mastodon - Link to source

If you have a #Dell laptop whose function keys act normally but whose Home and End keys do not, apparently the fix is the following.

* Restart your machine and at the Dell logo, repeatedly tap the F2 to get into BIOS.

* Look for POST Behaviour.

* FN Lock: Ensure this setting is Enabled.

* Make sure Lock Mode Secondary is selected.

Now I just have to find a sighted person to do this for me, because in 2025, BIOS is still inaccessible.

#blind #accessibility #A11Y

#a11y #Accessibility #blind #dell

mastodon - Link to source
Last week I found a modern laptop for $140 US at best buy, so I bought one. It comes with 4 GB RAM, which is completely inexcusable in 2025, and an Intel Celeron N150, which is ... surprisingly usable.
It has USB C and A, an SD card slot, a barrel charge port, and no ethernet. It does not charge via USB C.
The keyboard is pretty standard. It feels a bit mushy, but I could write on it without complaint.
Replacing the RAM was extra-annoying because four of the eight screws are covered by the rubber adhesive strips on the bottom, so you have to carefully remove both of them with a pry tool if you want to have a hope of sticking them back on again, and then you *definitely* need a spudger to pry open the largest collection of clips I've ever seen. Some of them broke off inside the laptop even though I was careful.
I couldn't get my Windows installer to boot, and eventually realized this laptop has secure boot enabled by default. It also has the typical function row problem. Both were easy to turn off, but not without sighted help.
For whatever reason, even though this uses a Realtek chip for audio, the recovery and installer environments don't autodetect them, so I used a Zoom H1Essential as a generic soundcard. The Windows install went off without a hitch, but Windows also came up with no wi-fi. At this point, I could have gone to the HP support site and downloaded the driver, but I like making my own life difficult, so instead I connected my Pixel to the laptop and turned on ethernet tethering. After a few minutes, Windows Update found the wi-fi drivers and I could suddenly join a network, no restart required.
I still don't have audio though, and there are a few other devices in the "Other Devices" category of device manager, so I'll have to download some drivers from the support site after all.
I got interrupted while doing this, but I got as far as installing Firefox and browsing the HP site with it. The laptop was getting pretty warm during all the Windows updating, but I didn't notice substantial slowdown when browsing around HP's support pages. I have an N150 mini PC at home and it just feels like a slightly slow computer. If the laptop doesn't have serious thermal issues, this would be completely usable for typical office work.
One last thing: One of the keys on the right is the copilot key, which sends the key combination ctrl+shift+f23. I don't know if this can be turned into an applications key in the typical sense, because it's not a single key that can be remapped. I'll probably poke around in the bios in case there's a setting in there. I think remapping F23 to applications would work for some scenarios, but any app that responds differently to regular applications vs. shift+applications vs. alt+applications would have problems. In fairness, the only examples that come to mind are Reaper, and Windows's ridiculous new context menus, which I always disable anyway. So maybe that key remap would be a good enough hack for many people.
Anyway, all things considered, a modern Celeron laptop with 16 GB RAM for under $200 is a pretty good deal, and most of the difficulty of disassembling it came from not knowing how. It's back up to $219 now, which is no longer a price worth talking about. Also, DDR4 RAM prices have been going up a lot, so finding cheap RAM wasn't very fun. I'm not sure if those will ever come back down.

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Wish #Codeberg wasn't so inaccessible to screen reader users. I hate Microsoft, GitHub, and all the AI slop that comes along with it, but I can actually navigate by repositories using standard screen reader navigation keys on GitHub, headings in the readme don't announce the name of the repository before the text every single time, etc. I will say though, major props to Codeberg for making an accessible CAPTCHA. Codeberg is a fork of Forgejo, and it is open source, so yes, I could technically go modify it. But that's not really what I want to do. I just want a git platform I can use. It seems like GitHub is still that, for now. Hopefully not for long though.
#codeberg

glitchsoc - Link to source

Sensitive content

@timberwraith

mastodon - Link to source
IT-ION war in unserem Rechenzentrum in Wien vor Ort. 🎥
Unser Geschäftsführer Alexander Windbichler teilte Details zu Kühlung, Energieversorgung (inkl. Wasserkraft & PV-Park), Sicherheit und der Rolle europäischer Rechenzentren für digitale Souveränität. ⚡🔒
Das ganze Video gibts auf YouTube. 👇​
anx.io/zZO3g

So sieht das Rechenzentrum hinter deiner Cloud wirklich aus - netcup Datacenter

➡️ Zu netcup: https://sohub.io/l46h In diesem Video zeige ich dir, wie das Rechenzentrum hinter deiner Cloud wirklich aussieht und wo deine Daten tatsächlich...
YouTube

mastodon - Link to source

To everyone running this shitshow in industry and government:

Great job! Way to show off your best-of-the-best decision-making prowess and profound empathy for your fellow human beings! /ssssssss

cnbc.com/2025/12/04/layoff-ann…


Layoff announcements top 1.1 million this year, the most since 2020 pandemic, Challenger says

The firm said layoff plans totaled 71,321 in November, a step down from October but still enough to bring the 2025 total up to 1.17 million.
Jeff Cox (CNBC)

gotosocial - Link to source

So if I wanted to get off of Spotify and take my playlists with me, what's a good accessible alternative, and how do I migrate?

When I used Title last, it was a mess of unlabelled buttons and deeply unpleasant to use. If that has changed then I'm fine with switching but I never got it to work.

Earlier this year I used TuneMyMusic to transfer some of my playlists from Spotify to Pandora, but despite it saying all over the website that it works, it now throws up some weird error about the connection no longer working, Pandora not having an API, and asks if I want to @ Pandora on X to complain about it. No thanks, I click. Why are these buttons always "No thanks" and not "Fuck no" or just "No?"

Are there any nice options I'm missing? I'm fine with CLI tools and CSV or somesuch, just predictably this has gotten worse and I've been putting it off because I didn't have the spoons. Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

in reply to Nolan Darilek

mastodon - Link to source

Jonathan

I tried Tidal for 2 months recently, and ended up switching back to Spotify. The Android app was unrelyable, in terms of crashing now and then, not remembering audio position, and over all there are basically no features. You can't see in which playlist you've added a certain track, you can't remove a track from the currently playing playlist from the player screen, you always have to find it in the playlist list, which makes editing a nightmare. And all sorts of that stuff. It confuses artists all the time. I listen to a german band called SDP and in my updates page, which was way slower and out of date than Spotifys, it showed me weird songs by some foreign rappers with the same names. Colaborations with an artist I was following where not beeing displayed in that updates thing at all... I kept my Tidal sub but just for the heck of ripping music in high quallity lmao. I think if you're on Apple try Apple Music, they'r windows app should be quite good as well. Can't say that about Tidals, it's just a mehish electron app.

Jonathan reshared this.

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We have a new full-time developer! Dan Williams joins the #LibreOffice team, working on design, UI and #UX improvements – with an initial focus on macOS. Of course, everything we do is open source, so you can help him: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #openSource #freesoftware
Photo of Dan

Welcome Dan Williams, new LibreOffice Developer focusing on UI/UX - The Document Foundation Blog

The Document Foundation is the small non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. It oversees the project and community, and is now expanding with new developer roles.
Mike Saunders (The Document Foundation)
#FreeSoftware #foss #opensource #libreoffice #UX

mastodon - Link to source

@frameworkcomputer Framework's continued commitment to "deliberately create a big tent" is paying off.

More than a month since the last public statement comment from Framework on the subject and they still haven't distanced themselves from this guy.

The forum thread has over 2000 replies at this point..

community.frame.work/t/framewo…

xcancel.com/dhh/status/1993747…

twitter.com/dhh/status/1993747…

#framework #dhh #ruby #linux #omarchy

DHH on twitter quote twitting another racist post. DHH's posts read: > The Danes have been publishing detailed crime statistics and other social outcomes of immigrant groups since the late 90s. > It's shocking how poorly some specific groups manage to integrate, how much violence they bring, and how expensive it is for the Danish state to host them. > It's equally remarkable how well other groups do. Japanese people literally have the lowest crime stats of any tracked group in Denmark. Americans almost as low. Immigrantion works fine when you cherry pick the very best from high-performing countries.
Framework's CEO on a public forum thread: > We support open source software (and hardware), and partner with developers and maintainers across the ecosystem. We deliberately create a big tent, because we want open source software to win. We don’t partner based on individuals’ or organizations’ beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software. We’ve sent out large quantities of hardware to folks at Fedora, Bluefin, Bazzite, NixOS, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Omarchy, and many other distros, and have sponsored either the organizations directly or events with Linux Foundation, LVFS, NixOS, Debian, KDE, Hyprland, and others. Within the team itself, personal distro and OS preferences span basically every Linux distro you can imagine along with FreeBSD. I personally am running machines with Fedora (for machine learning), Bazzite (for gaming), Omarchy (general productivity), and Windows 11 (when I have to). > I definitely understand that not everyone will agree with taking a big tent approach, but we want to be transparent that bringing in and enabling every organization and community that we can across the Linux ecosystem is a deliberate choice.

Framework supporting far-right racists?

Hi, I am not exactly sure how best to frame this, but recent events have got me wondering where exactly Framework, as a company, stands with regards to human rights and equality.
Framework Community
#linux #framework #ruby #dhh #omarchy @Framework
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Have you used a rotary dial telephone?

Please boost if you'd like to see this poll question get additional reach.

#Poll #Telephone #Rotary #Retro

  • No, what is that? (0%, 30 votes)
  • No, but I know what it is. (9%, 751 votes)
  • Yes, and I’m under age 60 (79%, 6353 votes)
  • Yes, and I’m 60 or older (10%, 865 votes)
7999 voters. Poll end: 2 weeks ago

#poll #retro #telephone #rotary

reshared this

glitchsoc - Link to source

In the early 2000s the ReactOS team paused development for years; to engage in a project wide audit, under accusations that a developer may have SEEN leaked windows sourcecode.

In the 2020s folks keep insisting it's cool for #FLOSS devs to use AI's trained on random other projects to generate code; when it is known that such AI assistants occasionally reproduce code verbatim, without regard to the original software license. #llm #AI #eliza #generativeAI

#floss #AI #llm #generativeAI #eliza
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

mastodon - Link to source
Hey! I’m CEO of a company that has just raised $10 billion for an app that takes the hard work out of enjoying music. Did you know, some people waste hours each day listening to “tunes”. Our AI will listen to it for you and summarise it in a 15 second scream leaving you more time to focus on what's really important in life: adding value.

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
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-…

Matrix-Stammtisch

Was Matrix-Stammtisch Wann Jeden zweiten Montag des Monats, ab 20:00 Uhr (ab dem 10.11.2025) Wo CCCAC, Schützenstraße 11, 52062 Aachen Kontakt #matrix-stammtisch:ccc.ac (web link)
CCCAC
#aachen @The Matrix.org Foundation @CCC Aachen

mastodon - Link to source

🧑‍🏫 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…


Find us at FOSDEM

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
Thib (matrix.org)

mastodon - Link to source
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

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

FIX: BUG: IPv6 CIDR notation in NO_PROXY variable or option by GenuaGSchulz · Pull Request #19828 · curl/curl

The Bug We noticed that using IPv6 CIDR-Notation in a NO_PROXY env var doesn't have the desired effect, contrary to what the documentation at https://everything.curl.dev/usingcurl/proxies/env.h...
GitHub
#curl

mastodon - Link to source

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.

Bertie's got a huge smile on his face in this picture, wearing a long-sleeved outfit which could have birds or something on it.
⇧