Unfinished Projects
See several of the V0LT projects that were never finished.
Feather
Feather is a minimalist mood tracker for Linux that integrates with HealthBox to store a history of your mood. It's designed to be as simple and intuitive as possible.
Feather was cancelled due to a bug in the development platform it was written in that prevented compiled versions of the software from accessing network resources. This effectively broke Feather's core functionality, since it could no longer communicate with HealthBox.
Sentry
Sentry is a command line utility that uses a typical consumer wireless network adapter to detect drones and other wireless threats. Using a MAC address lookup table, Sentry is able to detect the kind and brand of a given wireless threat in order to better identify.
Sentry was cancelled because its functionality was recreated in Assassin with much better performance and reliability. Instead of back-porting the upgrades from Assassin back to Sentry, Sentry was cancelled and its functionality was moved into Assassin.
Operator
Operator was a simple utility designed to quickly determine if a set of given conditions were compatible with the usage recommendations for dozens of Apple devices. Users could select a device, and the year is was manufactured, then enter a temperature, humidity, and altitude. Operator would return information about whether it was safe to use or store the device in the specified conditions.
Operator was cancelled due to messy and convoluted programming that lead to poor performance and reliability. Bringing the program up to modern V0LT standards would involve completely re-writing it from scratch, and I didn't feel it was worth it for the functionality provided.
Optic
V0LT Optic is a new kind of advertising network. Instead of using distracting ads, targeted tracking, and other tactics that annoy users, Optic uses plain text ads that are shown to all users regardless of their browsing habits. In other words, Optic serves ethical ads to users of websites, and allows ethical websites to earn revenue off their content.
V0LT Optic was cancelled for a few reasons. The first, and primary reason is the issue of payments. There isn't a conveinent way for advertisers to pay websites without using non-free software like Paypal or Google Pay. While cryptocurrency is a great alternative option, the infrustucture to accept and process payments in the form of cryptocurrency is complicated and hard to implement.
The second reason Optic was cancelled was due to the problem of ad fraud. Since Optic ads contain no trackers, there isn't anything stopping a website from simply reloading their own page serveral times in order to boost their earnings.
The final reason was simply the lack of interest. An advertising network has no reason to exist of no one uses it, so it wasn't worth finishing it's development.
Spark
Spark is a simple way for ethical content creators to distribute what they make. Designed to be an alternative to Itch.io built with only free software, Spark allows content creators to upload their music, podcasts, drawings, photos, articles, models, software, websites, and books. This allows them to distribute them to anyone using V0LT's server infrastructure. They could also accept donations to continue developing their projects.
Spark was cancelled because of the security issues and lack of interest. Allowing anyone to upload anything to the V0LT server obviously has quite a few security implications. It's difficult to prevent someone from uploading a malicious file, and it wasn't worth the risk. Spark would also only be successful if it had a community surrounding it. Since there was very little interest in the project, it wouldn't have offered much support to the creators who used it.
Dimension 0
Dimension 0 was intended to be a procedurally generated command-line game. In the game, your goal was to explore text-based, prodcedurally generated worlds/dimensions. In each dimension, there would be a random amount of seeds that could be entered to generate more dimensions. By exploring these dimensions, you could eventually come across Dimension 0, the basis of all the other dimensions. At this point, you would be able to access hundreds of other dimensions more easily, and be free to explore even more. Despite the game's randomly generated nature, Dimension 0 would be consistent across all play-throughs.
Dimension 0 was cancelled because of the logistics of carrying it out. Developing an algorithm that could consistently generate truly random dimensions that were also interesting was extremely difficult. If interest in the project increases, development will likely continue, but as of now, the time required to develop an algorithm like this is better spent elsewhere.
Copilot
Copilot was a free and open source clipboard manager from MacOS. Intended to be an alternative to expensive proprietary clipboard managers like Paste 2 and Uncluttered. It kept a log of the last 5 copied pieces of text, and even offered a setting to read off whatever was saved to the clipboard using text to speech.
When copying long strings of text or non-text media, Copilot became extremely unstable, even with checks in place to avoid trying to save this information. This introduced potential security issues, and could even cause the operating system to crash entirely. As a result, it was pulled from V0LT.