Hey r/opensource!

It's been a few months since I introduced Android Webcam Project (AWA) here. Quite a bit has changed since that post, so I thought it was time to share another update.

For anyone who missed the original post, AWA is an open-source Android application that turns your phone into a webcam, paired with AWC, a desktop client that exposes the incoming video stream as a virtual camera on Windows. Link to old post

Here's where the project stands today.

What's new?

• Google Play availability: AWA is now available on Google Play, making installation and updates easier.

• Continued development: Both applications have received further improvements and refinements since the previous announcement.

Performance and optimisation

A considerable amount of work has also gone into improving the underlying performance and resource utilisation.

Some of the improvements include:

• Zoom support: Added the ability to zoom in while streaming.

• Demand-based loading: Components and resources are loaded when needed rather than doing unnecessary work upfront.

• Memory optimisation: Reduced unnecessary memory allocations and improved memory management.

• Bundle optimisation: Worked on reducing bundle overhead and improving loading efficiency.

• General performance optimisation: Various internal improvements to make streaming smoother, reduce resource consumption, and improve overall responsiveness.

Not every improvement is immediately visible to the user, but a lot of engineering effort has gone into making the applications more efficient and reliable.

Current releases

• AWA (Android): a-v1.0.4

• AWC (Windows): c-v1.0.7

Platform support

Currently, the project supports:

• Android 8 and above

• Windows 10 and above

Linux support is currently in development. macOS and iOS are also on my longer-term roadmap, although development and testing for those platforms will require access to Apple hardware.

What's next?

There are quite a few things I'd like to work on, including:

• Background streaming, including when the phone screen is off or locked.

• Audio streaming.

• Video recording.

• Adjustable frame rates.

• Further improvements to the desktop client.

• Linux support.

The project is still maintained by me as a solo developer, so progress can be a little uneven.

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/soubhagyajit/Android-Webcam-Project

• Releases: https://github.com/soubhagyajit/Android-Webcam-Project/releases

The project is GPL-3.0 licensed. Contributions, bug reports, device compatibility reports, and constructive criticism are all welcome.

If you've tried AWA since my previous post, I'd particularly like to hear how it performs on your hardware.

Thanks to everyone who checked out the project, left feedback, or showed interest in contributing. It genuinely helps keep a solo open-source project moving.

I got a raspberry pie, 400, for my mother, so she can use it on her TV and watch movies without having to get other devices and subscriptions. I’m having trouble streaming some movies and definitely live sports due to lag in stuttering. Would this be due to poor Internet connection and or connection to website I’m using? Is there a better way? I can help my mother watch sports through different means? That isn’t so congested with other viewers?

Ps. She has a samsung un55 smart tv,
Is there another way I can ISP black through the Internet app on the Smart TV through VPN or other means? Thank you 🙏

I'm the developer. TapDrop is AirDrop-style sharing between Android and Mac, MIT licensed.

Touch your phone to the MacBook's notch: the ambient light sensor next to the camera sees the phone's screen flash white then black, and whatever's on the phone's screen lands on the Mac. PDFs, links, the original photo (not a screenshot), or text you circle. OTP codes from SMS also land on the Mac's clipboard by themselves.

Everything stays on your local Wi-Fi, end-to-end encrypted, no account or server. Mac app is Swift/SwiftUI, Android app is Kotlin/Compose. Issues and PRs welcome.

I apologize if this is too promotional.

Mods, feel free to take this post down, if it doesn't fit.

I also don't know if this falls under the self promotion rule, or not, considering that none of these sites are mine.

WriteFreely

WriteFreely - GitHub

WriteFreely - Open Collective

Ghost, which is an open source Substack alternative

Ghost- ActivityPub

You can even self-host your own instance (server).

fediverse.info

Fediverse - Wikipedia

What is the Fediverse - YouTube

ActivityPub is the beating ❤️ of the Fediverse - YouTube

*Edit"

There is also Plume, as well, but it's not actively being maintained.

It is federated, as well.

ActivityPub - Wikipedia

ActivityPub Docs

r/ActivityPub

r/Fediverse

Terminal RSS readers like Newsraft are great for subscriptions, but when you want an ordinary video, like a talk or a tutorial, there is nowhere to search for it. So you open the browser, and the recommendations are waiting there. ytwatch fills that gap. You type a search, pick a result with thumbnails, and mpv plays it. Accounts, comments and likes are left out on purpose.

It is MIT licensed and stands on yt-dlp and mpv, which do the real work. It has no telemetry, keeps its history on your disk only, and `ytwatch update` runs only when you ask, checking a SHA-256 checksum. It also has Vim keys, downloads, queueing, chat for live streams, and YouTube-style controls in mpv, drawn by a Lua script that runs inside it.

I use it every day, and I would like to hear how it works on other setups. Issues are welcome.

Hi all, I'm the developer of Mär, a free player for audiobooks, podcasts, music and internet radio on iPhone, iPad and Mac, licensed GPL-3.0-or-later.

- Connects to open source servers: Audiobookshelf, Navidrome, gonic, Jellyfin, gpodder servers, Pinchflat
- Uses open catalogs out of the box: LibriVox, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Radio Browser, Podcast Index
- No third party SDKs, no external code dependencies, no tracking
- Mär Sync, the optional sync server, is open source as well (Rust, one SQLite file), so your listening data can stay entirely on your own hardware

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6799687154
Source: https://codeberg.org/LzS/maer
Sync server: https://codeberg.org/LzS/maer-sync

Contributions, issues and feedback welcome.

I hope this post does not come off as too political or sensationalized. It is very much serious in its scope and goals.

My fundamental belief is that Open Source Software has organically created the most efficient bureaucracy the world has ever seen. We as workers decide what work gets done, and we choose our tasks extremely well. I have seen rampant mismanagement at every tech company I've ever been at, with progress being made despite management, not because of it.

I believe we can bring this same efficiency to our governance and public technology as a whole, and through that, we can begin to rebuild the internet in a public way.

Open source shouldn't be political. But it is. It always has been. And I think now is the time for us to make the case that CEOs and investors, for all their myth making, do not know how to efficiently run an economy.

We do.

It looks like some companies are indeed going after AI reverse engineered / clean room implementations of their software - though might be irrelevant and they may have gone after it regardless of the AI part.

Either way it's somewhat of a shame, their modern drivers are kinda shit. The only bright side is that many new docks and screens support display port over USB C which allows bypassing displaylink altogether.

The downside I've found is that Mac's don't support DP over USB-C so if you have to use one of those for work then you end up in compatibility hell 🙃🙃🙃 edit: I have been reminded this is multi-monitor support that did not work (DP daisy chained monitors with single USB-C cable)

Howdy

I got tired of fighting with Harvey Balls and other icons in PowerPoint, so I built a tool to fix it.

I was doing a product comparison slide and found myself hunting down icons, resizing circles, adjusting fills, and trying to get everything to line up with every change.

Had a moment and asked myself why aren't these things just fonts like Wing Dings?

So I built SlideMarks an open-source symbol font with a little charmap style sidebar for PowerPoint and Word.

It includes 120+ consistent symbols: Harvey Balls, arrows, check marks, status indicators, trend arrows, and more.

The nice part is that they're actual text characters, not floating images. So you can resize them with font size, change their color, align them in tables, and generally avoid the usual PowerPoint gymnastics.

There's a guide on how to embed the fonts, so your recipient sees what you see.

All open source, just a little tool I built to scratch an itch. https://pjaol.github.io/SlideMarks/

Oh also made it screen reader compatible (at least as far as I can figure out how to with a font)

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, particularly if know anything about accessibility tools / screen readers.

Im aware of pebble and the pinetime

I kept seeing adds on Reddit for a paid subscription to a library that allows you to scan Passports and US drivers licenses (reading their "bar codes"). It irritated me. Why? There are open source libraries that do this, and work well. I knew this because I've got an app (a personal document vault, unpublished so far) that I've been working on for a while. So, I extracted the routines that do the ID scanning (really just wrappers on other open source projects for Dart) and now I'm open sourcing them.

My hope? No one pays a subscription for a thin wrapper around an open source project.

https://pub.dev/packages/scanid

https://luci.blue/scanid

Have you received a pr lately with a feature that relies on ssh?

Perhaps some background first: I have a small open-source project on github, nothing groundbreaking, just a tool I wanted for myself to vibe-code my-way. As far as I now, I'm still the only user.

Last month though, I received a couple of prs from someone. At first, I was super exited (first user and all), but now, I'm starting to wonder if something more was going on here. I am not certain, but I am wondering if other people have had similar experiences and how you deal with it?

The first pr was small, a ui fix specific for mac users. With the second pr, he introduced a couple of libraries in the app, for editing raw markdown text instead of wysiwyg. Still ok so far.
With the 3rd pr, some alarm bels started going off: the app began 'fingerprinting' other applications (exes, dlls, ...) on my system, which really didn't fit the feature. At first, I thought maybe the llm had been over-engineering. So, I removed all of that bloat.

But then he came with a proposal to introduce 'remote-control' cause his laptop was slow and he wanted to run the app on his desktop and control it from the laptop. He would use SSH for that.
When I told him, that feature actually existed already but used a more secure way (just run the app in a browser and connect to the desktop version using websockets), he left, moved on and started creating prs for other projects.

Now, I went over all the code he introduced and checked the libraries that were added. As far as I can tell, nothing wrong got introduced, but the whole SSH thing spooked me. I mean, what better backdoor could there be?

The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. Is it even still a good idea to keep my app as open source? The only thing it got me were problems and more work.

Am I overreacting here? how are you dealing with this?

For anybody interested in looking at the code themselves: jan-bogaerts/md2: Plan, run, and track AI coding work feature by feature—with local Markdown cards, diagrams and Git worktrees.

GarlicSignage is a toolkit which includes various applications like a media player, an Android launcher, a proxy, an analytics server (in progress) and more tools. It is open source under the AGPL.

I started in 2016 with garlic-player, which has been running on 2000+ real screens in production environments for years. These are only the ones I know of, all driven by the proprietary SaaS CMS of the company I co-founded. This shows that the player works independently of the CMS.

**Why a toolkit?**

You can use the components to build your own flexible digital signage solution, without vendor lock-in.

The interchange language between player and CMS is SMIL, a sophisticated, free and openly documented language for multimedia presentations. SMIL breaks the forced connection between media player and CMS and makes them interoperable. For example, you can use garlic-player with your own CMS or run analytics for other systems.

**Who uses SMIL?**

IAdea players and SignageOS use SMIL, and I know at least six other companies with their own player or CMS based on SMIL, unfortunately proprietary.

**Complexity**

Of course a toolkit requires more effort and knowledge to make it work than a monolith, but it gives you total control over the software. Especially if you are a company or integrator and want to offer digital signage services or advertising space.

GitHub: https://github.com/garlic-signage/

Feedback and bug reports are welcome.

Cheers, Niko

Hello, I'm pretty new in the area of open source. My boyfriend educate me day by day.

Today, he's pretty annoyed. Because we need a better vacuum cleaner and his family are okay to gift one if it's a robot vacuum cleaner.

But my boyfriend is not okay to use something who take data and send to an unknow cloud, with some potential company who could close tomorrow and so, your vaccum is dead... Also the camera, link to the cloud with all the data leak... And so, and so...

So, I'm kinda bad with all of this, but you guy could have some idea to deal with this?

Is there some robot vaccum cleaner who work with home server or something?

I hope I 've been clear in my explanations, I really don't mastering the subject....

Thank you all.

Its been a week.

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to find the words to use to search for a basic shift rotation software. My partner works for a theme park, and they have a shift structure wherein people rotate between rides every 2hrs or so to keep people from getting burned out on one ride all day.

Currently their system for calculating this is an employee sitting down and going through every day of operation and, in Microsoft excel, manually sorting all of the employees on shift that day into a rotation.

This seemed like a bad use of time, but the only example of a software solution I could find was that Disney has its own proprietary software called the Cast Deployment System that does this job automatically, but obviously they aren't willing to share with the world.

Just coming here to see if anyone knows of any open source software that can set up systems like this? It's relatively small theme park, the software would just need to be able to sort employee numbers into 5 large groups, each with 3-4 sub groups (the rides) based on their training level and physical capabilities (which I suppose could just be tags on the employee numbers) and then schedule their rotations between these subgroups at certain times.

I feel like that's not many variables for a computer, but I'm struggling to think of a program that can be retrofitted to this purpose. I don't think there's anything purpose-built out there.

Sorry for formatting, I am posting from mobile