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Here is a picture taken this morning showing off how snowy it is around here. I am putting the description in the actual post, as I think it is too big for the image description part.

The image shows a quiet residential area blanketed by a fresh layer of snow, creating a calm and wintry atmosphere. The landscape is primarily white, as the snow covers the road, rooftops, and yards in a thick, undisturbed layer. The overcast sky is a pale, uniform gray, indicating continued cloudy weather, adding a subdued tone to the scene.

On both sides of the road are mobile homes, each painted in various muted colors like white, gray, and pale yellow. The homes have small front porches or steps leading up to their entrances, some of which are partially buried in snow. A few homes have lights on inside, casting a warm yellow glow through the windows that contrasts with the cold outdoor environment. Small trees and bushes surround some of the homes, their branches heavy with freshly settled snow.

A single light gray Jeep is parked on the left side of the image near a home, with a light dusting of snow on its roof, windshield, and hood. Tire marks and footprints are visible in the snow-covered street, leading away from the direction of the camera, showing that someone has already walked and driven on this quiet path recently. These tracks carve through the smooth surface of the snow, suggesting minimal traffic and a peaceful, early moment after the snowfall.

In the background, a red stop sign stands out vividly against the snow near the center right, placed at a street intersection within the mobile home park. The visibility of the stop sign and its bright color provides a striking contrast to the monotonous whiteness of the rest of the area. Spruce and bare-branched trees can also be seen further back, some leaning slightly and covered in a delicate coating of snow.

Overall, the image captures a serene and picturesque winter morning in a modest neighborhood. The footprints and vehicle tracks hint at the beginning of daily routines in a community gently waking up amidst a snowy landscape. The quiet stillness suggests the snow may have only recently stopped falling, leaving everything wrapped in a pristine, soft layer.

a picture showing how snowy it is here in Holt Michigan. a very detailed description is in the main part of the post.
in reply to Andre Louis

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JamminJerry

@FreakyFwoof @ke7zum I am going to try to answer what I think you are asking. if I am wrong, please clairify. normally here you take your kids down to where the office is, and that is where the bus picks up the kids. with may and I both being totally blind, plus at least one of our boys having ADHD, it makes it really hard for us to try to keep them under control, and hear where things are that we need to hear, so there bus actually stops right across the street from our trailor, for us only. so when I say we wait for them, we are waiting for them to get to across from our trailor. they don't show up the same exact time every day, so we go out a few minutes early just in case.
@Andre Louis @Sarah A

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If you are one of those transphobic motherfuckers who won't use someone's correct pronouns, you do NOT fucking get to say you are "in a relationship" with a chatbot.

You won't acknowledge the humanity of a trans woman, but you will build an emotional connection with a computer simulation you assigned a gender to?

Fuck ALL THE WAY OFF with that shit.

mastodon - Link to source

There's a song by Bad Religion called I Love My Computer, whose interpretation I will not attempt to make, but the lyrics speak of an obsession with a computer, as if it were a rather masoginestic sexual relationship with a powerless woman with the man dictating all, and in full control.
I haven't gotten all philisophical about it, but I enjoy it for its surface-level lyrics, in the computer sense of the words, not the sexual parts, and simply because not many even try to sing about anything to do with computers, couched in metaphor or not.
So its a unique niche genre topic, amongst the ranks of Its All About The Pentiums by Weird Al, and not really too many others.

So with all that preample out of the way, part of the lyrics of the above discussed song, 64 characters of them, to be exact, became my very first WiFi password, using the WEP encryption scheme. For individual end users, this was the best on offer at the time. You either had an open network, or you had a WEP encrypted network with a textual password with a hard limit of 64 characters. The password from the lyrics of that song, and my very first WiFi password was:
ILovemycomputeryoumakemefeelallrighteverywakinghourandeverylone
Of course, I became quickly aware that RC4 had been broken, and WEP was essentially at best an annoyance, quickly overcome, by anyone really wanting to listen to your network, so after I reprogrammed my mind for the acronym WEP standing for Wired Equivalent Privacy to Wire-exposed Privacy, I moved to WPA enterprise and set up a RADIUS server, and had MAC authentication going there for a while.
But with the prolipheration of devices, rapid upgrades and swaps, that became untennable. So I went back to WPA2 Personal and now WPA 3 Personal. I may investigate the enterprise modes a bit further, but authenticating devices is simply unwieldy, most especially with MAC randomization, its just impossible now.
But I'm really not all that worried about my network being hacked. Not to say it can't or won't ever happen, but its not something that keeps me up at night anymore. I just rock the latest protocols and schemes, latest firmware, and roll with it.
So that's a bit of a story on my first use of WiFi encryption and what locked it down. Until it didn't. LOL.

in reply to Adam MacLeod

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Borris

I am still (unfortunately) using WPA2/WPA3 mixed mode, which is probably no better than just WPA2 by itself, because of a couple of stupid devices that don't support WPA3. There are workarounds, such as putting said devices on their own VLAN/SSID, smashing them with hammers, or just not using them, but all those options have different sets of pros and cons.

I did briefly mess with WPA3 Enterprise, and, yes, getting keys on devices is annoying. That being said, if it were just me and no one else in the house, I'd probably do it anyway.

Also, if it were just me in the house, there'd be a lot less WiFi. Most of my stuff doesn't use it as-is.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason

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Baldur Bjarnason

More and more, generative models are looking like productivity tobacco. Promoted by biased research, it’s addictive, harmful, and the little benefit it has (nicotine is a somewhat effective ADHD drug, for example) cannot outweigh the fact that it’s hurting us all, directly and indirectly.

This shit is already turning out to be one of the most harmful tech innovations of the 21st century. It needs to be regulated at least as much as tobacco, if not banned outright from most economic spheres

mastodon - Link to source

The Australian government has announced on November 3 that, beginning next year in much of the country and spreading to the rest by 2027, all residents will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon.

That’s right: 3 hours of free electricity. This possible because Australia has built enough solar power that in the middle of the day the sun is generating so much electricity that wholesale electric prices often go negative few those few hours. So, they’re giving it away. electrek.co/2025/11/04/austral…

How’s that for a political platform plank? “Vote for us and we’ll build out so much solar power generation that we’ll give electricity away for free in the middle of the day.”

1/2


Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity

Australia's extensive solar power penetration makes so much energy that the government wants to offer free electricity at peak hours.
Jameson Dow (Electrek)
in reply to Jeff Spencer

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Jeff Spencer

Bill McKibben offers the bottom line: “Australia has enough solar power, and that solar power is so cheap, that now people who live there will get to have it for free. They will be, every afternoon, energy-rich. With just a little bit of care, they’ll be able to get done most of what needs doing for free.”

Meanwhile, Bill writes, “Trump and the corrupt fossil fuel cronies that surround him have done everything they can to make sure Americans will never get to share in this kind of bounty.”

You can read all of Bill’s comments at billmckibben.substack.com/p/fr…

2/2


Free Electricity. Like, at no cost. For everyone. Now.

Let's talk about affordability, abundance, and Australia--and why thanks to Trump we can't have nice things
Bill McKibben (The Crucial Years)
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to HOAXILLA®

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Marco Zehe

Für die zweite OP alles gute! Und kurioserweise ist mir im Oktober dasselbe passiert: Mitte Oktober gegen Influenca und CoVid impfen lassen, eine Woche später ein RSV- oder sonstiger Erkältungsvirus, der sich bei mir breit machte, und wo der Husten erst jetzt richtig abgeklungen ist.

Zum Thema lesen: Ihr kennt das meiste aus den letzten Jahren vermutlich schon, aber ihr könnt euch auf viele Arten Texte auch vorlesen lassen, wenn die Augen nicht mehr können. Bei Fragen gern DM.

mastodon - Link to source

The #dragons may have all been adopted, but, in the true spirit of #FLOSS, we give you the instructions on how to make your own!

Grab the instructions as a PDF document from the "thank you" page you see after donating:

kde.org/fundraisers/yearend202…

or directly download them from here:

kde.org/fundraisers/yearend202…

And get knitting!

#fundraiser #freeSoftware #amigurumi

A preview of the instructions of how to make an amigurumi KDE dragon. Get the full resolution PDF document from https://kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2025/thanks_paypal/konqipattern.pdf

Reaching the Inflection Point

Help us bring KDE’s software catalogue into the mainstream! Plasma 6 is a stable, usable and accessible desktop environment that brings us closer to meeting the needs of private citizens, companies and public institutions
Reaching the Inflection Point
#FreeSoftware #floss #fundraiser #amigurumi #dragons

mastodon - Link to source

"Controversy erupts at the plagiarism machine conference when it turned out people were using the plagiarism machine to do plagiarism."

This is genuine comedy.

nature.com/articles/d41586-025…


Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI

Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.
Naddaf, Miryam

mastodon - Link to source

We've released V21.2, as our 'traditional' end-of-year release.

There are some minor changes relative to the beta, most notably the addition of a warning if you are moving a way that has a majority of its nodes off screen, the minimum number of nodes for the check to be active can be set and the default is 5.

vespucci.io/help/en/21.2.0%20R…

#OpenStreetMap

21.2.0 Release notes - Vespucci

Main site for Vespucci the Android OpenStreetMap Editor
vespucci.io
#openstreetmap
in reply to Bubu ☎️: 3016

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Bubu ☎️: 3016

This was the trickiest part (that admittedly was broken long before moving) of the repair: part of the hip didn't print correctly initially (and as this was a ~20 hour print job when I printing this originally, I didn't particularly feel like reprinting the whole thing). The broken off part also got lost at some point.
Closeup on the repaired hip-bone. There's a very visible (whitetish) seam that matches neither the old nor new filament colours.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Bubu ☎️: 3016

mastodon - Link to source

Bubu ☎️: 3016

There was no completely straight seam where the part broke off and it also was very hard to judge where exactly to cut the model for reprinting it. So as expected the (two component) glue had to do a lot of work creating a very visible (and very ugly brown) seam. Painted over it with minitiature paint we had lying around.

It's not quite perfect yet, but good enough, I think. The idea specifically was to mend the existing model, not to just reprint it.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

mastodon - Link to source
the window for participation in the #osgeo devroom at #fosdem2026 is open for a few more days; if you're able to share in a fossy geo space but are unsure, I can assist - it's easy and fun to get involved. #fosdem #foss4g #geo #brussels #foss pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026…
an icon for open geospatial, represented by a cute seamonster poking its head, body, and tail out of different sides of a cube of water

FOSDEM 2026

Schedule, talks and talk submissions for FOSDEM 2026
pretalx.fosdem.org
#foss #fosdem #brussels #osgeo #foss4g #fosdem2026 #geo
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

mastodon - Link to source
I have been on vacation so I didn't get to post this until today, but if you haven't seen my bits and bops demo video yet, you really should. This is a super fun game, and the level of screen reader accessibility is very impressive. youtu.be/MdaGu4FSgfI

Let's Play the bits and Bops Demo

Checking out the Bits and Bops demo from Tempo Lab Games.Check it out on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com › app › Bits__BopsBecome a YouTube Member or a...
YouTube

reshared this

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RE: coywolf.com/news/social-media/…

„The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform. […]

It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, ‘We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.‘ While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there.“

This feels true for #Conversations_im as well.

#conversations_im
in reply to Daniel Gultsch

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Dusty

I feel that a platform needs to have an absence of annoying bugs first and foremost. Additional fancy features (as in OP) might *initially* attract new users, but it's an absence of such embarrassing bugs which keeps them there longer term. And people giving up on a failed attempt at a new platform is very costly to one's social capital, to ever recommend any new platform ever again, and be taken seriously.

mastodon - Link to source

Finally hit publish on a blog post I've been writing for a while.

It's common to hear the term "fully accessible" used to describe products which have passed WCAG 2.2 level AA. But, are they really?

In this post, I explore 5 examples which highlight why WCAG, as awesome as it is, is not a measure of great usability or performance.

craigabbott.co.uk/blog/2025/5-…

#accessibility #a11y #wcag


5 reasons why WCAG AA compliance does not mean your website is accessible

5 reasons why WCAG compliance does not mean accessible accessible
Craig Abbott (craigabbott.co.uk)
#a11y #Accessibility #wcag

reshared this

pleroma - Link to source

I knew it. KDE is goin to make their own login manager. If they can't integrate that piece with the plasma desktop you can't have a coherent OS experience and a ton of functionality is just missing.

So the year of the desktop Linux is a few more away, but it's getting closer I guess

blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog…

# A Roadmap for a modern Plasma Login Manager – David Edmundson's Web Log

blog.davidedmundson.co.uk

pleroma - Link to source

Oh a good HN comment. Also didn't know that SDDM was a potential root cause:

I love Wayland. I just absolutely love hard-rebooting my computer twice a day. Oh, need to walk away from the desk? Better switch into a TTY before unplugging the dock so I can force restart SDDM when it crashes. Oh no! Walked out of WiFi range? Your DE is hard frozen and the only operable button is the power button.
Wayland truly saves me so much time at work. It's forced me to re-up my ctrl+s reflex. Now I never lose work when it randomly crashes!

We've also been playing a fun new game. Every morning when I walk into the office my giant 5Kx1K monitor might be reset to literally any imaginable resolution and I have to figure out how to navigate to the display configuration menu to manually reset it because of course replugging the screen doesn't work.

I love Wayland. It's so easy to use and reliable. But MOST IMPORTANT it's newer than X11. Thank god I don't have to use gross old software written in uncool languages. God for-fucking-bid we have to run old software that works instead of new software that-- while not as good as the old software-- is still new

What's that? Wayland is almost 20 years old and still not to feature parity with any other OS? Well, it's newer than X11!

⇧