mastodon - Link to source
Today at 1 PM Central, I’m doing something different.
No agenda. No filter. Just me, live, ready to talk about whatever comes up—from AI and accessibility to the behind-the-scenes of my work and anything else people bring to the table.
Come hang out and be part of it:
youtube.com/watch?v=ZtyruFJ5F_…
#Livestreaming #TechCreator #BehindTheScenes #RealTalk #AIForEveryone #AccessibilityInTech #BlindCreator

Live Hangout: Anything Goes

Anything Goes Stream | Live Hangout, Tech Talk, and MoreWelcome to the Anything Goes Stream. This is a laid-back, unscripted session where I explore whatever...
YouTube
#Livestreaming #behindthescenes #accessibilityintech #aiforeveryone #techcreator #realtalk #blindcreator

mastodon - Link to source

I'm trying to document canoe routes in northern Minnesota, because the maps are disappearing from the USFS website. The Twin Lakes Canoe Route in northern Minnesota offers a short canoe route outside of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness that provides a wilderness-like experience. No permit is required.

paddlinglight.com/articles/twi…


Twin Lakes Canoe Route in Northern Minnesota

The Twin Lakes Canoe Route in northern Minnesota is a short canoe route outside of the Boundary Waters that provides a wilderness-like experience.
Bryan Hansel (PaddlingLight: Lightweight canoe and kayak travel)

mastodon - Link to source

A man and his girlfriend die in a car accident and meet Peter at the Pearly Gates. Peter says, "Welcome to Heaven, do you have any questions?" To which the man replies, "Yes, my girlfriend and I never had a chance to get married while we were alive. Can we get married in Heaven?" Peter says, "That's a good question, I will be back when I have the answer." Left at the gates, the couple begins to talk about love and how long eternity is. 6 weeks later, Peter returns and says, "OK, I've found your answer. Yes, you can get married in Heaven. So come right in and enjoy eternity together." The couple responds by saying, "We have another question. Eternity is a very long time and we are not sure if our relationship will last. If things don't work out, can we get a divorce in Heaven?" To which Peter replies, "Fucking Christ! It took me 6 weeks to find a priest up here, do you have any idea how long it'll take me to find a lawyer?!"

reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/1l…

mastodon - Link to source

For those of you who are “nuclear curious”, the attack on Iranian nuclear sites could have resulted in trace amounts of radioactive material getting kicked into the atmosphere. The Earth’s atmosphere is a river that flows across the globe, and other places will “see” those isotopes with sensitive enough instruments.

Here is gamma radiation air monitoring open data, including data from #SNOLAB where I work. These data aid in nuclear non-proliferation.

remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Advance…

Radiological Maps - European Commission

The Radioactivity Environmental Monitoring (REM) group of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC)
remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu
#snolab
This entry was edited (6 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source

today, I pass on some of my own music to take your mind off of all the ridiculousness in the world.
Instrumental, so no reason to pay full attention to it, but maybe while you sit and read a good book, relax on the sofa or whatever else you can think of.
I released this album a couple of years ago and you can stream it anywhere you normally stream music.

For my latest release entitled 'a Moment of Solitude', I decided to build down towards a state of calm. Starting out with up-beat grooves and rhythmic elements, by the last few tracks it's relaxed, drum-free and hopefully puts you in a place of contemplation and thoughtfulness.

On #Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/5oORtTK…

On #AppleMusic: music.apple.com/gb/album/a-mom…

The #Youtube playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK…

The #Distrokid #Hyperfollow page: distrokid.com/hyperfollow/andr…


A Moment of Solitude by Andre Louis on Apple Music

Album · 2023 · 20 Songs
Apple Music - Web Player
#youtube #spotify #applemusic #distrokid #hyperfollow

mastodon - Link to source

So! This audiobook's coming out in two days. I dunno about the book, but the music... The composer... I like him. I really do. He's nice. Very humble, too.
No seriously. I still can't believe this is a thing, but here we are. A nice and cozy fantasy with voices I'm sure you've heard before if you're into the genre, and somehow I've been lucky enough to make the music for it.
Disclaimer in case it matters: I'm not getting any commission or royalties or any kind of anything either for sales or for making noise about this, I just think it's a cool book and I'm super happy to have made the soundtrack for it!

soundbooththeater.com/shop/aud…


Natural Magic, Book 1: The Mudpuddle Manual of Natural Magic - Soundbooth Theater

A murder, a mystery, and a not-so-overactive imagination… Eccentric heiress, Maida Westabrook, treasures her peaceful, “ordinary” life in California — morning strolls along the beach, warm evenings by the fire, and losing herself in her beloved libra…
Soundbooth Theater

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Around 2013, someone created an add-on that allowed the old Siri voices to be used with NVDA, which worked because those voices were licensed to Apple by Nuance Communications.
The 2013 version of the US English Siri female voice, originally named Nicky, used in the add-on has interesting behaviors with the string "brr," from odd sounds to an interesting beat if "brr" is typed multiple times.

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in reply to Daniel V.

mastodon - Link to source

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

Wayland and systemd are both symptoms of the same behaviour, as was PulseAudio:

  • Observe that an existing system has flaws.
  • Don't engage with users to identify use cases.
  • Throw up some half-finished code (with incomplete or nonexistent backwards compatibility) that solves some of the problems of the old system but doesn't address all of its use cases and introduces more problems for other people.
  • Declare that the old thing is deprecated and everyone needs to move to the new thing.
  • Create a load of work in the rest of the ecosystem that other people have to do.
  • Silence all criticism by pointing out that the old thing was imperfect.

And that's the kind of thing that you can only get away with if you're able to act as a monopoly, by employing maintainers at key points across the ecosystem.

The biggest problem with Microsoft was not that their monopoly allowed them to be evil, it was that it allowed them to be stupid. A lot of things in the MS ecosystem are actually bad for Microsoft, but they're pushed out because no one inside MS cares enough to do the right thing and no one outside is able to fix the problems. I, personally, don't want the F/OSS OS ecosystem to end up like that.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

mastodon - Link to source

Simon Ser

@davidgerard@circumstances.run I have poured most hours of my last 10 years of life into listening to users and pushing things forward on Wayland even if I personally wouldn't need the feature. I really saddens me that someone would think that Wayland developers don't care.

We do care, but we only have a finite amount of time in our volunteer life. Yes, we don't copy-paste solutions from X11: we try to fully understand the problem space and do better. This does mean that coming to us with technical solutions rather than use-cases tends to be met with "please, explain why you need to do this?".

I don't really know what you mean when you say that we silence criticism. I've read enough in the past years to guarantee that it's not silenced. I appreciate constructive criticism better than rants, rants tend to demoralize me.

I am also saddened about the conspiracy that big corp deprecates X11 against the community's will. There is no single company with a monopoly here, please take a bit of time to look at Wayland developers' employers. Personally, I'm ex-SourceHut and now just a volunteer (my day job is unrelated: SNCF Réseau).

I've never said that X11 was deprecated, and I always tell people to use whatever works best for them. The only reason why X11 has less activity nowadays is because X11 lacks volunteers. (We severely lack volunteers on the Wayland side too.)

People, distros, communities move away from X11 if/when they collectively decide that they should. Nobody's pulling the strings here.

iceshrimp.net - Link to source
An aborted journey into accessible flight simulation:
It's been quiet here for a couple of weeks because a project I was hoping to begin fell through.
stuff.interfree.ca/2025/06/22/flight-simulation.html#blind#accessibility#screenreader#accessible#flight#simulation#fsx#audiogames#games#gaming

Sam's Stuff - An aborted journey into accessible flight simulation

stuff.interfree.ca
#Accessibility #accessible #blind #gaming #screenreader #games #audiogames #flight #simulation #fsx

mastodon - Link to source

Looks like the same poorly implemented Android CT library that broke a lot of apps a couple years ago... did it again 🤦‍♂️

github.com/appmattus/certifica…


June 21 update for log_list.json breaks the auto update

Latest update for log_list.json includes a logs: [], which breaks the requirement here. However maybe we should be checking whether logs or tiled_logs is not empty instead?
steppinlo (GitHub)
in reply to Juli Jane

mastodon - Link to source

Filippo Valsorda

it’s not so black and white. If you are an unpaid maintainer you have no obligation to put in extra work, for sure. But if you do take down the banking system of a country once (still not your fault!) and people tell you your library is broken… I think you start having a responsibility to either deprecate it, fix it, or at least warn users. We live in a society.
in reply to Filippo Valsorda

mastodon - Link to source

Kris

Maybe, as a bank, you should not be using a random library taken from the internet, with a single maintainer and some 100 stars, and make it a critical dependency of your banking operations.

Maybe, as a bank, your IT should write and maintain such a library and open source it.

Maybe, as a bank, you should not continue to use the first library, and do the second thing after the first library was able to take down critical parts of your infra the first time.

Because we live in a society, and as a bank, you should be contributing to it, too.

But then, what do I know.

@julijane

@Juli Jane
in reply to Filippo Valsorda

mastodon - Link to source

Filippo Valsorda

Amongst other things, there's an open source software supply chain story here.

This Android library with 174 stars and one maintainer has taken down Monday.com, Eventbrite (!!!), UPS, Kraken, Lowe's, YBS, IKEA, Agibank, iFood, PagBank, pago.ro, and Udemy.

Again, this is the same failure mode that caused outages in 2023.

github.com/appmattus/certifica…


June 21 update for log_list.json breaks the auto update

Latest update for log_list.json includes a logs: [], which breaks the requirement here. However maybe we should be checking whether logs or tiled_logs is not empty instead?
steppinlo (GitHub)
This entry was edited (6 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source

How a humanities background shaped the technical decisions behind the multilingual journey of Raccoon apps. Check out my blog post and stay tuned for updates!

livefasteattrashraccoon.github…

Global localization: Building a truly international open source app

How a humanities background shaped the technical decisions behind Raccoon’s multilingual journey
LiveFastEatTrashRaccoon (Procyon Project Blog)

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mastodon - Link to source

«Нэўрасеткі для мовазнаўцаў: першыя крокі». Адкрытая лекцыя аднаго з стваральнікаў Нацыянальнага корпуса беларускай мовы, праграміста Алеся Булойчыка.
* Чаго на самай справе варта чакаць ад нэўрасетак— разбурэньне мітаў і рэальныя пэрспэктывы
* Як бясьпечна і эфэктыўна працаваць са штучным інтэлектам — ключавыя прынцыпы для дасьледчыкаў

youtu.be/XCrcQ0MH5g4?feature=s…

#беларускаямова #нэўрасеткі


Нейрасеткі для мовазнаўцаў: першыя крокі

- чаго на самай справе варта чакаць ад нейрасетак— разбурэнне міфаў і рэальныя перспектывы; - як бяспечна і эфектыўна працаваць са штучным інтэлектам — ключа...
YouTube
#беларускаямова #нэўрасеткі
in reply to Zvonimir Stanecic

mastodon - Link to source

Viačasłaŭ

@asael так разумею, разьлічана на публіку бяз досьведу працы з нэўрасеткамі або зь вельмі павярхоўным досьведам. Толькі ня вельмі зразумеў, навошта вылучаць у назьве мовазнаўцаў, бо сказанае вельмі агульнае й тычыцца любога кантэксту. Мо будзе працяг з мовазнаўчай спэцыфікай.
@Zvonimir Stanecic

mastodon - Link to source
By George! I've got it! I've got access to Alexa Plus! Hear my first takes, and Oh Boy the Setup using the iOS App with VoiceOver could use some work. But I've Got! The voices are fantastic! creators.spotify.com/pod/show/…

Episode 356 Alexa Plus! By George I've Got it! by Echo Tips

I've finally got into the Alexa Plus Beta, and boy is it cool! We also have a demo of setting up the features the first time using the Alexa App, as a VoiceOver user.
Spotify for Creators

mastodon - Link to source

Canadians travelling to the US advised to not fucking do that

thebeaverton.com/2025/06/canad…


Canadians travelling to the US advised to not fucking do that - The Beaverton

OTTAWA - Canadians thinking of planning a trip to the United States are being advised by the Government of Canada to perhaps consider going anywhere else on the entire fucking planet for their summer vacations. 
Janel Comeau (The Beaverton)

mastodon - Link to source

Please share your recording of the 70th Anniversary BBC Midwinter Broadcast to Antarctica here!

swling.com/blog/2025/06/please…

#2025AntarcticBBCMidwinterBroadcast #AntarcticMidwinterBroadcast #MidwinterBroadcast


Please share your recording of the 70th Anniversary BBC Midwinter Broadcast to Antarctica here!

In the comments section of this post, I’d like you to share your recording of the 2025 BBC Midwinter Broadcast to Antarctica! Time and frequencies Our intrepid contributor, Richard Langley, r…
The SWLing Post
#midwinterbroadcast #antarcticmidwinterbroadcast #2025antarcticbbcmidwinterbroadcast

akkoma - Link to source

High time to announce my newest project: #PublicArtExplorer
If you are into art and would like to know what outdoor art is available around you (or any other place you are interested in) this app may be for you.
Check it out and let me know what you think.

Already available here: apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/a… and there play.google.com/store/apps/det….
And soon on #fdroid too. #IzzyOnDroid, #art. #OpenStreetMap, #osm


„PublicArtExplorer“ – IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

Discover and view public art
IzzyOnDroid App Repo
#fdroid #art #openstreetmap #OSM #izzyondroid #publicartexplorer

mastodon - Link to source
While in the #waymo ride, I commited an unprecedented act of self-indulgence by playing my own music on the car speakers. Simply created a station based on my own music, and there it was! I was pleased with the sound, I have to admit!
THis is what I played: youtube.com/watch?v=Kz1WLArws3…

Pan Au Chocolat

Provided to YouTube by DistroKidPan Au Chocolat · Victor Tsaran · Victor TsaranPan Au Chocolat℗ 3697663 Records DKReleased on: 2024-11-26Auto-generated by Yo...
YouTube
#waymo

microblog - Link to source
I’m looking into IP Telephone services like magicJack and Ooma, anyone use either of them or something else that I should maybe consider?

VoIP Phone Service | Internet Home Phone Service Provider | magicJack

Enjoy uncompromised VoIP calling and say goodbye to phone bills with magicJack. Get free unlimited calling to the US & Canada and keep your same number!
magicJack
This entry was edited (6 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source
Just before the #TactileReading conference, @ChanceyFleet and I took a little stroll through the lively streets of #Amsterdam. I recorded with my Meta glasses while she guided us and captured our commentary, interactions, me almost getting nailed by a bike, and just the overall #Blind travel experience. I cut the whole thing together with Terminal/ffmpeg, added captions, and hosted it. If you have 6 minutes to spare, pop on some headphones and enjoy our adventure! marconius.com/amsterdam/

A Walk Through Amsterdam - Marco Salsiccia

Chancey Fleet and Marco Salsiccia walking through the streets of Amsterdam as blind travelers.
marconius.com
#blind #amsterdam #tactilereading @ChanceyFleet

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in reply to André Polykanine

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Marco Salsiccia

@menelion I played the clips back in VLC and took note of the times where I wanted to trim the clips, then just used ffmpeg commands in Terminal to output the trimmed sections as their own video files. I write out a list of the order I wanted the clips to be put together, then run another command to turn them all into one final cut based on that text file. I can also add effects, potentially add audio, filters, and more, just need to keep playing with it. works great with TDSR.
@André Polykanine
in reply to Ada Ada Ada

mastodon - Link to source

Ada Ada Ada

When the AI bubble bursts, the tech industry will have reached the end of its decades long growth cycle, and will accept its role as a legacy industry at the same level of the auto industry, construction industry, hospitality industry or many other industries.

Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and other Big Tech-companies will still exist due to them already being embedded in our economies, but they will finally stop trying to hype up new technologies, because there is no ‘next big thing’.

pleroma - Link to source

Trump's probably like "hear me out guys, what if instead of giving them legal status we just make them property of the farmers, right? Nobody has ever tried this before, it's genius"

Trump Now Says Farmers May Continue Employing Migrants Under a System Where They Assume 'Responsibility' For Them
latintimes.com/trump-now-says-…


Trump Now Says Farmers May Continue Employing Migrants Under a System Where They Assume 'Responsibility' For Them

President Donald Trump said on Friday that farmers may be able to continue employing migrants without fear of raids
Demian Bio (Latin Times)
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