Josh Holme 📎

404media.coMeta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor PixelfedPixelfed said it is "seeing unprecedented levels of traffic."

Going to start a #BuildInPublic dev thread for my Sly Cooper #PebbleOS watchface. I started it as part of the 2nd @rebble.io Hackathon, and I’ll share some updates of what’s been going on so far as part of this thread so that I can look back at it if I want, and people can follow along if they want

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Daniel Supernault

@dansup.com

25 May

"I'm a corporate-America hit survivor" www.404media.co/meta-is-bloc... #ICEMAN #Pixelfed

For both the new gauge functionality as well as the weather, I'm going to need a settings screen for the watchface, so that might be my next obstacle while I ask around about popular weather sourcing for Pebble watchfaces

rebble.ioRebble · Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our WorkThis is a post that we don’t take any joy in writing. When we wrote last month about our agreement with Core Devices, we went into it believing that coopera...

4 Apr

Been a while since I worked on this. Went to port it to @repebble.com's new app store, and I guess it's time to update this for the two new watches

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

David Imel

@davidimel.com

24 Jan

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Rebble

@rebble.io

18 Nov 2025

Our negotiations with Core Devices have broken down, and we need your help, as the community, to decide what to do next: rebble.io/2025/11/17/c... (Aside: Ugh. This is probably the least pleasant thing we have ever had to write. We're incredibly sad it went this way, and sorry to have to post it.)

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Meredith Whittaker

@meredithmeredith.bsky.social

6 Oct 2025

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU. Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

Signal@signal.org

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.orgsignal.org

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Rebecca Williams

@rebeccawilliams.info

6 Aug 2025

the roll out age verification in the UK has clearly been devastating (clear examples of censorship & discrimination, & they’re scanning young people’s faces) but if platforms are also now blocking VPN workarounds that’s the end of the ability to “freely travel” online

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Evan Greer

@evangreer.bsky.social

16 June 2025

The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered. Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they've sided with the tech lobby over and over again. Their inaction is deadly.

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Meredith Whittaker

@meredithmeredith.bsky.social

16 June 2025

Use Signal. We promise, no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. <3

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Hey btw. Use signal

Starting #WWDC with an Apple TV+ ad. Fitting...

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Quinn Nelson

@snazzylabs.com

13 May 2025

The internet is an essential public utility and should be treated as such. Fiber networks should be (a) municipally owned, (b) funded by bonds and repaid by subscriber fees/dues, (c) leased to many different ISPs to ensure the lowest prices possible. It works. That is all.

So, I want to give people an option to set the top gauge (blue background) to either battery life or static blue. Then, the bottom gauge (stamina meter/orange) will give the option of battery life, or steps throughout the day.

I could possibly do a configurable goal and count down from it with the steps you take. Your stamina will actually decrease throughout the day as you get closer to your step goal, and run out if you hit it

It doesn't look as bad as I was afraid of, and daily driving it on the watch for a few days in person it's perfectly readable, so I think I'm going to leave it like that for now unless people start complaining that it's hard to read

I already talked about how I want to add the weather to the watch, but I'd also like to expand the use of the stamina meter. It always kinda bugged me that that was the battery life when the real health bar wasn't changing at all, then I remembered I can get the step count from Pebble Health

This required me to redesign the Sly face slightly to give it a black outline rather than the white outline. As a side effect, this also updated the color watch, but I think for the better. It seems sharper now and gives it a little more contrast, I'm definitely happy with it.

The B&W stamina meter is a little odd. I only had two colors to work with but needed 3 different ones for that area (date text, stamina meter fill, stamina meter background) I had to use the built in dither with white text.

I have some future plans for the project that will be easier to take care of if everything is cleaned up first, so that's what I did while it was all still fresh in my mind after the hackathon

Secondly, with the announcement of the new B&W watch, I decided it was time I focus on getting the black and white version of the watchface to a state that I liked. I wasn't really happy with the black background, so I wanted to give it a white background and have the details be black instead.

Took a bit of time off from the project (partly to get my dev thread here up to date) but I'm back with some updates

First off, I was mainly focused on cleaning up and organizing the code to reduce the LOC down to something a little more manageable, and get everything commented.

Josh Holme 📎 reposted

Ernie Smith

@ernie.tedium.co

7 Apr 2025

The tariffs have just led an innovative U.S. company to scale back sales of its own goods in its home market. Who does this help? What sort of “medicine” is this?

Framework@frame.work

Due to the new tariffs that came into effect on April 5th, we’re temporarily pausing US sales of a few of our base Framework Laptop 13 systems (Ultra 5 125H and Ryzen 5 7640U). For now, these models will be removed from our US site. We will continue to provide updates as we have them.

That should be everything I posted as progress updates in the project thread of the discord transferred over here. As I continue working on the project I'm going to try to crosspost to both the discord as well as this bluesky thread.

I still want the weather on my wrist, and with one of the new watches from @ericmigi.com and @repebble.com being black and white, I really should clean up the black and white version of this watchface

Huge thanks to the @rebble.io community for putting on the hackathon and being so helpful in the discord. It was a blast learning to make things for these cool watches and be a part of trying to breathe life back into the ecosystem. Definitely couldn't have done it without all the helpful people

One last tweak I made after the hackathon was to update the date font to be the dialog font from the game (Blambot Casual) instead of the title font. This made it a little more legible at smaller sizes and makes the whole thing look a lot nicer I think

With a little polish and some last minute bug fixing, that was a wrap for the hackathon. I fixed the date layout issue and also made sure the B&W version looked good as well. I also updated the blue to be a lighter color to more closely match the original health meter from the game

I wasn't able to get to adding the weather to the watchface during the hackathon, but I think i still managed to make something pretty cool in the time that I had. It came out almost exactly like the mock up I made at the start which was super satisfying to be able to accomplish.

Of the two remaining points, the pebble tutorial had a section on adding weather to the watchface, so it would probably be easier. However, time was limited before the end of the hackathon, and the battery gauge was more integral to the design, so I decided to try to focus on the battery gauge next

Again, with A TON of help from awesome people in the @rebble.io discord channel (this project wouldn't have happened without them) I was able to get the battery gauge working exactly like I wanted it to. I found a bug in the dates where the text would get cut off due to truncation, so that was next

Since I was wearing this personally, the next thing I was missing from the watch that I really liked was the date. The pebble tutorial had a section on displaying the date, so I followed that and got dates working, and positioned in the spots I wanted

Looking back at the main goals I had at the start of the project I was in pretty good shape at this point: ✅ Time ✅ Date ⬜ Weather ✅ Vector Sly Face ⬜ Stamina/Battery Gauge ✅ Themed Background

With a working PDC and some more help from the discord, I was able to get vectors to render on the watches. This was a huge hurdle, and was very rewarding to figure out. Still a long ways to go, but a lot of the technical unknowns were being checked off, leaving just the design and layout work.

github.comGitHub - HBehrens/pdc_tool: Tool to convert SVGs to Pebble Draw Command (PDC) files and to render them as PNG exactly like a Pebble would.Tool to convert SVGs to Pebble Draw Command (PDC) files and to render them as PNG exactly like a Pebble would. - HBehrens/pdc_tool

I really wanted to get the new version to a place where I could wear it daily, even in it's super unfinished state, so the next thing was getting the time, as well as the face in the correct position on both square and round watches. Since I had done some work with this already, this was pretty easy

Pebble doesn't work directly with SVGs. Instead they have their own format called Pebble Draw Command (PDC). Thankfully, people have made tools online to preview the render and convert from SVG. I used github.com/HBehrens/pdc... through the inkscape plugin github.com/hellcp/inksc...

I ran into some issues initially. I first made the vector in Affinity Designer on my iPad, but the PDC tool was having a lot of issues because of the way I made it. I switched to Inkscape and remade it with a lot more success. Shout out to LCP in the @rebble.io discord for the help (lcp.world)

Now that I was a little more comfortable with the programming, I started on the actual design work. This is when I made the mock ups shown in the first post in this thread, and also when I got the idea to use the stamina/gadget meter as the battery life indicator.

I was super happy with how these turned out and got some good feedback from people in the @rebble.io discord. I wasn't quite sure how I would handle B&W watches yet, but knew I'd get there. My focus was trying to get the vector image working in the Pebble app, and cross one more thing off the list

Now that I was getting better at laying out things in code for the watchfaces I wanted to add some color. I got the background color set for colored watches, and black and white watches were still displaying well, so everything seemed to be working

As is, the images of Sly's face are static PNGs I found online. This isn't great because 1. it's someone else's work, and 2. even if they were original, as static PNGs, they can't be resized. I would need a separate PNG for each resolution, and they can't be resized or re aligned in code.

I'd never made a watchface or anything else for a Pebble before, so I was trying to follow their watchface tutorial at developer.rebble.io/developer.pe.... First was getting the font imported and a png I found online of Sly. The font wasn't so bad, but the picture alignment was giving me some issues