If your car was made in the last decade, its dash probably has several displays, gauges, and indicator lights. But how many of those do you actually look at on a regular basis? Likely only one or two, like the speedometer and gas gauge. Knowing that, John Sutley embraced minimalism to use a Game Boy as the dash for his car.
Unlike most modern video game consoles, which load assets into memory before using them, the original Nintendo Game Boy used a more direct tie between the console and the game cartridge. They shared memory, with the Game Boy accessing the cartridge’s ROM chip at the times necessary to load just enough of the game to continue. That access was relatively fast, which helped to compensate for the small amount of available system RAM.
Sutley’s hack works by updating the data in a custom “cartridge’s” equivalent of ROM (which is rewritable in this case, and therefore not actually read-only). When the Game Boy updates the running “game,” it will display the data it sees on the “ROM.” Sutley just needed a way to update that data with information from the car, such as speed.
The car in question is a second-generation Hyundai Sante Fe. Like all vehicles available in the US after 1998, it has an OBDII port and Sutley was able to tap into that to access the CAN bus that the car uses to send data between different systems. That data includes pertinent information, such as speed.
Sutley used an Arduino paired with a CAN shield to sniff and parse that data. The Arduino then writes to the “ROM” with whatever Sutley wants to display on the Game Boy’s screen, such as speed.
This is, of course, a remarkably poor dash. The original Game Boy didn’t even have a backlight for the screen, so this would be downright unsafe at night. But we can all agree that it is very cool.
As a reminder Matrix will again be present at FOSDEM this year!
As always, FOSDEM is free to attend and will happen at the 1. and 2. of February. Additionally we will have a fringe event on the 31st of January.
You can find more information in the "Matrix in full force at FOSDEM" blog post.
Additionally please be aware that the Health and Safety Policy for the fringe event will be the same as the one of the Matrix Conference.
Extremely briefly: You need to wear a mask while indoors, except while eating and drinking.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.
As suggested from folks in the TWIM room, the above status now contains MSCs that are currently in proposed Final Comment Period. The hope is that this directs attention to MSCs that are close to being either merged/closed.
In Chapter 46 of Element’s neverending mission to persuade enormous Matrix deployments to contribute to Synapse and Matrix development costs, we’ve put out a blog post explaining precisely what Synapse Pro is, why it exists, and why if you base a huge national Matrix deployment on open source Synapse it will fail - https://element.io/blog/scaling-to-millions-of-users-requires-synapse-pro/
This week the Element team released Synapse v1.122.0. Please note that the minimum required version of PostgreSQL is now 13 - upgrade your DB cluster if necessary!
Otherwise this release contains a number of nice additions to the module API and the Admin API. It also stabilises the implementation of MSC3823: Account Suspension.
The usual round of bug fixes and dependency upgrades are also present. Enjoy and thanks!
matrix-media-repo v1.3.8 is out now! This release is a security release with other bug fixes and features contained within. Operators are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
This week we released Dendrite 0.14.1! This is a security release with just one additional fix for loading server ACLs.
gomatrixserverlib, which is powering Dendrite, was vulnerable to server-side request forgery under certain conditions. CVE-2024-52594/GHSA-4ff6-858j-r822 has been fixed by implementing Allow and Deny lists for network requests.
Loading server ACLs on startup has seen a huge improvement, this is mostly noticeable on larger instances with many ACL'd rooms.
I made an Android wrapper for gomuks web using GeckoView to get push notifications. There are a bunch of other new features too, read https://mau.fi/blog/2025-01-mautrix-release/ for more info
The most valuable fix goes to… showing consistently pills for users and rooms mentions in the right place instead of seemingly random places, getting rid of one of our oldest and most annoying bug.
The most sensible improvement goes to… using the send queue for attachments, ensuring correct order of all messages and improving the visual feedback.
The most underrated feature goes to… allowing to react to stickers, fixing a crash in the process.
The most obvious tweak goes to… removing the “Open Direct Chat” menu entry from avatar menu and member profile in direct chats.
The clearest enhancement goes to… labelling experimental versions in the room upgrade menu as such.
As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.
Working on the media gallery. It will be possible to swipe between media (images and videos) when displaying media in full screen. For the first iteration, and because of technical - temporary - limitations, it will be possible only when coming from the gallery (navigate to Room settings / Media and files).
Also finalizing (?) the work on the Knock feature.
A technical note: there has been an update on how we configure the log of the SDK, it's now limited to setting a log level.
We are publishing a new release of Element Android (v1.6.28), that will advertise user to migrate to Element X if they want to create an account on a homeserver with MAS support. As a reminder, matrix.org will migrate to MAS in a near future. This is the first step of redirecting user to Element X, which will become the main client that Element will support on Android and iOS platforms.
Also, Element Android is now dual-licensed: AGPL-3.0 and commercial license.
As a weekend project I wanted to solve the usecase we got at work where we develop Neoboard but mainly still use Miro for a lot of things. Hence, I wrote a tool to migrate :)
I've been hard at work squashing compile warnings! Hopefully pushing those in a few days?
User impact is not expected for those changes.
Not worth a separate TWIM post: Fixed a bug in Rory&::MatrixUtils that caused some tools to crash when you have an invalid session logged in.
Additionally: I hope you had a great new year!
Trim leading slashes out of well-known URIs. LibMatrix and anything that uses it (hello Rory&::MatrixUtils!) should now work more reliably for homeservers!
Update dependencies, keeping us up to date with the latest bug fixes and security improvements.
Allow building all parts of LibMatrix without depending on a local checkout of ArcaneLibs. This should help with packaging LibMatrix in NuGet/... in the future, making LibMatrix far more accessible for developers!
Besides that, we kept working on the persistent event cache storage, and some other topics:
The time when an event is added to the send queue is stored in some metadata so the send queue has a better understanding on how stale the event is. Thanks @zzorba! (#4385).
A new RoomPrivacySettings helper was added through Room::privacy_settings to customise a room's aliases, join rules, visibility, etc. (#4401).
We fixed a bug where we incorrectly discarded previous batch tokens when the persistent event cache storage is disabled, which caused some events to be missing while paginating (#4495).
When a room is forgotten by the SDK, we now also clear all the events related to it from the event cache (#4521).
Fixed a bug where UTD events where always added to any timeline unconditionally while syncing, including those that filter out events such as the pinned events timeline or the media one (#4525).
Added a Room::own_membership_details function to get both the current user's room member details and the ones of the sender of that room member event. Also, the FFI RoomMember struct now also contains the optional reason for the membership change (#4529).
We now handle redactions of redacted events (#4533).
Fix a bug that caused the logs at the FFI layer to be way too verbose (#4542).
You can finally see what's inside your users' account data! It is extremely handy for bots using account data as main data store
Respect base url when loading config.json
If you serve Synapse Admin under a subdir (e.g. example.com/admin), this one is for you! Previously Synapse Admin attempted to fetch config.json as-is, completely ignoring the base url you use
Respect other GET params when reading SSO login token
Previously, Synapse Admin extracted loginToken using regular expressions, and that didn't work well if you have any other GET params (like server). Well, the issue is no more!
The 2.0-beta programme has concluded and the long-awaited Draupnir 2.0 is here, bringing substantial improvements to moderation for public Matrix rooms. This update reflects over a year of hard work and community feedback.
This release marks a turning point for Draupnir, which has become an essential tool for moderators across Matrix's open communities. With the introduction of new features and optimizations, the bot is easier to use and more capable than ever.
The key improvements are:
Intuitive Prompts: Routine tasks like protecting rooms or watching policy lists are now as simple as inviting the bot and clicking a reaction. Prompts in the management room replace many manual commands.
Faster and Smarter: Draupnir now caches room state using a persistent revision system, significantly reducing the need to query homeservers. An optional room state backing store also cuts startup time dramatically.
Resilient and Recoverable: The new Safe Mode feature can diagnose and recover from configuration problems by using the bot's familiar prompts and commands UI.
Revamped Protections: The protections system has been overhauled, offering better hooks into room state, community membership, and policy changes. Protection settings and configurations are now also easier to manage.
In addition to hundreds of other fixes and smaller changes that add up to make a big difference. For full details, see the release notes. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Draupnir in any way to making this release possible, whether that was reporting an issue, feature request, or coming to talk in #draupnir:matrix.org.
As of today, 10589 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3152 (29.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 20436 rooms.
Jack Dorsey, who previously owned Twitter and now runs Block, will be giving a talk at FOSDEM 2025 entitled “Infusing Open Source Culture into Company DNA: A Conversation with Jack Dorsey and Manik Surtani, Block’s head of Open Source” and some people don’t like having a billionaire giving a talk at an open-source event and plan to host a protest. I recently wrote about my own FOSDEM 2025 schedule focusing on embedded systems topics, and while the event is usually non-controversial, I was startled by a tweet by FOSDEM organizers who issued a “statement on planned protests during the upcoming FOSDEM 2025”. I eventually found out that it was related to a post by Drew DeVault who did not appreciate having a billionaire talk during the open-source-focused event. The talk is planned in the Janson venue which is the biggest at the event with a capacity of up to 1,500 [...]
Linux 6.13 is bringing many exciting features for its stable debut expected this Sunday. But following that it's onward to the Linux 6.14 kernel merge window for which it will be yet another very exciting round from completing the NTSYNC driver to adding new hardware support and much more. Here is a preview of some of the changes expected to be submitted for the Linux 6.14 cycle...
The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is poised to introduce initial support for SpacemiT platforms, the Chinese computing chip company developing "next-generation RISC-V high-performance CPUs." For this next Linux kernel release the SpaceMiT Key Stone K1 octa-core RISC-V AI CPU with SpacemiT X60 cores will see support...
Improve the quick disk wiping feature. Increase the amount of data wiped at the head and tail of the device from 4 to 10 MiB to ensure that all metadata/signatures are removed.
Issue #1890: Improve parsing of the SMART attribute flags field. This will fix the display of the temperature for some devices.
The M5Stack LLM630 Compute Kit is a development platform targeting edge computing and intelligent applications. It features Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, camera support, and expansion interfaces, designed to handle tasks such as computer vision, large language model processing, and other embedded applications. According to the product brief, the AX630C is described as an SoC with […]
Cloud-native infrastructure is still evolving, and one thing that's clear is the need for scalability and efficiency in managing your Red Hat OpenShift clusters. Hosted control planes (HCP) is a paradigm-shifting approach in OpenShift designed to optimize the way control planes are deployed and operated. For cluster service providers operating Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift, the HCP model aligns perfectly with the demands of modern infrastructure. By separating concerns of management and workloads, providers can achieve better resource utilization with high density control, help ensur
Unless you have been gifted with a photographic memory, this is likely going to sound very familiar. Picture it: You’re away from your desk and you need to access one of your apps from your phone. You attempt to sign in and get the dreaded message: “the username and password entered do not match our records.” Thus begins the time-consuming process of requesting a password reset, including coming up with a new password that doesn’t match something you’ve already used in the past. Despite the frustration you feel, passwords have been the cornerstone of keeping our online data secure fo
Linux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out. As a workaround, Fedora 42 is looking to use the generic "SimpleDRM" driver during this initial boot splash screen experience to initially avoid the bulky DRM drivers...
Due to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he's preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening...
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems...
Please update to a new version to keep your data safe!
If you are using Nextcloud Hub 8 or 9, we strongly recommend you to update to version 29.0.11 or 30.0.5 respectively. Maintenance updates include important bug fixes, stability and security upgrades. It is a quick and safe process, as always!
About the updates
The updates include a number of important bug fixes and performance optimization, as well as other improvements in all supported Nextcloud Hub versions. You can find the full changelog on our website.
Nextcloud Hub 9 lets you stay connected like never before: federated calls, auto-magic with Nextcloud Flow, collaboration through a new medium with Nextloud Whiteboard, a big design redo and much more!
What’s new in Nextcloud Hub 9:
Federation: Edit documents and have video calls with users from other Nextcloud servers!
Nextcloud’s minor releases primarily focus on addressing security vulnerabilities and functionality bugs, avoiding major system overhauls that could jeopardize user data. Keeping your server up to date is vital, and our approach to testing and validation ensures that upgrading to minor releases is generally smooth and reliable.
For mission-critical Nextcloud systems in enterprise settings, consider switching to Nextcloud Enterprise. The tier provides you with ultimate deployment confidence: direct access to the Nextcloud engineering team, full assistance throughout deployment and integration, and peace of mind for system administrators. If you’re responsible for maintaining Nextcloud in your setting, this option may be the ideal solution for you.
At the start of the new year I talked about patches improving AMD Radeon video encode/decode for older GPUs. That work to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's UVD and VCE support has now been merged ahead of the Mesa 25.0 code branching coming up in just over one week...
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