Not really so much about election day as about trying to hold on to your stash, but a fine tune nevertheless.

Norway and Canada have announced that they will strengthen cooperation on defense, especially in the Arctic.

Source in Norwegian. Parts of the article is machine translated below.

– Canada is a close partner for Norway and an important ally in NATO. We share many fundamental values ​​and have common interests in the Arctic. In turbulent times, Norway needs more legs to stand on.
In turbulent times, Norway needs more legs to stand on.

Now we are strengthening cooperation with Canada, says Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (Ap).

On Sunday, he met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Ottawa.

Jonas Gahr Støre and Mark Carney have agreed to strengthen cooperation between Norway and Canada.

Arctic and defense

– This is one of the cooperations that is perhaps developing the most in our immediate vicinity, said Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre during a meeting with the Norwegian press in Ottawa last night.

It is about, among other things, the Arctic and defense.

– Canada’s choice of German-Norwegian submarines is a very clear anchoring of Canada in industrial cooperation with Norway for many years to come, said Støre.

Identical submarines

Norway, Germany and Canada will get identical submarines.

– This will strengthen our and NATO’s ability to monitor the sea areas in the north. It is very important for the security of both Canada and Norway.

Støre mentioned cooperation between the coast guards, in polar research and cooperation to map critically important minerals. The countries will also cooperate more closely in space and artificial intelligence, according to Støre.

– Within NATO, Norway and Canada are two of seven countries that have set the framework for how we should have an Arctic dimension in NATO, said Støre.

The latest version of Comaps, available from f-droid, now supports displaying user reviews, bringing it a big step closer to being a viable alternative to Google Maps.

Reviews are sourced from mangrove.reviews, and are open data licensed under creative commons. As Comaps is the first major app to support displaying the reviews they are still a bit lacking in numbers. Feel free to help change that!

It's not possible to review places from Comaps directly: a link to add reviews will be added in the next version. For now, the best way to review places is to find them on MapComplete (where restaurants and cafés/pubs are listed separately).

This is the first step towards review integration in comaps, and they are still working on features such as incorporating reviews into search results. So it'll keep getting better, but for now seeing scores and reading reviews works great. As a bonus all reviews are available offline.

I just made a discussion post to !Openstreetmap@feddit.uk, which is visible here: https://piefed.social/c/osm@feddit.uk/p/2091360/towards-an-open-federated-review-platform-based-on-osm

However, when federated to Mastodon, the post link is broken. It directs here, as if it was made to a local community: https://piefed.social/c/osm/p/2091360/towards-an-open-federated-review-platform-based-on-osm

This was pointed out by a user of sfba.social: https://sfba.social/@FinchHaven/116641561263747414

As I migrate away from big tech and towards independent solutions and in particular services powered by OpenStreetMaps and ActivityPub, I often find that the biggest missing piece remaining is that of a social element allowing for user reviews and feedback to locations on the map—in the intersection between the two services.

I have been playing with the idea of how this could be implemented, and decided would share my thoughts on a technically minimal and entirely federated standard for OSM reviews. The idea is to have a very basic ActivityPub integration that can work with even simple (microblog style) messages, allowing users to contribute reviews without having to sign up for additional services or necessarily install custom software.

The standard: Hashtags and OSM IDs

I propose a standard review format for microblogs based on a simple format:

[free_text] [optional_score] #OSMR #[OSM_ID]  

For example, a review of a café could look as follows:

Café In has delicious coffee and friendly staff. I would recommend it to anyone! 10/10 #OSMR #13042772401

The content that shows up first is free text, and could be anything. The score does not necessarily have to be standardized, as long as it takes the form of a fraction: It would be easy for any client to parse valid fractions and calculate average scores along any given scale. The hashtags enable the scores to be federated to any service seeking to make use of the reviews.

Federation of reviews

On the receiving end, platforms seeking to aggregate reviews would observe the #OSMR hashtag (OpenStreetMapsReviews - anything else would of course work as well) and parse posts containing a single valid OSM ID in a separate hashtag. Users should be encouraged to enable tags.pub in able to facilitate federation of their reviewss, and the receiving server of course also needs to make use of this service.

A challenge with Mastodon-style federation would be that reviews would not be retroactively collected: While this system would allow any service to collect federated reviews, I am not aware of any useful way of filling any existing backlog of reviews.

Once an ActivityPub instance is set up, subscribed to tags.pub, and receiving incoming reviews, it should however be relatively achievable to collect these reviews and connect them to nodes in various mapping applications. At least it seems to me this would be the least complicated way to implement federated reviews into OSM, and it would allow for a lot of flexibility for different implementations along every step of the way.

Moderation would be a challenge, as servers gathering user reviews would have to be able to provide some sort of guarantee against abusive or broken content. Mastodons upcoming shared block lists could be beneficial in this regard.

The types of posts visible - ranging from microblogs to pictures, blog posts, and peertube videos, would of course be up to the implementation in each app choosing to draw on these reviews.

Enabling user reviews

One challenge is for maps and apps to be able to display reviews, another is of course enabling people to write them in the standardized format. Writing these reviews would not currently be an intuitive process as OSM IDs tend to be hidden from users.

Ideally, map apps such that would benefit from showing reviews, such as CoMaps, OsmAnd, OrganicMaps, and MagicEarth, would allow users to sign in using Fediverse accounts and post reviews directly from these apps. A less ambitious implementation would be some sort of "share on the Fediverse" functionality, copying the two necessary hash-tags to the clipboard with a set of instructions for leaving federated reviews.

Establishments would be able to encourage customers to leave reviews on Mastodon directly using the share button, for example:

Leave us a review on Mastodon!

UX facing users on the fediverse

A shortcoming I see with this approach is that the hashtag for the OSM ID would not mean much (or anything at all) for the average fediverse user. In the best case scenario it would lead to posts reviewing the same establishment, in the worst case scenario it would be completely confusing for human readers. Perhaps if the standard caught on these posts could be recognized by federated clients to display OSM metadata for the relevant node, but this might be in poor taste vis-a-vis the implementation of ActivityPub. Some form of attachment providing node information would solve this problem, but would make the solution more technically complex and possibly break with the decentralized nature of this proposal.

Conserns raised in the comments

• "One Problem I see with using the OSM ID is that this is not necessary stable over time. For example switching the representation from a node to a way will change the OSM ID and also the OSM Ids are reused when objects are deleted so you could end up with reviews from other places mixed in." — @felixcremer@fediscience.org (direct link)

As I am not a developer I don't have the opportunity to implement this myself, and I realize this might be unhelpful day dreaming. On the other hand I believe this is one of the key missing elements of the Fediverse at the moment, and I think a standard along the lines of what is proposed here would be a powerful tool for both users and app developers. Sometimes I just miss having a way of recommending a great restaurant in a way people online could possibly benefit from without having to use big tech services. Even a minimal recognition of a standard such as this would provide a fruitful starting point to that effect.

I would love to hear opinions whether this would be feasible, whether alternative approaches are being explored already, and just general thoughts and comments!

Until recently I had an old projector inherented from a university to use for movie nights, but after a rather expensive bulb change the picture started flickering and it is now pretty much unusabe. So I am looking for a new one.

Things I want:

• HDMI or DisplayPort
• A standardized bulb of sorts, if possible - changing the bulb in my old projector was very specific and therefore expensive
• Reasonable brightness - I want to project across the room onto a white wall
• Somewhat silent - we have the projector behind us watching movies, so it's good if it's not very loud.
• Available in Europe
• Affordable

Things I do not want:

• Smart functionality or any form of spyware

It doesn't need to be super compact, but a smaller form factor is of course an advantage. Most importantly I just want a no-nonsense projector that does the job, is as repairable as possible if something breaks, and ideally doesn't cost a fortune.

If there's a projector that's reliable enough that it can safely be bought second hand that would be great.

Edit: I would ideally not pay much more than €600, and I am not very picky when it comes to picture quality - I just want to watch some movies now and then without having to buy a piece of trash with Android on it. I want a projector because I don't want a TV in my living room, not because I want a full-blown cinema experience at home. I'm sorry I didn't make this clear right away!

– Epstein var en nær venn av en god venn av meg. Så jeg ble introdusert for ham gjennom felles kjente – gjennom flere, egentlig. Og alle de jobbet innenfor global helse og organisasjonsliv. Det var folk jeg stolte på og stolte på vurderingsevnen til, sier kronprinsessen nå.

Hun vil ikke opplyse konkret hvem som introduserte henne for Epstein.

– Det er viktig for meg å beholde min egen integritet i dette. Så jeg kommer ikke til å verken gi ut noen andre navn eller prøve å skylde på noen andre. Det er mitt ansvar at jeg ikke undersøkte godt nok, sier hun.

Elitene har kanskje et avslappet forhold til menneskesmugling, grov korrupsjon og voldtekt av barn, men de er om ikke annet lojale ovenfor vennene sine.

Vis meg tullet ditt og jeg skal si deg hvem du er.

Habermas’ political consensus-building theory argued formation of public opinion vital for democracies to survive

The latest episode of the Europeans podcast (@europeanspodcast@mastodon.social) features a really nice interview with Eugen Rochko (aka "Europe's anti-Elon") where he goes into his thoughts about Mastodon, the Fediverse, and his own position in all of it. It's a really interesting discussion, and an excellent example of how one can talk to people about the Fediverse without making it sound incredibly intimidating.

The interview starts around 0:40:50.

Jeg har ikke til vane å kritisere foreldre, men altså. Kanskje ikke introduser barna dine til vennekretsen din av velkjente seksualforbrytere som har til vane å organisere voldtekt av barn. Bare en tanke.

Pretty good write-up calling out European politicians in particular for calling for increased tech sovereignty in Europe, but not putting their money where their moth is by actually using the European alternative that already exists.

I'm not sure the word Mastodating will catch on. I'm not sure I want it to either.