someone made a TOTP app for PalmOS 2 and up in 2024. heroic

https://palmdb.net/app/totp-authenticator

#palm #palmOS

@deadbeefdotmonster @vyr Very cool! I used to have an m100 and was learning C on the Macintosh at the time, so didn't really delve into PalmOS very deep.

In the early aughts, I was trying to decide between a #Palm Tungsten/Sony Clié/Palm Treo on in one hand or older #AppleNewton #MessagePad 2100 in the other. "I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference," to quote Robert Frost.

(I think I prefer an underdog. Or, maybe I'm just a masochist?)

@vyr

Neato!

I thinking I need to compile a list of technological "sweet spots" past to present, and Palm Pilot is certainly one.

#permacomputing

@tomjennings that's why i've been messing with them a bit lately. they were really interesting companion devices to full-power frequently-connected desktops, with absurd battery life, and i'm curious how much i could get done on one as a primary device. (with the obvious caveat that this wouldn't include my actual job — no developer in 2025 could function with LispMe and a 160×160 screen.)

last time i had a Palm as an actual daily driver in the early 2000s, i found it challenging to use for note-taking without a hardware thumb or unfoldable keyboard, let alone actual writing. stylus input was cute but it starts getting painful past a few paragraphs of text. but bolt a keyboard on, how close can it get to an iPhone's touch keyboard?

@tomjennings @vyr Incidentally, I have a solution I've been meaning to explore for some time, which would be to play tones, PSK, or "modem sounds" through the speakers of one phone and decode them through the microphone of another phone. Interestingly, this could be done even in a web browser tab via WebAudio. The fact that this would be annoying, impractical and antisocial, *yet still maybe the most effective way to do this specific thing*, delights me

@tomjennings @vyr Most smartphones support bluetooth file transfers

@mcc @tomjennings @vyr so I seem to recall someone made a PoC that uses ultrasonic (or really just "near ultrasonic") sounds over WebAudio to transfer data

@Lunaphied @tomjennings @vyr this seems problematic as it raises the question of whether the user is aware the data is being exfiltrated

@tomjennings @mcc i really miss OBEX. Apple doesn't even give you enough Bluetooth access on iOS to implement it yourself.

@vyr @tomjennings there are a lot of things I want but which Apple has decided I cannot have. Oddly for many of these things they are able to make this decision despite me not using Apple hardware

@noisytoot yes but not with other platforms and sometimes not with other hardware vendors on the same platform. Apple AirDrop and Google/Samsung Quick Share don't talk to each other.

@vyr I don't know about iOS, but I thought support for OBEX file transfers was part of AOSP and so would be supported on any Android phone. Are some OEMs removing it for some reason?

@noisytoot iOS has never supported OBEX (although macOS still does). EU plz regulate it back in

@tomjennings @vyr It does exist - I've used it. There is a "Bluetooth" option to share a file in Android and has been for quite a while (I can confirm that it's present in LineageOS 22.1 and Android 12 on a Google Pixel 3, but I remember using it years ago on older versions of Android from other OEMs too). It uses OBEX and is compatible with bluez-obex's implementation on GNU/Linux (which KDE supports with bluedevil-sendfile, even without KDE Connect).

@tomjennings @vyr It's an option in the file sharing menu, but for some reason it only appears for certain file extensions (you can share arbitrary file types if you rename them to a supported extension).

@tomjennings @noisytoot @vyr

ive used it in emergencies, the real problem is that it's obscenely slow and not good for sharing even an mp3. both of the tech cos(apple / airdrop, google / nearby share) have systems that use bluetooth to negotiate a file-transfer over a p2p wifi connection (wifi "direct" i think? and im not 100% google doesn't use an intermediary file server instead). there's no good reason for an open protocol to not exist and be widely used here, it's just banging the 2 main consumer wireless protocols together