Alfred is working on what he calls a Stereoptikon, which is a container for running graphical Linux apps on Mac OS. There is a Telegram group of the same name where people can join the discussion about it.

Dalton gave a plug to his new podcast, entitled LinuxAfterDark.

A big shoutout of gratitude to everyone who voted in the B1 Systems give-away. UBports secured third place and accordingly was awarded €1400. Our congratulations to all the other winners.

Mateo sent in a new roundup of apps. He includes either those which are new to the OpenStore or those which just got a substantial upgrade. To start, there is LiteP word processor, an HTML5 app by Nicolas Colla. It is touch operated and has some Rich Text features. Next, an app also by Nicolas Colla… this one is OnionSurf, which is a partial implementation of a Tor browser. It is still being worked on so don’t use it if you are being chased by the CIA :) He would love to have some developers help him to close IP and DNS leaks etc. more effectively. It is a fork of Morph browser.

Another new app is Transmission remote. It allows you to check on the status of your torrents from anywhere in the world. It is a client/server hybrid, not just a client.

TotalSonic reported on the introduction of GemFork by Aaron Heffner. It updates the Gem browser, which is a Gemini gopher browser. Multimaps is an app which uses satellite data to display data simultaneously from a variety of different map applications.

Florian talked about the coming OTA-20 release. There is a critical bug in syncevolution which prevents it connecting to LetsEncrypt encrypted servers. The older version of the LetsEncrypt certificate expired on the 30 September and this was one of the casualties. A bug in OpenSSL meant that the certificate fail was interpreted as a failure of the whole chain. There were plans for some new features but those have been dropped so that all attention is directed to this bug.

Most of the stuff will be under the hood but one very visible thing will be the ability to create and set a custom SMS receipt sound. It will also be available to any other app (such as Teleports) which delivers notifications. Thanks to LionelDbf for that. Vibrations and LED flashing is not 100% fixed but devices that are Android 9 and above should see this most of the time.

Florian has not only moved to a new address but his second son has been born, so if he has been a little less visible recently, that is why! Congratulations to Florian!

A reminder as ever that testing is a crucial part of preparation for a new release and there is nobody out there who is not capable of helping out with that [except of course those that don’t have a UT phone!]