I just saw an article saying Gabe Newell of Valve is obsessed with scuba diving. Must be something in the water.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Scuba diving is awesome (fucking expensive though), I think everybody should give it a try.
While googling around to gather clues for reverse-engineering the protocol for a Garmin smart watch, I stumbled upon an e-mail on a listserv, discussing pieces of Garmin BT communication. Only after a while I noticed it had been written by Linus, who apparently worked on diving software.
You're telling me I can self host a garmin server?
If you are asking whether you can use Garmin Connect without Garmin, I don't think so. But you can use a different non-Garmin app with your watch, see https://gadgetbridge.org/ Obviously, it does not have the full functionality of Garmin, and even more obviously, you would lose the Garmin social functions without Garmin Connect (but there are open-source projects for that as well). (Also, with Garmin, maybe you will lose some of the functions anyway to the Garmin Connect+ subscription, right? :-) )
Seems like this is the real git repository for subsurface.
Yes you're right. Idk how but I found Linus's forked repo first and saw on a couple websites that he did start the development for it.
A bit of history:
In fall of 2011, when a forced lull in kernel development gave him a chance to start a new project, Linux creator Linus Torvalds decided to tackle his frustration with the lack of decent divelog software on Linux.
Linus worked with a team of developers, and Subsurface is the result. It now supports Linux, Windows and MacOS and allows data import from many dive computers and several existing divelog programs. It provides a quick and easy way to see the key information provided by a modern dive computer and lets users track a wide variety of data about their dives. In fall of 2012 Dirk Hohndel took over as Subsurface maintainer.
License: GPLv2
https://subsurface-divelog.org/
https://www.deeperblue.com/scuba-meets-information-technology-with-linus-torvalds/
It's just a fork he did for Dirk.
Do not use - the real upstream is Subsurface-divelog/subsurface