Just a random observation. On FB someone posted up a thing asking who you'd like to kiss under the mistletoe, as in which celebrity. Is it just me, or does it seem that the majority of the sighted population picks actors/actresses? Meanwhile, I'll pick a musician every time.
@FreakyFwoof Also, maybe I'm weird, but I have never looked at a stranger a.k.a. a celebrity and thought wow I really want to make out with a person that I don't know and I've never spoken to! I have never understood having crushes on celebrities ever and I feel like such a weird outlier lol
@pawpower Not weird to me, quite normal. I mean I've heard some voices in programs I've thought hmm yeah that's kinda nice, but I'm not jumping out of planes to impress them or anything ridiculous.
@FreakyFwoof @pawpower Make out with? Definitely not. Talk to for hours on end? Yeah, there are a couple (non-fiction) writers I'd very gladly do that with.
@miki @FreakyFwoof Oh, there are definitely authors and historical figures I would love to sit down and chat with, but this kind of fetishizing or lusting after celebrities based on either physical appearance or the way they sound just has never been something I've understood. I'm interested in peoples thought processes and life experiences and that's what really makes me want to get to know them more.
Random Company Email: hi, we have an important thing to tell you.Which we could have put in this email.But we're going to ask you to click on this link to go to our website and then sign in to see the information.
V Liberci se ve středu sešli lidé na srazu trapných vánočních svetrů. V místní kavárně se už tradičně koná sváteční setkání. Letos se poprvé budou vánoční svetry i oceňovat.
If the guy who invented the GIF saying it’s a soft G Isn’t enough to win the argument, then Bruce Willis saying ‘Die Hard’ isn’t a Christmas movie sure as shit doesn’t settle anything.
I'm playing around with all three United States mobile carriers in my parents' neighborhood in central North Carolina.
Verizon and T-Mobile both do very well inside city limits, and are about neck and neck in this neighborhood in particular. Good, but not great. AT&T, in the immediate neighborhood, is the worse performer in terms of signal and speed.
T-Mobile is faster than Verizon in some places, but drops out and doesn't exist at all in others where both AT&T and Verizon still work.
I am really tempted to do that, but because I am in just two locations at most, it's more of a "ooh I wonder" kind of thing. How has switching worked out in practice? Like is it really as seamless as they make it out to be?
@twynn There are a couple of different ways you can do it. You can either use a dual network configuration, where you get two numbers that are on the same plan, then you just switch depending on which is better if you just use the same two all the time. Especially easy when you use two eSIMs. Or, you can do a network switch request, it takes a few minutes, usually 10 or so, you get a new eSIM, and that's that. Because I have two eSIMs on my phone, I have to delete one of them before I can install a new one, otherwise it would be a little faster.
basically, they are doing a port request on the back end every time you switch. Given that, it's pretty seamless.
Wait, aren't you on iOS? I thought that you could store multiple eSIMs, but only two can be active at once. is that not how that actually works? So id you do dual, you're paying for two lines, right?
@twynn It's an extra $10 a month if you do the dual network stack thing. Yes, I think you are supposed to be able to store eight eSIMs( but at least for me, I can't seem to install a new one until I delete one.
Oh, huh. That's actually pretty reasonable, and I might actually switch at some point in the future, so may bother you for an invite code one of these days.
FYI: I'll be getting a 2 TB external hard drive tomorrow and I'm also getting an iPhone 17 and I don't know what else what I'm getting, that's all I know for my christmas presence. Have fun.
I guess it's Xmas Eve. Please note, it's okay to feel other emotions at this time, besides utter glee and happiness. Xmas is difficult for most of us. It's never really been my happiest time of the year... and I'm okay with that. For me, what helps is talking to people on the phone and stuff.. Heck, I spent Xmas on my own one year and it was glorious! Another year, friends forced me to go to a local Chinese restaurant and man, the food was good. Then we went to a few pubs and I was amazed at how many people were out, just to hang out with other people. Anyway, just remember that if you are feeling alone, that you are not. Especially if you're on Mastodon.
It’s the 2025 Matrix Holiday Special!! Come read all about what went right and what went wrong in 2025 and what the future holds for 2026. Thanks for flying Matrix, and happy holidays! 🎄☃️⛷️🦑 matrix.org/blog/2025/12/24/mat…
> Write a blog post, tell TWIM, tell the world, tell us what we can improve
Well, I can tell you what improvements I would like to see from a perspective of a person who has been trying to write some maubot plugins.
I'd welcome improvements to HTML rendering in messages in all clients, because right now literally every client has some issues in this area and this makes it a pain in the ass to create message layouts that look good. Among those problems are incorrect <table> element rendering, missing newlines after some tags, <details> tag not working at all, issues displaying <sup> or <sub>, weird behavior around inline <img> tags or not displaying them at all, and many more, in every client there are different ones. Oh, and it would be nice to get some control of column width in <table>, pretty please. It's not in the spec, but would be great to have it. Element Desktop has the most correct implementation of all this but it's also not without problems. Why is this important to me? Because I want to create messages like the one on the screenshots I attached (made in Cinny), something similar to Discord embeds. The subset of HTML at our disposal is already very limited, so it's even more annoying when it doesn't work the way it should.
Other than that, I would appreciate fixing spoiler support in Element. Right now it's half-assed on desktop, and nonexistent in Element X. Have you ever tried to discuss movies or books without properly working spoiler tags? I'd rather not discuss them at all.
@korba well, we can work with that. the original choice of HTML for rich text in Matrix was to give us the flexibility for pixel-perfect copy-paste in future, but then we fell down a rabbithole of dealing with Markdown dialects and haven't got back to figuring out how to do richer text while sanitising styling against attacks. Have you already filed a bug for this somewhere ooi?
Happy holidays, merry christmas, julefest or just a wonderful winterday my little turnips 🎄❄️ I hope you have the tastiest food and the brightest candles 🌱 #art #illustration #cuteart #chritmas
Dear Amazon, if you're going to use AI enhanced synthetic speech for Audio Description on your Prime TV series, the least you can do is check it for pronunciation quality. The voice being realistic isn't enough.
In Talamasca: The Secret Order, AD mispronunciations include "Surré" instead of "Surrey", "alyus" instead of "alias", and "one hundreds" instead of "hundreds".
Fellow technical, geeky types who have found themselves in a position of leadership:
What books/courses actually helped you support a technical team?
I have a hard time taking corporate literature about team leadership skills seriously because I'm a cynical, technical IC. But I know it's not ALL junk.
did you know that L. Frank Baum, most famous for the Oz books, wrote an origin story for santa Claus? It's called the Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. It even had a Rankin/Bass special made based on it.
Naturally when I mentioned The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus earlier it's because I was reading it. and now I am not because I've finished it. I've read enough of the Oz books to know that I probably would have guessed this was written by the same author even if I didn't know that up front. Baum has a very particular style of writing that you can always tell it's him when you read one of his books.
This has nothing to do with Christmas, but I thought I'd mention it since you mention Baum. He wrote a ton of other stuff besides the Oz books, and it did sell quite a bit. I think the one which sold best, I'm not sure whether sales were better than the Oz books but am sure it didn't last as well, is his Aunt Jane series. It's an interesting glimpse of the time, I'm not particularly into that myself but did read the first one. Anyhow, it's on Gutenberg, I believe, as well as being in the usual Delphi collection which they call, with some justification given that it contains, at least, the vast majority of what he wrote, the complete Baum delphiclassics.com/shop/l-fran…
I love this recording of the Nat King Cole trio performing The Christmas song in 1946. The version you always hear with the strings is lovely and everything but this stripped back version with just bass, guitar and Nat's piano and vocals is something else. youtube.com/watch?v=5QJNhCi3Ay… #Music
People in power keep trying to make technology more oppressive and indifferent to your rights. But EFF supporters fight back, every single time. Stand with our community today! eff.org/yec
Good grief I wish someone would create a way to do a mass migration from #lemmy to #piefed. Lemmy is by far the most annoying software I have the displeasure of maintaining. In today's adventures, the Lemmy developers finally created a #postgres index in 0.19.15 that I'd created myself ages ago for performance reasons. But the database migration fails if the index already exists. Even if it's the exact index it wants to create, created exactly the way the migration is doing it. And no, you can't skip a database migration, and no, it's not smart enough to check and skip the migration by itself. So you have to log into the database and drop index idx_post_aggregates_creator, and let Lemmy recreate it. Yes, this takes a while, for absolutely no reason. And if you wanted to do it without downtime in an offline copy of the database, I guess you'd have to do a bunch of fiddling to trick Lemmy into thinking the migration happened when you went to upgrade production. There had to be a better way to do that! But it's not documented and I have no idea what it would be.
“What makes me transgendered is that my birth sex—which is female—appears to be in social contradiction to my gender expression—which is read as masculine. I defend my right to that social contradiction. In fact, I want to live long enough to hear people ask, ‘What made me think that was a contradiction in the first place?’”
Super huge panic. Took left Cadence out of backpack, now cells across two sides of it won't raise or lower at all. Gosh. Did me dropping my bag on the car floor ruin the display? (another reason I wish cases existed for it.) I ran the dot calibration tool, nothing- those dots, 4 cells on either left and right sides of the left display, appear dead to it. Wow, just wow. What a holiday. Still no luck. Now only 4 cells actually try to pop up when I use it. Have a feeling something did get dislodged inside and now will need new one sent.
Firefox is stopping a page from opening a popup, but I need to allow it do open. How do I do this? When I hear the alert, there's no button/hotkey announced that would allow the popup or open settings. No amount of tab, f6, and arrows gets me to where this alert is so I can change it. Firefox 146.0.1, NVDA 2025.2.
Bri🥰
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