Opinion: Exclusive TalkBack Features for Google TTS Are Doing More Harm Than Good accessibleandroid.com/opinion-…

For a while now I have been looking for an easy-to-use solution to track the time I spent on various tasks at my wor. My colleague has recommended Toggl, a tool to do just that in the browser. I have tried it and neither the website nor the Windows app were accessible. Thanks to somebody boosting it, I have discovered Timery for Toggl by @joehribar , a third-party client for the Toggl service. It is easy, definitely accessible and powerful with shortcuts and widgets. It's customizable to the point where i now use the VoiceOver gesture of two-finger swipe left to start a new time entry (an instance of time running), as opposed to a timer which is a predefined time counting config that creates its own time entries once launched (this I start with a two-finger swipe to the right, pick a timer from the list and go). The new time entry only requires a name and starts immediately. I can assign it to a project later. The quadruple tap with one finger resumes the recent timer and a single tap on both sides of the screen (actually the half of the gesture to enable Braille Screen Input), stops any running tracking (I'll have to change that actually as it gets triggered everytime I really try to activate BSI). The subscription is definitely worth it! I don't have to even open the app most of the time and tracking has become much easier. Thank you! apps.apple.com/pl/app/timery-f… #Accessibility #Blind #iOS

The number one reason for (at least) weekly changes to my site is to update the AI crawler/siphon blockers ... it never stops : there are 97 of them right now 😤

github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.ro…

#BlockAI #AI #LLM #NightmareOnLLMStreet #Webmaster

⚡ Google is killing Android freedom by stopping you from side-loading apps. What's your reaction?

Option 1: Stop call it side-loading: Google wants to stop us from INSTALLING apps on our OWN phones.

Option 2: Awesome, now I can hate Google and Apple equally for destroying freedom.

Option 3: I don't care as I'm using a different OS anyway (please comment which one!)

More info: tuta.com/blog/android-side-loa…

Sign the petition to stop Google from limiting APK file usage: change.org/p/stop-google-from-…

  • Stop call it side-loading (54%, 333 votes)
  • I can hate Google and Apple (23%, 141 votes)
  • I'm using a different OS (22%, 134 votes)
  • I'm using a different OS (0%, 0 votes)
608 voters. Poll end: 4 months ago

This entry was edited (4 months ago)
in reply to Tuta

i would not yet feel that issue because microG would never implement such anti-features, and if google puts that into aosp then would i need to worry tbh, but i already am switching over to #plasmaMobile6 on #PostmarketOS and with it away from the bloat of android but i am stuck on 2 apps that need AVB so no waydroid and for them do i use a seperate phone running #IodeOS.
i hope that this pushes the devs of android roms to maybe switch and contribute to #mobilelinux for more freedom.

@Tutanota Gmail blocked my message from Tuta to a friend on the ground of "reducing spam".
This is the message "host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.71.27]
said: 550-5.7.1 [185.205.69.213 12] Gmail has detected that this
message is 550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam
sent to Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. For more
information, go to 550 5.7.1
support.google.com/mail/?p=Uns…
5b1f17b1804b1-45df817e1fdsi13055195e9.31 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA
command)"
@Tuta

I really don't think Carney knows what the words "nation building" means. "Nation building" is making big ambitious investments that make people proud of being part of the nation and unite the nation.

Public healthcare was a nation building project. The railroad was a nation building project. The Canadarm did some nation building. Weed could have been if Trudeau didn't fuck it up and put the provinces in charge. Dental care could have been if it wasn't just Obamacare for teeth.

Examples of nation building projects would be:
- High speed rail
- Free universal child care
- Massive investment in public transit across all cities (not PPP)
- A UBI
- A nationalized ISP with a mandate to provide high speed internet to all

No one is going to be like "I am so fucking proud we have invested in a copper mine!" or "Wooo! Upgrades to existing nuclear power plant!!" or "phase 2 of an LNG pipeline? Awesome! Phase 2, baby!!"

Those are not nation building. Those are just industry investment.

#cdnpoli

cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-ma…

RIPE 91 is coming to Bucharest, Romania — 20–24 October 2025! 🌍

Why attend?
🟨 Technical sessions, policy discussions & tutorials
🔹 Share knowledge with experts worldwide
🟨 Connect with peers & grow the global Internet community

Since 1989, RIPE Meetings have united ISPs, operators, academics, governments, and regulators to shape the Internet together.

🔗 Register now: ripe91.ripe.net/

#RIPE91 #RIPEmeeting #InternetCommunity

Germany is not supporting ChatControl – blocking minority secured

Link: digitalcourage.social/@echo_pb…
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

#germany


🇪🇺YES: Germany is not supporting the EU's #ChatControl bill as proposed!
The blocking minority needed to stop this illegal mass surveillance plan seems secured (for now). ✅

Opposition now also from LU🇱🇺 & SK🇸🇰!

#KeepUpTheFight fightchatcontrol.eu


Zítra jdu poprvé zkusit vzít #kolo na nějakej real-deal výlet namísto drobných popojížděk. Vůbec netušim, co mě čeká, jestli to dám a jestli to dá kolo, ale kdo se bojí, chčije v síni!

Večer přemažu #Rockrider, nabiju powerbanku, pobalim hadry a na konci mě snad bude čekat zasloužený #pivo...

...anebo smrt :D

Vyrážím dopoledne, takže když někdo v okolí týhle trasy budete mít cestu, můžem pokecat (pokud někde nezabloudim :D )

Případný updaty budou v tomhle threadu

#inspirace od @Archos @Kipe @Shifter

Screenshot trasy z Plzně do Kadaně na zhruba 6 hodin cesty na kole

@Mikromobilita CZ/SK

in reply to Schmaker

Tak tady jeden song na dorou regeneraci :-)
youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjk…
@Kipe @zoufalec @micromobilita @shifter_cycling

Oh yes, we know your truth, and I’m a feisty bitch. The same Julie Deden who runs CCB, and regularly tells women who are sexually assaulted that “they need to not make this a big deal because it could wreck his life.” His, fucking, life? What about her life? The same Julie Deden who has been asked, multiple times, to step down and has refused? Sick bitch who should not be in such a high place of power. Julie Deden you should be ashamed to show your vile face in public let alone speak about supporting blind folks. nfb.social/@nationsblind/11518…
This entry was edited (4 months ago)
in reply to Allison Meloy

@technocounselor @cublanco @tardis I. Agree completely, if we were on facebook, twitter, and I was using my real name. Employers can easily look that up. For the record, my sense of humor is very dark and sarcastic, so not everyone will find it funny. So you’re right, I would put far less on facebook or even on a mastodon that uses my real name.
in reply to Allison Meloy

Don't be that paranoid, you are not entitled to give social media to employers, at all. So no idea why we'd even raise that up. It's not like we tag people or anything, this is fedi, if someone don't like it, there are plenty of choices. Every opinion is valid. And I don't know if any of you realise it, but people go to fedi to run off from popular social media, so there that. That was an unnecessary, if valid concern. Like I said, I am not dismissing, but we're all free to share. I created this because I don't care about the bosses of people. I do my job, you do your job, as long as that's a thing, no one really cares. Plus, let's be real, blind orgs suck, they probably have good stuff, yes, but if there are bad personnel, then the whole thing is caboom, untrustworthy, like who tf cares, even?
in reply to James H

Um, masto public posts are very public. Well, you really can't google me, for example. Google here prevents me for example, to look at people's backgrounds, or anything about them. So yeah. Also, everyone does background checks, and as long as someone isn't an ass and harming people in actuality, I doubt an employer will jump on them. Masto stuff shows on Google if you know what to look for, but yeah.

🇩🇪YES! SPD-Justizministerin Hubig blockiert zurzeit deutsche Zustimmung zur grundrechtswidrigen #Chatkontrolle! 🛡️
➡️ Damit dürfte die Sperrminorität aktuell stehen!
⚠️ ABER: Innenministerium will bis Oktober einen faulen Kompromiss. bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzme…
in reply to Patrick Breyer

🇪🇺YES: Germany is not supporting the EU's #ChatControl bill as proposed!
The blocking minority needed to stop this illegal mass surveillance plan seems secured (for now). ✅

Opposition now also from LU🇱🇺 & SK🇸🇰!

#KeepUpTheFight fightchatcontrol.eu

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of me trying to tell the world that doing curl --L with -X is most often *wrong*:

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/09/11…

Kind of a fun timing too since curl 8.16.0 features the new --follow option that works fine with -X!

1/3 "V pléne v stredu [Tomáš Zdechovský] hovoril, že miliardy z eurofondov miznú v projektoch, ktoré neslúžia slovenským ľuďom, ale nezodpovedným politikom a ich kamošom. „Kontrolné orgány, ktoré majú stáť na strate poctivých, sú paralyzované. Tam kde kedysi padali stovky žalôb, dnes padajú sotva dve ročne,“ dodal."

🔒dennikn.sk/4842340/nemozeme-po…

#SKpolitika #EUpolitics #eurofondy #korupcia

in reply to Peter Hanecak

3/3 "Zdechovský Kaliňákovi povedal, že sa o ňom v Česku „pomerne často“ hovorí v bezpečnostných službách. „Vaše návštevy ruskej ambasády a utekanie zadným vchodom, či vaša spolupráca s portálom Voice of Europe, ktorý patrí k proruskej dezinformačnej scéne….ukazuje to na úpadok demokracie a kultúry pri človeku, ktorý by mal radiť premiérovi,“

Is your website missing out on one of #HTML’s easiest yet most powerful tools? The lang attribute takes just seconds to add, but it makes a massive difference for #accessibility, SEO, and how your content displays. @webi18n

In this video, @xfq, who leads @w3c's #Internationalization activity, breaks down exactly what the language attribute does and demonstrate why skipping it can have real consequences. @webi18n

🎬 youtu.be/G3OwTPJo_Kw

As it happens, we still use CVS in our operating system project (there are reasons for doing this, but migration to git would indeed make sense).

While working on our project, we occasionally have to do a full checkout of the whole codebase, which is several gigabytes. Over time, this operation has gotten very, very, very slow - I mean "2+ hours to perform a checkout" slow.

This was getting quite ridiculous. Even though it's CVS, it shouldn't crawl like this. A quick build of CVS with debug symbols and sampling the "cvs server" process with Linux perf showed something peculiar: The code was spending the majority of the time inside one function.

So what is this get_memnode() function? Turns out this is a support function from Gnulib that enables page-aligned memory allocations. (NOTE: I have no clue why CVS thinks doing page-aligned allocations is beneficial here - but here we are.)

The code in question has support for three different backend allocators:
1. mmap
2. posix_memalign
3. malloc

Sounds nice, except that both 1 and 3 use a linked list to track the allocations. The get_memnode() function is called when deallocating memory to find out the original pointer to pass to the backend deallocation function: The node search code appears as:

for (c = *p_next; c != NULL; p_next = &c->next, c = c->next)
if (c->aligned_ptr == aligned_ptr)
break;

The get_memnode() function is called from pagealign_free():

#if HAVE_MMAP
if (munmap (aligned_ptr, get_memnode (aligned_ptr)) < 0)
error (EXIT_FAILURE, errno, "Failed to unmap memory");
#elif HAVE_POSIX_MEMALIGN
free (aligned_ptr);
#else
free (get_memnode (aligned_ptr));
#endif

This is an O(n) operation. CVS must be allocating a huge number of small allocations, which will result in it spending most of the CPU time in get_memnode() trying to find the node to remove from the list.

Why should we care? This is "just CVS" after all. Well, Gnulib is used in a lot of projects, not just CVS. While pagealign_alloc() is likely not the most used functionality, it can still end up hurting performance in many places.

The obvious easy fix is to prefer the posix_memalign method over the other options (I quickly made this happen for my personal CVS build by adding tactical #undef HAVE_MMAP). Even better, the list code should be replaced with something more sensible. In fact, there is no need to store the original pointer in a list; a better solution is to allocate enough memory and store the pointer before the calculated aligned pointer. This way, the original pointer can be fetched from the negative offset of the pointer passed to pagealign_free(). This way, it will be O(1).

I tried to report this to the Gnulib project, but I have trouble reaching gnu.org services currently. I'll be sure to do that once things recover.

#opensource #development #bugstories

I can't get the Z-Wave ZWA-2 device to pass through to a bhyve VM where I'm running Home Assistant because it only allows full PCI pass through of a device or USB controller. It does get exposed as a serial device which I can sorta pass through to byhyve, but it doesn't really work.

I was able to get a console on the HASS VM and figure out which serial device was matching com2 that I was connecting into it and I could connect from the host and pass through some ascii chars back and forth, but when HASS tried to talk to the device it kept saying there were errors talking to it. Very odd. Lights were blinking on the device though confirming communication of some sort was happening. I looked at the Z-Wave-JS code and saw it was using 115200,8n,0 essentially so that's what I used... no dice.

Someone on the FreeBSD forums suggested using a virtual null modem device inbetween and then using socat to connect to the other end of the virtual null modem cable, but that didn't work either.

However, I can configure HASS to talk to zwave-js-server running in a FreeBSD Jail as you can custom configure the websocket connection to point to anywhere instead of localhost. That did seem to work! It found the device and even did a firmware update on it. So it "works".

I need to clean up this setup because I'm literally running it as root at the moment and I'm using a git clone of their master branch 🥲

Now I just need to figure out how to ensure I can have a consistent serial device name in /dev so this doesn't break in the future.

Once that's sorted I'll have to write a blog post about it

github.com/zwave-js/zwave-js-s…

On Mastodon you can search just your own posts by including the phrase "from:me" in your search.

There are lots of these special phrases (called "operators") which let you customise your Mastodon search, so that you get a very specific set of search results.

You can see a complete list of Mastodon search operators in this guide:

➡️ fedi.tips/how-do-i-search-for-…

You can combine several operators in one search, or use a minus sign - before an operator to exclude it from the search.

#FediTips