My favourite talk from this year’s #id24 is How to consider non-native English speakers in UX. They talk about some really good things that also apply for cognitive accessibility and these things are so easy to overlook if you don’t carefully consider the impact language can have on understanding
I am brimming with pride, gratitude, and joy after the 1st annual Matrix Conference. So much to say!
Grateful to punctuate a great week sharing a lovely time at Café Botanico, a delightful garden-to-table restaurant hidden in the heart of Neukölln, with some of my colleagues at the Matrix.org Foundation. Thanks for being amazing, team 💖
Left-wing coalition wins French elections so King Macron forms right-wing government.
Such democracy.
(In case you needed yet another reminder that fucking neoliberals will always choose fascism over social justice when they feel their wallets are threatened.)
Contra the “humans are a virus” discourse that’s popular among eco-fascists and, unfortunately, a sizable segment of the left that likes to imagine other people (but never them) are The Problem, humans have a long history of sustainably and often *beneficially* interacting with their environments.
“Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as ‘natural,’ ‘intact,’ and ‘wild’ generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural.”
In other words, much of the wilderness we imagine as pristine reservoirs of biodiversity is in reality the product of human effort.
The Amazon River basin is covered with rain forest that many people mistake for a primordial sort of natural reserve, lightly peopled and untouched until recent deforestation.
On the contrary, we now know that the Amazon was once densely peopled as archeologists continue to discover the remains of city after sprawling city. The Amazon forest we see today is the remains of what was once a vast garden, cultivated to supply food to those cities.
Indigenous land use was once so pervasive and intensive that the forest’s soils, normally fairly poor, are pockmarked with patches of terra preta de Índio—“black earth of the Indians”—which are particularly fertile and self-sustaining soils produced by human activity.
Are you a FOSS developer? Do you want to learn #Rust #RustLang? I will give a two hour course on the basics of Rust Saturday, September 28, at 16:00 UTC. This is early evening for Europe, and morning in the US. (I can do another session that's more suitable for Asia, later.)
Boosting this again to add that if you don't know about Deniz Camp already, you should get acquainted with his work. I'm gonna be tracking everything he writes him forward after being blown away by this and his work on Ultimates.
Cum Ex - eine der größten Banken- und Finanz-Betrugsreihen der letzten Jahrzehnte. Aber was soll‘s? „Nächste Woche soll ein Gesetz im Bundestag verabschiedet werden, das es Banken ermöglicht, quasi legal Beweise zu vernichten, die ihre Beteiligung an CumCum-Geschäften belegen könnten.“
Anne Brorhilker von @Finanzwende ruft zum Widerstand auf.
people are told that equinox is the start of autumn and yet can't understand why it starts to feel like autumn weeks before. but if you go by the old calendars, equinox isn't the start: it's when autumn really comes into itself and is entirely its own season.
it used to be, in celtic countries but also elsewhere, that the quarter days — equinoxes and solstices — marked the mid points of the seasons, whereas the cross-quarter days marked their beginnings. the cross-quarter days are at the beginning of february, may, august, and november, and correspond to the modern/christian groundhog's day/candlemas, may day, lammas, and hallowe'en/all saints'.
but just like solstices and equinoxes, the cross-quarter days are specific astronomical points in the year and technically fall sometime during the first week of the month in question.
so northern hemisphere spring is born in february, when the wind begins to change and the air feels different sometimes. summer in may, when the world has truly come to life. autumn in august, when the wind changes again, and winter in november when the world begins to sleep.
this is why winter and summer solstice are traditionally known as midwinter and midsummer. and in china, this time of year is when the mid-autumn festival occurs.
so if the dates of the seasons have never really made sense to you, maybe this is why?
whatever you do, have a blessed and beautiful equinox. may we all find balance today, and rest in the darkness to come.
Today I refactored the code when sending files in FluffyChat. Now the app does not try to load all bytes from the files at once. It first checks the sizes and queries the max file size from the server.
Previously the app could even crash when picking a too large file. Especially videos. Now it is possible to pick large videos and let the app try to compress them, without the risk, that the app crashes.
This should make sending large files a much smoother experience.
The problem is often the skill issue that normies have, why use mastodon where you have to find a homeserver when twitter just let's you register? Why self host an SFTP server when you have Google Drive? Tutanota addresses this very well since it works like any other mail service. But the problem is finding other tutanota users.
Using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to 3 bottles of water — AI data centers also raise power and water bills for nearby residents | Tom's Hardware tomshardware.com/tech-industry…
Can you imagine a city with less noise and less air pollution?
Today we experienced it here in Brussels and in hundreds of EU cities on #CarFreeDay!
1929 cities from 43 countries are participating with a single motto: ‘Shared public spaces’ and show their commitment to cleaner and more sustainable urban transport during #MobilityWeek.
The BT Speak (blazietech.com/bt-speak-pro), particularly in its "traditional" (non-GUI) mode, takes such an interesting approach to implementing a UI specifically for blind people.
From the mid 2000s until I got my BT Speak, I thought the only viable options were to either implement a screen reader for a GUI, or implement a fully custom UI designed specifically for speech output and whatever kind of keyboard or keypad the device supports. The BT Speak does neither. 1/?
Instead, it builds on the Linux text console and BRLTTY (brltty.app/). BRLTTY is best known for supporting Braille displays, but it also supports speech output, as well as input from a stand-alone Braille keyboard. The BT Speak uses it this way. BRLTTY's maintainer, Dave Mielke, is one of the main developers of the BT Speak software. 2/?
By the way, all the source code for the BT Speak software is right there on the device. There's no attempt to obfuscate the code or to prevent device owners from accessing it. It's not under an open-source license, and the GitHub repository is private. So out of respect for Blazie's ownership of the code and their wish not to share it publicly, I won't share any code. But I didn't sign an NDA, so I can still write about what I've learned while studying it. 3/?
The BT Speak's central application is an editor, a modified version of GNU nano. Now, nano is under the GPL, so I guess I'd be entitled to share *that* code if I wished.
The other key component is what looks like a home-made terminal multiplexer, similar in function to screen or tmux, but tailored for the BT Speak UI. So, according to the ps command (which I can run while accessing the device via SSH), that runs on tty1, and the editor runs on pts/0. 4/?
OK, it looks like the program that owns tty1, called ui-main, isn't a general terminal multiplexer like screen or tmux. Unless I'm missing something in that program or the libraries it depends on, it only ever runs the editor in a pseudo-terminal. The editor also seems to be the only interactive application that can be backgrounded by bringing up the options menu. So in a way, all other applications are secondary, and multitasking is limited. 6/?
Those other applications (calculator, calendar, contacts, audio player, games, etc.) are accessed through the options menu, which is implemented in ui-main. It looks like the menus are implemented using ncurses, in a way that's designed to work well with BRLTTY's speech output. To back out of a menu, you press the Z chord on the Braille keyboard (dots 1, 3, 5, 6 plus the space bar), which maps to Escape in the terminal. 7/?
That use of the escape key is one place where the fact that we're using an emulated VT100 leaks through. Since the escape character (0x1b) is also the prefix for some other VT100 keycodes, as well as keystrokes that use the Alt modifier, a library like ncurses has to wait a bit before interpreting that character as an Escape keypress. So that command feels laggy. 8/?
So when you run an application from the menu, it looks like ui-main relinquishes control of the terminal to the application. This means, among other things, that all the applications have to directly support the convention of using Escape (Z-chord) to exit the application and return to the menu. I've verified, for instance, that if I run the calculator application in an SSH session, pressing Escape in that SSH session exits the application. 9/?
The calculator is perhaps the most classically Unixy of all the BT Speak applications. It's a shell script that runs GNU bc as a subprocess and interacts with it through pipes. The shell script includes a .sh file that defines some functions that are reused across multiple shell scripts. TO prompt for the expression, the calculator shell script calls one of these shell functions, which calls a Python script... 10/?
The Python script uses a "dialogs" Python module, which is also directly used by some other programs that are written fully in Python. The BT Speak system is quite polyglot. ui-main and the libraries it uses are in C. As I said, there are several shell scripts. And there's another program I'll get to later which is in Tcl.
I'll write more about this dialogs module after I've studied it. 11/?
Wow, the first thing I notice about this dialogs module is that its clearScreen function spawns the "clear" command as a subprocess. The whole system spawns processes like they don't cost anything. And yeah, I guess executing a C program on Linux costs very little. Still surprising though, and to be honest, I don't like it. 12/?
Of course, I should temper my criticism. What matters is that they shipped, while I only ever dreamed of developing an open pocket computer for blind people someday, and never came up with anything approaching a complete software design of my own, never mind the hardware. 13/?
The BTSpeak.dialogs Python module has a function, requestInput, that uses the curses module to prompt the user for a single line of text and process the input, with some basic editing. The prompt is shown in reverse video; I presume this is necessary to make BRLTTY speak it. The function somehow implements input in literary Braille. Note that BRLTTY has already translated the Braille keystrokes to characters by the time this function reads them from the terminal. Seems a bit roundabout. 14/?
To my surprise, though, most of the other functions in this dialogs Python module don't use ncurses directly as requestInput does. Instead, they invoke shell scripts which call whiptail to display dialogs. Yes, full TUI dialogs with border decorations and all. There seem to be some tweaks to the display for BRLTTY's benefit, though. 15/?
I think I would have at least had the Python module call whiptail directly, if not use the Python newt module (newt is the C library that whiptail uses). Going through shell scripts adds another layer of formatting and parsing code, which seems needlessly error-prone. 16/?
BTW, the source code on the BT Speak is a full checkout of the private Git repository, with all history. Dave Mielke, the BRLTTY maintainer as I mentioned earlier, is the top committer by far. He's clearly a master of the traditional Unix way, that is, lots of small programs written in multiple languages. 17/?
@mcourcel You can bring up a shell, either through the menus or by pressing all the Braille keys at once including Space (yes, seriously), and from there get to Python. Once you're in the shell though, you have to be familiar with BRLTTY's screen review commands, as BRLTTY doesn't automatically speak all output like, say, Speakup does.
The games seem to be a recent addition to the BT Speak, and these use another interesting hack, specifically, that Tcl program I teased earlier. BRLTTY doesn't automatically read all terminal output as other screen readers do. But the games that have been added so far are all line-oriented, and of course when playing, one doesn't want to be distracted with screen review commands. So there's a program called say-program-output... 18/?
say-program-output runs the specified program as a child process. The child process receives input from the terminal, but its output goes to the parent process, which directs that output to the text-to-speech engine. So, in effect, a very crude screen reader for line-oriented programs. 19/?
One downside, which I immediately noticed when I started playing Hangman on the BT Speak last night, is that there's a noticeable delay between when I type a character and when it's echoed back. I asked about this on the BT Speak support mailing list (just before I started this thread), and Dave says it's because say-program-output uses a tool called expect, which can only specify timeouts in whole seconds. I'm tempted to rewrite this program in Python using async I/O. 20/?
I could go deeper on various things that I've discussed on this thread. But I think I'll just briefly discuss the software update process and wrap up with some closing thoughts.
The update process pulls from the private GitHub repository (using an authentication token, presumably a read-only one, that can easily be found on the device), then does several steps (announcing each one), including installing Raspbian packages and compiling some things on the device itself. Then it reboots. 21/?
The update process might be the most user-visible contrast between the BT Speak and what we've come to expect from mainstream, polished, sealed (even if technically open-source) consumer platforms. With Android, for instance, the system image is a read-only filesystem, and the update process downloads that image onto an alternate partition then reboots into it. It's a definite case of what @glyph once compared to "fused silicon" (blog.glyph.im/2006/04/fused-si…). 22/?
In its architecture, if not its license or level of documentation, the BT Speak software fulfills the vision for end-user free software outlined in that old post by @glyph that I linked in my previous post. There's some C code, but basically all of the applications and system management utilities are written in interpreted languages, such that they can be run directly from source. And the update process is impressively transparent about what it's doing, which might spark curiosity. 23/?
@glyph I'm aware I tagged you in the middle (hopefully towards the end) of a mega-thread. I hope it wasn't too confusing seeing that post out of context.
The founder of the company behind the BT Speak, Deane Blazie, originally developed a PDA for blind people called the Braille 'n Speak in the 80s. (We often call that class of device a note-taker because of its original killer application.) Out of necessity given the hardware, the software for that device was much more monolithic, and it was closed-source. Still, it included a BASIC interpreter, and that was enough to help at least one blind person I know get started learning to program. 24/?
I hope that many blind kids have BT Speak units bought for them in the years to come. It seems to me that the openness of the software in this device (in practice, if not in license) could help future generations of blind hackers get their start. 25/25
(At least, I think this is the end of the thread.)
OK, I guess I'm not quite done after all. Having waxed positive about the BT Speak's openness, and acknowledging again that their real, shipped product is worth more than my criticism, I do wish they had written the whole UI and application suite in Python. The current mix of C, shell scripts, and Python is an inconsistent mess, albeit a functioning one.
I just wanted to express my appreciation for your taking the time to write this whole thread. This is a good perspective and is simple enough for those of us who don't really understand this stuff to get it. Thank you.
@techsinger No problem. As I was writing it, I thought I should really revive my blog. But it's easier to just dive in and do an off-the-cuff thread like this than to produce a polished, edited long-form blog post.
@techsinger I also wasn't actually trying to tailor my explanation for non-programmers. I think I was more conscious of trying to make it understandable to programmers who aren't immersed in access technology for blind people.
@techsinger Agreed! I really wanted to know what was driving this note taker. If they ever throw in a braille display into it, I might consider purchasing one. Especially if I can create my own programs, or run other Linux apps..
@mcourcel @techsinger To be clear, the only officially supported way to run third-party Linux apps is in the GUI ("desktop") mode, with the Orca screen reader. In traditional mode, you could open the shell and run CLI/terminal apps with BRLTTY. And in theory, you could edit the menu files to add third-party apps to the menus. But any edits to the menus, or other code in the BTSpeak tree, would risk causing conflicts on the next system upgrade.
@miki The origin Git remote is configured to pull from GitHub via HTTPS, with a token embedded in the URL in .git/config. No, I won't share the token. I presume it's read-only but don't wish to test that.
Come to think of it, this is actually not a great idea.
If they need / are forced to ever revoke that token for any reason, if it expires, or if Github changes their authentication mechanism, the devices are pretty much FUBAR and will need a far more arduous process to make them updatable again.
Fascinating thread. Not a programmer but like to read technical things anyway. Would like one of these units but can't justify purchase. Still, hope to see one one day and then make a decision.
Very interesting writeup on this. Now if they want to keep everything open-source, I don't really see how they can allow NLS talking book playback. Yes I know that in a good security system only the private keys and not the source code need to stay hidden, but still I can't see NLS being happy with anyone being able to look at the source code on-device and find out where those keys are stored.
In der Anwendung von freier, offener und wirtschaftlich fair betriebener Software sehen die Lukis eine praktische Verbindung zur #Freiheit des Evangeliums und vieler Narrative biblischer Texte.
Das war auch an diesem @luki@kirche.social Wochenende im Theologischen Seminar Herborn wieder zu spüren.
I've got some news about office environments. The absolute worst part for me was dealing with the rampant gossip and laziness. People would chat all day, accomplish next to nothing, and then pretend they were some kind of heroes for staying late. People walk around, take lunch or bathroom breaks, attend meetings, etc. Office or Home people will walk around. Stop writing stupid stories to promote back-to-office culture and risk everyone’s health.
![[The poem has been written in the shape of a deciduous tree with letters (or ‘leaves’) missing from the text]:
comm n pr ble whe writin p ems
in the shape of decid o s trees
is t at once t ere ar ives
the fir t sti rings of he new aut mn breeze,
he oems will begi to shake hemselves ge tly
ntil their letters loos n like leaves,
an they d start to float down
then
[The missing letters from the tree have landed on the last line to form the phrase]
turntomushuponthegroun
[The final ‘d’ is floating down to complete the phrase.]](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/592599 "[The poem has been written in the shape of a deciduous tree with letters (or ‘leaves’) missing from the text]:
comm n pr ble whe writin p ems
in the shape of decid o s trees
is t at once t ere ar ives
the fir t sti rings of he new aut mn breeze,
he oems will begi to shake hemselves ge tly
ntil their letters loos n like leaves,
an they d start to float down
then
[The missing letters from the tree have landed on the last line to form the phrase]
turntomushuponthegroun
[The final ‘d’ is floating down to complete the phrase.]")
))
SuspiciousDuck
in reply to Tomáš • • •