I'm an unpaid volunteer who runs five websites and six accounts helping people use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. I pay all their bills every month.

If you want to help these sites & accounts keep going, you can buy me a coffee:

➡️ ko-fi.com/fedithing

(No registration, choose any amount, all currencies work.)

...or alternatively become a patron:

➡️ liberapay.com/FediThing

All support greatly appreciated! 🙂

❤️ @FediTips, @FediFollows, @FediVideo, @FediGarden, @PixelfedHelp & @homegrown

Support FediThing on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/fedithing

Support FediThing On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations

^Ko-fi

Canadians are anxious, yes. But we are also angry - angry that the U.S. sees us as disposable, despite the deep economic ties that we have upheld in good faith.

We should NOT take this lying down. We stand together. We buy Canadian. We diversify our trade. And we refuse to support a country that threatens us for no reason other than a madman's political theatre.
#Canada stands strong. #ChooseCanada

School Systems Across US Declare They Will Not Comply With Trump's Anti-Trans Executive Order

erininthemorning.com/p/school-…

#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA

School Systems Across US Declare They Will Not Comply With Trump's Anti-Trans Executive Order

On Thursday, multiple school systems around the United States released advisories stating that Trump's EO mandating discrimination in schools will not be followed.

^{Erin Reed (Erin In The Morning)}

Word of the day: Kakistocracy

"A kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistoc…

This is very welcome news in the face of Trumpist depredations of US public data.
lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/…

"In recent months the Harvard Law School [@harvard_law] Library Innovation Lab [@harvardlil] has created a data vault to download, sign as authentic, and make available copies of public government data that is most valuable to researchers, scholars, civil society and the public at large across every field. To begin, we have collected major portions of the datasets tracked by data.gov, federal #Github repositories, and #PubMed...."

#DataGov #Libraries #OpenData #Preservation #Trump #USPol #USPolitics

Preserving Public U.S. Federal Data | Library Innovation Lab

^{lil.law.harvard.edu}

Web accessibility-related jobs are always going to flourish. Why? Because each browser, each screen reader, each operating system, each device, each input control, each custom control needs separate treatment.

Don't believe me? Try to implement a Vue3 combobox where you can filter items on Windows (Jaws, NVDA), Mac, iOS, iPad OS, Linux via a keyboard, touch, respecting screen sizes. Then, when all that is done, wait a few months until browsers receive some minor webkit update and things slowly start breaking.

The tale of an accessible combo box: ej2.syncfusion.com/vue/documen…

Food for thought

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/copy…

Copyright is a Civil Liberties Nightmare

If you’ve got lawyers and a copyright, the law gives you tremendous power to silence speech you don’t like. Copyright’s statutory damages can be as high as $150,000 per work infringed, even if no actual harm is done.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

For folks who couldn't make my first 2025 @fosdem.bsky.social talk Digital Public Goods - Incentivizing Collaboration fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event…

My slides are available here:
docs.google.com/presentation/d…

#DigitalPublicGoods #FOSS #FOSDEM #OpenSource #GovTech #Procurement

FOSDEM 2025: Digital Public Goods - Incentivizing Collaboration

Digital Public Goods - Incentivizing Collaboration FOSDEM, 5:35pm, Feb 1, 2025 25 minutes, Track: Community, Room: UB5.230 https://fosdem.

^{Google Docs}

Plus de 1.000 pages web ont été supprimées des sites officiels du Ministère de la Santé états-unien. Des pages sur la vaccination, sur l'avortement, sur les personnes trans...

Les quatre prochaines années vont être absolument dévastatrices aux États-Unis. L'information disparaît, l'éducation s'étiole, la haine va croissant.

Nous n'avons pas une seconde à perdre en Europe pour inverser la vapeur chez nous. Nous organiser, créer des espaces numériques qui soient des refuges. Contribuer à Wikipédia. Marginaliser à nouveau la haine, refermer la fenêtre d'Overton.

Qu'on arrête de nous comporter comme si nous n'étions pas les prochains, parce qu'on l'est.

If you remember back to Lizzie Bennet Diaries diaries on youtube then you will remember it's star Ashley Clements.

Sadly her house has burned down in LA. If she ever brought you some joy but never figured out a way to pay her back (that youtube production didn't pay much) now is the perfect time to give.

gofundme.com/f/help-ashley-cle…

#LAfire #firerelife #gofundme

Donate to Help Ashley Clements and Brendan Bradley Rebuild After Fire, organized by Ashley Clements

When I received an alert about a “fast moving fire in your ar… Ashley Clements needs your support for Help Ashley Clements and Brendan Bradley Rebuild After Fire

^gofundme.com

I’m researching the life of my 5 x great grandfather Samuel Cottrell. This will be an interesting challenge because Samuel, a non-conformist, managed to avoid all the censuses taken in the 1800s

Samuel was born on 11 July 1796 to John Cottrell and Mary Teek. He was baptised on 2 October 1796 at Saint Luke’s Old Street, Finsbury, London.

During this research, I hope to learn more about London as well.

#FamilyTree #FamilyHistory #History #Genealogy #London #1700s

Starting off #Movuary with a thing I posted several months ago now, because it's the first thing I did with all 8 scenes in a single project.
No external samples were used, and it was made entirely on Move, with no midi keyboard tracked in from elsewhere.

A Very Hot Day (Ableton Move BGM) youtu.be/Xf6MWeqIQxo

A Very Hot Day (Ableton Move BGM)

This was started on the day that my portion of London hit 31°C, which is nothing for my US followers with your fancy AC units, but for me without any of that...

^YouTube

How to win at CORS

jakearchibald.com/2021/cors/

by @jaffathecake

How to win at CORS

The 'how' and 'why' of CORS, from start to finish.

^{jakearchibald.com}

Call for Proposals: New short fiction – Applied African Speculative Fiction
appliedafricansf.com/2025/02/0…

#writing #amwriting #amwritingsf

Call for Proposals: New short fiction

Applied African Science Fiction (SF) is a project funded by Imperial College London that, together in collaboration with the University of Nairobi, the African Speculative Fiction Society, Vector a…

^{Applied African Speculative Fiction}

This is your timely reminder that you can download an offline copy of the whole Wikipedia.

And you really likely probably should.
Here's how: infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon…

#USpol #Wikipedia

Em

2025-01-22 15:41:37

Tiny Apocalyptic Time Tip 🌐✨

If you too feel uneasy about
the state of the world,
and you too worry about losing access to one of the greatest knowledge treasure of the internet,

Know that you can download an
offline copy of Wikipedia!

Here's how 📚👇

1. Download the free and open source software Kiwix (this will be your reader): kiwix.org/en/applications/

2. If you want smaller versions of Wikipedia, you can download them within Kiwix.

Within the app, go to "Categories" in the menu on the left, then browse to a topic/version you want. Scroll to the bottom for Wikipedia mini, for example. Click on it then click "Download" on the right

3. Once you have downloaded a database, click on "Opened" on the left > database you want to search > "Open Main Page" on the right.

4. You can use the Search field on the upper-right to find topics like on online Wikipedia! 🔍

5. If you want the full English version of Wikipedia (110GB), you might want to download it from the torrent file instead. Install a torrent client of your choice (I use Transmission).

Then, go to this page, click on "Download - 109.89 GB" blue button on the first result (size may vary overtime), then select "Torrent file": library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&ca…

6. Once you have the torrent file, open it with your torrent client to start the download. This is BIG! Be patient! 📦

7. Once the download is completed, open your Wikipedia `.zim` file with Kiwix!

8. Magic! 📖✨

Extra Tip: You can download many other awesome knowledge files from the Kiwix Library! Personally, I also got the iFixit knowledge base! ⚒️

#Wikipedia #Kiwix #Offline #KnowledgeIsPower

Kiwix Applications - Access Knowledge Offline on Various Platforms- Kiwix

Discover Kiwix applications that enable offline access to knowledge on different platforms. Explore the convenience of accessing information without an internet connection

^Kiwix

#foxesInLove #comic

Source: foxes-in-love.tumblr.com/post/…
Copyright: foxesinlove.net

For those planning to see @matthew Hodgson present “The Road to Mainstream Matrix,” at @fosdem please note it’ll now be *in the main Janson room.*

Sunday at 12:00.

See you there!

fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event…

FOSDEM 2025 - The Road to Mainstream Matrix

^fosdem.org

If you didn't find us at #fosdem today, there's still tomorrow! Building K, Floor 1 - play with Thunderbird for Android, meet the team, find out how to get involved, and get stickers!

#Thunderbird #OpenSource

#XMPP at #FOSDEM 2025

Talk: A Universal and Stable #API to Everything: XMPP

Real Time Communications (#RTC) track, room K.3.601, at 18:25 by Jérôme Poisson (@Goffi)

fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event…

#jabber #chat #interoperability
#opensource #decentralization #standard

Talk by Ilya Zverev about #15minutesCities

Being able to do most of your things in a 15 minutes transit distance from your home is a great quality of life and environment indicator for a city.
He talks about how to measure this metric and identify which cities and neighborhoods are 15-minutes compatible.

By @zverik at #fosdem in the #geospatial devroom.

#fosdem2025 #devroom #osgeo #opengeo

Het Arizona regeerakkoord is kil op vlak van menselijkheid en nalatig op vlak van milieu en klimaat.

Enkele eerste reflecties na het lezen van het akkoord. /1

Fox News reject Megyn Kelly got burned over her Little House on the Prairie reboot on Netflix tweet,
Megyn Kelly, “If you wokeify Little House on the Prairie, I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.”

Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls in the original series,
"Apparently Megyn tweeted (I'm not on that platform) asking that Netflix not “woke-Ify" their Little House remake. Ummm...watch the original again. TV doesn't get too much more “woke" than we did. We tackled: racism, addiction, nativism, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, spousal abuse and every other "woke " topic you can think of. Thank you very much. " #USPol

It's funny. The books and even the show is about how the women keep saving family from the father, who in real life, regardless of the hard working, pull em up by the bootstraps farmer they made him appear, was by all accounts a deadbeat failure with wanderlust, who was lazy.

🔗 Melissa Gilbert responds to Megyn Kelly threat against Little House on the Prairie reboot
Gilbert starred as young Laura Ingalls Wilder in the original Western adaptation

"independent.co.uk/arts-enterta…

#XMPP at FOSDEM 2025

Find us in K building 2nd floor! nearby the elevator! Yes, we have stickers!

xmpp.org/2025/01/xmpp-at-fosde…

#jabber #chat #interoperability #rtc
#opensource #decentralization #standard