mastodon - Link to source

Some good news in a time of darkness: the European wildcat, Felis sylvestris, is making a comeback! This thoughtful-looking example was photographed in a mountainous region of the Czech republic.

The European wildcat's extreme elusiveness may have helped it avoid hunters in places where a larger native cat, the lynx, has been killed off. There may be about 140,000 European wildcats spread across more than two dozen countries. But they are very hard to find!

Wildlife photographer Andrea Giovanni, who made a video of one, writes:

"I'd never even thought of taking photos of wildcats, for a simple reason: I thought it was impossible, or at least, extremely difficult. It's considered 'the ghost of the forests' because it's very, very elusive, and it's hard to predict where it can be spotted. Other animals tend to follow the same trails through the forest. The wildcat goes wherever she wants to."

One reason the European wildcat is coming back is increased legal protections. But another is that villages in Italy and other regions are becoming depopulated! Some are very worried about declining human populations. But it does make room for other species. That gives me some hope for the future.

I got this picture, taken by Vladimír Čech Jr in the Doupov mountains, from a very nice article on the European wildcat:

bbc.com/future/article/2026011…

For more on this species:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European…

Seven subspecies have been demarcated!

#cats #catsOfFedi #catsOfMastodon

A European wildcat, looking a bit like a tabby with a very large head and thick tail, turning and looking back suspiciouslyi as it walks next to a rock face amid greenery. Taken in the Doupov mountains in the Czech Republic by Vladimír Čech Jr. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260112-rare-images-of-europes-ghost-cat

'This mysterious little beast is returning to our forests': Rare images of Europe's 'ghost cat'

Wildcats are so elusive, they were thought to be extinct in parts of Europe. But they are making a comeback in some areas.
Sophie Hardach (BBC)
#cats #catsofmastodon #catsoffedi
This entry was edited (11 hours ago)

glitchsoc - Link to source

I lost a friend over my article about the murder of Renee Nicole Good.

He was angry I called out the underlying misogyny.

He was mad I didn’t give ICE the benefit of the doubt.

He made it personal.

He told me my “stupid clown hair” is why people don’t take me seriously

Everything he said to me was dripping with disdain and misogyny.

There was no debate.

There was no respectful disagreement.

In under five minutes he had attacked my intelligence, my politics, my appearance and my writing.

This is not normal behaviour.

He literally proved my point.

Had I taken the bait I’m convinced that I would have been called a “f*cking b*tch” by the end of the conversation.

This is what MAGA is doing to men.

It’s emboldening them.

It’s validating their bigotry.

I assume this person was always hateful and misogynistic on some level … but now he no longer feels he has to hide it.

He literally said as much.

He said “I never told you in the past because I wasn’t allowed. Now I am.”

Why is he allowed to tell me now??

Why does he feel justified in lashing out with rage and insults over something that has nothing to do with him?

It’s because of what happened to Renee Nicole Good.

We all watched a woman get shot in broad daylight and there’s been zero consequences

We’ve watched rapists, pedophiles and abusers go free for years.

Every woman who’s ever experienced abuse knew exactly what Jonathan Ross meant when he said “f*cking b*tch”

He didn’t fear for his life.

He was enraged she didn’t fear for hers.

My friend was enraged I dare speak out for a “lesbian leftist”.

He was enraged I didn’t remain silent, complicit and demure.

He was apparently also enraged I didn’t realize he hated my hair and change it to please him.

Make no mistake, there is a war against women going on.

This regime wants to make us “less than”.

They want us afraid.

They want us in the home serving our husbands and having children.

They want us seen and not heard.

They don’t want us resisting.

Which is why we must keep speaking out.

We must refuse to go back.

My life is better off without this person in it, and thankfully I can walk away.

Not everyone can.

Speak up if you see someone being hurt.

Protect your friends and neighbours.

Challenge misogynistic talking points.

Demand justice for Renee Nicole Good.

Don’t cower. Don’t be afraid. Don’t give up.

#reneenicolegood #abolishice #uspol #fascism #ableism #misogyny

#uspol #ableism #misogyny #fascism #abolishice #reneenicolegood

mastodon - Link to source

More HTTP/3 focus, one backend less

(#curl drops OpenSSL-QUIC support)

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/17…


More HTTP/3 focus, one backend less

In the curl project we have a long tradition of offering multiple optional backends for specific protocols. In this spirit we have added experimental support for a number of different HTTP/3 + QUIC backends over time.
daniel.haxx.se
#curl
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

mastodon - Link to source

Petr Menšík

yes, but it doesn't state clearly since OpenSSL 3.5 ngtcp2 does not need extra OpenSSL-QUIC implementation, because normal OpenSSL backend is supported in ngtcp2 itself. At least I didn't understand it from the article. If I didn't know it from experiment with unbound, I would read it like OpenSSL linked curl cannot support QUIC. That is wrong, but not simple to understand IMO.

mastodon - Link to source
Pues esto es de una noche que estaba situado en portable con mi antena miniwhip de fabricación rusa artesanal, y así se recibía La Voz de Corea. En lugares donde no se puede colocar una antena grande y hay poco ruido, el rendimiento es espectacular. 📻 #SWL #shortwave #ondacorta
#swl #shortwave #ondacorta

mastodon - Link to source
My complex has Google Fiber now. I just had someone over to set it up, so this is my first post from there. I thought I knew how to configure a router (you know, figure out its IP address and point a browser to it), but, no, not this one. It wants me to use Google Home from my phone. If I point a browser to its IP address, then it will serve me a page telling me to use Google Home from my phone.

mastodon - Link to source
Hi all! Ifinally got through a bit over 2 days of posts here because I wasn't able to be online much due to lots of things, mainly that I was in stress paralysis.
Why you ask?
Well, I had to take stock of my work situation: Would it get better if I had yet another talk with my supervisor, subjecting myself to her tirades then her agreeing to listen to me only to go back to the same old pattern a few days later?
Should I talk to my boss's supervisor again, not feeling any sense of trust that she'd help me and ensure my boss stop the negative behavior?
Should I go above my boss's supervisor to the vice provost, who is aware of my boss's eratic moods and negative behavior?
Should I just suck it up and just keep my head down and do my job and enjoy the students, the main part of my job?
After doing a lot of soul searching, hang wringing and feeling totally ill I ended up going to our human resources director, expressing my concerns and outlining everything that has been going on almost since I started this job just short of 3 years ago.
I finally realized that no matter what was done things would not get better given the way the department works and the personality of my boss and the admin in the office.
So I made the difficult decision to resign. I gave 2 weeks notice which is the minimum I could give, sticking to the policy.
It was a very hard decision because I really love my actual job. But I can't handle my boss any more.
So I'll have to adjust to this new reality and figure things out. I'll continue looking for a new job but who knows about that. In the meantime I'll have to restructure life so I don't become a total slug. That won't be good for me.
So there you have it!

mastodon - Link to source

The resilience of Minnesotans is unmatched. Day and night, in snow and freezing cold, they keep showing up and standing their ground. That’s people power. That’s BlueCrew strength.💙

Drop a ✊💙 for the Minnesotans holding the line in the cold and refusing to be silenced.
#BlueCrew #ProudBlue #PeoplePower #JusticeForRenee #ICE #AbolishICE

#ice #abolishice #bluecrew #peoplepower #proudblue #justiceforrenee

mastodon - Link to source
Have the world's biggest headache, but must power through. Nearly all bugs are solved that crept upon me after I changed that frontend DLL. C++ still sucks, and I'm only using it because I still haven't been bothered to check out other byte-compiled (machine code, not at runtime) languages. I learned it in high school like many coders, barely used it in college only on summer breaks, never used it during employment, and yet I use it for the small link-space. So yeah. That's our relationship. It's complicated.
Is all this coding making me like C++ any better? No, not really. Sure, no strict indent-checking and function definitions are easier to write than Java. It's all I'm giving C++.
This entry was edited (13 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source
Learn Six Ways to Increase Productivity with Braille and JAWS blog.freedomscientific.com/lea…

Learn Six Ways to Increase Productivity with Braille and JAWS

Are you looking for practical ways to get the most out of using Braille and JAWS? Want tips to help you work more efficiently? Join us Thursday, January 15 at noon ET for a live webinar, “Six Ways …
Freedom Scientific Blog

mastodon - Link to source
Ahahaha y'all wanna know why some people hear whispering and others don't? With the latest NV Speech? I know who might. @@radiorobbe who reported it first.
The Root Cause: "Dot" vs. "Comma"
NVDA Sets the Locale: When you set NVDA's interface language to Spanish, Hungarian, German, Polish, etc., NVDA configures the Python process's global locale (via setlocale) to match that region. In the US/English locale, the decimal separator is a dot (e.g., 0.5, 60.0). In many European/South American locales (the "supported languages" you noticed), the decimal separator is a comma (e.g., 0,5, 60,0). The DLL Inherits the Locale: The nvspFrontend.dll is loaded into the same process space. The standard C++ string parsing functions (like atof, strtod, or std::stringstream) often respect this global locale setting. So, all the YAML files become invalidly parsed because they use a period. Ha. Wow. What a bug.
@Steffen

mastodon - Link to source
The weirdest part of self-hosting isn't the control, it's the silence.
I logged into my dashboard tonight via the tunnel. No banner ads. No
"suggested content" algorithms designed to doomscroll me. No tracking pixels firing off to a data broker in Utah, lol.
Just my tools, sitting there, waiting.
We really forgot what the internet feels like when it isn't trying to extract value from us every single second. It’s quiet here. I like it.
#digital #minimalism #selfhosted #SmallWeb #AdFree
#digital #SmallWeb #selfhosted #minimalism #adfree

mastodon - Link to source

:PleaseReblog:
Question for people relying on alt text: When one posts contains multiple images, should each alt text be written independently, or does it make more sense for one text to refer back to previous ones?
Like, when the first describes shape and colour of a flower, should the second copy that description and add to it (independent alt texts), or refer back, like "the same flower [from a different angle, showing xyz]"?

#altText #imageDescriptions #Blind #questions

  • independently (16%, 13 votes)
  • refer back (45%, 36 votes)
  • just show results (38%, 31 votes)
80 voters. Poll end: in 5 days

#blind #AltText #imagedescriptions #questions
This entry was edited (1 day ago)

wordpress - Link to source
Jak se z nás stali geokačeři
Přemýšlel jsem, jak v pochmurném prosincovém počasí dostat děti ven, až mě napadl geocaching, který se ukázal jako trefa do černého. Pár řádků o tom, jak se z nás stali geokačeři.
#děti #geocachingblog.eischmann.cz/2026/01/17/j…(reakce na tento příspěvek se může zobrazit jako komentář pod článkem)

Jak se z nás stali geokačeři

Sesivany's blog
#děti #geocaching

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
yes, yes. The output for "level" seems incomplete, possibly missing leading "l" and "və." This might be happening because the pointer iteration isn't handled properly in the script. espeak_TextToPhonemes might modify the text pointer internally, and I may need to adjust this to correctly handle wide char pointers (wchar_t*) instead of using c_void_p. Let's fix that. Why not, let's fix it all. All the bugs. Fix fix fix. No breaks.
in reply to Cleverson

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@clv1 nah, I updated them just recently :) the instructions should be recent. It now talks about the formats for the various pack files, so definitely do a control+shift+R just to make sure you get the latest version.
Espeak is able to speak many of them, but you have to like, read them as individual letters sometimes. Yeah. I think JAWS is the only one I know where there's a way to get Eloquence to speak IPA, and supported posts about this (ruf.rice.edu/~reng/jaws-ipa.ht…) but it's tricky for sure. I will switch to Espeak sometimes in this workflow (or Speechplayer) and see how it speaks the symbol and compare as it's the only one I've seen in NVDA doing some interpretation.

Using Jaws with Unicode IPA Fonts

www.ruf.rice.edu
@Cleverson
in reply to Cleverson

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@clv1 kind of. For language-specific tweaks: don’t edit a shared IPA key in phonemes.yaml unless you want every language to change.
Instead:
1.
“copy the closest phoneme to a new key (e.g. y_hu / ᴇ) in phonemes.yaml”
2.
“in your packs/lang/<lang>.yaml, add a normalization rule that maps the IPA symbol to your new key”
That keeps the phoneme table centralized, and language packs only decide which key to use.
@Cleverson
in reply to Cleverson

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

for sure strange! Looks like it has to do with Espeak launching and maybe not finding espeak-data in the same path. We try to now find it more explicitly, and also if the error comes up again it should pass any Espeak errors through too. So if it appears again, it'll be more descriptive, LOL. eurpod.com/synths/NVSPPhonemeE… is the link, else the original one is the latest now too anyway.
This entry was edited (8 hours ago)
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