (GLK), and thus offers great battery-life and a fan-less design.

At the beginning of this month I participated to the foss-north conference, in Gothenburg, and took the stage to give a short presentation of the blockchain technology. Given that my talk was somehow critical of the blockchain (or rather, of the projects using it without due reason) I was prepared to receive a wave of negative remarks, assuming that all the hype surrounding this technology would have infected a good part of my audience as well. I was therefore positively surprised when several people came to me afterwords to express their appreciation for my speech, appreciation that now makes me confident enough to share the video of the presentation here too:

I want to publicly thank Johan Thelin and all the other foss-north staff and volunteers who organized such a successful conference. They also managed to get the video recordings out in a surprisingly short time. Indeed, the above video is taken from the foss-north YouTube channel, which I recommend you to visit as there were a lot of good talks at the conference; the topics were so varied, that I'm sure you'll find at least a couple of talks of your interest.

Last November I was invited to talk at the LinuxPiter conference. I held a presentation of the Ubports project, to which I still contribute in my little spare time.

The video recording from the conference has finally been published:

(there's also a version in Russian)

There was not a big audience, to be honest, but those that were there expressed a lot of interest in the project.