I love reading large threads of people with absolutely zero clue about stuff, and zero historical perspective about how stuff works, but throwing around absolutes like “this thing is unacceptable” or “the project is blocking everybody”. It’s literally hilarious to witness the extent of lack of self awareness.
20 years ago I would have parachuted into the thread with a flamethrower and unlimited amount of Molotov bottles; these days, however? Nah, waste of electrons. I guess that’s what you call “character development”
None of this history happened in private venues; there are primary sources available to anybody who wants to educate themselves. If you don’t want to, though, I’ll just point and laugh from afar
Remember that virtually all of the economic strife in Venezuela is not occurring because of “socialism,” but because of sanctions imposed in a response to Venezuela kicking foreign corporations out and nationalizing those industries. Same as with Cuba.
The plight of the people of Venezuela, just as with Cuba, has predominantly been the fault of the US government having a tantrum on behalf of its giant corporations.
Ich stelle einen #OpenTalk-Raum zur Verfügung und möchte damit gleichzeitig einen Stresstest machen (bis zu 200 Teilnehmer:innen gehen rein, daher teilt und boostet, so viel ihr könnt)! Ihr braucht nur einen Browser – und Zeit.
Emerged from the #Jabber #community in 1999 and originally designed to provide an open and #decentralised alternative to #ICQ and #MSN, XMPP evolved to an independent alternative for todays #chat apps. #rtc #whatsapp #signal
We’ll be in Brussels showcasing Bliss OS, Waydroid, SmartDock and more from our open-source ecosystem, alongside @IzzyOnDroid and our friends @shiftphone at booth UD2-02.
We’re excited to share what’s next for the BlissLabs ecosystem.
This builds on the hotfix in 2.41.2 to also fix .pkpass files explicitly stating ISO-8859-1 as format.
It also forcibly sets the barcode format of all existing cards to ISO-8859-1 on upgrade. This used to be the only format supported in Catima, so this reverts any sudden barcode changes.
We may need another bugfix release to get this all right. If you understand UTF-8, *please* join in in github.com/CatimaLoyalty/Andro….
STR Scan your source pkpass/website with https://zügli.app/ to verify the D-Ticket works. Import pkpass file. Click save without changing the binary data shown there. Scan it from Catima with https...
Those of you who use the #Deutschlandticket are likely affected in 2.41.0 - 2.41.2. And scanning a Deutschlandticket with your camera or from a PDF file (not using a .pkpass file) will likely not work correctly.
The current workaround for both cases is to manually set the "Barcode encoding" field in the card setting to "ISO-8859-1".
Not currently sure how to fix scanning Deutschlandtickets with the camera without breaking the issue 2.41.0 was meant to fix by adding barcode encoding support :(
I decided to just quickly release 2.41.4 and disable the automatic barcode encoding detection for now. Breaking Deutschlandticket is definitely one of the worst things that could have happened and I don't want people to get stranded in Germany.
Yes, from 2.41.0 - 2.41.3 Deutschlandticket is fully unusable based on the information I have. This includes Deutschlandtickets added to Catima before 2.41.0
In 2.41.4 both pkpass and scanned with camera Deutschlandtickets should work again as they did in 2.40.X and existing tickets will be fixed on installing the update with no user intervention needed.
Edit: 2.41.3 should deal with the pkpass correctly already, but 2.41.4 will fix also non-pkpass
You are the best!!! Instead of going to bed, cause it's late and your day starts early, you take care of your Catima users and give us another update to fix the DE-Ticket issue! Chapeau! 🎩 👍
Saludos, estimados fediversenses: Me asomo por quienes me habéis mencionado. Primero, toda mi gratitud por vuestros mensajes y por el tiempo de preguntarse cómo lo estaba pasando. En este momento estoy bien, dentro de la coyuntura que vive el país. Mi cercanía de zona militar y Fuerte Tiuna nos afectó de manera indirecta: un minuto antes del sobrevuelo se fue el servicio eléctrico. La interrupción nos dejó sin servicios básicos durante 31h. En mi zona residencial se vive una calma singular. No hemos observado violencia. la información oficial que disponemos es la activación de un Estado de Conmoción Externa. Hoy recibimos ayuda de mi compi de grado; mi núcleo lo constituye mi hermana y dos personas de la tercera edad con demencia que no pueden quedarse sin supervisión. Somos docentes universitarias, nuestro salario mensual no supera los $10 (ya no tengo el empleo2), así pues, buscamos formas de resolver las necesidades más fundamentales y este amigo que es como mi hermano, nos ayudó para que mi hermana no saliera sola a las calles hoy. Hay mucha desinformación y rumores, no voy a entrar en eso. Tampoco voy a hablar de política. Mi resumen es que hemos vivido en casa 31 h muy difíciles; da igual cuanta narrativa use, no alcanzaréis a comprenderlo y estoy muy agotada para engancharme en explicaciones innecesarias. todavía tengo que evaluar (dependiendo de mis glucemias) si la insulina que pude comprar (gracias a la ayuda de amigos del extranjero) no se fastidió por la falla en la refrigeración. Si os interesa mi experiencia, solo os puedo decir que no hay nada más duro que la incertidumbre y el miedo. En este momento hay que tener serenidad, paciencia y cautela. Evitar rumores y conclusiones precipitadas.
The 5th Doctor's era began 44 years ago on this day, 4th January 1982, with Season 19's Castrovalva - Peter Davison's first story as the Fifth Doctor. 😀 #DoctorWho
The problem with having a laptop with extremely excellent battery life is that I didn't realize it was on battery power for literally almost 24 hours, until it shut down. OOPS!
Mine isn't that long but long enough to make the user forget that he's on battery power. I have two programs to solve it, but both are for Windows only, unfortunately. The stand-alone is masonasons.me/pages/bnt.php and the NVDA add-on is github.com/vrivrixd/BatteryLev… This is hardly a difficult job for any app, these are just the ones I've found. My problem is that if they're speech only, I can easily ignore them.
So one of the problems with automated #translation based on #AI is that it's in this weird, awkward place now where it's not good enough to seem native, but it is good enough not to be immediately obvious. I had forgotten I set my browser to automatically translate pages in several languages to English for me. Then I clicked on a #fanfic, read the first couple chapters, and was getting really annoyed why one character kept changing Gender's, and the name of a location wasn't consistent from chapter to chapter. Turns out the author was writing in #Spanish, I hadn't noticed the language tag, and when I clicked the browser just automatically translated without clearly telling me. Thank goodness I realized, just in time, before I posted a comment on her work pointing out the issues with writing quality and offering editing help! Yikes! That doesn't mean that I'm against Machine Translation or even think it's a bad thing. But as it gets better and better, and starts living in this awkward uncanny valley, we really need to carefully rethink user interfaces. Maybe disable all form inputs until the user clicks "I'm aware this was translated" somewhere? I had the comment all written, folks; I was that close to posting. Maybe put "translated from" in some obvious place like the title bar? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that we need to be putting way more thought into it.
The latest version of Mona can auto translate posts using Apple's on device translation models, and for me that feature was worth upgrading alone even if that doesn't yet do every language I want so I still need to do some manual translation. Anyway in that case it does clearly indicate when a post was auto translated. I suspect the browser does too on the screen but screen readers don't announce this. That could definitely be improved.
@pitermach Even Mona only indicates it after reading the text. IMHO, it should be before! I can see myself replying to a toot in a language the author doesn't speak.
The biggest change in my lifetime which I have seen and experienced was going from a society where most people had a base level of trust. We have gone from that to *everything* being a scam by default and nothing you see or read is real.
nice beer, great brewery. I only live a few miles away so am lucky to be able to drink it as often as I want. Damn! There goes another New Year's resolution.
All of you must hope with all your best hopes for my old iPod, because he's being a difficult kid, or should I say, grandpa? He's 6th gen, so if anyone has any outlandish tips, I am all up for them, if there's a hack way to extract the data, that'll be awesome too. Grins.
You're not imagining it. I'm on here less. Not because I'm mad at anyone or anything but because whenever I scroll through here, I see plenty of news posts and very little from actual people. Any tips on how I can fix that without performing excessive technical labor?
I miss my old iOS lock screen that used to predictably show the time, date, any unread notifications, and that was it.
Sometimes it still does that(albeit with the date before the time), while at other times showing the full Notification Centre or a set of "media suggestions" and I haven't personally grasped exactly when it's likely to do what.
If you long press on the lock screen, you can customize what shows up on there. I believe there's a way to turn off Siri suggestions. I use my watch for the time and date, so I left them on. But if I didn't have a watch that would be infuriating.
1st post of 2026! The firmware from the Mobile ESPN version of the #Samsung SPH-A900 was dumped. Being that only 2 phones were released on this short-lived MVNO, one can say that every Mobile ESPN device has been dumped!
How much reverse-engineering of those old phone OSes do you guys do, or do you just dump?
I'm particularly interested in how old, pre-QNX Blackberry's worked (on an OS architecture and protocol levels). They seem like absolutely fascinating devices, and very little is known about them compared to other contemporary OSes, E.G. Symbian or Windows Mobile.
Ich bin aus Karlsruhe, neuhier und schaue mich noch um. Ich vermisse ehrlicherweise die Album-Funktion von Facebook, denn ich fotografiere gerne Kleinigkeiten hier und da. Meine vegan und häkeln Bubbles von Instagram suche ich hier auch noch 🔍 ☺️ #Fotografie #Photography #DIY #häkeln #vegan #neuhier #karlsruhe
Vielleicht ist Mastodon dann nicht das Richtige für Dich. Bei größerem Gewicht auf Fotos ist #PixelFed wahrscheinlich besser, z.B. pixelfed.de/ Mastodon-Accounts kann man dann trotzdem folgen...
Hi all, just wanted to note that the download links for the recent streams are now working properly! For the most part I'm still recovering from over 12 hours live after not streaming in years haha and thus it'll still be a couple days before some of the as yet unreleased things demoed on the streams start coming to fruition, but I'll still be doing a few things in the mean time here and there such as fixing these download links and hopefully soon slashing away at this audio chopping monster in Redspot a little.
@flyingpenguinMwauthzyx Currently I only tend to use mastodon and even then I don't appear very much other than for announcements and to check on messages, I've found that limiting my social media exposure can be a very good thing for me indeed. That being said especially as I release more products, I am preparing to probably return to the forum to some small degree as well.
I am disinterested in "downloading the app." It works fine in my browser. I don't see why it should have access to my contacts, location and my mother's maiden name at all times.
@amir Hi, please where can I find documentation on how to add words to an Eloquence dictionary? In particular, I want to correct the pronounciation of a few numbers such as 12 and 19 in Brazilian Portuguese. I need to know what file should I add the corrections to, e.g. main or root, and how to do it so that the correct pronounciation is used inside strings such as 12:14 but not when within bigger numbers such as 3124.
Hi. Unfortunately, there is no formal public documentation for writing Eloquence dictionary rules. What we know about them mostly comes from community reverse-engineering, existing dictionary files, and long-time practical use. Regarding root versus main, the root dictionary is still language-specific, not global across all languages, so using something like pt_BR.root.dic is perfectly fine for Portuguese-only fixes. main is usually preferred for general word corrections, but for numbers and symbols the root dictionary is commonly used and works just as well. Eloquence dictionaries rely on simple string matching rather than regexes or numeric logic, so there is no built-in way to express conditions like “only match 12 when it’s not part of a larger number”. Because of that, you can’t truly distinguish between 12 and 3124 in a single rule. That’s basically the limit of what Eloquence dictionaries can do here, and some numeric cases simply can’t be handled cleanly at the dictionary level.
I just published the TagFit landing page: tagfit.app
Here you will find all the information about the app, including places where you can get NFC tags. My idea is to record some demo videos next week.
I know the design is bland, to say the least. It will come. First things first: functionality and testing with real users. I hope you find it interesting!
TagFit helps blind and low vision people organize their belongings using NFC tags. Tag your clothes, food, and objects. Find them instantly with your phone.
Acabo de publicar la landing page de TagFit: tagfit.app
Aquí encontraréis toda la información sobre la app, incluyendo lugares en los que conseguir etiquetas NFC. Mi idea es grabar algunos vídeos de demostración la semana que viene.
Sé que el diseño es soso, cuanto menos. ya llegará. Lo primero, la funcionalidad y las pruebas con usuarios reales. ¡Espero que os parezca interesante!
TagFit helps blind and low vision people organize their belongings using NFC tags. Tag your clothes, food, and objects. Find them instantly with your phone.
So, during holidays I built (with friends) some original and off brand Lego trains stuff and I'm quite happy about how it went.
Two Lego original trains - Crocodile locomotive with official motorisation and Downtown tram with unofficial motorisation from Rebrickable (using official parts). A few train cars from Bluebrixx. A mixture of official tracks and tracks from Trixbrix/some no name brands - I'm especially happy about different track curves (R56 and R72, official is only R40), because I was able to build a really nice two-track railway with constant distance between tracks.
Regarding Bluebrixx - I'm glad I bought the train cars during the Black Friday sales, because although they're really nice, one of them had to be adapted to work properly with some spare Lego parts we had at home and the quality of the bricks is not as good as original Lego ones - they're sometimes too tight and sometimes too loose and it's slightly frustrating. I can't imagine building them again because of that - I will just keep them in a completed state forever 😟
Trixbrix tracks are really good quality - some are injection molded and those are almost indistinguishable from official Lego ones, some are 3D printed (specific switches), and these work well too, although they're slightly "soft" - I'm wondering what type of filament was used for them.
Also, I was amazed how fast the tram is using the custom motorisation - it sometimes derailed on full speed even when on the R72 curves, which are pretty wide.
Wow, our son has the downtown tram and I had no idea it could be motorised. And I didn't know about Bluebrixx either. Some of the trains they offer look great!
TFW you look at the bug and think you are gonna have to implement a lot of things. But in the end it was just that small bit that with missing: a one line because of a missing API that was just implemented in a few lines.
Tonight at 6 PM Eastern, Sonic Synergy goes live for its first show of 2026. We continue our year in review by looking through our 2025 Apple Music wrap-up. What will we find? Will there be any guilty pleasure songs that we’d rather not have others know about? Tune in and find out. This and more can be yours for the low low price of tuning in tonight at 6 PM Eastern. Extremely NSFW, and not for everyone. Proudly powered by your calls and messages to (833) 452-4452.
I love our apartment but we really do maximize every bit of space. In setting up my new ham radio gear, the only practical place to run the cable into the house is in the living room. Going to be using part of my entertainment unit for the radio and it’s power supply.
Many people think it can be substituted by speech synthesis, by audiobooks, by other things. It can't.
Voice is serial, it unfolds in time. It requires working memory. Braille is static. It unfolds in space, remains stable in time. It backs working memory, does not consume it. For things that require pinning down relationships (mathematics, music, programming) braile has clear advantages.
This is not to say people can't manage without it. I don't always use a braille display. But it makes things better: learning, accuracy, performance, speed.
Witholding braille from blind people is withholding literacy, it's denying capacity.
Thank you so much for your toots and the sharing of that article, that was so interesting !! I knew about the decrease in litteracy among blind and low vision people, mainly due to the digitalization of medias and the development of text to speech, but I did not know (even if I could have guessed) about all the barriers in learning and teaching Braille.
In the article you shared, I was surprised (though I should not have been, in retrospect) that the arguments "you would not make him blind" to not teach someone mobility skills, are precisely the same used for mobility impaired people, and all the "arguments" against using canes or wheelchairs. As if those tools were "giving up on disability", when they actually allow you to not give up on your participation in society. Not using them, is giving up !
Wow, I should have guessed that wasn't a unique blind thing; but of course it makes sense that to able society, an accommodation, especially if it's visible, if it sets you apart, is an unbearable reminder; when for us, it's how we get things done.
Fully agreed. I hardly ever use braille now that I'm done with public school, the efficiency gap is real. My top braille reading speed was 180 WPM, my screen reader reads at 910 WPM. That said, when I code, I see the code in my head in braille. It helps so much.
I set up several hundred public domain books with TTS on an android tablet for my friend that's going blind. He appreciated it, but it doesn't replace reading.
Also even Google and Amazon's best AI TTS isn't even close to a human narrator for fiction. Non mainstream names and places fail. SF&F etc is even worse.
It's not usually easy to learn braille for an adult, and getting braille printed books is complicated (they take up considerably more space). Braille displays are devices which plug into computers and can produce a line or two of braille on demand, dynamically. the problem is they're very expensive for complicated reasons involving scale of manufacture.
I hope the best for your friend; whether braille ends up being a part of it or not.
Yes, I know what a Braille display is. I considered designing one in 1990s based on dotmatrix print head ideas.
I assume, maybe wrongly, that a embossed label maker like a Dymo, exists, using wider tape, to print Braille labels by hand. Maybe there are computer based ones too.
It's increasingly hard to learn new alphabets, Morse code and languages as you get older. So I'd assumed this was true of Braille.
He has macular degeneration & got him a video camera some years ago. No use.
Right, there are braille dymo printers, I've never heard of computer-based ones, but manual ones, sure. The tape is thicker and wider and the printer is bigger.
And yes, with braille it's not just the normal mental plasticity issues of learning a new script, but also the sensorial issues of learning to read with a sense you haven't used for that before; and for some people even being able to tell the dots apart can be a challenge.
Hacking a manual one to work off a PC wouldn't be hard. Geared stepper motor to turn dial (if it's like a dymo), solenoid to punch and a sensor for one position (such as cut).
No driver needed. Emulate USB serial with €5 PIC micro.
Or make from scratch. You only need one column of punches and advance tape small amount in character and several times for character space.
Is it really only 2 columns and 3 rows? I guess once it was invented only the tiniest changes were possible.
In general yes, 2 columns, 3 rows, 6 dots altogether. Though there's computer braille which has 8 dots (2 columns, 4 rows). Most characters are the same but the lowest row is typically used for special characters and such.
This is why I desperately wish more r&d (or if it already exists, that it's way more visible) on how to make braille readable on computers and phones was a thing. As nice as screen readers seem to be, I got the impression before I even knew how ubiquitous they are that they were a poor alternative to if you could somehow display a braille version of a webpage.
There are refreshable braille displays, but they're extremely expensive, because the only mechanism that has been found that works well enough in terms of speed, durability, and power draw, uses the piezoelectric effect; and building those cells is very fiddly. It requires very large complex machinery, but braille display runs are small (maybe 5000 units at most) so the per-unit cost is large.
I work with UK university age students. Sadly most of our visually impaired students are never taught Braille even with progressive impairments or very slow visual-reading speeds/capacities. Many get no O&M either.
Your NFB article sounded so familiar. A VI child constantly babied by a full-time adult rather than taught skills.
We get many low-vision students who get a nasty shock at university as the disability support and university simply won't fund full-time adult assistance.
You are making me remember of a deaf student who was barely taught sign language when kid. She learnt a bit of it in the years she attended our school, but she lacked any autonomy.
Heck, braille might be a useful thing for a lot of fully-sighted people to know. I'm thinking of all the times I've reached around the back of a piece of hi-fi or computing equipment, trying to find the right socket while using my memory of the layout (but reversed) as a guide, or maybe looking through a small mirror. If the sockets were all labeled in braille, on the other hand...
Caveat: It might or might not be practical (can braille characters still be legible when they're as small as most electronic socket-labels?), but I have to wonder. ...and I can't think there aren't other cases where it would be even more obviously a plus.
TLDR: it's kind of silly (at best) to withhold a tool from someone for fear that it will make them less functional.
Depends on the socket size, but in some cases, sure. Labelling the types of USB on a board for example would be doable. Some headphones have an L or R character in braille on them (Sennheiser does this, for instance). I am sometimes a bit amused, no offence meant, at how helpless most sighted people are in the dark. If they can't see something they don't even bother exploring by touch and so on.
This also fits with why reading books on paper is often better for the thinking of sighted people than are ebooks or audio (ebooks lack most of the spatial signals that paper provides)
I think that's a bit more complicated; there's some research regarding neuroplasticity which shows blind people reading braille or listening to speech synthesis mobilise similar visual cortex machinery to sighted people reading. Which is to say, I think comprehension and retention can be very similar if one is used to it. But there are many cases where braille is clearly better: learning spelling (in one's own or a non-native language), maths, music, coding, tabular data. In a way, prose is the case where, I think, the difference is smallest.
There is a similar, but sort of opposite, problem with support for deaf people. There, many people assume that written text is enough and think it’s okay to ignore the signed modality. But written text is always in another language than the deaf person’s first language.
If only people could ask someone who knows something about the subject instead of just guessing.
I love it when there is braile labelling on products. Whenever I see it I think "Why don't all companies make this small effort?" I also think it's beautiful to feel, and to look at.
My spouse is currently losing their sight. With neuropathy and loss of sensation in their hands and elsewhere, Braille isn’t an option. They are feeling the loss of the static information so hard. Deliberately removing that from anyone is simply inhumane.
I'm not blind - but my father is. He never learned braille and would say disparaging things about "not needing it" - but I wonder how much of that was from shame or stigma a lot. He's not one to talk about any of it, either. I remember trying to ask him many years ago as a child - before we had the internet - and he was very against even considering learning it.
I think I would have liked to have learned it with him. I think language is cool and interesting. I'm sad he never felt like it was something worth of his time but it wasn't a boundary I wanted to press, either.
I get it, there are people who get very self-conscious about needing accommodations, especially ones that set them apart as different. There are people who don't want to use canes and such because it marks them. It's unfortunate.
The early detractors of Braille, sighted teachers in schools for the blind, burned Braille books precisely because they very clearly recognized the power that literacy gave blind people. No one should be in the business of taking Braille away from blind people in modern times.
@lerven I agree with this 100%! Even as someone who more or less exclusively listens to audio books for pleasure and use mostly speech on my computer, I am very thankful for my Braille display. Especially given my job at a Braille production facility, it's scary when I hear about blind folks who are either never given the opportunity or outright refuse to learn Braille. I can understand if someone loses their sight later in life and doesn't want to learn Braille, but in far too many instances I've heard about, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Emmanuele Bassi
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