glitchsoc - Link to source

A poll, about microwaves!

Assuming you have a microwave oven, does it have a digital display and buttons, or a number of dials only? Just got a new microwave, with dials as I hate the digital beeps, and a friend was surprised that it had dials and not a screen. Over here I think mine is quite normal and common and it's the type I always get! The "microwave is done" sound also comes from a physical bell, which is nice.

Share for science, should you care to.

  • Buttons plus display (14%, 1 vote)
  • Buttons, no display (14%, 1 vote)
  • Dials plus display (28%, 2 votes)
  • Dials, no display (42%, 3 votes)
  • ✨ No microwave participation club ✨ (0%, 0 votes)
7 voters. Poll end: in 18 hours

in reply to Sini Tuulia

mastodon - Link to source

Mikołaj Hołysz

As a blind person, I find that most household appliances fall on a bimodal distribution when it comes to accessibility. You have the cheap stuff with dials and buttons which is perfectly accessible, you have the super expensive stuff with apps and smart speaker integrations (though EU law certainly doesn't do us any good here). THe middle, with touch screens and no internet connectivity, is the most challenging of them all.
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

glitchsoc - Link to source

Sini Tuulia

@miki Oh yeah, that makes sense. I prefer the tactile and simple mechanical things in everything but my phone and computer, and even then I prefer a clacky mechanical keyboard and physical mouse versus touch screen. Even my sewing machine is as old as I am, with nothing but dials!

I figure the speech controlled ones are super nice when they work flawlessly, and exceptionally a hassle to troubleshoot when they don't.

@Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Sini Tuulia

mastodon - Link to source

Mikołaj Hołysz

There are some weird restrictions about that in EU law. I don't understand which devices this applies to specifically, but there's some restrictions on being able to remotely start devices which contain a heating element. Many devices that have an app only let you use it to adjust settings, but the start button has to be pushed on the (inaccessible) screen. Some gadgets don't have this restrictions, so I don't really know when it applies and when it doesn't.

mastodon - Link to source

Time for serious questions on #Reform and #Russia

(In March, the New York Times reported that “one of the biggest corporate donors to the #populist #ReformUK party has sold almost $2million worth of transmitters, cockpit equipment, antennas and other sensitive technology to a major supplier of #Moscow’s #blacklisted state weapons agency”.)

heraldscotland.com/politics/vi…


Time for serious questions on Reform and Russia

As a former prominent leader of Reform faces jail for taking bribes to make pro-Russian statements, Neil Mackay says we have to ask serious…
Neil Mackay (The Herald)
#Russia #Moscow #reform #blacklisted #reformuk #populist

mastodon - Link to source

I am collecting texts and resources on the "Haitian Revolution" for my Human Rights class and I thought I'd share a few things with you.
First of all, this Graphic Novel (online), which helps you understand what happened: "The Slave Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti" thenib.com/haitian-revolution/

And this short article which also gives an overview - both written by historian Laurent Dubois, who is an expert on the field: aeon.co/essays/why-haiti-shoul…

#HumanRights #Haiti #HaitianRevolution #Slavery


Why Haiti should be at the centre of the Age of Revolution | Aeon Essays

Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the Age of Revolution
Laurent Dubois (Aeon Magazine)
#HumanRights #haiti #haitianrevolution #slavery
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

glitchsoc - Link to source

Nina Kalinina

I've been thinking about your post a lot, especially after seeing such tools at my $dayjob. I'm biased due to their ethical impact, but even without it I consider them, on average, harmful. I write code, I make sure it works for my usage, I write tests, I do linters and static analysis, I do a peer review to share the knowledge and get external inputs. And then this thing, supposedly state of the art, goes over my code, mansplains it to me and finds either a false-positive (I wonder who removed false-positives from the lists you've got?), or a nit ("don't forget to add an extra check here!", "The comment is stale!"), or a misguided optimisation possibly introducing new bugs. I spend lots of time thinking over those useless blanket reports that ultimately don't matter because I have empirical evidence that my code works for my use case.

I have seen so called AI tooling generating "helpful reports", but they cannot replace decent tooling and tests. And yet some people replace their LSPs with LLMs :/

in reply to Nina Kalinina

mastodon - Link to source

daniel:// stenberg://

@nina_kali_nina all analyzer tools, including compilers, give a certain amount of false positives. I don't think we should expect AI tools to be any different. As long as frequency is manageable and there are decent ways to inhibit them.

The AI tools I've mentioned recently don't seem to have much more false positives than the state of the art static code analyzers we use also do.

@Nina Kalinina

mastodon - Link to source

Asking in English in hope that it'll reach more people! I'm french, windows user and unfortunately not playing locally. Do you know of some software a deafie could use to game with her pals? One that could transcript what people say in their mics? Not necessarily free, I'm willing to pay for something that works well.

Asking for a me.

Please, boost so a girl can play with her friends 🥰

#accessibility #Steam #gaming #discord #disability

#Accessibility #gaming #discord #steam #Disability
This entry was edited (3 hours ago)

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

The word 'Vrede' jumped out at me from this 'Peace' installation. 'Vrede' is Danish for anger, fury, wrath. I wondered if it was an artistic provocation. But it seemed too confined to chance, that someone who happens to understand Danish happens to see this German artwork. So I looked it up and learned that 'vrede' is Dutch for 'peace'.

Vrede. Peace in Dutch. Wrath in Danish. I wonder if there's a word for words like these, that mean the opposite in different languages.

pixelfed.social/p/Rudini/88129…

mastodon - Link to source
Krásné dobré ráno mastodonní bando! 🙋‍♀️🐈🐶
Zítra to bude rok, co odešel taťka. Mamka na dnešek naplánovala výlet na Portáš v Javorníku. Každoročně tam spolu jezdívali na borůvkové knedlíky. Pojede nás hodně. Jedna ze sester bere i tchána s tchýní. Docela nevím, co mám čekat. Prochajdu s Baldínem musím odložit. Vyrážíme ráno, protože sraz je u mamky. No, myslete na mě.
Vy si užijte krásnou neděli plnou pohody, dobrot a nicnedělání! 😊
#dobre_rano
#dobréRáno
#dobre_rano #dobrerano

mastodon - Link to source
I remember coming home from school and telling my mom Columbus "discovered" America. She told me it was a load of crap, and set me straight. Mom was a hippie who challenged the status quo. At the time, it embarrassed me, I'd get frustrated and just wanted her to be like the other parents.
I realized later how lucky I was, and do the same with my daughter.
#indigenous #fuckcolumbus #indigenouspeoplesday
Alt-text: A woman gesturing with her middle finger, along with bold and subtitle text, surrounded by a decorative geometric pattern frame. Transcribed Text: This Monday, don't forget: Fuck Christopher Columbus.
#indigenous #indigenouspeoplesday #fuckcolumbus

mastodon - Link to source

Go to log in.

<password is incorrect>

No, it isn't, I double-checked by opening my encrypted pwd file.

<password is incorrect>

<Login with backup email to be sent a verification code.>

Entered backup email, received verification code.

Enter verification code.

<must enter this info you never needed before>

What?!

Entered info, logged in.

It was never about an incorrect pwd.

I did remove the added info, though. We'll see what happens next time I need to log on. :(

Yes, I am grumpy.

This entry was edited (14 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source

On my AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC, NVDA is a bit sluggish in some cases in Firefox; e.g. cursoring through messages in Gmail folders. For reasons I don't fully understand, setting the processor affinity to a single CPU core and setting the process priority to "above normal" helps significantly, even when the CPU is nearly idle. I don't currently have the time/energy to debug the root cause for this or write a proper add-on, but I wrote an NVDA global plugin to make the change for me automatically when NVDA starts. If it breaks something, you get to keep all the pieces.
```
import ctypes

import globalPluginHandler

class GlobalPlugin(globalPluginHandler.GlobalPlugin):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
p = ctypes.c_void_p(ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetCurrentProcess())
ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetProcessAffinityMask(p, ctypes.c_void_p(1))
ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetPriorityClass(p, ctypes.wintypes.DWORD(0x00008000))
```
#nvdasr

#nvdasr
This entry was edited (13 hours ago)

reshared this

in reply to Andre Louis

mastodon - Link to source

Jamie Teh

@FreakyFwoof What's really intriguing about my situation is that clearly, it's not really anything in particular that is slow, but rather, how NVDA gets scheduled by Windows. That's not a bottleneck I ever expected to be noteworthy. One of these days, I might try to profile it and figure out what's really going on, but definitely not today and probably not any time soon.
@Andre Louis
in reply to Jamie Teh

mastodon - Link to source

Talon

oh yeah I've been doing this for quite a while now on a HX370. I have very little experience with NVDA addons so entirely possible I messed something up somewhere, but it works for me. This let's you set CPU affinity and priority in NVDA settings.
Addon: iamtalon.me/cpuPriority-1.0.0.…
Code: code.iamtalon.me/Talon/cpu-aff…

cpu-affinity-nvda-addon

Addon to set CPU affinity and priority for NVDA processes
Talon's Private Git
in reply to Talon

mastodon - Link to source

Andre Louis

@talon I think you're right, honestly. I won't see any performance gains until I upgrade this machine's well, everything.
It's running better than it ever has though, Jake hooked me up with a GPU instead of Intel onboard graphics, and I upped it from 16 to 32 GB RAM. Windows 10 but it's not end-of-life because of the I guess, EU mandate so I still get updates.
Never felt so good lol
@Talon
in reply to Jamie Teh

mastodon - Link to source

Talon

Not entirely sure, and also not even sure how I'd debug that. I'd imagine since it's a mobile CPU it's related to the power profiles, and changing them does improve things a little, but it makes a huge difference especially if you're running in a more energy saving mode. It switches to them especially when running on batteries and I haven't found out how I can prevent it from doing that, but to be honest sometimes I don't even want it to do that because it means giving up quite a lot of battery time. But setting CPU affinity and priority seems to do a good enough job that I kinda forgot about it until recently when I tried to get it working as an addon and not as a weird set of external scripts.
in reply to Talon

mastodon - Link to source

Jamie Teh

@talon My 8845HS is in a mini PC, so still a mobile-ish CPU but theoretically less of the power saving silliness. Obviously an older generation than yours though and I was thinking that was the cause, but I guess not. I'm definitely curious about the underlying cause, but now that I have an interim solution, I'm not quite curious enough to be motivated to dig into it further. I might get nerd sniped enough one day, we'll see.
@Talon

mastodon - Link to source

As if today couldn't get any worse, the bill for the server that runs this instance came out today and it was £1.60 more than expected. I never got any emails saying I'd gone over any limits or anything, but anyway, I'm now £0.02 negative. Some support to help keep this server going and help my other services grow, as well as covering personal costs, would be greatly appreciated.

* Patreon: patreon.com/seediffusion
* Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/seediffusion


Support Seediffusion ❤️

Support Seediffusion
Ko-fi

mastodon - Link to source

At a critical moment, the tech press are failing to connect the dots between Apple and Google's craven capitulations and the authoritarianism they have nurtured within their own ecosystems. Apple is now corrosive to democracy itself, and we have to get smarter about the way these forces interact:

infrequently.org/2025/10/the-a…

/cc @owa @pluralistic


The App Store Was Always Authoritarian

Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate.
Alex Russell
@Cory Doctorow @Open Web Advocacy
This entry was edited (15 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Trump admin lies about #ICE being attacked, so they can be the victim.
The Technique is called DARVO
(Deny Attack Reverse Victim & Offender)

But when people see that the "attackers" are people in frog costumes, it visually destroys the lie.

This means us sharing our silly protests on social media is REALLY important.

This @TomSullivan post explains
digbysblog.net/2025/10/11/liar…

Cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war.
-Nora Reed

#Portland #Frogs #Antifa #AntiFascistFrog #FrogBrigade

Two frogs holding sign Frogs together strong Cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war. -Nora Reed #Portland #Frogs #Antifa #AntiFascistFrog #FrogBrigade spoken by Mark Antony in Act 3, Scene 1, line 273 of William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar: "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war."
#portland #ice #antifa #frogs #antifascistfrog #frogbrigade @Tom Sullivan
This entry was edited (21 hours ago)
in reply to NicksWorld

mastodon - Link to source

Zach Bennoui

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that all wealthy people are narcissistic jerks who deserve nothing, but the fact of the matter is that many are. It also depends on how you got rich in the first place. If you were born into wealth, you will simply not relate to people who either don't have the extraordinary amount of money you do, or who have come into it honestly by doing good work. There's a lot of nuance here, as with everything.

mastodon - Link to source
In the late 1980's there was an MS-DOS program called PIANOMAN. Yup, in the docs, it's written in all caps like that. This program would let you compose, play, edit, and save tunes, and even compile them into self-contained executables to give to others who didn't have a copy of PIANOMAN themselves. This program's claim to fame was that it could create pseudo-polyphonic music through the monophonic PC speaker by playing different notes extremely rapidly. This was a shareware program (try it for a while, if you like it, send in a registration fee to get the latest version and another disk of sample songs). I just found the shareware distribution of version 4 on Archive.org. One of the included tunes, which exists here only as a compiled, self-contained executable, is a version of a Tom Lehrer classic. Naturally, I figured some folks might be interested in this. It's set up to play repeatedly until a key is pressed, so I've only included three playings in this recording, and the last one fades out. Enjoy! #TomLehrer

#tomlehrer
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