Skip to main content



Browser extension I'd love. An extension that has a list of sites that are known to be paywalled and says something like hey, possible paywall ahead, are you sure you want to read this? It'd save me so much frustration.
in reply to Mohamed Al-Hajamy 💾

Not this, but you can prefix many URLs with archive.ph and then they suddenly have no paywall.


As time passes, I'm more and more convinced that we'll see cases of "tech tourism" in the next 10 years.


Aah, new instance, new #Introduction post I guess.

I was on another instance that's closing down, so I've done the migration thing and decided to end up here.
As this server has the word 'hear' in the domain, and I'm a #Musician, it somehow seems fitting I do so.

I'm a #London-based musician that plays piano/keys, and finger-drumming also on keys.
I make #youtube videos on various things that interest me, make the #StroongeCast podcast with my wife, have two ridiculously amazing children and read voraciously. Being stereotypically British, I do like me a good cup of tea as well.

What genre I play is up for debate. Genres though, yes quite a few.
Jazz, Funk, Soul, R&B, Reggae, Pop occasionally, Drum and Bass recently.

This is too long already, so I'll just end by saying links to projects in bio for the interested.

Thanks for your time, and feel free to say hi.

reshared this



I’ve published my article on the Impact Hero SDK (as used by at least 16 browser extensions) and the refoorest extension. The company behind these is the France-based Colibri Hero, also known as allcolibri: palant.info/2024/10/01/lies-da…

Trust me, the article title is justified. I couldn’t believe it when I saw how everything they claim turns out to be a lie. Their line of business is commonly called “affiliate fraud,” so they carefully avoid this topic and instead make the impression of being supported by altruistic companies that genuinely care for our planet.

They promise to plant trees if people use their extensions but their numbers are all fake. The numbers displayed by the extension don’t add up to the numbers shown on their web page. Maybe they should have implemented access control if they didn’t want anybody to figure that out. And the numbers on the web page – well, these have been increasing at a constant rate of 20 trees per hour for the past four years, completely ignoring what their extension users did or didn’t.

Do they actually donate any money? Probably, I don’t know. They don’t disclose their finances, and if they did these would probably turn out fake as well. Should anyone trust them? No, not from what I saw. Should these extensions be nuked from orbit (or at least from the add-on stores)? Yes, absolutely.

There is more “fun” stuff going on here, so feel free to read the article.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)




Someone would get a free pass straight to diploma in a PR school for this statement. Good job, Sonos. "Unwavering focus on the customer experience: To ensure that we deliver the highest level of customer experience, we will always establish ambitious quality benchmarks at the outset of product development and will not launch products before meeting these criteria. We will also enhance the tools necessary to measure the quality of the experience actually being delivered to customers to ensure that we maintain the standards our customers expect."
in reply to Jakob Rosin

This may have been generated by AI! :) Now, how are they going to keep up with such a statement? :)


Na automobilový průmysl je kladeno nespočet požadavků, které navyšují cenu a komplexitu, každopádně co domácí spotřebiče?

Existuje nějaká legislativa nutící výrobce poskytovat API pro čtení/nastavení zařízení jako pračka, bojler/kotel, myčka, lednička, topení, a další "komponenty" domácnosti na standartizovaném rozhraní?

IMHO integrace otevřené komunikace je relativně (k ceně spotřebiče) levná položka otevírající dveře kompletní automatizaci a lepší ekologii domácnosti.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to David Heidelberg

K nějaké úrovni otevřenosti a standardizace se začalo tlačit u telefonů a domácí výpočetní techniky a lidi na to nadávaj, výrobci to všemožně bojkotujou a ojebávaj. Asi pro to keště není dostatečná poptávka. 🤷‍♂️
in reply to Štěpán Škorpil

@stepan Poptávka v téhle fázi nikdy nebude. BFU nezajímá nějaké API. Ale když uvidíš, že soused má malou krabičku, co mu šetří peníze a zpříjemňuje život (např. home-assistant.io/green/ ) - zájem mít bude...


Godot overtaking Unity in one of the most recent, largest game jams out there is a wonderful example of the triumph of free software against a corporate platform. Something something Year of the Godot Desktop yada yada.




Does anyone use Micro.blog? I'm still in my apparently endless consideration of WordPress alternatives.

I will continue to do this until I finally learn how/dedicate full time to write my own site from scratch.

Might be more of an "if" than a "when," but the desire is very strong.

in reply to Anne Deschaine

What about spinning up a static site generator, something like Hugo? You won't need to write everything from scratch, yet you can add themes and such.
in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion
Second the #ssg suggestion. There are some #Indieweb examples using #ActivityPub integrations within static pages. So transgressive!
in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion Bearing in mind that micro.blog is a SSG on top of Hugo, you get a lot of benefits by paying to let them take care of it all.
in reply to Eat This Podcast

@etp My only concern is that I cannot try before paying. I need good accessibility of every solution I pay for, so I don't really want to pay for the thing I don't know the accessibility of.
in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion @etp It appears to offer a 10-day free trial, but without signing up, I don't know whether it charges then refunds or what


Perhaps the last human-generated song I'll ever write.

"AGI: Artificial God Incarnate"

(recorded live at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas)

youtube.com/watch?v=1ZhhO7MGkn…

in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt Thanks MAtt. The backtracks are embedded in my Keynote presentation and I cue everything with my clicker (live sound is wired into the venue's audio)
in reply to Forrest Brazeal

Ah, I wouldn't have guessed that there was a Keynote presentation for the show. (I'm partially blind so I didn't pick up on that in the video.) Thanks.


Mein Domain-Registrar wohnt in der Prinzessinnenstraße, und mau, ich will da auch wohnen 🥺👉👈

(oder vielleicht auch nicht, wer weiß, wie die Umgebung dort so ist. Wenn das insgesamt sehr aristokratisch angehaucht ist, ist's wahrscheinlich doch nichts für mich)

in reply to Elinya~ >^.^<

Also es gibt eine im tiefsten Kreuzberg hier. Das ist ... eher nicht besonders aristrokatisch 🤔.


Upscaler just hit 100K downloads and became App of the Day :3


Following on from a recent question about taxis. Are dock based hire bikes (i.e. ov fiets, Boris bikes etc...) public transport?

  • Yes (36%, 4 votes)
  • No (63%, 7 votes)
11 voters. Poll end: 1 month ago

in reply to Quixoticgeek

in Montreal they (Bixi) are owned by the city and fall into the transit planning. So in that case definitely public with user fees.


A lot of the problems with #ActivityPub could be solved if we could all just collectively agree that it isn't a protocol but more like saying "I communicate in JSON."

So we're not communicating in AP, we're communicating the Mastodon API.

But there is a dedicated commitment to conflate them and in the protocol itself conflates them, which stifles the ability to work in this space.

The lack of a formal extension/handshake mechanism further makes it difficult to even get value from using it.

in reply to Hrefna (DHC)

What would an alternative look like? A thought experiment.

* Formalize the protocol in OpenAPI. Not all of it, just the behavior and shape of the inbox and outbox.
* Formalize and render as testable all of the behavior with side effects.
* Remove basically all of the other fields from the Actor object.
* Type is always a list and starts from the Base Type then applies essentially mixins, which can be extensions
* Type is always strongly specified
* Collections have precisely defined navigation




На правах бреда: а что если это не у нас блочат, а нас блочит какой‐нибудь Hetzner? 🤔 Ну или где там conversations.im хостится.

#lang_ru #xmpp #мысли

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
Unknown parent

Ténno Seremélʹ
@daniel That’s weird! Hm… Thank you for a quick answer.



8 y/o daughter lost her hearing. Had to learn to sign. Struggled at first as none of her friends knew how to talk to her. One day I noticed our Labrador run to the treat cupboard after she signed "treat?" to her. In the absence of friends our dog had learned sign language for her

reshared this



Gajim 1.9.5 has been released 🎉

This release comes with many improvements for Gajim’s Microsoft Store version. 👔

Translations are now available for all distributions again. 🌐

Thank you for all your contributions! :xmpp:

#gajim #xmpp #chat

gajim.org/post/2024-09-30-gaji…

Nicoco reshared this.



How do other people with disabilities learn to accept the constant, never ending inaccessibility of the world without being continually crushed, frustrated, angry and ultimately just feel like giving up? I see some folks just seem to accept it and move on and I just don't understand how to learn to do that. And it feels like the older I get, the harder it gets to accept.

WestphalDenn reshared this.

in reply to Jamie Teh

@kfjelsted I'm a very positive person. I don't have the energy to be negative all the time, and no that's not a criticism of you at all. I'm just answering your question from my own perspective. I don't even have the energy to advocate for blind people, which probably sounds selfish and no doubt everybody thinks I am selfish, however, I just want to live my life as well as I can. Added to that, I'm also a Christian who believes in the promise of everlasting life in the future With no more sin, death or pain. But yes, in the meantime, I try and just stay focused on the positive; my supportive friends and family. If I listen to the news or concentrated on all the inaccessibility of the world, yes, I would get weighed down as well. But I don't have the energy and I'm not going to let the negatives win. Sure, I do get frustrated at times when I'm on a website and cannot for the life of me think of how to do something, but I am getting better about being better about that.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)


Gotta love system firmware updates that install without asking, don't complete the install until you next power on the machine and then provide no audible indication that they're installing. If I hadn't thought to check what was going on with Seeing AI, I probably would've bricked my machine.

Tamas G reshared this.

in reply to Jamie Teh

Good luck. That company is definitely one of the reasons I switched OSes. Did they fix that broken audio driver yet, or does it still leak unpaged memory like crazy?
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

@miki I think they finally fixed it, but for various other reasons, I still use a dongle now, so I'm not 100% certain.
in reply to Jamie Teh

As a former screen reader developer, do you have an idea what, exactly was going on there, and why we were affected so much? I tought something along the lines of "frequent opening and closing of the audio session", but the bug still existing with the Bluetooth audio disproves that hypothesis. In that case, it should also appear in e.g. games
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

@miki Not really, no. I do know that the driver installs audio enhancements which run as ... I forget what they're called, but they're basically bits of code that run in the WASAPI audio chain. But that should only be relevant if the enhancements are enabled. My suspicion is that it did actually affect other audio beyond screen readers, but screen reader users just use audio so much and so regularly that it disproportionately impacts us. But I have no evidence either way.
in reply to Jamie Teh

Mine did allow you to disable enhancements easily, and that didn't seem to help.

Not sure how deeply you looked into this, I think I was one of the first users affected due to being on insiders for reasons too complicated to explain, so I tried tracing that leak before I knew what driver it was coming from. There was a tool from the Windows Driver developer Kit that let you see unpaged memory allocations by tag, and the tag responsible for the leak was related to the Windows Event Tracing subsystem.

in reply to Jamie Teh

Come to think of it, most (all?) vendor-supplied UEFI updates would install this way. Usually Windows update loads the firmware file pre-shutdown but post-logoff sequence, so the update is applied upon next boot. Normally this is less of a problem when you do "update and restart" (or manually had chosen the BIOS update in "optional updates" section), but more of one if you went to bed and chose a simple shutdown or "update and shutdown" and it did it. I could face it, too.



Gerade den Rant eines Fotografen gelesen, der angesichts des LAION-Urteils meinte, man könne KI-Zuzler nur noch dadurch sabotieren, indem man falsche Alt-Tags eingebe, damit die Deppen nicht auch noch die menschlich vergebenen korrekten Inhaltsangaben mitlutschen könnten. So nutzen ChatGPT und Co. die Angaben für Sehbehinderte zu ihren schmierigen Zwecken. Eigentlich wäre es mir lieber, den Alt-Text korrekt eingeben und den KI-Bots im Feed den Zugriff verbieten zu können.


Jail time for Montana man who smuggled and cloned an endangered 300-pound sheep

He takes his hobbies seriously.

arstechnica.com/science/2024/1…



kámo dnes sa to vlečie ako týždeň pred výplatou


T-Mobile reaches $31.5 million settlement with FCC over past data breaches

Apparently, T-mobile is now mandated to implement better cybersecurity controls, such as properly segmenting networks and using phishing resistant #MFA.

This settlement covers the breaches in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Will we get a 2024 special? 💀

#cybersecurity #infosec #databreach

cyberscoop.com/t-mobile-fcc-se…



Jimmy Carter turns 100 today. He is proof that decency and goodness can exist in public service.

Did you know that Jimmy Carter heroically saved Canada from a nuclear meltdown when he was a naval officer?

It's true!

The world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown occurred in the Ottawa Valley — and a young U.S. naval officer was brought in to contain the disaster — 72 years ago.

Leading a team of two dozen men, 28-year old Lieutenant Carter had himself lowered into the damaged reactor.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

reshared this



Etel Adnan:

It was Beirut, all over again,
because the sea rose on its feet
and unleashed a litany
of words,
it is Beirut, all over again,
because poets die
rather than surrender,
because they speak of hope,
and do not wear
their words like a necklace
of pearls,
because poets refuse to die,
and carry hope on their
backs, and go from door
to door, like bees do
from flower to flower,
to leave messages of defiance
in the
people’s hearts.



📢 The GStreamer Conference 2024 schedule is now up!

gstreamer.freedesktop.org/conf…

See you next week in Montréal!

PS: don't forget to register

#gstreamer #linux #multimedia




oi, every time I close and open my jaw, I hear a wooshing sound in my right ear, hate when fluid gets trapped like that.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)


A $621 million suit for ~$41,000 in "damages" for archiving thousands of musical recordings that would otherwise be lost to history.

This is nothing short of an effort to end the @internetarchive from major music labels and we should all be furious.

rollingstone.com/music/music-f…



I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the idea that asking nicer is how you debug malfunctioning computers
in reply to Jeremy Kahn

@trochee Indeed. I just fed the original post to Claude with no context, and it came back with a typically verbose response that missed the point.


jkap sure decided to end cohost the most way possible, huh
in reply to fluffy 💜

As much as I keep on armchair-architecting about how Cohost “could” have been an indieweb player, they were very specifically against interop in any meaningful way because they felt that centralized silos were the way to go for community building and moderation

so of course they shot themselves in the foot, repeatedly, regarding moderation, which I’m sure was a major contributor to their eventual burnout

in reply to fluffy 💜

my hope is that in this new surge of renewed interest for having your own damn blog on your own damn website, this finally gives #indieweb the push for adoption that it’s been sorely needing

it’d also be really funny to me if the indieweb community got totally overrun by socialist therian plural furries with a taste for anti-racist action



cada día comprendo menos lo de los derechos de autor, las patentes y demás mierdas, algún día en un futuro a la gente les parecerá mentira haberlas usado. Reconozco que la gente tiene derecho a comer y esas cosas, habrá que buscar un método, pero este no es. Quizás a lo mejor si dejamos el puto individualismo y trabajamos con el mismo afán para la comunidad


Apparently I can't find the health and safety policy for @XOrgDevConf ...

And it's happening next week, here.



Is the fedi for losers? « La question est provocante et intelligente : le Fediverse semble être un repère d’écologistes, libristes, défenseurs des droits sociaux, féministes et cyclistes. Bref la liste de tous ceux qui ne sont pas mis en avant, qui semblent « perdre ».

Je n’avais jamais vu les choses sous cet angle. Pour moi, le point commun est surtout une volonté de changer les choses. Or, par définition, si on veut changer les choses, c’est qu’on n’est pas satisfait avec la situation actuelle. On est donc « perdant ». En fait, tout révolutionnaire est, par définition, un·e perdant·e. Dès qu’iel gagne, ce n’est plus un·e révolutionnaire, mais une personne au pouvoir !»

Ode aux perdants, @ploum@mamot.fr, 1 octobre 2024 : ploum.net/2024-10-01-ode-aux-p…