hometown - Link to source
It’s hard to overemphasize just what a bombshell this was for the webcomic scene in the late 90s/early 00s. Comics had been using GIF even for non-animated strips, and major comics started spearheading anti-GIF campaigns and teaching people how to switch to PNG.
ioc.exchange/@siliconundergro/…

Silicon Underground (Dave F) (@siliconundergro@ioc.exchange)

30 years ago today, Compuserve and Unisys tried to give themselves a Christmas gift at the Internet's expense, by charging a $5,000 royalty for using GIF images. #retrocomputing https://dfarq.homeip.net/cashing-in-on-gif-by-charging-royalties/
IOC.exchange
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Interesting article in The Atlantic summarising some recent research suggesting that Walmart makes the communities it operates in poorer than if it had never been there at all.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…


The Walmart Effect

New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.
Rogé Karma (The Atlantic)
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, wherever you may be ✨🎄

Joyeux Noël!
Frohe Weihnachten!
¡Feliz Navidad!
Buon Natale!
Feliz Natal!
Весела Коледа!
Veselé Vánoce!
Glædelig jul!
Häid jõule!
Καλά Χριστούγεννα!
Nollaig shona!
Sretan Božić!
Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus!
Džiaugsmingų šv. Kalėdų!
Kellemes karácsonyi ünnepeket!
Il-Milied it-Tajjeb!
Vrolijk kerstfeest!
Wesołych Świąt!
Crăciun fericit!
Veselé Vianoce!
Vesel božič!
God Jul!
Hyvää joulua!

A festive Christmas-themed graphic with a red background. The image features 12 postage stamp illustrations arranged in a grid. The stamps represent various holiday traditions across Europe: a decorated Christmas tree, a white dove against a starry night, mistletoe tied with a ribbon, crossed candy canes, a blue Christmas sweater with red and white patterns, a stocking with holly leaves, a bunch of grapes, a green triangular bell with a red star, Christmas cookies (a star, a tree, and a snowman), a broom with stars, a green wreath with red accents, and a festive dinner plate with a fork and knife. Each stamp also features one star of the EU emblem. In the centre, "Merry Christmas" is written in white script. At the bottom, the logo of the European Commission appears in white.

mastodon - Link to source

“Elon Musk Is a Paid Subscriber to Shockingly Racist Pro-Apartheid South African X Account”
mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-is…

That’s silly. Why subscribe when he could buy it outright?

(And then bring his same success with Twitter and run it into the ground.)

Elon Musk Subscribes to Virulently Racist X Account

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, is a paid subscriber to a virulently racist X account.
Isaac Schorr (Mediaite)

mastodon - Link to source

🚨 Nevra needs £4,300 by Dec 31 or her surgery will be canceled! gofundme.com/f/save-nevra 🚨

Plus $2,954.46 for rent or she will be homeless paypal.com/paypalme/SaveLizNev…

She’s a severely disabled homebound young woman who escaped domestic abuse, no local orgs in her country will help, this is an emergency, please donate and share


Donate to Help Nevra Secure Surgery, Care, and Safety, organized by Adrian Bamforth

Nevra is a 28 year old young woman in Karachi, Pakistan, who has been suff… Adrian Bamforth needs your support for Help Nevra Secure Surgery, Care, and Safety
gofundme.com

mastodon - Link to source
OpenOffice has multiple unfixed security issues, over a year old, as this image from the Board report says. And no new committers since 2022, and no major release since 2014. Maybe the FOSS community can ask the Apache Software Foundation to finally put it in the Attic, and stop leaving users vulnerable: apache.org/foundation/contact
Screenshot of Apache Board Report saying there are three unfixed security issues in OpenOffice.

Contact Us | Apache Software Foundation

Home page of The Apache Software Foundation
www.apache.org

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
Here's some Christmas audio for today. Back in the early 2000's a telephone service called Tellme which could be called in the US at +1 800-555-8355 (sadly this no longer exists) had a thing going where starting December 10 you could call in and hear special messages from Santa. Then starting at 7:00 PM local time (since it knew where you were calling from based on your phone number) on Christmas Eve, you could track Santa's state-by-state progress with his deliveries. I have great recordings of the special messages and some of the state reports, and a bit distorted recordings of the rest of the states. Sadly this service no longer exists, so what we have is what we have. Anyway, here are the special messages you could hear.

reshared this

friendica - Link to source

Buon Natale a tutti gli abitanti del Poliverso! (e qualche novità interessante)

Carissimi iscritti,

prima di passare ai due contenuti informativi CHE VI CONSIGLIAMO DI LEGGERE CON MOLTA ATTENZIONE, vorremmo approfittare del nostro canale di comunicazione per augurare a tutti voi buone feste, in particolare vi auguriamo di trascorrere un Natale rilassante e riflessivo in attesa di un 2025 ricco di soddisfazioni personali e soprattutto ricco di relazioni interpersonali!

Per quello che ci compete, noi amministratori siamo molto contenti: Poliverso è infatti diventata stabilmente l'istanza Friendica con il maggior numero di utenti attivi e noi cercheremo di fare il possibile per rendere vivibile e soddisfacente questo angolo di web e vi chiediamo di diffondere tra i vostri parenti, amici, scopamici (beh, perché no...), ammiratori e conoscenti la notizia dell'esistenza dei nostri tre progetti, tutti integrati grazie al Fediverso:

1) Poliverso.org, per chi vuole vivere il web sociale al massimo delle potenzialità
2) Poliversity.it, per chi ama Mastodon, ma non vuole rinunciare alla possibilità di scrivere post lunghi e formattati
3) Feddit.it, per chi al social network preferisce i contenuti tematici

E se volete farci un regalo per Natale o per la Befana, potete sempre dare un'occhiata alla nostra pagina di supporto su Liberapay it.liberapay.com/poliverso/ o alla pagina dei menu di Ko-Fi ko-fi.com/poliverso

Veniamo quindi alle informazioni:

Formattazione post con titolo leggibili da Mastodon

Come saprete, con Friendica possiamo scegliere di scrivere post con il titolo (come su WordPress) e post senza titolo (come su Mastodon). Uno dei problemi più fastidiosi per chi desidera scrivere post con il titolo è il fatto che gli utenti Mastodon leggeranno il vostro post come se fosse costituito dal solo titolo e, due a capi più in basso, dal link al post originale: questo non è di certo il modo miglior per rendere leggibili e interessanti i vostri post!
Con le ultime release di Friendica abbiamo però la possibilità di modificar un'impostazione per rendere perfettamente leggibili anche i post con il titolo. Ecco come fare:

A) dal proprio account bisogna andare alla pagina delle impostazioni e, da lì, alla voce "Social Network" al link poliverso.org/settings/connect…
B) Selezionando la prima sezione "Impostazione media sociali" e scorrendo in basso si può trovare la voce "Article Mode", con un menu a cascata
C) Delle tre voci disponibili bisogna scegliere "Embed the title in the body"

Ecco, ora i nostri post saranno completamente leggibili da Mastodon!


Le novità di Raccoon For Friendica

Raccoon for Friendica sta migliorando a vista d'occhio. Dalle anteprime dei video, al miglioramento della composizione dei messaggi con immagini, fino ad alcuni aggiornamenti alla stessa architettura dell'app, la maturazione di Raccoon for Friendica è quasi conclusa.
Ci sono ancora alcuni aspetti che verranno risolti nella release di fine anno, come la modifica dei messaggi pubblicati, o novità molto interessanti dal punto di vista della visualizzazione, ma oggi Raccoon copre tutte le esigenze dell'utente Friendica, escluse le impostazioni avanzate dell'account che è opportuno gestire sempre dal browser.
Raccoon for Friendica può essere utilizzata anche dagli utenti Mastodon; anzi, al momento è l'unica app per Mastodon che consenta agli utenti di navigare facilmente tra i gruppi Activitypub (comunità Lemmy, gruppi Friendica, gruppi gup.pe o magazine Mbin), che sono oggettivamente difficili da apprezzare per gli utenti Mastodon, qualsiasi sia l'app che utilizzano.
Infine Raccoon for Friendica è l'unica app che consenta agli utenti Mastodon Glitch-soc (come Poliversity.it) di scrivere messaggi formattati sfruttando una barra di formattazione molto intuitiva!

Come installare Raccoon for Friendica?

Se avete F-droid, potete farlo direttamente da lì

Se volete scaricare proprio l'ultima versione, potete cercare il file .apk a questo link

Se invece volete complimentarvi con lo sviluppatore, potete trovarlo qui:

Una nuova istanza italiana Lemmy

Chiaramente feddit.it è la più bellissima meravigliosissima istanza Lemmy del mondo, ma da questa settimana non sarà più l'unica a parlare Italiano. Nasce infatti l'istanza diggita.com, un progetto per portare su Lemmy la comunità di diggita.com, uno dei più longevi aggregatori di notizie e commenti

Qui l'elenco delle comunità diggita attive finora

================

E con queste tre notizie abbiamo finito l'ultimo bollettino dell'anno.

Ancora tanti auguri di Buon Natale e a presto!

Gli amministratori

L'albero di natale del Fediverso in versione natalizia, con le palle di Natale con i nomi dei software del Fediverso le mascotte di Poliverso

mastodon - Link to source
I've often seen questions about places where you can find accessible electronic greeting cards. The other day, someone sent @Bruce and me an e-card and I noticed that there was a button to turn on descriptions. After doing a bit more experimenting, I discovered that this site has pretty much every single card I checked out available with audio description. The description is synthesized, and I don't know if the description shows up on a braille display at this point. If you use their iOS app and have audio description turned on in your iOS settings, the descriptions will play automatically. If you use the web site every time you go into a new card you have to enable the descriptions. I haven't played with the Android app yet. It's about $8 a month to send an unlimited number of cards. The site for these cards is jacquielawson.com/

Greeting Cards & Animated Ecards | Jacquie Lawson Cards

Charming animated greeting cards for birthdays and special occasions, featuring English landscapes, playful animals, and much more.
Jacquie Lawson ecards
@Bruce Toews

mastodon - Link to source
Sorry for linking to Substack, but this article is excellent and needs to be read by every man out there:
annawharton.substack.com/p/wha…

What Would A Woman Do To An Unconscious Man If She Thought No-One Would Find Out?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the course of the trial of Dominique Pelicot and his fellow accused: what would a woman do to an unconscious man if she thought no-one would find out?
Anna Wharton (White Ink with Anna Wharton)

mastodon - Link to source

Today the Parker Solar Probe will get 7 times closer to the Sun than any spacecraft ever has, going faster than any spacecraft ever has - 690,000 kilometers per hour. WHEEEEEE!!!!!!!

But the really cool part is what the newspapers are barely talking about: what it's like down there. The Sun doesn't have a surface like the Earth does, since it's all just hot gas. But it has an "Alfvén surface" - and the probe has penetrated that.

What's the Alfvén surface? In simple terms, it's where the solar wind - the hot gas emitted by the Sun - breaks free of the Sun and shoots out into space. But to understand how cool it is, we need to dig a bit deeper.

After all, how can we say where the solar wind "breaks free of the Sun"?

Hot gas shoots up from the Sun, faster and faster due to its pressure, even though it's pulled down by gravity. At some point it goes faster than the speed of sound! This is the Alfvén surface. Above this surface, the solar wind becomes supersonic, so no disturbances in its flow can affect the Sun below.

But it's even cooler than that, because "sound" in the solar wind is very different from sound on Earth. Here we have air. The Sun has ions - atoms of gas so hot that electrons have been ripped off - interacting with powerful magnetic fields. You can visualize these fields as tight rubber bands, with the ions stuck to them. They vibrate back and forth together!

You could call these vibrations "sound", but the technical term is "Alfvén waves". Alfvén was the one who figured out how fast these waves move. Parker studied the surface where the solar wind's speed exceeds the speed of the Alfvén waves.

And now we've gone deep below that surface!

(1/n)

Artist's impression of the Parker Solar Probe, a small satellite, shooting through fiery streaks of hot gas in front of the enormous Sun.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Excited to share the first of a 2-part deep dive into Estonia's digital journey in our latest Let's Think Digital podcast episode! Estonia looms large in the digital government conversation despite being a small country. What led to it becoming a global digital government leader?

As always, you can check out the episode on our website at: thinkdigital.ca/podcast/welcom… or on your favourite podcast platform!

Welcome to Estonia (with Liisa-Ly Pakosta, Ville Sirviö, and Siim Sikkut)

Follow the digital government space long enough and you will hear about Estonia. Despite being a small country of 1.4 million people with an overall eco...
thinkdigital.ca
in reply to Mike Gifford, CPWA

mastodon - Link to source

Ryan Androsoff

@mgifford be sure to also check out our most recent one that dropped yesterday which goes even deeper into issues around trust and digital government: thinkdigital.ca/podcast/trust-…

Trust is Everything (with Andres Raieste)

Trust is everything. It’s clear we’re in a moment in time where people do not trust their governments. There is skepticism about the impact of big t...
thinkdigital.ca
@Mike Gifford, CPWA
⇧