#Vaguetooting: equating* objecting to systemd to MAGA is a level of bullshirt I've never seen before, nor thought possible.
*Disclaimer: This equating is an interpretation of a person's statement. That interpretation may be incorrect. Also, some people who object to systemd are indeed horrible people with horrible ideas/ideals/ideologies.
P.S. Using "don't divide us" as a dialectical hammer to quash debate is pretty forking awful. For the millionth time, what the fork is systemd, really?!? Because if you say "it's an init system," I'm going to put you in the same category as people who way "lol linux is just a kernel" and "I asked ChatGPT..."
But XLibre was started not because of developer's anti-vaxer views.
Why some forks and new programs created by left/right radicals — is another question. I think this "happens" because mass-media always ready to promote some hot content which will start flamewars and give a lot of views for these media. I suppose, in reality a lot of OpenSource projects still started by a usual people, who don't have radical views and just love to code. But these projects are not visible, because today 
looks like popular to "change the world", "make actions", "fight with something" or "for something" and other loud words instead of silent, small and consecutive actions.
"Better to seem than to be"
What/whom (at least in the FOSS world) would you consider to be a Leftist radical, though?
The worst I've seen on the left is people with a surprising lack of perspective, and a scary capacity for self-delusion. The Right has that in spades, and much worse, in my experience.
#TLDR: Quad9 will be discontinuing support within DNS-over-HTTPS (DOH) using HTTP/1.1 on December 15, 2025.
Mark your calendar 🗓️ and please share, especially if you know someone who will be affected!
Full story here 👉 quad9.net/news/blog/doh-http-1…
A public and free DNS service for a better security and privacyQuad9
If I’m hearing it, you can, too.
Three Is A Magic Number by Bob Dorough
#SongInMyHead
Užívejte si videa a hudbu, kterou máte rádi, nahrávejte originální obsah a sdílejte vše s přáteli, rodinou i celým světem na YouTube.YouTube
Some #PeerTube video accounts to follow on assorted topics:
EXERCISE
@3morereps_workouts - Fitness instructor doing exercise & yoga videos
HISTORY
@premodernist - Univ. lecturer on history, from ancient to modern
@athenaproductions - Irreverent/sweary videos about bits of history, philosophy
@historical - Assorted public domain films from history
LANGUAGES
@moosesconlangs - Videos on constructed languages including Esperanto
@robert_riley - Educational videos about basics of English language
"Cheap Dopamine" by Taylor Acorn from her album Poster Child - Available now at https://ffm.to/ta_posterchildFollow Taylor:▶ Spotify: https://ffm.link/ta_spo...YouTube
Not doing overtime is not a "strike"
Die Distanz hinter den großen Begriffen
Man begegnet in diesen digitalen Räumen Menschen, die reden, als wären sie ständig auf einer Bühne.
Sie werfen mit Begriffen um sich wie Selbstbestimmung, Systemkritik, Dekonstruktion, Freiheit ..
ein ganzes Arsenal an Haltungen.
Alles klingt groß, reflektiert, fast so, als könnte man damit jedes Versäumnis übertünchen.
Und hinter dieser Kulisse liegt etwas Seltsames: Eine Unfähigkeit, Nähe auszuhalten.
Nicht aus Bosheit, sondern aus einer Mischung aus Unsicherheit, Eitelkeit und der Angst, dass echte Begegnung die eigene Rolle zerkratzt.
Also wird jede Annäherung sofort in einen Diskurs verwandelt.
Anstatt „Ja, lass uns mal treffen“, kommt ein Vortrag darüber, wie wichtig Freiheit ist, wie vorsichtig man mit sozialen Energien umgehen müsse, wie anspruchsvoll das eigene Innenleben sei.
Alles klingt nach Tiefe, doch es dient nur dazu, nicht in Berührung zu kommen.
Man selbst kommt schlicht herüber,
nicht mit einem Manifest, sondern mit einem offenen Blick. Nicht weil man besonders tugendhaft wäre, sondern weil das der Normalzustand ist.
Gerade, wenn man aus einer Gegend stammt, in der Nähe nicht als Bedrohung galt, sondern als Teil des Überlebens.
Wo man sich nicht mit Fremdwörtern schützen musste, sondern einfach da war.
Und dann prallt dieses einfache Dasein
auf ein Milieu, das sich in Selbstinszenierung eingerichtet hat.
In dem hat man sich angewöhnt,
Verbindlichkeit als Risiko zu sehen
und Distanz als Reife. Der Ton ist glatt, die Miene souverän, doch in Wahrheit ist da eine enorme Brüchigkeit.
Völlig absurd wird es,
wenn man diese Oberflächenkritik ausspricht und sofort Zuspruch bekommt, von denselben Menschen,
die exakt so leben.
Sie stimmen begeistert zu, als hätten sie nie im Leben die eigene Rolle im Spiegel betrachtet.
Wie ein Chor, der seine eigene Partitur nicht kennt.
Sie reden über Ausbeutung,
über den Kapitalismus,
über Sklaverei in der Arbeitswelt,
als hätten sie das Monopol auf moralische Sensibilität.
Doch wenn es darum geht, einem Menschen einfach respektvoll zu begegnen, ohne Maskottchen-Rolle,
ohne taktische Distanz, ohne Selbstdarstellung, ist plötzlich nichts mehr da.
Keine Verbindlichkeit, keine Wärme, keine Bereitschaft zur Realität.
Nur Begriffe, die wie Schutzwälle stehen
zwischen ihnen und jedem Moment,
der nicht kontrollierbar ist.
Und man bleibt zurück, nicht erschüttert,
sondern irritiert darüber, wie sehr manche Freiheit predigen und doch vor jeder Form von Begegnung zurückschrecken.
Wie sehr sie Weltanalysen liefern
und gleichzeitig die einfachste Form menschlicher Nähe nicht ertragen.
Es ist ein Muster, das überall auftauchen kann, Menschen, die sich selbst für kritisch halten, aber nie merken,
dass sie kritische Distanz mit menschlicher Abwesenheit verwechseln.
#Bruchzone #Zwischenwelten #Innensichten #friedisinniert #Theoriefassade
Federal Appeals Court disqualifies Alina Habba from serving as US Attorney for NJ
abc7ny.com/post/federal-appeal…
via ABC7NY App
The 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court decision that found her appointment violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.Peter Charalambous and Aaron Katersky (ABC7 New York)
Hey, all. One thing that’s different this year about the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2026 is that we’re going to include talks about the organizational and social aspects of rolling out Open Source Fediverse software for individuals and communities. Last year, we focused pretty heavily on technical talks from the principle developers of FLOSS packages. This year, we want to make sure the other aspects of Fediverse growth and improvement are covered, too.
Consequently, the guidance for last year’s event, which was focused on how to make a great technical presentation, might seem a little outdated. But on reviewing it, I’ve found that it still has good advice for social and organizational talks. Just like software developers, community builders see problems and construct solutions for them. The solutions aren’t just about writing code, though; more often they involve bringing people together, assembling off-the-shelf tools, and making processes and rules for interaction.
Talks about Open Source software to implement ActivityPub and build the social web are still welcome, of course. We’re just expanding a bit to cover the human aspects of the Fediverse as well.
I’m looking forward to having the interesting discussions about bringing people together to make the Social Web. If you haven’t already, please consider submitting a talk to pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026…. Select “Social Web” from the “Track” dropdown, and include the length of your talk (8/25/50) in the submission notes. The deadline is December 1, 2025, so get them in as soon as possible!
Speech-to-text right from your terminal?? 🎤
⚡ **ostt** — A terminal-based recorder & speech-to-text transcription tool.
💯 Real-time waveform visualization with dBFS volume metering & clipping detection.
⬇️ Demo by the author below
🦀 Written in Rust & built with @ratatui_rs
⭐ GitHub: github.com/kristoferlund/ostt
#rustlang #ratatui #tui #audiotech #tts #transcription #terminal
Open Speech-to-Text recording tool with real-time volume metering and transcription. - kristoferlund/osttGitHub
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Well, it's December 01, which means it's time to drag Sammy out of his box again.
This silly little song, which was probably someone's throw-away recording for a morning show in the 70s, has a story behind it, at least for me.
On Christmas Eve 1992, Brad Krantz played a song on Asheboro, NorthCarolina's WKRR, called Sammy the Christmas Snake, on his morning talk show.
It just so happened that my brother had a few boomboxes recording local radio stations to capture the essence of a Carolina Christmas that morning, when Sammy the Christmas snake played on Brad's show.
As I was 8 years old at the time, and my brother and I liked this silly little song so much, we decided to make it tradition to play it every Christmas morning before going upstairs for the "good stuff".
Unfortunately, however, in 1994, my brother went off to college, and the tape was lost somewhere. Naturally, it was the only copy we had.
A few years after that, Brad was fired from WKRR, and I lost track of him. I emailed one of the guys at the station around 2001 or so, to see if they knew where Sammy the Christmas Snake might be, or at least knew who recorded it. I was told that Brad took their only copy with him when he went to Charlotte, and they had no idea who actually wrote or recorded the song, only that Brad got it from someone in Boston.
In the summer of 2004, WZTK, a new FM talk station owned and operated by Curtis Media was launched. And, guess what? Brad Krantz is back with the Brad and Brit show.
I emailed him in August of 2004 just to politely ask if he still had Sammy the Christmas Snake, and asked if he would play it on his show over the holiday season. He said he would, that it was apparently widely requested, and said "thank you for remembering Sammy".
So, I started my audio recorder on December first to try and record Sammy the Christmas Snake for my own personal amusement, seeing as how I have been looking for it for 12 years on and off at this point. Apparently, Brad had expected this, and made sure to talk or play IDs at every possible opening in the song, which, as you can imagine, infuriated me. Yep, this was war!
I kept the recorder going every weekday morning through December 21, 2004, to see if he would slip and forget to play an ID in the same places.
Finally, on December 21, 2004, I had enough pieces to reconstruct it!
I ended up running seven different copies of the song as played on the Brad and Brit Show through my favorite audio editor, taking the best parts from each, to get the relatively unmutilated version of Sammy the Christmas Snake, albeit with a few compromises. The song came from a slightly scratchy record, dubbed to who knows what media, played over an FM radio station. After editing, there were differences in equalization in some parts of the song, most likely due to Brad playing the track back through a different player or channel on the station's console, but considering it was the only version of the song I could find anywhere, and, as of December 2025, I still have no idea who recorded it, my edit was good enough.
I wanted to share the song as widely as possible, thanks to my beef with Brad, and this was before the existence of Youtube, so I put it on a webpage with links to contact Brad and Brit, and thank them for allowing us to have access to such a wonderful song. This, of course, was in response to Brad's claim that he had exclusive rites to it, which I thought was completely unfair. There's no need to keep Sammy in a box like that!
Several years went by, and someone uploaded my edit of Sammy to Youtube. It has now been featured in several different videos, but it's obvious that it's my edit, and I've yet to find another version of it anywhere, online or offline.
There were some things that bugged me about my original 2004 edit, which I could now fix with tools and skills I didn't have at the time, so, on December 1, 2018, I fixed some small timing issues that existed between splices, reduced crackles, pops and rumble, made the equalization a little more consistent, got rid of some noise, and performed a few other touch-ups. This is the result. It's still not perfect, but it's better than it was, and certainly cleaner than any other version on Youtube as of December 1, 2018.
I'm still looking for a real copy of this song, or, at the very least, an idea of who recorded it. There is some speculation on the comments of this Youtube video.
I was told that this song also featured on a morning show on WNAP in Indianapolis, Indiana, around 1978-1982.
A few years ago, my edit was played on WKRR again, where it all started for me. Go figure.
As of May 2025, Brad Krantz has passed away, so if he actually knew anything about the origins of this song, we can't ask him now.
youtube.com/watch?v=o0eWo6qvZO…
Lyrics, sung by a guy with a New England accent sped up and singing with himself to the backing of a Fender Rhodes, some flutes, drums, bass and a glockenspiel are as follows:
There are such cute little Christmas galoots...
Little angels, and reindeer, and snowflakes that fly.
But from all those yule underdogs fondling my memory logs,
one multiple vertebrae kind of a guy.
Sammy the Christmas Snake
hid in the corner of Santa's workshop.
Sammy the Christmas Snake
bit all the elves and made all the work stop.
Hid in the stockings, he hid up the flue,
bit on Rudolph 'til his nose turned blue,
ain't no tellin' what a Christmas snake'll do...
*hiss, hiss, hiss*
Merry Christmas
Sammy the Christmas Snake
had peppermint stripes and pointy ol' fangs.
Sammy the Christmas snake
he hides in the holly where the mistletoe hangs.
Hid in the stockings, he hid up the flue,
he bit on old Santa and Misses Santa Too! OH!
Sammy the Christmas Snake
*hiss, hiss, hiss*
Merry Christmas.
Come on kids, sing with me!
Now, Santa lived with Herb the Christmas Dwarf at Santa's house,
and no one liked him much since he bit Sid, the Christmas Mouse.
'Til Rick the Christmas Mongoose went berserk and tried to wreck,
the sleigh and Sammy saved the day when he broke Rick's Christmas neck.
HEY!
Sammy the Christmas Snake
Now there ain't a ban on anacondas in the arctic.
Sammy that ol' Christmas Snake
Now those elves don't chase him with that forked stick.
What a merry mood he has all the girls and boys in,
givin' out the cheer and holdin' back the poison...
Sammy the Christmas Snake
Hey! Hey!
*Hiss, hiss, hiss*
MERRY CHRISTMASSSSS!
On Christmas Eve 1992, Brad Krantz played a song on Asheboro, NorthCarolina's WKRR called Sammy the Christmas Snake, on his morning talk show.It just so happ...YouTube
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🎶 Electric Hayride — Bluegrass Meets Dubstep | Suno AI InstrumentalSaddle up and plug in! Electric Hayride is a wild fusion of foot-stompin’ bluegrass energ...YouTube
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I wish the best of the AirPods Max could be combined with the new Sennheiser HDB 630 that would be amazing.
youtube.com/watch?v=NKvi0jk7qy…
🛒 Buy the Sennheiser HDB 630 on Amazon: https://soundg.co/tmsyrtAudio mainstay Sennheiser has long been in the conversation when it comes to the best-soundi...YouTube
The best way to test the resilience of your service is: reboot the server. I mean it. Don't just restart the service, reboot the server. A story in two parts:
Part 1: a while ago I configured ZFS under my Talos Kubernetes cluster, and everything was fine, until I decided to reboot. When it came back, nothing was working, because I forgot to properly configure a way for Talos to read the ZFS volume encryption key.
Part 2: at some point I configured Audiobookshelf to store data on top of said ZFS volume. Everything was working fine for a few weeks, until I had to reboot the server again (for reasons). When it came back, I lost all my downloaded podcasts, because I had a typo on my configuration that was pointing to a directory outside of the PVC, so it mounted as an emptyDir volume.
Honestly, I should have known better. I had issues in the past when some servers went down because of power failures (battery didn't last) and they did not come back properly.
You gotta do a reboot/power test every once in a while, just like you have to test your backups on a regular basis.
RE: infosec.exchange/@WPalant/1156…
Another drama in the FLOSS world! (In history this time.) Forks and insinuations! Who could have guessed.
I almost forgot an upcoming anniversary. 20 years ago I wrote this comment complaining about the state of the AdBlock extension: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315754#c12.Wladimir Palant (Infosec Exchange)
the funny part is the company behind AdBlock Plus ended up buying the one behind AdBlock.
(yes they both became for profit)
The other day, I thought yet again about how the formalized government of the USA was officially started because "The Thirteen Colonies" didn't like a nation (England) taxing them from abroad in addition to local taxes...
Yet the US is 1 of 3* countries worldwide that taxes its own citizens who live elsewhere _in addition_ to where they live.
(* The other two countries are the totalitarian dictatorships of Eritrea and North Korea.)
@hub Yeah, sadly. It's a huge burden on all of us who are not filthy rich.
The rich folks can pay people to take care of things for them, including finding loopholes.
The free software movement shaped by GNU/Linux reminds us that control over our digital tools is essential to our freedom. Today, at the heart of this ongoing struggle, Jami embodies this philosophy by offering a genuinely free way to communicate.
Read our article Jami and the GNU/Linux Spirit: jami.net/jami-and-the-gnu-linu…
#Jami #OpenSource #P2P #PrivacyMatters
Legacy Update has significantly expanded its archive of the Microsoft Download Center all the way back to 2012. It now indexes 41,000 downloads, of which over half have been deleted by Microsoft.
More about what went into this, and what we’re still planning to do: patreon.com/posts/expanding-ce…
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Following some significant Black Friday deals, with the Pixel 10 Pro starting at just $699 as part of Amazon's Cyber Monday offers.Damien Wilde (9to5Google)
It's December 1st, which means that throughout the entire month you should reserve 5-10 minutes every day to read a fantastic article about HTML. ❤️🔥
Check out what's hidden behind the first door.
htmhell.dev/adventcalendar?s=h…
An article, talk, or tool that focuses on HTML every day until Christmas.HTMHell Advent Calendar 2025 - HTMHell
My wonderful financial supporters have decided that my weekly updates of my work on GNOME will partially be public in the future!
Here is my first public weekly update about video thumbnailers, Pika Backup, translations for the GNOME website, and more
blogs.gnome.org/sophieh/2025/1…
Hello world! Last week, I asked the people that financially support me, if I should post my updates publicly. A majority voted to release my future weekly reports to the public, some voted to make...Sophie Herold (Sophie's Blog)
Was surprised to learn that there are apparently no command line tools for poking around the Linux accessibility tree, so I made Acsh, the Accessibility Shell. With Acsh you have both a CLI and REPL, in which you can do things like:
/> ls # Lists all top-level apps
/> cd firefox-1.26 # cd into Firefox, with tab completion. REPL only
/firefox-1.26> cat 0 # Get more information on the first child by index, if you're fine with the possibility that index might change before the command is processed--not likely at this level. Paths are referenced by name or index
/firefox-1.26> watch 0 # Get stream of events for the first child
/firefox-1.26> search -r button ok # Find all OK buttons in this Firefox instance
... # and moreacsh mount. This makes the accessibility tree available as a FUSE mount under ./a11y by default. ./a11y/README.md gives a better overview of the layout, but in brief, directories are apps/accessible objects with their children as subdirectories. Properties are either files containing their raw values or .json files with richer structure. There's an events.json.sock Unix socket in each directory below the root that lets you watch events for an accessible object and all its children, and you can use standard filesystem tooling to search/filter/stream. It's probably slow because there's no caching--it's meant to be a debugging/introspection tool, after all. I'll probably rename this to acfs and drop the CLI/REPL soon--it was great for prototyping and the idea to use FUSE only occurred to me after I realized I was slowly re-inventing all of a filesystem anyway.Thoughts? I'm sure it has bugs, but what doesn't? dev.thewordnerd.info/nolan/acs…
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cd .. working before I realized that if I made folks too comfortable working in this REPL, they'd probably eventually demand a full embedded BASH shell. :P So yeah, definitely try FUSE. If you need an example of how to do something, ask and I'll work it into the FUSE README.md. I don't want to make it super specific but I do want to make it scriptable and as user-friendly as a FUSE filesystem can possibly be.
Boycotts aren't enough.
A boycott doesn't tell a company that they've pissed you off: it tells a company that you have the option to not consume their products. It's very hard to boycott the electricity company or the water company, because you need their products.
This is why Google and Amazon are who they are. You want to boycott Google products? Good luck living in the modern world. Google have intentionally made themselves too important and ubiquitous to be successfully boycotted. It's not just the tech companies either. If you live in a town which only has one supermarket - and many people do - then you can't realistically boycott them.
We, and by we I mean the masses, are too weak to boycott these companies. Consider that for a moment. Consider the staggering power inequality that this demonstrates. We need stronger weapons.
Using acsh mount with Claude Code and holy shit is it a gamechanger. Mounting my accessibility tree as a filesystem and letting the LLM use tools it is trained on has made identifying accessibility issues so much easier.
I've wanted to play with Godot's AccessKit-based accessibility for a while now but it has enough rough edges to make it just difficult enough to have fun with. I know there are additional accessibility plugins but they're just not enough to make the experience one I want to have
A couple hours in and I've already A) labelled unlabelled controls in the New Project dialog B) turned a status area into an auto-updating live region and C) identified and fixed an off-by-1 bug in single-line text edit fields making them present as blank if the cursor position is at the end. And the only reason it took that long is due to some weird scons cache corruption where the labeling fix required 2 full half-hour builds, which is now fixed. I've also identified several other accessibility issues I plan to work on over the next few days to hopefully create a first-class accessibility experience in the editor and game UIs.
I remain conflicted about the harms generative AI/LLMs cause, because for me they're very much an assistive technology. Could I technically have trawled through all the event logs, widget information, and code to make these changes? Sure. Would I have? Not if I wanted a life outside of fixing accessibility issues. Could someone else have done this. Sure, but where's the overlap between the folks with the time to fix these issues and the lived experience of using a screen reader and finding all the edge cases, like labels speaking twice or text presenting as blank if you happen to be on the last character? Should I stop using it this way because thousands of others use it to generate unsupervised slop? Should I take a bus instead of a plane to travel back home today?
Legitimately not sarcasm, it's just hard to put all of this in perspective sometimes. If I had a spare 30K or so in the couch cushions, I'd buy my own GPU machine and call it an assistive tech expense.
What I'm not at all conflicted about is letting these things run amuck, dumping the slop onto someone else, and passing that off as somehow virtuous because the AI can do no wrong. I've seen it do plenty wrong that I would not leave it unsupervised and uncaged, just as I wouldn't leave my cat unsupervised around a plate of food. Nor would I just dump the results on anyone without taking the time to read them first, and to at least make sure nothing overtly silly is being done in my name. But where most folks can just glance at a window or a screen of logs and fairly easily spot errors or issues, I can ask Claude to take a screenshot or skim logs, and something that would either have been impossible or extremely time-consuming for me is done in under a minute. I don't know what to do about the fact that a bunch of jackasses want to do bad things with that same tech.
If the AI bubble burst tomorrow I'd shed exactly 2 tears and go on with my life. I just wish society's impulse with generative AI/LLMs wasn't to use them for just about every shady thing imaginable such that it's so hard to talk about the ways that they can help without worrying about the can of worms I'll open or the hate I might get. Yes they can be wrong. Yes they can hallucinate. So do humans, but I don't happen to have a helper human in my back pocket every time I need one.
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Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Fingel • • •GNOME
in reply to Fingel • • •