Soon it's time again for @matrix Stammtisch #Aachen! On the 2nd Monday of every month - next time is 2025-12-08 - at @cccac.
We invite you for an evening to exchange news, experiences and ideas, verify each other‘s devices, tune your homeservers, read, discuss, or write MSCs, or whatever you bring to the table.
Learn more at ccc.ac/post/2025-10-30-matrix-…

🧑‍🏫 This year again, we will have a massive presence at FOSDEM!

Between our hackathon on Friday, our booth during FOSDEM, and the Decentralised Comms Devroom on Sunday, you'll have plenty of opportunities to meet the team and get involved!

matrix.org/blog/2025/12/fosdem…

Ollama update: I'm looking around to see what models I can run locally on an m1 mac mini. I've seen some people use Gemma3 for image descriptions. I'd like to have NVDA hook into a local model I control in order to describe web images that don't have alt text. My machine's got 16 gigs of unified memory and MacOS uses between 6 and 7 gigs idle, so it looks like I can juuuuuuust about cram Gemma3:12b in without dipping into swap. That said, I do wanna get a VPN going so I can access it securely from anywhere, so that's going to eat into my RAM budget as well

Welcome Georg Schulz-Allgaier as #curl commit author 1424: github.com/curl/curl/pull/1982…
#curl

Thursday.

Turning 38 yesterday was an odd experience. On my last birthday I left the house at 4 in the morning for a work thing. Yesterday my only appointment was a 45 minute chat after lunch. Paternity Leave is a wonderful thing.

Bertie is 2 months old today, although he was 8 weeks on Saturday, of course. He's being a bit refluxy and I'm getting through more bibs and cloths than I thought we actually owned. The GP asked about contraception during his 6-in-1, Rotavirus and MenB vaccinations. Contraception! Who has time for anything that might even seem to lead to the need for that, I ask?
Apart from that he's a happy and healthy baby And I am only going ever so slightly mad at not being able to do anything.
I'm hopeful I'll feel better when I've gotten all my Christmas shopping out of the way, which I aim to do before we fly off for a weekend in Malta this time next week.

We could house everyone. We could feed everyone. We could care for everyone. We could build devices designed to last as long as possible. We could align our manufacturing around the needs of the people and the planet.

We materially have the resources to do so.

That's why leftists are so angry. The resources we need to build a world everyone can thrive in literally already exist. We are just using them mostly to pamper the rich or murder the poor.

Hitler called Jews “rats”.

Trump calls Somalians “garbage”.

The purpose is the same: To dehumanize a minority in order to justify violence against the minority.

Every Prime Minister and every President in the democratic world must condemn this. We know where this leads and we cannot accept this.

Never again.

youtu.be/veYM4-1PsSo?si=eIaHEg…

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Drawing together two themes from recent discussions in my timeline, its worth re-emphasising that:

In-work & housing benefits are not (in the last instance) policies that help the poor rather they are a mechanism to funnel state fund into supporting profits for low-wage employers, and landlords (whose rents are higher than they would be without housing & other benefits being paid to the poor).

So when people talk about 'benefits cheats' you might want to point this out...

#benefits #politics

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

It is a popular mathematical experiment to try and work out just how fast Santa has to be to reach every house with a child in a single 24 hour period.

The calculations always end up with a significant fraction of the speed of light.

There then usually follow discussions about what the collateral damage from Santa's passing would be. And cargo limits, and so on.

All of these are wrong, and ignore another end-of-year tradition. The portrayal of the ending year as an old man.

Now that I've put these two traditions side-by-side, I think you can see what is really going on.

It is possible for one man to visit every house in a night, with no shock waves or any of that silliness. But it comes at a cost.

For that man, the night lasts many years, as he travels back in time after each visit. Even with time travel, he does not get much time to eat - so the snacks you leave out are essential to him surviving the night.

But he only just survives. By the end of the night he will have aged over forty years. And then he hands the reins of the time-travelling sleigh to a younger man, warning him of the cost.

Someone always answers the call, despite the cost, because there is always someone willing to sacrifice everything to bring joy and light, even just a little, even if only for a moment.

So leave the snacks, and, if you catch a glimpse of him, give him a bow of respect. He deserves it.

#SFF #SF #Christmas #Santa #microfiction #microfic #tootfic #IAmWriting

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Rollstuhlfahrerin aus Darmstadt kämpft um Job: "Kostet sehr viel Kraft"
hessenschau.de/gesellschaft/ro…

'[...]"Sozialmedizinische Beurteilung" [...]sie sei nicht leistungsfähig, eine Teilnahme am Arbeitsmarkt sei ausgeschlossen.

"In dem ganzen Prozess hat nie jemand mit mir gesprochen, die haben allein nach Aktenlage entschieden", erklärt sie. Keine persönlichen Gespräche, keine Begutachtung durch eine Amtsärztin oder einen Amtsarzt.'

#Inklusion ist ein Menschenrecht

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Today December 4, at 18:00 CET I will talk tiny #curl. With a bird-themed slide set!

us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

#curl

Do you want to learn Docker by doing a simple fun and interactive exercises? This is the tool for beginners or developers who never build native Docker apps. Give it a try.

github.com/furkan/dockerlings

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I have been a long time user and promoter of @Tutanota for my email as part of my effort to #degoogle. However, I'm unfortunately at an impasse where they overcharged my credit card a ridiculous amount and are not responding to me at all. Definitely a deal breaker.

Does someone have alternative privacy centred email providers to recommend? Preferably ones that have support in case there's a billing error. To save me the hassle of doing credit card charge backs.

#tuta

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

If you're wondering what are we planning for the next year of Thunderbird on Android and iOS, here's a video of me talking through our planned roadmaps for 2026.
Made for humans by humans.

youtu.be/TB7XcRLVxFI?si=fesi1f…

another upload on #Audiopub

This is a recording of me riding the old creepy elevator in our building. This elevator always gets stuck, but this time, luckily for me, it didn’t. Note that when you hear me inside, I did not tap my cane or make any sound. Every creak, groan, and clank you hear is coming purely from the elevator’s old mechanics. I stayed for a while on the top floor, rang their doorbell, and waited for someone to open the door, but there was no one there. So you will hear the ambience of the building, then you’ll hear me going down.
Microphone used is the Roland CS-10EM connected to my Zoom H1 Essential recorder. I hope you’ll enjoy this.

audiopub.site/listen/f4c53dc5-…

#FieldRecording #Sound #Audio #Zoom

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in reply to GNOME

For the 28% of you who missed the reference, this was recently trending on Mastodon: mastodon.online/@Pepijn/115645…

To the 10% of you who joined #FriendsOfGNOME, thank you! 🙌


Hi #fediverse. We need to talk about something.

While talking to a colleague it came up that they have never sat on a cow. Like, not even once in their childhood.

Another colleague listening in admitted they also have never sat on a cow.

My hypothesis is that most people have at one point in their life sat on a cow.

🐃 🐄 🐮

Have you sat on a cow?

Please boost for scientific accuracy.


You might think it's not a priority with all the doom happening around.

But the erosion of privacy rights is directly linked to the erosion of human rights, and the loss of democracy.

Privacy makes it safe for you to discuss, to organize, to resist, and to be your true self. This is exactly why fascists and authoritarians are attacking it.

If we lose privacy, we lose everything else. We have to defend it with all we've got.

Privacy rights are a priority.

#Privacy #HumanRights #Democracy