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Hello community!

Welcome to the UBports Foundation email newsletter, June 11th, 2021

From your editor

Hi! It's that time again! A new news letter from the UBports Foundation about the Ubuntu Touch project. And this time I would  first like to talk a little but about a philosophical issue. You see, there's this small naming thing that is going round in my head. 

The thing is, we have this lovely mascot, called the Yumi.

(As a side note  now also available in plush to help you sleep better. Sorry for pointing to the webshop image but it was easier to edit it this way.)

And I have been told the "Yumi" comes from thinking about our community and "you" and "me" in our community makes up the "Yumi" term.

Okay, I get that. But at the same time we have the "UBports" Foundation trying to manage this immense project.

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And when we say "UBports" we usually say "U"-"B"-"ports". So, does this mean it should not be "Yumi", but "Yubi"?

And now I can't get this question out of my head.... So I made a small poll.

Warm greetings,

Jeroen Baten

News, hot from the press

If you did not have time to attend the live version of the Volla Community Days (held on 29-30 May) videos of the event can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/HelloVolla/videos.

I know for a fact that they are still busy splitting them up into separate videos and that work has not been finished yet. In the mean time, if you want to know about all things Volla, then here you can spend many hours watching :-)

Volla will soon have a new model for sale! It's the Volla model X rugged edition, with complete IP68 protection (what is IP68: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code) and a very, very large battery!. A video showing the model during the Volla community days is here: https://youtu.be/qLaX4DcBHZA?t=4702

There is also already some talk about it on our forum: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/6234/volla-phone-x-announced-rugged-phone-running-ut/15

In our community

Remember how I asked for you all to send me press contacts? Well, I wasn't exactly flooded with replies but I did get a fair amount of very nice and excellent emails. So a big thanks to all those who responded!

Anyway, at the moment, the current status is that we 122 press contacts in 14 countries. It's not yet the 195 possible countries in the world, but it's a whole lot better than nothing.

We also added a  Dutch bureau specialised in writing press releases. This is, by itself, a whole business on its own. Writing a good press release so that the information gets published is not a trivial task.

Soon we will be churning out Dutch press releases, I will translate them into English and use the list that we together created to get the word out about Ubuntu Touch.

Because being active with the best mobile OS that nobody knows about is not exactly my personal life goal. I'm really curious what the future will bring in this regard!

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Interview!

Interview with Rudi Timmermans 

Rudi Timmermans is the developer of several Ubuntu Touch apps and the driving force behind the campaign to improve Anbox on Ubuntu Touch. We asked him what made him start the latter.

"I was always seeing questions from Ubuntu Touch users about whether they could use WhatsApp, again and again. But the old Anbox to run Android apps on Ubuntu Touch was almost unusable for many apps. Because the core development team of Ubuntu Touch had their hands full with other tasks, I decided that something needed to be done. That's why I started the campaign."

Asked about what he considers the most important Android apps to have on Ubuntu Touch, he answers: "Personally, I'm only using my bank's app. But I think for a lot of users WhatsApp would be a critical app to have on their device." Rudi also develops his own Ubuntu Touch apps, such as the Facebook client Sailbook and the Twitter app Tweet Mobile. He keeps updating them, but all his focus is now going to Anbox on Ubuntu Touch.

Read the full interview on our blog: 

Interview with Rudi Timmermans

Help needed!

The OnePlus 5/5T phone now has a beta installer for testing available.

For full details see https://forums.ubports.com/topic/6227/installer-configs-beta-test/18

This is for the brave ones, not yet for end-users. Be wise and think before you try, after that, enjoy the ride!

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 101

After a short and well deserved hiatus, the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 101 session had a lot of news. Let’s talk about two items.

In the past weeks, the UBports installer gained support for a couple of new devices: the LG G4, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, The Pixel 3aXL, the OnePlusFive/5T, the Xiaomi Poco F and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7. Do you have one of these devices? Now is the time to install Ubuntu Touch on it! These continuous porting efforts are important because over time Ubuntu Touch probably won’t support some older phones any more. Their older kernels will inevitably become roadblocks because newer systemd versions will rely on newer kernel versions.

Dalton announced that he is about to begin work as a mentor, helping out a technology student. His mentoring approach is to ask mentees to list five things which really annoy them about Ubuntu Touch, because annoyance is a pretty good motivator. He then identifies the one that probably has the most straightforward solution and advises them how they might go about fixing it.

It will be interesting to see how this mentoring helps newcomers to contribute to Ubuntu Touch. A lot more information in the blogpost and of course the video recording.

My latest mistake

Don't tell my wife that I put down in writing that I admitted to making a mistake, but I did. I used photo's from people, taken at a public event (so I thought I could use them), in a UBports animation. Don't worry, it's already completely offline by now. But I did it, and I should have known better. I am truly sorry.


Anyway, I started thinking about a possible solution to this. How to make photo's from people at events, use those photo's and not have to worry about getting paperwork for consent. Sure, I could put a black bar over their eyes, but that would not send out the right message, now would it? So I came up with a 3D printer solution as you can see here next to this text. You can even see through it! Next time you want to be on a photo at an event, I will ask you to wear this. What do you think? Would it solve the issue at hand?


And, since we are an open source project after all, this design is available on Thingiverse.com. Just please use orange colour RAL2010 to stay inline with the official logo.

p.s. sorry about the ugly face :-)

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Some tech article (YATA?)

No, not really, but bear with me for a second. So there's the taskwarrior(.org) command line program that is, IMHO, a brilliant todo manager. Especially since it calculates an "urgency" factor based on priority, lifetime of task, whether it belongs to a project, etc.

Now, I have also taken a look at the Matrix network. Setting up your own internal small matrix server is pretty simple on Ubuntu:

apt install matrix-synapse

Now it doesn't do much yet and only listens on localhost, which is pretty limited if running in a vm on your system.

If you like you can take a look at /var/log/matrix-synapse/homeserver.log. The default and pretty empty SQLite3 database is at /var/lib/matrix-synapse/homeserver.db

If you would do the following:

sqlite3 /var/lib/matrix-synapse/homeserver.db
SQLite version 3.22.0 2018-01-22 18:45:57
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> select * from users;
sqlite>


As you can see, an empty response. Not even a "zeroo records found" to help a little bit. (talking about user friendliness, just don't get me started...). Anyway...

Edit /etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml:

Make "bind_address: 127.0.0.1" empty so it will bind to all interfaces "bind_address:" or put in another IP address.

Change "enable_registration: False" to "enable_registration: True".

Restart the server:

systemctl restart matrix-synapse


Now register  a first user from the command line. You need the option "-k" because the installation uses a self-signed certificate:

curl -k -XPOST -d '{"username":"yourdesiredusername", 
"password":"yourverysecretpassword",
"auth": {"type":"m.login.dummy"}}'
"https://localhost:8448/_matrix/client/r0/register"

And see a lovely JSON reply appear together with an access token.

You can redo the sqlite query to see a user record has been created:

sqlite3 /var/lib/matrix-synapse/homeserver.db
SQLite version 3.22.0 2018-01-22 18:45:57
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> select * from users;
@jeroen:mtw.home.local|n0th1s1sl33t@ndn0tmyh@ndl3:-)!|167|0||0|
sqlite> .quit


Now it's time to use that registration to a login from the command line:

curl -k -XGET "https://localhost:8448/_matrix/client/r0/sync?
access_token=a-very-long-string-of-random-characters-here

Now you can try to connect other clients to it, change the self-signed certificate for something better, etc. More ideas can be found here.

Now, about my idea...

I was thinking, would it be possible to create project/task/todo management functionality into the matrix network?

Something like: 
- Define project (aka Matrix room?)
- Invite friend into project
- Send task request to friend
- Friend accepts task requests.
- I see list of tasks with status (pending, accepted, done?)
- Friend sends task done signal back thus changing my status.
- Or friend sends back estimated completion date?

Now combine that with local task urgency calculation as done by Taskwarrior, so I would see what task I should work on next (if I like of course), wouldn't that be nice?

Or bundle tasks into projects?

Allow tasks to be payable or non-payable?

Show Gantt graph of project?be found here

Manage people into resource bundle? I don't care who does the work as long as somebody from that group does it?

Add an attribute with someone's hourly rate?

What could this mean for our UBports community?

Anyway, this opens up a whole can of ideas in my head. What about yours?
Tell me, as usual, at jeroen@ubports.com!

And... it's a wrap! Stay tuned for our next episode in two weeks. If you want to let me know what you think, write me an email (jeroen@ubports.com)


Thank you for joining us!

 


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