PEPPOL, IPv6, Thunderbird, JPEG XL, Python, WebAuthn

1. No wonder Maventa is so popular banking / invoicing integration partner. Because they provide excellent standardized API. When most of banks make everything they can, to make things hard or impossible for customers. I just asked my bank where's the OAuth2 token management, and API documentation for their back-end. And I'm already laughing when someone tries to answer that. As you might guess their help / support pages didn't exactly cover these topics. Yet it's amazing, how it's so hard for banks, when countless other companies and even open source projects get that done trivially?

2. It's a joy to say, that we're confident that the integration is possible, as long as you make it sure that the counter party is also willing to get the integration done. We've got the capability to fulfill the requirements. Of course integration scope affects the timeline and costs.

3. Checked out many Finvoice (Electronic Invoicing, (@ Wikipedia)) (e-invoice, TEAPSXML 3.0, PEPPOL) service providers. Yet PEPPOL isn't widely used in Finland. I personally would like to use modern EU standards, instead of older national standards.

4. Helped a few friends with IPv6 issues, it seems that they did hit the same MLD ICMP blocking issue, I did earlier. I guess it was due to "bad" default UFW ruleset, which tends to drop those packets and you've gotta modify the rule-set files manually to fix that.

5. Just noticed that when I post highly compressed images to Matrix rooms, the Element creates PNG thumbnail. That's ridiculous. Image WebP weighting ~43kB and the Thumbnail PNG weighting ~352kB. Awesome work and great engineering.

6. Latest version of SimpleX Chat adds nice identity manager feature, allowing users to have multiple identities inside the one application, including hidden profiles. This is the feature, I've missed from most of messengers. Yet personally I prefer separate devices / network connections for different identities, making connecting identities much harder. I'm not going to elaborate, but in some cases it takes quite many levels and complex setups, making user to be appearing in totally different location, as well as delaying communication / replies making it plausible that you're from different timezone and so on. Some people get annoyed if reply is delayed by a few days. Well, that's because I don't want you to know exactly when the reply was written and or if someone / something rewrote it with similar context but different phrasing and so on. They also added group calls and option to use separate network connections for each identity, etc.

7. Recurring events on Mozilla Thunderbird (@ Wikipedia) calendar do not work correctly. It gets obvious things wrong, like even repeating every 4 weeks or 28 days. How it's possible? Someone has had to write real quality code again. Sigh! If I remember correctly, I've been cursing this same issue earlier. So 1.1.2023 + 28 days is 5.2.2023? Right.... Well, NOPE! Whats even funnier, the next occurrence after that is 26.2.2023? So it's first 5 weeks and then 3 weeks. (102.4.2) Yet if I remember correctly this is and old issue. I've had my fights with this feature earlier. - Talking about enragingly stupid bugs?

8. JPEG XL (@ Wikipedia) can it break through? On some aspects, it's clearly better than existing formats, but is it good enough to add support for yet another image format? I guess it is. A new image format adoption has been always horribly slow. WebP is now usable, AVIF is just supported by the main browsers. Edge 121 brought AVIF support. That's why many still fallback with very old legacy formats like PNG / JPG all the time.

9. Improved some random older Python 3 based libraries by adding __format__ (@ docs.python.org) with custom format spec, making it easier for users to get the outputs from the library in exactly desired format(s).

10. Can't mobile phones be used as drone flight management system? GNSS, location, camera, attitude sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, computing power, etc. All you need to add is a few small cheap servos and an engine. I wonder if there's ready "drone control app" for that. I actually would wonder more, if there wouldn't be one.

11. Firefox 109.0.1 on Linux and FIDO2 WebAuthn (@ Wikipedia) is still broken. Awesomeness, it worked well until they decided to destroy it. Wondering when it'll be working again.

2024-01-28