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Cake day: February 6th, 2026

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  • I’ve also just started learning Android dev, avoiding Android Studio. So far I’ve followed this blog and have a Java “Hello World” app building out of a makefile (without even Gradle!), but using the Google SDK and build tools.

    I believe the build tools are FOSS, but I didn’t know that about the SDK; just searching now Replicant has some links to FOSS SDK-related things but that page hasn’t been updated in 2 years and nothing seems very easy. Would be interested to hear if you manage to get a FOSS version working.


  • Holy overengineering, Batman. IP addresses of all things are trivially parseable into fixed-length byte sequences. Just do that and use a search tree. Or, IDK; this is an extremely solved problem, there are probably even better solutions out there – but I promise you text regex is involved in none of the good ones.

    Even for actual string matching, any decent regex engine will compile and optimise an alternation a|b|c|... better than this text wrangling will. Unless you have actual benchmarks showing this gives you an advantage with the engine you’re using, you’re just introducing complexity for no gain.


  • I’m no expert but I believe ffmpeg will be using the rawvideo decoder to read that file. If it appears to work I guess the stream output by v4l2-ctl happens to match up closely enough with the default parameters listed in that doc, you may want to work out what it is and double check compatibility though.

    The difference from a regular container is that it’s uncompressed (hence the size) and can’t include any metadata (hence the need to specify parameters manually). v4l2-ctl writing in this format means it doesn’t need to worry about compressing and encoding the video on-the-fly, which would complicate the implementation and might not always be feasible in real-time.

    If you wanted to avoid the intermediate file you should be able to pipe v4l2-ctl directly into ffmpeg.




  • As someone in the market for a new phone and unwilling to forego custom ROM support, I find this list very helpful!

    My main other criteria are wanting something small (like, 140mm height), and something that works in Australia, which recently forced telcos to completely block anything that doesn’t support VoLTE emergency calls – basically a massive “fuck you” to anyone who has a niche and/or old phone (seriously! This was like 8 months ago now but I didn’t pay attention at the time so all my rage is fresh. Could they not have just required a warning sticker or something and let me make my own fucking decisions??).

    Unfortunately this seems to be a losing combination, and I think eventually I’ll have to resign myself to something larger. The other option is to get into ROM development lol, which I suspect requires more sustained motivation than I can muster. And I’d still need a daily driver in the interim.


  • apparia@discuss.tchncs.detoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Is GPS private?
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    8 months ago

    My first answer is “WTF is RTK?”; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is “no, they’re separate things”.

    RTK doesn’t sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don’t think it’s just because I’m dumb.


  • apparia@discuss.tchncs.detoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Is GPS private?
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    8 months ago

    It’s not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.

    In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use “Assisted GPS” of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.

    To nobody’s surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I’m pretty sure most Android distros don’t give you any control over when it’s used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.

    As I understand it, SUPL means even if you’re in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.

    I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs’ privacy. It has a background section (search for “Assisted GPS”) in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.