I am not sure what causes the OMEMO error though as I am not a iOS user.
I believe Profanity is mostly to blame for those errors. Profanity loses track of keys and fingerprints of other users, and I think what it does is encrypts the msg to myself, then transmits it without encrypting to the recipient. Then the recipient gets a msg that’s encrypted to others but they cannot decrypt it. Then to worsen matters it seems XMPP uses the same incorrect error message for many different situations. Profanity really needs to change so if any of the recipients keys are not found, it should refuse to send the msg. I see a bogus error on my end as well, and the fix is to disable OMEMO the re-enable it (/OMEMO end; /OMEMO start).
In any case, thanks for the suggestion. I’ll see if I can get someone to try that app. I cannot be fussy about features. I really just need text msgs to work.
You question forced me to revisit this and take a closer look. I have in my notes “If someone’s fingerprint is untrusted, they will get an encrypted msg that they cannot read.” So I entered a 1:1 window with the one person who only ever gets errors from me, entered /omemo fingerprint, and it simply showed the person’s fingerprint. Then I did the same for someone who has fewer issues with me, and printed next to their fingerprint is “(trusted)”. Ah ha! The other acct has an untrusted fingerprint and Profanity does a shitty job of informing the user. The absense of a “(trusted)” when asking for the fingerprint is the crucial indicator.
To answer your question, I think keys are managed automatically. I never had to add a key. But I have had to trust fingerprints. In the new version of profanity it’s possible to enter /omemo trustmode blind. That would also solve my problem but I don’t want to be sloppy. So I have to guide the other user to their own fingerprint and confirm it.
(edit)
Well this is bizarre. There are a couple people who I can talk to in Profanity just fine with OMEMO enabled, and their fingerprint also lacks the “(trusted)” next to it. Yet my trustmode is “manual”.
In this case I operate on the assumption car drivers are inherently good people. So when I am cycling in the middle of the lane (when the lane is too narrow for safe sharing), and they are behind me hitting their horn, I give them the benefit of the doubt as to whether they are being a malicious prick....
So let me get this straight. Instead of just moving to the side of the road and letting the car pass., you just do a full stop in the middle of the road, thus creating an unsafe situation?
You have a strange idea of safety. Traffic that is stopped is not unsafe. Or are you thinking that it would be holding up an ambulance or something? This 15 seconds of activism would not be carried out if there were an ambulance in the same direction of travel. I cycle without headphones so I can hear emergency vehicles.
Road safety in my region is organised this way: cyclists are entitled to 1 meter clearance of cars. That also includes parked cars because people open doors. So if civil engineers decide to designate part of the road for parking (instead of a cycling lane), then they have prioritized car parking above bandwidth. Cyclists can safely distance themselves 1 meter from the parked cars to avoid that door opening. Moving cars are legally required give cyclists another meter of clearance when passing, because shit happens and cyclists need enough buffer to dodge potholes and unplanned swerves. To give up that buffer is to create an unsafe situation, especially if the driver is in a hurry. The more aggressive a car driver is, the more risk you create by letting them pass. Passing is statistically correllated with accidents.
If car drivers want to move along faster, they should lobby to have parking lanes replaced with cycling lanes. When there is a cycling lane, the 1 meter clearance by moving cars is not legally required.
Don’t fuck with cars, one day somebody is not gonna stop.
I appreciate your genuine concern for my safety. As an activist, I’m perpetually up to my neck in trouble and I accept the risks.
This actually happened to me: I arrived at my destination and discovered my load was loose, ready to fall. There have also been times that I dropped something. And times that my backpack was mistakenly unzipped and I could have lost something worth keeping.
So if I operate with your assumption (that honking drivers are always assholes), then I lose the opportunity to pick up something I dropped or correct insecure cargo. Why should I give that up?
(edit) Since a horn is an ambiguous signal, in this circumstance of a car following a cyclist it should come to be universally understood to mean a cyclist dropped their phone or wallet, as this is the legit scenario.
My flimsy cable lock fell apart. So I needed a new lock. The common choices are a U-lock or a chain. I opted for a chain with a heavy integrated lock at one end. This chain could double as a self-defense tool. I wonder which martial art would bring the most utility to this kind of tool.
The chain is big enough that it’s partially falling out of my backpack. It could now actually be something that inspires honking on the basis that it could fall out.
It doesn’t take long for mold to grow on empty beer bottles. Considering beer bottles get returned for a refund, you have to assume that the brewery will make an effort to reuse as many as possible....
I doubt anyone does. I certainly do not. It would not be environmentally optimum to do so.
There is a stat that if you wash a typical dishwasher load worth of dishes by hand (with avg faucet output of 1 gallon/min), you will consume:
20 gallons of water if you are a novice
8 gallons of water if you are skilled
While a dishwashing machine uses ~4—5 gallons of water. So dishwashers are actually good for the environment. I will clear of any bulk waste before loading a dishwasher, but I do not hand rinse because it would be wasteful.
It’s essentially the same when returning bottles for reuse. People count on the industrial cleaning to do the full job (though I started the thread to get an idea of to what extent it really can be relied on). The refund for the bottle return is the same whether the bottles are clean or dirty, so there is no incentive for anyone to pre-clean them in any way.
In Europe they charge 10¢/bottle for simple bottles and 40¢/bottle for the fancy clamp-down style. Then that gets refunded when they are returned. It’s a bit of a hassle because some brewers do not participate, in which case the reverse vending machine rejects the bottle which means you then have to carry it to a glass recycle bin. The brewers that do not participate use a thinner more fragile glass that would be unfit for reuse. So consumers have to stay on their toes and keep track of which brewers participate. Can get quite tricky with the obscure artisinal brews.
Ireland is introducing the same concept for plastic bottles of charging a fee for them then returning the fee in a reverse vending machine. I can’t imagine reusing those. They must be recycling them.
I am aware that that happened in Oregon once, and even though the parts per million after one person’s bladder is empted into a tank of thousands of gallons is negligible, they emptied the whole water tank which covered a whole city and refilled it, and sent the guy a water bill for that.
I suggest watching the “how beer saved the world” documentary. It shows how they used filthy stagnant pond water with duck shit in it to brew beer, which was safe after the brewing process. But note the beer container is not part of the brewing process.
The water is not much of a risk. But filled bottles sit in warehouses with rats. Rats urinate on the bottles. This is why Europeans don’t drink directly from the bottle. I’m not sure why Americans are content drinking direct from the bottles… maybe US warehouses are rat-free.
Great for speeding up browsing on a limited connection, pointless for energy savings
We know from this research that video conferencing has a notable emissions impact, which could only be a consequence of energy consumption. Bandwidth doesn’t just cost energy at home but also all the servers and equipment that carry the payload upstream to the other end.
Video conferencing is like sending low resolution images with many diffs. Still images in a browser would be higher res (and bigger with higher pixel addressability), though much fewer in numbers, but still considerably more consumption than text.
Btw your reverse tethering option probably stopped being maintained because that is now built in to Android
What happens on the server side with recent versions? PCs don’t normally expect network traffic on USB (edit: well, not sure about windows, but not linux AFAIK). Gnirehtet is installed on the PC and it uses ADB to run the mock VPN on the Android.
(edit) Looks like on the linux side it’s just a matter of setting up a bridge with no extra software. But for the Android side every approach I find calls for an app. Does anyone know which Android version introduced built-in reverse tethering?
Nearly all the images you’ll encounter on your day to day browsing otoh is tiny and heavily compressed, bigger than text, but not enough to have a notable impact like video can.
I’ve noticed that people are quite bad at choosing the right compression algo for the job. And Wired mag concurs. SVG should be favored, but JPEG, PNG and GIF dominate. And even if you don’t have a vector graphic to start with, people often make the wrong choice between the three.
“reducing emissions can also be as simple as limiting the number of images that feature on each web page.”
– Wired
“Images are the single largest contributors to page weight. The more images you use and the larger those image files, the more data needs to be transferred and the more energy is required,”
– Vineeta Greenwood, account director at design agency Wholegrain Digital
edit: I just realized this is another problem Cloudflare brings us. When web admins opt to offload their job onto Cloudflare, they have less incentive to ensure their website is lean. The Wired article says web pages have quadrupled in weight since 2010. I’m sure much of that can be attributed to Cloudflare facilitating the bloat.
As far as reverse tethering, it’s under USB “internet” in settings
So you navigate this way: settings » USB internet? (my ~6+ y.o. device does not have USB anything in the top level)
Is the reverse tethering switch in a different place than the forwards tethering switch in your case? I found this well-written guide by someone who favors configs over software for this. Unfortunately the article has no date but it was archived in Oct.2020. He says root is required as well as terminal commands, but since it was possible with root for a long time I assume you’re saying recent versions make the option available without root. The article mentions this path:
and that’s what I have. There is a “USB tethering” boolean in the Tethering & portable hotspot page. I have always figured that option was strictly for forward tethering. And to reinforce that assumption, when Gnirehtet is running that “USB tethering” switch is in the off position (but perhaps because it uses the phony vpn approach). The article seems to be using that boolean for reverse tethering, unlike Gnirehtet.
The problem I have is on long trips (via bicycle or on foot) my phone’s battery hits 15% remaining and screen dims mid-trip, which is essentially blank in daylight when navigating. I’m in airplane mode with wifi also disabled. So the only power consumers are the screen and the GPS receiver. Yet I’m still forced to power...
I only use it when I don’t know the route. Usually it’s when I’m on foot all day long in an unfamiliar foreign city.
Sometimes my memory is almost sufficient for the trip, in which case I turn off the screen and go purely off the audible instructions, which greatly increases the range by using less battery. But the timing and accuracy of the audibles is not accurate enough for completely unknown routes.
So do you have your screen turned off most of the time?
Yes, because I’m usually not using it. I never use it as a phone and keep it permanently in airplane mode. Daytime navigation is its most common use, in which case I have the backlight on full power and the GPS on.
I usually get through a day fine with a charge.
I could probably get through a week if navigation were not involved. But when I do a day trip in a foreign city I have to carry a spare battery and still take every opportunity at bars and restaurants to recharge (which just gives ~5—10%). I also turn off the GPS when stopped to save battery, but this brings the inconvenience of reacquiring a fix.
If you bring a second phone, that is also a second device you’re carrying around, might as well be a small powerbank.
A powerbank needs to be wired to the phone and thus strapped to my arm. I’ll first test what an external GPS does and if that’s insufficient then I might consider an external battery.
The phone gets quite warm when navigating. I believe that’s because the GPS is computationally intensive. The heat is not only waste energy but it also heats the battery which then possibly impacts the battery performance and charging. So by using a separate device for the GPS, the impact from the heat should be reduced.
That looks interesting. I might have to keep my eye out for these at the 2nd hand street markets. When you say supplement, do you mean the ROX feeds coordinates to the phone?
Apparently Sigma has a proprietary app for the phone. If you don’t use that app, are open standards supported? In the pre-smartphone days, it was common to get a dedicated device that merely ran a GPS receiver and the sent to coords to any bluetooth device (e.g. palm pilot) that paired to it. I think the standard is called NMEA. The ROX 4.0 manual makes no mention of NMEA so I’m not sure if that could be used to feed OSMand.
In any case, your finding seems to suggest using an external GPS has a substantial power savings on the phone that hosts the maps.
I think it was the prime minister (or spokesperson) who made this very clever argument: (paraphrasing) “we are not taking away choice… cigarettes are designed to inherently take away your choice by trapping you in an addiction.”...
I’m ideologically opposed to anything that prevents an adult from doing what they want to their own body.
A couple other comments seem to imply this a full-blown prohibition as well. To be clear, my interpretation is that this is not a total prohibition. From the article:
The government is set to introduce a historic new law to stop children who turn 14 this year or younger from ever legally being sold cigarettes in England, in a bid to create the first ‘smokefree generation’.
So IIUC, there is no possession or consumption offense, and anyone at any age can grow their own or import¹ it. They’re just making it inconvenient to acquire by controlling commerce. That inconvenience will certainly add to the cool factor of kids who become the resourceful hookup.
¹ I suppose they will be able to carry it into the country, but probably legit mail order shops will be controlled. Not sure.
On the other hand, a complete ban on smoking in public spaces could be helpful ? I’m not certain if it has been tried
IIRC, the smoking ban in restaurants and bars started in CA or NY, then swept around the world from there. Then NY supposedly banned smoking near outdoor bus stops or something. Not sure if that experiment spread.
I saw no actions on that page. Then I dragged my cursor across the page and highlighting revealed they are using white text on a white background. I guess they did not consider that environmentalists might have images disabled in their browser.
Support Farmers and A More Resilient Food System
They are quite vague. One of the problems is livestock farmers are getting subsidies. They should be getting less support, not more. It’s unclear if this 2024 Farm Bill separates livestock farmers from the others.
Tell the World Bank to Stop Funding Fossil Fuels
Agreed. Though it’s a shame the action stops there. The advice should be to use cash as much as possible and to avoid these banks in particular.
Using Profanity to talk to iOS users
“Profanity” is an XMPP app. (For those who got the wrong idea about the title)...
How to diplomatically handle car drivers who use their horns to demand cyclists make room for them
In this case I operate on the assumption car drivers are inherently good people. So when I am cycling in the middle of the lane (when the lane is too narrow for safe sharing), and they are behind me hitting their horn, I give them the benefit of the doubt as to whether they are being a malicious prick....
What is your favourite way to give away free items you no longer need?
I’ve found Facebook marketplace to have a large reach, however I’d like to know if there are any good alternatives outside of Facebook?
Beer bottles can get quite nasty before people return them -- how good are industrial beer bottle dishwashers?
It doesn’t take long for mold to grow on empty beer bottles. Considering beer bottles get returned for a refund, you have to assume that the brewery will make an effort to reuse as many as possible....
(energy savings) Turn off Wi-Fi, cap ethernet, hardwire uplink, reverse-tether your phone
My SOHO router has a some “green” configuration features to reduce energy consumption:...
Repurposing old smartphones to assist your primary phone with navigation (increasing the range)
The problem I have is on long trips (via bicycle or on foot) my phone’s battery hits 15% remaining and screen dims mid-trip, which is essentially blank in daylight when navigating. I’m in airplane mode with wifi also disabled. So the only power consumers are the screen and the GPS receiver. Yet I’m still forced to power...
UK Prime Minister to create ‘smokefree generation’ by ending cigarette sales to those born on or after 1 January 2009 (www.gov.uk)
I think it was the prime minister (or spokesperson) who made this very clever argument: (paraphrasing) “we are not taking away choice… cigarettes are designed to inherently take away your choice by trapping you in an addiction.”...
Climate Reality Project: What You Can Do (www.climaterealityproject.org)
A great breakdown of concrete actions, sorted by time commitment (all the way from 5 minutes up to “I want to go to Italy and train with Al Gore”).