Don't miss UI/UX Design Studio Manager Laurel Terlesky's #FOSDEM talk, "Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System" at 13:30 (CET) today. Watch in person (K.3.201) or online (live.fosdem.org/watch/k3201)! #Thunderbird #OpenSource #Design
@jonhicks Last year the recordings were available after FOSDEM, and we will happily point people to it if that's the case. We'll reach out to the FOSDEM crew, after giving them a well deserved breather.
We have also nicely asked Laurel to come on our office hours this month to give the talk again, and so we'll have that up by the end of February/beginning of March!
We just had a GTK hackfest at FOSDEM. A good time for an update on whats new and exciting in GTK, with an eye towards 4.18.
Requirements
You can no longer call gdk_display_get_default() or gdk_display_open() before gtk_init(). This was causing problems due to incomplete initialization, so we made it fail with a (hopefully clear) error message. If you are affected by this, the usual fix is to just call gtk_init() as early as possible.
On Windows, we have a hard requirement on Windows 10 now. All older versions are long unsupported, and having to deal with a maze of ifdefs and unavailable APIs makes development harder than it should be. Dropping support for very old versions also simplifies the code down the stack, in Pango and GLib.
The same idea applies to macOS, where we now require macOS 10.15.
Spring cleaning
The old GL renderer has been removed. This may be unwelcome news for people stuck on very old drivers and hardware. But we will continue to make the new renderers work as well as possible on the hardware that they can support.
The X11 and Broadway backends have been deprecated, as a clear signal that we intend to remove them in the GTK 5. In the meantime, they continue to be available. We have also deprecated GtkShortcutsWindow, since it needs a new design. The replacement will appear in libadwaita, hopefully next cycle.
It is worth reminding everybody that there is no need to act on deprecations until you are actively porting your app to the next major version of GTK, which is not on the horizon yet.
Incremental improvements
Widget layout and size allocation has received quite a bit of attention this cycle, with the goal of improving performance (by avoiding binary search as much as possible) and correctness. Nevertheless, these changes have some potential for breakage, so if you see wrong or suboptimal layouts in applications, please let us know.
GTK has had difficulties for a while getting its pointer sizes right with fractional scaling on Wayland, but this should all be solved in GTK 4.18. No more huge pointers. Fixing this also required changes on the mutter side.
New beginnings
Accessibility in GTK 4.18 is taking a major step forward, with the new AccessKit backend, which gives us accessibility on Windows and macOS, for the very first time. The at-spi backend is still the default on Linux, and has seen a number of improvements as well.
And, maybe the biggest news: We have an Android backend now. It is still experimental, so you should expect some rough edges and loose ends. For example, there is no GL renderer support yet. But it is exciting that you can just try gtk4-demo on your phone now, and have it mostly work.
Son muchos quienes hablan del "sesgo ideológico" de la AI china #DeepSeek No les muestren este prompt y respuesta, que explican como funciona Bing Image Creator que utiliza #DALL-E, desarrollada por #OpenAi desde la "cuna de la libertad occidental".
@KaterinaGloserova Dobré ránko, já úplně nejsem fanoušek moto sportu, ale každý rok se těším na fotografie z Dakaru. To je vždy pecka. Hezky zbytek víkendu ☺️👋
A growing number of US government websites have gone offline as of Saturday, including several related to USAID and others focused on youth programs, Africa, and more.
This time it’s not mere partisan hyperbole. Fascism really has come to America, to an extent we’ve never seen before. (If you still have any doubt, look at the role of Steve Bannon.) An…
I'm an unpaid volunteer who runs five websites and six accounts helping people use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. I pay all their bills every month.
If you want to help these sites & accounts keep going, you can buy me a coffee:
Canadians are anxious, yes. But we are also angry - angry that the U.S. sees us as disposable, despite the deep economic ties that we have upheld in good faith.
We should NOT take this lying down. We stand together. We buy Canadian. We diversify our trade. And we refuse to support a country that threatens us for no reason other than a madman's political theatre. #Canada stands strong. #ChooseCanada
On Thursday, multiple school systems around the United States released advisories stating that Trump's EO mandating discrimination in schools will not be followed.
Try RIM (Remote Incident Manager) for remote access—lightweight, accessible, and cross-platform! Great for troubleshooting and training. Learn more: getrim.app #RemoteAccess #TechHelp
Brian Driscoll, the acting FBI director and head of the bureau's Newark field office, pushed back so aggressively that some feared he would be dismissed.
"A kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century."
"In recent months the Harvard Law School [@harvard_law] Library Innovation Lab [@harvardlil] has created a data vault to download, sign as authentic, and make available copies of public government data that is most valuable to researchers, scholars, civil society and the public at large across every field. To begin, we have collected major portions of the datasets tracked by data.gov, federal #Github repositories, and #PubMed...."
Právě dorazilo. V reprobedně s chybějící mřížkou něco těžkého chrastí, bohužel dovnitř se teď nedostanu, šrouby jsou zapuštěny příliš hluboko. Nicméně - hrají. Volant je skoro 20 let starý, ale s trochou přemlouvání by snad i pod Win10 mohl fungovat :)
Web accessibility-related jobs are always going to flourish. Why? Because each browser, each screen reader, each operating system, each device, each input control, each custom control needs separate treatment.
Don't believe me? Try to implement a Vue3 combobox where you can filter items on Windows (Jaws, NVDA), Mac, iOS, iPad OS, Linux via a keyboard, touch, respecting screen sizes. Then, when all that is done, wait a few months until browsers receive some minor webkit update and things slowly start breaking.
If you’ve got lawyers and a copyright, the law gives you tremendous power to silence speech you don’t like. Copyright’s statutory damages can be as high as $150,000 per work infringed, even if no actual harm is done.
Plus de 1.000 pages web ont été supprimées des sites officiels du Ministère de la Santé états-unien. Des pages sur la vaccination, sur l'avortement, sur les personnes trans...
Les quatre prochaines années vont être absolument dévastatrices aux États-Unis. L'information disparaît, l'éducation s'étiole, la haine va croissant.
Nous n'avons pas une seconde à perdre en Europe pour inverser la vapeur chez nous. Nous organiser, créer des espaces numériques qui soient des refuges. Contribuer à Wikipédia. Marginaliser à nouveau la haine, refermer la fenêtre d'Overton.
Qu'on arrête de nous comporter comme si nous n'étions pas les prochains, parce qu'on l'est.
After realizing that my servers were offline since the 25th of January 2025, I've been in contact with Oracle support in a multitude of ways trying to figure out why this happened and how we can recover both the account and data.
I wasn't told that my account was disabled. I didn't receive an E-Mail or anything. When logging in, I was simply told that my username or password was incorrect. After (successfully) resetting my password twice, I realized it wasn't about the password. Oracle had just deleted my account without any notice.
Both through calls and text, always with the same service request (SR) number, I contacted support. Initially, support told me that my account was flagged “Inactive” and hence disabled. They also verified that they saw me login almost daily and that I never missed a payment or anything. Even if an account was inactive, that's never a reason to disable it, especially without any warning E-Mail or an E-Mail letting me know that my account was disabled in the first place.
This chat was the result of all of that, where the highest team I've yet been elevated to told me that there's nothing they can do about it, there's no reason they can tell me for why this happened, and there's no one else I could ask.
I also love how I ask “Is there anything I can do to avoid this happening in the future?” and they respond with “Oh, don't worry. You don't have a future at Oracle. This will not happen to you again, as we don't allow for you to make another account.”
Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle's CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.
Day three of Trump's term and the largest push for surveillance capitalism yet has been made: Project Stargate will be a $500.000.000.000 (500 billion USD) data center used for running a multitude of AIs with the purpose of spying on you.
Larry Ellison, the world's second richest man and CEO of Oracle, one of the main partners of Stargate, said:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on [...]. We're using A.I. to monitor the video.”
— Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle on how the company's A.I. systems will be used for in the future [Source: Business Insider]
This is who is in power now. This is the vision they have.
If you remember back to Lizzie Bennet Diaries diaries on youtube then you will remember it's star Ashley Clements.
Sadly her house has burned down in LA. If she ever brought you some joy but never figured out a way to pay her back (that youtube production didn't pay much) now is the perfect time to give.
When I received an alert about a “fast moving fire in your ar… Ashley Clements needs your support for Help Ashley Clements and Brendan Bradley Rebuild After Fire
I’m researching the life of my 5 x great grandfather Samuel Cottrell. This will be an interesting challenge because Samuel, a non-conformist, managed to avoid all the censuses taken in the 1800s
Samuel was born on 11 July 1796 to John Cottrell and Mary Teek. He was baptised on 2 October 1796 at Saint Luke’s Old Street, Finsbury, London.
During this research, I hope to learn more about London as well.
Joint Statement from 12 State Attorneys General: President Trump is Misleading the American People on Purpose of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Acc... oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases…
OAKLAND – California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, with the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, t…
Starting off #Movuary with a thing I posted several months ago now, because it's the first thing I did with all 8 scenes in a single project. No external samples were used, and it was made entirely on Move, with no midi keyboard tracked in from elsewhere.
This was started on the day that my portion of London hit 31°C, which is nothing for my US followers with your fancy AC units, but for me without any of that...
Remembering Elisabeth Sladen (1st February 1946-19th April 2011), who played Sarah Jane Smith. She was my favourite #DoctorWho companion, it was lovely when she returned in School Reunion (2006), and went on to have her own series The Sarah Jane Adventures.
In this episode of Unmute Presents, Demasi explains what a password manager is, how it can help you create and store strong passwords for all your online accounts, and what are some of the pros and cons of using one.
The launch of a new flagship smartphone is always met with excitement and high expectations. For tech enthusiasts, it represents the pinnacle of innovation,
★ If Anyone Needed Further Proof, Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times Is Now a Propaganda Rag (and They’re Bad at HTML) daringfireball.net/2025/02/soo…
You can’t see the link or click on it as rendered in a browser, because there’s no content between the opening `` and closing `` tags, but whoever at the LA Times edited Reinhart’s column to pervert its meaning, did so sloppily, leaving behi…
Applied African Science Fiction (SF) is a project funded by Imperial College London that, together in collaboration with the University of Nairobi, the African Speculative Fiction Society, Vector a…
If you too feel uneasy about the state of the world, and you too worry about losing access to one of the greatest knowledge treasure of the internet,
Know that you can download an offline copy of Wikipedia!
Here's how 📚👇
1. Download the free and open source software Kiwix (this will be your reader): kiwix.org/en/applications/
2. If you want smaller versions of Wikipedia, you can download them within Kiwix.
Within the app, go to "Categories" in the menu on the left, then browse to a topic/version you want. Scroll to the bottom for Wikipedia mini, for example. Click on it then click "Download" on the right
3. Once you have downloaded a database, click on "Opened" on the left > database you want to search > "Open Main Page" on the right.
4. You can use the Search field on the upper-right to find topics like on online Wikipedia! 🔍
5. If you want the full English version of Wikipedia (110GB), you might want to download it from the torrent file instead. Install a torrent client of your choice (I use Transmission).
Then, go to this page, click on "Download - 109.89 GB" blue button on the first result (size may vary overtime), then select "Torrent file": library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&ca…
6. Once you have the torrent file, open it with your torrent client to start the download. This is BIG! Be patient! 📦
7. Once the download is completed, open your Wikipedia `.zim` file with Kiwix!
8. Magic! 📖✨
Extra Tip: You can download many other awesome knowledge files from the Kiwix Library! Personally, I also got the iFixit knowledge base! ⚒️
Discover Kiwix applications that enable offline access to knowledge on different platforms. Explore the convenience of accessing information without an internet connection
Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leadi…
If you didn't find us at #fosdem today, there's still tomorrow! Building K, Floor 1 - play with Thunderbird for Android, meet the team, find out how to get involved, and get stickers!
Requirements
Jon Hicks
in reply to Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox • • •Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
in reply to Jon Hicks • • •@jonhicks Last year the recordings were available after FOSDEM, and we will happily point people to it if that's the case. We'll reach out to the FOSDEM crew, after giving them a well deserved breather.
We have also nicely asked Laurel to come on our office hours this month to give the talk again, and so we'll have that up by the end of February/beginning of March!