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Ach jo :-(
Zemřel kytarista a klávesista skupiny The Cure Perry Bamonte
magazin.aktualne.cz/kultura/hu…

Zemřel kytarista a klávesista skupiny The Cure Perry Bamonte

Britská alternativní hudební skupina The Cure v pátek oznámila, že zemřel její kytarista a klávesista Perry Bamonte. Hudebník byl členem kapely od roku 1990. Po krátké nemoci skonal během vánočních svátků ve věku 65 let.
ČTK (Aktuálně.cz)

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My friend is subscribed to this service called drama box. It is basically movies that are divided up into tiny episodes and you have to spend coins to continue watching them. Not only is the iPhone app an accessibility nightmare, but the acting in most of the movies is so horrible and overdone. I would never hurt her feelings by telling her that because she is totally obsessed and addicted, but it’s just the truth. Also there is no audio description, although most of the time the plots are so predictable you can figure out what’s happening.
in reply to Allison Meloy

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Tamas G

think one time a podcast mentione this service, that I listen to. Good to know a bit more. I think the idea is that it is low budget and that allows more starting actors to get into acting in general, so these services have their place too. Their idea is that by making it smaller bites and lower budget there's not as much loss if a show does poorly, and if it does well, it can make back the money it cost to produce quite easily. We'll see how it works out in the longterm though.

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Still so sad about the broken Cadence. I can barely do anything from how much guilt my soul and conscience is racked with. How could I drop it off my bed and break it. How could I be such a fool during errands to just slip it in my bag without a secondary protection around it like a case. Ugh ugh. So, what do I do when I'm guilty, record more videos. Made another one for the Tactile Engineering folks about it, even though it's late at night, guilt consumes my soul. Will probably send that one tomorrow, no point sending an e-mail this late.
The only way this could be worse is if the right display also broke. Both fell together, but the right one is perfectly OK. Things could always be worse which is what I'm trying to take comfort in.
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in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark

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Tamas G

@jstark @amir LOL! One time I did trip my Braille teacher down a flight of stairs whilst she was holding my Brailler. Oh my gosh, will never forget that. The Brailler survived with only some minor bends on the paper tray, but the teacher, well, she had to go to the nurse and later the doctor for a broken ankle. Oof. Never gonna forget that moment, the huge thunk it all made.
@Jeffrey D. Stark @Amir

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Sick of complaints about my keyboard resonating through my mic. I'm not going to deny that my setup isn't the best thing in the world. But face the facts. There's literally a volume slider on your end! Use it and take some responsibility for your own listening experience instead of making it my problem. It'll reach a point where I won't do anything. You'll take action for yourself and turn me down on your own. It's blunt, I know. But I can't please everyone. I'm done trying.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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I write technical articles on my blog.
AIs show up in large numbers to read them, crawl them, learn from them.
Time passes. I publish a new post.

And right on schedule, someone comments:
"This was clearly written by an AI".

Which is fascinating, really.

I write.
Machines read.
I keep writing.
Then humans accuse me of being the machine.

At this point I am not sure if the problem is that AI sounds too human,
or that humans have forgotten what a human who actually studies sounds like.

Either way, I will keep writing.
Worst case scenario, the AIs will enjoy it.
Best case scenario, one day a human will too.

#IT #Blogging

#IT #blogging

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New let's Play starts up Monday. I've started playing Rimworld. YouTue members have 12 episodes they can watch right now, and every one else starts getting them on Monday. youtube.com/user/liamerven/joi…

Liam Erven

I'm Liam, a totally blind guy originally from chicago, and now living in Oklahoma. I create videos to educate, inform, and entertain. I play a mix of both console, an daudio-based games.
YouTube
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I was talking to my family about how my profession was dying, etc., and it was sad, and I wasn't sure what I would do.

Everyone keeps telling me that as a bilingual person in Ottawa, I can pretty much do anything. which.. is kinda true. But also, I didn't study for so many years in my field to... become middle management in the public service.

I'll do it if I have to, but please let me mourn my career, and my passion first!

(The funniest one was from my dad: "They can't actually lay you off from the government with your years of service? LOL)

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TextSpaced is a great idle game. Its one of the best Scifi games ever made, and while actions might take some time to complete, its fun to be able to know that your actions actually effect other actual players. If you want to get involved, please go to www.play.textspaced.com and when you create your account, enter the following code in when it asks for your ancestery in order to join the mighty Carbon faction. We need more people, any help counts, and if you join us, you'll be joining a team of great people who want to carve out there own part of space and who believe heavily in peaceful cooperation, the more, the merrier: 29123950d68f #TextSpaced
#textspaced

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Komplete Kontrol users using DAWs other than REAPER with KK DAW integration (Logic, etc.), can you please tell me what turning the 4d encoder does in plugin mode? Does it move by grid unit (e.g. measure, beat, etc.) or does it scrub in small time amounts more like a surface? I've had a number of requests to make ReaKontrol move by grid instead, but I thought other DAWs behave more like scrubbing and I think this should ideally be consistent between DAWs.

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These vague "something went wrong" error messages are ubiquitous, and I don't like them. Even GNOME has them. I'm getting a message on my phone saying that "a problem repeatedly occurred" opening a web page. It gives me no indication whatsoever of what kind of problem might have occurred. I was envisioning a broken link. Then I looked at my tabs in Safari and saw "Webpage crash." So, apparently, if Safari tells me that "a problem repeatedly occurred" when opening a web page, then it means that WebKit crashed. And I'm using VoiceOver, which presumably makes crashes more likely for me, although this is the first time I can recall experiencing one on IOS, and I have no idea if it is accessibility-related or not. (And, yes, I tried updating IOS, and it didn't make any difference.)

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Apple app developers. Please kindly remind the app review team to articulate the error they see in your app in text format instead of just through screenshots. This makes sure they are following accessibility best practices. Screen reader users who develop apps can't easily determine what errors the team is trying to demonstrate through the use of a screenshot. #iOSDev #swift #Apple
#apple #swift #iosdev

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Long: Brownie Mary

It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.

Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.

Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.

The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.

The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.

She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.

She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."

She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.

But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.

To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.

San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.

Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.

Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.

Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.

Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.

When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.

He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.

It was a mistake that would change American history.

Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.

She saw "her kids."

She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.

Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.

She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.

So, she made a choice.

She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.

Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.

The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.

She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.

She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.

"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."

And it did.

Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.

Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."

For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.

She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.

She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."

By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.

In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.

This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.

One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."

They underestimated who they were dealing with.

They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.

When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.

It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.

Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.

She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.

Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.

"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."

The quote ran in newspapers across the country.

The court didn't stand a chance.

Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.

The charges were dropped.

Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.

She needed to change the law.

August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.

She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.

But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.

She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.

She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.

In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.

She never got rich.

She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.

She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.

Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.

Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.

Most of them have never heard of Mary.

They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.

They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.

They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.

Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."

She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.

She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.

She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.

Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.

It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.

It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.

Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.

Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.

Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana."

Black-and-white photo of an older woman whose ready fist looks like she's about to punch the camera. Her clothes and glasses are authentic late '70s early '80s. There's a decorative patch on her shirt that depicts a marijuana leaf. Watermark says "Wonders You've Unseen and Unread" because that's the Facebook account this comes from. Text reads "The police found 54 dozen brownies in her kitchen. They arrested a grandmother. She changed the world instead of apologizing."
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but you know, even GPT-5.2 made the remove button an "X" icon that was just a span it was injecting into the div with the letter X. That's fucking right. In 2025. GPT still coded an inaccessible element, because of course, nothing in its training data has changed otherwise. Even though I had custom instructions set to make things WCAG compliant, to follow level AA, when it comes to this particular detail, it reverted to its "PRIMORDIAL " training. So that is how much you can trust these shits to make accessible content even still.

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an interesting arrangement of a song I believe one of the most beautiful #German songs ever. youtube.com/watch?v=O0a7yD598_… #Music

Maria durch ein Dornwald ging (arr. Jonas Wolf)

This is our version of 'Maria durch ein Dornwald ging', a song by an anonymous composer probably around 1600 in middle Germany. It's also possible however th...
YouTube
#music #german
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Politics, Israel, Hamas, Canada

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