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

uwaterloo.ca/astrophysics-cent…

GEESE-ON: Galaxy Evolution and Environment in Southern and Eastern Ontario

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.

teslacoilapps.com/nova/solong.…

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:

reddit.com/r/Android/comments/…

and another very similar quote with similar conversation here:

reddit.com/r/Android/comments/…

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:

change.org/p/make-nova-launche…

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.

#NovaLauncher #Nova #Branch #BranchMetrics #OpenSource #OpenSourceNova #Petition #Android #Apps #Google

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…

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"

youtube.com/watch?v=JX4dFaIEEw…

Transcript here:

thecjn.ca/news/harvard-experts…

#Podcast #Antisemitism #MentalHealth #Jews #Abuse

This entry was edited (4 months ago)

Ik zat vanochtend net een halve poging te doen om dochterlief naar Linux te helpen. Haar leptop is stuk dus dit is een mooi moment voor verandering.

Maar eigenlijk weet ik niks van Linux. Net zo min als de dochter heb ik veel zin in systeembeheren.

Ik zou wel tips willen welke tweedehands laptop geschikt zou zijn voor een verse Linux-installatie waar een eh, normaal mens ook mee kan werken.

#linux

in reply to Paul van Buuren 🍉

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.

A new version of MapComplete is out on mapcomplete.org

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!

Register here: conference.opensource.lu/

View the agenda here: conference.opensource.lu/agend…

This entry was edited (4 months ago)

#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

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…

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.

Data from doi.org/10.24381/cds.f17050d7

For your next coffee break listen : @bagder Keynote from #OpenSourceSummit hosted by The Linux Foundation is now available!

Listen to his key note now : youtube.com/watch?v=YEBBPj7pIK…

What will you gain from the keynote speech :

🔹insight into the growing challenges for Open Source maintainers, including lack of funding, questions of sustainability and AI race

🔹how can these challenges can be tackled while developing Open Source solutions

Hi everyone,

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.

Full details and download from: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2025-3r…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Update #NewVersion #PreRelease #FOSS #Update #News #Accessibility

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™).

Detail lovers can head over to stats.izzyondroid.org/ and dig in 😉

Sylvia reshared this.

📣 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

My keynote from Open Source Summit Europe 2025 is now up. 13 pretty packed minutes.

youtu.be/YEBBPj7pIKo?si=DBxSCF…

Bubu reshared this.

Working on a way to have #curl -w able to output the contents of all headers with a set name even from a redirect-"chain":

github.com/curl/curl/pull/1849…

#curl

Contact with Europeans in the 19th century first provided the Yapese at Palau with iron tools, that made the cutting and shaping of the stones much easier. Not much later, the Yapese made deals with Europeans to use their ships to transport the stones back to Yap. These arrangements enabled the manufacture of much larger and heavier rai stones, up to 4 meters in diameter, as well of a larger number of them. However, these "modern" stones were less valuable than more ancient ones.


Even stone money suffers from inflation.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_ston…

in reply to feld

That paired with this would be perfect for me

mokerlink.com/index.php?route=…

This is local Amsterdam news (in Dutch) about the library putting on a display of books banned from American schools and libraries, in little stars-and-stripes coffins. They say it’s because whatever nonsense America gets up to, the Dutch need to be ready to guard against it being pushed here a few years later. at5.nl/nieuws/234309/wat-je-in…

#uspol #censorship #bannedbooks

in anticipation of another bike trip, i've constructed porteur bag #2, refined and refreshed.

- first bag i've made with a liner! (robic nylon)
- structured like a big tote bag but with a zipper and a square footprint
- two wire gate clips to make attachment / straps experiments easier
- same ecopak material as my frame bag
- cordura on the bottom for durability

overall: an improvement, attachment to the rack is simpler and faster. could be slightly taller, and maybe all ecopak

#2

“Unlike a typical mesh, which stores per-vertex 3D positions, a mescher stores per-vertex 2D screen-space positions and a per-edge depth difference. Whereas differences in depth across edges must sum up to zero as we travel around a standard mesh, this is not necessarily the case for a mescher. It is a mathematical way of describing the perceptual impossibility.” anadodik.github.io/publication…

Thank you to everyone who attended the World Blindness Summit & WBU General Assembly last week in São Paulo, Brazil. It was an honour for NV Access to attend, and to have NV Access General Manager, James Boreham and NV Access director Emma Bennison present. It was an informative and uplifting week and a chance to meet many new people and hear people's hopes for the future!

#WBUSummit #WBU25 #Blindness #Blind #Accessibility #NVDA #NVAccess #NVDAsr #Brazil #SaoPaulo

For anyone who thinks Wayland compositors are being overly restrictive by not allowing applications to set absolute positions for their windows, as I did, there are good reasons for this restriction. canonical-mir.readthedocs-host…

Bug Hunter (1990) is one of those rare puzzle platformers written exclusively for the Acorn 32-bit machines.

Whenever I stumble on an Archimedes title, I perk up. These machines—descendants of Acorn’s BBC line—were the first computers powered by ARM CPUs. Think about that: ARM, the chipset now running your phone, your tablet, your Nintendo Switch, even your M-series Mac.

Back in 1990, ARM wasn’t about pocket gadgets. It was pitched as the next big leap in desktop computing. Only problem was the Acorn Archimedes barely left the UK, and outside of classrooms, almost nobody touched one.

That’s a shame, because games like Bug Hunter show what these machines could do. The hero is Hysteron Proteron—a bioengineered soldier gone wrong. A lab mix-up left him a spineless bug-eyed creature who can’t actually fight. So the army threw him on pest control duty.

His gimmick: suckered feet that let him scuttle along floors, ceilings, and walls, and the ability to pick up objects and drop them on unsuspecting insects. Kill them all, move to the next room, repeat. Simple, but clever.

Graphically, it’s impressive for 1990. Crisp sprites, fluid enough movement, and backgrounds that look every bit as solid as what you’d see on the Amiga or Genesis. The SNES wasn’t even out yet, and here’s Acorn pushing visuals in that league.

Sound, though, is the usual British compromise: no music, just effects. Still, compared to the PC speaker squawks of DOS games, those crunchy bug-splat noises were fine.

What makes Bug Hunter stand out isn’t just the gameplay—it’s the personality. One room even has a parody movie poster on the wall: Schwarzenegger in Decorator, with the tagline “They picked the wrong man…” It’s little details like that which make it feel less like a generic extermination game and more like someone’s sly passion project. Which it was.

Ian Richardson, a solo dev at the time, built this thing himself. He’d later go on to Gremlin and Ocean before becoming a respected figure in UK game development. He passed away in 2021, but Bug Hunter remains a testament to his early craft.

The sequel, Bug Hunter in Space, came out the same year, expanding the concept to alien ships and teleports. And Bug Hunter & Moon Dash was even sold together on a single disk, though everyone agrees Moon Dash was the weaker half. Bug Hunter’s the one people remember—the one schoolkids used to sneak onto Archimedes machines in British classrooms.

So if you ever find an Acorn 32-bit, don’t pass this up. Bug Hunter is charming, tough, and a reminder that the ARM revolution didn’t start with iPhones. It started with a bug-eyed mutant wandering the walls on a forgotten British computer.

@videogames

FYI trichloroethylene causes Parkinson's

Dry cleaning chemicals hang around - on your clothes | Environmental Working Group ewg.org/news-insights/news/dry…

For anyone interested in that AudioScreen add-on we just shared, the link posted by the vOICe was not the right one to download it, you need to follow that one through another post to it, or go direct to: github.com/nvaccess/audioScree…

This is a great example of an add-on where the original author didn't have capacity to continue developing it, and has passed it on to someone else. This is a healthy part of our ecosystem and one which should be encouraged.

in reply to James Dean (has moved)

@GamingWithEars @vick21 @alexhall You can explore an image on a touch screen and get audible feedback (pitch) of it. On the GitHub page - github.com/nvaccess/audioScree… - there is a link to an audio demonstration by Mick Curran "where he demonstrates the various modes, and uses it to explore a map of Australia, a rainbow, the earth from space, a cartoon house, and a sun set."
in reply to Kevan

@kev Thanks Kevan! We did write some tips on filing issues with GitHub here: nvaccess.org/post/in-process-1…

Also, have you tried our new "form" based template? The same questions, but in edit boxes you can tab between.

You can find the test templates here: github.com/nvaccess/nvda-issue…

Please note, these are currently only for testing - we are not monitoring issues submitted using those forms.

Once you test the form, please head to this discussion to leave feedback: github.com/nvaccess/nvda/discu…

If you use Claude Coe, you may be interested in the project I have been contributing the #accessibility features to. It's called Opcode. It's basically a GUI version of the Claude Code CLI.
Check out my branch at github.com/vick08/opcode.
There is an outstanding PR against the main repo, but I am not sure when the author decides to incorporate my changes. There are other 40 PRs in the queue! :)
Enjoy!

André Polykanine reshared this.