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The gnome-control-center panel I’ve been working on for the last many weeks is now ready for review, including a new chart widget for showing time spent using the computer screen (so you have some visibility into your compute use habits).

Glad to finally have this off my plate and on its way to being reviewed and hopefully merged.

#GNOME #DigitalWellbeing

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There is something I want sighted people to understand about blind people. If you see a blind person heading toward a wall, tree, bench, or any other object they might bump into and potentially get injured, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should immediately try to pull them out of the way. It's completely natural to feel concerned, but a better approach would be to just warn them and ask if they need help. While there are times when it's actually needed, it might also be that they are going toward a landmark they use for orientation, and as unfortunate as it is, you might unintentionally get them confused and disorientated. I often purposely look for such objects to better remember the route, and not all places are accessible enough for me to be able to get back on track if I take a wrong turn. Your help and concern are really appreciated a lot, but sometimes things are different from how they seem, and that's why it's always better to ask first.
in reply to Mariia Sydoruk

@modulux And what about those who, in the same situation, manage everything by shouting: BEWARE, BEWARE; or: Alas, alas, alas, alas, alas, alas!


Si tú también estás flipando desde fuera del País Valenciano sobre la combinación de criminal incompetencia con escándalos delirantemente bochornosos que es la gestión del PP valenciano, en nuestro pódcast lo analizamos y damos detalles sobre el tema.

plazapodcast.valenciaplaza.com…



🔴Los Franco pierden el juicio contra el Estado por la propiedad de los bienes del Pazo de Meirás.

Un juzgado de Madrid ha dado la razón a la Administración en el litigio que mantenía con los herederos del dictador.

Por @javierhrguez
elsaltodiario.com/memoria-hist…



When you say, “It’s ok, we’ve survived it before, we’ll survive it again”, please realize that some people did not, in fact, survive it before, and some will not in fact survive it now.


Now more than ever.

If you ever get asked this by some software, the answer is *always* YES.



Bueno, creo que ya es momento de anunciar que..., 🥁🥁🥁 ¡Acabo de empezar en un nuevo trabajo!💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻 y estoy super emocionada, nerviosa y con el síndrome del impostor no por las nubes, si no más bien en el espacio sideral. Hoy primera reunión con el equipo y primera cagada! me conecto a Google Meet con mi cuenta del podcast en vez de con la mía personal. Por favor llévame pronto y mátame camión ya🚛🫢


Turns out if a technology comes along that dismantles the basic interpersonal building blocks of everyday life in this world and replaces it with constant 24/7 insubstantial but incredibly loud screams of existential agony, both overt & covert, the world…starts to come apart at the seams.

We used to call that the Singularity. Funny how we thought it hadn’t happened yet.



I'm curious, is anyone doing an open-source software cooperative?


Anyone got recommendations for an uncomplicated video editor accessible with a screen reader? Don't really care which platform it's on. I thought Reaper could do this, but when I edited and exported, I lost the video portion of the project somehow. Don't need anything fancy, nor do I want to have to spend hours learning the thing. Really just need to cut Bits out, but not just trimming from beginning or end.

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in reply to Ricky Enger

@Ricky Enger Although it's an electron based app lossless-cut is one of the great ffmpeg frontents usefull for cutting videos. It has a lot of built-in keyboard shortcuts and it's very customizable. I'm using it with orca on linux, but I know other folks are using it with nvda on windows.

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in reply to Peter Vágner

@pvagner Can it do stream dubbing too? While I can mess with FFmpeg on CLI the kind of complicated stream merging and filtering is beyond me.
in reply to x0

@x0 @Ricky Enger You can choose which streams to include in the output. There is a tool that allows concatenating the files. I don't know what exactly stream dubbing is.
in reply to Peter Vágner

@pvagner Take audio from one file and video from another file and mux them together, sorry I could have been more clear about that.
in reply to x0

@x0 @Ricky Enger Yes this is listed as supported feature in their readme file although I don't yet know how to do it with lossless-cut. I'd use ffmpeg on the command line for this.


Something I've thought about lots over the past few years and even more recently: what can we do to foster and normalize small tech rather than big tech?

Individual communities are going to need to manage their own tech infrastructure in the coming years if they want to be more accessible, not beholden to large corporations, not surveilled constantly, etc. Individual creators will need to distribute outside of Steam or Spotify. Co-ops need property management portals. Mutual aid groups might benefit from lightweight logistics or communication tools.

I think platform is key. It needs to be easy to host/manage for others, and those others need to eject easily either to different providers or to their own host. Lots of stuff gets us parts of that, but I don't think anything is close to what would be ideal. Needs to be easy to build for and hard to break completely. Also needs to be entirely open source and not just open core.

in reply to Nolan Darilek

I still think Sandstorm is closest start here (or more likely, Tempest once it gets moving again), but it's been super hard to keep people engaged in building or funding it. Even I've been too busy with other things to focus on chipping away at my own todo list.

But we had ease of hosting (once started) and user portability pretty much completely down pat, and I still see nobody doing anything else that approaches selfhosting intended for other people to have their own agency on it.

in reply to ocdtrekkie

Yeah, I really want Sandstorm to succeed, and I think it's the model I'd like us to all move towards. You really do have to rewrite/adapt your apps for it, though, and I'm just thinking to give folks a standardized OIDC provider/mail setup/interop spec, and maybe something like NixOS to glue it all together. It's not the solution I want for sure, but I'm thinking we'll need a working solution sooner rather than later. I want to see tech succeed in these spaces because the alternative is that folks go back to writing things on whiteboards/pieces of paper, which means they're inaccessible to me. Thus my urgency to succeed on a quicker timeframe.

Speaking of, are the community meetings still happening? Always wanted to attend but 9 PM CST wasn't a great time and I never spoke up. Still have a soft spot in my heart for Sandstorm though.




Daniel's weekly report November 8, 2024

lists.haxx.se/pipermail/daniel…

release. rock-solid, fosdem, talks, curl -v google.com, podcasts, uncurled, security, polhem prize




I wonder how developers at Tailscale, Zoom, the Google Meet team, etc. test restrictive firewall and NAT scenarios in their office or, these days, home-office environments. Do they get cheap routers with OpenWrt or the like to emulate the external firewall products that corporate IT types use? Do they buy those actual firewall appliances? Do they set up a virtual network on their workstation inside VMware or the like? Something else?
in reply to Matt Campbell

I think even the cheap routers, when they have OpenWRT installed, behave well.
in reply to Matt Campbell

aren't mobile phones and carrier grade NATs the ultimate boss enemy?


Just tried to explain Mastodon & the Fediverse to my husband, which was tricky because like.. I don't entirely understand everything myself 😅
He's currently rolling out a software product and I think he should have a presence here, but I'm not sure whether it would make the most sense for him to run his own server, which he's not keen on, or.. how to find one that would be a good fit.
It's an RPG virtual table top online thingy, so if you know a server where that would be at home, lmk I guess?
in reply to WearyBonnie

I picked my instance purely on the fact that they accept people who care about tinkering and the intersectionality of tech and people.
Never had any problems being on defcon.social


youtu.be/aB_4jel8XH8


You Might Not Need that [JavaScript] Framework frontendmasters.com/blog/you-m… #webdev #webdevelopment #javascript


One more GNOME development and socializing meetup in Hamburg with @camelCaseNick and @FineFindus ! Today was a really productive day. @FineFindus created a libadwaita MR for some API we also want in Papers, and merged a locatization MR in udisks-rs. And @camelCaseNick and Ihelped debugging the libadwaita code and got 5 MRs in Papers in! As always, send us a message if you come around!

#GNOME #Papers #postmarketOS #Hamburg



Feeling grumpy

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This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Wenwei

Feeling grumpy

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Mood: I just put a second pair of glasses on the first pair of glasses that were already on my face.

(is it still Monday?)



I would love to see a study on how much productivity plummeted post-election over the second week of November in the technology sector, as the folks in these kinds of jobs are overwhelmingly liberal/left-leaning and are probably exposed to the fallout in some kind of way. Speaking for myself, I can say that my ability to pay attention and deliver my normal level of output has fallen ~50-75%. Luckily, I'll have a long weekend to reset.
in reply to Tristan

agreed, now that would be interesting to see. I noticed a lot of my meetings got moved, project deadlines extended a little quietly, stuff like that - even though my company is EU-based they had respect for the political climate here and some of them no doubt felt nervous watching the outcome too. The tech sector, as vital as it is, will get caught up and from a business side chum up to the new admin though, which is why stocks jumped too. Odd dichotomy for sure!


I wish I could tell Firefox to NEVER open a new tab from an external URL in some of the window. Or always in ONE specific.

For now it's just a crap shoot.

in reply to Ben Cox

@ben I don't want a new window. I just want it to NEVER open them in the window that is on the second screen.
in reply to Hubert Figuière

Oh yeah, that drives me nuts too. I'd like a lock button on the tab bar that means "don't you dare ever open anything else in this window"


I posted this on elsewhere, and folks found it helpful, so here it is for y’all

For #lgbtq married couples, it's time to take steps to protect your marriage in case same-sex marriage is officially dissolved in the coming years. My husband and I did this when Roe V Wade was overturned, so I hope this is helpful. 👇



This is an important effort to help explore what can be done to make the #Web less energy-hungry…. and thereby help reduce the impact of the overall #Internet on #ClimateChange. (Since web traffic is such a huge amount of Internet traffic.) Good to see this happening!

From: @w3c
w3c.social/@w3c/11344250260640…



A few months ago I wrote about how I approach alternative text for images and tried to offer context for each of my considerations.

“My Approach to Alt Text”

adrianroselli.com/2024/05/my-a…

I also link other resources that are not mine.

#a11y #accessibility



So much for being the 'ethical, safe one'

Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers

techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/anth…

#ai

#AI
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Imagine describing Alt+Tab as "popular", rather than, you know, critical in allowing non-mouse users to operate their computers: pcworld.com/article/2514044/wi…


Du weißt, dass eine Webseite scheiße ist, wenn sie automatisch übersetzten Tutorial-Text enthält, in dem curl als Locken übersetzt wurde.

#curl #Locken

in reply to erAck

Hast Du wieder mal in den offiziellen Google-Dokumentationen was gesucht? 🙊 💨

Ernsthaft: bevor ich da anfange zu lesen, ändere ich IMMMER zuerst "hl=de" zu "hl=en". Sonst wirste wahnsinnig – oder wie der Sachse sagt: "Orschwerdbleede!" 💡



Aaaaah, kate rusby's see amid the winter snow, bloody gorgeous! I always turn to her music when things get a bit ropey.
in reply to Kay

Yep, that's the one that has track 6 in particular, See Amid The Winter Snow, so huge thanks for the inspiration. Off it goes now. Hark Hark.


If you're worried about storing your data with US tech companies in light of the election results, this link has a list of European alternatives. These include:

- Email hosting
- Cloud storage
- Domain name registration
- Navigation apps
- Many other services

Stay safe.

european-alternatives.eu/

Edit: Follow the creator at: @european_alternatives

This entry was edited (5 days ago)


Sad to see that @mozilla needs to layoff 30%😢

Is Google’s ban on paying Mozilla for including G Search in Firefox the reason?

All #privacy companies must unite against Big Tech now! 💪
👉 tuta.com/blog/will-ban-on-goog…

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

Mozilla stopped being a privacy company a while ago TBH. The latest blow is the removal of uBlock Origin Lite. We need to develop an alternative browser engine.

I'm not even willing to try chromium based browsers.


in reply to Tzip

i just looked up a picture of wombats why are they so cuddly looking 🥺
in reply to Tzip

@Tzipporah did you know that wombat asses are super reinforced and when they’re in danger they stick their heads in their burrow with their asses sticking out and when a predator sticks its head in a small opening behind their ass they slam their ass into the predator’s head to kill or injure it
@Tzip


Can someone explain why the #Rosenbergs were executed for providing classified documents to Russia whilst convicted felon Trump did the same thing but was elected President of the United States🇺🇸?

#Treason #TrumpIsATraitor #Russia #politics



Me and my best friend listened to this banger a lot in college. Fickle Friends - Pretty Great.
youtube.com/watch?v=iEee4W9rEv…

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When nobody want the feature, include it in the base and increase the price to at least offset the cost:

Microsoft is bundling its AI-powered Office features into Microsoft 365 subscriptions

theverge.com/2024/11/7/2429026…




Any cryptographers who are sad about the post-quantum competitions coming to an end and looking for a new problem, here's one I've seen in a few places:

There's a trend towards end-to-end encryption for all datacentre interconnects (no plaintext on the wire, for any wire that leaves the CPU package). This includes things like PCIe, 100 GigE, and so on. As a result, we're rapidly approaching a world where there's over 1 Tb/s of encrypted traffic flowing in and out of every node.

At this rate, bit flips are inevitable somewhere (especially when you scale this up to a datacentre size). This leads to a couple of problems. The first one is bit flips on the wire.

The integrity tags in AES will catch these, but if you need to retransmit that's very painful (the bandwidth-delay product means the buffer sizes get huge), so ideally you want to bake in some forward error correction after encryption. But now you're reducing data rates.

Problem 1:

Can you design an integrity scheme for a symmetric cypher that also provides error correction, is easy to implement in hardware, and does not provide an oracle. I honestly have no idea whether this is even theoretically possible.

Beyond that, the AES engines are hot. Encrypting at even 10 Gb/s consumes a fair bit of power (Problem 0: Can you design a symmetric cypher that can be implemented in 10% of the power of AES in a hardware implementation?). This means that bit flips can occur in the middle of the encryption. These will corrupt the data but may have valid integrity tags.

Problem 2:

Can you design a symmetric cypher such that the integrity tag calculation can be computed in a pipeline that's independent of the main encryption (without duplicating a load of work or massively increasing the number of calculations) such that a bit flip in either pipeline will cause the integrity checks to fail?

Currently, I believe the work around for this is to add forward error correction before encrypting, such that a single block failing can be small, but that also adds a lot of overhead (i.e. lower bandwidth).

Problem 3:

Can you build a cypher scheme with both of these properties? Integrity tags permit error correction and can be computed cheaply in an independent pipeline so that they can catch bit flips during encryption.



I wish I was a #bot, not a #human. Whenever I get a #captcha, the #AI bots can all solve it just fine. I, being a #blind human, cannot.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

Tell me about these AI bots that can solve captchas. Clearly we need to package one as an NVDA add-on, browser extension, or something.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

Also, the #AI#bots have more rights than us #blind humans. Blind folks had to fight for years and years for copyright exemptions that would allow us to access and read books. The AI bots are just allowed to read as many books as they want, and swallow entire libraries whole. Yup; I'd definatly be better off as a bot.