Want to start a Repair Café in your area?

You can!

Repair Café International enables local groups around the world to start their own:

repaircafe.org/en/join/start-y…

@RepairCafeInternational supports #EndOf10 to prevent #eWaste!

#RCInternational #RepairCafe #RightToRepair #Linux #FreeSoftware #OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS #Windows #Win10

#AudioMo

This is one I posted a couple of years ago, but I've had new followers since then.

In March of 2010, I set up an always streaming set of microphones at my childhood home, then using an old, small form factor Pentium III desktop computer running Windows XP. In the late summer of 2014, I installed a similar setup at my New York apartment, this time using an old laptop running Windows 7.
In 2015, I switched to a Raspberry Pi 2 model B running Liquidsoap, added 24/7 archiving, and installed a second, nearly identical setup at the New York apartment.

I had to take the New York stream down when we moved five years ago, and my parents' have moved since then, but the stream there still exists.

What follows is a presentation highlighting some of the more unusual things these streaming setups recordedover a period between 2011 and 2020.

For those interested in such things, the live audio stream of my parents' back yard lives here:
stream.borris.me:8888/outside

Purism Featured in Fortune!

Secure Phone Made in the USA. While Big Tech claims U.S. smartphone manufacturing is “impossible” or “too expensive,”

In a recent Fortune feature, CEO, Todd Weaver explains how the Liberty Phone is made in the U.S.: puri.sm/posts/fortune-com-feat…

in reply to Turris project

After all those years, I automated the most of the setup with #Ansible so it can be easily reproduced next year:

github.com/oskar456/ansible-op…

We don’t treat #Hamas claims as fact, unlike some in the media,

says #WhiteHouse Press Secretary #karolineleavitt
when asked about reports accusing #Israel of killing civilians near an aid center.

Maybe the BBC should stop spreading fake news to vilify Israel?

Heute ist #Sehbehindertentag!

Der @DBSV thematisiert #Touchscreens

Oft sind sie der einzige Weg, um an #Informationen und #Dienstleistungen zu gelangen. Es ist deshalb wichtig, dass Touchscreens auch von Menschen mit #Seheinschränkung #barrierefrei genutzt werden können.

Ein #sehenswertes #Video des #DBSV gibt es dazu (bisher leider) nur auf YouTube:

youtube.com/watch?v=SVCmMV0Y4d…

#a11y #Inklusion #digitaleTeilhabe

Even with close confirmation I sometimes close my terminal and think "OH FUCK NO." Coming soon to Ghostty, you can undo that. 🥰 (Technical details: we keep the terminal running for a configurable time in the background before terminating for real, similar to email undo send).

(macOS only for now, AppKit APIs provide a nice undo manager implementation that eases this quite a bit. I still have to do research on GTK for Linux.)

in reply to Mitchell Hashimoto

This is potentially very dangerous. If you realize you have a destructive operation running which you did not intend to run, some users might have a "close close close" reflex, without realizing that it won't, in fact, stop the operation.

This way, you go from running rm -rf / for half a second to doing that for 10 seconds.

Same with media, I have a "close reflex" whenever I'm trying to figure out the structure of some audio file, pass the wrong parameters to Sox's play and get white noise blasted at me at full volume.

Apparently Lufthansa has a new "cabin concept" called Allegris. (source seatmaps . com)

Let's break down the basic economy class feature: seating space.

The regular one on B789 (787-9):

32" pitch (that's the distance between two seat) and 3" recline (mean 3" if personal space invasion).

Now the new Allegris on B789 (787-9):

31" pitch (one inch less,, 2.54cm) and 5" recline (2 more inches of personal space invasion). In short 3 more inches (7.6cm) of incomfort for tall people like me.

(1/2)

in reply to Hubert Figuière

And people wonder why I hate flying (in Economy). But simply put I'm tall and when I seat my knee already touch the front seat. And it gets worse over. Now when the person in front recline the seat, it hurts. I gave seen: 1. people doing violently (slaming the seat back) 2. people insisting they must when there is no room, and waiting I get to the washroom to do it so I can't seat back. Got scolded my Swiss crew for that.

(2/x)

in reply to Hubert Figuière

And then airline charge a premium for "front" seat (bulkhead or emergency exit). They are less convenient like less storage, no bag on the floor, or screen that must be stowed away. But I guess they don't discount that inconvenience, but they do charge more money for the leg room. And even if the seats are empty, you can GFY, at least on Air Canada.

(IANAL, but it becomes discriminatory)

(3/x)

Depressing but instructive as hell

AI really is "fake data science for software bros" so often

propublica.org/article/inside-…

in reply to Cat Hicks

Reading this continues to explain to me (finally, and at devastating scale) why I was SO frustrated trying to be a scientist working with software engineers building edtech who would NEVER listen to behavioral science about any aspect of human behavior and instrumented the worst systems for ever actually learning about human behavior. Just constantly thinking we could magically derive answers to our questions. And this was well before AI was used in this way! The mental fragility was there.
in reply to Cat Hicks

I honestly find the technical details of LLMs quite interesting -- like I find *many* models quite interesting. But the mad interaction effects, the amplification of existing exploitable fragilities in our mental models, that is boggling too. I feel it is necessary to understand just how cruel our systems already were (how we deal with health, and concepts of efficiency in a society that won't take care of its children), as a core piece of this and who gets to use this and in what way.

Keep up-to-date! #LibreOffice 25.2.4 is now available: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #OpenSource #freesoftware #Office

LibreOffice reshared this.

Re: last boost (mathstodon.xyz/@j_bertolotti/1…), about the researchers who trained a model trying to use only public-domain and openly licensed data, here's the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.05209 and here's the HuggingFace for the comma-v0.1-2t model: huggingface.co/common-pile (For anyone itching to play with it, no, it's not on Ollama, at least not yet; it's brand new.)


"AI companies claim their tools couldn't exist without training on copyrighted material. It turns out, they could — it's just really hard. To prove it, AI researchers trained a new model that's less powerful but much more ethical. That's because the LLM's dataset uses only public domain and openly licensed material."

tl;dr: If you use public domain data (i.e. you don't steal from authors and creators) you can train a LLM just as good as what was cutting edge a couple of years ago. What makes it difficult is curating the data, but once the data has been curated once, in principle everyone can use it without having to go through the painful part.
So the whole "we have to violate copyright and steal intellectual property" is (as everybody already knew) total BS.

engadget.com/ai/it-turns-out-y…


in reply to Matt Campbell

If someone (@simon?) puts together instructions for trying out this new model, it will be interesting to see how it compares to the well-known models that take the typical unscrupulous approach to training data and have undergone post-training (e.g. OpenAI's RLHF). I suspect that this model won't be nearly as useful (to the extent that LLMs are useful in the first place).

Calling all analog film photographers! 🎞️ I've been working on Filmbook, an open-source app to help you keep track of your film usage. It's built with Rust & GTK4/libadwaita for a smooth & modern experience – and it even runs on Linux phones like the Librem 5 and Pinephone Pro! 📱
The first version is ready for testing, and I'd love your input on what features would make it even better! Join the community & help shape Filmbook: codeberg.org/bjawebos/filmbook ✨ #filmphotography #analogphotography #rustlang #gtk #opensource #community #testing #featureideas #librem5 #pinephone #linuxphone

Your voice, our drive: We had the privilege of interviewing @tolgayenici a mechanical engineer residing in Canada, to find out why he chose Tuta Mail, how he became a privacy and open source enthusiast, and why privacy matters to him. 💬🔐

👉 Read the full interview: tuta.com/blog/tuta-user-interv…

#PrivacyMatters #TutaMail #OpenSource #MadeinGermany

"AI companies claim their tools couldn't exist without training on copyrighted material. It turns out, they could — it's just really hard. To prove it, AI researchers trained a new model that's less powerful but much more ethical. That's because the LLM's dataset uses only public domain and openly licensed material."

tl;dr: If you use public domain data (i.e. you don't steal from authors and creators) you can train a LLM just as good as what was cutting edge a couple of years ago. What makes it difficult is curating the data, but once the data has been curated once, in principle everyone can use it without having to go through the painful part.
So the whole "we have to violate copyright and steal intellectual property" is (as everybody already knew) total BS.

engadget.com/ai/it-turns-out-y…

reshared this

in reply to miki

Just to iterate on your idea (I still believe we can do better), we can force social networks to act as intermediaries between end users and AI bros. If the AI bros love subscription capitalism so much, let them subscribe to, say, Meta to scrape Facebook, with Meta being obligated to distribute the fee obtained between users on the platform.

...with an option to opt-out from scraping.
The world where I can sell my kidney but can't sell my personal data is kinda weird.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Bodil

By the way, I can't be the only one who's noticed the similarities between today's LLMs-in-programming "discourse" and the Agile fads of the previous decade or two. If you don't do TDD you'll be "left behind," if you don't do Scrum you'll be "left behind," if you don't do pair programming you'll be "left behind" etc. I'm just waiting for some vibe coding enthusiast to rediscover the derogatory term "cowboy programmer."

Jeff Geerling got the brunt of YouTube wrath when he showed people how to host their own media {media that they legally own, which means that they either have the originals, or have paid for whatever digital version they have} with the power of Open Source tools
Jeff explicitly made sure that he never ever told people how to circumvent subscriptions or worse. Nothing that could harm YouTube bottomline was ever discussed in this video.

Yet for reasons obvious to Open Source people like me YouTube gave him his second strike.

3rd Strike and you're gone. This is how Google / this is how Alphabet is treating their Golden Geeze.

Creators like Jeff are very valuable both to the people who follow them and to YouTube. However Google seems to be at Super odds with Open Source, needing it to run their data centers but hating it because they have to share the code again that they've worked upon.

Google is a paradoxical Company which is being controlled by Alphabet, a schizophrenic Entity drunk on power Ads and control

To me you're a star @geerlingguy keep Shining

jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/sel…

#Media #Hosting #OpenSource #programming #POSIX #Pie #Raspberry #4K #Video #4KVideo

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

I'm re-launching my original version of ReaKontrol, a #REAPER extension to integrate with #Komplete Kontrol keyboards, now with support for S-series Mk3 keyboards. It doesn't have some of the visual feedback or other features of the Brummbrum fork, so if you need those things, this is not for you at this stage. Website and downloads: reakontrol.jantrid.net/
This entry was edited (6 months ago)

WANTED: Intel Architecture Labs 1990’s CD-ROM’s. They appear to have maybe been monthly. They contained a mirror of Intel’s ‘download.intel.com’ ftp server, specifically the /ial/ subdirectory which is not in the 2014 backup of the site on archive.org.

Lots and lots of white papers and design guideline documents in there. Especially looking for ones from the late 1990’s (1998-ish onward) if they exist. I’ve seen references in mailing lists to them that lead me to believe they do.
Example gem: intel trying to cover its ass after the FDIV bug, and have some more FDIV

Photo of an Intel Architecture Labs CD-R or CD-ROM from the mid 1990's (september 1995), stolen from archive dot org which has exactly two CD's backed up.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to janhoglund

”…the real point of DOGE is not to save American taxpayers money. … Musk’s operatives have been systematically gaining access to databases across the US government and are now merging them. …these datasets are now being merged into a giant surveillance machine. A giant surveillance machine presided over by the dark lord of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel.”
—Carole Cadwalladr, The dark lord of Silicon Valley
#doge #musk #thiel

🚀 Big thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring macOS runners to power our CI pipeline!
This support helps us manage macOS builds more efficiently in GNOME. 🙌

🔗 More details: blogs.gnome.org/sid/2025/04/27…

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

It has been an incredible two years since NV Access founders Mick Curran & Jamie Teh featured on Australian Story: abc.net.au/news/2023-06-05/mic…

The impact NVDA has for blind people around the world has only grown & the need is as great now as ever!

You can watch the Audio Description enabled version of Australian Story: youtu.be/3i7gkN-1sAI

Regular version: youtu.be/jwHbXh3WzSw

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Blind #Accessibility #FreeSoftware #FOSS #Impact #Australia #AustralianStory

Okay, now I'm frustrated. I was trying to get the ancient A2 Apple II+ emulator, a completely text-based Apple II+ emulator, going on modern Windows, and I can't for various reasons. So I was gonna try to contact Rich Skrenta, the author, to see if maybe he'd even thought of it since twenty-five years ago when I wrote to him and compiled it for DOS under DJGPP. There appears to have once been a page about the emulator at skrenta.com/a2/ but that entire site now seems to immediately redirect to Linkedin, and you have to join Linkedin in order to be able to get contact info. I mean that's fair enough but as far as I know I would have no other use for that service since I'm not in the professional world, etc.
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo And it gets worse and worse. So I created an account on Linkedin…only to find out that to actually message him, I apparently need to have a Premium subscription. Not to worry, as I can get a thirty-day free trial. But oh yeah, they do need a payment method, and give a vague reason for needing it, but I'm sure it's really that they're hoping I'll forget about it and not cancel in time so they can bill me for something I have no use for…all to contact one guy about code he probably hasn't even thought of in twenty-five years! Sheesh! I'm not going *that* far, at least not now.