mastodon - Link to source

The holly jolly season is here! 🎄 To share the festive spirit, we’re giving away two of our own 3D-printed candle arches. Want to win one? Then go ahead & don’t miss it!
How to enter:
• Follow us here on Mastodon
• Boost this post

That’s it – nothing more!

⏰ Participation is open until Dec 17, 3:00 PM (CET)

ToP: hetzner.com/legal/giveaway

Good luck, fingers crossed! 🤞

3D printed Hetzner candle arch

https://www.hetzner.com/legal/giveaway

Find answers to your legal questions regarding the Hetzner Online GmbH.
www.hetzner.com

mastodon - Link to source
Our next major release is coming up – help us to test it! #LibreOffice 26.2 is due in February, and now the first beta is available: qa.blog.documentfoundation.org… #foss #openSource #freesoftware
LibreOffice 26.2 banner

LibreOffice 26.2 Beta1 is available for testing - LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 26.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2026 ( Check the Release Plan ). LibreOffice 26.2 Beta1 is the second pre-release since development of version 26.2 started at the beginning of June, 2025.
x1sc0 (LibreOffice QA Blog)
#FreeSoftware #foss #opensource #libreoffice

mastodon - Link to source
#Ageverification must not become mandatory. In general, the effect and implementation of age verification are still unclear, and the risks outweigh the benefits. There is no law worldwide that enforces mandatory AV for messengers. eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/afte…

After Years of Controversy, the EU’s Chat Control Nears Its Final Hurdle: What to Know

After a years-long battle, the European Commission’s “Chat Control” plan, which would mandate mass scanning and other encryption-breaking measures, at last codifies agreement on a position within the Council of the EU, representing EU States.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
#ageverification

mastodon - Link to source
Con vocado el 2025 AppleVis Golden Apple Awards para la elección de apps accesibles del año.
Participación española de @oriol y su reproductor accesible.
Votaciones hasta el 22 de diciembre.
Más información: applevis.com/newsletter/applev…

AppleVis Announces Nominees for the 2025 AppleVis Golden Apple Awards; Cast Your Vote Now | AppleVis

Hello from the team at AppleVis, We are very excited to share that today, we announced the nominees for our 2025 AppleVis Golden Apple Awards; highlighting this year's best of the best in accessible apps.
www.applevis.com
@Oriol Gómez Sentís
in reply to 🦄 🅃🅁🄰🄽🅂🄸🄲🄾🅁🄽 🏳️‍⚧️

mastodon - Link to source

🦄 🅃🅁🄰🄽🅂🄸🄲🄾🅁🄽 🏳️‍⚧️

For anyone unfamiliar:

A man goes to a newspaper stand every day, buys a copy of Pravda, glances at the front cover, curses, and throws it away.

After a few weeks of this the seller just has to ask what's going on: "why do you always look at the cover but never inside?"

"I'm looking for an obituary."

"An obituary? But those are in the back!"

"Oh no, the obituary I'm looking for will be on the front page."

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
NOt sure what's that all about Apple's "automation” attempts or even the iOS ”shortcuts” app, but it certainly doesn't feel like fun to create anything with them. Donno, perhaps it's a VoiceOver experience, but I equally find that a lot of the system prefs and features are not even properly exposed to take advantage of. Feels like a half-baked product feature to me!
This entry was edited (1 week ago)

mastodon - Link to source

I'm surprised no one has made a game of it...

ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/ma… #montreal #polMTL #MTLpoli


‘Maximum blockage’: Cones, cranes and construction making Montreal an ‘obstacle course’

The Montreal Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce (CCMM) and Tourism Montreal published 'Maximum Blockage: Taking concrete action to have a visible impact on site management and traffic flow,' criticizing the city's actions to open roads.
Daniel J. Rowe (CTVNews)
#polmtl #montreal #mtlpoli
This entry was edited (1 week ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Me: "You should use Firefox because it's the only real alternative, and you should keep yelling at Mozilla demanding they do the right thing"

User: "Yeah, I'm fed up with their behaviour, but they won't listen"

Me: "I know it's frustrating but Mozilla is full of good people, if you actively participate and share your feedback they will listen"

User: "All right, I'll tell them that they became too woke and corrupted by the leftist ideology"

Me: "Wait...what?! No...you can actually go away"

mastodon - Link to source

At this point, when you show me a trailer for your game that focuses on how lavishly detailed the visuals are all it does is make me wonder how many talented people you forced to give up their nights and weekends to make that happen

youtu.be/lAmkl1jL0fo


Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic Teaser Trailer

Developed by Arcanaut Studios in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic is a new single-player narrative-driven action RPG a...
YouTube

mastodon - Link to source
LOLOL Doom: The Dark Ages won the accessibility innovation award? WHY? They have no accessibility settings that are innovative. South of Midnight and Assassin's Creed Shadows, which are also not particularly innnovative, still put in more effort than Doom. South of Midnight deserved the award, at least they tried. What a damn joke.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Xantastic

iceshrimp.net - Link to source

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

@cordova5029 They're like...flat discs like on a gramophone, but instead of played from the outside, they're played from the inside. And instead of using a disposable needle, they use a shiny steel ball that bounces along the grooves and makes the sound that way. So no needle to replace. And the grooves are cut up and down, rather than side to side. Also, the ball places less wear on the record than a needle would. Unfortunately it didn't catch on outside of Europe. While it was a better system, before electronic amplification, the ball meant it was quieter than systems with a steel needle. So it just lost out because all anyone cared about was volume.
@Xantastic

mastodon - Link to source

#Enshittification of website is when it's written like this:

"The last 2/3rd inch XYZ camera I personally owned was this one." where "this one" is a link to Amazon. No other detail.

Several camera rumors websites do that. Not only it's shitty, but it often rots completely as it might just be a search query on the lookup for referral fees.

#enshittification
This entry was edited (1 week ago)

glitchsoc - Link to source
Fedora article about "AI" bot that recommends "use apt" lol fedoramagazine.org/find-out-ho…

Talk to your Fedora system with the linux-mcp-server! - Fedora Magazine

Generative AI systems are changing the way people interact with computers. MCP (model context protocol) is a way that enables LLMs to run commands and use tools to enable live, conversational interaction with systems.
Brian Smith (Fedora Project)

mastodon - Link to source
Initial notes on GPT-5.2 - I'm excited to see the knowledge cut-off bump up to August 2025, interesting that it's priced at 1.4x over GPT-5.1 simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/11/…

GPT-5.2

OpenAI reportedly declared a “code red” on the 1st of December in response to increasingly credible competition from the likes of Google’s Gemini 3. It’s less than two weeks later …
Simon Willison’s Weblog
in reply to Simon Willison

mastodon - Link to source

miki

It is rumored that "OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since 2024, initially claimed by semi-analysis and never denied."

It looks like 5 and 5.1 were just different post-trains of some base model that they have had for a while, either 4o, 4.5 or something else entirely that we haven't seen at all. 5.2 seems to be using a newer base model.

Source for rumor: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training ... | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com

mastodon - Link to source
Je viens de répondre au questionnaire du gouvernement sur l'IA. J'espère que je ne suis pas seul à répondre en faveur du numérique et IA accessible et du progrès technique. agora.gouv.fr/consultations/ci… #AI #France

Présentation de l'application Agora (Gouvernement)

Les citoyens aspirent à partager leurs convictions et idées régulièrement, pas seulement à chaque élection : c’est pourquoi Agora propose, pour la première fois, de créer les conditions d’un dialogue démocratique continu entre les citoyens et le Gouv…
www.agora.gouv.fr
#AI #france

friendica - Link to source

Hello @Raroun hope you're well. every now & then, when i have joined a different #Friendica instance in the past, i ask this same question of its Owners / Admins. always it's the same negative answer, but i live in hope!

on Masto & Sharkey instances, if the Admins are willing, it is technically possible to add FOSS emojis to the servers. consequently, on many of my instances i've been able to include these in various posts when applicable:

:linux: :archlinux: :kde: :plasma: :zenbrowser: :floorp: :firefox_nightly: :firefox: :thunderbird: :fedora: :opensuse: :debian:

so... is there yet any way that such emojis can be added to your instance, please?

cc: @Friendica Support

#FOSSemojis

#friendica #FOSSemojis @Friendica Support @Raroun
in reply to Droppie [opensoc]

friendica - Link to source

Droppie [opensoc]

@Raroun

Here's a screenshot of what i now see, in draft / preview format, when i paste my original emoji-suite again, since @Raroun kindly enabled / added

the standard "Smiley Pack Addon" for Friendica


so i can see that yes, some of my desired #FOSSemojis now work, but sadly still most don't. i shall be most interested to see what might happen after this weekend. 🤞 🤞 🤞

#FOSSemojis @Raroun
in reply to Droppie [opensoc]

sharkey - Link to source

George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

FYI but every one of those ​:customemojis:​ has to have the actual PNG or GIF uploaded to YOUR instance for any of them to work.

Until then they're simply not going to work no matter what you do.

They are not universal. Each custom emoji is unique to the instance that has it.

My instance might have :heart: look like this: ♥️But on another instance :heart: might look like this: 💓

in reply to Matthias

friendica - Link to source

Droppie [opensoc]

@Matthias sorry for my delayed reply. the large majority of my regular interlocutors are on various Masto instances, with some on Sharkey, so for me to derive full benefit of my desired #FOSSemojis in my Friendica instance/s, ideally each of the emoji codes needs to be the same across those platforms. doing a comparison of

has now shown me that whereas happily some are the same, eg:
:linux: :archlinux: :kde: :firefox: :thunderbird:
:linux: :archlinux: :kde: :firefox: :thunderbird:

unfortunately other important ones are different, eg:
:firefox_nightly: vs :firefoxnightly:
:fedora: vs :linuxfedora:
:opensuse: vs :linuxopensuse:
:debian: vs :linuxdebian:
:firefox_nightly: vs :firefoxnightly:
:fedora: vs :linuxfedora:
:opensuse: vs :linuxopensuse:
:debian: vs :linuxdebian:

and a few are absent in Friendica, though present in the others, eg:
:plasma: :zenbrowser: :floorp:

so, if i lump the "missings" with the "differents", the total number exceeds the "goods". it seems therefore that my desire to have comparable cross-platform FOSSemojis (without me needing to stop to think, each time i go to use some of them, "oh, are these good ones or bad ones?") is just not possible, so i need to abandon the idea.

oh well, thank you all for your help, anyway. 😢

@Raroun

#FOSSemojis @Raroun @Matthias
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@matt oooh not sure. Thought some software (like Braille Blaster) can import the SVG if those could be exported from a PDF, then you'd have to add Braille labels to any visually-labeled portions. As long as it's grayscale (which was easy enough to ask Gemini to do) embossers shouldn't try to squeeze too much detail into the graphic at once. But yeah, that's an interesting one to experiment with, perhaps something to also research during my break off work :D
@Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source
Today I got to experience the joys of the Scala programming language. Actually I do like it quite a lot - it's very readable syntax, statically typed however, oof. I think I don't like static typed languages for all the work you have to do, it does make you less careless, but it's why Python's great. Anyway, it uses functions and objects/classes, Scala does not require semicolons (;) to end statements. The val VS Var fight, mutable vs immutable variables, fun fun. But again, not a bad language overall, looks like I'll be needing it for work from time to time.

pleroma - Link to source

DeltaChat has just made its long-awaited Wireguard-esque multi-relay release.

You can add multiple relays (chatmail/email accounts) to your profile. Your account now survives server outages, censorship, or even government seizures. Your identity is not tied to a single email address anymore.

Change to another relay, message your contacts/groups, and they'll immediately learn the new address they can reach you at and will respond using that address now.

Just like how Wireguard gets a valid encrypted packet from a peer at a new IP address and automatically starts using it.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

feld

The one downside right now is that if you and all your friends were using the same server that disappears you can't really message them from your new address because... your point of contact for them is still the old address that is unreachable.

This is why it's important to embrace decentralization as much as possible.

Future work: automatically learning of ALL the current relay addresses for a peer and automatically re-routing your communications if the current point of contact is no longer valid. Or shotgunning your communications to the user across multiple addresses simultaneously just to be safe and letting the client ignore (not even download) duplicated messages they have already received.

in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

feld

If you use multi-device with DeltaChat, ensure all are on at least the new version 2.33.0 and add an additional relay. It will be automatically synced to your other devices so they are ready to use it as well.

support.delta.chat/t/how-to-mi…


How to migrate your profile to another relay (version 2.33)

Let’s say you have initially created a profile on the default relay and want to migrate away from it. Update at least to 2.33 on all your devices: Help testing upcoming Delta Chat 2.33.
Delta Chat
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