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Danie van der Merwe

@danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

47 followers 0 following 1.2K posts

I blog about #technology #gadgets #opensource #selfhosting #greentech #traditionalwetshaving #alternativeto #hamradio (ZS1OSS) #southafrica - see my blog at […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.social/@danie10, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12h

The Beginner’s Almanac for Wet Shaving "The first week in any wet shaving group feels like walking into a conversation halfway through. Somebody posts an SOTD with a three-piece OC and a croap, somebody else asks whether a G5 knot will splay too much for face lathering, and a third person […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

Data sovereignty in South Africa is not an address I rarely ever promote a partner sponsored article, but this one does touch on important aspects around data sovereignty which I wished government design-makers better understood. There are numerous risks to data being hosted (held?) in an […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

Fairphone’s latest repairable earbuds are smaller, lighter, and longer-lasting “The Fairbuds 2 have been redesigned from the ground up, moving to a stemmed design, available in black or green, and a case that’s 37 percent smaller than the first generation. Despite that shrinking hardware […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

Strata is an alternative file manager for Linux written in Rust “This file manager is written in Rust with GTK4 and released under the MIT license, with its lead developer, Pierre, announcing its first stable release a few hours ago. He claims that in 45 days, the project has picked up over 30 […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

2026 Kindles Have Removable Back Panels for Easy Battery Replacement All I can say is, this was quite a refreshing surprise to me, where everything is going tinier and more glued and sealed up today. True, I've not yet had to ever replace a battery on one of my Kindles, and they've been running […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Free cybercrime and online scams helpline goes live in South Africa “South Africans who have been scammed, hacked, extorted or harassed online now have a free place to turn for help. The Cyber Helpline, a UK charity, has launched a 12-month pilot in South Africa with local social impact […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

No phone signal? LastBar will find the nearest place that has it. “LastBar is a map of where mobile phones have signal and where they do not, made by the phones of the people who use it. When you are stuck with no bars, it gives you the distance and the direction to the nearest place where your […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

You can now tell telemarkers to get lost officially in South Africa “South Africans can register blocks against direct marketers on the government’s new National Opt-Out Registry now – not from May 2027, as the National Consumer Commission’s (NCC’s) own indicated – the commission has told […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Someone Vibe Coded a Free and Open Source Knockoff of Adobe Creative Suite “Using Claude Opus 5.5 and the programming language Rust, the creator of these apps, Atlanta-based Brandon Thomas, says he recreated Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat Pro, After Effects, and InDesign […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Dutch tax office ditches Microsoft 365 cloud for on-premises alternative “The Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its planned Microsoft 365 cloud migration in favour of services hosted on infrastructure it controls, alongside European open source alternatives. Email and […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Voicebox can clone your voice from a few seconds of audio on your own PC “Voicebox is an open-source and free-to-use voice studio created by Jamie Pine, who is the founder of Spacedrive Technology Inc. It is distributed under the MIT license, pitched as a local replacement for two paid services […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Map Animator makes animated route maps for travel and adventure videos, right in your browser “It's made for people who film their trips: motorcycle tours, cycling, hiking, road trips and sailing. Draw the route or use your GPX recording, give it a look, and get a video clip that shows where […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Honor’s Magic 9 Pro Max Has a Shotgun Mic and a 500mm Lens Mount “The Honor Magic 9 Pro Max launches in China on September 28 with a directional “shotgun” microphone, ARRI cinema color, and a lens mount that takes a 500mm teleconverter. If you shoot video on your phone, the mic may matter more […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

Veilamp is an open source music player that also streams your music to friends You really have to see this cross-platform player to believe everything it does. Apart from all sorts of technical music listening tweaks, it can act as a headless music server on your own network, or you can let […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

First for South Africa as robotic exoskeleton aids Table Mountain rescue I can really sympathise with this situation as it happened to me as well a few years ago. We hiked up the mountain and planned to come down with the cable car. But many hours later by the time we reached the Table Mountain […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

Microsoft going back to its roots and breaking spreadsheet compatibility “Microsoft has ended 40 years of single-occupancy for Excel cells and is now allowing multiple values to inhabit the same home. For the time being, this capability is only available in Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

F-Droid’s Android open-source app store has been rebuilt from the ground up “Virtually every Android device comes with the Play Store preloaded, but there are other ways to get apps. F-Droid bills itself as a community-driven source for free and open source Android apps, but its official app […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

OSS Document Scanner is an open source mobile app to scan documents to PDF This mobile app does largely what Adobe PDF Scan or similar apps do, but your scans stay private and offline. It runs on Android and iOS, with the Android app being available from a variety of sources. It is open source […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

Grist is an open source self-hosted spreadsheet with a database hiding underneath “Grist is a relational spreadsheet-database app that I can host on my own server. When I first tried it, it felt familiar because the basic idea is still the same: I get rows, columns, cells, and tables that I can […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

OpenCode is an open source alternative to Claude Code OpenCode is an open source agent that helps you write and run code with any AI model, including free (for now although the free tier uses a limited subset of backend models including Big Pickle) use of its own OpenCode Zen model. It's […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts This is a very though-provoking that applies much wider than just AI. In fact, its origins go back to long before AI was even around. It is applicable to whenever automation is involved with humans. The problem with humans is they get […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Immurok Fingerprint Key Unlocks Linux, Approves SSH and AI Agents “It is a tiny wireless box that can unlock your desktop session, approve a sudo command, authenticate via polkit, log you into a server over SSH, generate TOTP codes for 2FA, and put a physical touch in front of an AI coding […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

Australians Could Soon Opt Out of Social Media Algorithms Altogether “The Australian government is proposing to give social media users the option to switch off the default algorithmic feed, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Tuesday. Under the draft legislation, “Digital […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

I discovered KDE’s hidden superpowers after installing these 3 open-source utilities “If you've been in the Linux space for a while, you know just how customisable KDE Plasma can be. However, a lot of us only limit that customisation to picking the theme or moving the panel. What surprises me […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

Kept is an open-source self-hosted alternative to Google Keep notes It looks and feels like Google Keep notes, but is private and tracker-free. It has some extra features too, such as location notifications, CalDAV integrations, collaborative editing, file attachments, etc. Kept is designed […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

“I’m Not Dead Yet!” Reverse Polish Notation Calculators You Can Still Buy “RPN isn’t exactly the way people calculate with pencil and paper, and it certainly wasn’t derived from the slide rule, but there is a similarity in the way you work. With a slide rule, you generally establish some value […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

Tether Brings the Apple Continuity Experience to Linux “Continuity. That is Apple's catch-all term for how iPhone, iPad, and Mac talk to each other. It covers a wide range of small conveniences. Copy something on the iPhone and paste it on the Mac. Start an email on one device and finish it on […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

Could flipping Raise wrist to wake and Always On Display (AOD) improve battery life? This is an interesting option to try (I have a Pebble watch, so battery life is not an issue). The theory is that raising the wrist normally kicks the full CPU on to check time, and that probably triggers quite […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

Scientist learns in front of peers why we cannot trust AI Blindly “Sutter’s cringe-inducing tale perfectly illustrates how many users of AI tools are putting themselves at risk without knowing it, including in the most rarefied echelons of academia. The science world has been inundated with […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

HAMgpt Launches as a Personal AI Copilot Built Specifically for Amateur Radio “Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, HAMgpt is built around the real operating situation of each ham. It can take into account the operator's license class, country, grid square, radios, antennas and operating history […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

Image Toolbox is an open source Android app for social media creators “For you, as a content creator, the tools that matter the most are batch processing, format conversion, the 61 built-in export presets sized for platforms like Instagram, X, and YouTube, background removal, and watermarking […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Quest VR Headset Becomes Unlocked Hardware “The Quest virtual reality headset gets a fully unlocked bootloader thanks to the QuestStack tool, which automates a complex process of privilege escalation to provide stable, privileged access to the hardware. This solidly frees the headset from its […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

I tested out the new Elecrow ThinkNode M9 with MeshCore Decentralised Radio Network For those who don't know, MeshCore (similar to Meshtastic and same hardware LoRa radios) is a decentralised radio network that runs in the license free bands. It's a great way of being in contact with […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

Jellyfin Playlist Membership — Easily browse Jellyfin Music song titles to add or remove from playlists I wanted to quickly see which of my song titles are already in which playlists, and to quickly add them to other playlists or remove them etc. There is just no view that does this inside […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

Moving your Linux home folder to a dedicated drive is the distro-hopping secret I wish I knew earlier “Home is where the heart is. On Linux, home is where everything personal to you is: your documents, downloads, screenshots, and configuration. In fact, your home is so special, you really ought […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

The Powerful Chinese AI Model Experts Warned About Is Here The “best” model is not always the “best” model for you. Why I say this, is because Z.ai's model is still outperformed in some dimensions by proprietary models from Anthropic for example. But can you afford to actually use that top end […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools “In his talk Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools at Hackaday Europe 2026, Phil takes us through a series of progressively more advanced open hardware devices that he’s designed to increase the speed and accuracy of […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

N64 classic GoldenEye 007 has been 100% decompiled, paving the way for mods and ports “Rare's GoldenEye 007, which dropped back in 1997, is one of the most influential games in history. It arguably established the FPS genre on consoles thanks to its local four-player split-screen multiplayer […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

Cheap USB-C chargers are actually fine—these 4 specs are all that matter “These days, buying a charger requires you to be familiar with USB PD, PPS, GaN, and a handful of other acronyms, on top of having to check wattage, making it surprisingly difficult to figure out which specs actually […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

nfSensei is an open source fork of pfSense, by the original creator, for Linux “nfSensei is a modern network operating system built from scratch in Rust with a React frontend, designed around a single principle: one API to rule them all. The CLI, the web UI, and the on-device AI assistant all […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

FairEmail is an open source privacy orientated email app “Setup was IMAP credentials for each of my personal accounts. There's no account to create with the developer or a sign-in step before you can reach your inbox. Two things in the listing made it appealing to 1 million+ users, including me […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

I Remember These Modular Electronics Kits It's a real pity these kits are no longer around as they really “spark” an interest in building practical things, and in electronics. Mine was a 50-in-1 kit I think, and came in a wooden frame. You got all the various components fixed to the board with […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Homelabbers and Desktop Tweakers may want to move beyond just plain AI chat The days of asking AI a question, or pasting a config file in, and then pasting (or typing) the updated file back, are no longer needed. I have over 47 running docker containers, with almost as many stopped, and when I […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

SoloMD is a simpler markdown open-source app that opens your whole Obsidian vault “Obsidian is probably one of the best note-taking apps out there, but it's not open-source, which is fine, there are perfectly good reasons for that. But a part of the Obsidian user base has always wanted a […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026

Track Bird Visitors With A Raspberry Pi And A USB Mic “Avian Visitors is a lovely project by Teddy Warner that uses a Raspberry Pi and microphone to keep track of which birds have been visiting your home, and creates a colourful illustration of recent visitors on top of it all. It reports on a […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026

I turned my security cameras into AI assistants with open-source LLM Vision “LLM Vision is a free, open-source Home Assistant integration that lets an AI model examine the images from your cameras and describe what is happening in those images. LLM Vision doesn't replace systems like Frigate […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

Netflix accounts taken over in South Africa through session cookie hijacking “These cookies allow users to stay logged in to websites or to save items in a shopping cart even after they exit a site. Through these cookies, cybercriminals have found an exploit that has allowed them to access […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

Google Search is likely Yahooed now This is a lesson that you are never too big to disappear. I remember the arrival of Google Search (when that was all they did) and how it collapsed Yahoo search from the scene. Googling even became a verb. As big and massive as Google Search was, who can say […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

RSS-Bridge generates web feeds for websites that don’t have one You can either self-host the service, in many different ways, or there is also an official online instance you can use. The link to that instance is on the GitHub project page at the link below. See […]

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

Team South Africa wins at NASA space engineering competition “The international finals for the world’s longest-running space engineering competition were held at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre and the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida from 30 July to 2 August. Team ZA was the only African team […]

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