Y’all, history may not repeat, but it sure does reflect. In 1934, some of the German military were not happy about Hitler. This led to the Night of the Long Knives, where any military or political leader not willing to swear a loyalty oath was eliminated. Subsequently the German forces were consolidated into a unified command under Hitler’s direct control.

I tell you that story to tell you this one. The Secretary of Scotch and War, Fox weekend host Pete Hegseth has demanded that every Flag Officer in every branch of the service, everywhere in every command in the world, must fly to DC Tuesday for a meeting. It is unheard of to enable this sort of security threat.

This puts the entire military structure at risk. It removes generals and admirals from fields of active engagement. It is insane in a world where we have secure communications. 800 Flag Officers and their staff is about 1200 people, most of whom have dedicated 30+ years to service. Thats 36,000 years of experience.

Ummm, wow, how am I just now discovering this? I wanted to browse an ISP forum on dslreports.com, a website which for over 20 years, provided discussions of internet providers, and their performance, upgrades, and other topics of interest and news related to broadband providers, but now it seems it no longer exists? If so it's the end of an era, and I need to clear out several useful bookmarks to places of interest I had on that site. Awwww! Now if one goes to dslreports.com, you get this. dslreports.com is shuttered and
only the January 2025 home page is available. Somehow I missed the memo that my favorite, an only good website for broadband discussion and news, is gone! Again, end of an era, awwww. :(

Been following the BSD conferences for a while and have not yet had the chance to attend one. But what i have noticed from all the videos and photo's published on social media is that it seems to be a male ( I'm going to include NB folk here too ) dominated event ? Maybe I'm wrong and it's just how the media published distorts the reality ? Apologies if I have offended anyone it certainly isn't my intention.

#EBC25 #RunBSD #FreeBSD #EuroBSDcon #EuroBSDCon2025 #OpenBSD #NetBSD

Are there any Mastodon clients for Linux that are fully accessible? If Tweesecak ran on Linux, that'd be great--I love the screenless UI. Also, how can I get the exact same Espeak that NVDA uses by default? I think I'm using Espeak-NG, but it never sounds as good. My laptop decided to boot into Fedora this evening, so I'm playing around a bit.
in reply to Cleverson

@Cleverson @Martin @David Goldfield @Alex Hall I think those voices from oralux are the same voice, tyflotecnia has for NVDA, oralux has made these compatible with speech-dispatcher on linux and negotiated proper licensing.

As for the original question, NVDA uses variat called max for its built-in eSpeak-ng, so if you like this one, reconfigure your screen reader preferences of orca.

Gauging user interest! Over the last few weeks I have been working on a website that can auto describe YouTube videos. I am aware that the solution has already been created for windows, however, I don’t want to leave mobile users and non-Windows users out in the cold. I have already experimented with a desktop app and it works quite well. Would this be of interest to the community?
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

reshared this

in reply to jan Ki | 奇

AI bullshit

Sensitive content

in reply to André Polykanine

AI bullshit
@menelion
damn, German institutions still don't accept English messages? :/
I'm not surprised, but Germany has the 10th highest EF EPI. The only reason not to accept English forms and letters nowadays is discrimination against foreigners, but I guess that checks out, even though we're strongly dependent on immigration and should open up as much as possible
in reply to André Polykanine

AI bullshit
@menelion
on the topic of LLMs though, this is one of the rare use cases that I can understand. LLMs are heuristic models for predictive text synthesis, so constructing a template is something they are actually designed to do.
However, considering the energy cost for that template, I'd recommend looking for existing templates first. Even native speakers use them all the time because official letters and forms are a pain in the ass
in reply to Stéphanie

The full Québec experience includes:

- Motorways… by the bucket load
- Motorways... falling apart
- The A440 motorway leading into a wall
- Some stupid idea by the provincial government in the City
- Complaints about a mayor of a different City
- "But, but… *something, something* tram"
- Fake castle

Did I nail it from a tourist's perspective? 😝

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

A pretty cool thing about the Fediverse:

It will still be around in a decade. Even two decades.

Usenet still exists. IRC still exists. Email still exists. When you build platforms on open protocols and standards, it doesn't actually matter what corporations try and do to enshittify it. So long as there are people who are still willing to run instances, and users who still want to talk to one another without going through some corporation's platform, it'll still be here.

in reply to feld

Those posts that are like "we used to have phone apps like the one that makes your screen look like a beer glass and has fluid simulation so you can pretend to drink it, we just don't even know how to make apps like that anymore"

Ok sure that was a custom thing maybe even using APIs that don't exist anymore but we absolutely can make that with a game engine

Blender used to put high quality versions of their open movies here:

download.blender.org/demo/movi…

But I can't find anything recent there. I can't find Spring or Sprite Fright, for instance.

I just want a little library of high quality 4k stuff to add to my jellyfin and peertube to demo on nice monitors and projectors, but all their links go to Youtube. Even their official peertube doesn't have high quality anything outside of big buck bunny 🤔

video.blender.org/w/dmhvQNzwBn…

Where did they put the other films (for download)? I am happy to torrent them, but I'm also happy to just download a zip somewhere. I just want them ideally in 4k, but I'll settle for 1080p if they REALLY don't exist in 4k for the public.

#bigbuckbunny #blender #blenderstudio #blenderopenfilms

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Domo 🦇

:jellyfin: :blender: I am unstoppable! I found every single film except one called Heros, but honestly it really really warms my heart to see such dedication to open source. Every single one of these is completely open source. You can download the assets and re-render it yourself if you want. The world is your oyster. They used to laugh at people using blender and say that it would never be a professional tool and now it is one of the tools to use for 3D work, and it's free! I love FOSS so much :domo_attempt1: :blue_heart_sparkles:

#blender #jellyfin

#Firefox :firefox: unterstützt nun unter #Windows die Einrichtung einer Website als sogenannte #WebApp (support.mozilla.org/de/kb/web-…). Dafür gibt es rechts in der Adresszeile einen neuen Button: „Tab zur #Taskleiste hinzufügen“. Danach taucht die Website unten in der Taskleiste (und nicht mehr im Browser) auf und wirkt wie ein eigenes Programm. Wer das grundsätzlich nicht möchte, kann diese Funktion auch deaktivieren: about:config aufrufen, dann nach browser.taskbarTabs.enabled suchen und auf false stellen. 💡 Momentan gibts die Web-App-Funktionalität nur unter Windows. #MacOS und #Linux sollen aber folgen.

#Linux folks: I have a patch that I'd like to get merged into `Kconfig` - the GTK4 port I was working on while back. Sadly, it looks like the subsystem has went orphaned recently, and as much as I'd like to step up to maintain it I lack the deeper knowledge about the configuration subsystem (it's pretty out of my field of expertise). What do we think, is there still a way to get the patches merged? If I want to do so, do I send them to the general build system maintainers?

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/?radd=1… today brings you 10 updated & 1 added apps:

* Audio Output Switcher: adds a Quick Settings tile that provides instant access to Android's native audio output selection dialog 🛡️

RB Status: 719 apps (54.8%)

2 apps have been removed:

* NatriumWallet: Finances with GMS+Firebase
* Kage: repo was archived 2021, few downloads, so dead

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo :awesome:

Is Bluesky gaining any significant popularity among #blind people yet? I know a lot of us flocked to the fediverse when Musk canned the old Twitter accessibility team. Now that Bluesky has gained momentum in the mainstream, and even among some techies who weren't happy with the fediverse, I wonder if it's time for us to at least give Bluesky a try. And I wonder if some blind people already are.