Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Giving a 10-Year-Old GPS a New Life with Open Source

2025-07-26

A thrift store find – a 2015 Navman Bike 1000 GPS – sparked a reverse engineering adventure. Its map updates had ceased, a prime example of planned obsolescence. However, the author discovered it ran Windows CE 6.0. Using Total Commander and the open-source navigation software NaVeGIS with OpenStreetMap data, they resurrected the device with current maps and even managed to run DOOM! This story highlights the power of open source and reverse engineering, breathing new life into outdated technology and prompting reflection on planned obsolescence and e-waste.

Kubernetes-Native High-Availability MQTT Broker Setup

2025-05-18

This post details a fully declarative, Kubernetes-native setup for a highly available MQTT broker using Eclipse Mosquitto and Traefik. It leverages core Kubernetes primitives (Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, and RBAC) to create a primary and secondary broker, ensuring near-zero downtime failover. A custom controller monitors the primary and switches traffic to the secondary within 5 seconds of failure, maintaining message continuity. Internal MQTT bridging ensures seamless message propagation between brokers, even during failover.

OpenVMS Gets a Package Manager After 47 Years: VSP Beta Released

2025-03-17

After 47 years and support for 4 different CPU architectures, OpenVMS finally has a package manager – VSP! Currently in beta, it has some limitations: incomplete dependency resolution, no update management, and a lack of private repository support. However, it significantly streamlines software installation, saving considerable time. VSP allows searching, downloading, and installing software with simple commands, eliminating the manual download, extraction, and installation process. Future improvements will focus on automated dependency handling, update/upgrade capabilities, and private repository support, bringing it closer to modern package managers like APT, YUM, and DNF.