A new version of the popular Rufus utility once again bypasses the strict hardware compatibility requirements for Windows 11 upgrades. Your move, Microsoft.
So this is a thing now. Adventures in Senior Dog Ownership. đ The Old Pug is super weird about mealtimes now. She's ravenous. Then she won't eat. Then she tries to eat the Retriever's food. Now she will only eat her breakfast when it's next to the Retriever. Not her dinner though. She wants her dinner other side of the kitchen next to the water dish. Ah well. Whatever makes the old gal happy. đ #Pug #Pugs #DogsOfMastodon
In this article, you will learn how to install curl (and libcurl) on a Linux system and how to use curl in your daily computing work with practical examples.
I hadn't really thought of it in terms of a *bug*, but you know, it *is* awfully hard to see. I don't have time right now to grab the nightly and go through the proper bug reporting procedure, but if I get a chance to tomorrow, I'll let you know.
Enterprises use block storage such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for mission-critical workloads because it provides high performance, low latency, and reliable data access needed for demanding applications like databases, ERP systems, anâŠ
Wow! I'm making #Bandwagon -- an open source, community-focused alternative to #Bandcamp that anyone can self-host.
As of this morning, there are 99 #Musicians and #Bands who have set up #Fediverse profiles on bandwagon.fm -- and half of those already indexable on search engines.
So I'm humbled by the number of people who are giving it a go. There's obviously lots of people out there looking for something new.
I promise to do my best to give y'all the tools you deserve.
I hope so too. #Accessibility is important -- especially for an app based on music
I've talked to a couple of screen reader users, who have bravely volunteered to test out early versions of this code
They've told me that it works well (mostly) and I'm still running through their feedback to make things better
So I won't say Bandwagon is 100% WCAG compliant, but please try it out and let me know if you have any trouble. I jump on accessibility issues as quick as possible
I have been looking for a simple but comprehensive self-hosted alternative to Bandcamp, and I have to say this is very nice so far.
I also love the Emissary default template, everything so far works great with screen reading software and it's lightweight to run on a Raspberry Pi. Thank you
Really? It runs on a Rasberry Pi??Thats awesome. You made my day!
If youâre self-hosting, lots of things are changing rapidly with Bandwagon, so we should connect somewhere (email, Mastodon, GitHub) so I can make sure I donât break your site.
Thank you very much for the offer. At the moment there are a few missing things, such as embeddable tracks or possibly some sort of payment processor support, so I'm holding off on hosting it in production for now, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on how things will end up. Even without Fedi support, there is nothing out there which is as simple to set up and use as Bandwagon, so that's a plus as well.
I also really like the way Emissary works, it's quite inspiring and refreshing to see high quality software being contributed back to the open source community.
On this day (or near it) in 2015, I joined the Mozilla project by starting work as a full-time employee of Mozilla Corporation. Iâm two hardware refreshes in (I was bad for doing them on time, leaving my 2017 refresh until 2018 and my 2020 refresh until 2022! (though, admittedly, the 2020 refresh was actually pushed to the end of 2021 by a policy change in early 2020 moving from 2-year to 3-year refreshes)) and facing a third in February. Organizationally, Iâm three CEOs and sixty reorgs in.
Iâm still working on Data, same as last year. And Iâm still trying to move Firefox Desktop to use solely Glean for its data collection system. Some of my predictions from last yearâs moziversary post came true: I continued working on client code in Firefox Desktop, I hardly blogged at all, we continue to support collections in all of Legacy Telemetryâs systems (though weâve excitingly just removed some big APIs), Glean has continued to gain ground in Firefox Desktop (weâre up to 4134 metrics at time of writing), and âFOG Migrationâ has continued to not happen (I suppose it was one missed prediction that top-down guidance would change â it hasnât, but interpretations of it sure have), and Iâm publishing this moziversary blog post a little ahead of my moziversary instead of after it.
My biggest missed prediction was âWe will quietly stop talking about AI so much, in the same way most firms have stopped talking about Web3 this yearâ. Mozilla, both Corporation and Foundation, seem unable to stop talking about AI (a phrase here meaning âlarge generative models built on extractive data mining which use chatbot UIâ). Which, I mean, fair: itâs consuming basically all the oxygen and money in the industry at the moment. We have to have a position on it, and itâs appropriating âOpenâ language that Mozilla has a vested interest in protecting (though youâd be excused for forgetting that given how little weâve tried to work with the FSF and assorted other orgs trying to shepherd the ideas and values of Open Source in the recent past). But weâve for some reason been building products around these chatbots without interrogating whether thatâs a good thing.
And youâd think with all our worry about what a definition of Open Source might mean, weâd make certain to only release products that are Open Source. Butno.
I understand why weâre diving into products and trying to release innovative things in product shape⊠but Mozilla is famously terrible at building products. Weâre okay at building services (Iâm a fan of both Monitor and Relay). But where we seem to truly excel is in building platforms and infrastructure.
We build Firefox, the only independent browser, a train that runs on the rails of the Web. We build Common Voice, a community and platform for getting underserved languages (where which languages are used is determined by the community) the support they need. We built Rust, a memory-safe systems language that is now succeeding without Mozillaâs help. We built Hubs, a platform for bringing people together in virtual space with nothing but a web browser.
Weâre just so much better at platforms and infrastructure. Why we donât lean more into that, I donât know.
How can Mozilla make money if our search deal becomes illegal? Maintaining a browser is expensive. Hosting services is expensive. Keeping the tech giants on their toes and compelling them to be better is expensive. We need money, and weâve learned that there is no world where donations will be enough to fund even just the necessary work let alone any innovations we might try.
How do you monetize a platform? How do you monetize infrastructure?
Governments do it through taxation and funding. But Mozilla Corporation isnât a government agency. Itâs a conventional Silicon Valley private capital corporation (its relationship to Mozilla Foundation is unconventional, true, but I argue thatâs irrelevant to how MoCo organizes itself these days). And the only process by which Silicon Valley seems to understand how to extract money to pay off their venture capitalists is products and consumers.
Now, Mozilla Corporation doesnât have venture capital. You can read in the State of Mozilla that we operate at a profit each and every year with net assets valued at over a billion USD. But the environment in which MoCo operates â the place from which we hire our C-Suite, the place where the people writing the checks live â is saturated in venture capital and the ways of thinking it encourages.
This means Mozilla Corporation acts like its Bay Area peers, even though itâs special. Even though it doesnât have to.
This means it does layoffs even when it doesnât need to. Even when thereâs no shareholders or fund managers to impress.
This means it increasingly speaks in terms of products and customers instead of projects and users.
This means it quickly loses sight of anything specifically Mozilla-ish about Mozilla (like the community that underpins specific systems crucial to us continuing to exist (support and l10n for two examples) as well as the general systems of word-of-mouth and keeping Mozilla and Firefox relevant enough that tech press keep writing about us and grandpas keep installing us) because it doesnât fit the patterns of thought that developed while directing leveraged capital.
(( Which I donât like, if my tone isnât coming across clearly enough for you to have guessed. ))
Okay, thatâs more than enough editorial for a Moziversary post. Letâs get to the predictions for the next year:
I still wonât blog as much as Iâd like,
âFOG Migrationâ might actually happen! Weâve finally managed to convince Firefox folks just how great Glean is and they might actually commit official resources! I predict that weâre still sending Legacy Telemetry by the end of next year, but only bits and pieces. A weak shadow of what we send today.
Thereâll be an All Hands, but depending on the result of the US federal election in November I might not attend because its location has been announced as Washington DC and I donât know if the United States will be in a state next year to be trusted to keep me safe,
We will stop putting AI in everything and hoping to accidentally make a product thatâll somehow make money and instead focus on finding problems Mozilla can solve and only then interrogating whether AI will help
The search for the new CEO will not have completed by next October so Iâll still be three CEOs in, instead of four
I will execute on my hardware refresh on time this February, and maybe also get a new monitor so Iâm not using my personal one for work.
At the end of my post for my seven-year moziversary, I made some predictions about what was to be and now has been the next year of work. And I got them pretty spot-on: Predictions for the next yeaâŠ
Itâs horrifying that this even needs to be said. Of course this is why it was published anonymously. If you donât know that by now⊠jhfc. mastodon.social/@report_press/âŠ
Many people have asked or speculated on why our report was published anonymously.
Richard Stallman's political program speaks out in defense of sexual violence, harassment, and even coercion.
A lot of comedians are really smart. Not just quick witted. Smart as in, they read things, they know things, and they understand things. They keep the mask up though, because it's not as entertaining to know things.đ€·đżââïž
Sometimes they let the mask slip though. Here's Roy Wood jr, temporarily letting it slip that he knows things about hurricanes.
When Netanyahu is done with his genocide of Palestinians and is done with sacrificing the Israeli hostages the world will still have on its hands an entire population of genocidal men and women who enjoy seeing others suffer.
All of this was preventable were it not for the US and Germany.
This might just be my new goto tech stack. Kinda hard to argue with a single-file backend, and by the time you outgrow it you can likely afford to transition away.
Iâm a similar age to the author, so as I read it I absolutely recognised that feeling of repulsion Iâd have as a kid at the very notion of accessing any âgirlâ content. Wonder-Woman, She-Ra, Supergirl, âgirlyâ pop music, books about girl things; Iâd actively have nothing to do with them.
I donât think Iâm unusual in that. Perhaps these days, but not then.
Be My Eyes and Microsoft partnership, a good thing... Microsoft recruits accessibility app to make its AI more useful to blind and low-vision users engadget.com/ai/microsoft-recrâŠ
I have no problem with the arrangement between Be My Eyes and Microsoft but I wonder if users have the choice of opting out of having their data used for this as they do with AIRA.
@mfeir I'm glad to hear that. However, I think that @bemyeyes should first have an Opt-in button in the app for those who may not have received the email, along with an Opt-out button. I'm not against the use of AI; I just feel that companies who wish to use our data in this way would make it easy for users to first opt in and later opt out, if they choose to do so.
@DavidGoldfield @bemyeyes I agree that it would have been better to do that and have users defaulted to opt out unless and until they chose to include themselves as I have. However, I understand that such a partnership is far more attractive to Microsoft with an opt in default. (1/2)
To some extent, blind people and companies trying to use AI to improve life for them will have to accept the privacy tradeoffs if these services are to be sustainable and affordable for the majority of blind people. If we can't afford to develop our own AI, we have to pay with something if we want to leverage AI developed by others. (2/2)
Summarizing the state of the last few months of #accessibility work, slowly but surely getting a full stack with no vision support across all layers from CLI shell to window management to cooperative clients to uncooperative clients.
Our reference desktop environment, Durden, rarely gets covered here these days. This is mostly due to the major features are since long in place and that part of the project is biding its time withâŠ
Thanks for working on this. I remember now that you sent me a private message on Lobsters about AccessKit, and I'm sorry I didn't follow up on that. What are you hoping that AccessKit will let you do?
Also, I listened to some of the first audio demo. The gaps between words are stranger, and almost certainly not what most blind people who are accustomed to fast speech would want. Also, are the words spoken with higher pitch capitalized, or something else?
@matt I didn't find any documents for what would be 'beginner' friendly settings for initial pitch/wpm/punctuation controls, so I just took what I mostly been training using and slowed it down.
The default_eng profile used 180wpm, full punctuation, mid dynamic range, only left channel and higher pitch on capitals.
For the default profile, I suggest removing the gap between words, disabling the higher pitch on capitalized words, and reducing the punctuation level (in particular, no end-of-sentence punctuation).
@matt since the TTS engine is already active as that stage I'll probably define a few presets and let the picker just read a reference text with the corresponding settings.
I'm taking a much needed break from hearing 'wnd tit chromium' about 50 times an hour to poke at other parts (audio transcription and low-vision). The best write-up I've seen is w3.org/TR/low-vision-needs -- any other recommendations?
I definitely don't recommend "wnd tit" as a prefix for window titles. If it's literally pronounced like that, including the letter w, then that puts six syllables before the window title. Putting something long and static before the variable text isn't a good idea. You could make it say "Chromium window", or maybe play a sound effect concurrently with reading the window title.
@matt from my reading of accessKit code it would be in the sense of a platform where there's a dynamic check if arcan_shmif_primary(SEGID_ACCESSIBILITY)) gives you a context, and use that to either send per-item updates (MESSAGE events) in response to input events or the full tree wrapped in a file descriptor as BCHUNKSTATE events. The later would leave navigation up to WM, the former closer to what others would do.
What AccessKit would give you, assuming you don't want to implement the existing AT-SPI protocol based on D-Bus (I don't recommend that), is the schema for an accessibility tree, including incremental tree updates. AccessKit doesn't directly support sending direct TTS messages (assuming that's what you meant by MESSAGE events), though your platform adapter could do that; I guess that would amount to implementing a screen reader running inside the application.
I remember reading that you intended to implement support for the Wayland protocol. You may be interested in my prototype Wayland protocol extension for accessibility, code-named Newton, and the reference toolkit-side implementation as an AccessKit platform adapter. That adapter is here: github.com/AccessKit/accesskit⊠More on the project here: blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/1âŠ
what is this? I've been using linux for about 5 years already, yet never encountered this. Is this emacs related? it feels like it. Are you making a custom interface on top of the linux kernel? I have no idea what I just listened to. Why are the beeps repeating continuously? do you use your arrow keys to literally move the mouse around, isn't that slow? you have your own window management protocol? can I open gtk apps in it and get similar feedback to what you have there? I'm completely stumped as to what this even is, but imo, it's very interesting. For how long has this whole stack been a thing? I feel like it's something built on top of emacs, as I said before, is it? why did you have to press meta multiple times, and what are the screenreader modifiers, aka, can there be more than one?
@esoteric_programmer How long it's been worked on? since early 2000s. How long it's been in public view? closer to ten years. It's not marketed as much as it is leaving behind a trail of crumbs.
Is it a custom interface on top if the linux kernel? Well anything above kernel level is fair game, though it also works on BSD kernels and, at least last I tested, OSX. It is about as 'different' architecturally as Android is - other IPC system, network protocol, Low level APIs, Mod-level APIs, several WMs..
The beeps are not continuous, they were mapped to the mouse cursor but binned to a timer instead of event driven as well, that triggered my tinnitus something fierce with a 1KHz mouse.
The meta modifier and a11y bindings being forced to be pressed repeatedly was to a. avoid accidental presses, b. cover for running nested (VM, inside another windowing system, ...) where a long press could get cancelled from keyrepeats not being correctly disabled or from hardware keys with contact bounce problems.
GTK applications would run through the arcan-wayland protocol bridge, or the Xarcan one (used in the clip with chromium) but those are so far just pixel soup so feedback comes from OCR and other sight to sound mapping.
I'm not sure if you can use rust, but if so, for now you can just make an at-spi viewer or however you called it there, the same way you'd do one for access kit, if nothing else, because access kit isn't implemented widely enough yet, and access kit translates to at-spi anyway. Here's the atspi crate we use as part of odilia, the same one access kit depends on. I dk how old the crates.io version is, so I'll give you the thing straight from the source
@esoteric_programmer that's why I was chatting with @matt as AccessKit is architecturally more sound (Rust interop issues aside) - AT-SPI is a no-go simply because D-Bus is blacklisted on absolutely everything here.
you know access kit is using dbus as well, no? transpiling to at-spi, or using the newton protocol, it does require some dbus stuff. Also, how could you understand anything from that chromium part via ocr? I got lost from that point, and the fact that the mouse beeps were hurting my ears didn't help either :p
@esoteric_programmer @matt not necessarily, that comes from the AT-SPI compatibility and Unix platform. I'd substitute in another platform for arcan-shmif and avoid that.
This was my first attempt at an aural only demo, and still no idea how to convey the haptic parts -- like moving the mouse around, combined with the wrist mounted piezo I use to feel when the cursor crosses horizontal/vertical edges.
I'm sighted (though this work has been blindfolded), so the audio profile used is what I learned to use with some notes from watching @zersiax 's twitch streams, yet as you hear, different enough from what others might be used to. That's also why I opted to not show any of the HRTF/positional audio or seeing-with-sound bits.
ahh, interesting, so you want to make your own platform for which accesskit builds an adaptor? I wonder, would that help the current situation with chromium and similar? whoe, you have that much support for esoteric devices like those? linux doesn't have them even now, not as advanced as your thing, awesome! Also, I know the name sounded familiar from somewhere, now I found it, this popped up in my articles list when I was researching something about wayland. Reading some of your building clients with arcan articles, especially the part where you apparently have to clone arcan and build your apps into its source tree somewhere to make them found by the thing, I came to the conclusion that you're using wayland in some very, very weird ways, dk if that's awesome or not. Anyway, this is the article I read back then, but as I had no context, I dismissed it because it sounded weird
A commonly held misbelief about one of the possibly negative consequences with migrating from X11 to Wayland is that the system as a whole will become more brittle due to the merger of the display âŠ
đȘ” Encima de una mesa tenemos dos palos de diferente longitud. Los vamos a medir con un instrumento que cada vez que lo usamos comete un error de medida aleatorio, de una cierta magnitud que llamaremos Sigma. El instrumento se equivocarĂĄ mĂĄs o se equivocarĂĄ menos aleatoriamente cada vez que lo usemos (con un error diferente en cada caso), pero el error en la mediciĂłn siempre serĂĄ en torno a Sigma unidades. Eso sĂ, el instrumento estĂĄ INSESGADO, es decir, el error es aleatorio pero centrado en el valor real; no tiene una desviaciĂłn sistemĂĄtica que ocurra siempre.
â PodrĂa parecer que la mejor estrategia es medir cada palo individualmente⊠pero no. Gracias a una investigaciĂłn desarrollada por Harold Hotelling en 1944 sabemos que hay una manera mĂĄs eficiente de medir los dos palos sin tener que darle mĂĄs vueltas de la cuenta y consiguiendo mayor nivel de precisiĂłn.
đĄ El error de medida aparece en muchos instrumentos de todo tipo que utilizamos en nuestro dĂa a dĂa.
It sounds like an interesting idea, but a bit like the venerable comic book, silent cinema seems beyond me. There's an event in London for those who are interested, though. [Tactile silent cinema](groups.google.com/g/braillistsâŠ)
Covid did happen, but the RNIB seemingly haven't touched this sort of research since 2017. I wish they'd move on it. the UK used to lead the way, and now we're so not. NO push for apps to be accessible, no push for live streams to have a feed (that broadcast television already does), and no progress on portable access. [Audio description apps for people with sight loss | RNIB | RNIB](rnib.org.uk/living-with-sight-âŠ)
Honestly, if the idea is to watch a film with no actual diegetic sound at all and read descriptions? I'd prefer a book. I hope i'm misunderstanding the idea. Obviously if you have some eyesight, or used to, or have an interest in the medium, you'll be more interested by default. It souns to me like an interesting idea for a research proposal but an utterly impractical waste of time and energy, especially given people's levels of Braille literacy and reading speed contrasted with the speed of film.
- "There is a significant amount of unaccounted for massâ - Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than expected - Salesperson who conveyed the offer made a very inexpensive proposition for the pagers, and kept bringing the price down until he was pulled in
Table of contents What is MuseScore Studio?Download and installationAbout keyboard navigationFirst runCreating a scoreChoosing your instrumentsSecond pageEntering notesAccidentalsArrow keysSimple chordsTriplets and other irregular groupingCopy and paâŠ
@treefit Actually the âdefaultâ version is in-browser yeah!
Since itâs written in rust ive built the gui using egui, so it can support web+native where native def has better performance but shipping a website is just so much easier so thats the default
Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •Oh noooooo. If you report this on bugzilla.mozilla.org and shoot me the bug number, I do my best to bump this to the team!
(And trust me, this typist just got her first pair of bifocals. We get the challenges that come with experienced eyes!)
R. L. Dane
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox • • •I hadn't really thought of it in terms of a *bug*, but you know, it *is* awfully hard to see.
I don't have time right now to grab the nightly and go through the proper bug reporting procedure, but if I get a chance to tomorrow, I'll let you know.
Thanks again! :)