Here's the christmas question of the day. Do you believe that the 12 days of christmas compounds or just lists the things you get as a reminder? Watched some christmas movie I had never heard of with Eddie murphy in it called Candy Cane Lane where this dude signs a contract with an elf gone bad (think sell your soul to the devil). Elf tells him that he needs the five golden rings or he'll turn into an ornament but gets him on a technicality by saying nope, you really need 40 rings because 5 golden rings appears 8 times in the song. Sneaky. So. Does it compound? or no. Thoughts?
@arfy Yeah she got him on that technicality. he was like I have five golden rings. then suddenly there's 12 partridges and everybody starts scrambling to figure out why. Sneaky.
Last week, I threw together Syntherceptor, a SAPI5 synthesiser which speaks using NVDA. This is useful for apps like Komplete Kontrol, Surge, etc. which use SAPI5 but you'd prefer the speech output to happen using your NVDA synthesiser and settings. This also prevents voices from speaking over each other, allows you to interrupt speech with a key press, etc. There is an existing project called NVDASapi which already does this, but we can't seem to identify or contact its developer, it isn't open source, it doesn't interrupt speech when the app requests it and it's a bit tricky to install. That said, Syntherceptor is very early in development, so you may wish to tread carefully. If it crashes, it'll probably crash the app you're using, so save your work regularly, though I haven't seen that happen yet. syntherceptor.jantrid.net/
With today being Christmas, here is your annual reminder to be nice to newbies in your spaces.
There is going to be a very sudden influx of people who are just getting into the spaces you occupy because they got a gift that acts as their gateway into that activity. Maybe you're into photography and someone just bought them their first ever camera body, or you're into music and someone bought them their first guitar, or you're an audiophile and someone bought them their first really nice headphones, or you're big into TTRPGs and someone just bought them their first ever core rulebook.
Whatever the specific activity and gift, these people are going to have no idea what they're doing, they're going to ask a lot of obvious questions, they're going to make a lot of rookie mistakes, and there's going to be a lot of them.
I cannot stress this enough: BE NICE TO THEM.
Few things will ruin someone's enjoyment of something faster than trying to join its community and getting such a rude first impression that their conclusion is "People who like this are kind of assholes. I don't think I want to do this if it's going to involve getting yelled at." Craigslist and eBay and FB Marketplace will be filled with mint condition gifts being resold to attest to this in the coming months.
You were there at the very first step once. Be the person for them that you wish you had back then. (Or if you were lucky enough, the person you did have who fostered your love of it!) Make this something they'll love just as much as you do, not something they'll want to sell and get away from as soon as possible.
Be the reason this Christmas starts a lifelong passion for them, not the reason they decide to abandon something that they would've loved because people made them feel bad for needing a helping hand.
Can you imagine if the billionaire tech bros were spending all their energy developing solutions to clean the planet and distribute resources better instead of incessantly enshittifying our lives and trying to devaluate labour?
What a different world that would be. I wish them all a Ghosts-of-Christmas experience.
This is our third Christmas as a couple, our second Christmas in Yukon, and our first Christmas as mr. and mrs. Erven. Merry Christmas to all. @alyssa6595
The 2024 Annual Hope Valley Carol sing, submitted to us by @jcast, is already in progress, immediately followed by the Lessons and Carols service @coasterfreak88 submitted.
@Friendica Support i really wish there was another option for having a dark theme in #Friendica. i would like having a multi-shade black / charcoal page, with lavender / violet accents, but so far have not found a way to achieve it (note, for many years i used to use the #Stylus AddOn, with which i created numerous custom themes for many sites, but a year ago i disabled it & others as part of my desire to begin minimising all non-essential AO attack surfaces). Though in many ways using #DarkReader for Friendica is quite good, overall i tend to eschew it being on for this site, coz it hides that handy temporary shading highlight of posts in a thread for which a Notification was received.
The small number of current dark themes offer me a rather unappealing colour choice.
The custom theme option initially excited me, til i realised, afaict, it is based on the Light theme, with no Dark theme option, so that all the dialogue boxes & dropdown menus remain eye-piercingly bright white, that hurts my eyes. The least-worst i could conjure was
but as mentioned, too much blinding white remains.
inevitably then, i keep returning to the so-called Black theme, but it is... quite boring. the entire page is simply all a single "shiny" black tone, with my chosen accent relieving the monotony. compare this to the so-called Dark themes, to see the difference; they use different shades of the base colour, which is more visually appealing, creating a "panelled" effect.
@Droppie [opensoc] is this your own instance do you have access to all the files if so go to view themes and open up the style CSS for the theme you're using and look for all the colors are and change them through the code it takes a lot of trial and error to get it quite right then save it as a new theme in a new folder move everything else to that folder along with that style then enable it in admin go back to your settings select your new theme and you should have what you want again it takes a bunch of trial and error and a little bit of time to go through it and do it I had done that a couple of times ended up going back to White but I've made all my icons green anyways if it's your own instance you can copy the style sheet like I said copy the entire thing over to a new folder under a new name or rename the current style is style x and your new one is the regular style
Mike Gorse
in reply to Kevin LaRose, Antifa Member • • •