Hey everyone!

I'm a table tennis player and hobby developer from Serbia. Since having a full-time job, playing table tennis, maintaining servers and occasionally pretending to have a social life apparently wasn't enough, I decided to start a few free and open-source projects.

Over the past few months, I've been working on three of them:

• LibreTT (https://librett.org/) — a free and open-source desktop application for organizing table tennis tournaments. Runs on Linux, Windows and macOS. Somehow. The goal is to provide a genuinely free alternative to proprietary tournament management software.
• stoni.rs (https://stoni.rs/) — an independent table tennis player and club registry for Serbia, currently containing around 5,000 players, 217 clubs and over 11,000 historical registrations. Because apparently having this information scattered across hundreds of PDF documents was too convenient. Note: The database is temporarily unavailable to the public while I clarify some legal questions regarding player profiles and personal data protection. I've contacted digital rights organizations for guidance. I'd rather sort that out before publishing thousands of profiles and accidentally creating a fourth project called Legal Defense Fund.
• Velmoža (https://velmoza.rs/) — a volunteer initiative to help table tennis clubs get their own websites using free software. The idea is simple: clubs should own their websites and data instead of depending on proprietary platforms. Naturally, I decided to volunteer myself for even more work.

All three projects are currently developed and maintained by a highly professional team consisting of me, myself and I. Our meetings are extremely productive, although employee satisfaction is at an all-time low.

So, I'm looking for contributors!

Developers, designers, testers, translators, documentation writers, or anyone who finds these projects interesting. You don't even need to know anything about table tennis, although knowing which end of the racket to hold would be appreciated.

Everything is non-commercial, and contributions are entirely voluntary. There's no funding, no salaries, and unfortunately no free pizza. What I can offer is GitHub commits, occasional existential crises, and the satisfaction of contributing to something that anyone can use, study, modify and share.

I'm also considering eventually establishing a nonprofit organization to support free software and open digital infrastructure for table tennis, including projects developed by other people. But that's a longer-term idea. For now, I'd be happy just to have someone else to blame when something breaks.

There's no need for a long-term commitment. Even a small contribution, bug report, code review or suggestion would mean a lot.

P.S. In the interest of transparency, a significant portion of the code is AI-assisted or, as the kids call it, vibe coded. I've been responsible for the architecture, functionality, testing and the questionable decision to start all of this in the first place. So if you open the repositories and discover something horrifying, please remember that the code is free software. You're legally allowed to fix it. :)

Anyway, if any of this sounds interesting, feel free to reach out. If not, I completely understand. I'm also questioning my life choices.

Free software, free knowledge, and apparently free labor. 🏓

Hi! I’m a table tennis player, club captain and referee who apparently decided that what the world desperately needed was another tournament manager.

So I made LibreTT. 🏓

It’s a desktop app for running table tennis tournaments: players, registrations, fees, groups, draws, matches, knockout brackets, results, backups and exports. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, works offline and requires no account.

So why another one?

Because I don’t think competition data should belong to the software that records it.

A result is created by players, clubs, referees and organizers. The software is just a tool. If LibreTT disappears tomorrow, your tournament history shouldn’t disappear with it.

That’s why LibreTT is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. No subscriptions, activation servers, paid feature tiers or vendor lock-in. The source is public, the data stays local, and the community should always be able to preserve, move and continue its own infrastructure.

This is the first public beta (0.1.0-beta.1), so the next milestone is testing it against its natural predator: an actual tournament organizer who is 15 minutes behind schedule.

Development is AI-assisted and I disclose that in the README. I review and test what goes into the project and take responsibility for it.

Feedback, criticism and contributions are very welcome.

Source code · Website

Disclaimer: LibreTT website is still in development, expect bugs

This post is an update of the second part of my Moto server series: https://lemmy.zip/post/72142441

Rumor has it that keeping an 8-year-old phone permanently plugged in with its equally ancient Li-ion battery might not be the greatest idea ever conceived.

Some even claimed that a phone needs a battery to work.

Very negative people.

Anyway, I removed it.

Pettyl did not care.

nginx: UP PHP-FPM: UP MariaDB: UP WordPress: UP cloudflared: UP sshd: UP

The battery is currently sitting next to the phone, contributing absolutely nothing to the project.

Pettyl is now running entirely from USB power, at around 37°C, while continuing to serve the website like this is completely normal.

There is, however, one tiny detail the haters may enjoy:

It can’t boot without the battery.

So the official Pettyl disaster recovery procedure is now:

1. Insert battery
2. Boot Pettyl
3. Connect USB power
4. Remove battery
5. Pretend this is enterprise infrastructure

The battery is no longer a battery.

It is the starter motor.

I see no problems with this architecture.

Anyway, Part 3 is going great.

We did it boys! Battery is no more: https://lemmy.zip/post/72181546

This post is a follow-up to my original post: https://lemmy.zip/post/71885626

Surprisingly, it wasn’t that tough to set up.

My original plan was to install postmarketOS and turn the phone into a proper tiny Linux server. Unfortunately, my Moto E5 Play is the pettyl variant, while the available postmarketOS port is for james. I decided that turning the phone into a brick probably wasn’t an essential part of the project.

So I went with Termux instead.

It’s now running nginx, PHP, MariaDB, WordPress, SSH and cloudflared directly on the phone. Everything starts automatically on boot, and I even made a tiny WordPress plugin for anonymous Today / Total / Online visitor stats.

And yes, the website is being served by the exact phone in the photo.

1 GB of RAM. Somehow this thing is now a production server.

I named it Pettyl, after the device codename.

You can actually visit it at https://moto.dimitrium.org/.

The website is barebones, I plan to push it to the limits. Also, this project will soon be available on my GitHub page https://github.com/tradicije

Next problem: figuring out how long an old Motorola can tolerate my bullshit.

Update is here: https://lemmy.zip/post/72142441

Hey guys, since I got into hosting my own servers, any electronic device I see I wonder - can it become a server?

This is probably not a crazy and new idea with android phones, but I had to share it with you. If you don’t know, there’s this thing called postmarket OS, full linux experience on an android phone.

Of course, not all phones are supported, but a phone like Galaxy Note 9 is a great candidate - it supports LAN over usb, postmarket OS fully supports it (the Exinos version) and setting up a phone as a selfhosted server has it’s real perks. Pis got really expensive, not to mention they don’t have a built-in UPS (phones have batteries), they use slow SD cards, while phones have faster UFS memory, phones draw way less power.

What do you guys think? I will for sure get a used Galaxy Note 9 and explore this idea, and if all goes well, I might even buy more of them and create a cluster.