mastodon-archive is very useful, for Mastodon. We need the same for Lemmy.

Update: this announcement over the loss of endlesstalk.org reinforces the need for a backup tool. A good fedi server should not be fragile and dependent on the admin maintaining backups.

Update 2: This post gives some of the API calls that would be useful:

https://lemmy.ml/post/31128657/19022698

This flipper zero app enables you to tamper with ESLs:

https://github.com/i12bp8/TagTinker

Writing to them would of course be useful, but simply reading the tags could be quite useful too. As we get hit with personalised pricing and prices of goods fluctuate like stocks, it would be useful to grab prices programmatically as we walk through the store. The prices get fed to a DB to build a price history. This has a couple benefits:

• it could alert you when something you buy regularly is cheaper than recent history
• when a store ad says “today it’s $5 (normal price: $10)”, your DB can confirm whether the ad is lying about the normal price

Something like the “unwaffle” tool on https://goblin.tools/Formalizer would be useful to have so that large amounts of text can be condensed without relying on this cloud service.

For example, it would be useful for something like the Lemmyverse search tool, which I expand on here.

(update) Another example: I wrote an 80-page complaint to a government agency. They would like to have a summary of 5000 characters or less. A good tool could ensure brevity to the point of choosing words that give exactly 5000 chars, for example.

If you scan paper receipts which you will then later submit copies of (either to your accountant, to a tax auditor, or to your employer), it is often useful to organize them on a PDF or to print them.

Today’s FOSS tools leave a lot to be desired. We have:

• ImageMagick’s montage app, which lacks a smart rectangle-fitting algo. The user must specify which images to tile in what order. Not even sure it’s sophisticated enough to not overlap images after the first row when different dimensioned images are involved.
• LaTeX is manual labor intensive. You must micromanage the orientation and position of images.
• Probably even more manually intensive than LaTeX because it requires a steady hand to precisely place the images.

Human limitations will often likely have some paper waste due to inefficient placement. A clever algorithm could determine orientation and placement of each receipt to optimise minimisation of whitespace, thus wasting less paper.

A receipt-specific montage algo could detect the font size of each receipt and either shrink or enlarge depending on user-supplied constraints. The goal should be as few A4, A3, or US letter pages as possible, but then enlarge receipts to make better use of the available page space.

In principle, someone with a big brain creates an algorithm distributed as a library. Then ideally there would be an app that uses the library to generate LaTeX code. There could also be an enhancement to ImageMagick’s montage app to do the same.

Rectangle Repacking

After the rectangle packing app is created, it would then be useful to have an app that does the opposite. We arbitrarily put many receipts on the glass for scanning. Some receipts might not relate to others with respect to who it is presented to. A GUI app would accommodate drawing many boxes to mark the boundaries of each receipt and give a way to assign a filename to each box and write the files. Then any selection of resulting files could be fed into the rectangle-packing app. ATM we have to use GIMP to crop a single box, write the file, then reload the original image and repeat for each receipt, taking care to remember what was already cropped.

Copious access points are deployed by naïve admins who are oblivious to the fact that not everyone runs the latest gear. The shitty practice of pushing wi-fi in an arbitrarily exclusive way needs pushback. The first step is exposure. We need to enumerate the various ways demographics of people are being excluded and collect a DB on it.

The wi-fi protocol is the first point of failure. E.g. 802.11b vs 802.11a/g/n.. All new hardware is backwards compatible with older protocols. When an 802.11b device cannot see a signal, it’s because some asshat proactively disabled 802.11b.

Most exclusivity occurs with shitty captive portals. There are countless ways to fuckup a website to make it exclusive. E.g.

• to impose SSL, which inherently imposes recent certs and CAs that exclude old devices. It’s essentially rock stupid when the captive portal is nothing more than a button that says “I accept the ToS”.
• to impose JavaScript, which encapsulates a whole industry of poorly trained people who have no concept of stability of standards and interoperability.
• to impose SMS confirmation, which makes the ignorant assumption that every single user has a mobile phone, that they carry it with them, and that they are willing to share their number willy nilly.

🌱environmental impact🚮

The brain dead practice of deploying public Internet access using needlessly exclusive tech is a form of forced obsolscence. It’s one of the factors that pushes people to throw away working devices in order to overcome these ecocidal Internet access deployments.

🔧the fix💾

An app that records SSIDs, their location, and all the detectable exclusivity characteristics. It should also take human input with notes to record exclusivity that is not auto-detectable. Ideally the local DB would sync with a central DB. It should also be possible to extract a GPX file for a given region which could then be imported into OSMand or Organic Maps.