URLs, AVIF, Smart Home, Matrix

1. Did I mention sites with ultra bad URL handling? And there are many of those. Their incompetent developers push logical tasks which are too hard for them to the end users. I just completed one such task. Adding Briar to F-Droid the UX is dreadful. Because it requires reasoning skills which are above the developer teams skills. The app doesn't accept the add repository URL and doesn't process it correctly. But user can extract from the URL the required parts and then manually follow the redirects on the URL and then enter the final correct values. Ok, done. But I would claim that 99,99% of users fail. And it seems that 100% of the developers also fail on this kind of complex logical task, So sad. I've actually been really annoyed about many web sites having similar issues. Where users have to do things, which are above developer teams understanding of things. Sigh! List is long about such crap. Briar repo actually works, when you extract from their announced url the correct values and enter those: https://briarproject.org/fdroid/repo/ (This is the correct address after redirects!) and this is the fingerprint: 1FB874BEE7276D28ECB2C9B06E8A122EC4BCB4008161436CE474C257CBF49BD6. Check, now it works. But why they didn't tell this vital information on their web page?

2. AVIF (@ Wikipedia) image format support finally over 80%, now it really starts to entering the mainstream. Also you can create responsive pages which prefer AVIF but fall back to WebP (@ Wikipedia) and or JPEG (@ Wikipedia) in case it's necessary. Many people say that PNG (@ Wikipedia) is great, but actually lossless WebP is much better, and if it's photo, then AVIF of course.

3. Did read only platform development discussion and feedback from the users. It was painfully obvious that people don't understand design trade offs. If there are reasons why specific design has been chosen, it also always comes with drawbacks. Actually this applies to multiple open source projects and user requests and feedback. There are different platforms and designs for a reason. You should select the platform based on your requirements. And not to choose a wrong platform and then complain that it doesn't do something which it was never designed to do well. And then compare that feature on some other platform with different design, and say that this does this well. Sure it does, but it also loses some of the aspects which the other platform you've complained about did provide.

4. Matter Smart Home (standard) (@ Wikipedia) and Thread (network protocol) (@ Wikipedia). First thought, this sounds great and terrifying at the very same time. Let's see the details which have been made available. First observation is that the standard is much older than I thought. As far as I remember, I haven't seen any practical references on electronics stores, while investigating smart home stuff nor in tech media. Maybe it's starting to roll out, because the version 1.0 is out and it takes time for these kind of projects to proceed. Royalty-free sounds great. Just wondering if it's tied to the "cloud giants" or if you can run your own server. If it let's you run your own server and the protocol is secure, then it's absolutely awesome. Also read article: What matters about Matter, the new smart home standard (@ theverge.com). KV: Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), Built on Thread, IPv6, IoT, 6LoWPAN

5. Privacy. If possible services should not collect anything worth of breaching. Yet, so many sites ask for PII like email or phone number, even when it's technically meaningless information and not strictly required for the site to work. My contact account is - 958929f9-7bde-4552-8cbc-313471f2740b - And then there's the related data I've stored. Why do you need anything else? Also with every contact new identity is create,d so you can't even use that contact information to trivially collect sociograph. As well as I can change that ID whenever I want, or use alternate ID for connecting. Meaning that they key contacts, do not even use my public account id for anything. Kind of SimpleX Chat style thinking.

6. It seems that some people use Matrix to post (full long) announcements, in very Mastodonish / microblogging / blog / ActivityPub / RSS way. Then some users clearly use Mastodon to chat publicly, just they would do on public Matrix channel. Like very active discussion in blog comments section. Interesting overlap.

7. Something different? Kh-32 (@ Wikipedia) and Kh-35 (@ Wikipedia) missiles.

2024-01-14