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Let's keep the contributor appreciation from earlier going! Our most recent Contributor Highlight is out, and we're shining the light on Toad Hall, one of our Mozilla Support (SUMO) forum superheroes! The SUMO forums are the pillar of our support, and contributors like Toad keep it strong.

#Thunderbird #OpenSource #Community

blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/c…

in reply to TECC 🌱

@73CC We don't track you and we don't have trackers! We have telemetry, which is a completely different thing that is fully anonymous and only collects technical pings . You can see the things we collect here: stats.thunderbird.net/

But also, you can already completely disable telemetry from the settings page.

in reply to Aleca

With the release of Thunderbird Mobile, the tracker was removed.

»incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org« was included in the beta version.

This entry was edited (6 days ago)


I wonder what kind of programming is required to learn how to make JAWS and NVDA scrypts? because that's something I'm thinking I might want to get into if its not overly complicated. #Blind
in reply to Mendi

@luv4music1231 @mcourcel wouldn't fry the computer, though. JAWS has an emergency exit key so you could eventually stop it even with JAWS active.
yes, you could write a script that crashed the system, but you can always boot without JAWS.
A dangerous script could potentially corrupt your Windows installation, but it'd have to be pretty impressive to ruin the hardware.


Costco Is the Latest Grocery Chain to Announce Major Price Cuts cnet.com/news/costco-is-the-la…

Khronos reshared this.



@Friendica Support Was bewirkt in den #Kontakteinstellungen unter "Spiegle Beiträge dieses Kontakts" die Einstellung "Spiegeln als meine eigenen Beiträge"?




In spite of my 3D printer difficulties, the good news is I got my MK4 going again, so work on my Scan-Stand continues. I'm finishing the rework of the 3 part design in to a 5 part design. The advantage is this one will be compact enough to carry in a bag. The challenge is making that work without it becoming too wobbly. So glad to be back to 3D printing projects! So eager to work more on the folding cane and my wind instrument experiments, but I will finish this first.
in reply to bryansmart

What happened to your printer? Mine is still going strong. I have wondered though how repairs of this thing would work.


One of the downsides of working in govt for many years is I can no longer watch tv shows or movies about spies or conspiracies

‘I wonder how they procured that piece of tech and what forms they had to fill out’

‘I wonder what time code they used to track their after-hours sleuthing time’

‘How did they expense that’



The wait is over. HTML for People is OUT NOW!

I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This web book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.

And it’s free for all. 🚀

htmlforpeople.com

reshared this



New from 404 Media: people are using AI to auto apply for jobs. Bot scrolls LinkedIn, opens job applications, writes cover letter. Users say they've got interviews

We tested it. "By the time I finished breakfast, I had applied to 12 different jobs" 404media.co/i-applied-to-2-843…



Uber will let riders disclose whether they're hard of hearing or have low vision soon. The company will also start pilot testing another self-identification option for riders with service animals in the US and Canada over the next few weeks. engadget.com/transportation/ub…


Some people don’t believe in Santa Claus. I think I don’t believe in resumes… They all look great these days!


Please note: We are currently experiencing outages due to Hurricane Milton, and you may experience delays when trying to connect with our customer service and technical support teams. We appreciate your patience and understanding.


so if have a photo on fb or somehere how can I run it through my envision app?
in reply to Crystal bell

To be frank, I primarily use Seeing AI or Be My Eyes, so I just went by memory…



If TFG wins, expect a run on fly-by-night crypto/fintech companies. VCs are holding back on deals to see what they can get away with in the next administration.

The risk profile between an admin run by a former prosecutor and one run by a dude currently running many of the same scams turns out to be a little different.

Anyway, if you care even a little bit about grifters trying to sell Grandma unregulated crypto derivatives, that’s one of 1000 things that hinge on this presidential election.

in reply to victor tsaran

@vick21 I think his constituency consists of a large set of people who don't understand it, and a much smaller set of people who do, and intend to take advantage of it.


Beware of parking penalty text scams. 1 says if you don’t pay an overdue ‘parking penalty charge’ you may have to pay more, be banned, or go to court. But it’s fake. There are only 2 types of parking fines you can get, a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) or a parking charge notice, not a ‘parking penalty charge.’ You or your car can’t be banned from driving after getting a parking fine, even if you don’t pay. There are grammar errors and gov.uk is the correct domain ending.


Today I heard about Altirra, a free Windows emulator of 8-bit Atari computers. In the latest version it includes an accessibility mode, turned on from the configuration dialog under the system menu. After you do the emulated screen can be reviewed just like a modern command prompt (IE with NVBDA's review commands.) It aalso supports emulating a lot of peripherals and you can have authentic floppy drive sounds and I'm a total sucker for those. It's really cool to see another vintage #retro computer platform become accessible like this. #a11y #accessibility virtualdub.org/altirra.html

reshared this

in reply to Pitermach

Very cool! I have no experience with these machines at all. Will definitely take a look.


Please boost!

Do you need Code of Conduct Enforcement training in 2025?

Fill out my workshop time survey:

forms.gle/bXp5M8S7F7nbbJkd9

Help me figure out what time to run my monthly Code of Conduct Enforcement workshops.

otter.technology/code-of-condu…

With people needing training in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America, it's impossible to find one single workshop time that works for everyone. So each month I pick a different time zone to best accommodate.

If you are a conference organizer, please let me know which month and time you need training!

You can either fill out the form, or send an email to sharp@otter.technology

#CodeOfConduct #CoC



Nejdřív mě v kaufu nasrali. Lednice s minipivovary zmizela od piv. No tak jsem tam vzal basu ve slevě.

A pak mě znova nasrali. Oni tu lednici jen přestěhovali k pokladnám 🙃





Kurzer Bericht im DLF über Behinderten-Ausbeutungsbetriebe ("Werkstätten").

Es gilt immer noch als Argument, dass behinderte Menschen mit einem feuchten Händedruck entlohnt werden können, weil sie dankbar sein sollten, überhaupt arbeiten zu dürfen. Es ist einfach nur empörend, wie unsere Gesellschaft mit Menschen umgeht.

Knapp 6 Minuten, es gibt eine Zusammenfassung als Text.

deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag…

Ich kenne übrigens einige der Argumente aus meiner Erwerbslosenzeit, wenn mir irgendwelche Mistjobs oder Quatschmaßnahmen schmackhaft gemacht werden sollten: Geregelter Tagesablauf (als wäre das ein Wert an sich), "Anerkennung" (als stünde ein entwürdigender Lohn dem Anerkennungsgefühl nicht offensichtlich entgegen), "Sinnstiftung und Identität" (weil ein Mensch ohne Arbeit ein wertloser Niemand ist), blabla. Das alles sei viel wichtiger und toller als eine angemessene oder überhaupt eine Bezahlung.

Unsere verkorkste Arbeitsmythologie macht wenige Menschen reich und viele Menschen arm und krank.

#Behinderung
#Werkstätten
#Arbeit



+4915753024990

Das ist eine Nummer, die du in einer Situation weitergeben kannst, in der du dich belästigt oder unwohl fühlst. Wählt die Person dann diese Nummer, erhält sie kurze Zeit später folgende Nachricht:

„Hey, hier ist Noa. Eine Person hat sich nicht wohlgefühlt und dir deswegen diese Nummer gegeben. Besuche noanruf.de/nummer-bekommen/ und schau, wie du diese Situation beim nächsten Mal vermeiden kannst. Grüße, NoA.“



Today windows did another of its interesting gropey behaviours, changing my default browser to edge. I'm not going to fucking use edge, not now, not later. Stop trying.

And for some reason the programs that were opened while this change took place wouldn't use the right browser until I restarted them. Ugh.



Computer touchers! When you're attempting to figure out why some (open source) software does something which do you reach for first?

  • Documentation (81%, 64 votes)
  • Discord/IRC/Matrix/... (2%, 2 votes)
  • The code and grep (16%, 13 votes)
79 voters. Poll end: 3 weeks ago



OK Internet Brain.
We need a printer for the home office.
Small footprint is probably the top thing, because space is tight. Think something a bit bigger than a sheet of A4 for the ideal.
But we print rarely, so don't want the ink to dry up. It needs to be pulled out after 6-9 months of inactivity and work.
I am so lost with inktanks versus inkjet and have never seen a small laser printre.
#Advice on buying a new #printer in the #UK welcome.

modulux reshared this.

in reply to Sean Randall

You have to go laser if you don't want ink to dry out. I ended up spending more money and got the HP Pro Colour Laserjet as I wanted something minimal on space. The Brother machines were cheaper but are a lot bigger. Yeah I know the system has DRM on the cartridges but I've had this for over 3 years now and all cartridges still over 50%. I've got the model with a scanner as well so may be slightly larger than just a printer version.
in reply to Sean Randall

If you want a printer that just works, Brother deserves its reputation. The Verge actually wrote a review about this that went mildly viral. It contains a lot of AI jokes that aren't funny to me any more, but the actual review is still true. theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976…


#FollowerPower I am trying to install #MateDesktop on a #Raspberrypi5 to set up a system running with the latest version of #Orca #Screenreader and I am not able to get it working. I've read several step-by-step guides including installing a dummy display driver, making changes to xorg.conf etc. but no success. I wonder if there's an OS image where Mate is allready included. Any advice is much appreciated. #Linux #Accessibility
in reply to aaron

@fireborn I found it not very acessible using the standard Raspian desktop with #Orca. There are issues like unlabeled buttons, lost focus etc. as far as i know mate desktop works better.
in reply to Rene Ludwig

Hast du die Accessibility-Switches gesetzt? dbus-launch gsettings set org.mate.interface accessibility true && dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled true
Außerdem noch in der LightDM-Konfigurationsdatei (entweder /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf oder /etc/xdg/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/80_orca-dm-wrapper.conf) den Orca-Greeter einschalten, damit bei der Anmeldung gesprochen wird: greeter-wrapper=/usr/bin/orca-dm-wrapper
in reply to Steffen

@radiorobbe Nein, das hab ich noch nicht gemacht. Aber trifft das auch auf den Raspi zu? Da läuft doch glaube ich standardmäßig kein Gnome.
in reply to Rene Ludwig

Mate ist ursprünglich eine Abspaltung des alten GNOME2, da ähneln sich einige Einstellungen wohl immer noch. So habe ich jedenfalls damals einen Raspi 3 zum Sprechen gebracht.
in reply to Steffen

@radiorobbe Ich schau mir das noch mal an. Es scheint auf jeden Fall auch einen Hardware unterschied vom Raspberry vier zum Raspberry fünf zu geben. Es gibt nämlich noch andere Leute, die Mate Desktop auf dem Raspberry fünf nicht zum laufen bekommen. Ist wahrscheinlich noch zu neu das Teil.
in reply to Steffen

@radiorobbe In welchem Bereich in lightdm.conf muss ich die Zeilen eintragen?direkt unter [lightdm]?
in reply to Rene Ludwig

Es sollte bereits eine auskommentierte GreeterWrapper-Zeile existieren, schau mal im Konfigurationsabschnitt [Seat:*] oder ähnliches. Wenn du die 80_orca-dm-wrapper.conf nutzt ist dort nur dieser Konfigurationsabschnitt hinterlegt, und du musst nicht die Hauptkonfiguration bearbeiten.
in reply to Rene Ludwig

Dann scheint es bei Raspberry Pi OS noch etwas anders zu sein, kann mich momentan leider nur am normalen Debian orientieren, da ich derzeit keinen Raspberry Pi mit Desktop eingerichtet habe. Aber in der Hauptkonfigurationsdatei /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf sollte es eigentlich auch funktionieren.
in reply to Steffen

@radiorobbe Ich hab’s gefunden. Leider läuft Orca trotzdem nicht. Bisher habe ich ihn nur unter dem Standard. Raspian Desktop zum laufen gebracht.


Anxiety iss onestly one of the hardest things I've dealt with, when it hits me, it can feel like the feelings will never go away, and my emotions get stuck in my throat and they feel so thick, and finally, it feels like their being pushed out and it becomes more of a struggle because I'm finally able to try to cry, but i'm still struggling to breathe, and afterward, when the storm has passed, I feel relieved that it's over and I finally got it out, but really tired from the hole experience. I'm writing this for people who may have had similar experience and to spread awareness that not everyone who's hysterical is just beeing a drama queen. Some people really do struggle and need lots of grace, love and patience from those they care about and say they care about them. I'm very passionate about this because I've experienced being told that I was using my emotions as a crutch and using anxiety as a guilt trip which couldn't be farther from the truth. Please know that you're not alone if you suffer with this. Big hugs to all and thanks for taking the time to read.



The amazing thing about open source services is, you can create interfaces for it the way you imagine them best. Currently testing #Pipilo, an iOS Fediverse client by @luckkerr which presents each timeline as a horizontal bar you swipe through to get to the next post. From a VoiceOver perspective, a slider control is presented and you explore the posts by swiping up and down, then explore the screen to discover things like links, replies in the corresponding thread, attached multimedia. Łukasz also makes sure that everything works correctly with VO and more goodies are already there in the current Testflight build. Glad to see this level of attentiveness to accessibility and a fellow Polish person coding fedithings. Give it a try. apps.apple.com/pl/app/pipilo/i… #Accessibility #A11y #Blind #iOSDev
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

we have a handful of online supermarkets in the UK, and only the one uses this approach so that you can literally swipe up on any search result to add it to your cart. It's the only provider with a single flick per item, too.
No idea how it renders visually but it works well for VO.
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo Ohh, there's one doing that here in Austria. Last time I checked, though, it read some random variable when you did that instead of reading out the current number of items in the card. Will have o check whether they've fixed it. It's such a handy mechanism.
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

and the developer is a really nice guy. I left the testing group a few months back because I wanted to give Nostr a try. Only realizing now that you can actually use both. Though, I have to be careful what I say on here lest I get booted, something that can’t happen on Nostr.

Tell him I said hello. 😊



The GOV.UK “exit this page" button (for pages that might be visited by e.g. domestic abuse victims seeking support) doesn't take you to the Google homepage but instead BBC Weather, and the reason why is interesting and well-thought-out: beeps.website/blog/2024-10-09-…


Tak už taky vidím na druhou stranu! Dnes se mi povedlo doma zprovoznit ipv6! Trochu jsem se trápil, ale díky dobré radě jsem zaškrtl i ten poslední trapný checkbox na routeru a voila :ablobcatattention:
in reply to Smoon

Přes nějaký tunel? Nebo nativně od poskytovatele připojení?
in reply to Štěpán Škorpil

@stepan Nativně od poskytovatele .. jen /64, řešil jsem hlavně nastavení vlastního routeru.


Sometimes Emacs drives me up the fucking wall, but then I have to use editable dired like once a year and I regain all my love for it.

Is this codependency.


in reply to Lucinek

no úplne priateľsky nevyzerá, skôr ako... hej, čo si to povedal!?


Já teda zítra na @mastopivo nedorazím. Musela jsem si kvůli Můře vzít odpol směnu, tak si to užijte i za mě.


I think #Anki holds a great deal of potential for #blind learners of #languages and other subjects:

The desktop app uses Qt 6, so isn't entirely unusable. It's also fully open source.

The iOS app is extremely usable with VoiceOver, albeit relatively expensive for a mobile app at £24.99, and not open source.

The web interface is usable, but would currently cause people to think more about how to use it than the actual subject they were studying. Still, with some user scripting, it could be workable.

And finally, all Anki functionality is available via their Python library, which could be used in a command line app or more #accessible frontend.

Of course, the issue is always the time needed to take things from where they are now to where they need to be. And I suspect a significant challenge would be having screen readers speak/braille things in the correct language as hopefully declared by each flashcard.

#accessibility #language #languageLearning

in reply to James Scholes

is the python library for anki called panki? Because there's just something indescribably amusing about that name and if it isn't, it should be.


Currently at the #LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024: updates on right-to-left language support, and presenting new LibreOffice features created by Google Summer of Code students. conference.libreoffice.org/202…


Ok. work today, work tomorrow, Mastodon instance deployment over the weekend, maybe? It'd be nice to commit to a tech project and then actually do it.
in reply to simon.old

ooh are you deploying an instance? Sounds like a fun thing I'd like to try one day but have absolutely no justification for doing.
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo I don't have a good justification for doing it, I've just always wanted to. I bought a domain a month or two ago.
in reply to simon.old

Nice, welcome to the fedi admins club. Fortunately I only admin for myself so it's piss easy.
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo I've mentioned this a couple of times on here but check out Cloudron if you have a VPS and want to securely host some apps on it including Mastodon.
in reply to simon.old

Looking at prices on virtual and dedicated servers vs. prices of mini PCs, I wonder if I should just host it at home. I have a business internet plan, I could give it a dedicated IP, and as long as I don't need more than 200 mb upload speed I'd be fine. I could probably stick some nice SSDs in the server too. Someone talk me out of this.
in reply to simon.old

That's going to work, I never saturate 100mbps with an instance.
in reply to simon.old

What kind of router are you behind? Any fediverse server makes a lot of connections. The only risk I can see is your router running out of RAM as it tracks all of the open connections for the sake of the stateful NAT/firewall. But as long as you're not using a crappy consumer router with 256 mb of ram or something it should be fine.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

Also if this is a single user instance, don't deploy Mastodon. It's way overkill. Go with GoToSocial (if you're fine with no push notification endpoint) or Akkoma (if you want more features), or IceShrimp.net (if you want to run development code written in C# and don't mind modifying postgresql directly for things that have no UI yet like me). There's no reason for anyone to run Mastodon unless they're planning for maybe a hundred users or more.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

@fastfinge I wonder if Akkoma still breaks Tweesecake's login process. I'm not opposed to running something different, but I do want push and I have limited capacity to troubleshoot things and play around with undocumented projects. What are you running?
in reply to simon.old

I'm running Iceshrimp.net. But I use Enafore; absolutely everything breaks Tweesecake's login flow. If you want to keep using Tweesecake, you have to run standard Mastodon. There are no other options that will work.
in reply to aaron

But those are pretty much just Mastodon with slightly different coats of paint.
in reply to aaron

@fireborn @fastfinge Is Hometown still perpetually way behind Mastodon releases? Hosting with something that has adjustable character count is pretty much a given.
in reply to aaron

@fireborn @fastfinge When I looked at running my own instance I looked at all the various forks and lighter instances but honestly since using Mastodon on Cloudron I haven't done a single modification to the instance other than what we can do through the admin pannel. I run a couple of other services on that VPS as well and they all run in their own separate container without me having to do anything.
in reply to Andrew Hodgson

Yeah, but running strange software makes me cooler than you! Lol jk
in reply to Samuel Proulx

@fastfinge @andrew It's sad how many people actually think this way. I love gts, btw, but the lack of a push notification endpoint is a dealbreaker.
in reply to aaron

Yeah, I don't use mobile for stuff like this, so it doesn't bother me, but if you do push notifications make a big difference.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

@fastfinge I think it's one of those situations where I'm just waiting for something to nudge me into trying another client. I know Emafore works wel, I don't know if it's got more active development but that bar is unfortunately pretty low at the moment.
in reply to simon.old

It gets an update maybe once every couple of weeks or so. What do you use on your phone? Mona works with literally everything under the sun.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

@fastfinge Yeah, I use Mona. Not worried about that at all. Will have to check on Android clients, but basically I assume Cake "is in the minority and most things work with most things.
in reply to aaron

Only if you don’t mind modifying the database directly and making direct api calls with curl. It’s still in early beta.
in reply to aaron

Then go for it! The devs are lovely. And I like a server with an API first approach myself. I want to use my own things, not the official front end.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

@fastfinge I don't really care about a front end, that's just extra stuff I don't care about. Plus being API first means that I could make my own front end.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

Gts is great I can say, but doesn't work with the weird windows apps people use. Works with TWBLUE, toot, enafore, pinafore, semaphore, Mona, though that's a huge pay here, 40bgn never for all the apps that lose focus, and on Mac it's dumb, having to open settings every single time you set each setting. Ice cubes doesn't work, feditext works. Akkoma eats resources for breakfast and isn't maintained well, also postgress doesn't clean up itself well with Akkoma. GTS is really lightweight, but you'll be the only admin for now, since it's configured via the host, and you also have to add in new users yourself.
in reply to Мира🇧🇬🇭🇺

Both Akkoma and Pleroma eat far fewer resources than Mastodon. Did you tune your database?