ap-andersson

What country are you in?

There are a bunch of different protocols used to exchange scheduled and live transit information out there. And there are also a lot of different companies actually operating the vehicles (Transport Authorities). Sometimes several within one large city. But even if they have different systems underneath often they expose one of the popular protocols. Often there are even rules/law about certain protocols that you HAVE to support.

In USA that is mostly GTFS and GFTS-RT. I dod not think its a law but something about what you have to do to get funds maybe? I'm in Europe so my memory is foggy.

In EU I believe its NeTEx and SIRI. And every member nation needs a national hub where all transport authorities shares its data openly.

GTFS + GTFS-RT is very popular among consumer apps since its both pretty simple and pull-based. Static data is in CSV-files in a ZIP-file and the realtime data comes via Protobuf. If you check sources on the page this post is about you will se many GTFS sources. Ofc even transit systems built for the european standards can expose GTFS via a translation layer to support a broader range of consumers easily.

When it comes to signs at bus-stops there are those that are fed with this kind of data and can show both timetable data and realtime data based on the vehicles position. Here those signs are everywhere (Sweden) and I know there are plenty in the rest of Europe aswell. Outside of that I don't know if they are used as much.

New company have published this page on the website: https://novalauncher.com/nova-is-here-to-stay

You can also go to View in the menu and click "Filter by active branch" (Ctrl+Shift+A).

Also if you, like me, wanted to blame or view history for specific files there does not seem to be a way by clicking in the GUI to achieve it. But by using Ctrl+P you get the command search and can search for "Blame" or "File history".

If you want an easy to use project to get a map and feed to different sites like adsbexchange and flightradar24, I would recommend checking out: https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-adsb-ultrafeeder https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-flightradar24 https://adsb.im/home

There is a good community out there on github and discord that have flight tracking as a hobby. In addition to ADS-B there is also voice radio transmissions from aircraft (airband) and text messages (ACARS) etc. If you get hooked there is lots of different things to tinker with.

Or a way worse touchpad experience. No swiping geastures. No smooth scrolling. FN-buttons not working. Or any other million issues. I have never been able to install Linux on a laptop and getting things to work within a weekend. And then reverting becuase I need my computer.

Yeah and its $40 per year it seems. While its good that you can continue using your version after that it does seem just a little much. I'm not sure I even want to try it now because I don't want to like it and then decide I can't afford it. I'm not against yearly license cost at all, I think that it can be hard for software companies to make something good without it. But for a new software it seems just a tad high. And I guess it will seem even more depending on where you live.

To be honest I had forgot that it was an option. I zeroed in on the other alternative from the get go since I was the developer of the app and its very limited in its usefulness. Did not want to create work for others when I thought I could easily do the work :)

To be honest, not really. I wanted to first successfully get my app published before even thinking about that. I would need to explain WHAT to improve and HOW to improve it for it to be useful and that I cannot do until I am more familiar with the project. But it is a good point.

I myself use the following that are on F-Droid:

- Hacki for Hacker News

- Immich

- Organic Maps

- Synchting-Fork

- VLC

- Voice Audiobook Player

In general F-Droid works well for me even if I have only maybe 2-3 apps that I get from there. I think it's good that it exists.

There could be some improvements on the process of adding an app though. I recently made a very small app for myself that I thought "maybe a couple of people would find this useful, I should add it to F-Droid".

I started by reading their docs on how to add a new app. I created an account on gitlab, forked their repo and added my app. Their pipeline failed without telling me why. After reading and re-reading everything a bunch of times I had to give up and look for help. The instructions said to fix all pipeline problems before creating a merge request.

So I go to the contact page where there are a bunch of options. I chose IRC and join. Ask for help. No answer or any message sent in the channel for the next 24 hours. At this point I am getting a bit irritated and are thinking about truly giving up. Then eventually someone answers in the channel and says "create a merge request and someone will help you". Which is what the docs said NOT to do. Fine. Ok. I will create it.

I go to Gitlab and chose the right template for the merge request. And now I get a whole bunch of new instructions and questions that I have to answer that the docs never mentioned. And it even mentions in that template that I should TRY to fix pipeline problems, or someone will help me (still going against official docs on their site). Since there was a bunch of questions I would have to look up to properly answer I did not have the time to do it right away... And I still have not done it. Its on a todo-list.

tl;dr: F-Droid works okey but the whole process of submitting a new app for someone that has not gone through it before could be made way better with some updated and unified instructions.

Well I have installed latest APK from their site. Browsed for and installed apps without a problem. On my Pixel 9 Pro. So at least its not a bug affecting everyone.

Do you mean https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ or something else? That seems to be a crowdsources list of configurations for different apps.

What is broken in F-Droid? I just got Android 15 and are using F-Droid but have not noticed anything broken yet.

There is also projects you can run in your local network that skips the segments when playing youtube videos on chromecast. Using the same crowdsourced data from SponsorBlock. The one I use: https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip

Sorry for the late answer. Yes is uses Google Drive to sync the information. It is separate from Firefox account and syncs based on the Google account you are logged in with in the extension.

Sometimes I really wish that firefox sync was a bit smarter. The sorting seems so random sometimes and there is no grouping per window or anything. So when looking to open a tab when the computer has 5 windows with ~5-20 tabs per window open and they appear in a random order it can get very frustrating.

Also sometimes when sending specific tabs to my tablet or phone on android there is no notification, even if the app is open. Then I have to open the sync settings and manually press "Sync now" to trigger the notifications.

#3

There is an extension that lets you save and sync either all tabs or a certain window and restore wherever. Not exactly what you are looking for I think, but its very useful for me.

I believe that Google had something similar back in the day as an extension to Chrome but removed it.

Great when I am troubleshooting something at work and when done still want the 20+ pages saved for later reference but not open. Or when I am planning for the weekend or researching a product at work during lunch and want to open a bunch of tabs at home later.

https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager

I have moved to Traefik from NGINX aswell because of the built-in support for DNS challenge and wildcard cert. I myself spent many hours trying to get it working for my domain I use at work. I used the same config I use at home (which works perfectly) but could never get it to actually do anything, even though the setup was identical. Same domain registrar with same API based on the same docker configs etc. Had all logs enabled and still I get no information what so ever about why my certificate could not be created. It simply defaulted back to its generated cert without trying it seemed. After two troubleshooting sessions and several hours of searching and troubleshooting I had to admit defeat and just use my own self-signed cert files. Very frustrating when you get no information about why it doesn't work. Just a silent failure and fallback.

Overall that has been my biggest problem with traefik. Its awesome when it works, but when it does not I always seem to have problems troubleshooting and/or finding the information I need in the docs.

At work we will start using Traefik in prod towards the end of the year. I hope Traefik and I will become better friends before that :)

I have had to do the same to fix Youtube progress reporting, but not much more. That is one of few things the PiHole has ever broken for me (that I know of...). I agree that a problem with PiHole is that if something is not working and I disable uBlock as a debugging step, then I have to also browse and login to 2 different PiHole GUIs and temporarily disable it. Without knowing if PiHole actually blocked anything. It is especially inconvenient when on the phone. I have not looked if it already exist, but I would want a nice little app I can open and just click "disable for X time" which would disable the blocking on all my PiHoles at once. Also syncing all settings from a "master" instance would be great. Maybe the default lists should contain some of the whitelis domains or something aswell.

Still, these problems are so small compared to the value I get out of my PiHoles. Blocking ads for years on end while having troubles maybe 3-4 times in total. All the other time it just works.

Also love Fork and my whole team uses it at work aswell. We work on Windows and wanted a better GUI app since we use git from a GUI 90% of the time. We used to use Sourcetree years back and it never worked well. Tried a few alternatives but in my mind Fork was the clear winner. The UI is clear, snappy and works as you expect it would. I wish they had a higher price for companies (to make sure they can survive, since they use lifetime licensing...) and possibility to buy licenses that can be assigned and reassigned. I had to fight the company to buy the license since you always buy it for an individual, which does not fit how companies usually buy software or subscriptions.

It works when the company that takes care of the fiber is owned by the city and have more goals than to make money. Just like the company that create the electricity grid. When they have goals both in terms of how many people they reach with fiber within the area aswell as making money. Then you have a way of creating fiber and an open market where any ISPs can connect to the city-wide or region-wide fiber network and sell their services. Instead of competing in regards to the physical network close to the customer they compete when it comes to redundant connections to the city, quality customer support, prices, public IPs etc. This model is used all over Sweden (and I assume other countries in europe) to provide affordable internet. There are ofcourse still areas here that are only served by a single ISP with their own network. Often there can be a combination of those monopoloy networks and open networks within a single city. Depending on when the houses where built and who the estate owner is etc. Its sometimes cheaper for a smaller estate owner to sign with a single ISP since the initial installation cost may be lower. The end customer will of course pay higher prices for the services going forward.

The electricity works the same. One company owned by the city builds the electricity infrastructure. Then you pick whatever company you want to buy the electricity from.

I can pick between 10+ companies for Internet and many more than that for electricity in my town of around 60k residents.

Works fine as long as the company that takes care of that part does its job. You do put all trust in that one company to not be a douchebag. But seems to work here. Does of course not mean that it will work everywhere.

edit: Seems to work in some parts of the US aswell: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/open-infra-inc-got-i...

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2021/10/19/open-access-fiber-net...

An old PDF with some interesting facts, even if they are outdates by now: https://www.ssnf.org/globalassets/in-english/facts-and-stati...

I personally use a router box from teklager.se and they use open source schematics and bios which are actually updated. Without having done a comparison I am assuming they are a more expensive option though. It has been small, silent and stable since I bought it pre-installed with OPNSense though, so I am happy with it.

I believe I got default cron-files when I installed ZFS on ubuntu 21.04. It could be that they were created and I had to uncomment one line in a file. Then a scrub on the pools would run once a month. Then I setup email on the server and everytime a scrub is done with any errors, I get an email.

Quite easy for me to setup, even though its my first NAS that I built myself and first time using ZFS. Very surprised that LTT effed that up to be honest.

If you are interested in their story how the original client and architecture came to be and then how it changed to what it is today they have a podcast you can listen to: "Spotify: A Product Story" - https://pca.st/cbo7khrm

Here's also a blog post related to the topic: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/08/04/four-lessons-we...

I just want to add some more information about this.

First of all, even if municipal broadband in different forms are very common here in Sweden, its not the only option. There are some areas of cities or certain estate owners that have deals with ISPs where they install the fiber and have exclusive right to sell broadband services. This can happen in cities with municipal broadband, so different areas of a city can have different providers.

The most common form of municipal broadband here is that the company that manages the water and electricity in the city (a company owned by the city but are run to make a profit) also installs fiber cables (is a network operator). They are going to dig up streets anyway, right? I have never seen a fiber cable above ground in my life here. They manage the cables and install switches etc to get the signal from the customers home to a central location in the city where it can be handed over to the ISPs. The company is not an ISP and does not sell any services in the network, but they allow any ISP that want to sell services with their infrastructure to do so. More and more this is done by standardized APIs (since one ISP can sell services within many different fiber networks), but also more manually with web portals for smaller companies or for troubleshooting etc. The ISP usually pays the network operator for number of subscriptions and/or changes done (connections/disconnections etc). The ISP can then sell services to customers and compete with the others both on price but also on how good their support, bundles etc are. That means that in a medium sized city (for Sweden at least... ~150k residents in my hometowns municipality) there can be up to 20 different ISPs that you can choose between and compare in a portal. All with the same cables and one ethernet jack in the apartments (or a fiber box in houses). Any ISP can deliver the service within a few minutes. So while the municipality has a hand in the fiber market they are not a competitor to the private companies, they simply enable the ISPs to compete in an open market to the benefit to the customers. The same model is used for electricity aswell. One fee goes to the municipal company that manages the physical infrastrcuture and the electricity meters while the cost of the actual electricity used go to the private company you have a contract with. This is the Open Acces Network model and is very common here in Sweden. There are also open networks operated by private companies. For example both Telia (which is both a network operator and a big ISP, previously state owned now privateized) and Telenor (the same deal but from Norway) operate both open networks and "closed" networks (where they have a monopoly).

There is also another, less common, model where the municipality has created a separate company that places physical fiber cables under the streets but does not offer an active network (dark fiber). This model is used by Stokab in Stockholm and was in part created to prevent too many distruptions by private companies constantly digging up the streets. Then all ISPs can rent fiber on equal terms.

tl;dr: Fiber cables are in many places in Sweden handled like a utility and private ISPs can all use them to sell their services to customers on equal terms which create competition that is great for the end user.