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I don't need an AI companion for my Zoom
I don't need Rufus telling me what to buy on Amazon
I don't need Copilot telling me how to use Excel
I don't need Adobe's AI assistant summarizing PDFs for me.
These all all things I've run across just this morning trying to get through a day.
As I was already complaining about #WUR I can add another nice episode from their IT:
As some of you might know, @thunderbird added native support for exchange. I immediately wanted to connect my uni-email and get rid of my wonky outlook-brave-webapp.
Of course, it did no go as expected: an error message told me that admin approval is needed.
So far so good, let's ask IT if they could change this, as thunderbird is the e-mail-clients with the oldest and best track record you could possibly have.
Reply from them: "We cannot provide access because we don't know what is done with the data gathered from your Office365 Account. You will need to use Microsoft Outlook."
Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize - and it’s loaded with great features!Thunderbird
open source software really has some blind spots
SEVEN YEARS AND NOBODY HAS FIXED THIS??????????????????
@mikalai @collectifission it's a bug that affects me every single day. They have nothing more pressing than fixing what they've already made and actually building a fully integrated login manager so they can behave like a real OS.
All this rewriting everything every 2 years is nonsense. Maybe a lot has changed since I last used KDE 3 but I'm not seeing the fruits of their labor
My Ubuntu Summit talk is up! Where I talk about:
1. How Desktop UX is effectively dead
2. Why I hate the term UX/UI with the heat of 1000 suns
3. How OSS can actually innovate in #ux
youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bO…
This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecess...YouTube
i was informed yesterday that Atlassian has inserted an F1 racing game into Confluence.
I was asked if I (as an admin) could disable it because folks were finding it's pop ups annoying. Here is what I found:
"To disable the Car Racing Easter Egg feature, contact Atlassian Support. There is currently no in-product toggle for end-users to turn off this feature themselves. Support can assist with disabling the feature for your site or organization if required."
I'm now running into what I think of as "ghost" open source projects due to genAI.
You'll search for a project that does X, find a public repo for a project that says it does X, it has a beautifully formatted README and well-organized code, but when you install it, it doesn't work.
Then you find the note: "Written with the help of AI, never tested, please send me spare hardware so I can test it."
...
.....
Dead internet.
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FLOSS public transport passenger companion; a timetable in your pocket.f-droid.org
Jiří Eischmann reshared this.
Mixxx Stable 2.5.4 Released!
We're proud to share our early Christmas present with you: Mixxx version 2.5.4, a new stable release. This version bundles various minor corrections, improvements and fixes for the issues you reported. We recommend that all users upgrade to this version.
Check out the full announcement:
mixxx.org/news/2025-12-14-mixx…
Download the most advanced FREE DJ software available, featuring iTunes integration, MIDI controller support, internet broadcasting, and integrated music library.Mixxx DJ Software
KDE Dolphin has a thing called kio-fuse which will mount a fuse filesystem to provide paths to access files from other software that isn't KDE-ified.
This works fine as long as your fuse isn't broken. But also there are apps that get marked as supporting SMB natively... like VLC...
so what I've encountered is that VLC playing videos out of SMB shares you browse in Dolphin is broken on FreeBSD; Linux distro users complain about this sometimes too because they need additional packages
VLC can support SMB, but on FreeBSD it's not built with that by default. (ffmpeg needs SMB support enabled too)
Firefox works though!
Just published an article about how an expert learns - from sight-reading to performing music... on cello using eye tracking technology. it's open access, so freely available: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11…
Even if you don't read the fancy bits, the progression of the heat maps to show the engagement of the eye and mind are very cool ! #research #music #cello
Ecosia’s “Green AI”: false hope for corrosive tech
If, like me, you absolutely hate the recently introduced sidebar-like overlay "side-panel" that opens up when you click tickets in #GitLab, I finally found the obscure place where you can turn it off.
It's not in your user preferences or kebab menu, it's… tucked in that little "Display options" icon-only button between the tickets searchbar and the sorting order combobox:
This weekend, I tried out TalkBack 16.2. And rather than rant about the one step forward and a good 3 steps back it took in Braille support, or how it can't take an actual screenshot and describe the screen unless there's one accessible element onscreen it can grab on to, or any of the other stuff I routinely rant about, today, I'll just say thank goodness for the iPhone.
I'm so glad I didn't sell or give away my iPhone 16 or Apple Watch. I'm so glad I got the AirPods Pro 3. I'm so glad it's evident that at least a few blind people work at Apple and are listened to at least when it comes to their most popular product, the iPhone. I'm so, freaking, glad that Apple at least keeps the lights on for Braille on their platforms. And I'm so glad screen recognition is a thing so when I'm playing a video game, I can have the menu read out even though there is no accessible element on the screen. I'm so glad that with AirPods, Voiceover isn't too sluggish and that you can't really tell that, when you swipe passed the visible end of a list, like the settings app, VoiceOver scrolls the screen for you. I'm so glad that at least that bit of magic is still there. You don't *have* to know these things. In Braille, it *feels* like a Braille-first interface, as far as we've made one in the past 30 years. And when VoiceOver gets AI image descriptions, I'll be thankful for those too. In the meantime, hey Siri, describe my screen. I'm so glad that I can almost always keep my iPhone in my pocket and just use Braille. I'm glad I can type my passcode in Braille and it just works! I'm so glad I can read a book and it pans to the next page. I'm so glad I can bind just about any VoiceOver command to arbitrary Braille keys. If I want dots 1-3 with Enter to go to next link, I can make it do so! If I want Space with Enter with O to open the Braille Access app chooser, there it is! Oh also I can press Command, Option, Control, FN, and Shift modifier keys with Braille commands. Just sayin'. At this point, iOS with Braille would be a way more blind-friendly OS than Android. And I think we should make this more clear: Braille-friendly is blind-friendly. Because if your interface is flexible enough to work with Braille, it'll be flexible enough to work with speech.
An alternative for braille display support under Android is the Android-specific version of BRLTTY, reputedly available from the Google Play Store. As i don't have an Android device suitable for testing, I haven't investigated its capabilities further. I've used it under Linux, of course, but that's a very different environment from Android.
In general, TalkBack seems to be very much a corporate project. The source code used to be available (and perhaps still is), but as far as I know, there's no community of developers outside Google (except for Samsung's version - also a corporate project).
There's a new Amazon bot launching today: `Amzn-SearchBot`
"...used to improve search experiences in Amazon products and services...such as Alexa and Rufus. Amzn-SearchBot does not crawl content for generative AI model training."
Doc page shows user-agent & links to source IP list.
Looks like it *does* obey `robots.txt` at least.
developer.amazon.com/amazonbot
Customer facing page of Amazonbot crawler which all web content publishers can refer to.Developer Portal Master
@miki Yeah I agree, they're definitely trying to make a clear distinction.
I suspect orgs are becoming increasingly likely to outright block bots which pull content to train LLMs for whatever reason so perhaps they're trying to avoid that.
Would be nice if they were a bit more open on the detail of what they *are* going to use the bot for though.
I got the The Oracle archetype!
Неимоверно устаю. Не знаю даже почему видимо проблемы со сдоровьем и общая запущенность тушки. Но после каждого рабочего дня чувсвую себя еще более разбито. За выходные не успеваю полностью восстановиться. В пятницу дак я вообще как правило зомби. Самое обидно при всем том что я хочу постоянно спать. Уснуть крайне тяжело.
If you want to add more security to your Mastodon account, you can set up a system called "two factor authentication" (also known as 2FA). This prevents anyone else logging into your account even if they find out your email and password.
2FA works using a special app on your phone which gives you a short code number to type in when you log in.
I've done a non-technical guide all about 2FA and how to use it, including answers to many questions:
➡️ fedi.tips/using-two-factor-aut…
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediversefedi.tips
Pundit who always want to have it both ways say another analyst can't have it both ways even thought they aren't.
Film at 11.
Je suis trop fière de vous annoncer que je suis passée sur France 3 😁
J’avais trop le trac et beaucoup de mal à trouver les mots mais ça se voit pas trop.
C’etait dans l’émission Météo à la Carte :
france.tv/france-3/meteo-a-la-…
Dans le petit village de Riotor, la neige a déjà métamorphosé les paysages du Massif central, offrant un décor féerique. C’est dans cette ambiance hivernale ...France Télévisions
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I tried making a Neocities account today. I was stopped dead in my tracks by an unlabeled field with protected input in the signup form. I thought it was the password field, but there's a labeled password field with protected input a little further down, so I have no idea what that first one is. Just a little further down is an hcaptcha challenge that forces me to give my email address to hcaptcha because hcaptcha can't be bothered to implement actual accessibility
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 likes this.
Multiple times now Firefox has thrown away all my tabs and I don't know why.
Thank the BSD gods I can just restore the ~/.mozilla/firefox directory from a ZFS snapshot that was taken an hour earlier
> Rob Reiner and his wife murdered by their son
some people will do anything to get out of their family holiday traditions
After my talk at @gnome Asia Summit, I’ve published the source code of Jollpi, a Python-based text editor I’m rewriting with a modern stack.
Built with Python 3, @GTK 4 and GtkSourceView 5, using a modern async architecture and standard Python packaging (pyproject.toml, pip).
It installs cleanly and integrates like a regular Linux desktop app.
Feel free to try it and share feedback.
Source code: gitlab.com/zulfian1732/jollpi-…
#GNOMEAsia #GNOME #GTK #Python #OpenSource
Sustaining inclusive programs takes commitment, especially in challenging funding seasons.
As we welcome the December 2025 @outreachy cohort, we’re grateful for the organizations whose support helps keep this work strong and moving forward:
➡️ Equalizer: @wikimediafoundation, #Bloomberg
➡️ Promoter: @tarides #Cisco
➡️ Includer: #CUNY, @debian, @getsentry
➡️ Welcomer: @creativecommons , @mozilla, @gitlab, @gnome and #RedHat
Your partnership enables paid, remote internships and meaningful participation in open source for people facing systemic barriers.
Thank you for standing with us and investing in a more inclusive ecosystem
#Outreachy #OpenSource #Inclusion #Community
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