termux-packages VS SponsorBlock

This fully reflects my own Android experience (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus) -- writing Android apps is by no means a write-and-forget experience. As time goes by more of my apps are dropped from the platform from my unwillingness to drop everything and rewrite code for each new Android version.

My original intent was to put my free, open-source apps on the platform, much as I had done before Android existed. But no -- Android doesn't work that way.

My best-known Android app is SSHelper (https://arachnoid.com/android/SSHelper/), a Secure Shell server meant for file transfers. Still work perfectly, dropped some time ago.

TankCalc (https://arachnoid.com/android/TankCalcAndroid/), same story. It's a well-known multi-platform app tank farm managers use to profile storage tanks. Still works, dropped from the platform.

And not just mine. Many other free, first-rate Android apps -- Termux (https://termux.dev/) comes to mind -- have been driven off the platform by Google's onerous demands and commercial focus.

It's as though a wall is going up between people who like programming and people who like money.

If you don’t have Termux installed, download it from the official source. Once installed, open Termux and update it with the following command:

No, but yes.

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/blob/master/packag...

I just installed the package called `racket` from Termux's upstream, and it seems that they're using racket-minimal for that. But of a gotcha, but at least it doesn't seem like there's a bug.

containers/podman > [Feature]: Android support:

> There are docker and containerd in termux-packages. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/root-p...

But Android 13+ supports rootless pKVM VMs, which podman-machine should be able to run containers in; but only APK-installed binaries are blessed with the necessary extended filesystem attributes to exec on Android 4.4+ with SELinux in enforcing mode.

- Android pKVM: https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... :

> qemu + pKVM + podman-machine: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17717 :

> The protected kernel-based virtual machine (pKVM) is built upon the Linux KVM hypervisor, which has been extended with the ability to restrict access to the payloads running in guest virtual machines marked ‘protected’ at the time of creation.

> KVM/arm64 supports different execution modes depending on the availability of certain CPU features, namely, the Virtualization Host Extensions (VHE) (ARMv8.1 and later).

- "Android 13 virtualization lets [Pixel >= 6] run Windows 11, Linux distributions" (2022)

Not from PlayStore, but apparently everyone has English reading comprehension problems and wants to write a comment anyway.

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

I wonder if this is the solution something like SponsorBlock is looking for[1][2]. They have a similar-ish problem. How to replicate crowdsourced data that trickles in slowly, but ideally you want replicated quickly.

WAL replication, rsync, bittorrent, etc all things that don't quite work as needed.

[1] https://github.com/mchangrh/sb-mirror/blob/main/docs/breakdo...

[2] https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/1570

You should check SponsorBlock out: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock.

Another tip for youtube is to use https://sponsor.ajay.app/ -- helps skip the ads that are increasingly embedded in the video itself.

Make chapter entries for, or remove various segments (sponsor, introductions, etc.) from downloaded YouTube videos using the SponsorBlock API (https://sponsor.ajay.app)

I use https://sponsor.ajay.app/ to skip over them

SponsorBlock[1] does a pretty good job of skipping inline adverts and similar stuff on YouTube. It is, however, crowdsourced rather than using machine learning (so far as I am aware).

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

That's just a 6 month old reddit post by a random dude. If they're blocking firefox, they're doing it very badly, because I just spent all morning watching football highlight videos running firefox on linux, adblocked, sponsorblocked (https://sponsor.ajay.app/), forging my referer, blocking cookies, with userscripts to unlock private and age-restricted videos, without being logged in.

With my setup, youtube can be broken for months on end. It's running like silk right now.