So yesterday I saw a @postmarketOS toot about their web flasher for Android devices, and I thought - how hard would it be to make one for L5? Turns out - not hard at all. Here it is booting Jumpdrive.

Some caveats:
- requires permission setting on Linux ๐Ÿ˜” I may work out-of-box on other platforms though
- it's sloooow, but there's hope: github.com/WebAssembly/design/
- asks 5 times to allow access to the device. Could go down to 3, but no less than that.

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That's all I can think of on the spot. Of course there's still the camera and GPU stuff, but these would need their own dedicated threads ๐Ÿ˜‚ Feel free to hit me up if you want to hack on some of these things, I could likely offer some help and guidance.

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The Librem 5 (and mobile GNU/Linux in general) has matured a lot over the years, but there are still some areas where the software stack is behind the hardware capabilities. Some of them are often talked about, such as camera quality or GPU (GLES3/Vulkan/OpenCL), but there are also lesser known ones in need of some plumbing and middleware infrastructure. Maybe you'll find something interesting to hack on there?

1/N ๐Ÿงต

For those interested, Iโ€™ve pushed the firmware that implements the necessary alt-mode dance to get UART out of the 's USB-C port to โ€™s repository.

It wasnโ€™t pushed before because it was very crude and I wanted to clean it up before pushing. It still is, but I decided to actually get it out regardless rather than risk having it sit and wait for even more months ๐Ÿ˜›

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How to speed up your phone for free - tested guide, it works!

1. Enable KASAN and other kinds of instrumentation while debugging your phone's kernel.
2. Notice how it makes things slower, but not slow enough to be unusable.
3. Keep using the phone this way.
4. Get used to it and forget that these things are enabled.
5. Many months later, get back to stock kernel config while doing something unrelated and enjoy your newly unlocked extra performance! ๐Ÿ˜

Purism has released the Librem 5's mechanical design, adding to already available schematics and PCB layouts.

source.puri.sm/Librem5/3D_desi

I think that may make it the first proper Open Hardware smartphone out there.

Seems like nobody was reaching for this low-hanging fruit, so I did it myself:

"Glowup" is a quickly hacked up thing that lets you glow your Librem 5 photos up with one click right on the phone, using and about 30 seconds of processing.

gitlab.com/dos1/glowup

(late)#caturday ๐Ÿ˜œ

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Took me 3 days of soldering, but it works!

I can connect it to a Librem 5 and it automatically does all the needed PD stuff to expose its UART over USB-C ๐Ÿ˜ It's also capable of a lot of other PD magic as a USB PD analyzer / injector / filter.

However, while these solder joints made a good job lasting till I got the firmware PoC working, it doesn't seem like they're going to last much longer... More soldering ahead ๐Ÿ˜ซ

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No manual editing this time, but an automatic postprocessing script using darktable-cli and rudimentary lens corrections. Takes ~30 sec to develop on the phone - about ten times longer than the default script used by Millipixels, but with much better results.

It seems to have happened without much fanfare, but about a month ago @purism has released the Librem 5 hardware layouts under GPLv3 (as original PADS and converted KiCad projects), joining the schematics that were already available from the start.

source.puri.sm/Librem5/l5-sche

So turns out I'm going to be speaking at in February as part of the "FOSS on Mobile Devices" track. We'll go step-by-step through debugging a spontaneous modem reset issue that used to trouble the phone, which - spoiler alert - turned out to be a (not very well-)known bug in the 2.0 spec. Check this and other talks out at fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track

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