Companies keep bragging about how "smart" their smart devices are and keep advertising useless features, yet most, if not all of them can't even restore the time after an outage -.-
This isn't my sub-field of astronomy, but someone needs to give this conference 1000 internet bonus points for the best, most geographically relevant acronym, plus their logo is ADORABLE
An upcoming workshop for Ontario-based astronomers to discuss ongoing and future research in galaxy evolution, hosted by the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics.
I'm writing this post here today in hopes to bring some attention to something that is near and dear to my heart, and that's an update to the current situation with Nova Launcher, that I worked for and with for nine years up until August of 2024.
For those that haven't seen the news, Kevin Barry, the founder and developer of Nova has left Branch which in turn means he's now no longer involved with Nova Launcher in any way going forward.
For the past year or so Kevin has stated that he was working on the open source version of Nova Launcher so that if/when this time came, it would be out in the open and the community could take it over and contribute to it and have it continue being developed.
However, it seems that Harish Thimmappa and others at Branch had told him to stop working on that effort as they didn't want him to continue doing that for unknown reasons. This is sad news because this was something that former CEO, Alex Austin, had promised both via a contract and publicly that if Kevin were to ever leave Branch, Nova Launcher would become open source. You can find that quote here:
The reason for this post is to try and draw some attention to the folks at Branch, specifically folks like Harish Thimmappa to do the right thing and honor these promises and any writings in the contracts from 2022 and to fully focus on releasing Nova Launcher as an open source app.
The community deserves this more than anything, since that was something that Kevin was very adamant about when he allowed Branch to acquire Nova Launcher back in 2022. Plus, this is just something that Branch should do since it is something that has been promised.
There is currently a petition on Change.org to try and get Branch to do this as well. After only 3 days of it being posted to Change.org, it sits at almost 1,500 signatures, and that's with very little to no press coverage at this time, which is something that would be super useful to bring full attention to this situation. You can find the petition here:
I ask that everyone who sees this post can share it with their followers as I would love to see Branch do the right thing and follow through with their promises that were made back in 2022 when they acquired Nova Launcher and release it fully as an open source app now that Kevin is no longer working for Branch and not involved in Nova Launcher.
I'm going to tag some folks below that I worked with at Branch in hopes of getting this post seen by as many folks there as possible.
A good definition for "legacy code" is any code that you're afraid to change or update because no one at your company knows how it works anymore and there's no automated test coverage to tell you if your changes break it.
AI is only capable of generating instant legacy code. At scale.
Despite the phone telling us rain will be coming, the mother-in-law looks at the sky, says she can't see any clouds, and decides to hang out laundry.
Next, a delivery person has clearly just come through a thunderstorm. This is obvious by the fact that they told us they came through a thunderstorm, with supplementary evidence including the fact they're dripping on the doorstep.
finally, she hears thunder in the distance. She decides it was probably something else.
I cannot fathom the sort of mindset this lady has some days. How many clear signs do you need that your nice, clean laundry will almost certainly be drenched shortly?
I took it in before my next work meeting. A few minutes later, we had a torrential downpour. It's all but stopped, now, but there was enough to cause a re-wash if I hadn't.
Do my critically important, value-driven work supporting critical infrastructure and critical service delivery for which I receive an ungodly salary from a five year old laptop bogged down with bloat from IT so badly that it lags when scrolling web pages.
Do my fucking around building stupid shit nobody will ever use and playing stupid games on one of the fastest consumer-oriented desktop specs available.
Zkrátka a dobře, kombinace Kotlety a Ježkové funguje báječně, text je zábavně zvrhlý, přesto dokáže podnítit posluchače k mnoha úvahám, které nemusejí být úplně plytké. Jestli chcete nějakou radu na závěr, tady je: Kupte si to. naposlech.cz/recenze/hrdinka-z…
Kyberpunková swingers party přináší čtyři delší povídky a v nich očekávatelný děj, jaký si kterýkoli čtenář série s doktorem Koskem nejspíš umí dobře představit.
After over 20 years of only buying HP printers (because they work well in Linux) I finally got fed up by their anti-customer policies, their hard push against third parties, their heavily-overpriced, privacy violating ink cartridges and the planned obsolescence.
While not perfect, most certainly a lot better, so I ordered a Brother MFC-J5740DW. Reviews are pretty good, it does duplex, scan to cifs and works with Linux. Looking forward to it, shall write a small "review" in some days..
JEWS, PLEASE READ THIS NON-JEWS, PLEASE READ THIS!
Harvard experts warn Diaspora Jews are suffering from ‘traumatic invalidation’ after Oct. 7
"They call it traumatic invalidation, a condition first studied a decade ago for victims of other traumas such as sexual assault who are told it's their fault or they should get over it. For Jews, the same label should apply, the authors found, because it involves what they describe as a stunning mix of silence, denial, blame, gaslighting, whataboutism, and exclusion, such as documenting many cases of Jews being told their grief does not matter because of what's happening in Gaza"
Ik draai al jaren Ubuntu op mijn desktop, en mijn ervaring is dat de hoeveelheid systeembeheren ongeveer net zo veel is als bij Windows. Met als voordeel bij Ubuntu dat iemand het al voor je heeft uitgezocht en je een paar commando's in de commandline plakt die het in orde maken.
Grootste issue zal de software zijn -- als je Windows-only programma's gebruikt dan is het wel echt pielen geblazen. Maar Firefox (en dus ook alles wat via een browser kan) gaat prima.
@Tutanota I attempted to create an account a few days ago. I have not been able to sign in and keeps saying my log in credentials are invalid. I have the recovery code. I finally tried to cancel my subscription and require a refund. You don't have a way to contact you for support. How do I get a refund?
It has: - a brand new theme was created by @RLin about infrastructure. If you like power lines, pipelines, street cabinets, then this map will be for you: mapcomplete.org/infrastructure - More support for offline use (and even more is in the pipeline) - various bugfixes
1 October @oscl examines open source and data as the foundation for Digital Sovereignty. A great opportunity to engage with the open source community in Luxembourg!
I haven't really gotten into their whole catalog, but "Breakfast in America" is one of my favorites. "Goodbye Stranger" is a 10/10 song, and "Bloody Well Right" off "Crime of the Century" is a favorite of mine as well.
I loved singing along to that one as a kid, cause singing "bloody well right" felt like cursing, but didn't get me in trouble.
Don't just crave it – make it happen! We're a volunteer-driven, community open source project with very limited resources. We do all we can, but can't make an iOS app happen without some help. So please consider helping us, or funding a developer: documentfoundation.org/certifi… – Thank you! 😊
LibreOffice Certified Developers LibreOffice Certified Developers are individuals who have proven their ability to master LibreOffice code: to develop new features; provide L3 Support to enterprise users; research and develop solutions to new or unkn…
@auf_mastodon This is also a worst case scenario for evaluating AI use in a corporate environment. Q: Do you use the AI tools we provide? Yes Q: Did you get value out of using the tool? Yes Analysis: AI tools good!
Unless (very unlikely) the people studying actually look at the end-to-end value of the process they are going to come to false conclusions
I don't think AI in emails, especially in very private (secure) emails, is a good idea. I'd rather have good encryption, including a public key for the recipient. AI is only artificial, not intelligence.
The trouble is: This will be the Standard. When you go to your boss with a pile of paper and tell him, I printed out all I read and wrote on this project since yesterday, you are the best employee ever. Even though, the boss never dares to look at the paper, which is mostly empty. Now you let AI create stuff and tell your boss how busy you have been with all these reports. Just happened with my colleague. He had really good use case and used AI and it helped. Instead of finishing Friday at 4pm with sunshine, he finished at 2pm and went swimming. The questions are: 1. What do we do with all our spare time now? 2. When will superiors recognize this? 3. Will it lead to layoffs?
As with everything, it's about moderate and intelligent use of your tools. I wrote a Thunderbird extension. I write bullet points, short sentences full of typos. My locally hosted ollama AI model corrects the errors and expands the sentences so they make sense. It's not any longer or fuller of nonsense than an email I would spend 3x longer writing
from these comment AInis doing to tech what corporations have done to the food industry in the states. “Hi welcome to xyz it’s a beautiful day my name is abc want to try our new item have you signed up for …(5 minutes later)…what would you like to order?”
I keep my AI use to a minimum. For the kinds of emails I need to write I really don't need it, and when I do it's just to rephrase a sentence or to find a word I can't remember.
I use AI a lot for many things but I hate it in emails. I think the real problem is this corporate culture of mking things more complicated than they should be. In meetings it's very often the same
#Mastobada Green Day, Boulevard of broken dreams « I walk a lonely road The only one that I have ever known Don't know where it goes But it's home to me, and I walk alone I walk this empty street On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams Where the city sleeps And I'm the only one, and I walk alone » youtu.be/Soa3gO7tL-c
Watch the official music video for Boulevard Of Broken Dreams by Green Day from the album American Idiot.🔔 Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com...
LibreOffice 25.8 is our new major release – but we're maintaining the previous branch for a few more months. And today we're releasing #LibreOffice 25.2.6: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl…
Berlin, 8 September 2025 – The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 25.2.6, the sixth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.2 family, available for download at www.libreoffice.org/download [1]. LibreOffice 25.2.
Changes in September temperatures in the #Arctic by decade. The largest warming is co-located with areas of melting sea ice, such as the along the Eurasian coast.
ERA5 is the fifth generation ECMWF reanalysis for the global climate and weather for the past 8 decades.
Data is available from 1940 onwards.
ERA5 replaces the ERA-Interim reanalysis.
The other day me and @gregkh shot down a draft proposal to add a new role in the CVE ecosystem (SADP: "supplier ADP") that would append data to CVEs with details about dependencies and how they are or are not vulnerable to each particular CVE.
Imagine the amount of dependencies that use curl or the Linux kernel etc. These sweet innocent proposal makers thought in the terms of 5-10 dependencies per CVE. Not tens or hundreds of thousands which is far from unthinkable.
@jacques yeah, I think some of us realized that which also made us immediately realize the scale it would have to support to work - and how that alone would make the proposal not work.
@jacques Do you think the opposite can be done? e.g. push on downstream software to declare (through VEX or otherwise) whether or not they're vulnerable to something upstream?
@mlieberman @jacques we as producers of CVEs for a component cannot tell which users that are vulnerable nor how sever their problems are if they are vulnerable
@sjvn that’s been my experience for a lot of these things. Well intentioned ideas, but they don’t withstand contact with the realities of wide-scale reuse.
Don't miss out! Join us at the next Open Source Summit in Amsterdam, Netherland (August 25-29); or Seoul, South Korea (November 4-5). Join us at the premier ...
@karlemilnikka @bagder ah! det verkar som om när man postar en länk i mastodon-ekosystemet så besöker alla instanser min blogg samtidigt och då går den ner 5-10 minuter..
The NVDA 2025.3 Release Candidate is now available for testing. We encourage all users to download this RC and provide feedback. Unless any critical bugs are found, this will be identical to the final 2025.3 release.
This release includes improvements to Remote Access, SAPI5 voices, braille and the Add-on Store.
For number lovers: during the past 31 days, the #IzzyOnDroid repo saw almost 800,000 APK downloads – which roughly corresponds to 18 APKs/minute, or 1 APK every 3 seconds. And that's only from our main server, not counting the mirrors (coming soon™).
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
📣 Do-It-Blind (DIB) online Besprechung am Montag, 8. September, um 19:00 Uhr. Du bist eingeladen! bbb.metalab.at/rooms/joh-szv-o… Wöchentlich am Montag besprechen wir neue Formen der digitalen und inklusiven Zusammenarbeit. Mach mit! 🛠️ #make #blind #inklusion
Learn using BigBlueButton, the trusted open-source web conferencing solution that enables seamless virtual collaboration and online learning experiences.
The other day I sent out this tweet As it took off, got an amazing attention and I received many different comments and replies, I felt a need to elaborate a little. To add some meat to this.
I have an app that uses long, base64 encoded data in URLs, and the fact that many systems I don't have control over, such as CDNs, AWS, etc, convert double slashes to single ones, presuming path and filename semantics is infuriating! Isn't it meant to be an opaque string by HTTP standards?
1. the URL is not a HTTP standard. It's a URL standard. Unfortunately, we have several such and nobody follows them strictly... 2. There is a base64url charset designed to be used in URLs. Used by for example DoH. 3. No, the path component is not "opaque" in a URL
before @ it's webfinger, after it domain after column port but since it's empty then assume 80, after / is route, after ? is a param and after # is a html id????
I’ve gotta be real with you, @Tutanota: I love your work and your company, but you need to add Web Key Directory compatibility.
At this point, PGP/WKD support for a privacy-focused email provider has to be as fundamental as supporting TLS. Proton does not own PGP.
I simply cannot in good conscience recommend Tuta over Proton to people generally speaking, knowing that Proton users benefit from E2EE when they email me on my self-hosted email servers, as well as when they email plenty of other providers (Posteo, Mailbox.org). And that is a shame, because trust me I would love to be able to point anywhere other than Proton when I’m asked this.
Keep your superior encryption for intra-Tuta emails, absolutely. Give it a different UI indicator so people know the difference, I don’t care. At the end of the day, not at least silently supporting in the background the only decentralized email encryption method we have is antithetical to what email is all about: interoperability.
People have been asking you about PGP for 8+ years, I know Autocrypt used to be on your roadmap and now it seemingly no longer is.
These days, most of us have a smartphone. They are so commonplace that we rarely stop to consider how amazing they truly are. The open-source project Phyphox has provided easy access to your phone’…
Come along to see the latest and greatest progress in the Matrix world! From huge government deployments to the latest innovations, hang out with your peers to share the best learning, insights, projects and tips!
Don't miss out! Join us at the next Open Source Summit in Amsterdam, Netherland (August 25-29); or Seoul, South Korea (November 4-5). Join us at the premier ...
While the Trump administration tries to cancel offshore wind for "national security" reasons, here's the CEO of Ukraine's largest private energy company
Daniel Wood
in reply to TheEvilSkeleton • • •Od-Nan Kenobi
in reply to TheEvilSkeleton • • •